Sick Sympathies: Pathological Affect in Stowe’s Dred

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ For more criticism on Dred, see Philip McFarland’s The Loves of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Joan D. Hendrick’s Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life.

² For criticism on the problematic nature of sympathy in sentimental literature see Laurent Berlant’s The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, Ch.1, and Elizabeth Barnes’ States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel, Ch. 4.

³ For more information on the history of the cholera cloud, see Projit Bihari Mukharji’s article “The ‘Cholera Cloud’ in the Nineteenth-Century ‘British World’: History of an Object-Without-an-Essence”.

⁴ For reports of cholera’s atmospheric origins, see Bell, Theodore S. “ART. I.–Epidemic Influences, and the Duties of the Medical Profession in Relation to them,” and “Cholera Poison”.

⁵ Altschuler similarly observes in The Medical Imagination that “when cholera arrives, Stowe peppers her descriptions of the disease with the adjective “peculiar,” reminding her readers once more of its intimate connection to the “peculiar institution” (113).

⁶ Freehling, William W. The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854. Oxford UP, 1990, pp. 58–59.

⁷ See Maria Karafilis, “Spaces of Democracy in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred,” Arizona Quarterly 55.3, 44; and Cynthia S. Hamilton, “Dred: Intemperate Slavery,” Journal of American Studies 34.2, 277.

⁸ For more information on rabies and its cultural history see Bill Wasic’s and Monica Murphy’s Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus.