SOURCE: Barnes, Elizabeth. “Affecting Relations: Pedagogy, Patriarchy, and the Politics of Sympathy.” American Literary History 8, no. 4 (winter 1996): 597-614.

[In the following essay, Barnes looks at The Power of Sympathy in light of the American Revolution, characterizing the novel as a complex work concerned with individual rights, authority, and the role of sentimentality.]

1

The late eighteenth century not only marks America's entrance into the political arena as an autonomous nation, it marks the emergence of an American literature that both signals and helps solidify that national identity. Managing the marriage of political and literary ingenuity in true republican style, the “first American novel,” William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy: Or, the Triumph of Nature (1789), locates the conflicts of a newly emerging political body in the individual bodies of its middle-class characters.¹ It then dramatizes these conflicts in the context of the family structure. Through its sensational story line of seduction and sibling incest, Brown's epistolary novel foregrounds issues with which post-Revolutionary politics was most concerned: the nature and location of authority, the importance of individual rights in community, and the role of feeling in the maintenance of a stable and ordered society. What is at issue, for the novel and the culture at large, are the complicated and often contradictory resolutions of these competing claims.

Related to these contradictory resolutions is the rise of a sentimental ideology that, broadly speaking, I characterize as the cultural expression of the desire for union. Sentimentalism is a manifestation of the belief in or yearning for consonance—or even unity—of principle and purpose. Sympathy complements the work of sentiment: each can be defined as a set of registered impulses psychologically connecting an individual to things and people outside of him or her. The Power of Sympathy not only represents sympathetic attachment in its story line but reproduces it in the relationship between reader and text. In doing so, Brown's sentimental novel reveals its affiliation with other revolutionary works and with eighteenth-century patterns of thought and articulation that tend to depict social and political agendas in personal or familial terms. In an increasingly liberal era, growing distinctions between public and private spheres of influence were focusing greater attention on private life in general and the family in particular. The idealized sympathetic bond between parent and child served both to legitimate personal sentiment and to guarantee social interaction: according to such diverse thinkers as John Locke and Francis Hutcheson, filial attachment formed the basis of socio-political allegiances. Thus, put in a cultural context, “the power of sympathy” refers not only to the power of personal feeling but to the importance of interpersonal relations as necessary for the perpetuation of liberal social and political systems.² The very attempt to separate public from private obligations thus fostered new modes of personalizing authority, again confusing the boundaries between “public” and “private” agendas.

For centuries, of course, the family had been taken as the general model for social order, with the king representing the “father” of his domestic realm. Even Locke the rationalist, while asserting the differences between “a ruler of a commonwealth, a father of a family, and a captain of a galley,” reaffirmed the relationship between politics and parenting by including his theories of child rearing in Two Treatises of Civil Government (1689). Locke attempted to circumscribe parental power by limiting its duration: “[P]arents have a sort of rule or jurisdiction over [their children] when they come into the world,” but at length the “swaddling clothes” of infancy “drop quite off, and leave a man at his free disposal” (38).³ The analogy was not lost on the “sons” and “daughters” across the Atlantic; as Jay Fliegelman notes in Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800, Locke's pedagogical views provided the leading metaphor in the rhetorical campaign for American independence by justifying political rebellion against the “parent country” on the basis of “natural” development.

Locke's attempt to distinguish the “power of a magistrate over a subject” from that of “a father over his children, a master over his servant, a husband over his wife” (19), is essentially an attempt to distinguish civil from domestic, or public from private rule. A mark of liberal society lies in making just such distinctions. But in the midst of revolutionary fervor, the term “domestic” necessarily takes on a public, even national denotation. In the eighteenth century, revolution could not be imagined without a concomitant sense of national identity, and this new identity was closely connected with the development of an isolationist attitude. Both geographically and psychologically, Britain came to represent an authority disconnected from the interests and even the character of its political offspring, while America, reborn from the Colonies, symbolized the beneficent and profitable politics of a self-created “home rule.”⁴ Put another way, the effect of imagining Britain as first “parent” then “bad parent” then “foreign” country is a consolidation of American sympathies around or within a new larger domestic space, one that, ideologically at least, encompasses private, personal allegiances.

