Abstract
Lord Dorchester, the male protagonist of Sarah Fielding’s The History of Ophelia (1760), sets off to fight a duel in order to settle a misunderstanding caused by the naive Ophelia at her first ball. When Ophelia finds that Lord Dorchester left a will she understands the seriousness of the situation and falls into fits of fainting from which she barely recovers. A strikingly similar episode takes place in Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1791). When Miss Milner hears the news that Dorriforth, her guardian, is about to fight a duel with Sir Frederick Lawnly, she ‘sunk speechless on the floor’.1 In both novels, the heroine’s fainting is occasioned by a threat to the life of the man she loves – knowingly or unknowingly; yet social restrictions do not allow her to admit and express this feeling. While fainting reveals their deepest emotion, it is also a disadvantage for both heroines: it prevents them stopping the life-threatening event and assisting where they would be most needed.
Oh write it not, my hand – the name appears
Already written – wash it out, my tears!
In vain lost Eloïsa weeps and prays,
Her heart still dictates, and her hand obeys.
(Alexander Pope, ‘Eloisa to Abelard’)
Thus the content of a repressed image or idea can make its way into consciousness, on condition that it is negated. Negation is a way of taking cognizance of what is repressed; indeed it is already a lifting of the repression, though not, of course, an acceptance of what is repressed. (Sigmund Freud, ‘Negation’)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Sarah Fielding, The History of Ophelia, ed. Peter Sabor (Plymouth, UK: Broadview, 2004) 224–5
Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story, ed. J. M. S. Tompkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 67.
R. F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (London: Macmillan, 1974) 56–64
Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) 1–19.
Hannah More, Sacred Dramas […] To which it is added, Sensibility: A Poem. 5th edn (1782; London: T. Cadell, 1787) 284
Janet Todd discusses the character type of the ‘woman of feeling’ in Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986).
G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) 23–36.
Mary Ann O’Farrell’s Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century Novel and the Blush (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997).
G.S. Rousseau’s essay, ‘Nerves, Spirits and Fibres: Toward the Origins of Sensibility’ (1975), Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature, Culture and Sensibility (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) 157–84.
Julia Borossa, Hysteria (Cambridge: Icon, 2001) 70–1.
Otto Kernberg, introduction, The Work of the Negative, by André Green, trans. Andrew Weller (London and New York: Free Association, 1999) xiii–xiv
George Cheyne’s The English Malady: or, a Treatise of Nervous Diseases of All Kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriachal, and Hysterical Distempers, etc. (London: G. Strahan, 1733) 14–16.
John Quincy, Lexicon Physico-Medicum; or, a New Medicinal Dictionary, 5th edn (1719; London: Longman, 1736) 438–9.
Stephen Blanchard’s short, seventeenth-century definition: ‘a sudden Prostration or Swooning with a very weak or no Pulse, and a Depravation of Sense and Motion’. A Physical Dictionary (London: J. D., 1684). His dictionary was re-edited in the 1720s.
Robert James, A Medicinal Dictionary: Including Physic, Surgery, Anatomy, Chymistry, and Botany, in All Their Branches Relative to Medicine (London: T. Osborne, 1743–5).
G. Motherby, A New Medical Dictionary; or, General Repository of Physic (London: Johnson, 1775).
Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London: W. Strahan, 1755).
J.A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 4th edn (London: Penguin, 1992) 178, 255, 890.
William Godwin’s Deloraine (London: Richard Bentley, 1833)
Robert Hooper’s Compendious Medical Dictionary (London: Murray and Highley, 1798)
Eric Partridge, Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (London: Routledge, 1958).
William Battie, A Treatise on Madness (London: J. Whiston and B. White, 1758)
William Rowley, A Treatise on Female, Nervous, Hysterical, Hypochondriachal, Bilious, Convulsive Diseases, with Thoughts on Madness, Suicide […] (London: C. Nourse, 1788)
Robert James, A Medicinal Dictionary: Including Physic, Surgery, Anatomy, Chymistry, and Botany, in All Their Branches Relative to Medicine (London: T. Osborne, 1743–5)
William Perfect, Cases of Insanity and Nervous Disorders Successfully Treated (Rochester: T. Fisher, [1785?])
