Abstract
Oscar Wilde once claimed that pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about. And if pleasure still lacks the epistemic dignity accorded to desire in our own historical moment, a full generation after the varied provocations of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and other influential figures from the late twentieth century’s age of High Theory, then I will be happy if one of the consequences of this study is to contribute to a newly serious consideration of pleasure’s theoretical significance, if not also its dignity. Given the current dominance of various historicisms in the field of literary studies and the increasing indifference, distaste, and even hostility toward sexuality studies reflected in academic publishing trends of recent years, it seems more vital than ever to make clear the case for taking matters of affect and erotic feeling seriously. One of the implicit assumptions of this study is that, much like individual characters and the writers who create them, the realms of the aesthetic and the ethical touch one another as well. After Keats, we might say that both are matters “proved on our pulses,” things we understand most fully and meaningfully through feeling, not through reasoning. If this is still true today in the wake of new transformations in technology and our lived experience as political subjects in an increasingly globalized world—and I believe it is—the assumption that they were intimately conjoined, in fact inseparable, was far more prevalent in the post-Enlightenment world of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Pleasure is continually disappointed, reduced, deflated, in favor of strong, noble values: Truth, Death, Progress, Struggle, Joy, etc. Its victorious rival is Desire: we are always being told about Desire, never about Pleasure; Desire has an epistemic dignity, Pleasure does not.
Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Throughout this work I use capitalization to distinguish the broader cultural movement and stylistic mode of Sensibility from its merely local manifestations in texts from the period. This move also is made in part to insist that Sensibility, like Romanticism, refers not just to a discrete body of literary texts (much less the transitory fashion of a “cult”), but to a wide body of ideas, attitudes, and practices that were central to various forms of cultural production from approximately 1740 to 1840. The secondary literature in this area has grown substantially over the past 15 years, and the texts most relevant to my argument will be cited below when appropriate. I adopt a similar strategy with Sentimentalism, which should be distinguished throughout from its adjectival form, sentimental; for parity, I use the nonce word “sensibilious,” cognizant that readers might find this coinage eccentric but preferring to take this measure for the sake of clarity and precision of terms. There is precedent for this choice in fact in Jerome McGann’s The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (New York: Oxford UP, 1996).
I am in agreement here with similar claims made by Julie Ellison. See “The Politics of Fancy in the Age of Sensibility,” Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837, ed. Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Haefner (Philadelphia: U Penn P, 1994) and Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1999).
See also Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996)
and David Fairer, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century 1700–1789 (London: Longman, 2003).
See Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986) 4.
I borrow this term from Clifford Siskin, who uses it to describe how “culture” feeds notions of “disciplinarity” in the Long Eighteenth Century. See The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change 1700–1830 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998), especially Chapter 2.
John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford UP, 1988) and “Sentimental Novels,” The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996) 236–54;
Wendy Motooka, The Age of Reasons: Quixotism, Sentimentalism and Political Economy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York: Routledge, 1998);
Michael Bell, Sentimentalism, Ethics and the Culture of Feeling (New York: Palgrave, 2000);
Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (New York: Routledge, 1993);
Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996);
Julie Ellison, “Transatlantic Cultures of Sensibility: Teaching Gender and Aesthetics through the Prospect,” Approaches to Teaching British Women Poets of the Romantic Period, ed. Stephen C. Behrendt and Harriet Kramer Linkin (New York: MLA, 1997) 85–88, and Cato’s Tears;
G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992);
Gillian Skinner, Sensibility and Economics in the Novel, 1740–1800: The Price of a Tear (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999);
John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997);
Barbara Benedict, Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction, 1745–1800 (New York: AMS Press, 1994); McGann, Poetics of Sensibility;
Patricia Spacks, “Oscillations of Sensibility,” New Literary History 25 (1994): 505–20, as well as “The Poetry of Sensibility,” The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry, ed. John Sitter (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001) 249–69, and Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2003). Important exceptions to this rule include McGann’s Poetics of Sensibility, which he insists is “a book about writing and poetry, not a book about culture and ideas” (8); Spacks’s “Poetry of Sensibility”; and the final chapter of Fairer’s English Poetry. For related and often strikingly illuminating treatments, see also McGann, “Poetry, 1780–1832,” Byron and Romanticism (New York: Cambridge UP, 2002) as well as “Poetry,” An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776–1832, ed. Iain McCalman (New York: Oxford UP, 1999). Jones’ Radical Sensibility and Bell’s Sentimentalism include some discussion of Wordsworth’s poetry; Pinch’s Strange Fits of Passion features a chapter on Charlotte Smith’s poetry, and Ellison’s Cato’s Tears examines signal moments in early drama as well as a number of poets, including Anna Letitia Barbauld and Phillis Wheatley. In nearly all cases, any relation to the Sentimental and the Romantic traditions are brief and schematic rather than clarifying.
