One of the major paradoxes of leftist discourse in the United States during the early decades of the twentieth century is the repeated criticism of sentimentalism in radical literature and political rhetoric despite the enormous popular success of such novels as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1905–1906) and Ernest Poole’s The Harbor (1915), which tapped cannily into sentimentalism’s continuing appeal. Both bestsellers deliberately invoked and sought to extend the nineteenth-century tradition of literary sentimentalism. In the case of The Jungle, Sinclair claimed publicly to have modeled his novel on the most famous example of nineteenth-century sentimental fiction, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), in order to draw attention to—and agitate for improving—the conditions of working-class immigrants. Yet in October 1907, the year after Sinclair’s novel was published in book form, A. S. Edwards, editor of the Industrial Union Bulletin, the official publication of the leftist labor union the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), praised the IWW for having freed itself from “sentimentalism and bourgeois reaction” at its third annual convention.Footnote 1 Edwards’s conflation of “sentimentalism” and “bourgeois reaction,” which he contrasted against the IWW’s “distinct advance in an understanding of the philosophy and structure of the [labor] movement,” serves as a textbook illustration of Jennifer A. Williamson’s point that early twentieth-century Marxists tended to associate sentimentalism with “social structures based on Christian belief systems” and “the American middle class.”Footnote 2 Despite these misgivings, however, The Jungle and The Harbor proved influential with subsequent writers of what came to be known as proletarian literature, including Michael Gold and John Steinbeck, whose own use of sentimentalism was sometimes criticized by their peers.
This essay explores the Left’s reception of what I am calling radical sentimentalism, the deployment of the tropes of literary sentimentalism to build sympathy for marginalized working-class people and to advocate for conversion to radical politics, in the first four decades of the twentieth century. More specifically, I examine the efforts of Sinclair and Poole to manage the reception of The Jungle and to model a preferred reception of The Harbor—and other literature like it—within Poole’s novel itself. Sinclair and Poole explicitly framed The Jungle as a second Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Poole’s The Harbor consistently presents sentimentalism as the resulting synthesis of the dialectic between reportage, which was favored by leftist leaders, and aesthetic experimentation, which was valorized by emerging modernists. While their efforts were not entirely successful—even the sympathetic critics who helped canonize these two novels in the 1950s sometimes damned them with faint praise or backhanded compliments—they anticipated an important but frequently overlooked attempt by Antonio Gramsci to recover the political and artistic efficacy of sentimentalism in his prison writings of the 1920s and 1930s. This essay considers the implications of Sinclair, Poole, and Gramsci’s arguments in favor of radical sentimentalism in the face of significant resistance among their fellow leftist intellectuals.
Since the 1980s, of course, literary scholars have succeeded in recovering literary sentimentalism fully. In 1985’s Sensational Designs, Jane Tompkins demonstrated the important “cultural work” sentimental fiction did in the nineteenth century, arguing that its “enormous popularity […] is a reason for paying close attention to” it instead of viewing it with the “suspicion bordering on distrust” exhibited by earlier critics.Footnote 3 Subsequent scholars have uncovered much longer and broader histories of sentimentalism’s impact on American culture. Suzanne Clark, for instance, has shown the degree to which twentieth-century modernism—both its literature and its criticism—was shaped by its “antisentimentality,” that is, its opposition to the sentimental literary tradition and the women authors associated with that tradition.Footnote 4 Lisa Mendelman has gone even further, identifying a renewal of sentimentalism in the early twentieth century, “at the precise moment that its cultural relevance supposedly ceases,” and suggesting that modernists actually “reinvented” sentimentalism.Footnote 5 The essays in Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler’s edited collection Sentimental Men make a case for “the importance of masculine sentimentality in American cultural history.”Footnote 6 Scholars have also turned with increasing frequency to the radical political potential of sentimental discourse. For Lauren Berlant, “sentimental ideology” is utopian and focused on solidarity, “mobilizing a fantasy scene of collective desire, instruction, and identification that endures within the contingencies of the everyday.”Footnote 7 Arguing that “the sentimental and sensational [are] modalities that exist on a continuum,” Shelley Streeby identifies a long, global history of leftists making “sentimental and sensational appeals to readers when they translated political and economic struggles into melodramatic stories of villains, heroes, and victims […] in order to move people to act, join movements, and participate in projects of social, political, and economic transformation.”Footnote 8
This essay follows these and other recent scholars’ lead in focusing on the sophisticated aesthetic and political uses to which sentimentalism has been put, often well beyond the mid-nineteenth-century period with which it is most associated in American literary history. In a sense, I argue that Sinclair and Poole intuitively understood Philip Fisher’s claims in 1985’s Hard Facts, another important early contribution to the recovery of nineteenth-century literary sentimentalism, that the sentimental novel was “the most radical popular form available to middle-class culture” and that “sentimentality was a crucial tactic of politically radical representation.”Footnote 9 Clearly, not all of Sinclair and Poole’s fellow leftists agreed. Nevertheless, as Suzanne Clark points out, the fact that many high modernists, intellectuals, and New Critics expended energy debating or, rather, dismissing the merits of sentimentalism indicates just how seriously they took it. The shifts in Gramsci’s thinking that I chart below, and the positive conclusions he reached about sentimentalism’s political and aesthetic value, enriches our understanding of the reception of sentimentalism as a process that was complex and dynamic decades before its more recent scholarly recovery. Indeed, Gramsci demonstrates that there was a radical reception of sentimentalism as well as a radical sentimentalism.