Robert Whytt, Observations on the Nature, Causes, and Cure of Those Disorders which Have Been Commonly Called Nervous, Hypochondriac, or Hysteric. (Edinburgh: T. Becket, 1765)
John Haslam, Observations on Insanity (London: F. and C. Rivington, 1798).
John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988) 201–40.
Deborah Down- Miers, ‘Springing the Trap: Subtexts and Subversions’, Fetter’d or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670–1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986) 308–23
Linda Bree, Sarah Fielding (New York: Twayne; London: Prentice Hall, 1996) 135ff
Gillian Skinner, Sensibility and Economics in the Novel, 1740–1800 (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s, 1999) 57–8.
Moira Dearnley, Distant Fields: Eighteenth-Century Fictions of Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001) 70–1.
Peter Sabor, introduction, The History of Ophelia, by Sarah Fielding (Plymouth, UK: Broadview, 2004) 19.
Valerie Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001) 1, 21, 67–85.
Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986) 161–4.
Sigmund Freud, ‘The Neuro-Psychoses of Defence’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey et al., vol. 3 (London: Vintage, 2001) 58–9
Sigmund Freud, ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ (1905), SE, vol. 7, esp. 41–8.
Nicola J. Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel 1790–1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) 1–22.
Peggy Kamuf, Fictions of Feminine Desire: Disclosures of Heloise (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982) 97–100.
Linda M. G. Zerilli, Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and Mill (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994) 16–59.
Mary Jacobus, Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 59–66.
Nancy K. Miller, The Heroine’s Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722–1782 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980) 106
Tony Tanner, Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979) 122–3
Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism” (1927) SE, vol. 21, 148–57.
David Marshall, ‘Fatal Letters: Clarissa and the Death of Julie’, Clarissa and Her Readers: New Essays for the Clarissa Project, eds. Carol Houlihan Flynn and Edward Copeland (New York: AMS, 1999) 213–53.
Judith N. Shklar, ‘Rousseau’s Images of Authority (Especially in La Nouvelle Heloise)’, The Cambridge Companion to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Patrick Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 167–9.
Peter Mortensen, ‘Rousseau’s English Daughters: Female Desire and Male Guardianship in British Romantic Fiction’, English Studies 83:4 (2004): 360.
Henry Mackenzie, Julia de Roubigné, ed. Susan Manning (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1999) I, letter 20, 70–1.
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 170, emphases added.
James Boaden, Memoirs of Mrs Inchbald: Including Her Familiar Correspondence with the Most Distinguished Persons of Her Time, vol. 2 (London: Bentley, 1833) 152–4
Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel 1780–1805 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) 78.
Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story, ed. J. M. S. Tompkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 39.
Ian Balfour, ‘Promises, Promises: Social and Other Contracts in the English Jacobins (Godwin/Inchbald)’, New Romanticisms: Theory and Critical Practice, eds. David L. Clark and Donald C. Goellnicht (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994) 239
Roger Manwell, Elizabeth Inchbald (Lanham: University Press of America, 1987) 72.
Annibel Jenkins, I’ll Tell You What: The Life of Elizabeth Inchbald (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2003) 280.
Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (London: Methuen, 1986) 301–2.
Freud, ‘Negation’ (1925) SE, vol. 19, 235–9.
André Green, On Private Madness (London: Karnac, 1997) 257.
Nora Nachumi, ‘“Those Simple Signs”: The Performance of Emotion in Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 11.3 (1999): 317–38
Jane Spencer, introduction, A Simple Story, by Elizabeth Inchbald, ed. J. M. S. Tompkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Patricia Meyer Spacks comments on Lord Elmwood’s identification of Matilda with her mother in Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) 200.
Rosine Jozef Perelberg, ‘The Interplay of Identifications: Violence, Hysteria, and the Repudiation of Femininity’, The Dead Mother: The Work of André Green, ed. Gregorio Kohon (London: Brunner-Routledge, 2001) 185.
Copyright information
© 2012 Ildiko Csengei
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Csengei, I. (2012). Women and the Negative: The Sentimental Swoon in Eighteenth-Century Fiction. In: Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230359178_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230359178_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-33904-4
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-35917-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)