The Cure of the Passions and the Origins of the English Novel by Geoffrey Sill (review)

55 his equally compelling need to tell all that he knew about the political history of the previous thirty years, resulting in a magnificent failure. The Consolidator is at this time available only in the AMS edition. It will be included in the next set of 8 volumes from Pickering & Chatto, Satire, Fantasy and Supernatural Writings of Daniel Defoe, to be published in two parts in December 2003 andDecember 2004. That set will also include Defoe’s satirical poems, such as The True-Born Englishman and A Hymn to the Pillory; his ambitious twelve-book verse satire, JureDivino; and such prose satires as The Political History of the Devil and A System of Magic. Geoffrey M. Sill Rutgers University GEOFFREY SILL. The Cure of the Passions and the Origins of the English Novel. Cambridge : Cambridge, 2001. Pp. x ⫹ 261. $60. This new book on the passions in the eighteenth century makes a significant contribution to scholarship on the topic not so much for its solid understanding of and grounding in both medical and literary discourse on the subject, from Zeno and Galen to Smollett and the anatomists of the University of Edinburgh, but because it contains an idea. Passion in this passionately argued work is the slave of reason, and Mr. Sill’s eminently reasonable idea is that ‘‘the perceived crisis in the management of the passions ’’ in the eighteenth century is fundamentally linked to ‘‘the emerging mission of the novel’’ itself. A concern with the abuses of passion, he argues, appears first in the works of Behn, Manley, Haywood and Davys, and by the time of Pamela has become ‘‘a secure part of the agenda of the novel.’’ The connection, however, goes deeper than agenda. Mr. Sill cites an instance in the 1760s autobiography of Dr. Alexander Monro primus, professor of anatomy at the University of Edinburgh, where the doctor, instead of responding passionately to an insulting servant, writes the servant a note. Mr. Sill comments: ‘‘It would, perhaps, be doing the humble genre of the novel too much honor to credit it with having invented the technique of controlling the passions by making them into texts.’’Perhaps it would, but this fundamental connection resonates throughout the rest of his book. In the first section Mr. Sill sets out the ‘‘historical and intellectual context for the ‘cure’ of the passions’’ and focuses on the appearance in Western literary and medical discourse of the philosopher-physician, or ‘‘Physician of the Mind’’ as Fielding called him, from the time of the Stoics and Epicureans through to Fielding’s own Dr. Harrison in Amelia and Smollett’s Dr. Lewis in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. This section includes a fine chapter on Monro’s theory of nerves, and another on Michael Servetus, the sixteenth-century Spanish heretic, physician, and ‘‘prophet of individualism,’’ whose concern with ‘‘the problematical tension between individual passion and institutional authority’’ makes him in Mr. Sill’s view ‘‘the godfather of the novel.’’ The middle section of the book offers readings of Robinson Crusoe, The Journal of the Plague Year, Moll Flanders, and Roxana that are underwritten by Mr. Sill’s claim that Defoe’s purpose in these works ‘‘was not that of a ‘novelist’ . . . but rather that of a historian, one who saw the hand of the Devil in the troubled passions of mankind and projected a cure for them.’’ Passion produces irrational behavior—Crusoe’s de- 56 cision to leave home and H.F.’s decision in The Journal of the Plague Year to remain in London at the time of the plague. In one fascinating passage we are also asked to reconsider the episode of the cave and the goat in Crusoe as a kind of psychodrama pitting Robinson against his own ‘‘wild and uncured self.’’ The third and final section of the book, devoted to some ‘‘narrative representations of the cure of passion’’ after 1740, begins with a chapter on the Reverend John Lewis, whose manuscripts ‘‘illuminate a lifetime of struggle to cure his passions’’ and who wrote a ‘‘Life of Servetus.’’ Mr. Sill follows this with a comparison of Fielding’s reformativeattitudetowardthepassions ,whichhesuggestsisbestunderstoodwithHutcheson in mind, to the more radical attitude of Richardson and Frances...