The translation from “colonist” to “American” entailed a reconception of familial ties, and the shift was not without its attendant anxieties. Locke's educational theories placed modeling at the center of proper character development, and he provided these guidelines for making the proper impression on a youthful mind: “Imperiousness and Severity is but an ill way of treating Men, who have Reason of their own to guide them, unless you have a mind to make your children, when grown up, weary of you, and secretly to say within themselves, ‘When will you die, father?’” (34). The nominal “Founding Fathers” of the American Revolution had occasion to witness firsthand just such an effect of tyrannical and arbitrary rule, and doubtless had no wish to repeat the experience with themselves in the role of detested parent. The question remained, however, whether given the model under which colonists had been quite literally impressed, American politics could be fashioned to a new design. Sentimental literature—including political, philosophical, and fictional texts—is to a certain extent a response to the cultural anxieties present in the question of patriarchal authority; more than this, sentimental literature shares in the process of creating a new cultural impression.

Locke's theory of modeling implies psychological and chronological distance as well as discretion: in the parent a child is given an image of future maturity, a long-term goal after which to strive. Sentimental ideology supplants this hierarchical structure with the more intimate dynamic of identification. Whereas modeling assumes the difference between subject and object, identification diminishes the distance between these categories, blurring the boundaries between distinct identities, whether “parent” and “child,” “fact” and “fiction,” or “reader” and “text.” In fact, twentieth-century critics define a work as “sentimental” in part by determining the extent to which the work seeks to engage readers in identification with the main character or characters. Sympathy is a key component in this transaction, denoting, as David Marshall writes, “not just feeling or the capacity for feeling but more specifically the capacity to feel the sentiments of someone else” (Surprising 3). Yet as Marshall goes on to show, the experience of sympathy “represents an epistemological and aesthetic problem: since we cannot know the experience or sentiments of another person, we must represent in our imagination copies of the sentiments that we ourselves feel as we imagine ourselves in someone else's place and person” (5). In other words, rather than rescuing us from our isolated position as distinct individuals, sympathy reproduces our isolation by offering us a vision of unity while simultaneously confirming the impossibility of its attainment. It it just this tension between union and alienation that provides the dramatic—and pedagogical—conflicts in Brown's The Power of Sympathy.

The working out of socio-political anxieties in a newly configured domestic context is part of that sentimental structure of feeling in post-Revolutionary America devoted to unifying public and private demands, and to liberating the concept of authority from its burdensome past.⁵ The early American novel cannot be understood if separated from the sentimental ideology out of which it arises or from eighteenth-century theories of interpersonal dynamics of which sentimentalism forms a part. Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary concerns with the effects of sympathy, as it relates to both the novel and American socio-political structures, underscore the importance of relational methods and models in contributing to the liberal notion of individual authority.

Participating in the sentimental equation of family and country, Thomas Paine's Common Sense (1776) represents the political hostilities between Britain and the Colonies as a family feud, ultimately arguing for rebellion against the metaphorical “parent country” on the grounds of a greater duty to one's actual flesh and blood; he thus translates the act of revolution into an act of supreme filial loyalty. As a catalyst to momentous political (dis)union, Common Sense reveals the double-edged nature of all acts of sympathy, thus providing a fitting introduction to the first American novel, which devotes itself to tracing sympathy's tragic implications.

2

In An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725), the Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheson argues the position of the common sense school by claiming that the innate moral virtue that holds a society together springs not from “Self-love, or Desire of private Interest” but from the benevolent disinterest modeled in the parent-child bond. One of the differences between interested and disinterested love lies in the latter's ability to invest in things outside of the “self,” and Hutcheson juxtaposes commercial and interpersonal investments in order to resist a commodification of “personal regard.” Similarly, he contrasts the joys and sorrows of parenthood with the gains and losses of “several Merchants join'd in Partnership,” asking if such an investment is of the same kind as “that of Parents [and] their Children” and replying with the rhetorical quip, “I fancy no Parent will say so” (145).

