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Ruined by Design-2
Ruined by Design-2
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List of Figures ix
Preface xv
Acknowledgments xxiii
1 Redeeming Ruin 22
Notes 205
Bibliography 249
Index 261
List of Figures
SCHOLARSHIP ON SENSIBILITY
The culture of sensibility, which flourished in the second half of the eigh-
teenth century across much of Europe, has recently become a growth
industry within eighteenth-century studies. Many works have studied the
picturesque, the literature of sensibility, sentimentalism and its roots in
new approaches to epistemology and in anatomical theories. Recent schol-
ars have looked at its connections to medicine, science, philosophy, and
other domains. In the last decade, critics such as G. J. Barker-Benfield,
Barbara Benedict, Stephen Cox, Markman Ellis, Claudia Johnson, John
Mullan, Jessica Riskin, Janet Todd, and Ann Jessie Van Sant, have built
on earlier insights by R.S. Crane, Samuel Brissenden, Louis Bredvold, and
Jean Hagstrum (to mention only select English-speaking critics), and have
begun developing and illustrating a broader cultural context for the novel
of sensibility. Barker-Benfield, for example, used socio-economic history
to show the broader implications and function of the novel of sensibility
and was one of the fi rst to legitimate the term “culture of sensibility.” Ellis
continued the same project, weaving together issues in moral philosophy,
theology, commerce, and psychological theory to explore the effects of the
culture of sensibility on the eighteenth-century understanding of gender, in
particular. Van Sant, in particular, by building intriguing parallels between
scientific experimentalism and the novel of sensibility, exposes some of the
seemingly sadistic and hypocritical aspects of sensibility in Europe.
xviii Preface
Sensibility as a movement or “culture” requires, I would argue, a treat-
ment that is both interdisciplinary and international. This study also incor-
porates French and German texts, allowing for the fact that the culture of
sensibility defied national as well as disciplinary boundaries. Sensibility
was in fact one of the earliest pan-European fashions, necessitating a con-
sideration of multiple European cultures.
This work also builds upon what Ellis refers to as “the mutually inform-
ing nature of philosophy, theology, science and political economy in the
eighteenth century”; in this volume, the disciplinary boundaries of the
“culture of sensibility” (Barker-Benfield’s term) are expanded to encom-
pass landscape gardening and architecture, as well as the philosophy of
language. I will include evidence not only from philosophers and theo-
rists, but also from pattern books, how-to manuals, and popular rhetorical
guides. By pursuing the cultural significance of paradoxical constructions
in architecture as well as literature, this book develops the narrative strate-
gies that identify the novel of sensibility by drawing upon a broader context
of landscape gardening, philosophy of language, and moral philosophy. In
relation to many contemporary accounts of the culture of sensibility, this
study will have less emphasis on economics, science, and political history,
and more attention to individual novels, landscape gardening, landscape
architecture, and popular guidebooks concerning language and rhetoric.
In many ways, the cross-disciplinary comparisons that I have suggested
here are reminiscent of the “history of ideas” approaches of J. G. A. Pocock
or Arthur O. Lovejoy, approaches that have come under fi re from recent
critics of sensibility. Markman Ellis, for example, despite his own contribu-
tion to a broader cultural context for the “novel of sensibility,” also indi-
cates a suspicion of the “history of ideas” approach. Ellis makes the point
that although the history of ideas approach has lent importance to the study
of sentimental texts by linking them with the canonical texts of eighteenth-
century ethical philosophy, it has also compromised our understanding of
sensibility in a number of ways. For Ellis, these include: (1) the failure to
treat the significance of the act of reading novels of sensibility, (2) the dis-
regard for generic differences, such as the literary character of the novels,
and (3) the tendency to treat literature primarily as a tool for disseminating
philosophical ideas, thereby attributing both historical priority and causal
influence to philosophy. Critics such as Ellis and Barker-Benfield therefore
react against traditional intellectual history in favor of cultural history or
cultural studies, expanding their ‘texts’ to include chamber pots, under-
garments, and conduct books. This is appropriate since sensibility was
both high culture and cult, philosophy and fad, and morally ambivalent, as
Mullan, Van Sant and others have shown. By interweaving a range of dis-
ciplines representing both “high” and “low” culture—namely, landscape
gardening, grammar books, the novel, and other elements of material cul-
ture, as well as moral philosophy and philosophy of language, the current
study hopes to move beyond argument based on New Historical homology
Preface xix
to suggest a broader web of meaning (to borrow from Clifford Geertz) that
helps give coherence to the culture of sensibility.
Many of those recent critics who have attempted cross-disciplinary
studies of the mid-to-late eighteenth century without the context of a cul-
ture of sensibility have experienced difficulty accounting for the surpris-
ing similarities among the disciplines they are studying, even when those
similarities are precisely the point of their study. Ann Jessie Van Sant, for
example, in her comparison of the psychological model of sensibility with
the novel, apologetically claims no more than “analogy” and a surprising
“coincidence between the rhetoric of pathos and scientific presentation.”
While it is indeed difficult to avoid similar terminology, analogy may ulti-
mately fall short in describing the relation between these modes of thought,
and could be understood as an anachronism, since an analogy requires a
paradigmatic and disciplinary separation not historically characteristic of
eighteenth-century thought.
One might ask what is the particular relevance that drives the interest
in sensibility for scholars today. Sensibility is arguably the most revealing
of cultural movements in the second half of the eighteenth century. It was
a hugely innovative time period for narrative forms—especially the young
genre that we (somewhat anachronistically) name the novel—and also pro-
vides a treasure trove for the psychoanalytic and gender issues that have
come to the forefront of literary criticism in the past two decades.
While portraying a new type of self-conscious, feminized, and highly
idealized male hero, sensibility is also deeply involved with sadistic sides of
human nature. For example, its aesthetic relies on the innate curiosity, if
not pleasure, one feels in response to others’ suffering. Men and women of
sensibility take additional pleasure in witnessing and recounting scenes of
suffering in order to prove their own worth and ability to sympathize. When
combined with the gendered studies of sensibility or sentimentalism, one
cannot help but be astonished by the importance of female suffering in the
late eighteenth century—the assumption that young, beautiful women are
somehow particularly “interesting” and attractive when they are in distress.
Ultimately, the cultural fascination with ruination involves the active pur-
suit of human suffering and ruin in order to achieve its aesthetic objectives.
DEFENDING SENSIBILITY
However one refers to or defi nes the most popular European literary taste
of the second half of the eighteenth century, the literature of this period has
not fared equally well in the hands of critics. The term ‘Preromanticism’
itself is vaguely derogatory; it suggests a pseudo-Romanticism, inferior con-
tent, or a period not worthy of the name of what succeeded and surpassed
it: “a trough between two creative waves,” in D. J. Enright’s words, or the
“the swamps between the Augustan and Romantic heights,” according to
xx Preface
Janet Todd.1 Partly because of the tendency toward defi nition by hindsight,
the mid-to-late eighteenth century writings associated with the culture of
sensibility have not generally been afforded a great deal of respect. Even
Jerome McGann, elsewhere a defender of the literature of sensibility, con-
fesses that “so far as high culture is concerned . . . these traditions remain
something of an embarrassment.”2
While attracting unparalleled scholarly interest in the last decade, the
literature of sensibility oddly also remains a source of scholarly embarrass-
ment. In fact, it has become a tradition for studies of sentimentalism or
sensibility to begin with an apology for the quality of the literature that
they treat. This treatment does not merely occur in modern times among
readers who tire of sensibility’s lachrymose exhibitions of virtue in distress.
Dr. Johnson, for example, whose literary prominence overlapped with the
culture of sensibility, complained of “the fashionable whine of sensibil-
ity.” And indeed, the literature of sensibility consistently emphasizes excess
over moderation: façades of exquisitely melancholy and chaste tears loosely
cover a materialism and an eroticism that can be slapstick, hypocritical,
or even sadistic in nature. Its internal tensions propel it to extremes and to
hypocrisy, rather than to moderation or even to the resignation offered by
aporia. These characteristics underlie some of the most interesting and reve-
latory aspects of sensibility, however, which have generated psychoanalytic
insights as well as important contributions to gender studies. Yet perhaps
some of the provocative features of sensibility also provide the foundation
for contemporary scholarly embarrassment and defensiveness regarding the
subject matter. Scholars habitually distance themselves from this literature,
just as the fictional editors in the novels effectively serve to distance the
authors from the most histrionic characters. Many literary historians who
write about sensibility through the lenses of Romanticism have considered
it lacking in luster, particularly in contrast to the magnificent periods that
flank it: the bright and sparkling reign of neoclassical or Enlightenment
prose and the darker splendor of Romantic verse.
Sensibility has received especially negative treatment at the hands of
critics in relation to Romanticism. In this context, critics frequently use
such terms as “half-hearted” or “weak” to describe sensibility. Marilyn
Butler describes sensibility as a “weak trial run for Romanticism”; D. J.
Enright writes that “between the self-assured work of the Augustans and
the energetic and diverse movements of the Romantic revival came a period
of half-hearted, characterless writing.”3 Marshall Brown describes Prero-
manticism as “a problem, rather than an ambition,” while Robert W. Jones
echoes Barbara Benedict’s suggestion that sensibility is best understood,
“not as a confidently accepted cultural norm, but as an anxiously attended-
to set of problems.”4 Similarly, Markman Ellis’ English politics of sensibil-
ity are “the politics of an emerging middle class,” eager to demonstrate its
own liberality and progressive munificence in issues such as the anti-slavery
movement, yet “unwilling to engage with revolutionary change.”5 These
Preface xxi
phrases (“weak,” “half-hearted,” “characterless,” “problem,” “anxiously
attended,” etc.) all suggest in different ways that critics have been struck by
a weakness or deficiency in sensibility: it may be again that the seemingly
half-hearted revolutionary spirit of the failed man of feeling may be overly
reminiscent of the suit-clad hippie in a management position—the sense
of disappointment that revolutionary ideals were not accompanied by an
equally impressive commitment to action. Indeed, sensibility seems to pro-
mote the idea that defeat is somehow a prerequisite for true feeling.
This book can be seen as a rumination upon the cost and limits of a
cultural ideal that rests upon the admiration for ruin—whether that ruin is
geological, architectural, narrative, or personal. By exploring some of the
contradictory impulses at the heart of the culture of sensibility—impulses
that lead to the creation of innovative narrative and architectural struc-
tures—I hope to illuminate some of the insights that the culture of sensibil-
ity offers, even to contemporary audiences, wary of its sudden excesses.
Acknowledgments
The word ‘sensibility’ had a glorious past. It is largely gone from our vocab-
ulary today, where we use the word to mean little more than ‘emotional
viewpoint’; however, during the latter half of the eighteenth century, sensi-
bility could inspire enthusiastic encomia and designate the essential spark
of life, virtue, and humanity. Both epigraphs above describe the “man
of feeling” and his overriding virtue, sensibility: one is an entry in Denis
Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1765), the other a soliloquy by Parson Yorick in
Laurence Sterne’s novel A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
by Mr. Yorick (1768). In both cases, the authors equate the ability to feel
deeply with a virtue surpassing any achieved through discipline or reason,
even if (or perhaps especially if) it leads to ridicule in the eyes of the world.
It designates a moral superiority defi ned in opposition to more traditional
mores and societal standards of success.
In these passages, then, as univocal as they may at first appear, one can
see the conflicting impulses of the culture of sensibility at work. We see the
joyful and optimistic assertion of natural virtue—even a natural virtue with
a basis in the human body—yet also a sadness based on the reception that
such virtue receives in society, where sentimental actions are interpreted as
2 Ruined by Design
“errors.” In other words, there is the hope, on the one hand, of universal
access to sensibility and the euphoric description of the “source inexhaust-
ible of all that’s precious,” effectively denying any necessity for other sources
of virtue. At the same time, there is also the disturbing evidence that the
majority not only lack “generous” feeling but also misunderstand those who
possess it. As the passages suggest, this internal tension does not tend to
lead to moderation in the culture of sensibility; in fact, it frequently leads to
defensiveness or self-righteous declarations.
It is not only the external world that lacks sensibility: the second passage
reveals a second underlying fear that “generous cares beyond myself” are
difficult to achieve, even for the man of feeling himself—a fear that altru-
ism cannot actually exist in the face of human solipsism. Sterne’s phrase
“beyond myself,” spoken by Parson Yorick, exhibits the defensive tone of
sensibility—suggesting both the general absence of “generous cares” and
sensibility’s foundational insecurity. It is thus defensive optimism that fre-
quently leads to sensibility’s characteristically demonstrative outbursts of
enthusiasm. Conveniently, sensibility’s totemic tears express both joy and
sadness and thus provide the single most common signifier of virtue within
the culture of sensibility. The bi-valence of tears and sensibility’s penchant
for tragicomedy enable authors to avoid taking a stand on the difficult issue
of just how natural, how powerful, and how pervasive such generous care
for others actually is.
The same impulses that shape sensibility’s unremitting portrayal of vir-
tue in distress, as well as its weeping, high-blown expressions of sentimen-
talism in passages such as those above, also inform the aesthetic and ethical
position that shaped much of the literary art and material culture of the
late eighteenth century. As a direct “sensorium,” or private, spontaneous
source of morality requiring no education or other external sanction, sen-
sibility provided a way of justifying the individual’s independence from the
authority of reason and lack of need for centralized political power, as well
as justifying a liberation from social and ethical norms. Yet the concept
of sensibility grew to entail precise norms of its own—as well as a moral
and aesthetic, if not political, authority of its own—that permeated Europe
during the second half of the eighteenth century. 2
PLACING SENSIBILITY
Figure 1
4 Ruined by Design
to which adherents pay homage. Figure 1, for example, a frontispiece from
a novel of sensibility, written in French, which imitates Laurence Sterne’s
A Sentimental Journey, includes many of the most common signifiers of
sensibility: rags, beauty, a tear-drenched handkerchief, and a “philanthropic
posture” on the part of the traveler who witnesses a tearful, bittersweet
scene. The prospective reader of François Vernes’ Le Voyageur Sentimental
(1786) therefore knows from the frontispiece alone the philosophical, moral,
and aesthetic position that the novel espouses. The caption, “Ô Rousseau!
Ô Richardson, où êtes-vous?” [Oh, Rousseau! Oh, Richardson, where are
you?] suggests that the names of these authors of the culture of sensibility
have received cult status, so that their names alone can function as signs of
sensibility even within the fictions. The devotion to sensibility and its signs
can perhaps be measured by the number of poems and paintings entitled
“Sensibility” that appeared in the second half of the century as well.
Beyond placing sensibility in the second half of the eighteenth century,
there has been little agreement about the exact dates to attach to the cul-
tural movement, apart from saying that it is “linked to both the Enlighten-
ment and Romanticism but distinct from them.”4 Geographically diffuse
and lacking a specific manifesto or concrete set of goals, the culture of
sensibility may indeed seem overly amorphous to deserve a single epithet;
Northrop Frye’s term “the Age of Sensibility,” more recently resurrected
by Jessica Riskin, may appear to oversimplify the issues of periodicization.
Many scholars have used terms like the culture of sensibility (G. J. Barker-
Benfield), the counter-culture of sensibility (Syndy M. Conger), the cult of
sensibility (Janet Todd), or simply spoken of sensibility as a single move-
ment for the purposes of argument (Louis Bredvold). 5 On the one hand,
there are scholars who are engaged in extending the earlier boundary to
accommodate what they view as central features or exemplars of sensibil-
ity: such scholars have described sensibility as a subset of Enlightenment,
including Riskin’s recent work on medical discourse in sensibility, where she
convincingly argues that French and American Enlightenment thought was
imbued with the language and philosophy of sensibility. Other scholars, on
the other hand, are engaged in extending the later boundary, not only those
who prefer the term Preromanticism to sensibility, but also scholars such as
Julie Ellison, who has claimed that Romanticism itself is an episode within
sensibility. For the purposes of this study, I have focused on literary texts
and other artifacts constructed between 1750 and 1800 to allow for samples
of sensibility at its prime, as well as a glimpse of its subsequent decay.
In Germany, Preromantic movements in music have been separated into
“Sturm und Drang” (represented by artists such as Joseph Haydn) and the
“Empfi ndsamer Stil” (represented by artists such as C. P. E. Bach). There
is a similarly complex relationship between “Sturm und Drang,” the “Früh
Romantik,” “Empfi ndsamkeit,” and the Jena school of Romanticism in lit-
erature and philosophy. While it will not be a goal of this volume to untangle
this web of movements, most scholars would name the “Sturm und Drang”
Introduction 5
or “Storm and Stress” movement as the most conspicuous manifestation
of Preromanticism in German literature, featuring the extremely influen-
tial Die Leiden des jungen Werthers [The Sorrows of Young Werther] by
Goethe (1774).6 In France, Preromanticism also has numerous manifesta-
tions, including “Sensibilité,” the roman sensible, and the comédie lar-
moyante, exerting influence over French literary styles in both the novel
and theater.7 In English literature, Preromantic manifestations include both
sensibility and the Gothic (or Gothick)—largely overlapping, yet seemingly
distinguishable movements.8 In fact, the novel of sensibility postulated here
encompasses the literature which Patricia Meyer Spacks divides into two
groups in her recent book, Novel Beginnings: the novel of consciousness
and the novel of sentiment. It is not possible here to distinguish between
these many Preromantic cousins, nor is it a central purpose to establish
the culture of sensibility in relation to the broader historical movement of
Romanticism; instead this study will focus on sensibility, primarily in the
English novel of 1750–1800, but also as sensibility is manifested in the
prose fiction of French “Sensibilité” and of German “Sturm und Drang.”
Representative novelists include Laurence Sterne, Henry Mackenzie, Char-
lotte and Henry Brooke, Charlotte Smith, Frances Sheridan, and Mary
Wollstonecraft in England and Scotland; Johann W. Goethe, Jean Paul
(Johann Paul Friedrich Richter), E. T. A. Hoffman, Wilhelm Heinse, and
Karl Philipp Moritz in Germany; and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, l’abbé Pré-
vost, Jean-François Marmontel, and Bernardin de Saint Pierre in France.
If it is true that from mid-century to the 1770s, the culture of sensibility
was predominantly shaped by the novel of the time, then it is also the case
that it was largely shaped by foreign novels in translation. In the recent
Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, for example, Gary Kelly argues that
it was the translation into English of Rousseau, Prévost, and Bernardin
de Saint-Pierre (among others) that spurred sensibility in England, while
Robert J. Frail argues that it was the translation of Defoe and Richardson
(along with the poets Thomson and Young) into French that spurred Pre-
romanticism in France. In fact, as French “Anglomanie” intensified after
1750, English novels appeared by the hundreds and such frenchified English
novels were often called “le genre triste.”9 François Vernes’ Le Voyageur
Sentimental (1786) exemplifies this cultural ebb and flow: a clear imitation
of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768), it was fi rst published
in France, then translated into English, and became popular in England as
Louis and Nina (1789).10 As novels of sensibility swept Europe in the 1760s
and 1770s at the height of the movement, Werther and Julie became house-
hold names in England, and Clarissa and Yorick became familiar presences
in Germany and France, as well as in England. Within the literature of
sensibility, the dominant genres tended to be poetry, drama, and especially
the budding novel. Interestingly, most literary studies of sensibility have
focused on poetry, neglecting the innovations shaping narrative prose dur-
ing the eighteenth century.
6 Ruined by Design
One of the most apparent features of the eighteenth-century novel is the
experimentation with fragmentation: one can readily fi nd novels ending
mid-sentence, “fragments” published by fictional editors, radical experi-
mentation with typography and the printing press, and the generally epi-
sodic character of plots in the fi rst half of the century. Fragmentation takes
on a new tone in the second half of the century, when the culture of sensi-
bility starts defining narrative closure and even plot-driven engagement as
antithetical to sensibility. The reader of Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling, for
example, is taught that readers of sensibility are expected to differentiate
themselves from those who “may have expected the intricacies of a novel”:
instead of being driven by an anticipation of the resolution of intricate
plots, the reader of sensibility will be satisfied with “mutilated passages”
or “a few incidents in a life undistinguished, except by some features of
the heart.”11 In novels of sensibility, the basic narrative unit changes to the
episode or fragment—the discrete image, tableau, or situation that evokes
feeling rather than eliciting a desire for sustained narrative or closure. The
structural manifestations of sensibility in the novel thus include the non-
narrative features that purposely create gaps and fissures for readers to fill.
The other most apparent arena for experimentation in the novel is the
role of the narrator and its relation to the author’s voice. The increased use
of the self-conscious narrator is particularly significant for understand-
ing the growing self-reflexivity and concerns about the difficulties of self-
representation that helped shape narrative techniques of the literature of
sensibility, including first-person narratives, imbedded letters, fictionalized
memoirs, self-conscious narrators, imbedded tableaux, and content with
a deeper psychological edge. Basically, the idea of authorial omniscience
becomes inimical to sensibility; such omniscience, as a form of inauthentic
control or central authority, ceases to carry either credibility or prestige. The
skepticism surrounding omniscience elicits further literary innovation, par-
ticularly in narrative prose rather than lyric poetry or drama.12 For example,
authors experiment with ways of distancing the story from the seeming arti-
fice of the narrator; at times the paradoxical technique is to highlight artifice
for the sake of achieving a shared sense of authenticity. Unlike lyric poetry,
where there tends to be less distinction between narrating and experiencing
voices—less distinction between the personae of protagonist, narrator, and
implied author—the novel invites the performance of a theater of self-con-
sciousness, suitable to the self-reflexive nature of sensibility.13
As McGann describes it, sensibility is “a momentous cultural shift whose
terms . . . all but founded the novel, and . . . produced an upheaval in the
way poetry was conceived and written.”14 This is however not a new opin-
ion: scholars as diverse as Arthur Lovejoy, Erwin Panofsky, Christopher
Hussey, M. H. Abrams, Martin Battestin, Michel Foucault, Charles Rosen,
and Charles Taylor, have all located a highly significant aesthetic and philo-
sophical watershed at the midpoint of the eighteenth century. Although the
interpretations of this shift vary, all these authors describe the movement
Introduction 7
away from a confidence in neoclassical symmetry and order towards a new
interest in asymmetry and irregularity, whether this be manifested in the
growing importance of the passions and autobiography in moral philosophy
and conceptions of the self; the vogue for the English garden across Europe;
the renewed interest in mountains, cliffs, and fossils; chromaticism and dis-
sonance in music; or the growing importance of spectatorship and acting,
even in theology. In the aesthetic terms of Edmund Burke, or of landscape
gardening, sensibility is involved more with the serpentine curves and studied
irregularity of the picturesque than with the awe-inspiring and precipitous
sublime: it does not yet open up the realm of the monstrous, characteristic
of Romanticism per se.15
The developments in the novel thus relate to concurrent trends in moral
philosophy, philosophy of language, and aesthetics. The rise of empiricism,
the growing distrust of unaided reason, the elevation of the passions—espe-
cially as guides to moral behavior, and a new faith in the natural goodness
of mankind, as well as an increasing emphasis on the faculties of sympathy
and imagination—combined to shape the drastically new moral self which
accompanied sensibility. Each of these features reflects an underlying philo-
sophical insecurity that is expressed in a number of ways: in the contradictory
assertions of optimism and pessimism, in odd combinations of radicalism and
conservatism, and in ambivalence about whether order and system are funda-
mentally desirable and necessary or destructive forces in their own right.
Taken in this context, the remarkable innovations in narrative form show
how the ruin as dominant motif of the period affected the history of the
novel as well as many other aspects of material culture. 16 Just as authors of
novels of sensibility develop a new cluster of narrative techniques that are
suitable for embracing ruination and working against traditional narrative
authority located in an omniscient narrator, landscapers of the gardens of
sensibility also develop similar strategies to engage their viewers. Gardens
have their own narratives, their own syntax, as we will see, and as taste
in narration changes, the new aesthetic affects both art forms. The central
purpose of this book is thus to illustrate a structural parallel between the
shape of the novel of sensibility and the shape of the landscape architecture
of the English garden—both of which reveal a similar ambivalence regarding
the nature and necessity of externalized authority. By connecting the visual
and verbal landscapes of sensibility and positing a “rhetoric of ruins” that
applies to the novel of sensibility as well as to the so-called English landscape
garden, this book will show not only that viewing a ruined tower or a mel-
ancholy object in an English garden shares emotional effect, dynamic, and
structural strategies with the act of reading a novel of sensibility, but also
that these similarities stem from a common drive to fragment works of art.
Completion and explicit authority or control were rendered not only
suspect and aesthetically unpleasing, but also morally inferior by the fun-
damental philosophical stance of the culture of sensibility. This frame-
work helps us understand the development of the curiously truncated,
8 Ruined by Design
artificial ruins, called follies, that started appearing in pleasure gardens
all over northern and central Europe, as well as the remarkably innova-
tive narrative strategies developed by novelists of sensibility that include
multiple frames of fictional editorship. Purposeful ruination, therefore,
is one prominent technique within the culture of sensibility that shaped
composition in both literature and landscape gardening. Both architects
and authors addressed twin goals: to create a “publishable,” coherent
monument or volume and also to fragment their creation. They thereby
both mask the creator’s role and evoke greater emotional participation in
the reader or viewer, appealing to insecurity and contradictory impulses
through their paradoxical constructions.
This simultaneous optimism and pessimism regarding human possibili-
ties results in important literary and architectural experimentation during
the culture of sensibility. Ambivalence takes on new importance in this
context, particularly ambivalence regarding the possibilities of human
enterprise. The new structures—fragmented narratives imbedded with
multiple tableaux and multiple fictitious editors on the one hand, and ficti-
tiously ruined buildings called follies or fabriques on the other—represent
optimism and pessimism in a way that appears mutually contradictory.
The novel of sensibility and the folly thus share a number of traits and
purposes that will inform the argument of the subsequent chapters. They
both reflect the attempt to imbue ruination with moral superiority that is
portrayed in Chapter One, as well as a cultural mistrust of language itself—
whether of its abuse or of its natural inadequacies. Both structures also
appeal to the contradictory desires for monumentalism and for ruination
that become the subject of Chapter Two; they also reflect an ambivalence
regarding the authority to construct and about authorship in general; and
they involve a pretense about their original (fictitious) discovery, rather
than purposeful construction. Understood from a literary perspective, both
structures reflect a societal preference for a myriad of non-narrative and
anti-narrative techniques that can temper narrative drives and involve read-
ers and spectators in an active role, completing and interpreting the frag-
ments as co-authors or co-architects—the subject of Chapter Three. We
also consider how each structure paradoxically develops an elaborate peda-
gogy of its own, teaching readers and viewers how to see and to feel. A com-
mon thread among these shared traits is the philosophical insecurity of the
culture of sensibility—trustful in theory yet suspicious in practice—even of
the motives of its own adherents (and readers). Finally, in Chapter Four, we
consider the social cost of this purposeful ruination when it includes human
ruin and gives aesthetic preference to women in distress. Before proceeding
to the structure of the folly and the novel of sensibility, however, it is impor-
tant to describe the role of the “picturesque” in establishing changing cul-
tural and aesthetic expectations of the landscape garden, the characteristic
psychology of the man of feeling who inhabits both the English garden and
the novel of sensibility, and the challenges of narrating sensibility.
Introduction 9
SEEKING AUTHENTICITY
NARRATING FAILURE
DEFINING AMBIVALENCE
MAPPING RUIN
The appeal of ruins in the mid-to-late eighteenth century was based on far
more than antiquarian impulses. Chapter One locates ruin mania within a
broad desire to rewrite Genesis and to debunk Hobbes’ pessimism about
human nature. Thus we fi nd the roots of the new appreciation of ruins
already in the pervasive ideas of natural human goodness. The smooth
functioning of the passions allows the self to become the microcosm of
providential order, and this order expands to incorporate the irregularities
of nature. As passions grow both beautiful and moral, so do volcanoes and
the jagged cliffs of the Alps. The attitude towards the irregularities of nature
shows itself in the changing view of mountains, cleansed of their postdi-
luvian reputation. Authors thus reclaim Genesis with multiple desires: to
combine utopian ambition with a desire to reverse the ethical and aesthetic
judgments based on old testament readings and on skeptical philosophies
such as Hobbes’, while still retaining the sanction of biblical authority.
Introduction 21
Chapter Two turns from the general topoi of irregularity and ruination to
a particular kind of ruin: the folly. In focusing on the mutually illuminating
juxtaposition of the fascination with these fake ruins on the one hand, and
the purposeful fragmentation of the novel of sensibility on the other, this
chapter draws parallels between the architectural style of Thomas Whately
and the “rhetoric of ruins” employed by Laurence Sterne and J. W. Goethe.
For architects, the building of fake ruins is problematic in that it challenges
one central aspect of their traditional vocation—to build structures that will
stand the test of time intact. Instead the architect must aim for deliberate
failure. It is also a reversal of the architect’s usual role as creator: in building
an artificial ruin, creation must disguise itself as discovery, as the architect
poses as archaeologist. It is true that, in some sense, all architects use the
past, but seldom do they impersonate the hand of time and intentionally
unmake what they themselves have made. They must mask the traces of
their own artistry and industry, with ruination, irregularity, and the mark
of time. Follies and novels of sensibility thus both express the desire for
order and system coexisting with the relish of spontaneity, or the desire for
narration that seeks to hide all traces of narrative authorship.
Chapter Three delves further into the ethical and political implications
of the pursuit of the language of nature—whether in landscape gardening
and architecture or in the novel. In particular, this chapter treats the cul-
tural and philosophical significance of the use of fictional editors in novels
of sensibility and the political implications of the narrative techniques, such
as the use of (seemingly insignificant) dashes and asterisks within the nar-
ratives. In the process, it sheds light on the importance of spectatorship in
the landscape garden and literature of the culture of sensibility, an obses-
sion that culminates in the perceived need for hermits and mannequins to
pose as ideal spectators and spectacles, and the false promise of transfer
of authority and authorship to readers and viewers when they prove less
tractable than mannequins.
Chapter Four focuses on human ruin and sensibility’s moral ambiguity
regarding suffering. By studying the issue of female narration and the role of
an aesthetic category called the “interesting” in sensibility, we can see sen-
sibility’s codes of authenticity leading to sadistic extremes, anticipated and
ridiculed by Jane Austen. Building on Austen’s admiration for one of the
founders of the “picturesque” movement, William Gilpin, her multiple allu-
sions to Goethe and Rousseau, and a study of her narrative technique, this
chapter reveals how Austen inherits elements of the culture of Sensibility—
such as its ambivalence towards authority, completion, and eloquence—and
adapts them to suit her own didactic purposes. As an examination of the
pursuit of “natural acting” suggests, the paradoxes of sensibility’s artificial
efforts at appearing natural implode upon themselves, and reveal a fad that
extravagantly pursues primitivism and fetishizes female suffering with only
the pretense of sympathy, let alone the desire to relieve pain.
1 Redeeming Ruin
And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top
may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scat-
tered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
—Genesis 11:4
Figure 2
that were added between the years of 1788 and 1792. These volcanoes
had lamps and sound effects to enhance the simulated eruptions. These
fake eruptions could be seen and admired from great distances (see Figure
2). Such a demonstration suggests not only tolerance of ruin, but also the
purposeful mimicking of destruction.
This elaborate domestication of wildness provides an excellent example
of the human ambition to frame the terrifying forces of nature for our own
aesthetic purposes, even if it means artificially recreating the wildness in
order to frame it within the garden as a whole. Unconsciously subscrib-
ing to the mental habit of sensibility, including its insecurities, perhaps,
landowners and patrons in the culture of sensibility frequently attempt to
rise above chaos and above human limitation through art and material
culture—even if they must recreate chaos to seek this end.
In his immensely influential Sacred Theory of the Earth (1684), writ-
ten half a century before the fi rst flowering of the literature of sensibil-
ity, Thomas Burnet planted some of the seeds of the incipient appreciation
of fragmentation and irregularity. In Theory, Burnet attempts to explain
the phenomena of Genesis through scientific language. He describes the
original state of God’s created Earth, the “Mundane Egg”: “In this smooth
Earth were the fi rst Scenes of the World, and the fi rst Generations of Man-
kind; it had the beauty of Youth and blooming Nature, fresh and fruitful,
and not a wrinkle, scar, or fracture in all its body; no Rocks or Mountains,
24 Ruined by Design
Figure 3
no hollow Caves, nor gaping Chanels, but even and uniform all over . . .
’Twas suited to a golden Age, and to the fi rst innocency of Nature.”1 Subse-
quently, Burnet movingly portrays mountains as antediluvian reminders of
the fallen state of humanity and as decrepit, if awe-inspiring, ruins of the
original, smooth perfection of God’s creation (Figure 3). 2
Burnet’s thesis regarding the origin of mountains influenced many prom-
inent philosophers in the culture of sensibility, particularly Shaftesbury.
His “physico-theological” account was remarkable for using geology rather
than allegory as the key to access scriptural truth, for using scripture to
look at Nature in terms of its ancient wholeness (anticipating the revisionist
aesthetics of sensibility and Romanticism) and for suggesting that we have
fi rst-hand access to Eden: “we have still the broken materials of that fi rst
world, and walk upon its ruins.” Burnet’s thesis, strengthened by other
Redeeming Ruin 25
aspects of the subsequent culture of sensibility, eventually lent the Alps new
glory in their own right (even in their deplorably fragmented state). What
were, in the mid-seventeenth century, “Warts, Wens, Blisters, Impost-
humes” and “Nature’s Shames and Ills,” had become “temples of Nature
built by the Almighty” and “natural cathedrals, or natural altars.”3
The redemption of ruination and natural irregularity begs important
questions for the culture of sensibility: are the psychological and social
equivalents of jagged cliffs, volcanoes, and tempestuous storms equally
admirable in human nature? Is it possible that a new confidence in the
disruptive, mercurial elements of the self coincides with a new appreciation
for irregularity in art and the increase of chromaticism and dissonance in
music? If so, then not only are Sterne’s Yorick’s tingling nerves and fibers
key to his virtue, but his passionate eruptions may be as well. The Terror
following the French Revolution complicated the new admiration of the
passions and its accompanying confidence in human self-determination.
Rousseau, Goethe, Herder and other authors attempt to create or reclaim
authorizing origins that satisfy emerging democratic impulses by establish-
ing the possibility of self-sufficiency without isolation, of self-government
without chaos, and of virtue without external regulation.
Authors within the culture of sensibility, including Rousseau, Goethe,
and Herder, reappropriate the stories of the fi rst fourteen chapters of Gen-
esis in hopes of validating natural virtue, spontaneity, and irregularity:
they reinterpret the expulsion from Eden, the fall of Babel, and the flood
by asserting natural goodness; they reclaim the fallen world, its ruins, and
its irregularities; and they establish the ethical and aesthetic superiority of
ruination—as well as a new pedagogy and new hierarchy under the pre-
tense of eradicating hierarchical relations.4 There is of course nothing new
about reinterpreting Biblical authority to support particular arguments
about political or moral philosophy. Thomas Hobbes, for example, uses
Genesis in his 1651 masterpiece, Leviathan, to argue for unlimited sov-
ereign power. In his interpretation of the fall and expulsion from Eden,
Hobbes makes an explicit connection to the need for sovereign power to
be absolute. Not only do human beings have inescapably selfish tenden-
cies, as well as the “restless desire for power after power, that ceaseth only
in death”—tendencies that are displayed whenever there is no “common
power to keep them all in awe,” but, quoting Genesis 3.5 and 3:11, he
writes: “it [is] clear that the commands of them that have the right to com-
mand, are not by their subjects to be censured, nor disputed.” He con-
cludes: “So it appeareth plainly, to my understanding, both from reason
and from Scripture, that the sovereign power, whether placed in one man,
as in monarchy, or in one assembly of men, as in popular, and aristocrati-
cal commonwealths, is as great, as possibly men can be imagined to make
it.”5 Despite the fact that it predates the culture of sensibility by more than
a century, Hobbes’ Leviathan provides a theory that devotees of sensibility
loved to hate (just as seventeenth-century Latitudinarians had hated it).
26 Ruined by Design
Half a century later, in his Second Treatise on Government (1690),
John Locke relies on textual evidence from Genesis to propose a natural
human right to private property and a natural inclination towards society.
According to Locke, God gave Adam and his descendants the earth—the
fi rst emergence of property. The difficulties emerging from property, were,
according to Locke, somewhat remedied by the natural human sociability
described in Genesis 2:18: “God having made man such a creature, that
in his own judgement it was not good for him to be alone, put him under
strong obligations of necessity, convenience, and inclination to drive him
into society, as well as fitted him with understanding and language to con-
tinue and enjoy it.”6
Whereas these seventeenth-century authors do not limit God’s author-
ity, Rousseau and other eighteenth-century authors involved in the culture
of sensibility draw on Genesis in order to increase the human sense of self-
determination. “La religion nous ordonne de croire que Dieu lui-même
ayant tiré les Hommes de l’état de Nature . . . , ils sont inégaux parce qu’il
a voulu qu’ils le fussent; mais elle ne nous défend pas de former des con-
jectures tirées de la seule nature de l’homme et des êtres qui l’environnent,
sur ce qu’auroit pu devenir le genre-humain s’il fût resté abandonné à lui-
même.” [Religion commands us to believe that since God Himself took
men out of the state of nature immediately after the creation, they are
unequal because He wanted them to be so; but it does not forbid us to
form conjectures, drawn solely from the nature of man and the beings
surrounding him, about what the human race might have become if it
had remained abandoned to itself.]7 Rousseau’s separation of belief and
conjecture leads to a concomitant separation of scriptural origins and self-
actualizing origins.
The eighteenth-century tendency to reinterpret Biblical authority con-
cerning human nature while still wishing for Biblical sanction recalls sen-
sibility’s philosophical insecurity. While rebelling, theoretically, against
God’s Old-Testament authority, the authors in this chapter nonetheless
require Biblical authority to make their point. In other words, the point
is not so much to prove Genesis wrong, as to reinterpret or reappropriate
Genesis for the purposes of the culture of sensibility. But the desire to
reclaim Genesis for the culture of sensibility, rather than to disregard it,
is itself an expression of philosophical insecurity, using optimism about
human nature to assert independence from traditional religious author-
ity, while only half suppressing a lingering fear that human nature may
indeed be fallen. Philosophers representing the culture of sensibility felt
torn between Christian views of original sin or selfishness and Hobbesian
views of human isolation and solipsism on the one hand, and the hope
and desire to believe in natural goodness, transparency, self-determina-
tion, and the possibility of earthly community and meaningful intimacy,
on the other. In order to reclaim Genesis’ authority to accord with demo-
cratic impulses and a sense of natural goodness and transparency, authors
Redeeming Ruin 27
influential for the culture of sensibility revise Old Testament stories to
diminish the prevailing sense of sin, hierarchy, and of a single, omniscient
authority external to the individual agent. As altered myths are sought,
and faith diminishes in the classical or Judeo-Christian conceptions of
reason and virtue, new popular mythologies “abduct” (in Roland Barthes’
terms) signifiers already laden with meaning from familiar and loved cul-
tural contexts into alluring new “mosaic[s] of signs.”8
As we see in this chapter, authors reappropriate Genesis in hopes of
validating natural virtue, spontaneity, and irregularity by reinterpreting
the expulsion from Eden, the fall of Babel, and the effects of Noah’s flood.
Prominent authors expound upon the benefits of Noah’s flood, which
changed the configuration of the earth’s surface in favor of irregularity and
picturesque adornment and the beauty of the Alps, previously seen as ruins
of the Flood and thus reminders of human fallen nature. They also describe
an Adam and Eve who withstand original sin and instead can exhibit nat-
ural goodness, rely on intuition, and achieve mutual transparency. They
question God’s felling of the Tower of Babel, yet claim the ability to recre-
ate the original, universal human language of the passions, as well as to rec-
reate new gardens of Eden that allow the new Adams and Eves to indulge
in their innocent passions and that enable landscape to speak “the original
language of Nature.” While the search for the origin of language and the
“Ursprache” by no means originated in the second half of the eighteenth
century, it did however change its character from searching for the rational,
philosophical perfection desired by Leibniz to the uncensored authenticity
of the “wilde Mutter” described by Herder.
In other words, as this chapter progresses from archaeological and
geological ruin, to purposeful fragmentation in landscape gardening,
to attempts to reclaim the language of nature in human conversation,
we will see that these seemingly disparate traditions evince a similar
objective. In these disparate domains, a similar dynamic takes place:
the culture of sensibility tacitly redeems and elevates an aesthetic of
ruination and fragmentation as a symbol of new hope in human nature
and new democratic aspirations. The devastation described in Genesis
is reclaimed in favor of the picturesque, while God’s jealous authority is
dampened in favor of decentralization and in order to give human beings
a less subordinate position vis-à-vis God. Yet the frames and the sheer
artifice of the resolutions still reveal the doubts haunting sensibility’s
more revolutionary ideals.
Most eighteenth-century Grand Tours led to Rome via the Alps and the
Appenini, which were also described as “Ruins of a broken World”—that
is, of an antediluvian glory.9 In fact, in eighteenth-century portrayals, ruins
28 Ruined by Design
and mountains often blend almost indistinguishably, their interpenetration
revealing their kindred, ruined nature as well as the overriding importance
of an aesthetic of irregularity, disproportion, and fragmentation. Geomet-
ric forms and right angles are thus “naturalized” into irregular shapes, as
they are overtaken by time and weeds.
This interest in ruins did not originate in the eighteenth century: sev-
eral popular mid-seventeenth century European painters such as Nicolas
Poussin, Claude Lorrain, and Salvator Rosa, as well as numerous poets
across Europe, had already helped familiarize the public with ruins as a
symbol of memento mori. By enhancing their religious and secular paint-
ings with broken arches and porticos as backdrops, they brought Roman
ruins “into every cultivated home.” In the mid-eighteenth century, how-
ever, the fascination with ruins reached manic proportions,10 and they
became a favorite subject for artists and poets throughout France, England,
and Germany. Ruins figured prominently in the works of painters such as
Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, Hubert Robert, Joseph Vernet, J.H.W. Tischbein,
and even the American Thomas Cole. The celebrated engraver Giovanni
Battista Piranesi also helped spread the interest, and poets such as John
Dyer, William Cowper, Oliver Goldsmith, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
and William Wordsworth all found the rhetoric of ruins integral to their
art.11 Some well-known painters, such as Hubert Robert and Jean-Honoré
Fragonard both consulted on and built artificial ruins in actual estates as
well as painted them in their landscapes. Denis Diderot even writes of “la
poétique des ruines” which expresses the mood of sensibility.12
Men of feeling themselves invoke these painters, as Harley’s narrator
does in the Man of Feeling: “Harley looked on [Edwards] with the most
earnest attention. He was one of those fi gures which Salvator would
have drawn; nor was the surrounding scenery unlike the wildness of that
painter’s backgrounds . . . A rock, with some dangling wild flowers, jut-
ted out above where the soldier lay; on which grew the stump of a large
tree, white with age, and a single twisted branch shaded his face as he
slept” and so forth for over half a page of minute description, fi rst of
the fragmentation, sparsity, and ruggedness of the natural setting, then
an equally detailed description of the similarly rugged ‘topography’ of
Edwards’ face, which “had the marks of manly comeliness impaired by
time; his forehead was not altogether bald, but its hairs might have been
numbered.” 13
The ruin industry in mid-eighteenth-century Europe and England and
the renowned eighteenth-century “antiquarian impulse”14 was spurred not
only by the Grand Tours to Italy and Greece, but also by the archaeologi-
cal excavation of ruined Roman cities, notably Pompeii and Herculaneum.
These new discoveries brought ruins to the attention of the public eye. Yet,
the sources of interest and emotions raised by the destructive forces of
ruination were diverse: on the one hand, close contact with vast volcanic
destruction intensified philosophical and theological skepticism within the
Redeeming Ruin 29
culture of sensibility, yet on the other hand, the vast grandeur of Roman
civilization increased interest in ancient achievement. Fossils, especially
those excavated from volcanic fields in Italy,15 provided glimpses of an
unrecorded past and drew new interest in Biblical accounts of creation and
destruction. In the process, the forces that caused great destruction were
redeemed as legitimate arenas of human inquiry.
After having been seen as an ugly reminder of fallen nature, volcanoes,
hurricanes, and earthquakes actually grew to be a popular area of study.
Whereas, in his 1743 The Antediluvian World, Francis Walsh still agrees
with Burnet that “this terrestrial Globe as it now appears, is not the fi rst
and immediate Work of the Hands of the Almighty, considering its out-
ward Face, Shape and Form, as a thing not suitable to his immense Power,
and infi nite Goodness, being such an irregular, disordered, and incom-
modious Piece,”16 the anonymous author of a 1764 volume of The Beau-
ties of Nature and Art Displayed, in a Tour through the World strikingly
dedicates a full chapter to “An Historical Account of the most remark-
able Earthquakes, Inundations, Fires, Epidemic Diseases, and other Public
Calamities . . .,” in addition to the sections on “remarkable Mountains,
Caves, and Volcano’s [sic].”17 In the latter volume, these destructive forces
are included, notably, among “The Beauties of Nature.” The topic of these
volumes was not idiosyncratic: in the latter decades of the eighteenth cen-
tury, a flurry of volumes address the geological origins of Earth, physico-
theological interpretations of creation,18 reinterpretations of the fi rst three
books of Genesis, as well as countless studies of volcanoes and islands as
“fragments” from Iceland to Japan.
The titles of some of these volumes demonstrate the Enlightenment con-
fidence applied to these new areas, such as Sacred Scripture: Theory of the
Earth from its First Atom to its Last End (1798).19 There was, in other
words, a fascination with the grandeur of earth’s natural forces and also a
popularly driven desire to explain and control these forces—or at least to
simulate or domesticate them. William Hooper, M.D., for example, dem-
onstrates the Enlightenment techniques applied towards sensibility’s new
topoi in his Rational Recreations, in which the Principles of Numbers and
Natural Philosophy are Clearly and Copiously Elucidated by a Series of
Easy, Entertaining, Interesting Experiments. Here, Hooper shows simple
household experiments to create one’s own volcanoes and earthquakes, and
to simulate artificial lightning and other impressive spectacles of nature.
Armed with only fifty pounds of a powder made from fresh iron filings and
pure sulphur, anyone can create a “true” volcano: just bury it a foot deep
under the earth, and “in about eight hours the ground will begin to heave
and swell, . . . it will send forth hot sulphureous steams, and at last, burst-
ing into live flames, will form a true volcano.”20 Simulation thus provides
the impression of control.
The British Museum also exhibited a particularly impressive display that
included a study of volcanoes, samples of basalt rocks and hardened lava
30 Ruined by Design
from Mt. Vesuvius, as well as a darkened room with lighting behind a
transparent painting to simulate a volcanic eruption. It was in fact, this
display in 1775, that (along with his Grand Tour, numerous trips to English
gardens, and acquaintance with Laurence Sterne) inspired Prince Leopold
III Friedrich Franz von Anhalt-Dessau to build his island with artifical vol-
canoes at Wörlitz. 21 Philosophical debates were heated between “Volcan-
ists” and the “Neptunists” as to the exact role of volcanoes in creation of
the Earth, and these debates also informed the choices Franz made in the
English Garden at Wörlitz. In choosing to devise a staging of the volcano as
a “constructive natural force,” Franz was taking the part of the Volcanists
who argued that the volcanoes aid in the process of an ongoing, decentral-
ized model of creation, as opposed to the Neptunist argument that accords
more with traditional readings of Genesis and focused on one, central,
historical creative act (125–128).
The example of Wörlitz is significant for many reasons. The English gar-
den of Wörlitz grew to encompass much of the small principality itself, and
became known as the “Gartenreich” or “the Garden Kingdom.” Franz very
self-consciously designed his garden for didactic purposes using the vocab-
ulary of eighteenth-century debates from within the culture of sensibility.
In particular, he drew upon the parallels between political thought and
landscape gardening: just as he viewed his own state as a “Model for non-
state-centred reform”22 and “minimum state intervention,” he wished to
differentiate himself from neighboring principalities with less liberal poli-
tics. For this purpose, he adopts the language of the English Garden and of
its characteristic fragmentation and decentralization. One of the purposes,
then, of re-creating volcanoes was as a symbol of the power of natural
forces to create regularity without external control—to create spontaneous
order, symbolized by the crystalline, precise architectural columns formed
by basalt. To this humanistic end, Franz also displayed a Volcanist text
upon a table carved out of lava. 23
Countless other well-known, mid- and late-century intellectuals, such
as Addison, Gray, Walpole, Gibbon, Goethe, and Humboldt, to name a
few, indulged in the aristocratic taste for “Grand Tours” and made their
pilgrimages to Rome. The often life-changing effects wrought upon these
authors by the sight of the ruins of Rome led to a desire to appropriate
the ruins and thereby to perpetuate their aesthetic effect at home. Goethe,
for example, (who commented on the Neptunist-Volcanist debate in his
Faust) gathered as many fragments of classical culture as possible during
his Grand Tour. The sculptured ornaments that he could not physically
transport (because they were not yet sufficiently ruined), he had cast in
gypsum: “It is necessary to acquire these invaluable treasures,” he wrote,
“I am modelling them in clay, in order to appropriate everything.”24 The
famous full-length portrait of Goethe by Tischbein (Figure 4) shows the
patronizing tendency towards not only appropriation but also domestica-
tion of the wild and ruined objects dislocated and framed within walls or
Redeeming Ruin 31
boundaries of French, German, or English landscape gardens or estates.
Goethe’s posture, reclining and dominating the landscape, suggests a com-
fortable admiration from a superior position. Not only does he admire the
objects, he appears to hoard and even recline upon them. The attitudes
towards the new appropriations reinforce the insecurity characteristic of
the culture of sensibility: on the one hand they lend an aristocratic and
colonizing sense of conquest to their possessors, whether in real or arti-
ficial artifacts. On the other hand, they serve as a reminder of the hidden
destructive power of nature and reminders of the authority and biblical
omnipotence of God.
In Britain, Ruinenlust led not only to the importation of these clas-
sical ruins, fragment by fragment, but also, together with a developing
sense of nation and of local history, to a growing aesthetic appreciation
of—and search for—local ruins. As specific claims to classical connec-
tions were gradually abandoned, interest grew, not only in ruined Gothic
churches such as Tintern Abbey, but also in ancient pagan structures such
as Stonehenge. 25 The love of local, mostly Gothic, ruins inspired count-
less literary and artistic responses as well. To see this, one need only
consider the number of poetic and pictorial tributes to Tintern Abbey,
the growing taste for the Anglo-Saxon elegies of pagan Britain, or the
Figure 4
32 Ruined by Design
Ossianic cult of primitive landscape moods and imitations of Stonehenge
(such as the Ilton ‘Stonehenge’ in Yorkshire) that followed the publication
of James Macpherson’s The Works of Ossian, Son of Fingal (more com-
monly called The Poems of Ossian), begun in 1760.
Estate holders aspiring to current fashions imported columns from
ruined classical monuments and adapted them into objects of interest in the
landscape surrounding their estates. Whereas sixteenth and seventeenth-
century architects had been known to use occasional antique effects like
dropped keystones or broken pediments as an extension of rustification,
eventually fake ruins became a favorite form of architecture in the eigh-
teenth century. 26 The taste for artificial ruins is especially ironic given the
fact that ruins had been chosen as a favorite subject for painters in the
“picturesque” style because the decaying buildings were thought to blend
so naturally into the countryside—that is, because human artifice appeared
to have been reclaimed or ‘naturalized’ by nature. 27
Fake ruins, or purposely truncated monuments sometimes known as
fabriques or “follies,” reached a high level of notoriety and popularity in
what is today Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Poland, Austria, Swe-
den, Norway, Denmark, Russia, and the Netherlands. All of these areas
had significant English-style gardens with follies before 1800. 28 Hubert
Robert, a prominent painter of ruins, also became involved in designing
actual landscape gardens, including the tomb of Rousseau at Ermenonville;
the follies at Méréville and Betz; and Marie Antoinette’s hamlet near Ver-
sailles, Le Petit Trianon. Several of these gardens and follies still remain
intact today. 29 Later, private individuals arranged authentic ruins into inau-
thentic forms, suggesting local monuments that had never existed, such as
those at Ruinenberg, part of the gardens at Sanssouci in Potsdam. Most
follies were constructed anew, without access to such expensive architec-
tural fragments fresh from the Campagna, but often with the assistance of
some ancient stones or bricks from a nearby ruined castle or abbey that did
not have the benefit of an appropriately picturesque location. An example
of such a folly would be Sanderson Miller’s Gothic sham castle at Wimpole
Park, designed in 1750 for Lord Chancellor Hardwicke and built between
1768 and 1772 (Figure 5). The ruins are still visible today, with the large
column serving as a view tower.
Barbara Jones defi nes the folly as “a useless building erected for orna-
ment on a gentleman’s estate.”30 One might well wonder what could
have induced numerous landowners across Europe in the late eighteenth
century to spend large amounts of money constructing these artificially
ruined buildings and monuments for their garden estates. In the hands of
ancient-regime architects, ruins were often invoked to represent ancient
authority: Louis XIV had imported Roman columns en masse from Leptis
Magnus and grandly put them to use to assert both the ancient basis of
his authority and the unlimited nature of his rule. Wherever their loca-
tion in the culture of sensibility, ruins’ appeal rests in double meanings,
Redeeming Ruin 33
Figure 5
As the culture of sensibility was preoccupied with reclaiming Genesis for its
own moral, political, and aesthetic purposes, gardens, too, were reclaimed
for secular purposes and separated from their previous status as sacred
emblem. Traditionally, as John Prest’s interesting study shows, European
gardens were modeled after Eden. The garden was square and divided into
four quadrants representing the four corners of the world, and in it were
planted only the most civilized of plants; erratic and undisciplined flora,
such as wildflowers, were disdained. Gradually, as the eighteenth century
progressed, gardeners introduced a greater variety of plants and relaxed
the strict separation of garden from lawn; the geometric design was nearly
completely discarded in the English garden. In so far as most sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century European gardens imitated the original garden
in Genesis, the forbidden tree representing God’s authority tended to be in
the center of the garden. 31 And since the French style celebrated centralized
authority, many seventeenth and eighteenth-century depictions of the Gar-
den of Eden, such as the ones in Figure 6 and 7, used French-style baroque
gardening (complete with geometrically arranged parterres) to represent
the degree of order and harmony under God’s absolute dominion. On the
estates of noble and wealthy landowners in France and England, French
gardens in the baroque style, however, substitute worldly political author-
ity for divine authority.
The theological and political significance of the shape of gardens was
manipulated on both sides of the British Channel, and even on both sides
of the Atlantic. In England, the attempt to re-create the Garden of Eden
gained new strength and form in the culture of sensibility, as garden walls
and the visible fences of the enclosed garden (hortus conclusus) were elimi-
nated, and the variety of plantings greatly increased. Prest remarks that as
“men’s attitudes towards nature changed, . . . gardeners, who had burst
the bounds of the hortus conclusus either in an optimistic attempt to over-
come the consequences of sin, or with the intent to reduce a rebellious
people to subjection, began to stress the idea that nature likes variety.”32
With the more redemptive view of nature and human nature, plants such
as wildflowers that had been deemed inappropriate or too ‘fallen’ for the
garden, now were reclaimed as suitable to adorn garden landscapes. Simi-
lar thoughts led Horace Walpole to praise the garden design of landscape
designer Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown: “With one lost Paradise the name/
Of our fi rst ancestor is stained;/ Brown shall enjoy unsullied fame/ For so
many a Paradise regained.”33 As the postlapsarian and postdiluvian world
was reclaimed, the language and content of nature was also decentralized
to make it suitable for a more democratic Adam.
The picturesque also mixes older authority with newer ideals, attempt-
ing “to win traditional sanctions for a new experience.”34 By the time
William Gilpin, one of the mid-eighteenth-century founders of the cult
Redeeming Ruin 35
Figure 6
Figure 7
Redeeming Ruin 37
but he also encouraged the picturesque admiration for irregularity and
ruination and taught his readers how to capture picturesque and rugged
prospects on paper when wartime confl icts made continental travel less fea-
sible. For example, in one essay, he uses an illustration of a landscape with
only smooth surfaces to depict a “scene without picturesque adornment”
(Figure 8), a scene that resembles Burnet’s portrayal of the earth’s pris-
tine original condition as “mundane egg.” In Figure 9, Gilpin shows how,
by swiftly adding a few irregularities such as bumps, broken tree stumps,
rocks, or ruined abbeys, the scene can become gratifyingly “picturesque,”
thus “improv[ing] upon nature”: the postdiluvian world can thus be aes-
thetically enhanced through additional irregularities or small reenactments
of the flood, purged of any ethical significance. Eventually, topographical
irregularity or variety becomes one of the most general characteristics of
the picturesque that Uvedale Price tries to encode as a new aesthetic cat-
egory mediating between the beautiful and the sublime. According to pic-
turesque principles, a degree of wildness and irregularity was thought to
lend sympathetic interest to a painting or to natural scenery, whether in the
form of crumbling cliffs, architectural ruins, or banditti.
A term that now means little more than something that would look nice on
a post card, “the picturesque” once invoked a contested field of aesthetics and
wielded extensive influence on not only poetry, fiction, landscape improve-
ment and gardening, as we are discussing here, but also on tourism, ecology,
and politics; it provided a “point of intersection in discussions of science,
Figure 8
38 Ruined by Design
Figure 9
Figure 10
Figure 11
44 Ruined by Design
Figure 12
Figure 13
Redeeming Ruin 45
and artifice required to create an English garden indicates that natural-
ness alone is distinctly not good enough to meet the aesthetic require-
ments. Apparently, while the language of nature itself grows more
trustworthy, it still requires much artifice, labor, and disguise to pres-
ent this natural language in an appropriately affective manner. In later
chapters we will see that authors such as Thomas Sheridan and John
Walker describe the need for rhetorical training, if not actually train-
ing in acting, to learn how to convey natural feelings in speech: again,
nature requires cultivation to be sufficiently “natural.” Gardenists strive
for order without the marks of the scissors as moral philosophers seek
natural goodness without external sources of authority, and novelists
and narrators in the novel of sensibility seek the appearance of lack of
control over their stories. The landscape gardens associated with the cul-
ture of sensibility emphasize the newer, liberated English gardens over
neoclassical mechanism, but in the process they reveal another arena in
which sensibility’s half-hearted idealism leads to an ambivalence about
nature in its unimproved state.
In this pastorale, Harley bemoans the fact that if he felt less, he might
have been able to win his true love, but instead his strong passion only
speaks the “language of nature” and is unheard. The throbbings of the
heart are resistant to artifice, cannot rely on words for expression, and can
only speak through “glances.” In addition, Harley’s use of the word “rely”
suggests that a traditional safety net has disappeared or that a trust has
been violated, again indicating a Rousseauist nostalgia for a time of greater
transparency.
In these four passages, by Sterne, Goethe, Rousseau, and Mackenzie, we
witness linguistic forms of the insecurities common to authors of sensibility:
sadness over the shortcomings of language motivates, yet also tempers, the
poignant appreciation of the powers of non-verbal communication; there
is sadness over human isolation, yet also pride over heightened and natu-
ral sentiments such as longing or love that have not been sullied by direct
expression in words, and therefore remain untainted by artifice. There is a
lingering despair over limits of contemporary public language, along with
hope that we may yet retrieve pre-Babelian transparency. It remains to be
seen whether authors of sensibility reconcile themselves to Babel’s ruin by
asserting the dignity of that which words cannot express, or whether they
purposely invoke Babel’s ruins in order to separate themselves from accusa-
tions of cold rationality and to prove the authenticity of the feelings they
describe or profess. In either case, they actively search for alternatives to
words (especially narration and syntactic completion) and make frequent
allusion to Babel’s rubble.
Yet, we must not forget what Timothy Reiss has called a “period-
dity”58 —that Dr. Johnson’s writings overlapped with Shaftesbury’s as well
as Rousseau’s, and expressed a profound faith in reason, as well as the
duty to protect precise defi nitions of words. To a great extent, this can
be seen as his motivation behind his innovative Dictionary of the English
Language (1755). In an Idler essay from 1759, for example, Johnson writes
that: “Difference of thoughts will produce difference of language. He that
thinks with more extent than another, will want words of larger meaning;
he that thinks with more subtlety will seek for terms of more nice discrimi-
nation; and where is the wonder, since words are but the images of things,
48 Ruined by Design
that he who never knew the originals should not know the copies?”59 In
other words, the precision and size of one’s vocabulary in this taxonomi-
cal approach directly indicates the degree of one’s perspicacity or ability
to make fi ne discriminations. Since Johnson does not make the distinction
between thought and feeling here, the implication is that the better one
understands, the better one can communicate, regardless of the topic. Self-
representation and communication can be improved through study, just as
one’s understanding of the external world can be improved by study.
In contrast, authors writing from the ostensibly anti-Enlightenment per-
spective of sensibility tend to claim that the limitation lies in language itself,
as Goethe suggests: “sobald man spricht, beginnt man schon zu irren” [as
soon as one speaks, one begins to err]. Suspicion is cast upon eloquence,
oratorial speeches, analysis, defi nition, naming, logic, and what Mullan
has called the “tyranny of explanation.” In addition, the culture of sensibil-
ity suggests not only that language cannot do justice to the unfolding of the
inner drama of the individual, but also that this drama may be better rep-
resented through feelings, gestures, and imagination, when unfettered by
words or syntax. Babel’s original success would have enabled human rea-
son to “reach unto heaven”; however, its failure is an opportunity for the
heart to establish a new universal rhetoric. In subsequent sections we will
see how echoes of this “successful failure” resonate through the culture of
sensibility, ultimately providing hope that a new basis for community and
sociality might be found amidst the rubble of Babel, as well as new oppor-
tunities to exhibit authenticity. It seems that in the course of the eighteenth
century, these alternatives to the failed Babelian project themselves become
attempts at other, better towers, simply substituting new terms for the pur-
suit of the same mythical and Enlightenment project.
In this sense, there is no “perioddity” in the coexistence of Johnson
and Rousseau, or in the coexistence of sensibility’s mode of thought and
the Enlightenment mode of thought. Sensibility’s discourse depends upon
Enlightenment discourse, not only as fodder for oppositional self-definition,
but at the same time, an implicit respect for Enlightenment ambitions con-
tributes to its contradictory impulses. In the following section, we will see
this in the attempt to apply Enlightenment rational procedures, scientific
method, and taxonomy to sensibility and feeling. We will witness linguists’
attempts to systematize a universal ‘language of true feeling’—using ges-
tures, looks, intonation, and silence—to achieve what Babelian and Enlight-
enment endeavors had failed to achieve through the language of reason.60
Meanwhile, novelists were struggling to defi ne new notions of authorship
and to represent despite words that which cannot be articulated by words.
As we will see in subsequent chapters, some of the tactics they employ
include visual representation, masking of authorship, imbedded oral tales,
imbedded fragments, aposiopesis, and fictional editorial frames.
The new authority of the passions and of individual experience in gen-
eral is essential for understanding sensibility’s peculiarly distrustful attitude
Redeeming Ruin 49
towards language. The tremendous attention paid to language in eighteenth-
century England, France, and Germany largely corresponded to the energy
spent defining the new moral self implied by sensibility. As the century pro-
gressed, the linguistic interest shifted focus according to the dominant con-
ception of human psychology—especially according to the relative roles of
reason and passion in thought. One can gauge this interest by the “massive
. . . outpouring of dictionaries, secret code schemes, spelling books, gram-
mar books, pronunciation books, and lectures” that appeared in England,
for example, during the course of the century.61 The degree of debate and
attention suggests also that ideas about language were changing rapidly—
and it is, indeed, easy to detect a significant difference between attitudes at
the beginning and end of the century, as Aarsleff, Cohen, and Thompson
all have demonstrated in different ways (Thompson using poetry, and the
others through reference to eighteenth-century guidebooks and studies of
language).62 The change is, broadly speaking, from concerns about the abuse
of language to an emphasis on the limits of language—from a distrust of
speakers, to a distrust of words themselves. We will see that the growing
distrust of words is not only intimately connected with the fall of reason
from its position of moral authority, but also with the urge to reappropriate
Genesis, the desire to change the nature of the authority wielded by God, the
wish to confi rm an ideal of human innocence, and the hope for community
and communication.
In a Spectator essay from 1712, for example, Addison claims, “The
Reader fi nds a Scene drawn in stronger Colours, and painted more to the
Life in his Imagination, by the help of Words, than by an actual Survey of
the Scene which they describe. In this case the Poet seems to get the better
of Nature; he takes, indeed, the Landskip after her, but gives it more vigor-
ous Touches, heightens its Beauty, and so enlivens the whole Piece, that the
Images which flow from the Objects themselves appear weak and faint, in
Comparison of those that come from the Expressions.”63 However, a half
century later, in “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”
(1798), Wordsworth admits, “I cannot paint/ What then I was,” reflecting
a general shift in attitudes towards the adequacy of words.64
Looking back to the dominant modes of the mid-to-late seventeenth cen-
tury, when Locke was writing, the extremely influential Port-Royal Gram-
mar of 1660 looms large, stressing the ostensive referentiality of language:
like many other studies in the mid-seventeenth century, it assumes, based
on the Adamic model of Genesis, that words represent things, and that
cataloguing language is actually a scientific process of cataloguing reality.65
Largely through its taxonomy, language is a subject of study for philoso-
phy and natural science, functioning as an index to the “Book of Nature,”
guiding us to a better appreciation of the natural order inherent in the
external world.66 In the Port-Royal Grammar, the disciplines of grammar
and logic are considered as analogous if not identical, since the hidden
order of language corresponds to logic and thought, as well as to external
50 Ruined by Design
physical referents. This is the reason behind the curious combined occupa-
tion “grammarien-philosophe” found in the Encyclopédie. 67
When Locke casts doubt not only upon the taxonomical function of
language, but also on its referential and communicative powers, as well
as its epistemological utility, he separates himself from the authors of the
Port-Royal Grammar, revealing the potentially dark “gap between sign
and meaning”68 and undermining the Adamic Biblical tradition.69 By dis-
cussing the difference between ‘real’ and ‘nominal essence’ and describing
language’s lack of ostensive reference, Locke opens the door for the subse-
quent schism between two human languages: the “natural” and the “artifi-
cial,” a concept which, after Rousseau, becomes central to sensibility.
Locke’s notion of double conformity reveals the potential for the sub-
sequent development of his ideas in directions that he neither anticipated
nor would have condoned. When we use words to communicate, we always
seek what he calls “double conformity”—that is, conformity between our
ideas and the words we use to describe them, as well as between our ideas
and the things to which we would like them to refer. “Without this dou-
ble conformity of [our] Ideas,” Locke writes, “[we] fi nd, [we] should both
think amiss of Things in [our]selves, and talk of them unintelligibly to
others.”70 Not only does the passage suggest that there is a significant dif-
ference between private and public language (Locke says elsewhere that
“private” language never fails71), but it also opens the door for solipsism.72
The suggestion that words actually pose a threat to understanding is a
remarkable step away from language’s earlier Adamic or taxonomical role,
where the alliance between words, reason, and truth was undisputed.
Yet, Locke is terribly concerned about protecting “Language, which was
to be the great Instrument, and common Tye of Society.”73 Although he
introduces the splintering of language into private languages, he does so
for the sake of public language (like Dr. Johnson in the subsequent cen-
tury). He focuses on the imperfections of language with an eye towards its
improvement and more rational use.74 In other words, Babel fails privately
but hope remains for a public resurrection or an improved tower. Not only
does Locke seem to believe that language can be improved, he also claims
that language naturally protects itself from linguistic and semantic anarchy
through public meaning, which is created and preserved through a linguis-
tic analogue to the “Social Contract”: “common use, by a tacit Consent,
appropriates certain Sounds to certain Ideas.”75 Thus, public discourse
serves as a corrective against the tendency to develop private languages and
private meanings, a process Aarsleff calls “rectification.”76
Etienne Bonnot, Abbé de Condillac (1714–1780), in his response to
Locke, introduces a greater role for the senses in thought and therefore
contributes further to the fall of unaided reason from its position of author-
ity; Condillac also encourages the greater importance paid to language as
part of the internal human drama which psychology seeks to describe. In
his Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines [Essay on the Origin
Redeeming Ruin 51
of Human Knowledge] (1746), he claims, for example, that when Locke
derived two sources for knowledge—sensation and reflection—he had not
gone far enough, and that knowledge actually has a single origin in sensa-
tion. According to Condillac, however, the primacy of sensation does not
weaken the position of thought or reason, but rather allows for the perfec-
tion of thought and reason.
The crucial new element is the “linearity of speech.” “Si toutes les
idées, qui composent une pensée, sont simultanées dans l’esprit, elles sont
successives dans le discours: ce sont donc les langues qui nous fournis-
sent les moyens d’analyser nos pensées” [If all the ideas that compose a
thought occur simultaneously in the mind, then they occur successively in
speech: it is thus languages that provide us with our means of analyzing
our thoughts].77 Speech is, according to Condillac, “une méthode analyt-
ique” [a method of analysis]: thought does not exist over time, has no “suc-
cession dans l’esprit” [succession in the mind] without discourse, which
decomposes (décomposer) our thought into as many parts as the ideas it
contains.” This is the beginning of the self-conscious internal drama that
becomes so important to sensibility: as this decomposition happens, “nous
pouvons observer ce que nous faisons en pensant, nous pouvons nous en
rendre compte; nous pouvons par conséquent, apprendre à conduire notre
réflexion. Penser devient donc un art, et cet art est l’art de parler” [we are
able to observe what it is that we do when we think, we are able to explain
it; as a consequence, we can also learn to direct our thoughts. Thinking
becomes an art, and this art is the art of speech].78 In drawing this dis-
tinction between the nature of thought and the nature of discourse—that
thought is instantaneous and speech linear—Condillac opens the door for
the evaluative differentiation between natural and artificial language.
Once thought and discourse are so different in nature, the “inexpress-
ibility” of thought becomes an issue as well: Sensibility, as we will see with
Rousseau, starts paying attention to what is left behind when thought is
passed through the funnel of discourse. We can compare, for example,
Condillac’s description with the following passage from Diderot’s Lettre
sur les sourds et muets [Letter on the Deaf and Dumb]: “Notre âme
est un tableau mouvant, d’après lequel nous peignons sans cesse: nous
employons bien du temps à le rendre avec fidélité: mais il existe en entier,
et tout à la fois: l’esprit ne va pas à pas compté comme l’expression. Le
pinceau n’exécute qu’à la longue ce que l’oeil du peintre embrasse tout
d’un coup.” [Our mind is a moving picture from which we paint cease-
lessly: we use much time trying to render it faithfully; however, it exists
in its entirety instantaneously. The mind does not go step by measured
step like expression. The brush executes only in the process of time what
the painter’s eye embraces in a fl ash].79 The transition from thought to
language is precisely the same process as the one described by Condillac,
but Diderot reverses the values largely with the help of the important
analogy to painting.
52 Ruined by Design
Decomposition has been transformed from a process of refi nement to the
practice of producing hopelessly inferior copies of a greater vision: “Que la
diction la plus vive est encore une froide copie de ce qui s’y passe!” [Even
the most animated language is still a cold copy of what occurs.]80 Diderot
supports the movement away from perfectibility of reason and naming
described in Genesis 2. The aesthetic reversal here will be especially impor-
tant to sensibility and illustrates the fall of disengaged reason from its pri-
macy: “step by measured step” is no longer ground for admiration, and the
new praise (“éclair de genie,” “tout d’un coup” or “in a flash”) illustrates
the elevation of speed, light, and especially potential energy, so memorably
eulogized in Lessing’s “fruchtbarer Augenblick” [the fertile moment] of the
Laokoön (1766). In the novel, this aesthetic reversal and increased empha-
sis on anti-narrative “flash” diminishes the role of narrator, even of nar-
rative itself. Narrative comes to be seen as plebian at best, and autocratic,
inauthentic, or even vicious at worst.81
Studies such as Condillac’s and Diderot’s inspired interest in the “ori-
gins of language,” for it was thought that such study would show whether
speech or thought was prior—if not historically, then ontologically. Thus
the “origins” fashion was directly related to the attempt to understand the
psychological relation between reason, passion, and language. Rousseau’s
study of the origins of language transforms Condillac’s ideas by sentimen-
talizing them. Ultimately, Rousseau’s interest in his Discourses as well as
his essay on language is psychological and moral rather than historical; the
“return” to nature that he calls for in one, and reconstructs in the other, is
synchronic rather than diachronic. He uses the language of Genesis, along
with its structure and mythological force, to enhance his argument.
Addressing his reader in the second person, Rousseau invokes the univer-
salist language of myth: “O homme, de quelque contrée que tu sois, quelles
que soient tes opinions, écoute; voici ton histoire, telle que j’ai cru la lire,
non dans les livres de tes semblables, qui sont menteurs, mais dans la nature,
qui ne ment jamais . . . combien tu as changé de ce que tu étais!” [O man,
whatever country you may come from, whatever your opinions may be, lis-
ten: here is your history as I believed it to read, not in the books of your fel-
low-men, which are liars, but in nature, which never lies . . . How you have
changed from what you were!]82 He is not interested in the state of nature as
a historical condition, but rather as a key to human nature. We must learn,
he teaches, to listen to the infallible voice of nature or “conscience” in order
for the individual to achieve “moral self-sufficiency and encourage him to
live his life with eyes turned inward.”83 Reason plays little role in moral
education; in fact, philosophy, as commonly conceived, is virtue’s enemy
rather than guide.84 Science, philosophy, and analytical skills are worse than
superfluous to the moral project of regaining natural goodness.
Rousseau encourages us, as Arthur Melzer writes, to search for and
develop the natural within ourselves and to “prevent all false ideas of the
higher [such as the repression or transcendence of man’s lower, sensuous
Redeeming Ruin 53
nature] from corrupting or alienating us from our original natural good-
ness.”85 In this way he encourages a return to something closer to our natu-
ral (Edenic) existence, undoing or ignoring the ills of the Fall and expulsion
as Genesis described them.
Les philosophes, qui ont examiné les fondements de la société, ont tous
senti la nécessité de remonter jusqu’à l’état de nature, mais aucun d’eux
n’y est arrivé . . . enfin tous . . . ont transporté à l’état de nature des idées
qu’ils avaient prises dans la société: ils parlaient de l’homme sauvage, et
ils peignaient l’homme civil. Il n’est pas même venu dans l’esprit de la
plupart des nôtres de douter que l’état de nature eût existé, tandis qu’il
est évident, par la lecture des livres sacrés, que le premier homme, ayant
reçu immédiatement de Dieu des lumières et des préceptes n’était point
lui-même dans cet état . . . La religion nous ordonne de croire que, Dieu
lui-même ayant tiré les hommes de l’état de nature . . . ils sont inégaux
parce qu’il a voulu qu’ils le fussent; mais elle ne nous défend pas de for-
mer des conjectures tirées de la seule nature de l’homme et des êtres qui
l’environnent, sur ce qu’auroit pu devenir le genre-humain s’il fût resté
abandonné à lui-même.
Natural language is not just posited within the culture of sensibility, but also
didactically reconstructed in popular guidebooks on language, whose authors
paradoxically teach their audiences what methods to use in order to achieve
Redeeming Ruin 57
more natural and affective language. These how-to books attempt to undo
Babel’s damage to communication and community, and transform a nostalgia
for wholeness into a redemption of fragmentation and incompletion.
During the 1770s and 1780s, the new emphasis on communication (as
opposed to ostensive reference) spurs increasing attention to sounds, intona-
tions, and gestures—the non-verbal elements of language. As emphasis upon
“sentiment” grows, the question arises whether the heart speaks in the same
“language” as the mind—that is, whether the language of reason can ade-
quately express emotion.94 Several popular British guides to speech and rheto-
ric from the 1770s and 1780s, including writings by John Herries, Thomas
Sheridan, Hugh Blair, and John Walker, aim to help audiences regain the
affective power of their speech, whether for the purposes of achieving politi-
cal persuasion or expressing poetic feeling. “Vocal tones,” the “melody of
speaking,” aspiration, pauses, looks, and gestures become worthy of atten-
tion because they are thought to be especially affective, and can thus aid in the
goal of improved communication of sentiments or the alleviation of human
isolation. As Walker writes, “pronouncing or hearing . . . sounds effectively
leads us into the passion or sentiment of every speech,” implying not only that
sympathy and shared sentiment have become increasingly important goals,
but that these goals may be served through better pronunciation.
Rather than the taxonomical usage of language assigned to Adam by
God in Genesis, the analysis of language serves the purpose of attempt-
ing to overcome the division and opacity in human relations traditionally
associated with the fall of the Tower of Babel. More specifically, the late-
eighteenth century approach to language, especially as reflected in popu-
lar guidebooks of the time, works to further the hallmarks of sensibility
described above, especially the attention to emotions over reason, and the
emphasis on natural goodness or virtue. It also contributes greatly to the
growing aesthetics of irregularity. Finally, the techniques used to achieve
these ends underscore sensibility’s philosophical insecurity: sensibility
paradoxically relies upon Enlightenment techniques of systematization and
standardization, frequently involving universal claims and a return to tax-
onomy. Conservative constructions and methods of inquiry thus continue
to undergird its revolutionary claims.
In his Elements of Speech (1773), John Herries claims that accents and
other non-verbal aspects of language are not only more natural, but also
(or perhaps therefore) form the only universal language. Sounds, or the
“infi nite variety of vocal tones,” he writes, “correspond[-] to every impres-
sion of the imagination and senses. This is the universal, untaught lan-
guage of nature.”95 Hugh Blair echoes this idea in one of his widely read
works: “Cries of passion . . . are the only signs which nature teaches all
men, and which are understood by all.”96 And while Blair’s Herderian
“cries of passion” are only one example of the “variety of vocal tones”
described by Herries, both authors emphasize that the “untaught” lan-
guage of nature is not only closer to the original human language, but
58 Ruined by Design
also more readily communicated and understood. They also claim that
this non-verbal language is “universal,” defying the punishment associ-
ated with Babel’s mythical fall.
In addition, these guidebooks and others show the new importance of
what had been considered arbitrary or erratic features of language. The
illustrations included in late eighteenth-century guidebooks show an
attempt to reproduce the irregularities of language by charting aspiration,
plotting intonation curves, and diagramming pronunciation differences
among dialects.97 In Figure 14, we see one such attempt in John Walker’s
Elements of Elocution (1781): Walker uses this diagram to represent the
“variety” of speech, or the “melody of speaking,” in order to teach his
readers to maximize the rhetorical powers of speech. By breaking his sen-
tences to conform to the alpine zig-zags of the melody of speech, Walker
symbolically makes words secondary to the music of language. And while
the “melody of speaking” may seem both surprisingly regular and surpris-
ingly jagged, the speaker’s power as Walker portrays it, is the power of
silence—the power to pause—to space out the words of one’s sentences in
order for the words to coincide with the appropriately rising or falling parts
of the patterned music of speech. His regular depiction of irregularity thus
belies the divorce of meaning and music or the loss of control and transpar-
ency that his teachings imply.
Figure 14
Redeeming Ruin 59
Walker’s many popular works, including The Elements of Elocution
(1781), A Rhetorical Grammar (1785) and Critical Pronouncing Dictionary
(1791), show his attention to and the public’s concern about understanding
and overcoming idiosyncrasies in speech acts. In fact, such universalism at
times appears quite didactic, as he gives advice to Scottish and Irish speak-
ers on how their speech can sound more English in the latter volume. Hav-
ing to work rather hard to create that which he claims to be natural, Walker
exemplifies the aspect of the culture of sensibility that is a continuation of
the Enlightenment impulse towards order and standardization, as well as
sensibility’s contradictory impulses. In drawing attention to the seeming
irregularities of language, he echoes authors writing on the human passions
or the rugged Alps with the intention of framing or reclaiming unsightly
irregularities for the causes of order, virtue, and self-sufficiency.
One of Walker’s claims to fame was his invention of “rhetorical punc-
tuation” as an enhancement of “grammatical punctuation”—little markers
to help designate tone (the eighteenth-century equivalent of emoticons). In
A Rhetorical Grammar (1785), for example, Walker teaches how to speak
with appropriate inflections and pauses to express a given “passion or emo-
tion.” Walker’s goal was not the same as Locke’s when the latter also sug-
gested that studies of words are best complemented with illustrations.98
While both authors are concerned with the accuracy of communication, all
of Walker’s main works suggest that the primary goal of speech is to affect
the passions rather than to serve ostensive reference—to express rather
than to classify. Nor was this tendency limited to Walker. Thomas Sheri-
dan, another of the most popular authors of guides to speech, justifies the
purpose behind his Lectures on Elocution (1796) accordingly: “Some of
our greatest men have been trying to do that with the pen, which can only
be performed by the tongue: to produce effects by the dead letter, which
can never be produced but by the living voice, with its accompaniments.”99
Late eighteenth-century British linguists proclaim the written word “dead”
and either seek to revive it or seek to communicate despite its limitations.
Of all these rhetoricians who emphasize affect, Thomas Sheridan most
explicitly applies the Rousseauan distinction between artificial and natural
language to the new practical concern about communication in his distinc-
tion between a “language of ideas” and a “language of emotion”: the latter
is more important since “the communication of these internal feelings was
a matter of much more consequence in our social intercourse, than the mere
conveying of ideas.”100 Again, the natural “tones” are what constitute the
lost pre-Babelian transparency, a “universal language, equally used by all the
different nations of the world, and equally understood and felt by all.”101
These examples display the effects of the Deist shift as it applied to
language studies. Even Sheridan’s musical analogy in the previous pas-
sage is not analogous to the medieval Boethius’ attempt to mirror cosmic
order through music or song, but rather an attempt to fi nd meaning within
the individual’s natural sense of music: through intonation and accent,
60 Ruined by Design
speech’s “accompaniments.” Just as the passions, which for the Ancients
had been an enemy to community, now offer the philosophical basis of
both community and communication, so too the accents and the music
of language, which had been distractions from meaning now are seen as
offering hope for strengthened community and communication, if not uni-
versal transparency.
Like the Deist shift and the new psychology described above, this change
in attitudes towards language had implications for moral philosophy as
well. Not only was “natural language” or the “language of the passions”
considered more natural and transparent in the context of the culture of
sensibility, it was considered as an indication of greater virtue in a speaker.
Hugh Blair, in his immensely popular work on rhetoric, Lectures on Rhet-
oric and Belles Lettres (1783), writes that “no kind of Language is so gener-
ally understood, and so powerfully felt, as the native Language of worthy
and virtuous feelings. He only, therefore, who possesses these [feelings] full
and strong, can speak properly, and in its own language, to the heart.”102 To
a modern reader, the ethical terminology “worthy and virtuous” may seem
misplaced in this passage, but just as the elevation of the moral authority
of the passions and the new moral psychology would suggest, virtue tended
strongly to reside with the “natural” language of the heart rather than with
the colder, “artificial” language of the head,103 again lowering the status of
logos from that which it had in the New Testament. One of the new virtues
required for successful oratory is “a strong and tender sensibility to all the
injuries, distresses, and sorrows of his fellow creatures.”104 It also suggests
a problem that is to haunt both the discourse on the picturesque and sen-
sibility: the power to communicate feeling becomes an indicator of virtue
itself, leading to a raised appreciation for actors, such as David Garrick and
Lady Hamilton in England.105
This brings us back to the culture of sensibility’s philosophical insecurity
and the fortunate fall of the Tower of Babel—the problem of achieving, as
Sterne writes, “generous cares beyond myself.” The same failing (whether
one sees this failing as linguistic, physical, or moral) in nature that causes
isolation and misunderstanding among human beings also allows, within
the culture of sensibility, the possibility of human sympathy. Adam Smith
describes the failings of language that enable a spectator to feel sympathy
with a “brother on the rack”: “Though our brother is on the rack, as long
as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he
suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person,
and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what
are his sensations.”106 Within Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1754),
the failure of complete identification between spectator and sufferer leads
to the possibility not only of cooperation and therefore of society, but also
to the possibility of virtue itself. How well the individual compensates for
failed identification or transparency through vivid sympathy depends upon
the sensibility of the spectator. The better the imagination or the more
Redeeming Ruin 61
“exquisite” the sensibility of the spectator, the stronger his or her capacity
to feel and the greater the capacity for virtue. Smith falls short of claim-
ing that we regain transparency through spectatorship. In fact, he claims
that it is easier to enter into the feelings of the sufferer if one also knows
something of the context or narrative behind the suffering; therefore, some
description of circumstances tends to be more helpful than “general lamen-
tations” in exciting sympathy.107
High hope and claim of natural sympathy rests in what Sterne and oth-
ers refer to as the “sensorium”: Sensibility and feeling responses to specta-
torship are key to communication. A similar argument is at work in Pratt’s
poem Sympathy (1781):
According to Pratt, sympathy is built by God into our very nerves and
veins, unites the globe, and enables human community more than any
other faculty or passion.
The central issue of the human capacity for sympathy is taken up by
many other authors within the culture of sensibility. Thomas Sheridan’s
approach is more optimistic than Smith’s, despite the fact that it begins with
a similar problem—that mutual sympathy is necessary to society: “Tho’ it
be not necessary to society that all men should know much; it is necessary
that they should feel much, and have a mutual sympathy, in whatsoever
affects their fellow creatures.”109 Sheridan goes on to claim that this sym-
pathy can be established without the aid of speech: “Visible language alone
. . . shewn in the features and limbs of man, is of itself sufficient, without
other aid, to every purpose of social communication.” And again: “What
inward emotion is there, which can not be manifested by these [the eyes
and hands]? Do not the eyes discover humility, pride; cruelty, compassion;
reflection, dissipation; kindness, resentment? Is there any emotion of fancy,
is there a shade of ridicule, which they can not represent?” 110
Sheridan describes the dynamic of this communicative act by suggest-
ing that rather than punctuation marks, one needs “sensible marks,” tak-
ing Walker’s “rhetorical punctuation” one step further: “In order to feel
what another feels, the emotions which are in the mind of one man, must
also be communicated to that of another, by sensible marks . . . The sen-
sible marks necessary to answer this purpose, can not possibly be mere
words.”111 What we need to communicate emotion are “the true signs of
the passions, which are, tones, looks, and gestures . . . The language, or
62 Ruined by Design
sensible marks, by which the emotions of the mind are discovered, and
communicated from man to man, are entirely different from words, and
independent of them.” Only this language, “the language of the animal
passions of man,” is “fi xed, self-evident, and universally intelligible”
and has “been impressed, by the unerring hand of nature, on the human
frame.”112 Again these authors express the underlying insecurity common
among authors writing from within the culture of sensibility: on the one
hand, they wish to claim the universality of the natural language of tones
and gestures, yet they also wish to teach us to adopt them in order to
improve communication and lessen human isolation.
Only when he subsequently divides language into two types, the “lan-
guage of emotions” and the “language of ideas,” does the reader discover
any hint of shortcoming in Sheridan’s natural, non-verbal language of emo-
tions: “It is not in the power of the language of emotions, to give us the least
insight into the language of ideas.” More optimistic than Smith, Sheridan
nonetheless admits that knowledge of circumstances of suffering or reasons
for suffering are inaccessible without narrative. Yet he differs from Smith in
saying that this knowledge is not necessary for sympathy. In describing the
effect of listening to a person speaking an unknown tongue, Sheridan con-
cludes that: “Tho’ we may perfectly understand the nature of his emotions
and partake of his feelings, yet it is impossible, without an interpreter, to
know the cause of them, or the particular ideas in the mind of the speaker,
that gave them birth.” Yet the language of ideas has, according to Sheridan,
“no power of moving.”113 One of the ironies of this situation is that the
lack of transparency among human beings can lead us to perform our feel-
ings more overtly—or exaggerate them—in order to ensure their successful
communication. The knowledge that we cannot see each other’s motives
can lead to defensiveness and also to acting, leaving open the possibility of
even greater opacity through deception or misrepresentation.
There is an irony in the point at which authentic feelings need rhetori-
cal training in primeval intonation and gesture in order to communicate
authentically and successfully, when natural feelings need training in affect
and gesture in order to be persuasive, or when special punctuation marks
are required to communicate emotion. This irony reflects sensibility’s phil-
osophical insecurity and the persistent conflict as to whether transparency
is natural or requires cultivation: the attempt to reclaim a prelapsarian
innocence and transparency while relying on a scientific ambition for tax-
onomy, all the while haunted by a fear that Hobbes may have been right
after all. To this paradoxical end, Sheridan invented “the Natural Mode
of delivery,” a movement he pioneered in opposition to the “Mechanical
School” of rhetoric, which he viewed as excessively rule-bound. Again, we
see a good example of the dual impulses of the culture of sensibility, as
well as its seemingly high tolerance for paradox: whether one regards these
methods as a conscious return to Nature, a scientifically inspired attempt
to speak naturally; an artificial pursuit of transparency; or a mechanistic
Redeeming Ruin 63
attempt to regain organic understanding of language, these linguists found
a way to combine Enlightenment scientific methods with a hope of recreat-
ing a pre-Babelian natural transparency.
When novelists of sensibility apply these popular modes or conflicts to
their novels, they tend to reflect them in content (as well as form)—some-
times with direct reference to the Tower of Babel. Among novelists of sen-
sibility, Sterne in particular finds rich possibilities for artistic expression in
the dark gap between sign and meaning, and this may be part of the reason
why his work was received all over Europe as enthusiastically as it was, serv-
ing as a model for Goethe’s Werther, among many other works. According
to Sterne’s sermons and fiction, the insufficiency of language provides a pos-
itive aesthetic and moral opportunity. While it does necessitate the transla-
tion of silence, looks, and gesture, it also allows the freedom of the listener
to participate in the construction of meaning. Since the objective referents
of words are unclear, they affect the listener or reader with greater imagina-
tive force, resulting in a “successful failure.” In Sentimental Journey, Mr.
Yorick remarks: “If tone and manners have a meaning, which certainly they
have, unless to hearts which shut them out—she seemed really interested,
that I should not lose myself.”114 In this interesting little passage, Sterne’s
Yorick suggests that felicitous translation of “tone and manners” requires
sympathy or the ability to listen to them with one’s “heart.”115
Sterne speaks in one of his sermons about the natural transparency that
the language of gesture, look, and tone allows:
Sterne here inverts the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel: while he osten-
sibly supports the notion of original sin (“we are not angels”), his claim is
that our fallen nature paradoxically allows an even stronger connection
between our minds and our bodies. Rather than limiting the possibilities
of virtue, he describes our reliance upon interpretation as enhancing the
possibility of engaging our imaginations in communication—an antidote
for human isolation. The “strict correspondence” he claims in this pas-
sage is quite doubtful; and indeed he shows the frequent failure of well-
meant translation within the pages of Sentimental Journey as well as in
64 Ruined by Design
Tristram Shandy. Using the Deist language of Nature rather than reference
to a Judeo-Christian God, Sterne argues for virtue based on reception or
imagination rather than faith or knowledge.
