Gothic Subjects. Sian Silyn Roberts
this approbation greets a well-regulated display of emotion, it merely gratifies the agent’s “vanity” and self-regard.55 Thus he finds Smith guilty of promoting not only the selfish passions but also the abuse of words.56 A dyed-in-the-wool civic republican, Ferguson regards the specter of self-interest as anathema. He locates civil society in an active and closely knit community of politically minded citizens on guard against private, selfish desires. Ferguson’s ideal polity is grounded in such classic moral virtues as benevolence, charity, and martial valor—virtues he found wanting in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.57
Ferguson’s reservations arguably come to life in the conman Welbeck, whose self-expression is shrewdly calculated to manipulate the spectator’s feelings. His performative skill is so striking in this respect that, as witness to one of these displays, Mervyn is confounded: “I could hardly persuade myself that it was the same person.”58 Welbeck contrives his emotional spectacles to elicit feelings that serve his particular interest, and the threat he poses to republic notions of civic virtue has been thoroughly documented.59 But Brown’s critique of Smith goes well beyond its threat to civic virtue. While Ferguson took issue with sympathy on the grounds that it undermined the political and moral health of the nation, favoring instead the more organic affections of “generosity” and “friendship” consolidated through “acquaintance and habitude,” Brown challenges Smith’s use of spectacle on the grounds that we cannot trust what we see.60
Smith’s notion of “propriety” requires the agent to regulate his emotional display in such a way that it never exceeds or falls short of the social norm. A sense of propriety, that is, detaches the expression of feeling from the emotion that arises strictly within the agent. As Welbeck clearly demonstrates, the social expression of feeling is always performative. Sympathetic exchange is therefore possible only in a community where everyone’s internal spectator is likely to respond in approximately the same way, where both spectator and agent observe interpretative rules common to that community. This kind of sameness structures the household in domestic fiction, where people can trust each other’s emotions because there is not all that much difference between them to overcome. In Arthur Mervyn, this kind of community is exemplified in the sentimental Hadwin household. As Mervyn observes, the two Hadwin sisters Eliza and Susan “smiled and wept in unison. They thought and acted in different but not discordant keys … this diversity was productive, not of jarring, but of harmony.”61 Bonds of feeling unite the group in “harmony” while maintaining the individuality of its “different but not discordant” members. That is to say, the Hadwin household represents a community of likeminded but autonomous agents. In a culture of diversity, on the other hand, multiple interpretative standards expose the arbitrariness of a term like propriety. In such an environment, it is impossible—if not downright dangerous—to take any expression of emotion as a sign of authentic feeling. We enter a domain where expression is only arbitrarily yoked to actual emotion—where, moreover, the “internal spectator” regulating emotion is not one we necessarily share.
For the sake of argument, then, let us assume that cultural differences in Brown’s Philadelphia displace the similarity between spectator and agent necessary for sympathetic exchange. The diverse inhabitants of a city must be able to relate to one another, tolerate diversity, and cohere as a group on a basis other than the organic sameness that characterizes a Smithian community. In such an environment, Brown tells us, the sentimental conventions of domestic fiction will need to undergo radical reconfiguration. The gothic proves capable of performing such a task, as Brown sets about modifying sympathy to form a community where different interpretative strategies are in play.
Brown takes it for granted that one’s social performance of suffering or joy is no reliable index to internal feeling. On the basis of a thoroughly superficial spectacle alone, a spectator can read people wholly unconnected with himself without making any claim to know, feel responsible for, or otherwise care about the agent involved. There is no intimate commonality between spectator and agent based on an ability to feel the same way about things. They agree to tolerate differences because neither assumes that any common ground actually exists. This is an expedient form of sympathy. A superficial cohesion bridges cultural difference while preventing difference from disrupting the social body.
The Contagion Model
Brown’s first step toward making a case for expedient sympathy is to imagine a scenario in which the spectacle of suffering is detached from its source. He does so by creating a rumor of the yellow fever and allowing that rumor to act instead of the disease itself as it spreads beyond Philadelphia and enters the country household of the Hadwins. Rumor acts as the plague’s equivalent and extension in that it spreads from person to person and changes how each sees the world. Bryan Waterman calls this Brown’s “materialist theory of language,” where “words matter because they act like and even affect matter.”62 With rumor, emotion no longer originates within an individual or individuals but comes from an external source—language—that, like an infection, enters the subject from without. Its potency lies less in its putative truth than in its ability to grow and transform itself as it gains momentum by circulating through many different people. This exponential expansion creates an excess of meaning that allows for altogether different responses to the imagined spectacle. Emotion spreads as rumor repeats itself, and in the country domain outside Philadelphia, “[its auditors] were very different affected. As often as the tale was embellished with new incidents, or inforced [sic] by new testimony, the hearer grew pale, his breath was stifled by inquietudes, his blood was chilled and his stomach bereaved of its usual energies.… Some were haunted by a melancholy bordering upon madness, and some, in consequence of sleepless panics … were attacked by lingering or mortal diseases.”63 Here we see rumor introduce diversity into a sentimental domain that has hitherto been characterized by its constituents’ ability to think the same way about things. The operations of fiction (“as often as the tale was embellished”) are held directly responsible for these varied reactions. To show that sympathy is no more normative or natural a response than any other, Brown includes an auditor who grows pale and breathes with difficulty—one, in other words, who experiences a lesser form of the disease itself. There are, on the other hand, those who take the news too personally (“some were haunted by a melancholy bordering upon madness”). If these people are badly affected by the rumor, then those who experience sleepless panic experience the account of the disease-ridden city as if it were the city itself. They fail to distinguish fact from fiction, which, in Brown’s view, amounts to contracting the disease.
When Mervyn responds to the news of the plague as pure spectacle, he, by contrast, displays the expedient form of sympathetic identification I have described: “This rumor was of a nature to absorb and suspend the whole soul. A certain sublimity is connected with enormous dangers, that imparts to our consternation or our pity, a tincture of the pleasing.… My own person was exposed to no hazard. I had leisure to conjure up terrific images and to personate the witnesses and sufferers of this calamity. This employment … was ardently pursued, and must therefore have been recommended by some nameless charm.”64 Unlike those who react to the rumor as if it were the plague itself, Mervyn treats it as a fiction that allows him to aestheticize the sufferings of the plague victims without actually feeling them. According to Smith, anyone far removed from a spectacle of suffering—anyone like Mervyn and the other auditors who are “exposed to no hazard”—should either react to the spectacle of suffering with sympathetic distance or not react at all. As he puts it, “Whatever interest we take in the fortunes of those with whom we have no acquaintance or connexion [sic], and who are placed altogether outside our sphere of activity, can only produce anxiety to ourselves, without any manner of advantage to them.”65 But in a devastating critique of the Enlightenment model, Mervyn’s distance from the spectacle of suffering produces an avid sense of aesthetic “charm,” as opposed to the moderated suffering that supposedly accompanies disinterest. This in itself would invalidate Smith’s notion of sympathy, which depends on proximity to the spectacle, but Mervyn’s ability to take pleasure in others’ pain marks him as lacking any form of internal spectator, at least any form that Smith would recognize.
Rather than rush to condemn Mervyn as somehow deficient, though, let us pause to consider the implications