In the following sections, I first examine the reception of The Jungle, including the accounts Sinclair and his friend Poole wrote about its composition, in which they explicitly and repeatedly linked it to the legacy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, thereby asserting a literary tradition and establishing a pattern subsequent writers and readers of radical literature could follow. Next, I consider the implications of Sinclair and Poole’s efforts to reframe The Jungle as a second Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in terms of their efforts’ connection to a thread in Gramsci’s prison writings that makes a strong case for the revolutionary potential of sentimentalism. Finally, I read Poole’s The Harbor as a recursive engagement with the tropes and traditions of sentimentalism, resulting in formal innovation that renewed and extended the relevance of sentimentalism at a time when literary modernism was on the verge of displacing realism as the dominant movement in American literature. Since they concentrate primarily on reception, the first two sections will involve very little close reading of The Jungle. The turn to close reading of The Harbor in the third section, however, should be understood in terms of Poole’s effort to model for his readers how they should receive his use of sentimentalism. Throughout, I use the term sentimentalism to refer to literature that seeks to evoke from its readers sympathy and compassion for—and willingness to act on behalf of—its suffering subjects through a variety of literary techniques and conventions, including plots that involve threats to the stability of family units, characters who undergo conversion experiences, settings that explicitly or implicitly valorize domestic spaces, rhetoric and figurative language that emphasize emotional experiences, and so on. The scholarship cited above reminds us that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was far from the only example of the nineteenth-century sentimental tradition available to early twentieth-century writers and critics, and I will refer in passing to Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884). Nevertheless, Sinclair, Poole, and Gramsci deliberately made Stowe’s novel their lodestar, and this essay considers the implications of that decision, too.
The Jungle’s Reception and the Concept of a Second Uncle Tom’s Cabin
In the wake of The Jungle’s popular success, Sinclair reflected on how the controversy surrounding its publication had led to the Federal Meat Inspection and the Pure Food and Drug Acts of 1906, progressive legislation designed to regulate corporate meatpackers and thereby reassure middle-class consumers, rather than to improve the lives of the immigrant laborers employed by those corporations. “I wished to frighten the country by a picture of what its industrial masters were doing to their victims; entirely by chance I had stumbled on another discovery—what they were doing to the meat-supply of the civilized world,” Sinclair sheepishly acknowledged in October 1906. Then, he famously confessed, “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”Footnote 10 What Sinclair seems to imply here is that, in fact, he had set out to write a sentimental novel that would move readers to sympathize with—and, by extension, to agitate on behalf of—immigrant workers but that his efforts in that direction had been overwhelmed by the realistic details he had incorporated into the narrative. In short, months after The Jungle was published in book form, and nearly a year after its serialization ended, Sinclair was still attempting to manage or, more accurately, correct its reception.
By all accounts, from the beginning of his research for the novel, Sinclair directly and consciously modeled The Jungle on Uncle Tom’s Cabin. His friend and fellow socialist Poole emphasizes this point when describing his first encounter with Sinclair in a Chicago union headquarters. The “lad” who “breezed” in wearing “a wide-brimmed hat,” “a loose-flowing tie,” and “a wonderful warm expansive smile” said, “Hello! I’m Upton Sinclair! And I’ve come here to write the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the Labor Movement!” After two weeks researching the 1904 meat cutter’s strike, he announced, “I’ve got all that I need to get on the spot and now I’m going home to write!” Poole concludes, “And so he wrote The Jungle, the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the machine age.”Footnote 11 However apocryphal it may sound, Poole’s account is substantiated by a synopsis written by Sinclair and published in the February 11, 1905, issue of the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, two weeks before it started serializing The Jungle. “It will set forth the breaking of human hearts by a system which exploits the labor of men and women for profits,” Sinclair promised. “It will shake the popular heart. […] The novel will not have any superficial resemblance to ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’ Fundamentally it will be identical with it—or try to be. It will show the ‘system working.’”Footnote 12 It is worth noting that, unlike the mass audience Sinclair reached when Doubleday, Page and Company published The Jungle, the readers of Appeal to Reason may have viewed Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a protest novel rather than as a work of literary sentimentalism. Sinclair’s reference to “breaking […] hearts” is an unmistakable invocation of the rhetoric of emotion and sympathy, on which sentimentalism relies. Sinclair or perhaps the Appeal to Reason’s editor Fred Warren subsequently persuaded other radical writers to echo and reinforce this comparison between the two novels. Most notably, Jack London declared The Jungle “the ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ of wage slavery! […] What ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ did for black slaves, ‘The Jungle’ has a large chance to do for the wage-slaves of today.”Footnote 13
Moreover, throughout his life, Sinclair consistently described The Jungle—and his experience producing it—in intensely sentimental terms. In The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair (1962), he cast the writing of the novel as a means of articulating his own emotional pain, the result of his struggles with poverty and an unhappy marriage:
I wrote with tears and anguish, pouring into the pages all the pain that life had meant to me. Externally, the story had to do with a family of stockyard workers, but internally it was the story of my own family. Did I wish to know how the poor suffered in wintertime in Chicago? I had only to recall the previous winter in the cabin, when we had had only cotton blankets, and had put rugs on top of us, and cowered shivering in our separate beds. […] Our little boy was down with pneumonia that winter, and nearly died, and the grief of that went into the book.Footnote 14
What matters rhetorically about this passage is its prolonged engagement with the conventions of sentimentalism. Sinclair emphasizes his family’s physical suffering, the sheer precariousness of their domestic life together, and above all his own emotional response to the situation. His “tears” and “grief” not only inform The Jungle; they literally frame his account of its writing.
