Utopias of Sympathy
One of the general goals of this collection is to propose ways of figuring cultural interaction as existing in tension with conceptions of national identity.1 I would like to propose here that the eighteenth-century idea of sympathy often worked in exactly this way, even in novels written well into the nineteenth century. From its beginnings, the notion of sympathy allows for the imagining of an idealized interpersonal bond by offering a form of emotional communication that transcends the pitfalls and lapses of ordinary human interaction. Sympathy always transcends both the inevitable slippages of linguistic communication and the limits placed on interpersonal relationships by the laws and customs that divide people into separate groups (such as nations, classes, and legitimate, i.e., patriarchal, families) and then define individual identities and relationships strictly in terms of those legitimized groupings. Some of the most influential novelists in both France and England, from Rousseau to Brontë, employed this idealized interpersonal bond of sympathy, drawn from the literary code of sensibility that predominated in their time, in order to represent utopian imaginary communities that transgress the limits defining nations, along with national languages, class distinctions, kinship relations, and legitimate sexuality. These imaginary communities of sympathy, far from aligning “the novel” with the “imagined community” of the nation-state, mark the novels in which they appear as significant points of resistance to such an alignment, both generally and specifically in terms of the aspects to which Benedict Anderson points as the defining characteristics of the nation as imagined community.
Sympathy is a key term in the literature of sensibility, which is generally agreed to have predominated in literature written in English (and in French as well, although possibly to a lesser extent) for at least the second half of the eighteenth century. These conventions were still prevalent in the works of French women novelists in particular through the 1840s, in competition with the then emerging realist novel more familiar to the traditional canon.2 I would propose that it also thrives through the Romantic and Victorian periods in England, primarily, although not exclusively, in the novel’s Gothic mode.3 Thus, I am focusing here on the century that stretches from Richardson and Rousseau to Brontë and Sand. Throughout that period sensibility meant a physiological and emotional sensitivity that was supposed to endow a character or reader with sympathy, as it was then called in both English and French, or empathy, as we now call it in English following the German Romantics: a capacity to participate in an almost unmediated way in the feelings and experiences, especially sufferings, of others as if they were one’s own. Sympathy allowed a large number of novelists writing in French and English from the 1740s to the 1840s, at least, to imagine communities that were figured as utopian alternatives both to the nation and to its domestic core, the family.
During the first half of this period (and earlier, although to a lesser extent) these alternative social groups tended to be imagined as homosocial communities of women, usually “romantic friendships” but sometimes larger utopian, all-female communities, as in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall and The History of Sir George Ellison. This form of sympathetic community predominates in the eighteenth century, even though one of the meanings of sympathy all along is related to the idea now referred to as “love at first sight,” and has this sense as well even in fiction about female sympathetic communities.4 After 1800, fictional communities are still established on the basis of sympathy and imagined as alternatives to both family and nation, but these “sympathetic communities” come to be constituted more often as heterosexual couples.5 The romantic couple united through sympathy still substitutes for the kinship alliance represented by marriage and in fact is usually posed more violently in opposition to it than ever the female romantic friendships were. Whether such “imagined communities” are homosocial or heterosexual, though, sympathy continues to work to establish bonds that specifically transgress and replace those of kinship and nation.
