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Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature by Lori Merish (review)

For about a decade, Americanists have been working on rethinking the meaning of the once-maligned sentimental tradition. A part of this larger project, Lori Merish's Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and NineteenthCentury American Literature will be most useful for scholars ofAmerican literature and scholars ofgender since it gives a sprawling and often tantalizing account ofways in which American commodity culture found its emotional expression in the sentimental forms of the nineteenth-century. Merish's primary project is to show how things became not merely things but incorporations of both text and ideology (particularly as these things are consumed by women in sentimental narratives): that is, as Merish says in the preface, the nineteenth-century prelude to the twentieth-century Cartesian cogito, "I shop; therefore I am." SentimentalMaterialism takes the reader on a chronological voyage through a variety of cultural expressions that reveal the economics of market culture as an underpinning of sentimentalism. Reasoning that the republican culture of the eighteenth century must be a prelude to the flowering ofconsumerism in the nineteenth, Merish, following the Frankfurt School, reads the Scottish Enlightenment as central to a rethinking of the relationship between capitalism and freedom. She links this idea to the beginnings of the sentimental narrative in America, suggesting that women's political existence in the new republic depended on the organization of female emotions through the trope of the domestic. By the 1830s, the fledgling nation had undergone significant changes and the elements ofconsumerism were feminized. Merish theorizes that religion played a role in the development of commodity culture, arguing that, contrary to received belief, there is no impassable gulf between materialism and revivalism. Through her reading of Peter Cartwright's Autobiography, she posits that nineteenth-centuryAmericans were exposed to the notion that the maintenance ofa certain style of home and the acquisition of appropriate domestic objects were indications of one's spiritual standing. The work of spreading this gospel of religious comfort and decency devolved on women and was reflected in sentimental narratives. Building on her discussion of the psychology of caring for objects and home as part of logic of sentimental consumerism, chapter three makes the case that the