Sympathetic Subjects: Politics, Feeling, and the Space of Narrative in the Long Eighteenth Century

Botz, Samantha

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-6rfe-tg65

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Sympathetic Subjects: Politics, Feeling, and the Space of Narrative in the Long Eighteenth Century

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This dissertation examines how eighteenth-century ethics were reimagined by Enlightenment-era and Romantic women writes to better afford the grounds for political revolution and responsive reform. Whereas Adam Smith’s theatrical model of sympathy casts individuals in the passive role of spectators who feel deeply but are not necessarily moved to act, I discern evidence of an alternative model across women’s prose, poetry, and political writings: a narrative of sympathetic exchange as, not an affective instinct, but a reflective ethical disposition capable of navigating the complexities of communal engagement. Such mutability was of particular value to these women, whose limited and fraught access to public forums lent them a keen perspective on the contingency of community, and the need for methods capable of speaking—and feeling—across ideological and social friction. Sympathy, I ultimately propose, is not a bid for identification as frequently conceived, but rather an open-ended invitation to feel otherwise. By rooting this revision in fresh analyses of canonical writers such as Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, as well as less-theorized texts by Sarah Fielding, Jane Collier, and the anonymous author of The Woman of Colour (1808), “Sympathetic Subjects” unearths an alternate strain of sympathetic thought from the period, and so deliberately complicates the dominant theoretical model of sympathy predicated on immediacy and intimacy literary scholars frequently draw from Smith and David Hume. Instead, my project recovers the profuse and often conflictual representations of sympathy that troubled the epistemological confidence of prevailing sentimental models. Framing emotions as narrative phenomena does not privilege expressions of interiority as the incitement for moral action—nor does it confine my inquiry to literary representations of sympathy—but rather evokes the forms by which a sense of a particular “self” is communally created and recognized, and that constitutes, in turn, the sense of a public.

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