Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century by Ildiko Csengei (review)

Ildiko Csengei’s Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century is a capacious study of a topic that has and will continue to have broad interest for eighteenth-century scholars. Csengei focuses attention on the “darker side of sensibility” (1), the paradoxical opposition of its constitutive elements. Her object of study is “the ways in which sensibility … is produced and reproduced … as an inherently ambivalent, two-sided discourse” (1). Beginning with a careful historical analysis of sympathy, attending fully to the philosophical and physiological elements of her topic, Csengei argues that “feeling” as understood in the eighteenth century should not be separated from more modern treatments of affectivity. She positions the “age of sensibility” then, as “part of a long history of feeling, where connections and continuities can be found in the ways in which feelings have been experienced, expressed, conceptualized and studied from the eighteenth century to the present” (18). She gives particular attention to the degree to which languages of feeling belong both to literary discourses and the discourses developed to study feeling. “The links between eighteenth-century psychologies and philosophies of feeling and modern discourses of the psyche … inform [her] textual analyses” (19).

Part 1 deals first with the “Philosophies of Sympathy,” including Adam Smith’s analysis of “sympathetic identification,” and the “legacies” of sympathy—“empathy, transference, and psychoanalysis”—and then with “The Feeling Machine,” including work by Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Albrecht von Haller, and Robert Whytt. Part 2 provides three chapters of literary analysis: “‘I Will Not Weep’: Tears of Sympathy in Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling,” “Women and the Negative: The Sentimental Swoon in Eighteenth-Century Fiction,” and “Godwin’s Case: Melancholy Mourning in the ‘Empire of Feeling.’” These 3 chapters take the form of case studies, in which Csengei applies the concepts and theories from part 1 to the three works discussed in part 2.

The philosophies of sympathy, the physiological, nerve-based understanding of sensibility, and the mechanical (and automatic) underpinnings of sympathy and sensibility involving the work of Smith, La Mettrie, Haller, Whytt and others have been for some time part of the critical landscape for the study of sympathy, sensibility, and feeling, but Csengei argues for a strong interrelatedness among forms of affectivity (and the study of affectivity) from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. While some readers (perhaps many) may be initially sceptical of the move from sensibility to psychoanalysis, Csengei’s argument is carefully worked out and enhances our understanding of many of the strands of the cultural phenomenon of sensibility. She argues that “the history of sympathy is closely interrelated with the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, creating a framework in which the age of sensibility and that of Freud and his successors are theoretically and historically linked” (62). Empathy, transference, and psychoanalysis are part of sympathy’s “legacy.”

The strength of Csengei’s conceptual framework emerges not only in her argument but also in her readings. The analysis of A Simple Story (“Negative Affirmation in Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story”), for example, in which Csengei persuasively explains what Maria Edgeworth called “the force that is necessary to repress feeling” (160) is particularly apt. Inchbald’s novel, which is a decidedly “divided fiction” (to use Kristina Straub’s illuminating term), requires a divided language to explain the psychological power of the almost-nothing-that-happens as well as the fracturing of the fiction’s form in its attempt to tell a story that cannot be told. For “Miss Milner, the non-verbal sign-system of sensibility, instead of conveying an authentic expression of emotion, reveals itself as the pathological symptom-language of repressed desire” (164). In a further example, Csengei, analyzing “Godwin’s Case,” avoids both polemic and apologia. She deals instead with the subject of mourning. Godwin was excessive, as almost everyone appeared...