Passion and Language in Eighteenth-Century Literature: The Aesthetic Sublime in the Work of Eliza Haywood, Aaron Hill, and Martha Fowke by Earla Wilputte (review)

When in 1739 Hume wrote that reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, he was referring to the fact that thinking comes from feeling. Twenty years earlier Eliza Haywood had written that when one loves nobly (intellectually, erotically, and consistently), reason "is not debased to sense, but sense elevates itself to reason." It is possible to imagine Haywood asking Hume why it took him so long to catch up. In Passion and Language, Earla Wilputte offers an unimaginable thesis: the vocabulary of love and desire might be about—love and desire! The early 1700s, she argues, was a time when the passions and reason were in conversation, complementary rather than conflicting, and she exemplifies her point through the Hillarian circle, a performative, passionate, and intellectual group in the 1720s that included Aaron Hill, Richard Savage, Martha Fowke, and Eliza Haywood. All four espoused a sympathetic understanding of the passions while also upholding the ideals of platonic friendship. It was no easy task; they even parodied their own writing. But the project persisted because there was a need to develop a language for the passions that could convey deep emotions. Ms. Wilputte addresses how this literary circle, most particularly among Hill, Fowke, and Haywood, endeavored "to transcend human separateness and bind one soul to another through words." While this might have been an age of enlightenment, it was also a period during which reason did not outweigh the passions, but rather organized them; a few recent scholars would be surprised by this argument. Ms. Wilputte deftly shows that her chosen authors "slyly [combine] philosophic and amatory discourse to reveal that Locke and others are wholly inadequate as models for a language for the passions."

Passion and Language demonstrates how the Hillarians wrestled linguistically with the causes and effects of the sublime. For them, the sublime meant converting feeling into transport or ecstasy, which, according to Longinus, "aroused noble thoughts." They believed that the passions could stimulate honorable ideas, provoke principled judgments, and still excite heightened (i.e., spiritualized) feelings. For Ms. Wilputte's argument to work (and it does), she must show that the Hillarians adopted and explored all facets of the Longinian sublime. She begins with a definition of the passions (chapter 2), continues with epistolary passions (chapter 3), the passions of poetic production and response (chapter 4), passionate living through narrative example (chapter 5), and, finally, representing the passions through performance (chapter 6). These writers all felt they were engaged in writing the passionate sublime, an important lens which allows for an expressive and philosophical language to represent the sophistication of feeling. But while Longinus felt certain "commonplace" passions like pity, grief, and fear demonstrated a littleness that could not reach sublimity, the Hillarians, Ms. Wilputte tells us, proved him wrong. Passions in Hillarian dialogue, no matter how commonplace, are found to elevate and magnify beauty, grandeur, and truth.

Specifying, expressing, and sharing the power of the passions is the purpose of the Hillarians' writing and the center of Ms. Wilputte's thesis. Chapter 4, for example, insists on the passionate power of the word in epistolary forms. As with her other chapters, she demonstrates how language is a palpable means of connecting the physical and spiritual. The letters sent between the group's members connected them intellectually and emotionally, in the language of the passionate sublime. Communicating emotion through letter-writing becomes a philosophical thread that connects feeling and its ability to relay truth. When the physical body is absent or impossible to attain, language must release overwrought passion through its embodiment in letters. The chapter exemplifies the form and execution of the book in that it yokes passion and language in a clear relationship and demonstrates how a release of the passions can...