Sensibility, Reading and Illustration: Spectacles and Signs in Graffigny, Marivaux and Rousseau (review)

Ann Lewis undertakes a task of ambitious breadth and depth and of imposing complexity. Breadth and depth are evident in the opening overview and discussion of sensibility, an elusive and controversial term that resonates with emotional attitudes and is linked to moral, aesthetic, literary, and political concerns—with considerable variation both during and since the eighteenth century. Another dimension of breadth flows from the selection of three works as corpus, with a chapter each devoted to Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne, Marivaux's La Vie de Marianne, and Rousseau's Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse. Complexity is inevitable given the need, first, to catalogue and analyze the verbal signs and spectacles (textual images) as well as the visual representations (illustrations) in each of the three works and, second, to consider the interplay and possible tension between them, for contemporaries and for readers over time to the present day. Lewis has responded to the challenges in a way that shows solid scholarship, balanced interpretation, and useful synthesis.

Attention to scholarly detail is evident in the very physical characteristics of the book. The bibliography is divided into sources published before and after 1800, with useful subdivisions within each set of sources. The footnotes are grouped at the end of each chapter to avoid interrupting the flow of the text; numerous and sometimes lengthy, they provide useful context and references to alternate inter pretations. Using the bibliography in combination with the index and the notes, readers can easily trace the threads of discussion, enrich their knowledge of the evolving critical reaction to the various dimensions of sensibility in the works discussed, and deepen their understanding of theories of reader response, a key notion because sentimental narrative has the specific intent of acting as an emotional trigger. Summary tables provide a comparative list of full-length studies since 1986 devoted to "sensibility" and "sentimentalism" (31-33), a list of the illustrated editions of La Vie de Marianne (116-20), and details of the various series of illustrations of Julie (171-86). A significant number of illustrations are reproduced in the book: five from Les Lettres d'une Péruvienne, thirty-six from La Vie de Marianne, and twenty-six from Julie. On the front and back covers of the book appears a key illustration that is presented and analyzed in the introduction (1-2): "Les effets de la sensibilité sur les quatre temperaments" (ca. 1767), an engraving by Daniel-Nicolas Chodowiecki. The physical presentation of the book is thus an invitation (simultaneously verbal and visual) to explore its thematic content and approach. The numerous features of the book (tables, illustrations, footnotes, chapter subtitles) condition the reading experience and actualize the main approach: reading this book commands one to pay attention to both verbal and visual elements, to both sequence and fragmentation, and to the syntagmatic axis (how the components function within this particular book) as well as to the paradigmatic axis (how arguments and topoi relate to other critical works).

Balanced interpretations result from a judicious flexibility of approach. Lewis invokes appropriately the considerable scholarly production devoted to sensibility as a genre and literary movement which has been studied within a host of discursive fields (including history of ideas, aesthetics, religion, philanthropy, political economy, physiology, sexuality, and popular culture) (29-30). Her familiarity with recent critical works on iconography, framing, and representation allows her to draw on them to highlight the nuanced and often ambiguous treatment of sensibility by the three authors studied. Lewis chooses to focus on "spectacles" (verbal images in the texts, flagged by the use of words such as "spectacle," "scène," and "image" and experienced as images by characters and by readers) and on "signs" (gestures and other forms of non-verbal communication that are open to interpretation and misinterpretation by both characters and readers). Her intention...