Ruined by Design

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Ruined by Design
Shaping Novels and Gardens
in the Culture of Sensibility

Inger Sigrun Brodey

New York London

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Brodey, Inger Sigrun.
Ruined by design : shaping novels and gardens in the culture of sensibility / by Inger
Sigrun Brodey.
p. cm.—(Literary criticism and cultural theory)
Includes index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-415-98950-3
ISBN-10: 0-415-98950-7
1. Sentimentalism in literature. 2. English fiction—18th century—History and
criticism. 3. French fiction—18th century—History and criticism. 4. German fic-
tion—18th century—History and criticism. 5. Emotions in literature. 6. Sympathy
in literature. 7. Gardens in literature. 8. Ruins in literature. 9. Picturesque, The,
in literature. 10. Emotions (Philosophy) I. Title.
PR858.S45B76 2008
823'.509353—dc22
2008005413

ISBN10: 0-415-98950 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-415-98950-3 (hbk)

Contents

List of Figures ix
Preface xv
Acknowledgments xxiii

Introduction: Sensibility and its Discontents 1

1 Redeeming Ruin 22

2 The Anatomy of Follies 66

3 Reading Ruin 107

4 Constructing Human Ruin 153

Afterword: The Luxuries of Distress 197

Notes 205
Bibliography 249
Index 261
List of Figures

1. Frontispiece from François Vernes, Le Voyageur

Sentimental, ou ma promenade à Yverdun (Paris[?], 1786);
Translated into English as Louis and Nina in 1789). ©The
British Library Board. All Rights Reserved (1578/8641). 3
2. Karl Kuntz, The Volcano of Wörlitz (1797). Bildarchiv,
Kulturstiftung Dessau Wörlitz. 23
3. “The Postdiluvian Orb” from Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory
of the Earth: containing an account of the original of the
earth, and of all the general changes which it hath undergone,
or is to undergo till the consummation of all things (London,
R.N. for Walter Kettilby, 1697), 101. Rare Book, Manuscript,
and Special Collections Library, Duke University. 24
4. Goethe in the Roman Campagna by J. H. W. Tischbein
(1787). Staedelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt am Main,
Germany. Photo Credit: Kavaler/Art Resource, N.Y. 31
5. Gothic Ruin at Wimpole, Cambridgeshire. Designed by
Sanderson Miller in 1750, erected in 1772. National Trust
Photographic Library, Nick Meers. ©NTPL/Nick Meers. 33
6. Entrance to the Garden of Eden from G. B. Andreini,
L’Adamo Sacra Rapresentatione (Milan: Geronimo
Bordoni, 1617). Research Library, The Getty Research
Institute, Los Angeles, California. 35
7. Illustration of the Garden of Eden from A Curious
Hieroglyphick Bible; or, Select passages in the Old and
New Testaments, represented with emblematical figures,
for the amusement of youth . . . To which are subjoined,
a short account of the lives of the evangelists, and other
pieces. Illustrated with nearly five hundred cuts (Worcester,
Massachusetts: Isaiah Thomas, [1784] 1788), 5. Courtesy
of the General Research Division, The New York Public
Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. 36
x List of Figures
8. “Scene without Picturesque Adornment.” Etching
and aquatint from William Gilpin’s Three Essays: On
Picturesque Beauty, On Picturesque Travel, and On
Sketching Landscape (London: R. Blamire, 1792), facing
page 19. Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections
Library, Duke University. 37

9. “Scene with Picturesque Adornment.” Etching and aquatint

from William Gilpin’s Three Essays, facing page 19. Rare
Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke
University. 38
10. “Avenues at Hampton Court” from Johannes Kip’s
Britannia Illustrata or views of several of the Queen’s
Palaces as also of the principal Seats of the Nobility and
Gentry of Great Britain, curiously engraven on 80 copper
plates (London: Joseph Smith, [1709] 1724–29). ©The
British Library Board. All Rights Reserved (191.g.10–13). 40
11. The Topiary Arcades and George II Column, Hartwell
House (c.1738), by Balthazar Nebot. Courtesy of the
Buckinghamshire County Museum collections. 43
12. “A View of the South Side of the Ruins at Kew” (1763),
by William Chambers. Plans, elevations, sections, and
perspective views of the gardens and buildings at Kew, in
Surry (London: J. Haberkorn, 1763). Rare Book, Manuscript,
and Special Collections Library, Duke University. 44
13. “Rustic Bridge,” by Georges-Louis Le Rouge, Detail des
nouveaux jardins à la mode (Paris: Le Rouge, [1776?-1787?]):
Cahier 5: Traité des édifices, meubles, habits, machines et
ustensiles des chinois / gravés. Research Library, The Getty
Research Institute, Los Angeles, California. 44
14. “Accent Plate III” from John Walker’s Elements of Elocution
(London: T. Cadell, T. Becket, G. Robinson, and J. Dodsley,
1781), facing page I.137. From the copy in the Rare Book
Collection, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 58
15. Transept of Tintern Abbey (1794), by J. M. W. Turner.
Watercolor. V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum. 71
16. “Classical Cornice” from Jacques-François Blondel, Cours
D’Architecture, ou Traité de la décoration, distribution &
construction des bâtiments; contenant les leçons données
en 1750, & les années suivantes (Paris, Desaint, 1771–77).
Courtesy of the General Research Division, The New York
Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. 74
 List of Figures xi
17. Design plate from Gabriel Thouin’s Plans raisonnées de
toutes les espèces de jardins (Paris: Madame Huzard [née
Vallat la Chapelle], [1820] 1828). Research Library, The
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California. 77

18. Plan for a Fake Classical Ruin, from C. C. L. Hirschfeld,

Theorie der Gartenkunst (Leipzig: M. G. Weidemann,
[1765] 1779–85), v. 9. General Research Division, The New
York Public Library, Astor, Lenox
and Tilden Foundations. 78

19. “Ornamental Cottage and Ruin” from Robert Lugar’s

Architectural Sketches for Cottages, Rural Dwellings,
and Villas, in the Grecian, Gothic, and Fancy Styles, with
PLANS, suitable to persons of Genteel Life and Moderate
Fortune (London: J. Taylor, 1805). ©The British Library
Board. All Rights Reserved (C 193 b.52). 79

20. Plot Line from Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (London,

Printed for T. Becket and P. A. Dehondt, 1762–1767), 152.
Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library,
Duke University. 85

21. Page from the first edition of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa

(London, printed for the author, 1748), V. 239. Rare Book,
Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University. 93

22. “Turris Babel” engraved by C. Decker (based on a drawing

by Lievin Cruyl) in Athanasius Kircher, Turris Babel, sive
Archontologia qua primo priscorum post diluvium
hominum vita, mores rerumque gestarum magnitudo,
secundo Turris fabrica civitatumque extructio, confusio
linguarum . . . (Amsterdam: Janssonio-Waesbergianna,
1679). Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections
Library, Duke University. 124

23. External perspective of the broken column from Le Rouge,

Detail des nouveaux jardins à la mode. Research Library,
The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California. 125

24. Cross-section of the interior of broken column from Le

Rouge, Detail des nouveaux jardins à la mode. Research
Library, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California. 126

25. Elevation of the broken column from Le Rouge, Detail des

nouveaux jardins à la mode. Research Library, The Getty
Research Institute, Los Angeles, California. 127
xii List of Figures
26. An etching of “the Köhlerhütte at Hohenheim” from
Hirschfeld, Theorie der Gartenkunst, V. 353. General
Research Division, The New York Public Library, Astor,
Lenox and Tilden Foundations. 137

27. Title page from William Combe’s The Tour of Doctor

Syntax, in Search of the Picturesque (London: Ackermann,
1812). Author’s collection. 140
28. A plan of the Park at Hohenheim from Victor Heideloff,
Ansichten des Herzoglich-Würtembergischer Landsitzes
Hohenheim, nach der Natur gezeichnet von V. H. und
durch kurze Beschreibungen erlaeutert (Nürnberg:
Frauenholz, 1795). ©The British Library Board. All Rights
Reserved (181.h.3). 143
29. “The Theatre of Dionysos in Athens” (1787), by Nicholas
Revett. Engraving from James Stuart and Nicholas Revett,
The Antiquities of Athens (London: John Haberkorn,
1787), II, ch. 3, pl. I. Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special
Collections Library, Duke University. 147
30. Sir George Beaumont and Joseph Farington painting a
waterfall (1777), by Thomas Hearne. Dove Cottage, The
Wordsworth Trust. 148
31. Bramber Castle, Sussex (1782), by James Lambert. British
Library. ©The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved
(Additional MS. Burrell, 5677.fol.59). 149
32. Man of Feeling (1788), by Thomas Rowlandson. Courtesy
of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. 159
33. Sensibility (1809), engraved by Caroline Watson. Based on
George Romney’s 1786 painting of Emma Hart (later Lady
Hamilton). © The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. 185
34. An Artist Traveling in Wales (1799), by Thomas
Rowlandson. National Museum of Wales, Cardiff.
© National Museum of Wales. 188
35. Illustration of Amusements at Rambouillet by Le Rouge,
Details des nouveaux jardins (Paris, 1785), XI. Research
Library, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California. 189
36. “The Flying Mountains,” a perilous big dipper in Catherine
the Great’s garden at Tsarskoe Selo, as illustrated in
Frederick Calvert Baltimore, Gaudia Poetica (Augustae:
litteris Spätianis, 1770). Research Library, The Getty
Research Institute, Los Angeles, California. 190
 List of Figures xiii
37. Tales of Wonder (1802), James Gillray. Calke Abbey, The
Harpur Crewe Collection (acquired with the help of the
National Heritage Memorial Fund by The National Trust in
1985). ©NTPL/John Hammond. 193
38. “The Hermitage at Selbourne, Hampshire, with Henry
White as the hermit” (1777), by Samuel Hieronymus
Grimm. Courtesy of Dunster Castle, The Luttrell Collection
(The National Trust), ©NTPL. 198
39. “Sequence 4 (Bamboo Garden),” in Bernard Tschumi’s Parc
de la Villette, Paris. Illustration from Bernard Tschumi,
Event-Cities 2 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001). ©2001
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by permission of
The MIT Press. 200
Preface

Many of us have known 1960s flower children or hippies who in younger

days decried those in traditional positions of authority in commerce or aca-
demia, only to rise to similar positions of power and authority in the 1980s
or ‘90s. This book explores the culture surrounding a late-eighteenth-cen-
tury character who is analogous to the ex-hippie in a management position:
namely, the “man of feeling” who eschews all appearances of conforming
to convention including narrative conventions, yet wishes to narrate his
own life with authority. Like the American hippie culture of the 1960s,
the European fashion of sensibility in the 1760s also elevated spontane-
ity over control and bred an idealism that self-consciously defi ned itself
in opposition to commercial interests, conventional institutions, orthodox
approaches to religion, militarism, consumerism, materialism, and patriar-
chal or centralized authority. Both movements claimed to establish a mor-
ally superior counter-culture and a morally superior form of ‘failure.’ The
man of feeling was characterized, like the hippie, by embarrassment over
conventional measures of success for “men of the world,” including dis-
comfort with authority, wealth, and influence.
Yet what of authorship? The culture of sensibility features a wide-spread
reconsideration of the nature of the relationship between authorship and
authority. Authorship, in mid-to-late eighteenth-century Europe, was still
associated with the Enlightenment “man of letters,” an elite and traditional
source of masculine authority, rather than primarily with the burgeoning
self-expression of the middle class. Thus, the “man of feeling” needs to dis-
tinguish himself from both the “man of letters” as well as the “man of the
world.” The result is a perplexing difficulty for the “man of feeling” as he
aspires to write, publish, influence, and even express himself or survive in
the face of the banal requirements of daily life and unchanging institutional
expectations of society, particularly when the aesthetic ideals of sensibility
are defi ned in opposition to the very qualities generally required of author-
ship, including conscious control, active calculation, or the ability to com-
pose, revise, cohere, complete, or publish. In his pursuit of artlessness, the
man of feeling needs to reformulate authorship and the novel in particular
in order to tell and publish his story without appearing to wish to do so.
xvi Preface
Ultimately the hippie and the man of feeling are both rebels who disdain
authority, yet also succumb to its practical benefits. Are their internal ten-
sions and seeming contradictions simply signs of a natural process of matu-
ration or do they signify something more pernicious? This contrast between
ideals and reality is paradoxical and even humorous at its best, hypocritical
or even dangerous at its worst. When does this dilemma lead to hypocrisy
or to an excuse for subterranean exertions of control or authority—a form
of Tocquevillian soft tyranny? It can be seductive to laugh at the fallen ide-
alist, and there is something deeply interesting about the revelation of the
hypocrisy of a person who has claimed moral superiority. And yet, perhaps
it might be important to express ideals even though they are difficult—or
impossible—to maintain.
To some extent, one’s answers to these questions depend upon one’s
opinions about the perfectibility of human nature—that is, on “natural
goodness” or the existence of “moral sentiments,” much debated issues in
Enlightenment moral philosophy. These are some of the ethical dilemmas
that continue to concern the man of feeling and others involved in the cul-
ture of sensibility in the second half of the eighteenth century in Europe,
and they underlie the aesthetic fascination with ruination. The ruin, like
the exposed hypocrite, provokes multivalent responses and begs questions
about the perfectibility, duration, and import of human achievement, as
well as the fate of private ideals in public life.
The rich material and literary manifestations around authenticity and
authority within the culture of sensibility offer an unusual response to
issues that reappear throughout various moments in history—whether
in ancient quarrels between poetry and philosophy, historical tensions
between lyric and epic traditions in literature, or aesthetic debates around
the relative merits of organicism and mechanism in art. While I return to
some more contemporary aesthetic and social examples in the conclusion
of this book, the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility provides an inter-
esting locus for conflicts surrounding idealism and the hope for human
perfectibility. Amid a bewildering atmosphere of utopian aspirations
as well as violent destruction, novelists and landscape architects within
the culture of sensibility manage to create structures that simultaneously
appeal to anti-authoritarian ideals and love of spontaneity, yet also appease
more authoritarian (or pragmatic) impulses, such as the desire to main-
tain control of their audience’s responses. This ambivalence, or insecurity
regarding authority, is thus based on confl icted—or perhaps realistically
mixed—views of human nature.
There are many ways of interpreting the eighteenth-century fascination
with ruins: scholars have read ruins in the light of nation building, of histo-
riography, of the invention of the Gothic, and in connection with romanti-
cism, just to name a few. None of these, however, are the focus of this work.
This book describes a structural parallel between the fake ruins or follies
popular in the eighteenth-century “English” garden and the purposeful
 Preface xvii
fragmentation and other innovative literary devices of the novel of sensibil-
ity (whose popularity roughly coincides with the follies). Here the focus is
to understand the self-conscious aesthetic of the culture of sensibility, where
artists, authors, and architects use ruination and fragmentation more gen-
erally as an expression of the dilemma described above—that is, ruination
expresses an anti-authorian ideal, flaunting the lack of centralized comple-
tion and inviting the audience’s role in (re)construction. Yet these forms
nonetheless reluctantly, implicitly, and paradoxically rely on the presence
and authority of monumental institutions and centralized authority and
their creators. They give the appearance of allowing freedom of interpreta-
tion while taking numerous precautions against faulty readings. I thus argue
that the purposeful re-creation of ruin is part of a self-conscious literary and
aesthetic mode or fashion at the heart of the culture of sensibility, present
from Burke’s conception of “obscurity”; to the primal tones of Herder’s
“wilde Mutter”; to the extravagantly torn and imbedded fragments in nov-
els of sensibility; to laboriously constructed follies in gentlemen’s estates; to
the voluptuously exposed corpses and gravestones of the fallen fictional men
and women of sensibility. The Werthers, Julies, Harleys, and Clarissas all
testify to not only the inauthenticity of control but also the moral superior-
ity of ruin: they are popular martyrs to the cause of sensibility.

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

I have presented parts of the book in a range of formats, as the central

theses evolved. My fi rst attempt at comparing the follies and authors of
the culture of sensibility won the award for the best non-plenary paper
presented at the annual meeting of the Midwestern American Society for
Eighteenth-Century Studies, where Thomas Bonnell kindly encouraged its
further development. The hallmarks of sensibility mentioned in the Intro-
duction are treated more extensively in my essay “Preromanticism, or Sen-
sibility: Defi ning Ambivalences.”6 The Jane Austen sections draw on two
published articles and one book essay.7 I have also had the opportunity
to test my ideas in a variety of public fora, particularly the 2003 Leon
and Thea Koerner Foundation Lecture in the Liberal Arts at Simon-Frasier
University, entitled “The Architecture of Distress: Jane Austen, Follies, and
the Cult of Sensibility” and a plenary address at the 2001 Annual General
Meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America, entitled “Entertain-
ing Grief: Jane Austen and the ‘Luxury of Distress.’” I thank June Sturrock
and Kimberly Brangwin, the respective organizers of these conferences,
who encouraged me in developing, expanding, and synthesizing these ideas
and thus indirectly helped me complete this book.
I have been very fortunate in the generous support of academic and
private organizations that have helped to fund this research, beginning
with a five-year Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities from the Wood-
row Wilson Foundation to pursue my Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.
The American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies helped me, not only
with the award mentioned above, but also with a Ruth and Gwin J. Kolb
Annual Travel Grant for research at the British Library and the British
Museum. The Earhart Foundation helped me on two occasions, fi rst with
an Earhart Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, and later with an Ear-
hart Foundation Research Fellowship Grant. And fi nally, the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill generously provided a Spray-Randleigh
Faculty Fellowship as well as an Arts and Sciences Junior Sabbatical for
the completion of this project.
My thanks extend to many more individuals than I can mention here,
but particularly to those who have provided helpful advice and who have
xxiv Acknowledgments
read or listened to ideas about much earlier versions of the project: Douglas
Den Uyl, Denise Despres, Timothy Fuller, Gwin Kolb, Françoise Meltzer,
Charles Rosen, Barbara Maria Stafford, Stuart Tave, Stuart Warner, and
Anthony Yu. Saul Bellow, Gwin Kolb, and Wayne Booth did not live to see
its completion, but were each very helpful to me in its inception.
Several friends have been helpful both in suggesting additional resources
and in encouraging me not to allow this book to remain a fragment, pur-
posefully or not. These friends include: Katharine De Baun, Francis DuVi-
nage, Russ Geoffrey, Susanne Grumman, Joän Pawelski, Astrida Orle
Tantillo, and especially Debra Romanick Baldwin, whose critical eye is
ever a blessing. In the words of E. B. White, “it is not often that someone
comes along who is a true friend and a good writer,” yet Debra, in particu-
lar, is both.
Of my current colleagues at UNC-Chapel Hill, I would particularly
like to thank Jan Bardsley, Marsha Collins, Lilian R. Furst, Darryl Gless,
William Harmon, Edward Donald Kennedy, James Peacock, and James
Thompson—all of whom have read parts of the manuscript and have been
very supportive of this project, along with the rest of my colleagues in
Comparative Literature and Asian Studies.
On an even more practical note, this manuscript would never have been
completed without the Medici on 57th Street in Chicago; the Wallingford
Tully’s in Seattle; Strong’s Coffee Shop, Foster’s Market, and Three Cups
in Chapel Hill; nor without help from Breanne Goss, Diana Pitt, Dustin
Mengelkof, and Emily Bunner. Jessamine Hyatt and Diana Pitt also pro-
vided valuable assistance in checking my translations, and Rasmi Simhan
was invaluable in helping with the illustrations and permissions. Lori Harris
heroically created the index, and Erica Wetter, Liz Levine, and Eleanor
Chan made the fi nal steps of publication proceed (nearly) painlessly.
Finally, I would like to thank my parents, whose support enabled me
to gain confidence in my intellectual pursuits, and whose dedication to
symmetry and order helped shape my sense of aesthetics. My husband and
children have given me additional appreciation for qualities associated with
the culture of sensibility, including the beauties of disorder and irregularity.
To paraphrase Jane Austen, having experienced order early in life, I learned
to appreciate disorder later.
This volume is dedicated to Benjamin, who has endured many of the
pains of this project and who proves that it is possible to have both sensibil-
ity and an M.D.
 Introduction
Sensibility and its Discontents

Sensibility of soul, which is rightly described as the source of moral-

ity, gives one a kind of wisdom concerning matters of virtue . . .
People of sensibility . . . can fall into errors which Men of the world
would not commit; but these are greatly outweighed by the amount
of good that they do.
—Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt 1

—Dear sensibility! source inexhausted of all that’s precious in our

joys, or costly in our sorrows! . . . Eternal fountain of our feelings!—
this is thy divinity which stirs within me—that I feel some generous
joys and generous cares beyond myself—all comes from thee, great—
great SENSORIUM of the world!
—Laurence Sterne

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

The exaggerated pathos of sentimental literature invites theatrical displays

of streaming tears and drenched handkerchiefs and seems to warrant the
epithet “cult of sensibility,” a derogatory term sometimes used to refer to the
literary, artistic, and philosophical culture surrounding the “man of feeling”
in the latter half of the eighteenth century. 3 The term “cult” both indicates
the extreme devotion of adherents to the aesthetic surrounding sensibility,
and simultaneously marks it as a secret and seemingly arbitrary sign system
 Introduction 3

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

COMPOSING THE PICTURESQUE

Whereas twentieth- or twenty-fi rst-century critics would think of landscape

gardening, philosophy, and novel writing as very separate realms of dis-
course, involving different agents, this was generally far from the case in the
eighteenth-century. Alexander Pope’s gardening style influenced subsequent
garden design as much or more than his poetry influenced future poetry;
Adam Smith, in addition to achieving fame across Britain and Europe for
his Theory of Moral Sentiments, also subscribed to the newest publications
of William Chambers on oriental gardening and spoke about gardening and
architecture styles in his lectures; Capability Brown, one of the most well-
known commercial landscape gardeners, conversed with Hannah More,
poetess of sensibility, about the similarity of their arts and respective “com-
positions”; Jane Austen read the writings of William Gilpin, popularizer of
the picturesque style of drawing and traveling, and featured contemporary
debate over landscape gardening in her juvenilia and novels; and historian-
politician Horace Walpole was at least as well known for his thoughts on
gardening and his own architectural follies as he was for his political opin-
ions. In short, novels, poets, philosophers, and politicians in the second
half of the eighteenth century showed great interest in and knowledge of
landscape gardening, and landscape gardeners conversed with poets, phi-
losophers, and kings in their turn, widely published illustrated plans of their
gardens, writing influential and popular treatises, and affording a common
topic of conversation among the middle classes, regardless of whether the
conversants could afford the landscapers’ expensive services.
In a remarkable passage, the landscaper Lancelot “Capability” Brown
reports a conversation with Hannah More, poetess of sensibility, about the
similarities between their art forms. Brown, one of the most well-known
landscapers in the “English” style that dominated England and Europe dur-
ing the mid-to-late eighteenth-century, describes his art in terms of authorship
and punctuation. Rather than referring to God’s having composed landscape
in authoring the Book of Nature, Brown says that he himself ‘composes’ a
landscape much as More would a verse or a sentence: “Now there, said he,
pointing his finger, I make a comma, and there, pointing to another part
(where an interruption is desirable to break the view) a parenthesis—now a
full stop, and then I begin another subject.”17 Elsewhere Brown writes that
he has a “Capability” of improving landscape to tell a story just as authors
shape individual scenes in a novel.18 Brown’s comments attribute to gardens
a syntax and narrative; he assumes the viewer’s active participation and
expectations that are capable of punctuation and fragmentation.
Although Pope had claimed that the word ‘picturesque’ was fi rst adopted
from the French, modern scholarship has shown that it first came to English
through the Italian language and Italian painters, and achieved its full mean-
ing in England circa 1740. Christopher Hussey, an early historian of the pic-
turesque aesthetic, describes the designation as follows: “The relation of all
10 Ruined by Design
the arts to one another, through the pictorial appreciation of nature, was so
close that poetry, painting, gardening, architecture and the art of travel may
be said to have been fused into a single ‘art of landscape.’ The combination
might be termed ‘The Picturesque.’”19 Subsequently codified in the 1770s by
William Gilpin and later elaborated by Sir Uvedale Price and Richard Payne
Knight, the picturesque achieved a prominence in theoretical debates after
the 1760s and 1770s that lasted well into the nineteenth century.20
The so-called “cult of the picturesque” celebrated obscure, concealed, and
ruined scenes in nature that could evoke strong feelings in viewers trained in
“picturesque travel.” Thus the picturesque fondness for commanding vistas,
crumbling ruins, and irregular terrain achieved totemic power and shared
much of the culture of sensibility’s philosophical and cultural heritage. In
garden architecture and landscape gardening, the category of the picturesque
grew alongside the preference for the irregularity and informality of the Eng-
lish garden over the French baroque garden. Depending on the garden and
its owner, picturesque gardens might also be called English gardens, modern
gardens (coined by Horace Walpole), natural gardens (terms used by both
Walpole and Jean-Marie Morel), informal gardens, or irregular gardens (the
latter term sometimes confused with rococo style). 21
In the arts, ‘sensibility’ and ‘sentimental’ refer primarily to written works
of poetry and novels evoking sympathy and melancholy in the reader, while
the ‘picturesque’ usually refers to visual scenes, whether natural or artificial,
that evoke strong feelings in the viewer. And yet in some domains, such as
music, both terms could be used to designate characteristic styles. The unity
of the arts, however, was asserted from all corners of the culture of sensi-
bility—not only by such ‘sentimental’ thinkers as Lessing, or in Capability
Brown’s remarks above, but also in sensibility’s own attempt to escape from
language’s linearity into a more visually-based, emotive, ‘natural’ language.
In addition, adherents of both “cults” used visual imagery and tableaux to
train the eyes of followers—whether to identify picturesque scenery or exhibi-
tions of true sensibility. These all suggest that sensibility and the picturesque
were intimately intertwined. The novel of sensibility strove to be “pictur-
esque” just as the picturesque movement relied heavily on the moral aesthetic
of sensibility.22 Surprisingly, there has been almost no attempt to compare
these two “cults” and to consider whether they were perhaps representative
of broader characteristics of a common culture of sensibility.23

SEEKING AUTHENTICITY

Whether we examine Shaftesbury’s gentleman of taste; Hume and Smith’s

man of sympathy or moral sentiments; Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot’s
“homme naturel”; Mackenzie’s man of feeling; Sterne’s sentimental trav-
eler; or Goethe’s “schöne Seele,” the new literary hero of the culture of
sensibility exhibits certain essential attributes: these include an unspoiled
 Introduction 11
natural virtue based on an unusually deep capacity to feel, a susceptibility
to sights of beauty or suffering, a lack of worldly success or recognition, and
a sense of isolation stemming largely from the insufficiency of conventional
language to convey his emotions. The traits are all secondary to the suspi-
cion of centralized authority, whether construed in political, psychological,
cultural, religious, or aesthetic terms, and the desire to achieve an authen-
ticity defi ned in opposition to conformity to authority. Together these traits
help shape the ethics, epistemology, and attitudes towards friendship and
intimacy, as well as attitudes towards language exhibited within the culture
of sensibility. They help us identify a family resemblance among men of
feeling and women of sensibility.
The protagonists of sensibility reject reason as a guide to moral behav-
ior; instead their authors show that their purity and feelings (especially
sympathy) are superior guides to moral behavior. This results in a new
psychology that relies on contested notions of natural goodness. In direct
opposition to classical and Enlightenment thought, feeling takes the place
of reason as the supreme human faculty; feeling rather than reason thus
provides the only hope of community within the tenets of sensibility.
After John Locke establishes to an unprecedented degree the importance
of the senses and the passions to the process of “thinking,” 24 Anthony Ashley
Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, often taken as the official philosopher
of sensibility, began to substitute an ‘ethics of feeling’ for the dominant ‘ethics
of rationalism.’ Confident that human beings could achieve both virtue and
happiness by harmonizing their passions and by cultivating the delicacy and
aristocratic nobility of “taste,” Shaftesbury showed the limits of faculties like
judgment, unaided reason, and conscience based on discipline: “After all,”
he wrote, “’tis not merely what we call principle, but . . . taste which governs
men . . . Even conscience, I fear, such as is owing to religious discipline, will
make but a slight figure where this taste is set amiss.”25 Accordingly, weakness
of discipline, principle, and conscience and their inability to spur appropriate
action become key themes in the literature of sensibility.
Following Shaftesbury, philosophers such as Hume, Smith, and Rous-
seau all carefully exclude unaided reason from their discussion of virtue;
they achieve this by displaying the inherent weakness of unaided reason
and by taking additional steps to raise the passions to an exalted status
previously held exclusively by reason. Hume, for example, writes that only
passion can oppose passion, just as “morality . . . is more properly felt than
judg’d of.”26 The most shocking aspect of Hume’s philosophy was not so
much his claim that reason generally does not control the passions or ethics,
but rather his refusal of the idea that reason should. Law, reason, and dis-
cipline cannot move us to virtue; only such virtuous passions as sympathy
and benevolence can do so: “Our sense of duty always follows the common
and natural course of our passions.”27
In order to endow itself with greater authority, the ethics of feeling bor-
rows the phraseology of the rationalist philosophy it contradicts:
12 Ruined by Design
Conscience, conscience! Instinct divin, immortelle et céleste voix, guide
assuré d’un être ignorant et borné, mais intelligent et libre; juge infail-
lible du bien et du mal, qui rends l’homme semblable à Dieu; c’est toi qui
fais l’excellence de sa nature et la moralité de ses actions; sans toi je ne
sens rien en moi qui m’élève au-dessus des bêtes, que le triste privilège
de m’égarer d’erreurs en erreurs à l’aide d’un entendement sans règle, et
d’une raison sans principe.

[Conscience! divine instinct, immortal and celestial voice; the certain

guide of a being which, ignorant and limited, is yet intelligent and free . . .
without thee I feel nothing in myself which can raise me above the beasts
except the melancholy privilege of wandering from error to error with the
help of an unruly understanding and an unprincipled reason.]28

In order to achieve this socialization and normatization of the passions,

a singular noun—‘feeling’ or ‘sensibility’—replaces the chaotic plurality
of the term ‘passions,’ with the desired appearance of concord or even
unanimity. And conversely, instead of referring to the singular faculty
“Reason,” authors begin to speak of plural thoughts called “reasons”—
namely, rationalizations or cold, selfish, and ultimately divisive arguments
leading to the fragmentation of society, rather than providing a unifying
recourse to the common language of logic and truth. 29 The latent question
of whether this change is a superficial delusion or an actual refi nement
intensifies the philosophical insecurity of the culture of sensibility. 30 In
other words, it is unclear how the passions show themselves worthy of
this new ‘liberation’ from externalized sources of authority and why this
inner impulse does not degenerate into random subjectivity, solipsism, or
utter chaos. The novels of sensibility in the following chapters illustrate
the tenet that the passions alone can establish unity among kindred, sensi-
tive souls. Whereas in Genesis and for the ancients, in other words, reason
was a shared source of public unity while passions caused discord and
atomization, after what Charles Taylor refers to as the “Deist shift” of
the mid-eighteenth century, the only authentic source of unity was acces-
sible largely through the passions. Feeling, rather than logos, becomes the
human characteristic that separates us from beasts, and even becomes the
source of community.
Reason, in the passage cited above, is now the “unprincipled” and way-
ward force which leads mankind “from error to error” and does nothing
to “raise [men] above beasts.” The same words could equally well have
been applied, even fi fty years earlier, to passion. Such substitutions demon-
strate sensibility’s philosophical insecurity in that the appearance of revo-
lutionary thought is qualified by or muted by the limited change in syntax,
suggesting a fearful retention of the older paradigm. What I call “philo-
sophical insecurity” is thus a complex of doubt, assertion, and denial: it is a
vocal clinging to optimism regarding human nature, or government, or the
 Introduction 13
nature of authority that in its very enthusiasm reveals an underlying (and
stimulating) layer of doubt. 31
Underlying sensationist thought and the search for alternatives to reason
as a regulating force, are larger philosophical and political issues—par-
ticularly a hidden fight against externally imposed authority in favor of
the authority and primacy of individual experience. 32 Sensationist thinkers
such as Condillac, responding to empiricist philosophers such as Locke,
attempt to confound various sources of arbitrary power (in France, espe-
cially the Roman Catholic church). Implicit in the debates over psychology
and the passions is also a debate over governmental structure—the state as
the soul “writ large.”
Disengaged reason and the laws of logic come to represent Hobbes’
“common power” to keep all citizens in awe. If private, untutored “sen-
soria” can provide a moral foundation, then the spontaneous order of
the soul can be used to justify freedom from governmental intrusion, and
liberation from the tyranny of externalized reason can free one from the
necessity of obedience to doctrine. Within the literature of sensibility,
therefore, logicians are inevitably villainous—and represent a form of tyr-
anny or social destruction. 33 Within sensibility’s rhetoric, to rebel against
logic is tantamount to making a broader claim against the injustices of
society’s institutions.
Reason’s fall from favor is also directly related to the decline of ‘pru-
dence’ as a virtue. 34 The steady devaluation of “the colder homilies of
prudence”35 during the last half of the eighteenth century shows that not
only did behavior guided by reason come to be seen as a psychological
impossibility, but to attempt such control became positively disreputable
(as witnessed by Marianne Dashwood’s dispute with her sister Elinor in
Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility). The dominant psychological models
exhibited in the culture of sensibility thus exhibit a fear that authority,
authentic feeling, and virtue cannot coexist in any given individual, as well
as doubt as to whether virtuous individuals can ever conform their expres-
sions to the political and social conventions of society without sacrificing
their own authenticity and, therefore, their virtue. Prudence, or reason-
ing about potential behavior in general, became linked to Machiavellian-
ism and to hypocrisy. Reason, established etiquette, logic, self-conscious
moderation, and mathematical proportion eventually came to be seen by
devotees of sensibility as enemies of the “right inner impulse” that would
only be quenched or diffused by such censorship. Eventually, as we shall
see in Goethe’s Werther, any form of control becomes, not only aestheti-
cally unappealing, but inauthentic and therefore morally reprehensible.
Thus when Sedaine entitles his comédie larmoyante “Philosophe sans le
savoir” or “The Unwitting Philosopher,” he is not only referring to a par-
ticular character in his play, but also alluding to a popular notion within
the culture of sensibility: immediate sensation and intuition lead to greater
wisdom and virtue than discursive thought or study. 36
14 Ruined by Design
The importance placed on independence from institutional authorities
also shows itself in the consistent preference for rural simplicity over urban-
ity and consumerism, and for original genius over formal education. Across
the genres of literature, one can see a growing emphasis on nature, natural
simplicity, the ordinary, and everyday rustic life. The new moral aesthetic
left no room for more urban forms of virtue: urbane sophistication was
untrustworthy; erudition was formed for abuse; civility was another form
of dishonesty; and those with education were seen as most skilled in decep-
tion. Sensibility thus coincides with a dramatic rise in folklore movements
across Europe and Britain. Three works—in the French-speaking world,
Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inegalité parmi les
hommes [Discourse on the Origins of Inequality among Men] (1755); in
England, Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765); and
in Germany, Herder et al’s Von Deutscher Art und Kunst [Of German Style
and Art] (1773)—were especially significant in building a vogue for folk
culture and folk literature. 37 Some authors, most notably James Macpher-
son in his Poems of Ossian (1760–63), were so eager to include examples of
ancient, untrained, natural simplicity and virtue that they resorted to forg-
ery in order to claim the historical authenticity of their texts and protago-
nists. Others took to the fields to fi nd poems written by talented milkmaids
(such as Hannah More’s “discovery” of Ann Yearsley, who wrote under the
pseudonym Lactilla, Milkwoman of Clifton).
These changes aim to accord virtue equally to all, regardless of class, reli-
gion, or education. Sensibility’s ethics emphasize the most universal basis
of virtue: the body. Because of the notion of a biological basis of emotion
and sympathy, the faculty of sight is thus endowed with ethical, didactic,
and emotional power—a direct vehicle of communication to other sensi-
tive souls. Rather than by his actions or his principles, the man or woman
of feeling is judged by the degree to which his or her nerves are moved by
external stimuli such as sights and tales of virtue and suffering. The fall of
disengaged reason, the internalization of virtue, and the new emphasis on
the spontaneous overflow of passion enable Shaftesbury (and Marianne
Dashwood) to claim that a good man “never deliberates . . . or considers
of the matter by prudential Rules of Self-Interest and Advantage. He acts
from his Nature, in a manner necessarily, and without Reflection.”38 In
contrast to Enlightenment or neoclassical thought, where vision’s goal is
to perceive a rational, eternal order, and in contrast to Romantic thought,
where the “inner eye,” or what the imagination “sees” often seems more
significant than what the eye could witness in daylight, sensibility’s use of
sight focuses on affect—especially the possibility of sympathy evoked by
visions of suffering. In fact, this psychology that stresses the ethical, didac-
tic, and emotional effect of the faculty of sight rests upon the foundation of
the sensory origin of ideas, fi rst made popular by John Locke, and propa-
gated in literature through the works of Samuel Richardson, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Laurence Sterne, and others.
 Introduction 15
If vision looms large as a sense that enables the sensitive soul to sym-
pathize with others, then the nerves figure even more prominently as the
conveyors of emotion within the sensitive soul’s anatomy. Potential for vir-
tue, in other words, seems to have been proportionate to the functioning of
one’s nervous system. As a number of excellent studies have shown, preoc-
cupation with bodily mechanisms of emotion and experience stem from
Enlightenment materialist epistemology, and much discourse in philosophy
and natural science was devoted to fi nding the biological basis of emotion,
particularly as located in the nerves and senses. As a result, novels of sensi-
bility are sprinkled generously with visual tales and tableaux of suffering to
serve as stimuli for the virtuous feelings of protagonist and reader alike.
“Far more penetrating than the intellect alone,” sensibility’s ideal again
conveys the notion that reflection no longer has direct contact with the will,
and that the passions and nerves carry more potent (eventually even more
accurate) information than reasoning. Mary Wollstonecraft describes sen-
sibility as “the result of acute senses, fi nely fashioned nerves, which vibrate
at the slightest touch, and convey such clear intelligence to the brain, that
it does not require to be arranged by the judgment.”39 Reliance upon judg-
ment and obedience to rules betoken lack of feeling and lesser worth. Mary
Wollstonecraft’s Maria, for example, is “too much under the influence of
an ardent imagination to adhere to common rules.”40 In another, earlier
context (for example in Johnson’s Rasselas), this description would have
been an insult, yet within the culture of sensibility, it is high praise.
Depending on the individual authors, independence from external author-
ity takes on different meanings and can be construed in political, aesthetic,
cultural, or religious terms. Authors stress the inadequacies of old hierarchies,
praise a reliance on self-taught knowledge, and promote skeptical irrever-
ence towards theories and institutions. In French literature, this often takes
the form of freedom from Classicism and its aesthetic regulations, as well as
from traditional religious and social constraints. In Germany, it can be seen,
for example, in the growing popularity of Pietism, a brand of Protestantism
that emphasizes direct communication with a personal deity in preference to
mediation by institutions and clergy. These reformist or oppositional aspects
of sensibility have led many authors to place sensibility squarely in the camp
of French revolutionaries, as did Edmund Burke and other anti-Jacobins in
England in the 1760s-80s.41 The contradictory impulses and philosophi-
cal insecurities of sensibility make its political allegiances more difficult to
assess, however, as testified by the fact that Burke himself evinces sensibil-
ity’s moral aesthetics in his writings.42 The cult of the picturesque has been
similarly difficult to pinpoint in its political leanings.43
Behind this pursuit of originality and independence from authority and
traditional institutions, as I have mentioned, is the haunting dream of natu-
ral human goodness and the desire to prove Hobbes wrong in his pessimis-
tic description of human nature. For at least a century beforehand, authors
were haunted by Hobbes’ challenge to natural sympathy: “Let [any man]
16 Ruined by Design
consider with himself, when taking a journey, [whether] he arms himself,
and seeks to go well accompanied; when going to sleep, he locks his doors;
when even in his house, he locks his chests . . . ; what opinion has he of his
fellow subjects, when he rides armed; of his fellow citizens, when he locks
his doors; and of his children, and servants, when he locks his chests.”44 In
our everyday actions, Hobbes suggests, we continually reveal our lack of
faith in human goodness.
In contrast, David Hume pens the following rhetorical question: “Would
any man, who is walking along, tread as willingly on another’s gouty toes,
whom he has no quarrel with, as on the hard flint and pavement?”45 And
while Hume, like Shaftesbury, wants the answer to be an emphatic and
heartwarming “no,” the literature and indeed history of the time suggest
otherwise, and his rhetorical formulation allows for an element of doubt as
well. In fact, according to the odd workings of the moral-aesthetic associ-
ated with sensibility, the sight of human suffering or of architectural ruins
of ancient grandeur can paradoxically enhance the viewer’s sense of human
goodness. Similarly, in more philosophical writings, writers of sensibility
frequently minimize the threshold for virtue in their euphoric optimism; yet
the same authors also idealize the beauty and, more tellingly, the rarity of
this goodness with an almost disabling pessimism. As a result, the beautiful
Shaftesburian soul, or in Germany “die schöne Seele,” is often distinguished
precisely by its rarity and isolation in the midst of a Hobbesian universe.
The enemies to virtue have changed, in other words, along with its redefi-
nition in sensibility’s new Adam. Sterne, for example, emphasizes the physi-
cal basis of natural goodness—the common conception that the physical
impulses of sensibility are imbedded in human nature, and are the key to
sociability and brotherhood.46 They do not need a “common power” to bring
them into action; rather they are naturally effective for the common good.
Sterne’s Yorick claims, for instance, that he hopes he will continue to be “in
love with one princess or another” the rest of his life, for he is convinced that
“if [he] ever do[es] a mean action, it must be in some interval betwixt one
passion and another . . . The moment I am rekindled, I am all generosity and
good will again.”47 The sensual, if not erotic, passion that prompts many of
Yorick’s digressions is not the locus or origin of sin in Sterne’s world, for
each digression betokens fellow-feeling, whether or not it includes an erotic
admixture. In a sense, then, the smooth-functioning of the sensitive and
moral self becomes the new microcosm of providential order, which itself
expands to incorporate the irregularities of nature and even economics.
The American and French revolutions, occurring as they did during this
period, provided a test case for Hobbes’ and Hume’s theories, and were
therefore viewed with particular interest, since they presumably served as
an indicator of individuals’ and states’ ability to govern themselves and regu-
late selfish passions without a “common power” in place. The more capable
human beings are of creating order without external authority, or the more
naturally good human beings are, the easier it is to deny Hobbes’ theory and
 Introduction 17
its ramifications. The revolutions’ mixed results—the relative success of the
American Revolution and the Terror following the French—fueled both the
hopes and fears of sensibility and prevented the possibility of using contem-
porary political experiments simply to prove Hobbes right or wrong, result-
ing in a profound ambivalence about the nature and necessity of authority.
The rarity or scarcity of natural goodness and authentic feeling was
denoted in a number of ways, including the drive to look further and fur-
ther afield for its exemplars. Eventually, the published accounts and illus-
trations of Captain James Cook’s and Louis Antoine de Bougainville’s
initial voyages to the South Pacific gave additional fodder to the hope of
fi nding untainted natural goodness elsewhere, if not at home. Finally we
end up with an ironic return to a universe that seems strikingly Hobbes-
ian, as the “sensitive soul” or man of feeling becomes increasingly rare and
embattled.48 Authors of novels of sensibility thus felt pressure to portray
heroes who were also victims of society—Shaftesburian souls, forlorn in a
Hobbesian universe. In other words, sensibility reacts against civilization,
its unnatural hierarchies, and artificial aristocracy, yet it also establishes a
new, elaborate, exclusive aristocracy of its own.

NARRATING FAILURE

If one of the primary features of the psychology of the man or woman of

feeling is the assumption of the impossibility of the coexistence of author-
ity, authentic feeling, and virtue in any given individual, a second feature
is a doubt in the possibility that virtuous people can conform their expres-
sions to the political and social conventions of society. According to this
notion, good men do not tend to rise to positions of political or social
power, partly because they are too authentic to make good orators. Gener-
ally the protagonist is a “sensitive soul” or a “man of feeling” who is placed
in conflict with either “men of the world” (who think mostly of worldly
gain), or the prototypical Enlightenment “man of letters” (who argues with
great faith in reason, but little heart). Unlike protagonists in many other
cultural movements, his virtue is actually underscored by his weakness
in other traditional roles: he possesses neither prudence, public authority,
oratorial powers, martial skill, nor physical prowess. When he addresses
broader political or societal problems (such as Harley’s reflections on India
and the Jamaican slave trade, or Werther’s on the treatment of insanity),
he does so silently and with no external effect. We will return in Chapter
Four to the issue of whether female protagonists of sensibility are equally
able to satisfy this moral aesthetic; suffice it to say for now that the male
protagonists were more striking because the role of ‘man of feeling’ was
more overtly opposed to normative conceptions of masculinity, whereas
many of the characteristics described here were stereotypically considered
as ‘feminine’ traits.
18 Ruined by Design
Fictional heroes and heroines in the second half of the eighteenth cen-
tury frequently share great difficulty expressing their deep, naturally virtu-
ous feelings in the conventional public language of society. The one who
writes well or writes clearly must also be guilty of artifice or vice—mani-
festations of the mortal sin of “lack of feeling.” We can therefore also have
a character like Werther, who complains repeatedly about his inability to
express himself: what may at fi rst sound modest, is actually self-congratu-
latory, for only one whose feelings are naturally deep, mercurial, and boun-
tiful can “outrun” words. A strong sense of this new sin is common among
many of the authors treated in this volume: Diderot, Rousseau, Bernardin,
Sterne, Mackenzie, Goethe, and Austen. Rousseau, Voltaire, and Diderot’s
noble savage, Mackenzie’s man of feeling, Sterne’s sentimental traveler, and
Goethe’s Werther, all share a great difficulty expressing their deep, natu-
rally virtuous feelings in the conventional language of society.49 In fact,
their difficulty speaking becomes a measure of their sensibility: in being
men of feeling, they are explicitly not men of words.
The man of feeling or the woman of sensibility, far from being a good
orator, has feelings so keen and delicate that words inevitably fail to do
them justice. As the narrator of Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling writes:
“We would attempt to describe the joy which Harley felt on the occasion,
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.”50 In such passages, the necessity of speech
can function as a gesture of exclusion or despair. Rather than being simply
an attempt to gain understanding or community through explanation, the
very urge to explain reveals a lack of transparency as well as of intimacy.
Because of a growing distrust of the referential and communicative powers
of language, spectacle and fragmentary communication are sought as an
antidote to solipsism, melancholy, and madness.
Yet the philosophical suspicion of oration (and narration) goes even
deeper. Under the residual influence of Locke and Condillac, Diderot,
Rousseau, and Herder showed that by allowing feelings to be passed
through the ordering, but stultifying funnel of discourse, we lose the
authenticity of the instantaneous “fl ash” of feeling. To protect the
authenticity of original emotions, sensibility constantly pushes its heroes
and heroines towards silence, or draws readers’ attention to what is
either not said, only partially said, or said in an unfelicitous, desultory,
or solecistic manner. Thus, the culture of sensibility seeks to represent
through gestures, visual art, and fragmentation what can no longer be
articulated through syntactic completion, or with a reliance on logic and
discursive reason.
Silence, per se, does not satisfy the moral aesthetic of sensibility, and
indeed, none of its heroes or heroines are entirely mute (in fact, some are quite
garrulous in their own way). Its significance rests in its multivalence, as with
the other figures of ruin and tears. Simple silence could convey a dearth of
 Introduction 19
thought or feeling, as well as an abundance. Sensibility’s vocabulary is located,
paradoxically, in the gaps between words—the sighs, hesitations, stammer-
ings, and fragmentation that demonstrate an individual whose expansive feel-
ings are constrained but refuse to be corrupted by the “artificial” language of
society—and in follies, or crumbling monuments, built purposely to arouse
greater emotion in viewers as they imaginatively recreate the missing parts of
the monument. There must, therefore, be speech for the gaps to punctuate, as
well as walls for cracks to puncture. The hero of sensibility and the reader of
novels of sensibility must both be adept at the rhetoric of ruins.

