Sentimental communities

The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel

Volumn , Issue , 2009, Pages 106-132

  Cohen, Margaret ^a  

^a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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References (54)

1. This chapter was conceived in conversations with April Alliston concerning the need to rethink Benedict Anderson's notion ofthe imagined community in light ofwhat were in fact the first modern imagined communities: the transnational communities catalyzed by sensibility.
2. Elizabeth Ammons, introduction to Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe (New York: Norton, 1994), viii.
3. According to Anne Humpherys, The Mysteries of London was "the biggest bestseller ofthe nineteenth century in England" ("Generic Strands and Urban Twists: The Victorian Mysteries Novel," Victorian Studies 34 [1991]), 456.
4. James Turner writes of Pamela: "Ifw e said Europe was 'touched,' the pun would be appropriate, conveying an enthusiasm that supporters viewed as sentimental identification and skeptics diagnosed as a contagious madness" (James Grantham Turner, "Novel Panic: Picture and Performance in the Reception of Richardson's Pamela," Representations 48 [fall 1994]: 70).
5. No work makes sentimental fiction's ability to facilitate reflection on international and inter-cultural interaction more explicit than Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey, which opens by framing its hero, Yorick, as an unreflected mouthpiece ofn ational clichés: "they order, said I, this matter better in France" (Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey [1768; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1967], 3).
6. Patricia Spacks, Desire and Truth (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1990), 130, 131.
7. See Philip Fisher's chapter on Stowe, "Making a Thing into a Man: The Sentimental Novel and Slavery," in Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
8. Etienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas, trans. James Swenson (New York: Routledge, 1994), 212.
9. Similarly, Locke defines freedom in society as "[a] liberty to follow my own will in all things where that rule prescribes not" and "not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will ofanother man" (John Locke, Two Treatises of Government [1690; reprint, New York: Dutton, 1955, 119, 127).
10. Rousseau formulates "the fundamental problem to which the social contract holds the solution" as how "to find a form of association which will defend and protect the person and goods ofeac h member with the collective force ofall, and under which each individual, while uniting himselfw ith the others, obeys no one but himself, and remains as free as before" (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston [1761; reprint, New York: Pocket Books, 1987], 17-18).
11. Henry Mackenzie, The Lounger 20 (1785)
12. quoted in Ioan Williams, Novel and Romance, 1700-1800 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), 329-30. I thank Brian Norton for drawing my attention to this article.
13. See my use ofH egel in The Sentimental Education of the Novel. In a suggestive comment, Antonio Gramsci describes catharsis as "the passage from the purely economic (or egoistical-passional) to the ethico-political moment. . . . This also means the passage from . . . 'necessity to freedom' " (Prison Notebooks [New York: International Publishers, 1971], 366-67). My attention was drawn to this citation by the work ofE thel Brooks.
14. Rousseau, Social Contract, 65.
15. Nietzsche was in fact giving sentimentality its full political due when he inveighed in The Genealogy of Morals against "that sentimentalism which would have . . . ["the state"] begin with a contract" (1887; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, 1969), 86.
16. Spacks, Desire and Truth, 132.
17. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1984), 68.
18. Locke called natural freedom men's "State of perfect Freedom to order their Actions and dispose oftheir Possessions, and Persons as they think fit." Similarly, for Locke, "the great and chief end, therefore, of men uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation oftheir property" (Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 118, 180).
19. Priestly continued, "[P]olitical liberty is that which he may or may not acquire in the compensation he receives for it. For he may either stipulate to have a voice in the publick determinations, or . . . he may submit to be governed wholly by others," though, Priestly emphasizes, "every man retains, and can never be deprived ofhis natural right" (Joseph Priestly, Essay on the First Principles of Government, quoted in Robert Eccleshall, British Liberalism [New York: Longman, 1986], 106-7).
20. Anne Higonnet calls this sentimental vision ofthe child the "Romantic child" in Pictures of Innocence (London: Thames & Hudson, 1998).
21. Friedrich Schiller, "On the Pathetic" (1793), in Essays, trans. Daniel Dahlstrom (New York: Continuum, 1993), 58.
22. Denis Diderot, "In Praise of Ric hardson" (1762), in Denis Diderot: Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. Geoffrey Bremner (New York: Penguin, 1994), 85.
23. Similarly, Adam Smith cast the spectator's ability to imagine himselfin the place of the sufferer as basic to sympathy in the first pages of his 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976). It is thought-provoking that this process makes persons fungible, though it occurs in the disinterested imaginary economy ofsy mpathy. J. G. A. Pocock's writings on virtue as commerce provide the key to the relation between sympathy and liberal exchange, as I discuss below.
24. Samuel Richardson, preface to Clarissa (1747-48; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1985), 35.
25. See David Marshall's The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1988).
26. Michael Fried's Theatricality and Absorption: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), for a discussion ofthe theatricality ofsy mpathy. On the contribution ofthe drame bourgeois, specifically, to sentimental discourse, see Peter Szondi's "Tableau et coup de théâtre," New Literary History 11, no. 2 (1980).
