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Abstract Title of Dissertation: Global Sympathy: Representing Abstract Title of Dissertation: Global Sympathy: Representing Nineteenth-Century Americans’ Foreign Relations Sarah J. Sillin Dissertation Directed By: Professor Robert S. Levine Department of English Over the past two decades, scholars have established sympathy’s key role in nineteenth-century literary culture and the development of U.S. nationalism. While examining the bonds that feeling forges among citizens, however, critics have largely neglected the question of how sympathy also links Americans to the larger world. Representations of global sympathy—wherein characters from different cultures share one another’s joy and pain—pervade nineteenth-century U.S. literature. My project analyzes how authors narrativized the nation’s political, territorial, and cultural changes, while underscoring the persistent importance of feeling in defining America’s global role. “Global Sympathy” tells a story about what happens when writers imagine Americans as the kith and kin of foreign peoples. Beginning in the early national period, the first chapter explores how James Fenimore Cooper employs tropes of foreign friendship to establish Americans’ equality to the British, inviting readers to re-imagine the British Empire as a valuable trading partner. My second chapter considers the importance of Christianity to Nathaniel Hawthorne and Maria Cummins, whose Protestant American heroines become metaphorical sisters to people in Italy and Syria, respectively. Read together, these pre-Civil War writers evoke confidence in Americans’ ability to navigate foreign relations amidst political instability. Yet with increasing U.S. expansion, writers in the second half of the nineteenth- century expressed growing concern about America’s foreign influence. Chapters three and four center on minority writers who employ sentiment to criticize the effects of imperialism on “foreign” peoples both within and outside the nation. María Amparo Ruiz de Burton participates in Gilded Age literary critiques of America as unfeeling and undemocratic, and develops an international courtship narrative to convey U.S. oppression of both “native” Californios and foreign nations like Mexico. Pauline Hopkins’s turn-of-the-century fiction constitutes part of a broader body of literary responses to the Spanish-American War. Hopkins questions U.S. imperialism and racism by imagining the world, rather than the nation, as a family. More broadly, this project analyzes how Hopkins and all of the writers I study translate foreign politics into intimate terms and—by depicting U.S. citizens’ affective ties to diverse peoples—insist on America’s obligations to the international sphere. Global Sympathy: Representing Nineteenth-Century Americans’ Foreign Relations By Sarah J. Sillin Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy 2013 Advisory Committee Professor Robert S. Levine, Chair Professor Martha Nell Smith Professor Carla Peterson Professor Edlie Wong Professor Deborah Rosenfelt (Dean’s Representative) © Copyright by Sarah J. Sillin 2013 Acknowledgements This dissertation project has its roots in Professor Levine’s graduate seminar on Rethinking Empire and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, which introduced me to influential work in the field of Global American Studies. I was deeply fortunate to continue working with Professor Levine as the chair for this project, given his unstinting commitment to guiding and challenging graduate students. Indeed, he and Professors Smith, Peterson, and Wong have all modeled an incredible intellectual generosity in engaging with the ideas of my project, while also fostering my development as a writer over the course of numerous drafts. Their guidance has proven essential in helping me both to locate my central, unifying concept of global sympathy and to recognize how writers’ depictions of U.S.-foreign attachments shifted across the century. I am thankful to Professor Rosenfelt for kindly agreeing to represent the Dean of the Graduate School for my dissertation defense. I am also profoundly grateful to the warm community of faculty and graduate students in the University of Maryland’s Department of English, particularly my faithful editors and sounding boards, Michelle Boswell and Amanda Dykema. And finally, I wish to thank Adam Mansur for ceaselessly encouraging my work in so many ways from my applications to graduate school through to this complete draft of my dissertation. ii Table of Contents Abstract . iv-vi Introduction . 1-23 1. International Friendships: James Fenimore Cooper as Cosmopolitan Patriot . .24-74 2. Christian Sisters: American Sympathy Abroad in Maria Cummins & Nathaniel Hawthorne . 