Coda Election Fatigue

Abstract

If preceding chapters employed an atmospheric metaphor for thinking about politics’ affective environments the Coda argues that recent theories of temporality provide another important model for understanding Gilded Age political emotion. The chapter examines Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Washington novel Through One Administration (1881), whose title invokes a unit of official time that also bookends the novel’s love plots. Like Whitman’s neologism “presidentiad,” Burnett’s “administration” privileges the rhythms of electoral politics while also imagining that such timeframes could organize alternative forms of intimacy. This chapter argues that Burnett’s tale of Washingtonians moving alongside but not fully in step with administrative time suggests a rubric for revising recent queer theories of temporality which often valorize asynchronous sociality as necessarily radical. The chapter concludes by noting that in twenty-first-century vernacular “election fatigue” offers a related diagnosis of negative political emotions as indexes of the public’s fraught engagement with politics.