Austen 4

Sociability, Sympathy, Society:

Civilisation and its discontents
Essay subject: Secrecy
 Sentiment and Sociability: the
Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth-
Century by John Mullan
Selection of chapter titles:
1. Sympathy and the Production of Society
2. Richardson: Sentiment and the construction of
femininity
3. The Availability of Virtue
5. Hypochondria and Hysteria: Sensibility and the
Physicians)
 Sentiment makes
sociability,community
Mullan writes about Sterne and Richardson as using
language of feeling to show necessary social bonds.
In their writings we find sociability which is dependent
upon the communication of passions and sentiments
(Mullan 2)
David Hume wrote My Own Life (essay written in 1776
the year of his death) at the end of his life to be
connected with his last publications. Importance of
social life and the passions in any thought. Hume saw
social bonds threatened by fissile effects of religious
and political allegiance, or the desire for acquisition
excited by the developing economy (Mullan 3). Need
for sentiment
 The novels of Samuel Richardson, for instance,
envisage a responsive feminine sensibility as the best
embodiment of social instinct. Enactment of social
virtues Richardsons Clarissa (1748) and Pamela
(1740) show these bonds of delicacy and feeling (4)
Epistolary novels. Letter-writing: Correspondence for
Richardson was a cherished experience of sociability
and he spoke of social love (5). He called it the
converse of the pen and associated it with women
freest yet most virtuous communication (5).
 David Hume, Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion
(1742) and Treatise of Human Nature (1739-
1740) are important for Richardson and Sterne.
For Richardson feeling hearts are important. NB
For all three, sociability depends upon the traffic
not only of opinions, but of harmoniously
organized feelings (7)
Hume thought that philosophy was feeling. He
wrote against Shaftsburys confidently
aristocratic assumption that philosophy was
simply self-explanatory politeness.
 These novelists saw reader as exceptional
connoisseurs of commendable sympathies
(13) With special capacities of sensibility. It is
as if the very form of the novel in the
eighteenth-century implied a contract, by the
terms of which a reader was set apart from
the anti-social vices or insensitivities which
the novels were able to represent (Mullan
14). See Fielding, Smollet and Richardson.
 Richardson, Sterne, Smollet and also
Mackenzie as writers of sentiment.
Sentimentalism is often treated today as a
problem and explained away Mullan wishes
to redeem this sentiment: a language of
feeling devoted to the imagining of sociability
new representations of social instinct in
the novel (15).
 How can a language of feeling explain social
relations as such?
() feeling as articulated by the body by its
postures and gestures. Also construction of the
body its fixation upon tears, sighs, and
meanings beyond words novelistic convention,
again, of more than literary significance. For the
construction of a sensitive and socialized body
the site where the communicative power of
feeling is displayed, but also where sensibility can
become excessive or uncontrollable (Mullan 16)
 See also medical discourse in which the body
can show privileged sensitivity (vs. unsocial
habits of a larger world). A privileged delicacy
or refinement can forebode illness () from
sensibility to physical incapacity. Illness
became the last retreat of the morally pure.
What was originally posed as a capacity for
sociability was eventually realized in the most
private of experiences(Mullan 17).
Chap 1: Sympathy and the production
of society:
Hume in Treatise of Human Nature shows
limitations of reason. He shows how desires
and judgement are shared and communicated
how they are socialized (18). Drive is in
passions not reason the only thing that
makes achievement is passion. [See idea in
Hume of allowing destruction of world to
avoid scratching finger]. So Reason must be
slave of passion.
 Hume says: Passions are seen as so contagious
that they pass with the greatest facility from one
person to another, and produce correspondant
movements in all human breasts (Treatise, 605)
(Mullan 24). The mobility of passions permits
the communication upon which society is
founded, the agreeable movements which bind
its members together (24). Describing society
must be a description of the movements of
passions. In 18thc political world passions seen
as negative. Refutation of Hobbes who saw
passions as primal appetites
 For Hume passion is sentiment; the proximity
of feeling and judgement, impression and
idea. SYMPATHY is at the heart of Humes
philosophy: fiction writing which shows
sympathy PRODUCES society rather than
giving a reflection of it. [He could be talking
about AUSTEN!]