Both romantic friendships and heterosexual couples bonded by sympathy are repeatedly represented as transgressing national boundaries as well as familial ones, and especially as linking individuals separated by the English Channel. In the eighteenth-century fiction just described, female characters in particular, exiled from their native country, are regularly united in sympathy with newly encountered foreign friends or maintain the bonds of sympathy with a compatriot from a position of foreign exile.6 Later, heterosexual couples, from Staël’s Corinne and Oswald to Sand’s Indiana and Sir Ralph, also cross the English Channel in their sympathetic bonds at the same time that they defy the laws of family and kinship. These later novels also abandon the strictly epistolary form (although its traces remain strong) as they turn toward the representation of actual communities—people present to each other—rather than resigning themselves, as the earlier women’s fiction had mostly done, to the abstraction of “communities” existing mainly as epistolary communications. Such epistolary relationships, marking the inevitability of female friends’ separation in heterosexual marriages, convents, and patriarchal families, were nearly as abstract as Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities,” or nations imagined through print.7
Even in the era of bourgeois print culture, which, Anderson argues, allowed for the imagining of a vernacular, national community independent of aristocratic kinship alliances, both bourgeois nation and bourgeois family continued to privilege a sense of identity based on kinship and lineage rather than on the freely chosen “elective affinities” of sympathy. Franco Moretti speaks of Austen’s England as divided in the conflict between the rural central counties and the port cities, between Land and Money, and claims that in Austen it is Land that wins, “(preferably, with plenty of Money).” He also speaks of the importance of the marriage market in establishing a British sense of national identity, one that demanded a new mobility of women in order to link the central counties with one another while allowing the exchanged women nevertheless to feel at home, having moved only from one to another part of their own nation.8 But the mobility of women in the marriage market was, in Austen (and Richardson) and in reality, not just a geographical mobility, but also, and perhaps even more importantly, a class mobility. The world in which the novel and the nation-state came to full flowering was not one in which Money triumphed over or became divorced from Land, but one in which Money married Land, as the bourgeoisie sought the land and titles that would give them aristocratic pretensions, while the aristocracy sought the money to support their ancestral estates and privileges. This is not to say anything new, of course, but it needs to be repeated in order to avoid the traps of oversimplification that can arise from Anderson’s narrow focus on bourgeois national communities, as if they represented a point of clear opposition to aristocratic kinship groups, or Moretti’s on a geographic mobility, which, it must be remembered, significantly entailed social mobility.
Communities based on concepts either of nationality or of kinship are traditionally conceived as grounded in lineage or inheritance, while sensibility is paradoxically figured as a heritable character trait that makes possible the sympathetic bonds through which communities can be imagined that transgress and substitute for those of family or nation. Sensibility as a character trait is inflected by the pan-European vernacular of “national character,” and within that code it tends to be used in eighteenth-century novels as a kind of inheritance that can be transmitted outside, beyond, and across lineages either of family or of nation. Like any aspect of character, sensibility is imagined during the Enlightenment and Romantic periods as “heritable,” sometimes through birth and sometimes through education. Elsewhere I have treated in detail the preoccupation in epistolary fiction by women with sympathy and sensibility as central aspects of an education in feminine virtue that constitutes a very literal kind of inheritance (one often contained in letters), which can be passed down from one unrelated female generation to the next, outside of kinship relationships and in compensation for the legal exclusions of women from passing on patriline inheritances of family name and real property.9 What I would like to dwell on for a moment here, rather, is the way in which sensibility as a trait heritable by birth (as opposed to education) tends to be figured in novels as a mark of lineage that crosses national boundaries.
It may seem paradoxical, then, that sensibility is strongly associated with British national character. Just as Frenchmen are stereotypically courteous and superficial, while Italians are passionate, in the western European literary and cultural code of “national character” Great Britain is the home of sensibility. Richardson in Grandison and Sterne in A Sentimental Journey identify it thus, as do many women writers, from Frances Brooke and Elizabeth Griffith to Marie Riccoboni and Isabelle de Charrière. Still, this identification of sensibility with Britishness tends to be made in the context of constructing individual characters and imagining communities that themselves cross the very boundaries designated by the national character types invoked.
If sensibility is a British national characteristic, it is so in a way that is as complex as the very notion of a British nation. It comes increasingly to be identified with the Celtic Fringe, or with some even more vaguely defined border region that is Britain, but is decidedly not what Austen calls “the midland counties of England.” Although the sensibility of Richardson’s heroines of the 1740s is centrally English, the twin heroines of Sophia Lee’s The Recess, an early Gothic novel published in 1783, inherit their marked sensibility from their mother, the exiled queen of Scotland. It is no accident that the estate of Oswald in Corinne is in a place called both Ecosse and Angleterre, while that of Milord Edouard in La Nouvelle Héloïse is in Yorkshire—neither in the midland counties of England nor quite in a center of separatist nationalism. (I discuss Emily Brontë’s return to the Yorkshire setting in Wuthering Heights in detail below.) Sympathy in this context might appear to be related to what Katie Trumpener has called “bardic” nationalism in its deployment in novels that imagine communities resistant to the nation as imperial state.10 Yet if sympathy resembles a nationalism, it is more like one that insists on its own “hybridization,” as that term is developed in David Lloyd’s analysis of Irish nationalism.11 Sympathy frequently marks a crossing between imperial nation-states, particularly the British and the French, as well as within them—between the metropolitan centers and the resistant margins of each, whether Yorkshire or Scotland or a French island colony.
Sensibility can be passed on by birth, as if it were a racial characteristic, but when it is so inherited, it tends to mark a hybridization of national character. Heroines like Corinne and Sophie von La Roche’s Fräulein von Sternheim inherit it through the British side of their respective families. Staël’s Oswald is the typical British “man of feeling,” and while Corinne inherits a vivifying and convention-defying passion from her Italian mother, she inherits a morbid sensibility from the British side of her family that fatally complements Oswald’s. A similar national hybridization is mapped geographically in these and related novels.
In Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse, Milord Edouard Bomston attempts to seduce Julie and her Saint-Preux by imagining a community they might establish on Bomston’s estate in Yorkshire, one where the bonds of sympathy would legitimate, rather than violate, the construction of a social order. In Rousseau’s novel, this tempting alternative vision must be rejected in favor of the community he imagines at Clarens, where the same heterosexual sympathy is a powerfully disruptive force that must be contained in order to maintain the idealized patriarchal family as Swiss nationalist city-state. (The homosocial community of Julie and Claire is less threatening to the family-state at Clarens.) By contrast, in La Roche’s Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim, a German heroine who inherits the trait of sensibility from her English grandmother wanders in exile, establishing a utopian female community along the way in Belgium and ultimately marrying an English man of feeling, whose wealth allows her to create a duplicate of her father’s German estate on her husband’s property in England. There she, her husband, and his brother form a Clarens-like community in which, rather than dying like Julie, the heroine gets to live, keep both her lovers, and run both her husband’s and her father’s estates, while the community of female friendship remains purely epistolary. In La Roche’s version the heroine marries the younger man with whom she falls in love at the beginning of the novel, while the role of Saint-Preux at Clarens as frustrated lover and educator of his rival’s children is taken instead by the older man, who is wiser but not desired sexually by the heroine. The doubling of Sophie’s father’s continental estate on her husband’s British property spatially maps the plot of La Roche’s final revision of Rousseau, in which Sophie von Sternheim gets to live at once in the British paradise that Julie had to reject and also in the Continental one where Julie had to die in order for the disruptively sexual forces of sympathy to be contained. Sand’s Indiana escapes at once from her loveless marriage and from her heartless French lover with her cousin, Sir Ralph—another British man of sensibility—with whom she is allowed to live happily ever after in a colonial island paradise of sensibility. This island utopia resembles the one imagined by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre in his Rousseau-inspired Paul et Virginie, but like La Roche’s version, it is much less fatal to its heroine than is its more faithfully Rousseauvean model. All of these authors imagine communities that are utopian in their various refusals of the prevailing models of nation or family, but they locate them in very specific spots on the map of the real world that are significant in plotting the crossing of national boundaries.
