Naomi Greyser's On Sympathetic Grounds: Race, Gender, and Affective Geographies in Nineteenth-Century North America and Kyla Schuller's The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century are must-reads for critics who work on nineteenth-century literature, literature and science, settler colonialism, critical race theory, or affect studies. Because sentimentalism is at the center of both of these works, they make a particularly generative pair. Together, Greyser and Schuller show how sentimentalism was more than just a popular literary genre dominated by white women authors, but was rather a widely deployed cultural discourse that had a vast impact on the United States, from its geographic boundaries (Greyser) to the regulation of its population (Schuller). As Schuller defines it, sentimentalism was “a broad technology of power” used to define degrees of civilization across race and sex (18). Given the ways sentimentalism traded in what Schuller names sensorial discipline, it is crucial that critics attend to its capacity to become, as Greyser describes, “more or less oppressive, more or less ethical in the public sphere” (64). Sentimental feeling (for Schuller) and sympathy (for Greyser) are key to racist, sexist, and settler colonial oppression throughout US history.

On Sympathetic Grounds and The Biopolitics of Feeling each take interdisciplinary approaches to sentimentalism in order to understand this history more fully. While literary criticism about sentimentalism often naturally connects to affect studies and feminist studies, Schuller and Greyser extend this work further to include the fields of science, rhetoric, geography, and New Materialism.

Schuller's impressive expertise in the history of science, evolutionary biology (particularly the foundational work of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck), population studies, and genetics frames sentimentalism as a discourse fundamental to impressibility, or the capacity to receive and respond to impressions from the world around you. Understanding impressibility as an index for race, sex, and species difference, she argues, helps us to rethink Frances E. W. Harper and the nuances of her relation to respectability and sexuality (chapter 2); the work of Drs. Elizabeth Blackwell and Mary Walker and the neurology of the vagina (chapter 3); the biophilanthropical aims of the Children's Aid Society and other reform movements centered on impressible children (chapter 4); or W. E. B. Du Bois and the history of black eugenics (chapter 5).

In a different approach, Greyser deftly weaves rhetorical and literary approaches in her study of a variety of cultural objects. Told through a story of affective geographies, or places that are inherently both territorial and emotional, On Sympathetic Grounds boldly argues that sympathy has cartographically shaped the North American continent. Greyser's dually literal and metaphorical use of terms like “grounds” and “maps” subtly underscores the rhetorical weight of landscapes, territories, and legal boundaries. Chapters cover a wide range of topics, including the Trail of Tears as an affective terrain that reveals how the US government can deploy sympathy to redefine sovereignty (chapter 1); the ventriloquized narrative of Sojourner Truth as a case study in the power and oppression of rhetorical intimacy (chapter 2); Nathaniel Hawthorne's masculine uses of sentimentalism, especially in terms of the marketplace (chapter 3); sympathy's place in the negotiation of sovereignty versus incorporation in the New Southwest, as told by María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (chapter 4); and the home economics that negate sympathy in the domestic sphere of Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig (chapter 5).

The subtitles of Greyser's and Schuller's books suggest their shared investments as well as divergent approaches. Whereas Schuller's focus on Race, Sex, and Science is inherently biological, Greyser's Race, Gender, and Affective Geographies is rhetorical. In a sense, Schuller maps onto race what Greyser more literally maps onto the American continent. For both, sentimentalism is a tool for creating and collapsing difference and distance. Race, according to The Biopolitics of Feeling, “helped produce hierarchies of somatic capacity,” measuring different groups based on their supposed ability to appropriately navigate the impressions and sensations of their milieu (12). Sex difference operates within the category of race to further define civilization: according to many late nineteenth-century evolutionists, only the most civilized evolved with male–female dimorphism, an evolution which successfully allows for the female to take on the hysteric tendency of “delicate feeling,” while the male counterpart safely reaps the benefits of impressibility (59). Race and sex are not separate categories of difference, then; rather, Schuller argues, “sex difference represents one of the key mechanisms through which race fragments the biological into governable units” (65).

Such taxonomies of difference are also important to Greyser. Arguments about race in On Sympathetic Grounds are more focussed on boundary making and exclusion, as in Greyser's analysis of Sojourner Truth's Narrative, a text which reveals how sentimentalism “invites and requests a spatial politics of inclusion” even as “intimacy from white community members and audiences” is “painful” to Truth as a black woman (69). Read in conversation with The Biopolitics of Feeling, On Sympathetic Grounds shows, perhaps, the rhetorical impact of sentimentalism's biopower. In terms of sex and gender, Greyser's study of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville as male practitioners of sentimentalism displays the paradox of impressibility that Schuller describes: how much is too much feeling? As Greyser writes, male authors like Hawthorne and Melville find themselves “situating masculinity within reach of influencing others without being undone” (112). This is precisely the biopolitics of feeling: to understand – and benefit from – the metrics of impressibility.