 So David Hume and Adam Smith are like
Richardson and Sterne [and indeed Austen]
they produce narrative on sympathy. In
Smiths Theory of Moral Sentiment (1759): he
does not trust in sociability but rather
sympathy. But the latter must be regulated
and chastened. Hume proposes the
universality of social understanding which
counters excesses sentimental novel.
John MULLAN: Chap 2: Richardson: sentiment and the
construction of femininity.
Sensibility and moral rectitude brought together. Huge
influence on writers and readers. Johnson defended
Richardson, Denis Diderot adored him. Clarissa last
volume published (1748). Sir Charles Grandison was the
favourite of Jane Austen who adapted it as a play. George
Eliot too. (56). The special powers of feeling, the
exceptional reaches of sympathy are set against a world
of broken communications (Mullan on Richardson, 61).
Richardson liked pathetic scenes he said. In Pamela
overflowing aching hearts. heart ache occurs
hundreds of times. Clarissa envisages a heartfelt
language cast off from the moorings of social habit says
Mullan (63). I know my own heart (Pamela, I, 404).
Chap 5: Hypochondria and Hysteria: Sensibility and the
Physicians Feeling observable in body. When do we see
bodies showing sensibility in Sense and Sensibility?
 Secrecy and Sickness
Tanner, Tony, Jane Austen (preface to the reissued
edition by Marilyn Gaull), Basingstoke and New
York, 2007 [first published 1986].
Tanner says that S&S is not just an embryo of a
nineteenth-century novel which struggles but
fails to be born as many critics have said, but
complex in its use of sensibility and secrecy as
two themes
Scream of Marianne at the heart of the novel :
symptom of the sickness, and the sickness
intimately connected with the prevailing secrecy
 Antithesis was a trait of the Age of Reason (mode
of analysis) in Locke and Pope (heroic couplet)
Crude antithesis of novel (Walton Litz, Jane
Austen: A Study of her Artistic Development) with
Elinor and Marianne as first title like Maria
Edgeworths Letters of Julia and Caroline (1795).

Austen shows that Marianne has sense and Elinor

has sensibility so the traits are mixed. Real
tension not here but in instability of individual
and society which requires stability.
 Individual energy runs up against fixed social structures
(Marianne, Willoughby, Elinor, Brandon and others Eliza?)
Freuds Civilisation and its Discontents (1930). He shows
how the individual must constantly constrain and control
him or herself and give up basic drives (in French pulsions)
in order to benefit from civilisation and culture. Men and
women do this but are left with a sort of rage and
dissatisfaction which erupts from time to time in history in
violent anti-social and barbaric ways. Sexual licence, greed
and physical violence are sublimated into work, building of
society but can surface, untamed, at any time. Think of the
ways this happens in Sense and Sensibility (Willoughby,
Mrs. Ferrars, Robert Ferrars, Fanny Dashwood, Lucy Steele
and in its most primal version: the Eliza story).
 Neat geometry of plot (juxtaposed couples:
Elinor and Marianne moving towards desirable
happy marriage with Ferrars and Brandon. But
this is complicated by unscrupulous Lucy and
Willoughby. Harmony of first two couples against
false happiness of Lucy and Robert/ Willoughby
and wife/ John and Fanny). Austen helps us to
appreciate the value of the real thing by
juxtaposing a travesty or parodic version of it
(Tanner 79)
The clear resolution at the end is clouded by
much SECRECY and SICKNESS
What secrets?: Come, come, lets have no
secrets among friends cries Mrs. Jennings but
secrets are everywhere!
