Barnes, Elizabeth.
States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel.
New York; Columbia UP, 1997.
[Main Argument]
States of Sympathy calls for a new approach to reading early American fiction and politics, one that recognizes sympathy as crucial to the construction of American identity: to read sympathetically becomes synonymous with reading like an American. Examining philosophical and political texts alongside literary ones, Elizabeth Barnes explores the extent to which sympathy and sentiment are increasingly employed to construct the notion of a politically affective state. In works as diverse as Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Barnes demonstrates how the family comes to represent the ideal model for social and political affiliations. Familial feeling proves the foundation for sympathy and sympathy the foundation for democracy.
In holding up the family as a model for sociopolitical union, however, sentimental rhetoric conflates the boundaries between familial and sociosexual ties, resulting in a confusion of familial and erotic attachment. The distinction between licit and illicit love—exemplified in numerous stories about incest and seduction—becomes a preoccupying theme in American literature. While such stories have often been read as a manifestation of anxieties about corruption in the young republic, Barnes provocatively argues that incest and seduction actually represent the logical outcome of nineteenth-century American culture’s most deeply held values.
[Works]
l William Hill Brown, The Power of Sympathy
l Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland
l Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple
l Hanna Webster Foster, The Coquette
l Maria S Cummins, The Lamplighter
l Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
l Susan Warner, The Wide, Wide, World
l Herman Melville, Billy Budd
l Caroline Lee Hentz, Earnest Linwood
l Thomas Paine, Common Sense
[Key Concepts]
l Sentimentality and construction of democratic nation
l Eroticization of kinship relations, Incest as cultural Ideal (75)
l Seductive paternalism (42)
l Coercion and Consent
l Domestication of desire (74)
[Quatations]
l Sympathetic identification—the act of imagining oneself in another’s position (ix)
l [American Sentimental Novel] One of the distinctions American authors emphasized, and one of the tools with which they attempted to forge their new identity, was, ironically enough, sympathy. Sympathy was to be the building block of a democratic nation, and democracy, so the story goes, was a defining element of the United States. (x)
l [Man and sentimentality] For men to be truly American, that is, truly sympathetic, they must learn to be more like women: more suggestible, more seducible, more impressionable readers of both literature and human relations. (xi)
l [Sympathy and democracy] In this book I argue that American culture’s preoccupation with familial feeling as the foundation for sympathy, and sympathy as the basis of a democratic republic, ultimately confounds the difference between familial and social bonds. This accounts in part for why so many American stories centers on the distinction between licit and illicit love and why incest and seduction become recurrent themes. Although it is tempting to read these stories as proof of anxieties about national corruption, I believe that incest and seduction represent the “natural” consequence of American culture’s most deeply held values. Both can be read as metaphors for a culture obsessed with loving familiar objects. (xi)
l [Declaration of Independence and power of sympathy] His claim that “all men are created equal” epitomizes the power of sentimental representation—a power to reinvent others in one’s own image. (2)
l [Incest and Seduction] Incest and seduction represent the logical outcome of American culture’s most cherished ideals. In holding up the family as a model for sociopolitical union, sentimental rhetoric conflates the boundaries between familial and social ties. The result is a confusion of familial and erotic attachment: one learns to love those to whom one already feels related. Incest can thus be read as a metaphor for a culture obsessed with loving familiar objects. Similarly, seduction, while ostensibly representing a breach in legitimate union, actually serves as a model for the ways in which political union is effected after the Revolutionary War. In the typical story of seduction, protective fathers become indistinguishable from the seductive lovers whose power they seek to supplant. Rather than challenging national values, incest and seduction become the unspoken champions of a sentimental politics designed to make familial feeling the precondition for inclusion in the public community. (3)
l [Sentimentalism and nullification of Other] By displacing a democratic model that values diversity with a familial model that seeks to elide it, sentimental literature subordinates democratic politics to a politics of affinity, employing a method of affective representation that dissolves the boundaries between “self” and “other.” By contrast to critics who view sentimentality as distinctly democratic in nature and practice, I suggest that sentimental literature teaches a particular way of reading both texts and people that relies on likeness and thereby reinforces homogeneity. In the sentimental scheme of sympathy, others are made real—and thus cared for—to the extent that they can be shown in relation to the reader. (4) 他者を自己の延長線上のみで理解する危険性
l [同上] Sympathy thus proves a mediated experience in which selves come to constituted in relation to—or by relating to—other imagined selves, while those other selves are simultaneously created through the projection of one’s own sentiments. / personal feeling becomes the basis of both one’s own and the other’s authenticity (5)/ Throughout this book, I consider the ways in which early American novels employs sympathetic identification to reinforce a familial model of politics that subordinates difference to sameness and that teaches readers to care for others as if they were reflection of themselves. (17)/ the exclusionary principles of sympathy and of sentimental structures that seek to employ it: while an individual may be taught to see others as her- or himself, what she learns is that difference is to be negated rather than understood. A sense of self is created through identification with others, but only those others who can be proven in some way related to us. (22)
l the conflation of material and fictional bodies characteristic of sentimental narratives
l [The narrator as a seducer] What results is a confusion of legitimate and illegitimate authority, in which sentimental narratives reproduce the seducer’s verbal arts. (8)/ The language and design of the seducer is overshadowed only by the more persuasive language and manipulative design of the novel, leaving authority to reside in whatever agent has the more convincing speech. Seduction thus denotes not only what the story is about but also what it does: it breaks down distinction between parent and lover, moral guide and criminal influence, and translates “female education” into another form of seduction.
