Making Love: Sentiment and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature by Paul Kelleher (review)

Mr. Kelleher proposes an exciting reconfiguration of the literary history of sentimentality: although scholars typically identify Sterne as the first author to popularize sentimentalism in Sentimental Journey, it actually "emerges earlier in the century" through Shaftesbury's philosophy, Addison's and Steele's periodicals, Haywood's Love in Excess, Richardson's Pamela, and Fielding's Tom Jones. These authors, Mr. Kelleher contends, collectively develop incipient models of sentimentality and "devote their creative energies to vigorously heterosexualizing the human capacity for moral goodness." The close readings he produces of specific texts—Pamela in particular—go a long way toward demonstrating the viability of this thesis and while he sometimes digresses from his central argument, Making Love makes a compelling argument for the significance of early eighteenth-century literature in the development of sentimentalism.

Mr. Kelleher's first chapters focus on the emergence of sentimentalism in philosophy and periodicals, and particularly on how sentimentalism came to idealize the heterosexual conjugal family. He argues that Shaftesbury's "refracting" of Stoicism in the Characteristics through Plato's "model of erotic love" makes it a seminal text in the history of sexuality and sentimentalism. Although Shaftesbury as a philosopher is still tethered by the opposition "between virtue and pleasure," Mr. Kelleher claims that the other authors he analyzes develop a means by which "one can embrace both virtue and pleasure within the confines of sentimental heterosexuality." Addison's and Steele's Tatler and Spectator essays are the subject of the second chapter, although it also engages in a "dialogue between Foucault and Habermas" and discusses Ned Ward's The Secret History of Clubs (1709). What is supposed to tie these documents together is the idea of the public sphere as it is expressed in different types of clubs. The very concept of the club, Mr. Kelleher argues, helps "discover the limits of conjugal heterosexuality's power to morally condition and rationally temper the forms of mutuality and affective freedom that can be pursued in the world of public sociability."

The final three chapters turn from nonfiction to fiction: Haywood's Love in Excess, Richardson's Pamela, and Fielding's Tom Jones. The chapter on Pamela is the most compelling of these, largely because Richardson's novel, with its numerous scenes featuring the heroine on her knees before her master gratefully asking him for more of his "sweet injunctions," unquestionably traffics in sentimentality. Because Mr. Kelleher does not need to defend his inclusion of the novel, he moves quickly to his argument and sustains it effectively. He argues for the interpretive significance of Pamela's numerous invocations of male authority, or "cross-sex identification" as he describes it, in literature, religion, and history. These figures include Hamlet, Samson, the bishop in Foxe's Book of Martyrs who burns his fingers to prepare himself for martyrdom, the Roman general Manius Curius, King David, and a sea captain who escapes his enemies by using his clothing as a decoy. According to Mr. Kelleher, this appropriation of masculine power poses a threat to Mr. B's superiority, although her submission to God ultimately becomes the model for her worship of Mr. B and sets all the threatened hierarchies aright again. As Mr. Kelleher puts it, the "idea of providence is harnessed on behalf of the narrative fulfillment of conjugal heterosexual desire."

The chapters on Love in Excess and Tom Jones present more difficulties for Mr. Kelleher because neither novel is conveniently understood to be a sentimental narrative. It would have been more intuitive to base his arguments on the incontestably sentimental The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless and Amelia, but these novels appeared after 1750 so he likely chose to focus on earlier works to serve his larger purpose of locating the rise of sentiment in the first half of the century. The drawback of selecting texts not self-evidently sentimental is that Mr. Kelleher consequently must divert attention away from showing through extended close readings...