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Sensibility, Enlightenment and Romanticism: British Fiction, 1789 - 1820

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Sensibility, Enlightenment and Romanticism: British Fiction, 1789 - 1820 Sensibility, Enlightenment and Romanticism: British Fiction, 1789 - 1820 Nicola Lloyd PhD Thesis Cardiff University September 2013 Summary This thesis is a study of the discourse of sensibility in Romantic-period fiction. It suggests that sensibility was not, as has often been assumed, merely a transient and fashionable mode that peaked in the mid eighteenth-century before its association with radicalism and subsequent demise in the 1790s. Instead, it was redirected and refashioned during the first decades of the nineteenth century, functioning in effect as a metanarrative for the Romantic novel. The discourse of sensibility was both a formative influence on and a central ideological component of literary Romanticism and this thesis reads it as a creative, protean and self-conscious force that is capable of challenging many of our assumptions about the Romantic period. Analysing representative fictions by Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Dacre, William Godwin, Sydney Owenson and Walter Scott, each chapter traces the complex interactions of eighteenth-century discourses of moral philosophy and perception in the sub-genres of the gothic novel, the Jacobin novel, the national tale and historical fiction. In doing so, the evidence of sensibility’s pervasive influence destabilises any notion of discrete and fixed generic categories by suggesting widespread correlations and overlaps. Likewise, this generic assimilation and mutation that operates under the banner of sensibility proposes a challenge to conventional notions of Romantic aesthetic unity and spontaneity, suggesting instead a self-conscious and experimental engagement with genre. Finally, the novels considered depict a hybrid model of sensibility in which Enlightenment formations of feeling and perception as a means of social coherence coexist with Romantic models of alienated selfhood. As a result, the exploration of the discourse of sensibility in the Romantic novel provides an opportunity to reassess the complex and often contradictory relationship between the aesthetics of Enlightenment and Romanticism. Acknowledgements First I would like to thank Anthony Mandal for his supervision and support. His patience, advice and critical engagement have been invaluable and he has been unfailingly generous with his time, resources and understanding. Also to be thanked are Jane Moore and Heather Worthington for their input and advice and Martin Coyle for his assistance in preparing the initial research proposal, as well as for guidance during the later stages. For financial assistance I am grateful to the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University for funding for conference attendance and research trips. Thanks are also due to Nicola Bassett, Haley Miles and Rhian Rattray for their administrative support. I must also thank my colleagues in the Welsh School of Architecture for their understanding and flexibility, especially during the final stages of the project. To Rob Gossedge, thanks are due for critical intellect and sound judgment (not to mention composing his own acknowledgement); I count myself lucky to have had the benefit of his advice. Finally, my biggest debts are to my family and friends for their tireless encouragement and kindness, which have gone well beyond the call of duty. Contents Chapter One: Introduction 1 A Brief History of Sensibility: Terminology, Philosophy and the Cultural Context 3 Sensibility and the Novel: A Critical Overview 9 Beyond the Sentimental : Romantic Fiction and Genre 22 Sensibility, Enlightenment and Romanticism 37 Methodology and Structure 41 Chapter Two: Gothic Sensation and Sociability: Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Dacre 46 Ann Radcliffe: Sentimental Contexts 49 Ann Radcliffe Moral Sense Philosophy and Sociability in The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne and The Romance of the Forest 54 Ann Radcliffe: Sublime Selfhood in The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian 65 Charlotte Dacre: Sentimental Contexts 76 Charlotte Dacre: Dismembering Sentimental Community in The Confessions of the Nun of St Omer and The Libertine 83 Charlotte Dacre: Radical Sensibility in Zofloya and The Passions 91 Chapter Three: William Godwin: The Limits of Sympathetic Identification 108 Rationalism and Sensibility: Caleb Williams and St Leon 111 Contesting Enlightenment Selfhood: Fleetwood; or, The New Man of Feeling 119 Mandeville, Sympathy and Romantic Selfhood 137 Chapter Four: Sydney Owenson: Sensibility, Civility and Constructing the Nation 158 St Clair: The Man of Feeling and Cultural Assimilation 165 The Wild Irish Girl: Sensory Perception and Civility 173 O’Donnel: Importing and Exporting Sentimental Nationhood 186 Florence