“Made to Feel Wretched”: Royall Tyler and the Trouble with Global Sympathy

I pity you too, replied I, the tears standing in my eyes.

—The Algerine Captive

At a key moment in the middle of The Algerine Captive (1797), Royall Tyler sends his American narrator, Updike Underhill, to Africa aboard The Sympathy. The slave ship’s allegorical name is just one of numerous signs that the novel is concerned with sentiment. Beyond signaling this attention to feeling, The Sympathy invites us to recognize that sentiment carries Underhill into a series of fraught cross-cultural encounters. Tyler conveys the influence of these encounters through depictions of Underhill’s affect, including recurring scenes of sympathetic crying, such as the one quoted in the epigraph (126). These scenes suggest that the protagonist cannot resist expressing sympathy for foreign peoples, even as his tears signal the pain and vulnerability that compassion creates. For instance, when Underhill comes to pity enslaved Africans aboard The Sympathy, his sentiment simultaneously attests to his power as an American and destabilizes it through his identification with slaves. Attending to such depictions of affect, this essay builds on prior arguments that sentimental literature of the 1790s expresses anxiety about the tenuous cohesion of the United States to tease out Tyler’s concern with how feeling influences international relations and thereby shapes national identity.¹ I contend that his novel illuminates the vital role of foreign sympathy—meaning both Americans’ feelings for those outside their country and the compassion they elicit from foreign peoples—in early American literature.

Through his depictions of cross-cultural bonds that appear both appealing and troubling, Tyler explores a question central to his work: could Americans create a stable national identity? This concern, evidenced in his earlier play The Contrast (1787), resurfaces throughout The Algerine Captive. The novel begins with a brief narrative of the Puritan past and transatlantic encounters of the 1630s, then jumps ahead to the 1780s to tell the story of its narrator, a Puritan descendant, as he commences a picaresque-style journey. Underhill travels the United States to pursue education and employment. Unable to make a living, he becomes a ship’s doctor. His global voyages prove even more unsettling than his efforts to make a home in the United States, as Underhill participates in the slave trade and falls captive to Algerian pirates. By developing themes of rootlessness, slavery, and captivity, Tyler’s novel dramatizes pervasive concerns over the potential dissolution of domestic bonds and the destabilizing effects of foreign relations, which preoccupied Americans in the decades following the Revolutionary War.

To address these anxieties over the United States and its role in the global sphere, writers and political leaders alike turned to eighteenth-century theories of sentiment.² Political rhetoric of the day presumed that shared feeling functioned as a measure of virtue. By imaginatively entering into others’ feelings, spectators both signaled their own worth based on their compassion and conferred worth on deserving objects of sympathy whose suffering mattered. For instance, both Kwame Anthony Appiah and Lynn Hunt argue that as the discourses of human rights and abolition emerged in late eighteenth-century England, the British asserted their moral sensibility through their display of sympathy for foreign peoples. In this context, representing US citizens as sympathetic, in part, promised national stability. Not only did the founding fathers suggest that the nation depended on shared feeling to link fellow citizens, but Tyler and a number of contemporary writers asserted that Americans’ identity and moral standing in the global sphere likewise depended on their display (or lack) of compassion.³

Sympathy acquired particular importance as Americans faced the task of redefining their relations both to one another and to the global sphere following the Revolutionary War. To develop trade relations and negotiate peace, the government needed foreign empires to recognize the United States as a “treaty-worthy nation” (Gould 11).⁴ The expansionist ambitions of early Americans prompted negotiation with and conquest of foreign peoples and led to the further extension of the slave system.⁵ Even so, Tyler’s focus on Barbary captivity reminds readers that, in gaining independence, the United States had lost...