Utopias of Sympathy
In the wake of global exploration, according to Anderson, “it became possible to think of Europe as only one among many civilizations, and not necessarily the Chosen or the best.”12 Surely one could by the same logic substitute “the nation” for “Europe” and “imagined communities” for “civilizations,” producing the statement, “It became possible to think of the Nation as only one among many imagined communities, and not necessarily the Chosen or best.” If a strain of sentimental fiction after 1800 sought to imagine alternative communities based on presence but transgressing the boundaries of family and nation, that presence, by virtue of its very transgressiveness, had to occur elsewhere: neither in England nor in France, but in utopia. Yet these utopias, ideal and mythical as they may be, are never imaginary places like the original Utopia. They are always located on the map of the real world in ways that diagram spatially their complex relationships to the nation-state, in ways that attempt, indeed, to map the real geographical complexity of the nation-state, far beyond the “central part of England” to which Austen symbolically reduces the British nation.13
That “elsewhere” is represented in Corinne as an idealized map of Italy, a country that is neither a city-state nor a nation, but begins the novel as a sunny land of female freedom. It is transformed, as it becomes a place of absence rather than presence over the course of the novel, into a double of Oswald’s estate in the border country between England and Scotland, a haunted land of exile from within the “empire of death.”14 There is also a French tradition, much older than Corinne, of locating such utopias on that nation’s own colonial map.15 Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s bestseller, Paul et Virginie, draws upon the eighteenth-century tradition of colonial utopias and merges it with the literature of sensibility’s tradition of imagining communities in opposition to the nation and family in order to respond to the uneasy resolution offered by Rousseau in La Nouvelle Héloïse of the problematic relationship between nation and domestic sphere in the terms of sensibility. Attempting to domesticate the earlier women’s tradition of female communities, while resisting, as had his predecessors, the containment of France’s national boundaries, Bernardin transforms the bond of sympathy from the earlier model of female homosocial friendship into a heterosexual coupling within the first few pages of his novel: two mothers in exile form a sympathetic community crossing the boundaries of class and family honor (one woman is in exile because she has fallen from the path of feminine virtue and should be treated as socially untouchable by the other), as well as the internal regional boundaries within the French homeland (the aristocrat is Parisian, the peasant Breton—a denizen of the French “Celtic Fringe”).16 Bernardin undoubtedly chose the island of Ile de France (now Mauritius) as the scene for his utopia of sympathy partly because he had been there, but it is clear, too, that in a novel in which all place-names are loaded with significance the name also distinguished it from the many other French colonial islands, allowing this particular “île sauvage” the more readily to suggest the colonial synecdoche by which a distant colony could stand for the metropole, replacing the imperialist European nation-state of France (and, by another metonymy, its “central part,” île-de-France, Paris and the surrounding provinces) with a France in a utopian, Rousseauesque state of nature.
Utopian sympathetic communities thus lie somewhere between Anderson’s account of More’s, Bacon’s, and Swift’s “tongue-in-cheek utopias, ‘modelled’ on real discoveries,” on the one hand, and the “barrage of subversive writings directed against current European social and political institutions” produced by Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau by “exploiting a ‘real’ non-Europe,” on the other.17 The later novels written by Bernardin, Staël, Brontë, and Sand represent neither newly “discovered” dystopias reflecting the ills of the metropole nor orientalist Others ventriloquizing internal political criticisms of the strongest European nation-states. Rather, they map their utopian sympathetic communities onto real colonies or borderlands—the very places only nervously gestured toward by Austen. They populate her Celtic Fringe and her Antigua, spaces that are liminal to the nation-states, both culturally and geographically, yet (uneasily) contained within them.
Literary Channel-Crossing
The colony in the French tradition provides an “outside” from within the nation as family—always distant, and progressively freer, from stifling bourgeois marriages and country estates. Unlike Staël and earlier women writers, Bernardin does not imagine the English Channel as one of the significant borders crossed by the sympathetic bonds that construct his community, although he does draw on a literary tradition, as did his model Rousseau, built by novelists writing in English as well as French. The readership of his novel crossed the Channel, as does Bernardin’s own intertextual “reading” in Paul et Virginie, leading to at least as many literary responses, not to mention mass sales of buttons, buckles, and lampshades bearing images from the novel, in Britain as in France. Two of the most famous English literary responses (which, however, as far as I know have never been identified as such) are Austen’s Northanger Abbey and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.18 Unlike Sand, who, following the example of numerous English novelists (such as Maria Edgeworth in Belinda), draws attention to the fact that Indiana is a rewriting of Paul et Virginie, Austen and Brontë rewrite Bernardin without naming his novel or its characters, thus fostering an illusion that their writings are nationally self-contained while nevertheless, in the case of Wuthering Heights in particular, vigorously rewriting the French tradition of utopian sympathetic communities stretching back to La Nouvelle Héloïse through Indiana and Paul et Virginie.
Emily Brontë’s choice of setting, like Bernardin’s, has not only the usually emphasized biographical associations, but also literary and symbolic ones, which were more inescapably pervasive in their times than in ours.19 In Wuthering Heights she revisits the very same spot on the map where Julie and Saint-Preux are allowed in one brief letter to imagine a heterosexual utopia of sympathetic community. Milord Edouard’s estate in Yorkshire is the only place in which they might imagine escaping the patriarchal family to realize and live out their love. As mentioned above, Rousseau’s lovers, and Julie in particular, must renounce this imaginary community in order to demonstrate a virtuous obedience to the law of the bourgeois paterfamilias, which Rousseau firmly instates in his preferred utopia at Clarens as the core, the deity, indeed the very identity of the ideal nation as Swiss village-state. Rousseau’s disciple Bernardin envisions another pair of lovers, who, born far from Europe and far from any fathers, are at least able to attempt to live the utopia of sympathy renounced by Julie and Saint-Preux without losing their requisite virtue. That attempt too is doomed, not by the law of the father and the nation, but by the very feminine lineage that makes the attempt possible. Bernardin’s novel takes up a whole tradition of earlier fiction in which a foster-mother’s legacy of virtue through education enables life for heroines excluded from patrimony and patrilineage. His initial community based on feminine sympathy and romantic friendship makes the childhood idyll of Paul and Virginie possible in the first place, but in Bernardin’s Rousseauesque terms the foster-mother’s inheritance of virtue through (an inevitably European) education, now linked with rather than divorced from the filthy lucre of a material inheritance, and combined with Virginie’s naturally dangerous female sexuality, is what requires it to end before adult sexuality can enter to sully the virtuous picture. Sand rejects all these Rousseauvean values to rehabilitate Bernardin’s pair of child-lovers in the tropics and allow them, in the ending of Indiana, to live out the fantasy of adult sexual sympathetic community in the French island colony. This intertextual web woven by Rousseau, Bernardin, and Sand around naive quasi-sibling lovers in utopias of sympathy forms the rich material worked by Brontë.
Like Staël, Emily Brontë returns to the Yorkshire estate imagined as a false alternative to Rousseau’s patriarchal nation. She places Bernardin’s class-defying child-lovers on Rousseau’s original site of utopian sympathetic community. Like Sand, Brontë complicates Bernardin’s device of the frame narrative, in which the story of the lovers is related by a local observer to the novel’s narrator, who in all three versions is a young and naive male visitor. Perhaps because she was really there, however, Brontë does not allow Yorkshire to be imagined in the end as a place where lovers might escape the rule of fathers, the bourgeois family, or the corruptions of European civilization and imperialism in order to live in a sympathetic utopia. Rather, she imagines the child-lovers’ attempt to live out the French idyll of sympathetic community in a wild British borderland where the oppressive power of fathers is unrestrained by the European civilization they nevertheless well know how to abuse. The word sympathy is among the most frequently used in Wuthering Heights because this novel is above all an anguished exploration of the multifarious deformations, betrayals, and abuses of sympathy as a basis for imagined community.
Imaginary Communities
Anderson emphasizes his distinction between the “creole nations” of the Americas and the fragmented European nationalisms that arose simultaneously during the nineteenth century, the former sharing a language with the metropolitan nation-states from which they claimed political independence, setting themselves up in the image of the mother-nation without challenging the hegemony of European print language, the latter breaking up ancient, multilingual empires in favor of regional vernaculars. Both the American creole nationalists and the European regional nationalists resisted imperialism, ironically, by imitating politically the strong nation-states at the core of the resisted empires (this holds true, for example, for both the United States, a “creole nation,” and Ireland, a European regional vernacular-based nation, in relation to the United Kingdom). While Anderson’s historical nationalist “imagined communities” sought independence from the European imperial powers by modelling themselves upon Europe’s strongest nation-states, the imaginary communities represented in the novels of Bernardin, Staël, Sand, and Brontë resist the two strongest European imperialist nation-states of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries neither by imagining political independence from them nor by imitating their structure or characteristics. Rather, they express resistances to and critiques of their own nation-states by legibly mapping the inescapable containment within their empires of even the most remote areas and most utopian communities.20 Furthermore, they construct imaginary communities that cannot possibly be mistaken for an “imagined community” as nation because they specifically avoid the very features that Anderson and his intellectual heirs have identified as those by which an imagined community can be recognized as a nation.
