Under the Government of Sympathy

Sentimental History in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts

Bibliographic Data

ID20156220
AuthorsDavid Watson (0000-0002-2749-6136, Uppsala University, corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume29
Issue2
Pages6-23
Publication date2013-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Literary Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0256-4718 • E-ISSN: 1753-5387
PublisherUnisa Press (PUBLISHER • ZA)
DOI10.1080/02564718.2013.777141
OpenAlexW2009823481
LanguageEN
References cited24

There has been an ongoing debate about the meaning and significance of sympathy in nineteenth-century American literary culture, about its role in the public sphere and its function in the reproduction of social relations. Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie; or, Early Times in the Massachusetts (1827) is set in the aftermath of the 1637 genocidal war between the Puritan colony in Massachusetts and the Pequots. In this study I explore how a frontier romance raises questions about the role of sympathy in the narration of traumatic histories. I argue that Sedgwick seeks to find in the rhetoric of sympathy a means of imagining a reconciliation between the Puritans and the Pequots, and then also of reconfiguring the relation between the United States and the American Indian in antebellum America. At the same time her text self-reflexively interrogates the efficacy of sympathetic strategies to reconcile these communities. Hope Leslie emerges from this as a text that examines the curative potential of sympathy in the public sphere

Art · Epistemology · Frontier · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Rhetoric · Romance · Sociology · Sympathy · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Gender Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Law · Literature: history, themes, analysis · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

Tools

Open DOISci-HubOpen Access