Traveling Pleasures and Perils of Sensibility

Abstract

philosophical investment in pleasures of sympathy--especially if represented as contagious--provides a continuity between traditions of Sensibility and of Romanticism. To illustrate, I pair two blockbusters of first decade of nineteenth-century, Sydney Owenson's Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale (1806) and Germaine de Stael's Corinne, or Italy (1807). Together they offer a perspective on moments of cultural encounter, on pleasures and perils of Sensibility that animate cultural polities of both works. Both novels function partly as travel books introducing intense, destabilizing pleasures of foreign locales, customs, and traditions to critique domestic political circumstances. But for these women writers (and in different ways for female protagonists at center of novels) notion of home is vexed itself. Tensions produced by distance, displacement, discomfort, and sometimes even by divided allegiance, add complexity to subtle and implicit nationalist critique their narratives enable. Owenson conveys her competing allegiances to Ireland and England after Union of 1800 both through marriage plot uniting characters and nations in conclusion to Wild Irish Girl and in her insistent equation of national with natural, especially for natives of wild western region of Connaught. De Stael's familiar homelessness, constantly displaced by Napoleon's dictates of exile, is reflected by a geographically diverse and thorough immersion in Italian landscape and culture, past and present. Both novels distrust excesses of nationalism while imagining cross-cultural love relationships animated by extreme states of sympathetic attachment to people, places, and objects that are master tropes of Sensibility. Ultimately, pleasure in both novels engenders a volatile notion of history that embraces pleasures of historical change and transcends its inevitable pains. Owenson's embrace of futurity in a revolutionary era in contrast with de Stael's fatalism distinguishes two novels. In literature of Sensibility, electric charge of human contact provides more than simple pleasure. Moments of literal contact arouse one's own physiology and sensitivity to other beings: hence, fellow-feeling. Such moments of imagined sociability follow from a heightened ethical imperative to connect with others, often at one's own peril. Typically, in a Sternean mode, touching scenes in Wild Irish Girl foreground eroticized benevolence between characters which Owenson frames with Gaelic symbolic significance. For example, when fingers of hero and heroine accidentally meet on harp Glorvina is playing, Horatio comments, The touch circulated like electricity through every vein, breeding (Owenson 66). Both trope of circulation and unaccountable emotion protagonist experiences (while assuming it is shared by both parties) express Sensibility tradition. This excitement is less than utter delirium of an earlier scene, but beyond power of words--a commonplace of eighteenth-century tradition that, would be retooled through Romantic versions of sublime. This interchange is also significant in introducing a key interruption in narrative, an extended chain of footnoted material which discusses antiquity of harp and distinctive Gaelic tradition of itinerant bard, while citing Percy's Reliques, introducing Brian Boru and Cambrensis, and drawing (as notes so often do) on author's personal experience of Ireland--the author as native informant. specific linkage of Gaelic culture with tradition of Sensibility provides a necessary corrective to critical narratives that root Sensibility within a primarily British cultural framework, while nodding to French and German influences. As several critics have noted, this reduction ignores increasing identification of Sensibility with the Celtic fringe (Eagleton; Alliston). …