A Model Heart: Public Displays of Emotion in Sedgwick’s A New-England Tale

Catharine Maria Sedgwick was an affect theorist. This description may seem surprising given a tradition of criticism situating her as a religious reformer in which her first novel, A New-England Tale (1822), is typically read as an attack on Calvinism. But religion comprises only one part of Sedgwick’s didactic novel. It gives “social virtues” as much attention as religious virtue in presenting emotions as powerful social tools.¹ The novel’s heroine, Jane Elton, elevates her position within her New England town by displaying emotions in ways that others admire. Yet, despite the importance of emotions in the novel, this aspect remains mostly unexamined, perhaps because Sedgwick’s message deviates from a well-documented tradition in nineteenth-century women’s writing, especially in the sentimental novel, that encouraged women to cultivate emotions such as sympathy, compassion, and love. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous direction in Uncle Tom’s Cabin to “feel right” exemplifies this tradition in urging readers to show sympathy to others.² This direction reflects a contemporaneous “culture of sentiment,” which celebrated feelings that signaled selflessness.³ Writing when this culture was developing, Sedgwick explores the complexity of feelings.⁴ She encourages readers to espouse emotions such as sympathy, but she also shows how it is impossible to always “feel right” and to always be selfless. Her heroine often feels the “wrong” emotions such as anger and pride that do not facilitate sympathetic bonds; however, she appears to “feel right.” In making this distinction, Sedgwick describes the nature of emotions as having a split, two-part structure with interior, automatic, corporeal responses that are separate from exterior, controllable, social expressions. She introduces this model in the novel and then develops it in a series of conduct manuals published from 1822 through the 1840s.⁵ In understanding how emotions animate, readers could manage their expressions of emotion and ultimately use them, as Jane does, to improve their reputations. While this advice on social advancement may be expected from conduct books, Sedgwick also features this compelling prescriptive theory in her early novel A New-England Tale.

I argue that emotions—and not more traditional means such as wealth—emerge as a major reason for characters’ changes in social position. Jane, Bet, and Mrs. Wilson feel many of the same emotions, including anger, pride, grief, and sympathy, but only Jane’s expressions signal selflessness and self-possession, qualities that her neighbors value. And only Jane gains respect. Her expressions, and not her actual feelings, are integral to her rise in position. In one example that illustrates this model, Jane explains how she chooses which emotions to display. Speaking with her friend Mary Hull, she shares that she often feels anger, an emotion inconsistent with “feeling right.” She becomes aware of this emotion by feeling her “temper rising” within her body, and, although she cannot prevent it, she can manage it and conceal it from others.⁶ In one strategy, she diverts her attention from the anger. She regularly practices other ways to “restrain” certain emotions. For example, “Jane was making a strong mental effort to subdue that longing after liberty, that lurks in every heart. Habitual discipline had rendered it comparatively easy for her to restrain her wishes” (NET, 63–64). Then, she explains, “I sometimes feel the rising of a pride in my heart,” but she takes measures to appear humble (NET, 64). In each case, Jane’s appearance matters most, as Mary admires how Jane presents herself, believing her emotions to be markers of good character. Mary’s reaction underscores how emotions are not epiphenomenal but rather have a pragmatic, social function. This function can be illuminated in examining contemporary affect theory.

Originating in the body and occurring independently of thought, Jane’s anger and pride are corporeal and automatic. For contemporary theorist Brian Massumi, affect has an “irreducibly bodily and automatic nature.”⁷ It is an “intensity” that is “embodied in purely automatic reactions most directly manifested at the skin—at the surface of the body, at its interface with things.” ^8...