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Wounded Hearts: Masculinity, Law, and Literature in American Culture
The literary study of emotion is part of an important revisionary movement among scholars eager to recast emotional politics for the twenty-first century. Looking beyond the traditional categories of sentiment, sensibility, and sympathy, Jennifer Travis suggests a new approach to reading emotionalism among men. She argues that the vocabulary of injury, with its evaluations of victimhood and its assessments of harm, has deeply influenced the cultural history of emotions.
From the Civil War to the early twentieth century, Travis traces the history of male emotionalism in American discourse. She argues that injury became a comfortable vocabulary--particularly among white middle-class men--through which to articulate and to claim a range of emotional wounds. The debates about injury that flourished in the cultural arenas of medicine, psychology, and the law spilled over into the realm of fiction, as Travis demonstrates through readings of works by Stephen Crane, William Dean Howells, Willa Cather, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. Travis concludes by linking this history to twenty-first-century preoccupations with "pain-centered politics," which, she cautions, too often focuses only on women and racial minorities.
From the Civil War to the early twentieth century, Travis traces the history of male emotionalism in American discourse. She argues that injury became a comfortable vocabulary--particularly among white middle-class men--through which to articulate and to claim a range of emotional wounds. The debates about injury that flourished in the cultural arenas of medicine, psychology, and the law spilled over into the realm of fiction, as Travis demonstrates through readings of works by Stephen Crane, William Dean Howells, Willa Cather, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. Travis concludes by linking this history to twenty-first-century preoccupations with "pain-centered politics," which, she cautions, too often focuses only on women and racial minorities.
232 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
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July 10, 2014
Another book that arrived just when I needed it for my dissertation! I don't agree with Travis' interpretation of "soldier's heart" but her use of injury as a category of thought in the 19th century is fascinating (not to mention useful). Wounded Hearts rejects the standard wisdom that women "domesticated" emotion and men rejected emotion in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Instead, the book interrogates how discourses of emotional injury destabilized the relationship between gender and feelings. Travis emphasizes that male emotional injuries sometimes reinforced male power and, at other times, destabilized their 'natural' social position. She frames the text around the language of "injury" and its multiple, shifting meanings in legal, political, and emotional discourse. She emphasizes how men created "privateness for an audience" (pulling the phrase from Habermas) in order to obtain recognition and recompense for an emotional injury.
It's an excellent book and one well worth reading for folks interested in law, trauma, or culture. It does presume a level of knowledge of the novels she analyzes but that's a fairly minor complaint.
It's an excellent book and one well worth reading for folks interested in law, trauma, or culture. It does presume a level of knowledge of the novels she analyzes but that's a fairly minor complaint.
Displaying 1 of 1 review