DEFINING AMBIVALENCE

In the preceding pages, we have considered the distrust of reason argued

most persuasively and rationally by philosophers; the insistence upon nat-
ural goodness accessible to all, yet which is poignantly rare and fragile;
and the lengthy and voluble, if fragmented, explanations of the insuffi-
ciency of language for communication. As this book seeks to establish,
sensibility’s contradictory impulses consist in a persistent tension between
extreme optimism and fearful pessimism, between revolutionary fer-
vor and nostalgic conservatism, between democratic and authoritarian
impulses, between egalitarianism and elitism, between virtue as natural
and virtue as highly cultivated, between ruins and carefully constructed
buildings, and between fragmentation and narrative closure. In most of
these cases, sensibility started as a reaction against Enlightenment confi-
dence in the powers of reason and education, but ultimately resulted in an
ironic reversal, showing the continuity of family traits by pursuing similar
goals under different terms. Literary didacticism, too, continues in masked
form—transformed into a pedagogy of seeing and feeling, rather than a
pedagogy of abstract reasoning.
As the passions grow reasonable and even moral, the need arises to cul-
tivate rather than suppress them. We will see the effects of this trend in
the pedagogy of seeing and feeling emphasized both in landscape garden-
ing and the sentimental novel. Sensibility’s moral psychology brings with
it an emphasis on receptivity or sensitivity to external behavior and sights,
whether the landscape garden, the Alps, or the sight of human suffering at
home. The new aristocracy and pedagogy of feeling indicate the underlying
ambivalence about whether sensibility itself was profoundly “natural”—
that is, whether it is defined in opposition to the corrupted, “artificial,” cold
ways of society, or whether it is a product of great aesthetic refinement.
In other words, despite the moral sense school’s attempts to portray vir-
tue as increasingly natural and accessible, virtue actually became rarer and
more fragile as the culture of sensibility progressed. Returning again to
the epigraphs above, sensibility emphasizes quotidian virtues, accessible
to all on the one hand, and on the other, rarity and heroism enter because
20 Ruined by Design
people of sensibility are defi ned as being at odds with the presumably more
commonplace “men of the world” and “fall into error,” if not into ruin.
The confl ict implied in the epigraph above foreshadows the fate of this new
character—one that almost always ends either in ruin or impotence when
faced with “men of the world.”
In short, the culture of sensibility exhibits a profoundly ambitious and
exuberant hope in the natural goodness of human nature and in human
attempts to regain a natural innocence, community, and mutual transpar-
ency—an exuberance that is simultaneously spurred on and held in check
by its haunting fear of human depravity and inescapable isolation. 51 And
while such an internal tension might describe other “transitional” moments
in history, the culture of sensibility demonstrates innovative responses to its
philosophical insecurity in its art, literature, and philosophy. 52
There are certain philosophical advantages to the dialectic tension
within sensibility, which stems from its defensive insecurity. The lack of
Romantic or revolutionary univocalism, in other words, is not necessarily
a weakness. While sensibility’s confl icting impulses may seem hypocritical
at times, its heartfelt ambivalence not only distinguishes it from Romanti-
cism, but is also at least partly an enlightened response to the events of the
French Revolution and subsequent Terrors. 53 Simultaneously intrepid and
fearful, sensibility is an interesting experiment in combining both optimis-
tic revolutionary fervor and conservative nostalgic concerns for order and
stability without falling into either disastrous extreme—in political terms,
avoiding both anarchy and totalitarianism. Their very ambivalence, built
into the structure of these cultural artifacts, may be a key reason that these
novels merit serious critical treatment.

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

There are certain combined looks of simple subtlety— where

whim, and sense, and seriousness, and nonsense, are so blended,
that all the languages of Babel set loose together could not express
them . . .
—Laurence Sterne

Upheaval characterizes many areas of mid-to-late eighteenth century

European life. It was not only a time for self-conscious new begin-
nings, but also a time for recovering (and at times inventing) origins of
all kinds—whether the original human language, the state of nature, or
the geography of the antediluvian Earth. Events and scientific discov-
eries reinforced the sense of significant beginnings and endings into a
form of millenialist self-importance. Examples include the eruption of
the American and French Revolutions and resulting experimentation in
nation building; the growing age of exploration and naval discovery; the
dawn of the microscope and drastic improvement of the telescope, reveal-
ing new worlds both far away and close at hand; and the discovery of
the ashen, fiery fates of Pompeii and Herculaneum; as well as the more
immediate devastation resulting from the Lisbon earthquake of 1757. It
was a time of optimism in widening human achievements and utopian
fantasies, as well as sullen reminders of the fragility of peace, innocence,
and even civilization itself.
Despite the Lisbon earthquake and the presence of recent ruination
from civil war and other natural and human disasters, irregularities and
jagged edges became increasingly valuable in the novels and gardens of
sensibility. A particularly vivid example is an English garden in Ger-
many—the Garden of Wörlitz, which included two artificial volcanoes
 Redeeming Ruin 23

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.

TOURING RUIN, COLLECTING RUIN

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

intensified by interest in origins and biblical accounts of destruction. In

subsequent chapters, we will see that the desire to reappropriate Genesis
to sensibility’s mental habit of ambivalence is also reflected in the desire
to fi nd innovative narrative structures for the novel. In all these arenas,
the domestication and secularization of ruination, fragmentation, and
the irrational aspects of human nature enable viewers (or owners) to feel
increased control over cataclysmic events.
34 Ruined by Design

CONSTRUCTING EDEN, OWNING EDEN

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

of the picturesque, wrote his essays on the picturesque, the aesthetics of

irregularity had boosted the status of ruins and mountains from shame-
ful reminders of fallen nature to an exalted symbol of authenticity, feel-
ing, and the language of nature. 35 Gilpin not only helped create a British
counterpart to the Alpine travel growing so popular on the continent,
36 Ruined by Design

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

ecology, theories of association, and the psychology of perception.”36 While

its special meanings are still the subject of intense debate among scholars, the
importance of the picturesque to general eighteenth-century aesthetics seems
difficult to dispute. 37 Just as the irregular terrain of the postdiluvian world
rose in public esteem with the rise of the culture of sensibility, smoothness of
any kind in the garden grew offensive for picturesque theorists such as Gilpin
and Uvedale Price. “Turn the lawn into a piece of broken ground: plant rug-
ged oaks instead of flowering shrubs: . . . give it the rudeness of a road: mark
it with wheel-tracks; and scatter around a few stones, and brushwood; in a
word, . . . make it rough; and you make it also picturesque.”38
It is then fitting that the new Adam entailed by the culture of sensibil-
ity requires a new garden—one that has “lep’t the fence,” has done away
with the traditional walled or fenced garden, emphasizes irregularity, and
deemphasizes the hierarchical authority of God. Sensibility and the pictur-
esque thus both attempt to recapture a fallen world to engage the interest,
sympathy, and moral engagement of viewers or readers. 39 As the movement
grew, the “English” gardens and the picturesque school came to be the per-
fect setting for the unfolding of the inner drama of the Shaftesburian soul
trapped in a Hobbesian world, or for the lone and virtuous spectator with
exquisite sensibility, who therefore could properly appreciate the landscape
and its picturesque settings and artifacts. The garden becomes a status
symbol for the prestige associated with sensitive souls.40
 Redeeming Ruin 39
Not only status, but also politics figured prominently if not always
overtly in discussions of the differences between English and French gar-
dening styles, and frequently involve responses to the American and French
revolutions. There is evidence that landscape gardening (tied to agricultural
law, enclosure acts, and merchant conditions, for example) became a party
issue separating Tories and Whigs, as well as enemies and supporters of the
American and French revolutions. Edmund Burke invokes the same aes-
thetic assumptions when he refers to Thomas Paine’s “geometric principles
of government” and in relation to the domestic importation of views gener-
ated by the French Revolution in particular. The irregularity of ‘natural’
gardens contrasted not only with absolute monarchies of Europe, but also
with domestic Jacobin thought. Samuel Kliger, one of the first scholars to
write of these connections, writes of the pattern of ideas “that equated
political liberty with a taste for ‘natural’ art and tyranny with formal art.”
Kliger quotes John Aikin as saying “Even moral ideas are brought in to
decide the preference; and a taste for nature is said equivalent to a love
for liberty and truth; while the votaries of art are pronounced slaves to
formality and constraint.”41 Similarly, on the other side of the Atlantic,
Washington Irving recounts a conversation with an English squire defend-
ing his father’s formal garden, where “grounds were laid out in the old for-
mal manner of artificial flower-beds, clipped shrubberies, raised terraces,
[etc.]”: “[My father] admired this fashion in gardening; it had an air of
magnificence, was courtly and noble, and befitting good old family style.
The boasted imitation of nature in modern gardening had sprung up with
modern republican notions, but did not suit a monarchical government; it
smacked of the levelling system.”42 To glory in ‘natural’ appearance and its
liberal or levelling associations could only be done by ignoring the artificial
means through which they were achieved.
When Burke wrote of the “fetters” of the garden in his Philosophical
Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, his
mind was not far from politics; when Pope wrote scathing essays attacking
the art of topiary, he was arguing about more than horticulture; and when
Addison champions gardens that allow prolific flowers “in their natural
Luxuriancy and Disorder . . . [that] they could [never] have received from
the Checks and Restraints of Art,”43 he has French autocracy in mind, as
well as domestic importations of French style, whether in gardening, art,
or politics. According to John Dixon Hunt, Pope and Addison also have
Lockean associationist psychology in mind: it would seem that according
to these authors, irregularity, variety, and surprise (a subsidiary of irregu-
larity that presumes the audience’s anticipation of regularity) protect lib-
erty of mind and feeling, as well as civic liberty. French gardens, regardless
of their location, typically used a large château as the center of the geo-
metrical patterns. We see a version of this style reflected in the Avenues
at Hampton Court (Figure 10), as well as in the more prototypical French
garden of Versailles, designed by André Le Nôtre.
40 Ruined by Design

Figure 10

In the baroque garden, cultivation, order, and control would symbolically

emanate from the central château and suggest the relative importance of
the landowner, as well as the literal extent of his political authority. While
often equally involved with the display of worldly authority and posses-
sions, “English” gardens tended to be less public and far less geometrical:
they were often designed to be viewed from a manor house, rather than
using the manor house as the principal prospect. The synoptic, bird’s-eye
view of the estate demonstrates how the estate claims surrounding terri-
tories in the progression of its avenues, symbolically reinstates order, and
explicitly separates civilization and wilderness.
It is appropriate that at the same time, illustrations of landscape gar-
dens change from being presented from a bird’s-eye (or God’s-eye) view
to a more subjective, lateral view from the perspective of an individual
walking through a garden (compare, for example, Figure 10 against the
perspective of Figures 11–13). Prest and Pizzoni both note the diminishing
use, in the eighteenth century, of a central vanishing point and a bird’s-eye
view to represent the “boundless garden” and correspondingly boundless
authority of the owner of great estates that could visually “subordinate”
all neighboring villages (see Figure 10).44 Although somewhat later, Hunt
also reports of the 1809 Volksgarten in Vienna that was “laid out in open
regular French style, largely in the interests of controlling large crowds.”45
Both symbolically, visually, and practically, the French garden came to
represent a more authoritarian or hierarchical perspective of the individual
 Redeeming Ruin 41
in the garden, whereas, the English garden was more suited to the strong
inclination towards a belief in natural goodness characteristic of the culture
of sensibility and useful for establishing the claim that democracy could
function justly and peacefully without external restraints. And while Rep-
ton warns against excessively political or factional interpretation of land-
scape gardening, he nonetheless formulates the prevalent political readings
of the salient difference between English and French gardening. As Repton
idealistically describes it: “I cannot help seeing a great affi nity betwixt
deducing gardening from the painters’ studies of wild nature, and deducing
government from the uncontrolled opinions of man in a savage state. The
neatness, simplicity, and elegance of English gardening, have acquired the
approbation of the present century, as the happy medium betwixt the wild-
ness of nature and the stiffness of art; in the same manner as the English
constitution is the happy medium betwixt the liberty of savages, and the
restraint of despotic government; and so long as we enjoy the benefits of
these middle degrees betwixt extremes of each, let experiments of untried
theoretical improvement be made in some other country.”46 It was based on
this shared aesthetic that Franz imported the English style of gardening to
Germany at Wörlitz.
In the baroque (French) garden, intruders or anything out of order could be
easily detected, and there was no escaping the central eyes of the landowner.
In his poem Liberty (1735), James Thomson avails himself of this association
when he equates political tyranny with the gardening styles of France:

Those parks and gardens, where, his haunts betrim’d,

And Nature by presumptuous Art oppress’d,
The woodland Genius mourns.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Detested forms! that, on the mind imprest,
Corrupt, confound, and barbarize an age. 47

“Presumptuous Art,” or the marks of the scissors, as Hunt demonstrates,

were equated with the oppressive rule of the autocrat.
There is, of course, another great irony in that the natural garden is
enabled by an agricultural revolution where enclosure acts enabled land-
owners to consolidate large contiguous blocks of land around their house
and park.48 Eden turns out to exist only at the expense of a good many
commoners. Additionally, the English garden has its own forms of artifice
and masks the “presumptuous Art” through anti-utilitarianism, an affec-
tive focus, and the emphasis on the individual viewer’s experience. In both
the English garden and its baroque nemesis, therefore, “art” is the enemy.
It is interesting that artifice is a critique leveled at both styles in eighteenth-
century discourse: one explicitly critiqued as “presumptuous,” the other as
hypocritical. One is critiqued for excessive artifice, the other for pretending
it has none.
42 Ruined by Design
One of the transitional forms between the French and English garden
was the “emblematic” style,49 which involved direct quotations and liter-
ary allusion to classical and medieval texts, engraved on stones, urns, and
benches for more directed associations. Such inscriptions were eventually
disapproved of by gardeners such as Thomas Whately for being too explan-
atory rather than evocative—too tyrannical, in a sense. Whately, for exam-
ple, complained of these overly literal (and overtly artificial) endeavors:
“natural cascades have been disfigured by river gods; and columns erected
only to receive quotations . . . All these devices are rather emblematical
than expressive; . . . they make no immediate impression; for they must be
examined, compared, perhaps explained, before the whole design of them
is well understood.” “Allusions should have the force of a metaphor, free
from the detail of an allegory” (Observations, 150–1).
Within the fashion for English gardens, the literary emblematic style
transitioned to a more emotional and loosely associative style. These asso-
ciative gardens subsequently gained strength and meaning through the
broader changes in the culture of sensibility. The Baroque’s overt sense of
order and human control was replaced by the emblematic garden’s sense of
erudite inclusion and nostalgia. Finally, the full-fledged English garden fur-
ther emphasizes one’s own experience, particularly a heightened sensitivity
to one’s surroundings. Whereas the emblematic garden frequently relies on
written language, the later English garden emphasizes the affective powers
of landscape without the aid of written language.
As we shall see in later chapters, elaborate stratagems arose to hide the
marks of the shears or scissors from the view of the spectator. The result is
not wildness, but a picturesquely regulated wildness, a compromise remi-
niscent of sensibility’s insecurity and equivocation towards external sources
of authority. Similarly, the appearance of mechanism was avoided in favor
of organicism whenever possible; the experience of the individual gained
more autonomy, as private spaces were created among the serpentine paths.
While transition from a scientific mechanism to an organic appreciation of
wholeness occurred in painting by the movement from an emphasis on line
to an emphasis on color, lines and structure also became less permanent
in the English garden: rather than meticulous mosaics or paths made of
stone or brick, the new breed of gardeners used gravel, or suggested lines
by planting rather than pruning.
In baroque styles of gardening, nature was often made to imitate architec-
ture, using trompe l’oeil devices such as topiaries—trees and hedges pruned
into geometrical forms of even the shape of knots, locks, and bridges. Such
overtly artificial techniques highlight the control of the gardener’s hands—
they mark the presence of human authority and celebrate the transform-
ing power of reason. The Topiary Arcade at Hartwell House, for example,
first constructed in 1738, looks almost as though the hedges had been sliced
into perfectly smooth planes rather than pruned; the sharply defined edges
emphasize the machine-like perfection of the manual labor which proudly
 Redeeming Ruin 43
obliterates the naturally irregular surface of the bushes (see Figure 11).
Balthazar Nebot emphasizes the man-made precision by portraying the tal-
ented gardeners and their sharp blades prominently in the foreground of the
painting. In contrast, sensibility’s more “natural” styles of gardening reverse
the direction of imitation and often make architecture imitate nature: bridges
imitate trees, rather than trees and hedges imitating bridges. For example,
William Chambers camouflaged his “Ruined Arch” at Kew Gardens to
resemble overgrown tree stumps and piles of rocks in order to hide from the
viewer the arch’s purpose as a transport bridge (Figure 12). By using organi-
cism to hide and mask mechanism, sensibility reverses the prior trend. Not
rejecting mechanism entirely, sensibility once again reveals its dual impulses:
organicism is the new ideal, but mechanisms are trusted as the way of ensur-
ing the properly organic appearances while retaining maximum utility. The
goal: the appearance of Nature, but without inconvenience. See Figure 13 for
example of a bridge made to look as rustic, precarious, and impractical as
possible. François Nicolas Henri Racine de Monville had it built at Le Désert
de Retz purely as a picturesque adornment, since he provided another hidden
(practical, yet unscenic) entrance for supplies to the tower.
The “tyrannical” tendencies of the emblematic garden give a clue to
an even greater irony regarding the English, “natural” garden: while
applauding Nature’s “escape[-] from . . . fetters,” the degree of expense

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.

RECLAIMING THE RUINS OF BABEL

One of the most prominent architectural ruins in the eighteenth-century

imagination is a mythical one: the tower of Babel. In its philosophy as well
as in linguistics, the culture of sensibility resonates with the fall of Babel.
Whereas before Babel, according to Genesis, “the whole earth was of one
language, and of one speech,”50 Babel’s fall symbolized not only the lost
“transparency” or immediacy of communication depicted by Rousseau
in his discourses, but also the loss of a singular, universal language and
of the possibility of homogeneous community. “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 scattered abroad upon the face of the whole
earth.”51 The ruins of Babel thus draw attention to the artificial nature
and fragility of human community and authority, especially in contrast to
divine omnipotence.
As the following verses suggest, the Old Testament God is jealous of the
godlike centralized power that the human beings seek: “And the Lord came
down to see the city and the tower . . . and the Lord said, Behold, the people
is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now
nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go
to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not
understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from
thence upon the face of the earth: and they left off to build the city.”52 The
multivalent ruins of Babel can therefore represent either a humbling sight,
a reminder of the dangers of hubris and the limits of human achievement,
or remind the reader or viewer of a lost human innocence and intimacy,
46 Ruined by Design
mythically recorded in Genesis, as well as in Rousseau’s own revision of
Genesis, the Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi
les hommes [Second Discourse] (1754).
Older, more authoritarian explanations of the Tower of Babel, such as
Hobbes’, were no longer satisfactory: “All this language gotten, and aug-
mented by Adam and his posterity, was again lost at the Tower of Babel,
when, by the hand of God, every man was stricken, for his rebellion, with
an oblivion of his former language. And being hereby forced to disperse
themselves into several parts of the world, it must needs be, that the diver-
sity of tongues that now is, proceeded by degrees from them.”53 Linguistic
diversity is thus itself an emblem of decay. Rebelling against God’s punitive
assertion of authority, authors writing from within a culture of sensibil-
ity were nonetheless still unsure about the human ability to self-govern.
The challenge to satisfy sensibility’s dual impulses required an assertion of
natural goodness and renewed human innocence; however, it also had to
acknowledge a degree of Hobbesian corruption and chaos in the world at
large. It attempted to balance liberal aspirations and conservative skepti-
cism, liberty and traditional sources of authority, spontaneity and order
in modern society, by reclaiming the authority and mythological power of
Genesis on its own behalf.
Sensibility’s reappropriation of the Babel story from Genesis helps shape
mid-to-late eighteenth-century aesthetics, landscape gardening, and litera-
ture: on the one hand, authors of sensibility mourn the fall of language
from an elevated position as well as the loss of community and mutual
transparency. On the other hand, the same voices often also celebrate the
“fortunate fall” of Babel. In the epigraph to this chapter, for example, Lau-
rence Sterne has his Yorick of A Sentimental Journey exclaim that “there
are certain combined looks of simple subtlety—where whim, and sense, and
seriousness, and nonsense, are so blended, that all the languages of Babel
set loose together could not express them.”54 Yet, for Yorick the limits of
verbal language, as we shall see, enable him to progress in the translation
of looks, gesture, and silence—languages that, according to him, express
feeling more directly than words. The rubble of Babel, rather than being
a reminder of God’s central authority, becomes an indicator of the impor-
tance of individual language communities, for better and worse. Authors
in a number of fields locate the possibility for the “progress of sociality” in
extra-verbal communication.
Most mid-to-late eighteenth-century literary depictions of the fall of
language from a position of trust and objectivity are composed so as to
communicate this ambivalence—the bittersweet fact of Babel’s fall. This
ambivalence is apparent every time Goethe’s Werther bemoans the short-
comings of speech to capture his emotions (“O Wilhelm, . . . Wie kann
der kalte, tote Buchstabe diese himmlische Blüte des Geistes darstellen”
[Oh, Wilhelm, . . . How can cold, dead letters represent this heavenly spiri-
tual blossom?]55), and every time Rousseau and his characters explain the
 Redeeming Ruin 47
impossibility of using words to communicate what they instinctively feel
(“Que d’ardens sentiments se sont communiqués sans la froide entremise de
la parole!” [What ardent feelings are communicated without the cold intru-
sion of speech!] 56). Consider, for example, Harley’s pastoral poem included
within the pages of Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling:

It [my passion] ne’er was apparell’d with art,

On words it could never rely;
It reign’d in the throb of my heart,
It gleam’d in the glance of my eye. 57

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.

[The philosophers who have examined the foundations of society have

all felt the necessity of going back to the state of nature, but none of
them has reached it . . . All of them . . . have carried over to the state of
nature ideas they had acquired in society: they spoke about savage man
and they described civil man. It did not even enter the minds of most
of our philosophers to doubt that the state of nature ever existed, even
though it is evident from reading the Holy Scriptures that the fi rst man,
having received enlightenment and precepts directly from God, was
not himself in that state . . . 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; but [religion]
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.] 86

In this interesting passage, Rousseau shows an ambivalence towards the

authority of Genesis as well as towards his philosophical project’s need
for Biblical sanction. He relies on Genesis for confi rmation of an original
Edenic state of human perfection and therefore relies upon a religiously
based sanction of his view of human nature. Yet while he uses Genesis as
an ontological starting point, he outdoes Genesis in his assertions of origi-
nal purity and innocence, interpreting God’s actions in Genesis as the fi rst
source of our painful separation from our nature. While Rousseau tacitly
acknowledges God as the source of original purity, God is, more impor-
tantly for this passage, also the fi rst source of “lumières et . . . préceptes”
54 Ruined by Design
[enlightenment and precepts]. As such, God actually contributes to our cor-
ruption as does civilization itself in Rousseau’s account. Somewhat ironi-
cally, then, the Adam and Eve inhabiting the Garden of Eden before the Fall
are insufficiently pure to represent Rousseau’s model of innocence. Rous-
seau thus contributes potently to the culture (and the cult) of sensibility, as
well as to a new conception of the self.
In his Essai sur l’origine des langues [Essay on the Origin of Lan-
guages], Rousseau uses the origin of language to reconstruct our alien-
ation and decline from the natural state of innocence: he encourages the
growing distrust of words by presenting them as tokens of this artifice and
deadening convention which has alienated us from our natural goodness.
Rousseau gives the distinction between “natural” and “artificial” language
new fervor: the original speech, he claims, was the figurative, melodious
language of the poets; however, “L’étude de la philosophie et le progrès du
raisonnement ayant perfectionné la grammaire ôtèrent à la langue ce ton
vif et passioné qui l’avoit d’abord rendüe si chantante.” [Having perfected
our grammar, the study of philosophy and the progress of reasoning now
robs language of the lively and passionate tone that had initially made it
so lyrical.]87
Rousseau constructs a defi nite hierarchy among the communicative arts:
music and drawing express feeling infi nitely better than speaking,88 and
speaking much better than writing: “L’écriture, qui semble devoir fi xer la
langue, est précisement ce qui l’altère; elle n’en change pas les mots mais
le génie; elle substitue l’exactitude à l’expression. L’on rend ses sentimens
quand on parle et ses idées quand on écrit. En écrivant on est forcé de pren-
dre tous les mots dans l’acception commune.” [Writing, which seems as if
it should fi x language, is precisely what alters it; it changes not its words
but its genius; it substitutes precision for expressiveness. One conveys feel-
ings in speech and ideas in writing. In writing, one is forced to take all
the words according to common usage.]89 One of the flaws of writing is
thus that it obscures the speech act, transmitting neither intonation nor
gesture. As Diderot explains: “Par la raison seule qu’aucun homme ne res-
semble parfaitement à un autre, nous n’entendons jamais précisément, nous
ne sommes jamais précisément entendus; il y a du plus ou du moins en tout:
notre discours est toujours en deçà ou au delà de la sensation.” [For the very
reason that no man is identical to any other, we never understand precisely,
and we are never precisely understood. There are degrees in everything; our
speech always goes beyond or falls short of the sensation itself.]90
Rather than reason and speech being the means to unity as taught
by classical authors or in Locke’s “Common Tye,” now unity is present
in sensations that defy expression as words. Or as Diderot wrote in his
Pensées détachées sur la peinture (1776–1777): “Le sentiment est difficile
sur l’expression, il la cherche; et cependant, ou il balbutie, ou il produit
d’impatience un éclair de génie. Cependant cet éclair n’est pas la chose
qu’il sent; mais on l’aperçoit à sa lueur.”91 [It is difficult to fi nd the right
 Redeeming Ruin 55
expression for a feeling; we search for it, and, in the process, we either
stammer or else, out of impatience, we have a fl ash of genius. However,
this flash is not the thing we felt; but it can be glimpsed through the light
of the fl ash.] As time wears on, stammering itself becomes a way to com-
municate genius.
Communication is by nature a public enterprise, and the public domain
of speech remains hazardous to “l’homme naturel” in us all. In the task
of (self-) representation in particular, one risks, on the one hand, a richly
emotional isolation or solipsism in the pursuit of natural speech and, on
the other, the tempering and therefore corrupting influence of convention
and its public and “artificial” language. The unfortunate alternatives to
which Rousseau’s theory leads help establish the new and important role
acquired by the rhetoric of silence during sensibility.
Others, like Herder, responded to the confl ict between language and
feeling with less pessimism, echoing tones of Babel’s fortunate fall. In his
interpretations of Genesis within Über den Ursprung der Sprachen [On
the Origin of Languages], Herder demonstrates the more optimistic read-
ing of the split between natural and artificial languages—or as Herder calls
them, “innere” and “äußere Sprache” (inner and outer speech). The fall
from Edenic Grace, for Herder, is less a catastrophe than a new beginning,
humankind’s great opportunity (“Möglichkeit”). His interpretation of
Babel’s fall is similarly optimistic. Although he agrees with Rousseau about
the regrettable domestication of language from its “original wild mother of
the human race” (“[die] ursprüngliche[-] wilde[-] Mutter des menschlichen
Geschlechts”) to “the child of reason and society” (“das Kind der Vernunft
und Gesellschaft”),92 he thinks that the grand passions of the few will pour
forth nonetheless: “Unsre künstliche Sprache mag die Sprache der Natur
so verdränget, unsre bürgerliche Lebensart und gesellschaftliche Artigkeit
mag die Flut und das Meer der Leidenschaften so gedämmet, ausgetrocknet
und abgeleitet haben, als man will; der heftigste Augenblick der Empfi nd-
ung, wo und wie selten er sich fi nde, nimmt noch immer sein Recht wie-
der und tönt in seiner mütterlichen Sprache unmittelbar durch Akzente.”
[Our artificial language may have suppressed the language of nature so
much, our bourgeois style of life and social courtesy may have dammed in,
dried up, and re-channeled the tide and ocean of the passions so much as
one will; the most powerful moment of feeling, wherever and however sel-
dom it is found, still reclaims its right, sounding its mother tongue directly
through accents.]93
Like Rousseau and unlike Dr. Johnson, Herder claims that the acuity
of the senses is inversely proportionate to the development of language;
this lamentable loss is actually due to the great human capacity to adapt
to different spheres of activity. According to Herder, it is a sign of human
strength. In this way Rousseau and Herder delineate the dispute over
just how dark the “gap between sign and meaning” or between language
and feeling really is; it is not a dispute over whether the gap exists, but
56 Ruined by Design
rather how one should react to it. Thus, for Herder, human and linguistic
incompletion signifies freedom and potential rather than inevitable dis-
satisfaction. The catch is, however, that in order to achieve this optimis-
tic reading, Herder must interpret “Sprache” as not necessarily verbal. In
other words, purity still has a strong suggestion of incompatibility with
grammatical and syntactic speech. As he writes in his Kritische Wälder
(1766), rational language so weakens expression, that we are left with a
language fit only for philosophy, not for poetry.
In contrast to Condillac, Rousseau and Herder both locate purity on
the same side of the “decomposition” from thought to language as does
Diderot—that is, to compose language is to allow it to decompose in the
process. A split between the language of thought and the language of dis-
course, and therefore between “natural” and “artificial” languages, is
implied in the very notion of origins studies. The natural language, associ-
ated more closely with a putatively pure source of expression (regardless of
whether this source is defi ned as “thought” or “feeling” or “sentiment”),
takes on features that are non-verbal, non-lexical, asyntactic, or non-gram-
matical. This is where the moral-aesthetic components of sensibility start
to alter the discourse about language: “inexpressibility” becomes not only
natural, but also expressive of greater sentiment. Subsequently, issues such
as the ability to convey moral feeling, the moral ability to convey feel-
ing, and the moral ability to feel all rise in prominence, as we shall see in
subsequent sections. The opponent to “pure” language and sentiment in
these tensions continues to be convention, including conventional regard
for logic, grammar, syntax, and narration.
As we have seen, the same wary optimism that leads philosophers
associated with the culture of sensibility to create theories of “moral sen-
timents” and to pursue natural goodness in the absence of traditional
authority, religion, or disengaged reason, also leads linguists in the late
eighteenth-century to search for a more “natural” form of language. This
more natural language could not only reestablish greater transparency
among human beings, but also help to rediscover a long-lost universal lan-
guage supposed to predate Genesis’ Tower of Babel. Frequently, in fact,
these philosophers and linguists are the same individuals: prominent phi-
losophers, such as Rousseau, Diderot, and Herder, give their reactions to
the writings of Locke, and accordingly establish a new interpretation of
the fall of the Tower of Babel, where the language of emotions is the most
authentic one of all.

THE LANGUAGE OF TRUE FEELING

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):

Hail, sacred source of sympathies divine,

Each social pulse, each social fibre thine;
Hail, symbols of the God, to whom we owe
The nerves that vibrate, and the hearts that glow;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Thy heav’nly favours stretch from pole to pole,
Encircle earth, and rivet soul to soul!108

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:

In the present state we are in we fi nd such a strong sympathy and union

between our souls and bodies, that the one cannot be touched or sen-
sibly affected, without producing some corresponding emotion in the
other.—Nature has assigned a different look, tone of voice, and gesture,
peculiar to every passion and affection we are subject to; and, there-
fore, to argue against this strict correspondence which is held between
our souls and bodies,—is disputing against the frame and mechanism
of human nature.—We are not angels, but men cloathed with bodies,
and, in some measure, governed by our imaginations, that we have
need of all these external helps which nature has made the interpreters
of our thoughts.116

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

We must use the mallet, instead of the chissel:

we must beat down one half of it, deface the other,
and throw the mutilated members around in heaps.
In short, from a smooth building we must turn it into a rough ruin.
—William Gilpin

Why is it that a beautiful sketch pleases us more than a beautiful

painting? It is because a sketch has more life and less form.
As form is gradually introduced, life disappears.
—Denis Diderot

While on his Grand Tour to Rome, Addison comments upon both

“Buildings the most magnificent in the world, and Ruins more magnifi -
cent than they.”1 His comment suggests the interesting possibility that
ruins can exceed monuments in magnificence. For later eighteenth-cen-
tury audiences, old symbols of authority and power, whether classic or
Gothic, have a particular appeal when they are weak and crumbling.
The intertwining of ruin and monument can demonstrate the late eigh-
teenth-century’s characteristically ambivalent attitude towards authority
and order. The “ideal” ruin must be grand enough in stature to sug-
gest what it once was, and, at the same time, decayed enough to show
that it no longer is; grand enough to suggest a worthwhile conquest,
yet decayed enough to quell any doubts about who conquers. Ruins can
emphasize either permanence—that is, the enduring presence of the past
and its still-unextinguished glory—or the impermanence of the present
and, indeed, of all earthly glories. For this reason, they are capable of
evoking emotions as varied as national pride, melancholy, nostalgia, or
even utopian ambitions. Contradictory impulses undergird the fascina-
tion with ruins, which Rose Macaulay dubs the “ruin drama”: “Half of
[the] desire is to build up, while the other half smashes and levels to the
earth.”2 Just like the famous glass of water which can appear either half-
full or half-empty, a given ruin can also be seen as either half-remaining
 The Anatomy of Follies 67
or half-vanished—as either “comforting” or “horrifying,” or more likely
both at the same time. 3
This multivalence of ruins is especially important in sensibility, for, as we
have seen, there are similarly multivalent interpretations not only of human
goodness, but also of the gaps between sign and meaning or between lan-
guage and thought. For Rousseau, the emphasis was on the tragic loss of
former glory, and for Herder, the loss signaled new possibilities: yet the
fall of the tower of Babel was for each tragi-comedy. Their difference in
tonality reflects sensibility’s ambivalence concerning human nature: the
emphasis upon natural human goodness was, ironically, defi ned in ways
which made it seem just as rare, exotic, and difficult as the models of virtue
it was meant to replace. The multivalence of ruins could thus suit the philo-
sophical insecurity of sensibility: its hopeful idealization as well as cautious
minimization, its optimism as well as pessimism, its utopian fervor as well
as its nostalgia.
An unfi nished, fragmented quality in art, the nonfi nito,4 which lends
itself towards the reader’s or viewer’s participation, is quite central to
eighteenth-century aesthetics in general, and profoundly influenced peo-
ple’s assumptions about the activities of reading and viewing. 5 Just as
philosophers in the culture of sensibility associated natural language with
non-linearity and disruption of syntax, numerous eighteenth-century
authors support the notion that incompletion—whether visual or narra-
tive in form—leads to greater imaginative or affective involvement of the
spectator. Diderot, for example, consistently prefers sketches, outlines,
and incomplete drafts to fi nished creations, as he suggests in the rhetori-
cal question used as an epigraph to this chapter.6 Just as syntactically
fragmented and solecistic sentences connoted greater sensibility in the
literature of sensibility—that is, deeper, more authentic, more “natural”
expression of feeling—ruined buildings, too, were thought to be more
expressive. Several authors within the Picturesque movement, particu-
larly Thomas Whately in England (whose works were quite influential
in France), wrote of architecture in terms of its associationist capacity
to rouse emotion. 7 Just as, in discussions of language, it becomes impor-
tant to discover how “natural” expressive language can best be achieved
through gestures, tones, and other non-verbal aspects of language, a simi-
lar rhetoric of ruins was developing in the architecture associated with the
English garden.
As the conversation between Capability Brown and Hannah More
(where each discusses the art of “composition”) suggests, gardens have
their own narratives, their own syntax that can be disrupted for emotional
or aesthetic purposes. As taste in narration changes, the new aesthetic
affects both art forms. In the novel of sensibility, a new cluster of narra-
tive techniques emerged, suitable for embracing ruination and working
against traditional narrative authority located in an omniscient narrator.
The ruins addressed in this chapter, then, are actual ruins that dotted the
68 Ruined by Design
landscape of the English garden, as well as the fragmentation that became
a liberating feature of the novel of sensibility. In both cases, authors and
architects (or gardenists) create a delicate balance between the urge to nar-
rate and the forces that disrupt, freeze, silence, or interrupt narrative—a
tension between story telling and spectacle—in order to represent sensibil-
ity’s subject and also to affect sensibility’s reader or viewer.

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

The last line introduces an interesting suggestion, especially in light of

sensibility’s emphasis on origins, authenticity, and natural language. The
fact that architects began to erect artificial ruins in many public and pri-
vate parks suggests that impulses other than historical authenticity were
involved: interest in the psychological effect of the ruins overshadowed
the importance of their historical authenticity and perhaps also their sym-
bolic meaning.
These monuments are, in fact, often more perfect in decay than in full
form. In describing a piece of Palladian architecture that does not look suit-
ably picturesque in a landscape, Gilpin gives useful, if somewhat ironic,
advice on what measures need to be taken : “We must use the mallet, instead
of the chissel: we must beat down one half of it, deface the other, and throw
the mutilated members around in heaps. In short, from a smooth building we
must turn it into a rough ruin.”13 Neoclassical smoothness and harmony are
70 Ruined by Design
not the goal in the picturesque style, but rather an ambivalent roughness and
incompletion, maintaining a largely complete (if “defaced”) half to enable
viewers imaginatively and emotionally to participate in the effect.
According to Whately, the gardenist should avail himself freely of the
picturesque advantages of ruins in a landscape, regardless of whether they
are real or artificial. As much as the suggestion would shock a contempo-
rary archaeologist, Whately requires the architect to rearrange or move
any authentic ruins in order to ensure the proper emotional effect on gar-
den visitors.

Ruins . . . are . . . peculiarly calculated to connect with their append-

ages into elegant groupes: they may be accommodated with ease to ir-
regularity of ground, and their disorder is improved by it; they may be
intimately blended with trees and with thickets, and the interruption
is an advantage; for imperfection and obscurity are their properties;
and to carry the imagination to something greater than is seen . . .
Straggling ruins have a bad effect, when the several parts are equally
considerable. There should be one large mass to raise an idea of great-
ness, to attract the others about it, and to be a common centre of
union to all: the smaller pieces then mark the original dimensions of
one extensive structure.14

As this passage indicates, the “expressive” character of ruins is dependent

upon the organization of the fragments. There needs to be a center point
in order to organize the imagination and emotions of the viewer to its
imaginary “grand” completion. While the follies thus are useful because
of their “irregularity,” “imperfection,” and “obscurity,” the secret to their
picturesque use is in the proper ordering, unifying, or regularizing of their
arrangement, so that a dominant narrative emerges out of their seemingly
anti-narrative existence.
The seeming preference for ruins over (intact) monuments nonetheless
requires an intimation of a monumental quality in the original structure:
in his statement about “straggling ruins,” Whately makes it clear that
ruination is not enough in itself, but that the ideal ruin in a landscape
must suggest the grandeur of an original monument, even if only an imag-
inary one. (Hence the trend of allowing ruins to remain partially buried
in order to enhance the imaginative scale of the original structure). Its
degree of residual completion lends Tintern Abbey its picturesque quality,
according to Whately. Enough remains of its original proportions that the
spectator can easily imagine its original state; yet enough was destroyed
to satisfy the desire for both ruination and spectatorly participation in
its imaginary reconstruction. “In the ruins of Tintern Abbey, the origi-
nal construction of the church is perfectly marked; and it is principally
from this circumstance that they are celebrated as a subject of curiosity
and contemplation. The walls are almost entire.”15 In Figure 15, Turner
 The Anatomy of Follies 71

Figure 15

emphasizes the picturesque qualities of Tintern Abbey by using multiple

ruined archways that no longer support a roof or enclose a door. These
archways function as window frames in his painting, framing layer upon
layer of ruin, with the uppermost arch appearing to hold the entire abbey
together. Sensibility’s aesthetic model thus depends upon remnants of the
imposing authority of the past, impressive for its very longevity and for-
mer strength.16 The two sides of the ruin drama are ultimately inseparable;
72 Ruined by Design
they compose a double symbolic meaning, crucial for expressing the phil-
osophical insecurities of the culture of sensibility.17
The contradictory impulses of the rhetoric of ruins somewhat uncom-
fortably combine the importance of authority with the beauty of decay, the
“monumental” with the “ruined,” or centripetal with centrifugal forces.
While the appeal of ruins to sensibility’s democratic impulses relies upon
a degree of decentralization, successful interpretation, according to the
architects, depends on a degree of centralization, albeit generally invisible.
That is, the metaphysical peculiarity of ruins, like Friedrich von Schlegel’s
Fragmente, is that they involve something else which must not be present.
The ruin, unlike the modern fragment which Schlegel describes, implies
a former completion.18 The pathos of the ruin depends upon the intima-
tions of former grandeur—of a wholeness that has been lost. The more
monumental the original (whether historical or imaginary), therefore, the
greater is the effect of ruination and privatization. The viewer must be
able to imagine a “fi nito” in order to participate in the pathos of the “non
fi nito”—must imagine a former public presence to enjoy its decayed, and
therefore privatized, exposed, and intimate state.
For the spectator, the task is to reconcile a present fragment with an
absent wholeness, yet this can have multiple tonalities: is one recovering
lost history or imaginatively completing a new ahistorical narrative to suit
one’s own desires? Paraphrasing Walter Benjamin for her own purposes,
Susan Buck-Morss writes: “The ruin . . . is the form in which the wish
images of the past century appear, as rubble, in the present. But it refers
also to the loosened building blocks (both semantic and material) out of
which a new order can be constructed.”19 In other words, Buck-Morss,
along with Sophie Thomas and Elizabeth Harries, concludes that ruin-
ation tends to free people by drawing attention to the constructed char-
acter of the past, loosening the hold that history can have over us, again
freeing the New Adam from previous legacies of history. 20 This suggests
reasons behind the appeal of ruins to the explicitly democratic impulses
of sensibility. Thus, in order to fulfi ll the aesthetic demands of sensibil-
ity, the monumental quality of a public edifice (the hypothesized original
monument) needs to be ruined, feminized, and privatized in order to suit
the emotive needs of the viewer and to suit the private residence of a man
of feeling.
For these reasons, gardenists, architects, and novelists of the culture of
sensibility seek unusual ways of incorporating “ruins” into their fi nished
products—whether through the inclusion of actual architectural ruins
and narrative fragments, or by using a variety of the anti-narrative devices
that become essential to the novel of sensibility. Sensibility’s contradic-
tory impulses thus are apparent across visual and literary disciplines: for
follies, in the tension between the urge to monumentalize and the urge to
destroy; for novels, in a constant dialectic between the more traditional
impulse to form a complete narrative with beginning, middle, and end
 The Anatomy of Follies 73
and the impulse to devise “anti-narrative” techniques that interrupt nar-
ration for the sake of immediacy, intimacy, authenticity, or the appear-
ance of virtue.

NATURAL LANGUAGE IN ARCHITECTURE

Whately’s Observations on Modern Gardening was translated immediately

into French by Montesquieu’s protégé François de Paul Latapie; it had an
enormous influence on architects and gardenists in France, especially the idea
that one could rouse imagination and moods in the viewer through three-
dimensional composition. Several French architects echoed his ideas in the
last four decades of the eighteenth century and wrote of architecture in terms
of its theatrical and emotionally evocative nature. One of the earliest of these
authors, Jacques-François Blondel, wrote influentially on the emotionally,
intellectually, and sexually expressive powers of architecture in his Cours
d’Architecture (1771–77). Blondel taught his students to give each building a
character by evoking particular responses in the viewer, and thereby engag-
ing the viewer’s imagination: “Nous allons donner l’idée précise que doivent
produire à l’imagination des Spectateurs.” [We will give the precise idea that
they should produce in the spectator’s imagination.]21 Thus his buildings
could take on diverse and often gendered dramatic roles, from the “mâle,
ferme, ou viril” to the “elegante ou delicate” to the “caractère naïf.”22
As architects, these authors did not only wish to describe the ‘natural’
language of visual structure, but they also wished to devise and imitate it
through artificial constructions. Blondel’s pupil, Claude Nicolas Ledoux,
follows in the theatrical vein, describing buildings as actresses assuming dif-
ferent stage presences: “Cette coquette habile, appuyée sur les doux arts de la
civilisation, joue tous les rôles; elle est alternativement sévère ou facile, triste
ou gaie, calme ou emportée. Son maintien impose ou séduit; elle est jalouse
de tout, et ne peut supporter le voisinage qui l’offusque, ni la comparaison
qui détruiroit ses charmes.” [This clever coquette, aided by the sweet arts
of civilization, plays all roles; she is alternatively severe or easy, sad or gay,
calm or passionate. Her attitude imposes or seduces; she is jealous of all
and can tolerate neither neighbors who obscure her nor comparisons that
detract from her charms.]23 Drawing further on the analogy between archi-
tecture and speech, he writes: “L’Architecture est à la maçonnerie ce que la
poésie est aux belles lettres: c’est l’enthousiasme dramatique du métier . . .
Comme il n’y a pas d’uniformité dans la pensée, il ne peut y en avoir dans
l’expression” [Architecture is to masonry what poetry is to literature: it is
the dramatic enthusiasm of the profession . . . Just as there is no unifor-
mity in thought, there can also be none in expression].24 Using this rhetoric
(or natural language) of architecture, architects can stage urban theater. 25
In Figure 16, Blondel displays an anthropomorphic understanding of the
expressive powers of a Classical cornice in relation to a Palladian cornice,
74 Ruined by Design

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:

The classical idea of architecture as a fixed language was . . . replaced by

a situation where the observer made instantaneous communication with
the building sur place, allowing it to work on his emotions and to declare
itself to him in other ways. Meanwhile, he in his perceptions of the build-
ing, replied to it, and this response when governed by education and other
resources could add to the artistic sum of the whole transaction.26

Blondel’s ideas influenced Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières’ Le Génie de

l’architecture, ou l’analogie de cet art avec nos sensations (1780). Le
Camus’ work, also inspired by Condillac, as well as by Julien-David Leroy,
was calculated to appeal to the associationist aesthetics of the culture of
sensibility. Le Camus describes the experience of moving through a build-
ing as analogous to movement through a picturesque garden, with vari-
ous theatrical tableaux giving rise to appropriate moods. In other words,
the growing cult of the picturesque inspired Le Camus and others to see
architecture, as well as nature, as theatrical and expressive—a new means
of reclaiming a more natural language. 27 Viewing architecture, especially
ruins, was thus an interactive experience—its transparency obscured only
by the references to education and resources. It was tantamount to engaging
in a sympathetic conversation, similar to what Hume and Smith prescribe
in their moral philosophies. For Smith and Hume, imaginative sympathy,
spectatorship, and theatrical dynamics are necessary precisely because
direct, verbal communication of sentiment is impossible. Therefore, just as
in “the rhetoric of ruins,” such conversation is simultaneously a testimony
to failure and a hopeful result—a reflection of the philosophical insecurity
of authors within the culture of sensibility. One must engage in a social
pursuit of meaning, whether it is “rectification” through conversation, or
imaginative completion of fragmentary evidence. 28
76 Ruined by Design
As the construction of follies becomes more popular and more mainstream,
many volumes of pattern books appear with designs for building authentic-
looking ruined classical temples, arches, colonnades, and island precipices,
such as the various exotic examples shown with suggested dimensions in
Gabriel Thouin’s templates (Figure 17). In Figure 18, C. C. L. Hirschfeld
offers a plan for a purposely ruined classical temple designed to be evoca-
tive in an outdoor park setting. While its footprint does not reveal its ruined
nature, the lateral view suggests how one can use irregularity and artificial
decay in the roofline to enhance its effect on the viewer. Figure 19 is especially
interesting in regard to the domestication of the ruin. In this plan from Robert
Lugar’s Architectural Sketches for Cottages, Rural Dwellings, and Villas, in
the Grecian, Gothic, and Fancy Styles, with PLANS, suitable to persons of
Genteel Life and Moderate Fortune (1805), Lugar’s “ornamental cottage”
“contains rooms sufficient for a numerous and respectable family, partly
formed in ruins, together with a chaise-house and stable, connected by a gate
way.”29 A look at the floor plan confirms that the three-story ruin and two-
story cottage are joined together as one living space, with more formal activi-
ties assigned to the cottage, while the more private spaces are reserved for the
ruin. The partially ruined wall in front of the combined structures screens
the more modern parts from view and ties both buildings together as though
part of a larger castle complex. The fact that private rooms are assigned to the
ruins of a grand tower emphasizes the privatization and domestication of ruin
that accompanies the picturesque taste.
Pattern books for garden ornamentation were widespread across Europe
and in the United States. Volumes such as Lugar’s aimed to appeal to subur-
ban landowners, landed gentry, and perhaps especially the newly wealthy
merchant class eager to gain the prestige of a settled estate. By domes-
ticating ruin, these landowners felt able also to imitate the effects of a
large-scale park and to appropriate the ancient grandeur of ruins. In addi-
tion, within the culture of sensibility, it was fashionable to represent one’s
modern sensibility through the English style of the garden. Therefore, the
picturesque style afforded these landowners simultaneous modernization
and antiquation, both of which could be seen as symbols of status, if not
virtue, particularly when combined in the same structures.
Meanwhile, architects, gardenists, and theoreticians, such as Whately
and Gilpin, aggrandized the artistry needed to perfect the fake ruin. Gilpin
writes: “to give the stone its mouldering appearance—to make the widen-
ing chink appear to run naturally through all the joints—to mutilate the
ornaments—to peel the facing from the internal structure—to shew how
corresponding parts have once united . . . are great efforts of art.” Finally,
he writes, the architect cannot achieve such masterpieces singlehandedly:
“you must put your ruin at last into the hands of nature to fi nish,” and
induce the ivy and the “long, spiry grass” to encroach. 30 Accordingly, a
new breed of architects specialized in this art of dissembling and disas-
sembling the past.
 The Anatomy of Follies 77

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.

