The sentimental touch: Hands in American novels during the rise of managerial capitalism

This project contemplates the surprising endurance of a specific way of representing human contact in American literature. In sentimental literature, the touch is touching; scenes in which characters interact solely through their bodies, especially with their hands, are moments of the deepest profundity for the characters, and are moments that are intended to move the reader emotionally. The most authentic, transparent mode of communication is the meaning produced when two bodies touch.; The sentimental touch seems to rely on the legibility of the body; bodies convey meaning easily only when bodies themselves are easily read. It is surprising then, to see the sentimental touch endure in literature even when authors begin to question the full legibility of bodies. The sentimental touch becomes rare, yet the figuration persists---through realism and naturalism, when authors begin to question the apparent truth of the body---and even into modernism, when the body, like society, becomes fragmented and threatens to break down.; This project traces one of the hallmark expressions of the sentimental novel---the human touch whose meaning surpasses all language---through literary works that were written between 1850 and 1940, during the rise of managerial capitalism. I investigate the sentimental touch in Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 Uncle Tom's Cabin, Mark Twain's 1885 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Sherwood Anderson's 1919 Winesburg, Ohio, and Nathanael West's 1933 Miss Lonelyhearts . During this time span, there was a fundamental shift in the organization of the American economy. The most powerful businesses were no longer family-owned, but became sprawling organizations owned and controlled by complex bureaucracies. In tracing the use of sentimental figurations beyond sentimental literature, my dissertation charts the increasing anxiety about relationships in a society where the body has suddenly become opaque, mysterious, and unlocatable. As a marker of intimate human contact, the sentimental touch represents a literary desire to resist a cultural change in which human closeness gives way to corporate organization.