The Cure of the Passions and the Origins of the English Novel (review)

Abstract

312 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION15:2 eighteenth-century women represented a range of possible accommodations , suggested reforms, and imagined resistances to patriarchy. Katherine Green Western Kentucky University Geoffrey Sill. The Cure ofthe Passions and the Origins of the English Novel. Cambridge and NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ix + 261pp. £40. ISBN 0-521-80805-7. The Cure ofthePassions and the Origins oftheEnglish Novelis filled with interesting information about eighteenth-century culture and the history ofthe novel. The book's thesis links the perennially studied origins ofthe English novel to revolutions in medicine and morals from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. In a nutshell, Geoffrey Sill argues tiiat the English novel came about in order to address a crisis in the philosophy of human nature, not only as "product" or passive "response" to the crisis, but as an active force in the field ofculture and the quality ofindividual lives. Accepting Harvey's discovery of the circulation ofblood—itselfrelated to the earlier even more radical natural philosophy and theology ofMichael Servetus, who emerges as the hero ofthe study—eighteenth-century writers such as Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, and Burney create narratives that embrace and enact the idea that the passions, which complexly determine human behaviour, can be "cured" through narrative means. The eighteenth-century novel therefore performs a version of"art therapy" upon the diseased minds ofcharacters, readers, and modern British culture. Reflection redeems mankind; religion and morality can triumph even in a world of modern medicine. The book's thesis will challenge scholars and teachers to rethink their approaches to the eighteenth-century novel, as Sill clearly hopes. Citing Michael McKeon's Origins oftheEnglish Novel, Sill argues that "Questions of truth, questions of virtue, and perhaps especially the question of the passions dominated all fields ofdiscourse through the eighteenth century" (p. 12, emphasis added). The "question of the passions" involves medicine and theology equally, as the book's argument sets out. With the discovery of the circulation ofblood and the real role of the heart in human physiology, the old theory ofthe humours was fully exploded. This opened space for a fuller understanding of the complex interplay between body and mind in any number ofailments. It also led directly to challenges to the nature and even existence of the Holy Trinity. The Cure of the Passions and the Origins of the English Novelincludes an analysis spread over several chapters ofthe cultural importance of Servetus, the Spanish theologian and physician. Servetus predated Britain's William Harvey by a century, but this was only known (and became an issue) in the late seventeenth century, when William Wotton REVIEWS313 "resurrected" the "ghost" ofServetus "as the spirit ofmodern learning" (p. 47) in Reflections upon Ancient and Modem Learning, his riposte to Temple's "Essay upon Ancient and Modern Learning." Thus Servetus—and the nature of the passions—became a central element in the Batde ofthe Books. It was the work of novelists such as Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, and Burney (the four primarily addressed in the book) to reconcile the modern understanding of human physiology with Christian theology. (Sill points out that although Servetus was burned as a heretic by his sometime correspondentjohn Calvin, he was no atheist; the eighteenth-century novelists were, in a significant sense, catching up with Servetus.) The individual chapters include a curious mix of cultural history and literary criticism. The first chapter, "The Physician of the Mind from Zeno to Arbuthnot," moves back and forth between the history of medicine and Smollett's Humphry Clinker to introduce the "physicians of the mind," who understood the psychological basis for ailments concerning the passions but saw the human being as more complicated than the mechanistic version put forward by Hobbes or Mandeville. Chapter 2 discusses the "ghost" ofServetus. Chapter 3 concerns Alexander Monro (the son, although the father's importance is cited as well) and the eighteenth-century understanding of the nervous system in order to lay the groundwork for sensibility in culture and the novel. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 address Defoe, both his uncategorizable works such as The Consolidator, The Natural History of the Devil, and A fournal of the Plague Year, and what we now consider "novels"—Robinson Crusoe, MollFlanders, and...