The Power of Sympathy

A Note on This Argument

This essay is part of the Resistance as Testimony series. Brown is not a major literary figure, but he is a significant inaugural one. The first American novel is, from TLA's angle, a revealing document: it establishes the American fictional tradition as one organized around moral concern, female virtue, and the consequences of transgression — concerns that are implicitly theological even when they are not explicitly religious.

The Moral Novel and Its Assumptions

The early American novel is organized around a moral framework that it does not always make explicit but that it consistently assumes: that virtue is real and distinguishable from vice, that transgression has consequences, that the formation of character matters, and that literature has a role in that formation. These assumptions are not self-evident. They are grounded, in the culture of the early republic, in a broadly Protestant moral theology that the secular liberalism of later American culture would progressively erode.

Brown’s novel makes these assumptions visible by insisting on them so directly. It is not a subtle book. But its lack of subtlety reveals the structure of the moral framework it embodies: a framework in which seduction is not merely a social problem but a sin, in which the consequences of transgression include not merely social disgrace but death, and in which the proper response to these facts is not therapeutic management but moral formation.

What The Power of Sympathy Reveals

The novel’s title refers to the sentimental theory of moral development that dominated Anglo-American moral philosophy in the late eighteenth century: the idea that human beings have a natural capacity for sympathy with others that, properly cultivated, produces virtue and, improperly managed, produces the dangerous “power” that the title names. The sympathy that should produce virtue becomes, in the novel, the instrument of seduction and destruction.

This is a more sophisticated moral psychology than the novel’s reputation suggests. The problem is not the absence of feeling but its misdirection — precisely the Augustinian account of sin as disordered love rather than simple wickedness. Brown arrived at this insight through the conventions of the sentimental novel rather than through theological reflection, but the insight itself is recognizably theological.

The Seed of the Woman

Genesis 3:15 describes a conflict that plays out, in the early American novel, as the struggle between female virtue and male predation — a struggle that the sentimental novel consistently frames in moral terms even when it lacks the theological vocabulary to name what is at stake.

The first American novel is, at its core, a story about the Fall: about the vulnerability of the innocent, the predation of the powerful, and the consequences of moral failure. That it cannot fully articulate what redemption would look like is a limitation of its form and its moment. But the diagnosis it offers — that human beings are capable of genuine wickedness and that the innocent require protection — is not wrong. It is the beginning of wisdom, if not its completion.