NARRATING SENSIBILITY’S SELF

The apparent disdain for monumental façades appears in other domains of

the culture of sensibility. As architectural façades in the garden grow pref-
erable in a semi-ruined condition, and as a sense of order and closure grows
aesthetically and morally suspect in the literature of sensibility (signify-
ing shallow feelings and lack of moral refi nement), omniscient narration
and tidy endings also grow suspect. A distrust of syntax, of grammar, and
of the referential and communicative power of words creates an unusual
80 Ruined by Design
problem for the author of narrative fiction, since the very possibility of
representation is thrown into doubt. The problem is only heightened when
the dominant aesthetic of the period insists that deeply felt emotion must
be incommunicable—when “les langues se taisent mais les coeurs parlent”
[languages are silent, but hearts speak]32 —and when dominant linguists
proclaim that passion “expresses itself most commonly in short, broken,
and interrupted Speeches; corresponding to the violent and desultory emo-
tions of the mind.”33 Thus sensibility’s moral aesthetic alters the novelist’s
role; he or she is forced into a position which is paradoxical, if not hypo-
critical. In fact, the fragile balance of authority and freedom, speech and
silence, completion and fragmentation, plans and spontaneity—which the
aesthetic of sensibility demands—eventually brings about its own end.
Certainly it is no new metaphor to associate the construction of a text
with that of a building. Words have been connected with buildings at least
since the writing of Genesis’ Babel. Spatial metaphors and the language of
architecture pervade our everyday descriptions of speaking and writing: we
construct arguments, we frame sentences, we plan sentence and paragraph
structure, we build bridges between related thoughts—and we choose the
right words just as we choose the right bricks, according to our mental
blueprints. 34 But how does the builder of a text conform to an architectural
aesthetic that prefers ruins to fi nished structures? An author who writes a
work, and who intends to publish it, most likely intends to construct a work
that readers will admire and want to buy. The challenge, then, is to produce
a fragmented text without making the readers question their mastery of the
medium and to communicate a distrust of written words without instilling
in the reader a similar distrust of the author and the author’s own words.
We shall see how two masters of the novel of sensibility, Sterne and Goethe,
try to settle these difficulties by developing techniques in the novel analo-
gous to the anatomy of the folly. This similarity will help demonstrate the
primacy of the figure of the ruin in the culture of sensibility.
Partly because of Goethe’s acknowledged debt to Sterne, A Sentimental
Journey (1768) and Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774) are similar
in a number of ways, despite a radical difference in tone: although one is
diaristic and the other is epistolary, each traces the travels of a young man
of feeling—a sensitive soul who records and communicates his own feel-
ings with difficulty. 35 Both novels were immensely popular, and enthusias-
tic audiences imitated the characters’ way of dress and speech, and in the
case of Werther, scores of readers reputedly followed the protagonist, not
only in his sartorial eccentricities, but some even to suicide. 36 Both works
share an ambivalent attitude towards the efficacy of language or the value
of words and a narrative marked by many anti-narrative techniques, such
as thoughts breaking off mid-sentence; a proliferation of dashes, asterisks,
ellipses, and other lacunae; and a narrator who appears disorganized.
In both cases a protagonist not only narrates, but also “writes” his own
experience; therefore, within each protagonist, an internal tension exists.
 The Anatomy of Follies 81
Yorick and Werther both combine the narrative drive of an author wishing
to communicate a holistic experience (his own identity or essence) with the
non-narrative drive of a man of feeling cum protagonist, interacting emo-
tionally with the world or particular experiences around him every day. Part
of the underlying question for each is: to what extent is it possible to nar-
rate the self? Is it possible to represent the self in words without sacrificing
authenticity for the sake of presenting a unified whole, particularly when
narrative comes to be seen as autocratic and inauthentic? Although Sterne
and Goethe ultimately differ philosophically on these points—Sterne see-
ing greater hope for communication and community despite words and the
author of Werther viewing the potential for both much more skeptically,
they arrive at solutions which structurally resemble each other.
While they both attribute higher authenticity and ethical value to frag-
mented speech, they each combine anti-narrative and narrative impulses
within their novels in their attempt to allow the protagonists to represent
themselves. In Werther, fragmentation is an inescapable part of human
existence, an epitaph to transparent communication, and painful reminder
of the limitations imposed by conventions upon human souls. In Senti-
mental Journey, the tonality is more comic, and fragmentation represents
the quixotic pursuit of higher ideals that can only be attained fleetingly
and which are generally obscured by our ever-changing emotions and con-
stant distractions. In one, the combination of anti-narrative and narrative
impulses presents a metaphysical crisis; in the other, it expresses a comic
recognition of human folly and weakness, as well of occasional success.
In his Tristram Shandy (1760–67), Sterne struggles valiantly (and very
explicitly) to overcome the inherently linear character of language identified
by Condillac, and particularly the referential and communicative problems
raised by Locke. In Sentimental Journey, Sterne combines Locke’s emphasis
on the dark gap between sign and meaning and Rousseau’s cultural claims
about the difference between “natural” and “artificial” language in his own
linguistic ideas. Unlike in Tristram Shandy, Sterne here makes no overt ref-
erences to the seventeenth-century philosopher, but one senses his presence
nonetheless, especially in the emphasis placed upon the referential and com-
municative limitations of language. Where Tristram would directly address
the issue: “’tis one of the silliest things . . . , to darken your hypothesis by
placing a number of tall, opake words, one before another, in a right line,
betwixt your own and your reader’s conception,” Yorick is much more likely
to show sentimentally the disjunction of “tall, opake words” and true feel-
ing, such as in the following passage: “The pauvre honteux could say noth-
ing—he pulled out a little handkerchief, and wiped his face as he turned
away—and I thought he thank’d me more than them all.”37 Where Tristram
plays with Locke’s Essay as a seal does with a ball upon his nose, Yorick
explores sentimentally the ramifications of a single issue of his work. 38
In Journey, Sterne confi rms the Rousseauan notion that conventions and
speech have caused the affectation (and infection) of a purer human state.
82 Ruined by Design
“I could wish,” Yorick writes, “to spy the nakedness of [others’] hearts,
and through the different disguises of customs, climates, and religion,
fi nd out what is good in them, to fashion my own by—and therefore I am
come.”39 Sterne uses ancien-regime France, the locus of the entire novel, as
a symbol of elegance, fashion, aristocratic manners—a society where the
codification of manners and speech has reached new levels of complexity.
In Rousseauan fashion, Sterne’s Yorick interprets this as insincerity or “dis-
guise”; he longs for transparency and natural language, free of disguise and
distortion. Yet all along, he is terribly self-conscious and humorously arti-
ficial himself. Thus, when he says: “All that can be said about the French
sublime . . . is this—that the grandeur is more in the word; and less in the
thing . . . The French expression professes more than it performs,”40 Yorick
reflects upon the effects of manners and conventional forms of speech in
general, rather than specifically on France. And yet, there is a distinct paral-
lel drawn between the French emphasis on form in language and the French
baroque style of gardening. In both cases, the ancien regime is connected
with centralized forms of constructed meaning opposed to the ostensibly
democratic and authentic spirit of sensibility.
Yorick disdains the conventional laws and expectations of society; yet
he expresses his preference for following the “laws” of sentiment instead.
While it is true that it is precisely because they are not laws that he pre-
fers them, there is still an important irony in the fact that he humorously
substitutes new laws, new hierarchies, and new grammar for the old. In
his supposed rebellion, he still relies on the ancien-regime authoritarian
model.41 On an especially memorable occasion, Yorick decides to overturn
the old and highly-codified rules of heraldry by placing a starling on his
crest, largely because a caged starling has just fueled him with enough tear-
ful sympathy to fill two chapters with a sentimental daydream. Although
he turns the bird in the opposite direction from that allowed by heraldic
tradition, his rebellious gesture turns out to be ineffectual. The real bird
is subsequently not freed, but rather passed on from owner to owner in its
cage. To make matters worse, once incorporated into his crest, the bird
becomes frozen in a static, official position, and therefore just as codified,
conventional, and artificial as the rest of the crest.42
Regardless of his ultimate success, Yorick is constantly searching for a
purer, more natural, form of communication. If we remember Condillac’s
description of the translation of thought into language as the movement
from an atemporal composite of ideas into an orderly linear sequence, we
can see that Sterne, through Yorick, both accepts and refutes this idea. Yor-
ick agrees that speech is linear, but for Yorick, as for Diderot, its linearity
betrays its cold artificiality. Sterne (and Yorick) comically try to overcome
language’s linearity in order to recapture the rich, supraverbal, supratem-
poral, pictorial multivalence of pristine thoughts that have not yet been dis-
tilled by grammar and logic.43 He seeks a language that is not encumbered
by “tall, opake words” and does not force the speaker into artifice, yet he is
 The Anatomy of Follies 83
hopelessly self-conscious. Partly in response to this attitude, “ruined” lan-
guage—characterized by unfi nished sentences and the breakdown of logic
and conventional grammar—comes to be a sign of sincerity and of purity—
that is, of sensibility. The proliferation of dashes simulates such sincere
non-narration: LaFleur’s “faithless mistress had given his gage d’amour to
one of the Count’s footmen—the footman to a young sempstress—and the
sempstress to a fiddler, with my fragment at the end of it—Our misfortunes
were involved together—I gave a sigh—and LaFleur echo’d it back again to
my ear—.”44 The illusion is one of flow of feelings uninterrupted by the cen-
sorship of grammar and punctuation, and therefore unimpeded by reason.
Lacunae render his syntax more expressive. The style approximates spoken
speech, which, as we have seen, both Rousseau and Herder rank as more
natural and more capable of expressing emotion than writing.45 In speech,
there can be neither revision nor erasure; accordingly, Sterne achieves the
effect of uncensored, unreflective simultaneity. We feel as though Yorick
records the event as it occurs, as he experiences it, since he involves us in
each stage of the construction of his sentences rather than just presenting
us with the fi nished product. The momentary silence represented by each
dash reveals Yorick’s “heart” more than his words possibly can.46
Just as a crumbling public edifice invites the viewer into an unseen pri-
vate, interior space, Yorick’s surface fragmentation invites the reader’s active
participation in reconstructing his feelings. Through these devices, Sterne
consistently tries to conquer sensibility’s Babel—however vainly—to avoid
the linearity of language and yet to retain the visual and emotional impact
of the scenes that he describes. As we saw, Lessing, in Laokoön, points
out that language, because it consists of artificial signs organized in time,
cannot achieve the simultaneity of the plastic arts.47 He, like Diderot, finds
language’s linearity a limitation. Condillac, of course, represents the oppos-
ing view and applauds language’s linearity as that which enables analytical
thought, logic, and reason.48 The moral aesthetic of sensibility would favor
the view of Lessing and Diderot, who, while noting the same linearity of
language, bring more attention to what is lost in translation from simultane-
ous impression to a linear expression. As Diderot writes: “Notre âme est un
tableau mouvant, d’après lequel nous peignons sans cesse: nous employons
bien du temps à le rendre avec fidélité: 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. La formation des langues exigeait la decomposi-
tion.” [Our mind is a moving picture from which we paint ceaselessly: we
spend a lot of time rendering it faithfully: . . . 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 flash. The formation of languages
demanded the decomposition.]49 Writers of sensibility were generally engaged
in a battle to regain what is lost in this “decomposition”: that is part of the
reason for the great emphasis on gesture and visual imagery in sensibility,
as well as on the spoken word, which was considered less decomposed than
84 Ruined by Design
the written. 50 Perhaps it is, in this regard, fitting that Sterne wrote Journey
immediately following a Grand Tour to Rome. While constructing his own
form of the rhetoric of ruins, Sterne is, despite his parodies, also aspiring to
a universal language of nature.
By combining roles of narrator and protagonist into one character, Sterne
incorporates these “unwritten” and antirational elements into Journey; by
considering Yorick’s double role, we can better understand Sterne’s escape
from and partial recapitulation to linearity, as well as his characteristic
response to sensibility’s contradictory impulses. Figure 20 from Tristram
Shandy shows Tristram’s attempt at a “tolerable straight” narrative line,
comically juxtaposing the narrative and anti-narrative impulses within Tris-
tram as he struggles to be both narrator and protagonist. The illustration
could apply to the self-conscious narrator of Sterne’s later novel, although
with greater emphasis on anti-narration. On the other hand, Yorick self-
consciously distinguishes himself from non-sentimental travelers who do
travel “in straight lines,” and while he does not allow linearity or rational
purpose to dictate his itinerary, his narratorial duties do impose a chrono-
logical linearity upon his narration. 51 In other words, Yorick, too, attempts
a “tolerable straight” line of narration, but is disrupted by the pathos of
individual characters or scenes rather than by Tristram’s haphazard memo-
ries. If association of ideas drives Tristram’s anti-narrative curves, then the
association of feelings or sympathy for others drives Yorick’s. 52 Because of
his double role, Yorick (unlike Werther) can distance himself from his own
story enough to view his digressions as digressions: “As I have told this
[little unrelated anecdote] to please the reader, I beg he will allow me to
relate another out of its order, to please myself—the two stories reflect light
upon each other,—and ’tis a pity they should be parted.”53 Yorick is very
conscious, both of the curves, squiggles, and meanderings in his narrative
sequence, as well as of the more traditional linearity.
There is only one line in each narrative graph, to represent the single
most unifying factor within the novel—namely, the single voice and per-
spective (however fragmented and torn) of Tristram that unifies the whole.
However, just as Yorick spends much effort in trying to untangle his iden-
tity in the course of the novel and is plagued by his double role as partici-
pant and narrator, observer and translator, the line is anything but orderly.
The straight part of the line belongs to Yorick the master, ‘author,’ and
man of words, while the curves belong to Yorick the man of feeling and
“Sentimental Traveller.” If one were to draw a similar graph for LaFleur,
for example, there would be no straight segments, for LaFleur simply feels
and has neither self-consciousness nor responsibility. 54
If we took a close-up look at one of the curves in the graph in Figure 20,
we could use it to represent the individual turns in Yorick’s narrative. For
example, when Yorick is just realizing that he has no passport and may be
put in prison for his offense, he notices the starling in the cage, which sends
him on his rhapsodic detour to the suffering inmates of the Bastille, and
 The Anatomy of Follies 85

Figure 20

onward to the praises of Liberty. Just as he bursts into tears of sympathy

for those who cannot enjoy liberty, LaFleur (who has not been privy to
Yorick’s private and silent associations) sees him crying and thinks it must
be over the passport. It is Yorick’s sympathetic recognition of LaFleur’s
connection with his “straight” line of narration that brings him back to
the problem at hand. LaFleur’s association reminds him of the assump-
tions made in public discourse. Often Yorick repeats the last phrase of an
interrupted conversation or scene as he returns to the “straight” line from
which he departed. Thus, the interrupted straight line also represents the
interruption of public clock time in favor of Yorick’s sentimental concep-
tion of private time measured by his “heart.”55
Sterne’s techniques superficially resemble modernist stream-of-conscious-
ness narratives, yet Figure 20 again reveals the difference: the constant,
self-conscious return to the straight line reveals the continued conservative
reliance on a traditional narrative plot line, traditional chronology, public
authority, and also public communication. In Journey, however, there is
86 Ruined by Design
greater emphasis on Yorick’s explicit role as author. For example, Yorick
plays with the reader’s expectation that a travelogue should begin with a
preface: instead of omitting one altogether, he includes a “preface” several
chapters into the book. In Journey, order and disorder are pursued alter-
nately, according to whether Yorick listens more to his head or to his heart.
Yorick the narrator-author provides the authoritative and orderly frame-
work within which Yorick the participant can sentimentally meander and
which brings attention to his serpentine curves. We began this chapter by
exploring the confl icting impulses inherent in the general eighteenth-cen-
tury fascination with ruins. By now it should be apparent that the novelistic
“rhetoric of ruins” shares a similar ambivalence. The “rhetoric of ruins” in
the case of both literature and landscape shows a tension between comple-
tion and incompletion, monument and ruin, narrative and anti-narrative
impulses, and the desire to construct system versus the desire to particu-
larize experience. Follies were thus constructed by authors and architects
specializing in the material expression of these contradictory impulses.
In Journey, we fi nd a self-conscious narrator-protagonist who has defi-
nite opinions about language—a man of feeling struggling constantly with
words. In the process of his narration, fragmentation and omission func-
tion as meters of sympathy. For example, Yorick occasionally omits whole
sections of dialogue: in perfect accordance with his idea that words are
insignificant shells when not backed by sympathy, Yorick simply omits the
monk’s speech when he does not sympathize with him. In the two adja-
cent chapters entitled “THE MONK—CALAIS,” Yorick hardly lets the
monk get a word in edgewise. When the monk fi nally does speak, his words
are elided across the transition between chapters. The second chapter thus
begins with Yorick’s reply to the monk’s omitted speech: “—’Tis very true,
said I . . .”56 The reader still has no idea to what he is responding—we wit-
ness the fragments of a conversation, and the fragments represent Sterne’s
lack of sympathy with the monk. One of the multiple effects of such frag-
mentation is that the reader sympathetically fi lls the gap with imagina-
tive scenes, allowing the reader to feel as though he or she is experiencing
alongside Yorick. In this case the fragmentation also encourages the reader
to sympathize with the monk, even when Yorick neglects him. (He later
attempts to compensate for his failure in sympathy.)
Sterne, of course, was not the fi rst novelist to present a fragmented text,
nor the fi rst to express the difficulty of communication. Sterne’s success
with the use of fragmentation and gesture in Journey is partially due to
his ability to use and improve on techniques developed by François Rabe-
lais, Miguel de Cervantes, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, and Tobias
Smollett, among others, and employ them in the service of the novel of
sensibility. Fragmentation in Rabelais and Cervantes includes a variety of
mutilated manuscripts to create surface texture as well as comic effects
for the reader. Their use of fragmentation has a serious side as well: “their
mutilated and missing manuscripts make visible the uncertainties that mark
 The Anatomy of Follies 87
all narrative.”57 Yet the effect of this fragmentation is very different from
the type involved in the novel of sensibility, where dual impulses and the
doubts about the communicative and referential powers of language play
a stronger role.

TRANSLATING HAMLET

In a pure, natural state unsullied by convention, human beings would be

transparent to one another, enjoying “la facilité de se pénétrer réciproque-
ment” [the ease of mutual understanding];58 however, in post-Babelian
society, translation has become necessary and Yorick proclaims himself
as “translator” of the world around him. This is not to say, in Sterne’s
fictional world, that nature has grown silent, per se, but rather that nature
and society speak in different tongues. Ann Jessie Van Sant mentions the
poignancy with which the desire for transparency is echoed throughout the
culture of sensibility, formulated by Sterne’s Tristram Shandy in his wish
for “a glass in the human breast,”59 a literally transparent body through
which we could witness the workings of the inner heart.
Gestures speak to those who can understand—and translate—the lan-
guage of nature. An example is Yorick’s translation of a young girl’s curt-
sey: “—’twas one of those quiet, thankful sinkings where the spirit bows
itself down—the body does no more than tell it.”60 Bodies speak, gestures
speak, but they speak neither English, nor French, nor the language of
reason. In fact, it could be said that these seemingly silent gestures speak
whereas speech merely interprets: “There are certain combined looks of
simple subtlety—where whim, and sense, and seriousness, and nonsense,
are so blended, that all the languages of Babel set loose together could not
express them—they are communicated and caught so instantaneously, that
you can scarce say which party is the infecter. I leave it to your men of
words to swell pages about it.”61 As Mullan indicates, “the rhetorical sug-
gestion is that the signifier (the look, the gesture) can exist in all innocence,
detached, for a special moment, from the words which hamper expres-
sion.”62 In loudly proclaiming that he is not describing, Yorick achieves the
effect of describing both the pure signified and the “opake” signifier: he
preserves the moment of translation.
Willingness to translate such “looks of simple subtlety” is a sign of both
sociality and sensibility in Sterne: “There is not a secret so aiding to the
progress of sociality, as to get master of this short hand, and be quick in
rendering the several turns of looks and limbs, with all their inflections
and delineations, into plain words. For my own part . . . when I walk the
streets of London, I go translating all the way.” Such passages, however,
simultaneously throw his assertions of ability into doubt: “I have more
than once stood behind in the circle, where not three words have been said,
and have brought off twenty different dialogues with me, which I could
88 Ruined by Design
have fairly wrote down and sworn to.” 63 Without this ability to trans-
late, or “decode,”64 each human being would be isolated by language and
convention, since individual imaginations threaten a unified experience
of reading. And while solipsism still looms as one of the greatest threats
to humanity, Yorick’s translation may offer the best protection (or solace)
available, even if it is momentary and perhaps illusory within the shifting
contexts of Sterne’s work.
Ultimately, silence is the most sincere escape from artifice: sighs, tears,
gestures, and glances communicate more directly when untainted by words.65
Smollett often uses detailed physical descriptions of his characters’ gestures
and stances to convey their emotion; however, Smollett’s use is formulaic,
and one gesture may refer to three or four different emotions in varying
contexts. Sterne, in contrast, uses highly specific gestures that are individu-
alized and located in place and time: “There are some trains of certain ideas
which leave prints of themselves about our eyes and eye-brows; and there is
a consciousness of it, somewhere about the heart, which serves but to make
these etchings the stronger—we see, spell, and put them together without a
dictionary” (Tristram Shandy, 5.127). His use of gesture, corresponding to
sensibility’s moral aesthetic, suggests the complexity of individual emotions
which defy verbal translation as well as traditional narration.66 The reader
must look to the gaps between words, sentences, and chapters, for the sen-
sible heart struggling to express itself within the confines of “artificial” lan-
guage. Yorick describes how his spoken words ruin the entrancing moment
he shares with a mysterious Frenchwoman while silently staring at a remise.
His words destroy the intimate moment, as she complains: “the heart knew
it, and was satisfied; and who but an English philosopher would have sent
notices of it to the brain to reverse the judgment?”67 In dramatically direct
opposition to its etymology, conversation severs the intimacy engendered
by silent sympathy. She concludes with “a look which I thought a sufficient
commentary upon the text,” and Yorick is suitably silenced.68
The phrase “sufficient commentary upon the text” deserves further
consideration. According to the passage, the natural language of the body
as “text” includes its own syntax and grammar. Yorick frequently uses
the language of the written word to describe spoken and even unspoken
exchange, such as the words ‘text’ or ‘translation’: these borrowed terms
suggest that there is no way of speaking about conversation without fall-
ing into analogies with the written word. Ironically, such terms highlight
the inescapable similarities between the language of gesture or feeling and
the language of written words, while maintaining the superiority of the
former. In the same vein, Yorick calls his instinctive intuitions “axioms”
and uses grammatical terms to express his social interactions: “I am apt
to be taken with all kinds of people at fi rst sight; but never more so, than
when a poor devil comes to offer his service to so poor a devil as myself;
and as I know this weakness, I always suffer my judgment to draw back
something on that very account—and this is more or less, according to the
 The Anatomy of Follies 89
mood I am in, and the case,—and I may add the gender too, of the person
I am to govern.”69 In these passages, Yorick also plays with analytical cat-
egories and terms like “mood,” “case,” “gender,” “person,” and “govern”
that normally refer to precise grammatical relationships, and uses them
to describe spontaneous, associative movement. Such passages parody the
codification of sensibility—or the extent to which even the rejection of
linguistic artificiality still depends on language for its mode of expression.
In establishing that logic, grammar, and syntax are all inescapable, these
terms also suggest the possibility of hypocrisy in the man of feeling.70
Names, too, are equally artificial constructs of society, tainted by the
fall of the Adamic tradition. For this reason, not once do we witness Yorick
asking for the name of the numerous characters he encounters. On the one
hand, this means he is not fulfi lling his conventional task as author; it is
also an implicit critique on the generalizing or homogenizing effect of the
unchecked narrative impulse. Since Yorick is narrator as well as protago-
nist, the reader, too, must learn to dispense with names and identify char-
acters according to their sentiments or actions instead. Yorick will either
entirely omit a name or he will mention the name much later in the novel
(such as the Frenchwoman by the remise and Father Lorenzo), drawing
attention to the earlier absence.71
When Yorick omits names, in other words, it is because he considers
them inadequate representations of individuals—signifiers that require
translation—to the point that he does not know what to answer when he is
asked to identify himself. In a particularly illuminating scene, Yorick for-
gets to introduce himself to the Count—that is, in the conventional way, by
telling his name; instead he tells of his love of Shakespeare, which to Yorick
is a more accurate introduction. The reader discovers Yorick’s omission
after their long, long conversation, when the Count fi nally has to ask him
for it. Yorick responds:

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

his experience as a master printer to create these unusual paratextual and

anti-narrative devices that reveal a grief that exceeds narration.83
Whereas Richardson “clings desperately to his faith in man’s ability to
order and control life according to the conventional rules of prudent moral-
ity, to live, as Sir Charles Grandison does, strictly according to principle,”
the “fi nal result of Clarissa is to demonstrate . . . the ultimate inadequacy
of systems, and the fact that belief in them is not nearly so important as
94 Ruined by Design
belief in the dignity and value of individual human beings.”84 Ultimately,
Richardson’s novels are dominated by the singular narrative drive, and
the non-narrative and anti-narrative impulses that emerge from within
his novels run counter to his authorial (and moral) intent. Sterne, on the
other hand, begins with a more Quixotic or humanistic suspicion about
the systematization of human experience. Subsequent authors of sensibility,
such as Henry Mackenzie, become increasingly explicit about the combi-
nation of narrative and anti-narrative drives embodied in their literature:
Mackenzie, echoing the epigraph from Diderot, for example, writes to a
friend of “the Fragment Manner on which I formed my Plan [for The Man
of Feeling],” claiming that disjointed sketches and “detach’d Essays” can
“interest[-] both the Memory and Affection deeper, than mere Argument,
or Moral Reasoning.”85
Sterne takes this inexpressibility one important step further towards an
increased self-consciousness, especially about the inherent limitations of
language and their implications for the author. For Richardson, ‘sentiment’
and ‘sentence,’ meaning and the grammatical forms of language, have not
yet divorced. The fragmentation of Clarissa’s writing does indeed evoke a
sense of her virtue as well as her distress; however, one has the sense that
the fragmentation of her language has more to do with her unfortunate
circumstances and the lack of a sympathetic audience than with an inescap-
able aspect of language. Through his unique technical innovations, Sterne
succeeds in combining popular notions of the inadequacy of speech, the
artifice of writing, and the suspicion of author(ity) with sentimental trust
in natural virtue and sympathy.
Goethe uses slightly different techniques in his depiction of Werther’s dif-
ficulty translating the world; however, the topic brings him to the unfortu-
nate Prince of Denmark as well. For Werther, the central obstacle is not the
referential capacities of language but the problem of inauthenticity. Given
the growing attitude (in the mid-to-late eighteenth century) toward what
Lionel Trilling calls “the inauthenticity of narration,” or a growing distrust
of controlled or balanced prose, omniscient narration grows incompatible
with sensibility, and anti-narrative techniques proliferate. Just as follies
attempt to preserve a fast eroding moment in time, precariously balanced
between completion and utter destruction, the prose fiction of sensibility
functions as a monument to the moment of intense feeling.
Werther’s belief in the singularity of experience and the uniqueness of
the moment, as well as his hatred of the censorship of emotions, is reflected
in his distrust of any process of re-writing, polishing, or perfecting earlier
attempts at expression. He is outraged, for example, when “Der Gesandte”
(the Ambassador) suggests revisions to his written reports: “‘Er ist gut,
aber sehen Sie ihn durch, man fi ndet immer ein besseres Wort, eine reinere
Partikel.’—Da möchte ich des Teufels werden. Kein Und, kein Bindewört-
chen darf außenbleiben, und von allen Inversionen, die mir manchmal
entfahren, ist er ein Todfeind.” [‘It’s good, but look through it: you can
 The Anatomy of Follies 95
always fi nd a better word, a cleaner particle of speech’—Then I get devil-
ishly upset. No ‘and,’ no conjunction can be omitted, and he is the mortal
enemy of all inversions that sometimes escape me.] For Werther, the initial,
disjointed expression is more perfect in its authenticity than any refi ned,
polished, grammatical revision. His dramatically morbid choice of words
above (“Teufel” or devil, “Todfeind” or mortal enemy) show what mortal
stakes are involved in issues of grammar.86 According to this stance, the
anti-narrative force of an utterance is proportionate to the worthiness of
the speaker to narrate; to narrate experience is to demean it.
Werther frequently complains that his representation will fall far short
of his experiences; in fact, these complaints form a constant refrain in his
letters to Wilhelm. Werther claims to feel everything so deeply that the
linearity of prose falls short—only the greatest poet could make words
carry his feelings, he says: “Ich müßte die Gabe des größten Dichters besit-
zen” [I would need to possess the talents of the greatest poet].87 As ironic
as this is, coming from Goethe’s pen, the stronger his feelings, the more
reluctant Werther is to express them: “Lieber, ich mag nicht ins Detail
gehn; so reizend, als es mir war, so einförmig würde es in der Erzählung
werden” [Dear Friend, I don’t want to go into details; it would become
just as monotonous in its recounting as the experience was exciting].88
Language flattens his emotional upheavals, with the sheer weight of its
conventionality. Yet his complaints about the inefficacy of his writing are
not apparent in the quantity of his actual writing (which increases rather
than decreases). Underlying his constant complaints is a strain of pride.
Whereas Pope, for example, in his fi nal lines of Eloisa to Abelard, proudly
proclaims: “He best can paint ’em [her woes], who shall feel ’em most,”89
Werther expresses the same pride, but in an opposite direction. Werther,
too, is a poet, but as a “man of feeling,” he believes that those who “feel ’em
most” also have the greatest difficulty communicating their sufferings.
Rather than allow reason to censor the expression of his emotion,
Werther writes long, highly fragmented, disorganized paragraphs in his
letters: “Dir in Ordnung zu erzählen . . . wird schwerhalten.”90 The more
extreme his feelings, the greater the fragmentation, especially the prolif-
eration of dashes, which in Werther’s case should be called Gefühlstriche
rather than Gedankenstriche: “daß Albert nicht so beglückt zu sein schei-
net, als er—hoffte—als ich—zu sein glaubte—wenn—Ich mache nicht gern
Gedankenstriche, aber hier kann ich mich nicht anders ausdrücken—und
mich dünkt deutlich genug” [That Albert didn’t seem so fortunate as he—
I hoped—when I—believed it was—if—I don’t like to make dashes, but
here I can’t express myself any other way—for me it seems quite clear].91
Werther, a good student of Rousseau, assumes that if words must be used,
it is more “natural” and more evocative to avoid syntactically complete
sentences (recalling Rousseau’s remarks that savage men gave every single
word the sense of a whole proposition). The elliptical ejaculation “Klop-
stock!” is infi nitely more personal for Werther than any sentence, such as,
96 Ruined by Design
“Doesn’t the storm remind you of one of Klopstock’s sublime odes?” ever
could be. It can be a sign of intimacy and trust to allow another to fill in
the gaps of one’s sentence. If successful (and it is generally successful until
proven unsuccessful), this dynamic produces a sense of having simultane-
ously come upon the same thought. In other words, the breach of silence,
the use of words to communicate anything, reveals in itself a distance—
something yet-to-be-shared. The inappropriateness of verbal expression
grows with the intensity of the feeling. “O darf ich, kann ich den Him-
mel in diesen Worten aussprechen?—daß sie mich liebt!” [O dare I, can
I express heaven in these words?—that she loves me!]92 To force poignant
feelings into words is, according to Werther, like trying to express eternity
using a linear, temporal medium. Prolixity, in this context, heightens the
speaker’s sense of alienation from the addressee; therefore, according to the
new rules of rhetoric influenced by the hallmarks of the culture of sensibil-
ity, the degree of intimacy would seem to be inversely proportional to the
number of words used to express a sentiment.
After Lotte has, at the early climax of the novel, turned to Werther and
uttered the word “Klopstock!” with such poignancy, he addresses the self-
same poet in his imagination and hopes never to hear the name again,
for fear of sullying the memory of that moment: “Edlere! hättest du deine
Vergötterung in diesem Blicke gesehen, und möcht’ ich nun deinen so oft
entweihten Namen nie wieder nennen hören!” [Noble one! Had you seen
your deification in this look, and now may I never hear your oft profaned
name spoken again!]93 Only silence (or death) can preserve the utterance’s
purity. This connection between articulation or narrative completion and
death helps drive the topos of fragmentation within the culture of sensibil-
ity. The actual death of Mackenzie’s Harley, for example, coincides with
the moment he finally articulates his true feelings.94 For Werther the stakes
are equally high; repetition, like convention, grammar, and logic, homog-
enizes and de-personalizes language and obscures the original emotions in
which the utterance originated.
Werther, like Yorick, portrays himself as a translator of (his own) poi-
gnant experience into sluggish words. The difference is that while Yorick
translates the outer world and its communicative gestures, Werther trans-
lates his own emotion. Werther’s is an intensified crisis in self-representa-
tion that Goethe portrays using the greater realism of Werther. Werther
translates his feelings into words, which to his “Herzi,” or heart, are are
like a foreign language. This attitude towards language is a symptom of an
attitude towards society in general, a Rousseauan distrust of convention:
it is a recognition of a fundamental irreconcilability between attention
to manners and forms versus attention to feelings: the confl ict between
Sittlichkeit and Sinnlichkeit. Although Sittlichkeit might make for good
neighbors and superficially pleasing social interactions, Werther’s position
is that rules, convention, moderation, and even narration are nonetheless
all enemies of feeling. The narrative drive to represent the self has been
 The Anatomy of Follies 97
tainted by its connection to form, manners, grammar, and tradition. The
fi nal and most extreme statement of his break with convention comes in
the last letter, addressed to Lotte: “Und was ist das, daß Albert dein Mann
ist? Mann! Das wäre denn für diese Welt—. . . Du bist von diesem Augen-
blicke mein!” [What does it mean that Albert is your husband? Husband!
That then, is for this world—. . . You are from this moment mine!].95 Eter-
nity alone does not compromise the man of feeling.
Self-control and cheer become increasingly loathsome for Werther, and,
ultimately (and paradoxically), he seeks death to preserve himself from
change: “O, so vergänglich ist der Mensch, daß er auch da, wo er seines
Daseins eigentliche Gewißheit hat, da, wo er den einzigen wahren Eindruck
seiner Gegenwart macht, in dem Andenken, in der Seele seiner Lieben, daß
er auch da verlöschen muß, und das so bald!” [O, so transient is man, that
even there where he has the actual assurance of his being, there where he
makes the only true impression of his presence, in the memory, in the soul
of his beloved, that he even there must extinguish—and this so soon!]96
He wishes to isolate each moment in time, halting the urge to narrate, sav-
ing the original feeling from the levelling hand of storytelling. Suicide, the
ultimate silence, paradoxically affords Werther the only way he can protect
his feelings from the corruption of society and escape from its conventional
restraints. He must die to preserve authenticity, as well as his presence in
Lotte’s heart and their last intimate moment together. Ultimately, language,
just like nature, becomes nothing more and nothing less than an obstacle
to infi nity. In his fi nal act against society’s encroaching “artificiality,” he
destroys himself before he will allow society to tame him. In rejecting all
artifice, including artifice in the service of authenticity, Werther performs
the fate of the natural ruin: eventually crumbling to nothing.

FROM SYMPATHY TO SOLIPSISM

The emphasis on self-representation causes sensibility’s moral psychology

to be singularly theatrical—a theatricality that is both its strength and its
weakness. At its best, it heightens a sense of human dignity and encourages
self-knowledge as well as the ‘socialization’ of the passions. For Smith, for
example, sensibility allows for the comic resolution of a regrettable situation:
the impossibility of complete sympathetic identification between individuals
leads to the necessity for us to display our emotions to others according to
our conception of how we might respond to them if we were the specta-
tor rather than the actor. Thus the theatricality of communication has its
basis in the perceived crisis of self-representation. The failure of complete
identification makes us strive to understand and be understood; it leads to
the possibility, not only of cooperation and therefore of society, but also to
the possibility of virtue itself. To use Smith’s musical metaphor, as much as
we naturally long for unison, we must recognize it as impossible; but it is
98 Ruined by Design
because of this failure that we can achieve harmony instead.97 Impossibility
awakens and enlists the imagination. For better and for worse, sensibility
does indeed turn those who feel into actors displaying their wares. At its
worst, the actors never take off their masks, all of nature is turned into a
“living Tableau” (as David Marshall warns), and sympathy degenerates into
self-complacency, hypocrisy, and atomization.98
Could sensibility’s great emphasis on sympathy be an attempt at an
antidote for this intense self-consciousness? Marshall and Cox have both
remarked that sensibility’s constant emphasis on sympathy tends to be
somewhat defensive: “the passionate assertions that universal sympathy
must exist may well betray more than a little anxiety about the self’s abil-
ity to overcome its psychic isolation, more than a little fear of solipsism.” 99
Or as Mullan puts it, “the real threat is that faced with the impenetrable
aspects of others, faced with the impossibility of knowing other people’s
sentiments except through acts of imagination, sympathy itself might be
impossible.”100 In this sense, the culture of sensibility shows the profound
influence of both Hume and Rousseau. On the one hand, it cherishes
Hume’s and Smith’s vision of the social role of the passions: “We can form
no wish, which has not a reference to society . . . Whatever other passions
we may be actuated by; pride, ambition, avarice, curiosity, revenge, or lust;
the soul or animating principle of them all is sympathy.”101 Rousseau, on
the same subject of sympathy, writes that it is “obscur et vif dans l’homme
sauvage, développé mais faible dans l’homme civil” [incomprehensible and
vivid in the savage man, developed but weak in the civilized man].102 Rea-
son, in the civilized man, “replie l’homme sur lui-même” [turns man back
upon himself] and makes him immune to others’ sufferings, allowing him
to turn his back on his natural sympathy.103 Rousseau’s description empha-
sizes that civilized man’s sympathy is both more and less than the savage
man’s, because the civilized man is painfully aware of what he does not
do for others. Together, Rousseau and Hume express sensibility’s curious
combination of optimism and pessimism about human nature.
Despite sensibility’s relatively optimistic moral aesthetic, novels of sensi-
bility generally reveal that feeling, just as much as reason, can turn human
beings in upon themselves. When Werther fi rst realizes that Lotte loves
him, his response is striking: “Wie ich mich selbst anbete, seitdem sie mich
liebt!” [How I worship myself now that she loves me!]104 It becomes increas-
ingly evident that Werther’s love for Lotte has more to do with Werther’s
fragile and artistic internal world and private, creative imagination than
with the actual woman. In his later parody of the cult of sensibility, Der
Triumph der Empfi ndsamkeit [The Triumph of Sensibility] (1777), Goethe
ridicules just such a response. In this play the lovesick Prince, who has built
a mannequin of his beloved to remind him of her when she is away with
her husband, is in the end given his choice between the puppet and the real
woman. Ultimately, he vastly prefers the puppet he has lovingly created
with his own hands and we witness their tearful and ludicrous reunion.
 The Anatomy of Follies 99
The mannequin ironically conforms more closely to his ideals of intimacy
and kinship.
Within Werther, we have intimations of a similarly narcissistic response:
for example, when he hears a description of the beautiful woman that the
farm boy loves, he responds by hoping that the exquisite creature he has cre-
ated in his imagination will never be sullied by the sight of the real woman:
“vielleicht erscheint sie mir vor meinen Augen nicht so, wie sie jetzt vor mir
steht, und warum soll ich mir das schöne Bild verderben?” [Perhaps she
would not look as good to my eyes, as she does standing before me now, and
why should I ruin the beautiful picture?].105 Yorick, too, allows his imagina-
tion to supplant reality: “I had not yet seen her face—’twas not material; for
the drawing was instantly set about, and long before we had got to the door
of the Remise, Fancy had finished the whole head.”106 Sensibility’s imagina-
tive creations become more important than nature herself, just as, in these
novels, self-narration threatens to replace the self.
Ironically, the movement that gave new clout to the imagination, and strove
to prove Johnson wrong about Imlac’s “dangerous prevalence of the imagina-
tion,” in the end proves him in some sense right. Both Sterne and Smith, for
example, show that imagination, like sympathy, is essential for communica-
tion—to fill the gaps left by the failure of words to communicate meaning
and emotion. In both of their fictional worlds, the greatest danger is not
the imagination’s going astray and leading to madness as Johnson, through
Imlac, had warned; for them, the greatest danger would be a lack of imagi-
nation, which would leave individuals permanently isolated from each other.
The ‘sensible’ imagination of both Sterne’s Yorick and Goethe’s Werther,
however, leads them to admire the solipsistic world of madness. Werther in
the end goes mad himself, much in the way described in Rasselas.
Ultimately, as Jane Austen so admirably parodies in Love and Freindship
and Sense and Sensibility, unchecked sensibility leads not only to solipsism,
but also to insensibility—a deadening of the senses themselves. As the novel
progresses and as Werther becomes increasingly involved in his own sensi-
bility, he begins literally to lose his senses: when he first falls in love with
Lotte he writes that “die ganze Welt verliert sich um mich her” [The whole
world dissolves around me] 107; a few months later “alle meine Sinne aufges-
pannt werden, mir es düster vor den Augen wird, ich kaum noch höre, und
es mich an die Gurgel faßt wie ein Meuchelmörder . . . Ich weiß oft nicht,
ob ich auf der Welt bin!” [All my senses are stretched thin—it is dark before
my eyes, I can hardly hear anymore, and it it clutches at my throat like an
assassin . . . I often don’t know if I am on Earth!] 108; and finally, near the
end he writes, “mit mir ist es aus! Meine Sinne verwirren sich, schon acht
Tage habe ich keine Besinnungskraft mehr” [It’s over for me! My senses
are confused, for eight days now I have been unable to think].109 As docu-
mented in Werther, there is a causal connection between extreme sensibility
and a lapse into insensibility. Werther’s life gradually becomes a “mono-
drama” (the prince’s favorite genre in Triumph): his voice replaces all other
100 Ruined by Design
voices, and his imagination replaces the external world. He gradually loses
all contact with the objects of his sensibility. He must deaden his senses in
order to preserve the mental picture of the world he has created for himself.
Werther loses the delicate, ironic balance that forms the rhetoric of silence
and lapses, instead, into silence itself. It is in this context that we could say
that madness begins where irony ends. And, because in the “monodrama”
there is no separation between the narrating and narrated “I”s, the crisis of
self-representation is resolved only where madness begins.110
Within the culture of sensibility, agony over the (im)possibility of human
intimacy and communication is exacerbated by concern over human ten-
dencies towards solipsism, so effectively illustrated by Laurence Sterne in
his Tristram Shandy. Solipsism, in fact, becomes such a hallmark of sen-
sibility that Keats and Hazlitt both denigrate sensibility’s purposeless and
solipsistic self-consciousness.111 In a philosophical dispute that resembles
a linguistic corollary to the dispute over Hobbes and natural goodness,
authors were torn between the demand for intense self-consciousness on the
one hand and awareness of the dangers of solipsism on the other: between
self and society.
For novelists of sensibility this forms not only an intriguing philosophical
problem, but also an opportunity to exercise new narrative techniques, par-
ticularly following the eccentricities of Sterne: “from the want of languages,
connections, and dependencies, and from the difference in education, cus-
toms, and habits, we lie under so many impediments in communicating our
sensations out of our own sphere, as often amount to a total impossibility,”
writes Yorick in Sentimental Journey.112 Because of this concern, first-per-
son, self-conscious narrators become much more common, largely through
the work of Sterne, Tieck, and Diderot, and authors generally experiment
with the self-conscious mediation of sentiment via language.
Running through the writings of the cult of sensibility is the theme of
the “tender” or sympathetic heart, the most precious asset of the man of
feeling, and seemingly the most valuable antidote for solipsism. Ostensibly
it is precious for its ability to sympathize with others, yet these comments
reveal the solipsism inherent in this admiration.113 In fact, we must remem-
ber Yorick’s preface written in the Désobligeant (a one-person chaise): the
“see-saw” and “agitation” of the stationary coach that attracts the atten-
tion of at least one “inquisitive traveller” presumably stem from the mas-
turbatory exercise that a solitary Yorick connects with writing a preface:
“’Twould have been better in a Vis-à-Vis.”
Yorick, however, treats the danger of solipsism with self-conscious irony
and humour as the following scene displays: “The old French officer deliv-
ered this with an air of such candour and good sense, as coincided with my
fi rst favourable impressions of his character—I thought I loved the man; but
I fear I mistook the object—’twas my own way of thinking—the difference
was, I could not have expressed it half so well.”114 Sterne’s Yorick reveals
an awareness of a natural tendency to remark and love what we already
 The Anatomy of Follies 101
know and feel, thereby often mistaking a narcissistic projection of the self
for a nobler sentiment such as love or sympathy.115 Sterne, through Yorick,
also suggests an antidote: the vis-à-vis. Society is the only way to avoid this
trap: “—Surely—surely man! it is not good for thee to sit alone—thou wast
made for social intercourse and gentle greetings.”116 In order for self-repre-
sentation to succeed, an audience, if not a partner, is required.

