Sensibility, Reading and Illustration

Spectacles and Signs in Graffigny, Marivaux and Rousseau

Ann Lewis

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351194655
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"Eighteenth-century sensibilite has always been controversial. In fact, the term itself refers to complex forms of physical and emotional responsiveness, and Lewis's study investigates the fictional exploration of various key problems of sentimental response that were at the heart of eighteenth-century moral, epistemological and aesthetic debates. These are analysed in conjunction with some of the actual (often emotional) responses that the term, its fictions and images have provoked through time, including an indispensable survey of the varying construction of sensibilite as an object of study, and the polemics subtending its definition. The verbal evocation of the visual in the form of 'spectacles' and 'signs' was understood in the eighteenth century as having an especially powerful impact. Lewis provides a new reading of the theme of sensibility by analysing the 'textual images' in three best-selling novels from the mid-century: Graffigny's Lettres d'une Peruvienne, Marivaux's La Vie de Marianne and Rousseau's Julie. The examination of a largely neglected corpus of illustrations, understood as readings of each text, provides striking new evidence of the complexity, thematic richness and duplicity of these spectacles, whose power to provoke different reactions is perhaps their most interesting characteristic."

Chapter 1
Critical Readings of Eighteenth-Century French 'Sensibility'

Literary History and the History of a Word

I. Sensibility in Literary History and Criticism: Constructions of a Category

Eighteenth-century sensibility has been variously dubbed an 'institution' (Taine), an 'épidémie' (Monglond), an 'age' or 'ère sensible' (Frye, Van Tieghem), a cult or indeed culture (Todd, Barker-Benfield), a 'physiological doctrine', 'literary movement' and 'discourse' (G. S. Rousseau), a 'literary and social phenomenon' (Jamieson), a 'conceptual and cultural construct' (Vila), and a 'New Orthodoxy' (Conger).¹ These epithets suggest the importance and ubiquity of sensibility in eighteenth-century cultural life, and draw attention to the difficulty of pinning it down in a definition that adequately conveys its diverse manifestations. But as well as signalling its polyvalence, these different encapsulations of sensibility also reflect the shifting preoccupations and methodologies of literary history and criticism from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first.

The following overview of different critical approaches to eighteenth-century 'sensibility' (primarily) in France will both place the present study in its wider critical context and constitute a series of readings of a polymorphous and unstable object of study, whose definition has changed over time. These critical reactions to eighteenth-century sensibility have often themselves been charged with emotion (largely hostility), and inscribed in aesthetic polemics and political debates (such as the relation of 'sentimentalism' to the 'Enlightenment', to nineteenth-century Romanticism, or the French Revolution).² No less interesting, in the context of reception, is the disparity in the attention devoted to the subject in English and French literary criticism over the last twenty-five years. After all, 'sensibility' was not a uniquely French phenomenon, and the different ways it has been understood in various national critical traditions is particularly revealing. In this way, the problem of the different responses provoked by 'sensibility', whose permutations are the core of this study, can also be extended to the secondary literature which has sought to define it.

The following account is not exhaustive (even if such an undertaking were possible), but instead focuses initially on two important moments from sensibility's critical history (the late nineteenth century, and the 1930s). Two contrasting accounts from each period are examined, bringing out the key issues and interventions, and leading to a broader discussion of dates and definitions in more recent approaches to the subject. Part II then turns to a series of eighteenth-century sources in order to establish whether its meanings at this point were any less contentious, or more specific.

Two Nineteenth-Century Accounts of Sensibility: Taine and Lanson

The recuperation of sensibility as an eighteenth-century fashion in social manners is characteristic of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century accounts. Taine's discussion of sensibility in his description of the Ancien Régime occurs in the section on 'Les Mœurs et les caractères': 'Ce n'est pas que le fond des mœurs devienne different [...] Mais la mode autorise une affectation nouvelle, des effusions, des rêveries, des attendrissements qu'on n'avait point encore connus' (1, 208); 'Par suite, dans tous les détails de la vie privée, la sensibilité étale son emphase' (p. 210) — 'La sensibilité devient une institution' (p. 211).³ Sensibility, he argues, emerges as a kind of fashion accessory to salon culture, with a range of 'symptômes dans l'art et dans la littérature', most obvious in Rousseau, Diderot, and Greuze: 'Voici donc la littérature, le théâtre, la peinture et tous les arts qui entrent dans la voie sentimentale pour fournir à l'imagination échauffée une pâture factice' (p. 209). Taine outlines a range of fashionable attitudes and postures (e.g. little temples dedicated to Amitié and Bienfaisance, weeping and fainting in social contexts) based on contemporary evidence such as memoirs. He argues that despite the tendency to inauthentic display, these social forms ultimately did permeate beneath the surface of the 'mascarade de salon':

Néanmoins la mousse de l'enthousiasme et des grands mots laisse au fond des cœurs un résidu de bonté active, de bienveillance confiante, et même de bonheur [...] Pour la première fois, on voit des femmes accompagner leur mari en garnison; dés mères veulent nourrir, des pères s'intéressent à l'éducation de leurs enfants.(p. 212)

While all of this is debatable in historical terms, nonetheless, Taine's description of social sensibility highlights an important aspect of what was not a purely literary phenomenon — and its very modishness has been a reason for the enduring critical distaste for the subject.⁴

Ten years later, Gustave Lanson also drew attention to the importance of 'ce produit singulier auquel on applique dans un sens très spécial le nom de sensibilité', giving it a whole chapter in his book on the comédie larmoyante.⁵ In this account, sensibility is construed as a 'nouvelle morale' (p. 235) or 'disposition nouvelle' (p. 237) — a new set of attitudes towards love and virtue, and more generally, the celebration of the ascendancy of 'nature', 'instinct', and the emotions in moral life. These attitudes are traced back to fictional, religious and philosophical works of the late seventeenth century, and he examines their elaboration in Nivelle de la Chaussée's theatre. Lanson argues that understanding this nexus of assumptions is key to making sense of the comédie larmoyante, since it also subtends a set of literary conventions, which he analyses in terms of plot and characterization, as well as identifying a specific 'style sensible' (pp. 259—64): 'C'est qu'elles [ses comédies] sont entièrement conçues selon les lois et les conventions spéciales de la sensibilité [...] Il faut les regarder de ce point de vue: on apercevra alors l'unité de l'œuvre' (p. 240).

