Notes
No notion has been more important to materialist work on the novel in recent years than Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community.”1 This importance is an instance of the tautological relation between object and method that characterizes the most successful criticism: the notion of distanced individuals joined by their common investment in an imaginary representation has been so invigorating to studies of the modern novel because it owes its existence to the genre. That is to say, it is not just that novels helped crystallize imagined communities—the notion of an imagined community was put into place by the modern novel and is foundational to its cultural work. The imagined community was, in fact, the product of a specific subgenre of the novel that dominated the literary landscape from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. This subgenre is sentimental fiction, though sentimentality does not appear in Anderson’s account that equates the representational forms catalyzing secular imagined communities with the codes of realism.2
During a century that ran from Richardson’s Pamela (1740) to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) sentimental novels were in the vanguard of formulating the notion of an affectively charged association among distanced readers. Sentimental discourse and its imagined communities, moreover, extended beyond the novel to figure prominently in political, moral, and aesthetic theory, drama, poetry, medical and humanitarian writings, historiography, nascent anthropology and ethnography, history painting, genre paintings of daily life, and images of children. The sentimental production of imagined communities was not limited to the years when sentimentality was a high cultural form. Though sentimental discourse fell from prestige around the middle of the nineteenth century, it has had an active afterlife in mass culture, where it has been used in a range of media genres popular with vast audiences, such as sensation novels, movies, television soap operas, talk shows, and news spectacles like the O. J. Simpson trial and the life of Lady Di.
The imagined communities of sentimentality were both sociological and textual; they existed among historical readers, and they were produced by the figures of speech and thought found in cultural artifacts. In this chapter I speculate on how these imagined communities were constituted through rhetorical strategies, how they were implied as text-effect. Given the tawdry aura that now hovers around sentimentality, it cannot be stressed enough that I offer my speculations not to unfold virtual possibilities contained in sentimental novels but rather to respond to the astonishing—indeed to many readers today almost scandalous—appeal these novels once had. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold more copies than any book in the world except the Bible,”3 and a similar popularity characterized the most prominent works of sentimental fiction in their time, from Pamela and Clarissa, La Nouvelle Héloïse and Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, to Staël’s Corinne, Eugène Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris, and G. W. Reynolds’s Mysteries of London.4
The international significance of these works, however, points to a thought-provoking distinction between the national scale of the communities theorized by Anderson and the first modern imagined communities catalyzed by sentimental texts. The sentimental subgenre was a transnational literary form during the century of sentimentality’s prestige, and sentimental novels were the most translated of all literary fiction.5 Certainly, sentimental novels exhibit their transnational appeal in the Anglo-French invention of the novel. In contradistinction to many subgenres important to this process that were marked as national within the Enlightenment republic of letters (the French novel of worldliness, the British Gothic and domestic novel), sentimental fiction was the subgenre practiced with most equal enthusiasm by authors on both sides of the Channel, taking shape as a genuinely cross-Channel form.6 As such, it served as a privileged site for the exchange of literary codes and observations concerning national character and difference, along with reflection on the process of exchange and translation itself. In her chapter in this volume, April Alliston, moreover, makes clear that sentimental fiction was the privileged Channel site for examining the complexities of the relation of national to trans- and subnational communities, along with the uses and abuses of the nation as the unit of collective identification.7
In describing the implied communities constructed by sentimental texts, I am interested in what features might account for their transnational appeal. But the fact that these features can travel does not mean that they always signify the same way. And in conclusion I ask how a form’s international portability interacts with specific national context, describing distinct national differences in the way sentimentality took root in England and in France. At the horizon of my discussion is what might seem a rather perplexing asymmetrical feature of the subsequent history of the novel in the two countries, namely, that one international subgenre, sentimentality, could end up with a completely opposing relation to realism, the form that was to succeed sentimentality as the generic dominant of the novel in an international republic of letters. In France, as I suggest in The Sentimental Education of the Novel, sentimentality reigned pretty much intact until the end of the Empire, and Balzacian realism emerged as a hostile takeover of sentimental codes.8 In Britain, sentimentality mutated in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries into a range of subgenres (the Gothic novel, the domestic novel and the related novel of manners, the national tale and the historical novel) that writers then unified in the emergence of a nineteenth-century Victorian realism.9 Although a mix of specifically literary and broadly social factors inform this asymmetry, I want to emphasize its beginnings in the practice of sentimentality preferred on each side of the Channel.
The codes of sentimentality are first and foremost codes of narration. There is, in particular, one narrative situation that defines the subgenre (as well as the discourse more generally). This situation, what might be called sentimentality’s primal scene, is a spectacle of suffering that solicits the spectator’s sympathy.10 “Sentimentalism,” Patricia Spacks quite rightly declares, “implies a set of ethical principles,” and she emphasizes that “[p]olitical implications … are always latent in sentimentalism.”11 Philip Fisher, writing on the nineteenth-century American context, accurately observes these ethical and political implications when he proposes that sentimental novels are engaged in creating the free subjects of liberal democracy.12 What Fisher does not sufficiently elaborate, however, is that this is no easy feat, since liberal freedom is in fact fraught with contradictions and tensions from its Enlightenment inception. In sentimental suffering, the protagonist painfully plays out the practical ramifications of these contradictions. Sympathy with this suffering is the beginning of spectators’ interpellation into sentimentality’s cultural work.
The suffering of sentimental protagonists results above all from one tension deeply troubling to Enlightenment political thinkers, and that, according to Etienne Balibar, is “the political problem par excellence”: how to construct a social form that is “both egalitarian and libertarian,” or, as Enlightenment thinkers generally posed the problem, how individuals might fully exercise their private freedom without impinging on the equal freedom of their fellows.13 Most artifacts represent this question through a conflict between what we might call, using the language of political theory, negative and positive rights. By negative rights is meant the private rights to life, liberty, and property. Positive rights designates the foundation of political rights, the public freedom to participate in the workings of the collective.
In many novels of sensibility this conflict emerges in a plot that stages what Henry Mackenzie called “that war of duties.” Evincing ambivalence about the form that had made his fame, Mackenzie wrote: “The principal danger of novels, as forming a mistaken and pernicious system of morality, seems to me to arise from that contrast between one virtue or excellence and another, that war of duties which is to be found in many of them, particularly in that species called the Sentimental.” In this war, “[t]he duty to parents is contrasted with the ties of friendship and of love, the virtues of justice, of prudence, of economy, are put in competition with the exertion of generosity, of benevolence, and of compassion.”14 If we look at the range of sentimental plots, it turns out that among the possibilities offered by Mackenzie the first conflict, that between duty to the family and love, is the conflict most frequently used by sentimental authors. In this conflict, the rights to participate in the collective epitomized by family obligation express positive freedom, and they conflict with the negative freedom to dispose of one’s own person, epitomized by the rights of the heart.
The conflict between negative and positive rights structures many of the most celebrated eighteenth-century sentimental novels, such as Richardson’s Clarissa, Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, and Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther. In all these novels the conflict results from the impossibility of according more value to one of the duties in the conflict than to the other. Although the terms virtue and duty are most often used to characterize positive rights, it would be a mistake to understand sentimental conflict as transgression versus the law. As I argue in The Sentimental Education of the Novel, the pathos of the protagonists’ situation is that right is on both sides; how is one to choose between conflicting duties, asks Rousseau’s Julie, who is torn between a lover and a father. I propose that we call narratives built around this conflict tragic sentimentality in recognition of Hegel’s proposition that tragedy stages the encounter of two valid ethical imperatives that meet in a situation of mutual contradiction.15
Mackenzie ascribes the plot of two conflicting duties to “our neighbors the French” (though of course the plot fully crystallizes for the first time in Richardson’s Clarissa), and his comments are suggestive. François Furet and Mona Ozouf have proposed French liberalism as far more troubled by the problem of how to design a form of government promoting both negative and positive rights than Anglo-American liberalism, with its primary emphasis on negative rights. Certainly, this problem is central to Rousseau’s theory of the social contract.16 For Rousseau, the state of nature is characterized by freedom but no rights beyond what Rousseau called man’s premoral “absolute right to anything that tempts him and that he can take.”17 The social contract creates both negative and positive rights, and the brilliance of this institutionalization, as well as the difficulty of realizing it in practice, is that to safeguard one form of rights, one must safeguard the other, even if they enter into flagrant contradiction.18
But tragic sentimentality is not the only way sentimental fiction plays out the difficulties of modern freedom; some works employ an alternative scenario of suffering also put into place by Richardson, who was a virtuoso in the modulations of Enlightenment pathos. In the novel bearing her name Pamela solicits sympathy from her mistreatment by Mr. B, who embodies negative freedom, but Mr. B’s negative freedom takes the form of his natural freedom to do as he pleases. Against this negative freedom, Pamela asserts her virtue, the positive freedom to uphold community that the text grants full ethical sanction. When Spacks characterizes “the problem of self-love versus social” as defining British sentimental fiction in the 1760s and 1770s, it is this conflict between a negative natural freedom (self-love) and a positive social freedom (social) that is, I believe, at issue.19
As Spacks’s terminology suggests, negative freedom is represented in much more ambivalent fashion in this version of sentimental conflict than in the tragic plot. The protagonist espousing negative freedom is an amoral figure, even a libertine, whose exercise of freedom is more strongly bound up in the desire for sheer possession, whether sexual or economic, than in the tragic version. Nonetheless, it would be an oversimplification to understand this freedom to be devoid of value, as the attractions of Mr. B and his redemption at the end of Pamela make clear. Positive freedom impedes the abuses of private natural freedom, placing salutary limits on it and channeling it for the public good.
In this version of sentimental plot, natural and social freedom are typically made concrete by being embodied in two opposing characters, in contrast with the tragic typology, in which one protagonist anguishes over the impossibility of choice. It is as if natural and social freedoms need to be delineated as so distinct that they cannot be espoused in a single voice; the distribution of roles emphasizes that these freedoms place their proponents in two different realms.20 I will call narratives structured around this alternative primal scene melodramatic sentimentality, in recognition of the way melodrama pits characters embodying opposing forces against each other, specifically a character embodying the natural urge for possession against a character upholding virtue. This is, of course, anticipation, for melodrama is an inheritor of this strand of sentimental narrative via the Gothic.
That Spacks seizes the essence of this conflict in examining English novels from the 1760s and 1770s and that the Gothic was an English invention are not coincidental, for the melodramatic plot articulates freedom in a fashion that resonates with a celebrated Anglo-American lineage of liberal theory. In this lineage, as Thomas Paine declared, “natural rights are the foundation of all … civil rights”: the state of nature comports freedoms that contain in embryo the freedoms promoted by the social contract.21 These freedoms are negative; the most basic negative freedom in nature, as well as in society, is the freedom to possess property.22 In this lineage of liberalism, positive freedom is instituted to check the abuses possible if each individual pursues negative natural freedom without concern for others. In contrast to the Rousseauvean version of the social contract, the character of positive freedom here is secondary and limiting rather than constitutive of the notion of freedom as an ethical right.23 Joseph Priestly offers one of the most succinct formulations of such a view in his Essay on the First Principles of Government: “If I be asked what is meant by liberty, I should chuse for the sake of greater clearness to divide it into two kinds, political and civil … It is a man’s civil liberty, which is originally in its full force, and part of which he sacrifices when he enters into a state of society.”24
Nowhere is the melodramatic version of sentimental conflict more starkly played out than in the pathetic scenes of illness and death crucial to many nonfictional as well as fictional instances of sentimental discourse. In these scenes natural freedom takes its most ruthless and antisocial form. It becomes the freedom of nature to destroy and is pitted against the moral independence of sufferer or spectator in the face of death. In the deathbed scene that produced more tears than any other scene in all of sentimental fiction, indeed perhaps in all of literature, the fact that a child, little Eva, is its subject only redoubles the intensity of the melodramatic conflict. For the child already instigates pathos from the way she occupies the boundary space between the negative freedom of nature and a freedom to participate in the collective aligned with her induction into the moral order.25
The deathbed scene occurs before a group of spectators who dramatize for the reader the sympathy it solicits. As Jay Caplan, notably, has argued, the group of sympathetic spectators is fundamental to the workings of sentimental narrative; it is what the entire pathetic spectacle works to produce. When readers’ sympathies are aroused, they sympathize not only with the sufferings represented but with one another, and through this sympathy they come together into a kind of community. “[N]o sympathy is stronger than the sympathy we feel with sympathy,” wrote Schiller.26 Diderot ascribes this reaction to the way in which the sympathetic response activates the spectator’s imagination when he declares, “[C]ome, we shall weep together over the unfortunates in his stories, and we will say: ‘If fate casts us down, at least honest [honnêtes] folk will also weep over us.’ ”27
The sympathetic community is, that is to say, a community that is constitutively imagined, even if its spectators are present to one another—it takes shape through the spectator’s ability to picture himself or herself occupying the place of the victim. Tears are the bodily indication that the display of sympathy has bonded spectators or readers together; indeed, in her Histoire des larmes Anne-Vincent Buffault, inspired by Marcel Mauss, suggests sentimental communities as catalyzed and maintained by their exchange. Tears are so suggestive as the synecdoche of sentimental community because they are a universal human response and thus signify the universality of this community’s potential membership, comprising the same formally equal individuals that are the citizens of emerging liberal society. The sympathetic response is available to anyone regardless of rank, social status, age, gender, or nationality; all that is required is the taste to be moved.