One could say that the central locus of both the tragic and comic ele-
ments involved in the fall of Babel lies in the necessity of interpretation and
self-representation in the absence of transparency: on the one hand, this is a
cruel fact and on the other hand, it allows for increased creative expression,
more active authorship, and increased participation by the interlocutor,
spectator, or audience. The positive sides of the fall are greater freedom and
creativity, while the negative are reminders of human isolation and inescap-
able solipsism—insecurities of the culture of sensibility. The popularity of
late eighteenth-century linguistic and elocutionary studies may have been
driven by such combined hope and fear: the defensive concern that listeners
will misunderstand meaning as well as the hope that the art of rhetoric and
elocution can help audiences regain mastery over speech acts.117 Although
these linguistic writings pay attention to irregularities (the peaks and val-
leys) of language that resist transcription into words, they analyze them
in order to perfect the communicative act or to mitigate linguistic insuffi-
ciency: to decrease human isolation by (re)creating a natural language that
increases mutual transparency.
In other words, as we have seen, philosophical insecurity underlies these
authors’ returns to linguistic claims in the ancient texts of Genesis. The
culture of sensibility in France, Germany, and Britain in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries represents one literary reaction to the dark
gap between sign and meaning. Doubts about both the referential and com-
municative ability of language suggest that language is limited as a tool for
both reason and emotions. Yet, hope in the natural power and social effects
of sympathy abides and partially fi lls the lacunae left by the loss of a previ-
ous generation’s unquestioning faith in objectivity, while authors devise a
“language of feeling” that communicates through evocation rather than
explanation, avoiding the censorship of reason.
Through the vehicle of Deism, through the doctrine of natural good-
ness, and through the cult of feeling, the man of feeling is relieved of his
presumed subservience to God as heavenly monarch, to nature as norma-
tive or hierarchical, to reason in its externalized or disengaged form, to
sin as an inescapable aspect of life, and by extension to earthly monarchs
as well. As an example of this new deist Adam, eccentric as he may be,
Sterne’s protagonist Yorick from Sentimental Journey reveals the changing
relationship with the divine. As his eulogy to “sensibility” illustrates, the
source of Yorick’s virtue is his sensibility, which he externalizes, objectifies,
and almost deifies in the following, extremely sentimental passage quoted
above. The encomium concludes with the additional claim, omitted in the
epigraph above: the Sensorium “vibrates, if a hair of our heads but falls
upon the ground, in the remotest desert of thy creation—.”118 This Godlike
source of all virtue “vibrates” if a hair of our head is lost, unlike the New
Redeeming Ruin 65
Testament God who shows more mathematical propensities, numbering
the hairs on our head.119 This passage thus dramatizes the internalization
of virtue; in fact, Yorick’s eulogy of sensibility comes interestingly close
to self-eulogy, reflecting a narcissistic tendency that runs through novels
of sensibility and the culture as a whole, despite its aspirations to natural
goodness and universal sympathy. At the same time, the context of the
passage also dampens the idealistic content of the encomium and adds to
Sterne’s comic purpose, as the entire chapter “The Bourbonnois” is dedi-
cated to the goal of sufficiently erasing the memory of the suffering Maria
from his mind, so that he can enjoy the rest of his journey in this new
region of France, some ninety miles southeast of Moulin, where he has
encountered her.
The tensions between sensibility’s idealistic aspirations and its intel-
lectual inheritance inform sensibility’s recreation of Genesis as well as
its philosophical insecurity. Authors from a variety of domains implicitly
revise Genesis to accord with new democratic ideals of decentralized gov-
ernment, but reveal their uncertainty about the practicality of these ideals.
We will see in subsequent sections, for example, that a profound awareness
of Babel’s ruin ironically suggests new plans for tower-building. What fol-
lows includes: a pursuit of authenticity and immediacy that leads to new
heights of artifice; a pursuit of innate goodness that leads to remote parts of
the world; a pursuit of the “language of nature” that leads to vast redesigns
of privately held lands; a quest for the “natural language of feeling” that
leads to new forms of naturalistic acting; a desire for intimacy even when
based on the principles of acting; and a new appreciation of the authenticity
and immediacy of irregularity and fragmentation that leads to its conscious
construction in picturesque landscapes, the “natural” mode of delivery,
and in the novel of sensibility. These authors, gardenists, and architects
attempt to recreate or retrieve nature in linguistics, landscaping, acting,
and literature, even through recourse to great artifice.
2 The Anatomy of Follies
NARRATING NATURE
The liberty of mind or feeling that the English gardens were also felt to
support stemmed partly from the sensation of immediacy that they could
evoke. There was a strong connection between the linguistic discourses
about regaining “natural language” and the landscape gardeners’ discourse
over learning the “language” and “syntax” of Nature herself in order to
affect the viewer immediately, without recourse to thought. According to
William Gilpin, in an oft-quoted passage from his Three Essays on the
Picturesque: “It is not from this scientifical employment, that we derive
our chief pleasure. We are most delighted, when some grand scene, tho
perhaps of incorrect composition, rising before the eye, strikes us beyond
the power of thought—when the vox faucibus haeret [voice sticks in the
throat]; and every mental operation is suspended. In this pause of intellect;
this deliqium of the soul, an enthusiatic sensation of pleasure overspreads
it, previous to any examination by the rules of art. The general idea of the
scene makes an impression, before any appeal is made to the judgment. We
rather feel, than survey it.”8 Gilpin describes pleasure in the non-discursive
immediacy of experience, defi ned by the suspension of our natural urges to
examine, judge, explain, or narrate. Natural language achieves immediacy
by separation from discursive thought, analysis, contemplation, reflection,
distance, and narration; similarly, the natural garden was by defi nition un-
mediated by obvious signs of human control, rectilinear designs, cement
paths, and other seeming impositions of authority.
Christopher Hussey describes the psychological advantages offered by
the picturesque attitude towards incompletion: he notes that whereas the
Elizabethan “regarded distance as little more than an inhibition to clear
seeing,” by the end of the eighteenth century, a poet could extol obscurity:
“’Tis distance lends enchantment to the view/ And robes the mountain in
its azure hue.”9 In this atmosphere, it is natural that ruins should become
a favorite subject of the picturesque, because they are both formally and
emotionally suggestive. The spectator cooperates in recreating the ruins
just as one sympathetically recreates language (according to Burke), oth-
ers’ emotions (according to Smith), or the omitted words of ‘men of feel-
ing’ at telling moments in the novel of sensibility. Partial destruction of
monuments and edifices satisfies aesthetic demands, then, not by making
the buildings more beautiful, but rather more picturesque. In avoiding the
The Anatomy of Follies 69
appearance of order, completion, or authority, ruins give the imagination
more room to play.
The preference for unfi nished structures, tied to a desire for greater
spectatorial participation, was at times so strong that it led to the prefer-
ence for ruin over monument: Following Addison, Wilhelm von Humboldt
writes, for example, that “we are even vexed when a half-buried building
is dug up; it is a gain for learning at the expense of the imagination.”10
Taking this one step further, Diderot writes in his Salon of 1767, “Nous
anticipions sur les ravages du temps, et notre imagination disperse sur la
terre les édifices mêmes que nous habitons.” [We anticipate the ravages of
time, and our imagination scatters over the ground even the very buildings
that we inhabit.]11
Thomas Whately describes the desired effect of ruins on spectators and
imagination: “beautiful as objects, expressive as characters,” suggesting
that ruins facilitate an “expressive” form of communication towards the
spectator. He describes the psychology of viewing ruins further in his
Observations on Modern Gardening (1778):
All remains excite an enquiry into the former state of the edifice, and
fi x the mind in a contemplation on the use it was applied to . . . They
suggest ideas which would not arise from the building if entire. The
purposes of many have ceased: an abbey, or a castle, if complete, can
now be no more than a dwelling; the memory of the times, and of the
manners, to which they were adapted is preserved only in history and
in ruins; and certain sensations of regret, of veneration, or compassion,
attend the recollection . . . Whatever building we see in decay, we natu-
rally contrast its present to its former state, and delight to ruminate
on the comparison. It is true that such effects properly belong to real
ruins; they are however produced in a certain degree by those which
are fictitious.”12
Figure 15
Figure 16
The Anatomy of Follies 75
for example. The two dominant curves of the cornice have been interpreted
as human brow and chin, and the other more angular turns have been soft-
ened to facilitate an anthropomorphic interpretation. Just as we saw with
theories of language and rhetoric, however, there is a fine line between the
claim to have found a more ‘natural’ way of communication and the use of
this language for entirely artificial or even hypocritical purposes. The goal is
still a return to a universal language; however, the implication is that silent
visual language grows important because of failure of the spoken, or that
paradoxically, theater becomes important for conveying natural effects.
Blondel’s analogy to theater highlights the “non-linear,” visual, and
immediate, if not intimate, qualities of this architectural language. As rea-
son, in moral philosophy, is changing from a static source of knowledge to
an active process or energy (reasoning) and begins to resemble the passions,
similar changes occur in architecture. In a sense, what was mythically lost
through architecture at the Tower of Babel is thus to some extent reclaimed
through a new understanding of architecture’s communicative potential:
Figure 17
Finally, one of the great ironies that result from the strict principles regu-
lating the construction of follies (and the picturesque’s rule-bound pursuit
of irregularity) is that it grew possible for sham ruins to be either incomplete
or ruined: Gilpin and Hirschfeld, for example, complain of follies that have
78 Ruined by Design
Figure 18
not been sufficiently overgrown with ivy, and which are therefore aestheti-
cally incomplete. Ruins—even fake ones—can also be ruined when they
crumble excessively and lose their picturesque proportions. In A Poem on
The Anatomy of Follies 79
Figure 19
the Park and Woods of the Right Honourable Allen Lord Bathurst (1796),
Edward Stephens complains of the ruined state of a favorite folly and its
“crusted, mould’ring wall”: “This pile the marks of rolling cent’ries wears,
/ Sunk to decay,—and built scarce twenty years.”31 Appropriately enough,
the picturesque structure cannot hold; the fake ruin is overtaken by nature;
the precarious balance asserted by the picturesque—and indeed by the con-
tradictory impulses of the culture of sensibility—is destroyed. The fake
ruin inherently and precariously balances in avoidance of two anathematic
extremes: on the one hand, it seeks the more natural appearance, avoiding
order, balance, and harmony, whether neoclassical, Palladian, or baroque
in style; on the other hand, it must also rely upon traditional balance and
order to avoid complete ruination.
Figure 20
TRANSLATING HAMLET
There is not a more perplexing affair in life to me, than to set about
telling anyone who I am . . . I have often wish’d I could do it in a single
word—and have an end of it. It was the only time and occasion in
my life, I could accomplish this to any purpose—for Shakespear lying
upon the table, and recollecting I was in his books, I took up Hamlet,
and turning immediately to the grave-diggers scene in the fi fth act, I
lay’d my fi nger upon YORICK, and advancing the book to the Count,
with my fi nger all the way over the name—Me, Voici! said I.72
Yorick’s “perplexing affair” stems from the great chasm that lies between
knowing and naming, as well as between name and identity.
Yorick does not end with this frustrating account, however. The passage
as a whole suggests that identity is both “identifiable” and potentially com-
municable, albeit with difficulty; it suggests the occasional concurrence of
knowing, naming, and being. But why, one might ask, would showing the
90 Ruined by Design
written name on a printed page signify more (or be any less “perplexing”)
than speaking the name? Is this a play on the semi-fictive protagonist-nar-
rator of Sterne’s novel, who cannot recognize himself except in yet another
layer of fiction? Self-representation cannot rely on traditional narrative
impulses; identity must be performed rather than told. An interactive com-
mitment is required for self-revelation, according to Yorick’s stance.
If we look closely at the passage, we notice that not only the Count,
but the narrator himself confl ates the two Yoricks: “recollecting I was
in his books, I took up Hamlet,” he says, the fi rst “I” referring to Yor-
ick, the king’s jester in Shakespeare’s play, and the second “I” referring
to Yorick, the narrator and protagonist of Sterne’s novel. “Me, Voici!
said I” shows the same confl ation once again. In a certain sense, such
confusion is hardly new to the novel, rather, this scene crystallizes the
structure of the whole novel, where, although narrator and protagonist
are the same voice, it is the process of self-conscious writing that links
them as well as separates them, as the following passage parodies: “I
declare, said I, clapping my hands.”73 The structure of the novel equates
self-representation with self-performance and simultaneously mocks this
comic state of affairs.
The danger and the beauty of words, according to Sterne’s (and Locke’s)
representation, is that while one uses them to refer to essences, they can be
mistaken for the essences themselves. Yorick extends this problem one step
further: one of the ironies of the man of feeling’s linguistic position is that his
great capacity for sympathy leads him to identify with others—he assumes
their misfortunes as his own. In fact, he shapes and performs his own iden-
tity in the moments when he identifies with others. This is part of the reason
why Yorick needs a character in a play to communicate—and establish—his
own identity. “I lay’d my finger upon YORICK,” he says, suggesting that he
can only see himself in external manifestations—in interactions with other
characters, even if they are fictive (within the novel). This is of course doubly
appropriate since Shakespeare’s Yorick also depended upon Hamlet’s sym-
pathetic identification of his “name” from the ruins of his body. Like the
architectural ruin, which depends upon the viewer’s imagination of a former
state of completion, so Yorick depends upon sympathy to fill the gaps of his
identity: thus, a sympathetic, literary unity is possible for the self, even when
philosophical unity is not.74 It is a risky process, however, as we see after-
wards when the Count mistakes name for essence.
Sterne’s conception of the self depends to a large extent upon such sym-
pathetic connection with the external world. In a later passage, he remarks:
“’Tis going, I own, like the Knight of the Woeful Countenance, in quest
of melancholy adventures—but I know not how it is, but I am never so
perfectly conscious of the existence of the soul within me, as when I am
entangled in them.” The passage also shows how previous literature and
protagonists like Don Quixote, as well as Hamlet, have been reinterpreted
or reclaimed, like Genesis, according to the demands of sensibility’s moral
The Anatomy of Follies 91
aesthetic. On the very next page, after just such an “entanglement” with
Maria, he writes: “I am positive I have a soul.” 75 Shakespeare also provides
such an “entanglement” by immediately arousing specific emotions and
affections in the Count.76 It is ironic that Yorick makes this connection on
a verbal basis, and although he insists that there are two Yoricks, kindred
only in name and association, the Count takes him literally, and introduces
Yorick henceforth as the King’s jester. The fi nal and greatest irony is, there-
fore, that in his (painful, contorted, exaggerated) attempt at self-identifica-
tion, his identity is nonetheless misunderstood.
It is important to note that, although the “Sentimental Traveller” or the
man of feeling can, by defi nition, never be satisfied with language and con-
vention, Yorick never gives up hope of communication and community. His
attempts at making himself understood are Quixotic, not Sisyphean: each
attempt is the beginning of a comic adventure in “translation.” We can see,
therefore, that although Sterne shares some of Rousseau’s ideas about the
fallen state of language, Sterne’s tone has more in common with Herder’s
emphasis on “Möglichkeiten” or “possibilities.”
In this regard, we can better appreciate Sterne’s choice of a name for his
protagonist: Shakespeare’s Yorick was a silent skull from a grave to which
Hamlet lends a voice—a ruined fragment, which Hamlet lovingly restores
in imagination to its former glory. Hamlet, to use Sterne’s word, sympa-
thetically translates Yorick’s silent gaze. The new Yorick, Sterne’s Yorick,
is simultaneously Yorick and Hamlet, ruin and monument, silent skull
and eloquent interpreter, spectacle and storyteller.77 This is the source of
Yorick’s tragicomic interpretation of the failure of words to communicate
sentiments. Yet the death of spoken language is necessary, in Yorick’s econ-
omy, for the discovery of the semiotics of the body.78 If one could defi ne,
one would not need to enact; however, even this more ‘natural,’ visual lan-
guage of gesture or facial expression must be ‘enacted’ through words—the
process Yorick calls translation. For Yorick, the death of words enables the
birth of intimacy, whether erotic or fraternal.79
One might ask whether Sterne’s usage of gesture and fragmentation
is really so different from his predecessors earlier in the century, such as
Swift, Fielding, and Smollett. Fielding and Smollett, for example, also com-
plain of the limitations of mere words to express certain poignant scenes.
“O, Hogarth! had I thy pencil! then would I draw the picture of the poor
Serving-man,” cries the narrator in Tom Jones (1749). Similarly, in Rod-
erick Random (1748), the protagonist-narrator laments: “It would require
the pencil of Hogarth to express the astonishment and concern of Strap
on hearing this piece of news.”80 Yet in adapting his use of gesture and
fragmentation in Journey to suit the dictates of the cult of sensibility, par-
ticularly in the depiction of natural virtue and the increasing difficulty of
self-representation, Sterne distinguishes himself from these authors and is
the fi rst to combine these various techniques in the service of the hallmarks
of the culture of sensibility.
92 Ruined by Design
Sterne’s fragmentation may appear even closer to that used by Jonathan
Swift in Tale of a Tub (1697–1710), yet here, too, there is a difference in
tonality and purpose. In Tale of a Tub’s last chapter, for example, when
the Hack himself admits his “unhappiness in losing, or mislaying among
my papers, the remaining part of these memoirs,” Swift wishes to portray
holes where arguments should be, but not because of a moral aesthetic
that questions the value of argument and narrative per se, but rather stem-
ming from the Hack’s intellectual defects, including what Harries calls his
“modern rootlessness.”81 Anti-narrative forces cause even greater uncer-
tainty in Swift’s Tale of a Tub, where appended fragmentary “discourses,”
with missing chapter numbers, rows of asterisks, a mock-preface, elaborate
digressions, gaps, and lacunae mock the narrative form. In Tale of a Tub, as
Northrop Frye and Elizabeth Harries have shown, Swift experiments with
textual fragmentation, including the visual representation of lacunae with
asterisks, which may at fi rst appear similar to Sterne’s technique; however,
Swift has other goals in mind and does not develop the technique to the same
extent. Swift does not share Sterne’s goal of inspiring emotion and simulta-
neous, sympathetic participation in the reader; the lacunae are also overtly
intentional on the part of the (fictional) author.82 While Swift also ruminates
on the problems of authorship, they are not the same problems as involved
in the novel of sensibility. The important difference is that these intellectual
traits are seen by the implied reader as defects, rather than as indicators of a
competing moral aesthetic, indicating a Shaftesburian or Rousseauan natu-
ral goodness in a world filled with Hobbesian enemies to virtue.
The use of anti-narrative disruption is at least as old as Montaigne, who
also used anti-narrative techniques to distinguish his text from an orderly
treatise; this continues as a strong tendency in modernism, not to men-
tion post-modern discourse. Sterne, however, applied such techniques to
the novel and brought it to new heights. In fact, the emphasis on showing
works “in progress” grew suddenly so popular in the 1760s and ‘70s that
this newly refined temporal manipulation of the reading act was Northrop
Frye’s main criterion for distinguishing the “Age of Sensibility” from the
preceding Augustan period. Richardson foreshadows this move in his style
of “writing to the moment” in epistolary novels like Pamela (1740)—a
technique which places the letter writer in occasionally ridiculous postures.
What Richardson tries to effect through actual chronology and letters,
Sterne achieves through syntax. In Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–48), Rich-
ardson foreshadows some of the visually explicit anti-narrative techniques
that Sterne is well known for. Within the novel, Richardson also uses aster-
isks, dashes, and gaps to indicate the “inexpressible” emotion of his hero-
ine. See for example Figure 21, from an early edition of Clarissa, where
Richardson typographically reveals the difficulty of generalizing or narrat-
ing Clarissa’s subjective experience, foreshadowing her ultimate role as a
ruined individual at the center of his novel. There is no obvious sequence in
which her marginalia and the center text should be read. Richardson uses
The Anatomy of Follies 93
Figure 21
We would attempt to describe the joy which Harley felt on the occa-
sion, did it not occur to us, that one half of the world could not
understand it though we did; and the other half will, by this time,
have understood it without any description at all.
—The Man of Feeling
On the surface, Sensibility’s redefi nition of authorship is, like the reclama-
tion of Genesis, associated with a reaction against centralized authority,
108 Ruined by Design
rational ordering, and the synoptic presence of an omniscient author/nar-
rator. 2 Authors and their narrators begin adopting a more democratic
approach to authorship, at least rhetorically. As Sterne’s Tristram speaks
of “halving the matter amicably” with his readers, Mackenzie claims to
favor placing “the Pencil into their [the readers’] own Hands.”3 Such ges-
tures indicate the desire to raise the affective powers of the work and
emphasize the new dignity in uncensored human passions and “internal”
sources of authority, whether in the form of Sterne’s “Great Sensorium,”
Mackenzie’s “feeling heart,” Goethe’s “wunderbare Empfi ndung,” or
Smith’s “great Demigod within the breast.” Sensibility’s concern about
authorship naturally affects and reflects concern about human relations
with the divine—-in particular, the authority and authorship of God—-
both as “Author” of our being and as author of the “Book of Nature.”4 As
the culture of sensibility adapts Genesis to reclaim the aesthetics of irregu-
larity while also relying on the authority of an older tradition, its authors
also try to reclaim a form of authorship that can allow for the tenets of its
moral aesthetic—including authenticity and spontaneity in the absence of
a central controlling voice.
Even the landscape gardener Uvedale Price, in his description of how
gardeners need to conceal their art, makes an analogy to the need for
authors of literature to conceal their own presence as authors within the
work: “whenever there is any thing of natural wildness and intricacy in
the scene, the improver should conceal himself like a judicious author,
who sets his reader’s imagination at work, while he seems not to be guid-
ing.” And the way to achieve this “natural wildness” is through disguise
of explicit artifice. Using the superior example of Homer, who “Scarcely
ever appears in his own person,” Price complains of Fielding’s tendency
to appear “sometimes ostentatiously.”5 Especially if it is omniscient,
authorial description needs to be vivid enough to make readers forget
they are reading, just as the effect Macpherson’s spurious Ossian had
upon Joseph Warton: “who then can look at the following description
and not forget almost, that he is reading words? . . . so naturally do the
real objects themselves rise to our view!”6 Authors must fi nd new modes
of narration to conform to the moral aesthetic of sensibility, all the while
masking their own authorship so as not to distract from the workings of
sympathy and imagination.
There is a similar authorial tension among landscapers in the pictur-
esque English garden, between control or mastery of the garden and the
attention to the authentic role of nature. The rhetoric of ruin in the novel
of sensibility is parallel to the “art of accident” in landscape gardening.
Gardeners would hide control, authority, and the marks of the scissors, yet
between Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight, for example, there was
active debate about the role of “accident” in landscape design. In trying to
establish his difference from Repton and his followers, Knight champions
“accident” as Nature’s most instructive work. Knight writes of the great
Reading Ruin 109
efforts required to achieve the effect of accident, yet he also describes how
cultivated neglect differs from actual neglect:
The representation [of fictitious ruins], though it does not present facts
to the memory, yet suggests subjects to the imagination: but, in order
to affect the fancy, the supposed original design should be clear, the
use obvious, and the form easy to be traced; no fragments should be
hazarded without a precise meaning, and an evident connexion; none
should be perplexed in their construction, or uncertain as to their ap-
plication. Conjectures about the form, raise doubts about the existence
of the ancient structure; the mind must not be allowed to hesitate; it
110 Ruined by Design
must be hurried away from examining into the reality, by the exactness
and the force of the resemblance.9
The crisis of authorial authority sheds light on paradoxes that seem cen-
tral to the novel of sensibility—namely, that in order to satisfy a moral
aesthetic, authors are forced into a position of hypocrisy. They must mask
their authorship and authority and avoid revealing their creating, order-
ing presence in the novel. They must hide their role as ‘men of words’
to protect their role as ‘men of feeling,’ yet ultimately the deception and
artifice involved in this pretense gives rise to an even greater obstacle to
authenticity and transparency. Typical male protagonists in these novels,
such as Sterne’s Yorick, Henry Mackenzie’s Harley, and Goethe’s Werther,
are “men of feeling” who, although writers, self-consciously distinguish
themselves from “men of letters” by exhibiting a distrust of discipline,
plans, logic, grammar, straight lines, and virtue based on an obedience to
law. Instead they admire the spontaneous overflow of extreme feelings—
usually benevolence and tenderness, mixed with some erotic overtones.
Novelists thus respond to sensibility’s anxieties of authorship—such as
the newly perceived disharmony between writing, speaking, and feeling
subjects—by creating works that privilege the unspoken, the unwritten,
and the unplanned in a number of new ways.
In other words, not only do authors of novels have to find ways to hide
their characters’ reliance upon traditional means of speech, and instead
show the successful communication of feeling through the “language of
nature” (frequent descriptions of look and gesture), but gradually authors
begin to present their own narration in the “language of feeling” as well.
Sterne, Goethe, and their protagonist-narrators, as well as authors of other
such self-consciously fragmented narratives, depend upon and simulta-
neously reject the order, control, and closure associated with authors,
authority, and “artificial” language in order to involve their audience in
the sympathetic and imaginary completion of the more “natural” lan-
guage of fragmented texts. As Tristram expresses with remarkable clarity
in Tristram Shandy, “Writing . . . is but a different name for conversation
. . . The truest respect which you can pay to the reader’s understanding is
to halve this matter amicably, and leave him something to imagine, in his
turn, as well as yourself.”12 This corresponds to the viewer’s role in the
aesthetic appreciation of the picturesque. Viewers and readers do their
112 Ruined by Design
share to ensure that the scenes (whether verbal, visual, or musical) achieve
their proper emotional effect.13 It may also be that just as Whately describes
the assistance he gives the spectator in order to focus emotional attention
on an interesting object, the authors of these novels also develop additional
structures to direct their reader’s emotions.
A narrator who is not self-conscious, and therefore not a participant in
the action and feelings of the novel, can be seen as anonymous or heartless,
randomly imposing the author’s authority. Detached narration or omni-
science implicitly generalizes human experience and seeks to communicate
methodically and rationally; however, it ultimately leads to even greater
linguistic isolation than silence, according to this aesthetic. Only sponta-
neous speech, ‘uncensored’ by strict grammatical rules and ‘untainted’ by
practical purpose or preconceived plans, can count as authentic or sincere.
According to the dominant tenets of the culture of sensibility and Empfi nd-
samkeit, as we have seen, only speakers who feel can be trusted, and only
speech that is fragmented is sincere; therefore, only an author or narrator
who shows an awareness of the difficulty of expressing himself can be sym-
pathetic. The gaps in the writing of these narrators can therefore function
within the novel—within the author’s grand but hidden plan—as a means
of representing the narrator as an anti-author or man of feeling. And while
this chapter will focus on the techniques used by Sterne, Mackenzie, and
Goethe, the phenomenon affected a much wider group of authors in Eng-
land, France, and Germany.
Yorick and Werther reveal different aspects of the shame and anxiety
surrounding authorship. In addition to the visual fragmentation that Sterne
offers on the pages of his two novels, he also provides additional techniques
to display Yorick’s difficulties as author in Sentimental Journey. Multiple
chapters have the same titles; the preface is “written” after six chapters
and remains in that position; and the title (A Sentimental Journey through
France and Italy by Mr. Yorick) remains pointedly unrevised, since Yorick
never reaches Italy. Sterne’s unusual title displays sentimental chronology’s
usurpation of reason’s traditional hierarchy over any sequence of moments.
Rather than rising above time in an atemporal hierarchy—to the godlike
foreknowledge belonging to an author revising his or her text—Sterne’s
title feigns a position of simple, uncensored sequence. Just as Yorick might
have responded if asked at the outset of his journey, that he was heading
(vaguely) for France and Italy, and might change his itinerary at any whim,
so the title, too, merely records a momentary whim which is only partially
materialized. Sterne takes the culture of sensibility’s distrust of reason and
authoritative speech to its logical (and humorous) conclusion in dethroning
the title from its position of authority. According to the unspoken laws of
sensibility, he must display ineloquence and lack of revision to prove his
virtue: his fragments, half-fi nished sentences, and ellipses display not only
his spontaneity and unconventionality, but also, interestingly, the degree of
his sensibility.14
Reading Ruin 113
Another kind of narrative disjunction, which poses as an omission,
serves to illustrate Yorick’s denial of authorship. For example, when Yorick
begins to describe a blush, he writes:
There is a sort of pleasing half guilty blush, where the blood is more in
fault than the man—’tis sent impetuous from the heart, and virtue flies
after it—not to call back, but to make the sensation of it more delicious
to the nerves—’tis associated.—
But I’ll not describe it.—15
Yorick begins to defi ne and falters several times; then after describing it
quite well in this fragmentary, disjointed way, he claims to decide not to
defi ne it at all. Again, this hypocritical declaration of silence emphasizes
the irony of having to develop a “rhetoric of silence”—that is, of portraying
the inadequacies of words and sentences through words.
There is more to this issue of defi nition, however: “Eugenius, said I . . .
to defi ne—is to distrust.”16 This remark from Tristram Shandy illustrates
the intimate connection in Sterne’s work—and in the culture of sensibility
in general—between linguistic and socio-ethical concerns. It also suggests
that the way to establish community and trust is not through self-con-
scious, analytical language, if indeed it is through language at all. It reveals
the deep difficulty about the role of public discourse and the pursuit of
shared meaning. Mullan’s phrase “the tyranny of explanation”17 is helpful
in this context; it suggests the important connection between analysis and
authority. Defi nitions, names, and categories (“tall, opake words”) are arti-
ficial limitations which society imposes upon the individual. In her poem
entitled Sensibility, Hannah More even refers to the “chains of defi nition.”
The sensitive soul, the sentimental traveler, the man of feeling can stand as
individuals in their search for transparency above society’s conventional
urges to defi ne and to control. Society’s limitations and the opacity of lan-
guage do not serve, however, as a source of anger for Sterne or Sterne’s
semi-fictive protagonists, but instead are objects of good-humored mock-
ery and allow for the potential of additional intimacy with the reader.
