Abstract

Chapter 2 examines how private feelings are collected into an eighteenth-century and transatlantic culture of sentiment. Scholars of early national and antebellum American literature often read the sentimental romance as an inherently democratic genre in which marginalized subjects, excluded by their gender or race, are permitted to register their feelings in the public sphere. I complicate this approach by identifying mutual aesthetic processes of inclusion and exception that enable these feelings to be collected by the sentimental community. Focusing on two of the most important eighteenth-century "men of feeling," Henry Mackenzie and Thomas Jefferson, I argue that instead of promoting feeling as a universal capacity shared among a (re)public, they also ruin-and then mourn-feeling as an utterly private thing, as a veiled affective fragment incapable of ever being publicized. Rather than simply promoting liberal and Enlightenment ideas of freedom, charity, and democracy, the sentimental romance also needs the prestige of these singular and private differences. As such, I show how for Jefferson the tearful man of feeling and the Enlightened man of science are dialectical twins rather than agonistic opposites: the political systems they both help to found return again and again to the spectacle of the ruined sentimental body, a spectacle that emerging taxonomies of racial difference similarly invoke in their own romance of blood.

Share