Sentimental novel

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The sentimental novel or the novel of sensibility is an 18th century literary genre which celebrates the emotional and intellectual concepts of sentiment, sentimentalism, and sensibility. Sentimentalism, which is to be distinguished from sensibility, was a fashion in both poetry and prose fiction beginning in the eighteenth century in reaction to the rationalism of the Augustan Age.

An early example is Manon Lescaut by Antoine-François Prévost in 1731, the story of a courtesan for whom a young seminary student of noble birth forsakes his career, family, and religion and ends as a card shark and confidence man. His downward progress, if not actually excused, is portrayed as a sacrifice to love.

The prototype of the English sentimental novel is Samuel Richardson's novel Pamela (1740). The term and the literary style originate in medieval French (and later English) romances, in which the hero is usually preoccupied with his or her love and love sufferings. The novelist Henry Fielding, known later for his novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, satirized the sentimental style in his early novels Shamela and Joseph Andrews.

Sentimental novels are related to the domestic fiction of the early eighteenth century. Among the most famous sentimental novels are Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey (1768) and Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771).

Along with a new vision of love, sentimentalism presented a new view of human nature which prized feeling over thinking, passion over reason, and personal instincts of "pity, tenderness, and benevolence" over social duties.

Possibly the most prominent example of sentimental fiction in America is Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World.

The novel of sensibility

After the 1760s, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy spawned the novel of sensibility; it is also a peak in the development of sentimentalism. In it, the protagonist, most often a young woman, naively encounters the world and learns to refine her natural goodness. Sensibility was a character trait important in the mid- to late-eighteenth century. A person with sensibility was attuned with nature and was easily, and rightly, affected by the feelings of others; the "sensible" person noticed the hurt of others and was a barometer of social morality. Tobias Smollett tried to imply a darker underside to the "cult of sensibility" in his The Expedition of Humphry Clinker 1771. An excellent example of this type of novel is Frances Burney's Evelina (1778), wherein the heroine, while naturally good, in part for being country-raised, hones her politeness when visiting London she is educated into propriety. This novel also is the beginning of "romantic comedy", though it is most appropriately labelled a conduct novel (modeled on earlier conduct books) and a forerunner of the female Bildungsroman in the English tradition exemplified by later writers such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot.^[1]

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1774 The Sorrows of Young Werther was highly sentimental and immediately extremely popular throughout Europe, and even inspired young people who could relate to Werther's sorrows to commit suicide.^[2] It is also an excellent example of an epistolary novel, an especially typical form for eighteenth-century novels of sensibility, beginning with the influential novels of Samuel Richardson, [[Pamela (1740)]], [[Clarissa (1748)]], and [[The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753)]]. The latter was an especially important influence on Jane Austen, who references it repeatedly in her letters and began a dramatic adaptation of the work for the amusement of her family.

Gothic novel

At the end of the eighteenth century, sensibility's value was questioned, as it made its bearers, particularly women, too overwrought and too prone to imagining worlds beyond their appointed ones. ^[3] These anxieties can be seen in the rise of the Gothic novel, at century's end. The Gothic novel's story occurs in a distant time and place, often Medieval or Renaissance Europe (especially Italy and Spain), and involved the fantastic exploits of a virtuous heroine imperiled by dark, tyrannical forces beyond her control. The first Gothic novel is Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), but its most famous and popular practitioner was Ann Radcliffe. As in other Gothic novels, the notion of the sublime is central. Eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, following Edmund Burke, held that the sublime and the beautiful were juxtaposed. The sublime was awful (awe-inspiring) and terrifying while the beautiful was calm and reassuring. The characters and landscapes of the Gothic rest almost entirely within the sublime, with the heroine serving as the great exception. The “beautiful” heroine’s susceptibility to supernatural elements, integral to these novels, both celebrates and problematizes what came to be seen as hyper-sensibility.

Finally, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the overwrought emotions of sensibility, as expressed through the Gothic sublime and in sentimental fiction, poetry, and drama, largely had run their course. Jane Austen wrote a Gothic novel parody, Northanger Abbey (1803), which pays homage to the influence of the Gothic novel and thematizes the dangers and difficulties of women's education. Moreover, while sensibility did not disappear, it was less valued. Austen introduced a different style of writing--what is often referred to as "comedy of manners"--but the comedy in her novels also provides a scathing critique of the restrictive, gentry culture of the early nineteenth century. Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813), has been a blueprint for much subsequent romantic fiction. Her Sense and Sensibility is most often seen as a "witty satire of the sentimental novel",^[4] by juxtaposing values of the Age of Enlightenment (sense, reason) with and those of the later eighteenth century (sensibility, feeling) while exploring the larger realities of womens' lives, especially through concerns with (marriage and inheritance). This reading of Sense and Sensibility specifically and Austen's fiction in general has been complicated and revised by recent critics such as Claudia L. Johnson (Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel [1988] and Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s [1995]), Jillian Heydt-Stevenson (Austen's Unbecoming Conjunctions [2005], and Christopher C. Nagle (Sexuality and the Culture of Sensibility in the British Romantic Era [2007]), all of whom see unruly and even subversive energies at play in her work, inspired by the sentimental tradition.

References

1. ^ Laura Sue Fuderer, The Female Bildungsroman in English: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism (1990)
2. ^ Tobin Siebers, “The Werther Effect: The Esthetics of Suicide,” Mosaic (Winnipeg), Vol. 26, 1993.
3. ^ Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (1986)
4. ^ http://www.broadviewpress.com/bvbooks.asp?BookID=235