ABSTRACT
Just as Harriet Martineau in The Prince envisioned the process of sympathetic engagement as one in which not only girls, but also boys, could participate, so, too, had eighteenth-century British philosophers of sympathy and sentiment theorized the sympathetic act as one open to both sexes. Lord Shaftesbury, David Hume, and Adam Smith all used the general “he,” not the specific “she” in their influential essays exploring the functions of emotion in the process of engaging with another; as Shaftesbury notes, “there is naturally in every Man such a degree of social Affection as inclines him to seek the Familiarity and Friendship of his Fellows” (255). Sentimental literature during the high period of the cult of sensibility (1740s-1770s) often featured male protagonists: both Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) and Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768) take the sympathetic act as central to male, not to female, subjectivity.