Showing spectators at a deathbed is one version of a common sentimental procedure to underline the importance of community, which is to include these communities as characters within the narrative.28 Alliston analyzes novels of sensibility, where the formation of sympathetic communities is indeed a central thematic preoccupation. Even where this preoccupation is muted, sympathetic communities figure as peripheral spectators of the main action. They frequently appear, for example, in the framing devices common in eighteenth-century novels. In the opening to Manon Lescaut Des Grieux offers his tale to the man of quality and perhaps his aristocratic student, and he offers it to members of the community of New Orleans, including his adversary, Synnelet, as well as to his friend, Tiberge, at the novel’s end. Richardson’s editor introduces the letters comprising the “history” of Clarissa with mention of several “judicious friends” as he discusses his cogitations concerning whether to publish these “documents” in their complete but lengthy form.29
As David Marshall has stressed, sentimental communities owe much to notions of theatrical spectatorship; indeed, sentimentality’s key codes for soliciting pathos historically took shape in the cross-fertilization between dramatic and novelistic forms.30 That this process was an exchange between a genre that depends on spectatorial presence and one that works through distance is telling, for sentimental community extends the affective bonds of presence to define bonds of absence.31 Accordingly, peripheral spectators may witness a living scene, hear an oral narrative, or read a written text, but they respond to all three forms of representation with the same warm, living tears. The importance of the continuum from presence to absence explains the availability of sentimental texts to deconstructive interpretations. But this continuum is invoked with specific historical significance: it is in fact central to liberal-democratic notions of citizenship and representation, a point that not only Anderson but Habermas has made when he links the modern novel to the emergence of the modern political formation in his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.
The play of presence and absence is, moreover, constitutive of the sympathy provoked by sentimental pathos, whether this sympathy is offered by spectators who are present at the spectacle of suffering or by spectators who witness it in mediated form. Sentimentality is, as Nietzsche charged in The Genealogy of Morals, pity at a distance. In La Souffrance à distance Luc Boltanski rightly observes that such distance invites the political objections brought against sentimentality throughout its history, but it is also crucial to the discourse’s cultural work.32 As a result of the spectator’s distance from sentimental conflict, he or she not only is engrossed in its outcome but can debate its construction and significance.
Today, we are used to thinking of pity as narcotic if not totalitarian, shutting down the critical faculties, which is the legacy of an avantgarde Marxist lineage epitomized by Brecht. But when Richardson invoked his community of gentlemen friends in the preface to Clarissa, they turned out to disagree completely, a response that led him to solicit “others” to give their opinions, “but no two … [were] of the same mind.”33 Diderot too viewed diversity of opinion as constitutive of sentimental communities, pointing out that Richardson’s works provoked debates concerning morals and taste as lively if not as heated “as if it has been a question of the most serious affair.”34 When Schiller theorized pathos as a figure devoted to vindicating freedom, he gave a rather Newtonian view of the matter: the more powerful the pathos that aroused feeling, the greater the freedom the spectator asserted in overcoming his initial response with reason. Schiller wrote that “the principle of freedom within us makes itself known only by the resistance it exerts against the power of feelings, while the resistance can be measured only by the strength of the onslaught of feelings. Thus, in order for human intelligence to reveal itself as a force independent of nature, it is necessary for nature first to demonstrate all its might before our eyes. The sensuous being must suffer deeply and vehemently, the pathos must be present, so that the rational being can testify to its independence, and, by acting, can present itself.”35
Sentimental communities are thus situated squarely within the Enlightenment public sphere. As I argue in The Sentimental Education of the Novel, they are idealized instances of the liberal public sphere, offering an occasion for both the performance of community and the enjoyment of free debate. In doing so, they respond to Enlightenment difficulties by devising a form of political organization that enables modern freedom to be successfully performed.36 In the imagined communities of sentimentality, individuals may exercise their own freedom without impinging on the freedom of their fellows. This freedom takes the form of judgments on what Diderot called morals and taste.37 While an individual’s aestheticomoral judgments may run directly counter to the judgments of others, this diversity is in no way limiting; rather, it is an affirmation of the nature of the aesthetic collective constituted through discussion and debate. What better instantiation of Rousseau’s idea of liberal citizenship, where, according to Rousseau, “every individual may, as a man, have a particular will contrary to, or divergent from, the general will which he has as a citizen.”38 Against those readings that would want to see sentimentality purely as false consciousness, it cannot be stressed enough that the public sphere is not simply a retreat from political activity but rather spans the distance from aesthetics to politics.
Sentimentality’s preoccupation with the problem of how individuals can exercise their freedom without impinging on the freedom of their fellows also, I would suggest, explains the puzzling affinity of sensibility with irony from its inception. Boltanski observes this affinity and comments that not only did sentimental novels invite parody, as least as far back the publication of parodic novels immediately following the appearance of Pamela, but, “more remarkable,” there is “the progressive appearance of works that mix, as was already sketched out in Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, ‘sensibility and comedy’ … sentimentality, the spectator who is moved in response to sufferings … and its ironic unveiling.”39 Such a mixture of sentimentality and irony may well reach its disturbing apogee with Sade’s Justine.
How are we to make sense of such proximity? For Boltanski, the unstable boundary between sympathy and irony reveals the fragility of sentimental claims to sincerity; it reveals that, as Marshall observes, its theater of affect is predicated on a transparency that the spectator, dangerously, has no way to distinguish from artifice. I think, however, that this unstable boundary confirms sentimentality’s engagement with the paradoxes of a community joined by the bonds of freedom. As Linda Hutcheon points out, irony is deeply engaged with the production of community; in order for irony to work, recipients must belong to what Hutcheon calls “discursive” communities; there must be agreement between writer and readers if they are to understand by certain discursive markers that a text means other than it says.40 At the same time, ironic communities recall sentimentality in acutely problematizing the individual’s situation vis-à-vis the collective. After all, ironic communities comprise individuals joined together on the basis of their difference from and, usually, resistance to the more naive communities that read ironic statements literally. Ironic readers both secede from literal communities and enter into an alternative community made up of readers attuned to figuration (and often represented as an elite—smart enough not to succumb to literal readings). Though irony expressed the individual’s troubled relation to community long before Enlightenment liberalism, it makes sense that the figure would be of particular interest to this project. There is, moreover, a specific Enlightenment inflection of irony to explore contradictory aspects in the practice of modern freedom that finds its characteristic expression in the worldly knowledge of libertinage.
Let me offer one more speculation: sentimentality’s ability to catalyze a community resolving the tensions in modern freedom helps explain the spectacular ability of the discourse to travel. To stick with sentimental novels, the subgenre is a wild success in emerging liberal societies, which is to say, precisely the societies where the constitution of modern freedom is a pressing political issue, whether in theory and/or in practice. Think, futhermore, of the affinity of sentimentality with political experiments in liberalism. Sentimental rhetoric permeated the debates of the French Revolution and the utopian socialisms of the first half of the nineteenth century, such as Chartism and the movements instigated by Owen, Saint-Simon, and Fourier, along with the theory and practice of revolutionary movements across Europe in 1848. And sentimental rhetoric, together with sentimental novels, played a prominent role in the institution of new Latin American societies experimenting with “liberalism adapted from examples in Great Britain, … the United States, and also France.”41 Indeed, the prominence of sentimental rhetoric in the institution of nationally scaled liberal societies may well be the missing link between Enlightenment sentimental communities, with their universal aspirations, and the nationally based imagined communities discussed by Anderson. At the moment of their inception sentimental community was for the first time mapped onto a political rather than a cultural geography, and this geography was the modern nation.
