Novels of Sensibility
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Novel of Sensibility (The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature):
Sensibility
During the mid-eighteenth century, “sensibility” became something of a key word, a nodal point in a web of ideas that encompassed literature as well as philosophy, politics, and science. Despite its importance, contemporaries found the word difficult to define. In her poem “Sensibility” (1782), Hannah More writes:
Sweet SENSIBILITY! Thou secret pow’r
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Thy subtle essence still eludes the chains
Of definition, and defeats her pains.
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To those who know thee not no words can paint,
And those who know thee, know all words are faint.
To complicate the matter, the word was closely related to two equally hazy terms, “sympathy” and “sentimentality.” While the three were sometimes used interchangeably, it is possible to make distinctions. “Sensibility” generally denoted an innate ability to experience readily and intensely a broad spectrum of emotions, perceptions, and sensations, but especially a kind of tender, pleasurable sorrow. “Sympathy” referred more specifically to the act of entering into the emotional state of another: feeling, not so much for, but with another. “Sentimental” meant simply “characterized by feeling,” though in the nineteenth century it came to connote inauthentic, clichéd, or superficial emotion. This etymological shift marks a broader sea change in the understanding of feeling itself. Indeed, investigating the eighteenth-century discourse of sensibility reveals the extent to which the understanding of feeling—perhaps even the experience of feeling—is subject to historical change.
Literary historians sometimes refer to the mid-eighteenth century (1740–1785) as the “Age of Sensibility,” in contradistinction to the preceding “Age of Reason” (1700–1740). Briefly, seventeenth-century “Enlightenment” thought placed a new emphasis on reason as the most important human ability. Without necessarily excluding a belief in God, reason was privileged over faith as the primary source of knowledge and chief guiding principle in human affairs. This value is reflected in much early-eighteenth-century literature, including the poetry of Alexander Pope; it was also entwined with political events, notably the French Revolution. The reasonable notion that all men (and perhaps women) are equal in view of their inborn capacity to reason formed part of the basis for revolutionary thinking.
This interest in reason, however, provoked an equally strong interest in what seemed an excluded term: that is, feeling. Philosophies of sympathy, or “fellow feeling” for those subject to injustices, came to supplement or even supplant reason as a basis for moral behavior, the arts, and social activism. When it came to revolutionary politics, however, sympathy sometimes muddied the waters. One might feel sympathy for oppressed peasants in France, yet it was just as easy, perhaps easier, to feel sympathy for the guillotined aristocrats. In a certain light, the value on feeling appears democratic—if all humans have a capacity to reason, all humans must have a capacity to feel. But the equalizing potential of sensibility was countermanded by the notion that the higher classes had more sensibility than the lower classes. Simple peasant people might become affecting objects for those with sensibility to spend, but would not be expected to experience such refined feelings themselves.
Nevertheless, a strong current of abolitionist and anti-imperialist feeling runs through much of the discourse on sensibility. In Henry Mackenzie's 1771 novel The Man of Feeling, the protagonist says, “You tell me of immense territories subject to the English: I cannot think of their possessions without being led to inquire by what right they possess them. … What title have the subjects of another kingdom to establish an empire in India?” Such novels, moreover, continually model individual acts of charity, and an attitude of benevolence toward social outcasts. Yet critics always recognized the danger that feeling would become an end in itself, diverting impulses that might otherwise have energized concrete attempts at social reform. Mackenzie himself expressed this concern in “On Novel-writing,” which appeared in The Lounger (1785): “in the enthusiasm of sentiment there is much the same danger as in the enthusiasm of religion, of substituting certain impulses and feelings of what may be called a visionary kind, in the place of real practical duties, which, in morals, as in theology, we might not improperly denominate good works.”
