The Form of the Sentimental Novel

Abstract

Most discussions of sentimental literature, taking their lead from Goldsmith's Comparison between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy, center on matters of content and atmosphere-especially the prevalence of tears, whether those of the characters or the audience. But sentiment on stage is not equivalent to sentiment in the novel, nor can the most striking formal characteristics of the fiction being written in the 1760's and 1770's be illuminated by invocations of such philosophic doctrines as Shaftesbury's benevolism. Through a discussion of the form of sentimental fiction, I would like to suggest that such works as Tristram Shandy, The Man of Feeling, and The Sorrows of Young Werther were neither the resurgence of a cultural stream that had somehow gone underground for almost half a century, nor part of an essentially discontinuous novelistic tradition. They show instead both a structural and a thematic continuity with earlier eighteenthcentury novelists, and with the work of Pope and Swift, that is more central to the best of sentimental literature than any continuity with the themes, plot turns, and moral atmosphere of late seventeenthand early eighteenth-century drama. A convenient foil to my view is the frequent assertion, however qualified, that the form of the novel had become so established in the little more than twenty-five years between Pamela and Tristram Shandy that Sterne could already freely experiment with all the givens of the well-made novel, including its typographical conventions. In this literary-historical commonplace, formal balance and circumstantial realism are the assumed standards; sentiment, gothidsm, and Sterne are the deviations, to be explained more by reference to the history of ideas than the history of the novel. At best the change is explained as a revolt against realism: the critic defines sub-genres and asks us to sit back and wait for Jane Austen. But I would like to argue that Sterne, among others, is not upending but extending the essential self-definition of the novel in England, and I would like to show how a literary form whose first appearance trailed banners of fidelity to real life and moral correctness could metamorphose into Sterne's elaborate formal games and the discovered manuscripts of Walpole and Mackenzie. Structure in the sentimental novel strives to imitate feeling rather than intellect, and to embody direct experience rather than artistic premeditation; this basic imperative of the novel from Defoe on is only made a little more apparent in the works of Sterne, Mackenzie, and others. The form of the sentimental novel, the gothic novel, and eighteenth-century fiction in general never seriously imitates such non-literary fictions as the order of providence, philosophic system, or social hierarchy, no matter how it may comment on them or include their patterns