Sympathy Control: Sentimental Politics and Early European Aesthetics

This essay re-reads early American sentimental novels (Charlotte Temple, The Coquette, Emily Hamilton) through the lens of contemporaneous European aesthetics (Baumgarten, Schiller) to argue that American writers’ anxieties concerning the power of their work to either educate or deceive are more than defensive responses to the novel’s detractors. These anxieties are real: they testify to concerns about the reliability of sensuous perception that also haunt early European aestheticians. Once we realize this, we see that sentimental writers do not, as major theorists of sentimentalism claim, unconditionally affirm the expression of feelings. Instead, they advocate what I call 'sympathy control.'