Narrating Friendship and the British Novel, 1760-1830

Katrin Berndt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317132608
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Friendship has always been a universal category of human relationships and an influential motif in literature, but it is rarely discussed as a theme in its own right. In her study of how friendship gives direction and shape to new ideas and novel strategies of plot, character formation, and style in the British novel from the 1760s to the 1830s, Katrin Berndt argues that friendship functions as a literary expression of philosophical values in a genre that explores the psychology and the interactions of the individual in modern society. In the literary historical period in which the novel became established as a modern genre, friend characters were omnipresent, reflecting enlightenment philosophy's definition of friendship as a bond that civilized public and private interactions and was considered essential for the attainment of happiness. Berndt's analyses of genre-defining novels by Frances Brooke, Mary Shelley, Sarah Scott, Helen Maria Williams, Charlotte Lennox, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, and Maria Edgeworth show that the significance of friendship and the increasing variety of novelistic forms and topics represent an overlooked dynamic in the novel's literary history. Contributing to our understanding of the complex interplay of philosophical, socio-cultural and literary discourses that shaped British fiction in the later Hanoverian decades, Berndt's book demonstrates that novels have conceived the modern individual not in opposition to, but in interaction with society, continuing Enlightenment debates about how to share the lives and the experiences of others.

Part I

The Virtuousness of Conventions

Friendship and the Ethics of Fiction

That love arising from a conformity of virtuous dispositions, which we call friendship, is far more lovely as it shews an high relish for moral excellence, and an affection which would extend to many in a considerable degree, if like virtues appeared in them.¹

Friendship is a touchstone for the ethics of fiction in the later Hanoverian period that serves to validate ideals of virtue and sociability. A distinguished form of bonding and an esteemed quality of private and public relations, the bond is located at the heart of Enlightenment and Romantic discussions about moral conventions and social conduct. In novels from the 1760s to the 1830s, friendship exemplifies virtuous principles and directives for both individual and communal interaction, and it illustrates how they can be substantiated and realized in different situations. The values most often connected with the friendship motif are sympathy, other-regard, respect, love, and companionship. Whatever its persuasion – for friendship has the potential to embody established structures and sentiments as well as revolutionary tenets – it seeks to determine the ethical value of the represented behaviour by putting the latter’s virtuousness to the test. In contrast to the motif of romantic love, which often sets the individual against society, friendship derives significance from exemplifying interaction with others. It binds characters to their community and seeks to impact their situation by endowing conventions with the virtues they claim to warrant. In this respect, friendship represents the ethical dimension of the eighteenth century’s preoccupation with manners:

[In the eighteenth century,] the idea of manners assumes both moral and social significance, despite the neutrality of manner as merely a way of doing something. Moral meanings preceded social ones. [. . .] Since even the most trivial rules justify themselves in terms of the individual’s effect on others, concern for manners shades readily into moral obligation. Morality, after all, involves responsibility to and for one’s fellow man and woman.²

The ambiguous meaning of manners reflects the tremendous socio-economic changes, including urbanization and the emergence of a reading public, that affected the shift from ‘a consanguineal family formation [. . .] to a conjugal family formation’ in the eighteenth century.³ Both friendship and familial bonds were located at the interface of institutionalized obligations and voluntary responsibilities, where they show a ‘highly variegated social world’ in which forms of allegiance and liability were volatile.⁴ The genre of the novel became directly engaged in these transitions since its themes and formal features were both part of, and reflected ‘this enormous, unique social, economic, cultural unleashing, the unforeseeable freedoms and possibilities’ in a way that ‘filled a gap and found a great need, a great demand – more than any other literary genre the novel is also an economic phenomenon.’⁵

According to Susan Manning, the Scottish Enlightenment in particular related sociability to the civilizing progress of humankind, a notion that came to shape literary sensibility as well:

The assumption that humanity was naturally social, and could best be studied through observation of relationships, was fundamental to the ‘Science of Man’. The study of sociability was therefore the basis of Sensibility. [. . . . Sentimental characters represented] a particular phase within a universal model of societal progression, a ‘moment’ in which a society’s economic surplus over subsistence need enabled humanity to cultivate the luxury of emotional expression in relationships.⁶

Sensibility, as substantiated by sociability, provides a moral principle to supersede the codes of conduct of a hereditarily stratified society. Scottish Enlightenment was conducive to ‘constructing [. . .] the distinctive ethics of sentimental fiction’ because it praised the importance of benevolence and sympathy for the attainment of reason and moral understanding.⁷ Moreover, the ‘Scottish theory’ of the ‘Science of Man’ tried to overcome the Cartesian separation of mind and body by ‘realign[ing] the moral and physical selves’ – an attempt that, in fiction, resulted in eponymous characters such as Sir Walter Scott’s Edward Waverley, whose journey serves as an exemplary narrative describing the history of the formation of an individual, and of civil society, in eighteenth-century Britain.⁸ It is noteworthy that this Scottish Enlightenment concept of sensibility reaches beyond the display of exaggerated feeling, for it signifies ‘mature ethical understanding [as] the emotional basis of action.’⁹ Feeling, sentiment, and emotion are not perceived as opposition to reason here, but as an inspiration to sympathy, which then must be guided by judgement.

