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American Sympathizers: Confessing Illicit Feeling from the Civil War to the Vietnam War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 April 2018

SARAH SILLIN
SARAH SILLIN*
Affiliation:
Department of English, Gettysburg College. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

Portraits of sympathizers recur across American literature, from nineteenth-century narratives by Edward Everett Hale Jr., Loreta Velazquez, and Walt Whitman to Viet Thanh Nguyen's twenty-first-century novel. Together, their texts elucidate why this understudied trope remains provocative. Whereas nineteenth-century literature often imagines how sympathy fosters national cohesion, feeling for the enemy threatens such stability and prompts government efforts to regulate sentiment. Sympathizers may perform loyalty to claim the authority associated with white masculinity. Yet they also gain power by confessing to criminal sentiments. This figure thus embodies fantasies of rebellion, fears of national dissolution, and the state's affective power.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 3 , August 2019 , pp. 613 - 635
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2018 

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References

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7 Writers deployed “sympathizer” to refer both to compassionate, upstanding citizens and suspected traitors; the term's multiple meanings signal cultural tensions over when to valorize and when to punish fellow feeling. For clarity, I use the phrase largely in the latter sense, as Nguyen deploys it. Earlier work on the trope typically centers on characters who are celebrated for feeling that serves the state. For instance, Mielke, Laura, Moving Encounters: Sympathy and the Indian Question in Antebellum Literature (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

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43 Robin Sager offers a more extensive analysis of how Velazquez appropriates white masculine authority through cross-dressing to serve the Confederacy, in particular. I build on this work to consider how Velazquez's display of sentiment enables her to adopt this identity. Sager, “The Multiple Metaphoric Civil Wars.”

44 Velazquez, 500.

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61 Recent headlines include Scott Shane, Matt Apuzzo, and Eric Schmitt, “Online Embrace from ISIS, a Few Clicks Away,” New York Times, 9 Dec. 2015, A1–A16; and Barrett Devlin, “Some Terror Sympathizers Get Counseling,” Wall Street Journal, 6 Aug. 2015, A3.

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68 Ibid.

69 Ibid., 223.

70 Ibid., 58.

71 Ibid., 174.

72 Ibid., 74.

73 Ibid., 72.

74 Nguyen reinforces that the Asian refugee must affirm US exceptionalism through his affect when the captain celebrates Americans’ right to the “pursuit of happiness,” while carefully avoiding any acknowledgment that he is either unhappy (failing to attain the American dream) or happy (highlighting others’ unhappiness). Ibid., 254.

75 Pat C. Hoy II professes to being “so taken” by the “first quarter of the book that I believed myself to be reading an actual confession.” Pat C. Hoy II, “Spying with Sympathy and Love,” Sewanee Review, 123, 4 (2015), 685–90, 685.

76 For example, see Elisabeth Mermann-Jozwiak's review, “What I'm Reading: The Sympathizer,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 17 April, 2016, A23.

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81 Ibid., 72.

82 Ibid., 312–14.

83 Parikh, An Ethics of Betrayal, 12.

84 Nguyen, 355.