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“THE POWER OF FEELING”? EMOTION, SENSIBILITY, AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2011

SARAH M. S. PEARSALL
SARAH M. S. PEARSALL*
Affiliation:
Oxford Brookes University E-mail: spearsall@brookes.ac.uk
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Extract

In January 1776, Thomas Paine demanded to know whether “the Power of feeling” did not require that American colonists declare independence from Great Britain. Paine's efforts included an appeal to “common sense,” to the idea that it was only natural for colonists to end their ties with Britain. For Paine, independence did not depend on elaborately wrought arguments; instead, it should be obvious to all, even the most unlettered. His own emotionally charged language—the king was akin to a “crowned ruffian” descended from “a French Bastard landing with an armed Banditti”—sought to stir even those who still longed for reconciliation to “examine the passions and feelings of mankind” and to throw off the yoke of oppression. Paine's formulations, like these two books, raise numerous questions. How significant has the expression of emotion been in American history? How far can scholars go in attributing to it sufficient momentum to effect major historical change? Can something so universal be harnessed into nationalist political trajectories? Should America be seen as having a unique emotional culture in the eighteenth century? Did this exceptional culture of feeling contribute to the Revolution itself? These two authors answer yes to the last three questions, thus prompting re-evaluation of the “power of feeling” in the American Revolution itself.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , November 2011 , pp. 659 - 672
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

1 Paine, Thomas, Common Sense: Addressed to the Inhabitants of America (Philadelphia: R. Bell, 1776)Google Scholar, Introduction (no page numbers).

2 Paine, Common Sense, 16, 13, 23.

3 For treatment of emotions in American history, see Stearns, Peter N. and Lewis, Jan, eds., An Emotional History of the United States (New York: New York University Press, 1998)Google Scholar. In her work on Virginia, Jan Lewis alluded to the importance of a British “cult of sensibility” in reshaping social relations, a line found elsewhere. See Lewis, Jan, The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson's Virginia, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 217–19Google Scholar; Smith, Daniel Blake, Inside the Great House: Planter Family Life in Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Fliegelman, Jay, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Barker-Benfield, G. J., The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)Google Scholar; May, Henry F., The Divided Heart: Essays on Protestantism and the Enlightenment in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; and Burstein, Andrew, Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America's Romantic Self-Image, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999)Google Scholar. There has also been considerable attention to sentimental images in American literature and art. See Fliegelman, as well as Stern, Julia A., The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Barnes, Elizabeth, States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Ellison, Julie, Cato's Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)Google Scholar; and Lovell, Margaretta M., Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), chap. 5Google Scholar. Although his work does not figure much in these books, Rhys Isaac's recent important scholarship has focused on shifting expressions of emotion and the politics of the American Revolution. Isaac, Rhys, Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar as well as his “Communication and Control: Authority Metaphors and Power Contests on Colonel Landon Carter's Virginia Plantation, 1752–1778,” in Wilentz, Sean, ed., Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics Since the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 275–302Google Scholar.

4 For a terrific overview of the historiography of feeling in the French Revolution see Rosenfeld, Sophia, “Thinking about Feeling, 1789–1799,” French Historical Studies 32/4 (2009), 697–706CrossRefGoogle Scholar, especially 702. For other approaches to sentiment in eighteenth-century France see, among others, Darnton, Robert, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1984)Google Scholar; Vincent-Buffault, Anne, The History of Tears: Sensibility and Sentimentality in France (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Maza, Sarah, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Pre-Revolutionary France (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Riskin, Jessica, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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6 Sancho, Ignatius, Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African, 2 vols. (London: J. Nichols, 1782)Google Scholar; and Equiano, Olaudah, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (London: T. Wilkins, 1789)Google Scholar.

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11 Pearsall, Sarah M. S., Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 This kind of narrative appears in, among others, Fliegelman, Lewis, and May.

13 Isaac, Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom.

14 See, for instance, Yokota, Kariann Akemi, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, forthcoming)Google Scholar; and Irvin, Benjamin, Clothed in Robes of Sovereignty: The Continental Congress and the People out of Doors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.