Abstract
This chapter demonstrates how Austen draws from Smith an understanding of temperament and mood as reflective of the trope of sensibility. How characters feel, how others react to their feelings, what actions are prompted by feeling, and how feeling transmutes to mood: the impact of feeling rightly, wrongly, violently, and badly compels plots in which characters suffer and cause suffering. But why do characters need to suffer? Why should love provoke violence? Why does sensibility mute its victims? The chapter demonstrates how Smith, and then Austen, mandate that sensibility-as-mood reverse and undo itself.
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Notes
- 1.
Edward is passive, Edmund oblivious, Desmond faux heroic, Willoughby (George) gullible, Willoughby (John) hungry, Henry Crawford selfish, Delamere spoiled, Darcy cautious. Col. Benwick in Persuasion, perhaps the male character most closely identified with sensibility, turns out to be the most easily cured of sensibility’s prime trait: devotion to one’s first love.
- 2.
Her poetry, especially the sonnets, might be seen as a kind of second opinion, but it should be noted that her speakers never find solace in their sensibility—only food for an intensified suffering.
- 3.
Taylor Walle, ‘He Looked Quite Red: Persuasion and Austen’s New Man of Feeling’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 29 (2016), 45–66, 48.
- 4.
Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1986), 7. Quoted from the 1797 Encyclopedia Britannica.
- 5.
Geoffrey Sill, ‘Neurology and the Novel: Alexander Monro Primus and Secundus, Robinson Crusoe, and the Problem of Sensibility’, Literature and Medicine 16.2 (1997), 17 August 2015. http://literature.proquest.com.
- 6.
Quoted in Sill; source unclear.
- 7.
Elizabeth Dolan, ‘British Romantic Melancholia: Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, Medical Discourse and the Problem of Sensibility’, Journal of European Ideas 33 (2003), 237–253, 240.
- 8.
The mental disruption produced by sensibility is akin to what Thomas Arnold in Observations on the Nature, Kinds, Causes and Prevention of Insanity (1782–1786) called ‘incoherent insanity’: ‘its characteristic is an incoherency of ideas, occasioned by an excessive, perverted, or defective activity of the imagination and memory, accompanied with images existing in the mind, which do not exist externally’. See Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century: A Reader, ed. Allan Ingham (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998), 164–174: 169.
- 9.
Loraine Fletcher, ed. Emmeline (Peterborough: Broadview, 2003), 213.
- 10.
In Fletcher, ed., Emmeline, 480.
- 11.
So many of Smith’s heroes are extremely problematic in how their self-indulgent passions put their loved ones at risk: Delamere, Orlando, Willoughby, and Montalbert himself all victimize the women they love by loving them. The difference is that their sensibility might be better labelled socio/psychopathic in that the destructive impact is on others rather than themselves.
- 12.
Montalbert, 3 vols. (London: S. Low, 1795), III:268.
- 13.
Space constraints will not allow me to discuss this fully: however, I agree with Todd that roughly 1800 marks a change in how sensibility is portrayed, but I take a different tack in suggesting that while the early nineteenth-century novel writes threatening sensibility it is more often than not in light of recuperating heroines.
- 14.
Wilson, ‘The End of Sensibility’. See also Wiltshire, Jane Austen and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Naomi Booth concurs: ‘In Sense and Sensibility … we find an exploration of the pervasiveness of sensibility as a particularly feminine, pathological self-indulgence’ (‘Feeling Too Much: The Swoon and the (In)Sensible Woman’, Women’s Writing 21.4 [2014], 575–591, 582).
- 15.
Sense and Sensibility, ed. Tony Tanner (London: Penguin Classics, 1969), 337, 338.
- 16.
Robert Irvine, ed. Pride and Prejudice (Peterborough: Broadview, 2002), 242.
- 17.
Kristin Flieger Samuelian, ed. Emma (Peterborough: Broadview, 2004), 328.
- 18.
