Stern, Julia. The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997.

Grinnell library catalog page

Stern proposes that "those eighteenth-century novels best remembered for impassioned excess...contemplate the possibility that the power of genuine sympathy could revivify a broadly inclusive vision of democracy" (2). Stern suggests that the sensationalism of these 1790s novels gives voice to "invisible Americans": the poor and marginalized factions of society. Stern writes in her introduction, "I hope to reveal an unappreciated level of novelistic creativity--one that expresses a dialectic of inclusion against exclusion, thereby enacting and to various degrees discomposing the way an elitist culture contains the dissent at its margins. The constitutive power and simultaneous unraveling of sympathy as an operative cultural fantasy become the abiding metaphors through which eighteenth-century American fiction figures problems of social and political cohesion" (3). Stern devotes chapters to the study of "fellow feeling" in Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple, Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette, and Charles Brockdon Brown's Ormond.

In the titular chapter, Stern provides a brief historical sketch of the 1790s as well as a discussion of spectacle, sympathy, trauma, post-Revolutionary grief, the "feminization of narrative voice," (13) and epistolarity. She also focuses on depictions of slavery and incest in prominent novels of the decade, among those previously mentioned, Charles Brockdon Brown's Wieland and William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy.

The second chapter, "Working through the Frame: the Dream of Transparency in Charlotte Temple," explores the cultural significance of seduction and the "problem of female dissent from patriarchal authority" (34). It pays close attention to Rowson's use of structure to communicate the "psychic separateness" of melancholia (60) as well as meaning, maternal sympathy and separation.

The third chapter, "Beyond 'A Play about Words': Tyrannies of Voice in The Coquette, examines two opposing modes of sympathy set forth in the novel--one connected to "the idea of a material self-sufficiency that enables the transcendence of personal 'interest'" and one connected to "an understanding of the commonweal predicated on the well-being of solitary citizens" (73). Stern addresses The Coquette's implications about the propriety of female possession of political voice, taking into account ideas of female love, "fancy" and spectacle.

The fourth and last chapter, "A Lady Who Sheds No Tears: Liberty, Contagion, and the Demise of Fraternity in Ormond" addresses the text's post-Revolutionary unraveling of sympathetic relations, the link between liberty and violence, and misrepresentation.

Entered by Sarah on 13 July 2004 at 10:47 AM.