Macarthy: Sensibility and Cosmopolitanism 208 Chapter Five: Walter Scott: History, Sympathy and Realism 229 Narrative Fellowship: The Reception of the Waverley Novels 241 Waverley and the Sympathetic Historical Spectator 250 The Bride of Lammermoor: Ekphrasis and Alienation 270 Ivanhoe: Linguistic Representation and Sentimental Fellowship 279 Conclusion 292 Bibliography 302 1 Chapter One Introduction: Sensibility and the Romantic Novel We have been accustomed to associate with our ideas of this character the amiable virtues of a Harley, feeling deeply the distresses of others and patient, though not insensible, of his own. But Fleetwood […] feels absolutely and exclusively for […] Fleetwood himself […] In short, the new Man of Feeling, in his calm moments a determined egotist, is, in his state of irritation, a frantic madman.1 Walter Scott (1805) When it comes to the category of the ‘Romantic novel’, Walter Scott’s scathing review of William Godwin’s Fleetwood (1805) is significant in a number of ways. First, the very act of Godwin’s engagement with the paradigm of the eighteenth-century sentimental novel in his self-styled reworking of Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) is surprising, to say the least. Not only would Godwin – as a central figure in the movement of Jacobin rationalism – seem highly unlikely to engage with the literary tradition of novelistic sensibility, the fact that he was doing so in 1805, apparently well beyond the peak of a genre that is generally supposed to have met its demise in the final decade of the previous century, is unexpected. Second, the idea that Scott – pioneer of the realist form of the historical novel – would engage in such an impassioned defence of an outmoded genre founded in excessive and improbable displays of private feeling poses a challenge to our understanding of the nineteenth-century novel. 1 Edinburgh Review, 6 (April 1805), 182-93 (pp. 192-93). 2 This suggests a need for a rethinking of the Romantic novel’s relationship to the eighteenth-century discourse of sensibility and this thesis aims to provide an alternative account. It contends that it was not, as has often been suggested, merely a transient and fashionable discourse that peaked in the mid eighteenth-century before its association with radicalism and subsequent demise in the 1790s. In fact, the discourse of sensibility can be read as a metanarrative for the Romantic novel. Considering it in this way offers some important insights into the complex and fraught category of Romantic fiction. As Miriam Wallace has recently observed, to ‘claim prose fiction [of the years 1785-1832] as “Romantic” raises as many questions as it answers’.2 Defining the Romantic novel is problematic in terms of period designation, genre and its engagement with the traditional aesthetic tropes of Romanticism. In considering the role of sensibility in the novel between 1789 and 1820, this thesis hopes to improve our understanding of the Romantic novel, especially within the context of its Enlightenment heritage. By tracing the complex interactions of eighteenth-century discourses of moral philosophy and perception in the novel of the early nineteenth century, it seeks to destabilise the binary of Enlightenment and Romanticism, suggesting sensibility as a hybrid form of Enlightenment sociability and Romantic selfhood. The thesis discusses the work of five major novelists of the Romantic period: Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Dacre, William Godwin, Sydney Owenson and Walter Scott. Given that the discourse of sensibility is ubiquitous in the fiction of this era, the work of any number of writers could have appeared here. However, in order to demonstrate the latitude of sensibility in the period, it seems appropriate to consider the work of writers 2 Miriam L.Wallace, ‘Enlightened Romanticism’, in Enlightening Romanticism, Romancing the Enlightenment: British Novels from 1750 to 1832, ed. by Miriam L. Wallace (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 1-20 (pp. 8-9). 3 from a range of fictional sub-genres. As such, chapter two discusses Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Dacre within the context of the gothic novel and sensation, chapter three considers the interaction between sympathy and the Jacobin novel in the fiction of William Godwin, and chapters four and five examine the role of sensibility in the national tales of Sydney Owenson and the historical novels of Walter Scott. However, these authors do not feature merely as representatives of a variety of sub-genres. Their prominence as literary figures and pioneers of their respective strands of the novel means that their fiction demonstrates numerous and diverse intertextual affiliations, suggesting that a widespread and interactive process of sentimental reconfiguration was taking place at this time. Each of the authors discussed was responsible for various innovations and experimentations
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