“A Fatal Sympathy”: Suicide and the Republic of Abjection in the Writings of Benjamin Rush and Charles Brockden Brown

In the aftermath of the Revolution, U.S. citizens were engrossed in print accounts of suicide. Two prominent figures in the public debates surrounding the epidemic of suicides, Benjamin Rush and Charles Brockden Brown, grappled with the interpersonal and larger political consequences of medical and literary treatments of self-destruction. Through their work in social reform and literature, respectively, Rush and Brown positioned suicide prevention as a critical public enterprise in which to cultivate the sensibilities of the body politic through the practices of witnessing to and intervening in the despair of others. In so doing, Rush and Brown each explored the efficacy and consequences of entering into the sensibilities of the suicide as a critical measure for preventing self-destruction. By examining the politics of witnessing and intervention, this article argues that the project of sensibility in the early republic extended beyond the practices of training sympathy as a means of fostering social cohesion. As the writings of Rush and Brown on the methods of suicide prevention demonstrate, the work of cultivating sensibility also involved negotiating profound disruptions of communal fellow feeling through direct social action.