For readers who associate literary sentimentalism exclusively or primarily with women authors, Sinclair’s extensive meditation on his feelings may seem remarkable. As Glenn Hendler has shown in Public Sentiments, however, a significant number of literary works written by men throughout the nineteenth century, ranging from Martin Delany and Horatio Alger to Henry James and Mark Twain, “deploy an expressively emotional form of sentiment as a way of making heterosocial alliances […] while at the same time their tearful male sentiment served to refigure and buttress the homosocial bonds that underlay the masculine character of the public sphere.”Footnote 15 It should not surprise us too much, then, that Sinclair likewise deploys sentimentalism, in both The Jungle and his Autobiography, to forge “alliances” between his working-class characters and readers. Moreover, despite choosing to focus on women writers because of “the enduring association of sentimentality with femininity and female authorship,” Lisa Mendelman acknowledges that, in the modernist era, “sentimentalism appears in texts by male and female authors alike.” She explicitly tries “to denaturalize the equivalence of the sentimental with its gendered historical profile.”Footnote 16 Similarly, Deborah Nelson has identified a tradition of “unsentimentality” among women who wrote about subjects of suffering with a “refusal of empathy and solidarity,” calling it an “unusually thoughtful” response to the “gendering of emotional style.”Footnote 17 Thus, it is possible that gendered distinctions among modes of writing were muddier and in far more flux in the early twentieth century than critics have supposed. Sinclair and other men concerned with helping their readers understand pain and injustice may have become more willing to engage sentimentalism directly as women’s writing became more diverse.
Numerous critics have pointed out that direct comparisons between Uncle Tom’s Cabin and later novels that deploy sentimentalism for the purpose of protest are incredibly common—almost to the point of meaninglessness. In one of several essays discussing the connections between Stowe’s novel and Jackson’s Ramona, itself frequently called “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the Indian,” Susan Gillman puts it succinctly: “Given how strikingly often the old saw ‘a second Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ is invoked and just as quickly passed by, it’s as though the initial comparative gesture alone is enough, the fact of comparison assumed and forgotten.”Footnote 18 Gillman’s essay, however, takes the claim that Jackson’s Ramona constitutes just such a “second Uncle Tom’s Cabin” seriously. She posits that Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Ramona, and José Martí’s translation of the latter novel constitute a “text network” in which they become not just “individual texts that refer to one another indexically or contextually, but rather as a set of iterations independent of their birth order and the priorities dictated by country or language of origin.” Approaching those texts in this way, Gillman suggests, may help readers avoid “the pitfalls of simple juxtaposition without analysis or, perhaps worse, the hierarchy of original and copy.”Footnote 19
Invoking the concept of a “text network” is not an excuse for sidestepping the question of how The Jungle resembles Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which is apparent in the dissolution of protagonist Jurgis Rudkus’s family, in his own suffering and sorrow, and in his later conversion experience when he discovers socialism. The Jungle begins with Jurgis, a Lithuanian immigrant, getting married and moving with his extended family to Chicago in order to work in the meatpacking industry. Jurgis initially thinks the United States is “a place of which lovers and young people dreamed” because people can become “rich” or at least “free” there.Footnote 20 He quickly learns that the United States’ economic, political, and judicial systems are inherently and thoroughly corrupt. He is scammed in various ways and forced to work in dangerous conditions. One by one, the members of his family die due to their “life-and-death struggle with poverty” (372), and Jurgis is injured at work and imprisoned when he attempts to punish his wife’s boss for raping her. Throughout these experiences, Sinclair emphasizes Jurgis’s emotions, just as he did his own in his Autobiography. As early as the fourth chapter, we find “tears in his eyes” when he realizes how weak he