Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (review)

Professor Festa’s history of sentimentality follows the confluence of two psychological and cultural phenomena in the eighteenth-century British and French literary imagination: “the sentimental mode,” or depictions of sentiment as a defining human quality and capacity, and the drive toward colonial and imperial rule in matters of nation, gender, family, class, and race.

This comparative cultural history, an examination that is equally balanced between Britain and France, makes a very coherent argument for critical research that focuses on the person—the emerging concepts of the self, of who has feelings and the medical and moral capacity and right to feel, and how they relate to “the literary mode of empire.” The focus here is mainly on how sentiments intersect with and contradict the brutal and bloody practices that are a part of colonizing and exploiting peoples in other societies and cultures. It is then argued that the sentimental depictions of colonial enterprises allowed the readers to selectively recognize the humanity and suffering of non-European people and still keep European “distinctive cultural and personal identities.” The result is defined as a refashioning of “conquest into commerce” and “scenes of violence and exploitation into occasions for benevolence and pity” (2). The central conclusion is that “sentimentality” is a necessary result of these psychological and moral contradictions in the eighteenth-century novel with Enlightenment principles and ideals, producing unavoidable consequences. As such “empire begets sentimentality” (7).

In five chapters, sentimentality is treated as the result of the encounter between the newly formed concepts of the self and the other in British and French literature. The first chapter separates “sentimental feeling” in the eighteenth century from earlier ideas about human psychology and culture. The next four chapters examine the representation of the internal life of Europeans and the figures and tropes presented in texts, primarily novels, representing in the external world those who are psychologically and culturally distinct and are most often inferior categories of peoples in far away continents.

The introduction is short but cogent and defines “The Great World Without” and the spatial topology of the outside versus inside worlds in the sentimental novel. The first chapter shows what is new in the 1760s and 1770s about sentiment and sentimentality by triangulating in Foucauldian genealogy what would become foundational terms at the time––sympathy, sentimental, and sensibility––along the lines of Northrop Frye, Anne Vila, Ann Jessie Van Sant, and G. S. Rousseau. The meanings of these three terms are described according to Hume and Smith on the British side and Rousseau, Locke, Diderot, and Montesquieu on the French side. The chapter ends with a description of the “sentimental rewriting” of eighteenth-century empire by virtue of the process in which “sentimental feeling consolidates individual and collective identities” (55). The second chapter explains how sentimentality permits the society to succumb to commoditization that inspires feelings, even love, for objects and reveals the social effects of market forces on exchanged goods and people, the colonized and exploited other, to the point that some objects acquire very special “personal and collective identities” (68). Referring to the 1768 book A Sentimental Journey, “Sterne’s Snuffbox” in the next chapter title is the principal case in point of a “sentimental commodity” (69) among figures of speech and tropes of things that inspire the reader’s feeling. These literary objects are said not only to feel themselves but also to speak in “objective narratives,” based here on Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism and social relations in which commodities are selectively attributed feeling and, in certain texts, speech, called the “Commodity’s Soliloquy” (115).

Chapter 4, “Making Humans Human,” the longest and most convincing chapter, explains the process of attributing human qualities and value to sentimental figures in commerce, in images, and particularly in printed texts. The analysis of sentimental figures in this chapter places moral emphasis on the relationship between price and person for African slaves. Such sentimental tropes show the...