Unsettling Sympathy

Discussions of politics and the novel often turn to sympathy, or the imagination of the thoughts and feelings of others, in spite of widespread recognition of sympathy’s limitations. This essay uses Harriet Martineau’s historical romance of the Haitian Revolution, The Hour and the Man (1841), to consider how novels might seek to move or even motivate readers in ways that do not rely on sympathy. Rather than asking readers to feel for or with her characters, Martineau encourages readers to experience how slavery complicates or even precludes the possibility of sympathy.