SENSIBILITY’S CIVIL WAR

In Journey, Sterne’s Yorick takes self-consciousness and internal division

to a new extreme. Yorick-the-narrator reveals that Yorick-the-participant’s
silent gestures and silent conversation (which supposedly represent a ‘natu-
ral’ and spontaneous language) are as painfully self-conscious as spoken
language: for example, in one of his fl irtatious encounters, he remarks
“that I continued holding her hand almost without knowing it.”117 The
telling “almost” here represents the disjunction between the two Yoricks,
which prevents him from achieving a ‘natural’ state. The result, in Jour-
ney, is constant mental theatrics: “—I will not go to Brussels, replied I,
interrupting myself—but my imagination went on—.”118 Both Werther and
Yorick strive against all odds to be natural and both fail miserably. Each
is defeated by the self-consciousness that he cannot suppress. In each man
of feeling there is a separation between an observing, recording self and an
acting, feeling self; an Erzähler (the storyteller) and an Erzählung (the tale).
In Werther, this amounts to civil war, while for Yorick, these two selves
engage in conversation.
As the novel progresses, Werther’s self-consciousness increases and with
it his internal discomfort. His self-knowledge gradually and uncomfortably
exceeds his self-control, as he begins to ask an increasing number of ques-
tions about his own motives, observing himself as though a spectacle over
which he has no control. For example, he addresses the following rhetorical
question to Wilhelm: “Doch wozu alles, warum behalt’ ich nicht für mich,
was mich ängstigt und kränkt? Warum betrüb ich noch dich? Warum geb’
ich dir immer Gelegenheit, mich zu bedauren und mich zu schelten. Seys
denn, auch das mag zu meinem Schicksal gehören!”119 [What’s the purpose
of all this: Why don’t I keep to myself all that worries and sickens me? Why
do I still distress you? Why do I always give you the opportunity to pity
me and scold me? Maybe that, too, is part of my fate.] Werther follows the
logic of sensibility’s rhetoric to its natural conclusion: why speak or write at
all? Why try to communicate the incommunicable? By asking the question,
he reveals the paradoxical nature of the novel as a whole: he is the teller of
his own story, but the story he wants to tell is of the hopeless artificiality of
words and conventions—sensibility’s second fall of Babel.
The invocation of Fate in the last line of this passage also suggests
Werther’s complex relation towards authority: on the one hand it accords
102 Ruined by Design
with sensibility’s disdain for attempts at control or planning—the hubris
of unaided reason; on the other hand, it also seems an admission of defeat,
which we encountered in Harley as well. The defeat of delicate virtue is
quite central to sensibility, as Brissenden has shown; however, Werther
exhibits a slightly different, newly personalized emphasis. Werther takes
Yorick’s self-reflexivity to new heights and combines it with Harley’s pessi-
mism about the man of feeling’s potential to survive in the world. There is,
however, a degree of self-disapproval and internal division, if not civil war,
that we do not fi nd in the other two characters. The internal division (“I”
is both questioner and object of question) tends to suggest that Werther
could possibly have avoided his fate, that he could conceivably have chosen
another course of action: the questioning “I” sees options that the feel-
ing “I” does not. The passage thus expresses Werther’s growing detach-
ment from himself and painful recognition of his own degree of control
and foreknowledge—recognitions that reveal extreme forms of the tension
between control and lack of control or between public appearance and pri-
vate essence that characterize the culture of sensibility.
Werther’s remarks about his own reading of his diary reveal more of the
difficulties involved in his increasing self-consciousness: “ich bin erstaunt,
wie ich so wissentlich in das alles, Schritt vor Schritt, hineingegangen bin!
Wie ich über meinen Zustand immer so klar gesehen und doch gehandelt
habe wie ein Kind, jetzt noch so klar sehe, und es noch keinen Anschein zur
Besserung hat.” [I am astonished at how consciously I went into all of it,
step by step! How I saw my situation ever so clearly and yet acted as a child,
. . . still see so clearly, and there is still no sign of improvement!]120 Here we
see Werther suggesting the familiar confl ict between head and heart, Ver-
nunft and Herz, through the words “wissentlich” and “klar sehen” to rep-
resent reason and control, and “ein Kind” to portray uncensored, ‘natural,’
emotional experience. The passage shows that Werther cannot purely be a
man of feeling as he defi nes it. His inescapably rational side demands to be
heard if not obeyed. There is a great gulf between what Werther’s reason
forces him to see and what his heart feels, intensified by the split between
two moments of time recorded within the passage. The part of Werther
that sees clearly also writes clearly, while the part of him that feels most
keenly inclines him towards silence and self-destruction.121
Goethe was, of course, not the first, even within sensibility, to use the
image of internal civil war. In his Supplément au Voyage de Bougain-
ville (which was written in 1772, although censored until 1796), Diderot
describes civilization’s deleterious effect upon the ‘noble savages’ of Tahiti:
“Si vous proposez d’être tyran, civilisez-le. Empoisonnez-le de votre mieux
d’une morale contraire à la nature; . . . embarrassez ses mouvements de mille
obstacles; attachez lui des fantômes qui l’effraient; éternisez la guerre dans
la caverne, et que l’homme naturel y soit toujours enchaîné sous les pieds de
l’homme moral” [If you want to become a tyrant, civilize him; poison him as
best you can with morality that is contrary to nature; hamper his movements
 The Anatomy of Follies 103
with a thousand obstacles; provide him with phantoms that terrify him, . . .
eternalize the conflict inside him, and arrange things so that the natural
man will always be chained under the feet of the moral man].122 Civilization
brings about the civil war, for according to Diderot, as for Locke and Rous-
seau, the state of nature is peaceful and harmonious. Werther, too, strives
wholeheartedly for a ‘natural’ and ‘authentic’ existence. This is of course
his difficulty: to strive for authenticity is already to admit defeat. Werther
cannot escape from civilization, any more than he can escape from his own
rationality. As the novel progresses, the same split which Diderot describes
between the ‘natural man’ and the ‘moral man’ grows within Werther.
Werther chooses the ‘natural man’ over the ‘moral man,’ but ultimately, the
natural man cannot survive the separation. His acceptance of this civil war
spells the beginning of his ruination.
For Yorick, Harley, and the Werther of Part I, the civil war is largely exter-
nal—a conflict between those of sensibility and those without, between men
of feeling and men of words, between those who listen to their natural senti-
ments, and those who censor them with reason. In contrast, Werther of Part
II internalizes this civil war. Especially in his revised version of Werther,
Goethe emphasizes Werther’s inability either to silence his reason or to con-
trol his passions. Passages such as the following show his growing self-irony:
“Ich kann nicht beten: ‘Laß mir sie!’ und doch kommt sie mir oft als die
Meine vor. Ich kann nicht beten: ‘Gib mir sie!’ Denn sie ist eines andern. Ich
witzle mich mit meinen Schmerzen herum; wenn ich mir’s nachließe, es gäbe
eine ganze Litanei von Antithesen.”123 [I cannot pray: ‘Grant her to me!’
and yet she often seems to me as my own. I cannot pray: ‘Give her to me!’
For she belongs to another. I tease myself with my pain; if I were to desist,
there would be a whole litany of antitheses.] Werther, both spectacle and
storyteller, narrates an internal drama where his passions fi rst overcome his
reason, and his reason alternately tries to overcome his passion. Rather than
an internal conversation à la Yorick, Werther shows that reason and passion
are engaged in a duel unto death within himself, and he represents himself
as a helpless spectator of the conflict.
If one regards Werther’s central conflict as Herz versus Vernunft, one
could say that he lets Herz direct his words as well as his actions: “ich lache
über mein eigenes Herz—und tu’ ihm seinen Willen” [I laugh over my own
heart—and give it what it wishes] and then again, “Auch halte ich mein Her-
zchen wie ein krankes Kind; jeder Wille wird ihm gestattet” [I coddle my
heart like a sick child; his every wish is fulfilled].124 Werther applies the same
standards to others and suggests the hypocrisy of any words and actions
not dictated by the heart. Words without sympathy behind them—one of
sensibility’s new sins—are worse than empty for Werther; they are insup-
portable: “nur insofern wir mitempfinden, haben wir Ehre, von einer Sache
zu reden” [Only insofar as we empathize do we have the right to speak of
a matter].125 Of course, one of the agonies of his situation is that those who
feel too intensely, rather than those who do not feel enough, are in the end
104 Ruined by Design
driven to silence. Reason or Vernunft is at home in words, while feeling or
Herz remains forever alienated. This is what constitutes the deadly connec-
tion between Werther’s too exquisite sensibility and his overriding rebel-
lion against narration and generalization.
In his long, last scene with Lotte, when words fail both Lotte and
Werther, Werther reads aloud his translation of Ossian’s poetry. Ossian’s
unrhymed, liberated verse, “the compulsive telling over of defeat, darkness,
despair, the eradication of clear outline and all degree, the world torn and
scattered,”126 its story of tragic deaths and truncated relationships, form
the perfect foil for Albert’s analytical reason and disdain for ‘theatricality’
and suicide. Part of Ossian’s appeal is that it deals with fourth-century
Caledonians of Scotland, who were never touched by either Christianity or
the Roman Empire, and were, therefore, considered more “natural.” This
scene places Werther in the position of protector and translator of “ruins.”
It is worth remembering that not only are Ossian’s poems fragmentary,
and thus analogous to ruins, but they are also artificial relics written by
the contemporary Macpherson: they are the literal embodiment of the fake
ruin. Werther is of course unaware of this irony.127 It is parallel to the scene
in Journey where Yorick identifies himself through Shakespeare’s charac-
ter by the same name: Werther also ‘performs’ his identity and depends
upon literature and shared poetic sensibility to complete and express what
he is incapable of expressing in reference to himself alone. Of course, the
irony is that Werther never escapes from himself: just as his translation of
Ossian remains unpublished (within the fictive world of the story, that is),
destined for private consumption, “translation” remains primarily an issue
of self-expression rather than a means of achieving community with other
sensitive souls.128
Throughout Part Two, Werther contemplates his own ruin, as he nar-
rates his anti-narrative urges. Rousseau used the statue of Glaucus to
represent the pale reminders of a vibrant past; Werther similarly draws a
portrait of himself as a ghost (the “ruins” of a prince) who returns to visit
his ruined castle: “Kein Wink der vorigen Welt, kein Pulsschlag meines
damaligen Gefühles. Mir ist es, wie es einem Geiste sein müßte, der in das
ausgebrannte, zerstörte Schloß zurückkehrte, das er als blühender Fürst
einst gebaut und mit allen Gaben der Herrlichkeit ausgestattet, sterbend
seinem geliebten Sohne hoffnungsvoll hinterlassen hätte.” [No hint of the
former world, no pulse of my former feeling. It is to me as it would surely
be for a spirit who returned to the burned-out ruins of the palace that, as
a prospering prince, he once had built and furnished with all bounties of
magnificence, and then dying, left in hopefulness to his beloved son.]129 The
passage makes no distinction between a ruined world around him and his
own ruin—or more precisely, his ruined “heart.”
It is interesting that Werther identifies with “ghost” imagery and Yorick
with “skull” imagery. In both cases, they invoke ruined remnants of indi-
viduals to invite the reader to participate in the imaginary recreation of
 The Anatomy of Follies 105
their essences, and in both cases they invoke the same play: Hamlet. Yorick
allies himself with the dead jester and Werther with the suffering Prince. In
Werther, the implication is that we can detect in the earlier passages a pris-
tine, uncorrupted Werther, and the reader’s sympathies are called upon to
imagine the discrepancy between the “monumental” sensibility of his heart
in its prime and its current disillusionment and ruination. The reference to
Hamlet is particularly interesting for the indication that Hamlet’s indeci-
sion and difficulty conveying thought into action may actually be ethically
superior to more decisive action.
It is interesting to note in this regard that Mackenzie, in his analysis of
Hamlet, calls Hamlet a “man of feeling” precisely because of his tendency
to split into two people. Sensibility, and its corresponding distrust of words,
depends upon a degree of ‘unnaturalness’ and discomfort, while simulta-
neously idealizing an unattainable, ‘natural’ state. Shaftesbury similarly
interprets the Delphic inscription: “Recognize yourself; which was as much
to say, divide yourself, or be two.” Self-knowledge, according to Shaft-
esbury, depends upon a “self-examining practice and method of inward
colloquy.”130 We see the same emphasis upon an internal conversation in
Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. (This is important in the history of
Shakespearian criticism: it is at this time that Hamlet becomes interpreted
as the divided, indecisive, sensitive character attractive to the ethical and
aesthetic predispositions of audiences in the culture of sensibility.)
As the use of the allusions to Hamlet suggest, Werther exhibits the form
of sensibility wedded to a character that gradually rejects sensibility’s mode;
Goethe’s interjection of a note of bitter realism transforms it to something
which more closely resembles Romanticism. This is largely because Werther
is unwilling to accept the necessity of public speech or to acknowledge the
participation of others in communication and the construction of meaning.
He neglects Sternean “translation” for the sake of madness and private
inspiration, so crucial to authors in the Romantic mode. Werther is unwill-
ing to accept the irony that is Yorick’s primary preoccupation, and which
eventually allows Austen’s Marianne Dashwood to survive.
Like the architectural ruins, language’s necessary fragmentation leads
to multiple interpretations as varied as Rousseau’s and Herder’s, Goethe’s
and Sterne’s. It is impossible to emphasize either decay or survival in the
ruins—the half that remains or the half that has vanished, yet it is nonethe-
less possible to emphasize one half or the other. Sterne’s view, as presented
in Journey, suggests that although language is treacherous because it can
lead to solipsism, fragments are a sign of hope for intimacy despite words.
The gaps created by verbal fragmentation and the anti-narrative drive are
the gaps where sympathetic imagination can enter. Yorick’s distrust of
words leads to an emphasis on the shared moment of community and of
imagination, which provides the only escape from solipsism.
Werther, on the other hand, shows the despair of community or inti-
macy that ensues from a belief in the impossibility of successful translation.
106 Ruined by Design
As monuments need to be excoriated in order to appeal to the aesthetic of
the picturesque, Werther too excoriates himself in pursuit of an ideal. For
Werther, fragments are a wrenching sign of his despair; they are gaps that
seldom, if ever, can be filled. Goethe relies on the reader, however, to fill
the gaps with sympathetic imagination, showing the difference between the
novel as a whole and its eponymous hero—the separation between Werther
and Werther. Werther’s distrust of words leads to despair, to increasing
fragmentation, to anti-narration as an end in itself, and fi nally to suicide
and silence. Communication is for Yorick a Quixotic adventure; while for
Werther it is an ultimately unendurable Sisyphean struggle.
3 Reading Ruin

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

I leave it to your men of words to swell pages about it.

—A Sentimental Journey

In the epigraphs above, and in many similar passages, narrators of novels

of sensibility pointedly and somewhat self-righteously lay down their (ficti-
tious) pens. They symbolically abdicate their authority and authorship either
in favor of explicitly lesser men or to illustrate the shortcomings of a world
that forces a cruel and destructive separation between the man of feeling and
the man of words. Multiple factors lead to this abdication of authorial respon-
sibility, particularly the concerns about communication and self-representa-
tion explored in the previous chapter. In addition, both real and fictitious
authors of sensibility express concern about their self-image and hope to pres-
ent themselves in a way that will not compromise the appearance of sensibility
to the reader. This latter anxiety in particular leads to great concern over the
reader’s freedom of interpretation as well as to elaborate techniques for con-
trolling reader responses. These additional techniques involve perfecting the
art of “accident” and creating multiple levels of fictional editing to protect the
reputation of authors. Each of these techniques is designed to mask authorial
control, introducing the important (and perhaps hypocritical) element of dis-
guise. This disguise and evasion of authority affect the masking of control in
both follies and novels and demonstrate how the novel of sensibility involves
an altered relation between reader and author.1

THE ART OF ACCIDENT

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:

Those, indeed, who think only of making fi ne places, in order to

gratify their own vanity, or profit by the vanity of others, may call
this mode of proceeding a new system of improving by neglect and
accident; yet those who have tried it know, that, though to preserve
the appearance of neglect and accident to be one of its objects, it is
not by leaving every thing to neglect and accident, that even that
is to be obtained. Profi ting by accident is very different from leav-
ing everything to accident; and improving by neglect, very different
from neglecting. 7

One of the characteristic tensions within the picturesque is between the

drive to achieve “artificial” mastery over the environment, so overt in
baroque geometrical plantings, radial axes, and topiary, and the newer
respect for “natural” accident.8 The landscape gardener thus faces the same
struggle as the artist: to what extent must he hide his own artistry (shovel
as well as scissors) in order to mimic nature’s authenticity, and while also
claiming enough art to justify his occupation.
The language of feeling, like the language of nature, relies heavily on
artifice; natural appearance is more important than how that appearance
is achieved. Even so, the examples from Sterne show how “perplexing”
communication can be and how much the listener or reader is involved in
the process of translation. How, then, does an author control the emotional
response to narrative fragmentation? Not only is there a problem of osten-
sive reference, but also accuracy regarding all products of the imagination:
to what extent can an author trust the reader or viewer to reach the desired
emotional states or conclusions? The very desire to control such responses
suggests an uneasy decentralization of power on the part of authors; while
pretending to “halve” the power amicably, in the absence of trust, authors
return to the wish for authoritarian authorship.
Building upon the narrative drive common to both follies and novels,
Thomas Whately elucidates the difficulties of interpretation. He describes
the desired psychological effect of the ruins in terms of their ability to
engage the viewer’s imagination in a hypothetical former state:

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 best architects of follies are, in this sense, storytellers or authors of

evocative fiction, as Capability Brown had suggested. The effects of follies
are built upon the assumptions that ruins, like irregularity in general, allow
for more evocative, theatrical, and interactive viewing by virtue of the gaps
they offer spectators. Ruins, like tears, are studies in ambivalence: they
can evoke contradictory emotions regarding the human struggle against
time—either marking the sad remnants of human achievement despite
time’s travails, or the majestic persistence of human achievement approach-
ing immortality. These figures both appeal to a culture that wishfully exag-
gerates a faith in both the human capacity for goodness and the ability to
self-regulate. Both tears and ruins thus reflect the philosophical insecurities
at the heart of the culture of sensibility.
At the same time, a great irony consists in the fact that the ambivalence
inherent in the ruin/ fragment as symbol causes artists and authors who con-
struct them to need to rely even further on successful communication with
the reader or viewer. This dynamic relies upon the viewer’s narrative drive
that lends meaning to “an unmeaning heap of confusion.” In other words,
the freedom of interpretation that ruins’ ambivalence allows can lead to the
“perplexity” Whately and other artists and authors fear. The authoritarian
terms of the passage (e.g. “must not be allowed,” “force”) thus suggest the
underlying insecurity of this aesthetic stance and Whately’s lack of trust
in his audience. Similar to the culture of sensibility’s confl icted impulses
regarding human nature—the desire to believe in both natural goodness
and the need for cultivated ethics—here we see a wavering confidence in
the “natural language” of ruins. Ruins are indeed the “natural language”
or “language of nature” that can communicate without words to the spec-
tator’s ready heart, and yet, without very careful arrangement on the part
of the architect or gardenist, the correct response cannot be assumed. Spec-
tators can easily become “perplexed” or “uncertain,” distracted by mul-
tiple sensations, antiquarian impulses, or burgeoning intellectual curiosity,
all of which are antagonistic to the desired emotive effect. Artifice and
authenticity, art and nature, order and irregularity, natural language and
analytic devices are all precariously balanced in the artistry of the folly.
Meanwhile, the possibility of follies deteriorating into “unmeaning heaps
of confusion” and generating “perplexity” in the viewer point to the frailty
of ruins as a form of communication.
And although no novelist can control the temporal aspect of any read-
ing of his or her novel, and therefore cannot ‘create’ silence in the way
that is feasible in theater, opera, or music, Sterne comes as close as pos-
sible for a novelist to ‘an empty bar of music’ when he leaves us a blank
page in Tristram Shandy. Even there, the emphasis is on how the reader
will fi ll the silence—by picturing the beautiful Widow Wadman. In
 Reading Ruin 111
order for silences to function in the novel, the author must train the
reader’s expectations and responses so that the reader will help compose
the novel while reading it.10 And while, by defi nition, readers always help
constitute texts by participatory reading, Sterne tailors his use of this
feature of the implied reader’s role to the specific demands of the culture
of sensibility and the inherent confl ict between the ‘man of words’ and
the ‘man of feeling.’11

THE SHAME OF AUTHORSHIP

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.

FRAMING THE MAN OF FEELING

If the narrative impulse is traditionally associated with utilitarianism,

linearity, chronology (having a distinct beginning, middle, and end),
and the maintenance of one sustained, overarching, and organizing per-
spective, then it is also associated with the drive to generalize, to view
human experience as homogeneous or universal, and to support a cen-
trally authorized authority—namely, the narrator (or implied author).
The anti-narrative impulse, then, is non-utilitarian, purposely erratic,
and non-chronological (or at least non-linear); it features multiple sub-
jective perspectives, a higher regard for subjectivity, and the drive to
sympathize with others without merging them into one’s own narrative
path. Anti-narrative or non-narrative (or paratextual) impulses suggest
the decentralized authority of the crumbling public edifice, resulting in
the exposure of interior lives. Rather than generalization, it encourages
localized particularity and the resistance against codification. Narra-
tive impulses lead us to tell or recount; anti-narrative impulses strive to
perform what cannot be told. Revisions are generally subsumed within
the narrative impulse—their traces erased to favor a single narrative
 Reading Ruin 117
sequence; the anti-narrative impulse encourages revision and highlights
it as a decentralizing force in anti-narratives. In three-dimensional
terms, narrative strives for the cumulative, incremental completion of
a single monument that resists the centrifugal powers of decay; non- or
anti-narrative drive does not aspire to a single monument, but rather is
pulled in multiple directions, delighting in entropy and not allowing for
a coherently organized whole in conventional terms. Narrative impulses
strive for the monument, order, and system; anti-narrative for the ruin,
irregularity, and spontaneity.
For digressions and lacunae to be noticeable, however, they must occur
within a narrative framework—an assumption of a main topic or chronol-
ogy that can then be effectively shaken, interrupted, or left incomplete. In
the same way, a folly depends upon a tension between the desire to recreate
and the desire to tear down—between the monumental and the ruined—to
achieve its effect. Sensibility and the picturesque also both evince a concern
for diverse subjective experiences, yet also depend partly on conventional
authority, for the sake of such contrast. Sensibility’s rhetoric of ruins, then,
depends upon an internal tension between narrative and anti-narrative
drives; it depends on the coexistence of these two drives for the construc-
tion of its narrative fiction, just as the picturesque does for the construction
of follies.
As architects had to pose as archaeologists, pretending to have discov-
ered, rather than have built, such “authentic” monuments, authors too
pretend to have discovered what they actually write. Both architects and
authors addressed twin goals: to create a “publishable,” coherent monu-
ment or volume and also to fragment their creation and thereby mask
the creator’s role as well as evoke greater emotional participation in the
reader or viewer. Only by studying the developments in narrative tech-
nique within this broad cultural context, can we understand the ethical
stakes involved in the aesthetic demands imposed upon artists within the
culture of sensibility. What is especially interesting is how Sterne, Goethe,
Mackenzie, and other authors solve the problem introduced by the fake
ruin—that is, the problem of presenting a fragmented text without caus-
ing the readers to lose confidence in the author’s degree of mastery, and,
conversely, of hiding the artfully organized character of their works so
that they will appear ‘authentic.’
On the 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 new structure allows the
accidental, the spontaneous, the dreamt, the unintended, and the unspo-
ken to become more significant, more credible, and more aesthetically
appealing in these novels than the effects of cold reason, conscious sym-
metry, and planning—just as the monument is more authentic and more
aesthetically appealing when it is crumbling.
118 Ruined by Design
An omniscient or objective narrator would have been just as unthink-
able in Journey as in Werther, for it would have directly confl icted with the
“unfathomableness of subjectivity” that is central to Sterne’s moral psy-
chology. 26 And yet, Sterne seems to give Yorick more narratorial authority
than Goethe does Werther, since Yorick is engaged in a public act of writ-
ing. Yorick’s narrative authority, though, is undermined by the fact that
there is very little plot or action to report. Sterne plays with Yorick’s double
role as narrator and subjective participant in order partially to mask his
authority as well as to depict what is lost in translation in the gulf between
feeling and words. From the very beginning, Yorick makes it abundantly
clear that the position thrust upon him by the moral aesthetic of sensibility
necessarily leads to hypocrisy: “There are certain combined looks of simple
subtlety—where whim, and sense, and seriousness, and nonsense, are so
blended, that all the languages of Babel set loose together could not express
them—they are communicated and caught so instantaneously, that you can
scarce say which party is the infecter. I leave it to your men of words to
swell pages about it.”27 Yorick qua man of feeling disdains words and their
users, yet it takes Yorick, the man of words, to teach us this. Sterne achieves
Yorick’s rhetoric of ruins—or his art of eloquent not-saying—using charac-
teristically fragmented syntax.
While it is hard to overstate the difference of tone in these two
works—humor being almost as absent from Werther as tragedy from
Sentimental Journey—Sterne and Goethe both use an intruding narrator
to create an additional frame (or frames) of authorship in their texts and
to respond to the aesthetic that distrusts yet relies upon authorship and
control. In Journey, Yorick is the narrator as well as the central charac-
ter in his travels; in Werther, Werther also narrates his own story—this
time, in the form of letters. Goethe provides a second self-conscious nar-
rator, the Herausgeber or Editor, who compiles Werther’s letters and
comments upon them. The Herausgeber forms a second narrative frame,
especially noticeable since his is the fi rst voice and the last voice of the
text. All three of these narrators contribute to the fragmentary nature of
the narrative because they are self-conscious about their writing and the
difficulties associated with producing an organized, unified text. These
complicated linguistic and narratorial requirements were not limited to
these two novels, but instead exhibit responses to the central concerns of
sensibility’s moral aesthetic. Involved, as these techniques are, with the
protection of one’s reputation as a man of feeling, these authors tended
to involve the implied reader in an evaluation of each man of words
involved in the text. This may be one way of understanding Virginia
Woolf’s complaint about Sterne in her introduction to the 1928 edition
of Sentimental Journey: She claims that the “chief fault” of the work
“comes from Sterne’s concern for our good opinion of his heart.”28 The
reader is forced to participate in the protagonist’s performance, much
like the audience that Tieck creates in Gestiefelte Kater (Puss in Boots).
 Reading Ruin 119
As Patricia Meyer Spacks writes, “Yorick’s is an existence of self-display.
If he does not have an immediate audience, he must imagine one . . .
revealing himself on the stage of his own fantasies . . . Sensibility entails
its own performance, ever demanding publicity.”29
Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling is particularly useful for under-
standing the role of narrative frames for the novel of sensibility. It is hard
to imagine fragmentation taking a more calculated effect in a novel. Only
twenty-five out of the original (purported) fifty-six chapters remain in the
text, many of them only brief fragments of the “original,” which suffered
the indignities of being torn, burnt, lost, shredded, or even used as wadding
for a rifle by a variety of unfeeling hands. Upon examination, we can see
that each of the three central voices in this novel—the three central “I”s—
represents a separate “feeling heart” through its fragmentation. Although
Harley does not narrate his own story, the narrators transcribe his spoken
words and (somewhat unaccountably) his private thoughts at great length.
At such times, Mackenzie shows his response to the demands of the culture
of sensibility by sacrificing authenticity in plot for the sake of authenticity of
emotion. Just as it is more important to own a Roman ruin in Sweden or the
north of England than it is to explain how it arrived there in the first place,
it is more important that Harley not be a man of words, than that the reader
understands how the narrator could possibly have known his feelings.
On a rare occasion, Harley does write of his (unproclaimed) love: in
Chapter 40, we fi nd a pastoral poem that Harley has laboriously written;
however, he promptly uses it to lift a hot teakettle, and forgetfully leaves
it on the handle. The narrator, Charles, finds it there, and later records: “I
happened to put it in my pocket by a similar act of forgetfulness.”30 Mack-
enzie will go to great, and almost comic, lengths to stress the unpremedi-
tated nature of these men’s actions; therefore, their status as men of feeling
cannot be sullied with imputations of ‘rational’ or ‘artificial’ motives. The
narrator-participant Charles must not think of himself as narrator during
the time frame that his narration depicts, lest the reader fi nd him cold,
hypocritical, or untrustworthy. Thus, somewhat ironically, he must display
a lack of foresight in order to gain the ‘sensible’ reader’s trust. The poem
embodies thematically the ‘rhetoric of silence’ and the pursuit of ‘natural’
language as the following excerpt shows:

I term’d her no goddess of love,

I call’d not her beauty divine:
These far other passions may prove,
But they could not be figures of mine.

It ne’er was apparell’d with art,

On words it could never rely;
It reign’d in the throb of my heart,
It gleam’d in the glance of my eye. 31
120 Ruined by Design
Harley’s great distrust of words (and in the same poem his painful con-
sciousness of “tongue[s] that [are] smooth to deceive”) hinders him from
writing his own story, just as it keeps him from declaring his love for Miss
Walton. 32 However, Harley is far from silent: Harley speaks and thinks,
and both are recorded by the original narrator, whom we discover to be an
intimate friend.
Through this combination of two characters—the all-important yet
silent Harley, and the nearly anonymous narrator—Mackenzie is able to
express the dual impulses of sensibility. Harley is allowed the silent pursuit
of authenticity, with occasional quickly aborted attempts to express his
feelings; the presence of his friend Charles (we learn his name on the last
page) assiduously collecting Harley’s thoughts and scraps of paper not only
functions as a model reader and spectator for the reader (a model student
of pedagogy of seeing), but also enables Harley to escape any suspicion of
authority, contrivance, or authorship.
Charles repeatedly evinces traditional narratorial omniscience, but this
omniscience is masked by his personal subjectivity: Charles loves Har-
ley, and his great affection for him prevents him (according to his own
account) from presenting the narrative in an orderly fashion. Charles’s nar-
ration, like Harley’s speech, is fragmented with dashes: “At that instant a
shepherd blew his horn: the romantic melancholy of the sound quite over-
came him!—it was the very note that wanted to be touched—he sighed!
he dropped a tear!—and returned.”33 Charles is disorganized and writes
much about the difficulties of writing: “We would attempt to describe the
joy which Harley felt on the occasion, 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.”34
Mackenzie’s narrators all take Tristram’s lesson to heart, namely that “to
defi ne is to distrust.” According to the typical paradox of the ‘rhetoric of
silence’ and of sensibility in general, Harley’s emotions are repeatedly (and
paradoxically) described as surpassing description: “There were a thou-
sand sentiments;—but they gushed so impetuously on his heart, that he
could not utter a syllable. * * * *.”35 Again we fi nd, as we did in Journey
and Werther, that ineloquence is a token of depth of feeling, keenness of
perception, and even virtue. The fi nal asterisks indicate that feelings—the
“thousand sentiments” that refuse analysis, sequential consideration, and
linear narration—also reduce the narrator to silence. 36
The use of fictional frames and fictitious provenances stems from the
epistolary novel. Samuel Richardson is known for his innovations in the
epistolary novel, especially his emphasis on “Familiar Letters, written, as it
were, to the Moment, while the Heart is agitated by Hopes and Fears, on
Events undecided.”37 He fictitiously refers to himelf as an Editor rather than
author in all his major works, but does not provide the elaborate fictions of
acquisition that developed in the second half of the century. His goal was
also to minimize the presence of the autocratic author or the Editor in his
 Reading Ruin 121
novels—the Editor intrudes only once in Pamela (1740), as she is abducted,
and not at all in Clarissa (1747–48). In the preface to Clarissa, he uses an
interesting device to justify the anti-narrative force of the novel, excuse the
length of it, and to dramatize the Editor’s lack of ordering.
The Editor reports great concern over the length of the collection of
letters and considers presenting them in another form, either through
narrative summary or just by omitting parts to single out one narrative
thread. He reports having “several judicious friends” read the letters and
consult upon how they should be arranged. Some argued to “give a nar-
rative turn” to the letters; others “insisted that the story could not be
reduced to a dramatic unity, nor thrown into the narrative way, without
divesting it of its warmth and of a great part of its efficacy.”38 Finally he
says he will present the fi rst two volumes to the public, and let the public
decide whether or not the collection is too long. Throughout this discus-
sion, however, it is not authenticity or the arousal of sympathy that are at
stake, but rather “instruction” and the didactic value of the novel. This
places Richardson in an ethically authoritative position, even as he is tak-
ing pains to mask his authorship. His didactic tone also distinguishes him
from authors of sensibility: he publishes a table of the collected “Moral
Sentiments” of Clarissa as an appendix to the novel, as well as an edi-
tion of Clarissa’s Meditations Collected from Sacred Books (1749), to
ensure the proper sentiments are conveyed by his novels. While avoiding
the appearance of autocratic authority, Richardson waxes fairly tyranni-
cal in his desire to control his audience’s responses, especially through the
use of paratextual material. 39
Similarly, the editor of the third edition of The Beauties of Sterne (1782)—
a compendium of the most moving scenes from both Tristram Shandy and
Sentimental Journey for the “Heart of Sensibility”—expresses his difficulty
in arranging the sentimental episodes and tableaux. Whereas he intended
to arrange them alphabetically, he states that this would have overwhelmed
the reader by too many consecutive scenes of intense pathos. So instead, the
editor divides up the most pathetic scenes, so as not to overwhelm the reader
of feeling.40 Interestingly, this editor not only creates gaps in the sequence
of the text in order to evoke feeling, but, confident of success, also exerts
additional paternalistic control over the reader’s emotions.
Frances Sheridan, in her epistolary novel The Memoirs of Sidney Bid-
ulph (1761), sees fit to include multiple narrative frames, with two successive
fictional editors mediating between the heroine and the historical author.
While Sheridan does not focus as much on the surface fragmentation of the
text, she does create many gaps when the heroine is too ill or grieved to be
able to write. At those times, her nurse Patty “takes up the pen” to relate
the minutiae. As in Werther, there is a very fi ne line between letters and
journal entries (Sidney and Cecilia both refer to the letters as “the journal”
at times in the narrative), but this time with a more sympathetic reader than
Werther’s Wilhelm—one who arrives in the fi nal pages to become an active
122 Ruined by Design
character within the story. Again, there are model readers imbedded in the
text—not only Cecilia, but also her faithful servant Patty and the second
nameless editor who tries desperately to discover more of Sidney’s story
and is disappointed to publish it as a “fragment.”
Authorship flows in rapid succession between the male editor and at
least four other authors; Cecilia’s family history of Sidney; Sidney’s own
letters with multiple inset letters from others, as well as many letters writ-
ten for her by Patty and others; another note from the editor; and Cecilia’s
fi nal summary of events (also fragmented). With such a number of authors
present in the novel, authorship is diluted and the reader is less distracted
by Sidney’s dual roles as protagonist and narrator of her own events. It is
interesting to note that the explicit (fictional) editor is the only male author,
and is the only one with the goal of publication, thus he is the only of
the authors involved whose authenticity is potentially tainted, yet Sheridan
makes it clear that he too is moved by Sidney’s misfortunes and therefore
still reliably represents the culture of sensibility.
All of Mackenzie’s novels include some form of narrative frame to hide
authorship and account for the mangled manuscript that lies at its cen-
ter, regardless of whether the novel is epistolary or not. In the epistolary
Julia de Roubigné, for example, the novel is interspersed with many rows
of asterisks showing the missing letters and sections of letters that again,
faithful editors have gathered in spite of other Hobbesian readers. Here
too, sympathetic servants take up their mistress’ pen to fi ll in gaps when
their oversensitive mistress is incapable of writing herself. In addition, Julia
segments her letters into miniature episodes or moments by leaving large
spaces and lines between them, as she records each individual event or feel-
ing “to the moment” in Richardsonian fashion. As a result the text has a
much more fragmented surface appearance than Sidney Bidulph.
Finally, the editor’s non-narrative impulses are made quite explicit, as
the work is divided into two sections of letters—one arranged chronologi-
cally to portray Julia’s fragmented but largely chronological narrative, and
the other introduced as being purposely disordered: “MY Readers will eas-
ily perceive something particular in the place where the following letters of
Savillon are found, as they are manifestly of a date considerably prior to
many of the preceding. They came my hands assorted in the manner I have
now published them, probably from a view in my young friend, who had
charge of their arrangement.”41 After going back and forth as to whether
or not to rearrange the two sets of letters into one whole, the editor says he
decided to leave them in this order because “it is not so much on story as
sentiment, that their interest with the Reader must depend.”42 Thus, for the
sake of sentiment, the Editor perpetuates their non-narrative arrangement
and thereby also lessens his own authorial or ordering role.
In Rousseau’s preface to Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), Rous-
seau conducts a dialogue between himself and an unnamed literary critic,
debating the style of the letters in the novel. In the course of this dialogue,
 Reading Ruin 123
Rousseau defends the fragmented style of the writing, saying that “a let-
ter from an honestly impassioned lover will be loosely written, verbose,
drawn out to great lengths, disorderly, repetitious.” He defends the style in
terms of emotional authenticity rather than instructional utility. Similarly,
when he describes the composition of Nouvelle Héloïse in the Confes-
sions, he, like Goethe, emphasizes his own lack of forethought: “Je jettai
d’abord sur le papier quelques lettres éparses sans suite et sans liason, et
lorsque je m’avisai de les vouloir coudre j’y fus souvent fort embarrassé.
Ce qu’il y a de peu croyable et de très vrai est que les deux prémiéres Par-
ties ont été écrites presque en entier de cette maniére; sans que j’eusse
aucun plan bien formé.” [At fi rst I jotted down a few scattered letters on
paper, unconnected and without sequence; and when I made up my mind
to place them in order, I was often in considerable trouble. What is almost
incredible but is quite true is that the fi rst two parts were written almost
entirely in this manner, without my having any well formed plan.]43 Of
note here is that rather than taking elaborate strategies to mask his author-
ship through editorial frames, Rousseau chooses to take other strategies to
protect his reputation as a man of feeling. For him, it is not as necessary
to pretend that the letters were historically authentic, and instead more
important to show his similarity to the characters in their shared non-nar-
rative impulses that distinguish the man of feeling from the monarchical
author, man of reason, or hack. In this way, Rousseau’s approach to mask-
ing authority and authorship bears more in common with Goethe than
with either Sterne or Mackenzie.

THE ARCHAEOLOGIST’S DISGUISE

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

of nature with tableaux were only literal manifestations of the point of

view the beholder of the picturesque was supposed to internalize.”81
It is noteworthy, in this regard, that the notorious tours in search of
officially picturesque sights and locations, conducted by the gentry and
138 Ruined by Design
aristocracy in the second half of the eighteenth century, involved not
only the obligatory sketchbooks and watercolors, but also such devices as
Claude glasses and convex mirrors, to “miniaturize,” “fi x,” “station,” and
“compose” the untamed landscapes. Paraphernalia associated with the
picturesque movement further supports its growing over-codification as
well as its acceptance of artificiality. The picturesque ideals became fi xed
even in their palette, for it spawned a new kind of lens called the “Claude-
Glass,” tinted in just the yellow shades of one of Claude Lorrain’s sun-
sets.82 The word ‘compose’ reinforces the (uncomfortable) authorial role
that such viewers assumed, in pretending to have found the picturesque in
nature rather than to have created it. The paraphernalia and vocabulary of
these tours suggest not only the desire to dodge any suggestions of ‘author-
ship,’ but also a desire to enjoy nature’s wildness from a safe distance.
Picturesque travelers could travel from scene to scene, carrying Claude
glasses, a Gray’s glass, or a camera obscura, and add the fi nishing touch
to a compositionally perfect sight.
The Claude glass and other convex tinted mirrors, for example, tended
to create oval images on paper. Many of Gilpin’s illustrations were oval,
replicating the effect of the convex mirrors that tend to exaggerate fore-
ground and provide a protective barrier for the viewer. Frequently, such
scenes would include some foreground desolation, ominously pointing
towards the more peaceful background. In a memorable passage, Gilpin
himself describes the experience of looking out the window of a chaise with
Claude glass in hand: “A succession of high-coloured pictures is continu-
ally gliding before the eye. They are like the visions of the imagination,
or the brilliant landscapes of a dream. Forms and colours in the brightest
array fleet before us; and if the transient glance of a good composition hap-
pen to unite with them, we should give any price to fi x, and appropriate
the scene.”83
In this scene, Gilpin is doubly separated from the natural scenery he
is viewing—fi rst by the window frame of the chaise, and secondly by the
tinted Claude glass through which he is viewing nature as though it were a
fi lm. His use of the words “fi x” and “appropriate” also suggests that nature
is a commodity to be consumed. In addition, in order to use a Claude glass
appropriately, one must actually have one’s back or shoulder to the natural
scene, in order to compose it. Such paraphernalia reveals the separation
from reality to which this rigidly codified way of seeing ultimately leads;
it also underscores a great, inescapable irony inherent in both “cults.” The
emphasis on seeing and feeling, as well as a general receptivity to nature and
to one’s surroundings—goals which served to distinguish these movements
as linked with the culture of sensibility—eventually leads to its reverse, a
greater separation from nature and others.84
As these examples show, the picturesque eventually falls from its exalted
status, as does sensibility, when each becomes over-codified and ripe for
such satires as Combe’s and Rowlandson’s in Figure 27. Both movements fall
 Reading Ruin 139
from precariously balanced contradictory impulses regarding authenticity
and artifice and tip irretrievably towards hypocrisy and artifice. By the time
William Combe writes his poem Doctor Syntax in 1819, to accompany the
illustrations by Thomas Rowlandson, the two men are able to parody both
the novel of sensibility and the pursuit of the picturesque within the same
volume. Literary critique and aesthetic critique merge in the Doctor Syntax
and Doctor Prosody stories. Combe and Rowlandson reveal that the artifi-
cially domesticating tendencies of the picturesque could blind its tourists to
the real nature around them.85
In Figure 27, ivy-covered follies spell out the fi rst three letters of the
word ‘picturesque’-–an architectural fi nd that stimulates the artist’s nar-
rative impulses, his ambition toward authorship. However, as the C teeters
precariously, demonstrating the limits of artifice in construction of follies
and threatening the ruin of his ruin, Dr. Syntax succumbs to his narrative
urges and etches the remainder of the word into a nearby boulder. (This is
probably also an allusion to the forgeries of ancient scripts by Macpher-
son, Chatterton, and others.) In the background, several well known
ruins, including Tintern Abbey, dot the horizon in exaggerated proxim-
ity. Combe and Rowlandson’s frontispiece shows the thin line between
painter and writer, between observing or imitating nature and imposing
one’s own wishes, as well as the eager attempt to make nature conform to
preconceived ideals. Combe reveals the traveling tourists’ eagerness not
only to read nature, but also to read into nature, and even to compose
nature according to the demands of their own fi xed aesthetic categories.
These artists abiding by picturesque principles experience the same dis-
comfort over authorship and denial of authority as we witnessed in the
novels of sensibility.

With curious eye and active scent,

I on the picturesque am bent.
That is my game; I must pursue it,
And make it where I cannot view it.

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.

THE PEDAGOGY OF SEEING

As the literature of sensibility flourishes, the ethics of feeling continues to dom-

inate, as evidenced by: the emphasis on intense friendship or ardent romantic
love as indicators of the ability to feel, continued emphasis on expressivism,
and growing use of narrative techniques to affect emotion in the audience.
While the Augustan tendency towards didacticism does not fade fully in Eng-
land until the nineteenth century, the nature of the didactic lessons changes,
and authors manipulate readers’ emotional responses in order to achieve a
sentimental education of the audience, presumed immune to the effects of
direct argumentation, and eventually, of omniscient narration.
While their purposes and tonalities differ greatly, both Goethe’s Werther
and Sterne’s Journey teach the reader how to become an imaginative transla-
tor of the world by becoming an imaginative participant in the novel and an
interpreter of nature. The novels function as literary analogues to Gilpin’s
published tours of the English countryside. Just as Gilpin teaches his read-
ers how to find, view, and describe picturesque sights, Sterne and Goethe
also travel and respond to evocative tableaux, such as the scenes involving
Werther’s friendship for the farm boy, and children in general, as well as
his reactions to landscape. The authors teach readers how to respond sym-
pathetically to and alongside their protagonists in the multiple tableaux of
sensibility that we witness.
Ethics, like art collecting or traveling in pursuit of the picturesque, become
sthe realm of the connoisseur. The novelists of sensibility treat their readers
as connoisseurs, and they also portray the sensibility of their protagonists
through their aesthetic taste—especially their responses to visual sights. The
man of feeling (and virtue) must show an ability to see with taste, whether
beholding the various spectacles in an English garden, reconstructing a folly,
recording his reactions to a Grand Tour through the Alps and Rome, wit-
nessing the plight of a suffering human being, reminiscing over the fictitious
remnants of Ossian’s poetry, or admiring the delicate simplicity of a sensitive
mimosa plant.87 As a result of this emphasis on the art of seeing, sensibility’s
visual and literary art was replete with representations of seers seeing and
thereby functioning as pedagogical models. Since sensibility’s central hall-
marks equate virtue with the ability to feel delicate emotions, one could train
one’s emotional reflexes through picturesque sights.
142 Ruined by Design
As we have seen, the picturesque’s pictorial appreciation of nature applies
to several art forms; Christopher Hussey claims “poetry, painting, gardening,
architecture and the art of travel may be said to have been fused into a single
‘art of landscape.’”88 The emphasis is on spurring the imagination and train-
ing the emotions to respond to various scenes, whether human, botanical,
or architectural. Most of the books on the picturesque, in fact, were travel
guides to help travelers identify and appreciate “official” picturesque spots.
To Hussey’s list of arenas influenced by the picturesque, I would add prose fic-
tion as well, since novels of sensibility also function as guides to traveling and
models for responding to situations and spectacles. A Sentimental Journey,
in particular, functions as a guidebook for learning not only how to travel
‘sentimentally,’ but also how to behave sentimentally in all situations.
Once again, Sterne builds upon tradition to emphasize sensibility’s
traveling motif: most directly Sterne responds to—and ridicules—Tobias
Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy (1766).89 Yorick defi nes him-
self in contradistinction to Smollett (the splenetic Smelfungus), and lists
him among the inferior kinds of travelers, declaring his own determina-
tion to be a “sentimental” traveler instead: “I pity the man who can travel
from Dan to Beersheba, and cry, ’Tis all barren—and so it is; and so is all
the world to him who will not cultivate the fruits it offers. I declare, said
I, clapping my hands chearily together, that was I in a desart [sic], I would
fi nd out wherewith in it to call forth my affections.”90 Sterne combines
the travelogue with the rage for sensibility and the picturesque by creating
a journey where destinations are determined by gentle faces and pitiable
sights and where nothing is barren if the traveler be sentimental.
The new dangers involved in Alpine travel helped spur the market for
engravings and prints of Roman ruins, prominent in illustrated chapbooks,
volumes of miscellanies, and circulating libraries. Gilpin’s tours of the
English countryside, published as guidebooks with helpful illustrations to
explain picturesque principles, appeared from 1782, promoting domestic
travel as well as literacy in the picturesque aesthetic and its correspond-
ing cant. These developments made the picturesque tour more available to
the middle classes or lower gentry—indeed, it is illustrated by Elizabeth
Bennet’s proposed tour of the Lake Country in Pride and Prejudice. Tour-
ing landscape, abbeys, and castles becomes an increasingly popular sport
among middle and upper middle classes, providing the practical experi-
ence with objects required of the “picturesque eye.” Therefore, those who
owned no estates to transform into picturesque style, or who did not have
the luxury of travel, were able nonetheless to travel vicariously through
Gilpin’s tour books, or through his and others’ etchings, published prints,
plans of English gardens, and even novels of sensibility, which frequently
replicate a picturesque aesthetic through the narrative techniques and mode
of sentimental traveling that they portray.
Unlike “Mundungus” (Samuel Smart), who “travell’d straight on looking
neither to his right hand or his left, lest Love or Pity should seduce him out
 Reading Ruin 143
of his road,”91 the sentimental traveler eschews straight lines and prede-
termined destinations, just as he does the formal restrictions of logic,
grammar, and etiquette. This principle fi nds its parallel in the aesthetic
of the picturesque, where horizontal and vertical lines are taboo and
considered “unnatural.” (Compare the English garden at Hohenheim in
Figure 28 with the Avenues at Hampton Court in Figure 10). As Julie
declares of her garden in Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761), “Vous
ne voyez rien d’aligné, rien de nivelé; jamais le cordeau n’entra dans ce
lieu; la nature ne plante rien au cordeau.” [You will see nothing aligned,
nothing leveled, no straight lines in this place; nature plants nothing in
rows.]92 Yorick is in complete agreement, although he claims it is out of
his control: “I think there is a fatality in it—” cries Yorick, “I seldom go
to the place I set out for.”93 Yorick travels through France, then, trans-
lating all the way, encountering poignant, picturesque scene after scene,
very much like the spectator in one of Hirschfeld’s parks, and each scene
moves in him the appropriate sentiments. Yorick the Protagonist’s “pic-
turesquely” unpredictable itinerary as well as Yorick the Narrator’s plot
line curiously resemble the narrative graphs which Sterne visualizes in
Tristram Shandy (Figure 20).