R.F. Brissenden still provides the most thorough and useful treatment of the linguistic and semantic issues in Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (London: Macmillan, 1974).
See also Erik Erämetsä, A Study of the Word “Sentimental” and of Other Linguistic Characteristics of Eighteenth-Century Sentimentalism in England (Helsinki, Finland: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1951).
I recognize this issue is far more complex and contested than what is suggested by these brief remarks. For a more nuanced account of the potential pleasures and dangers of twenty-first-century technologies as they continue to shape our world, see N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1999).
Robert Markley’s essay collection Virtual Realities and Their Discontents (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996) also provides stimulating reminders of the stakes involved if we forget the important irony that digital media is still dependent in many ways on the older technology of print, and perhaps more crucially, that it cannot escape “the politics of representation precisely because it is a projection of the conflicts of class, gender, and race that technology both encodes and seeks to erase” (4).
Although those who are inclined to draw an association here with the oscillation conventionally associated with wave patterns or other similar natural phenomena will not be far afield, this term has a specificity in the literature of the period. Laurence Sterne uses it himself in the earlier Tristram Shandy (New York: Oxford UP, 1983), for example, where the oscillations of the chaise Tristram is traveling in—and quite possibly writing in, too, as we see Yorick doing in the Preface of A Sentimental Journey—spread to Tristram himself, until they are with “the kindliest harmony vibrating within me” (Tristram Shandy 522). These oscillations thus connect the present narrator, his absent Uncle Toby—or more properly, Uncle Toby’s “amours”—the vehicle the narrator is traveling in, and the “vehicle” by which he is sharing the “communication” between each one of these different but necessarily connected experiences with his audience. As always in Sterne, the “secret spring either of sentiment or rapture” that enables this circulation of sympathetic connection is Sensibility. See also Spacks, “Oscillations of Sensibility” 505–20. It is also particularly appropriate that Coleridge, one of Sterne’s best if not most generous readers, refers in the course of his incisive remarks on Sterne’s “knowingness” to an effect this quality produces in his readers, “a certain oscillation in the individual’s own mind between the remaining good and the encroaching evil of his nature”; this criticism is reminiscent of similar attacks from reviewers who censured Sterne’s writing for its “ambiguity.” Coleridge in fact had mixed feelings himself about Sterne, as one sees in the difference between his enthusiastic response to the first sections of Tristram and his dismissal of the later volumes, as well as the A Sentimental Journey, as “poor sickly stuff” characterized by “a great deal of affectation” and “dirt.”
See Alan B. Howes, ed. Sterne: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974) section 116.
The literature on this connection is extensive. See, for example, George Rousseau, “Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres,” Studies in the Eighteenth Century, ed. R.F. Brissenden and J.C. Eade (Canberra: Australian National University, 1976);
Patricia Spacks, “‘Ev’ry Woman is at Heart a Rake’,” Eighteenth Century Studies 8.1 (Fall 1974): 27–46;
G.J. Barker-Benfield, “Sensibility,” Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776–1832, ed. Iain McCalman (New York: Oxford UP, 1999) 102–14, and The Culture of Sensibility (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992), especially Chapter 6. In related work not explicitly addressing literature of Sensibility, Julie Carlson makes the observation that works of this period seem to be much more invested in embodiment, unlike the often more hostile Romantic texts that follow; see her excellent piece, “Forever Young: Master Betty and the Queer Stage of Youth in English Romanticism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 95.3 (Summer 1996): 575–602.
For a good discussion of how the Della Cruscan interchanges functioned, see Elizabeth Fay’s A Feminist Introduction to Romanticism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998). I will return to this crucial movement in chapter 2 because it is still ignored in most studies of Sensibility and Romanticism and I believe it offers one of the clearest links between the two traditions. In addition to Fay, McGann’s Poetics of Sensibility
and Judith Pascoe’s Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1997) offer exceptions to this critical absence. McGann makes a similar point about what I am calling performativity, noting that for texts in this tradition “the act of writing instantiates its subject” (Poetics of Sensibility 66). It is important to note that the performative elements are not simply reducible to matters of “theatricality” as elaborated by some critics. Pascoe’s excellent study, for instance, attends to the various ways Romantic writers draw on an earlier legacy of public, theatrical performance, especially in the literary and political culture of the 1790s. As important as this contribution is to our understanding of the grounds on which Romanticism was built, it fails to give adequate weight and attention to the powerful influence of performative works of Sensibility, which constitute more than simply a “pre-Romantic” phase leading up to a Romantic movement. For an extensive and original attempt to renovate this outdated concept,
see Marshall Brown, Preromanticism (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991).
