Feeling Too Much: The Swoon and the (In)Sensible Woman

Abstract

This article argues that swooning became a particularly feminine, eroticized art of sinking during the eighteenth century under the rubric of sensibility. The sentimental novels of this period share with the moral-sense philosophers a new focus on the importance of feeling as the precursor to sympathy, and the swoon is deployed as a textual sign of overwhelming feeling. But the swoon paradoxically pushes high sensibility over into insensibility. Swooning, then, textually literalizes the potential failure of sentimental language through the inert female form, and an association with morbidly excessive feminine feeling is bound up with the “problem of sensibility” by the end of the eighteenth century. Textual swooning is seen as paradigmatic of a complex and potentially sadomasochistic sentimental scenography, in which gender is a crucial factor: whilst advertising for sympathy, the sentimental novel is seen to fall back on the pleasures of regarding the inert female form. Henry Mackenzie's popular sentimental novel The Man of Feeling (1771) is seen to demonstrate the erotic impasse of feminine swooning in the discourse of sensibility, while Jane Austen, writing at the start of the nineteenth century, is seen to attempt a creative alternative to it, proposing an anti-swoon position and venerating female exertion against faintness.