Exploring violence and sentimentality: 'Love's Whipping Boy'
How can America be so violent, and yet so sentimental at the same time?
It’s a question that has intrigued English Professor Elizabeth Barnes for almost a decade and forms the basis for her upper-level seminar, Christianity and 19th-Century American Literature. It’s also the subject of her new book Love’s Whipping Boy: Violence and Sentimentality in the American Imagination.
“I wondered how nineteenth-century Americans understood the role of violence in a democratic, sympathetic nation,” says Barnes. “During this time, there were lots of acts of domestic violence—slavery, Indian removal, naval flogging, corporal punishment—that contradict an antebellum ethos of democratic, Christian love.”Barnes turned to period literature to trace American understanding of violence and sentimentality. She discovered an interesting literary pattern of privileged people engaging in dynamic acts of violence, then identifying with the victim, and ultimately seeing themselves as the victim—it’s something she calls the “whipping boy effect.”
Whipping boy refers to a practice of discipline first recorded in the sixteenth century. Because of his royal blood, Prince Edward, son of Henry VIII, could not be whipped for bad behavior. So a boy of similar age was whipped as a substitute. By watching another be beaten for his mistakes, he was expected to feel shame and guilt, making him more mindful of how his actions affected others.
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