actually is (65). Those tears reappear frequently: “tears came into his eyes” when he considers how much money he wastes on alcohol in chapter fourteen, “tears would come into his eyes” when he remembers other people mocking him in chapter seventeen, “hot tears ran down his cheeks” when his wife dies in chapter nineteen, he “wet the ground with his tears” dreaming of her in chapter twenty-two, and so on (166, 199, 228, 260). Eventually, Jurgis meets some socialists, who teach him about such concepts as “common ownership and democratic management of the means of producing the necessities of life” (400). Jurgis is caught up in the effort to “Organize! Organize! Organize!” (411), and he effectively sublimates his individuality—and desire for personal success—to a common cause instead of allowing himself to be subsumed by the social and economic forces he cannot resist alone. As John Funchion notes, Sinclair’s commitment “to reclaiming Stowe’s sentimental power” enables him to call for “political transformation rather than for [mere] reform.”Footnote 21
My goal here, however, is to explore what meanings and legacies emerge through Sinclair’s insistence that his novel be understood in relation to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. If anything, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Jungle inhabit an even more striking “text network” than do the former novel and Ramona. While Ramona’s popularity sustained a significant afterlife, involving stage and film adaptations as well as a thriving tourism industry in Southern California, The Jungle profoundly influenced the entire genre of the proletarian novel. As Walter Rideout observes in his classic The Radical Novel in the United States, “in the lonely twenties [Sinclair] almost was radical American literature. In the thirties the young Leftists […] admitted that his novels and tracts had been and still were instrumental in teaching them the facts of capitalist life.”Footnote 22 What Rideout misses is that the proletarian writers who followed Sinclair seem to have read The Jungle in exactly the way Sinclair hoped they would because they, too, engaged and extolled sentimentalism. Rideout describes Michael Gold’s 1930 novel Jews without Money as possessing “the rhetoric of intense emotion, an emotion that is always on the verge—and frequently well beyond the verge—of diving into sentimentality.”Footnote 23 Gold promoted sentimentalism while editor of The New Masses, the literary magazine of the Communist Party USA and an important venue for radical authors. In a January 1929 essay for New Masses entitled “Go Left, Young Writers!” Gold characterized “proletarian literature in America” as “sensitive and impatient” and “violent and sentimental by turns.”Footnote 24 Even those contemporary critics who did not share Gold’s enthusiasm for sentimentalism recognized its role in structuring proletarian novels. In On Native Grounds, Alfred Kazin characterizes Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), another bestseller, as a “book […] as urgent and as obvious a social tract for its time as Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been for another.”Footnote 25
As Kazin’s point of reference underscores, Sinclair, Poole, and their followers’ engagement with the sentimental tradition began and ended with Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Nowhere in their respective descriptions of The Jungle’s genesis do Sinclair and Poole refer to Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850) or Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854). In restricting their vision of the sentimental to Stowe’s novel alone, they opened themselves up to further criticism from some quarters that their literary works were merely protest novels, with limited potential for effecting the kind of structural changes they sought. As James Baldwin famously observed, in positioning Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the model “‘protest’ novel,” its spiritual descendants became “an accepted and comforting aspect of the American scene.”Footnote 26 Yet despite Baldwin’s misgivings, it is perhaps that “comforting” recognizability that made Sinclair’s, Poole’s, and Steinbeck’s novels, like Stowe’s, so accessible to a wide readership. In short, by inviting readers to view Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Jungle, The Harbor, Jews without Money, and The Grapes of Wrath as part of a “text network,” these authors made their political goals more, if not completely, legible to their readers.