75-124 3. María Amparo Ruiz’s Anti-Reunion Novel: Marriage & the Failure of American Sympathy . 125-175 4. The Global Family: Sympathy, Mesmerism, & Empire in Pauline Hopkins . 177-221 Coda . 222-227 Bibliography . 228-253 iii Introduction Near the middle of Maria Cummins’s antebellum novel El Fureidîs (1860), the British hero observes a devastating earthquake in a small Syrian village. He views this “great calamity” as “a call for public sympathy and aid” from the villagers’ Syrian neighbors.1 He thereby expresses the familiar association of sympathy with local and national communities. However, Cummins challenges this association when it instead falls to the novel’s British and American protagonists to provide both the sympathy and material aid needed for the village’s recovery. Strikingly, Meredith’s remarks in this scene anticipate a common emphasis within current studies of sympathy: the role shared feeling plays in uniting a country and its inhabitants. Yet the novel’s subsequent representations of international benevolence suggest the need for sympathy that transcends national borders, a subject that has received much less critical attention than national sympathy. Representations of international sympathetic bonds—what I will call global sympathy—recur throughout nineteenth-century U.S. literature, linking Americans to a broad array of foreign peoples. This project examines how, as the U.S. nation developed, writers invoked fellow-feeling to address Americans’ changing relations to one another and to the world. Sympathy, stated simply, is shared feeling. To sympathize with someone is to suppose that you are that person, to imagine the pleasure or pain s/he is experiencing, and to enter into that experience.2 As Adam Smith explains in his familiar example of sympathy, when “our brother is upon the rack,” “by the imagination we [can] place ourselves in his situation . we enter as it were into his body” and “his agonies are thus Sillin, Introduction 1 brought home.”3 While sympathy became the “most highly valorized emotional form” in nineteenth-century America’s culture of sentiment, this process of identification and imagination was nonetheless a contested subject.4 Nineteenth-century writers and current scholars alike have sought to define what inspires sympathy, who constitutes an appropriate subject of it, and what political and social effects sympathy produces. These debates have emerged, in part, because of the central role feeling played in Enlightenment philosophy following the shift to republican forms of government in Western Europe. Adam Smith and David Hume, among others, theorized how, in the absence of feudal social and political structures, sympathy could foster a sense of national cohesion among fellow citizens.5 Following the Revolutionary War, Americans turned to the discourse of sympathy to understand what linked them to one another, as well as to foreign peoples. Thus it is important to recognize the persistence of Enlightenment conceptions of sympathy, which nineteenth-century literature both drew on and revised. The central authors of this study—James Fenimore Cooper, Maria Susanna Cummins, Nathaniel Hawthorne, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, and Pauline Hopkins—employed sympathy to represent changing U.S. domestic and foreign relations. Yet these and numerous other U.S. writers also expressed pressing concerns about sentiment in a global context. Their works raise questions about when sympathy could transcend cultural and racial differences and when it reinforced such distinctions, at times to the detriment of those it was supposed to benefit. Enlightenment theories of sympathy proved important to Americans because, as Kristin Boudreau argues, sympathy offered “a source of social order that relied on natural passions rather than on the tyranny of a single political leader.” As a result, “Thomas Sillin, Introduction 2 Jefferson and Benjamin Rush avidly read Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith and looked to natural human affections to provide the fundamental bond of political union.”6 Garry Wills has argued that, in keeping with Scottish common sense philosophy, Jefferson viewed men as equals on the basis of their shared moral sense.7 According to Wills, Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence suggests that the bonds of the nation would be based in man’s inherent capacity for feeling. Meanwhile, in the decades after independence a number of popular novels, most notably Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), employed sympathy to critique the nation for allowing the tyranny of slavery, rather than ostensibly just “natural passions,” to dominate the social order. Even writers who criticized the nation’s failure of feeling, though, expressed an interest
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