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"Guiding us through a 'women's culture' animated by scenes of longing for a fantasmatic commonality, an ever-elusive normativity, Lauren Berlant illuminates, in readings unfailingly subtle and wise, the psychic negotiations and emotional bargaining that women in U.S. culture conduct to be part of an 'intimate public.' More dazzlingly still, she addresses what the business of sentimentality works to obscure: the possibility of political agency in the face of a cultural machinery that makes us feel helpless to do anything more than affirm our ability to feel. To read "The Female Complaint "is to realize how long and how much it's been needed."--Lee Edelman, author of "No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive"

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THE FEMALE COMPLAINT

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface......................................................................................................................viiIntroduction: Intimacy, Publicity, and Femininity............................................................................11. Poor Eliza................................................................................................................332. Pax Americana: The Case of Show Boat......................................................................................693. National Brands, National Body: Imitation of Life.........................................................................1074. Uncle Sam Needs a Wife: Citizenship and Denegation........................................................................1455. Remembering Love, Forgetting Everything Else: Now, Voyager................................................................1696. "It's Not the Tragedies That Kill Us, It's the Messes": Femininity, Formalism, and Dorothy Parker.........................2077. The Compulsion to Repeat Femininity: Landscape for a Good Woman and The Life and Loves of a She-Devil.....................233Overture/Aperture: Showboat 1988-The Remake..................................................................................265Notes........................................................................................................................281Bibliography.................................................................................................................319Index........................................................................................................................347

Chapter One

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty. JAMES BALDWIN, "EVERYBODY'S PROTEST NOVEL"

"The Small House of Uncle Thomas"

Rodgers's and Hammerstein's The King and I is a rare instance of classic Americana whose scenario is not in America. Atypical for its time (1949), the lavish musical is set during an imperial crisis in relations between Britain and Siam, which involves a variety of military and economic intrigues but focuses on a culturalist politics. Opening with the arrival of Anna Leonowens in Siam, the play recalls that Britain exported a civilizing pedagogy as part of its imperial strategy: Leonowens is imported "to bring to Siam what is good in Western culture." Her teachings include respect for "science" and for anti-despotism in the political and palatial spheres.

Yet to describe The King and I this way neglects the sensuous spirit of the play: the spectacle and songbook continuously overwhelm the story, displaying the king's visibly smooth and muscular body, the palace's surface of shining metal and richly colored fabric, the women's and children's adorable exoticism, and the intensities of erotic and familial life in the world of the palace. Haunted by the love plot that never happens between the Siamese "King" (Mongut) and the British "I" (Leonowens), the play's story nonetheless uses the tragi-comic conventions of "the war between the sexes" to express political and cultural antagonisms that also appear here in stereotypic drag as national tragedy and imperial farce.

The scene of this war is the passing into modernity of Siam, for which the king has prepared by insisting that the elite of his nation develop economic, technological, and rational literacy in the ways of the West. Eventually he learns from Leonowens, however, that to be modern requires something more than a cultivated mind-it wants an educated heart. But the king's heart breaks and he dies when he is unable to follow Siam into the moment in which the nation becomes a state of feeling as opposed to a regime of power. As the play proffers the abject image of the king's waning virility and pompous philosophizing it sets up a series of organizing antinomies by which the audience can measure the king's and the nation's progress, including West and East, barbarism and civilization, the vulgar and the refined, the vernacular and the literary, the student and the teacher, the brutish and the feminine. Above all is the king's attempt to develop an organ of compassion as opposed to ideology or what the play calls philosophy. These changes are achieved aesthetically (in the play) and subjectively (by the characters) by a romance with a constellated third term: sentimentality, intimacy, democracy, America.

The unfinished business of sentimentality that this chapter tracks involves its political component, one that develops within political thought a discourse of ethics that, paradoxically, denigrates the political and claims superiority to it. This mode of sentimentality takes up the Enlightenment project of cultivating the soul of the subject toward a visceral capacity to embody, recognize, and sanction virtue, and it expands it into the collective activity of compassionate cosmopolitanism, which places affective recognition at the center of what binds strangers to each other. Yet sentimentality's universalist rhetoric gains its authority not in the political domain, but near it, against it, and above it: sentimental culture entails a proximate alternative community of individuals sanctified by recognizing the authority of true feeling-authentic, virtuous, compassionate-at the core of a just world.

The culture of true feeling has no inevitable political ideology. It does not always liberalize society, forcing politics to gain a higher ethical footing by dismantling structural inequalities or expanding the formal terms of citizenship. Its core pedagogy has been to develop a notion of social obligation based on the citizen's capacity for suffering and trauma. This structure has been deployed mainly among the culturally privileged to humanize those subjects who have been excluded from the formal and capaciously social aspects of citizenship, embedded seemingly intractably on the bottom of class, racial, ethnic, and sexual hierarchies. As a force for the conversion of the politically privileged, sentimental politics has had powerfully transformative effects on which subordinate populations are recognized as candidates for inclusion in the body politic. But as Baldwin asserts, the humanization strategies of sentimentality always traffic in clich, the reproduction of a person as a thing, and thus indulge in the confirmation of the marginal subject's embodiment of inhumanity on the way to providing the privileged with heroic occasions of recognition, rescue, and inclusion. In this view, sentimentality from the top down softens risks to the conditions of privilege by making obligations to action mainly ameliorative, a matter not of changing the fundamental terms that organize power, but of following the elevated claims...