Regulating Feeling in the First American Novel: Sympathy, Sensibility, and Sentiment in William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy

Abstract

Regulating Feeling in the First American Novel:Sympathy, Sensibility, and Sentiment in William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy Dana C. McClain (bio) Harrington, the main character of William Hill Brown's novel The Power of Sympathy (1789), feels too much and for too many people. He feels for his sister, Harriot, almost resulting in incest. He feels for a slave woman, leading him to dream about democracy. He feels for himself, culminating in his suicide. As these examples ought to suggest, the first American novel is foremost about feeling; it considers who should have what kind of feelings for whom, a question of great political and cultural importance in eighteenth-century America.1 In a social order based on consent rather than coercion, many people believed that feeling could be the glue that would hold the nation together. While the novel agrees that good Americans have the capacity to feel for others, it also stresses the importance of controlling and restricting this facility. Fellow feeling, the novel warns, can easily become excessive and promiscuous—that is, there can be too much of it and too many indulging in it. This essay examines Brown's attitudes toward three related yet distinct kinds of fellow feeling: sympathy, a natural and inevitable attraction to familiar objects; sensibility, an elevated physical and emotional responsiveness that is often triggered by witnessing the suffering of others; and sentiment, an emotion tempered by reason and morality. These terms, according to Janet Todd, were not defined or used consistently in the eighteenth century; sometimes treated as synonyms, they could also refer to specific concepts or allude to emotion in general.2 Despite the fluidity of these terms, however, I disagree with the critical consensus that Brown uses them haphazardly. Robert Arner, for example, contends that the terms "become almost interchangeable" in The Power of Sympathy, while Kristen [End Page 143] Boudreau refers to "this power of sympathy—or, as it is alternately called, sensibility."3 Brown, however, is invested in making distinctions among the terms in order to classify, scrutinize, and evaluate different types of feeling. Far from demonstrating "confusion concerning the role of emotion," Brown clearly distinguishes among, and assesses the significance of, sympathy, sensibility, and sentiment in order to define and contain feeling. When the terms slip, as they occasionally do, it's not a "failure" but rather a strategy Brown uses to emphasize the necessity of controlling emotion.4 In seeking to classify different kinds of feeling, Brown engages with eighteenth-century transatlantic discourses about emotion. As Nicole Eustace argues in Passion Is the Gale, "Emotion—passion, feeling, sentiment, as it was variously called—contributed as much as reason to the structure of eighteenth-century British-American power and politics."5 From ordinary individuals to statesmen to novelists, Americans were debating the role of emotion. "At moments of public crisis," according to Eustace, "the cultural disputes and social confrontations over the expression of emotion . . . took on heightened strategic significance."6 Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense, for instance, proclaimed an "uncompromising emotional universalism" that fueled the Revolution by maintaining that all men were created equal.7 After the Revolution, the role of emotion continued to be a central issue as Americans dealt with another "public crisis"—the formation of the new nation. Emerging at this critical time, early American sentimental novels explored the role of feeling in establishing appropriate social bonds.8 In so doing, they drew from the British culture of sensibility, particularly literary texts such as Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey and Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling that both contributed to and critiqued the cult of feeling.9 Despite the British influence, however, the early American authors working within the sentimental tradition did not merely imitate their British predecessors but rather handled the issue of feeling in creative and unique ways. Brown's endeavor to classify feelings is a prime example of how early American writers drew from and deployed the sentimental tradition for political purposes. Eustace explains, "According to eighteenth-century understandings, emotions could be sorted into markedly different categories[,] . . . each with its particular characteristics and implications."10 Brown draws on these distinctions to challenge assumptions about...