Werther also reveals the painful division between narrator and protago-
nist through his activities as author. Goethe is careful to limit Werther’s
authorial positions: Werther writes only letters, rather than a public book
with title, preface, and a larger intended audience. Werther writes to his
‘dear friend’ Wilhelm; however, his letters show that Wilhelm does not
understand Werther and his sentiments. Thus the letters reveal Werther’s
extreme emotional isolation; Yorick’s authorship is isolated geographically
and linguistically, he is far less isolated emotionally. More importantly,
the limited authorship reveals that Werther, a true man of feeling, neither
writes with ease nor wishes to publish.
Like Yorick, Werther also exhibits the difficulties of self-representa-
tion: both experiencing as a protagonist and recording this experience as
114 Ruined by Design
an ‘author.’ Werther, too feels a confl ict between the drive to narrate and
the need to resist the generalizing tendencies of narration. He desperately
wants to represent himself authentically, and struggles to fi nd a means to
do so. Ultimately, Werther’s struggles reflect his sense of isolation within
society and lead to an internal civil war. The self-consciousness that seems
inevitable to Yorick and humorous to Sterne spells danger, disintegration,
and inauthenticity to Werther. In the end, Werther chooses suicide and his
own self-ruination rather than suffering the inauthenticity of his existence
within society and its rule-bound institutions, including language.
Werther’s complaints that his telling will fall far short of his experiences
form a constant refrain in his letters to Wilhelm. Language flattens his
emotional upheavals, with the sheer weight of its conventionality. Victor
Lange calls Werther “the record, transposed into fiction, of Goethe’s own
perception of the tantalizing ambiguity of words.”18 And although we will
not try to judge Lange’s biographical claims about Goethe’s lifelong atti-
tude toward language, it seems clear that the world portrayed in Werther,
by Werther, is a world from which the only escape is silence. From the
very beginning, the reader knows that Goethe’s Werther interprets gram-
mar and conventional forms of speech as examples of how language, while
pretending to express feelings, actually obscures them: “alle Regel [wird],
man rede was man wolle, das wahre Gefühl von Natur und den wahren
Ausdruck derselben zerstören!” [No matter what we say, all rules destroy
the authentic feeling of nature as well as its authentic expression].19
Convention fetters the authentic, the heartfelt; therefore, Werther must
choose between a less ‘authentic’ and therefore compromised survival
within society and ‘authentic’ expression which transgresses society’s rules
as described by Rousseau: “Avant que l’art eût façonné nos manières et
appris à nos passions à parler un langage apprêté, nos moeurs étaient rus-
tiques, mais naturelles; et la différence des procédés annonçait, au premier
coup d’oeil, celle des caractères” [Before art had shaped our manners, and
taught our passions to speak an artificial language, our customs were rus-
tic but natural; differences of behavior announced, at fi rst glance, differ-
ences of character]. 20 Werther longs for just such immediate or transparent
connection with other souls, and he searches for it in rustic Wahlheim.
Werther emphasizes this dilemma by repeating the word authentic (das
wahre Gefühl von Natur, der wahre Ausdruck): it is precisely this truth or
emotional authenticity that words, being mere shadows of experience, can
never hope to capture.
Werther the protagonist experiences life as a torrential stream of pas-
sions and cannot tolerate any punctuation, modification, or constriction
that would make his experience any less true, even in his own recollec-
tion or recording of events. He longs for the infi nite, the sublime moment,
the “rapture of one great emotion,”21 and is frustrated by any inkling of
transience or limitation (“Beschränkung,” or “Beschränktheit”). He yearns
for the sublime, rather than the picturesque, especially in Part II of the
Reading Ruin 115
novel. With a strong sense of nostalgia that haunts him, Werther conflates
authenticity with preservation of each mood, or each moment of time; thus
change itself is cruel and inauthentic for him. This trait leads Werther to
some ironic extremes. For example, when someone comes and interrupts
Werther as he is writing an especially tearful passage, Werther is distraught
(and enraged): “Ein unerträglicher Mensch hat mich unterbrochen. Meine
Tränen sind getrocknet. Ich bin zerstreut. Adieu, Lieber!” [An intolerable
person has interrupted me. My tears have dried. I am distracted. Adieu, my
friend!]. 22 Werther cannot tolerate that even sorrow is ephemeral: ironi-
cally, he draws tragic implications even from its interruption. 23
In this particular passage, the return to the world around him disrupts
Werther’s experience of infi nity, which has increasingly little to do with
anything other than himself. The fact that tears dry, and that individual pas-
sions wear themselves out, only to be replaced by others, are equally signs
of mankind’s inadequacy: “Was ist der Mensch, der gepriesener Halbgott!
Ermangeln ihm nicht eben da die Kräfte, wo er sie am nötigsten braucht?
Und wenn er in Freude sich aufschwingt oder im Leiden versinkt, wird
er nicht in beiden eben da aufgehalten, eben da zu dem stumpfen, kalten
Bewußtsein wieder zurückgebracht, da er sich in der Fülle des Unendlichen
zu verlieren sehnte?” [What is man, the lauded demigod! Does he not lack
the very powers he needs most? And if he lifts himself up in joy or sinks
down in affliction, will he not be arrested in both just there—, returned to
blunt, cold consciousness just there where he was longing to lose himself in
the fullness of the infi nite?]24
The role of narration is, according to this view, not only to represent
the present moment, but also to preserve the past, yet, ultimately these two
purposes are in confl ict for Werther as his present is ever-changing with his
experiences and moods. As each word leaves his mouth or especially his
pen, it ages into a hard, cold, hollow shell of meaning, no longer represent-
ing himself or his essence, and thus seems to him to be a self-prostitution.
Unlike what Diderot says about the power of sketches, Werther, an art-
ist, has no faith in his power to represent the world visually. As a result,
Werther successively gives up painting, sketching, and even writing: “Ich
könnte jetzt nicht zeichnen, nicht einen Strich, und bin nie ein größerer
Maler gewesen als in diesen Augenblicken” [I would not be able to draw
now, not even a line, yet I’ve never been a better painter than I am in
these moments]. According to Werther’s dichotomy, drawing, like gram-
mar, concerns itself with detail, forms, and outlines; therefore, Werther
grows to prefer painting which concerns itself with the essences he desper-
ately wants to express. “Lottens Porträt habe ich dreimal angefangen, und
habe mich dreimal prostituiert” [Thrice I have begun Lotte’s portrait, and
thrice I have prostituted myself]. The only artistic activity which remains
with Werther to the end is the enjoyment of his own, old translations of
Ossian’s verse. 25 The dramatic verb choice emphasizes Werther’s pain at
the discrepancy between his unarticulated perception and his attempts
116 Ruined by Design
at conventional articulation, and it has its roots in Sterne’s description of
preface-writing as masturbatory. Both of these images suggest a shared
inability to achieve lasting intimacy with others through representation.
The difference between masturbation and prostitution also indicates the
central danger of authorship for each protagonist: for Yorick (or Sterne)
it is solipsism or selfishness; for Goethe’s Werther it is inauthenticity. His
nostalgic attachment to authenticity, successful mimesis, and transparency
disappoint him bitterly.
The irony is that meanwhile, Goethe is relying on those very effects to
work on the level of the reader of the novel. Goethe relies on the “art of acci-
dent,” the successful communicative powers of the fragmented and imper-
fect text, while Werther despairs of them internally to the plot. In other
words, while the novel itself illustrates the insecurities and ‘successful fail-
ure’ of the culture of sensibility, Werther fights against these principles, just
as he fights against other forms of inauthenticity, progressively throughout
the novel. In Werther, the internal confl ict between the narrative structure
and the ideological and anti-narrative struggles of the protagonist reveals
its affi nity with the philosophical insecurity of the culture of sensibility.
Ultimately, where Goethe creates an ironic text, though, Werther himself
refuses to accept irony and artifice in his search for authenticity. Werther
refuses to accept the art of accident that Goethe has mastered. Thus while
structure and narrative techniques put Werther squarely in the camp of
sensibility, the character Werther intimates the end of the culture of sensi-
bility, particularly in the second volume.
Like the follies of the previous chapter, novels of sensibility combine the
dual desires for monuments and ruins, artifice and nature, concealing and
revealing, control and spontaneity in order to satisfy sensibility’s ambiva-
lence regarding authority and its longing for authentic communication. For
the purposes of this chapter, we will take a closer look at one particu-
larly striking folly that still exists today: the inhabitable Column House
built by M. François Nicolas Henri Racine de Monville for his picturesque
park in Paris, le Désert de Retz. His park included stereotypical ingredi-
ents of an English-style garden, including two classical ruins, a medieval
ruin, a classical Temple, a Chinese pavilion, a Tartar tent, an obelisk, a
pyramid, a tomb, a rustic bridge, a thatched-roof cottage, a hermitage, a
dairy, an open-air theater, and a grotto.44 Monville built his Column House
as the centerpiece of his picturesque garden in Paris approximately in the
year 1781, and it was much admired by visitors such as Thomas Jefferson,
Marie Antoinette, and his good friend, the Duc d’Orléans. The structure
was fi fty-five feet tall, and approximately fi fty feet in diameter, striking in
its hill-top setting, the highest point in his estate.
124 Ruined by Design
Starting with comments made by visiting architects in the eighteenth-
century, many commentators have remarked on the fabrique’s similarity to
drawings of the Tower of Babel, such as the seventeenth-century engraving
by Athanasius Kircher in Figure 22. Monville, too, seems to have associ-
ated the fall of Babel with the building of ruined structures. Building upon
the analogy, Diane Ketcham asserts that the upper cracks were “created to
further the illusion that the structure had been blasted by God’s wrath.”45
Following the traditional proportions of Doric columns, the broken ruin
suggests to the viewer original columns almost 400 feet tall, supporting an
even grander original classical temple. This awe-inspiring, if not threaten-
ing, spectacle may engender “Lilliputian” thoughts in the minds of specta-
tors. “How grand the idea excited by the remains of such a column,” writes
Thomas Jefferson in a letter regarding his visit to the Désert de Retz.46
Figure 22
Reading Ruin 125
While purposefully ruined on the outside, with carefully planned jag-
ged edges and long, suggestive cracks, the interior of the Column House
includes five stories of carefully appointed circular and oval suites surround-
ing a central spiral staircase (compare Figure 23 and Figure 24). The latter
was illuminated by a skylight and hung with pots of exotic plants from
Monville’s greenhouse. Even the fourth story above ground has carefully
disguised windows: they can only be seen inside the purposefully made
cracks and crevices of the tower. The Column House became Monville’s
principal residence, and its suites included a laboratory, library, and art gal-
leries; Thomas Jefferson was so inspired by the interior beauty of the layout
of the Column House that he copied elements of it for the Rotunda of his
plans for the University of Virginia.
In short, in designing his centerpiece folly, Monville carefully disguised
its artificial origin, its utility, and its internal luxury from external eyes,
using fragmentation, cracks, and plantings. In addition, he went to great
lengths to disguise all mechanical or practical aspects of the ruin, provid-
ing, as mentioned earlier a picturesque and extremely rickety bridge (Figure
13) as a decoy to his more useful transportation routes hidden by bushes.
His original elevation drawings (Figure 25) attest to the mathematical pre-
cision and care that went into this calculated ruination. Throughout his
project, Monville carefully disguised all traces of planning hands for the
sake of emotional, if not historical, authenticity. Thus, as Monville con-
structed a building that was ruined on the outside and entirely orderly and
inhabitable on the inside, the author of novels of sensibility must also invis-
ibly combine two roles that may never be seen at the same time. On the
Figure 23
126 Ruined by Design
Figure 24
one hand, the author must work to create the illusion that the text resulted
from no plan of his own—that is, he must pretend to have discovered the
text rather than have created it, while on the other hand, he elaborately
constructs it to fit his purposes.
The art of accident discloses a profound ambivalence about order and
authority, which demands a medium that would simultaneously display its
presence and its absence.47 Order and closure grow suspect in the culture of
sensibility, yet they still remain a symbol of an old and impossible dream. The
surface fragmentation of Journey and Werther thus deliberately veils their
carefully constructed nature, and thereby appeals to a view of authority that
Reading Ruin 127
Figure 25
128 Ruined by Design
desires strength and order, but also demands that they be invisible.48 In all
of these novels, the fragmented, ‘natural’ language depends upon a context
of ‘artificial’ order for it to interrupt and punctuate: “The very act of writing
absence, ruin, or death is already the beginning of a monument to them . . .
The phenomenon of writing, even as it is stating a destruction, represents the
victory of the monument over ruin.”49 In a sense, both Goethe and Sterne use
self-conscious narrators to “salvage order out of seeming chaos;”50 however
the salvaging is under-cover. Werther’s story is the ruin that the Herausge-
ber (his fictional editor) wants to monumentalize. Yorick, like the builder of
fake ruins, seeks to assert both ruin and monument simultaneously. But the
fragmentation can also be interpreted in two different ways: one pointing to
the disintegration of communication and the other exhorting us to pursue the
possibility of communication that still persists.
The ambivalence about authority, power, and control that accompanies
the conflation of the roles of architect and archaeologist shows itself during
the same period in ambivalent attitudes about the role of the novelist as cre-
ator and planner of fi nished texts. By transferring authorship and authority
to their self-conscious narrators, Sterne, Mackenzie, and Goethe are able to
combine elements of ‘ruin’ and ‘monument,’ like builders of the fake ruins
of the last chapter, in an attempt to bridge the gap between men of feeling
and men of words. The special technique that both Mackenzie and Goethe
devise involves an additional frame of editorship and discovery. Like the
architect, the author must invisibly combine two roles that may never be
seen at the same time. The fragmentation and chaotic elements of the novels
can therefore be attributed to the narrator agents, while the authors them-
selves can still maintain an invisible control over, mastery of, the text. The
aim of both rhetorics of ruins, the literary as well as the architectural, is
thus paradoxical: they aim for invisible control or successful failure. Fried-
rich von Schlegel could almost have been writing about the rhetoric of ruins
when he wrote that “many works of the ancients have become fragments.
Many modern works are fragments as soon as they are written.”51 A work
that is a fragment as soon as it is written is one that succeeds in suggesting
enough of its message to hint at what it fails to communicate explicitly. It
must represent what it cannot articulate.
Ruins and passionately fragmented speech alike satisfy the need for a
separation of private and public speech, of ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ lan-
guage: “Ruins too are the shapeless antithesis of the classical utterance, that
well-founded speech which asserts truth clearly and publicly with the full
force of antiquity’s auctoritas. Instead, they have become components in a
private language, elusive and allusive metaphors of personal grief scarcely
audible at a distance.”52 The fear that feelings are “scarcely audible at a
distance” is one that haunts sensibility, and encourages authors of novels of
sensibility to develop techniques of portraying feelings while avoiding any
appearance of “distance,” control, or authority, as the picturesque seeks to
erase the “marks of the scissors.”
Reading Ruin 129
The man of feeling’s crisis involving self-narration seems so central to
the hallmarks of sensibility that it might at fi rst appear that a protagonist
who does not narrate his own experience could not partake of the same
cultural phenomenon. Mackenzie’s Harley, for example, unlike Yorick and
Werther, only occasionally narrates his emotions into smatterings of poetry;
he does not self-consciously narrate his own story. How, then, one might
ask, can the problem of self-narration be as central for Mackenzie as for
Sterne and Goethe? The difference is not as great as it may fi rst appear; in
fact, The Man of Feeling reveals structural and strategic similarities that are
far more significant. Mackenzie’s decision to leave the narrating of Harley’s
story to others is precisely not a return to an authoritative narrator, such as
the one in Fielding’s Tom Jones, for example53; instead, Mackenzie goes to
great lengths to undermine any appearance of order, control, or objective
detachment on the part of his narrators. Mackenzie’s novel uses narratorial
frames to mask the authorship of those whom it seeks to portray as “men of
feeling”; in fact, a similar introductory and framing device is present in all
his novels of sensibility. Just like Goethe’s Werther, The Man of Feeling has
multiple narrators, only Mackenzie uses three layers of editors who account
for its fragmentation as well as its order.
Harley’s world is the cruelest of the three fictional worlds, and his reluc-
tance to write and speak grows in equal proportion to the misfortune he
experiences. Like Werther, his disgust for society’s cold conventions and his
inability to adapt himself to the ‘artificiality’ of speech ultimately leads to his
death. He is unable to propose to the woman he loves, who unlike Lotte is
single and willing; this inability and unwillingness to speak becomes a way
for Mackenzie to heighten the cruelty of the world which forces a man of
such delicacy and promise to silence. “There are some feelings,” admits Har-
ley, “which perhaps are too tender to be suffered by the world. The world is
in general selfish, interested, and unthinking, and throws the imputation of
romance or melancholy on every temper more susceptible than its own.”54
One cannot help but detect the foreshadowing of Werther’s constant
refrain that the world thinks he exaggerates when words actually force
him to understate (and thereby abase) his feelings. 55 However, Harley lacks
Werther’s fiery passion and anger; he combines Yorick’s good-humor with
Werther’s sense of isolation and natural aristocracy and surpasses both in
naiveté. Like these other two men of sensibility, Harley follows his “heart”
in his adventures, which leads him upon a strikingly circuitous path. Others
around him, and he himself, refer to his heart as though it were synonymous
with both soul and will: “You have a feeling heart, Mr. Harley; I bless it that
it has saved my child.”56 In his death throes, he extols his heart as Werther
does his. In fact, all three heroes might claim that Descartes’ “cogito ergo
sum” [I think, therefore I am] has been replaced by Rousseau’s “je sens, donc
je suis” [I feel, therefore I am].
Many of the major gaps and silences in the narrative stem from neither
Charles’s delicate sensibility nor Harley’s distrust of words: instead their
130 Ruined by Design
source is on another plane of narrative altogether. They are the result of
the actions of “the unfeeling curate” who, as we learn in the introduction,
fi nding Charles’s story worthless, uses it as wadding for his rifle when he
hunts: “the hand is intolerably bad, I could never fi nd the author in one
strain for two chapters together: and I don’t believe there’s a single syl-
logism from beginning to end.”57 An additional layer of meaning here is
in the choice of the curate to be an unfeeling man of reason: because of
the corruption of the modern church, sensibility’s natural goodness must
be reclaimed outside of traditional Christian or political institutions. Of
course, the curate’s objections to the narrative style reveal precisely the
story’s worth in terms of sensibility: a strong hand would betoken a cold
heart, the love of syllogisms would reveal a blindness to the irregularities
of individual experience, and more adherence to story or plot would signify
insincerity. The curate’s “selfish, interested, and unthinking” mangling of
the document is the ostensible reason the novel begins with “Chapter XI”
and has chapter headings such as “The Fragment”: the narrative gaps of the
manuscript function literally as wounds inflicted by a Hobbesian society
upon the sensitive Shaftesburian soul.
Charles’s story becomes the ruin that the second narrator not only saves
from destruction, but in a sense, monumentalizes in the process. Just as one
effect of ruins on the viewer is to encourage the imaginary recreation of the
past and its former fullness, so the ‘sight’ of the suffering man of feeling
will allow (equally sensitive) readers sympathetically to recreate his story.
The second narrator models such behavior for the reader: in contrast to the
curate’s reaction, the second narrator claims “I found it a bundle of little
episodes, put together without art, and of no importance on the whole,
with something of nature, and little else in them.”58 The second narrator
takes over at the end, as well, and in the gaps between fragments. In all of
this he strikingly foreshadows Werther’s “Herausgeber.” Both editors also
include occasional footnotes that carry the guise of historical objectivity as
well as accuracy; however, again like the Herausgeber, Mackenzie’s second
narrator is far from objective. He reveals himself as a natural kinsman,
because he too is a ‘man of feeling.’
In the multiplication of narratorial tasks and the separation of ‘autho-
rial’ power, Sterne, Mackenzie, and Goethe resemble one another, as well
as other authors of sensibility. While Sterne’s Yorick physically unites both
narrator and protagonist, much of the comedy of his situation is due to
his distinct opinion about the natural incongruity of these two roles, and
Sterne expends great energy displaying Yorick’s equal lack of control over
his itinerary and his story—that is, the absence, rejection, and masking
of authority. Mackenzie multiplies Yorick’s difficulty by portraying three
characters who share the same double duties of character-as-narrator and
character-as-participant. Goethe uses the same framework as Mackenzie,
reduces the narrative frames to two, yet increases the linguistic tension
for the main protagonist: Werther’s tormented rhetoric of ruins is initially
Reading Ruin 131
more apparent than Harley’s because he makes greater attempts to com-
municate by writing—the failure is more poignant because we witness his
struggle to write—that is, to represent himself. The thematic and structural
similarities imply that there is something about the form that separates nar-
rator and participant, Erzähler and Erzählung, and which emphasizes the
absence of authority as well as the difficulty of writing and self-representa-
tion that is essential to the moral aesthetic of sensibility. Non-narration
alone tells no story, whereas anti-narration that punctures and challenges
traditional forms of narration allows for the creative tension upon which
sensibility thrives.
These structural demands affect all the speakers in the novels: not only
the characters and the self-conscious narrator, but also the ‘implied author.’
The aesthetic requirement to protect each author’s reputation—whether his-
torical authors (Sterne, Mackenzie, or Goethe) or fictional (such as Yorick,
Harley, Charles, Werther, and the Herausgeber)—poses additional problems
within the narrative. To speak and to write is to admit separation, distance,
a lack of immediate understanding; the very nature of these activities implies
interpersonal gaps, yet they also represent the attempt to bridge these gaps.
This is part of the reason that all ‘men of feeling’ and their female equiva-
lents need to speak and at the same time to remain silent. Their dilemma is
twofold: while feeling transcends words, words are still, in the novel at least,
the vehicle for communicating these feelings. Similarly in the architecture
of a folly, while order betokens the cold artificiality and unaided reason
that are sensibility’s enemies, the precious disorderly contours are only vis-
ible, effective, and, most importantly, affective within an orderly and care-
fully constructed context. A ruined monument can inspire greater emotive
response than a pile of rubble, especially when the viewer is distanced from
the moment of destruction, free of any aspiration to historical precision, and
able to (re)construct the original monument imaginatively.
In order to accomplish this masking of their authorship and authority,
Sterne and Goethe both encourage a conflation of the narrator and the
author. This has led to a tradition of criticism that devotes itself to untan-
gling the autobiographical and the fictional elements of their novels. 59 Simi-
larities between events in Werther’s life and Goethe’s have, consequently,
been exhaustively researched.60 There are indeed many similarities, and
Goethe emphasizes them by, among other things, giving Werther the same
birthday as his own: August 28th. Sterne also complicates matters in Jour-
ney, by giving the narrator a name that is not only the name of a character
in Tristram Shandy, but also his own, well-established pseudonym.61
By conflating their roles as Erzähler and Erzählung, as the one who
represents and that which is itself represented, Sterne and Goethe both, in
effect, portray themselves portraying the narrative. They become charac-
ters within the fictional world of the novel, as well as its creators. Just as
the narrator takes on authorial responsibilities by ostensibly composing the
story, the authors themselves become subjects of their own works. Monville,
132 Ruined by Design
too, was both architect/choreographer of and inhabitant/actor in his folly
at the Désert de Retz. The conflation of implied author and narrator works
alongside the additional authorial frame to camouflage the author’s control.
Even in their portrayals of themselves, these authors dodge all appearance
of authority in order to protect themselves against the charge of being ‘men
of words’ and therefore not ‘men of feeling.’
In Dichtung und Wahrheit [Poetry and Truth], Goethe tells of his state
of mind when writing his youthful Werther, describing himself as a man
of feeling, heavily influenced by the moral aesthetic of sensibility. Goethe
claims to have composed Werther in a brief, exuberant period of “leiden-
schaftlich Bewegung” [passionate emotion]: “Ich hatte mich äußerlich völ-
lig isoliert, ja die Besuche meiner Freunde verboten, und so legte ich auch
innerlich alles beiseite, was nicht unmittelbar hierher gehörte . . . Unter
solchen Umständen, . . . schrieb ich den ‘Werther’ in vier Wochen, ohne
daß ein Schema des Ganzen, oder die Behandlung eines Teils irgend vorher
wäre zur Papier gebracht gewesen. [I had completely isolated myself exter-
nally, indeed forbidden the visits of my friends, and in the same way I even
laid everything inward aside that did not immediately pertain to this . . .
Under such circumstances, . . . I wrote ‘Werther’ in four weeks, without
having brought a plan of the whole or a treatment of any part of it to
paper.]62 Rather like Coleridge in his preface to Kubla Khan, Goethe claims
that Werther came to him in inspiration and was uncensored by reason,
plans, or system, and yet its organization as well as his own admission of
plans seem to suggest otherwise. Goethe’s emphasis upon his feverish speed
in composing Werther also sits uncomfortably with the fact that the version
commonly read today is the much revised one which he did not complete
until 1787, thirteen years after the publication of version one.63 The point
is, that as much as Goethe claims to have been like Werther, and plants
autobiographical analogies in the novel to encourage readers to identify the
two, Goethe, as Tobin Siebers astutely remarks, “could not have created
Werther if [he] had been a Werther.”64
‘FIXING’ NATURE
Narrative frames not only protect the “reputation” of each man of feel-
ing who presumes to write, they also enable the man of feeling to avoid
responsibility and self-control. Since he defi nes feeling in opposition to
institutions and authority, sensibility’s man of feeling tends to be a power-
less victim and an outsider, by defi nition.65 Werther’s avowed helplessness
does not, therefore, in itself constitute a reaction against sensibility. On the
contrary, the inability to control oneself becomes a token of both sensibility
and virtue within the culture of sensibility. Over and over again, Werther
displays his keen sensibility (his receptivity to nature) by emphasizing that
he is physically drawn to Lotte like a piece of metal to a magnet: “ich bin zu
Reading Ruin 133
nah in der Atmosphäre—Zuck! so bin ich dort” [I’m too close in the atmo-
sphere—Zip! I’m over there] and again: “Wutsch! bin ich drauß” [Whoosh!
Now I’m outside].66 In Harley and Yorick, we see the same helplessness.
Yorick, for example, remarks: “—but I am govern’d by circumstances—I
cannot govern them.”67 Such an emphasis on helplessness, passivity, and
resignation to fate poses important political and moral problems about
responsibility and potential for action; the distinction between authentic
victimhood and an aestheticized self-victimization is dangerously tenuous.
As a result, it seems that every man of sensibility must be protected and sup-
ported either by a woman of sense or by a Sancho Panza figure.68 Werther’s
mother sends him money to feed and clothe him; others find him a job and
protect him; yet another tells his story. Werther’s ‘failures,’ however, pro-
vide the narrator’s opportunities, and establish Goethe’s success as well.
The narrative frame that Goethe provides thus not only illustrates the
structural demands that sensibility makes in order to mask the authority
of authors, but it also suggests the weaknesses inherent in sensibility’s role
in the public world of decisions and action—a role that will ultimately
help bring it to a close in cultish extremes. The crisis of moral authority
and philosophical insecurity that inspires sensibility remains fundamen-
tally unresolved. Reason has been dethroned, yet there is no new authority
to take its place. The irony built into the structure of the novel of sen-
sibility reveals the painful fact that silence generally goes unheard when
unannounced, just as rubble does not communicate ruin as well as trun-
cated monuments: silence depends upon surrounding words that it can
dramatically punctuate. Since it is potentially even more ambiguous than
words, silence depends upon context to suggest a meaning. Werther cannot
accept this inauthenticity: he will tolerate no strategy, no dual impulses, no
self-conscious rhetoric of silence. And because Werther is fundamentally
unironic, he finally chooses eternal silence and ruination, rather than have
to compromise himself in a worldly existence.
The aesthetic component of this framing is clearer in the context of the
history of the picturesque. As an aesthetic category, the ‘picturesque’ devel-
oped within the framework of the debate over the sublime and the beauti-
ful that Edmund Burke so memorably formulated in his A Philosophical
Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757),
a work that served as a basis for aesthetic debate for half a century. Burke
bases our perception of these two qualities on two natural and opposing
instincts: self-preservation, which is connected with pain, and self-propa-
gation, which is connected with pleasure. Sublime objects are immense,
rugged, obscure or impenetrable and evoke in the viewer a sense of infi nity,
difficulty, or fear, while beautiful objects are gentle, smooth, and round
and evoke pleasing, gentle sensations in the viewer. A beautiful woman, for
example, affects the viewer in the following physical manner: “The head
reclines something on one side; the eyelids are more closed than usual,
and the eyes roll gently with an inclination to the object, the mouth is a
134 Ruined by Design
little opened, and the whole body is composed, and the hands fall idly
to the sides. All this is accompanied with an inward sense of melting and
langour.” On the other hand: “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the
ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible . . .
is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion
which the mind is capable of feeling.” Burke emphasizes the direct influence
of objects upon the passions (via the senses and natural instincts), without
any involvement of (or censorship by) the conscious mind or reason; how-
ever, Burke must also account for the differences between the reactions
of any two viewers to the same object. The “physical causes” are “always
proportioned to the degree of beauty in the object, and of sensibility in
the observer.” Disagreements over the “standard” of taste can therefore,
according to Burke, not be resolved without evaluation of the sensibility of
the viewer, leaving the door open for the elitism of sensibility. 69
The aestheticians of the picturesque took Burke’s definitions of the sub-
lime and the beautiful and assigned a name to the qualities that neither
term could comfortably admit. The picturesque thus becomes an interme-
diary category for that which is irregular yet pleasing—neither smooth nor
overwhelming.70 In 1794, in his Essay on the Picturesque, Sir Uvedale Price
fi rmly established the picturesque as a third aesthetic category alongside
the sublime and the beautiful, and gives musical examples of all three: A
chorus of Handel, because of its vastness and obscurity, exhibits the sub-
lime; “Corelli’s famous pastorale” is beautiful because of its smoothness
and gentleness, and “a capricious movement of Scarlatti or Haydn” is pic-
turesque because of the “roughness and sudden variation joined to irregu-
larity” of form, or, in this case, sound.71 Price contends that the picturesque
is ugly until one learns to appreciate it—again evoking the emphasis on
connoisseurship which becomes marked in both “cults.”
Within Burke, there is a seldom noticed model for this third category.
