Narrative Spectacle and Affective Response in the Late Eighteenth-Century Novel

City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects CUNY Graduate Center 2006 Visible Effects: Narrative Spectacle and Affective Response in the Late Eighteenth-Century Novel Tanya Radford The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/4259 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] VISIBLE EFFECTS: NARRATIVE SPECTACLE AND AFFECTIVE RESPONSE IN THE LATE EIGHTEENTH–CENTURY NOVEL by TANYA RADFORD A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2006 UMI Number: 3213271 UMI Microform 3213271 Copyright 2006 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346 This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date: April 24, 2006 Professor Rachel Brownstein Chair of Examining Committee Date: April 26, 2006 Professor Steven Kruger Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Professor Rachel Brownstein Distinguished Professor Mary Ann Caws Professor David H. Richter THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK Abstract Visible Effects: Narrative Spectacle and Affective Response in the Late Eighteenth–Century Novel by Tanya Radford Advisor: Professor Rachel Brownstein Eighteenth-century visual culture and literature reflect a struggle between two models of vision and understanding: one one side, an Enlightenment vision dedicated to disembodied objectivity and technical precision; on the other, a sentimental or expressive vision that produces irrational or emotional insight. If the disembodied eye can be seen as an emblem of reason and the goal of the Enlightenment approach to scientific knowledge, the spectatorial and incarnate eye represents an alternative and equally significant emblem of the period’s visuality. This dissertation focuses on novels from the late Eighteenth century in which the spectatorial and incarnate eye is the dominant visual mode. Committed to the depiction of affecting visual encounters, the novels discussed in this study—Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, and the Marquis de Sade’s Justine— construct their readers as spectators. Employing both narrative storytelling and visual spectacle in the service of representing and transmitting emotional experience, the novels pit visual apprehension against verbal communication. In Walpole’s Gothic novel, truth adheres in emotional responses to visual experience, while verbal representations are revealed to be untrustworthy. In the sentimental novels of Sterne and Mackenzie, scenes of storytelling demonstrate the futility of verbal communication and representation, even as a sufferer’s visible distress produces a tearful response in onlookers. In Sade’s pornographic novel, Justine’s efforts to make her virtue visible—in her sentimental storytelling and strategic use of tears—consistently produce physical libertinism in her audience. In all of the novels, in-text audiences model appropriate spectatorship and demonstrate the desired emotional and somatic responses. Meaning, in the novels, is inseparable from feeling. In their exploration of irrational and emotional visual experience, the novels of narrative spectacle reject objectivity in favor of the visual apprehension of irrational truth, entertaining the possibility of unmediated expression. As they create the illusion of leaving their own ontological nature behind, so they encourage readers to leave off reading and experience the text as if he were spectator to the incidents. Acknowledgments Over the course of this project, I have changed direction more than once, moved house at least 5 times, and lost touch with more than one of the people near and dear to me. Thanks and appreciation are extended to my friends—who have always been happy to see me when I dropped in unannounced and have sustained me with good talk, good times, and good memories. I regard it as extraordinarily lucky that I landed a fellowship with the Lehman College Writing Across the Curriculum program as I began to wrap up the work of this dissertation. I learned a great deal about teaching and writing from my colleagues there— fellows, faculty, and advisors alike. The effects of that experience are as visible in this dissertation as they are in my college classroom. Working with Elaine Avidon, Sondra Perl, and Marcie Wolfe was both pleasure and privilege. From them I learned—by example—the value of collaboration. My dissertation advisor, Professor Rachel M. Brownstein, has nudged my thinking and praised my writing at all the right times. I am especially grateful for the formidable questions she posed to me in our meetings. Though I could not always answer these questions on the spot, they invariably helped me to articulate the direction and shape of the project. The advice and comments of my committee members—Professor Mary Ann Caws and Professor David Richter—were invaluable in the final stages of revision. Special thanks are extended to the inimitable writers of my dissertation group— Vince Bissonette, Melissa Bloom, Greg Erickson, Elizabeth Hollow, Jennifer Lemberg, and Richard Santana—who offered their sage advice about “the process,” checked my neologisms, turned me on to new ideas and sources, and read every chapter with care and respect. At once my most sympathetic and critical readers, you have consistently pushed me into the better draft. Diana Polley has been my first and best advisor in all things academic as well as a treasured confidante and dinner companion. Donna Cataldo has the almost uncanny ability to know when I am needing to talk to her. And last, but never least, Danese Grigg always gets me laughing, and knows just when to check in. Though I do not begrudge her the happiness of life in the country, I have missed her terribly since she left the city. My parents kept me supplied with news from home and dried fruit, which sustained me through many difficult seasons. I am profoundly thankful for my family’s love and encouragement, arguably as important as dried pears and pictures of my spunky nephews. Thanks are also due Heather for nagging, listening, and helping in more ways than I can possibly express. The companionship of Craig Bernardini, my most dedicated reader, has enriched every aspect of my personal and professional life. My admiration and gratitude, deeply felt, are essentially ineffable. This work is dedicated to you and to the memory of Professor Gillian Brown, who I have often imagined as my ideal reader and who I miss very much. Table of Contents Introduction: On Blindness and Sympathetic Insight 1 Chapter One: “Evidence beyond a thousand parchments”: Narrative Spectacle in The Castle of Otranto 27 Chapter Two: Sentimental Vision: or, the Emotional Optics of Men of Feeling 83 Part I: Seeing Feeling and Frustrated Reading: the Visual/Verbal Dynamic in Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 89 Part II: Sentimental Value and its Visible Trace in Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling 122 Chapter Three: The Spectacle of Virtue’s Suffering in Sade’s Justine 146 After word(s) Spectatorship, Reading, and the Critical Insight 192 Works Cited 205 Radford 1 Introduction On Blindness and Sympathetic Insight In the 1749 “Lettre sur les Aveugles,” Denis Diderot argues that the blind have a less developed moral sensibility than the sighted, an immaturity that he traces to their inability to be affected by “external demonstrations” or visual encounters. For Diderot, the affective dimension of image reception is constitutive of virtue. Thus, the blind’s inability to see others carries with it a disability for feeling and decreased access to virtue. On this basis Diderot speculates that the reduction of vision produced by looking at objects from a distance (a movement away from clarity and toward blindness) produces a similar effect on the sighted: Since the blind are affected by none of the external demonstrations that awaken pity and ideas of grief in ourselves…I suspect them of being, in general, unfeeling toward their fellow men. […] Do we ourselves not cease to feel compassion when distance or the smallness of the object produces the same effect on us as lack of sight does on the blind? Thus do all our virtues depend on our way of apprehending things and on the degree to which external objects affect us! I feel quite sure that were it not for fear of punishment, many people would have fewer qualms at killing a man who was far enough away to appear no larger than a swallow than in butchering a steer with their own hands. And if we feel compassion for a horse in pain though we can crush an ant without a second thought, are these actions not governed by the selfsame principle? (17) The blind, says Diderot, “perceive matter in a more abstract way than we,” suggesting that a concrete understanding of matter is based in the visual sense, and not, rather Radford 2 paradoxically, in the tactile. The more blind we become, the less affected we are by the suffering of others, and the more capable of violence or apathy. This account of the blind as insensitive is of course inaccurate.1 But it takes part in an enlightenment alignment (a troubled one) of vision with the concrete and of language (or signs) with the abstract which has much broader ramifications than a consideration of the moral nature of the blind.

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