Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 57-01, Section: A, page: 0292.

Director: Jean-Christophe Agnew.

The new placeless market of the 1830s demanded methods of defining its boundaries; the emotional immediacy of sentiment appeared to be the antithesis of the calculations of business. Sentimentalism employed the language and ideas of religious devotion, moral philosophy, and human emotions to describe a new world of market transactions. Each chapter examines a paradox of market culture: sentimental value, domestic economy, fancy work, and marriage market. In chapter one, I use literary spin-off products to trace the connections between eighteenth-century sentiment and nineteenth-century sentimentalism, and to explore the development of the concept of sentimental value. The second chapter examines the sentimental pragmatism about the market that characterized the fiction and advice in Godey's Lady's Book. The magazine addressed the prosperity and uncertainty of middle-class life, and proposed a definition of domestic economy that acknowledged the parlor as a site of production and consumption. Fancywork, the subject of the third chapter, was one of the most frequently practiced forms of parlor production. The marketing of fancywork as a genteel labor of leisure gave legitimacy to its production for charity fairs and personal profit, by allowing middle-class women to represent their labor as fancy work and their leisure as fancy work. The fourth chapter examines the celebration of Valentine's Day as a symbolic economy of nineteenth-century commodity culture. Valentines were a form of sentimental realism about the marriage market; they celebrated the raptures of romantic love and mocked its mercenary motives.

Nineteenth-century America was not characterized by a disappearance of women from the marketplace, but rather by significant increases in their market lives, despite continuing legal and social barriers. This dissertation recovers the public, economic discourse of sentimentalism; it re-examines the roles of women and men in the formation of consumer culture, and re-evaluates the gendered history of class formation. The devotional quality of sentimental enterprise, its homage to the home and its new sacred rituals, laid the groundwork for a consumer culture that thrived on building up and breaking down the boundaries between home and market.