Emotional Display and National Identity

In the first chapter of his elegantly written study of elocutionary discourse in the eighteenth century, Paul Goring reminds us that by the midpoint of that century, only half the British population was literate. With the phrase "elocutionary discourse," Goring evokes "the wealth of utterances and practices—some literary, some oral, some graphic, some somatic—which in different ways contributed to the construction of eighteenth-century understandings of bodily eloquence" (13). The body's capacity for communication assumes a signal importance at a moment when half the population experienced print culture only by listening to someone read out loud. That reader—along with preachers, actors, and novelists—as Goring convincingly argues, was immersed in a heated and continuously evolving debate over bodily gestures. Goring considers this debate in relation to the contemporaneous emergence of notions of politeness, and, in so doing, makes an important contribution to our understanding of eighteenth-century constructions of emotion, theatricality, and civility.

Goring finds amid "the scattered fragments of the post-humanist and post-structuralist subject," as conceptualized by Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, an alternative body that prevails with "an awkward and insistent stability" (17) in the work of critics who dwell on the body's infinite varieties, "its differences of sex, gender, race, age, health, [and] ability" (18). Criticism centered on the body routinely dwells on the distinction between nature and culture, Goring notes. Following the work of Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, he treats shifts in the perceived boundaries as indicators of larger cultural concerns. By analyzing the ways in which bodies, both real and fictional, were used in the eighteenth century to promote new standards of politeness, Goring also shows how culture gets embodied and the body gets acculturated.

Given the number of articles, books, conference papers, and class lectures devoted to the topic of sensibility—G. J. Barker-Benfield's The Culture of Sensibility (1992) and Adela Pinch's Strange Fits of Passion (1996) stand as exemplars of the critical literature—one might well ask whether it is possible to put new tires on this cultural vehicle and take it for a spin. Goring manages to do so by analyzing elocution debates that were carried out on the stage, in the pulpit, on the lecture circuit, and in the sentimental novel. Beginning with a chapter that discusses public speech in the eighteenth century and that tracks efforts to reform oratorical delivery, Goring shows how displays of genuine feeling became key markers of oratorical success in James Fordyce's 1753 An Essay on the Action Proper for the Pulpit. Fordyce advocated nurturing virtuous passions so that persuasive expressions were naturally marked upon the body (57), and he anticipated efforts to codify acting techniques for appearing natural onstage. Goring's second chapter takes up the sensational "Orator Henley," whose wild gestures drew attention to Henley's preaching even as they were criticized for being impolite. John Henley pushed the boundaries of acceptable physical behavior and, in so doing, ushered in a new era in which effective preaching was increasingly linked to the evocation of passion through gesture. Goring argues that when Thomas Sheridan, the actor, theater-manager, and elocutionist, published his 1756 treatise, British Education (Sheridan's several works on elocution serve as the focus of Goring's central chapter), he linked oratory and national strength (91). A few days after the political union of England and Wales with Scotland in 1707, Sheridan convincingly suggested that a systematic attention to English language usage and physical eloquence could forge a nation. As Goring writes, "[Sheridan] saw in speech a socialising power that was always unavailable to the writer" (107).

Sheridan's career serves as a pivotal point; his prominent position on both the lecture circuit and the stage supports Goring's greatest critical contribution, his insistent interconnection of religious, theatrical, literary, and civic realms. When, at the end of his study, he turns to the sentimental novel, the starting point of most discussions of sensibility, he works from the outside in, having...