Many chapters across The Biopolitics of Feeling and On Sympathetic Grounds speak to one another in this fashion. Take, for example, Schuller's fourth chapter, on “Biophilanthropy and the Child Migrants of the Lower East Side.” Schuller describes the Emigration Plan, Charles Loring Brace's endeavor to remove impressible (often immigrant) children from tenements and transport them to families settling in the West. His plan was based on the biopolitical idea that these children, if raised within a better domestic milieu, could improve their hereditary material. Schuller emphasizes the settler colonial terms of Brace's plan, noting how Brace positions “the West as a space of rejuvenation that would transform his immigrant children into real Americans” (147). In other words, Brace's orphan trains traversed an affective geography through which the “vast West” (Schuller, 157) will absorb a certain population by providing new, sympathetic homes. Understanding the West as a space coopted by sentimental biophilanthropy, we see how sympathetic grounds dovetail with population studies and an early history of eugenics: both discourses describe means of inclusion and exclusion in terms of the US population and its geography.

Capitalism also provides a helpful through-line for The Biopolitics of Feeling and On Sympathetic Grounds. Brace's Emigration Plan hinges on the value of orphan laborers to settlers in the West, such that some children were not actually rescued from poverty, but chose to pursue an opportunity to work. What began as a project to combat the supposed environmental effects of tenement life eventually became a profitable exchange of labor and resources. Remembering that the population of laborers in question is immigrant children, we see how a sentimental politics of life – a measure of whose life is more or less valuable to the population, based on impressibility – undergirds many systems of power, including “free market capitalism, urban reform, western settlement, domestic literature, and child welfare” (Schuller, 170). Greyser's chapter on “Harriet Wilson and the Unsympathetic Materialism of White Northern Domesticity” reveals a similar intersection of capitalism, domestic literature, and sentimentalism. Greyser argues that Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig challenges an idealized domesticity that protects its inhabitants from the outside world (a model of domestic literature evoked by Brace and his orphan trains, as Schuller notes in “Orphan Plots,” 157–60), revealing instead the negotiations that take place in order to secure sympathy and its material benefits. Noting Wilson's door-to-door sales of Our Nig as well as Frado's status as a laborer “possess[ed]” by the Bellmonts (169), Greyser theorizes an “economy of sympathy” based on the “loss and gain, profit and shortfall” of affect and affection (181, original emphasis). Frado sheds tears throughout Our Nig, and shows great feeling for her dog Fido, but the novel shows such sympathy to be denied to her in return. Greyser argues that Our Nig, then, “ultimately advocates” for a “negotiated reciprocity” of sympathy and “a more ethical exchange of care” (179). Both Our Nig and Charles Loring Brace's Emigration Plan raise the question: who stands to benefit the most from programs of sympathy? In both cases, sentimentalism can cover over more complex dynamics of labor, and racial and gendered subordination.

At the beginning of On Sympathetic Grounds, Greyser writes that “perhaps because sentimentalism tends to take shape through fantasies about merging as salvation, it is surprisingly difficult in practice to engage the genre without finding oneself swept alternately into condemnation or rescue” (10). Both Greyser and Schuller resist this binary response, instead illuminating how sentimentalism was a dynamic, nation-building paradigm that scholars across disciplines should strive to better understand, especially because its impact is still felt today. Schuller's discussion of the ways sentimental feeling can be deployed to regulate a population certainly bears on contemporary politics that sometimes aim to delineate lives that are valuable from lives that are disposable. Similarly, Greyser's discussion of the ways sympathy can alternately erase and enforce sovereignty, incorporation, and survivance is visible in current debates about whether border patrol constitutes a necessary and/or effective program of national security – or a humanitarian crisis.

Epilogues to On Sympathetic Grounds and The Biopolitics of Feeling appropriately address these contemporary resonances. Greyser's study of how current art installations and monuments (including those to figures like Harriet E. Wilson and Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, objects of study in earlier chapters) brings history to present-day spatiality. In discussing these sites, Greyser considers sentimentalism as “an inherited mode of inquiry and artistic practice,” a methodology of postpresentism wherein scholars might experience both “intimacy and distance between the past and present” (193). Schuller's epilogue on “The Afterlives of Impressibility” more explicitly names how the present-day US has inherited the history of evolutionary biology described throughout The Biopolitics of Feeling. Most notably, she suggests, contemporary queer and feminist activisms are still grounded in “racializing structures in which sex difference is located in the pelvis and figures as a function of whiteness” (209). It is unclear whether biopower and impressibility are paradigms that we can eventually outgrow, but Schuller urges us to highlight “our collective bonds, rather than subjugating to economic imperatives our very capacities of feeing” (213). As Greyser might put it, sentimental feeling is only ethical when it is reciprocal.