Why political agents should invoke sentimental rhetoric is a thought-provoking question. This gesture might seem to be self-defeating, given that the success of sentimental community depends precisely on the autonomy of the aesthetic, on its distance from the questions of expediency governing political decision making. The case of the French Revolution suggests that such appeal is both to move the audience and also to underline the importance of freedom when its practice encounters impediments at the level of practice; thus, no moment of the French Revolution made greater use of sentimental figures than the Terror. The invocation of sentimentality, I am suggesting, implies that liberal democratic freedom is at issue but that it is in some way problematic, that there is an aspect of the political formation that is not working to fulfill the liberal promise. We could, I think, trace such a political use of sentimental rhetoric from the French Revolution and nineteenth-century abolitionism to a range of current American movements that have emerged at the faultlines of the liberal-democratic project, from left-wing identity politics to the Christian right’s emphasis on the family.
But to assert that the preoccupations with modern freedom shared by Enlightenment societies explains the transnational appeal of the sentimental novel is not to oversimplify that this appeal was also rooted in local context. The specific national concerns informing the local implantation of this international subgenre are, I think, vividly illustrated by distinct national differences that emerged in the way the sentimental novel was practiced on either side of the Channel. I return here to the melodramatic and tragic conflicts structuring sentimental fiction.
Now, while I linked these conflicts to nationally based liberal lineages to heighten their political specificity, it cannot be stressed enough that both took shape in a transnational cultural field.42 As I have pointed out, an English author, Richardson, first gives both conflicts their fully developed articulation, and the melodramatic conflict is the undoing of Prévôt’s Des Grieux, who erratically praises virtue austerely codified by Tiberge while savoring Manon’s negative natural freedom, even as it crowns Richardson’s Pamela. Meanwhile, tragic anguish over negative and positive freedom treated as fully constituted ethical duties destroys Frances Sheridan’s Sidney Bidulph as well as Rousseau’s Julie. But sentimentality’s internationalism should not obscure the fact that by the 1760s a distinct national preference for each of these typologies had developed in keeping with the political articulation of freedom dominating each national context. Mackenzie was stating a truth about contemporary practice if not origins when he characterized tragic sentimental fiction as “borrowed from our neighbors, the French.”43 The tragic situation was not only preferred by French authors but became marked as a French import in the Channel literary field, and the melodramatic situation fared similarly in relation to England.44
Novelists give evidence that they recognize the link between narrative conflict and national preference when they employ the conflict that dominates across the Channel and map it onto the appropriate national geography. When Mackenzie pens his own novel about a tragic conflict between duty to the heart and duty to collective obligation, Julia de Roubigné (1777), he offers it as his translation from the French of actual letters. In The History of Emily Montague (1769), written by Frances Brooke (who was also Riccoboni’s translator), Emily Montague and her beloved, Colonel Rivers, suffer from the tragic conflict in the form of Emily Montague’s previously contracted engagement to another. At this same time, this novel terminates in the happy ending more characteristic of the melodramatic sentimental novel preferred in England, and it makes quite clear that the form of freedom at issue in its marriage plot is the negative freedom that has primacy in the English liberal lineage. Comparing the political freedom of the Hurons to the civil freedom of the English, one of Emily’s friends remarks, “Dear England! … There is no true freedom anywhere else. They may talk of the privilege of chusing a chief; but what is that to the dear English privilege of chusing a husband?”45 Fittingly, this sentimental novel joining tragic conflict with melodramatic outcome is played out in Canada, which is to say a setting evocative of Anglo-French political struggle in the wake of the recent Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), and that offers the occasion for commentary on differences between England and France.46 This commentary is not only hostile but seeks ways to represent Anglo-French interaction as mutually beneficial. Thus, the English hero remarks of the heroine that “her manner is irresistible: she has all the smiling graces of France, all the blushing delicacy and native softness of England.”47
What we might call a similar channeling, though in reverse, characterizes those French novels that borrow codes from melodramatic sentimental fiction. The novels of Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni are frequently set in England, and this invocation must have been convincing, for I have found her classified as an English writer in an early-nineteenth-century French bookseller’s catalog.48 Riccoboni’s literary geography is in keeping with her poetics: her novels set in England borrow the melodramatic narrative situation, though they confuse its terms in a way reminiscent of tragic sentimentality. In Lettres de Milady Juliette Catesby and Lettres de Mistriss Fanni Butlerd the jilted heroines transform melodramatic virtue in a fashion informed by the representation of negative freedom characterizing the tragic sentimental typology. The virtue upholding the community is the ethical grandeur of erotic love that embodies an individual’s freely contracted obligations to another. This version of virtue is opposed to the betrayal of an absent protagonist who asserts his natural freedom to do as he pleases by engaging in a marriage of convenience on the grounds of self-interest. The marriage plot, that is to say, becomes a manifestation of excessive natural freedom rather than its containment, which is usual in melodramatic sentimental texts.
Lettres de Milady Juliette Catesby, moreover, explicitly veers in the tragic direction when we discover that Milady Catesby’s lover has jilted her out of a sense of obligation to a woman he slept with in a moment of thoughtless passion, Miss Jenny, who subsequently found herself dishonored. Milord Ossery proves, that is to say, to be caught between his love for Juliette and his sense of duty toward another even though this other individual is not, as is typical, a member of his family but rather his sexual conquest. Jenny dies, however, and the two protagonists, paralyzed unhappily in the conflict of duties, receive the melodramatic ending of “virtue rewarded,” as the alternative title to Pamela puts it.
Another example of a French, or, more properly speaking, Francophone, novel set in England that is a hybrid of melodramatic and tragic sentimental conflict is the Swiss-Dutch (though very much identified with French culture) Isabelle de Charrière’s Lettres de Mistriss Henley publiées par son amie (1784). Like Riccoboni, Charrière cites the terms of the melodramatic conflict to twist them from their classic articulation. In Charrière’s transformation, too, full ethical sanction is on the side of negative rights, in this case Mistriss Henley’s rights to self-determination. The transformation continues in the person of the character who abuses her, a perfectly virtuous and devoted husband whose virtue is, however, ambiguously mixed up with his own negative rights to live as he pleases. For her husband’s pursuit of virtue is in keeping with his retiring, upright disposition, which stifles Mistriss Henley’s own yearning for worldly society.49
The English preference for melodramatic sentimentality and the French preference for tragic sentimentality were at the beginning of two highly specific national trajectories of the sentimental subgenre that, eighty years later, took the form of the distance separating prosentimental Victorian realism from antisentimental Balzacian realism. What I want to emphasize in concluding this article is aspects of the melodramatic sentimental conflict absent in tragic sentimentality that not only can be accommodated to the realist episteme but, more than that, help produce it in a lineage that leads from melodramatic sentimentality to realism via the domestic Bildungsroman, the Gothic, and the historical novel.50 These aspects are bound up in the specific articulation of modern freedom characteristic of British liberalism, but they are its poetic manifestations, situated at the intersection of poetics and ideology. The crucial difference relevant for the history of sentimentality’s relation to realism is the importance in melodramatic sentimentality of negotiation, both as narrative principle and as ethical stance.51
The plots of melodramatic sentimental novels are built on a narrative dynamic in which negotiation is paramount. This emphasis derives from the nature of the conflict between negative and positive freedoms. While the conflict is posed as a symmetrical one, this symmetry is illusory, for the primacy of negative freedom is never at issue, so the plot does not face an insoluble task (and hence, perhaps, the frequency of happy endings in this version of the subgenre).52 Rather than trying to reconcile two contradictory imperatives, the challenge is how to check, channel, and limit negative freedom so that it will not be socially destructive; the plot dynamic is one of excess and corrective.