Paradoxically, despite the enthusiasm of Sinclair, Poole, London, Gold, and others for the radical possibilities of sentimentalism, most critics and intellectuals on the Left have historically viewed those possibilities with a great deal of skepticism. As Williamson has shown, sentimental literature’s “emphasis on the middle-class, bourgeois domestic space” presented special problems for authors concerned with “the destructiveness of capitalism”: writers who adopted the conventions of sentimentalism left themselves “open to charges of overdoing their depictions and of emotional falseness.”Footnote 27 Baldwin’s critique of Uncle Tom’s Cabin plays out partly along these lines, and plenty of other critics viewed proletarian novels in similar terms. In his 1937 memoir A Long Way from Home, Claude McKay, who had briefly coedited The Liberator with Michael Gold in the early 1920s, criticized Gold for preferring “sentimentality above intellectuality in estimating proletarian writing and writers”—a preference that McKay called “mawkish.”Footnote 28 James T. Farrell, author of the Studs Lonigan trilogy (1932–1935), denounced what he deemed Gold’s “school of revolutionary sentimentalism,” which he considered “anti-rational to the core” and “a literature of simplicity to the point of obviousness and even of downright banality.”Footnote 29
McKay, Farrell, and likeminded critics had significant party-line justification for their objections. In an essay published posthumously in the July 27, 1924, issue of Pravda, V. I. Lenin cautioned against making revolutionary appeals primarily through the rhetoric of sentimentalism, singling out Sinclair as his primary example: “Sinclair is naïve in his appeal, although fundamentally it is a very correct one; he is naïve because he ignores the development of mass socialism over the last fifty years and the struggle of trends within socialism.” Lenin believed that Sinclair’s writing lacked the thick description of realism and tried to make up for it by appealing to emotion. Sinclair, Lenin charged, “ignores the conditions for the growth of revolutionary action when an objectively revolutionary situation and a revolutionary organization exist. The ‘emotional’ approach cannot make up for that.”Footnote 30
In the decades that followed, even those critics who helped canonize The Jungle and The Harbor did so in ambivalent ways, often echoing Lenin’s characterization of Sinclair’s fiction as essentially “correct” politically but ultimately “naïve” due to its reliance on sentimentality. Walter Rideout, for instance, claims, “Jurgis’s militant acceptance of Socialism” in The Jungle “is far less creatively realized than his previous victimization” because “Sinclair’s outraged moral idealism is attracted more to the pathos than the power of the poor.”Footnote 31 Rideout was perhaps The Harbor’s most prominent champion, yet he also inadvertently undercuts his case for what he called “the best Socialist novel of all,” when he suggests that it was not until the emergence of John Dos Passos, with his “technical brilliance and sardonic objectivity,” that the radical novel moved beyond the “artistically crude and […] sentimental.”Footnote 32 Lewis Mumford paid The Harbor a similarly backhanded compliment in his 1957 introduction to The Golden Day: Poole, he allowed, had written “a minor work that nevertheless took a special place in our imagination.” For Mumford, The Harbor exemplified American fiction’s tendency, “at this period,” to “lurch from the morass of sentimentality into an almost equally maudlin swamp of realism.”Footnote 33 For these critics, Sinclair’s and Poole’s presumed inability to free their writing from sentimentalism is precisely what renders The Jungle and The Harbor in some way “minor” or “crude.”Footnote 34
Antonio Gramsci’s Early Marxist Recovery of Radical Sentimentalism
Lenin and others’ dim view of sentimentalism’s revolutionary potential—due, in part, to its long association with middle-class readers and subjects—informs the early work of Antonio Gramsci. In his brief account of the founding of the Italian Communist Party, first published in the September 25, 1921, issue of L’Ordine Nuovo, Gramsci recalls how “the Socialist Party [fell] into total confusion” as Fascism emerged in Italy: “Its infantile and sentimental revolutionary beliefs were utterly confounded. […] Only a minority of the party, made up of the most advanced and educated part of the industrial proletariat, […] did not allow itself to be taken in by the bourgeois state’s apparent strength and energy. Thus the Communist Party was born.”Footnote 35 Although his views would gradually change, Gramsci’s formulation links “sentimental” beliefs to “infantile” and presumably uneducated thinking, which in turn is susceptible to being “taken in” by bourgeois state power. Taking an “‘emotional’ approach” to social and political problems, however, is neither as “naïve” nor as “infantile” as Lenin or Gramsci, in his early years, claim. Instead, the “text network” that The Jungle and Uncle Tom’s Cabin inhabit can be extended to include Gramsci’s later prison writings as a means of recovering an early and productive attempt at theorizing The Jungle’s attempt to deploy Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s sentimentalism for even more radical ends.