Burke assigns special significance to the word “delight,” which he uses to
describe the feeling, akin to, but not identical with, the pleasure which we
have when we are separated from pain or relieved from danger: delight
describes a safe distance from terror, not far enough removed, however, to
become indifference: “When danger or pain press too nearly, they are inca-
pable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances,
and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful.”72
Delight, therefore, can serve as an unnamed picturesque—a combination
of irregularity and obscurity with a sensation of momentary safety. We
might call it a form of framed or domesticated wildness. One could say that
it resembles the desire to secularize the destruction of Genesis; it also pro-
vides the frame within which the man of feeling has the freedom to indulge
in passions without sacrificing structure or sympathy.
With the picturesque, qualities such as obscurity, which Burke had
located in the sublime, take on a newly domesticated role: whether in paint-
ing, landscape, or poetry, “obscurity” stimulates the reader’s or viewer’s
Reading Ruin 135
imagination,73 for as he says, “we yield to sympathy, what we refuse to
description.”74 For Burke, however, the “sublime” is anything but calm or
social: it is a strong, destructive, antisocial force. The aesthetic category of
the “picturesque” combines his emphasis on obscurity with a new confi-
dence in a positive and socially beneficial role. Burke himself seems to be
interested in achieving this effect, for in Burke’s long and interesting sec-
tion on “Words” at the end of his Enquiry, his main purpose seems to be to
emphasize that the natural obscurity of words demands that we participate
in each other’s feelings and imagine sympathetically in order to understand
one another. Burke, along with Hume and Smith in moral philosophy, and
Reynolds in aesthetics, thus fi nds sympathy and imagination central not
only to the aesthetic experience, but to communication, per se. Therefore,
after Burke, sensibility and the picturesque transform “obscurity” into
the ‘non fi nito’ that can satisfy sensibility’s contradictory impulses: it can
ensure both the social and the educative functions of art, without sacrific-
ing its emotional appeal.
The picturesque, as it grows out of Burke’s and Price’s discussions to a
broader principle of aesthetics, can represent something that is threaten-
ingly close to the state of nature: a domestication of the sublime that threat-
ens to reassert itself when the picture frame is removed, or the viewer’s
head is turned. It tames the wild aspects of the sublime, yet simultaneously
seeks to conceal the authority that tames it.75 Its dual impulses thus echo
Knight’s art of the accident and the rhetoric of ruins established by What-
ely and others. This is the source of the awkward position in which the pic-
turesque fi nds itself: stemming from an Italian word for a painterly style,
it must rely on artificiality (the picture frame) while it seeks authenticity
(the natural, undisturbed, irregular, potentially terrifying scene). Although
it tacitly admits the need for the ‘picture frame’ or that which can tame,
domesticate, or temporarily remove the danger, the picturesque tends to
mask the frame, as the novels of sensibility mask authority and author-
ship.76 The picturesque, then, demonstrates a similarly curious ambivalence
towards authority, reason, and order. Just as gardenists seek to hide the
marks of the scissors and architects mask their own hands in architectural
follies, authorial contrivances are masked in the novel as well. In this sec-
tion, we discover that the additional editorial frames that develop in the
novel of sensibility are required because of a characteristic ambivalence
about authority: editorial frames are necessary to articulate the dual vision
of the culture of sensibility.
One of the most curious and symbolically appropriate inventions of pic-
turesque landscape gardeners is the “ha-ha.” According to Hussey, Vanbrugh
was the first to popularize this device, which was a type of fortified ditch,
lined with stone or brick, although Dézallier D’Argenville and others claim
it originated in France. The side closer to the great house was generally built
higher to camouflage the ditch and to assist in creating a “boundless estate”
from garden to park. Without visually breaking the estate into partitions,
136 Ruined by Design
the ha-ha was also designed to control the grazing of livestock or keep out
neighboring peasant children without destroying the scenic prospect, as
carefully composed as a still-life painting. Ha-has thus attempt to maintain
order and prospect while also hiding the traces of the landscape gardener’s
hands (and the owner’s fences).77 They protect the random, natural appear-
ance while actually keeping disruptive or unsightly forces at a safe distance;
at the same time, they seek to avoid the appearance of linearity and overtly
imposed order.
The dual needs for authenticity and artifice evident in the ha-ha, as well
as in the narratorial frames of the novel of sensibility, easily translate into
a paradoxical combination of primitivism and luxury, and result in humor-
ous arrangements, especially in landscape gardens and their architecture.
These arrangements include not only ha-has and fake ruins, but additional
forms that stem from the desire to mask authority and portray the domes-
ticated, inhabitable wildness of Nature. Figure 26 shows an example of the
fetishized huts (often “pilgrim’s houses” or “hermitages”) that adorned so
many landscape gardens.78 Built in the 1790s, Hirschfeld’s “Köhlerhütte”
is covered with bark on the outside to imitate a hermit’s impoverished and
provisional attempt at shelter. Its triangular form suggests a tent or teepee,
rather than a permanent structure. Inside, however, it is opulently deco-
rated and contains, among other luxuries, a Turkish sofa, paintings, mir-
rors, and an excellent library. In fact, the ‘tree stump’ that protrudes from
the roof is actually a chimney to ensure the inhabitant’s comfort in all sea-
sons.79 Such hermitages reveal a prevalent ambivalence, not only towards
fi nished, orderly structures, but also towards civilization’s luxuries. Such
structures suggest that the culture of sensibility’s preference for primitivism
as a spectacle never quite translates into a practical alternative. The culture
of sensibility and the picturesque both exhibit a high threshold for irony—
so much so, in fact, that their artifacts teeter precariously on the brink of
hypocrisy. The movements thus prove themselves ripe for aesthetic, ethical,
and socio-economic satire.
The picturesque, like sensibility, is not entirely what it makes itself out to
be. There is a rational, orderly, and artificial aspect to each movement. Just
as the novels of sensibility try to camouflage their orderly external struc-
tures, the picturesque, especially as formulated by Gilpin, fi nds itself in a
similar quandary, using artifice and reason to achieve what its artists know
is beyond reason to achieve.80 The picturesque, as it becomes codified, leads
to a habit of viewing nature with a certain amount of the connoisseur’s
detachment, according to how good a given scene might look as a paint-
ing. Viewers should carry a mental picture frame as they travel and evalu-
ate nature’s composition. As Marshall writes, the stage-like descriptions
of picturesque prospects emphasize this artificiality: “from the outset the
question of aesthetic distance informs the very concept of the picturesque.
The construction of amphitheaters, the arrangement of trees to frame natu-
ral scenes like the wings of a stage, and the use of mirrors to fill the gallery
Reading Ruin 137
Figure 26
The last phrase in particular emphasizes the thin line between fi nding and
creating, and should remind us of sensibility’s redefi nition of authorship,
of architects posing as archaeologists, and of the numerous painters (such
as Hubert Robert and Fragonard) who assisted landscape architects in
designing prospects and suitably evocative follies. The picturesque’s mask-
ing of order and control ultimately leads it to the inescapable artificiality
we found with the fake ruins and which played a significant role in bringing
sensibility to an end or in converting a culture into a cult.86
Curiously, the caricatured Dr. Syntax is equally reminiscent of Gilpin
and another traveling pastor, Laurence Sterne. In addition, there is also a
resemblance to a fictional traveling pastor, Yorick, Sterne’s alter ego. While
generally taken to be a portrait of William Gilpin, other factors suggest
140 Ruined by Design
Figure 27
Reading Ruin 141
a more literary origin—particularly the linguistic terms used to name Dr.
Syntax and Dr. Prosody, the appearance of Dr. Syntax himself, and the
content of the volumes. As a result of this recurring connection between
landscape innovations and literary experimentation, both sensibility with
its fractured syntax and the picturesque with its calculated love of irregular-
ity, are held culpable for the distance they erect between natural causes and
artificial responses.
Figure 28
144 Ruined by Design
As novels of sensibility encourage readers to follow the serpentine wind-
ings of the narrative—witnessing its fractures, responding to its emotive
tableaux, and participating in the responses of the protagonists—so too the
English gardens across Europe provide carefully constructed views designed
to rouse emotional responses in the reader. Seifersdorfer Tal, an English
garden in Germany, for example, originates as an emblematic garden and is
later transformed to accord with current tastes for sensibility. By the 1780s,
it sports a series of temples, monuments, inscriptions and busts featuring
characteristic icons of sensibility, including: “Goethe’s young Werther,
Petrarch’s passion for Laura, Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, Sterne’s
Yorick on his sentimental journey, . . along with altars to Truth and Virtue,
an open temple dedicated to the joys of country life, and a monument to
Gothic friendship.”94 Generally seats or benches are placed in opportune,
private locations, to enable the spectators to indulge in the appropriate
sentiments in comfort. Goethe himself was profoundly influenced by his
1776 visit to Franz’s English garden Wörlitz at Anhalt-Dessau (and by the
subsequent publication of the Wörlitz guidebook in 1782); he encouraged
Duke Karl August to engage in similar landscaping around Weimar.
As the rhetoricians seek to describe the language of nature in order to
recreate it, gardenists of the eighteenth century were also engaged in learn-
ing nature’s language in order to recreate an Eden suitable for the man
of feeling, supposedly driven by feelings and associations rather than by
erudite references, elaborate topiary, or (explicit) displays of wealth and
grandeur. Hirschfeld, one of the fi rst to write a guide to Theorie der Gar-
tenkunst [Theory of Garden Art] (1779–1785), describes the “natural” lan-
guage with which the garden architect controls the responses of the viewer:
“Der Mensch steht also in einem so nahen Verhältnisse mit der Natur, daß
er ihre Einwirkungen auf seine Seele nicht verläugnen kann . . . Der Garten-
künstler soll alle Wirkungen der natürlichen Lagen der Landschaft kennen,
um solche auszuwählen, die der Bestimmung eines Gartens gemäße Bewe-
gungen hervorbringen, und ihnen eine solche Verbindung und Anordnung
zu geben, daß diese Bewegungen in einer harmonischen Beziehung auf ein-
ander folgen.” [Man is, then, in such a close relationship with nature that
he cannot deny her influence on his soul . . . The garden architect should
know all of the effects of the natural situations of the landscape in order to
select those that evoke movements particular to the requirements of a gar-
den, and to give them such an association and order that these movements
follow one another in a harmonious relationship.]95
Hirschfeld’s lengthy descriptions of garden scenes and the emotions they
evoke constitute a “grammar” of the language of nature.96 He describes
both vocabulary and syntax, showing how each variation in physical ter-
rain produces certain emotional states in the onlooker: “Die Vertiefung ist
die Wohnung der Einsamkeit und der Ruhe; sie ist melancholischen Anla-
gen und Scenen günstig . . . Der Character von Gebirge ist Erhabenheit und
feyerliche Majestät.” [The hollow is the dwelling of solitude and quiet; it is
Reading Ruin 145
favorable for melancholy structures and scenes . . . The character of moun-
tains is grandeur and solemn majesty.]97 He even provides pictures to illus-
trate the correlations between mood and natural scenes, choosing among
the standard garden vocabulary, which includes shepherd’s hut, cloister,
Nero’s tombstone, hermit’s dwelling, Gothic ruin, and classical colonnade.
Hirschfeld instructs the reader in the appropriate sequence (syntax) of these
scenes, and suggests that “the Gartenkünstler could, by staging specific
human responses to nature, make nature’s language clearer.”98 The impli-
cation is that the language of nature retains its communicative ability and
the close connections to human emotions that spoken language has lost; as
long as it is manipulated well, viewers can avoid “perplexity.”
Generally, an English garden in picturesque style on a large estate would
have several follies of great variety. In his map of the gardens at Hohen-
heim, for example, Hirschfeld provides a list corresponding to its sixty-
six picturesque and poignant scenes (Figure 28), each arousing a specific
emotion and together creating a smorgasbord of sensibility—an emotional
obstacle course geared for veteran spectators with malleable hearts. The
more sentimental the garden visitor, the more keenly would he or she feel
each emotion, suggesting that sensibility can be gauged by the ability to
read nature and to translate its visual symbolism into emotion. He provides
a botanical analogue to the novel of sensibility’s similar “pedagogy of see-
ing,” also in response to the philosophical insecurity of the culture of sensi-
bility: again we see a natural language that needs to be learned, cultivated,
or achieved through artifice.
In Die Theorie der Gartenkunst, Hirschfeld records his response to the
ruins of Hohenheim: “Nirgends sind wohl Ruinen schöner gezeichnet und
ausgeführt, als hier . . . Die Ruinen sind das herrlichste, was sich in dieser
Art von Nachahmung denken kann . . . Alles ist wahr und überraschend.”
[Nowhere are ruins more beautifully drawn and executed than here . . . The
ruins are the most delightful that can be imagined in this type of imitation
. . . All is authentic and surprising.]99 The surprising word in Hirschfeld’s
description is the word “wahr”: he claims that the delight of the experience
lies in how true or authentic the ruins are, knowing full well of their recent
origin and attempted imposture. This remark suggests that there is an
authenticity involved with the appreciation of follies that overshadows the
importance of historical authenticity. Perhaps it is the perfectly picturesque
adaptation of structure to landscape that enables a suspension of disbelief
and therefore—in some sense—an authenticity of emotional response.
The author or narrator has to hide the “marks” of their scissors in nar-
rative form to achieve the desired evocative and didactic effect. There are
suggestions that authors were self-aware of this pedagogy of seeing—that
is, of the sentimental novel’s responsibility to evoke emotions in the reader.
Henry Mackenzie, for example, writes to a young reader, warning him
about the proper way to read The Man of Feeling: he warns him not to read
the chapters where virtue is in the greatest distress, “till you have a mind
146 Ruined by Design
to indulge those Feelings which it endeavours to produce.”100 Readers and
authors alike have responsibilities to produce the novel’s sympathetic par-
ticipation, which begins where speech ends. This sympathetic participation
and self-conscious evocation of feeling, nature’s “language,” thus form an
essential part of the general moral aesthetic of sensibility, as exhibited in
both landscape gardening and the novel.
The locus of the ruin drama thus shifts gradually inwards to the sensi-
tive soul of the viewer. Even in the English gardens, dotted as they are with
interesting and ruined objects, the benches grow to be the most significant
architectural features and the locus of the real drama. Spectators feature
as the main actors in sensibility’s theatricals. Whereas at fi rst, spectators
focus on recreating proper literary allusion suggested by engravings in the
emblematic garden, subsequently they engage in the nostalgic recreation of
the past, invited by ruination. The focus becomes private associations and
poignant experiences of private loss. Finally, one might conclude that this
loss transforms itself into a joyful confidence in one’s own exquisite capac-
ity to feel. Ludwig Tieck parodies the growing importance of the audience
in his play Gestiefelte Kater [Puss in Boots] (1796), where he literally places
the audience on stage to participate in the unfolding of (and especially the
reaction to) events. Gradually the audience assumes increasing authorship,
while retaining the guise of ‘pure’ spectatorship—of viewing, rather than
effecting or creating. This individual reception was the key to virtue and
art, as well as pleasure.
Again, Wilhelm Tischbein’s life-size portrait of Goethe helps further
elucidate the psychology (Figure 4): the aim of the painting is not only for
us to see Goethe, but more importantly to see Goethe seeing the classical
ruins. This dynamic reveals the narcissism inherent in the cult of sensibil-
ity, which bases virtue on one’s ability to feel and thus turns those who
feel into actors displaying their wares. In Goethe’s own account of the
character of his enjoyment of similar scenes in the Campagna, he travels
with his eyes (rather than his feet) with minimal effort and maximum sen-
sual pleasure. He speaks of the ruins of Rome, in picturesque fashion, as
though the scene were a stationary, two-dimensional painting that he could
observe at his leisure and from a comfortable distance. When the ruins
cannot otherwise be conveniently fi xed, he brings them home to survey in
private: “Ich habe mich nicht enthalten können, den kolossalen Kopf eines
Jupiters anzuschaffen. Er steht meinem Bette gegenüber, wohl beleuchtet,
damit ich sogleich meine Morgenandacht an ihn richten kann.” [I was not
able to keep myself from acquiring the colossal head of a Jupiter. It stands
across from my bed, well lit, so that I can immediately direct my morning
devotion to it.]101 In these passages, one detects that the sensual sounds
and architectural sights are unified and glorified not only by their appro-
priation, but also by their reception and appreciation in the connoisseur’s
‘sensible’ soul.102 Many paintings can therefore be found of artists eager to
be seen seeing in order to prove their aesthetic sensibility or instruct the
Reading Ruin 147
Figure 29
viewer about the worthiness and evocative character of the scene within the
scene (Figures 29, 30, and 31).
The technique is similar to Michael Fried’s descriptions of French paint-
ing after 1750, when he said new techniques were used to seduce the viewer.
According to Fried, painters begin to attract viewers’ gaze and hold them in
stopped time; however, they can only achieve this by negating the viewer’s
own presence. Instead of using frontal figures, artists turn figures with
their backs to the viewer to invite the viewer to engage sympathetically in
viewing the scene.103 Such paintings, encouraged by contemporary critics
Denis Diderot and Melchior Grimm, secure their appeal by hiding their
artifice. In picturesque landscape paintings too, as Michasiw describes it,
the evocative landscape is achieved through “the representation’s implica-
tion of multiple prospects available only to those within the frame.”104 In
other words, in engravings such as the one of Nicholas Revett in Figure
29, and in paintings such as those by Thomas Hearne and James Lambert
in Figures 30 and 31, the painted spectator mediates between the scene
and the (implied or historical) viewer, just as the fictional editor mediates
between the protagonist’s suffering and the (implied or historical) reader.
In all three cases, a tableau is established, nature is ‘fi xed,’ an emotive
source is safely framed and presented, and the reader or viewer is indirectly
instructed about the appropriate response to a scene. The Nicholas Revett
drawing dramatizes the contrast between the static ‘fi xing’ of the artist
148 Ruined by Design
Figure 30
and the unruly nature he seeks to ‘fi x’ by framing the artist from within a
grotto and by including a horse-taming scene in the external frame. The
grotto frames the exterior activities, just as the horse tamers seek to tame
Reading Ruin 149
Figure 31
the horses, and the artist attempts to fi x nature on paper. The artifice of
painting becomes explicit, yet at the same time it is also naturalized. The
two paintings are very effective in showing the looming and inspiring force
of monumental ruins, and both use a similar composition with ruins tow-
ering above and to the right of the artists. In all three cases, artifice and
nature are intertwined, so that it is difficult to ascertain where vegetation
and rocks end and ruin begins. Like the protagonist-narrator, the illus-
trated artist has dual roles—he is simultaneously a spectator moved by the
sight and also an artist recording it on paper or canvas.
This dynamic is especially striking when the artist portrayed is the
same as the artist painting the actual painting, as is the case with Lambert
(Figure 31) as well as with Revett. Just as Sterne and Goethe introduce
autographical elements into their novels of sensibility, the layer of self-
referentiality adds an additional frame of authorship. The painter is dou-
bled into two characters—both of whom are participants and narrator/
recorders—Erzähler and Erzählung. The ultimate effect is not so much
to mask authority per se, since the brush is not disguised, but rather to
highlight the painter’s authentic involvement in nature and thereby mask
his artificiality. The techniques suggest painters’ emotional involvement in
painting the scene as men of feeling, taste, and virtue.
150 Ruined by Design
Within the novels of sensibility that we have examined, not only do
Sterne and Goethe portray themselves portraying the narrator (and portray
the narrator portraying himself portraying the man of feeling at the cen-
ter of the novel!), but throughout the novels, including Mackenzie’s Man
of Feeling, there are inset scenes which show how characters react to a
series of spectacles. Yorick, Harley, and Werther all serve as models for
the reader of how to see and respond emotionally to scenes around them
(“training the imagination to feel with the eyes”). The reader is to respond
as a man of feeling (regardless of gender) according to the pedagogy of see-
ing that the novel establishes. Thus Gilpin and Yorick both serve as models
of traveling for the reader, and, more literally, Werther serves as a model
reader within his novel. Just as Werther is a model reader of Ossian, trans-
ported by his moods, the Editor is a model reader of Werther’s letters, and
we implied readers are to model our reactions accordingly, spurred on by
the editor’s marginalia. One of the results of this dynamic is that external
events, including episodes with other minor characters, function as stimuli
for delicate emotions in the observing ‘heart’: minor characters, and indeed
all external phenomena, become means to a private end. Thus we fi nd,
for example, that all the chapter headings in Journey refer to apparently
insignificant stimuli, such as “A Remise” or “The Passport” that are lent
significance because of the private emotions they inspire in a feeling heart.
This dynamic works two ways: it can glorify the unnoticed, the commonly
ignored; however, it can also trivialize that which is significant independent
of the viewer or as an end in itself, by reducing everything to spectacle.105
Within novels of sensibility, we can perceive a similar dynamic between
the dramatized narrators and the implied reader. As early as the preface of
Werther, the Herausgeber invites the rare and worthy reader to join the
elite group who can sympathize with Werther. Frequently, the Herausge-
ber’s notes (and asterisks) imply a similar point: feeling hearts have no need
of words, and those who have no feeling heart, would not understand the
words anyway, since only the imaginative sympathy of the rare individual
can fi ll the gaps left by words’ impotence.
Sensibility evokes a strong division between the singular man of feeling
and all the rest of the world; the reader is enlisted to pronounce him or
herself as a member of this natural aristocracy based on feeling rather than
conventional standards. The fate of Harley’s papers informs the reader
before the story has even begun that Harley is too delicate, too virtuous,
for common understanding; he therefore relies upon the sympathy of a
precious few to preserve his story.106 Mackenzie uses many inset scenes—
internalized tales within the novel—to separate the sympathetic auditors
and spectators from the heartless masses. By implication, he weeds out
unsympathetic readers as well. In Werther there are no auditors who fully
understand and appreciate Werther, including even the addressee of his
many letters. The reader must fi ll in the gap of sympathy, therefore, and
feel ennobled by the role. Sterne’s Yorick, too, writes: “there is so little
Reading Ruin 151
true feeling in the herd of the world, that I wish I could have got an act of
parliament, when the books fi rst appeared, that none but wise men should,
look into them.”107
Inherent in the structure of the novel of sensibility, given its dual
impulses, is the fl attery of the reader, whose participatory role in the
novel doubles both as a rescue mission as well as a self-assertion of vir-
tuous sensibility (since sympathy is both expression and self-representa-
tion). The sympathetic reader is, by defi nition, neither of the “herd of the
world,” nor cold and unfeeling—as long as the reader is also uncritical of
the text, its protagonists, and its author. Filling in the fragmentation of
the rhetoric of silence (or imaginatively completing the rhetoric of ruins)
draws one into the community of those who recognize the insufficiency
of language, those who need no external authority to achieve consensus,
and those who can ostensibly communicate without sullying their feelings
with words. As the editor says of Harley: “There are some feelings which
are perhaps too tender to be suffered by the world. The world is in general
selfish, interested, and unthinking, and throws the imputation of romance
or melancholy on every temper more susceptible than its own.”108 The
‘reader of feeling’ represents, as it were, natural human goodness in a cold
and decadent world.
This sentimental education (or seduction) of the reader is not without a
price, however, for the eighteenth-century ‘reader of feeling.’ This reader
had to survive the accompanying pressures of a mechanistic approach to
the picturesque, which measured potential for feeling by the appearance of
grief (or the number of tears shed), and established canonical barometers
of feeling, such as responses to the writings of Richardson, Sterne, Goethe,
Mackenzie, and Ossian. Frequently the author’s name alone sufficed to
elicit the desired response. The Monthly Review (May 1771), for example,
describes the natural effect of Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling upon the reader
of feeling: “The reader, who weeps not over some of the scenes it describes,
has no sensibility of mind.”109 Diderot writes about the appropriate tearful
reactions to a perusal of Richardson’s Clarissa. And Lady Louisa Stuart
worried that she would not cry enough when reading Henry Mackenzie’s
The Man of Feeling “to gain the proper credit of proper sensibility.”110
Debates over the historical authenticity of Ossian were not as relevant as its
undisputed emotional authenticity: in fact, Ossian, too, was used to judge
the merit (or sensibility) of individual readers. Boswell wrote in a letter to
Erskine, 17 December 1761, for example: “take my word for it, [the High-
land bard] will make you feel that you have a soul.”111
Boswell also records that Erskine and Sheridan “talked very well upon
the poems of Ossian whom Sheridan said he preferred to all the poets in the
world . . . He said that Mrs. Sheridan and he had fi xed it as the standard
of feeling, made it like a thermometer by which they could judge of the
warmth of everybody’s heart.”112 Such codified reactions became so stan-
dard that a nineteenth-century edition of The Man of Feeling “follow[s]
152 Ruined by Design
the author’s intent” by including an “Index to the tears shed (chokings,
etc., not counted).” The list contains entries such as the following:
Amidst all my Lamentations for her (& violent you may suppose they
were) I yet received some consolation in the reflection of my having
paid every Attention to her, that could be offered, in her illness. I had
wept over her every Day—had bathed her sweet face with my tears &
had pressed her fair Hands continually in mine—
—Austen, Love and Freindship
I would give the world for your picture, with the expression I have
seen in your face, when you have been supporting your friend.
—Wollstonecraft, Mary, a Fiction
One has to admit that there is something about other people’s grief that
naturally excites curiosity. This human characteristic causes great debate
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, often revealing profound
doubt about the possibility of natural goodness. Depending upon one’s per-
spective, this natural interest in others’ grief may reveal a heartwarming
fact about human nature or quite the reverse. Smith, Rousseau, and others
during the eighteenth century interpreted curiosity about others’ suffering
(our “brother on the rack”) as a natural spring of human sympathy.
In addition, Smith claims that sympathy actually works to alleviate pain:
“Sympathy . . . alleviates grief by insinuating into the heart [of the suf-
ferer] almost the only agreeable sensation which it is at that time capable
of receiving.” Smith assumes such sympathy to function in conversation
154 Ruined by Design
whenever the sufferer fi nds a person who will listen to the “cause of their
sorrow”: “in relating their misfortunes, they in some measure renew their
grief . . . Their tears accordingly flow faster than before, and they are apt
to abandon themselves to all the weakness of sorrow. They take pleasure,
however, in all of this, and, it is evident, are sensibly relieved by it.”1 Spec-
tators’ curiosity thus allows for a cathartic effect upon the sufferer.
Pity or sympathy, in fact, was elevated to the status of a “moral senti-
ment” by Smith, and viewed as a virtue by others, alongside more traditional
virtues such as charity, courage, and justice. Others, such as Samuel John-
son, Austen, and other more traditional Christian thinkers, had less faith in
human sympathy and innate human goodness, but the tide of the culture of
sensibility strongly favored those who felt that sympathy was not only proof
of human goodness, but that virtue could be measured by the number of
tears one shed or the ease with which one could shed them. Since the culture
of sensibility stems partly from egalitarian desires to notice the downtrod-
den and the unheard, such as children, animals, the wounded, the homeless,
and the insane, there is a distinctly moral and didactic component to these
descriptions of sensibility. The ability to perceive instantly what others leave
unnoticed is a key feature of all heroes and heroines of novels of sensibility.2
It is very difficult to separate sensibility’s emphasis on feelings from its
emphasis on those who feel—to separate sympathizer from sufferer, spectator
from spectacle. The emphasis on the often theatrical demonstrations of sympa-
thy again reveals sensibility’s philosophical insecurity and the fear of a human
tendency towards solipsism or narcissism. Werther, for example, extols his
heart as the root of his delicate sensibility: “dies Herz, das doch mein einziger
Stolz ist, das ganz allein die Quelle von allem ist, aller Kraft, aller Seligkeit
und alles Elendes. Ach, was ich weiß, kann jeder wissen—mein Herz habe
ich allein.” [This heart, which is my only pride, is the lone source of every-
thing—every power, every blessing, and every misery. Ah, anyone can know
what I know—but my heart is mine alone].3 While extolling his excruciatingly
delicate perception of the world around him, the remarks and emphasis on
possession reveal that ultimately his sensibility turns him inward and causes
him to congratulate and admire himself at the expense of his surroundings
and ultimately his senses.4 Sterne in a letter from 1761 makes a strikingly simi-
lar remark: “praised be God for my sensibility! Though it has often made me
wretched, yet I would not exchange it for all the pleasures the grossest sensual-
ist ever felt.”5 One of the interesting problems here is that of Sterne’s complex
eroticism: Sensibility’s dominion over the nerves, rather than muscles (leading
to tingles rather than action), actually allows Sterne to preserve a purity or
chastity in Yorick that he would otherwise not maintain, and which separate
him from “the grossest sensualist.” In a sense, his actions are filial and remain
at least technically chaste, while his nerves are erotic and self-indulgent.
The defi nition of ‘sensibility,’ as we have seen, took on multiple mean-
ings including readiness to respond physically and emotionally to sensory
stimuli. The additional problem here is that the keen and physical response
Constructing Human Ruin 155
could be stimulated by either beauty or suffering: in other words, ‘sen-
sibility’ takes over not only aesthetic terrain but also the moral terrain
of charity. As sympathy and sensibility replace charity, the emotions in
the spectator become more important than any actions that this virtuous
observer might take to alleviate the suffering. Personality and spontaneous,
overflowing feeling replace character, plans, discipline, and, eventually,
action; nerves and glands come to bear greater ethical significance than
muscles. This crucial shift in ethics and aesthetics affects the representation
of sensibility’s protagonists, who increasingly prioritize feeling over action
and sympathy over charity as the movement progresses.
As we have seen, authors of novels of sensibility return to first-person
narrations of distress as opportunities for the simultaneous expression of
sympathy and assertion of sensibility. To weep at another’s grief is to evince
one’s aesthetic and moral status as a man or woman of feeling. The fact that
this grief must be vicarious stems from the desire to confirm a selflessness in
human nature, and yet, the spectatorial necessity of another’s suffering to
prove one’s own merit or to satisfy one’s own sense of virtue is problematic.