First, as already mentioned, these novelistic sympathetic communities decentralize the nation-state geographically. They are specifically located on the margins of the nation-state, contained, but uneasily so, by its political boundaries, and distant in every sense from Paris or the “central counties of England.” In this respect the French colonial islands of Bernardin and Sand resemble the Yorkshire borderland that recurs in Rousseau, Staël, and Brontë. Second, these novels of sensibility decentralize the vernacular language shared with the resisted nation-state. Bernardin develops a complex tree language, a Rousseauesque “natural” vernacular indigenous to his island setting and to a community in a state of nature—a language to which Sand refers directly in her revision of Bernardin.21 Brontë makes use of Yorkshire dialect, a regional language that is emphatically not a print language or a national vernacular in Anderson’s sense. All, drawing on a tradition that stretches back well into the seventeenth century and undoubtedly earlier, invoke sympathy itself as a nonverbal language of the eyes (and other bodily signs of emotion), an immediate form of communication that allows precisely for the formation of bonds across linguistic, as well as national and class, boundaries.
Third, sympathetic communities are miscegenated; unlike classic nation-forming communities, they deliberately imagine the crossing of racial boundaries. In Sand’s self-conscious rewriting of La Nouvelle Héloïse via Paul et Virginie, the creole Indiana (whose racial impurity is heavily hinted at, although identified openly only in her double, Noun) and her English lover, Ralph, pass through a false tragic ending that echoes Virginie’s virtual suicide by water (and Saint-Preux’s contemplated one) to live out the happy ending denied to Bernardin’s (and Rousseau’s) purely European couple on another colonial island.22 Virginie, like Paul, is racially pure European, but the European education entailed by her racial and class inheritance becomes her downfall. Indiana’s mixed race and creole upbringing seem to help make the envisioned utopian sympathetic community of two more realizable.
David Lloyd argues in “Adulteration and the Nation” that imagining racial hybridization is an important way of resisting nationalism.23 Much has been written on Heathcliff as a hybrid of racial Others, a “gypsy” figured as black who is also imagined as the son of “the Emperor of China and an Indian queen.”24 This hybridization takes on new significance when Wuthering Heights is recognized as a rewriting of the French tradition of sympathetic utopias. In that context, Heathcliff is surprisingly revealed as a masculine avatar of the French creole heroines Virginie and Indiana/Noun. If the two Cathys are also avatars of those heroines, that ambiguity is accounted for by Catherine Earnshaw’s most famous utterance, that Heathcliff is “more myself than I am.”25 It is Heathcliff who, like Indiana/Noun, has the whiff of miscegenation about him, and it is Heathcliff who, like Virginie, crosses the sea, not to a corrupt Europe, but in the opposite direction, to dim colonial destinations, for his similarly gentrifying and equally tragic “education.” Cathy’s poisonous European bourgeois education, meanwhile—the cause of her loss of innocence and her death, just as Virginie’s is the cause of hers—is to be found right at home, even though it is no more “native” to Yorkshire than to the island of Ile de France. Despite their inhabiting, in Brontë’s Gothic vision, a patriarchal dystopia whose whole energy is directed toward the deformation of sympathetic as well as of kinship bonds, however, the potent miscegenation of Heathcliff with Catherine Earnshaw triumphs in a sympathetic community that cannot be contained by boundaries of class, race, nation, the domestic sphere, or even those that supposedly separate human and animal, life and death. Breaking every window, every coffin, every constraining domestic containment, they leave their descendants, the new child-couple of Catherine Linton and Hareton Earnshaw, to inherit the house and live out a tame version of the idyll made possible by the second Cathy’s domestication of Hareton. It is no accident that Hareton’s domestication is achieved precisely through the latest Virginie’s teaching him to read proper English, the national print vernacular, by means of “costly” books that are as much an imported luxury in Yorkshire as in any colony. This ending gestures toward a consoling reinstatement of Austen’s England in the “northern extremity” that Austen herself had yielded up to the undomesticated Gothic, but of course this doubling of the primary pair remains only a pale shadow of the imaginary community that eternally haunts the moors.