Contrary to the line of argument Gramsci made in 1921, the conflation of sentimentalism and bourgeois values is not self-evident from a Marxist perspective. In their Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels actually count sentimentalism and the familial and social relations it often celebrates among the many victims of the bourgeoisie, which “has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. […] The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.” Far from deploying sentimentalism as a screen for its exploitation of other classes, Marx and Engels suggest, the bourgeoisie works “pitilessly” to strip it of its affective power, making “naked self-interest [and] callous ‘cash payment’” the only “nexus between man and man.”Footnote 36 As a result, a more productive question for Marxists in the early twentieth century was whether sentimentalism, a pre-capitalist mode of expression, had become historically irrelevant or if its power to resist the bourgeoisie was recoverable. Certain critical discussions of sentimental literature’s commitment to domestic rather than market values and its tendency to paint “free market capitalism as the antithesis of compassion and permanent values” point to its continued relevance and utility to those seeking to move beyond capitalism.Footnote 37 That is not to suggest, however, that Marx and Engels—or subsequent Marxists—desire to return to the family as it has been traditionally defined, but rather to account for the affective power of certain pre-capitalist social formations dialectically.Footnote 38
That reappraisal and recovery of sentimentalism’s revolutionary possibilities is one of the major themes of Gramsci’s prison writings.Footnote 39 His reconsideration of sentimentalism appears to have resulted at least partly from his rereading various works of popular literature, including Uncle Tom’s Cabin, during his imprisonment. Prompted by his son Delio’s interest, Gramsci reread Stowe’s novel during the summer of 1933. At first surprised by Delio’s request, which he attributed to his son’s overhearing “some general talk about it as a great book,” Gramsci confided to his sister-in-law Tania that Stowe’s “tearful concoction filled with Quaker sentimentality [had] bored [him] to death” when he had “tried several times to read it” and that he didn’t “remember anything of its plot.”Footnote 40 He tried to dissuade Delio from reading it, rehearsing the twin arguments that it had been written for middle-class readers and that it was no longer relevant: “You yourself will be convinced that this is a book written to stir the emotions of the shopkeepers of North America many years ago and that it is of little interest to you.”Footnote 41 Upon rereading Uncle Tom’s Cabin himself, however, Gramsci confided to Tania that “it made an impression on me that is better than my memories of it based on my first reading. In the midst of so much conventionality and propagandistic artifice I have nevertheless found some rather forceful passages.”Footnote 42 These mixed feelings grew more positive when he realized that he had read a copy “translated from the French in a very paltry and pedestrian manner,” and he promised to send a better edition to Delio, asking his wife Julia to find “somebody [who] will explain it to him historically, by setting the religiosity and emotions with which this book is permeated in their proper time and place, […] explaining and justifying them as a historical necessity of the past.” He was eager for his son to experience “a catharsis, as the Greeks used to say, by which the emotions are relived ‘artistically’ as beauty, and no longer as shared and still operative passion.”Footnote 43 The attitude toward Uncle Tom’s Cabin that Gramsci eventually reached—that readers can learn to appreciate its formal deployment of sentimentalism once they understand the historical context in which that deployment could operate successfully—anticipates Tompkins’s notion of the “cultural work” of Stowe’s book.
Around the time that he was reevaluating Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s potential for producing “catharsis” in modern readers, Gramsci was writing about the role of the organic intellectual in strikingly similar terms. “The intellectual element,” Gramsci warns in the tenth of his Prison Notebooks, “does not always feel […] the elementary passions of the people” and therefore all too often is incapable of “explaining and justifying” the passions that the people feel but do not understand. “One cannot make politics-history without this passion,” Gramsci continues, “without this sentimental connection between intellectuals and people-nation.” For Gramsci, sentimentalism serves as a sort of meeting ground, the means by which understanding is produced for both intellectuals and the people they seek to represent: “If the relationship between intellectuals and people-nation […] is provided by an organic cohesion in which feeling-passion becomes understanding and thence knowledge (not mechanically but in a way that is alive), then and only then is the relationship one of representation.” Operating as both a mode of expression (what Gramsci calls “an exchange”) and a shared set of experiences and dispositions (what he calls “the shared life”), sentimentalism enables intellectuals to lead the people they represent “into a catharsis of modern civilization.”Footnote 44 Indeed, over the course of the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci increasingly uses the word sentimental [sentimentale] in both senses until they begin to merge in the passage in which he calls for a “sentimental connection.” Hence, in the Sixth Notebook, he discusses the value of using “a sentimental pathos that renders […] arguments more sympathetic and intense,” clearly referring to sentimentalism as a mode of expression, while also discussing “the cultural, political-moral-sentimental environment” in which meaning is made.Footnote 45
Stowe’s novel was not the only example of literary sentimentalism that Gramsci read (or reread) during his imprisonment. He rediscovered writers in the Italian sentimental tradition, too. In particular, and for obvious reasons, the letters that the nineteenth-century journalist and politician Silvio Spaventa wrote while imprisoned by the Austrians during the Risorgimento resonated with Gramsci’s own experiences. “I had the impression,” he wrote to Tania, “that in many of his letters, naturally written in the language of the times, that is, somewhat romantic and sentimental, he perfectly expresses states of mind that resemble those that I often experience.”Footnote 46 What Frank Rosengarten and Raymond Rosenthal refer to as “Gramsci’s close sense of identification with Spaventa” in their introduction to the first volume of Gramsci’s Letters from Prison speaks to Gramsci’s growing appreciation of the continued affective power of the sentimental language in which Spaventa and others wrote.Footnote 47
Not coincidentally, it turns out, Gramsci was also reading Sinclair during his imprisonment. In particular, in a letter to Tania dated April 16, 1928, Gramsci notes that he had just received a French translation of Sinclair’s Oil! (1927).Footnote 48 That novel must have made a positive impression on Gramsci because the following year, in another letter to Tania dated March 11, 1929, he lists it among six books that were “missing,” surmising that “they’ve been selected and held back on purpose,” and that he “would like to have” again.Footnote 49 While it is of course impossible to know for certain, it is tempting to imagine that, when he reencountered Uncle Tom’s Cabin four years later, he was rereading it through the lens of Sinclair’s emotionalism. That is to say, perhaps Gramsci’s notion of a “sentimental connection” that serves as an appropriate means of producing a “modern”—and radical—cathartic experience results from his navigating the “text network” that Sinclair established when he set out to write his own Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Gramsci presumably saw in Sinclair’s fiction an instance of establishing a “sentimental connection.” Sinclair, who had experienced grinding poverty himself, assumes the role of an organic intellectual and, in the case of The Jungle, translates feelings into knowledge (and vice versa) through his own understanding of both, with Jurgis Rudkus modeling the cathartic experience both Sinclair and Gramsci obviously hope to evoke.
