Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature

Touching Fiction

A. Wetmore

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137346339
• eBook ISBN: 9781137346346
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Analysing texts by Sterne, Smollett, Brooke, and Mackenzie, this book offers a new perspective on a question that literary criticism has struggled with for years: why are many sentimental novels of the 1700s so pervasively and playfully self-conscious, and why is this self-consciousness so often directed toward the materiality of the printed word?

1

Introductory Matter: Structuring Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Fiction

This book examines the links between sentimentalism and narrative self-reflexivity in eighteenth-century novels about men of feeling. At the centre of things is a set of texts that were all published around the same time: Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) and A Sentimental Journey (1768), Henry Brooke’s The Fool of Quality (1766–1770), Tobias Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771), and Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771). Each of these novels participates in the cultural turn to sensibility by populating their narratives with new models of virtuous and sympathetic masculinity. Equally significantly, these novels about sentimental men also share a tendency to employ a variety of self-referential literary techniques, including typographical play, textual fragmentation, anti-linear narrative structures, visual puns, manipulations of digression and intertextuality, and self-conscious intrusions by narrators, authors, readers and editors. These techniques not only undercut any realist illusion that the reader is directly perceiving immediately beheld events, but they also, importantly, draw attention to the narratives in question as materially embedded in printed books. The novels of Sterne, Brooke, Smollett and Mackenzie thus consistently display a distinctly eighteenth-century concern for books as physical objects that reflects their participation in a rapidly expanding print culture, something that is also reflected in the many instances where these texts blur the boundaries between printed books and sentimental bodies.

The pervasive self-consciousness of these texts, when it is addressed at all,¹ has sometimes been seen as evidence of eighteenth-century literature’s capacity to anticipate (post)modernist experiments in metafiction, or as an indication of underlying tensions between the form and content of sentimental fiction. In this book, however, I argue that instances of narrative self-reflexivity in novels about men of feeling can best be accounted for as strategies of ‘corporeal defamiliarization.’ In its broadest sense, the term ‘defamiliarization’ can be applied to any case where a text or work of art employs devices that denaturalize or ‘make strange’ that which has come to seem natural and familiar. The term also more narrowly applies to texts that specifically denaturalize their own status as literary artefacts, often through reflexive devices that foreground a work’s structural and linguistic foundations. What I hope to convey with the term ‘corporeal defamiliarization’ is how novels about men of feeling exhibit a distinct type of self-consciousness that is more concerned with denaturalizing their own status as tactile, tangible books – and with the entanglements of the literary and the somatic more broadly – than with representing themselves as constructions of language or structural convention. This more fleshly species of self-consciousness is ultimately mobilized in the service of the moral, aesthetic and ideological aims of sentimentalism. The novels of Sterne, Smollett, Mackenzie and Brooke support sentimentalism’s preoccupation with embodied sensibility through strategies of corporeal defamiliarization that foreground books as intimate things to be felt, whose literary value should be approached along physiological lines as registered in embodied effects on readers – shaken nerves, dilated vessels, palpitating hearts, flushes, blushes and flowing tears.

Two significant changes had to occur in the eighteenth century in order to get to this point, where narrative strategies that engage with the materiality of texts and exploit parallels between texts and bodies could be deployed in support of sentimentalism. First, a new generation of authors working in literature, medicine and philosophy had to subtly redefine sympathetic feeling in ways that transformed the body from a source of vice and corruption to a foundational resource for the communication of virtue, sympathy and sociability. Secondly, authors of sentimental narratives had to re-appropriate literary techniques previously employed by Augustan satirists like Pope and Swift to strengthen the associations between vice and the realm of the flesh, and reinflect these techniques to serve the new concerns of a culture that, by contrast, closely aligned moral virtue with the body’s delicate nerves. Both of these changes are covered in Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature, which traces sentimental self-reflexivity from its roots in Augustan satire and the Scottish Enlightenment, to its realization in mid-century novels of sensibility, and, finally, to its eventual dissipation after the French Revolution.

One of the benefits of approaching self-reflexivity as corporeal defamiliarization is that it brings formal properties that can appear antagonistic to sentimental fiction into alignment with one of the genre’s most characteristic features: its valorization of the sensitive body as a medium for communicating sympathy and virtue. However, that is only part of the picture I want to sketch in this study. As Michael McKeon has recently reminded eighteenth-century scholars in “Mediation as Primal Word” (2010), a medium is something that not only can connect but that also stands between (385). This valorization of embodied sensibility should not be considered evidence of some sort of naïvely empirical or philosophically realist faith in the authority of individual sense experience. Paying close attention to strategies of corporeal defamiliarization in Brooke, Sterne, Smollett and Mackenzie, as I will show, brings to light an important underlying duality that governs the logic of sentimental investments in the somatic. Even though self-reflexive practices help these novels about men of feeling bring themselves close to hand – and help point to the embodied practices and processes at the heart of literary and affective experience – they do not do so by emphasizing the transparency of either books or the bodies that hold them. Instead, self-reflexivity tends to manifest itself at sites in these works where the opacity of printed pages and bodily surfaces comes to the fore: where books become damaged and passages go missing; where words give over to ambiguous black marks and blank spaces; where facial expressions elude interpretation, and fleshy exteriors act as cloaks over the heart. What this reveals, I maintain, is an underlying strain of somatic scepticism. Along with corporeal defamiliarization, somatic scepticism is a key concept in this study. I have appropriated the term from Richard Kroll’s The Material Word (1991), a work that, as with Deidre Lynch’s The Economy of Character (1998), has been foundational for my research since I began this project. I employ it here to refer to the doubt, anxiety and uncertainty that invariably surrounds knowledge and meaning communicated through embodied means. Alongside a characteristically sentimental interest in the somatic as the primary medium for emotional exchange is a parallel concern in novels about men of sensibility with how bodies also get in the way, intervene and conceal more than they reveal.