The fourth, final, and perhaps most fundamental way in which novels imagine sympathetic communities as alternatives to nations is by resisting the connection between the domestic and public spheres upon which the idea of the bourgeois nation is founded.26 They resist the plot of the “national marriage market,” whether by imagining homosocial communities based on women’s romantic friendships or by imagining adulterous heterosexual unions.27 Sympathy is repeatedly invoked in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels as a way of imagining alternatives to the type of group identity based on kinship or patrilineage by which even local, “hybrid,” “bardic,” or anti-imperial nationalisms generally define themselves. As I have shown, Bernardin, Staël, Sand, and Brontë employ the eighteenth-century code of sympathy to imagine utopian alternatives to the nation-state in part by legibly mapping out its fragmentation both from within and from without, and also by representing alternatives to the family at its heart, the private sphere that anchors and images the public nation.
Notes
1. This chapter was conceived in conversations with Margaret Cohen 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. See Margaret Cohen, The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
3. I have argued elsewhere that the Gothic is a specific mode of literature of sensibility in which its typical emotional states are literalized (see April Alliston, Virtue’s Faults: Correspondences in Eighteenth-Century British and French Women’s Fiction [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996], chs. 4 and 5).
4. In Virtue’s Faults I identified a subgenre of novels published by women in English and French that I called “novels of women’s correspondence,” which often used the epistolary form to enact and establish such homosocial communities of women (see esp. chs. 1 and 3).
5. Fictions of female community became prevalent later in the United States. The model that predominated in British and French fiction during the second half of the eighteenth century was adapted in American fiction primarily in the nineteenth century. On female communities in American fiction, see Nina Auerbach, Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); and Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels By and About Women in America, 1820–1870, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).
6. A few examples include Sophia Lee, The Recess; or, A Tale of Other Times (1783–85); Marie Gacon-Dufour, Le Préjugé vaincu, ou Lettres de madame la comtesse de *** et de madame de *** refugiée en Angleterre (1787); and many novels of Marie Riccoboni (see Alliston, Virtue’s Faults).
7. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (1991; reprint, New York: Verso, 1998), esp. 9–82.
8. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998), 14–20.
9. See Alliston, Virtue’s Faults.
10. Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), e.g., 22–23.
11. David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Dublin: Lilliput, 1993), 88–114.
12. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 70.
13. Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 15.
14. See April Alliston, “Of Haunted Highlands: Mapping a Geography of Gender in the Margins of Europe,” in Cultural Interactions in the Romantic Age: Critical Essays in Comparative Literature, ed. Gregory Maertz (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 55–78.
15. See, e.g., Julia V. Douthwaite, Exotic Women: Literary Heroines and Cultural Strategies in Ancien Régime France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); and Alliston, Virtue’s Faults, ch. 4.
16. Bernardin figures his literary inheritance from earlier women novelists in the generational narrative of his novel: the original sympathetic community on the island is a female friendship between two women exiled from their nation and their families in which sympathy overcomes differences of class. The lovers of the novel’s title are born into an ideal world constructed out of their mothers’ homosocial sympathetic community, from which fathers are absent (Jacques-Henri Bernardin Saint-Pierre, Paul et Virginie, ed. Robert Mauzi [Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966], 82–89).
17. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 69.
18. I discussed Northanger Abbey as a revision of Paul et Virginie in some detail in the epilogue to Alliston, Virtue’s Faults.
