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By Marianne Noble. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. 258 pp. $57/50/$19.95 paper.
When Harriet Beecher Stowe famously urged readers to "feel right" as a mode of political response to her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, she was undoubtedly not referring to the feelings reported by patients of Freud and Krafft-Ebing, who used the novel as a source for sadomasochistic fantasies and masturbatory pleasures. Yet for Marianne Noble, the response of such readers indicates that they have indeed rightly felt the masochistic erotics central to sentimentalism's power and appeal. In identifying masochism as a lure that beckoned to women, in particular, through the popular nineteenth-century idiom of sentimentalism, Noble makes an unsettling claim -- a claim that she repeatedly characterizes as double-edged. On the one hand, a masochistic erotics would seem oppressive to women, inviting them to enjoy their own suffering, subjugation, and abuse. On the other hand, as Noble argues throughout this book, masochism offered women a degree of agency, enabling them to express a form of embodied self-hood and desire. In focusing on masochism as a central strategy of sentimental writing, then, Noble overcomes the longstanding debate within scholarship between the claim that sentimentalism was a "rancid" discourse encouraging women to participate in their own confinement (Anne Douglas) and the claim that sentimentalism consolidated new forms of subversive power for women (Jane Tompkins). Noble would answer "yes" to both sides of this argument; her analysis of sentimentalism thus attempts to move beyond (or...