Book Review

Bruce Burgett explores the effect of sentiment in the political and literary cultures of the early American republic. Part literary criticism and part historicist political theory, Sentimental Bodies argues that sentimental writers were fundamental to the articulation of the connections between the body and the body politic during the early republic. The historical importance of sentimentalism, Burgett suggests, lay in its paradoxical ability to treat the body and its sensations as ground for, and topic within, democratic debate. Or, as he puts it: "sentimentalism located readers' bodies as both pre-political sources of personal authenticity and as public sites of political contestation" (3). This capacity, Burgett proposes, was rooted in what he calls the "disestablishment of the body." With the democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century, the body ceased to be "one of the many phenomena ordered through pre-existing political, ethical, and theological systems." Instead, it became "the noumenal grounding of existence itself—a point of origin upon which political, ethical, and theological systems are then erected" (15). The contradictory implications of this disestablishment form the subject of Sentimental Bodies.	1
This new place of the corporeal, Burgett believes, framed the emergence of both republicanism and liberalism. He contends that rather than tracing the historical replacement of republicanism by liberalism, we would do better to see liberalism and republicanism as distinctive, continually recurring, strategies for social and political organization within democratic societies. Republicanism, in his telling, was fundamentally committed to an ongoing and expanding literary and political publicity. This commitment led to debate not only over the nature of the public realm but, perhaps unintentionally, over the place of the body within that public realm. Despite the public sphere's notoriously disembodied character, its structural pressure to unencumbered debate meant that the issues of body politics incessantly returned. Liberalism, on the other hand he insists, focused on the protection of privacy. While this focus allowed the private body to escape some public scrutiny, Burgett contends it ultimately worked to enable a representative state to demarcate rigid boundaries between public and private while narrowing discourse about the politically acceptable body. "For republicanism," Burgett argues, "the same acts and objects liberalism codes as obscene remain politically significant in both a broad sense due to the structural challenge they pose to the existing boundary between publicity and privacy, and in a narrow sense due to the ideological challenge they pose to the moral judgments invoked by the state in order to police that boundary" (147).	2
Sentimentalism, Burgett contends, oscillated between a republican and a liberal form. "The utopian promise of sentimentalism relies upon its structural commitment to the publication of all bodily sensations—sexual and non-sexual—as a non-heteronomous means of linking the body and body politic. Its ideological realization betrays that commitment by privatizing those (sexual) relations that threaten to disrupt the equivalence between 'code' and 'feeling' upon which sentimentalism depends" (156). Sentimentalism's contradictory relationship to publicity and privacy, to the literary public sphere and the representative state, offers a powerful ideological inscription of the contending republican and liberal visions. As a site where Americans argued out the realm of the politically and socially possible, Burgett argues, sentimentalism helped shape the structure of the national state and the relationship between law and the most intimate experience.	3
To develop this argument, Burgett ranges through a selective, but wide-ranging, set of texts and genres. Rhetorically, he proceeds from a discussion of the works of Arendt and Habermas to extended readings of George Washington's "Farewell Address" (1796), Hannah Foster's The Coquette (1797), Charles Brockden Brown's Clara Howard (1801), Commonwealth v. Sharpless (an obscene libel case, 1815) and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Conceptually, Burgett structures his argument around two central scholarly controversies: the political-theoretical debate on the relationship of republicanism and liberalism to democratic emancipation and the feminist literary-critical debate on the implications of sentimental literature for women. As regards the former, he draws primarily upon the work of Hannah Arendt, Claude Lefort, and especially Michael Warner and Jurgen Habermas; for the latter, the issues are set primarily in relationship to the arguments of Cathy Davidson, Ann Douglas, and Jane Tompkins.	4
As even this short discussion makes clear, Sentimental Bodies is a highly provocative work that contains challenging readings (especially, though not exclusively, of Brown's Clara Howard). But it is also a problematic one. For one thing, Burgett's categories (liberalism, republicanism, and sentimentalism) assume the capacity of agents. Is it really the case that "sentimentalism," for example, had a "structural commitment to the unfettered publication of bodily and intimate sensations" as opposed to sentimental writers having that commitment? That it is possible to read the texts as he proposes is clear. But that they had the historical meanings that he adduces is not. Burgett would have had to provide more evidence on authorial intent or cultural reception to secure that position. A related problem arises out of the relationship Burgett establishes between his theory and his historical materials. He insists that in Sentimental Bodies history "enters into the argument as a form of provocation to theory, while theory enters as a provocation to history" (20). But this admirably dialectical project is not particularly developed. Burgett brings theoretical formulations worked out elsewhere to bear on the literature of the early republic. But I, at least, was hard put to determine how examining the early republic altered our understanding of those theoretical formulations. The "provocation" went one way.	5
Nonetheless, Bruce Burgett has written a provocative study. That it does not complete its own agenda may be a mark of its ambition.	6
Michael Meranze University of California, San Diego

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