What is at stake for Hutcheson in differentiating between commercial and family models of shared experience is, paradoxically, the integrity of the larger community. That is, whereas cooperative ventures in business tend to reinforce one's inclination toward self-interest, filial love encourages a disinterested benevolence that will allow individuals to forgo their private interests (including family interests) for the good of the whole. It is filial attachment, then, that makes social structures possible. But although Hutcheson implies that it is possible, when one is not self-interested, to “admire any Action, or love any Person in a distinct Country, or Age,” he ultimately turns the sympathy between parent and child into a training ground for a specifically national allegiance. For Hutcheson, filial attachment provides the theoretical lens through which one may imagine “weaker degrees of Love[,] where there is no tie of Parentage[,] … extend[ed] to all Mankind” (146). Narrowing his field of vision from the world at large to one's country in particular, Hutcheson then concludes that it is in fact familiarity that forms the basis of “national Love.” Since one's “Friendships, Familys, natural Affections, and other humane Sentiments” are associated with the “Buildings, Fields and Woods where [one] receiv'd them,” it is inevitable that the “dear Idea of a COUNTRY” should become inseparable from the loving attachments first cultivated in that land (148).

It is clear from these examples that there are wide-ranging, often contradictory purposes that familial attachment is meant to serve. This is again represented in Paine's polemic against the private interests of the British monarchy, Common Sense. Paine makes both implicit and explicit connections between the integrity of the home and of the nation, juxtaposing the selfish, private interest of a British monarchy with the honorable, socially responsible interests of Colonial families, and arguing for political affiliation based on shared investments, both economic and emotional.

The third section of the treatise, “Thoughts on the Present State of American Affairs,” opens with the first allusion to the pamphlet's title:

In the following pages I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense; and have no other preliminaries to settle with the reader, than that he will divest himself of prejudice and prepossession, and suffer his reason and his feelings to determine for themselves; that he will put on, or rather that he will not put off, the true character of a man, and generously enlarge his views beyond the present day.

(79)

In his recourse to “plain arguments” and “simple facts,” Paine suggests that one need not be a member of the educated elite to possess the kind of sensibility that apprehends a danger to one's interests. The phrase “common sense” reinforces this idea, alluding as it does to a system of moral philosophy predicated on the assumption of a common human nature. Whether that common human sense be located in reason, as it is in Locke's philosophy, or in feeling, as it is in Hutcheson's, the implication remains that there exists a natural, universal “character of man” to which Paine may appeal. This “true character” will lead men in a common cause of separation from England, a cause that subsumes both reason and feeling under the greater rubric of nature, whose “weeping voice” echoes the “blood of the slain” to cry, “'Tis time to part” (83).

The connection between nature and blood in this quotation reveals the paradox inherent in the concept of common sense. While the reference to blood reinforces the idea of commonality by reducing it to its most fundamental element, the specificity of the blood referred to—that of the “slain”—denotes natural but selective ties of kinship. Thus for Paine, the shedding of blood on the battlefield at Lexington marks the decisive moment in Anglo-American affairs: after this battle a “new era of politics” arises, one that reconceives the relationship between Britain and America as economically and not sentimentally based. Paine asserts that Britain's motive in protecting America from foreign invaders was always “interest not attachment”: “she did not protect us from our enemies on our account but from her enemies on her own account” (81). To cling to the notion that England is America's “parent country,” then, only heaps “more shame upon [England's] conduct,” for “[e]ven brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war upon their families” (81). By debunking the myth of a filial and thus reciprocal relationship between Britain and America, Paine redraws the boundaries between those interested parties who are allies, those who are enemies, and those who are family. Britain may have been the first and may become the second, but it never was the third. As further evidence, Paine refers readers to simple geography: “Even the distance at which the Almighty hath placed England and America, is a strong and natural proof, that the authority of the one, over the other, was never the design of Heaven” (83).

The physical distance between the two continents allows Paine to articulate the battle at Lexington in terms of an invasion rather than a civil war and thus to further encourage a geographic narrowing of obligation. The fact that it is American property that is threatened in the ongoing conflict provides tangible evidence of national difference. Such evidence must result in a change of sentiments, regardless of one's previous political position:

But if you say, you can still pass the violations over, then I ask, Hath your house been burnt? Hath your property been destroyed before your face? Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on, or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or a child by their hands, and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor? If you have not, then are you not a judge of those who have. But if you have, and can still shake hands with the murderers, then are you unworthy the name of husband, father, friend, or lover, and whatever may be your rank or title in life, you have the heart of a coward, and the spirit of a sycophant.