Lanson is far from approving of sensibility, in terms of either its moral attitudes (charged with 'égoïsmi' and self-gratification) or its aesthetic credentials (lacking modesty and sincerity, and responsible for simplistic characterization, moral platitudes, and an overwrought style). His moral disapproval of sensibility is apparent in an abundance of barbed comments like the following:

Dans tout cela disparaissent le dogme chrétien de la nature corrompue [...] La grâce et le devoir sont inutiles: la nature suffit pour la vertu, dont le dernier mot consiste à aimer beaucoup, tout ce qu'on peut, n'importe quoi, et comme on peut, sans oublier les sens. (Nivelle, p. 338)

His critique of sensibility's conflation of the moral and sensual: 'Confusion de l'amour sensuel et de l'amour du bien dans un même enthousiasme expansif et bavard' (p. 233), can also be found in other nineteenth-century accounts such as the Goncourts' appraisal of Greuze: 'Partout le tempérament du temps, le tempérament de l'homme traversent les idées du peintre, mettant à toute cette morale en action une pointe de libertinage, ne laissant par moments entrevoir dans le moraliste qu'un Baudouin officiellement vertueux' — 'ne sont-ce pas des amours de Boucher habillés en Savoyards et descendus par la cheminée?'⁶

Lanson makes the important distinction between textual and fictional representations of sentimental behaviour on the one hand, and their actual appearance in social mores on the other. In his view, the appearance of sensibility in social manners postdates its fictional elaboration by several decades, and results from Rousseau's influence (p. 265). This is rather more sophisticated than Taine's impressionistic generalizations, which seem to assume a transparent relation between fiction and social reality, and the emergence of sensibility in both at the same time (the latter part of the eighteenth century).

'Preromanticism' and 'Sensibility' in the 1930s

The next important moment of sensibility's critical history occurs with the emergence of several monumental literary histories in the 1930s. These retain certain assumptions and methods implicit in the late-nineteenth-century accounts of sensibility outlined above. However, in this new critical context, sensibility also becomes embroiled in the impassioned debate on Romanticism and its notional offshoot 'preromanticism'. Monglond's and Trahard's literary histories are almost exactly contemporaneous (1930, 1931—33) but produce very different versions and evaluations of sensibility. In these studies, the socio-historical generalizations typical of Taine's analysis: 'Le caractère du siècle reçoit alors son trait final, et "l'homme sensible" apparaît' (p. 208) are fused with a kind of psychological exploration of the 'âme sensible'. Methodologically speaking, this psycho-social characterization of sensibility (or 'l'âme sensible') maps onto the 'l'homme et l'œuvre' approach, so that in the case of Monglond, who qualifies himself as an 'historien de la vie intérieure', the analysis of the psychological make-up and passional states of various individuals is used to represent wider social and literary trends and to recreate an atmosphere. Trahard establishes a canon of eighteenth-century Maîtres de ta sensibilité française, and, finding sensibility in both hommes and œuvres, explores the relationship between them.

Monglond: 'Le Préromantisme Français'

André Monglond provides an interesting case study of the 'préromantisme' thesis insofar as his heavily rhetoricized argument exaggerates tendencies also present in more measured accounts.⁷ He constructs a model of organic growth and decline using his version of nineteenth-century Romanticism as the norm by which to judge the preceding period, in the identification of a diverse set of symptoms ('pressentiments') which later coalesce into 'un tout organique' (I, 16): Romanticism is 'le germe [qui] se développe peu à peu' (I, 12). 'Préromantisme' itself is a rather nebulous category: Monglond has recourse to the phrase 'je ne sais quoi' more than once in his attempts to define it (e.g. 1, 193; II, 8). Evaluated as a preparation for and the source of Romanticism, it is sometimes defined as a particular period (a generation of early Romantics, post-Rousseau but pre-1830, I, 16).⁸ At other times, it is identified with individual destinées or experiences, or with specific qualities considered Romantic before their time. These range from the general (preromanticism's 'essence religieuse', II, 7—16) to the psychological (a kind of emotional and artistic integrity inhering in particular individuals: 'l'unité de la vie intérieure', II, 13, 402), and also correspond to a set of literary forms and themes explicitly defined against 'classicism' (including 'le spontané', 'l'inspiration', poetry, 'lyrisme', a special relation to nature).⁹

Within this schema, sensibility (dealt with under the category of 'l'âme sensible', the title of a substantial chapter in Volume II) tends implicitly to be recuperated as an imperfect or corrupted form of preromantic experience — and in a final taxonomical twist at the end of Volume u, as 'pseudo-préromantisme' (II, 408). Despite, or because of, its moral pretensions, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Illustrations
• Sources and Editions
• Introduction
• 1 Critical Readings of Eighteenth-Century French 'Sensibility': Literary History and the History of a Word
• 2 The Power of Images: Sensibility, Communication, and Aesthetic Experience in Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne
• 3 Problems with the Passion of Pity, and Pitiful Passions: Love, Sex, and Sensibility in La Vie de Marianne
• 4 (Re)Reading Sentimental Topoi, Scenes, and Spectacles in Julie
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Bibliography
• Index