Working to reconcile the Christian dictum to "love one's neighbor
as oneself" with evidence of U.S. sociopolitical aggression,
including slavery, corporal punishment of children, and Indian
removal, Elizabeth Barnes focuses her attention on
aggressors--rather than the weak or abused--to suggest ways of
understanding paradoxical relationships between empathy, violence,
and religion that took hold so strongly in nineteenth-century
American culture.
Looking at works by Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott, among others, Barnes shows how
violence and sensibility work together to produce a more
"sensitive" citizenry. Aggression becomes a site of redemptive
possibility because salvation is gained when the powerful
protagonist identifies with the person he harms. Barnes argues that
this identification and emotional transformation come at a high
price, however, as the reparative ends are bought with another's
blood.
Critics of nineteenth-century literature have tended to think about
sentimentality and violence as opposing strategies in the work of
nation-building and in the formation of U.S. national identity. Yet
to understand how violence gets folded into sentimentality's
egalitarian goals is to recognize, importantly, the deep
entrenchment of aggression in the empathetic structures of liberal,
Christian culture in the United States.