(85)

In a provocative union of interest and attachment, Paine equates the economic loss of one's house with the emotional devastation of loss of family. Paine's list of possible offenses suggests that, whether or not one's own possessions have been violated, the sanctity of familial ties remains at issue, and demands a sympathetic response. The purpose of putting the matter in such personal terms is not to “[provoke] revenge,” Paine goes on to say, but to “awaken” readers from their “fatal and unmanly slumbers.” To this end Paine is compelled to examine current events in the light of “those feelings and affections which nature justifies, and without which, we should be incapable of discharging the social duties of life” (85). Paine thus affirms that proper socialization begins at home and that to deny or suppress these familial feelings constitutes a breach not only of one's relative identities as “husband, father, friend or lover” but of one's essential identity and the “character of a man.”⁶

In the midst of arguing the difference between economics and sentimentalism, then, Paine employs the rhetoric of filial loyalty in order to explain and justify the colonists' desire to protect (or expand) their economic interests. Such loyalty extends even to future generations: “As parents, we can have no joy, knowing that this government is not sufficiently lasting to ensure anything which we may bequeath to posterity. … [A]s we are running the next generation into debt, we ought to do the work of it” (84). The British “family of kings” is to be superseded by the authentic American family whose economic ties are legitimated by the sentimental attachments those ties inspire. Rather than continue with a fiction of the family, Paine concludes, “let us come to a final separation, and not leave the next generation to be cutting throats, under the violated unmeaning names of parent and child” (86).

In the decade after Common Sense was published, the first American fiction of the family made its mark on the imaginations of American readers. The Power of Sympathy continues Paine's campaign for domestic attachment, offering as it does both a new “domestic” literature and a narrative that brings the issue of attachment to a dramatic conclusion. In Common Sense, Paine seeks to narrow the boundaries of familial obligation by focusing attention on the natural “feelings and affections” between blood relations. By 1789, however, obstacles to harmonious political union had made themselves known in events ranging from Constitutional debates to popular rebellions. It may not be surprising, then, that Brown's novel explores the dangers as well as the attractions of familial sympathy. The concepts of danger and attraction inform the methodology of the novel as well. As a sentimental work, The Power of Sympathy not only focuses on the emotional and psychological dynamics between individual characters, it attempts to recreate that powerful dynamic in the reading experience. The “power of sympathy” therefore denotes more than the natural sentiments that blood kinship calls forth: it alludes to the pedagogical model by which sentimental literature claims its own authority over the hearts and bodies of its readers.

3

Paine's revolutionary pamphlet demonstrates the ways in which sympathy may be used to undo previously accepted obligations even as it creates or reinforces others. This ability was in fact one of the most serious charges leveled against the early sentimental novel. Contemporary critics of the novel believed that, regardless of the author's intentions, the power of sympathetic attachment might provoke uncontrolled and unreasoned responses on the part of readers. In Brown's novel of seduction, the unpredictability of influence is itself made the central focus of the narrative. By eroticizing the concept of “common sense,” the novel shows the power of nature to be not only sentimental but sexual as well. Such a revelation calls into question the reader's own responses to the story—his or her ability to resist narrative seduction.⁷ It also challenges the kind of family dynamic espoused by Paine and others: in Brown's narrative, familial bonding becomes the forbidden impulse that one must resist. While it is true that Brown's novel fails to adequately theorize its own assumptions and conclusions regarding sentimental influence, this failure only serves to underscore critics' concerns over the kinds of models being offered to the public. As itself a model of American sentimental literature, The Power of Sympathy represents the complex and often involuntary mechanisms at work in negotiating external and internal authority, mechanisms that sympathy itself simultaneously exposes and imposes.

The main line of Brown's story involves a wealthy young man and a financially dependent woman, Harrington and Harriot, who meet, are drawn to one another, and fall in love. The hero eventually opts for marriage to, rather than seduction of, the apparently orphaned woman he loves, only to find out before their wedding day that they are half brother and sister. Not an orphan at all, Harriot is the senior Harrington's illegitimate daughter, the result of his earlier seduction of an impressionable and unconnected young woman. The revelation of their sibling relationship dampens the lovers' spirits but does nothing to dry up their desire. By the end of the novel, scandal is abroad, families are torn apart, and three out of the four principal players are dead. Harriot, unable to overcome either her passion for her brother or the social restrictions of her culture, languishes to her death, while Harrington, in a rather conventional turn of revolutionary ardor, claims his “independence” through suicide.