 Secrets
Colonel Brandon must cancel the Whitwell outing
Lucys secret engagement (only told to Elinor to
silence her as a potential rival) its always been a
great secret)
Willoughbys secret plan to marry Miss Grey it
was no longer to be a secret
Game of secret relationships is entertainment. Sir
John plays with Elinor His name is Ferrars, said
he..but pray do not tell it, for its a great secret
 BUT more than this perhaps secrecy of self, what is not
expressed. What is within the self and not shared
Restraints and suppressions to protect the innermost
feelings. Strange kind of secrecy maintained by
Marianne and Willoughby or by Marianne in London
even from Elinor a privacy that eluded all her
watchfulness. Elinor on hearing of Edwards
engagement manages a composure of voice under
which was concealed an emotion and distress beyond
anything she had ever felt before. Brandon says that
concealment () is all that remains concerning his
love for Marianne. Many, many phrases with ill-judged
secrecy or the appearence of secrecy
 Secrets of private self from society or from ones
entourage. Self-survival can count on it. Cruel,
coercitive powers of society (Tanner 81) like John
Dashwood and his and Mrs. Ferrars desire to
stop marriage of Lucy and Robert
Elinor is a repository of other peoples secrets
with no one to tell her own
So secrecy can be imposed, be a necessity, or a
strategy
 Illness, sickness
All secrets resolved at end, but before this
Marianne is very sick. Traced very carefully by
Austen so that we find language of symtomology
and diagnosis: melancholy, wholly dispirited
over fatigues, almost catatonic without
stirring..altering her attitude screamed with
agony, faint and giddy starved, general
nervous faintness, hysterical. She contracts a
fever which nearly kills her. Doctor says putrid
tendency, stupor
 Psychosomatic and pathological: almost a
madness. Cowper, Mariannes favourite poet
went mad in real life. Foucault shows in Madness
and Civilisation great increase in nervous diseases
in 18thc. Foucault shows that English in 18thc
believed madness could come easily after stress
or a shock. Nation of stressed merchants,
individualism which meant isolation. Michel
Foucalt in Histoire de la Folie tries to explain
increase in nervous disorders. He says English
saw demands of social life as being detrimental
to health and nature was a remedy with its
gentle laws. Elinor tries this with Marianne in
chapter 16.
 So connection with the early Romantic movement and a
unironic excess (Tanner 84). Marianne suffers from what
Foucault as a historian calls interiority of passion and
unfulfilled desire, break with the immediate.
Marianne fights against a society of forms (social structures,
need for appearences, the use of screens of which one is
lies). For Marianne forms are falsity, social masquerade.
Marianne does not observe the forms. She is a person of
sensibility who cannot bear Lady Middleton (pure form with
empty interior). Marianne says nothing when Lucy praises
Lady Middleton. Elinor has the task of telling lies when
politeness required it. Marianne wants to annihilate the
forms that restrain her and construct her social world (See
again Freuds Civilisation and its Discontents).
Society maintained by necessary lies. But Marianne refuses
this. Pure sincerity and projection outwards of inward
feelings. Austen knows that society cannot function like this.
 Willoughby seems Romantic and daring slighting too easily the
forms of worldly propriety in Elinors sober eyes.
Tanner says he readily abandons his passionate sincerities to
secure wealth and social position which will maintain him in his
idleness and self-indulgence (Tanner 85). Both he and
Marianne live at the expense of other people (Marianne is
sincere but needs Elinor to cover up for her. Elinor paints
screens in the novel literally and metaphorically). Veneer of art.
Marianne openly shows her anger when Mrs Ferrars despises
these screens so Austen encourages appreciation of both the
maker of screens and the discarder of screens (Tanner 85)
See Virginia Woolfs idea of screen-making habit of the human
personality which preserves our sanity. Need to shut people off.
Without it we might perhaps dissolve utterly; separateness
would be impossible (Woolf wanted also to break down the
screens and see real connections but knew they were
necessary).
 Tanner says at the heart of S&S is the following
question: how much of the individuals inner
world should be allowed to break out in the
interests of personal vitality and psychic health;
and how much should the external world be
allowed to coerce and control that inner reality
(86)
Attachment and affection is a personal act while
engagement is social and public. Elinor says to
her mother I want no proof of their affection ()
of their engagement I do.
 Scream of Marianne in London is a scream
against the forms and structures which
surround her. A bodily expression of the
strictures which contain her. Austen shows
with this scream the secret sickness of many
people as they struggle against their desires
and instincts to fit into civilisation.(See
Civilisation and its Discontents/Malaise dans
la civilisation) Mariannes cry is also a sort of
giving up of her autonomy a cry of defeat.
 Essay: Secrecy
Introduction:
What are the connotations of the word? Unfold its
different meanings (historically and in contemporary
usage).
Where can we position Austen in terms of the notion
of secrecy (brief explanation)?
What will the dissertation demonstrate about secrecy
in Sense and Sensibility? (problmatique). I wish to
show that
Main body of the essay: Parts 1, 2, 3
Conclusion