As Elizabeth Dolan observes, although to a more general effect, seeing suffering is what makes it real. Therefore Fanny must be seen; as Mrs. Norris notes, somehow Fanny is always there. See Dolan, Seeing Suffering in Women’s Literature of the Romantic Era (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Press, 2008), 6 passim.
- 19.
See Jenkins, ‘The Puzzle of Fanny Price’, Philosophy and Literature 30, 346–360, 347, 346, 358; and Johnson, ‘Mansfield Park: Confusions of Guilt and Revolutions of Mind’, in Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 114, quoted in Jenkins, 351.
- 20.
Nagle, Sexuality and the Culture of Sensibility in the British Romantic Era (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 99.
- 21.
Seven: a symbolic number.
- 22.
Alan Richardson, ‘Of Heartache and Head Injury: Reading Minds in Persuasion’, Poetics Today 23 (2002), 141–160.
- 23.
Adela Pinch cites this as an instance of Smithian allusion; see Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
- 24.
See ‘Jane Austen’s Subdued Heroines’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30.3, 281–202, 282, 303, 290, 285. Shaw aligns Emma and Elizabeth Bennet with Elinor as those whose path towards the happy ending is uncomplicated by tragedy.
- 25.
We think again about Ethelinde, the subject of so much similar gossip, who maintains an oblivious front by simply choosing to and apparently suffers no social consequences.
- 26.
‘Yet in stark contrast to her budding radical sympathies, Geraldine continues to comply with conduct-book constructions of the dutiful wife; eventually, however, for objectives so baneful they impugn the very ideology of impropriety she seems to [want to] embody’, say Antje Blank and Janet Todd in their Introduction to the novel (Peterborough: Broadview, 2001), 31. But see their full argument, which perceives Geraldine’s unusual characterization.
- 27.
That is, his.
References
Arnold, Thomas. 1786. Observations on the Nature, Kinds, Causes and Prevention of Insanity, Lunacy, or Madness. London: G. Ireland.
Booth, Naomi. 2014. Feeling Too Much: The Swoon and the (In)Sensible Woman. Women’s Writing 21: 575–591.
Dolan, Elizabeth. 2003. British Romantic Melancholia: Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets, Medical Discourse and the Problem of Sensibility. Journal of European Ideas 33: 237–253.
Dolan, Elizabeth. 2008. Seeing Suffering in Women’s Literature of the Romantic Era. Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate Press.
Ingham, Allan (ed.). 1998. Patterns of Madness in the Eighteenth Century: A Reader. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Jenkins, Joyce. 2006. The Puzzle of Fanny Price. Philosophy and Literature 30: 346–360.
Johnson, Claudia. 1988. Mansfield Park: Confusions of Guilt and Revolutions of Mind. In Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel, ed. Claudia Johnson, 94–120. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Nagle, Christopher. 2007. Sexuality and the Culture of Sensibility in the British Romantic Era. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Pinch, Adela. 1996. Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Richardson, Alan. 2002. Of Heartache and Head Injury: Reading Minds in Persuasion. Poetics Today 23: 141–160.
Shaw, Valerie. 1975. Jane Austen’s Subdued Heroines. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 30: 281–303.
Sill, Geoffrey. 1997. Neurology and the Novel: Alexander Monro Primus and Secundus, Robinson Crusoe, and the Problem of Sensibility. Literature and Medicine 16: 250–265.
Todd, Janet. 1986. Sensibility: An Introduction. London: Methuen.
Walle, Taylor. 2016. He Looked Quite Red: Persuasion and Austen’s New Man of Feeling. Eighteenth-Century Fiction 29: 45–66.
West, Jane. 1796. A Gossip’s Story and a Legendary Tale. London: Printed for T. Longman.
Wilshire, John. 1992. Jane Austen and the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wilson, Erin. 2012. The End of Sensibility: The Nervous Body in the Early Nineteenth Century. Literature and Medicine 30: 276–291.
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Labbe, J.M. (2020). Mood: (In)Sensibility. In: Reading Jane Austen After Reading Charlotte Smith. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38829-4_5
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