Mr. Harrington's seduction of Harriot's mother, Maria, provides the discernible cause for the tragedy that follows. Supporting this reading is the subplot in which a father's refusal to forgive his daughter's “incestuous” relationship with her brother-in-law leads to her suicide.⁸ Both plots demonstrate that the consequences of paternal error are not to be taken lightly. But the threat to individual liberty goes beyond mere human frailty. For instance, when Mr. Harrington discovers that his two children are engaged, he immediately rejects reason's ability to explain the event: “But how shall we be able—how shall we pretend to investigate the great springs by which we are actuated or account for the operation of sympathy. My son … has accidentally seen her and, to complete the triumph of nature, has loved her” (102). In its eighteenth-century context, “sympathy” connotes identification: not feeling for a person, from a distance, but with or alongside of a person. According to the novel, such a blurring of ego boundaries is nature (including and subsuming human nature) in full force. At first the younger Harrington tries to deny this fact by claiming that, had he known Harriot was his sister, he would have loved her as such. But in the next letter to his friend Worthy he asks if it were possible for him ever to live with Harriot in this world, answering, “Ah no! it never would here—it never would. I will fly to the place where she is gone. Our love will be there refined—it will be freed from all criminality” (118). Harrington does not envision his love being freed from passion but from the censure which that passion invites; the “natural,” then, describes a force that overrules convention. 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.

Brown's emphasis on the power of filial sympathy subordinates free will to kinship, or the “voice of blood” (see Wilson). In the late eighteenth-century debate between heredity and humanism, this novel vacillates between older notions of destiny and contemporary republican standards of moral culpability.⁹ When Harriot and Harrington meet, the attraction is instant and irrevocable; neither can modify her or his love to the demands of the situation. At a time when the rhetoric of liberty, rights, and independence still echoes in the ears of most Americans, The Power of Sympathy speaks for the “voice of blood,” a voice that carries with it an implicit critique of the promise of freedom.

The relationship between Harrington and Harriot represents the fantasy of complete identification that then must be terminated because it has no place in this world. But despite the outcome, it is the fantasy that drives the plot and that finally effects the reader's “education.” The epistemological problem posed by sympathy was taken up by Adam Smith, whose Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) asserts, “Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person.” In what could pass for an endorsement of the power of fiction, Smith adds that “it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are [another person's] sensations”; it is by the imagination only, in other words, that we experience sympathy. Smith explains, however, that even the imagination cannot make what is another's completely our own, for it can only “[represent] to us what would be our own [sensations], if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy” (8).

As if this secondary sense of alienation were not enough, Smith theorizes a primary alienation from oneself, the result of a kind of “mirror of sympathy.” Putting himself in the position of the observer, the sufferer acts as observer to himself, becoming at once both spectator and spectacle. This sense of alienation is for Smith the greatest affliction, just as the strongest desire is not a relief from pain but for a “more complete sympathy. [The sufferer] longs for that relief which nothing can afford him but the entire concord of the affections of the spectators with his own” (22). Of course, this is exactly what the experience of sympathy has taught him he cannot have.

For Smith, sympathetic identification is a relational dynamic. Total identification with the other person might extinguish sympathy altogether since sympathy operates by a simultaneous awareness of separateness and inclination to overcome it.¹⁰ Therefore Harrington and Harriot, though connected down to the roots of their names, cannot be read as gendered halves of a single being. Their distinct identities and physical kinship work together and against each other to keep perspectives (and passions) constantly in flux. In her final letter to Harrington Harriot wrestles with this ambiguity:

Allied by birth, and in mind, and similar in age—and in thought still more intimately connected—the sympathy which bound our souls together at first sight is less extraordinary. Shall we any longer wonder at its irresistible impulse? Shall we strive to oppose the link of nature that draws us to each other? When I reflect on this, I relapse into weakness and tenderness and become a prey to warring passions. I view you in two distinct characters: if I indulge the idea of one, the other becomes annihilated; and I vainly imagine I have my choice of a brother or—.

(112)

As sympathy makes the sufferer aware of her own predicament through the eyes of the other, thus doubling her subject position, so it forces Harriot here to double per perception of the other with whom she identifies. But not only does she read Harrington as both brother and lover, she multiplies her experience as spectator as well—she must read her own pain through the eyes of one who feels the same pain himself and who calls up her sympathy even in the act of imagining his. Suffering is thus compounded rather than alleviated by the double mirroring of sympathy that causes each character to experience the tragedy twofold.