In the tragic conflict, in contrast, both negative and positive freedoms are equally valid, full-fledged ethical principles that cannot be transformed without diluting their power. It is thus not surprising that the most frequent outcome of this conflict is impasse, if not death. Since to act on one term is to negate the other, the characters are in a closed universe from the plot’s inception; they are caught in a paradigmatic situation of double bind.53 The tragic conflict hence contains no possibility for narrative negotiations—in tragic sentimentality, as I have argued, the impasse can only be played out with incremental, ineluctable force. True, Rousseau’s Julie, like many other sentimental protagonists, does search for a way to shift the terms of her dilemma, and she thinks she has found it in trying a formula made celebrated by the Rousseauvean social contract, that is, in choosing freely to be unfree and marry Wolmar. But duty to the heart cannot be so easily cheated, and her love for Saint-Preux reasserts itself despite her best efforts. The non-negotiability of the principles coming into conflict finds its ultimate confirmation in the inevitability of the novel’s ending, which only reiterates what Julie’s hero, Saint-Preux, already recognized from the first sentence: “I must flee you, young lady … or rather, I should never have seen you.”54
Pamela’s efforts to set the appropriate limits on Mr. B’s excesses are called virtue. J. G. A. Pocock makes clear the ideological content of Pamela’s activities when he describes how virtue was framed by eighteenth-century British liberalism. Pocock writes that “virtue was redefined … with the aid of the concept of ‘manners.’ … [T]he individual … entered an increasingly transactional universe of ‘commerce and the arts’ … if he could no longer engage directly in the activity and equality of ruling and being ruled … he was more than compensated for his loss of antique virtue by an indefinite and perhaps infinite enrichment of his personality, the product of the multiplying relationships, with both things and persons, in which he became progressively involved. Since these new relationships were social and not political in character, the capacities which they led the individual to develop were not called virtues but ‘manners.’ ” Pocock’s observation that the desire for possession is crucial to the process is illuminating concerning the importance of Mr. B’s desire in Pamela’s ability to bring him to heel. “The social psychology of the age declared that encounter with things and persons evoked passions and refined them into manners; it was preeminently the function of commerce to refine the passions and polish the manners; and the social ethos of the age of enlightenment was built upon the concept of close encounters of the third kind.”55 Po-cock’s notion of virtue as commerce also permits us to highlight what is slightly misleading in the novel’s emphasis on Pamela’s virtue as upholding her duty to the collective, for Pamela’s commerce not only improves Mr. B but catalyzes an exponential “enrichment” of her own manners. The assertion of positive freedom, that is to say, turns out to be only a particular (and socially useful) individual choice about how to pursue negative freedom.56 What could be more appropriate as a reward for such virtue than the private property that is the foundation of negative freedom in British liberalism? When Fielding points a finger at Pamela as Shamela, objecting that her virtue is hypocrisy because it makes her rich rather than upholding morals, he is not wrong about her actions, but he is wrong about the split between ethics and profit within the framework of British liberal ideology.
Now, it is certainly true that the melodramatic conflict elaborating virtue as commerce developed in a cross-Channel literary field. In drafting Pamela (1740), Richardson learned much from the negotiations of Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne, published across the 1730s, which was a great success in England as well as in France. But while Marianne’s commerce remains resolutely self-interested and bound up in the power plays of le monde, the miracle of Pamela’s negotiations is that such commerce is ethically forceful. A second difference between the commerces in virtue in the two subgenres, crucial for the nationally specific trajectories of realism, is that melodramatic commerce ultimately vindicates, as I have pointed out, the ethical force of negative freedom. In the novel of worldliness, in contrast, the commerce in virtue confirms, not freedom, but the inescapable weight of the collective.
The inescapable weight of the collective is also confirmed by the constitution of virtue characterizing the tragic sentimental conflict. When asked what virtue is, the protagonist of a celebrated early-nineteenth-century French tragic sentimental novel declares: “It is strength … it is the courage to carry out rigorously everything we feel to be good, whatever pain it may cause us.”57 Virtue, that is to say, is not a negotiation between negative and positive freedoms but an uncompromising sacrifice of private freedom. Diderot was codifying tragic virtue when he defined it as the reader’s imaginary “sacrifice of oneself” in sympathy with the protagonist. The paradigmatic case of such sacrifice is the protagonist’s painful abandonment of erotic love in a desperate though ultimately unsuccessful effort to preserve the integrity of the collective.
Such a notion of virtue as sacrifice contains precisely the hybrid fusion of republicanism and Anglo-American liberalism that I have suggested characterizes tragic sentimentality, like contemporary French liberalism, more generally. The notion of virtue as sacrifice owes much to the classical republican tradition, in which the citizen sacrifices the personal sphere for the good of the collective, though, as Alliston’s work on the passivity of sentimental heroines makes clear, the sacrifice is not undertaken with the military, politically empowered agency of virtus romana.58 Rather, it is performed in the private, social sphere of manners that is the site of virtue as commerce, and in requiring a sacrifice it produces interior struggle that develops the protagonist’s personality. But this enrichment is not infinite. Its limits are the res publica, which cannot be reduced to commerce however hard protagonists try.
The melodramatic negotiations of virtue, however, also solicit a readerly response that is distinct from the sympathy founding sentimental community. This activity is the reader’s speculation concerning the validity of the choices made to check negative freedom. At each juncture in Pamela, for example, the reader evaluates her perils and speculates on what course of action she should take. Such speculation is both ethical (what is the right thing for her to do?) and hermeneutic (what is the result of her choice? will it have the desired effect?). Readers thus not only sympathize with suffering represented and debate its ethical and aesthetic contours; as they read, they also pose the hermeneutic questions that Iser suggests are central to eighteenth-century English fiction more generally and that according to Barthes are certainly central to nineteenth-century Balzacian realism.59 And hermeneutic speculation resolves the question of the relation between negative and positive freedoms rather differently from sympathy. In such speculation individual readers dialogue with a text that gives them their answer; that is, readers test their private readerly freedom against immutable objective conditions (the text) rather than elaborating them as part of the consensus-building process of aesthetic community.
