LITMIR.BIZ

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that destroys the sentimental household. As the city extends its network of communication through rumor to incorporate the domestic domain, contagion and the gathering dysfunction of community itself erodes the boundaries of the sympathetic community. Once this happens, the sympathetic operations of the sentimental community likewise change. Like all the other country auditors, each Hadwin family member reacts to the same rumor in different ways, the most extreme form of which is Susan Hadwin’s “paroxysms of a furious insanity.”⁶⁶ When, driven frantic with worry for her absent fiancé, she tries to kill herself, her feelings step out of line with the rest of her family. As the country becomes an extension of the city through the operations of the rumor, the natural bonds of sympathy are severed. Susan’s exaggerated reaction and eventual demise snap the fragile bonds of the Smithian community.

      Mervyn, on the other hand, proves adaptable in the face of this paradigm shift. For all his nostalgic, unfounded longing that his sojourn with the Hadwins would prove “the return to a long-lost and much-loved home,” he cannot return to a community to which he never belonged. He remains a cultural outsider throughout the Hadwin episode, his full integration inhibited by such “obstacle[s]” as religion and economic status. Indeed, his own version of sympathy—performative, superficial, expedient—destroys this community. Consider his response to Susan’s suffering in the face of her fiancé’s absence. Susan’s hyperbolic dismay already disqualifies her as the object of sympathy, so rather than engage in such an exchange by experiencing a lesser degree of the emotion, Mervyn reacts by imagining a purely fictional scenario in which he brings back the truant fiancé safe and sound from the city: “With what transports will his arrival be hailed? How amply will their impatience and their sorrow be compensated by his return! In the spectacle of their joys, how rapturous will be my delight!”⁶⁷

      Like so many of Mervyn’s reflections, this series of purely conjectural statements has no foundation in anyone’s emotions but his own. There is no such spectacle to read, only his urge to produce one. He projects what his own reaction to such a scenario would be—transport and rapture—onto other members of this community. Mervyn has not responded with sympathy to their distress; rather, he has mistaken his own emotions for those of his friends.

      As a fictional construct, this fantasy nevertheless has the power to change the world because it turns sympathy into a destructive force. Its artificial allure and the approval he stands to gain prompt Mervyn, in search of the fiancé, to disappear without telling anyone of his intentions. This decision precipitates a disastrous chain of events: Hadwin follows Mervyn to the city and is fatally exposed to the yellow fever, a raving Susan dies of consumption, and the family farm falls to a brutish uncle who shares none of the Hadwin family feeling. In making his plans, Mervyn never considers that his actions may have dire consequences because he assumes that, were their situations reversed, the Hadwins would think and act the same way that he does. Once difference has intruded into the sentimental domain, those responses become unpredictable. What can really destroy a community, Brown suggests, is the assumption of sameness among its members.

      On the other hand, Mervyn’s obtrusiveness proves socially advantageous when we assume that community is made of different people, all of whom will respond in different ways to any given scenario. Mervyn treats everyone, from loved ones to enemies to mere acquaintances, with the same common geniality. This democratic approach to sociability may operate destructively in those sentimental spaces that presuppose intimacy at a deeper level, but it serves Mervyn extremely well in situations where cultural difference prevails. In his encounter with Hadwin’s brother Philip, for example, the violent anger of this self-interested bully is kept at bay only by Mervyn’s unshakeable yet entirely staged affability. The apparently irreconcilable differences between Mervyn and Philip are suspended by a performative stance that Mervyn quite consciously adopts for the purpose of self-preservation. As he acknowledges, “I was indebted for my safety to an inflexible adherence to this medium.”⁶⁸ His performance of congeniality—that is, his “medium”—allows their differences to provide the basis for a functional unity. Mervyn’s superficiality works well in this scenario because he accepts the fundamental difference between two potential combatants and decides to leave those differences alone.

      This kind of performativity adapts and responds to an altogether different model of subjectivity. With rumor, the source of emotion is not a single individual but an entire collective. To put it another way, feeling courses through the social body without apparent origin or destination. By generating different responses to a purely fictional spectacle, rumor undermines the notion that one can both have one’s own feelings and still share the feelings of others; those exposed to the rumor catch emotion as if it were the plague itself. With this in mind, consider Brown’s description of Philadelphia in the grip of the yellow fever: “Terror had exterminated all the sentiments of nature. Wives were deserted by husbands, and children by parents.… Men were seized by this disease in the streets; passengers fled from them; entrance into their own dwellings was denied to them; they perished in the public ways.”⁶⁹ Here Brown draws on an older literary tradition that associates descriptions of plague with disintegration and the inversion of social norms. In A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), for example, Daniel Defoe cites several instances in which conventional familial and labor relations have become monstrous: “Mothers murder[ ] their own children in their lunacy [or] hired nurses who attended infected people, us[e] them barbarously, starving them, smothering them, or by other wicked means hastening their end.”⁷⁰ In Defoe’s London, officials respond to the plague by removing many middle-class families to the country and quarantining the remaining populace by locking people in their homes. At pains to preserve the institution of the family through removal or vaccination, Defoe therefore treats these barbarous inversions of familial love as exceptional and offers many more instances in which families stick together despite the plague’s incursions.⁷¹ Brown’s yellow fever, by contrast, constitutes a full-blown assault on Smith’s model, where panic in the City of Brotherly Love destroys every emotional attachment and with it the sentimental family. In the place of a sympathetic community, Brown substitutes a social model whose dynamics resemble the contagion, using the passive voice (“men were seized”) to describe the plague as an entity that enters directly into the subject’s body and assumes control.

      Mervyn’s emotional expediency qualifies him as a member of such a network. His superficiality may have destroyed the sentimental model of social relations, but it proves ideally suited to his life in the city, where he is thoroughly indiscriminate in his attachments, paying no heed to either difference or commonality: “I was formed on purpose for the gratification of social intercourse. To love and to be loved; to exchange hearts and mingle sentiments with all the virtuous and amiable … I felt no scruple on any occasion, to disclose every feeling and every event. Any one who could listen, found me willing to talk. Every talker found me willing to listen. Every one had my sympathy and kindness, without claiming it, but I claimed the kindness and sympathy of every one.”⁷² Mervyn’s emotional bonds are characterized by immediacy, spontaneity, and transfusion—he wants to “exchange” and “mingle” with others rather than preserve and distance himself. He may regard the be all and end all of social attachment as “to love and be loved,” but he repeatedly violates the foundational distinctions between subject and object implicit in that formula—namely, to love as a subject and to be loved as an object. For him, there is no difference at all. Brown dramatizes this principle by having Mervyn habitually invade people’s houses, bedrooms, parlors, even prison cells. This intrusion into private interiors reflects and produces a lack of social separation, analogous to his unwillingness to observe the imaginative boundaries that separate people’s emotions. By refusing to observe these boundaries, Mervyn breaks the Lockean rule of one-mind-per-body and introduces the possibility that one mind may exist across two bodies. The logic of individualism demands that such a possibility be foreclosed, and Mervyn consequently encounters violent reactions against his intrusions whenever he enters a domain in which that logic prevails. Whether he is shot by a prostitute or denounced as a thief, Mervyn is excluded because he represents a force that would destroy individualism. However, to grasp this notion of invasion—by Mervyn, rumor, or the plague itself—as another model of humanity altogether rather than as a disruption of Enlightenment categories, we should imagine Mervyn’s model of social relations as something on the order of

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