From Smith's analysis it would appear that sympathy does not just fail to bridge the gap between psyches, it forces recognition of that gap in the very attempt to traverse it. Harrington and Harriot thus become victims of a desire heretofore unexpressed because unknown until the moment its potential fulfillment faces them in one another. Once aware of their desire, Harrington and Harriot are unable or unwilling to return to their previous condition as autonomous beings. And it is in this that the story's true rebellion lies. Threatening to eschew social and moral strictures in order to embrace her ideal attachment, Harriot declares, “I see the danger and do not wish to shun it, because to avoid it is to forget it” (111). Although Harriot's death is inevitable—a novel predicated on “exposing vice” cannot countenance incest—it also short-circuits the obligatory conversion of erotic into fraternal sympathy, a conversion that Harriot sees as tantamount to “forgetting” sympathy itself. In a like spirit Harrington announces his decision to take his life despite the social censure it may incur: “As to the world … I despise its opinion. Independency of spirits is my motto—I think for myself” (121). Given the attachment that prompts his decision, this is an ironic declaration indeed. What these examples suggest is that sympathy does not result in a loss of self but in a dynamic interchange between senses of self and Other.

A similar dynamic is played out between characters and readers, and is the method by which the novel's pedagogy is put into practice. 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? While it is not surprising that Harrington and Harriot are not finally joined in earthly union at the end of the novel, the high drama and emotional intensity with which their separation and eventual deaths are expressed serves to idealize their attachment rather than critique it. Their deaths therefore do less to register a moral warning with readers than to secure the fantasy of a “complete sympathy” that Smith both imagined and discounted. Put another way, the lure of sympathetic identification is reproduced rather than annulled in the experience of reading their story. This might not appear so disturbing if the outcome were not so tragic or if Brown's novel did not contain within it a striking example of just how seductively influential narrative models can be.

4

The Power of Sympathy's portrayal of a father's sexual transgression and its unfortunate consequences makes tangible the problem of paternal influence in post-Revolutionary politics. It also serves as a catalyst for the translation of paternal into narrative authority: Mr. Harrington's failure as moral exemplum to his children becomes the exemplum of the novel. As Fliegelman observes more generally, “Literature could play the exemplary role parents were obliged, but often failed, to fill. It could educate as well as corrupt” (26). What remains in question is just how clearly the line is drawn between education and corruption. If the power of sympathy cannot be contained within the novel's plot, there is little reason to assume that its sympathetic readers will be any more circumspect. The Power of Sympathy illustrates this conclusion in the final pages of its story.

After learning of Harriot's death, Harrington resolves to join her where their love “will be freed from all criminality” (129). His choice of suicide is not prompted solely by his love for Harriot, however; it is also informed by the narrative he has been reading just before his death. When Worthy finds his friend's body, on the table beside Harrington lies—perhaps predictably—a copy of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther.¹¹ That Harrington felt himself a kindred spirit to Goethe's hero is evidenced by the language and reasoning of Harrington's last letter, which closely follows Werther's own justification for suicide. Werther takes his life for the sake of a woman he can never possess, for in death, reasons Werther, lies the fulfillment of his dream: “[F]rom this moment you are wholly mine: I go to my Father, to thy Father, I shall carry my sorrows to the feet of his throne and he will give me comfort until you arrive. Then will I fly to meet you, I will embrace you, and remain with you forever in the presence of the Almighty” (2: 85). In like spirit, Harrington's final letter asserts that surely the “Eternal Father” will “[l]et the tears of sorrow blot out [Harrington's] guilt from the book of [God's] wrath.” In their lives he and Harriot “loved, but were unhappy; in death they sleep undivided” (127).

Just as the congruity of language and idea between Harrington's and Werther's last letters indicates a sympathetic connection between the two, so the juxtaposition of Harrington's body and Goethe's novel epitomizes the intimate relation between reader and text. In the final moments before his death, Harrington becomes a model reader, reading himself into the narrative and making the story his own. His suicide attests not only to the power of sympathy but to the power of fiction as well. As if to underscore the point, after his death Harrington serves as a sight for sympathetic eyes to observe and interpret: “Great numbers crouded [sic] to see the body of poor Harrington; they were impressed with various emotions, for their sympathizing sorrow could not be concealed” (128). Although the spectators acknowledge the young man's error, in the end they cannot condemn him, for knowing his history, they know that he was the “dupe of nature, and the sacrifice of seduction” (128).

