Oscillations of Sensibility

Abstract

IGHTEENTH-CENTURY VERSIONS of sensibility provide few obvious attractions for the postmodern consciousness. Novel after novel, play after play, the early literature of sensibility rehearses its register of human misery, without consistent irony, without appropriate rage. In their sheer relentlessness, the bizarre multiplications of misfortune frequently verge on inadvertent comedy. Equally appalling to twentieth-century feelings are the remedies prescribed for vast accumulations of suffering. Money and tears take care of everything. A Man of Feeling can derive perverse aesthetic satisfaction from contemplating others' suffering and can rescue prostitutes and invalids by opening his purse. Recent commentators, predictably, have noted the political and moral inadequacies of this arrangement,' and Henry Mackenzie himself, considerably after he wrote A Man of Feeling, suggested with alarm the possibility that readers might exhaust their humanitarian capacities by weeping for figures in a text rather than confronting the actual suffering around them.2 Eighteenth-century female novels of sensibility-contributions to the genre written by and mostly about women-differ from their male counterparts most obviously by emphasizing the situation of the afflicted rather than that of the responder to affliction. In such works, female victims typically suffer endlessly and ingeniously, revealing their virtue by their acceptance of what Providence dictates. Frances Sheridan's Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761), to which I shall return, exemplifies the mode. Its heroine, narrating her own career, tells of ever-increasing mishaps, all of which she accepts as opportunities for goodness. For a time unexpected prosperity, the direct reward of her virtue, alleviates her distress, but a third-person narrator intervenes to assure the reader that accumulating disasters soon ensue: Sidney's wealth promptly disappears. An organizing scheme for fiction dependent on female victimization may respond directly to the relative lack of opportunity for agency experienced in actuality by many middle-class eighteenth-century women. But female novels of sensibility, which have received little critical attention as distinct from their male equivalents, also reveal unexpected ideological complexity. Despite their apparent predication on the value New Literary History, 1994, 25: 505-520