Category Books

The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy: Sadomasochistic Sentiments from Clarissa to Rescue 911 »

Authors: Laura Hinton
ISBN-13: 9780791443392, ISBN-10: 0791443396
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Date Published: September 1999
Edition: (Non-applicable)

Author Biography: Laura Hinton

Book Synopsis

Suggesting that sentimental novels, films, and TV melodramas are guided by an ambivalent and sadoerotic sympathy, this book shows sympathetic sentiments to be cultural formulations of male desire, and sympathy itself to be the embodiment of a controlling gaze. In a playful but historically persuasive linkage of diverse texts, Laura Hinton shows how sympathetic spectators love their victims and, in the process, maintain authoritarian codes of sexual and racial difference.

Booknews

By examining sentiment in , and , Hinton (English, The City College of New York) shows sympathetic sentiments to be cultural formulations of male desire, and sympathy to be the embodiment of a controlling gaze. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

	List of Illustrations
	Acknowledgments
	Introduction: The Failed Mirror of Sympathy	1
1	Clarissa through the Epistolary Key-hole	35
2	A Masochistic Spectator's Sentimental Education: The "Illusion of Reality" in Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale	75
3	Giving Isabel an "Ado" (Adieu): Sympathy and Sadomasochism in James's Preface to The Portrait of a Lady	121
4	Sentimental Nature in Wuthering Heights; or, William Wyler Meets Emily Bronte on the Yorkshire Moors	147
5	Excessive Women's Sadomasochistic Sentiments: Maternal-Melodrama Fetishism in Imitation of Life and the TV Talkshow Sally Jessy Raphael	189
6	The Spectacular Survival of Sympathy on Rescue 911	219
	Notes	235
	Works Cited	261
	Index	273