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Temperance in the Age of Feeling: Sensibility, Pedagogy, and Poetry in the Eighteenth Century

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Temperance in the Age of Feeling: Sensibility, Pedagogy, and Poetry in the Eighteenth Century University of Rhode Island DigitalCommons@URI Open Access Dissertations 2015 TEMPERANCE IN THE AGE OF FEELING: SENSIBILITY, PEDAGOGY, AND POETRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Sarah Hattie Maitland University of Rhode Island, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss Recommended Citation Maitland, Sarah Hattie, "TEMPERANCE IN THE AGE OF FEELING: SENSIBILITY, PEDAGOGY, AND POETRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY" (2015). Open Access Dissertations. Paper 319. https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss/319 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@URI. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@URI. For more information, please contact [email protected]. TEMPERANCE IN THE AGE OF FEELING: SENSIBILITY, PEDAGOGY, AND POETRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BY SARAH HATTIE MAITLAND A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN ENGLISH UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND 2015 DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DISSERTATION OF Sarah Hattie Maitland APPROVED: Dissertation Committee: Major Professor J. Jennifer Jones Stephen Barber Wendy Roworth Nasser Zawia DEAN OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF RHODE ISLAND 2015 ABSTRACT TEMPERANCE IN THE AGE OF FEELING: SENSIBILITY, PEDAGOGY, AND POETRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BY SARAH HATTIE MAITLAND British Romanticism has traditionally been understood as participating in a narrative of progressive secularism. Temperance in the Age of Feeling seeks to challenge this narrative by examining the influence of temperance on Romantic conceptualizations of the relationship between sensation, thought, and feeling. I begin my argument by investigating Romantic notions of temperance as influenced by Book II of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. I claim that Romantic temperance differs from classical temperance because Romantic temperance is concerned with balancing mental faculties while classical temperance is concerned with moderating passions. Next I consider how temperance influenced Romantic theories of the relationship between the senses and the mind. Drawing on the study of neuro-Romanticism, I argue that Romantic medicine and Romantic poetry—most particularly Wordsworth’s poetry—shared a concern with the possible negative repercussions of sensory overstimulation. In my final chapter I engage with the overlap between temperance in Romantic theories of education, religious sermons from the period, and Wordsworth’s poetry. By looking at education theory with religious sermons and poetry I show the ways religious thought on temperance influenced many of the educational ideas and aesthetic ideals that continue to govern modern pedagogy. The three chapters are united by their preoccupation with the ways that typically religious ideals of temperance are woven into the ideas that shaped education, poetry, and mental health at the moment they were first becoming recognizably “modern.” ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to express my deep gratitude to my advisor Dr. J. Jennifer Jones for her personal and professional mentorship over the entirety of my graduate doctoral career. It was in her “Romanticism and Italy” course that I first fell in love with Romantic poetry and I am forever indebted to her for sharing her passion for Romanticism with me. I could not have progressed without her rigorous engagement and kind patience with my work. Thanks also to Dr. Stephen Barber for many hours of edifying discussion on life and literature and for his boundless compassion and kindness. I cannot imagine my experience at the University of Rhode Island without him and will forever think of him as the most ethical person I know. I express sincere appreciation to Dr. Kathleen Davis for her work on my behalf as a member of my committee and as Graduate Director. I am grateful for her encouragement and her generosity as a reader. Thanks as well to Dr. Wendy Roworth of the Art History Department for helping me to think about my work through the lens of another discipline. I could not have completed this work without the administrative support of Michelle Caraccia. Her care and concern have surpassed the bounds of necessity and I am truly thankful for the time she has spent talking with and encouraging me. I would also like to thank Jeff Cowton, curator at Dove Cottage for allowing me access to Wordsworth’s library and for speaking with me about this project in its early days. I would like to thank friend and fellow graduate student Rebekah Greene for her support. I am eternally grateful for the many hours she willingly spent listening to me contemplating these ideas. I am also grateful to Jessica McCall for her unfailing confidence in my ability to complete this project and for her continuous