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• W2078805628 abstract "When the Personal Doesn’t Become the Political Michelle Massé (bio) Further Responses to Marianne Noble on Stowe, Sentiment, and Masochism In “The Ecstasies of Sentimental Wounding in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Marianne Noble examines the “sentimental wound,” “a bodily experience of anguish caused by identification with the pain of another.” The wound ostensibly serves as the occasion to heal the breach between people, but can instead become a suppurating injury we take pleasure in probing. In Part I of her essay, Noble argues that the wound “represents a critique of abstract, disembodied notions of personhood” (296), a critique implicitly associated not only with nineteenth-century abolitionism, but with feminism, which also seeks “political transformation through feelings” (295). In Part II, she emphasizes how the wound also can “function as a mechanism for transforming raw violence into ecstatic stimulation” (297), a stimulation, Noble asserts, that is self-gratifying to white women, but which has very little to do with the actual tortured bodies of black people. The vicissitudes of sympathy bring her to conclude that sympathy is “a dangerous form of political thought; but . . . a lack of sympathy is more dangerous” (314). Like Elizabeth Barnes, I appreciate Noble’s analysis of Stowe’s “real presence,” which lets us know the “embodied, affective personhood” of others through “intuition, imagination, and sympathetic responses” (302, 295), her emphasis upon the importance of “real bodies,” and her scepticism about what we might call sentimental feminism, whether in the nineteenth century or today, a sentimentalism that assumes women are “naturally” moral and caring. 1 In reading and re-reading the essay, I find myself engaged by Noble’s general topics: the importance of the “presymbolic voice” (302) in sentimental fiction and the ways in which an appeal based on empathy with pain can become yoked to a masochistic pleasure in pain. I also find myself confused, however, by the larger implications of Noble’s line of reasoning. In thinking through the differences between my own and Noble’s readings of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, specifically, and of masochism, more generally, it seems to me that there is a dissolution of interpretive boundaries and frames within the essay itself that uncannily mirrors the shifting self/other borders she sets out to examine in interpersonal relations. Early and later psychological developmental stages become conflated as Noble traces the paths of masochistic desire that lead to white identification with black suffering in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Gradations in identification blur into a non-specific “intertwining with the other” (313): neither the eighteenth century’s careful calibration of empathy, sympathy, and compassion, nor modern psychoanalysis’s equally fine distinctions among incorporation and identification, mirroring and merging, are used to suggest degrees of rapport. Levels of representation conflate: there seems to be little difference between someone being whipped—or watching someone being whipped—in a novel and “real” life, or between the “gut feeling” (302) of a reader, the represented agony of a character being beaten, and actual pain. Finally, then, what Noble calls the “anti-individualistic” epistemology of sympathy begins to seem anti-individual in discussion, as characters and readers become aggregate creatures generating predictable responses according to sex, race, and kind of “wound.” And much of this seems at odds with Uncle Tom’s Cabin itself, which questions the adequacy of “right feeling” and represents [End Page 154] the subordinate, whether black or female, as no less capable of sadism than the dominant. The essay’s insistence upon pre-Oedipal or pre-Symbolic merger as the guarantor for what psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin calls “intersubjectivity” is troubling (e.g., 301, 302, 303, 306). Noble draws extensively upon Benjamin’s key concept, which designates the reciprocal ability “to recognize that other subject as different and yet alike.” 2 Noble’s linking of “intersubjective, non-individuated identities” (295) thus strikes me as a contradiction in terms, and at odds with my own understanding of Benjamin: we can only recognize the other as a subject or self because we are individuated. As Noble herself points out, reunion with “a mother who represents pure plenitude . . . necessarily entails the destruction of individual life, since it eradicates the boundaries of individuality” (307). How, then, does..." @default.
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• W2078805628 title "When the Personal Doesn't Become the Political" @default.
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