The use of suffering representations in order to spark

social change only leads to its simulation which in turn

makes it impossible to solve- instead of solving reality we
continue the consumption of pleasure from the fantasy of
suffering
Wahl, 05 (Gregory R. Wahl, Doctor of Philosophy, 2005 , THE BRIDGES OF
MADISON COUNTY AND IOWA:PRODUCTION, RECEPTION, AND PLACE,
quoting and paraphrasing Lauren Berlants Poor Eliza,
http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/2590/umi-umd-
2482.pdf;jsessionid=2E7AF09D7239CB2202DA0D72D84992C5?sequence=1)
MJG

Lauren Berlants analysis of Bridges also presumes that readers experience of the text is guided by
Wallers frame narrative. Berlants essay reads not only Bridges, but also the 1936 Shirley Temple movie
Dimples, the Rogers and Hammerstein 1949 musical The King and I, and Toni Morrisons 1987 novel
Beloved as inheritors of Harriet Beecher Stowes use of sentimentality to attempt
social critique in her 1852 novel Uncle Toms 179 Cabinin
particular, the scene in which the slave Eliza, carrying her child,
impossibly crosses the Ohio river to freedom by leaping on rafts of
ice. Our sentimental identification with Elizas resolve and the
national moral victory it represents, according to Berlant, is the
most frequently and spectacularly appropriated part of the master
text of Uncle Toms Cabin. The awe it produces in readers
simultaneously enacts witnessing and identifying with pain and
consuming and deriving pleasure and self-satisfaction. For the
reader imagining these impluses will lead, somehow, to changing
the world because it connects readers to others who share the
same feeling in an imaginary world, a fantasy scene of national
feeling (645-646). However, Citing James Baldwins criticism of Uncle Toms Cabins
sentimentality in his Everybodys Protest Novel, Berlant asserts that the sentimental
aesthetic destroys its own capacity to criticize by replacing a public
portrayal of the suffering with a personal fantasy of universal
empathy for the sufferer disseminated on a mass scale. This fantasy
separates the suffering from its political causes, reframing it as a
personal problem, which reduces the impetus to do anything about
it on behalf of others. (635-647). Berlants interest in these texts is the degree to which their
sentimentality is ambivalent, refusing, at least in part, to reproduce the sublimation of
subaltern struggles into conventions of narrative satisfaction and
redemptive fantasy.