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:

Eye wet with a tear Page 127

Tears, face bathed with 130
Dropped one tear, no more 131
Tears, press-gang could not refrain them 136

The list illustrates the parallel between Hirschfeld’s botanical version

of the emotional obstacle course and the literary one exemplified by
Mackenzie or Sterne; the index also epitomizes the eventual over-codi-
fi cation of sensibility and the self-conscious artifi ciality it encourages in
its readers.
The narrators and fictional editors of novels of sensibility nearly
defi ne their reader out of existence. Recurring phrases deny worth or
membership to readers who do not feel the appropriate degree of interest
in the protagonists’ plights or who do not feel the right emotion to the
right degree at the right time. Readers who do not pass the editor’s tests
are considered sub-human, alien to this world, unworthy, cold hearted.
Sterne’s Yorick momentarily speculates whether “tone and manners have
a meaning,” yet he quickly and defensively responds to himself: “cer-
tainly they have, unless to hearts which shut them out,” again defi antly
expressing optimism alongside the potential for despair. Mackenzie’s
editor, too, bemoans that “some feelings [are] too tender to be suffered
by the world.” And Austen’s fi ctional editor warns more directly: “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.”
Whereas Mackenzie’s fictional editor claims that only “one half” of the
world need not be told the story that they already understood, these and
other phrases suggest the haunting fear that humanity as a whole is less
easily moved to sympathy than the authors of novels of sensibility would
like to believe.
What begins in the distrust of authorities ends in the distrust of read-
ers and consumers (and perhaps humanity itself). Similarly, the demo-
cratic solution of shared authorship and shared responsibility between
author and reader fails in light of the authors’ inability to trust the read-
er’s interpretive role. Ultimately, the avoidance of overtly authoritarian
structures leads to a disguised tyranny, as well as new structures and
regulations, perhaps even more dangerous in their pretence of liberal-
ism. The eagerness to disguise the editor, author, or architect’s role thus
ultimately substitutes a masked tyranny in place of a more explicit one
founded on rationalist Enlightenment confidence.
4 Constructing Human Ruin

With what a moral delight will it crown my journey, in sharing in the

sickening incidents of a tale of misery told to me by such a sufferer?
To see her weep!
—Sterne, A Sentimental Journey

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

THE PLEASURES OF PITY

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.

She wept.—Life’s purple tide began to flow

In languid streams through every thrilling vein;
Dim were my swimming eyes—my pulse beat slow,
And my full heart was swell’d to dear delicious pain.
Life left my loaded heart, and closing eye;
A sigh recall’d the wanderer to my breast;
Dear was the pause of life, and dear the sigh
That call’d the wanderer home, and home to rest.
That tear proclaims—in thee each virtue dwells,
And bright will shine in misery’s midnight hour;
As the soft star of dewy evening tells
What radiant fires were drown’d by day’s malignant pow’r,
That only wait the darkness of the night
To cheer the wand’ring wretch with hospitable light.

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”:

A lovely young Woman lying apparently in great pain beneath a Citron-

tree was an object too interesting not to attract their notice. Forgetting
their own dispute, they both with sympathizing tenderness advanced
towards her & accosted her in these terms.
“You seem fair Nymph to be labouring under some misfortune
which we shall be happy to relieve if you will inform us what it is. Will
you favor us with your Life & adventures?”
“Willingly Ladies, if you will be so kind as to be seated.”

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

The common, pleasant, Anglo-Saxon Bridget can be neither “delicate” nor

“refined” and is even worthy of “contempt.” In the same story, the heroine
assumes Janetta’s father must “have no soul” because “he had never read the
Sorrows of Werter [sic],”15 again pointing to the totemic value of sensibility’s
signifiers, even when the signifiers are literary artifacts themselves. Elsewhere
in Love and Freindship, a respectable gentleman is deemed beneath the notice
of the heroines because of one dreadfully unromantic habit: “His Behav-
iour . . . was entirely of a piece with his general character; for what could
be expected from a Man who possessed not the smallest atom of sensibility,
who scarcely knew the meaning of sympathy, & who actually snored—.”16 In
Sense and Sensibility, Austen plays further with these strict aesthetic codes,
when she has Marianne object to Colonel Brandon’s waistcoat.
In such passages, Austen parodies the over-codification and decay of
sensibility—where it becomes an esoteric cult and its members aesthetes,
who take Shaftesbury’s equation of taste, feeling, and virtue as an excuse
to indulge in feeling at the expense of any consideration of others—a far
cry from sensibility’s original impulses to celebrate sympathy as a central
human virtue that overcomes societal divisions.17 With the aestheticizing of
human worth, sympathy is only afforded to those who satisfy the aesthetic
 Constructing Human Ruin 159
requirements of the ‘interesting’: they must be beautiful; distressed; of rank,
if possible; and, generally, amenable to erotic overtures.18
In Figure 32, Thomas Rowlandson parodies the potentially self-serving def-
inition of the interesting: a lecherous man of feeling accosts a young woman,
“interesting” in her solitary situation. This is inspired particularly by Laurence
Sterne’s unusual combination of eroticism and charity, brotherly and not-so-
brotherly love in his version of sensibility and universal kinship. Poignantly,
the man illustrated is also a parson, and his church is in the background of the
picture. The caricature points to the difficulty of channeling the “social emo-
tions” to good ends, or of distinguishing sympathy and self-indulgence.

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:

“Two Gentlemen most elegantly attired but weltering in their blood

was what fi rst struck our Eyes—we approached—they were Edward
and Augustus—Yes . . . they were our Husbands. Sophia shrieked &
fainted on the Ground—I screamed & instantly ran mad—. We re-
mained thus mutually deprived of our Senses, some minutes, & on re-
gaining them were deprived of them again—. For an hour & a Quarter
did we thus continue in this unfortunate Situation . . . No sooner did
we hear my Edward’s groan than postponing our Lamentations for the
present, we hastily ran to the Dear Youth and kneeling on each side of
him implored him not to die—.”

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.

What share of picturesque genius Cromwell might have had I know

not. Certain however it is, that no man since Henry VIIIth, hath con-
tributed more to adorn this country with picturesque ruins. The dif-
ference between these two masters lay chiefly in the style of ruins in
which they composed. Henry adorned his landscapes with the ruins of
abbeys, Cromwell with those of castles. I have seen many pieces by this
master, executed in a very grand style. 20

Austen, no doubt with Gilpin in mind, wryly comments in her History

of England, that “nothing could be said in vindication [of Henry VIII],
but that his abolishing Religious Houses and leaving them to the ruinous
depredations of time has been of infi nite use to the landscape of England
in general.”21 Playing upon the picturesque tendency to rely upon a safe
distance from (and therefore enjoyment of) danger or ruin, both authors
poke fun at the fi nding of beauty in the destruction of war and hatred, even
 Constructing Human Ruin 161
though their playful representations also risk a similar culpability. In both
cases, the authors attribute aesthetic purpose, composition, and agency of
ruin where Cromwell and King Henry VIII would have denied it. In this
inversion of the “art of accident,” Cromwell and Henry VIII’s moral culpa-
bility is compounded by a dependence upon ruination for the achievement
of their aesthetic (or otherwise authoritarian) goals, as well as by their
unwillingness to accept responsibility and direct agency. The passage thus
reflects some of Austen’s central concerns about the masking of authority
common to the picturesque aesthetic and the culture and novel of sensibil-
ity: the denial of responsibility and heedless pursuit of aesthetic purity that
can have inhumane results. 22

RECLAIMING FEMALE NARRATION

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.

AUSTEN’S FEMALE WERTHER

William Godwin once called Mary Wollstonecraft a “female Werter”: she

was one of the rare people, he wrote, “endowed with the most exquisite and
refined sensibility, whose minds seem almost too delicate a texture to encoun-
ter the vicissitudes of human affairs, to whom pleasure is transport, and
disappointment is agony indescribable.”45 While not calling Marianne Dash-
wood directly a “female Werter,” Austen draws upon allusions to Werther
to ally Marianne with traditional heroes of sensibility. She also relies on the
broader aesthetic (particularly as it relates to language, fragmentation, and
the half-spoken) to identify Colonel Brandon and Edward as heroes or men
of feeling. Strangely enough, despite the fact that Austen makes overt refer-
ences to Goethe’s Werther in her writings, very little has been written about
the role of this extremely popular novel in Austen’s literary imagination.46
 Constructing Human Ruin 169
Not only is Marianne Dashwood a female counterpart to Werther, but Aus-
ten’s portrayal of Marianne also helps us understand both her affinities with
the culture of sensibility and her domestication of its extreme forms. Austen
creates explicit parallels between Werther and Marianne in characterization,
on the level of plot, and in the structure of their respective novels—focusing
particularly on Werther and Marianne’s self-ruination and refusal to accept
their own public authority.
Like Werther, Marianne is spirited, idealistic, and inflexible. Just as
Werther narrates his choice between ‘inauthentic,’ and therefore compro-
mised, survival within society and ‘authentic’ expression that transgresses
society’s rules, Marianne also fancies herself in the same heroic struggle.
Her thinking follows the same circuitous route as Werther’s: the principle
that to resist sorrow is to be inauthentic leads to the idea that for sorrow to
cease is inauthentic and fi nally to the paradoxical moral obligation to nour-
ish her sorrow (artificially) for the sake of its authenticity. Like Werther,
she chooses to “court[-]. . misery” and “to augment and fi x her sorrow by
seeking silence, solitude, and idleness.”47 The word “fi x” here, also used by
Gilpin, is reminiscent of the artificial framing that is useful for capturing
a picturesque composition. In Sense and Sensibility, Marianne similarly
“fi xes” her sorrow to preserve the authenticity of the moment she experi-
ences. The use of picturesque vocabulary emphasizes the aesthetic compo-
nent of her emotional life: Marianne, like Werther, does not wish to disturb
her own riveting tableau of the self. In a sense, each of these characters is
his or her own artistic creation according to principles of sensibility and
the picturesque.48 They artificially nourish their unhappiness, as Thomas
Whately artificially builds and maintains ruined edifices for aesthetic pur-
poses—only, for Marianne and Werther, the stakes are moral, if not mor-
tal, as well as aesthetic.
From Marianne’s first encounter with Willoughby, their entire relation-
ship is governed by a code of sensibility: their kinship is as instantaneous
as Werther’s with Lotte, their degree of intimacy inversely proportional to
the number of words they need to achieve it, and the conventional gauges of
intimacy, such as time, are irrelevant to them. Marianne disdains conven-
tional rules of etiquette, which fade away in comparison with the intense,
‘natural’ bond she feels with Willoughby. Just as Werther feels that natural
genius should not be held to the standard rules of convention, Marianne also
believes that her sensibility allows her to transcend manners and ritual.
Even the structure of Marianne’s sub-plot is strikingly similar to Werther’s
story. In fact, Marianne’s falls naturally into two parts as well. In the first, we
encounter Marianne absorbed in nature; however, we quickly learn that she
is as proprietary of her trees as Werther was of “mein Wald.” Both Werther
and Marianne derive ownership according to sensibility. They claim owner-
ship of nature because they believe only they can truly appreciate it: “now
there is no one to regard them,” Marianne complains when she leaves her
trees at Norland.49 Echoing Sterne and others, Edward playfully intimates
170 Ruined by Design
that Marianne shares the elitism of the man of feeling: “And books! Thom-
son, Cowper, Scott—she would buy them all over and over again; she would
buy up every copy, I believe, to prevent their falling into unworthy hands.”50
(Sterne’s Yorick, for example, also suggests that only the feeling should be
allowed to read his novel: “there is so little true feeling in the herd of the
world, that I wish I could have got an act of parliament, when the books first
appear’d, ‘that none but the wise men should look into them.’”51) Edward’s
remarks on the commercial results of any wealth accrued by the Dashwoods
thus highlight the theme of appropriation that we first saw in relation to
ruin hunting and Tischbein’s portrait of Goethe (Figure 4), and which also
becomes a leitmotif in later novels of sensibility.
In the fi rst part of her story, Marianne, like Werther, is loquacious;
however, both stammer feelingly in their appreciation of nature, especially
when they fall in love. She is wild in her enthusiasms and “excessive sensi-
bility.”52 There are continual hints that Marianne is more taken with her
conception of Willoughby, however, than with the real man, and that she
forces him to conform to her ideal, just as Werther does to Charlotte. Both
Marianne and Werther reveal that their loves are narcissistic projections
of themselves: “Wie ich mich selbst anbete seitdem sie mich liebt!” [How
I worship myself now that she loves me!]53 In the second half of her story,
Marianne’s beloved marries another, and, as with Werther, the result is iso-
lation, increasing insensibility (blindness and deafness to others), silence,
and (near) suicide: “Had I died, it would have been self-destruction.”54 As
with Werther, Marianne’s initial, self-conscious appreciation of nature and
general benevolence in Volume I eventually turns to something approach-
ing misanthropy in Volume II, and her self-nourished grief takes her, in
Werther’s footsteps, to illness and the brink of madness and death.
Like Werther (and Harley), Marianne’s reluctance to write and speak
grows as the novel progresses. She consistently seeks words that are worthy
of the supposed sublimity of her feelings and when she fi nds none, chooses
silence instead: “I detest jargon of every kind, and sometimes I have kept
my feelings to myself because I could find no language to describe them in
but what was worn and hackneyed out of all sense and meaning.”55 Her
stance here again almost parodies that of the ‘man of feeling,’ for, as we
saw, Mackenzie too uses silence to heighten the cruelty of the world that
can force a man of such delicacy and promise to retreat from words. Har-
ley, rather immodestly, agrees with the narrative voice: “There are some
feelings,” admits Harley, “which perhaps are too tender to be suffered by
the world, . . . [which] throws the imputation of romance or melancholy on
every temper more susceptible than its own.”56
In her pursuit of authenticity and ruination, the inexpressibility of Mari-
anne’s emotions becomes a source of pride, as does her inability to be com-
forted. In this emphasis on proud helplessness, she resembles all three ‘men
of feeling’ of the preceding chapters. As Werther proclaims his inability to
resist his attraction to Lotte (“Wutsch! bin ich da”), Marianne (proudly)
 Constructing Human Ruin 171
explains: “misery such as mine has no pride. I care not who knows that
I am wretched. The triumph of seeing me so may be open to the world.
Elinor, Elinor, they who suffer little may be proud and independent as they
like . . . but I cannot. I must feel—I must be wretched—.”57 Marianne mea-
sures sensibility according to lack of self-control, missing the fact not only
that deep feeling can (and must, in Austen’s world) coexist with reason and
“exertion,” but also that self-control can be an expression of feeling. Austen
brings attention to the fact that an aesthetic of ruination leads these protag-
onists to crumble as they glorify victimization and demonstrate their virtue
(sensibility). 58 They implicitly rely on editors and others to tell their story. As
Goethe both represents the culture of sensibility and also challenges it with
his brutal realism in sections of Werther, Austen too both represents and
critiques sensibility—particularly within the character of Marianne.
In general, Marianne’s words flow very freely, but not as freely as she
would like to think. As Edward successfully parodies (in a rare, eloquent
moment), Marianne’s romantic vocabulary limits her. Edward playfully
tells her that he does not subscribe to the same aesthetic rules and vocabu-
lary—namely the ‘picturesque’ and the cult of sensibility: “Remember I
have no knowledge in the picturesque, and I shall offend you by my igno-
rance and want of taste if we come to particulars. I shall call hills steep
which ought to be bold; surfaces strange and uncouth which ought to be
irregular and rugged; and distant objects out of sight which ought to be
indistinct through the medium of a hazy atmosphere.”59 Marianne, confi-
dent that her great sensibility lets her experience nature more directly and
express it more freely and spiritedly, shows herself to be quite the reverse.60
She is stubborn and fi xed where she ought to be free; blind where she ought
to perceive. The fi xity of her rigid code of life keeps her from being open
to experience and enables her to see only what fits into her pre-existing
categories. Like Yorick and Werther, Marianne strives against all odds to
be ‘natural’ and fails miserably. Like Werther, she is impatient with the
language available to suit the grandeur of her emotions. In the end, she, like
Werther, is defeated by her own self-consciousness, for, like Werther and
the heroines of Austen’s juvenilia, Marianne is in love with her own grief:
“Mine is a misery which nothing can do away.”61 Ultimately, Marianne’s
failure is the failure of the picturesque art of seeking fashionably natural
appearances by design.
Marianne follows the example of countless heroes and heroines of sensi-
bility by measuring her own sensibility according to lack of self-control. In
the end, Marianne’s sensibility is little better than the mechanistic approach
to sensibility which measured potential for feeling by the number of tears
shed. She expresses sensibility’s perversion of the concept of ‘virtue in dis-
tress’ into ‘the virtue of distress.’ The former state of emergency invites
rescue where the second disdains it. Ruination becomes a worthy goal in
itself. Although her agency is masked (even to herself), she indulges in self-
ruination and “torrent[s] of unresisted grief” to prove her genius, feeling,
172 Ruined by Design
and taste, as well as to establish herself as a rare Shaftesburian soul suf-
fering in a Hobbesian universe.62 Werther, of course, takes self-ruination
several steps further: he combines the roles of actor and dramaturge, victim
and agent, as he coolly arranges for his death tableau, maximizing its effec-
tiveness in every visual detail.
In addition to establishing the striking resemblances between Marianne
and Werther, Austen also uses style of speech to place male characters in
Sense and Sensibility in relation to the traditional hero of sensibility—
the man of feeling. In doing this, Austen, like the authors of the novel
of sensibility, purposely invites the participation of the reader for didac-
tic effect. Both ‘heroes’ of Sense and Sensibility—Colonel Brandon and
Edward—are remarkably poor speakers and resemble, in this regard, the
men of feeling of the preceding chapters. Colonel Brandon stammers when
he tries to express his feelings and confesses himself to be a “very awk-
ward narrator.”63 His speech is punctuated with dashes and characterized
by unfi nished sentences. In one particular episode, it takes the Colonel
over one hundred words to hint at what he is trying to say to Elinor: “My
object—my wish—my sole wish in desiring it—I hope, I believe it is—is to
be a means of giving comfort;—no, I must not say comfort—not present
comfort—but conviction, lasting conviction to your sister’s mind . . . ,” and
so he continues. He completes not a single sentence, but Elinor manages
to understand him and promptly summarizes what he intended to say in
fifteen words: “‘I understand you,’ said Elinor. ‘You have something to tell
me of Mr. Willoughby, that will open his character farther.’”64
Edward, too, is “no orator,”65 as he repeatedly admits and as all his
friends acknowledge with varying degrees of compassion and disappoint-
ment. His presence is frequently “silent and dull.”66 Even in the fi nal
scenes, when he has been disburdened of his secret engagement to Lucy
and arrives to Barton Cottage to propose to Elinor, he fi rst responds to
Mrs. Dashwood’s greetings by “[stammering] out an unintelligible reply,”
then slumps into a silent “reverie, which no remarks, no inquiries, no affec-
tionate address . . . could penetrate,” and fi nally flees from the drawing
room “without saying a word.”67 The reader cannot come to love the two
heroes of this novel through charming speeches, for unlike Willoughby, for
example, they cannot charm others, including the reader, with their readi-
ness of conversation.
The power to speak, and to speak well, belongs primarily to the cold-
hearted characters in Sense and Sensibility. As early as the second chapter
of the novel, the reader knows to beware of words because they can be
abused by anyone who, like John and Fanny Dashwood, have a degree
of sense without “the strong feeling of the rest of the family.”68 In addi-
tion to the abuse of promises, willful deception also runs rampant in the
novel. Not only one, but both of the heroes have secrets—one a secret
engagement, and the other, a secret ward resulting from a previous (and
also secret) attachment. The most deceitful characters manipulate words
 Constructing Human Ruin 173
to achieve their goals, as Lucy Steele, the most cunning of all the char-
acters, does in her conversations with Elinor and in her letter to Edward.
The rampant deception and reticence within the novel create gaps within
the narrative, leaving room for the imaginative participation of readers, as
more blatant narrative omission and fragmentation function in the novel of
sensibility and in the rhetoric of ruins. Readers must attempt acts of trans-
lation, in Yorick’s sense, alongside the fictional characters, since self-rep-
resentation is so flawed and self-articulation so difficult. The sympathetic
men, in particular, are represented as uttering ruined speech that the reader
is trained sympathetically to complete.
In this way, the reader participates in the authorship of the text, and
the text relies upon the reader’s sympathy and narrative urges. It is only if
the reader learns to distrust the charms of free-flowing language that he or
she can not only forgive, but even admire those in the novel whose speech
is constrained. Yet the reader must also share the curiosity and desire for
completion (narrative urge) to fi ll gaps. In this way Austen adapts the nar-
rative techniques of sensibility to suit her own didactic purposes. To admire
Colonel Brandon and Edward Ferrars is to adopt the moral aesthetic of
sensibility—a belief that intense and benevolent feeling, unappreciated
in the unsympathetic and even cruel external world, leads these men to
silence—that these ‘men of feeling’ are admirable and virtuous not despite
their ineloquence, but because they are not ‘men of words.’ Yet, using Eli-
nor, Austen shows that sensibility need lead neither to the abdication of
authority and responsibility nor to self-victimization.
Like the novelists of sensibility of the previous chapter, Austen places
great weight on extra-lingual communication, especially on the significance
of gesture and vision. As did Rousseau and Herder, and authors within the
culture of sensibility in general, Austen emphasizes that, because of its fre-
quent abuse and inherent limitations, verbal evidence is generally less reli-
able—and further removed from true feeling—than visual evidence: “On
parle aux yeux bien mieux qu’aux oreilles” [one can speak better to the eyes
than the ears].69 Austen’s suspicion of verbal evidence results from the crisis
of self-articulation that we have been following in the preceding chapters.
The cause here is somewhat different, however: it results from the social
separation of the sexes (that is, it is conventional or situational rather than
inherent). As a result, unlike other authors of sensibility, Austen retains a
greater element of hope in the possibility of human intimacy. In some sense,
all her characters need to learn to represent what they cannot articulate
directly. They must learn to combine the roles of Erzähler and Erzählung
as they struggle to represent themselves authentically. The theatrical nature
of communication thus becomes an easy target for good actors, and sug-
gests the danger of extreme linguistic isolation.
But Austen’s novels show that there is a measure of hope and opportu-
nity as well, in learning to observe and discern carefully—in learning to
become a good reader of one’s surroundings. In a sense, Austen’s novels
174 Ruined by Design
teach that we all necessarily rely on the observation and sympathetic imagi-
nation of spectators to fill in the gaps of our stories, to recreate monuments
from the shabby ruins we display, to “translate” our spoken comments into
emotional coherence. To establish her pedagogy of seeing, she frequently
avails herself of the technique of imbedding exemplary observers within
her novels, such as Mr. Knightley of Emma or Anne Elliot, and eventu-
ally Wentworth, of Persuasion. Love produces a keenness of perception, a
natural aptitude for Sternean translation, a sensibility inaccessible to those
whose loves are merely narcissistic projections of themselves. Translation,
then, comes quite close to Mr. Yorick’s definition: the sympathetic par-
ticipation in (re)constructing private meaning obscured (and/or partially
revealed) by another’s public utterance or attempt at self-representation.
The ‘true’ lovers in all Jane Austen’s novels tend to watch their objects
from afar rather than hang about them, chattering as the ‘false’ lovers do.70
Colonel Brandon, in the narrator’s telling formulation, visits the Dashwoods
in order to “look at Marianne and talk to Elinor.”71 If his silence to Mari-
anne leads us to believe that he loves Elinor more than Marianne, we are
falling into the trap of trusting words over sight, as Elinor is tempted to do:
“[Colonel Brandon’s] open pleasure in meeting [Elinor] after an absence of
only ten days, his readiness to converse with her . . . might very well justify
Mrs. Jennings’ persuasion of his attachment . . . As it was, such a notion
had scarcely ever entered [Elinor’s] head except by Mrs. Jennings’ sugges-
tion; and she could not help believing herself the nicest observer of the two;
she watched his eyes while Mrs. Jennings thought only of his behavior.”72
Whereas one of the fundamental ideas of the cult of sensibility was suspi-
cion of rational detachment and objective stances, Austen portrays detach-
ment in the service of feeling and even of intimacy. 73 Rather than always
leading to a loss of objectivity, sympathy can benefit from the ethical and
rational benefits of detachment, through the desire to see one’s beloved
in context, at a distance; this social sensibility thus tends to express itself
through a rhetoric of ruins or of silence. Where the vocal suitor conversing
and exchanging ideas with the object of his admiration is self-conscious
about presentation and pleasing, the silent suitor who watches is turned
outward.74 Truly seeing is sympathizing; and by observing the loved one
interacting with others, one learns more about the community to which
the other belongs. The establishment of community through silence is an
aspect of sensibility’s moral aesthetic that Austen adopts for her own, more
social, purposes.
Marianne, in her adamant opposition to detachment, poses a greater
challenge to sensibility than any other of Austen’s heroines. She, like
Werther, represents Diderot’s internal “civil war” between the natural and
the moral; in other words, she is divided against herself rather than against
society. It is quite apt, in this regards, that Willoughby reads Hamlet aloud
during his early visits with the Dashwoods, and that he never completes
the play.75 In the end, Marianne discovers that she has been playing a role,
 Constructing Human Ruin 175
reading a script based on the strict codes of the degenerated cult of sensibil-
ity; she discovers the hypocrisy to which sensibility can lead. Eventually,
she, like Werther, discovers the internal division between aesthetic require-
ments and moral requirements, which Yorick and the complete man of feel-
ing never recognize. For Werther, the “civil war” remains one between
himself and the society that oppresses him. He will not allow the ironic
acceptance of dual impulses that, in the end, enables Marianne to survive
as well as to accept her own public role and authority.

FRAMING THE PICTURESQUE HEROINE

It is difficult to determine Elinor’s stance in relation to the culture of sen-

sibility because of her status within the novel. The strong identification
of the narrative voice with Elinor has led critics, such as Angela Leighton
and others, to assume that the narrative voice sympathizes entirely with
Elinor.76 If this is the case, then Elinor is associated with (and complicit
in) authority and authorship—that is, suspect according to the cultural
code of sensibility. In examples above where Elinor adeptly summarizes
Colonel Brandon’s rambling and fragmented speech, or where she fills the
conversational gaps created by Edward’s awkwardness, Elinor shows her-
self to be an ideal reader of the novel of sensibility, a translator in Yorick’s
sense, participating imaginatively and sympathetically to create a whole
image out of fragments, or transcend the limitations of public discourse.
Following the culture of sensibility’s pedagogy of seeing, Elinor shows her
sensibility in her sympathetic spectatorship—like Werther’s editor, Elinor
functions as an ideal reader imbedded in the narrative. There is, however,
a danger attached to this performance: in her verbal acts of heroism and
perspicacity, Elinor risks seeming a woman of words. And, as we will see,
this is in fact how Marianne interprets her behavior.
Austen avails herself of her audience’s familiarity with Werther by
extending the allusions beyond Marianne: in addition to Marianne’s
resemblance to Werther, Austen portrays Elinor as a female Albert. Like
Albert, Elinor reminds her sister of issues of justice, convention, prudence,
and manners, risking the appearance of insensibility. While Albert never
approaches centrality in Werther, however, Elinor is generally considered
the central protagonist of Sense and Sensibility, causing confusion among
readers and critics as to what degree of sympathy they should feel for the
two older Miss Dashwoods. Let us take the passage where Marianne and
Elinor debate the beauty of the autumn leaves: “‘Oh!’ cried Marianne, ‘with
what transporting sensations have I formerly seen them fall! How have I
delighted, as I walked, to see them driven in showers about me by the wind!
What feelings have they, the season, the air altogether inspired!’” Marianne
delights in the picturesque vision, and it is clear that (true to the picturesque
style and the culture of sensibility) the emphasis is on her perception of the
176 Ruined by Design
leaves, and the feelings that the leaves inspire within her are most impor-
tant. Meanwhile, Elinor coolly responds, “It is not every one . . . who has
your passion for dead leaves.”77 In line with the preference for ruination and
decay common in both the picturesque and sensibility, particularly in their
most codified versions, dead leaves are more picturesque than living ones,
and the latter are no more able to inspire admiration than the practical and
ethical Bridget did above.
On the one hand, the narrator seems to applaud Edward and Elinor’s
playful teasing of Marianne’s fi xed aesthetic codes, yet at the same time,
Marianne shows her appealingly youthful love of nature, her warmth of
spirit, and her local attachment through such outpourings. We know, from
her brother Henry’s short biography, that “at a very early age,” Jane Aus-
ten “was enamoured of Gilpin on the Picturesque; and she seldom changed
her opinions either on books or men.”78 This would seem to suggest that
the author and perhaps the implied author may have greater sympathy for
Marianne’s position than the simple equation with Elinor would allow.
Without conflating the narrative voice and the implied author, one can still
observe that the authorial sympathy and authority that generally appear
to accompany Elinor, may actually not be quite so clearly identified with
Elinor after all. Or is it that Elinor is more than what she represents her-
self—in speech—to be?
Part of the difficulty Austen discovers within sensibility’s dual impulses
is the difficulty of accurate self-representation or communication within
the parameters of narration or public speech. Just as the ‘rhetoric of ruins’
can connote either optimism or pessimism—that is, monuments mourn-
fully half-decayed or gloriously half-remaining—linguistic fragmentation,
unfi nished sentences, and silences built into a narrative can express either
the tragic emptiness of language or the comic fullness of silence. A nega-
tive silence can emphasize the contamination of convention and the arti-
ficiality of language: characters who exemplify this type of silence (such
as Harley of The Man of Feeling or Werther of Part II of Die Leiden des
jungen Werthers) withdraw from speech reluctantly or rebelliously. A posi-
tive silence, on the other hand, (as we witness in Yorick of A Sentimental
Journey or the Werther of Part I), emphasizes the communication beyond
words, the silent flourishes of imagination and sympathy which linear
speech (although it facilitates them) cannot contain. Negative silence tends
towards isolation while positive tends towards society. As we saw in the
preceding chapter, although Journey emphasizes the comic and social and
Werther the tragic and isolated, the novel of sensibility, like its architec-
tural counterpart the folly, depends upon the conjunction of the mean-
ings—upon the multivalence of silence, fragmentation, and ruination.
Many interpretations of Austen have ignored her indications of the mul-
tivalence of language or her distrust in the powers of self-representation;
therefore, they have tended to oversimplify her position. Such critics as
Elaine Bander, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Claudia Johnson, Mary
 Constructing Human Ruin 177
Poovey, Gene Ruoff, Clara Tuite, and especially D. W. Harding and Marvin
Mudrick, have all emphasized Austen’s portrayal of the crumbling decay
of the old order—whether in social, political, architectural, or linguistic
terms. On the other hand, critics such as Marilyn Butler, Alistair Duck-
worth, A. Walton Litz, and Jane Nardin have tended to emphasize Austen’s
comic and traditional perspective.79 Because there were Jacobin and anti-
Jacobin reasons for silence, critics are similarly divided along political read-
ings. She has been portrayed as arch conservative (Butler and Duckworth),
liberal feminist (Johnson and Gilbert/Gubar), or counter-revolutionary
conspiratrice (Ruoff). Even in terms of her relations to landscape, there
have been those authors who have allied her closely with public monument
and traditional authority, and those who ally her with the most innovative
fragmentation and Reptonian “improvement.”
Just as Elinor’s “exertions” to speak are portrayed as physical hero-
ism, Marianne’s fi nal exertions toward public speech, and away from her
shrieks of misery, are similarly praiseworthy. Marianne’s movement from
sickness to health is marked by a movement from “private inarticulateness”
to “public speech,”80 as Marianne’s statements near the end of the novel
reveal: “‘There, exactly there’—pointing with one hand, ‘on that project-
ing mound,—there I fell; and there I fi rst saw Willoughby . . . I can talk of
it now, I hope, as I ought to do.’”81 “Not without effort,”82 Marianne has
resolved to speak, confide in Elinor, and give up her narcissistic projections
by allowing them to be tempered, “rectified,” to return to Condillac, by the
process of converting them into rational statements. 83
The double meaning of the final “as” in the above passage is telling: it
suggests that simple dualisms might no longer govern Marianne—that no
longer does she see the world in terms of cold-hearted reserve versus pas-
sionate, ungoverned expression, or cold-hearted, empty speech versus pas-
sionate, ungoverned silence. Not only does Marianne learn to speak, but
she learns to speak as she ought to: the prepositional phrase takes circum-
stance, community, context into account. One cannot speak as one ought
without observing what—and who—is around one. This is not necessar-
ily a movement to the generalization so feared by sensibility, but rather
a movement towards attention to immediate context—an alteration in
Marianne’s frame of reference. Speaking ‘as one ought’ requires great sen-
sibility and is itself an act of love. She learns that words, like conventions,
“need not be limitations: they are a resource, not a restraint, for the human
spirit.”84 Marianne acknowledges both her responsibility and authorship
of her own ruination, whereas earlier she masks or denies her own agency.
Austen, through Marianne, reclaims post-Babelian speech for the expres-
sion of sensibility and for self-representation, despite its conventionality,
weaknesses, and inescapable artificiality.
One might argue that while Marianne’s transformation constitutes a
gain in terms of civic and individual responsibility, it is also a loss in terms
of sensibility and feeling. For many readers, there is a lingering feeling that
178 Ruined by Design
something has been lost in the taming of Marianne—a loss that perhaps
hampers the reader’s full enjoyment of Elinor’s fi nal triumph. Does Austen
sacrifice the intimacy of experience for the sake of generality, or for the
didacticism associated with detachment and narration?85 Is there not some-
thing within the novel that trains the reader to depend upon Marianne’s
“wildness” and “violence” even for our enjoyment of Elinor?
Angela Leighton’s approach to the problem of sympathy in the novel
will help us further understand Marianne’s structural role, the role of the
picturesque in the novel, and the narrative burdens placed upon Elinor:

Although both heroines retreat into Silence at various points, it is the

Silence of Marianne which remains problematic, because it is not incor-
porated into the narrative, like Elinor’s. Elinor’s Silences have Austen’s
approval; they signify heroic reticence and control, and are contained by
the language of Sense. Marianne’s Silences signify emotions which have
escaped control, and which are therefore in opposition to Austen’s art.86

There is some truth to Leighton’s observations regarding the dynamics of

sympathy and narratorial authority in the novel, but I would differ with
her conclusions. It is precisely because they are presented within the care-
ful control of Austen’s art, and Elinor’s “censorship,” that Marianne’s
silences can “signify emotions which have escaped control.” It is Elinor’s
explicit authority and authorship that allow Marianne to deny her own
authorship of her situation. Narrative and anti-narrative forces are thus
divided between the sisters to the detriment of both: one sacrificing like-
ability and sympathy, the other responsibility and health. Austen’s struc-
ture might remind us of the ‘rhetoric of ruins’ and is another version of the
late eighteenth-century’s delicately balanced dual impulses which I have
been describing. There is indeed important “opposition” within Austen’s
art, but rather than constituting a flaw, it helps to further her redemption of
sensibility. In fact, one could say that Elinor acts as a frame for Marianne,
much in the way that the double roles of the narrators worked to achieve
the liberation of the man of feeling in the preceding chapters.
Time after time, we experience Marianne’s (rigorously) ungoverned
passion: “Marianne continued incessantly to give way in a low voice
to the misery of her feelings, by exclamations of wretchedness”; she is
attracted to “something more of wildness”; we experience the repeated
“violence of her affl iction,” her “violent oppression of spirits,” and so
forth. 87 This “violence” or “wildness” seems to equate Marianne, like
Goethe’s Werther, with the Burkean sublime, by the anti-social, unruly
nature of her passion. One of the ways Austen emphasizes this is through
Marianne’s association with “fi re.” Not only does Marianne associate fi re
with genius in her judgment of others (“His eyes want all that spirit, that
fi re, which at once announce virtue and intelligence”), but she is also fas-
cinated with the actual burning flames of the fi replace. Unlike “cold, cold
 Constructing Human Ruin 179
Elinor,” as Marianne calls her, the younger sister languishes “by the fi re in
melancholy meditation,” spends “every night” gazing into “the brightness
of the fi re,” and sits “by the drawing-room fi re . . . , without once stirring
from her seat or altering her attitude, lost in her own thoughts and insen-
sible to her sister’s presence.”88
The fi replace is Marianne’s counterpart to Werther’s and Ossian’s cliffs;
however, Austen makes Marianne’s folly clear as well. Austen’s partial
parody of Marianne becomes clear particularly in the latter passage, where
Marianne is transfi xed by the fi re: her fascination with the fi re does not
lead her to sublime action or to awe; instead, Marianne grows increasingly
apathetic and simply retreats from life. It is ironic that Marianne’s absorp-
tion with the burning flames, which symbolize her passionate nature (or at
least her absorption with her own passions), leads her instead to apathy and
insensibility. Accordingly, the flames grow weaker and are no longer able
to sustain her as the novel (and her illness) progresses: She leans “in silent
misery, over the small remains of a fi re,” and later spends “a day . . . in sit-
ting shivering over the fi re with a book in her hand which she was unable
to read.”89
Meanwhile, we learn that Elinor loves to paint screens—fireplace
screens, appropriately enough—which allow for the fi re to be enjoyed more
indirectly.90 Elinor paints screens both metaphorically and physically: the
verb “screen” also appears twice in her interactions with Marianne. Elinor
attempts “to screen Marianne from particularity” and again later as she
“trie[s] to screen [Marianne] from the observation of others, while reviv-
ing her with lavendar [sic] water.”91 Marianne’s excesses place narrative
burdens on Elinor, who converts her unsought authorship into artistry.
Elinor, who has been forced to have restraint enough for two, spends most
of her energy arranging Marianne’s representation to others, as well as
her own, striving to retain—or achieve—surface order. The same dynamic
is repeated elsewhere in the novel as well, without specific reference to the
word “screen”: “At breakfast [Marianne] neither ate nor attempted to eat
anything; and Elinor’s attention was then all employed, not in urging her,
not in pitying her, nor in appearing to regard her, but in endeavouring to
engage Mrs. Jennings’s notice entirely to herself.”92 Ironically, the appear-
ance of Elinor’s pair of fi rescreens gives Marianne the opportunity for a
display of just the unmasked emotion that Elinor feels the need to screen.
Elinor is, in effect, the editor, the Herausgeber of the public version of
Marianne’s and her own story. Unlike Yorick and Werther, however, Elinor
does not write.93 The pen is not in her hands, but the paintbrush is, and
she covers over as many as she can of her sister’s flaws. Just as in the moral
aesthetic of sensibility, Elinor purposely obscures her own authority, and is
more lovable for doing so, because she does not obscure it in order to avoid
responsibility: she desires order, but allows it to be, perhaps not quite as
invisible as sensibility requires, but aesthetically pleasing nonetheless. This
would place Elinor in a similar position to Werther and Yorick. She is not
180 Ruined by Design
a narrator-protagonist per se, but she does have to reconcile narration and
experience. The narrative impulse to paint the fi rescreens is not dissimilar
to the task of disguising the marks of the scissors in landscape garden-
ing—an attempt to balance nature and artifice.94
In this sense, the picturesque is actually triumphant as a narrative struc-
ture in this novel, as in the other novels we have examined. Just as the
Herausgeber allows Werther to focus on and indulge in his solipsistic vision
of the world, Elinor’s framing and screening ironically allow Marianne to
indulge in her “violent” excesses and selfish sensibility. Just as every ‘man
of feeling’ is protected by either a woman of sense or a Sancho Panza figure,
Elinor protects and supports Marianne, who is (by her own inclination)
helpless against her own inclinations.95 Structurally, Elinor provides the
safe distance from Marianne’s sublime extremes that allows, in Burke’s
terms, the opportunity for “delight.”96
However, the picturesque raises problems of sympathy that arise else-
where in the text. Near the end of the novel, Elinor’s forgiving, sympa-
thetic reaction to Willoughby, “whom, only half an hour ago she had
abhorred,”97 affi rms the Burkean (and Smithian) principle that delight
and sympathy come from the safe distance from peril.98 In a similar way,
Elinor’s framing, screening, controlling presence heightens sympathy for
Marianne, perhaps at Elinor’s own expense. When Marianne grows ill,
then subdued, and later chastened, the reader, like Elinor, forgives her
for her past offenses and she becomes dearer, almost, than she should. In
other words, if Elinor’s steadiness allows Marianne’s wildness, does it also
to some extent sacrifice Elinor’s attractiveness as a character? According
to Benedict, the problem with Austen’s “sympathetic portrayal of Mari-
anne and the unflagging praise for her opposite, the “sensible” sister Eli-
nor” is that this confl ict “shakes the reader’s faith in Austen’s narrative
control” and “weaken[s] the authority of the narrative voice.”99 I would
argue instead that the burdens of narration, authorship, and framing make
Elinor’s role seem more “masculine,” authoritarian, and therefore more
suspect, according to the hallmarks of the culture of sensibility. It is this
difficulty of representing oneself—of being simultaneously a participant
and an observer in a situation that so puzzles eighteenth-century authors
and readers.
To counteract this impression, Austen gives the reader many ‘feminizing’
clues that Elinor cannot speak freely either. At moments of intense feeling,
she, like the heroes and heroines of sensibility, grows speechless. When
Edward arrives at Barton Cottage at the end of the novel, Elinor “saw her
mother and Marianne change colour; saw them look at herself, and whis-
per a few sentences to each other. She would have given the world to be able
to speak—. . . but she had no utterance.”100 Like a true ‘woman of feeling,’
Elinor loses her ability to speak when she feels most deeply.101 Generally,
however, Elinor either will not or cannot indulge her spontaneous emo-
tions, and thus differs from Yorick and Werther, and instead approximates
 Constructing Human Ruin 181
Harley’s isolation from his unsympathetic surroundings. Unlike Yorick,
however, her silences are generally not exuberant and seldom erotic.
Whereas Elinor generally uses “balanced, periodical phrases that
resemble those of the essayists Austen admired: Addison and Steele, and
Samuel Johnson,”102 the depth of Elinor’s emotions is revealed through a
proliferation of dashes and the suddenly more fragmented syntax of the
narrative voice when it represents her point of view at especially poignant
moments.103 At such moments, the narrator’s syntax alters—associating the
anti-narrative with Elinor’s unexpressed interior world: “The comfort of
such a friend at that moment as Colonel Brandon—of such a companion
for her mother,—how gratefully was it felt!—a companion whose judg-
ment would guide, whose attentions must relieve, and whose friendship
might soothe her!—as far as the shock of such a summons could be less-
ened to her, his presence, his manners, his assistance, would lessen it.”104
Such dramatic and syntactically fragmented passages are “preceded and
followed by passages of ‘normal’ prose”; they also represent “the power
of feelings almost beyond her control.”105 They are framed, picturesquely,
between passages in her almost pedantically composed Augustan prose. By
the end, Elinor, absolved of her narrative burdens on behalf of Marianne,
indulges in fancy, becomes speechless, and “almost runs out of the room,
and as soon as the door [is] closed, burst[s] into tears of joy.”106 She fi nally
expresses the feelings which she cannot narrate. In other words, Austen
creates a second frame of editorship in Sense and Sensibility. Whereas the
fi rst frame (Elinor’s editing of Marianne) allows Marianne to indulge in her
grief unencumbered by narrative burdens of self-representation, the second
frame (the narrator’s representation of Elinor) eventually allows Elinor to
separate herself from detachment without abdicating responsibility for her
own self-representation. By the end, both sisters learn to carry authority
and to recognize the responsibilities inherent in the authorship of their own
public images.
Critics like Leighton who do not recognize the picturesque, ironic ele-
ment to the structure of the novel, also do not recognize the layers of repre-
sentation within the novel (characters representing themselves, characters
representing each other, and the narrator’s representation of the characters,
as well as the author’s representation of the narrative voice. Leighton, for
example, tries to divorce Marianne’s story from Elinor’s—in order to gain
access to the ‘authentic’ Marianne, uncensored by either Elinor or the nar-
rator. As a result, she presents a vastly oversimplified view of Elinor. As
in Werther, the hero’s own version of the story cannot be separated from
the frame through which his story is presented. To make this mistake is to
follow in the footsteps of both Marianne and Mrs. Dashwood, neither of
whom, despite their protestations, understands the picturesque. The prob-
lem of sympathy for Elinor can be understood in terms of a problem of
framing or the picturesque, since both mistake “Elinor’s representation
of herself” for Elinor’s actual internal state. 107 Mrs. Dashwood, we learn,
182 Ruined by Design
“had been misled by the careful, the considerate attention of [Elinor], to
think [Elinor’s] attachment, . . . much slighter in reality than she had been
wont to believe . . . under this persuasion she had been . . . almost unkind
to Elinor.”108
Mrs. Dashwood, like Marianne, shows herself to be incapable of irony,
and therefore incapable of one of the essential arts of living and speaking
in Jane Austen’s world: the ability to speak on two levels simultaneously
or to distinguish private meaning within public utterance. Marianne, Mrs.
Dashwood, and the reader who explicitly trusts Elinor’s words may not rec-
ognize that Elinor knows no private discourse: her sister’s behavior forces
her into public discourse even in her own home. By the end of the novel,
Austen has reclaimed female narration from its own tendency towards self-
victimization or extinction: by the end of the novel, both heroines recog-
nize and acknowledge their own authorship and their individual and civic
responsibilities. In addition, by depicting Elinor’s dual impulses, Austen
not only rehabilitates the concept of civility, but she also succeeds in chal-
lenging sensibility’s false dichotomy between the woman of words and the
woman of feeling. Austen does not deny the central connection between
words and artifice, but she does challenge the assumption that artifice must
come at the expense of virtue, intimacy, and beauty. Austen redeems a
degree of artifice both in terms of landscape and human relations: the pic-
turesque landscape at Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice does not suffer
from the artificial damming of its rivers, nor does individual authenticity
necessarily suffer from the artifice and ‘rectification’ entailed by a degree
of civility.109

ACTING AND THE PROBLEM OF THE INTERESTING

In Sense and Sensibility, Austen acknowledges the limitations of self-rep-

resentation and the necessarily theatrical nature of communication, giving
preference to the testimony of the eyes over the testimony of words. The
testimony of the eyes is, however, highly subject to interpretation and error,
particularly when all are not equally free to give visual expressiveness to
their feelings, and some have no scruples regarding feigning them. Paul
Hazard has shown that “les mouvements de l’âme” were not metaphorical
in “an age committed to the belief that every phenomenon was the effect
of a physical cause . . . the passions were said to move as the fibers of our
body moved.”110 As I have sought to show above, the urge to fi nd physical
sources for thought and emotion also relate to the fall of disengaged reason
and the ethical significance of rational detachment from its earlier promi-
nence. One of the results of these changes was added credence in the popu-
lar science of physiognomy, particularly within the culture of sensibility.
In 1746, Aaron Hill wrote a work in honor of the visual expressiveness
of Richardson’s novel Pamela, and in it he claimed as the basis of his study
 Constructing Human Ruin 183
that “Every Passion marks the Face” and ultimately gives “the right expres-
sive GESTURE to the Body.” Ironically, at least to twenty-fi rst-century
audiences, his study was entitled The Art of Acting.111 Such irony, however,
was not generally perceived within the culture of sensibility, for acting, or
indeed the ability to read literature aloud “with feeling” (an ability that
figures prominently in the novels of Jane Austen), was commonly viewed as
evidence of a soul’s sensibility or ability to sympathize with the plights of
others who suffer, albeit fictitiously.
One of the most curious examples of sensibility’s dual vision is apparent
in the odd position of acting in the moral aesthetic of the time.112 Practicing
gesture or expression is a form of exercise, building malleability and sensi-
bility, rather than the capacity to deceive. The subtitles of Hill’s book make
it clear that he sees acting skills as capable of aiding daily conversation
as well. This points to the sad but pervasive eighteenth-century fear that,
because of the fallen state of natural language, training may be required to
convey emotions that one already feels. Another problem that Hill suggests
is the difficulty of distinguishing between authentic feeling and simulated
feeling. For Austen’s heroines, this is tantamount to the distinction between
heroes and villains, between a fulfi lling marriage or a disastrous union.
In addition to providing training for sensitive actors and actresses and to
providing insight into the natural language of feeling, theater also provides
opportunities for audiences to practice their own abilities to be sympathetic
spectators. Within Laurence Sterne’s fictional world, this activity is, as we
have seen, called “translation” of visual gesture into emotion, or looks into
words. Recalling Rousseau’s conception of convention and artifice, Sterne’s
Yorick proclaims himself as translator of the world around him, rendering
“looks and limbs” into “plain words.”113 Like Rousseau, he suggests that
in a pure, natural state unsullied by convention, human beings would be
transparent to one another, enjoying immediate and mutual comprehension
(“la facilité de se pénétrer réciproquement”)114; however, in sensibility’s dual
vision of post-Babelian society, translation has become a skill as well as a
necessary burden. Nature and society now speak in different tongues, and
only the “man of feeling,” the “sentimental traveller,” or, ironically, the
actor can speak the language of nature—the “language of real feeling.”
In other words, the significance of acting, in conjunction with the moral
and aesthetic importance of one’s reaction to spectacles of suffering, sug-
gests that the image or sight of sympathy comes dangerously close to
usurping the importance of the feeling of sympathy—in danger of becom-
ing a substitute for the emotion itself. Within the novels of sensibility this
can be seen in what Janet Todd has dubbed “philanthropic postures.”115
A character in Mary Wollstonecraft’s novel Mary, a Fiction, for example,
exclaims to Mary that “I would give the world for your picture, with the
expression I have seen in your face, when you have been supporting your
friend.”116 An aestheticized tableau depicting virtuous sympathy deserves
immortalization—and complete divorce from the ugly facts that originally
184 Ruined by Design
spurred the feeling. In fact the “picture” may ultimately be more impor-
tant to the speaker than Mary is herself.
One actual “picture” or portrait of sensibility will serve to illustrate
this point further. George Romney, close friend of Laurence Sterne and
illustrator of Sterne’s writings, painted a portrait entitled Sensibility, which
summarizes this new ideal (engraved by Caroline Watson in 1786; Figure
33). He portrays a young woman staring with kind and sympathetic eyes at
a sight beyond the canvas. At her side is a delicate mimosa plant, in fuller
view in the original Romney painting. She is absorbed and sympathetic; she
is moist-lipped, tender, young, and seemingly uncorrupted by society. Her
mouth is open, but in a singularly unverbal manner: she looks as though, if
she emitted sounds, they would be sighs rather than words. The illumina-
tio effect, together with her bonnet, which resembles a halo, heightens the
atmosphere of purity.
The presence of the mimosa plant as a cultural symbol also reinforces
the notion of a physical basis of virtue. The mimosa was also called the
“sensitive plant,” because its leaves would recoil and seem to shrivel at the
slightest touch. Erasmus Darwin anthropomorphizes the plant, conveying
the ideals of the culture of sensibility—innocent weakness combined and
the ability to perceive what other, coarser souls ignore:

Weak with nice sense, the chaste Mimosa stands,

From each rude touch withdraws her timid hands;
Oft as light clouds o’erpass the Summer-glade,
Alarm’d she trembles at the moving shade;
And feels, alive through all her tender form,
The whisper’d murmurs of the gathering storm.117

A character from Henry Brooke’s Fool of Quality (1766–70) also uses

the mimosa to argue the physical basis of conscience: “His blushing here
demonstrates his sensibility; his sensibility demonstrates some principle
within him, that disapproved and reproached him for what he had com-
mitted . . . It is therefore from the fountain of virtue alone that this flush
of shamefacedness can possibly fl ow; and a delicacy of compunction, on
such occasions, is as a sensitive plant of divinity on the soul, that feeling
shrinks, and is alarmed on the slightest apprehension of approaching
evil.”118 Thus the mimosa personifies sympathy as well as the feminiza-
tion of weakness.
Interestingly, Watson’s engraving reveals several of the weaknesses
emphasized by sensibility’s subsequent parodies: most importantly, the
focus of the portrait is the sympathetic observer, a focus which places
the spectacle in a clearly secondary position, important only for the emo-
tions it rouses in the “sensible” viewer. This emphasis becomes ethically
questionable since the spectacles of sensibility are generally people in
distress. Yet what she sees, the source of her distress, the person relaying
 Constructing Human Ruin 185

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

juvenilia have to earn the interest of others by conforming to specific pic-

turesque criteria.
Sensibility’s ethical problem is reflected in the changing meaning of the
adjective “interesting.” As Patricia Meyer Spacks has also shown, the older
meaning “of importance” waned by the beginning of the nineteenth century,
and a newer meaning was introduced in the mid-eighteenth century: “adapted
to excite interest, having the qualities which rouse curiosity . . . or appeal to
the emotions.” The older meaning refers to piquing the intellect according
to an externalized standard; the newer meaning to stimulate subjective emo-
tions. For our purposes, it is significant that the Oxford English Dictionary
lists the earliest occurrence of this newer affective meaning in Sterne’s A
Sentimental Journey (1768); the history of this word is thus imbedded in the
history of the novel of sensibility. Within the context of sensibility, the word
“interesting” narrows substantially in its meaning, attributing strong impor-
tance given to distress, ruination, and rusticity, and gradually becoming a
code word for identifying whether or not a scene or an individual conforms
to the aesthetic requirements of the picturesque or sensibility. In addition,
the word bears feminine connotations, because of the association with the
usage “to be in an interesting condition,” a phrase which was also coined
in the mid-eighteenth century meaning “to be pregnant.”123 In other words,
if only the “interesting” can interest spectators, sensibility has lost its origi-
nal, egalitarian aspirations. The Bridgets of the world have little sympathy
to hope for, unless they find themselves elevated by rank, beauty, or suffer-
ing (or pregnancy) to provide a suitably “interesting” and evocative tableau.
“Interesting” women are also by definition vulnerable—since positions of
power are, at least for women, uninteresting according to this aesthetic code.
This is part of the meaning implicit in Thomas Rowlandson’s satire on the
“man of feeling” above (Figure 32): the parson, no doubt invoking Yorick’s
benevolent fellow-feeling in his Sentimental Journey, takes advantage of the
isolated woman to indulge in his objectivizing sensuality.
In Sense and Sensibility, Austen parodies the cult of the “interesting”
through Marianne and Willoughby, both of whom find the other in “interest-
ing” situations, invoking novelistic clichés. Marianne, the narrator informs us
early on, is “sensible and clever; but eager in everything; her sorrows, her joys,
could have no moderation. She was generous, amiable, interesting: she was
 Constructing Human Ruin 191
everything but prudent.”124 At their initial meeting, Marianne, out walking in
the woods, sprains her ankle and is rescued by an “uncommonly handsome”
“gentleman carrying a gun, with two pointers playing round him” who “r[uns]
to her assistance” in the midst of “animating gales of an high south-westerly
wind” and “a driving rain”; he literally sweeps her off her feet, rescues her, and
carries her to her home.125 Mrs. Dashwood, Marianne’s twin in sensibility,
finds Willoughby’s entrance equally “interesting”: Willoughby “apologized
for his intrusion by relating its cause, in a manner so frank and so grace-
ful, that his person, which was uncommonly handsome, received additional
charms from his voice and expression. Had he been even old, ugly, and vulgar,
the gratitude and kindness of Mrs. Dashwood would have been secured by any
act of attention to her child; but the influence of youth, beauty, and elegance,
gave an interest to the action which came home to her feelings.”126
Again, interest is earned, not merely through a virtuous act, but particu-
larly through “youth, beauty, and elegance.” In contrast to such superficially
evocative situations, Marianne stubbornly refuses to interest herself in the
man who, of all the characters, has experienced the most romantic past: Col-
onel Brandon had a youthful love affair, was forbidden from marrying the
girl he loved, witnessed the decline and death of his beloved, took her child
as a secret ward, and finally fought a duel with the man who seduced and
betrayed her. Despite all these off-stage heroics and a life of bravely endured
suffering, Colonel Brandon does not earn Marianne’s interest because he
wears a waistcoat and is in his mid-thirties. Austen exposes the degree of
selection that is involved in responding to others and their distress—or the
moral responsibility involved in determining who is “interesting” and who
deserves sympathy or love.
Part of what makes Willoughby so “interesting” to Marianne is the way
in which he flatters her, conforming himself and his opinions to her aes-
thetic code. In this way he resembles another chameleon, Henry Crawford
of Austen’s later Mansfield Park. Willoughby also shows an ability to make
words serve his own interests. Willoughby is an excellent actor; he adopts
the language of those he would like to please—that is, those who can please
him. Even in his first conversation with Marianne, he shows he can play the
role she assigns him; he can appear to be what she wants to behold: “Their
taste was strikingly alike”; “if any difference appeared, any objection arose,
it lasted no longer than till the force of her arguments and the brightness of
her eyes could be displayed. He acquiesced in all her decisions, caught all her
enthusiasm.”127 Willoughby copies Marianne’s vocabulary just as, at the end
of the novel, he copies his wife’s letter and sends it to Marianne. By the end, he
demonstrates that he has mastered so many people’s idiolects that he hardly
knows how to express his own emotions:

When the fi rst of [Marianne’s notes] reached me . . . , what I felt is, in

the common phrase, not to be expressed; in a more simple one—perhaps
too simple to raise any emotion—my feelings were very, very painful.
192 Ruined by Design
Every line, every word was—in the hackneyed metaphor which their
dear writer, were she here, would forbid—a dagger to my heart. To
know that Marianne was in town was—in the same language—a thun-
derbolt. Thunderbolts and daggers! What a reproof would she have
given me! Her taste, her opinions—I believe they are better known to
me than my own, and I am sure they are dearer.128

Before finishing each sentence, he deliberates about which effect he would

like to achieve upon his audience, and he shows the shortcomings of each
language he speaks. But Willoughby (bending like a ‘willow’ in winds of
social pressures and temptations) has never learned to speak his native
tongue—that is, he has spent so much time flattering and conforming him-
self to others’ opinions that he neither knows nor cares to develop his own.
Marianne’s fault is that she does not acknowledge her own authorship—
not only of her own grief and distressed tableaux, but also her authorship
of Willoughby, who gladly conforms (at least superficially) to her fiction
in dialogue, if not to the narrative trajectory she imagines. From their first
encounter, the narrator uses an analogy to novels to underscore Marianne’s
authorial tendencies: “His person and air were equal to what her fancy had
ever drawn for the hero of a favourite story; and in his carrying her into the
house with so little previous formality, there was a rapidity of thought which
particularly recommended the action to her. Every circumstance belong-
ing to him was interesting. His name was good, his residence was in their
favourite village, and she soon found out that of all manly dresses a shoot-
ing-jacket was the most becoming. Her imagination was busy, her reflections
were pleasant, and the pain of a sprained ankle was disregarded.”129 In this
way, the novel serves Austen’s didactic reclamation of authority and indi-
vidual responsibility from the extremes of the cult of sensibility. Here again,
Marianne bears resemblance to Werther, who reads himself into the motiva-
tions of the lovesick farm boy, particularly when he goes mad. Werther and
Marianne both author fiction rather than translate the world around them;
yet because they do not admit their agency, they refuse to bear responsibility
for their narcissistic interpretations. Although technically not a narrator-
protagonist like Yorick, Harley, or Werther, Marianne nonetheless writes
her own story and masks her authorship—even from herself.
The strict aesthetic code and jargon of the picturesque and of sensibility
thus form a subset of a larger moral concern for Austen, relating to “occu-
pational hazards” of novel-reading itself. Many of the same human traits
that attracted people to the cult of sensibility and cult of the picturesque
in mid-to-late-eighteenth-century Europe and Britain are also what attract
readers to novels in general.130 These traits include a curiosity about others’
lives, a love of novelty, the exhilaration of romance, and the excitement and
glamour of danger and suffering (especially when vicarious). James Gillray’s
Tales of Wonder (Figure 37) parodies the reception of the fi rst edition of
M. G. Lewis’ controversial Gothic novel The Monk (1796): the readers
 Constructing Human Ruin 193
experience rapt terror as they read the book aloud; the picture shows a girl
carried off to rape and slaughter; even the ornaments on the mantle are
horrified. The illustration suggests that an occupational hazard of reading
novels (whether they are Gothic, sentimental or otherwise) is the tempta-
tion to read life as a novel and thereby blind oneself to one’s actual sur-
roundings. Gillray portrays the slightly masochistic psychology through
the closed curtains and the fact that the ladies are reading in the dark by
candlelight, purposely enhancing their suspense and titillating fear through
voluntary isolation and darkness.
Accordingly, most, if not all, of Austen’s major novels include at least one
warning about the danger of imagining or creating the “interesting” scene
and human ruination for our own pleasure or momentary thrill—another
literary corollary to pursuing ruination or danger. Instead of heighten-
ing perception, such imagining or authoring of dramatic scenes actually
deadens perception. Austen warns readers to distinguish themselves from
Marianne and her mother, who “must always be carried away by her imag-
ination on any interesting subject,” while simultaneously relying on such
tendencies for generating readers’ “interest” in her own novels.131 Austen
returns again and again to this theme and poses it as a danger both to one-
self and to others.

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

The culture of sensibility partly functioned as an urban society’s fanciful

celebration of utopian rural simplicity. If we can judge from the number
of ‘hermits’ hired to feign poverty and isolation and to inhabit the English
gardens of the 1770s and ‘80s, however, sensibility remained a beautiful
and intriguing spectacle, rather than a practical alternative: “The practi-
cal man produced the impractical model.”1 The courtly politician and the
nomad meet in the silent spectacle of the philosophical hermit, hired to
provide a romantic flair to estates. The hermit might live then in carefully
constructed, yet fl imsy-appearing hermitages of the period that imitate a
rusticity that is less evanescent and less accidental than it appears. All the
conveniences of modernity could be combined with the authority and mys-
tique of the past. Both modernization and rustification carry status, and
their combination in such paradoxical constructions as follies and hermit-
ages are the height of fashion for at least two decades.
This study has been an attempt to understand the psychology behind such
a fashion that attempts both to call forth and halt the process of deteriora-
tion—to exert control over decay itself in freezing the moment in perpetuity.
It would be wrong, however, to relegate such paradoxical impulses to the
dustbins of history. In fact, the turn of the twenty-first century in Europe and
the United States shares much of the philosophical insecurity that character-
ized the mid-nineteenth century: its simultaneous wish for decentralization,
immediacy, transparency, and universal kinship, while also haunted by fears
that these ideals cannot be achieved in the current atomistic society.
In 2002, an ad appeared in the on-line Reuter’s News in England:
“Wanted: Professional Hermit for Cave-Dwelling Duty.” The ad generated
considerable interest, as it was supposedly the fi rst hermit ad to be seen in
Britain since the early nineteenth century. 2 The duties included occupying
a cave on the 900-acre English garden of the Shugborough estate in Staf-
fordshire, as well as “acting as a sage” and “frightening walkers” out for
a stroll. 3 The ad generated responses from over 200 individuals, including
many actors and even a few monks, eager to escape from urban life to the
nostalgic seclusion of the past (and to be paid £600 for the effort). The
return to hiring a hermit suggests an urban society’s fanciful and somewhat
198 Ruined by Design
nostalgic celebration of rural simplicity not terribly dissimilar to that evi-
denced in the late eighteenth century. 4
One of the regulations generally found in hermit contracts of the eigh-
teenth century was that of silence: hermits were not allowed to speak, par-
ticularly in the presence of any guests to the estate. When hired hermits
proved inconvenient, expensive, or excessively chatty, stuffed mannequins
were used instead. The hermits were desirable as spectacles only; no actual
human contact was desired. It is an example of sensibility’s privileging
imagination over reality—aesthetic principles over individual concerns. In
fact, it seems strangely appropriate that the man whose estate the modern
hermit was to inhabit is the royal photographer Lord Patrick Lichfield, and
also that the purpose was part of a larger art project, or ‘installation’ of
sorts. Another age would have called it a tableau.
While the hired hermit was a self-conscious spectacle and an imitation
of an eighteenth-century tradition, there are other aspects of contemporary
life that less self-consciously echo the culture of sensibility. The hermit in
Figure 38 was a neighbor of Jane Austen’s. He is seen here in robes and a
shepherd’s staff, his hat mimicking the maximally non-rectilinear shape
of the hut. The cross on top symbolizes the early Christian symbolism fre-
quently associated with hermits and primitivism.
It may be valuable to acknowledge the pursuits of ruination that are still
pervasive today, as well as a suspicion of authority that persists in twentieth-
and twenty-first-century culture and continues to shape our architecture,

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 THE PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1. D. J. Enright, “William Cowper’” Pelican Guide to English Literature, ed.

Boris Ford (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1957); Janet Todd, Sensibility,
an Introduction (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), 142.
2. Jerome McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), xi.
3. Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature
and its Background, 1760–1830 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982),
29; Enright, “William Cowper,” 391–392.
4. Marshall Brown, Preromanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1991), 99; Robert W. Jones, “Ruled Passions: Re-Reading the Culture of
Sensibility,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 323 (1999): 400.
5. Jones, “Ruled Passions: Re-Reading the culture of Sensibility,” 401.
6. “Preromanticism, or Sensibility: Defi ning Ambivalences,” in Companion
to European Romanticism, ed. Michael Ferber (London: Blackwell, 2005),
10–28.
7. “The Adventures of a Female Werther: Austen’s Revision of Sensibil-
ity,” Philosophy and Literature 23, 1 (April 1999): 110–126; “Masculin-
ity, Sensibility, and the ‘Man of Feeling’: the Gendered Ethics of Goethe’s
Werther,” Papers on Language and Literature 35, 2 (Spring 1999): 115–140;
and “Words ‘Half-Dethron’d’: Jane Austen’s Art of the Unspoken,” in Jane
Austen’s Business, ed. Juliet McMaster and Bruce Stovel (London and New
York: Macmillan and St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 95–106.

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1. Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt, “Sensibilité,” in Encyclopédie ou Diction-

naire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Jean-Bapiste René
Robinet (Paris: Briasson, 1751–65), 15.52. Unless otherwise noted, transla-
tions are mine.
2. Many scholars diminish the unusual characteristics of sensibility by label-
ing it Pre-romanticism. Defi nition through hindsight has a long tradition,
including the term “Middle Ages,” yet even if it is true that Preromanticism
“preceded and anticipated Romanticism,” as Gary Kelly writes, can one not
say that any period which precedes generally also anticipates subsequent
periods? (“Pre-Romanticism: Britain,” in Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era:
1760–1850, ed. Christopher John Murray [New York and London: Fitzroy
206 Notes
Dearborn, 2004], 904–5.) We can certainly fi nd anticipation of Romantic
literary notions and style as early as Plato, Montaigne, or Cervantes, if we
choose to call them anticipation. Charles Rosen, for example, cites many
17th-century analogues to Preromantic traits in music. In French literature,
Lafayette, Racine, and Scudéry all bear resemblances to the sentimental
impulses of Preromantic literature, or to the literature of Sensibilité.
3. The eventual elitism and over-codification of sensibility led to its designa-
tion as a “cult”: see Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and
Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago,
1992), 258, n.135.
4. Kelly, “Pre-Romanticism: Britain,” 904–5.
5. More recently, cultural historians have come to see sensibility as “the specifi-
cally cultural aspect or expression of a broad, late-eighteenth-century move-
ment for social, economic, or political reform” (Kelly, “Pre-Romanticism:
Britain,” 904–5).
6. Interestingly, this work is also sometimes categorized under the movement
“Empfi ndsamkeit.”
7. The situation is further complicated by nomenclature, with some authors
speaking of a fi rst and second Romanticism. Michel Baridon, for example,
refers to Preromanticism as “premier romantisme,” (Les Jardins: Paysagistes,
Jardiniers, Poètes [Paris: Robert Laffond, 1998}, 929).
8. Another confounding element in discussions of sensibility in England and
beyond is its relation to sentimentalism. Sensibility became a dominant
aspect of Preromanticism, distinguishing itself from sentimentalism (a much
broader term, preferred by Janet Todd) in its combination of assumptions
about human psychology and anatomy. There is scholarly dissent regarding
this matter as well: Jerome McGann sees the discourse of sensibility as a
precursor to the discourse of sentiment (McGann, Poetics of Sensibility, 4,
7), while in Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction,
1745–1800 (New York: AMS Press, 1994), Barbara Benedict sees sentimen-
tal literature as a transitional and ambiguous cultural mode.
9. Robert J. Frail, “Pre-Romanticism: France,” in Encyclopedia, ed. Mur-
ray, 907. In music, representatives of sensibility would include Haydn and
Mozart; in painting, Constable, Turner, Claude, Poussin, Greuze, and
Piranesi; and in landscape gardening, the Englishmen Gilpin, Repton, and
Whately.
10. For further information about the intertextual relations of the work and its
successors, see Jean Marie Goulemot, “Un Roman de la Révolution: Le voya-
geur sentimental en France sous Robespierre de François Vernes,” Europe:
Revue Littéraire Mensuelle 659 (1984): 80–88.
11. Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (Oxford and New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1987), 93; henceforth, Man of Feeling.
12. Marilyn Butler writes that the “tendency towards relativism . . . becomes
conscious and explicit” in the novels of the 1760s and 1770s and claims that
this change grows naturally in the novel, because of its form which natu-
rally emphasizes the individual and his or her independent worth. In saying
this, Butler draws on Ronald Paulson’s claim that given its concentration on
explaining the motives of individual protagonists, the ethics of the novel are
naturally more relativist than satire, for example (Butler, Romantics, 11).
13. On self-reflexivity and the theatrical impulses of sensibility, the best work to
date is David Marshall’s The Figure of Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam
Smith, and George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
Additional works in this area include: Michael Bell, Sentimentalism, Ethics,
and the Culture of Feeling (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2000);
 Notes 207
Syndy McMillen Conger, Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance
to Sentiment from the Augustans to the Romantics: Essays in Honor of
Jean H. Hagstrum (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1990);
Stephen D. Cox, “The Stranger within Thee”: Concepts of the Self in Late-
Eighteenth-Century Literature (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,
1980); Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder
in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of Cal-
ifornia Press, 1980); Morris Golden, The Self Observed: Swift, Johnson,
Wordsworth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972); John Mul-
lan, Sentiment and Sociability: the Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth
Century (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press,
1988); Charles Rosen, The Romantic Generation (Cambridge: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1995); and Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of
the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
14. McGann, Poetics, ix.
15. This is true especially in French and English versions of Preromanticism; the
German example is more complicated. The Sturm und Drang movement was
more involved in the sublime, storms, and darker, emotional concepts including
a fascination with death, in comparison with the French and English versions
of sensibility. Although contemporaries like E. T. A. Hoffman called all three
composers “romantisch” (“Beethovens Instrumental-musik,” Fantasiestücke in
Callots Manier: Blätter eines reisenden Enthusiasten), Mozart and Haydn can
be considered Preromantic, whereas Beethoven can be seen to represent Roman-
ticism because he opens up the realms of the monstrous and immeasurable.
16. Connections between landscape gardening and the literature of feeling have
also generally focused on poetry rather than the novel. See, for example,
John Dixon Hunt’s excellent The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting,
and Gardening during the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1989).
17. Quoted in Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View
(London: Frank Cass and Company, Ltd., 1967 [1927]), 137–38. Such dis-
course is the main focus of Lipking’s The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-
Century England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970).
18. John Barrel, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840:
An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge and New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1972), 48.
19. Hussey continues: “The picturesque phase through which each art passed,
roughly between 1730 and 1830, was in each case a prelude to Romanticism.
It appeared at a point when an art shifted its appeal from reason to imagina-
tion.” (The Picturesque, 4; see also 32).
20. See Katherine Haskings, Picturing Britain: Time and Place in Image and
Text, 1700-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 1993), 12, 21;
Hussey, The Picturesque, 151–185. The best treatment is perhaps Michel
Baridon on the gardens of the man of sensibility in Les Jardins, 801–937.
Baridon displays an awareness of the broad cultural affi nities of sensibility
and the picturesque, but the study remains an overview of the history of
the garden. Michasiw mentions the strong connections with the culture of
sensibility in passing: Kim Ian Michasiw, “Nine Revisionist Theses on the
Picturesque,” Representations 38 (1992): 87, 93–95.
21. John Dixon Hunt, The Picturesque Garden in Europe (London: Thames and
Hudson, 2002), 8.
22. Martin Price claims, on the one hand, that “moral or religious grounds” are
initially absent from the picturesque, and that once it is given such grounds,
it moves towards the sublime (Price, “The Picturesque Moment,” in From
208 Notes
Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, ed.
Frederick W. Hilles [New York: Oxford University Press, 1965]: 262–63).
He also claims in the same article, however, that the “dissociation of . . . gen-
erally aesthetic elements from other values” is a “late” requirement within
the picturesque (Price, 260–61). His ambivalence here seems important. I
have argued that the picturesque was influenced by sensibility’s conflation of
ethics and aesthetics—its ‘moral aesthetic.’
23. These characteristics of sensibility are further developed in my essay “Prero-
manticism, or Sensibility: Defi ning Ambivalences.”
24. Locke divides “Experience” into “Observation” of both “external, sensible
Objects” and “internal Operations of our minds” (John Locke, An Essay
Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch [Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1975], 105). The sensations and passions do not themselves rule
thought or reason, but they come fi rst in the process and provide thought
with its fodder. Most scholars agree that for Locke, “disengaged reason”
nonetheless still rules supreme and provides the only way we gain our right-
ful place in the providential order; cf. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self:
The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1989), 265. Or as Hans Aarsleff writes, “To Locke all men are by nature
rational and God ‘commands what reason does’” (From Locke to Saussure:
Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History [Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1982], 175). See also A. D. Nuttall, A Com-
mon Sky: Philosophy and the Literary Imagination (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1974), 13–19, for a discussion of the eighteenth-cen-
tury interpretations of the implicit solipsism in Locke’s teaching, as well as
Locke’s foreshadowing of nineteenth- and twentieth-century existentialism.
25. Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (London:
1727), III.2.177. “Be persuaded,” Shaftesbury wrote elsewhere to one of his
students, “that wisdom is more from the heart than from the head. Feel
goodness, and you will see all things fair and good,” quoted in Louis I. Bred-
vold, The Natural History of Sensibility (Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1962), 12. Bishop Butler protested that conscience could not survive
without judgment, discipline, authority, or a standard which stood outside
and opposed itself to the individual, and suggested that such thinking as
Shaftesbury’s offered no protection against human weakness and vice. Voices
such as Bishop Butler’s and Samuel Johnson’s, however, were outnumbered
by those who had greater faith in the “internalization” of virtue.
26. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H.
Nidditch (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press,
1978), 470. Cf. “I shall endeavour to prove fi rst, that reason alone can never
be a motive to any action of the will; and secondly, that it can never oppose
passion in the direction of the will” (Hume, Treatise, 413).
27. Hume, Treatise, 484.
28. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, La Profession du Foi du Vicaire Savoyard, (Paris: J.
Vrin, 1978), 26.
29. Cf. Wendy Motooka, The Age of Reasons: Quixotism, Sentimentalism, and
Political Economy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London and New York:
Routledge, 1998).
30. This “disengagement” or “externalized” view of reason is inherently unsta-
ble because of the multivalence of the external stance: one can be detached,
in the sense of disinterested, objective, and capable of good judgment—or
one can be detached in the sense of uninterested and unassociated.
31. An example would be David Marshall’s analysis of Hume’s 1757 essay, “On
the Standard of Taste”: Marshall reveals Hume’s defensive position within the
 Notes 209
essay. Hume’s rhetorical choices reveal his philosophical insecurity; Hume is
desirous of avoiding any reliance on externally imposed authorities (critics)
for a standard of taste, yet insists upon the existence of a popularly conceived
standard of taste. Yet his own argument undermines this certainty and he
fi nds himself torn between anarchy and tyranny in his attempt to achieve a
democratically based, “naturally occurring standard by which choices may
be evaluated” (The Frame of Art : Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750–
1815 [Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005], 176–196).
32. See John O’Neal, The Authority of Experience: Sensationist Theory in the
French Enlightenment (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1996).
33. Examples in the literature of sensibility abound: for example, the man who
destroys Harley’s manuscript is a “strenuous logician” (Man of Feeling, 4);
similarly, in Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers [Sorrows of Young
Werther], Albert’s use of traditional logic in his argument with Werther over
suicide shows he cannot comprehend matters of true feeling. See Die Leiden
des jungen Werthers in Goethes Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe, ed. Erich
Trunz (München: C.H. Beck, 1989); henceforth Werther.
34. This connection has received little attention. The one exception is Douglas
Den Uyl’s interesting work The Virtue of Prudence (New York: P. Lang,
1991). Den Uyl traces prudence’s fall from a position as one of the four car-
dinal virtues, to a position of disrepute, almost amounting to a vice.
35. Man of Feeling, 40.
36. Michel-Jean Sedaine, Le philosophe sans le savoir (Durham: University of
Durham, 1987 [1765]).
37. Each in a different context, Edward Young, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Johann
W. von Goethe, all wrote about the importance of originality and the corrupt-
ing and diminishing effects of society, draining individuals of their authenticity.
In his Discours sur les sciences et les arts (1750), henceforth First Discourse,
Rousseau complains of the homogenizing effect of society upon our passions:
“Avant que l’art eût façonné nos manières et appris à nos passions à parler un
langage apprêté, nos moeurs étoient rustiques, mais naturelles” [Before art had
shaped our behavior, and taught our passions to speak an artificial language,
our morals were rude but natural] (Œuvres Complètes [Paris: Gallimard, 1968],
III.8). Nine years later, in his Conjectures on Original Composition in a letter
to the author of Charles Grandison (London: A. Millar and J. Dodsley, 1759),
Edward Young similarly complains of the contemporary lack of originality in
a society that seems to require uniformity: “Born Originals, how comes it to
pass that we die Copies?” (42). With a memorable line that could almost be a
paraphrasing of Young’s credo, Rousseau opens his Le Contrat Social (1762):
“L’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers” [Man was born free, but
he is everywhere in chains] (Œuvres Complètes [Paris: Du Seuil, 1971], I. 518).
And in his Werther, Goethe’s eponymous protagonist shows fictionally the fate
of those who try to remain authentic originals despite the pressure of society
to conform to regulations and homogenizing expectations, whether in terms of
social conventions or ethical standards: his struggles bring him to the brink of
madness and, ultimately, to suicide.
38. Shaftesbury, Characteristics (London, 1727), I.4.129–30. Francis Hutcheson,
following suit, speaks of “subtle Trains of Reasoning, to which honest Hearts
are often wholly Strangers” in An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Pas-
sions and Affections with Illustrations on the Moral Sense (London: J. Darby
and T. Browne, 1728), 4. The attempt to guide action by reasoning is taken as
cunning or calculation, which must be opposed to ‘true’ virtue ‘of the heart’:
“while some men are willing to wed virtue for her personal charms, others are
210 Notes
engaged to take her for the sake of her expected dowry.” William Melmoth the
younger wrote these words in 1742: The Letters of Sir Thomas Fitzosborne,
On Several Subjects (London: R. Dodsley, 1750), XVIII.79.
39. Mary Wollstonecraft, The Cave of Fancy in Posthumous Works, ed. William
Godwin (New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1974), IV.135.
40. Mary Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria; A Fragment: to
which is added the First Book of a Series of Lessons for Children in Posthu-
mous Works, ed. William Godwin (London, 1798), I. 69.
41. For further discussion of Whig and Tory interpretations of sensibility see
Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce
in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1996). For Whig and Tory interpretations of the picturesque, see Ste-
phen Copley and Peter Garside, The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature,
Landscape, and Aesthetics since 1770 (Cambridge and New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1994), and Nigel Everett, The Tory View of Land-
scape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
42. Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality
in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago and Lon-
don: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 4–19.
43. While scholars of the 1990s frequently stress one political side or another—
either the undercover Tory politics of the picturesque and its implicit pro-
motion of aristocratic estates at the expense of the public, or (more rarely)
its Whig effects on liberating the middle classes—the approach here is con-
sistent with a more recent set of interpretations, such as David Marshall’s
“Problem of the Picturesque” and Gary Harrison and Jill Heydt-Stevenson’s
volume of essays in The European Romantic Review 13, 1 (2002). In the
introduction to their collection, Harrison and Heydt-Stevenson forward a
“self-contradictory politics of the picturesque” and a “dialectical view of the
picturesque” that emerges from the essays: in recognition of the “playful”
origins of the picturesque aesthetic, the essays as a whole note the seem-
ingly contradictory impulses embodied within the picturesque aesthetic.
One essay notes that the picturesque, while seemingly controlling viewers,
also liberates their eyes; another that it forwards both utilitarian and non-
utilitarian aesthetics; a third that it provides a balancing of objective and
subjective impulses; a fourth that the picturesque effect of surprise can erode
its illusions of authority; and fi nally that the picturesque characteristically
shifts between the beautiful and the sublime (Gary Harrison and Jill Heydt-
Stevenson, “Variations on the Picturesque,” 4, 6). These critics contribute to
the understanding of the paradoxical forms and potentially unstable under-
pinnings inherent in the picturesque: “The picturesque . . . is a subversive
genre in its own right because it contains its own ability to self parody, adapt,
and resist control. That is, like nature, the picturesque is always threatening
to undermine structures we place upon it” (“Variations on the Picturesque,”
9–10).
44. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan: Or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Com-
monwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, ed. Michael Oakeshott (New York and
London: Collier, 1962), 100. Michael Gassenmeier traces an attempted Puri-
tan reframing of sensibility in Der Typus des man of feeling (Tübingen: Max
Niemeyer Verlag, 1972).
45. David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning
the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, [1748, 1751]1975), 226.
46. Cf. the following passages by Sterne: “REASON is, half of it, SENSE; and
the measure of heaven itself is but the measure of our present appetites and
 Notes 211
concoctions” and “L’amour n’est rien sans sentiment. Et le sentiment est
encore moins sans amour.” The fi rst is from The Life and Opinions of Tris-
tram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Ian P. Watt (Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1965),
7.13.494, and the second from A Sentimental Journey through France and
Italy by Mr. Yorick, ed. Gardiner Stout Jr. (Berkeley: University of California
Press), 153; henceforth Journey.
47. Journey, 128–9.
48. R. F. Brissenden also views this paradoxical situation as central to sensibility.
In fact, it is the inspiration for the title of his book Virtue in Distress (e.g.,
21): Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson
to Sade (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974).
49. See Bredvold, 24–25; and Brodey, “The Adventures of a Female Werther,”
110–126.
50. Man of Feeling, 69.
51. Basil Willey once wryly described mid-eighteenth-century English thought as
“intrepid in speculation and conservative in practice” (The Eighteenth Cen-
tury Background: Studies on the Idea of Nature in the Thought of the Period
[London: Chatto & Windus, 1940], 119). Although only made in passing,
this remark rather aptly describes the philosophical insecurity or conflicting
impulses of the culture of sensibility in England, Germany, and to a lesser
extent, also in France. In his Origins of the English Novel (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1987), Michael McKeon also speculates whether the
growth of the novel in the eighteenth century might function as the “adjudica-
tion” of historical change in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, which
could result in a similar ambivalence to that described by Willey.
52. A series of older, etymologically-based studies attempted to make sense of
sensibility’s characteristic ambivalence (dual impulses) by studying the strange
history of phrases like ‘common sense.’ According to C. S. Lewis, in his Studies
in Words, eighteenth-century authors simultaneously minimized and put great
new emphasis on the phrase ‘common sense’: ironically, the phrase “stooped
to conquer,” as Lewis puts it, during the first half of the eighteenth century,
in “the age which of all others made sense or good sense or common sense its
shibboleth.” “The implication of the whole Augustan attitude,” Lewis writes,
“is ‘We’re not asking much. We’re not asking that poets should be learned,
or that divines should be saints, or courtiers heroes, or that statesmen should
bring in a heaven on earth . . . We ask only for rationality’” [Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990], 154–5). The rhetoric of sensi-
bility can be seen as continuing the same tendency simultaneously to minimize
and idealize; however it is in relation to perception rather than common sense.
53. For all its vocal self-conscious contrast to Hobbes, there is a strong resem-
blance here to Hobbes’ own perspective, at least as understood by Michael
Oakeshott: Hobbes too acknowledges that there is a “radical confl ict between
the nature of man and the natural condition of mankind: what the one urges
with hope of achievement, the other makes impossible . . . [I]t is neither sin
nor depravity that creates the predicament; nature itself is the author of his
ruin” (Oakeshott, Leviathan introduction, 36).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