The subsequent development of the Gothic and the domestic novel, two genres fusing hermeneutic and sympathetic ways of reading, makes clear that hermeneutic ways of reading need not conflict with the reader’s participation in the aestheticomoral judgments of sentimental community. But when the private dimension of the process is highlighted, it can disrupt sympathetic consensus and thus the solution sentimentality brings to the conflict between negative and positive freedom. Balzac made much of such disruption in his polemic against sentimentality, as I argue in The Sentimental Education of the Novel.
As I also argue there, hermeneutic questions, in contrast, are only of minor importance in tragic sentimentality. This is because the sentimental conflict highlights the impossibility of choice rather than testing its outcome. Another way to put this difference is that in tragic sentimentality the question what would be the right action—the ethical question—is only barely diluted by hermeneutic questions, since readers rapidly become aware that they witness an impasse repeated with increasing force from episode to episode. “All should be clear to the spectator,” Diderot wrote of the narrative dynamic best suited to inspire disinterested sentimental “interest”: “What a difference in interest between the situation where I am not in on the secret, and that where I know everything.”60
The poetic legacy of melodramatic sentimentality to both Victorian and Balzacian realism is, in short, the commerce of virtue and its attendant confirmation of the primacy of negative freedom, both for the protagonists within the plot and in the processes of reading shaping the implied reader. In the case of realism, however, the emphasis is on commerce rather than virtue, since it occurs in a universe where rights and duties have become problematic (hence the “real” of the realist demystification of the ideal).61 But rights and duties do not stop working in the same fashion on each side of the Channel; to isolate the contribution of melodramatic sentimentality to both Balzacian and Victorian realism is also to take an archaeological route into their differences. In Victorian realism, while ethical principles are not implemented in society, they are nonetheless preserved as an ideal; hence those numerous endings in which characters retreat into their private spheres to practice their ethically sanctioned negative freedoms. In French realism, in contrast, virtue cannot be parsed, to cite Le Père Goriot. The tragic conflict persists, but it has become a de facto description of contemporary society utterly devoid of ethical force. Individuals who are successful short-circuit its terms by asserting their negative freedom as the amoral right to anything that tempts them and that they can take.
Notes
1. This chapter was conceived in conversations with April Alliston concerning the need to rethink Benedict Anderson’s notion of the imagined community in light of what were in fact the first modern imagined communities: the transnational communities catalyzed by sensibility.
2. It is more accurate to speak of realisms than realism since Anderson allies the imagined community with a range of literary practices for representing objective social reality: eighteenth-century formal realism, nineteenth-century Balzacian and Victorian realisms, the realism of the mass daily, and a modernist realism of montage. The sentimental dimension to the imagined community is missing in recent work inspired by Anderson that pursues the details of the relation between novels and the consolidation and/or complication of national identity in a range of global contexts. See for example, Homi Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (New York: Routledge, 1990); or, more tellingly, Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), so important for understanding the way in which sentimental fiction is implicated in the emergence of the modern nation-state. Sommer has only the not quite accurate alternative of romance to name what are in fact sentimental codes, so denigrated has sentimentality become in the materialist theorizations informing her analysis, though sentimental discourse was once the lingua franca of transatlantic as well as European cultural modernity.
3. Elizabeth Ammons, introduction to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe (New York: Norton, 1994), viii.
4. According to Anne Humpherys, The Mysteries of London was “the biggest bestseller of the nineteenth century in England” (“Generic Strands and Urban Twists: The Victorian Mysteries Novel,” Victorian Studies 34 [1991]), 456.
5. James Turner writes of Pamela: “If we 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). I quote at length from his description to emphasize the international appeal of the novel, whose cross-Channel contours are extensively discussed by Lynn Festa in chapter 3 of this volume. In England during the 1740s, when the vogue for the novel was at its height,
a keen Pamela hunter … could buy the novel in large or small format, with or without Francis Hayman’s engravings and Richardson’s sequel plus The Life of Pamela, The Celebrated Pamela, Pamela in High Life, Pamela or Virtue Triumphant, Shamela Andrews, Pamela Censured, Joseph Andrews, Pamela, or the Fair Impostor, The True Anti-Pamela, and Anti-Pamela, or Feigned Innocence Detected, the last by Eliza Haywood, who also published her own translation of the Chevalier de Mouhy’s Paysanne parvenue (Richardson’s most striking antecedent and rival). She could visit two Pamela waxworks, drop in on Joseph Highmore’s studio to see his twelve Pamela paintings, and buy the set of his engravings, then see David Garrick in Pamela, a Comedy. (With luck she could avoid the Newcastle ballad-opera version, with its grueling emotional climax “I’m sad if my Pammy’s not there”). The day would end in Vauxhall Gardens, sitting in front of Hay-man’s Pamela murals, cooling herself with the Pamela fan, and opening a magazine to read “Remarks on Pamela, by a Prude.” The next day she would slip across the Channel, picking up for the journey Pamela, ou La vertu récompensé, traduit de l’Anglois (rumored to be by Prévost), the Abbé Marquet’s Lettre sur Paméla, the French translation of Haywood’s Antipamela, and a different novel called Antipamela, ou Mémoires de M.D. In Paris she would take in the pathetic comedy Pamela, the burlesque Déroute de Paméla, Voltaire’s Nanine, ou le Préjugé vaincu (also available in two different editions and an English translation) and Louis de Boissy’s Paméla en France, ou La vertu mieux éprouvée, a comedy that miraculously turns into an opera in the last act, [which was] reissued … with a score for home performance. (71)
He says further that “Pamela was translated into Dutch, Danish, German, and Welsh; ‘acomodada a nuestras costumbres’ in Madrid; and adapted to the Venetian taste by Carlo Goldoni, who squeezed at least two plays and two libretti out of this story,” and so on (71). A similar international enthusiasm surrounded the publication of all the great sentimental bestsellers, from Clarissa, La Nouvelle Héloïse, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, Corinne, to Les Mystères de Paris, whose international resonance can be gauged by the number of direct imitations produced in Europe and the United States that were enormously popular in their own right. Only a small fraction of these rewritings are mentioned in the introduction to this volume.
6. Robert L. Dawson credits “truncated translations” of Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe, specifically, with promoting a boom in the French interest in British books that was crucial to the vitality of Anglo-French cultural exchange during a time of political tensions (“Books Printed in France: The English Connection,” in The Channel in the Eighteenth Century: Bridge, Barrier, and Gateway, ed. John Falvey and William Brooks, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 292 [Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1991], 139).
7. 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 of national clichés: “they order, said I, this matter better in France” (Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey [1768; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1967], 3). Propelled across the Channel in only one sentence by his curiosity, Yorick goes on to demonstrate sympathy as a medium of cross-cultural, indeed universal, human exchange; suggests that sympathetic intercourse to be founded on an atomistic notion of isolated individuals whose alienation is so radical that even fellow countrymen meet one another through “translation” (79); recovers an eroticized sympathy offering refuge from alienation; pursues this mixture of the erotic and the sentimental via a freedom of circulation that eventually rouses the notice of repressive French authority; uses sympathetic bonds between Enlightenment intellectuals to escape French abuses of freedom; then represents these bonds as facilitating a conversation that perpetuates nationalistic clichés, and so on until Yorick irreverently dumps his reader midsentence with a vulgar pun as he gropes in a darkened hotel room for a woman met traveling, only to catch “hold of the [interloping] fille de chambre’s—. / END” (148).