reminders of iv all the reasons I love the Humanities. My thanks go as well to Rebecca Fairbank friend, counselor, and fellow lover of books for her help and enthusiasm. I wish to express my sincere appreciation to Stefanie Head for being my first friend in the field of Romanticism. I am grateful for her willingness to share with me her love of Wordsworth and her brilliant mind. I remember our many conversations about Romanticism with joy and fondness. I wish to thank the women of the Providence Second Branch for their kindness and prayers. I have been inspired by their strength and enriched by their capacity for love. Finally, I cannot imagine having completed this project without the love and support of my parents, Jo and Bill Maitland. They taught me to love nature and books and to believe the world is what we imagine it to be. I am forever grateful for all that they are and love, and for their earnest desire to share their many joys with me. v DEDICATION I dedicate this dissertation to my grandmother, Catherine “Kay” Maitland. Thank you for always believing I could do better. You are one of the hardest working women I have ever known and I miss you every day. vi PREFACE TO TEMPERANCE IN THE AGE OF FEELING Romanticists with ties to a variety of critical movements in the field have been united in the alacrity with which they have eluded the issue of Romantic religiosity. For example, in his introduction to Romanticism: An Anthology (2012), Duncan Wu writes of the Romantics: It is not just their capacity for optimism that distinguishes them, but the kind of belief to which they clung. Where earlier generations looked to an afterlife, the Romantics tended to reject formalized religion . Instead they thought they could create through their writing, a promised land in which property was of no consequence and people would live in harmony. Wordsworth is famous for having said he had no need of a redeemer, when he wrote “Tintern Abbey” he had little need of God, at least in the generally accepted sense. For him mankind is capable of redemption through an act of self-realization. (xxxix) In the section above, Wu defines Romanticism against religious belief with little attention given to defending the assertion. It is, Wu argues, a defining feature of Romanticism that the Romantics believed not in religion but in literature. In his introduction to Romanticism, Wu carefully considers the influence of the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the rise of the media, the state of the Monarchy, and sexual politics on the Romantic period. Given his careful resistance to master narratives of the period, such a quick dismissal of the influence of religion is surprising. I do not point out his dismissal to undercut the contribution Wu makes to vii the field. His anthology beautifully complicates accepted interpretations of the period by arguing for a greater diversity of authors and more attention to the ways the concept of Romanticism itself resists definition. I point out the way Wu bypasses religion in his introduction because it is largely indicative of attitudes in the field. Whether it is Paul de Man’s notion of demystification or M.H. Abrams’ theory of assimilation, one of the few points on which most Romanticists have historically agreed is that the Romantic period participates in a movement away from a religious understanding of the world toward a secularity more commensurate with modernity. This view of Romanticism as playing a crucial role in our march toward secular modernity often obscures that Romanticism was a minority movement. Many authors of the period such as Hannah Moore and Maria Edgeworth did not participate in the radical politics or the radical poetics we now think of as indicative of the Romantic period. Narrativizing the Romantic period from the present magnifies the risk of normalizing those elements of Romanticism that more closely align with modern sensibilities. Recently, however, there has been a movement in Romantic studies to complicate the narrative of secular modernity by more thoroughly historicizing the role of religion in the Romantic period. It is from one such project that I take my departure. Colin Jager’s book, The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (2007) offers a way to re-think progressivist narratives that posit a “religious” past against a “secular” modernity. Jager uses the presence and importance of the argument from design in Romantic literature as a means through which to critique the role the Romantic period is often cast as playing in narratives of secular viii modernity. But The Book of God does not simply provide a history of the changing concept or value of “intelligent design” during the Romantic period; Jager’s book illustrates how that concept has come to be woven into modernity. Jager examines “how religion finds ways to creatively appropriate the institutional transformations that characterize modernity” (39). Published just two years after Tammy Kitzmiller, et al. v. Dover Area School District1 (2005), Jager’s critique is significant in a way he could not foresee when he began his research.
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