1. Thomas Burnet, Sacred Theory of the Earth: Containing an Account of

the Original of the Earth, and of All the General Changes Which It Hath
Undergone, or Is to Undergo till the Consummation of All Things (London:
R.N. for Walter Kettilby, 1697), I: 67–68.
212 Notes
2. Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The
Development of the Aesthetics of the Infi nite (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1959); Elizabeth Wanning Harries, The Unfi nished Manner:
Essays on the Fragment in the Later Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1994).
3. Nicolson describes at length how the attitude towards the irregularities of
nature showed itself in the changing view of mountains: Nicolson, Mountain
Gloom, 2 ff.
4. Whereas these seventeenth-century authors tend not to limit God’s author-
ity, Jean-Jacques Rousseau reverses the causality of Genesis’ ruination. In
the Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hom-
mes [1755], he writes: “Semblable à la statue de Glaucus: que le temps, la
mer et les orages avaient tellement défigurée qu’elle ressemblait moins à
un dieu qu’à une bête féroce, l’âme humaine altérée au sein de la société
. . . a, pour ainsi dire, changé d’apparence au point d’être presque mécon-
noissable” [Like the statue of Glaucus, which time, sea, and storms had so
disfigured that it looked less like a god than a wild beast, the human soul,
altered in the bosom of society . . . has, so to speak, altered its appearance
to the point of being nearly unrecognizable] (Œuvres complètes [Paris :
Gallimard, 1966] III.122); henceforth, Second Discourse. Modern man is
a ruin, but his ruined state is not desirable for Rousseau. By stressing God’s
authorship of a ruined or picturesque world, His authority is lessened, or at
least made less threatening.
5. Hobbes, Leviathan, 80, 100, 157.
6. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C.B. McPherson (India-
napolis and Cambridge: Hackett, [1690]1980), 18, 42.
7. Rousseau, Second Discourse, III.133.
8. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1957), quoted in
Syndy McMillen Conger, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Language of Sensi-
bility (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994), xix.
9. Cf. Nicolson’s extensive treatment of Burnet’s claims in chapters 5–7 of
Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory; see also Hussey, The Picturesque,
56, 83–127.
10. Cf. Erwin Panofsky, “Et in Arcadio Ego: On the Conception of Transcience
in Poussin and Watteau,” in Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to
Ernst Cassirer, ed. Raymond Kilbansky and H.J. Paton (Oxford: Claren-
don Press, 1936); Laurence Goldstein, Ruins and Empire: The Evolution of
a Theme in Augustan and Romantic Literature (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1977), 31; and Rose Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1953), 183.
11. Cf. Goldstein’s discussion of Dyer, Cowper, Goldsmith, and Wordsworth; cf.
Hussey, Picturesque, on Dyer (18), Thomson (32ff.), and Young (102ff.).
12. Denis Diderot, “Salon of 1767,” in Œuvres complètes de Diderot, XI. 227.
13. Man of Feeling, 64.
14. See Anne F. Janowitz, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National
Landscape (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990), 14; Macaulay, Pleasure, 48.
15. Barbara Maria Stafford, “‘Illiterate Monuments’: The Ruin as Dialect or
Broken Classic,” The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual 1 (1987): 26.
16. Dr. Francis Walsh, The Antediluvian World; Or, a New Theory of the Earth:
Containing a Clear Account of the Form and Constitution of the Terrestrial
Globe before the Universal Deluge; Proving It to Be Quite Different from
What It Is at Present. And Also of the Origin and Causes of the Said Deluge,
Subterraneous Cavities, Seas, Islands, Mountains, Etc. (Dublin: Printed by
S. Powell, 1743), 55.
 Notes 213
17. Anonymous, The Beauties of Nature and Art Displayed, in a Tour through
the World (London: Printed for J. Payne at the Feathers, Pater-Noster Row,
1763–64), Vol. IX.
18. E.g., Rev. W. Derham, Physico-Theology: a Demonstration of the Being and
Attributes of God from His Works of Creation (London: Printed for A. Stra-
ham; T. Cadell Jun.; and W. Davies in the Strand, 1798).
19. William Drysdale, Sacred Scripture: Theory of the Earth from Its First Atom
to Its Last End (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1798).
20. William Hooper, M.D., Rational Recreations, in Which the Principles of Num-
bers and Natural Philosophy are Clearly and Copiously Elucidated by a Series
of Easy, Entertaining, Interesting Experiments (London: Printed for B. Law and
Son, Ave-Maria Lane and J. Robinson, Pater-Noster Row, 1794), Vol. IV: 155.
21. Ludwig Trauzettel, “Wörlitz: England in Germany,” Garden History 24, 2
(1996): 221–236.
22. Maiken Umbach, “Visual Culture, Scientific Images, and German Small-
State Politics in the Late Enlightenment,” Past and Present 158 (February,
1998): 116.
23. Umbach, “Visual Culture,” 132.
24. Quoted in Macaulay, Pleasure, 191–92. Macaulay emphasizes the personal
effect of the Grand Tour on various well-known eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century figures throughout her work. See also Michel Baridon, Les Jardins,
808, for a discussion of the “idée-image” of England as a new Rome, which
helped inspire the combination of classical and Gothic elements in the ruin
collecting of the time.
25. Cf. Stafford, “Illiterate Monuments,” 26–8. The following two passages (one
from John Dennis and one from Edmund Burke) suggest the enormous change
in aesthetics that was required in the redemption of ruin. The late-seven-
teenth-century critic John Dennis had written that “the Work of every reason-
able Creature must derive its Beauty from Regularity; for Reason is Rule and
Order, and nothing can be irregular either in our Conceptions or our Actions,
any further than it swerves from Rule, that is, from Reason. Nature is nothing
but that Rule and Order and Harmony, which we find in the visible Creation
. . . And nothing that is Irregular, as far as it is Irregular, ever was, or ever
can be either Natural or Reasonable” (The Critical Works of John Dennis,
ed. Edward Niles Hooker [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1939],
335). The question was whether Nature had been perverted at the Fall, and
whether its irregularity is a token of a depraved condition. In contrast to Den-
nis, Edmund Burke, writing in the mid- eighteenth century, refers to artificial
lines and angles of buildings in gardens, openly discarding a reliance upon
proportion as a principal source of beauty: “Nature has at last escaped from
their discipline and their fetters” (A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of
Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful [London: Routledge and Paul; New
York: Columbia University Press, 1958], 71–6).
26. According to Jeffery Whitelaw, the fi rst folly may have been built as early
as 1579 (Freston Tower in Suffolk); however, the original purpose—and
extent—of the building is unclear. See Whitelaw, Follies (Malta: Gutenberg
Press, 2005), 4–5.
27. Janowitz, England’s Ruins, 4.
28. The terms folly and fabrique refer to a much wider range of artificial archi-
tecture than just fake ruins (see Figure 17 for examples). Fabrique can also
refer to the very popular Chinese pagodas, hermitages, and other exotic
buildings inspired at the same period. For the purpose of this study, I am
limiting my use of follies to purposely ruined and antiquated monuments,
whether inhabitable or not. These fake ruins have received surprisingly little
214 Notes
critical attention, especially in the literary context of sensibility. Macaulay,
Hussey, Goldstein, McFarland, and Janowitz all have written interesting
accounts of the cultural and literary significance of the general fascination
with ruins in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, but none
has dealt adequately with the added complications of the artificial ruins.
Each has tended to isolate one particular symbolic meaning of the ruins (e.g.
Janowitz tends to focus on the glorification of the past for political pur-
poses), or assign one reading for each author or painter, rather than address
the inherent multivalence of the rhetoric of (especially fake) ruins. One of
the best treatments of the multivalence of follies is Michael S. Roth, Claire
Lyons, and Charles Merewether, Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed (Los
Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1997).
See John Dixon Hunt’s The Picturesque Garden in Europe for the most
thorough account of the dissemination and adaptation of the English gar-
den style and picturesque taste throughout Europe. See also Stephanie
Ross, What Gardens Mean (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1998); Jane Brown, Art and Architecture of English Gardens (New
York: Rizzoli, 1989); and Michel Baridon, Les Jardins (Paris: Robert Laf-
fond, 1998).
29. For a list of extant British follies as well as historical descriptions and direc-
tions, see Follies, edited by Hugh Casson (New York: Taplinger Publications,
1965).
30. Barbara Jones, Follies and Grottoes (London: Constable, 1953).
31. The location is not clear in the King James translation of Genesis: “And the
LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man
whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow
every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also
in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.”
32. Prest, The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re-Creation of
Paradise (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), 96–7.
33. Walpole composed this epitaph in a letter to William Mason, Feb. 4, 1783;
quoted in H. F. Clark, “Eighteenth Century Elysiums: The Role of ‘Associa-
tion’ in the Landscape Movement,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes 6 (1943): 184.
34. Martin Price, “The Picturesque Moment,” in From Sensibility to Romanti-
cism, ed. Frederick Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1965), 259.
35. Alpine interests long predate Gilpin, as the example from Burnet’s Sacred
Theory suggests.
36. Gary Harrison and Jill Heydt-Stevenson, “Variations on the Picturesque:
Authority, Play, and Practice,” European Romantic Review 13, 1 (2002): 3.
37. Ann Bermingham in Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago,
1994) makes excellent comparisons between landscape and government that
reveal similar ideas regarding the picturesque. In her Landscape and Ide-
ology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1986), Bermingham connects the developments of the pic-
turesque to changes in agriculture, class division, and the nouveaux riches.
Tom Williamson connects economics, politics, and perceptions of personal
identity as reflected in eighteenth-century landscape gardens in Polite Land-
scapes, Gardens, and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). John Dixon Hunt has been the
most prolific author in this area: his works include Gardens and the Pictur-
esque (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry,
Painting, and Gardening During the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns
 Notes 215
Hopkins University Press, 1989), and The Picturesque Garden in Europe
(London: Thames and Hudson, 2002).
38. William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque
Travel; and on Sketching Landscape: To Which is Added a Poem, on Land-
scape Painting (London: R. Blamire, 1792), I: 8.
39. There has been a considerable number of scholarly works focusing on the
picturesque in the last decade, particularly in relation to consumerism, tour-
ism, and political ideology. The following sources have been most helpful in
this study: Malcolm Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape,
Aesthetics, and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1989); Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw: Studies in the
Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2000), 77–126; Stephen Copley and Peter Garside, eds., The Politics
of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics Since 1770 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Nigel Everett, The Tory View of
Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); John Dixon Hunt,
Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Archi-
tecture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992) and The Picturesque
Garden in Europe; Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque: Studies in a Point
of View (London: Frank Cass and Company, Ltd., 1967); David Marshall,
“The Problem of the Picturesque,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, 3 (2002):
413–37; Kim Ian Michasiw, “Nine Revisionist Theses on the Picturesque,”
Representations 38 (1992): 76–100; Stephanie Moss, “Gardens and the
Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture,” Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 52, 2 (1994): 252–4; Martin Price, “The Pic-
turesque Moment,” in From Sensibility to Romanticism, edited by Harold
Bloom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965); and Sidney K. Robinson,
Inquiry into the Picturesque (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
40. As Gilpin explains, the love of irregularity and masking of order or human
contrivance helps explain the popularity of ruins in picturesque landscaping:
“The solid, square, heavy form we dislike; and are pleased with the pyrami-
dal one, which may be infi nitely varied; and which ruin contributes to vary.”
Quoted in William D. Templeman’s The Life and Works of William Gilpin
(Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1939), 145.
41. Samuel Kliger, “Whig Aesthetics: A Phase of Eighteenth-Century Taste,”
English Literary History 16, 2 (1949): 135–150.
42. Washington Irving, Christmas at Bracebridge Hall (New York: David
McKay, 1962). Quoted in Kliger, 138.
43. Joseph Addison, “No. 161,” in The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1987), 398. According to Baridon, the equation of recti-
linearity with tyranny and the serpentine curve as “the sinuous line of free-
dom” was widespread: “la ligne droite est le signe du despotisme; la ligne
sinueuse, celle de la liberté. L’argument est caricatural mais c’est justement
sa force” (Baridon, 812).
44. Filippo Pizzoni, The Garden: A History in Landscape and Art (New York:
Rizzoli Press, 1999), 130–1. Cf. John Prest, The Garden of Eden, 94.
45. John Dixon Hunt, The Picturesque Garden in Europe, 151.
46. Humphry Repton, A Letter to Uvedale Price, Esq. (London: G. Nicol,
1794), 9.
47. James Thomson, Liberty, a Poem (Glasgow: Robert & Andrew Foulis,
1774), V.164–6, 681–2.
48. Marshall, “Problem of the Picturesque,” 436 n.13.
49. Hunt uses this term derived from Diderot and Whately, among others.
50. Genesis, 11.1.
216 Notes
51. Genesis, 11.4.
52. Genesis, 11.5–8.
53. Hobbes, Leviathan, 33–34, my emphasis.
54. Sterne, Journey, 168.
55. Goethe, Werther, 58.
56. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (Paris: Hachette, [1761]
1925), II.59.
57. Man of Feeling, 114–5.
58. Timothy Reiss, “Perioddity: Considerations on the Geography of Histories,”
Modern Language Quarterly 62, 4 (2001): 425–452.
59. Samuel Johnson, The Idler (London: J. Parsons, 1793), II.49–50.
60. Riskin does an excellent job of demonstrating the legacy of the Enlighten-
ment at work in the culture of sensibility: Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age
of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
61. James Thompson, Between Self and World: The Novels of Jane Austen (Uni-
versity Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), 92.
62. Cf. Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860 (Minne-
apolis and London: University of Minnesota Press; Athlone Press, 1983) and
Ralph Cohen, Studies in Eighteenth-Century British Art Aesthetics (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1985).
63. Joseph Addison, Spectator 416 (London: J. Bumpus Holburn-Bars, 1819
[June 27, 1712]).
64. William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,”
lines 75–6. Cohen describes how the emphasis shifts from language’s impor-
tance as representation of nature’s order (waning at the turn of the eighteenth
century), to an emphasis on language’s role as expression of ideas (fi rst half
of the eighteenth century), to a concern primarily about the communication
of feeling and the social context of language (second half of the eighteenth
century). Aarsleff shows that similar changes occur in France and Germany
as well as England; he describes the change in terms of changing ideas of
“natural” and “artificial” language, an idea to which I return below. Martin
Elskey also provides an illuminating study of changing attitudes towards
language. Elskey focuses on the debates between Humanists and Scholas-
tics beginning in the late Middle Ages, and draws interesting conclusions
applicable to the confl ict between speech and writing in later periods as well.
Although he treats some eighteenth-century figures, he does not represent
the specifically eighteenth-century debate and its permutations of the prob-
lematic relationship between speaking and writing, which must take into
consideration the new moral psychology. Not considered in these and other
studies of changing attitudes towards language is sensibility’s corresponding
moral psychology based on the newly elevated position of feeling.
65. Cf. Aarsleff, Study, 15–16. See also Foucault on “Classifying,” in The Order
of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1971), 125–162. This is called the Adamic tradition, as it is based
directly on the function of Adam’s naming of animals in the King James
Genesis: “And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the
field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he
would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was
the name thereof” (Genesis 2.19).
66. There was neither separation of word and thing, sign and referent, nor of
names and meanings: ‘sentence’ and ‘sentiment’ had not yet been divorced.
As Foucault writes in his study of this document: “The fundamental task
of classical ‘discourse’ is to ascribe a name to things, and in that name to
 Notes 217
name their being . . . When it named the being of all representation in gen-
eral, it was philosophy: theory of knowledge and analysis of ideas. When it
ascribed to each thing represented the name that was fitted to it, and laid
out the grid of a well-made language across the whole fi eld of represen-
tation, then it was science—nomenclature and taxonomy” (Foucault, The
Order of Things, 120).
67. “On ne sait pas encore, ce me semble, combien la langue est une image
rigoureuse & fidèle de l’éxercice de la raison” [We do not yet know to
what extent language is a rigorous and faithful image of the exercise of
reason], writes one representative of this hybrid profession, Jean-Bapiste
René Robinet, “Encyclopédie,” in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné
des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. Jean-Baptiste René Robinet (Paris:
Briasson, 1751–65), 5: NA9.
68. William V. Holtz, Image and Immortality; a Study of Tristram Shandy
(Providence: Brown University Press, 1970), 61.
69. Locke also intimates the rise of the passions in authority by claiming
that immediate sensory experience is much more effective than words for
conveying the taste of pineapple, for example, or describing the shape
of a horse: “He that thinks otherwise, let him try if any words can give
him the taste of pine-apple, and make him have the true idea of the rel-
ish of that celebrated delicious fruit” (Locke, Essay, 424). The arbitrari-
ness of words, names, or signs also casts further doubt on the referential
power of language: “our distinguishing substances into species by their
names, is not at all founded on their real essences; nor can we pretend
to range and determine them exactly into species according to internal
essential differences” (Locke, Essay, 449). One might speculate whether
the practice of capitalizing nouns ended in English during the course of
the eighteenth century partly because of increasing doubt about ostensive
reference. Capitalizing nouns suggests a privileged status of the naming
of things that never disappeared from German; it also suggests a parallel
with proper nouns—that nouns for all persons, places, and things evoke
equally specifi c, clear, and communicable referents as do proper nouns,
like ‘Samuel Johnson,’ or ‘Antigua.’ The capitalization of nouns thus
serves as visual tribute, it seems, to the Adamic tradition, which equates
nouns with names.
70. Locke, Essay, 386.
71. Locke, Essay, 476.
72. Words, according to Locke, “interpose themselves so much between our
Understandings, and the Truth, which it would contemplate and apprehend,
that like the Medium through which visible Objects pass, their Obscurity
and Disorder does not seldom cast a mist before our Eyes, and impose
upon our Understanding,” (Locke, Essay, 488). In fact it hearkens back to
Hobbes, who wrote: “A man can have no thought, representing any thing,
not subject to sense.” In fact, there are many chapters in Hobbes where he
demotes reason and language (logos), as well as the human pride of self-suf-
ficiency. It is ironic that so much of late-eighteenth-century thought, while
pretending to spurn him, is in a way accepting his assumptions and just
challenging his conclusions regarding the need for centralized authority
(Hobbes, Leviathan, 31–32).
73. Locke, Essay, 402.
74. Locke actually wanted an illustrated dictionary of natural science: “Words
standing for things which are known and distinguished by their natural
shapes should be expressed by little draughts and prints made of them”
(Locke, Essay, 3.11).
218 Notes
75. Locke, Essay, 408.
76. Borrowing a term from Destutt de Tracy, Aarsleff writes, “in so far as
words communicate adequately, they do so only because they are submitted
to a constant process of ‘rectification’ in the social intercourse of speech”
(Aarsleff, From Locke, 375–76). “I shall imagine I have done some service
to truth, peace, and learning,” Locke writes, “if, by any enlargement on this
subject, I can make men reflect on their own use of language” (Essay, 436).
77. Étienne de Condillac, Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines” in
Œuvres (Paris: Baudouin Freres, 1827, [1746]), I. 436b.
78. Condillac, Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines, in Œuvres, I.
403b.
79. Denis Diderot, Lettre sur les sourds et muets, in Œuvres complètes de
Diderot, ed. J. Assezat (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1875), I. 369.
80. Diderot, Lettre sur les sourds et muets, in Œuvres, I. 369.
81. Van Sant makes excellent observations on the perceived opposition between
narrative and sentiment within the culture of sensibility. Narrative coherence
or continuity “exists in the reader’s experience, not in narrative form. The
episode becomes the height of narrative achievement, its immediate effect
registered on the reader’s interior structures . . . [P]lot is thus potentially
undermined when sensibility governs narrative structure” (115–118).
82. Rousseau, Second Discourse, III.133.
83. Arthur M. Melzer, The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rous-
seau’s Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 280.
84. Rousseau, Second Discourse, III.133.
85. Melzer, Natural Goodness, 286–7.
86. Rousseau, Second Discourse, III.132–33.
87. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues: ou il est parlé de la
mélodie et de l’imitation musicale, ed. Jean Starobinski (Paris: Gallimard,
1990), 65, 138.
88. See the following related passage: “L’amour, dit-on, fut l’inventeur du des-
sein. Il put inventer aussi la parole, mais moins heureusement; Peu content
d’elle il la dédaigne, il a des maniéres plus vives de s’exprimer” (Rousseau,
Essai sur l’origine des langues, 60). Such a hierarchy is arguably much older
than Rousseau—at least as old as Vico. I am bracketing for further study the
marked differences between this interpretation of Rousseau and Derrida’s
influential reading in Grammatology.
89. Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, 79.
90. Denis Diderot, “Le rêve de D’Alembert,” in Œuvres, II.180–1.
91. Denis Diderot, “Pensées détachées sur la peinture,” in Œuvres, XII.77.
92. Johann Gottfried Herder, Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache:
Text, Materialien, Kommentar (München: Reclam, 1983), 9.
93. Herder, Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache, 6–7, my emphasis.
94. Murray Cohen documents this change in the popular linguistic writings of
Britain—that is, where “words . . . come to function less referentially or logi-
cally and more affectively” (Sensible Words: Linguistic Practice in England,
1640–1785 [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977], 109).
95. John Herries, The Elements of Speech (London: E. and C. Dilly, 1773), 247.
96. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (Edinburgh: W. Stra-
han, T. Cadell, and W. Creech, 1783), I. 101.
97. Murray Cohen also notes a similar trend towards printed visualization,
phonetic alphabets, and transcriptions of spoken language (Cohen, Sensible
Words).
98. Locke also recommended visual aids, particularly for an illustrated diction-
ary of natural science: See note 74 above.
 Notes 219
99. Thomas Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution (1796) (Delmar, New
York: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1991), x-xi.
100. Thomas Sheridan, Lectures on the Art of Reading. In Two Parts: Contain-
ing Part I, The Art of Reading Prose and Part II, The Art of Reading Verse
(London: J. Dodsley and C. Dilly, 1787), 88.
101. Thomas Sheridan, A Complete Dictionary of the English Language, Both
with Regard to Sound and Meaning, One Main Object of Which Is, to Estab-
lish a Plain and Permanent Standard of Pronunciation: To Which Is Prefi xed
a Prosodial Grammar (Dublin: Pat. Wogan and Pat. Byrne, 1790), lviii.
102. Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, II. 231.
103. Hugh Blair, John Walker, John Herries, James Beattie, Adam Smith, Thomas
Sheridan, Lord Monboddo, as well as Rousseau and Herder, all contributed
to this heightened regard for natural language, whether it was by comparing
modern language against ancient, European language against “primitive,”
human against animal, or prose against poetry. The natural in each case
represents a past ideal from which we have degenerated. For Monboddo and
Sheridan, the corruption is a fall from classical perfection; for Rousseau and
Herder, it is the fall from a purer state of nature that is reenacted daily. Seen
in this way, both Classicism and primitivism have their roots in the growing
moral aesthetic of sensibility.
104. Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, II. 232.
105. The analogous actress in France was Mlle. Clairon, who not only contrib-
uted Encyclopedia entries on aspects of acting, but also wrote an essay, after
she had retired from the stage, condemning the exaggerated use of make-
up in favor of more ‘natural’ pantomime of expressions. See Kirsten Gram
Holmström, Monodrama, Attitudes, Tableaux Vivants: Studies on Some
Trends of Theatrical Fashion, 1770–1815 (Stockholm: Almkvist and Wik-
sell, 1967), 28.
106. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie
(Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1982), 9.
107. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 11.
108. Samuel Jackson Pratt, Sympathy, a Poem (London: T. Cadell, 1781), II.55.
109. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 121.
110. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 136.
111. For a modern comparison, consider usage of emoticons such as :) and :( in
contemporary e-mail messages, attempting to ensure that tone is transmitted
correctly to counterbalance ambiguity—or rather to “fi x” the affect of the
written word.
112. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 120–121.
113. Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution, 147–154.
114. Sterne, Journey, 162.
115. There is a similar claim in relation to landscape viewing in the picturesque style:
that the appreciation of picturesque views requires a “picturesque eye.” Once
again, such claims raise the vexed issue of whether sensibility’s moral aesthetic
relies on naturally occurring abilities or ones that need careful cultivation.
116. Laurence Sterne, The Sermons of Mr. Yorick (Stratford-upon-Avon: Shake-
speare Head Press, 1927), II. 239–40.
117. Victor Lange describes a simultaneous faith in and doubting of the powers
of language among authors of the late-eighteenth-century cult of sensibility;
he claims that they were “deeply committed” to “all the rhetorical strategies
of speech” and yet “return again and again to the haunting experience of lin-
guistic insufficiency” (Victor Lange, “The Metaphor of Silence,” in Goethe
Revisited: A Collection of Essays, edited by Elizabeth Wilkinson [London
and New York: Calder, Riverrun, 1984], 133).
220 Notes
118. Sterne, Journey, 277–8. The idea of God as “omnipotent awareness infi-
nitely extended through time and space” and “the motion of the universe
as a divine ‘sensorium’ had been put forward by Newton, discussed vigor-
ously in the Clarke-Leibniz correspondence, and commented upon at length
by Addison in the Spectator, no. 565” (Brissenden, Virtue in Distress, 48).
Hagstrum also points out that Hartley anticipates Sterne by deriving the
term from Newton as well: Jean H. Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility: Ideal and
Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1980). See also Christopher Nagle, “Sterne, Shelley and Sensibility’s Pleasure
of Proximity,” ELH 70, 3 (Fall, 2003), 840, n.4. In the passage from Sterne,
it is not clear whether the “Sensorium” is another name for God the creator,
or whether it is a name for the internal physiological sources of individual
sensibility.
119. “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on
the ground without your Father. But the very hairs on your head are num-
bered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows,” The
Gospel according to St. Matthew 10.30, King James version.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

1. Quoted in Nicolson, Mountain Gloom, 319.

2. Macaulay, Pleasure, 100.
3. Goldstein, Ruins and Empire, 5.
4. Marcia Allentuck uses the term to mean the artistically and intentionally
unfi nished: “In Defense of an Unfi nished Tristram Shandy: Laurence Sterne
and the Non Finito,” in The Winged Skull, ed. Arthur H. Cash (Kent: Kent
State University Press, 1971), 147. See also Eric Rothstein, “‘Ideal Presence’
and the ‘Non Finito’ in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics,” Eighteenth-Cen-
tury Studies 9, 3 (1976): 308.
5. Cf. Rothstein, “Ideal Presence,” 309; Michael Fried, Absorption and Theat-
ricality.
6. “Pourquoi une belle esquisse nous plaît-elle plus qu’un beau tableau? C’est
qu’il y a plus de vie et moins de formes. A mesure qu’on introduit les formes,
la vie disparaît” (Denis Diderot, “Salon of 1767,” in Œuvres, XI. 245).
7. See also Hussey for the crucial importance of irregularity to the cult of the
picturesque, 211 ff.
8. Gilpin, Three Essays, 49–50.
9. Hussey, The Picturesque, 24.
10. In an 1804 letter quoted in Macauley, 192–93.
11. Diderot, “Salon of 1767,” in Œuvres, XI. 227. Famous literal examples include
Hubert Robert’s painting of the Louvre in ruins and William Chambers’ plans
for a mausoleum for the Prince of Wales. See Sophie Thomas, “Assembling His-
tory: Fragments and Ruins,” European Romantic Review 14, 2 (2003): 183.
12. Thomas Whately, Observations on Modern Gardening, Illustrated by
Descriptions (London: T. Payne and Son, 1777), 132.
13. Gilpin, Three Essays, I. 7–8.
14. Whately, Observations, 72, 131.
15. Whately, Observations, 134.
16. For a discussion of the “cult of the colossal” in France, see Hussey, 200.
17. With the notable exception of Erwin Panofsky’s article “Et in Arcadia Ego”
and a few intimations in Robert Rosenblum’s Transformations in Late
Eighteenth Century Art (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967),
112–115, cultural historians and literary critics have tended artificially to
 Notes 221
isolate one or the other of these aspects of ruins, thereby ignoring their inher-
ent multivalence. Goldstein claims that the eighteenth-century fascination
with ruins is due to “an undeniable mania for physical representations of
decay” (Goldstein, 3). I think, however, that this is inaccurate. Unlike the
later Romantic fascination with general decay and crumbling peasant-cot-
tages (which Jane Austen parodies so well through Marianne Dashwood),
the interest in ruins in the 1760s and 1770s was not an interest in decay an
sich, but rather was dependent upon this juxtaposition of the monumen-
tal and the ruined, which uniquely corresponded with ambivalent attitudes
towards authority.
18. “Many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many modern works
are fragments as soon as they are written” (August Wilhelm von Schlegel and
Friedrich von Schlegel, Athenaeum, eine Zeitschrift [Berlin: Bey F. Vieweg
dem Älteren, 1798], Fragment No. 24).
19. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the
Arcades Project (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1989), 212.
20. Cf. Elizabeth Wanning Harries, The Unfi nished Manner: Essays on the
Fragment in the Later Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press
of Virginia, 1994), 85. See also Thomas, Assembling History, for a descrip-
tion of “the ways in which ruins function more generally and reveal aspects
of the ruin’s necessarily constructed relationship to questions of history, and
its importance in the creation of the present” (181 ff.)
21. Jacques-François Blondel, Cours d’architecture, ou traité de la decoration,
distribution & construction des bâtiments; contenant les leçons données en
1750, & les années suivantes (Paris: Desaint, 1771–1777), 373.
22. Blondel, Cours, 411, 413, 418.
23. Claude Nicolas Ledoux, L’Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art,
des moeurs, et de la législation (Paris: Hermann, 1997), 11.
24. Ledoux, L’Architecture, 14.
25. G. L. Hersey, “Associationism and Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Archi-
tecture,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 4, 1 (1970): 75.
26. Quoted in Hersey, 75 and 89.
27. See Louise Pelletier “Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières’s Architecture of Expres-
sion, and the Theater of Desire at the End of the Ancien Régime; or the Anal-
ogy of Fiction with Architectural Innovation”, (Ph.D. diss., McGill School of
Architecture, 2000).
28. In Rousseau, too, we can fi nd the philosophical analogy to this specta-
torly and sympathetic interaction with ruins. Civilization, according to
Rousseau’s portrayal, is a ruin; it is always incomplete, unsettled, and
unsatisfactory because it is located—not temporally, but ontologically—
between the perfect satisfaction of “l’homme sauvage” and the utopian,
moral, rational society that we can imagine. One of the primary goals of
the Second Discourse is to awaken readers to the fundamental fragmen-
tation of their condition and to encourage us to envision the better state
accessible through our imagination. He draws our attention to our ruined
state, enlists our human perfectibilité, and invites us to complete the mon-
ument. Therefore, even though Rousseau’s emphasis is on the catastrophic
side of the story, the recognition of failure (just as with Smith and Hume)
is not the end, but instead a point of departure. It represents another of
sensibility’s compensatory successes that rely upon a more foundational
sense of failure.
29. Robert Lugar, Architectural Sketches for Cottages, Rural Dwellings, and Vil-
las, in the Grecian, Gothic, and Fancy Styles, with Plans, Suitable to Persons
of Genteel Life and Moderate Fortune (London: J. Taylor, 1805), 23.
222 Notes
30. William Gilpin, Observations on Several Parts of England, Particularly the
Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland, Relative Chiefly
to Picturesque Beauty, Made in the Year 1772 (London, 1808), 73, 74.
31. Edward Stephens, A Poem on the Park and Woods of the Right Hon. Allen
Lord Bathurst (Cirencester: printed for the author, 1748), 8–9.
32. Saint Preux uses this quotation from Marini in a letter describing Julie in
Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse.
33. Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, II. 510.
34. It is true that many of these verbs could apply to sculpture as well as architec-
ture (cf. Cleanth Brooks and “well-wrought” urns); however, as the Tower
of Babel illustrates and Locke suggests in his writings, language is more than
an artifact that we admire upon a shelf or in a display case. We inhabit lan-
guage, just as we imaginatively and temporarily inhabit the world which the
reader helps the novelist ‘build.’
35. For thorough discussion of the difficult and much debated question of which
techniques Goethe adopted from Sterne and which arose independently out
of a similar philosophy and aesthetic, see Wilhelm Robert Richard Pinger,
Laurence Sterne and Goethe, University of California Publications in Mod-
ern Philology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1920), X.1.
36. For a discussion of the semiotics of Werther’s clothing, see Daniel L. Purdy,
The Tyranny of Elegance: Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Goethe
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). My thanks to Eric Down-
ing for this suggestion.
37. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 3.20, my emphasis; Sterne, Journey, 134. This is not to
say that this treatment is absent in Tristram: the silently sentimental scenes with
uncle Toby work in much the same way as Journey. It is striking that precisely
those scenes were the ones in Tristram which received the most critical acclaim.
For this reason, Sterne’s later novel is more useful for the themes pursued here.
Journey became a symbol of the cult of sensibility, partly because Sterne self-
consciously tried to make it match the public taste for sentimentality.
38. My thanks to the late Saul Bellow for his insight on this issue. There is no
hint of such sentimentalism or nostalgia in Locke, unlike what John Sitter has
suggested in referring to Locke’s “nostalgia for things and ideas untouched
by words” (Sitter, 156). Sitter is applying a later nostalgic interpretation to
Locke’s conclusions. (See Nuttall, Chapter One, for a discussion of the dis-
crepancies between Locke’s view of his own work and later perspectives.) For
a perceptive analysis of the often exaggerated influence of Locke on Sterne,
see Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, 164–170.
39. Sterne, Journey, 217–218, my emphasis. Cf. also Laurence Sterne, The Ser-
mons of Mr. Yorick, II. 239–40: “Nature has assigned a different tone, look
of voice, and gesture, peculiar to every passion and affection we are subject
to . . . We are not angels, but men cloathed with bodies, and, in some mea-
sure, governed by our imaginations, that we have need of all these external
helps which nature has made the interpreters of our thoughts.”
40. Sterne, Journey, 159.
41. With the eventual over-codification of sensibility, they do, in effect, become
laws and bring themselves to an end.
42. Sterne, Journey, 205–6 and notes. This is the scene to which Austen alludes
in Mansfi eld Park, chapter 10, during the visit to Sotherton. Maria com-
plains: “But unluckily that iron gate, that ha-ha, give me a feeling of restraint
and hardship. ‘I cannot get out,’ as the starling said.” See Brodey, “Papas and
Hahas: Authority, Rebellion, and Landscape Gardening in Mansfield Park,”
Persuasions 17 (December 1995): 90–96, for further treatment of the role of
the ha-ha and reference to Sterne in this scene.
 Notes 223
43. This is parallel to the emphasis on potential energy in Lessing’s Laokoön.
Painting, Lessing writes, can transcend a given moment in time by imitating
bodies at their most “pregnant moment”: “aus welchem das Vorhergehende
und Folgende am begreifl ichsten wird” (G. E. Lessing, Laokoön, ed. Hugo
Blümner [Berlin: Weidmannsche, 1880], 251). See also Rothstein, “Ideal
Presence,” 317–18.
44. Sterne, Journey, 256.
45. For further discussion of Sterne’s use of dashes, see Wolfgang Iser, Laurence
Sterne: Tristram Shandy, (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1988), 61, and for Sterne’s punctuation in general, see R. B. Moss,
“Sterne’s Punctuation,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 15, 2 1981–1982):
179–200.
46. “The comic use of association, Lockean or otherwise, is usually taken as
Sterne’s chief way of attacking logic,” Frank Brady, “Tristram Shandy: Sexu-
ality, Morality, and Sensibility,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 4.1 (Autumn,
1970): 47. But the sentence structure also attacks logic and the hegemony of
unaided reason, just as it attacks Cartesian dualism.
47. Cf. Holtz, 63.
48. Quoted in Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure, 157.
49. Denis Diderot, Lettre sur les sourds et muets, in Œuvres, I. 369.
50. Even Addison admitted that “colors speak all languages, but words are
understood only by such a people or nation” (Addison, 159).
51. Yorick’s feelings dictate the pace, as well as content, of the novel. When he
fi rst meets LaFleur, Yorick sees him advance three steps: “from that single
trait, I knew his character as perfectly, and could rely on it as fi rmly, as if
he had served me with fidelity for seven years.” The movements of Yorick’s
heart, which determine all his actions, cannot be measured by the clock, any
more than his feelings could be expressed in conventional essay form. After
several chapters and at least two sentimental episodes, all of which take place
in Calais, “Lord!” Yorick exclaims, “hearing the town clock strike four,”
and recollects “that [he] had been little more than an hour in Calais—”
(Sterne, Journey, 193). Time can expand or shrink depending upon the affec-
tions of the heart; and while this in itself is not a new observation, Sterne
devises syntax and narrative structure that ensure the reader intimately fol-
lows the beating of Yorick’s heart.
On time and the rapidity of “sentimental commerce,” see Stout’s note,
91–92, on Sterne’s letter to Elizabeth Vesey (Letters, No. 76, June [?1761],
137–138). For a discussion of Sterne’s indebtedness to Locke’s analysis of
duration, see John Traugott, Tristram Shandy’s World: Sterne’s Philosophical
Rhetoric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954), 34ff. On Sterne’s
portayal of time, see also Jonathan Lamb, Sterne’s Fiction and the Double
Principle (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989),
and Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal
Form, 1660–1785 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
It may not be inappropriate to draw the analogy to the pocket watch,
which had just been appearing in the years before Sterne wrote Journey. The
pocket watch not only creates “private” time—a portable, personal author-
ity compared to the clock on the church tower in the town square—but it is
also worn on the chest. Its position, together with the ticking sound, make it
analogous to the heart. Yorick’s private pace is guided by the beating of his
own heart, and external time is irrelevant to his progress.
52. Note also that some points extend into the past or future, suggesting anti-
chronological narration; in the bottom left corner, there is also a reference to
Hogarth’s serpentine line of beauty.
224 Notes
53. Sterne, Journey, 80, my emphasis.
54. If there were straight segments in an analogous graph for Werther in his
eponymous novel, they would be the digressions that cruelly distract him
from the wanderings of his heart. Werther, too, is an author and has simi-
lar dual roles to Yorick, yet his letters do not attempt to form a sustained
narrative: his goal is authentic representation of a series of immediate
moments.
55. For Werther, in contrast, interruption forces a return to his authorial role—
and to his unwanted self-consciousness.
56. Sterne, Journey, 73.
57. Harries, Unfi nished Manner, 26–7.
58. Rousseau, First Discourse, III.8.
59. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, I.82, quoted in Van Sant, 60–62.
60. Sterne, Journey, 189.
61. Sterne, Journey, 168, my emphasis. We return in the next chapter to the
irony of Yorick’s last claim, considering he has just “swollen” his own page.
62. Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, 171.
63. Sterne, Journey, 171–2.
64. Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, 171.
65. See Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, 170–71, for an excellent description
of this effect in Tristram Shandy.
66. William V. Holtz, Image and Immortality; A Study of Tristram Shandy
(Providence: Brown University Press, 1970), 41–59.
67. It is interesting that just as the French gardener is presumed guilty of exces-
sive artificiality in gardening, the English philosopher is presumed guilty of
excess ratiocination in philosophy.
68. Sterne, Journey, 96–7.
69. Sterne, Journey, 107, 124, my emphasis.
70. The revised rules of rhetoric which accompany the moral aesthetic of sensi-
bility signify a recognition that speech is indispensable for public use as well
as that it is not only inherently flawed, but also inevitably abused. The late-
eighteenth-century linguists wish to discard nomenclature, syntax, and the
tyranny of explanation, while still expressing a longing for order, taxonomy,
and rules of rhetoric. As a result of these contradictory impulses, authors fre-
quently use the terms of the model they are replacing: Sterne and others make
reference to terms such as ‘the grammar of sentiment,’ ‘the syntax of feeling,’
or ‘the logic of feeling,’ suggesting that feeling, accent, tone, and gesture can
be systematized as well as words in a dictionary.
71. Sterne, Journey, 108, 102. It is constructive to compare this technique with
the opening of Tom Jones, for example, where names and descriptions of
each character precede their words and actions. For Fielding, names and
descriptions hamper identification neither of nor with the characters.
72. Sterne, Journey, 220–223.
73. Sterne, Journey, 115.
74. Cf. Holtz, 135–37.
75. Sterne, Journey, 270, 271.
76. This passage is in all likelihood a self-conscious echo of the Rousseauan
phrase “je sens, donc je suis.” See also Austen’s Love and Freindship where
a “sensible, well informed man” has “no soul” because he “had never read
the sorrows of Werter” (Austen, Minor Works, 93, my emphasis). Cf. also
Shaftesbury’s interpretation of the Delphic inscription: “Recognize yourself;
which was as much to say, divide yourself, or be two,” in Characteristics
(Basil, 1790), I.2.147. Self-knowledge, according to Shaftesbury, requires a
“self-examining practice and method of inward colloquy” (Characteristics,
 Notes 225
I.3.282). We see the same emphasis upon an internal conversation in Adam
Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.
77. For a somewhat different interpretation of the skull metaphor, see Lamb,
108.
78. “The failure of linguistic communication,” Iser writes, “is only a step
towards a new discovery: a semiotics of the body, which represents a fi nal
link between self and the world” (Iser, Laurence Sterne, 45).
79. Interestingly, Sterne employs a similar technique for exegesis in his sermons.
In Sermon XX on Luke 15 and the prodigal son, Sterne exemplifies the act
of sympathetic reading, emotively entering into the complaints of both father
and son, and drawing a visual tableau for his parishioners, down to specific
details of gestures and nerves: “——I see the picture of [the prodigal son’s]
departure:—the camels and asses loaden with his substance, detached on
one side of the piece, and already on their way:——the prodigal son standing
on the fore ground, with a forced sedateness, struggling against the fluttering
movement of joy, upon his deliverance from restraint:——the elder brother
holding his hand as if unwilling to let it go:——the father,——sad moment!
with a fi rm look . . .” Laurence Sterne, The Complete Works of Laurence
Sterne, ed. David Herbert (Edinburgh: William P. Nimmo, 1872), 312.
80. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (London: A. Millar,
1749), IV.64. Also cited in Holtz, 42–44.
81. Swift, Tale, 100.
82. See Martin C. Battestin, The Providence of Wit (Oxford: Clarendon Press
1974), 215–69, on the distinction between Swift and Sterne.
83. Richardson also inserted a musical score into the pages of Clarissa, to ensure
that the experience of the novel could be carried forth beyond its pages.
For an analysis of Richardson’s paratextual innovations, see Janine Barchas,
“The Engraved Score in Clarissa: An Intersection of Music, Narrative, and
Graphic Design,” Eighteenth-Century Life 20, 2 (1996): 1–20.
84. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress, 122.
85. Henry Mackenzie, Letters to Elizabeth Rose of Kilravock (Münster: Verlag
Aschendorff, 1967), 5 July 1769, 16.
86. In a letter of August 15, Werther shows that even poetic improvement will not
justify alteration of original expressions, suggesting that the moral consider-
ations of authenticity are ultimately of greater importance than the aesthetic,
tipping the scale irretrievably toward ruination. Society’s eternal search for
the “better word” or for grammatical or syntactic completion destroys the
immediacy of experience (Goethe, Werther, 61, 51).
87. Goethe, Werther, 18.
88. Goethe, Werther, 73.
89. Alexander Pope, “Eloisa to Abelard,” in Letters of Abelard and Heloise, to
Which is Prefi x’d a Particular Account of Their Lives, Amours, and Mis-
fortunes by the Late John Hughes, Esq. To Which Is Now First Added, the
Poem of Eloisa to Abelard by Mr Pope (London: W. Johnston, B. Law, T.
Lownds, and T. Caslon, 1765), 180.
90. Goethe, Werther, 19.
91. Goethe, Werther, 82.
92. Goethe, Werther, 38.
93. Goethe, Werther, 27.
94. Mackenzie, Man of Feeling, 96. This exemplifies Peter Brooks’ psychoana-
lytic reading of narrative, where it is at the moment of death that narrative
becomes transmissible: Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narra-
tive (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 28.
95. Goethe, Werther, 117.
226 Notes
96. Goethe, Werther, 83.
97. “What [others] feel, will, indeed, always be, in some respects, different from
what he feels, and compassion can never be exactly the same with original
sorrow; because the secret consciousness that the change of situations, from
which the sympathetic sentiment arises, is but imaginary, not only lowers it
in degree, but, in some measure, varies it in kind, and gives it a quite different
modification. These two sentiments, however, may, it is evident, have such a
correspondence with one another, as is sufficient for the harmony of society.
Though they will never be unisons, they may be concords, and this is all that
is wanted or required” (Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.I.36).
98. See Marshall, “Problem of the Picturesque,” 414.
99. Cox, “Stranger within Thee”, 45.
100. David Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot,
Rousseau, and Mary Shelley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988),
181.
101. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P.H.
Nidditch (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press,
[1739–40] 1978), 363.
102. Rousseau, Second Discourse, III.155.
103. Rousseau, Second Discourse, III.156.
104. Goethe, Werther, 38.
105. Goethe, Werther, 19.
106. Sterne, Journey, 92.
107. Goethe, Werther, 28.
108. Goethe, Werther, 55.
109. Goethe, Werther, 100.
110. For the defi nition of a monodrama, see Holmström, Monodrama, Attitudes,
Tableaux Vivants, 40–41. Rousseau invented the genre with his one-act play
Pygmalion, written in 1763, and fi rst performed in 1770. The monodrama,
as invented by Rousseau, is a combination of drama, musical score, recita-
tion, and pantomime. A “phrase musicale” introduces every “phrase par-
lée” to compensate for the failing of spoken language, and in moments of
extreme emotion, all words cease, and instead pantomime set to a musical
score ensues.
111. See comments by Keats and Hazlitt in Sterne: The Critical Heritage, ed.
Alan B. Howes (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974).
112. Sterne, Journey, 13.
113. Stephen Cox writes about the “education of [self-] consciousness” in read-
ers and authors of sensibility, who measure their own emotional responses
against an ideal. He gives the example of Burke, who “was proud that he
could pass the test of his own description of the suffering queen of France:
‘Tears came again into my Eyes almost as often as I looked at the description.
They may again’” (Stephen D. Cox, “The Stranger within Thee,” 68).
114. Sterne, Journey, 181.
115. Cf. Sterne, Journey, 207 n. 19–20; 181 n. 34–35.
116. Sterne, Journey, 167.
117. Sterne, Journey, 90, my emphasis.
118. Sterne, Journey, 147: “[T]hought and self-analysis,” as Todd writes, “are
dramatized and externalized” in Journey (Todd, 107).
119. Goethe, Werther, 77.
120. Goethe, Werther, 44, my emphasis.
121. Deirdre Vincent also fi nds similar importance in Werther’s growing aware-
ness of his inescapable, but impotent, rationality: “the confl ict is actually
intensified by his new clarity; this rational self asserts its existence and its
 Notes 227
helplessness here at one and the same time” (Werther’s Goethe and the Game
of Literary Creativity [Toronto; Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press,
1992], 155).
122. Diderot, Supplément, in Œuvres, II. 246–7.
123. Goethe, Werther, 87.
124. Goethe, Werther, 75, 10.
125. Goethe, Werther, 48.
126. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1972), 51.
127. Cf. Cox, “The Stranger within Thee,” 53–54.
128. Nicholas Boyle seems to be thinking of just such a distinction when he describes
the difference between the English and German forms of sentimentalism. He
claims that the English were primarily influenced by Locke and therefore
focused on “a philosophical concern with the knowledge our sensibility might
provide about things and minds other than ourselves” and subsequently cared
about its overt manifestations, social consequences, and social penalties, while
the Germans, in Leibnizian fashion, focused on a “philosophical concern with
the unity of the soul” and on the inner processes of sensibility which lead to
isolation and destruction (Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age [Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 1991], I.32).
129. Goethe, Werther, 76.
130. Shaftesbury, Characteristics (Basil, 1790), I.2.147, I.3.282.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