27. Note that the play ofdistanc e and absence crucial to the imagined communities catalyzed by sentimental novels also characterizes the communities mobilized by theater once plays are reviewed and disseminated through the press.
28. Luc Boltanski, La Souffrance à distance (Paris: Editions Métailié, 1993).
29. Richardson, preface to Clarissa, 36.
30. Denis Diderot, "In Praise ofRic hardson," 88-89. I have here modified the English translation. The French runs: "que s'il eût été question de l'affaire la plus sérieuse" (Diderot, "É loge de Richardson," in Oeuvres esthétiques [Paris: Garnier, 1959], 38).
31. Schiller, "On the Pathetic," 45.
32. Habermas writes, "The privatized individuals coming together to form a public also reflected critically and in public on what they had read, thus contributing to the process ofenlig htenment which they together promoted. Two years after Pamela appeared on the literary scene the first public library was founded; book clubs, readings circles and subscription libraries shot up" (Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989], 51).
33. The freedom of such reaction marks a crucial distinction between the Enlightenment use ofpathos and an earlier Christian solicitation ofc ompassion. As Jauss remarks, Christian suffering is exemplary, and compassion provokes imitation. "The true compassio . . . must prove itselfas readiness for imitatio," Jauss writes of A ugustine on the dangers of the theater. Such imitation is at the farthest reach from the aesthetic freedom provoked by sentimental community (see Hans-Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Michael Shaw [Minneapolis: University ofM innesota Press, 1982], 104).
34. Rousseau, Social Contract, 63.
35. Boltanski, La Souffrance à distance, 143, my translation. This fact makes clear that it is a mistake to periodize the history ofsentimentalit y into a moment of enthusiasm followed by a moment of disenchantment: both occur together from the very first.
36. Linda Hutcheon, Irony's Edge (New York: Routledge, 1995), 91-92.
37. Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 13. On the use ofsentimentalit y in the French Revolution.
38. David Denby, Sentimental Narrative and the Social Order in France, 1760-1820 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
39. Liberal political theory, too, ofc ourse, took shape in a transnational Enlightenment republic oflett ers, though it was simultaneously decisively informed by the political practices dominating in each national context.
40. Mackenzie continued by saying that their "style ofmanners, and the very powers of[their] language give them [the French] a great advantage in the delineation ofthat nicety, that subtlety off eeling, those entanglements ofdelicacy , which are so much interwoven with the characters and conduct ofthe chiefpersonages in many oftheir most celebrated novels" (Mackenzie, The Lounger 20 [1785], quoted in Williams, Novel and Romance, 330).
41. Frances Brooke, The History of Emily Montague, 4 vols. (1769; reprint, 4 vols. in 2, New York: Garland, 1974), 1:116.
42. Brooke, History of Emily Montague, 1:119.
43. The catalog is Antoine Marc's Dictionnaire des romans (1819).
44. Peter Brooks was the first to suggest the link between melodrama and realism, in The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), and it is indeed accurate that in the French case, Balzacian realism takes a great deal from melodrama, minus the sentimentality. In Britain, however, Victorian realism is quite sentimental.
45. See Franco Moretti, The Way of the World (London: Verso, 1987), on compromise as distinctive to realism.
46. Huis clos would be Sartre's term. In the twentieth century the most powerful high cultural manifestation of this closure was existentialism, with its emphasis on freedom as the anguish ofc hoice in situations ofethical double bind.
47. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1762; reprint, Paris: Garnier, 1960), 5, my translation.
48. J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 48-49.
49. Pocock's theorization ofv irtue as commerce makes the link between Adam Smith's account ofmor ality as founded on sympathy (Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759) and his economic liberalism developed in the Wealth of Nations (1776). In enriching all whom it touches, melodramatic virtue is the "interested" (in the sentimental sense ofdisint erested), ethical manifestation of the happy "trucking" ofliberalism's economic agents, benefiting society and individuals alike.
50. Sophie Cottin, Claire d'Albe (1799), in Romans de femme du XVIIIe siec̀le, ed. Raymond Trousson (Paris; Robert Laffont, 1996), 734, my translation. I discuss Claire d'Albe at length in The Sentimental Education of the Novel.
51. See April Alliston, Virtue's Faults: Correspondences in Eighteenth-Century British and French Women's Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). The tragic notion ofv irtue as sacrifice is crucial to French history painting contemporary with the reign ofsentimentalit y, from David to Delacroix.
52. Wolfgang Iser's notion ofthe process ofr eading as Bildung, as the "continual interplay between modified expectations and transformed memories," works beautifully for the eighteenth-century English novels that he discusses, as well as for the French novel ofw orldliness, but is less applicable to the tragic sentimental paradigm (Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978], 111. On the importance oflear ning to make choices for the Bildungsroman, see Moretti, Way of the World.
53. Denis Diderot, "De la poésie dramatique" (1758), in Oeuvres esthétiques, 227, my translation. Such clarity is epitomized in the most pathetic setpiece ofthe sentimental repertory, the deathbed scene, which involves, as Fisher observes, "action that occurs once a fate is inevitable but has not yet come to pass" (Fisher, Hard Facts, 109).
54. See Prendergast, in The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), on virtue as commerce in Balzac.