Novel Feelings: Emotion, Duration, and the Form of the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

Novel Feelings: Emotion, Duration, and the Form of the Eighteenth-Century British Novel Candace Gail Cunard Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2018 © 2018 Candace Gail Cunard All rights reserved ABSTRACT Novel Feelings: Emotion, Duration, and the Form of the Eighteenth-Century British Novel Candace Gail Cunard One of the first features of the eighteenth-century novel to strike the modern reader is its sheer length, and yet critics have argued that these novels prioritize emotional experiences that are essentially fleeting. “Novel Feelings” corrects this imbalance by attending to ongoing emotional experiences like suspense, familiarization, frustration, and hope—both as they are represented in novels and as they characterize readerly response to novels. In so doing, I demonstrate the centrality of such protracted emotional experiences to debates about the ethics of feeling in eighteenth-century Britain. Scholarship on the sentimental novel and the literature of sensibility tends to locates the ethical work of novel feeling in short, self-contained depictions of a character’s sympathetic response to another’s suffering. Such readings often rely on texts like Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling or Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, short works composed out of even shorter, often disjointed scenes in which the focal characters encounter and respond emotionally to the distresses of others. And yet, these fragmentary productions which deliberately deemphasize narrative connection between scenes do not provide ideal models for approaching the complex large-scale plotting of many eighteenth-century novels. Through my attention to larger-scale formal techniques for provoking and sustaining feeling throughout the duration of reading a lengthy novel, I demonstrate how writers from Samuel Richardson to Jane Austen taught readers to linger with feelings, particularly ones that might initially produce pain or discomfort. By challenging readers to remain within a feeling that refuses to be over, these novels demand a vision of ethical action that would be similarly lasting—moving beyond the comfortable closure of a judgment passed or a sympathetic tear shed to imagine a continuous, open-ended attention to others. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ii Introduction 1 1. “Labouring in Suspense”: Paying Attention to Providence in Richardson’s Clarissa 27 2. “Leave, if Possible, Myself”: Familiarity and the Limits of Sensibility in Tristram Shandy 70 3. Ladies in Waiting: Dependence and Delay in Frances Burney’s Cecilia 117 4. Learning to Live with Hope in Jane Austen’s Persuasion 169 Bibliography 215 i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS If reading an eighteenth-century novel offers insight into the emotional experience of ongoing processes, then so too does writing a dissertation. I am beyond grateful for all of those who have read, discussed, and lived alongside my dissertation over the past years, taking part in this process with me. Jenny Davidson enthusiastically supported my growth as a scholar and my interest in this project long before it took shape as a dissertation. My close readings have been inestimably sharpened by her eye and ear for prose style, both novelistic and critical, just as my understanding of the eighteenth century has been expanded by her encyclopedic familiarity with the period. Nicholas Dames was instrumental in helping me develop a robust critical vocabulary for talking about novels. Throughout the research and writing process, I knew I could rely on him to articulate my own claims back to me in more coherent terms. Sharon Marcus regularly prompted me to think about reading in new ways, whether by broadening my primary source archive or insisting on precise terminology for differentiating between related readerly feelings. I am grateful to all of my committee members for challenging me to consider the stakes of this project beyond the eighteenth century, and beyond the academy. In addition, I want to thank Katherine Bergevin, Ruen-chuan Ma, Li Qi Peh, and Dustin Stewart for talking through article drafts and arguments-in-progress in ways that shaped my understanding of the project as a whole. Additional thanks are owed to Dustin and to Kathleen Lubey for their insightful and generous responses to the finished dissertation, as well as for the encouragement they offered along the way. Kira Del Mar and Kathryn Fore provided ongoing emotional support throughout the writing process, buoying me up on the bad days and celebrating with me on the good ones. Kaite Smith-Welsh shepherded me through the final months of writing with keen-eyed strategy and expert pep talks. ii Much of what I learned about the intersection of literature, ethics, and pedagogy while writing this dissertation was first discovered, or at least reinforced, in my own ongoing experience as a teacher. I want to offer up my sincere thanks to all of the students who trusted me to facilitate their learning, and from whom I learned so much in turn. Dissertations are written with bodies and with spirits as well as with minds, and so I want to thank Dr. Ilana Attie and Magi Pierce for the ways they have supported and guided me in taking care of my body and my spirit throughout this lengthy process. I thank my parents, Kristen and Robert Cunard, whose unshakable belief in me is as familiar and comfortable as meals shared around the family dinner table; my sister, Corinne Cunard, for asking the really important questions and keeping me honest; and my grandmother, Sandra Klueter, for her unfailing love. Finally, I want to express my ongoing gratitude and ongoing love for Christopher McKeen. His infectious curiosity, unabashed silliness, sharp mind, patient listening, comforting presence, and unconditional belief in me and in our shared intellectual work have enriched my life as well as this dissertation. iii Introduction The Feeling of Novel-Reading “Length will be naturally expected…” —Samuel Richardson, Preface to Clarissa1 “You accuse Richardson of being long-drawn-out! You must have forgotten how much trouble, care and activity it takes to accomplish the smallest undertaking, to see a lawsuit through, to arrange a marriage, to bring about a reconciliation. Think what you will of these details. They will always be interesting to me if they are true to life, if they bring passions to light and reveal people’s characters.” —Denis Diderot2 Throughout his Eloge de Richardson (1762), Denis Diderot attributes the intense emotional effects of Samuel Richardson’s novels to the interplay between specific elements of Richardson’s style and their deployment in a particular temporal pattern. Defending Richardson’s notorious prolixity, Diderot emphasizes Richardson’s “details” (what he later calls “this multiplicity of little things”), and claims that they are revelatory, not merely because they are the stuff of realism (what makes the novel “true to life”), but because their accumulation can help simulate the “trouble, care, and activity” of navigating lengthy and emotionally-fraught processes in readers’ lives: lawsuits, marriages, reconciliations.3 Diderot goes on to explain that the gradual build-up of detail which “bring[s] passions to light and reveal[s] people’s characters” also stokes the reader’s “impatient expectations,” “prepar[ing] our minds for the powerful effects made by great events.”4 Thus, for Diderot, the “powerful effects” of Richardson’s prose are carefully orchestrated by formal features which may seem insignificant taken alone but play into 1 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (New York: Penguin, 1985), 35. 2 Denis Diderot, in Selected Writings on Art and Literature, ed. and trans. Geoffrey Bremner (New York: Penguin, 1994), 86. 3 Diderot, 87. Diderot is also interested in the way that the novel can condense the experience of real life: “In the space of a few hours I had been through a host of situations which the longest life can scarcely provide in its whole course…I felt I had gained in experience” (Diderot 83). 4 Diderot, 87. 1 a lengthy and ultimately powerful sequence. After extolling the virtues of an apparently minor letter late in Clarissa, Diderot defends his choice by acknowledging that “to experience this delight you need to start at the beginning and read through to this point.”5 Diderot’s insistence that no letter, no detail can produce the appropriate emotional effect on its own suggests that at least where feelings are concerned, the whole may be greater than—or at least different from— the sum of its parts. Despite the temptation to consider Richardson’s novels as comprised of small pieces that accumulate over time, to really understand the emotional impact of Clarissa, Diderot proposes that one must see the whole novel as a contained emotional unit, whose smaller parts can only function appropriately as part of the larger experience. Critical accounts of the eighteenth-century novel regularly attend to sudden and intense emotional experiences, explaining how novelists develop techniques to affect the kinds of novel- readers who “read for sensation (in order to be thrilled or to have their fibers shaken).”6 However, these accounts often lack a clear sense of the lengthy processes that prepare the way for—or follow in the wake of—such overwhelming emotions. The result is a paradox: the feelings critics privilege are relatively brief, but the novels that contain them are long. “Novel Feelings” works to correct this imbalance by attending to ongoing emotional experiences, both as they are represented in novels and as they are thought to characterize readerly response to novels. In particular, I suggest that valuable information about emotional response to eighteenth-century novels might be located not only in the primary source evidence left behind by actual readers, but also in the formal features of novels themselves, which are designed to orchestrate particular 5 Diderot, 94.

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