patriarchal, or white literary criticism are so varied, and so full of contradictions, that it is almost impossible to set up an alternative set of criteria for proletarian, feminist, or black literature. Tompkins's rejection of stylistic intricacy, psychological subtlety, and epistemological complexity could easily be seen as a conservative strategy, offering to readers a directness of experience that will reinforce their stereotypes and discourage any questioning of the established world view. Indeed, the death of Little Eva is a very questionable example of enacting a philosophy of reform and a radical cultural intervention: to radical movements, dying is a form of defeat; only to an otherworldly ideology can it be seen as victory.
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Next, it is necessary to question the version of cultural history put forward by the critics we are discussing. Does sentimentality belong to the female sphere? Behind Hemans lies Wordsworth, behind Stowe lies Dickens. Hemans was a passionate disciple of Wordsworth ("During the last four years of her life she never, except when prevented by illness, passed a single day without reading something of Wordsworth's"
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and Wordsworth's claim to be considered a poet of the affections was universally admitted. Ross's attempt to place Hemans in a specifically female tradition therefore involves an ingenious attempt to "contradict" the view of her as a female Wordsworth, but most of what she sees as a contrast looks, to the unprejudiced eye, like similarity.
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Tompkins's book, dealing only with the Americann experience, ignores the history of sentimentality and the enormous importance of Dickens in Victorian culture and does not, therefore, confront the question of the male sentimentalist at all. Virtually all the testimonies to the emotional impact of Nell and Paul quoted earlier in this chapter came from men, and in the case of Mrs. Greene's uncle the sentimental response seems to belong more to the man than to the woman. Within the novels there is very little to identify the pathos as predominantly feminine. "Anyone familiar with Victorian life," writes Philip Collins, "can remember many anecdotes of the manly tear being shed'';
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and indeed the changing meanings of "manly" show the changing fortunes of sentimentality. Nowadays its usual opposite is
womanly
or
effeminate
, and one of its main characteristics is emotional control; but early Victorian manliness was contrasted quite as much with childishness or beastliness, and even when contrasted with effeminacy did not necessarily exclude weeping, so that "manly tear" was not then the oxymoron it has since become. It is not even clear that
Uncle Tom's Cabin
itself should be placed all that firmly in a feminine tradition. Not only is Tom a man, but the main example
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