Cynthia Wall offers convincing observations about how readers made this connection during the earlier part of the century in her excellent Introduction to Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock (New York: Bedford, 1998) 3–38. In her thorough analysis of the phenomenon of “sex panic” during the 1790s, Katherine Binhammer connects these anxieties as well because they are both documented and incited by texts in relation to excess sexual behavior at this time, especially in the form of “criminal conversation”; see “The Sex Panic of the 1790s,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 6.3 (1996): 409–34. See also Barker-Benfield, “Sensibility.”
There is a critical history that seeks to reduce the operations of Sensibility in writers like Sterne and MacKenzie to mere narcissism or self-interested calculation. George Haggerty’s otherwise brilliant Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia UP, 1999), for instance, asserts that this behavior [in MacKenzie’s Man of Feeling] takes the form of benevolence and works to idealize the relations of “others” to oneself but in the end it only takes oneself as the object of desire and exposes sensibility as inherently narcissistic. (84) Patricia Spacks’s “The Poetry of Sensibility” follows a similar line of argument, seeing a tendency in the verse tradition toward exclusivity, inaction, and the hierarchical exercise of power. Both readings essentially follow the lead of
Robert Markley (“Sentimental Performance: Shaftesbury, Sterne, and the Theatrics of Virtue,” The New Eighteenth Century: Theory-Politics-English Literature, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown [New York: Routledge, 1987] 210–30), whose influential materialist critique of the tradition conflates “performance” with performativity, while reducing notions of “circulation” to a simplistic logic of economic exchange. Rather than being static, isolated, and narcissistic, it would be more accurate to say that Sensibility is troubled by its dependence on others, and by the need to establish active inroads outside the self. It is this outward-reaching drive that feeds the production and circulation of its texts. In a more recent treatment of Sensibility in the context of pre-eighteenth-century European-Asian relations, Markley usefully calls attention to the decided eurocentrism of nearly all work on the subject and the need to work within a broader, comparativist frame; see “Civility, Ceremony, and Desire at Beijing: Sensibility and the European Quest for ‘Free Trade’ with China in the Late Seventeenth Century,” Passionate Encounters in a Time of Sensibility, ed. Maximillian E. Novak and Anne Mellor (Newark: U Delaware P, 2000).
The paradox I draw attention to here is clearly related to the “paradoxes of propriety” identified by Mary Poovey in her classic study of ideology and style in women’s writing: See The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1984).
See for example, Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature (New York: Routledge, 1992), especially “The Law of Genre”;
Ralph Cohen, “History and Genre,” New Literary History 17.2 (1986): 203–32;
Clifford Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (New York: Oxford UP, 1988), especially Chapter 7.
Valerie Traub, “Friendship’s Loss: Alan Bray’s Making of History.” GLQ 10.3 (2004): 339–54.
See also Marshall Brown, “Periods and Resistances,” MLQ 62.4 (December 2001): 309–16.
Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?” PMLA 110.3 (May 1995): 347.
These signal contributions have been articulated in the following works: on reparative and paranoid reading practices, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling (Durham: Duke UP, 2003) 123–51, a piece that originally appeared as the introduction to the essay collection Novel Gazing (Durham: Duke UP, 1997); on “perverse presentism,”
see Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke UP, 1998), especially Chapter 2; and on “unhistoricism” (and “homohistory”),
see Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon, “Queering History” PMLA 120.5 (October 2005): 1608–17. The latter essay makes a remarkably incisive case for returning to fundamental ideas first raised by Hayden White and Michel Foucault nearly 30 years ago, the significance of which have been obscured by many influential studies that followed in the wake of these earlier thinkers—including the work of some key figures associated with queer studies.
See also Valerie Traub’s trenchant challenge to “unhistoricism” in “The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography,” Blackwell Companion to LGBT/Q Studies, ed. George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry (London: Blackwell, 2007).
