Abigail and John Adams: The Americanization of Sensibility ISBN: 9780226037448 Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / University of Chicago Press Digital rights:Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
In this dense academic study, the celebrated correspondence of John Adams and his wife, Abigail, is mined for clues to the Revolutionary era's cult of emotionalism. Historian Barker-Benfield, at the State University of New York at Albany, investigates the 18th-century rise of "sensibility"-a worldview, expressed by the period's sentimental literary style, that held feelings and passions, rather than reason, to be the proper grounding of human psychology and morality. He traces its spread from British philosophers, moralists, and novelists into the awareness of genteel Americans like the Adamses, where it emerges, for example, in Abigail's plea for John to insert more "personal and tender soothings" into his letters. Barker-Benfield's rich analysis posits sensibility as a feminization of culture, an assertion of women's emotional claims against heartless rakes and gruff, tyrannical husbands, but also situates it at the heart of male revolutionaries' political rhetoric, with its appeal to the world for its sentimental allegiance. But the author's gray, jargon-riddled writing is a turnoff; under his plodding exegeses the charm of the Adams correspondence wilts. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
G. J. Barker-Benfield is professor of history at the State University of New York, Albany. He is the author of The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes toward Women in Nineteenth-Century America and The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain.