The Harbor and the Making of a “Sentimental Connection”
One of the most important implications of Gramsci’s loaded use of the word sentimental, at least from a literary-critical perspective, is that it suggests sentimentalism itself can produce a unity of form and content, an aesthetic value that would gain increasing traction among Gramsci’s contemporaries as they valorized the more experimental forms of literature associated today with high modernism. Like other critics, Gramsci recognized the power that unified works of art exert on their readers; however, he argued that that unity works best when it extends into—and resonates with—the world of feelings that those readers inhabit. In his Sixth Notebook, he claims, “The immediate contact between the reader and the writer occurs when the unity of form and content in the reader is premised upon a unity of the poetic and sentimental world; otherwise, the reader has to start translating the ‘language’ of the content into his own language.”Footnote 50
The Harbor’s dialectical account of a writer coming to terms with revolutionary socialism, and the power of sentimentalism to render that struggle legible, makes it an exemplary work of the kind Gramsci describes. Poole’s novel unifies its “poetic and sentimental world” as well as its “form and content,” and helps to explain why it, like Sinclair’s The Jungle, became a powerful influence on subsequent writers of proletarian literature. Deliberately and reflexively blending various modes of fiction, including realism and sentimental romance, Poole’s novel dramatizes its narrator-protagonist’s efforts at developing an aesthetically appropriate and ideologically responsible means of making the modern economic conditions and relations of New York City’s port district legible. Moreover, the novel thematizes its own engagement with literary sentimentalism. Through a variety of formal techniques, The Harbor enacts a dialectic whereby sentimentalism emerges as a synthesis of the hard-nosed realism of reportage and the more romantic and imprecise conventions of aestheticism to which Billy, the aspiring writer who narrates the novel, is drawn equally. In this respect, Poole signals to his readers within the novel itself how they should receive it.
Poole seems not to have invoked Uncle Tom’s Cabin as directly as Sinclair did when marketing his novel. Indeed, at one point within the novel, Billy dismisses socialist propaganda when it is “as sentimental as Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”Footnote 51 But Billy’s story is in part a künstlerroman that charts his evolution from a would-be aesthete into a politically committed artist. In that respect, The Harbor’s playfully indirect allusion to Stowe in its opening paragraphs is more indicative of Poole’s attitude toward Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In that scene, seven-year-old Billy and his mother listen to Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s real-life brother, preach a sermon at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. Billy initially thinks Beecher is a “chump,” but it is Beecher who introduces the novel’s central metaphor of “the harbor of life” (3–4). In sentimental fashion, Beecher casts the harbor as a “home”—an image of domesticity that makes Billy’s “mother’s eyes [look] so queer” (4, 3). Billy rejects Beecher’s assertion because he views the harbor above which his own home is situated as a “strange and terrible” place of industrial ugliness (4), and it takes him the course of the novel to recognize that the harbor is indeed home to the laborers who make his comfortable childhood possible at the expense of living in squalor themselves. Thus, over the course of The Harbor, the protagonist matures by learning that Beecher is, in fact, correct. The harbor is a literal home for the working classes, and the protagonist must learn to understand and sympathize with its inhabitants’ conditions before he can represent them accurately in his writings.
The Harbor tells the story of Billy’s learning how to make the “sentimental connection” that Gramsci describes as a fundamental precondition of becoming an organic intellectual. Poole’s novel is therefore simultaneously a künstlerroman and a conversion narrative. Billy’s growth as an author, his friend and fellow writer Joe Kramer tells him, involves shifting his focus from “the men at the top” to “the millions of people here who depend on the place [the harbor] for their jobs and their lives” (170). In order to make that shift in his writing, Billy also must learn to have faith in “something deep down in the people themselves that rises up out of each one of them the minute they get together” and to believe that “that power has such possibilities that when it comes into full life not all the police and battleships and armies on earth can stop it” (318). In other words, Billy must become radicalized politically and must accept the revolutionary power of solidarity and group action before he can write effectively about his chosen subject, the New York port district that is “the harbor” of the novel’s title. In the novel’s concluding paragraph, after the contradictions of his political and aesthetic commitments resolve themselves, Billy is able to record the “thick voice” that rises up “from the harbor” itself: “Make way, all you habits and all you institutions, all you little creeds and gods. For I am the start of the voyage. […] For I am your molder, I am strong—I am a surprise, I am a shock—I am a dazzling passion of hope—I am a grim executioner! I am reality—I am life! I am the book that has no end!” (334–35). At once a call to action and a commitment to a socialist vision of the end of history, Billy’s empathy finally gives voice to the harbor and to the revolutionary struggle that emanates from it.
