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Self-Consciousness and Sentimental Fiction

One of Transcendental philosophy’s effects was (as Emerson put it so well) to make the mind aware of itself. In fiction this meant attention to the “deeper psychology” that Henry James appreciated in Hawthorne. An essay in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, “Novels: Their Meaning and Mission” (1854), noted that because “the domain of the novel ranges over the entire field of the real and the ideal,” it “touches every point of man’s consciousness.” In the 1850s, such interest in consciousness, particularly selfconsciousness—the relation of the “me” to the “Not-Me” that Emerson had written about in his seminal Nature (1836)—began to inform fiction in a variety of ways. As sentimental novelists replaced piety with moralism, other novelists, influenced by their interest in the “transcendent,” moved toward a faith based in internalized religious experience. Neither adherence toward a faith of abstract doctrine nor good works satisfied their characters’ spiritual hunger, and thus they imagined a close relationship to God and particularly to Christ. In this private space, one discovered the true self. But because of the way such faith was conceived and realized, it was not easily accessible to others and could encourage solipsism.