As Werther serves as a model for Harrington, so the fictional readers of Harrington's body and story serve as a possible model for sentimental readers. While the onlookers' “sympathizing sorrow” grants them humanity, their critical distance and judgment affords them a safe position outside of the emotional fray. Yet the latter condition undercuts the former, because, by the terms in which we have been examining it, sympathy requires identification with the sufferer. As Marshall points out, “[I]f the spectators withhold sympathy, they remain spectators. If they grant sympathy—if they enter into the sentiments of the person they are beholding, if they become in some measure the same person as him, identify with him through a transfer of persons and characters—then they stop being spectators” (Figure 192). The very scene in which the reader reads the spectators viewing Harrington's body bespeaks the spectacle that Harrington has become. If sympathy is to do its office, the reader must resist identifying with the onlookers, must resist becoming a spectator to the theatricality of this final scene. To fail to do so is to turn the hero into nothing but a corpse. It is also to have failed in the final lessons of sympathy, lessons that teach that the extent to which one is willing to be a spectator is the extent to which one must imagine oneself a spectacle. When read in this light, the novel's attempt to mitigate the effects of sympathetic identification, both in the early lectures on novel reading and in the final scene of judgment, appears disingenuous, as does the final line of the poem that concludes Brown's novel. “May you never love as these have loved” is a wish made in vain on behalf of eighteenth-century readers: according to the lessons of sentimental education, they already have.

5

Ironically, it is as parental substitute that The Power of Sympathy reveals the difficulty of transcending familial models: by authorizing its own sympathetic identification between reader and protagonist(s), Brown's novel reproduces the attachment first authored by the father. As our examination of certain common sense philosophers has shown, this sympathetic attachment forms the basis of sentimental politics. In an ideal republic, government functions as an extension of the people's desires. The question of whether or not autonomy can ever be achieved—whether the son, or the nation, can ever outgrow the father's influence—is rendered moot once the subject's private voice is perceived as speaking the same language as the public voice of authority.

This negotiation of public and private authority, of community and individual rights and privileges, lies behind the metaphor I have been examining. “Fatherhood,” for all of its negative as well as positive connotations, implies a bond of the blood. Yet as Paine has argued, more important even than biological ties is the emotional investment that legitimates them. This is substantiated in the novel by Harriot, who, never having been able to claim kin with her own father, attempts to convert into a father that person for whom she feels the greatest affinity: “Come, O Harrington! be a friend, a protector, a brother—be him on whom I could never yet call by the tender, the endearing title of parent. … I will be dutiful and affectionate to you, and you shalt be unto me as a father” (112). In a final effort to construct a family, Harriot participates in the sentimentalization of authority to which “common sense” has led her. In doing so, however, she reenacts the drama she is seeking to revise. By conflating the junior and senior Harringtons, Harriot eroticizes the father through the would-be lover who represents him. For Harriot, as for the novel of which she is a part, there is no solution to the dilemma of domesticated desire: the very attempt to turn the forbidden into the familiar leads back to incest.

In keeping with the age, The Power of Sympathy strives to personalize authority—to bring it back home, as it were. As the novel ultimately reveals, however, what constitutes domestic space is a matter of perspective. Shifting boundaries between the national, the familial, even the individual body, confirm the relational dynamic inherent in these categories. Again, Smith's spectacular theory of morality helps illustrate this point. Claiming that through the mirror of sympathy, through “the eyes of other people” we can “scrutinize the propriety of our own conduct,” Smith turns the individual into his judge, his own internal and by extension his own external monitor, housed in a single psyche. Smith's “man within the breast,” that “ideal spectator” and “arbiter of conscience,” effectively renounces the need for an external authority even as it underscores the relational matrix at the center of identity.

