Alternative Sentimentalisms: The Critique of 'Feeling Right' in Four Antebellum American Sentimental Novels

This dissertation explores the way a few antebellum American writers responded to the pressures and promises of liberal democracy by trying to educate their readership out of a condition of tutelage. I argue that these writers, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Joseph Smith, find mainstream US sentimental education inadequate to the task it sets for itself: to produce a citizenry capable of governing itself. But where other writers interested in alternative modes of democratic indoctrination might focus on alternatives to sentimentalism, these writers investigate the possibilities of resistance to an enervating and manipulative sentimentalism from within the sentimental mode.;The point of criticism of mainstream sentimentalism common to all these texts is that they see it as grounded on a logic of escalation, which leads away from genuine engagement with political opponents toward special pleading and moral grandstanding. Of primary concern is the role of "feeling right" in the organization of political groups. How does one "feel right" without feeling "the same"? And how does a nation that praises itself for promoting the freedom of speech remain united under an ideological regime of common feeling without undercutting that principle? This dissertation traces through its four central texts predictions of a future of dysfunctional politics, and their attempts to reconfigure sentimental rhetoric such that its subjects become habituated to productive dialogue in a democratic setting.