Fictions of Sensibility
. . . the discourse of feeling was closely entwined with the practice of representation. Literature came to be viewed as a forum in which sensibility could be at once modeled and exercised. In Britain, this literary project centered on the novel, though it makes an earlier appearance in drama. Just after the turn of the century, Sir Richard Steele pioneered the genre of “sentimental comedy” as a reaction against the bawdy wit of Restoration comedy. His plays model the virtues generally associated with sensibility: fidelity, sincerity, altruism, self-consciousness, responsiveness; a belief in following one's heart and marrying for love; a lack of interest in wealth or social position; an aversion to cynicism, duplicity, and the abuse of power; a determination to make morally right choices; an appreciation for beauty; and a heightened sensitivity to others’ pain. Designed to move the audience to tears, the plays are “comedies” in the sense that they end happily and reflect optimism about human capacities. Steele did not have many followers in England, though even in novels the dynamics of sympathy are in many respects theatrical.
Novels of sensibility (also called “novels of sentiment” or “sentimental novels”) purport to provide moral instruction in the form of “examples” or “warnings.” Ideal characters model virtuous behavior and refined sensibility, while emotionally overcharged scenes give readers themselves a chance to manifest emotion in the form of flushes, smiles, sighs, and, especially, tears.
Sexuality and Gender
During the 1790s, sensibility continued to be celebrated in Ann Radcliffe's gothic novels. But a hostile reaction against sensibility took hold by the end of the century. The opposition was strikingly heterogeneous: contradictory attacks were launched on a wide variety of political, social, moral, and aesthetic grounds. Broadly speaking, sensibility fell victim to a tectonic shift in British culture, one that robbed its ideals of plausibility. The shift took place within a generation: practitioners of the genre, including Mackenzie and Wollstonecraft, later participated in its critique. Novels that had been tremendously popular now seemed ridiculous to the same readers. After reading The Man of Feeling to a group of friends in 1826, Lady Louisa Smith wrote in a letter, “I am afraid I perceived a sad change in it, or myself—which was worse, and the effect altogether failed. Nobody cried, and at some of the passages, the touches I used to think so exquisite—Oh Dear! They laughed.”
One of many fault lines at work in this shift was the reconfiguration of gender difference. “Men of feeling” were now ridiculed, derided as effeminate or emasculated. Critics today also call these heroes “feminized,” arguing that for a brief moment it was fashionable for a man to be feminine. Yet this appellation may be anachronistic, a retrospective application of the binary opposition between masculinity and femininity that emerged after the turn against sensibility. To see Harley, for example, as feminine requires that we impose gendered associations not made in the text itself. Neither “manly” nor “womanly,” Harley is literally selfless, a kind of blank openness—as though personality might be understood as a shifting bundle of feelings held together by benevolent inclinations. Carried toward its most radical limits, then, sensibility worked to evacuate the significance of gender as a category of identity. However, this radical potential was always curtailed, in part by the notion that women had greater innate capacities for feeling than did men.
While sensibility was valued, this belief gave women a certain amount of cultural authority—and, by proxy, a certain claim to authorship. Yet hypothetical authority did not always translate into real social power, especially because feeling was so often linked to powerlessness. Sentimental heroines are confined, thwarted, subjected to the sexual machinations of villains, sometimes hindered by their feelings from speaking, acting, or reasoning. They often become objectified spectacles, their sensitive bodies pruriently displayed to a more powerful male gaze. Such gender-power dynamics are especially disturbing when “men of feeling” visit beautiful madwomen, directly linking feminine attractiveness to the absence of agency and volition. In such scenes, moreover, the troubling possibility that lots of feeling might lead to madness is decisively displaced onto women. As the century turned, sensibility, still feminized, was more emphatically pathologized. “Nervousness” and “delicacy,” which had been terms of approbation, became medical conditions; the pretense of protecting “nervous” women from overstimulation was used to limit their freedoms.
In texts of the 1790s and 1800s, one can trace a victorious effort to dissociate masculinity from sensibility, leaving it tied to women. Some women writers attempted to counter this trend by rejecting sensibility themselves, stressing women's rationality and good judgment. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft argues that sensibility is antifeminist: it undermines women's credibility. Jane Austen mocks the “cult of sensibility” in much of her work, especially Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Northanger Abbey (1818). Sensibility had become a social and literary liability, a ruse for sexism, an association women writers needed to negate.
