Feeling Past Politics: Affection, Settlement, and the Disciplines of Civil Society in Early Anglo-America, 1620-1682

University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2017 Feeling Past Politics: Affection, Settlement, And The Disciplines Of Civil Society In Early Anglo-America, 1620-1682 Ana Schwartz University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the American Literature Commons, and the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Schwartz, Ana, "Feeling Past Politics: Affection, Settlement, And The Disciplines Of Civil Society In Early Anglo-America, 1620-1682" (2017). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2572. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2572 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2572 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Feeling Past Politics: Affection, Settlement, And The Disciplines Of Civil Society In Early Anglo-America, 1620-1682 Abstract This dissertation argues that emotional experience consisted in diligent effort on the part of the seventeenth century setters of the New England colonies and that this care for fellow-feeling comprised one of the key civic disciplines complementing early Anglo-American settler political life. Literary historians of the early republic and antebellum periods have argued that sentimental literary production manifested and reproduced the ideal political dispositions of the new nation. Earlier colonial literary historians have in turn revealed the precedents of those practices and ideals in the prescriptions for emotional life in the English colonies, particularly within those self-consciously civic-minded settlements of New England. Neither of those discourses, however, have described the phenomenological aspect of sentiment and affection; nor how those were transformed and renewed by the exigencies of the new American continent; nor, finally, how such experience participated in the transformation of emergent power described by historians and anthropologists as modern settler colonialism—a form of power qualified by the ability to make an indigenous population appear to disappear, both materially and discursively. Emotional discipline, I argue, facilitated power’s reformation, and did so with particular intensity in the paradigmatic settler colonial context, the Massachusetts Bay Colony and its nearest colonial neighbors—Plymouth, New Haven, Connecticut and Rhode Island. This study draws on methods of close reading and historically-informed literary analysis to reveal how prescriptions and descriptions of feeling in writing and in speech shaped normative and intimate knowledge of recognizable social bonds. This dissertation reveals furthermore that hostility and aggression characterized all forms of fellow feeling prescribed by the New England settlers—in fact, maintaining these emotionally fortified distinctions between individuals and between groups was one of the most useful conditions reproduced by New England settlement’s self-consciously political revolution in sentimentality and affection. My study concludes that these techniques of prescribing more earnest social feeling endure, inflecting exhortations in the present to “sympathize” with those who seem less fortunate, exhortations amplified in the discourse by which literary analysis tends to justify its existence today. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group English First Advisor David Kazanjian Second Advisor Max Cavitch Subject Categories American Literature | American Studies | Literature in English, North America This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2572 FEELING PAST POLITICS: AFFECTION, SETTLEMENT AND THE DISCIPLINES OF CIVIL SOCIETY IN EARLY ANGLO-AMERICA, 1620-1682 Ana Schwartz A DISSERTATION in English Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the ReQuirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2017 Supervisor of Dissertation Co-Supervisor of Dissertation ______________________ _________________________ David Kazanjian Max Cavitch Professor of English and Comparative Literature Associate Professor of English Graduate Group Chairperson _________________________ David Eng, Richard L. Fisher Professor of English Dissertation Committee Max Cavitch, Associate Professor of English David Kazanjian, Professor of English and Comparative Literature Nancy Bentley, Donald T. Regan Professor of English FEELING PAST POLITICS: AFFECTION, SETTLEMENT, AND THE DISICPLINES OF CIVIL SOCIETY IN EARLY ANGLO-AMERICA, 1620-1682 COPYRIGHT 2017 Ana Virginia Schwartz This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ ACKNOWLEDGMENT This dissertation would not have been possible without support by the following institutions, listed in chronologically reverse order: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose Predoctoral Fellowship in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences made possible the final year of dissertation writing; the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania—and within it, the AmLit reading group—whose intellectual vibrancy this dissertation represents only a very narrow sliver; the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, a magnet for the diversity of perspectives on an archive so important for our sense of shared peoplehood; and before that, the University of California at Berkeley and Santa Rosa Junior College, whose commitment to access to education and whose guidance in intellectual pursuits informed the stakes and ambitions that this dissertation has hoped to bear and to fulfill. Within to these institutions, this dissertation acknowledges the following individuals for their academic guidance and support: Eugenie Brinkema, Wyn Kelly and Diana Henderson; David Kazanjian, Nancy Bentley and Max Cavitch and Anne Norton; Dan Richter; and, more distantly but perhaps most foundationally, my undergraduate instruction and encouragement from Kathleen Donegan, Anne Donegan, Melissa Kort and Stephen Booth. Adjacent and complementary to these individuals and institutions, this dissertation has depended on the ongoing support, intellectual and otherwise, from the following friends and colleagues: Jazmín Delgado, Evelyn Soto, and Najnin Islam; Kelly Rich, Alice McGrath, and Alan Niles; Devorah Fischler, Sangina Patnaik and Michelle Ty; Lilian Mengesha; Hector Kilgoe, Emmerich Davies and Yonah Freemark. Ajay Kumar Batra’s presence, and all it has comprised, merits, among these, a discrete sentence. iii ABSTRACT FEELING PAST POLITICS: AFFECTION, SETTLEMENT, AND THE DISCIPLINES OF CIVIL SOCIETY IN EARLY ANGLO-AMERICA, 1620-1682. Ana Schwartz David Kazanjian Max Cavitch This dissertation argues that emotional experience consisted in diligent effort on the part of the seventeenth century setters of the New England colonies and that this care for fellow-feeling comprised one of the key civic disciplines complementing early Anglo-American settler political life. Literary historians of the early republic and antebellum periods have argued that sentimental literary production manifested and reproduced the ideal political dispositions of the new nation. Earlier colonial literary historians have in turn revealed the precedents of those practices and ideals in the prescriptions for emotional life in the English colonies, particularly within those self- consciously civic-minded settlements of New England. Neither of those discourses, however, have described the phenomenological aspect of sentiment and affection; nor how those were transformed and renewed by the exigencies of the new American continent; nor, finally, how such experience participated in the transformation of emergent power described by historians and anthropologists as modern settler colonialism—a form of power qualified by the ability to make an indigenous population appear to disappear, both materially and discursively. Emotional discipline, I argue, facilitated power’s reformation, and did so with particular intensity in the paradigmatic settler colonial context, the Massachusetts Bay Colony and its nearest colonial neighbors— Plymouth, New Haven, Connecticut and Rhode Island. This study draws on methods of close reading and historically-informed literary analysis to reveal how prescriptions and descriptions of feeling in writing and in speech shaped normative and intimate knowledge of recognizable social bonds. This dissertation reveals furthermore that hostility and aggression characterized all forms of fellow feeling prescribed by the New England settlers—in fact, maintaining these emotionally iv fortified distinctions between individuals and between groups was one of the most useful conditions reproduced by New England settlement’s self-consciously political revolution in sentimentality and affection. My study concludes that these techniQues of prescribing more earnest social feeling endure, inflecting exhortations in the present to “sympathize” with those who seem less fortunate, exhortations amplified in the discourse by which literary analysis tends to justify its existence today. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENT ......................................................................................... III ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................

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