L'Invention du sentiment: roman et économie affective au XVIIIe siècle (review)

This monograph begins by reminding us that passion in the seventeenth century was seen by many as a source of suffering and benightedness, but that such a view gradually yielded to a more positive and nuanced account of human affects. Philip Stewart's concern is to trace a shift in the period 1650-1730, during which a discourse of sentiment began to displace earlier thinking in the French novel. And this helps to understand how sentiment became entwined with morality, a phenomenon often associated with the mid- to late eighteenth century. As Stewart puts it: 'cette étude est [. . .] concentrée sur la période qui précède l'ère "sentimentale", celle où prennent forme les conditions de sa possibilité' (p. 2). This subject requires scrupulous attention to be paid to the origins and transformation of a family of words clustered around 'sentiment' (in French and English), and Stewart rises admirably to the challenge of setting out the evolution of all the key terms in the period. This involves tracing terminology and concepts through authors including Descartes, Racine, Bossuet, Madame de Lafayette, and Fontenelle. There are major chapters on Prévost, Marivaux, and Crébillon, in which Stewart makes illuminating comparisons and contrasts between these precursors of late eighteenth-century novels of sentiment. The two final chapters, respectively, relate sentiment to sensibilité and illuminate 'le triomphe du sentiment moralisant'. Stewart demonstrates a pitch-perfect command of period vocabulary and concepts throughout. But one of the most fascinating aspects of his study is that it offers a considered response to the problem that present-day terminology of feeling overlaps with that of the eighteenth century to a severely limited extent. Yet the field of inquiry under discussion — human emotions — cannot be seen as belonging to the past to the exclusion of the present (as might be said, for instance, of concepts and terms rendered obsolete by the progress of science). So how far is it valid to speak of the 'soul' or 'passion' using (for instance) Freudian terms? Stewart's answer is that it is perfectly acceptable, indeed extremely useful to use specialized modern terminology once the necessary groundwork is in place. And he proves his case by drawing on discourses as varied as those of psychoanalysis, speech act theory, and anthropology (particularly as reflected in the work of W. R. Reddy). In brief, whilst Stewart uses the tools made available by modern theories of text, language, psychology, and affect in illuminating ways, he never loses sight of historical shifts of meaning occurring throughout the period under review. All specialists of the eighteenth-century novel can benefit from reading this impressive study.