In this section, my discussion focuses on the ethical soundness of values that are closely related to friendship, so much so that they are often identified with it: sympathetic other-regard and (the longing for) companionship. In novels of the later Hanoverian period, friendship exemplifies these ideals of interaction in both intimate and communal contexts, serving to appraise the virtuousness of cultural standards of benevolence as well as individual manifestations of sympathy. In short, friendship verifies the ethical value of these conventions. Its double function, as a quality and as a bond in its own right, proves essential here because it renders friendship well suited to highlight that form and content are not always congruent: what assumes the form of a friendship does not necessarily entail its merits. Moreover, as an acknowledged component of familial and conjugal relationships, friendship serves to explain why principles such as truth, respect, and equality are in conflict with hierarchical structures. The significance of friendship becomes particularly obvious in relationships that are not informed by its qualities, for example when professions of regard are either shown to be limited by complacence, or revealed to be self-serving. After all, an age that was preoccupied with ‘detect[ing] the fundamental principles of sociability’ was bound to be interested in such ‘expressions of solidarity which were disruptive of social cohesion.’¹⁰

In the novels by Frances Brooke (1724–89) and Mary Shelley (1797–1851), benevolence that lacks sincere consideration for the concerns of another leads to hubris rather than genuine friendship, while the longing for compassion and companionship remains unfulfilled when driven by selfishness rather than other-regard. The double signification of friendship as a value and a form of (inter)action forms the focal point of ethical concern in The History of Lady Julia Mandeville (1763) and Frankenstein (1818): in both texts, characters acknowledge the virtuous quality of the friendship ideal, but fail to realize it in their relations and behaviour. The following analyses therefore pursue a twofold aim: they illustrate the importance of friendship and the principles associated with it in two major novels of the second half of the long eighteenth century, and they demonstrate how the ideal of friendship reveals whether conventions that are purported to correspond to benevolence and mutual regard actually are virtuous in character and impact. In particular, they show that Brooke and Shelley use friendship values to disclose the destructive potential of patriarchal authority, Romantic ideals, and dysfunctional family structures. Their narratives are concerned with ‘consciousness possessed and experienced by an individual or individuals operating in relation to [. . .] a frivolous, often corrupt, but severely judgmental society.’¹¹ They highlight the isolation of their characters by contrasting it with friendship virtues that represent a counterpoise to hubris, cowardice, and power abuse legitimized by convention.

Brooke’s and Shelley’s novels present friendship as essentially valuable in order to denounce structures that fail either to observe or to realize its principles. Their choice of friendship as a touchstone for virtuousness shows the influence of Scottish Enlightenment philosophy on their works, for virtue and friendship are not always self-evident companions in eighteenth-century discourse. The appreciation of friendship by the majority of eighteenth-century philosophers and novelists stands in an interesting contrast to the treatment of the phenomenon in the most popular genre of the era: the conduct book, written to instruct female readers on feminine virtuousness and appropriate forms of behaviour. Conduct literature demonstrates the conservative anxieties that haunted debates on the appropriate education of middle- and upper-class girls during ‘the revolutionary and transitional period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.’¹² The later Hanoverian period’s ‘conflicting ideas about women’ emerged from the ‘mid-century worry over whether women should have much learning’ to result in a ‘discussion of the gendered intellect and whether or not there are masculine and feminine areas of intellectual life.’¹³ While novels present friendship as virtuous when it is adhering to moral ideals (a correlation confirmed by the relegation of vice to being represented by false friends), conduct books betray general disregard and suspicion towards women’s homo- and heterosocial friendships. With their focus on educating girls and women for their role as Christian wives, authors like William Kenrick and Richard Fordyce are wary of the potential of friendships to compete with conjugal affection. Anxious to discourage emotional intimacy outside of marriage, they subordinate friendship under their didactic agenda, and discuss it mainly as a means by which women may learn to become good wives. Moreover, Fordyce expects ‘young men [to be] more frequently susceptible of a generous and steady friendship for each other’ because they are, in contrast to women, ‘engaged in a vast diversity of pursuits, from which [women] are precluded by decorum, by softness, and by fear.’¹⁴ He approves of heterosocial friendship because it complements the sexes: women ‘should naturally expect to gain from [men’s] conversation knowledge, wisdom, and sedateness; and they should give us in exchange humanity, politeness, chearfulness, taste, and sentiment.’¹⁵

In conduct books, friendship derives its value from the perpetuation of gender conventions, while homosocial relations among women are denounced as unstable and harmful.¹⁶ The genre does not approve of friendship as a value in its own right; instead, the virtuous courtesy-book girl ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Narrating Friendship and the British Novel, 1760–1830
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I The Virtuousness of Conventions: Friendship and the Ethics of Fiction
• PART II Public or Private? Friendship and the Novel Sphere in Utopian and Sentimental Writing
• PART III A Question of Perspective and Character: Friendship and Narrative Situation
• PART IV The Progress of the Plot: Epistemologies of Friendly Interventions
• Conclusion: Friendship and the Novel Genre
• Bibliography
• Index