These essentialisms are simultaneously embraced and discarded here. Alcott’s condemnation of the second speaker’s effect on her audience gathers its imagery and its moral point from the normative construction of the ideal voter’s abstract embodiment and disinterested rationality. At the same time, however, this image of the bribed “Patrick” discloses the power relations that make him vulnerable to parties that wish to use him as an instrument; his poverty, lack of education, and unwillingness to venerate democratic principle all bear witness to his social and economic disenfranchisement, despite his civic incorporation. Insofar as his democratic incompetence is contingent upon the power relations that structure his position, the women in the audience are like him not essentially but conditionally. His example also shows the failure of liberal democracy to bring about meaningful equality in a class-divided society; universal manhood suffrage creates abstract equality at the polls—“one man, one vote”—without creating substantial social or economic equality. On its own, that is, formal inclusion in the franchise fails to politicize or put power into the hands of its subjects. Rather than sponsoring the women’s political conversion, then, the second speaker makes them alternately enflamed and instrumental.
The third and final speaker who precedes Christie’s outbreak of genius also fails to properly constitute the working women as political subjects. While the second speaker fails because she turns the women into the opposite of liberal subjects, the third speaker fails because she appeals to them precisely as the ideal liberal voters—as if, that is, they are disinterested and abstract. “A third well-wisher quenched their ardor like a wet blanket, by reading reports of sundry labor reforms in foreign parts; most interesting, but made entirely futile by differences of climate, needs, and customs. She closed with a cheerful budget of statistics, giving the exact number of needle-women who had starved, gone mad, or committed suicide during the past year; the enormous profits wrung by capitalists from the blood and muscles of their employees; and the alarming increase in the cost of living” (W, 331). This speaker reports to the working women as if they have no experiential or concrete relation to the data she provides; she asks them to think about their own situations as if they are not actually in them. She relies on abstract analytical models—statistics, global data, economic trends—and ideologically metabolized interpretations of the sorts of hardship the women in the audience encounter. Unschooled in abstractions, the women can interpret the speech only literally and locally; to them, “immediate starvation seemed to be waiting at the door” (W, 331). They cannot manipulate or synthesize what they have just heard with other interpretive tools; instead they receive it passively, are overwhelmed, and lose any impetus to action: “the impressible creatures believed every word and saw no salvation anywhere” (W, 331).
These speakers serve to demonstrate an impasse between the genteel lady reformers and the working women on whose behalf they ostensibly operate. This class gap, however, is merely one symptom of a larger set of democratic problems playing out in progressive women’s reform efforts. The speakers employ archives of reference, rhetorical styles, and analytical tools that place the women in an improper relation to democratic consent; the women are, in sequence, bewildered, aroused to violence, and alienated by abstractions. Although Alcott raises the specter of the intransigently bad citizen—the overly interested and ethnically marked “Patrick”—the women’s responses to the speakers are not flagged strictly as signs of their incapacity. Indeed, the narrator is preparing to describe the beginnings of their efficacious politicization. Instead what these speeches show is that forms of collectivity are always forged through the rhetorical and epistemological mediums in which any deliberation or collaboration could conceivably take shape and, moreover, across the differentials of position—class and education, to name the two most important to this scene—of the participants. Actors in a democratic context, this scene demonstrates, carry their bodies, histories, and sensuous and cognitive apparatuses into deliberative contexts where programs and collectivities are formed.33 Each speaker, “so earnest, so hopeful, and so unpractically benevolent” (W, 331), proceeds as if discourse can be transparent and disembodied, while each at the same time relies on specific expert epistemologies and styles of engagement. In addition each in a different way stymies her audience’s access to the political process she advocates.
Christie’s sudden “inspiration” intervenes. Listening, Christie feels the genesis of “a strong desire to bring the helpers and the helped into truer relations with each other” (W, 331). She rises and speaks spontaneously and under the pressure of compulsion: “a sudden uncontrollable impulse moved Christie to rise in her place and ask leave to speak” (W, 332). Like the historical Dickinson and Howe in my opening examples, Christie finds that “what she said she hardly knew: words came faster than she could utter them, thoughts pressed upon her” (W, 332). Her disavowal marks her speech as collective property, belonging to the movement she has entered and motivated by the situation, needs, and desires she shares with the other working women. Her lack of authorship shows her disinterestedness—she does not speak for personal gain but from an impulse to galvanize women across class. Her speech incorporates but also transcends, as it were, her particular personal history. Christie’s interests are her own here in the context of the myriad circumstances that ally her interests with those of other working women, but it is also as if the only way to speak disinterestedly is to not really be speaking herself.
In tandem with the evacuation of her personal authorship, her speech materializes her body and experience. Her mediation of her own particular concern and the collective situation of working women is anchored in her body—her speech authorizes a form of democratic subjecthood that permits her to have her body and therefore access to the history of labor and experience written on it. This, in turn, makes her available as an object of corporeal identification for her listeners: “The women felt that this speaker was one of them; for the same lines were on her face that they saw on their own, her hands were no fine lady’s hands, her dress plainer than some of theirs, her speech simple enough for all to understand” (W, 333). Embedding her listeners in bodily history rather than in abstract statistical reckoning, she makes it possible for them to experience their shared bodily incorporation in the material and systemic conditions of their labor, and to make that experience the foundation of collective political action. By exposing their collective condition, she also performs cognitive work, exposing the systematic national economic reliance on the laboring bodies of women.
Writing recently about this scene, Glenn Hendler sees Christie’s speech as an attempt to extend the sentimental novel’s logic of sympathy into a public social movement.34 While he is certainly right to see the continuities between the “sympathetic undertone” (W, 332) of Christie’s speech and the sympathetic exchanges that not only cement the bonds between members of Christie’s community but also motivate their activist work, the radical alterity of Christie’s speech—the condition that “it spoke itself”—should give us pause. The speech is autonomous and impersonal, cut off from the particular person who feels with and for others. Christie’s seeming self-abnegation and lack of agency in giving her speech seal her into the sentimental mode for Hendler, and the rich context of sentimental culture that he builds around his reading of the scene compellingly shows Work’s pervasive commitment to the ideal of a sympathetic community. But until the novel’s last chapter, sympathetic identification has not been enough, or it has not been the right thing, to create a self-recognizing movement of working women. Christie’s speech is set many years after the rest of the novel’s action. In the intervening time, her personal practice of sympathy has not created a transformative scene of publicity. The home in work might be permeable to the problems and politics of the public sphere, but its space instantiates these in particular, face-to-face terms, making Christie and her friends behave in improvisational and reactive ways to the social problems that they have trouble comprehending in totality, beyond their personal experiences and