Beyond Sense and Sensibility by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Published: 2014-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

8

Unfelt Affect

James Noggle

The word “insensibly” recurs with peculiar readiness and regularity in British prose of the age of sensibility. “A thousand occasional meetings,” Burney’s heroine in Evelina (1778) says of her growing feelings for Lord Orville, “could not have brought us to that degree of social freedom, which four days spent under the same roof have, insensibly, been productive of.”1 This usage crops up in the period’s historiography, philosophy, periodical essays, and other kinds of writing that bring to notice unnoticed changes to individuals, groups, and even nonliving elements of the human world. The adverb, related ones like “imperceptibly,” and other suggestive locutions point to something more complex than what the heavy noun “insensibility” names, which is almost always a blockage of feeling: dullness, impassivity, indifference, stupefaction. So Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe declaims against the “barbarous insensibility” of any man unaffected by compassion upon the “proper occasions.”2 The adverb instead depicts not a state of affective lack but a positive process in which affects are added to, built up, or altered without itself being felt, often because of its extreme gradualness. (In Johnson’s Dictionary, 1755, insensibly is said to mean “by slow degrees.”3) Far from naming something “barbarous,” it characterizes the “proper” way in which the passions are refined and civilized.

Hence the notion of insensibly occurring processes sits oddly within sensibility, neither opposing it nor fitting very explicitly within its recognized body of concepts and aims. Scholarship in recent decades has described sensibility as a discourse—even a “culture”—stimulated and organized theoretically and practically in the middle decades of the eighteenth century by disciplines such as medicine, physiology, psychology, and philosophy. From these, it grew strong enough to affect other cultural expressions including the sentimental novel. This development has for several commentators seemed especially well exemplified by the direct influence of the “nerve ideas” of physician George Cheyne on Samuel Richardson.4 While the lines of influence may run in various directions and include more kinds of writing and cultural practices,5 the elaborate efforts to define and determine the bodily bases of sensibility undertaken in physiology and medicine unquestionably granted it a pronounced degree of self-consciousness and sophistication. And within all the kinds of writing affected by this discourse, the term “insensibly” frequently occurs. It is nothing if not a favorite word of its time. A survey of raw data using Google’s Ngram Viewer—as misleading as such may sometimes be6—shows an upward slope in occurrences of the word starting around 1690 and peaking in 1786, with a precipitous decline from then into the nineteenth century (see figure 8.1).7 Coupled with this popularity, the term’s obvious morphological and semantic connections to sensibility ensure that the two significantly interact in the period’s prose.

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