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영어

This paper examines how sympathy works as an effective medium for producing a consensus between members of the nation in William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (1789). The text delineates a tragic story of Harrington and Harriot who nearly escape an incestuous relationship because of their father’s wrongdoing. Deeply shocked, Harriot loses her health and dies, while Harrington shoots himself. By warning about the threats of seduction to the family, a microcosm of the nation, and emphasizing the importance of female eduction, the novel emphasizes that the members of the new Republic need to educate themselves into proper citizens. Taking an epistolary form, the novel amplifies the educative function through the multiple exchange of letters between the characters. A variety of perspectives presented by each letter-writer produces polyphonic heteroglossia in Bakhtin’s term. However, as the title suggests, sympathy promotes to reconcile disparate standpoints of each letter-writer. Mrs. Holmes and Worthy represent a voice of proper citizens, and function as a center of sympathy and consensus between letter-writers. As a result, the process of producing sympathy turns out to be a process of exerting power over citizens through discipline in Foucauldian sense. Sympathy plays a double role in building a nation as ‘an imagined community,’ and exercising power over its citizens. I argue that this project of building a nation and educating citizens properly helps to enthrone The Power of Sympathy as the first American novel.