As the epigraphs above indicate, sympathy may not be so selfless after all
when it performs its theatrical role within the culture of sensibility. The nar-
cissistic and hypocritical, if not sadistic, potential of these scenes of pathos
becomes especially questionable when coupled with the novel of sensibility’s
masking of authorship. Authors and protagonists write, record, and experi-
ence these scenes of suffering while denying any responsibility for their exis-
tence, let alone offering assistance to the injured parties. Thus, the purposeful
constructions of scenes of distress and ruination within the culture (and
especially cult) of sensibility become fodder for its critics. Uvedale Price, for
example, in his Essay on the Picturesque, does not limit his examples of pic-
turesque sights in nature to landscape and animals, but instead he interweaves
examples of the human picturesque: “beggars, gypsies, and all such rough
tattered figures as are merely picturesque, bear a close analogy, in all the
qualities that make them so, to old hovels and mills, to the wild forest horse,
and other objects of the same kind.”6 In this way, human poverty, age, and
signs of suffering—human ruin, in short—is enabled by, if not authorized and
encouraged by, sensibility’s moral aesthetic. This disturbing fact is exploited
by opponents of sensibility—such as Bernard Mandeville and the Marquis de
Sade—for their own purposes.7
Van Sant discusses the ways in which novelists of sensibility, such as Rich-
ardson, can be seen to adapt a trend in natural science to narratives. Scen-
tific experiments frequently focused on the bodily manifestations of feeling,
and taking this to an extreme, inflicted pain on animals in order to study
the physical results; Van Sant persuasively argues that Richardson’s narra-
tor in Clarissa, for example, acquires a larger role after the rape, somewhat
sadistically helping the reader observe her pain and death in minute detail.8 I
would argue that because of the self-narration in the novel of sensibility, this
focus on the infliction of and response to pain can be seen as masochistic as
156 Ruined by Design
well. This can be another explanation of the need for editorial frames for the
protection of reputation. Not only can these editorial frames help maintain
the fiction and ideal of sympathy, protecting men of feeling from accusa-
tions of sadism, but they also disguise protagonists’ control over their own
suffering in order to avoid the appearance of masochism. In both cases, the
narrative structure helps preserve the reader’s sense of the virtuous or elite
displays in which he or she vicariously participates.
While this study focuses on the narrative prose fiction of sensibility,
Wordsworth’s fi rst publication, a sonnet entitled “On Seeing Miss Helen
Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress” (1786), rather succinctly exem-
plifies sensibility’s moral psychology and its emphasis on receptivity or sen-
sitivity to external behavior and sights, whether the landscape garden, the
Alps, or the sight of human suffering at home.
There are at least four loci of distress in this poem: (1) an unknown party’s
distress that forms the content of the “tale of distress,” (2) the distress dis-
played by Miss Williams as a sympathetic listener, (3) the poet’s distress
as a sympathetic viewer, and (4) the adventures of the historical Williams,
a well-known icon of sensibility.9 The use of a historical figure and icon
of sensibility invites the reader to attribute to Wordsworth the sensibility
exhibited by the narrating voice of the poem—an author’s indirect testi-
mony to himself as a man of feeling, as we saw with Goethe and Sterne.
By the third line, we know that the subject of the poem is the self-image
and delight of the second-hand spectator, rather than Miss Helen Maria
Williams herself. Another is suffering, yet the topic of the description is the
sympathizer/admirer’s own bodily functions: the poet/spectator’s sensibility
is beautifully exemplified using sensibility’s physical hallmarks, including
blood, tears, pulse, fainting, and sighing. The sonnet reveals nothing about
the original source of distress nor the one(s) who suffer: the initial source of
pain is all but forgotten in the poet’s reverie. And of the portrait or tableau
Constructing Human Ruin 157
of Miss Williams, we only see her weeping and hear a sigh. The poet/specta-
tor’s weeping is at a triple or quadruple remove from the source of suffering
and only the last line suggests any benefit to the suffering individual.
The poem also involves the glamorization and eroticization of the sufferer,
the substitution of tears for aid, and the substitution of narration for experi-
ence. On at least four levels in Wordsworth’s poem, spectators eroticize the
spectacle of suffering and glamorize their own ability to perceive it and feel it
vicariously. Claudia Johnson takes a similarly voyeuristic and self-gratifying
phenomenon as the starting point of her book-length study of sentimental-
ism: she records Edmund Burke’s description of the attack of Marie Antoi-
nette in her bedchamber, where he intersperses remarks on his own emotional
responses. Burke is moved to exemplary tears by his own description: “Tears
came again into my Eyes almost as often as I looked at the description. They
may again.”10 Similar to the seats or benches in English garden that allow the
viewer to indulge in the appropriate emotional responses, victims are required
in order to allow spectators to glorify their own sympathy and tears. Words-
worth complies with this tendency to eroticize “dear, delicious pain” and to
describe the pleasure of witnessing purity au naturel, virtue in distress, the
pleasing cracks of the crumbling monument, a human tableau unencumbered
by traditional decorum or reserve.11 Of course, the trajectory of the cult of
feeling described here culminates in the sadistic tendencies most notoriously
developed and distributed in the narrative fiction of the Marquis de Sade,
whose name was adopted to describe the psychological urge.
In a passage from a short epistolary story entitled “Jack and Alice,”
written when she was 11 or 12 years old, Jane Austen spoofs the problem
of self-conscious sympathy and eroticized victimization within the extreme
forms of sensibility. Laura, the heroine, recounts an event to the young
reader of her letters, a scene that two characters fi nd most “interesting”:
She proceeds with her lengthy history of woes, but neither does the narra-
tor mention, nor do the characters seem to notice, that she has a bloody
broken leg, caught in “one of the steel traps so common on gentlemen’s
grounds.” Several pages later we learn that she had been screaming at the
top of her lungs until a servant released her from the trap, and she has still
been lying on the ground with her bloody and “entirely broken” leg while
recounting several pages’ worth of life and adventures.12
158 Ruined by Design
The phrase “Life and adventures,” reminiscent of a subtitle of an eigh-
teenth-century novel, suggests also the entertainment value of the lady’s nar-
rative—and thereby of her distress. “At the melancholy recital, the eyes of all
were suffused with tears.” Finally, however, Lady Williams thinks to set the
leg, which she does with great dexterity “the more wonderfull on account of
her never having performed such a one before.” The explicit delay in providing
medical attention emphasizes the fact that narrative impulses were stronger
than the desire to relieve her pain. Experiencing the stranger’s self-narrated
past distress was more pressing than eliminating her present distress. It is also
unclear what bearing her physical appearance has on the degree to which her
story “interests” her interviewers/ spectators. She is a “fair nymph,” “lovely”
and picturesque, sitting under a citron tree—portrayed detachedly, as a pic-
ture. Austen’s implication seems to be that her situation “interests” the view-
ers only because of a combination of beauty, rank, and distress, and this
“interest” piques the desire for immersion in a narrative.13
Since, within the culture of sensibility, ethics becomes a matter of con-
noisseurship, the rational, tranquil, and conventional can never please aes-
thetically, as the following foil from Love and Freindship demonstrates:
She was very plain and her name was Bridget . . . Nothing therefore
could be expected from her—she could not be supposed to possess ei-
ther exalted Ideas, Delicate Feelings or refi ned Sensibilities—She was
nothing more than a mere good-tempered, civil & obliging Young
Woman; as such we could scarcely dislike her—she was only an Object
of Contempt—.14
Figure 32
160 Ruined by Design
Elsewhere in Love and Freindship, Austen again parodies this ubiqui-
tous story-telling feature of the novel of sensibility: scenes of distress evoke
pity and also entail the narration of personal histories, frequently seeming
(to the critical and unfeeling eye, of course) to place vulgar curiosity above
humane sympathy. Laura recounts “the lucky overturning of a Gentleman’s
Phaeton” and the sight that the heroines saw:
What does she say to him? She asks him to recount his life story since the
time they last met: “Oh! Tell me Edward (said I) tell me I beseech you
before you die, what has befallen you since that unhappy Day in which
Augustus was arrested & we were separated—.”19
These situations parody a culture in which the hobby of ruin-hunting
has expanded from architectural ruin to human ruin as well. Even the aes-
theticization of architectural ruins caused by war can cause a similar ethi-
cal dilemma. We might recall, in this light, Gilpin’s wish for just a little
more “lightness of parts” in Tintern Abbey, a beloved monument for later
Romantics. He explained that if it were only just a little more ruined, it
could achieve the best visual effect—that is, be a little more picturesque.
Most of the authors and protagonists we have dealt with thus far have been
male; such a focus on male authors seems strange when one considers that
most of the novels written in the eighteenth century, according to Patri-
cia Meyer Spacks, were written by women. 23 While not exclusive to male
authors, the masking of authority through multiple narrative frames seems
to be most common among male authors. Somewhat different problems
arise with female authors, not only of the novel of sensibility, but also of the
novel itself, which was gaining cultural respectability as a relatively new
genre in the second half of the eighteenth century. 24 Eighteenth-century
female authors, in contrast, tend to assert their authorship with apologies.
Authors such as Charlotte Lennox and Elizabeth Boyd offer “weakness,
harmlessness, youth, ill health, lack of ambition, fi nancial need—in short,
femaleness—as excuse for [the] presumption” of authoring fiction. 25 The
apologies seem simultaneously to assert weakness and identity; to assert
their authorship in a non-threatening way, perhaps more appealing to audi-
ences unsure about the relationship between authorship and femininity.
Scholars differ as to the effect the culture of sensibility had on female
readers and authors. G. J. Barker-Benfield, for example, claims that sensi-
bility’s cult of feeling empowered women and their favored discourse, by
preferencing feeling and individual experience; Nancy Armstrong similarly
argues that the rise of the novel and the emergence of female authority are
“elements of a single historical event.”26 Adela Pinch is less optimistic in
her interpretation: Pinch argues that the culture of sensibility restricts and
confounds women’s access to their own desires and experiences, by empha-
sizing sympathetic responses to others. Claudia Johnson offers perhaps the
most nuanced, if controversial, interpretation of the effect of sensibility
upon gender: Johnson argues that exaggerated male sensibility is detri-
mental to women’s status, as it casts women in the roles of victims, while
elevating the male suffering gaze higher than that of the victims themselves.
In effect, however, she fi nds that the response of women writing in the
162 Ruined by Design
1790s (such as Burney, Wollstonecraft, and Austen) is to create “equivocal
beings”—beings ambiguous in their sexuality, who overcome the weak-
nesses of sensibility’s sentimental men of feeling without returning to more
traditional gender roles. I argue that the equivocality she describes extends
to style and narrative technique as well: it is a way of describing a response
to sensibility’s philosophical insecurity. 27
Van Sant also argues persuasively that sensibility defi nes a new male
rather than a new female character type. One could argue that ‘woman’ and
‘woman of sensibility’ might have been thought synonymous. For a man to
be so defined by delicacy was noticeable enough to require a label; the senti-
mental characteristics coincide, on the other hand, with cultural expectations
for women. Van Sant argues that the role of physical responses to external
stimuli in narratives of sensibility makes the existence of female heroines
of sensibility socially difficult. For a woman to embark on a man-of-feeling
plot, she would be perceived as an adventuress. “Though Mackenzie’s hero-
ine can report her own experience, sensibility did not represent new modes
of expression for women, nor was it fully available to them. Despite the fact
that the body of sensibility is defined by a reference to a nervous system
conceived as feminine, it does not represent a woman’s body.”28
Pierre Carlet de Marivaux illustrates some of the intricacies of gendered
authorship and authority in mid-century France, in his relentlessly “femi-
nine” novel La Vie de Marianne (1731–41), who is herself “furieusement
femme.”29 His example makes it clear that self-effacing apologies and fram-
ing can coexist as narrative techniques, and may have more to do with
the conventions of gendering the voices within the narrative than with
the gender of the author. Aurora Wolfgang, in a recent study of gender in
the French eighteenth-century novel, notes Marivaux’ historical and eco-
nomic incentive: “feminine-voice novels,” regardless of the gender of the
author, “represent the modern novel of this period” and the public seemed
insatiable for examples of “more personal and idiosyncratic forms of liter-
ary expression.”30 The “feminine-voice novel” as Wolfgang describes it, is
characterized by a “natural and transparent writing style” based in an epis-
tolary tradition and, in France, the oral tradition of salons. She also notes
that with the rising psychology associated with sensibility, “subjectivity
became immanently female.”31
Wolfgang’s study centers on the ways in which Marivaux assiduously
“erases” all traces of masculinity from his writing as he represents several
layers and sources of women’s writing in his novel. Although not noted by
Wolfgang, it is of interest here that Marivaux uses a fictional editor who
fi nds, peruses, appreciates, and publishes Marianne’s letters, but also that
this fictional editor is the only male voice among the “authors” of the novel.
In his short note, the editor notes that the document is “une écriture de
femme” [a woman’s writing], and apologizes that “cette histoire n’intéresse
personne” [this story will interest no one], again using the divided audi-
ence trope to challenge the reader to demonstrate his or her sensibility by
Constructing Human Ruin 163
enjoying the book. 32 Interestingly, Marivaux’ editor also explicitly denies
and limits his own authorship: “Voilà tout ce que j’avais à dire: ce petite
préambule m’a paru nécessaire, et je l’ai fait du mieux que j’ai pu, car je ne
suis point auteur, et jamais on n’imprimera de moi que cette vingtaine de
lignes-ci.” [That is all I had to say: this little preamble seemed necessary to
me, and I made the best of it I could, since I am no author and no one would
ever publish more than my twenty or so lines.]33 In an “avertissement” later
attached to the novel, the fictional editor again apologizes: this time for
the fact that Marianne’s letters include too much thought. In an attempt to
reclaim Marianne’s feminine sensibility, the editor stresses that the reflec-
tive sections of the letters are just a product of varying moods (“suivant le
goût qu’elle y a pris”). 34
In other words, the growing distrust of reason and omniscient narra-
tion that shaped, yet also gradually grew incompatible with sensibility, was
most closely associated with male authors. A male narrator who was not
self-conscious, and therefore not a participant in the action and feelings of
the novel, could be seen as anonymous, heartless, and bringing a random
imposition of the author’s authority. Only spontaneous speech, ‘uncen-
sored’ by strict grammatical rules and ‘untainted’ by practical purpose or
preconceived plans, could count as authentic or sincere. Traditional mas-
culine narrative is equated with cold-hearted rationality and worldliness,
especially if the narrative is dominated by a central omniscient narrator
addressing a public audience and exhibiting the conscious intent of pub-
lication. Both male and female voices in the novels (regardless of histori-
cal genders) must still conform to the gendered expectations of sensibility,
associated with the “feminine voice.”
The focus here is upon the narrative strategies that result from com-
promised authorship. It is not the object here to decipher whether or not
they result from a situation peculiar to female authors, arise because of
changing attitudes towards political authority at large, or simply reflect the
culture of sensibility’s general skepticism about the moral or aesthetic ben-
efits of unmasked authority or authorship. It may be that as male authors
strive to fragment and punctuate their narratives and defer their authorship
in order to appear men of feeling, female authors such as Jane Austen and
Mary Wollstonecraft seek to assert their authority in a way that requires
less masking. “In an era when fashionable male subjectivity veers toward
the luridly sentimental, and sympathy—or fellow-feeling—becomes the
unifying cry of male philosophers, women seem to gain in the sphere of
reason what they may have lost in their traditional dominance in the field
of feeling.”35
In other words, male authors mask their authority, building narrative
follies to achieve the conventional expectations of sensibility; in contrast,
many female authors are trying to escape their own sense of ruination,
while relying on societal discourses that dictate feminine weakness. In
particular, Austen contrives, through her use of free indirect discourse,
164 Ruined by Design
to create a style of narration that is more compatible with intimacy and
sensibility’s humane goals, and which serves her didactic purposes. 36 Aus-
ten turns the masking to a syntactic level: she uses free indirect discourse
as a way of simultaneously asserting and not asserting, narrating and not
narrating, combining omniscience and subjectivity, establishing and deny-
ing her own authority.
Barbara Benedict also sees in Austen’s narrative strategies a “dialectical
tension.” According to Benedict, it arises in the contrast between an audi-
ence desiring an immersion in private and authentic, if vicarious, feelings
and a fear among English society about the ramifications of ungoverned
feelings upon susceptible female readers devouring stories of unchecked
passion in the vulnerable privacy of their own rooms. As Benedict per-
ceives it, the dialectical tension results in the censorship and framing of
tales of feeling by conventional morality and tradition. 37 For Benedict, the
dialectical tension thus comes from a confl ict between the culture of sensi-
bility and more traditional British culture and moral didacticism at large;
I would instead argue that the culture of sensibility inherently relies upon
tension between conservative and utopian forces, between skepticism and
optimism, between narration and anti-narration. For Benedict, pedagogy
intrudes upon the cult of feeling, whereas I would argue that the novel
of sensibility develops, alongside the picturesque, not only a characteristic
moral aesthetic, but also a characteristic pedagogy of its own—training its
readers to feel and respond to a variety of spectacles, following the example
of model readers or viewers purposely imbedded in the texts. Sensibility’s
masked urge to instruct is, in fact, one of the most powerful expressions of
its philosophical insecurity.
Interestingly, conventional eighteenth-century assumptions about the
inherent qualities of the female mind or of female speech are not terribly
different from some contemporary (often essentialist) feminist conceptions
of female discourse or female narration. Conventionally, eighteenth-century
women’s discourse was considered disorganized and impulsive: it “circles
around the subject self with its tumbling, unordered phrases and imprecise
language”; it challenges the central singular authority of objective narra-
tion, long considered a masculine style, through its “value for multiplicity
and feeling.”38 This discourse can be described in negative terms as “disor-
derly, disorganized, incoherent, illogical, irrational,”39 or in more positive
terms as “less analytic than synthetic, more intuitive than logical, more
complex than simple; in other words . . . having an appearance of disorder
that conceals a particularly complex mode of order.”40 The most general
features are non-linearity, resistance to traditional (male, omniscient, pub-
lic, detached) narration, and the pursuit of innovative means to replicate
the immediacy of experience, uncensored by reason, resulting in a prefer-
ence for fragmentation, subjectivity, and private discourse over linearity,
objectivity, and public discourse. Accordingly, the most popular form of
prose fiction for eighteenth-century female authors is the epistolary novel,
Constructing Human Ruin 165
which conveniently eliminates the narrator and emphasizes the female pro-
tagonists’ immediacy of experience. In other words, the central difference
between “male” and “female” discourse echoes the difference between the
language of authoritative detachment and the language of immediate expe-
rience, between narration and anti-narration, between public discourse
and private discourse.
Part of the difficulty surrounding detached narration stems from the fact
that, as Benedict states, “Eighteenth-century fiction accords detachment
moral power, the right to decide who and what is valuable. This detach-
ment . . . is conventionally prohibited to women because it is structured by
a narrative point of view founded on models of masculine writing which
are informed by a neoclassical preference for generality,” one form of overt
authorial contrivance.41 This tension between detachment and experience,
or between generality and particulars, is central to the culture of sensibility
as a whole and to its epistemological suspicion of knowledge as it is associ-
ated with authority, even when not explicitly connected to issues of gender.
In practice, the novel of sensibility in the latter half of the eighteenth cen-
tury champions the ambivalent, rather than the radical. Not yet espousing
purer forms of the unchecked language of immediate expression (such as
the modernist stream-of-consciousness style of Virginia Woolf), the culture
of sensibility still requires the tension between those who experience imme-
diacy and those who merely record it, whereas Woolf’s narrators themselves
record and “publish” without needing the assistance of a less feeling editor
to organize their experiences. In fact, even the hope or desire for such orga-
nizational force has been lost in post-WWII disappointments. If, in other
terms, sensibility’s ambivalence is a tension between the neoclassical and
patriarchal tradition of literary order, closure, and monument on the one
hand, and the feminized literary culture with a new value for fragmenta-
tion, chaos, and ruin, on the other, then it could be argued that ruination is
another word for non-linearity or for the “feminization” of the novel.
In order to appeal to sensibility’s contempt for overt authoritative detach-
ment and omniscient narration, male authors use ‘female’ narrative style in
order to hide their public authority as authors; they effectually cross-dress
using a stereotypically female avoidance of narration, in order to appeal to
their audiences. Male and female characters must vie for the greater sen-
sibility, the greater responsiveness, the greater passivity—and ultimately
the greater victimization and failure within the novel of sensibility. The
extremes of sensibility, including its ‘feminized’ heroes, thus become open
fodder for parody and ridicule by the end of the century.
Within the novel of sensibility, the need for narratorial frames can be
seen as analogous to the picturesque desire to hide the “marks” of author-
ship and construction; narrative frames also reveal sensibility’s insecurity
regarding omniscient narration and the moral authority it seems to wield.
The epistolary tradition characteristically appeals to the authority of expe-
rience by highlighting the specific circumstances of individual experience
166 Ruined by Design
and promoting an ethics of sympathy, whereas the tradition of more omni-
scient narration provides greater distance from individuals and the pos-
sibility of comparing and evaluating situations philosophically, promoting
an ethics of comparison and abstraction. The frames within the novel of
sensibility allow it to champion the authority of experience over the author-
ity of narration, just as an epistolary novel does, yet it also explicitly pro-
tects the experiential quality of the novel by delegating narrative urges (and
commercial interests) to other fictional “authors.” Authors of sensibility
must negotiate the Scylla and Charybdis of excessive subjectivity (narcissis-
tic solipsism) and excessive objectivity (generalization, moralism, disregard
for individuals), taking into account the benefits of each form of author-
ity. Ultimately, suspicion against detachment propels sensibility’s novel-
ists (and their self-conscious protagonists) towards ‘monument’ as well as
‘ruin,’ towards the desire to narrate their experience as well as to preserve
the immediate authentic experience in its unordered state. The result is
the delicate balance that the term ‘monumental ruin’ suggests; however, as
we see above, the balance easily degenerates into hypocrisy, abdication of
responsibility, or self-absorption, as well as attraction to sadism.
Passages such as the above sections of “Jack and Alice” as well as Love
and Freindship have been taken by critics such as Marilyn Butler as a sign
that Austen renounces sensibility; however, close attention to the themes
presented in her novels tend rather to reveal not only her intimate and
formative experience with the culture, literature, and moral aesthetic of
sensibility, but also her genuine attachment to many of its central tenets.
The force and economy of her parody may be directly proportional to the
attachment and acquaintance Austen had with the culture before it deterio-
rated to cultish extremes. In other words, Austen attacks only the sensibil-
ity that becomes insensible to others, to nature, and even to its adherents
through excessive codification, elitism, victimization, or narcissism, and
which encourages human ruin.
Sensibility’s revision of authority and authorship, along with its dual
impulses, thus profoundly affects even a writer who, in many ways, defi nes
herself in opposition to it. In her own narrative innovations, Austen discov-
ers a way effectively to combine the strengths of Fielding’s central narrative
voice with the demand for the authenticity of uncensored individual experi-
ence, championed among male authors by Richardson and Rousseau. She
combines the balanced prose of the Augustan essayistic tradition (authors
such as Addison, Steele, and her beloved Dr. Johnson) with the immediacy
of the female epistolary tradition—a form which figures prominently (in
fact, almost exclusively) in her earliest writings, intended for family enter-
tainment rather than publication. In the process of adjusting her writing
to a public audience and reclaiming female authority, Austen adjusts the
female epistolary tradition to new ends, attempting to avoid sensibility’s
cultish extremes. A closer look reveals that her characteristic innovations
in narrative style actually reflect her own ambivalence regarding authority,
Constructing Human Ruin 167
as well as her own dual impulses, and her desire to reclaim sensibility from
its more extreme forms. Basing her innovations on the narrative fragmenta-
tion and editorial framing characteristic of the novel of sensibility, Austen
both reflects and rejects the culture of sensibility, based partly on her thor-
ough knowledge of the authors in the previous pages. In her innovations
and revisions of Sense and Sensibility.
Austen shows the limits of both forms of moral authority. The author-
ity based on individual experience is unreliable, especially since it lacks
distance, perspective, and objectivity; the authority of narration must also
be chastened of its claims to objective knowledge in order to allow the
coexistence of multiple perspectives. In order to reform the expectations of
an audience steeped in the culture of sensibility, Austen uses familiar struc-
tures from the culture of the picturesque and from the culture of sensibility
to develop a narrative style that can reclaim authority, public discourse, and
narrative detachment without returning to older masculine ideals of ratio-
nal detachment, omniscient narration, and univocal objectivity. In Sense
and Sensibility, for example, Austen retains twenty-two letters that mark
its epistolary origins,42 and develops her innovative use of free indirect dis-
course and narrative perspective to establish a dominant voice that allies
the reader with Elinor’s more mature, but not omniscient, perspective.
Observation is a key human ability that is under debate, even internally
within Sense and Sensibility, as Austen revises sensibility’s pedagogy of
seeing for her own purposes. For Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sen-
timents, observation allows for sympathetic and imaginative interaction
with other individuals, and bridges the chasm between individual expe-
riences, separated as we are by our own bodies. As Smith describes it,
observation gains value primarily in so far as it trains and authorizes the
“demigod within the breast” to sympathize with others, particularly in
their suffering. Observation, however, is also key to a more Enlighten-
ment-based rational value for general observation, allowing one to gain
philosophical perspective and detachment by separation from others and
even from one’s own immediate situation. This latter understanding also
implies an authority—earned through observation and reflection—to judge
others’ behavior (Benedict’s concern). In Austen’s hands, the two roles for
observation are melded: observation serves the purposes both of sympathy
and comprehension; individual ethics need not be sacrificed, as Marianne
initially thinks, for the sake of determining propriety or virtue.
Recognizing its dangers and potential hypocrisy, Austen tries to revise
sensibility’s pedagogy of seeing to accord with a sense of individual respon-
sibility, an engagement in the community at large, an admiration of tran-
quility and self-control, and the possibility of community, all of which
tend to be absent from its cultish extremes. 43 Austen is particularly con-
cerned about the moral consequences of purposeful ruination, especially
when ruination involves the victimization of real trees, real abbeys, or
especially real human beings, sacrificed to suit a fleeting fashion—when
168 Ruined by Design
self-narration becomes a vehicle for another’s self-promotion, and, as in
the epigraph from Sterne, “sickening incidents of a tale of misery” pro-
vide “moral delight.” In Sense and Sensibility, Elinor’s teasing question to
Marianne “Confess, Marianne, is there not something interesting to you in
the flushed cheek, hollow eye, and quick pulse of a fever?” actually signifies
a much greater issue within the culture of sensibility—namely, the enjoy-
ment of other people’s suffering for the sake of an aesthetic principle. The
focus here will be to uncover Austen’s own version of the multiple narrative
frames we saw in Sterne, Mackenzie, and Goethe, a technique that Austen
adapts to train her reader in the ethics of ‘translation,’ the possible abuses
of authority and authorship, and the potential decadence of the fascination
with ruination and primitivism.44 If Yorick portrays sensibility’s character-
istic ambivalence regarding authority and authorship, and Werther shows
the mortal stakes involved in authorship, and authentic self-representation,
then Marianne and Elinor Dashwood, as Austen portrays them, redeem
both authorship and the possibility of public speech.
Especially in her main novels, Austen turns issues of sensibility and pic-
turesque codes onto her narrative techniques, not only by applying ear-
lier novelists’ use of narrative frames to her own work, but also by using
them as a didactic technique to encourage similar growth in her reader.
One central goal for her protagonists is successful self-representation in
a Hobbesian world despite limitations of language and a fallen nature. In
response, Austen builds a style of narrative representation that combines
both narrative and anti-narrative impulses in one character, manipulating
narrative sympathy and the reader’s participation, while reclaiming a form
of authority and authorship that is compatible with sensibility, as well as
with self-control and responsibility, all the while aiming at a reconciliation
of public discourse and private intimacy and the edification of an implied
reader imbued with the novel of sensibility.
Figure 33
or suffering distress, and the nature and content of the distress are all
unknown to the viewer, and presumably have little bearing on her status
as Sensibility personified. Her response alone serves to distinguish her,
regardless of the stimulus. In addition, the woman of sensibility looks
186 Ruined by Design
as though in the next frame she were more likely to fall backwards on
a couch in a swoon, than to rush forward to aid someone in distress: it
becomes evident that the ideal heroine in the cult of sensibility is ulti-
mately as incapable of action and foresight as she is of syntactically com-
plete expression. Finally, there appears an incongruity between the cause
of the emotion and its degree of dramatic expression, which eventually
leads to accusations of inauthenticity. In this sense the culture of sen-
sibility authorizes personal ruin alongside architectural decay, for the
sake of its aesthetic ideal. Whatever is actually suffering or moving in the
picture is secondary in importance to the viewer and she who feels sym-
pathy and evinces sensibility. Sensibility has become a means of display,
rather than feeling, and is entirely involved with the image of the person
who would like to be considered “feeling.”
Most importantly for the point here, Romney made no secret of the fact
that Sensibility was also one of his series of portraits of Emma Hart, the
later Lady Hamilton, who was admired not only for her beauty, but also her
ability to act. Romney’s biographer William Hayley describes why Romney
liked to paint her: “Her features, like the language of Shakespeare, could
exhibit all the feelings of nature, and all the graduations of every passion,
with a most fascinating truth, and a felicity of expression.”119 As a result of
“her eloquent features,” Emma Hart Hamilton inspired a full-length Circe,
a Calypso, a Magdalen, a Wood Nymph, a Bacchante, the Pythian Priestess
on her tripod, and a Saint Cecilia in addition to the portrait of Sensibility.
Later in her life, she became famous as a sort of walking tableau, for pos-
ing in her “attitudes” in the court of Naples: these were a series of “poses
plastiques,” where, just as in her portraits with Romney, she would repre-
sent a series of classical and other figures.120
As we see, one of the incipient dangers within the culture of sensibility
(that ultimately leads to its degeneration into cultish extremes) is that the
images of emotion begin to be equated with or even preferred to the senti-
ments themselves. This is consistent with Diderot’s call for tableaux in the
new genre of bourgeois drama (genre sérieux): according to Diderot, well
chosen frozen attitudes may have the greatest effect upon spectators of the
spectacle (similar to what had already been demonstrated in “absorptive
painting,” the realist mode connected with Greuze and Chardin at mid cen-
tury). As Thomas Sheridan, master rhetorician, writes: “Let any one who
has seen Mr. Garrick perform, consider how much he was indebted to the
language of his eyes, and there will be no occasion to say more, to give him
an idea of the extent and power of expression to which that language may
be brought.”121 The stage actor Garrick is a model for the natural language
of feeling to imitate, as the pose of Emma Hart is a model of sensibility’s
virtuous sympathy for the suffering.
