sentiment is… often found to bestow too great a share of his benevolence on himself. There is a selfish, as well as a social sensibility; and, — 192- when this is the case, we cannot wonder that the former should sometimes predominate. It is fostered by that minute attention to his own feelings, which forms one of his favorite employments.'
In the later eighteenth century, philanthropic movements of all kinds, including efforts to abolish the slave trade, to improve the condition of prisons and madhouses, and to make better provision for orphans, fallen women, and animals, were inspired and sustained by the ethos of sensibility. These struggles for more humane treatment of society's outcasts or victims have been regarded as progressive in spirit, creditable to the minds and hearts of their promoters, and as evidence of egalitarian stirrings. The Wedgwood medallion, from which an enchained African pleads, 'Am I not a man and a brother?' has thus seemed an apt emblem of sentiment in the service of liberty and fraternity, if not of equality.
What has been investigated less, even by those hostile to sentimentalism, is its tendency to leave the existing social hierarchy intact or stronger than ever. For one thing, the high degree of stylization and artifice of most of this writing situates it in a cultural context that is unmistakably and unshakably genteel. Like the tradition of pastoralism, with which it has many affinities, sentimental literature allows both author and audience to explore the delights of simpler, more spontaneous, more «natural» life without having to give up the morally equivocal pleasures of power, privilege, and worldly protocol that they enjoy within existing society. A work like Sterne's Sentimental Journey may call into question some of the artificial distinctions and stratifications of eighteenth- century culture, yet its very texture as a work of art-all the deft posing, all the playful rococo embellishments, all the self-consciousness and wit and lightness of touch-tends to celebrate, at a much deeper level than any overt social statement, the grace, the polish, and the erotic inexhaustibility of artifice itself. Along the way, in Sterne's book as in others, there may be a dabbling in the pleasures of the primitive; Yorick will temporarily renounce Paris and the children of art for provincial peasants who are children of nature, Werther will read Ossian to Lotte, René will abandon Europe for the wilds of America, and the mothers of Paul and Virginia will retreat to bucolic Mauritius. But short of death, this 'going native' never reaches the point of throwing off once and for all a concern for civilized, hierarchical customs and values. The heroine of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's
This sense of inconsequentiality may be acknowledged in a jocular or a melancholy spirit, as the different endings of Paul and Virginia, The Man of Feeling, and A Sentimental Journey demonstrate. Despite their great tonal range, however, these works and most others of their kind do not hold out much hope of changing the ways of the world-or even much prospect that a sensitive soul can come to lasting terms with the world, except through defeat, exile, or death. This is not a conservatism that endorses things as they are, but one that may strengthen the hold of existing conditions by suggesting that they are immutable and inevitable.
In the area of relations between the sexes, sentimental fiction appears, on the face of it, to question hierarchical values in the name of more egalitarian ones. The ethos of sensibility challenges a number of prevailing gender assumptions: that the public, civic realm is more important than the private, familial realm; that dominance is a worthier posture than submission, strength more creditable than weakness, determination better than diffidence; and that ways culturally defined as «manly» must take precedence over the concerns and characteristics thought of as inherently 'feminine.' Sentimental fiction calls into question this subordination of feminine to masculine values, but not in the interest of equality. Sentimental novels tend to assert that the constellation of feeling and behavior ordinarily regarded as feminine is not merely the equal of the masculine one, but is preferable to it in all essential respects. This position can reflect a genuine concern with women's status and welfare, particularly when it appears in works by women, such as Sarah Fielding's David Simple; but male authors like Sterne and Mackenzie seem motivated rather by a wish to challenge the customary conception of what men themselves are and should be. They do so by attaching the highest value to traits ordinarily despised as womanish, such as emotional sensitivity, delicacy, and expressiveness-the prime example being the capacity of the sentimental hero to shed tears, and his pride in doing so. -194-
Sentimental novels often involve a quest for a haven secure from the world, but the very nature of this goal tends to prevent any but fleeting, partial, or symbolic attainments of it short of death. This helps to account for the failure of sentimental novels to achieve much in the way of genuine resolutions, let alone triumphant finales, except when death is the ultimate answer to the problems of hero and author. And sentimental novels usually lack the kind of cumulative development that eventually transforms the hero of a bildungsroman into an adult. But different social assumptions about masculinity and femininity make sentimental novels about young women different in each of these respects from those about young men. In the eighteenth century, the idea of a woman of feeling was much less anomalous and paradoxical than that of a man of feeling, for it tended to reinforce rather than subvert common assumptions about femininity. Proneness to tears is weakness, weakness is effeminacy, and effeminacy is shameful-unless one happens to be a woman, in which case such traits are natural and becoming. The sentimental hero violates gender stereotypes and is praised for doing so, but this calls for a great deal of authorial justification. The creator of a sentimental heroine is spared the necessity for this kind of special pleading, and is released from the need to portray the sentimental figure as misunderstood, despised, and alienated from the bulk of society. Since she shares the dovelike innocence and diffidence of the sentimental hero, the sentimental heroine will be similarly vulnerable to the aggressions and duplicities of worldlings; but since the qualities that make her vulnerable are those that the community values in young women, the fact that she has them may facilitate her integration into adult society. The sentimental hero is called upon by the world to renounce childlike virtues for manly ones, and chooses not to; the sentimental heroine faces no such impasse, since the virtues demanded of her as a woman are the same ones prized in her as a child. The transition from boy to man is seen from the sentimental perspective as a fall from grace, and from the worldly perspective as a necessary and desirable shedding of puerility, but in either view as a drastic change. Between girl and woman, all parties see a fundamental continuity.
Since the sentimental view of woman is not at odds with the view of her held by the world at large, the glorification of sentimental heroines poses no such ideological challenge as the idealization of sentimental heroes. When the main character is female, there need be no incompatibility between the sentimental novel and the bildungsroman. -195-
Although the sentimental heroine (like her male counterpart) is seen as a superior person, there is nothing eccentric in her position, either in relation to the rest of her own sex or to the opposite sex. Such merging of the sentimental novel with the bildungsroman and of the sentimental heroine with her environment can be seen in a work like Burney's
Evelina is commonly regarded not as a sentimental novel but as a kind of bildungsroman enlivened by social comedy, or as a social comedy given substance and continuity by the 'Entrance into the World' plot. In a book about a young woman, however, such features can coexist with sentimental ones in a way hardly possible in books about young men. For Mackenzie's Harley, to marry would mean taking on the assertiveness and authority he is intent on avoiding; for an Evelina, marriage involves not a betrayal but a public validation of her submissiveness and dependence. For this to be so requires playing down any evidence that she is physically attracted to the man, which would jeopardize the innocence indispensable to her character as sentimental heroine. On this matter Burney is very circumspect, not only in her presentation of Evelina herself, but in the antithesis she sets up between the young men in Evelina's life, Sir Clement Willoughby and Lord Orville. Burney's aim and method come out clearly in Evelina's words:
