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  • Not Just Another Pretty Commodity
  • Cynthia Wall
Lynn Festa . Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ., 2006). Pp. 300. $55. ISBN 0-8018-8430-6

Laurence Sterne's village midwife in Tristram Shandy (1759 – 67) is the center of the world—a world four miles wide, "a small circle described upon the circle of the great world," and that is the opening image of Lynn Festa's Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France, a beautifully written and compellingly argued book about "the margins of the Enlightenment" (1). Festa relates those well-dissected cultural and ideological issues—sentiment and empire—to eighteenth-century concepts of personal identity and to the spill of eighteenth-century objects, revealing sentimentality as a by-product of empire: "Sentimentality allowed a society undergoing rapid commoditization to rope off areas that would not be absolutely fungible, both by stressing the particularity of the feeling self and by withdrawing objects from indiscriminate circulation" (68). The small, local world of the self, carefully clutching its commodities-turned-beloved-possessions, wrote itself on the increasingly expanding world of empire and other, creating real and fictive communities of reassurance, and in general keeping a close eye on the disconcertingly shifting boundaries of subjectivity.

Festa aligns her study with recent work that calls into question the borders of the self, such as Adela Finch's Strange Fits of Passion (1996) and Jonathan [End Page 3] Lamb's Preserving the Self in the South Seas (2001), and argues that "sentimental texts helped create the terms for thinking about agency and intent across the geographic expanse of the globe by giving shape and local habitation to the perpetrators, victims, and causal forces of empire. In an era in which imperial reach increasingly outstripped imaginative grasp, sentimental fiction created the tropes that enabled readers to reel the world home in their minds" (2). While accurately (and with typical grace) acknowledging the importance of current discussions surrounding the ways colonial and imperial agendas influenced ideas of nation, gender, family, class, and race (by Laura Brown, Felicity Nussbaum, Julia Douthwaite, Roxann Wheeler, Kathleen Wilson), the role of gender in the management of emotions (Claudia Johnson, Julie Ellison), and other work treating sentimentalism and empire (Markman Ellis, Mary Louise Pratt), Festa argues (with Dror Wahrman) that following the thread of personal identity through sentimentalism to empire pulls away from the usual tracks of gender, race, and nation. Sentimentality rather exposed than disguised "the discrepancy between Enlightenment ideals and the realities of human suffering and exploitation" (7), and in spite of its frequent reductionism, its own internal critique still makes possible "an awareness of what is not to be assimilated in a master template of the human: the intransigent singularities that elude or defy sentimental representation" (241).

The first chapter, "The Distinction of Sentimental Feeling," is useful, clear, important to the argument, but not quite the jewel in the crown. It looks first at the ways that sentimental texts monitor the boundaries of the self in the great wash of feeling described by the theories of sympathy, and then at how sentimental identification can form communities of readers and agents. Festa defines her terms with imaginative precision:

That the nouns that describe sensibility tend to consolidate qualifiers into qualities (i.e., sentimental into sentimentality) suggests an attempt—only partly successful—to arrest dynamic forces in self-contained terms. The movement between modifier and substantive, between adjective and noun, which characterizes the vocabulary of the sentimental, exposes the problem of ossifying the language of affect around defined objects. Simply propping the before the adjective, as in 'the sentimental,' only provisionally does the trick. . . . Sentimental texts are thus crammed with adjectives desperately seeking nouns and nouns clinging to their modifiers, not least in the co-dependent coupling of the word sentimental with some–any–noun.

(18)

The problem is the messiness between inside and outside, self and other; George Campbell in the Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776) sees the sentimental as a kind of "entremetteur between inner and outer worlds, lending moral interest of pathos and conviction to reason" (20), thereby provisionally fusing inside and outside, while Johnson's definition of...

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