S M O L L E T T ’S S E M I O L O G Y O F E M O T I O N S : T H E S Y M P T O M A T O L O G Y O F T H E P A S S I O N S A N D A F F E C T I O N S I N R O D E R I C K R A N D O M A N D P E R E G R I N E P I C K L E J O H N M C A L L IS T E R University of Saskatchewan O n e of the most distinctive features of Smollett’s style is the remarkable physicality of his methods of characterization. One technique, in particular, stands out: the consistent representation of emotions by crude formulas of physical display. While conceding, often grudgingly, that this is a legitimate mode of representation rather than just a substitute for an authentic imagery of human feeling, most critics have complained that this technique is incapable of portraying complexity or subtlety of feeling. Albrecht Strauss, for example, admits that Smollett’s technique is effective for broad comedy but finds it coarse and limiting: “the physical reactions Smollett manipulates are so crude as to be incapable of doing justice to finer shades of feeling.” 1 Similarly, Thomas Preston argues that Smollett’s method ignores subjective emotional experience,2 and Susan Auty refers to “classic poses of stupefaction, madness, frenzy . . . that undermine the feeling while exaggerating the manifestation of it.”3 Much of this criticism implies a non-realist Smollett; real human emotions are subtle, complex phenomena, but Smollett’s comic method reduces them to stylized, conventional formulas. According to Strauss, for example, Smollett shows “a tendency to lapse into ready-made formulas whenever the occasion for describing strong emotions arises. . . . [H]e always has a readily available repertoire of descriptive phrases to fall back upon.”4 For Philip Stevick, it is a matter of Smollett’s “stylistic norm,” which is peculiarly “high-pitched” and “consistently hyperbolic.”5Damian Grant takes a similar view,6while Preston relates the technique to the stylized conventions of contemporary theatre. In fact, Smollett clearly intended his novels to be taken as realistic depic tions of life and manners. He is quite clear about this in the preface to Roderick Random, where he contrasts his fiction with the “monstrous hyper boles” of romance.7 Like Cervantes, Smollett is concerned with “ the follies of ordinary life,” not the “ludicrous and unnatural” inventions of romance (Preface, xliv). This satirical project requires realism. The extravagance of Gil Bias, for example, “not only deviates from probability, but prevents that E n g l is h Stu d ie s in C a n a d a , x iv , 3, September 1988 generous indignation, which ought to animate the reader, against the sordid and vicious disposition of the world” (Preface, xlv). Later, in the dedication to Ferdinand Count Fathom, Smollett reiterates this commitment to realism in his well-known definition of the novel as “a large diffused picture, compre hending the characters of life. . . The success of such fiction, he goes on to argue, depends on “propriety” and “probability.”8 The physicality of Smollett’s depiction of emotions is not part of some antinaturalistic design. The frenzies, fits, swoons, changes of colour, and wild gestures by which his characters display their feelings represent, in fact, an attempt to portray emotional experience as Smollett, the doctor, understood it. If the responses of his characters now seem unnatural and grotesquely exaggerated, this is the result of our very different assumptions about the nature and value of emotions. In our modern fascination with the individual mind and the inner life of the psyche, we make a distinction between emo tional and physical response which eighteenth-century medicine did not. For the most part, we assume that our emotional responses are more nuanced, more indirect, more subjective, and more independent of our environment than our physical responses, and that they deserve a privileged attention. Eighteenth-century doctors, especially conservatives like Smollett...