19. On the pervasive influence of Rousseau’s novel on British Romantic women novelists, see Annette Wheeler Cafarelli, “Rousseau and British Romanticism: Women and the Legacy of Male Radicalism,” in Maertz, Cultural Interactions in the Romantic Age, 125–55: “The two key texts for women were Rousseau’s novel Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and his educational treatise Emile, ou de l’éducation (1762). The plot of Julie succumbing to a liaison with her tutor Saint-Preux, and afterwards settling into an exemplary marriage amid sub-alpine scenery with the older Wolmar in perfect amity with her former lover, to whom she professes her enduring passion before expiring, gave rise to a wide variety of novelistic sentimental duos and triads set amid inspirational scenery…. Rousseau’s Héloïse swept England in the 1760s, and its immense vogue generated plot and scenic elements throughout the late eighteenth-century British novel. Its popularity is evident in … the abundance of Rousseauvean landscapes, whether Alpine fantasies or domesticated as English Lake or Irish countryside, as in the works of Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Smith, and Sydney Owenson Morgan. More daring were the various triads that were modeled on the threesome of Saint-Preux, Julie, and Wolmar” (126, 128, emphasis mine). Authors mentioned as reworking or referring to Julie include Jane Austen, Hannah More, Clara Reeve, Frances Brooke, Helen Maria Williams, Mary Hays, Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Hamilton, and others (128–33).
20. I include Staël in this group even though Corinne imagines the failure rather than the utopian success of a resistance to empire and nation attempted through the establishment of a heterosexual sympathetic community. On the details of that failure, see my Virtue’s Faults and “Of Haunted Highlands.”
21. George Sand, Indiana (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), e.g., 319, first published in 1832.
22. Ibid., 330–44.
23. Lloyd, Anomalous States, 114–15.
24. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (New York: Bantam Books, 1974), 51, first published in 1847. See also, for example, Susan Meyer, Imperialism at Home: Race and Victorian Women’s Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); and Howard L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
25. Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 73.
26. Although it may be a commonplace to say that the bourgeois nation is founded upon an ideology of the separation between public and private spheres, the very articulation of this separation establishes an interdependency between the two spheres, to which I refer here as a most significant “connection.” One writer of the period in question who most clearly articulates the connectedness inherent in this separation of spheres is Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, in her argument that women become the guarantors of the public sphere by remaining sequestered in the private sphere and devoting themselves to the moral education of the children who will become future citizens and public actors: “Public education, of every denomination, should be directed to form citizens, but if you wish to make good citizens, you must first exercise the affections of a son and a brother. This is the only way to expand the heart; for public affections, as well as public virtues, must ever grow out of the private character, or they are merely meteors that shoot athwart a dark sky, and disappear as they are gazed at and admired. Few, I believe, have had much affection for mankind, who did not first love their parents, their brothers, sisters, and even the domestic brutes, whom they first played with…. A man has been termed a microcosm; and every family might also be called a state. States, it is true, have mostly been governed by arts that disgrace the character of man; and the want of a just constitution, and equal laws, have so perplexed the notions of the worldly wise, that they more than question the reasonableness of contending for the rights of humanity. Thus morality, polluted in the national reservoir, sends off streams of vice to corrupt the constituent parts of the body politic; but should more noble, or rather, more just principles regulate the laws, which ought to be the government of society, and not those who execute them, duty might become the rule of private conduct….—The conclusion I wish to draw, is obvious; make women rational creatures, and free citizens, and they will quickly become good wives, and mothers; that is—if men do not neglect the duties of husbands and fathers” (Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H. Poston, 2nd ed. [New York: Norton, 1988], 162, 177, first published in 1792). Since Wollstonecraft, like the many other British women writers documented by Cafarelli (see above, n. 19), is responding in this work primarily to Rousseau, the idea that “every family might also be called a state” may well derive partly from La Nouvelle Héloïse, in which the family of Wolmar almost literally becomes a state (as described in a more theoretical way in The Social Contract). The influence of Rousseau might help explain why this ancient patriarchal model of family-as-state, against which John Locke had argued a century earlier, might be revived by Wollstonecraft and other writers of her time.
27. Cf. Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 14–18.