Critical Fictions: Sentiment and the American Market 1780-1870

In the last decade, Charles Sellers’s The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: OUP, 1991) has been a very influential synthetic study for scholars and critics of the nineteenth-century American literary tradition. Sellers charted the emergence in the antebellum period of a capitalist hegemony over the American economy, politics, and culture. The market revolution, he argued, created “ourselves and most of the world we know” (5). Sellers found this market revolution in all kinds of places that might seem to have been resistant or immune to it, for example, in evangelical Protestantism. However, he had much less to say about literature and the market, perhaps because the secondary literature for at least part of the period he covered (1815-1835) was so thin.

Joseph Fichtelberg has a lot to say about literature and the market, and thus his new analysis covers important ground on how sentiment was used to respond to the market revolution. Fichtelberg argues that, contrary to received wisdom, sentimental literature was not opposed to the impersonal, unsentimental, public market. Instead, sentimental literature was used to naturalize and normalize the brave new world of competitive capitalism: sentimentalism “made invisible market forces familiar, immediate, and even reassuring. . . . [It] helped to turn the heartless market into a habit of mind” (15). Fichtelberg argues that sentimental literature grappled with the notion of an impersonal and ruthless market in three distinct stages. First, late in the eighteenth century, writers like Olaudah Equiano and Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur discovered the inner workings of consumption, realizing in their own desire to consume that their lives were or had become reflections of larger market forces. They then struggle in their famous autobiographical texts to strike a balance between unrestrained consumption and virtuous, rational restraint.[1] At that moment, the world of republican virtue first glimpsed the revolution that was under way. Then, in the first half of the nineteenth century, writers (and merchants) began to use sentimental tropes to fashion a more supple virtue, one that could respond more energetically yet still virtuously to the shocks and traumas and unexpected downturns of the market. One such trope was the “characterless woman,” who could respond in infinite ways to the market’s heterogeneity, yet still remain morally uncompromised. In the final stage, in the 1860s and 1870s, a new kind of market virtue fully emerged, one in which the “characterless woman” was refigured as a feminized merchant who was threatened by the market but who persevered by using a pliable sentimentality and transparent sincerity to accommodate any contingency.

Fichtelberg’s insight is to find a pattern that connects a novel like Martha Meredith Read’s Margaretta (1807), an under-read retelling of Fanny Burney’s Evelina, to Walt Whitman’s expansive poetic persona, to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s genderless soul, and to the large body of business fiction published in the 1860s. Having seen this pattern, in which authors imagine feminine sympathy engaged in the market without being sullied by it, Fichtelberg uses the theories of Marxist critics like Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson to analyze the “mode of practical consciousness, [the] means of thinking through social impasse” (5) that sentimental American writers were employing. That is, his concern is not with the sublime elements of ideology, but with American culture’s conscious creation of “parables of control” (115) of the dynamic, impersonal, and uncertain market.

Practically, this means that in each chapter Fichtelberg ‘reads’ a particular historical problem or problems—the Panic of 1837 (Chapter 4), for example, or Jefferson’s Embargo of 1807 (Chapter 3)—and then ‘reads’ a literary text or texts in conjunction with it. He wants to see how writers responded in texts to specific historical pressures. The result is a mild form of New Historicism, sensitive to the fact that ‘events’ like the Panic of 1837—which existed more securely in the minds of investors and writers in 1837 than, in hindsight, it existed in fact—but in truth much more intent to read the literature itself than the historical problems. This is not unsatisfying. But, in practice, the literary texts are read and opened much more fully than are the historical events or moments.

One drawback of this method is that historical events seem undifferentiated in Fichtelberg’s account, while the literary texts seem rich in their variety of responses to ‘the’ market. Some historians have identified fourteen to seventeen depressions in the United States between 1780 and 1870, but here they all seem the same. Maybe they were. Also, getting shorter shrift than the literary texts, the historical moments seem curiously thin to me, lacking the richness and complexity of the literary texts. They are not ‘read’ with the same richness. On the literary side, one drawback is that these literary responses—“creative attempt[s] to name, and possibly to control, the pressures that were reshaping lives” (7)—are offered as somehow “American,” yet they respond to a revolution that was transnational in scope. Sentiment and sympathy, too, of course, were transnational in scope. So, what was peculiarly national about Emerson’s transcendental theories of the soul? What was peculiarly American about Whitman’s poetic persona? I ask this question about Fichtelberg’s early chapters most particularly since in them Equiano (who spent precious little time in the United States and self-identified as ‘British’) and Crèvecoeur (who was born and raised in France, and died a French citizen) are his focus, but it is also relevant to his later chapters.  At what point, if any, one wonders, did the Anglo-American, or the Anglo-American-European, uses of sentiment to control the vagaries of the market diverge? At what point did it become national? As unfashionable as it may seem to inquire about “American-ness,” Fichtelberg’s project raises the issue squarely but does not address it. At this moment, when circumatlantic or transatlantic studies is all the rage, his study might profitably have engaged such a question.

But that is perhaps a different book. The book at hand is smart, interesting, and ambitious. Its purview extends beyond the research interests of some members of ASECS, but it joins a whole host of studies (some of them also focused squarely on sympathy and sentiment) that take on the question of the emergence of the ‘modern.’ Fichtelberg’s able study argues that the modern had emerged fully by 1860, by which time sentiment had moved from the privacy of domestic life to the national domestic market in which men adopted the ‘feminine’ characteristics of transparency and compromise in order to control the market, in imagination if not in fact. His argument is certain to provoke useful debate as we continue to sort out sentiment’s history in the long eighteenth century.

[1] Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer is not, strictly speaking, an autobiography, but Fichtelberg elides the distinction between author and narrator in his analysis of the text.