Affecting Anxiety: The Power of Sentimental Novels

I enjoyed reading Elizabeth Barnes's chapter--it provided a nice summation of many things we've been discussing (and I've been blogging about) throughout the semester while also offering a taste of something new.

The struggle for the novel to gain a true, unique national identity was rough, especially when you look at a work such as Charlotte Temple, with its ambiguous British/American label. (For more on my thoughts regarding Charlotte Temple, please refer to my blog post on that novel done earlier this year.) Barnes also highlighted the correlation between the promotion of American nationalism and the promotion of the "American" novel--was The  Power of Sympathy truly worthy of being called "the first American novel," or was it simply an arbitrary label and nothing more? And did its failure on the market have anything to do with its inability to capture the essence of what Americans wanted in their novels? Perhaps it would have fared better had there not been the expectation of it being quintessentially American. 

As we see through the popularity of Charlotte Temple, and as makes sense given the prevalence of Enlightenment ideals, American readers wanted to feel something when they read their novels. Even if the plot was, as it was in The Power of Sympathy, something that could have (and did) happened on American soil, people wanted their affectations evoked. People wanted validation for their own feelings and emotions, and novels helped to give them that. Successful novels allowed readers to have a dialogue between the text and their emotional psyches, and in such novels, the anxiety of influence--which to me seems inescapable, then, now, always--mattered not at all.