l [Coercion and consent] The meaning of seduction can thus be seen as effectively defined by the uneasy relationship between coercion and consent. (9)/ The ideological shift from a coercive to a consensual view of paternal rule informs my reading of sentimental family narrative as well, but I argue that the move from coercion to consent ultimately bolsters patriarchal claims to domestic authority. (10) Foucault的モデル。CoercionからConsentに権力のモードが変わる。
l [女のものとしてではないsentimental novel] the importance of sentimentalism to the construction of a patriarchal state/ the central place of women in the development of a national sensibility (13)
l [Power of Sympathy] By eroticizing the concept of “common sense,” The Power of Sympathy underscores the confusion that develops from conflating familial and social attachment. Given this model, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish those individuals one wants to marry from those to whom one is already related. Incest is thus shown as the “natural” conclusion to a society built on the power of familial love. . . The Power of Sympathy teaches its readers to desire the very thing it has forbidden them to have. (14) By reconceiving the family in terms of volitional attachment, nineteenth-century novels perfect the conflation of familial, erotic, and social ties, at once legitimizing incestuous bonding and extending the parameters of patriarchal influence. (16) Brown’s novel reproduces the confusion between licit and illicit feeling. / [PoS] eroticizes the concept of common sense, revealing the power of nature to be not only sentimental but sexual as well. (32)/ In its eighteenth-century context, sympathy connotes identification: not feeling for a person from a distance, but feeling with or alongside of a person. According to Brown’s novek, such a blurring of ego boundaries is Nature (including and subsuming human nature) in full force… Nature itself is finally offered as the author of Harrington and Harriot’s misfortune, calling into question the power of human reason and resolution ever to overcome the power of sympathy. (33)/ The relationship between Harrington and Harriot represents the fantasy of complete identification that must be terminated because it has no place in this world. (33)/ Total identification with the other person might extinguish sympathy altogether since sympathy operates by a simultaneous awareness of separateness and inclination to overcome it. (34)/ Their death … do less to register a moral warning with readers than to secure the fantasy of a “complete sympathy” (36)/ By conflating the junior and seniot Harringtons, Harriot eroticizes the father through the would-be lover who represent him. (38)
l [Seduction novel as negative example] Since the novel of seduction works by negative example, readers must be willing to put themselves in the character’s position in order to experience the full effects of the punishment meted out. What happens, then, when the desire to identify leads the reader astray? How are the effects of sympathy to be discarded once the impulse has been indulged? (35)
l [Seductive paternalism] in American fiction, husbands and fathers become inextricable connected, resulting in an ethos of seductive paternalism that characterizes republican culture. (42)/ While ostensibly representing the perversion of republicn virtue, “seduction” actually signifies the sentimental operations by which patriarchal politics gains access to the national body. (42)
l [Problem of paternalism after the Revolution] The question for postrevolutionary America was how to redeem the image of the “father”—the educated Anglo male—while preserving liberal and revolutionary ideals of equality and independence. (43)/ a pattern of American novel—reintegration to the system through the failure of attempted revolt (47)
l [Necessity of female education] Paradoxically, it is the freedom of their country that necessitates giving women a “peculiar and suitable education,” for a free society requires especially virtuous and responsible citizens. (58-59)/ Eighteen-century seduction novels offer their own full-length “easy reading lessons” for feminine audiences, displaying and inculcating sympathetic attachments that will put narrative lessons (in)to effect. (60)/ Early fiction supports the republican cause of female education but effects this education through liberal strategies designed to conflate private and public authority and interest. Contrary to Warner’s claim . . . sentimental literature confirms (and then often exploits) individual autonomy, authority, and desire through reader’s sympathetic identification with the protagonist who represents them. Individuals are singularly affected in order to create a consensus of sensibility whereby the public is served through the modification of private desire, yet private liberty is affirmed by the attention to personal feeling. (61)
l [Charlotte Temple: 読者の女性化、正しいaffectの教育者/誘惑者としての語り手] Charlotte’s personhood is continually reconstituted by the emotions of those who sympathize with her plight. Such sympathies may be exploited, manufactured, even mass-marketed, but readers nonetheless experience them as personal and, in that sense, real. . . . This is in effect the hermeneutic exercise of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-American novel—to inscribe the law of the narrative onto individual hearts. In terms of American culture, liberalism intersects with republicanism through the process of sympathetic identification, in which lessons in virtue are registered not as imposition but as instinct. (62) / The author goes beyond the creation of a sympathetic protagonist to the creation of an ideal sympathetic reader as well. Married women and men are not in themselves antipathetic; they simply represent readers who cannot adequately identify with the main character. Thus, when Rowson’s narrator declares, “to my dear girls. . . only am I writing,” she is not addressing young women exclusively but any reader affected by the novel who is thereby constituted a “dear girl.” (62-62)/ The construction of readers as feminine, and the corresponding manipulation of “feminine” suggestibility intrinsic to the novel, becomes even clearer once we recognize the ways in which the seduction novel aligns itself with the classically educated gentleman-seducer it is attempting to denounce. … A gentleman view language as “performative” rather than “constantive.” . . . In the seduction novel, the genteleman-seducer depends on his verbal skills to break down the woman’s resistance. The novel itself does much the same thing. Each acts with intent—not to inform or to educate in and about context but to “modify the situation.” In other words, to alter the woman’s behavior. (64)
l [Coercive→Consent]The old model of patriarchy, associated with coercive and arbitrary rule, is supplanted by a domesticated version of male prerogative, represented as the champion of all Americans’—especially women’s—rights. In the seductive paternalism of this period, patriarchy is not repudiated but reconceived. (66)
l [Coquette] Male privilegeであるindependenceをusurpしようとするEliza. 妊娠によってgender lineは引き直される。While the personalizing of heroines contributes to liberal ideas of individual autonomy and authority, it has the concomitant effect of making larger social problems appear personally idiosyncratic. That is, by and large, seduction novels do not attribute the problem of seduction to the political flaws of republican society but to the personal flaws of each particular heroine. （69-73）
l [Relational Self] If sentimental literature attempts to teach us anything, it is that psychological boundaries are permeable and that “selfhood” is a distinctly relational construct. Autonomy thus becomes an often sought but ever elusive epistemological condition. (76)
l [Domestic Fiction] actually abstract concepts of home, family, and self from their physical and biological moorings, thereby legitimizing the incestuous alliance of earlier seduction stories. (78) The emphasis on spiritual over biological kinship (79) ある種、大文字のFather（神）との近親相姦である、と論じる。すごいな。By abstracting the concept of family ties, partriarchal power becomes more invasive as well as pervasive. The conversion of sympathy from dangerous to conventional feeling ultimately legitimizes incestuous familial bonding by detaching it from the material base that renders incest taboo. (91)
l [Domestic fiction as a daughter of Seduction novel] Charlotte Temple (seduction novel) and Charlotte’s Daughter (domestic novel). (103) In domestic novel, daughters are taught by their mothers how to regulate themselves, and this is achieved both by their internalization of the mother’s precepts and her method of transmitting them. What the mother bequeaths to her daughter is essentially a version of herself, and the impression she leaves upon her is the stamp of literacy as well as love. (109)
l [Mother-daughter relationshipに閉じ込められる] The American ethos of seductive paternalism characterized by sentimental fiction is complemented by the image of the seduced and seducing mother, bringing to light once more the potentially stultifying effects of a virtually incestuous filial identification. In the end, we see that while the mother may offer an example of how to write one’s own story she cannot tell how to avoid being imprisoned by it: sympathetic identification, the cornerstone of sentimental education, converts readers and characters alike into reflection of each other. The sentimental world of familial intimacy, though seductively alluring, suggests the disturbing possibility that, for the reader enshrined within, there is no way out of the house of mirrors. (114)
l [Jesus Christ as an ideal model of sympathy/vicarious experience] Christ becomes the ideal representative whose ability to identify completely with all humanity signifies the unifying power of sympathy. In Christ we get not only a theological but a political model for the unification of diverse individuals into one coporate body—Christ’s own. . . . To be a Christian is to be like Christ, and to be like Christ means to partake of his willingness to put himself, literally, in the place of others, If resemblance to Christ is the goal of a Christian life, it is also, somewhat tautologically, the precondition for recognizing who it is one is to resemble. Ann Douglasとの呼応。メンションはほとんどないけど。Christ thus epitomizes the way in which disparate individuals are brought together into one corporate or collective body through the sympathetic dynamic, a dynamic that simultaneously depends on and reproduces likeness. (119)
[Overview]
l One of the strongest argument about sentimental literature in US.—maybe just to my taste because it flirts with psychoanalysis (though never mentions) in terms of its idea to read sentimental fictions as family romance.
l Introduction is superb. A model example of dissertation. Clear-cut. Nice combination between literary and historical (political) text. Almost perfect.
l By far the most convincing reading of The Power of Sympathy and its underlying sanctioning of incest. It does not prohibit it at all.
l The significance and impact of incest as cultural ideal is tremendous. More over, Barnes reads domestic fiction as a development of seduction novel and its latent idealization of incest, arguing that the heroine has incestuous relationship with the spiritual Father. OMG.
l No mention about melancholy, but “blurring of ego boundaries” (33) in sentimentalism will be in part explained by melancholic identification. Pursue this line? But is Lacan/Kristeva applicable for 18th century novels?
l Frequent appearance of the word “melancholy” in seduction novel. May become a good argument?
l More like Ann Douglas argument (than Jane Tompkins) in that regarding sentimentality in accomplice with paternalism?
l Coats’ reading of Charlotte Temple: resisting the sentimental reading of Charlotte Temple
l Coquette and The Power of Sympathy both revolve around Elizabeth Whitman? Need to check.
