The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel.
Chicago; Chicago UP, 1997.
[Main Argument]
In her reading of sentimental literature written in the post-Revolution era, Julia Stern contends that the melodramatic overflow of heightened states of feeling, which is a distinct marker of the genre, operates to palliate the collective trauma of the Revolution and its troubling repercussions in the nation building. According to Stern, sentimental and gothic novels of the 1790s can be seen as a psychic realism that embodies the nation’s collective mourning over the non-citizens foreclosed by the early republic—women and racial others, namely, Native Americans and African Americans—who were buried alive beneath the Federalist monolith. In this context, sentimentalism can be regarded as a fetishistic practice, wherein effusion of feeling—most eminently, that of sympathy as fellow feeling—enables the reader to imagine the nation as an egalitarian space, washing away the presence of violence in its cathartic operation.
[Quotations]
l [Sentimental literature] suggests that the foundation of the republic is in fact a crypt, that the nation’s noncitizens—women, the poor, Native Americans, African Americans, and aliens—lie socially dead and inadequately buried, the casualties of pose-Revolutionary political foreclosure. These invisible Americans, prematurely interred beneath the great national edifice whose erection they actually enable, provide an unquiet platform for the construction of republican privilege, disturbing the Federailst monolith in powerful ways. (2)
l Early national fiction begins its protean imagination of the nation’s encrypted others, making articulation of their stifled voices its unforeseen, if nevertheless defining, cultural work. (5)
l The early American novel gives expression to enunciatory dilemmas with far-reaching political implications. It conjoins the efforts of individuals blending their voice with others—whose experiences of identification become a form of democratic fellow feeling (Charlotte Temple, Wieland)—with the practice of those who would speak for each other—whose acts of representation degenerate into tyrannical usurpation (The Power of Sympathy, The Coquette, Wieland, Ormond). (5)
l [I]n the face of the overwhelming hate, anger, fear, and grief that grip the nation in the 1790s, the sensational novelistic practices of the era constitute a form of psychic realism. (6)
l Offering a theater of emotional excess staged in the incestuous family romances and images of mourning that obsessively constitute the heart of its matter, the novel of the 1790s prognosticates a union sundered by conflicting claims. (6)
l [Susanna Rawson, Charlotte Temple] independence can be survived only if rituals of commemoration, extended mourning for the violence of the Revolution itself and for post-Revolutionary disorder and social exclusion, become the emotional basis for a regenerated polity. . . . Charlotte Temple not only makes spectacular the notion that the Founding of the republic is a melancholic formation; it actually transforms the experience of grief into an affective ground that might allow Americans to imagine the nation as an egalitarian space. (8)
l operative fantasy of sympathy (8) operative fantasy of fellow feeling (29)
l the melodramatic luxuriation in heightened states of feeling (8)
l sentimentalism is vitally related to fetishistic practices of disavowal and substitution, enabling the presence of violence to be disclaimed and covered over by outpouring of feeling that carries only positive valence. (9)
l cathartic revelation about the powers of sympathetic imagination (25)
l A post-Revolutionary vision of communal order based on “fraternal sympathy” (29) Margarettaには犠牲はないがこのイデオロギーは強く出ている、と。
l [The narrator of Charlotte Temple] it is the unnamed and overtly present narrator who function as the novel’s absent emblem of maternal power and who does Charlotte Temple’s most important cultural work. This symbolic mother stands in analogouos relation to the “patriarchal authority” . . . (35)/ Rowson creates a maternal voice notable for its extraordinary rationality, a pragmatic worldliness that stands in stark contrast to the tableau of female hysteria it frames. (39)/ the narrator sets up an alternative, maternal economy of feeling that substitutes reader and storyteller for female child and male parent; displacing the law of father with the voice of mother, Charlotte Temple reimagines the gendering of power in decidedly antipatriarchal ways. (40)/ perform a preemptive and potentially reparative ritual of maternal mourning (41)/ Rowson’s speaker seek to surround her reader with a blanket of comfort constructed in words. (45)
l The maternal tableau unfolded in this episode renders such loss a reflexive female experience, and the polymorphous female subject positions the passage inscribes—position that are simultaneously occupied by narrator and reader—may account for the uncanny appeal Charlotte Temple has had for women readers across two centuries. (48)/ The real tragedy of seduction, argues the narrator, is that it puts young girls in the structural position of orphans. (50)/ the overindulgent or fusional mother –her phallic counterpart (53)
l [mother-daughter love story manqué] In the epistolary discourse of Charlotte Temple, mother-daughter longing stands in for adult heterosexual desire not because sexuality is necessarily incongruent with virtue but, rather, because the reciprocal yearnings of mother and daughter represent desire in its purest state. (61)/ the heroine herself becomes a maternal fetish, the obsessive object of collective discussion and desire (67)
