Cato's Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion

Late in Cato's Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion, after having dismissed the names of the discussants in Philip Freneau's The Rising Glory of America, Julie Ellison suggests that the "net effect of such naming strategies is to dignify opinion by disembodying it" (143). Without pausing to argue that those names (Acasto, Eugenio, and Leander) are at least as suggestive as "unlikely," I adapt that phrase to her own intelligent and provocative book, where the strategy is to dignify sensibility by politicizing, embodying, gendering, racializing, localizing, and, eventually, Americanizing it. This most recent entry from "the Michigan school of sentimental studies" (ix) into "the rapidly cohering interdisciplinary field of 'circum-Atlantic studies' " (15) exhibits its own effective naming strategies. First, it claims (and proves) to be a bold and welcome continuation of the work of Donna Landry, Marlon Ross, Adela Pinch, Cathy Davidson, Lauren Berlant, Laura Brown, and others; then it acknowledges, while firmly differentiating itself from, the work of Jerome McGann, Claudia Johnson, Lawrence Klein, and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, among others.

Wide-ranging and well-argued, this study develops subtle connections between sensibility and "Fancy," which "is at the heart of this cultural matrix" (100-101). Probing its managerial, political, geographical, gendered, psychological, and biographical components, Ellison shows fancy to be "a legitimate vehicle of cultural criticism" (122). While sometimes a little too fancy with it [e.g., "Fancy travels through its own reproductive zone, its chaotic womb, where the systems that consciousness will continue to explore take shape" (107)], Ellison knows Fancy to be a wayward vehicle. She herself rides a disciplined intelligence, swooping up into ideology, back into history (especially the history of empire), among genres (plays, novels, philosophical tracts, poems, Indian death songs, abolitionist writings, captivity narratives), and between continents, genders, and races. This is a book of strong, indeed, in the fancy diction of Phyllis Wheatley, "silken pinions" (119).

Ellison moves efficiently and with shrewd selectivity through a remarkable variety of texts, pausing to elaborate on the conspiracies, nobility, and tears of Titus, Absalom, Jaffeir, and Massinissa, and the confidences, nobility, and fears of a number of Colonials and post-Colonials. In Nathaniel Lee's Lucius Junius Brutus (1680), Titus's tears and "arias of sensibility" (35) induce rigor in his father, while in Cato (1713) Juba falls in love with Rome because of Cato's dry-eyed, paternal sternness--Cato's tears are only for the Republic! Thomson's Sophonisba (1730) complicates its sensibility by combining race and gender in Massinissa, in ways too intricate to summarize. John Dennis's Liberty Asserted (1704) and Ponteach: or the Savages of America, A Tragedy (1766--Ellison questions the attribution to Robert Rogers, and exploits the play's absurdity) fit the frame nicely, though even after Ellison has finished with them they lie inertly at its bottom.

The pages on Barbauld's disciplining of emotion with politics (103-14) offer particularly fine readings and arguments. Fancy, intelligence, criticism, and theory become all but fissionable in the discussion of Barbauld's "Eighteen Hundred and Eleven" and its "hallucinatory rage" (114). This discussion provides a firm, though agitated, basis for the move to "Transatlantic Realms" (103). The implications and reverberations developed in it carry over forcefully into the analysis of Phyllis Wheatley, who evaded the victim's position, and Hannah More, who "made the connection between fancy and guilt explicit" (115). The reading of Sarah Wentworth Morton's Ouabi, Or the Virtues of Nature, An Indian Tale in Four Cantos (1790) provides a satisfactory culmination of the concern with sentiment, politics, race, "homosocial bonding," and empire. So much so, that the next chapter on Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly and the anonymous Algerine Captive seems to wander into diffusion.

Ellison generates the energy to cover all this ground by a series of provocative, but plausible connections among manageable and meaningful entities. Those between sensibility and conspiracy, motion, exile, and empire, are well and variously developed. These connections are repeated, explored, developed, and modified in each chapter: "Race and empire, then, are key factors in the story of how sensibility becomes central to the historical vision of women poets" (98); "Wheatley retains the by-now generic connection between tyranny, slavery, mourning, and the rhetoric of complaint" (120). In making them, Ellison produces and supports an impressive sequence of confident pronouncements: "Sensibility is the admitted connection between speculation, mood, and power" (7); "Sensibility increasingly is defined by the consciousness of a power difference between the agent and the object of sympathy" (18); "Sensibility is inseparable from ambivalence" (57); "sensibility is a transaction, not a character type" (98); "Sentimental representations of pain duel with conscious cynicism and lose" (109); "Sensibility is the practice of mobile connection" (123); "Sensibility is orchestrated by flights of fancy as well as by the desire for local ground" (147).

A few of the connections, however, are made mostly by association or assertion--those between sensibility and "parliamentary manhood" (19) and "the conversion of race into subjectivity" (60), for example. The most impressive arguments are grounded in readings of place ("territories of emotion"[18]), from Utica (Cato) and Carthage (Sophonisba) to the Bleeckers' estate, Tomhanick, north of Albany. I must add that I hear more of the heroic epistle than the prospect poem in Bleecker's "Written in Retreat." I do agree that Bleecker exorcises the woods (of "savages"), and I admire the phrase "pastorals in a time of war" (133).

I would willingly have seen a more precise and philosophical concept of "Stoic," which gets attached, rather loosely, to Clarissa, "The Man of Feeling," and almost every utterance or action that is not softhearted. I think more attention could be paid to the theatricality of sentiment and its effects on the sentiments (and attendance) of the audience--the emphasis seems to be on the politics of the dramatist. I would like to have heard more about the blush--the other gender's equivalent of tears? More needs to be said about the differences between class in Britain and race in America: aren't the outposts of empire especially finicky about class, and the victims (if that is the right word) troubled by race? How, for example, might a race-inflected view of the landscape differ from "a class-inflected view of the landscape"? (127). And how much ivy entwines class and obscures race in the works of Freneau and Timothy Dwight?

As for the final chapter, really an appendix, on liberal guilt, I prescribe a clear-sighted, hard-hearted, re-reading of the stern passages against remote and "artificial commiseration" from Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments quoted on page ten. Smith explains away what Ellison embraces. In any case, this searching and unsentimental investigation of emotion will make every reader think, and read, more liberally, widely, and thoughtfully.