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Some Facts from Sentimentalism to Romanticism

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Some Facts from Sentimentalism to Romanticism Some Facts From Sentimentalism to Romanticism January 25 & 27, 2016 Sentiment and Sentimentalism à Critics of the Comedy of Manners were offended by: • The heroes were ultimately removed from the world around them and completely self-sufficient • No reliance on society for its charity nor God for salvation • There was no religion in these plays: ministers, often in disguise, appeared only to bless a union quickly before couple changed their minds. • Characters were careless of the example they set for others • No responsibility for others and no responsibility to some higher authority. • Irreverence, hypocrisy, and immodesty of Restoration Comedy. à Plays are not philosophical essays; they communicate the emotional structure of characterization as much as the logical and linguistic capacity of the individual. à The Third Earl of Shaftesbury – connection between reason and feeling – Through Morality à He helped establish the basis for sentimentalism, or the dramas of sensibility. à Sentimentality originally indicated the reliance on feelings as a guide to truth, but current usage defines it as an appeal to shallow, uncomplicated emotions at the expense of reason. Few Other Plays The Country Wife (1675) William Wycherley • Horner feigns impotence in order to gain access to the women of the town. • The frequent oath, “Pox on you,” and variations thereof, highlights the sexual disease rampant in the world of the play. • Pinchwife tries to avoid cuckoldry by keeping his wife innocent in the country. • Women of honor, unlike their male counterparts, conduct their amorous affairs in private. • The theater is a place to be seen as well as to see. • Innocent Margery learns to dissemble in pursuit of her love. The London Merchant or, The History of George Barnwell (1731) George Lillo • The play excites the passions in order to correct behavior and teach a moral lesson. • The main title, like that of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, refers to a supporting character and suggests the play’s preoccupation with trade, commerce, and capitalism. • Millwood presents a less altruistic view of social relationships. • Barnwell falls deeper into crime once he deviates from the path of moral rectitude. The Conscious Lovers (1722) Sir Richard Steele • Based on Terence’s Andria – Action set in eighteen- century London • Rather than seeking to arouse laughter or ridicule, it sought to arouse noble sentiments through the depiction of trials borne by sympathetic characters who are rescued from their sufferings and handsomely rewarded. • Social morality that values restrained passion and patient reflection over bold, contentious behavior • “A pleasure too exquisite for laughter” • Notions of sentiment altered tragedy as well as comedy during the 1700s. • Watching The Conscious Lovers, The London Merchant, and other sentimental plays, spectators generally expected to immerse themselves in the feelings of sentimental heroes and those with whom they sympathized. • The objects of sympathetic concern in sentimental plays ranged from slaves, to the poor, to distraught heroines, all the way to general pity for suffering humanity. • According to sentimental aesthetics, exposure to such feelings on stage would spark a sentimental response in the genteel viewer, who might then use this response to improve his or her own sensitivity and morality. • Adam Smith: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) So my thesis is that our fellow-feeling for the misery of others comes from our imaginatively changing places with the sufferer, thereby coming to •conceive what he feels or even to •feel what he feels. If this doesn’t seem to you obvious enough, just as it stands, there is plenty of empirical evidence for it. When we see someone poised to smash a stick down on the leg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and pull back our own leg or arm; and when the stick connects, we feel it in some measure, and are hurt by it along with the sufferer. When a crowd are gazing at a dancer on a slack rope, they naturally writhe and twist and balance their own bodies, as they see him do, and as they feel they would have to do if they were up on the rope where he is.... Men notice that when they look at sore eyes they often feel soreness in their own eyes. .
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