SOURCE: "The Sentimentalists: Promise and Betrayal in the Home," in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 4, No. 3, Spring, 1979, pp. 434-46.

In the essay that follows, Kelley claims that authors of the domestic novel simultaneously glorified and protested women 's domestic roles.

The sentimentalists, especially those who focused upon woman and her role in the family and society, have long been objects of neglect, dismissal, and scorn. Hawthorne's oft-repeated outburst that "America is now wholly given over to a d d mob of scribbling women" was echoed a century later by Leslie Fiedler's ridicule of "the purely commercial purveyors of domestic sentiments."¹ Adopting a more fruitful perspective, other critics have chosen instead to concentrate upon the social and cultural values articulated by this popular and highly influential group of nineteenth-century writers of fiction. Generally the assessments have been strikingly dissimilar, even contradictory, as the interpretations of...