The Repentant Son and the Unforgiving Father

This chapter, which focuses on Virginia and Scotland, looks at a rupture between a father and a prodigal son, over issues of sensibility and sentiment, but mainly over issues of credit, in the period immediately following the American Revolution. It seeks to understand why a father remained so furious at a son who died young that it was difficult for the son to obtain forgiveness, even in death. The importance of credit, in economic, political, and domestic terms, is central to this story. The chapter also sketches the ways that the social and political merged, so that a political background could significantly affect the way a father-son relationship played out. It corrects notions of rigid Loyalism or anxious patriarchy, and instead concentrates on the pressures of an Atlantic economic and credit system.

Aesthetics · Affect (linguistics) · Art · Feeling · Forgiveness · Patriarchy · Period (music) · Political science · Politics · Sensibility · Sociology · Gender Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology