Uneasy Sensations: Smollett and the Body (review)

354 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 9:3 Aileen Douglas. Uneasy Sensations: Smollett and the Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. xxx + 201pp. US$29.95; £23.95. ISBN 0-226-16051-3. In the recent explosion of literature on the eighteenth-century novel, Smollett and his fictions have been largely ignored. One has to go back forty years—to Alan Dugald McKillop's EarlyMasters ofEnglish Fiction—to find a major study of the early British novel that takes Smollett seriously. What is more, sustained studies of Smollett's fiction that connect with larger critical and theoretical discussions of the novel are also thin on the ground; the studies by Paul-Gabriel Boucé and John Sekora are now twenty years old. Thus, drawing as it does upon semiotics, feminist theory, the history of the body, and, from time to time, new work on the novel, Aileen Douglas's book is a welcome monograph. However, although this study is illuminating, it is also somewhat disappointing. Douglas has much to say of great interest about both Smollett's work and "eighteenthcentury apprehensions of physicality" (p. xiii), and yet her discussion finally seems less than the sum of its parts. To be sure, Uneasy Sensations is possessed of many worthwhile and insightful parts. There is, first of all, the new perspective that Douglas brings to the study of Smollett; she uses the work on the body engendered by Foucault (although Douglas distances herself somewhat from Foucault and the Foucauldians) and new work on sensibility by scholars such as John Mullan and GJ. Barker-Benfield. Douglas argues that in the wake of the destabilizing influence of Descartes and Locke, questions about the nature and the legibility of the body were of central importance to the eighteenth century and that the novel provided "a place to ... explore ... what bodies are and what they are said to be" (p. xv). She also asserts that Smollett was an important and distinctive novelist largely because of "his concern for bodily sentience" (p. xviii). This is fruitful ground, and, after a sound initial survey of attitudes towards the body in eighteenth-century discussions of physiognomy and sensibility as well as in satire, Douglas explores the terrain well in successive chapters on Smollett's Travels through France and Italy, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Ferdinand Count Fathom and Launcelot Greaves, Adventures of an Atom, and Humphry Clinker. She focuses on a cluster of issues, including the nature and limits of the body, the body as matter and as social construction, the body as sign, the gendering of the body, the ways in which the body "serves particular class interests and maintains social cohesion and stability" (p. 21), and the focus on the body as a means of understanding new or changing literary forms like the novel or satire. What she does best in these chapters is to show how attention to these matters throws new light on Smollett. The chapter on Roderick Random, for example, argues productively that the eponymous hero's body is "at first an object of suspicion" and then gradually "acquires social meaning" (p. 68). Douglas makes the case (also put forward recently by R.D. Spector) that Smollett is better and more interesting on the subject of women than has been acknowledged heretofore. She demonstrates convincingly that despite the highly conventional figure of Emilia, Peregrine Pickle represents the experience of women to a remarkable REVIEWS 355 degree and repeatedly exposes the way in which "the law isolates women and destroys tender bonds" (p. 94). The discussion of eighteenth-century "atomism" (p. 147) in the chapter on the Adventures ofan Atom clarifies Smollett's use of the atom as a narrator in that text. What is missing from Uneasy Sensations, however, is a compelling argument that pulls these individual insights into a coherent whole. At the beginning the reader is likely to expect either that Douglas will use her case study of Smollett to explore the question of how the novel functions as "a formal recognition" (p. xvi) of the century's attention to the problem of the body or that she will use her perception that Smollett's importance arises from his sustained attention to the body as...