Diagnosing Romanticism

INDIFFERENCE come! thy torpid juices shed
On my keen sense.… Come, thou foe
To sharp sensation, in thy cold embrace
A death-like slumber shall a respite give
To my long restless soul, tost on extreme,
From bliss to pointed woe.

Ann Yearsley, "To Indifference" (1787)

Disease is the master trope of the Romantic period. When poets, critics, and social commentators wrote about the state of current affairs, they consistently employed the paradigms of medical discourse to figure larger concerns about morality, class struggle, and sexual and state politics. Whether appraising the private body or the body politic, they used metaphors of illness and health in complex and often paradoxical ways.¹ This preoccupation with the body had been deeply engrained in the cultural imaginary of Britain throughout the eighteenth century. From Locke to Hutcheson, to Hume, to Burke, experience of bodily sensation is the basis of knowledge, of moral conviction, of aesthetic taste. As a refined sensory-perceptual apparatus came to be seen in the culture at large as an index of superior worth, literary representations of the individual negotiating the pitfalls of public life dramatized the difficulties as well as the virtues of this model of embodied agency. To pick up any novel from this time, from the amatory fiction of the 1710s to the sentimental and Gothic fiction of the 1790s, is to be struck by the constant presence of the tremulous body of sensibility. This body is a volatile vessel whose actions are determined less by the reasoning mind than by the movement of the humours, the diffusion of the animal spirits, the circulation of the blood, the stimulation of the nerves.² The Romantics inherited a way of thinking through the body that emphasized pathology more than equilibrium, and that valued the display of high-strung sensitivity—even to the point of hypochondria—as a mark of cultural distinction.

As well as resulting from this attention to the vicissitudes of the embodied self, the Romantics' tendency to diagnose their condition stems from their position as inheritors of the Enlightenment's propensity to critical self-examination. Reflecting on one's current condition can be emancipatory, can be the first step in improving both self and society—this is, of course, Kant's point in his famous call to his fellow citizens: "Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding!" (58). But excessive self-examination coupled with a preoccupation with the feeling body can encourage self-absorption, skepticism, neurosis. The Romantics' tendency to invoke discourses of disease betrays a more general ambivalence about the condition of the subject in modern life, an ambivalence that Eugene L. Stelzig nicely captures in the title of his article "Romantic Subjectivity: Disease or Fortunate Fall?" As Stelzig observes, the self-consciousness of the Romantics was often seen as both curse and blessing, as encouraging an egocentrism that leads to alienation, yet also motivating a drive to artistic production that promises a form of existential therapy, a transformative process of discovery that will allow the subject to merge with wider phenomena outside the self.

The status of the writer figures large in contemporary concerns about the condition of the feeling subject. On one hand, we have the robust, self-authorizing model typified by Wordsworth's definition of the true poet as "endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind" (138). More common is a more conflicted model, that of the poet as melancholy visionary, whose genius is both a gift and an affliction. Typically, the person of sensibility portrayed in the novel, in the lyric poem, or on the stage is characterized by morbidity, both in the psychological sense of being preoccupied with death, and in the pathological sense of being diseased. The hero or heroine of sensibility is the beautiful soul who feels more than others, and suffers as a consequence. This is the "nervous narrator" whom Peter Melville Logan identifies as the paradigmatic speaking subject of the early novel, as the only one with a...