Like an English garden with a variety of interesting monuments that are
each designed to invoke distinct emotions as one travels from sight to sight,
such visual tableaux are also opportunities for adherents of the culture of
Constructing Human Ruin 187
sensibility to demonstrate their spectatorly prowess. The pedagogy of seeing
and feeling emphasized both in landscape gardening and the novel of sensibil-
ity thus responds to the new need to cultivate feelings rather than suppress
them. These examples suggest that the culture of sensibility values the ability
to communicate emotion, regardless of whether this emotion is authentically
felt. The most important factor is whether the spectator viewing this “pic-
ture of sympathy” feels emotionally aroused. In this way, the two movements
develop a parallel emphasis on distress and ruination—sensibility focusing
on human suffering and distress while the picturesque emphasizes crumbling
ruins in architecture and landscape. The emphasis throughout the culture of
sensibility is on spurring the imagination as well as on training the emotions
to respond to various scenes, whether human, botanical, or architectural.
They also both involve on-lookers traveling from sight to sight, seeking the
views and situations that fit particular aesthetic criteria and that evoke the
appropriate emotions. As we have seen, eventually both movements share the
dubious distinction of pursuing such ruination voluntarily, for the sake of
entertainment and self-image. The result is, for a decade or two, a seemingly
hypocritical national pastime of seeking grief and ruination to prove onlook-
ers’ own sensibility and virtue.
Just as the visitor to Hirschfeld’s gardens at Hohenheim, Monville’s
Désert de Retz, or the Kew Gardens are aware of what type of participation,
admiration, and affect is required, the ‘reader of feeling’ also encounters an
approach to the picturesque that measures potential for feeling according
to visual displays. Austen echoes the pressure on implied readers in “Fred-
eric and Elfrida,” when the narrator proclaims, in reference to a ridiculous
little epitaph: “These sweet lines, as pathetic as beautifull [sic] were never
read by any one who passed that way, without a shower of tears, which if
they should fail to excite in you, Reader, your mind must be unworthy to
peruse them.”122 The reader of the novel of sensibility must fi ll in the narra-
tive gaps with sympathy or even tears and feel ennobled by the role.
As we have seen, both the culture of sensibility and the picturesque favor
the inclement, the ruined, the irregular, the decaying, and the suffering
for the sake of their aesthetic criteria. Thomas Rowlandson parodies this
trait in his illustration of an artist working hard to locate the picturesque
in all sorts of inclement weather (Figure 34). The artifice of this artist,
supposedly pursuing natural vistas, is highlighted by the sheer volume of
equipment that he carries. He nonetheless has a hand to carry an umbrella
and shield himself from the rain, showing that he cares about his own
comfort almost as much as he is fanatical about the “picturesque.” He is
bent over and haggard, completely uninterested in what surrounds him—
both natural vistas and the “interesting” plight of a young mother with her
three children. The young family (who have no umbrella amongst them)
look inquisitively at the man. In short, the artist is portrayed as allowing a
fanaticism with the picturesque to blind him to both nature and humanity.
And while he thinks of himself as braving weather for aesthetic pursuits, he
188 Ruined by Design
Figure 34
does not consider that others may have to endure it less willingly, making
his distress a “luxury” indeed.
In Marianne’s initial terms, “twisted trees” are better than straight,
and suffering from “violent fever” is better than having to wear a waist-
coat against catching a cold. Monuments are more picturesque when they
are decayed, and people are more “interesting” (and allow greater oppor-
tunities for exhibiting sensibility) when they are suffering. When com-
bined with the strict aesthetic codes associated with sensibility and the
picturesque, this preference for ruination at times amounts to a mode of
entertainment. As it happens, the English garden transitions from a locus
for reflection, to an opportunity to express sympathy, to a stage for the
performance of sensibility, and fi nally to pleasure grounds for entertain-
ment and novelty. In this sense, the English garden is a forerunner of the
modern amusement park, as Figure 35 and 36 show. Figure 35 shows
plans for a variety of “rides” where one can display oneself to advantage,
and Figure 36 depicts a forerunner of the modern roller coaster. The tran-
sition from sentiment to amusement also raises some disturbing issues.
When applied to the dynamic of sympathy, only those who are “interest-
ing” (or entertaining) deserve attention, just as the characters in Austen’s
Constructing Human Ruin 189
Figure 35
190 Ruined by Design
Figure 36
Figure 37
194 Ruined by Design
We need only recollect Henry’s stern lecture to Catherine in Northanger
Abbey, after she has indulged in transforming Northanger Abbey in her
imagination into an Italianate melodrama with a bloody history that might
even satisfy the author of The Monk: “Consult your own understanding,
your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing
around you.”132 Meanwhile, Catherine loses her ability to assess “what is
around her”—including the real dangers, folly, and vice that are present in
Northanger Abbey and her world in general. Leaving aside for the moment
how dangerous her own world actually is, in succumbing to the temptation
to glamorize, Catherine temporarily loses her ability to be an independent
spectator and moral agent. Until Catherine recognizes her own authorship
of the laundry-list she fi nds in the guest bedroom at Northanger, she can-
not understand the world around her, and she will remain incapable of
seeing her friends for who they really are.
There is generally one character in each of Austen’s novels who is dead
to real intrigue because she prefers to create her own; she wishes to be an
author of her own novel according to the fashions of the day. Other char-
acters in her novels also reveal the dangers of masked authorship: Emma
Woodhouse exhibits such traits in her stubborn insistence on seeing roman-
tic potential in Harriet Smith rather than Jane Fairfax, much as Marianne
chooses to prefer her scripted intrigue with Willoughby over the actual
potential for romantic interest in Colonel Brandon. This kind of authorship
is not limited to women: Wentworth, too, in Persuasion, must acknowl-
edge his own authorship of the past before he can reunite with Anne Elliot;
symbolically, he drops “his pen” at the moment of this recognition.
“We shall never agree upon this question,” Captain Harville was begin-
ning to say, when a slight noise called their attention to Captain Wen-
tworth’s hitherto perfectly quiet division of the room. It was nothing
more than that his pen had fallen down; but Anne was startled at find-
ing him nearer than she had supposed, and half inclined to suspect that
the pen had only fallen because he had been occupied by them, striving
to catch sounds, which yet she did not think he could have caught.133
When he lifts his pen again, it is in full recognition of his earlier self-vic-
timization and denial of responsibility. What follows, and is reflected in
the style of the letter he composes, is a co-authorship of the letter (and by
extension, their futures) with Anne. The content of the letter responds to
her commentary at the windowsill, as though in dialogue with Anne. The
Roger Michell fi lm adaptation of Persuasion (1995) portrays this narrative
technique quite effectively using non-diegetic voice-overs of both Anne and
Wentworth reading the letter—fi rst Wentworth’s voice alone, then alter-
nating lines with Anne in briefer and briefer intervals, until they both read
in unison by the end of the letter, symbolically culminating the letter in
co-authorship.134
Constructing Human Ruin 195
Beginning and ending as it does with Sir Walter and his volume on the
Baronetage, a volume which he carefully edits, and in which he is delighted
to see his own image, Persuasion provides reflection on male authorship.
As Anne complains in her debate with Captain Harville, she will not
“allow books to prove anything” since men have had more opportunities
for authorship and books therefore tend to reflect men’s subjective opin-
ions rather than reality as a whole: “Education has been theirs in so much
higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands.” And while Wentworth’s
relinquishing (and sharing) of his pen suggests hope for the democratiza-
tion or socialization of the authority associated with authorship, this is not
necessarily true for society at large. Sir Walter, for example, accepts Anne’s
marriage by a reversion to his authoritarian and self-referential authorship:
Wentworth’s good looks and “well sounding name” “enable[-] Sir Walter,
at last, to prepare his pen, with a very good grace, for the insertion of
the marriage in the volume of honour.”135 The reclamation of authorship
for Austen works better at the individual level than the societal; her pri-
mary concerns are psychological rather than political. Perhaps therefore,
in addressing the culture of sensibility, Austen is concerned with the occa-
sions where the denial of authority leads to the forsaking of responsibility.
In this way, Austen balances the limits of authority with the recognition of
its inescapable necessity.
In chastening the cult of sensibility, Austen instead offers a new kind
of heroism—dramatically different in the context that she is writing. This
new heroism of daily life applies to readers as well. Austen stresses the
courage and strength it takes to achieve moderation, the “exertion” that it
takes to achieve civility towards fools and enemies, the heroism that can
be involved in the expression of “good Cheer,” or the difficulty of achiev-
ing “tranquility.” (The latter themes are prominent in Pride and Prejudice
and Persuasion.) Austen’s new heroism challenges the culture of sensibil-
ity without rejecting it, yet it also marks a return to some of sensibility’s
core impulses. Only by pursuing the common or by paying attention to
the ordinary details of daily life, can one preserve the societal bonds that
unite us, whether friend or foe, despite the limitations of language and our
own solipsistic tendencies. Austen’s is a heroism of the “common”—a criti-
cal word in Northanger Abbey, where it is used in opposition to Isabella’s
favorite word “amazing.” The intoxicated pursuit of amazement, horror,
the sublime, the picturesque, sensibility, or even charm, wit, or vivacity,
will blind us to each other and cause us to lose our perceptive powers—the
key to our independence. In this sense, Austen’s project was a return to
sensibility’s goal of encouraging the keen observation of others necessary
to feel sympathy—a pedagogy of seeing, purged of connections to the cult
of the “interesting.”
By using readerly expectations to achieve a complex dynamic between nar-
rator and implied reader, Austen forces readers to recognize their expectations
of the novel, particularly their concept of the “interesting.”136 Ultimately the
196 Ruined by Design
reader is again challenged to perceive sensibility in the heroine who does not
initially fit the category of the interesting or picturesque. Austen’s attempted
reformation of sensibility is limited by the fact that our admiration for Elinor
is inherently linked to her degree of suffering. The two heroines never actually
remove themselves from sensibility’s trope of competing for misery and simul-
taneously for the sympathy of the reader. In Persuasion, Austen finds a better
solution to this problem, further removing herself from the ethical dilemmas
of sensibility. Suffering and prudence are united in one character, Anne Elliot.
And Anne’s portrayal, devoid of Marianne’s tableaux by the fireplace and at
the window, is singularly un-visual. Since Anne is largely unobserved, she is
also no one’s spectacle. Appropriately enough, as Austen struggles to find a
way to revise her didactic impulses to accord with her moral philosophy, we
readers are taught a basic lesson in sympathy ourselves.
Afterword
The Luxuries of Distress
Figure 38
Afterword 199
our literature, our gardens, our clothing, and our furniture, not to mention
our minds. In literary theory, deconstruction, whose name seems to invoke
purposeful ruination, also glories in contradictory impulses, crumbling
(intellectual and institutional) edifices, and exposed suffering. The name
itself combines both the narrative or monumentalizing urges (construction)
and the opposing anti-narrative urges that prefer the ruin (destruction).
It, too, particularly as formulated by Jacques Derrida, reacts to perceived
limitations of language, 5 and glories in the use of punctuation to fragment
the act of reading. In the case of the syntactic style generally practiced in
deconstruction, individual words are frequently perforated with punctua-
tion marks in order to represent their instability as signifiers, engaging the
reader in a non-linear game of self-conscious meaning-making. At least ini-
tially, deconstruction would seem to embrace ambivalence in a way that
is similar to sensibility, since “If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive
reading, it is not the text, but the claim to unequivocal domination of one
mode of signifying over another.”6 However, deconstruction is far more
univocal in its normative assertions of ambivalence or of inconclusion as
the only mode in language as well as in contemporary society. While self-
consciously referring to play, jouissance is an end in itself, and ultimately
less playful, I would argue, than the culture of sensibility’s dual impulses.
Deconstruction’s playfulness is limited by its resignation to the human isola-
tion and solipsism so feared by authors in mid-eighteenth-century Europe.
In short, deconstruction exhibits the same fears without the accompanying
(or compensating) exuberance, the appreciation of ruination without the
ambivalence generated by a lingering and defiant esteem for monuments.7
And yet, deconstruction, like sensibility, has spawned a style of architec-
ture that similarly exhibits a rich cross-fertilization between disciplines of
study or art forms. Figure 39 shows one in a series of architectural struc-
tures, still unfi nished, installed in a public garden in Paris, designed by
Bernard Tschumi. Interestingly enough, the project, upon which Derrida
consulted, is self-consciously referential to the culture of sensibility and to
the history of the English garden, for the structures are called “folies” or
follies (also meaning “madness” in French). Dozens of red metal structures
are erected at uniform distances in a grid-like pattern in Parc de la Vil-
lette; each one is different in design: “multiple, dissociated, and inherently
confrontational elements—aimed at disrupting the smooth coherence and
reassuring stability of composition, promoting instability and program-
matic madness.”8
Although Tschumi’s project has not yet been completed, neither the bare
metal beams nor the fi nal, intended structures make any attempt to con-
form to their natural surroundings—they resist nature and narrative alike.
“My pleasure,” writes Tschumi, “has never surfaced in looking at buildings
. . . but rather in dismantling them.”9 Like the earlier follies, functionality
is hidden if not entirely avoided, and it is intellectually playful but in a way
that does not invite human story-telling impulses. To tell a story would be
200 Ruined by Design
Figure 39
to invite narrative impulses and the wish for meaning, or for future conclu-
sion or resolution.10 Such logocentric desires are to be avoided, as the frame
with no completion in Figure 39 poignantly suggests.
In an early manifesto of deconstructive architecture, Wolf D. Prix and
Helmut Swiczinky, founders of the Austrian architectural group co-op
Himmelblau, write: “We are tired of seeing Palladio and other histori-
cal masks, because we don’t want architecture to exclude everything that
is disquieting . . . Architecture should be cavernous, fiery, smooth, hard,
angular, brutal, round, delicate, colorful, obscene, voluptuous, dreamy,
alluring, repelling, wet, dry and throbbing.”11 This could almost be a
return to Ledoux and Mézières in the anthropomorphizing of the archi-
tectural structure and the assertion of its dramatic role; in fact, the affec-
tive influence upon the viewer is again paramount. Architecture should
“discomfort and unbalanc[e] . . . expectations.”12 Similarly, the Parc de la
Villette project, according to Tschumi, “can be seen to encourage conflict
over synthesis, fragmentation over unity, madness and play over careful
management . . . subvert[ing] a number of ideals that were sacrosanct.”
These encouragements are made in the name of authenticity, or the lack
of “historical masks”: for the “nostalgic pursuit of coherence . . . ignores
today’s social, political, and cultural dissociations.”13
Afterword 201
This emphasis on discomfort (along with the functional requirements
of architecture as consumer good) invites the hypocritical constructions of
sensibility where primitive huts are actually comfortable on the interior, for
example, or where a cold column could actually host luxurious suites.14 This
brings us back to the hypocrisy at the extremes of (or perhaps at the heart
of) sensibility—namely, the uncomfortable combinations of primitivism and
luxury that we saw in Robert Lugar’s “Design for Cottage and Ruin” (Fig-
ure 19) or in Monville’s Column House at the Désert de Retz (Figures 23
and 24). Such structures again underline the culture of sensibility’s prefer-
ence for primitivism as a spectacle that never quite translates into a practical
alternative, as well as the hypocritical desire to have the benefits of luxury in
the guise of primitivism. As sensibility moves farther and farther away from
a focus on virtue and suffering towards glamour and frivolity, such para-
doxes become painfully apparent and result in the fashionable enjoyment
of “luxurious” grief at the expense of those who grieve in earnest, as well
as self-absorption posing as humane sympathy. I would argue that similar
trends exist in society today, perhaps stemming from the admirable desire
to sympathize with or identify with the downtrodden, yet these attempts
may perversely culminate in the commodification of ruin and distress, and
thus both diminish the possibility for actual human sympathy and distract
us from actual attempts to alleviate distress and poverty.
The political ramifications of these seeming contradictions within sensi-
bility were certainly quite apparent to eighteenth-century audiences, partly
through the extravagancies of Queen Marie Antoinette. The Queen built
her own dairy in her favorite section of the Trianon at Versailles (1787)—a
whole miniature village, in fact, with mill, dairy, aviary, barn, and farm-
house. The Queen would enjoy visiting her dairy wearing pretty frocks and
pretending to live a rural and simple life, while at the same time dining
on dishes designed by Sèvres. She also had a second dairy at Rambouillet,
built by her husband Louis XVI; there again, the interior belies the rustic
pretense of the exterior, since upon entering the doors, one is greeted with
lavish mosaics, marble, and almost life-size sculptures. The King’s “pas-
toral retreat” for the Queen included a real sheep farm for merino wool;
the Queen, however, preferred the other dairy, where there was no offend-
ing smell of animals. A look at the cross-section of the dairy at Rambouil-
let reveals some of the facets of this decadent primitivism: not only is the
inside extremely lavish, but it also includes a grotto and waterfall. There is
the need to evoke “nature” even inside the building through this elaborate
mechanism: in order for the dairy to fulfill its associative goals, it cannot
give away entirely to overt luxury.
The purposefully primitive still commands a cachet, and even a higher
price tag, in the culture of the twentieth- and twenty-fi rst-century United
States. Furniture producers paint furniture white, only to tear off patches of
paint in order to achieve a “distressed” look. Leather is purposely stretched
roughly and unevenly to appear “worn.” Grunge clothing purposely imitates
202 Ruined by Design
the clothing and hairstyles of the homeless and disenfranchised; and denim
is washed with stones and elaborately torn in order to provide the desired
fashion statement. As long as it is fashionable, people pay more for clothing
and furniture that has been partially destroyed, in their eagerness to imi-
tate the downtrodden and to mask (and paradoxically flaunt) their wealth.
Newly constructed malls with brick exteriors are painted with faded paints
to resemble mills that were deserted and then rehabilitated, while actual
rehabilitated mills demand higher rent than new spaces. These are the con-
temporary “luxuries of distress.”15
The “man of feeling” in the contemporary world is not so much pitted
against the “man of the world” or the “man of letters” as was the case in sen-
sibility: he is instead defined in opposition to the “business man,” who rep-
resents finance, power, and the cold unfeeling heart of the corporate world.
He (or she) still conceives of himself (or herself) as the materially innocent
Shaftesburian soul in a cruel, selfish Hobbesian universe, and accessorizes
accordingly. Authority itself is suspect because of its ties to commercial enter-
prises as well, and business is anathema to genuine artistic pursuit, accord-
ing to contemporary codes. Just as the eighteenth-century man of feeling is
a self-defined outsider, the contemporary innocent must struggle to remain
an outsider—on principle. Sensibility, too, is a reaction against civilization,
its unnatural hierarchies, and artificial aristocracies; on the other hand, it
paradoxically also establishes a new, elaborate, and exclusive aristocracy of
its own called the “interesting.” We can see the same dynamic at work today,
and curiously, it is still defined in terms of successful failure.
In fact, defi nitions of the “shabby chic” style of decorating explicitly
(and unconsciously) invoke the language of the picturesque as well as the
paradoxical terms of the culture of sensibility. The language of advertising
thus helps reveal the unconscious degree to which we daily imbibe an aes-
thetic that bears many similarities with the eighteenth-century culture of
sensibility. A brief foray through the advertising campaigns of Rachel Ash-
well, who originally coined the phrase “shabby chic,”16 as well as of oth-
ers who have since imitated her, reflects the paradox inherent in the name
itself. Through this style of décor, one can have rich elegance (“sumptuous
settings”) without the embarrassing ostentation of overt order, newness, or
effort: it is “a style that evokes a comfortable, lived-in feeling”; “unpreten-
tious, yet truly exquisite”; through it, “entertaining need not be expensive
or intimidating.”
The favorite adjectives associated with shabby chic are “worn,” “faded,”
and “rumpled,” satisfying the simultaneous demands for luxury and egal-
itarianism that help defi ne contemporary American culture: “instead of
replacing the worn floor with carpet, they installed lower-grade lumber for
an old-fashioned look. The knots and imperfections only add to the aura of
the home.” The result is a form of masked wealth, analogous to the masked
authority and authorship we found in the culture of sensibility. Wealth is
less “intimidating” if you incorporate “flea market fi nds” into your décor.
Afterword 203
The phrases also suggest a longing for history, regardless of whether or
not it is authentic: “Place something elegant and chic next to something
aged with time”; “wrinkled fabrics only add to the charm”; “upholstery
should not appear pressed, but rather worn”; “paint your furniture white
with a chipped or crackled fi nish, or simply use a white garage sale fi nd that
already appears worn!” This modern antiquarian impulse even encourages
the incorporation of ruined objects such as “concrete column bases, iron
corner brackets, old mantles, and more.” The ruination or fragmentation
of an object is an added attraction: “a broken item can still function . . .
Bringing these things into a room gives it another sense of history that
wasn’t there originally.” The haphazard appearance and avoidance of sym-
metry in shabby chic décor also serves to deemphasize the agency of the
decorator, once again echoing sensibility and the picturesque’s preference
for fi nding over creating, since fi nding involves less obvious contrivance
and effort.
“Ruined by design,” then, refers not only to the self-conscious pursuit of
ruination—or fragmentation—in the novel and garden architecture associ-
ated with sensibility and the picturesque, but is also meant to indicate the
potentially hazardous side of sensibility. Ironically, sensibility’s cherished
emphasis on the keen perception and delicate emotions that allow for sym-
pathy—sensibility’s central hope for humanity—decays into a compelling,
yet uncomfortably narcissistic self-consciousness, and ultimately into hypoc-
risy. Few people who have felt real distress would think it a “luxury.” It is
only when the distress is optional, voluntary, and either vicarious or affected
that one could consider it luxurious. Eventually, the viewer overshadows the
view, and ruin (whether human or architectural) serves as a vehicle for the
reassurance of one’s capacity to feel. Not only used as theatrical proof of
virtue or an attempt to communicate one’s delicate, Shaftesburian soul, the
ruin also serves as a means to self-portrayal, self-promotion, or, at its worst,
sadistic enjoyment of others’ pain. In the modern world, too, the ruin serves
as a means of commodifying the suffering of others.
As we have seen through the excesses of the cult of sensibility, a princi-
pal danger involved with the suspicion and masking of authorship is that
they encourage a deferral or disavowal of responsibility. This is frequently
done in the name of authenticity. Yet, it is nearly impossible not to author
words, letters, literature, and even oneself, since experience and representa-
tion are nearly always separated in time and by selection or other ordering
principles, even if they are calculated attempts to reproduce the effects of
randomness. Like Werther, contemporary audiences often try to fool them-
selves out of rational detachment—to regain the “left side of the brain”
for aesthetic purposes or to achieve a sense of immediacy. Composition
classes refer to “writing from the gut,” or brainstorming, as though the
brain were a Bastille, better taken by storm than allowed to maintain its
predatory, authoritarian grip on thoughts. Contemporary audiences relish
the disjointedness of thoughts as evidence of their freshness, and deplore
204 Ruined by Design
those who still use outlines for composition to be as dull as a Bridget.
Hacks, like Anthony Trollope, who diligently produced a fi xed number
of pages per day in order to earn a living, are disregarded in favor of the
myth of more passionate authors whose prose flows unchecked and uncen-
sored from their pens. Narration and closure are perceived as a form of
intellectual violence, an authoritarian imposition, just as we might have
heard Werther complaining about the impositions of grammar upon his
uncensored speech and writing. Glamour, in other words, is still associ-
ated with the fragmented, the passionate, the uncontrolled, even when the
appearance of these qualities has to be pursued using artificial techniques.
It is the unwillingness to accept our own complicit artifice that places us in
a similar position to the hypocrisy frequently displayed by authors writing
within the cult of sensibility.
Are we resigned to the primacy of chaos? It is perhaps useful to recog-
nize the hypocrisy that leads contemporary thinkers to treat chaos as an
organizing principle of art on the one hand and the despair that leads them
to insist on the univocal acceptance of the lack of absolutes on the other.17
The concept that disorder is a more natural or authentic state of being is
expressive of an aesthetic stance, if not a political one. Authenticity cannot
be aimed at directly—cannot become a goal in its own right. As much as
we might wish to, we cannot escape inauthenticity, because we will never
cease to reflect, to plan, nor to desire order. We cannot escape authentic-
ity either, since we are naturally divided beings. Yet authenticity must be a
by-product of daily living rather than a “lifestyle” or a fashion statement;
otherwise the pursuit of authenticity becomes another superbist Tower of
Babel. The irony of course is that once building ruined towers becomes a
goal, then there is ultimately no difference from the rationalist tower build-
ing in Genesis.
Notes
NOTES TO CHAPTER 1
NOTES TO CHAPTER 2
NOTES TO CHAPTER 3
NOTES TO CHAPTER 4
1. Basil Willey wrote, referring to Hume’s remark that “whenever he left his
study all his doubts vanished,” that the eighteenth-century spirit was char-
acterized by “intrepidity in speculation coexisting with conservatism in
practise” (Willey, 119). See also John Mullan, “The Language of Sentiment:
Hume, Smith, and Henry Mackenzie,” in The History of Scottish Litera-
ture:1660–1800, ed. Andrew Hook and Craig Cairns (Aberdeen: Aberdeen
University Press, 1987), II. 117–8.
2. My thanks to Marsha Huff for sending me an article about this strange cul-
tural phenomenon.
3. “Scores Clamour to be a Hermit,” BBC News, 20 August 2002.
4. The typical hermit contract was for as much as five years, with a small salary
and a large sum to be offered upon completion of the term (as opposed to the
one weekend sought by the Reuter’s ad). Hermits were generally not allowed
to speak, drink, smoke, or have visitors. On the other hand, they were often
supplied with libraries and food. (The hermits seem to have had difficulty
in completing their tenures and reaping the promised rewards. There are
stories of hermits losing their jobs for a variety of offenses: being found in
alehouses, consorting with milkmaids, and otherwise breaking their hermit-
ly contracts.) Hermitages were widespread; even Longbourn, of Pride and
Prejudice, had one, yet most were uninhabited.
5. Jacques Derrida, “The Future of the Profession, or the Unconditional Uni-
versity (Thanks to the ‘Humanities’: What Could Take Place Tomorrow),”
Stanford Presidential Lectures in the Humanities and Arts, April 15, 1999.
6. J. A. Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (Lon-
don: Blackwell, 1991).
7. In contemporary narrative theory, for example, the manipulation of a dis-
tinction between story and discourse loses its effect on the reader, because
there is less confidence in the heuristic assumption of a “true order of events,”
or a constant level of structure (fabula) for the narrative to manipulate. As
Jonathan Culler writes, “Without the assumption that there is a true order
of events prior to narrative presentation, one could not claim that the lack of
order was the result of point of view,” (“Fabula and Sjuzhet in the Analysis
of Narrative,” Poetics Today I, 3 [1980]: 28).
246 Notes
8. Bernard Tschumi, Cinégramme Folie: Le Parc de la Villette (Princeton:
Princeton Architectural Press, 1987), vi.
9. Tschumi, Cinégramme Folie, 16.
10. See, for example, the interesting remarks of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guat-
tari: “We no longer believe in the myth of the existence of fragments that,
like pieces of an antique statue, are merely waiting for the last one to be
turned up, so that they may all be glued back together to create a unity that is
precisely the same as the original unity. We no longer believe in a primordial
totality that once existed, or in a fi nal totality that awaits us at some given
date,” quoted in Harries, Unfi nished Manner, 9.
11. Coop Himmelblau, “Architecture must blaze,” in The Power of the City, ed.
Robert Hahn and Doris Knecht (Darmstadt: Georg Büchner, 1988), 95.
12. Bernard Tschumi, “The Pleasure of Architecture,” Architectural Design 47.3
(1977): 214.
13. Tschumi, Cinégramme Folie, vii.
14. The deconstructionist artist also attempts to present architecture as excava-
tion or archaeology, just as Thomas Whately and others do in the eighteenth
century. Bart Van der Straeten indicates that the more contemporary analogy
to archaeology is based in Freudian concepts of the uncanny. Van der Straeten
describes an architectural entry by Peter Eisenman for a competition on a hous-
ing project near Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin: “Eisenman’s unrealised project
included more than the original assignment, a housing block next to the Ber-
lin Wall. Eisenman wanted to raise an entire city block against the Wall that
would incorporate the existing buildings in the new project. Around that block,
an underground park was designed that was to be called the ‘City of Excava-
tions.’ By constructing a park below ground level the architect hoped to dis-
cover archaeological relics of the old city. Still, no relics that explicitly referred
to the city’s history were found, but that did not seem to bother Eisenman. The
essential point was not that ‘real’ archaeological objects could be shown, but
rather that the project emphasized and drew the people’s attention to the site as
a pool boiling with history. That is why the City of Excavations was planned to
contain a part of a wall that would serve as a merely hypothetical reconstruc-
tion of a nineteenth-century rampart” (Van der Straeten, “The Uncanny and
the Architecture of Deconstruction,” Image & Narrative: Online Magazine of
the Visual Narrative 5). Just as in the culture of sensibility, historical authentic-
ity is secondary to the desired effect upon the audience.
15. The purposeful pursuit of distress or grief, the emphasis on the intention-
ally impractical, and the heartless romanticization of poverty and suffer-
ing—all in the name of sympathy and sensibility—eventually troubles many
authors. In Love and Freindship, the young Austen successfully (if somewhat
broadly) caricatures such an attitude. Edward, in conversation with his sister
Augusta, proudly asserts his unwillingness to seek reconciliation with and
fi nancial assistance from his father. When Augusta asks if he will not need
money to provide “victuals and drink” for his wife, he responds:
“Victuals and Drink! ([he] replied . . . in a most nobly contemptuous
Manner) and dost thou then imagine that there is no other support for
an exalted Mind . . . than the mean and indelicate employment of Eat-
ing and Drinking?”
“None that I know of, so efficacious,” (returned Augusta).
“And did you never feel the pleasing Pangs of Love, Augusta? (replied
my Edward). Does it appear impossible to your vile and corrupted Pal-
ate, to exist on Love? Can you not conceive the Luxury of living in
every Distress that Poverty can infl ict, with the object of your tender-
est Affection?”
Notes 247
The phrase “the Luxury of living in every Distress that Poverty can Infl ict”
captures the hypocritical stance of sensibility, especially when the same char-
acters rob others in order to maintain their own (luxurious) love of fashion
and high living. Characters in novels of sensibility go to great lengths, and
great artifice, to achieve the appearance of simplicity, rusticity, and sponta-
neity—the literary parallel to hiring hermits and playing dress-up at dairy
farms and inhabiting purposely ruined structures.
16. See www.shabbychic.com for these phrases and more complete descriptions
of the style.
17. Harries, Unfi nished Manner, 8–9.
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Index