Cultural criticism conclusion referec introduction

3.CULTURAL CRITICISM
Like Tompkins, who asserted the transformative power of sentimental texts, cultural critics have analyzed specific works in terms of the authors' efforts at social reform. Although some scholars have criticized mid-century writers for buying into the status quo of the dominant society, such criticism cannot be applied to all writers. Moreover, such criticism fails to recognize the complexity of sentimentalism: a writer who believed strongly in the religious teachings of her culture could also oppose other aspects of that culture which she felt did not live up to those teachings. If a writer took seriously the dictates of religion and conscience as well as the democratic teachings about equality, the writer could be inspired to attack inequities that she saw in the system. The basic rule of thumb in sentimentalism was that one had to "feel right." Using a deliberate appeal to feeling, sentimental writers spoke out strongly against slavery, for example. As Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) wrote in the preface to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), her intention in the novel was "to awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race" (p. 3). And Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897) wrote in the preface to Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), "I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered" (p. 1).
In addition to their efforts with respect to bringing about an end to slavery, sentimental writers also weighed in on gender issues, revealing such injustices as married women's property laws, women's legal infirmities, and cultural attitudes demeaning to women. Fanny Fern (1811–1872) in Ruth Hall (1855) and E. D. E. N. Southworth (1819–1899) in The Hidden Hand (1859), for example, used conventional strategies to reveal inequities in the situation of women. By portraying the fact that sane women could be locked away in insane asylums with impunity, that women had no control over any money that they earned or brought into a marriage, that their employment opportunities were limited to exploitative labor or prostitution, and that they were expected to obey without question even the most wrongheaded or cruel husband, such texts, by gaining the sympathy of readers and their admiration for a gritty heroine, advanced the cause of women's rights even without seeming to. A hundred years later, critics might ask why such texts were so popular. But it is important to remember that sentimentality was the principal frame of reference of the time. As Michael Riffaterre and other students of narrative have pointed out, a text's verisimilitude is dependent upon references to the "sociolect," that is, the "myths, traditions, ideological and esthetic stereotypes, commonplaces, and themes" that are harbored by its audience (p. 130). Thus, nineteenth-century writers' portrayals of people and situations that contemporary readers could relate to, in a language and within a frame of reference that all readers were familiar with, reached a wider audience and could be more persuasive than any abstract treatise.
Even the most "sentimental" of the sentimental novelists used the appeal to feeling to provide a guide for women who might be floundering in a society that accorded them little respect as individuals. Certainly the reason why Susan Warner's (1819–1885) The Wide, Wide World (1850) and Maria Cummins's (1827–1866) The Lamplighter (1854) were such blockbusters was because they spoke to such women. In spite of the fact that the dominant culture had no use for higher education for women (Walt Whitman in 1857 argued against the establishment of public high schools for girls because, he said, women's function was simply to be good wives and mothers, and Dr. Edward Clarke reflected long-standing popular prejudices when he warned in 1873 that too much education would damage a woman's reproductive organs), both novels emphasize the intellectual development of their heroines. And in spite of the fact that the dominant culture decreed that women should never question male authority (a story in Godey's Lady's Book in 1850—ironically titled "Woman's Rights"—praises a young woman for silently and passively bowing her head in acquiescence to the blows and verbal abuse from her ill-tempered father), both heroines not only question male authority, but Gertrude in The Lamplighteractively defies her guardian and leaves home in order to follow her conscience. The lesson of sentimentalism was that one had to do what made one "feel right"—whether it meant defying one man's rule or a nation's laws—and this was a powerful lesson for the legally and socially powerless.
In this sense Christianity, rather than being only an opiate to lull women into passive acceptance of an unjust system as some critics would claim, was often used by women—who had no political rights and whose opinions were trivialized—to support a position that was contrary to national law or their culture's mores. Thus, Ruth Hall in Fern's novel finds in religion the courage to defy her relatives and the whole social structure in order to seek economic independence—then an ignominious role for a middle-class woman (p. 123). Frances Harper (1825–1911) in her 1859 short story "The Two Offers" uses religion to defend her antisocial position defending productive spinsterhood against the misery of a failed marriage and urging education for women, including African American women: "scope should be given to [woman's] Heaven-endowed and God-given faculties. The true aim of female education" should be the development of "all the faculties of the human soul" (p. 109). Mrs. Bird in Uncle Tom's Cabin, in disagreeing with her senator husband who has voted in favor of the Fugitive Slave Law, asserts, "I don't know anything about politics, but I have read my Bible" (p. 89). Similarly, Stowe in writing Uncle Tom's Cabin gained credence—and clearly also courage—from her appeal to a higher authority, invoking God in her attack on America's law. The novel concludes with the powerful warning: "Both North and South have been guilty before God; and the Christian Churchhas a heavy account to answer . . . for, not surer is the eternal law by which the millstone sinks in the ocean, than that stronger law by which injustice and cruelty shall bring on nations the wrath of Almighty God!" (p. 485).