The Power of Sympathy not only depicts such a matrix, it attempts to generate it. According to Smith, the “lesson of self command” is learned through mediated experience. Literature, and sentimental literature in particular, provides such mediation, allowing the reader to examine him- or herself and, in the reading experience, to take authority to heart. After this fashion, Harrington, in a last letter before his death, claims he can read the end of his life in the work before him: “I just opened a book, and these are the words that I read: ‘The time of my fading is near, and the blast that shall scatter my leaves. Tomorrow shall the traveller come, he that saw me in my beauty shall come; his eyes will search the field, but they will not find me.’ These words pierce me to the quick—they are a dismal prospect of my approaching fate” (124). We are to conclude from Harrington's interpretation of this event that literature does not coerce the reader into an unwanted act, but confirms to the reader what the heart already knows. It is a subtle difference, but a significant one. The work of the sentimental novel of seduction is to educate the heart, but when the work is done, one can rarely distinguish between the operations of the heart and the operations of influence. But then, this is where seduction truly begins.

Notes

1. For a thorough discussion of the “scurrilous history” of Brown's novel, as well as the criteria for designating “firstness,” see Davidson ch. 5.

2. As Fliegelman observes, the phrase was one of the rhetorical markers of the Scottish common sense school, which assumed “the sociable character of man” and “extolled ‘soul kinship,’ ‘affinity,’ ‘sympathetic attachments,’ and ‘the power of sympathy.’” Fliegelman goes on to note, “For Locke such subrational and noncontractual relationships endangered the sacred principle of moral independence” (26).

3. Locke's gender-specific term here is of course intentional. His reference to “man” assumes the connection between political power—and thus individualism—and masculinity.

4. As Alfred Young notes, the idea that the Revolution “was the result of two general movements … the contest for home rule and … of who should rule at home” (4) is a formula that has been much repeated since it was first argued by Carl Becker in 1909.

5. The phrase, particularly apt to this discussion, is Raymond Williams's and is from “Structures of Feeling” in Marxism and Literature (1977).

6. As I have indicated, the positive aspects of sensibility and sympathy were generally associated with men in the eighteenth century. Not until the nineteenth century, with sensibility's decline into “sentimentality,” did sentiment become synonymous with “woman.”

7. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg addresses this problem briefly by discussing how the seduction novel permits illicit liaisons to be vicariously enjoyed as well as vicariously punished (167).

8. The family involved was actually that of the American poet Sarah Wentworth Morton. Sarah's sister Frances (Fanny) had an affair with Sarah's husband, Perez Morton. Fanny later committed suicide.

9. While sibling attraction is present in nineteenth-century novels as well, in these narratives the “brother” and “sister” are invariably not related by blood. In the reconstructed family, attraction is based almost solely on familiarity: the hero and heroine have grown up together and have a common background.

10. The claim is Marshall's: “[S]ympathy must stop short of total identification: if we really changed persons and characters with the people we sympathize with, we might not feel sympathy” (Figure 179).

11. It is unclear whether Brown means to depict his protagonist as a revolutionary or a conventional hero at this point. On the one hand, Goethe's unconventional life—and by extension his work—led him to be strongly associated with sexual immorality for Anglo-American readers. On the other hand, the tragedy resulting from the power of narrative influence was itself already a literary convention by this time. The “independency of spirit” that Harrington claims must therefore be qualified, if not made ironic, by his participation in a model already familiar to eighteenth-century readers.

Works Cited

Brown, William Hill. The Power of Sympathy. The Power of Sympathy and The Coquette. New York: New College and University, 1970.

Davidson, Cathy. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

Fliegelman, Jay. Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. The Sorrows of Young Werther.

Hutcheson, Francis. An Inquiry into the Originals of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue.

Locke, John. Two Treatises of Civil Government.

Marshall, David. The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot. New York: Columbia UP, 1986.

———. The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.

Paine, Thomas. Common Sense. The Thomas Paine Reader. Ed. Michael Foot and Isaac Kramnick. New York: Penguin, 1987. 65-115.

Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie. Oxford: Clarendon, 1976. Vol. 1 of The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith. 6 vols. 1976-1983.

Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. “Domesticating ‘Virtue’: Coquettes and Revolutionaries in Young America.” Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons. Ed. Elaine Scarry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988. 160-184.

Wilson, W. Daniel. “Science, Natural Law, and Unwitting Sibling Incest in Eighteenth-Century Literature.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 13 (1984): 249-270.

Young, Alfred F. Introduction. Beyond the American Revolution: Exploration in the History of American Radicalism. DeKalb: Northern Illinois UP, 1993. 3-24.