BOOK REVIEW: Kete, Mary Louise. _Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and
Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America_. Duke University
Press, 1999. Pp. 304. Bibliographical notes and index. Paper, $17.95. ISBN
0-8223-2471-7

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Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:
Gregg Camfield <[log in to unmask]>
University of the Pacific

Copyright © 2001 Mark Twain Forum. This review may not be published or
redistributed in any medium without permission.

I agreed to review this book because, as a scholar of American Literature,
I have spent much time and spilled much ink in trying to understand
America's complex and often perverse uses of sentimentalism, from the most
debased forms of literary sentimentality to the most complex forms of
empiricist philosophy.  Naturally, I find the work of other scholars in the
same vein to be of personal interest. I am aware, however, that I'm
reviewing this book for the Mark Twain Forum, so I'll concentrate on the
part of the book that treats Twain directly. The book's preface uses Twain
to set up the larger argument and the closing  section of the book--four
brief chapters of about ten pages each--takes Twain as a test case of a
much larger theory. I'll encapsulate the larger argument to give a brief
sense of how Kete treats Twain.

It is no surprise that Kete refers to Twain at the beginning of her book
and ends her book with a substantial discussion of _Tom Sawyer_ and of
_Huckleberry Finn_ because she sees in Twain a kindred soul, one who has
both a sophisticated disdain of sentiment and a deep emotional attraction
to it. She explains that ambivalence through her argument that
sentimentality acts as something of an exchange similar to gift exchanges
in non-market economies. She postulates further that these exchanges, which
take place almost exclusively to compensate for losses, create an ideal
American character, one not of radical individualism, but rather of
collaboration in making a community. She stresses the opposite connotations
of the two denotations of "collaboration," suggesting in the process some
of her own and of Twain's ambivalence toward sentiment.

She moves into her discussion of Twain against the backdrop of a historical
development from ante-bellum to post-Civil War uses of sentiment. The first
of the four chapters on Twain situates _Tom Sawyer_ and _Huckleberry Finn_
in context of the way sentimentalism functioned politically during and
after the Civil War:

On the political stage Lincoln was deploying an operation fully approved
and demonstrably effective within the personal sphere. In the face of
imminent or actual loss, sentimentality aims at negating that loss by
instituting (or revealing) a structure that maintained connections. Through
the making and sharing of an idealized image of both the mourner and the
mourned, say in a poem, middle-class parents could force their grief into
acceptable bounds. . . . But Reconstruction as formulated after Lincoln's
death betrayed the sentimental promise of mourning; the rituals of mourning
failed to effect a utopian reunification of the national family. Instead
they brought about an increasing sense of nostalgia for a time when it was
possible to imagine the nation as a family bound together in the mutual
project of forming "A more perfect Union."  This nostalgia informs and
structures Twain's comedy in _The Adventures of Tom Sawyer_, while the
profound cultural disappointment that followed the war informs _The (sic)
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_.

Such a discussion usefully frames these two books, adding richness to our
understanding of Twain's ambivalence about sentimentality.

The next two chapters treat _Tom Sawyer_ and _Huck Finn_ in sequence,
developing this background by showing the interconnected uses of mourning
and sentimentality in the two books. Not surprisingly, she charts Twain's
increasing disillusionment, even as she shows the persistent sentimental
tendencies of the latter book. The final Twain chapter, which is also the
final chapter of the book, explains that Twain's disillusionment never rose
beyond the boundaries of sentimentalism itself:

But, though Twain might imagine the desire to forgo the shaping bonds of
affections (or at least the constraints of middle-class life), he was
unable to imagine much of an alternative. Twain's alternative to a
sentimental world is its binary opposite: a cynical world whose logic is a
parallel inversion rather than a replacement of the sentimental. When
Twain's characters do escape, they find themselves faced with a world
dominated by the threats against which sentimentality had defined
itself--loneliness, grief, arbitrary determinism, and meaninglessness--and
from which Twain himself had fled.

Having made similar points myself, I find it easy to agree. I am surprised,
however, by how formulaic Kete's picture of Twain's work is. Beyond her
careful exegesis of one aspect of the two Mississippi novels, she retails
images of the cynical late Twain with no apparent awareness of the debates
that have taken place in Twain criticism on exactly these points. Part of
this may stem from Kete's limitation of her discussion of sentiment to
mourning. She seems averse to seeing the sentimentality of humor, for
example, and thus can see no alternative in Twain's works to the simply
binary formulation that she carried into her project from the beginning.

In short, Kete does not seem so much interested in Twain per se as in using
a conventional version of Twain to fit a larger argument. And yet that
larger argument does cast important light not only on American culture as a
whole, but also on one significant aspect of some of Twain's most important
work.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER: Gregg Camfield teaches English at the University of the
Pacific. He is the author of _Sentimental Twain: Samuel Clemens in the Maze
of Moral Philosophy_ (1994) and _Necessary Madness: The Humor of
Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature_ (1997). He is
currently finishing _The Oxford Reader's Companion to Mark Twain_.