God, Women and the Power Effete

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE by ANN DOUGLAS 403 pages. Knopf. $15.

Ann Douglas is a 35-year-old American literature scholar with a provocative thesis. It is that U.S. mass consumer culture was born about 150 years ago in the pious alliance of middle-class women and the liberal Protestant clergy of the Northeast. Expansionist, masculine America was also getting started at this time but, argues the author, the period was one of intellectual and spiritual decline.

Douglas reasons thus: the stern, rigorous theology of the Puritan fathers was eventually weakened by the less demanding beliefs of such sects as Congregationalism and Unitarianism. Women, once full working partners in clearing and planting the New World, were turned by industrialization and commerce into homemakers and clotheshorses. Shunted to the sidelines, these women and the liberal clergy sought power as guardians of art, literature and refinement. America's sentimental education began. Feeling became more prized than thinking. Popular literature grew trashier at the same time that magazine and book publishing was burgeoning. Narcissism flourished, and with it a greater appetite for the products and kitsch of popular culture.

To support this bold brief, Douglas, who teaches at Columbia University, has rummaged through the cultural bric-a-brac of American Victoriana--ministerial bombast, dreadful 19th century novels, and fatuous, hypocritical ladies' magazines. She has made the proper linkages to British Victorianism and German romantic philosophy. She has analyzed the lives and works of 30 women and 30 liberal clergymen (there was a high percentage of literary Unitarians). There is an excellent chapter on the life of Margaret Fuller, the American Transcendentalist who challenged the sentimental female stereotype by participating in the activity and danger of Italy's struggle for independence. Douglas also offers a penetrating chapter in which the works of Herman Melville are seen as bitter social criticisms subtly designed to repudiate the values of the reader.

Anti-lntellectualism. Though steeped in the 19th century, Douglas takes an important part of her text from Richard Hofstadter's Anti-lntellectualism in American Life (1963). In the heavy, bunkered prose of the embattled intellectual, the historian wrote that "to the extent that it becomes accepted in any culture that religion is largely an affair of the heart or of the intuitive qualities of the mind and that the rational mind is irrelevant or worse, so far it will be believed that the rational faculties are barren or perhaps dangerous."

Hofstadter's book rode a mainstream of the national experience. His words applied to the egghead-baiting and benign neglect of the '50s, but they were also prophetic for the drug culture of the '60s and the trivialized mysticism of the '70s. The Feminization of American Culture attempts to tap an underground current. It is that meandering flow of frustrations, veiled hostilities and confusions about power and innocence so common to the powerless.

Harriet Beecher Stowe shrewdly perceived the women that Douglas writes about as the "Pink and White Tyranny." This, according to the author, was "the drive of the 19th century American women to gain power through the exploitation of their feminine identity as their society defined it." Respectable women would, in effect, profit by turning themselves into grotesques of sentimentality--vulnerable, unselfish creatures dedicated, as one clergyman put it, to "the world's comfort and blessing." The crude sexual equivalent is the streetwalker whose bizarre costumes are intended to match her customers' pornographic fantasies.

Douglas has little difficulty demonstrating Victorian America's perversions of intellect and emotion. They were generously paraded in popular novels and magazines of the mid-1800s --the overwhelming number of which were written by and for women. There was a type of story in which women who had suffered male brutality exacted the dubious revenge of Christian forgiveness --or "punitive mercy." Consolation literature like Stepping Heavenward (1869) took the sting out of death by furnishing heaven with the comforts of home. Guides to female etiquette competed vigorously for attention, while they advised their readers to shun the crudities of the business world. The Rev. Horace Bushnell, a Connecticut Congregationalist, spoke of women's "beautiful errand," and Sarah Hale, editor and writer for Godey's Lady's Book, envisioned a true Christian civilization in which men were more like women and wom en more like angels.

Whether such banalities are the causes or the effects of mass consumer culture is a question for unrewarding cir cular arguments. That banality is essential in selling most of the culture's goods and services is unarguable. Douglas' "feminization" is also very real and it still goes on, even when masquerading as women's liberation. In a recent ad a comely Ms. tells her mechanic what she thinks is wrong with her car. The mes sage carried below: "Sometimes ... to zoom in on the problem ... it takes a woman's touch." The image of female competence is married to the suggestion that feminine intuition exists. Douglas may be a bit of a cultural elitist but she would never define liberation as having it both ways. sbR.Z. Sheppard

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