Though close attention to narrative structure is a key component, this book ultimately aspires to do more than offer a new approach to the formal techniques of a few sentimental novels. Of greater significance is what insights into the culture of sensibility are yielded by understanding self-referential practices in sentimental texts as corporeal defamiliarization. Different chapters offer analyses of the interplay of sentimentalism and self-reflexivity in Sterne, Brooke, Smollett and Mackenzie from various perspectives, including their implications for understanding contemporary concepts of language, mechanical phenomena, and health and medicine. Collectively, these chapters work together to uncover evidence that somatic scepticism is a central feature not only of these particular works, but of the eighteenth century’s culture of sensibility more broadly. The eighteenth century turned to the realm of embodied feeling as a potential means of resolving a crisis of virtue that plagued a British society grappling with radical disruptions to its social and economic order. However, enmeshed with the hope that the cultivation of feeling might offer a way for virtue to survive in an increasingly modern and commercial Britain were corresponding and omnipresent fears about relying on a medium – the body’s nervous sensibility – that was perpetually vulnerable to, among other things, fluctuation, ambiguity, corruption, deception and disease. This leads sentimentalism to consistently counter-balance its emphasis on the central importance of embodied sensation with a thorough self-awareness of the instability and uncertainty that invariably surrounds corporeal forms of knowing and connecting. One of the sites where this self-awareness most consistently manifests itself is through practices of corporeal defamiliarization in novels of sensibility.

Matter and mediation in the middle of the century

The remarkable self-referentiality of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy has, of course, been widely acknowledged and thoroughly analysed. However, discussions of this aspect of the novel have often been bracketed off from analysis of Tristram Shandy’s relationship to contemporary literary and cultural trends, including sentimentalism. As Thomas Keymer explores in Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (2002), the “widespread contemporary sense of Tristram Shandy as the defining work of its immediate day, tied intimately into the writing of a culture it both reflects and influences, is rarely registered in modern criticism” (4). Instead, Sterne’s popular work has too often been treated as an historical anomaly, whose significance must be understood either in terms of its indebtedness to earlier literary traditions or its anticipation of modernist and postmodernist experiments.² Left out of the battle between advocates for Sterne’s traditionalism or his uncanny modernity is a thorough consideration of Tristram Shandy’s responsiveness and relevance to his own cultural present. For all their antagonism, the two sides of the debate have worked in tandem to reinforce Sterne’s status as an author that does not belong to his own time.

Thomas Keymer himself has done more than most to help try to change this situation. One of the goals of Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel is “to reinsert Sterne’s writing into its rich and heterogeneous cultural moment” (7). Keymer tries to accomplish this, in part, by showing how thoroughly Tristram Shandy responds to highly self-conscious fiction from the largely forgotten era of the 1750s. Despite the decade’s reputation as a period of stagnation in the history of the novel, works like John Kidgell’s The Card (1755), The Life and Memoirs of Mr. Ephraim Tristram Bates (1756), Thomas Amory’s The Life of John Buncle, Esq. (1756), and The History of Charlotte Summers (1750) take novelistic form in new directions. In particular, “they push a literary self-consciousness inherited from Fielding into a more directly practical self-consciousness about the mechanisms and institutions of print culture” (17). From this perspective, Tristram Shandy participates in a broader movement from Swift’s Tale of a Tub to Henry Fielding’s narrative self-awareness and, finally, toward a species of self-conscious narration more directly engaged with the novel’s materiality and more reflexive about its participation within an expanding commercial print industry.³ Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel shows how a deeper appreciation of the “typographical play” or, more generally, the “play on the physicality or ‘bookness’ of the literary text” (63) in Tristram Shandy allows us to reinsert Sterne back in his own era, as a writer actively responding to and extending developments in contemporary experimental texts.

Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel is one of a number of recent critical works to draw attention to the curious propensity for literature in the middle decades of the eighteenth century to self-consciously foreground its own status as printed matter. Other works in this vein include Mark Blackwell’s essay “Hackwork: It-Narratives and Iteration” (2007) from The Secret Life of Things, Christopher Flint’s new book The Appearance of Print in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (2011), and, even more recently, Christina Lupton’s exciting and provocative Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2012).⁴ Each of these studies explores the need for a fuller understanding of how fictional works of the 1750s and later – an era often denigrated as “the nadir in the glorious ascendancy of the novel” and “a period rife with shameless imitation” (Blackwell 187) – experiment with typographical and printerly self-reflexivity in ways that foreground their own materiality and commodification. Unlike Scriblerian satires from the beginning of the century, which mock the papery ephemerality of hack literature from a position of cultural superiority, later works seem to openly embrace and even celebrate their humble material existence as printed books made of paper and ink. For this reason, Lupton argues that “a special account is needed of why these kinds of writing, produced largely for profit, reflect so closely on their status as paper products, on the marketplace for which they [are] written, and on the misbehaviour and appetites of their authors and readers” (3). By no means do critics fully agree on all aspects of what this “special account” should look like.⁵ Lupton and Flint, in fact, explicitly position themselves on opposite sides of a debate over whether self-consciousness about one’s own commodification necessarily leads to some hope for regaining agency or otherwise standing above that very process. Despite differences, though, all three critics share a common belief, along with Keymer, that new understandings of eighteenth-century literature can be yielded by close attention to how mid-century texts self-consciously play around with print. In doing so, these critics all trace out potential answers to a question Lupton proposes in the final chapter of Knowing Books: “what would a more literal approach to the materiality of writing as it is represented within texts look like?” (128).

Men of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Literature also aspires to provide a “special account” of what self-reflexivity is doing in post-1750s fictional works, and why some self-conscious fiction from the era appears to revel in its own materiality. While Lupton, Flint, Keymer and Blackwell all have sentimental literature on their radar, none take the presence of a more practical self-consciousness in novels of sensibility as their primary focus.⁶ One of the modest hopes of my study is to make some contribution to this active and growing critical conversation by moving questions about sensibility in mid-century novels from the margins to the centre of inquiry. What would a more literal approach to the self-conscious materiality of specifically sentimental writing look like? How can efforts to “reinsert Sterne’s writing into its rich and heterogeneous cultural moment,” as Keymer puts it, be helped even further by considering Sterne’s incorporation and extrapolation of contemporary trends toward typographical self-reflexivity in conjunction with his incorporation and extrapolation of contemporary literary trends toward the sentimental? How does our understanding of the significance of self-reflexivity in mid-century fiction change when we begin from the premise that Sterne is not remarkable, but actually quite typical of his time in intermingling sentimentalism and practical self-consciousness in this manner?

In The Man of Feeling, for instance, not only is the narrative of Harley, the sentimental protagonist, filled with references to inscription practices and the weighty materiality of books, but the coherence of the narrative is shot through with editorial intrusions that serve as intermittent reminders of the manuscript’s discovery as partially-destroyed wadding for a curate’s gun. Through a labyrinth of narrative techniques that include typographical playfulness, along with disruptive digressions, numerous gaps, intertextual insertions, fragments and self-conscious inconsistencies, the reader is constantly forced to encounter the shaping influence of the novel’s supposed material origins in a mutilated and fragmentary collection of papers. In Humphry Clinker, the adventures of the sentimental, if cantankerous, Matthew Bramble and his entourage are represented through a kaleidoscopic epistolary form, within which are interwoven cues that foreground the incompleteness and uncertainty surrounding the thick pile of letters that composes the narrative. Moreover, Tobias Smollett himself shows up as a character within his own fiction on multiple occasions, including as host of a dinner for Grub Street hacks, most of whom exhibit physical disabilities associated with their literary profession. Henry Brooke’s The Fool of Quality opens its supremely digressive and eccentric tale of the sentimental education of Harry Clinton with a dedication and preface both playfully self-conscious enough to rival almost anything in Sterne. And as Brooke’s narrative proceeds, in its own meandering way, it is frequently interrupted by debates between the unreliable author and a sceptical reader who raises legitimate concerns about the inadequacies of the novel and the missteps of its creator. These kinds of manoeuvres, which draw attention to books as mere matter, or as circulating objects in a commercial public sphere, do not have the same valence when they appear in novels that are otherwise about promoting the circulation of benevolence and virtue. Playful references to writing and reading as first and foremost physical rather than intellectual exercises can no longer be presumed to carry the same satirical weight in novels where the status of the corporeal has otherwise been elevated, and where sympathy expresses itself through eloquently emotive bodies. Instead, instances of self-reflexivity in these cases must be placed in the context of broader shifts brought about by Britain’s cultural turn to sensibility.

Questioning the distance of things

Figuring out how exactly to place self-reflexivity in this context, however, is no simple matter. The interplay of self-reflexivity and sentimentalism in these novels can be disorienting to modern audiences as the two literary modes appear in many respects to be working at cross-purposes. Self-reflexivity is commonly associated with structural and affective distance, since it typically undermines the wilful suspension of disbelief in favour of laying bare a novel’s conventions and artifice. Sentimentalism, on the other hand, is predicated on affective proximity.⁷ It devotes itself to affecting a reader’s sympathies which, one might plausibly assume, would require a certain amount of structural transparency in order to limit interruptions...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introductory Matter: Structuring Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Fiction
• 2  Body/Language
• 3  Feeling/Machines
• 4  Public/Health
• 5  Concluding Matter: Tear-blotted Texts and Men ofFeeling in the 1790s
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index