For a related observation, see David Halperin, “Introduction: Among Men—History, Sexuality, and the Return of Affect,” Love, Sex, Intimacy, and Friendship between Men, 1550–1850, ed. Katherine O’Donnell and Michael O’Rourke (New York: Palgrave, 2003) 1–11. I discuss the shared significance of this figure of the “web” for Sterne and Shelley in chapter 1. A rare and exciting exception to the anti-anachronism bias in British Romantic studies is exemplified by
Jerome Christensen’s challenging recent work, Romanticism at the End of History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000), which draws on this underlying theme in his earlier work on Byron (see Lord Byron’s Strength: Romantic Writing and Commercial Culture [Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 19931) to counter some of the blindnesses of historicist scholarship with a new “conspiratorial theory of Romantic poetry” grounded in “an ethics of imaginative, collaborative work” (3, 8). As much as I admire this work, I see the anachronistic and anarchic impulses Christensen attributes to Romanticism coming directly from the earlier energetic models of Sensibility.
See Barker-Benfield, Culture; Binhammer, “Sex Panic”; Carlson, “Forever Young”; Poovey, Proper Lady; Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1995). Much of this work seems indebted at least in part to Thomas Laqueur’s now wellknown claim that “Sometime in the late eighteenth century human sexuality changed.” See “Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology,” The Making of the Modern Body, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Berkeley: U California P, 1987) 1–41.
Johnson, Equivocal Beings 17. By the denomination “masculinist” I mean not just forms of expression issued by writers who are biologically male, but writing whose ideological coding is explicitly marked as masculine; in the example of Edmund Burke, discourse that articulates a cultural logic of chivalry and patriarchal dispensation. Clearly there are women writers who contribute to this tradition as well. For a recent, powerfully original study that restores to modem readers a fuller sense of Burke’s conflicts and complexity, both in relation to the culture of feeling and to British colonialism, see Luke Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland (New York: Cambridge UP, 2003).
Anne Mellor’s Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000) argues that women at this time, such as the archconservative Hannah More, actually find access to a significant degree of material and symbolic power authorizing their writing as cultural work involved in the serious business of nation-building.
See also the rich explorations of More’s contribution to the cultural politics of the age in Beth Fowkes Tobin, Superintending the Poor: Charitable Ladies and Paternal Landlords in British Fiction, 1770–1860 (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1993)
and Kevin Gilmartin, “‘Study to be Quiet’: Hannah More and the Invention of Conservative Culture in Britain,” English Literary History 70.2 (Summer 2003): 493–540. Fascinating new work also has emerged in recent years challenging the status of Burke’s heteronormativity; see, for example,
Katherine O’Donnell, “‘Dear Dicky,’ ‘Dear Dick,’ ‘Dear Friend,’ ‘Dear Shackleton’: Edmund Burke’s Love for Richard Shackleton,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 46.3 (Summer 2006): 619–40 and “Sodomy and Catholicism: Political Caricatures of Edmund Burke,” unpublished paper, Queer People Conference, Cambridge, England, July 28, 2006.
See Lilian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow, 1981);
Caroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford UP, 1985);
Lisa Moore, Dangerous Intimacies: Toward a Sapphic History of the British Novel (Durham: Duke UP, 1997);
Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928 (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2004).
Valerie Traub usefully summarizes this ongoing debate in the Introduction and Afterword to her magisterial work The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002).
S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 Vols. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983) 2: 12. Randolph Trumbach notes that treating both forms of pleasure as taboo was “mutually enforcing,” especially since contemporary “documentation” in texts such as the famous Onania; or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution (ca. 1712) attested to the frequency of boys learning to masturbate within the sociable circle of other boys or men. On masturbation, see also Barker-Benfield, Culture, which suggests that a rise in this specific form of literature is stimulated by a similar rise in literacy during the century, and more recently and far more fully,
Thomas Laqueur’s masterful Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York: Zone, 2003), which argues that the activity is “a moral problem of the modern self, a reflection of the very deepest problems of modern life” (249); the latter details problems with dating an original edition of the endlessly replicating Onania (179).
Andrew Elfenbein claims that “medical writers from this period [the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century] were far more worried about masturbation than homosexuality as a danger to masculinity” (Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role [New York: Columbia UP, 1999] 65) and also corroborates the connection of “effeminacy” with homosexuality as early as 1757—the year of Burke’s influential and paradoxical A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.
