Critical Fictions: Sentiment and the American Market, 1780-1870

Abstract

Critical Fictions: Sentiment and American Market, 1780-1870. By Joseph Fichtelberg. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003. Pp. x, 280. Cloth, $39.95.)Joseph Fichtelberg's ambitious, well-researched, and richly suggestive study is frustratmgly difficult to summarize; that is both a strength and a weakness of his recent book, Critical Fictions. Examining interrelations of sentiment and market consciousness in political discourse and literature, Fichtelberg contends that language of sentiment was used both to represent and to manage recurrent crises associated with an expanding capitalist market during republic's first century. Challenging scholars who would see in sentimentalism a domestic consciousness antithetical to market-a feminine in opposition to masculine rationality of capitalist exchange-Fichtelberg argues that the language of sentiment [ . . . ] figur[ed] market relations at most crucial historical moments, when economic forced individuals to question very bases of their understanding (5). Sentiment is, for Fichtelberg, a mode of practical consciousness, a means of thinking through social impasse (5). Drawing upon Raymond Williams's concept of structures of feeling, Fichtelberg argues that writers' use of sentimental language constituted improvisauonal efforts to make market relations and subjectivities ideologically comprehensible, humanizing] economic crisis by rendering intimate and domestic abstract of economy and polity (14, 7). In particular, language of sentiment salvages a sense of agency and the of individual action (7), creating a subject capable of adapting to economic change.Fichtelberg develops this analysis in five chapters (plus introduction and conclusion), organized chronologically, in wliich he reads literary texts against newspaper articles, congressional debates, and other historical documents. Literary texts occupy pride of place; what Fichtelberg terms critical often doubled as economic thought, creating an intelligible, orderly political economy by insisting on sentimental ties and bolstering a threatened (17-18). Chapter 2 focuses on early national period, when writers began to see their lives as reflections of market forces (16). Texts by Hector St. John de Crevecoeur and Olaudah Equiano map out a sense of market boundlessness propelled by the drive to consume (15); at same time, they register political anxieties about British goods flooding market. In Chapter 3, on debates surrounding Embargo of 1807 and Panic of 1819 in contemporary popular fiction, Fichtelberg illustrates that sentiment provided a crucial counterweight to sense of helplessness and alienation (17) by feminizing economic vulnerability and offering strategies for moral renewal. While ruined merchants and impressed sailors used images of seduced heroines to dramatize their plight, fictional heroines transformed] fragility into power (235) and embodied success amidst economic instability. In decade following Panic of 1837, Fichtelberg argues in Chapter 4, writers seized upon plastic, transparent nature of feeling to fashion a and more supple definition of virtue in which sympathetic souls [ . . . ] yield to others and yet remain morally pure (19). Locating this market-oriented stance in debt-ridden Emerson's journals and letters, Fichtelberg charts its appearance in sentimental fictions of such writers as Susan Warner, in whose novels virtuous pliancy became a measure of moral autonomy and 'characterless woman' emerges as a cultural ideal (19). Chapter 5 shows how Walt Whitman's poems translate characterlessness into national ideology (20). Situating Leaves of Grass in labor debates preceding Panic of 1854, Fichtelberg argues that Whitman's sympathy figures cooperative vision of radical artisans and their accommodation to market demands, ultimately endorsing a new liberal [economic] order (20). …

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