Abstract
When Hume described the uncontrollable animation of Thomas Blacklock’s body in a letter to Joseph Spence, as we saw in the previous chapter, this provided incontrovertible evidence of the blind poet’s laudable ‘sensibility’: his taste, poetic discrimination and social sensitivity. A very different bodily activity (or lack of it) focuses Mary Wollstonecraft’s depiction, in chapter 3 of her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), of a woman whose purported sensibility connotes indolence, immorality and luxurious selfishness:
I once knew a weak woman of fashion, who was more than commonly proud of her delicacy and sensibility. She thought a distinguishing taste and puny appetite the height of all human perfection, and acted accordingly. I have seen this weak sophisticated being neglect all the duties of life, yet recline with self-complacency on a sofa, and boast of her want of appetite as a proof of delicacy that extended to, or, perhaps, arose from, her exquisite sensibility; for it is difficult to render intelligible such ridiculous jargon. Yet, at the moment, I have seen her insult a worthy old gentlewoman, whom unexpected misfortunes had made dependent on her ostentatious bounty, and who, in better days, had claims on her gratitude. Is it possible that a human creature could have become such a weak and depraved being, if, like the Sybarites, dissolved in luxury, everything like virtue had not been worn away, or never impressed by precept, a poor substitute, it is true, for cultivation of mind, though it serves as a fence against vice?1
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Notes
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 7 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1989), vol. 5, pp. 112–13.
Important secondary literature on physiology and sensibility includes ‘Nerves, Spirits and Fibres: Towards the Origins of Sensibility’, in George Rousseau, Nervous Acts (New York: Palgrave, 2004), Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel (Cambridge University Press, 1993), John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) and G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility (University of Chicago Press, 1992).
Mary, A Fiction, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Todd and Butler, vol. 1, p. 7. Lady Kingsborough, Wollstonecraft’s employer whilst she worked as a governess in Ireland, is frequently identified as the source for these women. For Claudia Johnson’s observation that Eliza is both ‘hypercorporeal … unanimated by higher faculties of mind or spirit’ and ‘hypocorporeal’, see her Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s (University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 51.
For discussion along these lines, see Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility (London: Routledge, 1993), John Whale, ‘Death in the Face of Nature: Self, Society and Body in Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark’, Romanticism, 1:2 (1995), 177–92, and Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
On seventeenth-century moral philosophy, see Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. MacFie (Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 158. Future references will be abbreviated to TMS.
Archibald Campbell, An Enquiry into the Original of Moral Virtue (London, 1734), pp. 29–30. Italics as in the original.
For the differences between Hume and Smith on sympathy, see David R. Raynor, ‘Hume’s Abstract of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 22 (1984), 51–79.
David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 66 and 219–20.
Peter de Bolla, ‘The Visibility of Visuality’, in Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, ed. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 65–79.
Adam Smith, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. J. C. Bryce (Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 58.
On theatrical metaphors in TMS, see David Marshall, The Figure of Theatre: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith and George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
Adam Smith, ‘The History of Ancient Physics’, in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W. P. D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 107.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, ed. Nora Crook (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1996), p. 81.
John Barrell discusses the class associations of viewing landscapes in ‘The Public Prospect and the Private View: The Politics of Taste in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Reading Landscape: Country-City-Capital, ed. Simon Pugh (Manchester University Press, 1990), pp. 19–40.
Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 7 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1989), vol. 6, p. 243.
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© 2012 Catherine Packham
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Packham, C. (2012). Generating Sympathy: Sensibility, Animation and Vitality in Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft. In: Eighteenth-Century Vitalism. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230368392_3
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