8. Margaret Cohen, The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
9. As Katie Trumpener has suggested in Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), the geneses of the national tale, the Gothic novel, and the historical novel are all implicated in the emerging nationalisms of Britain’s internal colonies. If this chapter focuses on the relation of the imagined sentimental community to hegemonic notions of England and Englishness, it is not to deny the importance of sentimental fiction in offering alternatives to hegemonic cultural formations (on this subject, see chapter 5, Alliston’s “Transnational Sympathies, Imaginary Communities”). Indeed, I think we can better understand the form’s appeal to writers seeking to found a distinctively Irish and Scottish tradition of the novel if we understand its ability to catalyze imagined communities.
10. Here I concentrate on this narrative situation since it is the foundation of the sentimental aesthetic; all other codes help the sentimental primal scene to emerge with maximum clarity. The sentimental primal scene is, moreover, a code that remains constant across a range of genres. The codes that help it to emerge with clarity, in contrast, vary more from genre to genre, for they depend on the specific techniques used in different genres to render vividly the affecting narratives being presented. I discuss some of the accompanying codes found in sentimental fiction in The Sentimental Education of the Novel.
11. Patricia Spacks, Desire and Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 130, 131.
12. 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).
13. Etienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas, trans. James Swenson (New York: Routledge, 1994), 212. Locke emphasizes that private freedom is foundational when he describes both the state of nature and life in society. Locke also, however, emphasizes that this private freedom is not unlimited but rather must be checked by individuals’ need to respect the freedom of others. In the state of nature, “being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions”. 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 of another man” (John Locke, Two Treatises of Government [1690; reprint, New York: Dutton, 1955, 119, 127). 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 of each member with the collective force of all, and under which each individual, while uniting himself with 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).
14. Henry Mackenzie, The Lounger 20 (1785), 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.
15. See my use of Hegel 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 of Ethel Brooks.
16. See François Furet and Mona Ozouf’s preface to Le Siècle de l’avènement républicain, ed. Furet and Ozouf (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), as well as the chapter in that volume by J. Kent Wright, “Les Sources républicaines de la Déclaration des droits.” See also The French Idea of Freedom: The Old Regime and the Declaration of Rights of 1789, ed. Dale Van Kley (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), and, notably, Keith Michael Baker’s “The Idea of a Declaration of Rights” included in the volume. Summarizing national distinctions among models of modern freedom in his introduction, Van Kley writes, “Anglo-Saxon ‘liberty’—English and American—has specialized in the defensive protection of the concrete rights of individuals, groups and regions from public authority.” Van Kley contrasts this notion of freedom with a “uniquely French kind of republicanism that … saw the individual’s freedom from the state as compatible enough with the state’s collective freedom from each individual…. French freedom, moreover, not only alternated these freedoms cyclically but juggled them simultaneously” (19).
17. Rousseau, Social Contract, 65.
18. 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.
19. Spacks, Desire and Truth, 132.
20. That the two freedoms are personified in distinct characters explains, I think, the fact that, as Spacks observes, some protagonists, particularly those upholding virtue, are “unrendered as personalities” (ibid., 119). Being the embodiment of forces, these characters do not need to struggle with them and hence may never encounter the interior conflict that produces psychic complexity.
21. Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (1791; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1984), 68.
22. Locke called natural freedom men’s “State of perfect Freedom to order their Actions and dispose of their 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 of their property” (Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 118, 180).
23. Thus Locke’s Two Treatises: “The great end of men’s entering into society being the enjoyment of their properties in peace and safety, and the great instrument and means of that being the laws established in that society, the first and fundamental positive law of all commonwealths is the establishing of the legislative power.” (183). Locke is emphatic that the establishment and maintenance of legislative power is through consent and participation of free and equal citizens, but it is important that Locke does not detail how this participation occurs, that is, how citizens are to perform their positive freedom.
24. 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 of his natural right” (Joseph Priestly, Essay on the First Principles of Government, quoted in Robert Eccleshall, British Liberalism [New York: Longman, 1986], 106–7).
25. Anne Higonnet calls this sentimental vision of the child the “Romantic child” in Pictures of Innocence (London: Thames & Hudson, 1998).
26. Friedrich Schiller, “On the Pathetic” (1793), in Essays, trans. Daniel Dahlstrom (New York: Continuum, 1993), 58.
27. Denis Diderot, “In Praise of Richardson” (1762), in Denis Diderot: Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. Geoffrey Bremner (New York: Penguin, 1994), 85. Similarly, Adam Smith cast the spectator’s ability to imagine himself in 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 of sympathy. 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.
28. The death of little Eva shows how these communities open beyond the confines of the text to solicit its readers. The spectators at Eva’s death are the protagonists Uncle Tom and St. Clare, secondary characters like Miss Ophelia and Marie, and nameless servants, who are represented as a passive bustle perceptible to anyone who wants to assume the position of spectator: “[T]he house was soon roused,—lights were seen, footsteps heard, anxious faces thronged round the verandah” (Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 256).
29. Samuel Richardson, preface to Clarissa (1747–48; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1985), 35.
30. See David Marshall’s The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), and 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 of the theatricality of sympathy. On the contribution of the drame bourgeois, specifically, to sentimental discourse, see Peter Szondi’s “Tableau et coup de théâtre,” New Literary History 11, no. 2 (1980).
31. Note that the play of distance 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.
32. Luc Boltanski, La Souffrance à distance (Paris: Editions Métailié, 1993).
33. Richardson, preface to Clarissa, 36.
34. Denis Diderot, “In Praise of Richardson,” 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, “éloge de Richardson,” in Oeuvres esthétiques [Paris: Garnier, 1959], 38).
35. Schiller, “On the Pathetic,” 45.
36. 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 of enlightenment 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). Whether or not Habermas’s claim concerning Pamela is historically accurate, it underscores the important role Habermas accords sentimentality in catalyzing structures that define the liberal public sphere. For Habermas, the key to sentimentality’s importance is its production of interiority; in my view, it is crucial that this interiority takes shape in a struggle with the problems inhering in the practice of modern freedom. Sentimental subjectivity thus thoroughly implicates the production of interiority in the emergence of the liberal citizen.
37. The freedom of such reaction marks a crucial distinction between the Enlightenment use of pathos and an earlier Christian solicitation of compassion. As Jauss remarks, Christian suffering is exemplary, and compassion provokes imitation. “The true compassio … must prove itself as readiness for imitatio,” Jauss writes of Augustine 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 of Minnesota Press, 1982], 104).
38. Rousseau, Social Contract, 63.
39. Boltanski, La Souffrance à distance, 143, my translation. This fact makes clear that it is a mistake to periodize the history of sentimentality into a moment of enthusiasm followed by a moment of disenchantment: both occur together from the very first.
40. Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge (New York: Routledge, 1995), 91–92.
41. Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 13. On the use of sentimentality in the French Revolution, see David Denby, Sentimental Narrative and the Social Order in France, 1760–1820 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
42. Liberal political theory, too, of course, took shape in a transnational Enlightenment republic of letters, though it was simultaneously decisively informed by the political practices dominating in each national context.
43. Mackenzie continued by saying that their “style of manners, and the very powers of [their] language give them [the French] a great advantage in the delineation of that nicety, that subtlety of feeling, those entanglements of delicacy, which are so much interwoven with the characters and conduct of the chief personages in many of their most celebrated novels” (Mackenzie, The Lounger 20 [1785], quoted in Williams, Novel and Romance, 330).
44. It would, I think, be possible to read sentimentality in the eighteenth-century German context as honing a specifically German version of the tensions fissuring modern freedom. If, as Leonard Krieger has argued in The German Idea of Freedom: History of a Tradition (Boston: Beacon, 1957), German freedom emphasizes the moral autonomy of the individual against a strong state, Werther is a text that uses tragic sentimental conflict but inflects its terms in a fashion resonating with Krieger’s analysis. Think, for example, of Werther’s overwhelming subjectivity and his failure to find satisfaction in a political performance of his duty to the collective when he flees Lotte to accept a position at the court. I thank Andreas Huyssen for drawing my attention to the political specificity of Goethe’s text.
45. Frances Brooke, The History of Emily Montague, 4 vols. (1769; reprint, 4 vols. in 2, New York: Garland, 1974), 1:116. Lady Sydney Morgan’s novel The Wild Irish Girl (1806) is also based on the tragic narrative situation and gives it a happy ending. Here, generic hybridity is mapped onto a third term, Ireland, a political formation geographically positioned between England and France. Moreover, Morgan interweaves the sentimental conflict with lengthy sections on Irish culture, history, and folklore and thus transforms the sentimental subgenre in a fashion both reminiscent of and diverging from the appropriation of sentimentality in domestic fiction. Description is not subordinated to the sentimental conflict here; it is not used as a tool to heighten the conflict’s power. Rather, it is valued for its social specificity, but in contrast to domestic realism this specificity is pointedly historical and political rather than offering a window onto contemporary manners.
46. Mackenzie’s novel, too, uses what might be called the “third” space of the colonial New World to facilitate Anglo-French interaction. Julia’s beloved is not the somewhat austere nobleman chosen for her by her father but rather a childhood friend, Savillon, who has gone off to seek his fortune in Martinique. There, Savillon makes friends with an Englishman, Herbert, as national differences between the two are suspended in their common sympathy for each other’s sufferings. The channeling effect intensifies as the novel draws to a close, for Savillon will narrate its tragic denouement in letters to Herbert.
47. Brooke, History of Emily Montague, 1:119.
48. The catalog is Antoine Marc’s Dictionnaire des romans (1819).
49. Charrière’s novel is itself a rewrite of a Swiss novel by Samuel de Constant entitled Le Mari sentimental (1783) that transforms the usual distribution of gender roles characterizing the melodramatic schema. In Constant’s novel the character pursuing negative freedom is not a male rake but rather an abusive wife in love with worldly pleasures, while the character upholding virtuous duty to the collective is the sentimental husband. Riccoboni’s novel Histoire d’Ernestine (1765) also invokes cultural foreignness in a plot containing elements from the sentimental conflict dominant across the Channel. Riccoboni’s novel is shaped around the tragic conflict: the heroine, Ernestine, stifles her love because it runs counter to her sense of collective obligation to her beloved’s higher rank and superior wealth until her virtue earns a melodramatic happy ending. Riccoboni, however, makes Ernestine German, not English, and her story is set in France. Montolieu’s Caroline de Lichtfield (1786) is another tragic sentimental fiction with a melodramatic happy ending that takes place in Germany, more specifically Prussia.
50. 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.
51. See Franco Moretti, The Way of the World (London: Verso, 1987), on compromise as distinctive to realism.
52. The predilection for a happy ending in the English context and the disastrous ending in the French context had, interestingly, already been noticed before the genesis of the sentimental form, as Richardson makes clear when he cites Joseph Addison to explain why he used a tragic ending for Clarissa: “The English writers of tragedy, says Mr. Addison, are possessed with a notion that when they represent a virtuous or innocent person in distress, they ought not to leave him till they have delivered him out of his troubles, or made him triumph over his enemies. This error they have been led into by a ridiculous doctrine in modern criticism, that they are obliged to an equal distribution of rewards and punishments and an impartial execution of poetical justice” (Richardson, Clarissa, 1495, citing Addison in the Spectator, no. 40). While the English think that morality should receive its just desserts, Richardson continues, the French, in contrast, recognize that poetical justice corresponds more to life in the world than to the judgments of a court. Thus, Richardson cites “a celebrated critic of a neighboring nation,” René Rapin, on the nature and design of tragedy according to Aristotle: “[T]ragedy … makes man modest, by presenting the great masters of the earth humbled; and it makes him tender and merciful, by showing him the strange accidents of life, and the unforeseen disgraces to which the most important persons are subject” (1497). It remains to explore the full significance of Richardson’s observation by contextualizing it in relation to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dramatic as well as novelistic practice. Georges May, for example, gives evidence that French critics called for “the practice of the happy ending [in English in May’s original French]” at the time of Corneille and Racine, though these dramatists had the “good taste to hold [it] in low esteem.” (Georges May, Le Dilemme du roman au dix-huitième siècle [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963], 123, my translation). That May identifies a positive outcome with an English phrase is suggestive.
53. 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 of choice in situations of ethical double bind.
54. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1762; reprint, Paris: Garnier, 1960), 5, my translation.
55. J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 48–49.
56. Pocock’s theorization of virtue as commerce makes the link between Adam Smith’s account of morality 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 of disinterested), ethical manifestation of the happy “trucking” of liberalism’s economic agents, benefiting society and individuals alike.
57. Sophie Cottin, Claire d’Albe (1799), in Romans de femme du XVIIIe siècle, ed. Raymond Trousson (Paris; Robert Laffont, 1996), 734, my translation. I discuss Claire d’Albe at length in The Sentimental Education of the Novel.
58. See April Alliston, Virtue’s Faults: Correspondences in Eighteenth-Century British and French Women’s Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). The tragic notion of virtue as sacrifice is crucial to French history painting contemporary with the reign of sentimentality, from David to Delacroix.
59. Wolfgang Iser’s notion of the process of reading 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 of worldliness, 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 of learning to make choices for the Bildungsroman, see Moretti, Way of the World.
60. Denis Diderot, “De la poésie dramatique” (1758), in Oeuvres esthétiques, 227, my translation. Such clarity is epitomized in the most pathetic setpiece of the 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).
61. See Prendergast, in The Order of Mimesis: Balzac, Stendhal, Nerval, Flaubert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), on virtue as commerce in Balzac.