Billy’s conversion experience—a middle-class writer learns to sympathize with the revolutionary struggles of the working classes and commits to engender more of that sympathy through his writing—is immanent within the novel’s opening invocation of the nineteenth-century American sentimental tradition. It is not just Henry Ward Beecher’s status as the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe that matters. Beecher’s ability to move an audience, including Billy’s mother, to tears models a masculine engagement with the affective power of sentimentalism. At important points in the novel, the emotional responses of Billy’s male readers serve to affirm his ambitions of becoming a professional writer. His father’s reaction to a sketch entitled “The Phantom Ship”—“‘Son,’ he said very huskily, ‘this is a strong piece of work!’ His eyes were moist as they moved rapidly down the page” (117)—foreshadows the fact that it will become Billy’s first publication as an adult, for which he earns $100. Likewise, what enables Billy to win the affection of—and eventually to marry—Eleanore Dillon is her engineer father’s approval of Billy’s writing, which Dillon praises for its ability to capture the “human part” of the commerce that goes on in the harbor (131).
Appropriately enough for a socialist novel, The Harbor presents Billy’s conversion and gradual adoption of sentimentalism dialectically, and this dialecticism suffuses the novel at multiple levels: the plot, the narrator-protagonist’s relationships with other characters, and sometimes even the sentence structure, which frequently juxtaposes ideas and events via comma splices. Describing Joe Kramer’s different attitude toward writing, for example, Billy writes, “Beauty and form were nothing to him, it was ‘the meat’ he was after” (54). The comma that separates that sentence’s two independent clauses also separates the two seemingly contradictory directions in which Billy’s writing is pulled. After graduating from college, he moves to Paris and commits himself to fin de siècle aestheticism: “This was art, this was beauty and truth, this was getting at life in a way that thrilled” (54). When he returns to New York and becomes a professional writer, however, circumstances force him to adopt the less fussy, more straightforward style of reportage. One editor assigns a no-nonsense photographer to work with Billy in order to show him the ropes and ridicule the high-mindedness out of him, reasoning that the photographer “is just the sort of chap to take hold of an author from Paris and turn him into a writer” (139). Nevertheless, Billy persists in trying to synthesize the concern with form and technique he learned in Paris with the content American readers want or need. The synthesis that he achieves eventually earns the respect of Joe Kramer. “I was wrong about you in Paris,” Joe admits. “What you got over there was just what you needed, it has put you already way out of my class, and it’s going to give you a lot of power as a spreader of ideas” (170). Only, Joe insists, Billy must make sure that they are not “the wrong ideas” (170). It is at this point that Joe advises Billy to turn his sympathies to the working classes, which Billy gradually does. The result of this long process is that Billy recovers the sentimentalism he had rejected out of hand in the novel’s opening pages.
In its own self-referential engagement with the sentimental tradition, The Harbor goes further than simply inviting comparison with Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Like The Jungle (and Uncle Tom’s Cabin), The Harbor begins with a more or less idyllic vision of domesticity. As in Sinclair’s novel, that domesticity falls victim to the forces of capitalism. Also like The Jungle, The Harbor ends in the conversion of the protagonist to socialism. Whereas Sinclair’s protagonist gradually loses his individuality as he takes his place within the newly empowered working classes, Poole’s protagonist gradually recognizes his responsibility as a writer to give voice to the titular harbor and the workers who inhabit it. In a word, The Harbor recasts sentimentalism for the age of modernism—an achievement that is radical not only politically, but aesthetically as well. The Harbor’s dramatization of a writer’s efforts at reconciling aestheticism’s romantic faith in art and reportage’s straightforward realism means that, in its own way, Poole’s novel enacts the influential thesis about the emergence of literary modernism that Edmund Wilson proposed in Axel’s Castle: that “the literary history of our time is to a great extent that of the development of Symbolism and of its fusion or conflict with Naturalism.”Footnote 52 Like his contemporary Mumford, though, Wilson was unable or unwilling to engage The Harbor’s sentimentalism seriously enough to appreciate what Poole was doing; Wilson dismissed The Harbor as “flavorless fodder.”Footnote 53 It is precisely for this reason that Gramsci’s prison writings offer a powerful supplement to the criticism of Wilson, Mumford, and others, including even Rideout, who proved incapable of appreciating the continued aesthetic work that sentimentalism performed in Poole’s novel, as well as in the works of Sinclair and other, later proletarian writers.
Open access
