Emotions in Translation: Helen Maria Williams and “Beauties Peculiar to the English Language”

Abstract

Emotions in Translation: Helen Maria Williams and “Beauties Peculiar to the English Language” Louise Joy (bio) Louise Joy Homerton College, Cambridge, UK Louise Joy Louise Joy is Lecturer in English at Homerton College, University of Cambridge. Her essays have appeared in The European Romantic Review and The History of European Ideas. She is co-editor of Poetry and Childhood (2010). Footnotes 1. Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, The Indian Cottage, or, a Search after Truth (Workington, 1797), 108. 2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, vol. 1 of Eloisa, or a Series of Original Letters, trans. William Kenrick, rev. ed., 4 vols. (London, 1803), viii. 3. In 1773, Kenrick published a revised edition of Eloisa in which he changed the heroine’s name to an anglicized version of Rousseau’s original. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julia: or, The New Eloisa, trans. William Kenrick, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1773). But this revised edition never captured the popular imagination in the same way, and it was the earlier Eloisa text that continued to be reprinted. For an account of how the novel Rousseau entitled Julie became known as La Nouvelle Héloïse to the French and as Eloisa to the British, see Philip Stewart, “Half-Title: or Julie Beheaded,” Romantic Review 86 (1995): 30–44. 4. Alexander Pope, “Eloisa to Abelard,” in Miscellaneous Poems and Translations, by Several Hands (London, 1722). For example, in his Essays: On Music and Poetry, James Beattie quotes from the Pope epistle, identifying his source as “Pope’s Eloisa.” James Beattie, Essays: on Poetry and Music, as they Affect the Mind; on Laughter, and Ludicrous Composition; on the Usefulness of Classical Learning, 3rd ed. (London, 1779), 53. 5. For a more detailed discussion of the moral character of British readers in the eighteenth century, see Samuel Pickering, The Moral Tradition in English Fiction, 1785–1850 (Hanover, NH: University of New England, 1976). A useful account of the issues involved in the translation of French novels into English during the period is provided by Josephine Grieder, Translations of French Sentimental Prose Fiction in Late Eighteenth-Century England: The History of a Literary Vogue (Durham: Duke University Press, 1975). 6. Much has been written about the representation of women in Rousseau’s work. For a useful window on these discussions, see Linda Zerilli, Signifying Woman: Culture and Chaos in Rousseau, Burke, and Mill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). For a discussion of how Helen Maria Williams is recurrently drawn to represent the figure of Julie (or “Eloisa”) in her prose works, see Nicola Watson, “Novel Eloisas: Revolutionary and Counter-Revolutionary Narratives in Helen Maria Williams,” The Wordsworth Circle 23 (1992): 18–23. 7. The theologian and moral philosopher, Thomas Cogan, characterizes the difference between these two categories of the emotions: “the term passion...may with strict propriety, be used, and used exclusively, to represent the first feelings, the percussion as it were, of which the mind is conscious from some impulsive cause....The...term affection...supposes a more deliberate predilection and aversion.” Thomas Cogan, A Philosophical Treatise on the Passions, 2nd ed. (London, 1802), 6–9. 8. See Helen Maria Williams, Poems, 2 vols. (London, 1786). 9. See also Mary Hays, vol. 1 of Memoirs of Emma Courtney, 2 vols. (London, 1796), 41 and Thomas Holcroft, vol. 4 of Anna St. lves: A Novel, 7 vols. (London, 1792), 151. For a sustained analysis of the role Rousseau’s novel plays in eighteenth-century debates about the emotions, see Ernst Cassirer, The Question of Rousseau, trans. Peter Gay (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963). 10. Mary Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria, vol. 2 of Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 4 vols. (London, 1798), 42. 11. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (London: Allen Lane, 1984), 242–43. 12. Edmund Burke, A Letter from Mr. Burke to a Member of the National Assembly; in Answer to Some Objections to his Book on French Affairs (Paris, 1791), 32–33. 13. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, &c. &c. in a Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Paris, rev. ed...