Some of the best recent work done on the issue of perversion in the Romantic era is Richard C. Sha’s continuing excavation of the medicalization of sexual pleasure; see in particular “Medicalizing the Romantic Libido: Sexual Pleasure, Luxury, and the Public Sphere,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 27.1 (March 2005): 31–52, “Romanticism and the Sciences of Perversion,” The Wordsworth Circle 36.2 (Spring 2005): 43–48, as well as the edited online issues of Romanticism on the Net and Romantic Circles, “Romanticism and Sexuality” (August 2001) [http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/guest12.html, accessed July 17, 2005] and “Historicizing Romantic Sexuality” (January 2006) [http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/sexuality/index.html, accessed January 25, 20061, respectively. Sha’s elucidation of the Romantic transformations of unproductive pleasure into productive social forms bears an affinity with my investigation of the shifts from pleasure to desire, though his genuinely stimulating work fails to account for Sensibility’s central role in what he sees as purely Romantic manifestations, no doubt partly because the Habermasian framework within which he is working tends to privilege the realm of the rational-sensible while occluding the feeling-sensible. See also Dino Franco Felluga’s outstanding The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular Male Poet of Genius (Albany, NY: SUNY P, 2005), which confines itself to a nineteenth-century context as well.
John Brewer also suggests that this anxiety is especially prevalent in British culture during periods of national crisis like the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, the War for American Independence, and the French Revolution, when fears arose that luxury and refinement might breed an effeminacy that could compromise the nation’s ability to protect itself from rebellious “Others.” See especially Chapter 2 of Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997). A classic strategy for dealing with this problem, of course, is to displace this anxiety by associating such forms of moral weakness with one’s enemies. For an important treatment of this dynamic, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1992). For a detailed history of the intersecting realities of gender and class for the middle class from 1780 to 1850,
see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1987).
See Tim Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 1700–1800 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), especially 110–14. The other major factor that he identifies is “the rise of an urban philanthropy and social policy,” though this element is also “largely built on literary and discursive practice, rather than experience” (112). Elfenbein convincingly connects this paradox of pleasure directly to concerns with excess and sexual behavior: The collision of the civic and civil humanist ideologies helped to create the odd double bind of homosexuality, in which the admired behavior of the man of feeling and the energetic heroine was only a hair’s breadth away from the most despised behavior of the sodomite and the sapphist. (Genius 27) This observation is directly relevant to Sensibility, since one of its central efforts, according to Barker-Benfield, was to “[convert] men to the values for which women stood,” and thus it increasingly risked “[making] women and men more like the other—women ‘masculine,’ men effeminate” (“Sensibility” 106, 109). See also Culture, Chapter 3. More recently, Ellison has complicated this narrative by drawing attention to the earlier Restoration context and a specifically masculine republican ethic that provides a precedent for the very “feminization” that comes later in the period, see Cato’s Tears, especially Chapter 1. Susan Manning usefully notes how troubling moralists found the circulation of excess and arousal, since “feelings are excited and stimulated by the spectacle of suffering” (“Sensibility,” Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1740–1830, ed. Thomas Keymer and Jon Mee [New York: Cambridge UP, 2004] 90, emphasis in original).
For one such exemplary “repressive” reading, see George Haggerty, “Amelia’s Nose; or, Sensibility and Its Symptoms,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 36.2 (1995): 139–56.
For an interesting contrast to this line of thinking, see Guinn Batten’s The Orphaned Imagination: Melancholy and Commodity Culture in English Romanticism (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998), which sees some of the subversions I ascribe to Sensibility as present in Romanticism itself, largely through disengaging the mode of “melancholy” from its home in the literature of Sensibility. On the relation between pleasure and instruction,
see William Warner’s excellent work, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley: U California P, 1998), especially Chapter 6. As I have noted, Haggerty has convincingly shown that “love” is far from being the unambiguous and heteronormatively productive term that Wordsworth and his brethren would like it to be. See Men in Love for a recovery of male-male expressions of love from the Restoration through the eighteenth century, and chapters 2 and 3 of the present study for Wordsworth’s specific difficulties with love, desire, and the specters of same-sex attachment. Also, for a vastly different, actively Sternean version of “joy” contemporary with the formulations of Coleridge and Wordsworth, see Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan’s “Joy (Fragment XXXVII),” from The Lay of an Irish Harp (1807). This early poem carries on the Della Cruscan tradition of playful, confessional public displays of affection, featuring a joy that is “wild, warm, and tender,” with delights so thrillingly “delicious” that, fleeting or not, it is solicited for its own sake.
For an exemplary instance of public critical debate about this issue, see the interchange between Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser in Social Text 52–53 (Fall/Winter 1997): 265–89.
Copyright information
© 2007 Christopher C. Nagle
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Nagle, C.C. (2007). Introduction The Pleasures of Proximity. In: Sexuality and the Culture of Sensibility in the British Romantic Era. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609327_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609327_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-53993-2
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-60932-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)