1. Patricia Meyer Spacks also relates the presence of fragmentation to a distrust

of centralized authority and provides explicit historical events that could
have stimulated or encouraged this distrust. The use of “fragmentary struc-
ture [ . . . ] reflect[s] a troubled and troubling social situation, thus enabling
the development of the sentimental novel” (Spacks, Novel Beginnings, 282–
283). Other abuses and abusers of authority in her account include Tory
landholders, the moneyed middle classes, the burst of the South Sea bubble,
the American colonies, and the British “natural” dominion over France.
These abuses are reflected in falsified and borrowed letters and documents in
the novels of sensibility (Spacks, Novel Beginnings, 147–151).
2. There is an interesting parallel in late-eighteenth-century landscape images:
lateral perspectives tended to replace the bird’s-eye view that had dominated
seventeenth-century depiction of landscape. Accordingly, landscapes too
are portrayed to deemphasize a hierarchical universe, replacing centralized
authority with greater importance on individuals’ subjective experiences,
just as novels make a shift from an impartial narrator’s objective view to
protagonists’ psychologically subjective views, shared more directly with
the reader.
3. Henry Mackenzie, Letters to Elizabeth Rose of Kilravock on Literature,
Events, and People 1768–1815, ed. Horst W. Drescher (Münster: Verlag
Aschendorff, 1967), 29.
4. The term authorship carries religious connotations that affect its later his-
tory. There was a tradition of referring to God as an author, such as in
Addison’s “Supreme Author of our being” (Essays in Criticism and Literary
Theory, ed. John Loftis [Northbrook, Illinois: A.H.M. Publishing, 1975]) or
in Hobbes’ Preface to Leviathan, where he describes his own authorship, as
well as a king’s authority over a state, as microcosms of God’s authorship of
the Book of Nature.
228 Notes
5. Uvedale Price, An Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime
and the Beautiful (London: J. Robson, 1796–8), I. 344–45.
6. Warton, An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (London, 1782): II,
165.
7. Richard Payne Knight, The Landscape: A Didactic Poem in Three Books
Addressed to Uvedale Price, Esqu., 2nd ed. (London, 1795), 48 n. (Also
quoted in Michasiw.)
8. Michasiw, “Nine Revisionist Theses,” 83. Michasiw’s concern is whether acci-
dent can be subsumed under rule, and therefore expected or anticipated by the
viewer. Or does accident always challenge the viewer’s ability to create a cohe-
sive whole? Does accident rely on viewers’ noticing its non-conformity?
9. Whately, Observations, 132. In this regard, Tintern Abbey is an especially
effective model for building follies, according to Whately: “if any parts are
entirely lost, they should be such as the imagination can easily supply from
those which are still remaining. Distinct traces of the building which is sup-
posed to have existed, are less liable to the suspicion of artifice, than an
unmeaning heap of confusion. Precision is always satisfactory; but in the
reality it is only agreeable; in the copy, it is essential to the imitation” (What-
ely, Observations, 134). Precision, a word so inimical to the anti-analytic
fervor associated with the culture of sensibility, is here invoked again to
ensure the highly artificial success of the natural, showing the paradoxical
stance or dual impulses involved in the building of follies.
10. In addition, Sterne tauntingly passes the responsibility for the bawdiness of
his jokes from himself to Yorick to the reader. The most famous technique
of such fragmentation is Sterne’s use of aposiopesis, such as the last lines of
Journey: “So that when I stretch’d out my hand, I caught hold of the Fille de
Chambre’s —END—” (Journey, 291).
11. This crucial issue of Sterne’s writing and the cult of sensibility in general
has received surprisingly little critical attention. The best treatment of this
subject is to be found in Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability (e.g. 171).
12. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 83.
13. Northrop Frye, in his pioneering article on “Sensibility,” identifies its empha-
sis on revealing the process of creation, rather than just the result, as its most
characteristic feature. This notion of “process” and participation applies
equally well to the picturesque landscapes.
14. For an illuminating contrast, see Austen’s Emma, where the fragmented,
unclear speeches of Mr. Elton characterize him as a hypocrite.
15. Sterne, Journey, 234–335.
16. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 3.31.
17. Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, 182.
18. Victor Lange, “The Metaphor of Silence,” in Goethe Revisited: A Collection
of Essays, ed. Elizabeth Wilkinson (London and New York: Calder, River-
run, 1984), 137.
19. Goethe, Werther, 15.
20. Rousseau, First Discourse, III.8.
21. Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility, 261.
22. Goethe, Werther, 75.
23. Goethe expresses a similar sentiment in a letter to Charlotte von Stein, dated
January 9, 1779: “Einen guten Morgen von Ihren stummen Nachbar. Das
Schweigen ist so schön dass ich wünschte es Jahre lang halten zu dürfen.” Like
Werther, Goethe here longs for the perpetuation of his state of mind and of
silence. Such passages (despite their epistolary context) suggest that emotional
authenticity is of greater importance than intimacy or communication.
24. Goethe, Werther, 92.
 Notes 229
25. Goethe, Werther, 9, 41, my emphasis.
26. Iser, Laurence Sterne, 56.
27. Sterne, Journey, 168, my emphasis.
28. Virginia Woolf, “Introduction,” in A Sentimental Journey through France
and Italy (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), xiv.
29. Spacks, Privacy, 83.
30. Mackenzie, Man of Feeling, 113.
31. Mackenzie, Man of Feeling, 115, my emphasis.
32. One could protest that it is not this overwhelming “grammophobia” that pre-
vents Harley from declaring his love to Miss Walton, but instead her superior
social status. I would argue, however, that these two points are inseparable:
since he believes in the superiority of natural aristocracy—or aristocracy of
feeling—it is not that he deems himself hopelessly unworthy, but rather that
in both cases, he fears that it is impossible for nature to win in the battle with
artifice and societal convention.
33. Mackenzie, Man of Feeling, 113.
34. Mackenzie, Man of Feeling, 69.
35. Mackenzie, Man of Feeling, 105.
36. Swift also uses two fictional narrative frames in Tale of a Tub (the “Hack’s”
and the “Editor’s”) to “explain” the omissions in the text: “Here is pretended
a defect in the manuscript; and this is very frequent with our author either
when he thinks he cannot say any thing worth reading, or when he has no
mind to enter on the subject, or when it is a matter of little moment; or per-
haps to amuse his reader (whereof he is frequently very fond) or lastly, with
some satirical intention.” Swift’s fictional authors openly draw attention to
and acknowledge the artifice involved in these pretended “Defects”—they
are not due to external, Hobbesian, unfeeling forces.
37. Samuel Richardson, The History of Charles Grandison (Oxford and New
York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 4.
38. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady (Harmond-
sworth, Middlesex, England: Viking and Penguin, 1985), 35–6.
39. For more on Richardson’s didactic use of paratexts, see Janine Barchas,
“Grandison’s Grandeur as Printed Book: A Look at the Eighteenth-Cen-
tury Novel’s Quest for Status,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 14, 3/4 (2002):
673–714.
40. “I intended to have arranged them alphabetically, till I found the stories of
Le Fever, the Monk, and Maria, would be too closely connected for the feel-
ing reader, and would wound the bosom of sensibility too deeply: I therefore
placed them at a proper distance from each other” (The Beauties of Sterne:
Including all his Pathetic Tales, and Most Distinguished Observations on
Life, Selected for the Heart of Sensibility [London, printed for T. Davies et
al, 1782], viii). This example is cited in Van Sant, 52.
41. Henry Mackenzie, Julia de Roubigné, a Tale in a Series of Letters (London:
W. Strahan, T. Cadell, 1777), II.v.
42. Mackenzie, Julia de Roubigné, II.vii.
43. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Confessions, in Œuvres Complètes, ed. Bernard
Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), I. 431.
44. Diana Ketcham, Le Désert De Retz: A Late Eighteenth-Century French
Folly Garden, the Artful Landscape of Monsieur De Monville (Cambridge
and London: MIT Press, 1994), 3–4.
45. Ketcham, Désert, 7.
46. Ketcham, Désert, 6–7. While the tower certainly bears suggestions of ancient
grandeur, and the ruins are magnificent enough to inspire the imagination
and feeling to complete the imaginary monument, Ketcham has argued that
230 Notes
Monville’s Column House reverses the usual role of the picturesque, not
enhancing the viewer’s sense of physical and intellectual power, but rather
forcing upon the viewer a sense of smallness, insignificance, and even terror.
47. See Rosenblum’s interesting discussion of the tabula rasa mentality of this
period, an ambivalent attitude towards authority that evinces itself in the
simultaneously constructive and destructive impulses of the French Revolution
(Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art, 146–91).
48. It is interesting in this regard that Goethe destroys the drafts of Die Wahlver-
wandtschaften in order to conceal the structure of the work.
49. Michael Riffaterre, Text Production (New York: Columbia University Press,
1983), 155–6.
50. Wayne C. Booth, “The Self-Conscious Narrator in Comic Fiction before
Tristram Shandy,” PMLA 67, 2 (1952): 164.
51. Friedrich von Schlegel, Athenaeum, Fragment No. 24.
52. Barbara Maria Stafford, “‘Illiterate Monuments’: The Ruin as Dialect or
Broken Classic,” The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual 1 (1987): 29.
53. While Fielding does not explicitly flaunt his authority quite as much as Thac-
keray with his analogy to puppets and their puppeteer, I agree with Patricia
Meyer Spacks’ assessment: “Fielding more explicitly than any of his con-
temporaries or immediate followers acknowledges fictional artifice, directly
asserting the author’s power as contriver and manipulator of events” (Imag-
ining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England
[Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1976], 6).
54. Mackenzie, Man of Feeling, 128.
55. While Werther complains about his inability to express the depth of his
feelings in words, he also alludes simultaneously to the constant complaint
Wilhelm and others make of him—namely, his exaggeration: “Ich werde,
wie gewöhnlich, schlecht erzählen, und du wirst mich, wie gewöhnlich,
denk’ ich, übertrieben fi nden” [I will, as usual, tell it poorly, and I think you
will, as usual, think I exaggerate]. The Ambassador, too, rebukes Werther
for his “allzugroße Empfi ndlichkeit” [excessive sensibility] (Werther, 18,
66). The irony is, of course, that while Werther is ruing the fact that all his
words sound too fl at, or fall so short of the actual emotions, others call it
exaggeration and claim that he already conveys unacceptably overblown
emotions. What is for Werther devastatingly little is already too much in
society’s eyes.
56. Mackenzie, Man of Feeling, 69, my emphasis.
57. Mackenzie, Man of Feeling, 5.
58. Mackenzie, Man of Feeling, 5, my emphasis.
59. See Edward Fowler for a discussion of a parallel phenomenon in the Japanese
novel: The Rhetoric of Confession: Shishôsetsu in Early Twentieth-Century
Japanese Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
60. See Horst Flaschka for an exhaustive study of these biographical parallels:
Goethes “Werther”: Werkkontextuelle Deskription und Analyse (München:
W. Fink, 1987).
61. The Sermons of Mr. Yorick was published in 1760. The name “Mr. Yorick”
also appears in the full title of A Sentimental Journey through France and
Italy by Mr. Yorick. See Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, 7ff. for a discus-
sion of Sterne’s use of his own letters and of autobiography in the novel. See
also Nagle, “Sterne and Shelley,” n. 36.
62. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethes Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe, ed.
Erich Trunz (München: C. H. Beck, 1989), IX.587.
63. See Vincent for a book-length study that attempts to untangle the differences
between versions one (1774) and two (1787).
 Notes 231
64. Tobin Siebers, “The Werther Effect: The Esthetics of Suicide,” Mosaic 26, 1
(1993): 20. It is well known that writing Werther had a purging effect upon
Goethe, as he admits in Dichtung und Wahrheit. What is less commonly
understood is that Goethe could write Werther out of his system without
writing Werther out of his system: that is, Werther contains within its struc-
ture an antidote to Werther’s excessive and ultimately suicidal sensibility.
It may be true, as Deirdre Vincent observes, that “Goethe used his literary
talent as a means to order his own inner world” (Werther’s Goethe and the
Game of Literary Creativity [Toronto; Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto
Press, 1992], 234). Order is certainly not absent from the pages of Werther.
Goethe uses the two narratorial perspectives of the novel—Werther’s and
the Herausgeber’s—to portray simultaneously the man of feeling’s emotion-
laden chaos and the man of words’ impoverished but practical control. As
a result, the message of Werther is implicitly even more mixed than it is in
Journey and exhibits what Boyle describes as Goethe’s “middle path between
the official and the marginal, between establishment and opposition” (Boyle,
Goethe, 39). Werther represents this same middle path between Albert and
Werther that Boyle fi nds more generally in Goethe’s writings.
In an editorial note, Ernst Trunz makes a similar distinction between
Werther’s self-consciously chaotic existence and the degree of order within
Werther: “Werther ist nur eine Seite von [dem jungen Goethe], und wenn
man genau hinsieht, fi ndet man auch im Werther-Roman den anderen Pol
mit angelegt, in der Art der Darstellung, im Bericht des Herausgebers und
nicht zuletzt in der harmonischen Gestalt Lottens, die, schön und seelen-
haft, in ihrer Begrenztheit eine Unendliche repräsentiert” (Werther, 571 n.
13).
65. Inger Sigrun Brodey, “Masculinity, Sensibility, and the ‘Man of Feeling’: the
Gendered Ethics of Goethe’s Werther,” Papers on Language and Literature
35, 2 (1999): 137.
66. Goethe, Werther, 41, 47.
67. Sterne, Journey, 209.
68. Lillian Furst also notices this trend in “The Man of Sensibility and the
Woman of Sense,” Jahrbuch-fur-Internationale-Germanistik 14, 1 (1982):
13–26, passim.
69. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 149 and 39. In his “Introduction”
(added later), which focuses on the concept of “Taste,” Burke qualifies this
idea: he states that Taste is based upon a combination of “sensibility” and
“judgment.” The want of sensibility leads to a want of taste, to indiscrimina-
tion, and the want of judgment leads to “wrong” or “bad taste.” The lack of
either faculty eventually leads to dullness and insensibility (Burke, Philosophi-
cal Enquiry, 23–24).
70. Gilpin fi rst invents the term “picturesque Beauty” to distinguish “objects
that were actually beautiful and also adapted for pictures” (Hussey, 13).
Unlike Knight, Gilpin never actually divorces the picturesque and the sub-
lime (Price, 259). The term “picturesque Sublime,” interestingly enough,
never becomes popular.
71. Uvedale Price writes: “[W]e no more scruple to call one of Handel’s cho-
russes sublime, than Corelli’s famous pastorale beautiful. But should any
person simply, or without qualifying expressions call a capricious movement
of Scarlatti or Haydn picturesque, he would with great reason, be laughed
at, for it is not a term applied to sounds; yet such a movement, from its sud-
den, unexpected, and abrupt transitions,—from a certain playful wildness of
character and appearance of irregularity, is no less analogous to similar scen-
ery in nature, than the concerto or the chorus, to what is grand or beautiful
232 Notes
to the eye” (“Essay on the Picturesque as compared with the Sublime and the
Beautiful” in Essays on the Picturesque [London, 1810], I. 45–46).
72. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 40.
73. See James T. Boulton’s introduction to Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry,
cviii.
74. In the same passage, Burke writes that “all verbal description, merely as
naked description, though never so exact, conveys so poor and insufficient
an idea of the thing described, that it could scarcely have the smallest effect,
if the speaker did not call in to his aid those modes of speech that mark a
strong and lively feeling in himself. Then, by the contagion of our passions,
we catch a fi re already kindled in another” (Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry,
175). Intonation and gesture communicate passions where words alone are
impotent.
75. Hunt speaks of the picturesque as a movement to process and tame the natu-
ral world by pictorializing it (Gardens and the Picturesque, 5). Stephanie
Ross also notices this characteristic in a book review of Hunt’s Gardens and
the Picturesque: “The physical world could be seen more pleasantly, occu-
pied and visited more safely, if it were thought of as a painting” (Journal of
Aesthetics and Criticism 52 [1994.2]: 250–252).
76. In Part II, Werther fl irts increasingly with the sublime, as we can see in his
love of Ossian’s wild and tragic fragments and his climbing the ragged cliff
before he dies. His suicide may be the ultimate submission to the sublime. Part
I and the structure of the novel as a whole, however, bear greater affi nity to
the picturesque—through the editing of the Herausgeber, we remain at a safe
distance from Werther’s wildness. In his later Die Wahlverwandtschaften
[Elective Affi nities], published in 1809, Goethe again plays with the same
theme of the picturesque which politely and delicately, but also dangerously,
attempts to frame nature’s wildness.
Barbara Stafford makes the point that during this period, even the por-
trayal of fossils and volcanoes was done in the picturesque mode; she implies
that this mode of representation constrains its subjects “to speak a ratio-
nal or geometrical language.” That is, violent, mysterious, and wild natural
occurrences were presented in an orderly and ‘picture-perfect’ manner. The
aspect of picturesque representation which she does not mention is that the
picturesque (like sensibility) also strives to conceal the very order it imposes
through, for example, its strict avoidance of straight lines and right angles
(Stafford, “Illiterate Monuments,” 26).
77. In Austen’s Mansfi eld Park (published 1814), a ha-ha plays a very important
symbolic role in the “Wilderness” scene where Fanny sits by the ha-ha and
watches Maria, Julia, and Henry squeeze through and hop over it, while Mr.
Rushworth is running to get the keys. It is an interesting scene, in that each
character reveals his or her attitude towards authority, convention, and pro-
priety by his or her responses to the ha-ha—and therefore to society’s hidden
constraints—the realm of virtue, rather than legality. Maria also compares
herself to Sterne’s caged starling. (See Brodey, “Papas and Hahas.”)
78. Even Longbourn, in Pride and Prejudice, has a hermitage.
79. “Nicht weniger ist die Köhlerhütte in einem dichten Pappelwald eine artige
Erfi ndung, denen äußeres Ansehen das Auge täuscht, und deren Inneres mit
einem feinen Kabinetchen überrascht, das eine sehr ausgesuchte Bibliothek
der Frau Reichsgräfi nn von Hohenheim enthält . . . ; sie lehnt sich an den
Stamm einer großen, aber abgestorbenen hohlen Eiche, worin sich Kamin
und Rauchloch befi nden” [No less is the hut of a charcoal maker in a dense
poplar wood a charming invention, whose exterior appearance deceives the
eye and whose interior surprises us with a fi ne little chamber that contains
 Notes 233
the Duchess of Hohenheim’s highly exceptional library . . . ; the hut leans
on the trunk of a great but dead, hollow oak, which contains a fi replace and
chimney]. See C. C. L. Hirschfield, Theorie Der Gartenkunst (Leipzig: M.G.
Weidmann, 1779–85), V: 351–352.
80. Jonathan Lamb identifies what he calls the “Shandean Sublime” in Sterne’s
writings (especially Tristram Shandy); this is Lamb’s way of describing the
paradox of purposeful fragmentation or how a “story can be written digres-
sively and progressively at the same time” (Lamb, 23). Lamb, however, does
not carry his own theory far enough, for it would carry him past the Shan-
dean Sublime, to the “Sternean picturesque”: by its nature, his question
involves the multiple narrative frames, including the implied author as well
as the narrator. Lamb notices what I have called Sterne’s “rhetoric of ruins”
except that he does not see that Sterne’s ruins are really fake ruins, involving
the masking of the author-builder’s creative role. In so doing, Lamb mis-
places the later Kantian sublime at the cost of ignoring Gilpin’s and Price’s
responses to Burke’s sublime. To do so is to miss a crucial part of Sterne’s
irony and humor. Lamb’s book is, however, useful for his treatment of epis-
temological questions and their relation to literary structure.
81. Marshall, “Problem of the Picturesque,” 419.
82. For an excellent book-length treatment of the Claude glass and additional
paraphernalia of the picturesque, see Arnaud Maillet, The Claude Glass:
Use and Meaning of the Black Mirror in Western Art, translated by Jeff
Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2004). See also Andrews, The Search for the
Picturesque, 68; Barrell, The Idea of Landscape, 23; Hunt, Gardens and the
Picturesque, 171; and Bermingham, Learning to Draw, 87, 101–103.
83. William Gilpin, Remarks on Forest Scenery, and Other Woodland Views,
Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty (London: R. Blamire, 1791), II: 225.
84. In his seminal work on the Claude Glass, Arnaud Maillet tells also of the
eighteenth-century desire to mediate natural lighting to protect the health
and comfort of the viewers: “the rawness of natural light constituted . . . an
anti-aesthetic effect, disagreeable to the very organ of sight, sometimes cruel
to the point of engendering ocular maladies. This led to the constant rec-
ommendation to contemplate the landscape at twilight” (Maillet, 139). See
also Alan Liu’s notion of “arrested desire” in Liu, Wordsworth, the Sense of
History, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 60–61; and Raimonda
Modiano’s response in The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Land-
scape and Aesthetics since 1770 ed. Stephen Copely and Peter Garside (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 197 n. 3.
85. Combe and Rowlandson also frequently represent the powers and dangers
of nature that the picturesque never completely manages to tame. Since the
picturesque represents a controlled view from afar of nature’s wildness,
Rowlandson’s images frequently show Doctor Syntax and Doctor Prosody
involved in “accidents” of nature: nearly drowned by a wave, knocked off
a horse, falling off precipices, etc. Artists engaged in the domestication of
wildness for the sake of the picturesque experience nature at such a distance
that they are surprised by its inconveniences and dangers. Rowlandson sug-
gests that under a very thin guise, nature is ready to reassert herself.
86. The waning of the picturesque occurred when viewers, reacting to standards
of ‘authenticity,’ became overly conscious of the discrepancy between the
picture frame and nature. For example, the picturesque fascination with fake
ruins had come to an end when Sir Edward Turner would say, “Come and
deplore the ruin of my ruin” (quoted in Macaulay, 31–32). While the pictur-
esque claims to control and compose nature and halt time, the decay of the
fake ruins reveals this to be false. The fake ruins were more fragile than real
234 Notes
decaying monuments, and susceptible to time in a way that the genuine prod-
uct is not. The picturesque movement could tolerate an unusual degree of
disguise. Hersey gives a passage from 1835, after the movement had waned,
to show this change: “A barn disguised as a church would afford satisfaction
only to those who considered it as a trick. The beauty of truth is so essential
to every other kind of beauty, that it can neither be dispensed with in art nor
in morals” (Hersey, 85).
87. Using Shaftesbury’s aestheticization of virtue as a cornerstone of its moral
aesthetic, the culture of sensibility establishes the equation of feeling, taste,
and virtue. Because of this intimate connection between art and ethics, little
distinction is made between artist and moral agent.
88. Hussey, The Picturesque, 4.
89. Sterne, Journey, 14–15 and notes.
90. Sterne, Journey, 115.
91. Sterne, Journey, 119.
92. Rousseau, Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, II. 234.
93. Sterne, Journey, 208.
94. Hunt, The Picturesque Garden, 176.
95. Hirschfield, Theorie Der Gartenkunst, I: 186.
96. James Courtney Federle, “Authenticities: Bodies, Gardens and Pedagogies
in Late-Eighteenth Century Germany,” (diss., University of California at
Berkeley, 1991), 128.
97. Hirschfield, Theorie, I. 191–94.
98. Federle, 112.
99. Hirschfield, Theorie, V. 350, my emphasis.
100. Quoted in Todd, Sensibility, 91–92.
101. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italienische Reise, ed. Herbert von Einem
(München: C. Wegner, 1978), 151.
102. This movement is related to the growing cult of “genius” as well, for it was
only the rare individual who was capable of such aesthetic appreciation. We
can fi nd this tone in Werther’s expression of the uniqueness of his fate: “Man-
chmal sag’ ich mir: Dein Schicksal ist einzig; preise die übrigen glücklich—so
ist noch keiner gequält worden.—Dann lese ich einen Dichter der Vorzeit,
und es ist mir, als säh’ ich in mein eignes Herz. Ich habe so viel auszustehen!
Ach, sind denn Menschen vor mir schon so elend gewesen?” [Sometimes I
say to myself: Your fate is singular; count the rest lucky—no other has yet
been tortured like this.–Then I read a poet of the past, and it seems to me
as though I were looking into my own heart. I have so much to endure! Oh,
have people before me ever been so wretched?] (Goethe, Werther, 88).
Goethe, too, in a letter to Sophie von La Roche, portrays himself as a rare
man of feeling (i.e. genius): “You complain of solitude! . . . Alas that is the
fate of the noblest souls to sigh in vain for a mirror of themselves” (quoted in
Boyle, 135). Isolation is not the moral failing for Goethe and Mackenzie that
it is for Sterne and later Austen: rather it is a symptom of the unappreciated
genius who is too good for his surroundings.
103. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality.
104. Michasiw, “Nine Revisionist Theses,” 85–86.
105. Interesting in this regard is Williams’ article on the use of illustrations within
the sentimental novel of the 1780s and ‘90s (by authors such as William
Sadler, Charles Dodd, and Courtney Melmouth). Williams identifies tab-
leaux in these novels that signify “frozen pathos” (465); her thesis is that tab-
leaux “serve to undercut the sense of privacy, of immediacy, and so inscribe
contradiction as one of the very foundations of this genre” (465). Engravings
of pathetic scenes within the novels: “represent the most important and most
 Notes 235
pathetic moment in the story, they are referred to and deferred to within
the narrative” (466). Such tableaux “constituted of description rather than
narration, work further to garment the story’s narrative and to interrupt the
plotline” (468). In other words, the illustrations further sensibility’s dual
impulses by simultaneously decreasing and increasing readers’ intimacy and
sympathy with the suffering characters. They can also function as imbedded
critiques—authors’ warnings about their own protagonists (e.g. Goethe’s
warnings about Werther; Mackenzie’s about Harley; or the narrator of Ann
Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho warning about the sensibility that is the
dominant trait of the female protagonist).
106. Cf. Ann Radcliffe’s initial description of the heroine of Udolpho: “uncom-
mon delicacy of mind, warm affections, and ready benevolence; but with
these was observable a degree of susceptibility too exquisite to admit of last-
ing peace. As she advanced in youth this sensibility gave her a pensive tone
to her spirits and a softness to her manner, which added grace to beauty
and rendered her a very interesting object to persons of a congenial disposi-
tion” (The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Jacqueline Howard [London: Penguin,
2001], 8–9, my emphasis).
107. Sterne, Letters from Yorick to Eliza (Altenburgh: printed for Richter, 1776),
131–2, my emphasis.
108. Mackenzie, Man of Feeling, 128.
109. Monthly Review XLIV (May 1771): 418.
110. Lady Louisa Stuart’s writings reflect the trajectory of sensibility toward cult-
ish and laughable extremes, as she monitors her own reactions to readings of
The Man of Feeling: at the age of 14, she worried about not crying enough
when reading its “Exquisite” and pathetic scenes. In 1826, audiences laugh
at the same scenes: “What was exquisite becomes comical . . .” (Selections
from her Manuscripts [Edinburgh: David Douglass, 1899], 235–36).
111. Andrew Erskine, Letters between the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and
James Boswell, Esq. (London: Samuel Chandler, 1763), 58.
112. James Boswell, Boswell’s London Journal 1762–1763, ed. Frederick A. Pot-
tle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950), 182.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

1. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.i.2.2–4.

2. Other authors at the time also warn of the deleterious effect of the novels of
sensibility, in that they cultivate a sensitivity to suffering without the ability
to act. Barbauld warns that “at length the mind grows absolutely callous”
(“An Inquiry into those Kinds of Distress which Excite Agreeable Sensa-
tions,” The Works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld (London: Longma, Hurst, et
al., 1825)” II. 225). This problem of course intensifies when the ability to
perceive suffering is predicated on the inability to speak or act in an effective
manner. In this regard, Harkin makes an interesting argument that sensi-
bility’s fragmented speech combined with its emphasis on sympathy is an
indicator of a broader sense of political helplessness (Harkin, 30–37).
3. Goethe, Werther, 74. The Herausgeber, too, writes of Werther’s “wunder-
bare[-] Empfi ndung, Denkart und . . . end- lose[-] Leidenschaft” [wonderful
sensibility, way of thought, and infi nite passion], Werther, 98.
4. One might remember in this regard, Samuel Johnson’s parody of the Shaft-
esburian stoics in The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abbissinia (Edin-
burgh: William Creech, 1789), 117: “When [the philosopher] had spoken,
he looked round him with a placid air, and enjoyed the consciousness of his
236 Notes
own beneficence.” As Donald Green writes regarding this passage, “Shaft-
esbury does indeed argue that one of the rewards of virtuous behavior is
the pleasant awareness of your own superior virtue, such as the Pharisee in
the Gospels enjoyed” (The Politics of Samuel Johnson [New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1960], 114).
5. Sterne, Journey, 277.
6. Price, Essay on the Picturesque and Sublime, I:76. See Mackenzie’s descrip-
tion of the “old soldier,” as picturesque as his setting because of his age and
weariness: “He was one of those figures which Salvator would have drawn;
nor was the surrounding scenery unlike the wildness of that painter’s back-
grounds. The banks on each side were covered with fantastic shrub-wood.
[ . . . ] A rock, with some gangling wild flowers, jutted 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. [ . . . ] His face had the
marks of manly comeliness impaired by time; his forehead was not alto-
gether bald, but its hairs might have been numbered; while a few white locks
behind crossed the brown of his neck with a contrast the most venerable to a
mind like Harley’s” (Mackenzie, Man of Feeling, 85).
7. It is an open question as to whether these authors are opponents of sensibility
or rather simply make aspects of sensibility explicit that are inherent in the
culture and its literature.
8. Van Sant, 60–82.
9. Miss Williams was an icon of sensibility and a poet in her own right.
In the 1780s, she was known for her rural and simple upbringing, her
“modesty and candour” (European Magazine 1786): see for example her
well-known poem “Sensibility,” published in 1786, one year before Word-
sworth’s poem: “In Sensibility’s lov’d praise/ I tune my trembling reed;/
And seek to deck her shrine with bays,/ On which my heart must bleed!”
(lines 1– 4). There is perhaps one additional level depending on whether
one views telling a tale as separate in time, substance, or personage from
the initial event.
10. Burke, Letter to Philip Francis, Esquire (1790). See also Stephen Cox’s
treatment of this feature of Burke’s writing. In Sentimental Journey, Sterne
makes the solipsism of this dynamic explicit, as Yorick bursts into tears over
his own imaginings of the sufferings of a prisoner in the Bastille: “I burst
into tears—I could not sustain the picture of confi nement which my fancy
had drawn” (Sterne, Journey, 204).
11. Worthy readers are even included within the novels as models. In The Liberal
American (1785), the female protagonist narrates the following scene: “The
book I had been reading lay by my side. He took it up, and opened it where
I had marked down the page. It was wet with tears. He regarded me with a
look of inquiry, then pressing the page to his lips, he exclaimed: ‘Gracious
heaven! What enchanting sensibility!’” Real readers, such as Lady Louisa
Stuart, for example, worried that she would not cry enough when reading
The Man of Feeling—enough, that is, “to gain the proper credit of proper
sensibility.”
12. Austen, “Jack and Alice,” in Minor Works, 20–23.
13. “When in common language we say a miserable object, we mean an object
of distress which, if we relieve, we turn away from at the same time. To
make pity pleasing, the object of it must not in any view be disagreeable to
the imagination. How admirably has the author of Clarissa managed this
point!” (Anna Laetitia Barbauld, “An Inquiry,” II. 223.
14. Austen, “Love and Freindship,” in Minor Works, 100–101, my emphasis.
15. Austen, “Love and Freindship,” in Minor Works, 93.
 Notes 237
16. Austen, “Love and Freindship,” in Minor Works, 105–6.
17. We find the same Shaftesburian sentiments parodied in Sanditon, Austen’s
last, unfinished novel, and spoken by Sir Edward Denham, who represents the
‘man of feeling’ turned hypocritical aesthete: “[Although] the Coruscations
of Talent, elicited by impassioned feeling in the breast of Man, are perhaps
incompatible with some of the prosaic Decencies of Life,” Sir Edward insists
that “it were Hyper-criticism, it were Pseudo-philosophy to expect from the
soul of high toned Genius, the grovellings of a common mind.—” (Austen,
Sanditon, in Minor Works, 398). Decency, in Sir Edward’s inflated vocabu-
lary, is common, prosaic, and altogether unsuitable for the man of genius.
18. Patricia Meyer Spacks has an excellent treatment of “The Problem of the
Interesting” republished in Boredom: A Literary History of a State of
Mind (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 113–125.
Although she treats some of the aspects of the interesting mentioned here,
she does not address the broader ethical concerns or the question of the erotic
admixture so significant for Laurence Sterne.
19. Austen, “Jack and Alice,” in Minor Works, 24–25.
20. William Gilpin, Observations . . . on the Mountains and Lakes of Cumber-
land and Westmoreland (London, 1786), II. 122–23.
21. Austen, “A History of England from the Reign of Henry the 4th to the Death
of Charles the 1st, By a Partial, Prejudiced, and Ignorant Historian,” in Minor
Works, 142. A passage from Anna Laetitia Aikin[Barbauld]’s memoirs of visit-
ing a monastery reduced to a piteous site also reveals the delight in ruination
fueled by dislike of the Roman Catholic church: “These mossy stones and scat-
tered reliques of the vast edifice, like the large bones and gigantic armour of a
once formidable ruffian, produce emotions of mingled dread and exultation.
Farewell, ye once venerated seats! Enough of you remains, and may it always
remain, to remind us from what we have escaped, and make posterity for ever
thankful for this fairer age of liberty and light” (J. and A.L. Aikin, Miscella-
neous Pieces in Prose, 63–5; quoted in Maurice Levy, “Les ruines dans l’art et
l’écriture: esthétique et idéologie,” Bulletin de la Societé d’Études Anglo-Amer-
icaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe Siècles 13 [1981]: 152).
22. In Van Sant’s terms, the desire for mutual transparency and a glass chest to
see the contents of the human heart perversely becomes the desire to open a
woman’s chest and see (or actually hold) her beating heart, as we see in Cla-
rissa. Lovelace begins by wishing to “unlock” the secrets of Clarissa’s heart,
and the verb choices become more violent and intrusive until the end of the
novel, when he actually has a surgeon standing by to extract her heart from
her dead body for his own possession (Van Sant, 81).
23. Spacks, Imagining a Self, 57.
24. Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 127; see also Paul Hunter, Before
Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New
York: W.W. Norton, 1990).
25. Spacks, Imagining a Self, 58–61.
26. Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, 129.
27. Heydt-Stevenson uses the picturesque to inform Austen’s gender in a way
that is analogous with Claudia Johnson’s Equivocal Beings: the picturesque,
according to Heydt-Stevenson, allows Austen to mediate gender between
the extremes of the masculine sublime and feminine beautiful, as posited by
Burke (“Liberty, Connection, and Tyranny,” 261–79).
28. Van Sant, 113–115.
29. Pierre Carlet de Marivaux, La Vie de Marianne, ou, Les aventures de Madame
la comtesse de *** (Paris: Garnier, 1966 [1745]), 49.
238 Notes
30. Aurora Wolfgang, Gender and Voice in the French Novel, 1730–1782 (Wilt-
shire and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004), 1–2.
31. Wolfgang, Gender and Voice, 18.
32. Marivaux, La Vie de Marianne, 7.
33. Marivaux, La Vie de Marianne, 7.
34. Marivaux, La Vie de Marianne, 5.
35. Julie Choi, “Feminine Authority? Common Sense and the Question of Voice
in the Novel,” New Literary History 27, 4 (1996): 641–62.
36. In John Bender’s terms, Austen negotiates between the “fantasy of omni-
scient authority,” or retaining a powerful central authoritative perspective,
on the one hand, and presenting the individual subjectivities of the charac-
ters on the other, but she does so invisibly, using the guise of free indirect
discourse (Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind
in Eighteenth-Century England [Chicago and London: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1987], 165, 177–180). In this way Austen negotiates between the
claims of authenticity and authority.
37. Barbara M. Benedict, “Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility: The Politics of
Point of View,” Philological Quarterly 69.4 (1990):One of the main differ-
ences is that, while she too claims a dual impulse among novelists of sensibil-
ity (sentimental novelists), her focus is on imbedded tales within volumes of
“literary miscellanies” and their intended pedagogical effects, rather than the
narrative techniques in question here, such as the multiple frames of fictional
editors. Pedagogical effect, for example, is for Benedict almost exclusively the
realm of conventional morality, rather than something that sensibility co-opts
for its own purposes.
38. Benedict, “Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility” 455.
39. Marsha Warren, “Time, Space, and Semiotic Discourse in the Feminization/
Disintegration of Quentin Compson,” The Faulkner Journal 4, 102 (1988-
1989): 99–111.
40. Patrick Brady, “From Feminism to Chaos Theory,” Discontinuity and Frag-
mentation, ed. Henry Freeman (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 108.
41. Benedict, “Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility,” 468.
42. Jan Fergus argues that Sense and Sensibility was fi rst written in an epistolary
format, then substantially revised, and fi nally became Austen’s fi rst book
accepted for publication. (Pride and Prejudice had been submitted earlier,
but was not published until after Sense and Sensibility, by “the author of
Sense and Sensibility.”) Jan Fergus, Jane Austen: a Literary Life (Basing-
stoke: Macmillan, 1991), 74.
43. Austen explicitly parodies sensibility and the picturesque in her juvenilia, as
well as in her major novels, most of which, one must remember, were fi rst
written in the eighteenth century. Sense and Sensibility (started sometime
before 1797, published in 1811), Pride and Prejudice (original version writ-
ten in 1796–1797, published in 1813), Northanger Abbey (mostly written in
1798–99, published posthumously), and Sanditon (written in her last years,
published posthumously with Northanger Abbey in 1817) have been repeat-
edly misunderstood because her affi nities with sensibility have either been
ignored, or her rejection of the movement taken more literally than her work
warrants. Many elements of her novelistic world probably stem from her
youthful acquaintance with the moral and cultural aesthetic of sensibility.
These aspects include: an emphasis on an (initially) isolated individual, the
importance of inner feelings, the difficulty of self-representation, a mistrust
of public discourse, the importance of feeling for virtue, an emphasis on
vision as a vehicle for imaginative sympathy, and the preference for ordinary
and domestic experience.
 Notes 239
The most important work to date on Austen’s connection with sensibility
or ‘novels of sentiment’ has been done by Marilyn Butler, Claudia John-
son, A. Walton Litz, and John Mullan: Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and
the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); Claudia L. Johnson,
Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Woll-
stonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1995); A. Walton Litz, Jane Austen, a Study of her Artistic
Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965); and John Mul-
lan, Sentiment and Sociability: the Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth
Century (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press,
1988). On Austen’s attitudes regarding authority, especially the authority
associated with authorship, see Rachel Brownstein, “Irony and Authority,”
in Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice: Jane Austen ed. Robert
Clark (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), 180–192; Deborah Kaplan, “Achiev-
ing Authority in Austen,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 37, 4 (1983): 531–51;
Tara Ghoshal Wallace, Jane Austen and Narrative Authority (New York:
Macmillan Press; St. Martin’s Press, 1995); and William Galperin, The His-
torical Austen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005).
44. There have been a few treatments of Austen’s relation to the picturesque. The
most seminal have been: Martin Price, “The Picturesque Moment,” in From
Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle ed. Fred-
erick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York: Norton, 1965), and Forms of
Life: Character and Moral Imagination in the Novel (New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1983), 65–89; and Alistair M. Duckworth, The Improvement of the
Estate: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1971), 35–80. The most important for this study are essays by Jillian
Heydt-Stevenson that focus on issues of tourism and economy, such as “Liberty,
Connection, and Tyranny: The Novels of Jane Austen and the Aesthetic Move-
ment of the Picturesque,” in Lessons in Romanticism, ed. Thomas Pfau and
Robert Gleckner (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 261–79; an unpub-
lished dissertation by Roberta Blackley Hannay, which draws connections
between the picturesque and moral education (“Jane Austen and the Picturesque
Movement: The Revision of the English Landscape”); David Marshall’s insight-
ful treatment of representation in “Problem of the Picturesque”; and Mavis
Batey’s broad and engaging overview of the picturesque in Jane Austen and the
English Landscape (London and Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1996). Batey
illustrates Austen’s specific familiarity with real follies, wildernesses, ha-has,
hermitages, and historical landscape gardeners and theorists. More recently,
William Galperin applies the picturesque aesthetic to Austen’s Sense and Sen-
sibility in The Historical Austen, 44–81: Galperin argues, as do I, that the pic-
turesque affects Austen’s modes of representation, and he offers one of the best
treatments to date of Austen’s ethical scruples regarding the picturesque.
45. Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman
by William Godwin (London, 1798), 114–15.
46. We have no direct evidence that Austen read the English editions of Werter
(sic), so popular during her day (most likely the 1780 version by Peter Graves
or the 1789 version by J. Gifford); however, her allusions to the novel show a
distinct familiarity with the plot. This could have been acquired a number of
ways, since print-shops, too, were full of images of Werther and Lotte. The
following passage from Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline (for which I am grate-
ful to Albrecht Strauss) is an example of a reference to Werther’s popularity
that Austen most surely read. An offensive young woman is said to be “drest
in the character of Charlotte in the Sorrows of Werter,” and speaking of her
and her equally objectionable sister, the narrator declares, “Their air and
240 Notes
manner were adapted, as they believed, to the figures of those characters
as they appear in the print shops; and their excessive affectation, together
with the gaudy appearance of their mama, nearly conquered the gravity of
Emmeline and of many in the company” (Emmeline: Orphan of the Castle
[London: Oxford University Press, 1971], 506–7).
The only other studies, to my knowledge, that draw connections between
Werther and Marianne are my “The Adventures of a Female Werther: Aus-
ten’s Revision of Sensibility,” Philosophy and Literature 23, 1 (1999):110–
126, and Lionel Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1972).
47. Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility in The Novels of Jane Austen, ed. R. W.
Chapman (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1932), 83, 104.
48. Goethe dramatizes this principle in the ending tableau of Werther. The Her-
ausgeber reports that in his death scene, Werther carefully creates a tableau
that functions as an epitaph, the contents of his room carefully arranged to
indicate his priorities and philosophy of life. One such detail, the open copy
of Lessing’s play Emilia Galotti (1772), further attests to the extreme lengths
to which this principle of the authenticity of the arrested moment can lead.
In Emilia Galotti, the chaste eponymous heroine asks her father to kill her,
to give rest to her teeming emotions and to preserve her virtue, rather than to
let her live and potentially be seduced: “Eine Rose gebrochen, ehe der Sturm
sie entblättert” [a rose, broken before the storm deprives her of her petals].
49. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 88, my emphasis.
50. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 92.
51. Sterne in a letter to John Eustace (February, 1768).
52. Austen, Sense and Sensibility,7.
53. Goethe, Werther, 38, my emphasis.
54. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 345.
55. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 97.
56. Mackenzie, Man of Feeling, 128.
57. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 189–90, my emphasis. It is interesting to
compare this attachment to misery with the treatment of a similar theme in
Persuasion. In the fi nal scene where Wentworth writes the proposal letter
to Anne, Anne and Captain Harville engage in a verbal competition as to
whether men or women suffer most and grieve longer. The difference is that
substantial loss is at stake and has actually occurred—a sister’s death in his
case, eight years of loneliness in hers—and also that neither one disdains
rescue or relief from this grief. It is the sense of real loss and grief that leads
critics to refer to Persuasion as “autumnal” and which also underscores the
dying Austen’s critique of feigned ruination and misery.
58. Cf. “Elinor saw, with concern, the excess of her sister’s sensibility; but by Mrs.
Dashwood it was valued and cherished. They encouraged each other now in the
violence of their affliction. The agony of grief which overpowered them at first,
was voluntarily renewed, was sought for, was created again and again. They
gave themselves up wholly to their sorrow, seeking increase of wretchedness in
every reflection that could afford it, and resolved against ever admitting conso-
lation in future. Elinor, too, was deeply afflicted; but still she could struggle, she
could exert herself. She could consult with her brother, could receive her sister-
in-law on her arrival, and treat her with proper attention; and could strive to
rouse her mother to similar exertion, and encourage her to similar forbearance”
(Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 7).
59. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 97.
60. Cf. Tave, Some Words of Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1973), 90–91.
 Notes 241
61. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 186. Cf. a scene from Mary Wollstonecraft’s
novel Mary, where Henry, the dying man of feeling, and his beloved Mary
compete for the most misery: “‘I have myself,’ said he, mournfully, ‘shaken
hands with happiness, and am dead to the world; I wait patiently for my
dissolution; but, for thee, Mary, there may be many bright days in store.’
‘Impossible,’ replied she, in a peevish tone, as if he had insulted her by the
supposition; her feelings were so much in unison with his, that she was in
love with misery’” (Mary, a Fiction [London: J. Johnson, 1788], 91, my
emphasis).
62. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 185. Marianne attests later on to her own self-
ruination and the “negligence of [her] own health”: “Had I died, it would
have been self-destruction” (Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 345).
63. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 204.
64. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 204. It is true that Colonel Brandon’s task—to
vilify another man—is a difficult one; however, to respond to such a declara-
tion is also difficult. The contrast between their styles is therefore, I would
maintain, significant.
65. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 289.
66. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 95.
67. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 359–60.
68. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 5. In the following pages, they are remark-
ably adept at abusing the sense of the promise which John gave his father on
his deathbed. In the successive stages of their conversation, the John Dash-
woods convince themselves with profuse self-congratulation, and dexterous
manipulation of words, that they really have satisfied the promise John made
his father on his deathbed to do “everything in his power to make [his sur-
viving family] comfortable.” Their mutual observations of their excessive
generosity to Elinor, Marianne, and their mother gradually substitute them-
selves for any real gifts of money, to the point where the actual gift shrinks
from an initially intended one-time gift of £3000, to £1500, to £100 per
year, to an occasional £50, to nothing at all: in a stunning reversal, Mrs.
John Dashwood audaciously concludes, “They will be much more able to
give you something” (8–13, my emphasis; parts of the following discussion
were taken from my “Dangerous Words and Silent Lovers” in Persuasions 12
(1990): 134–38.
69. Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, 33; of interest in this regard is Mary
Ann O’Farrell’s Telling Complexions: The Nineteenth-Century Novel and
the Blush (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). O’Farrell traces the use of
blushes in Austen and her successors to indicate physical and emotional truths,
as well as the limitations of these visual signs as indicators of characters’ inner
worlds.
70. Brodey, “Dangerous Words,” 136–37.
71. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 169.
72. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 305.
73. Austen’s philosophy seems close to Adam Smith’s on this point: Smith claims
that communication is not necessary for sympathy, but rather, imaginative
sympathy is necessary for communication (Smith, Theory of Moral Senti-
ments, 337).
74. Austen was certainly aware that this distinction might also be abused. Mr.
Collins, for example, feigns inarticulacy to heighten his rhetorical effect:
“Words were insufficient for the elevation of his feelings; and he was obliged
to walk about the room” (Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 216).
75. This also raises the issue of Marianne as an Ophelia character. For an excellent
discussion of Ophelia figures in the eighteenth century, see Mary Floyd-Wilson,
242 Notes
“Ophelia and Femininity in the Eighteenth Century: ‘Dangerous Conjectures
in ill-breeding minds,’” Women’s Studies 21 (1992): 397–409.
76. Angela Leighton, “Sense and Silences,” in Jane Austen: New Perspectives,
ed. Janet Todd (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1983), 132–33.
77. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 87–8.
78. Austen, Northanger Abbey, 7.
79. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic; Claudia L. Johnson, Jane
Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1988); Marvin Mudrick, Jane Austen; Irony as Defense and Discovery
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952); Gene W. Ruoff, Jane Austen’s
Sense and Sensibility (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992); Clara Tuite, Roman-
tic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002). Examples of the more conservative interpretations
include Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Claren-
don Press,1987 [1975]); Alistair M. Duckworth, The Improvement of the
Estate; a Study of Jane Austen’s Novels (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity Press, 1971); A. Walton Litz, Jane Austen, a Study of her Artistic
Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965); and Jane Nardin,
Those Elegant Decorums: The Concept of Propriety in Jane Austen’s Nov-
els (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1973).
80. Leighton, “Sense and Silences,” 138.
81. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 344.
82. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 349.
83. Cf. Aarsleff’s explanation of Destutt de Tracy’s term: “In so far as words
communicate adequately, they do so only because they are submitted to a con-
stant process of ‘rectification’ in the social intercourse of speech” (Aarsleff,
From Locke to Saussure, 375–76). See also Rothstein on “modification” in
Systems of Order and Inquiry in Later Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1975), 20ff.
84. Jan Fergus in Jane Austen and the Didactic Novel (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and
Noble, 1983), 51.
85. Stuart Tave makes the point that Marianne’s alteration is not only an inte-
gral part of Elinor’s triumph, but also relieves her of her heaviest burden.
Marianne, Tave claims, is not, in contrast to what many contemporary
critics claim, “the girl of strong feeling whose sensibility (resisting the
novelist’s intention) makes her the true heroine of the novel” (Tave, Some
Words of Jane Austen, 96). Building on Austen’s audience’s knowledge of
the inheritance and dynamic of the novel of sensibility, Tave shows instead
how both structurally and thematically, Marianne’s story clearly fits within
Elinor’s. He claims that Sense and Sensibility’s fl aw is not Marianne, but
instead Edward (Some Words, 78). Emma Thompson’s screenplay of Sense
and Sensibility addresses this issue by adding several scenes that enable
Edward to display his charm, allowing the viewer to sympathize with
Elinor’s love. The fi lm, however, also domesticates Marianne to the point
that the dramatic effect described in this section is entirely absent. The
fi lm version of Marianne is even able to laugh at herself—unthinkable in
the novel.
86. Leighton, “Sense and Silences,” 132–3.
87. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 178, 305–6.
88. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 17, 168, 172, 175.
89. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 197 and 307.
90. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 234.
91. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 86, 177. Interestingly, “lavendar [sic] water”
was a common eighteenth-century treatment for sun-burned skin, which
becomes significant in relation to Marianne’s association with fi re.
 Notes 243
92. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 181. It is tempting to argue that the metaphor
of the screen is especially appropriate given that historically, fi replace screens
served the purpose of protecting ladies’ wax-based makeup from melting in
the direct heat. In that sense, Elinor’s screens would serve similar ‘face-sav-
ing’ purposes; however, the screens in Sense and Sensibility are for camou-
flaging the empty fi replaces in summer. It may still be that this is an even
more affective parody of the heatless fi re within Marianne.
93. Jan Fergus’ suggestion that the earliest forms of Sense and Sensibility were
epistolary only emphasizes my point (Literary Life, 74).
94. See description of the Pemberley estate in note 117 below.
95. Remember that Werther’s mother feeds him, others protect him, and another
tells his story. See Furst, “Man of Sensibility,” on this topic.
96. Marshall and Litz have each suggested hidden thematic (but not struc-
tural) emphases on the picturesque in Mansfi eld Park and Pride and Prej-
udice: David Marshall, “True Acting and the Language of Real Feeling:
Mansfi eld Park,” Yale Journal of Criticism 3, 1 (1989) 88; A. Walton
Litz, “The Picturesque in Pride and Prejudice,” Persuasions 1 (1979) 13,
15, 20–24.
97. Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility, 273.
98. In an interesting passage, Smith shows that a sense of injustice is “planted
in the human breast” to the extent that everyone wants criminals to be cap-
tured and perhaps even put to death; however, then he says that as soon as
the prisoner no longer threatens us, when he is behind bars, we begin to
sympathize with him—we wish him well and do not want him to die. In
other words, justice naturally transforms itself into benevolence when we
can “afford” it (Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 86 ff.).
99. Benedict, “Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility,” 453; Austen has reached a
better solution to this problem of sympathy for the character carrying the
burden of authority by the time she writes Persuasion.
100. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 358.
101. Elinor’s silences are also not all similarly motivated, nor are they always sim-
ilarly manifested. Elinor silences herself in two principal ways: not speak-
ing and speaking otherwise than she feels. Not speaking is retreating into
a private world in the midst of others, while speaking otherwise than she
feels exhibits a public engagement. In addition, there is a lack of respect that
also can induce her silence: “Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he
deserved the compliment of rational opposition” (Austen, Sense and Sensi-
bility, 252).
102. Benedict, “Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility,” 457.
103. Norman Page, The Language of Jane Austen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1972), 97–98.
104. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 311–2.
105. Page also notices that the “formal patterning has by no means disappeared”
(Page, 98). This is important for the point below about Elinor’s picturesque
“framing” of Marianne.
106. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 360.
107. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 355: “Mrs. Dashwood [ . . . ] now found
that she had erred in relying on Elinor’s representation of herself; and justly
concluded that everything had been expressly softened at the time, to spare
her from an increase of unhappiness, suffering as she then had suffered for
Marianne. She found that she had been misled by the careful, the consid-
erate attention of her daughter, to think the attachment, which once she
had so well understood, much slighter in reality than she had been wont to
believe, or than it was now proved to be. She feared that under this persua-
sion she had been unjust, inattentive—nay, almost unkind, to her Elinor:—
244 Notes
that Marianne’s affl iction, because more acknowledged, more immediately
before her, had too much engrossed her tenderness, and led her away to
forget that in Elinor she might have a daughter suffering almost as much,
certainly with less self-provocation, and greater fortitude.”
108. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 355–6.
109. “It was a large, handsome stone building, standing well on rising ground, and
backed by a ridge of high woody hills; and in front a stream of some natural
importance was swelled into greater, but without any artificial appearance.
Its banks were neither formal nor falsely adorned. Elizabeth was delighted.
She had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural
beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste” (Austen, Pride
and Prejudice, 245).
110. Herbert Josephs, Diderot’s Dialogue of language and gesture: Le neveu de
Rameau (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1969), 50.
111. Aaron Hill, The Art of Acting, Part I (London: J. Osborn, 1746), iv. Hill
dedicates his work to Lord Chesterfield, and in admiration of Pamela. This
is discussed in Marcia Allentuck’s “Narration and Illustration: The Problem
of Richardson’s Pamela,” Philological Quarterly 51 (1972): 886.
112. Theater is treated elsewhere at length in an excellent work by David Mar-
shall, The Figure of Theater. See also Spacks, Privacy: Concealing the Eigh-
teenth-Century Self (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
2003), 55–86, on the “performance of sensibility.”
113. Sterne, Sentimental Journey, 57.
114. Rousseau, First Discourse, III.8.
115. Todd, Sensibility, 120.
116. Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Fiction, 78.
117. Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, Part II, Containing the Loves of the
Plants, a Poem (Lichfield: J.Jackson, 1789), II.25, lines 247–252.
118. Henry Brooke, Fool of Quality, 5 vols. (London; W. Johnston), II.ix, 100–
101, 120–21 (cited in Ellis 225, n 47, 48).
119. Kristen Gram Hayley, Life of George Romney (Chichester: Mason, 1809),
119.
120. Lady Hamilton’s attitudes were even published in a series of twelve. See Wil-
liam Holström, Monodrama, Attitudes, Tableau Vivants, 122–125.
121. Thomas Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution (London, 1796), 127.
122. Austen, “Frederic and Elfrida,” in Minor Works, 9.
123. Oxford English Dictionary Online, Oxford University Press, 2005.
124. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 6, my emphasis.
125. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 42.
126. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 42.
127. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 47. Cf. Love and Freindship: “She was all sen-
sibility and Feeling. We flew into each others arms & after having exchanged
vows of mutual Friendship for the rest of our Lives, instantly unfolded to each
other the most inward Secrets of our Hearts—” (Austen, Minor Works, 85).
128. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 325.
129. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 43: “His person and air were equal to what
her fancy had ever drawn for the hero of a favourite story; and in his carry-
ing her into the house with so little previous formality, there was a rapidity
of thought which particularly recommended the action to her. Every circum-
stance belonging to him was interesting. His name was good, his residence
was in their favourite village, and she soon found out that of all manly dresses
a shooting-jacket was the most becoming. Her imagination was busy, her
reflections were pleasant, and the pain of a sprained ankle was disregarded.”
130. This observation applies equally well to sensibility and the Gothic.
 Notes 245
131. Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 336.
132. Austen, Northanger Abbey, 197.
133. Austen, Persuasion, 232–235.
134. Persuasion, BBC/Sony: Television/theatrical release. (104 min.). Dir. Roger
Michell; screenplay by Nick Dear; produced by Fiona Finlay and George
Faber, 1995.
135. Austen, Persuasion, 234 and 238.
136. One can see this in Mansfi eld Park, for example, where Austen purposely
juxtaposes a vivacious, witty, attractive character with her much less prepos-
sessing heroine. Readers are challenged, along with Edmund, to prefer the
good to the interesting—or rather, to learn to fi nd Fanny Price more interest-
ing and affecting than Mary Crawford, despite the latter’s picturesque quali-
ties. One of the arguable shortcomings of Sense and Sensibility emerges from
a similar didactic purpose. Debates about whether Elinor or Marianne is the
heroine (or whether this novel has one or two heroines) stem from Austen’s
desire to chasten readerly responses to sensibility, while being unwilling to
give up on sensibility itself.

NOTES TO THE AFTERWORD

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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tury England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
Wolfgang, Aurora. Gender and Voice in the French Novel, 1730–1782. Wiltshire
and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Cave of Fancy. In Posthumous Works, ed. William
Godwin. London: 1798.
. Mary, a Fiction. London: Printed for J. Johnson, St. Paul’s Church Yard,
1788.
. The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria; A Fragment: to which is added the First
Book of a Series of Lessons for Children. In Posthumous Works, ed. William
Godwin. London: 1798.
Woolf, Virginia. Introduction to A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy
by Mr. Yorick, by Laurence Sterne, ed. Virginia Woolf. London: 1928.
Wordsworth, William. “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.” In
The Poetical Works, 2: 150–4. London: Edward Moxon, 1850.
Young, Edward. Conjectures on Original Composition in a letter to the author of
Charles Grandison. London: A. Millar and J. Dodsley, 1759.
Index

Note: Page numbers in boldface indicate illustrations.

A architecture, xviii, 9–10, 32, 142;

Aarsleff, Hans, 49, 50, 218n. 76 deconstructive, 199–200, 246n.
Abrams, M. H., 6 14; expressiveness, 67–70, 73,
accident, 107–9, 116, 126, 161, 228n. 75, 131; imitation of and by
8 nature, 42–3; influence on lan-
acting, 7, 21, 60; Marianne Dash- guage, 80; Palladian, 69, 73, 79,
wood’s, 174–5, 193–4; natural 200. See also follies; ruin
feeling conveyed by, 45, 62, 65, Armstrong, Nancy, 161
75, 183; spectators as actors, art of accident, 107–9, 116, 126, 161,
146, 183, 186–7; Willoughby’s, 228n. 8
191–2. See also Clairon, Mlle.; artifice, 6, 27, 32, 41, 47, 123; Austen’s
Garrick, David; Hamilton, Lady redemption of, 182; in garden-
Emma Hart; theatricality ing, 41–5; language as, 18, 54,
Adam (Biblical character), 26, 46, 54; 82–3, 88, 94, 111; needed to
Adamic tradition of language, simulate authenticity, 45, 65, 97,
49–50, 57, 89, 216n. 65, 217n. 108–9, 136, 145, 246–7n. 15.
69; sensibility’s new Adam, 16, See also authenticity; masking of
27, 34, 38, 64, 72 authority
Addison, Joseph, 30, 39, 49, 66, 69, Ashwell, Rachel, 202
166, 181 asterisks, 21, 80, 92, 120, 122, 150
Aikin, John, 39 audience: authorial control of, xvi-xvii,
Alps, 19, 20, 59, 156; Alpine travel, 27, 107, 109–10, 112, 121, 141,
35, 141, 142; as ruins, 25, 27. 144–5; authorial distrust of, xvii,
See also mountains 8, 64, 109–10, 152; freedom of,
American Revolution, 16–7, 22, 39 xvii, 63, 64, 107, 110. See also
anti-narrative, 52, 72–3, 131, 164–5, model audience; participation of
199; Austen’s use of, 168, 178, audience
181; impulses, 81, 84–6, 94–5, Austen, Henry, 176
104–6, 116–7, 121–3; tech- Austen, Jane, 9, 18, 21, 162, 166–7,
niques, 6, 8, 72–3, 80, 83, 92–4. 183, 198; authorship, 163–4,
See also narrative 193–5; Bridget, 158, 176, 190,
aposiopesis, 48, 228n. 10 204; Marianne Dashwood, 14,
architects, 21, 76, 110; as archaeolo- 105, 188, 196, 241–2n. 75;
gists, 21, 117, 128, 139, 246n. parodying sensibility, 99, 157–8,
14; compared with authors of 160–1, 166; sympathy, 152,
sensibility, xvi-xvii, 7–8, 68, 72, 154, 187–8, 196; Emma, 174,
117, 128, 135–6 194; “Frederic and Elfrida,”
262 Index
152, 187; History of England, Baridon, Michel, 206n. 7, 213n. 24,
160; “Jack and Alice,” 157–8, 215n. 43
166; Love and Freindship, 99, Barker-Benfield, J.G., xvii, xviii, 4, 161
153, 158, 160, 166, 246–7n. baroque gardens. See French baroque
15; Mansfield Park, 191, 222n. gardens
42, 232n. 77, 245n. 136; Barthes, Roland, 27
Northanger Abbey, 194, 195, Battestin, Martin, 6
238–9n. 43; Persuasion, 174, Beattie, James, 219n. 103
194–6, 240n. 57, 243n. 99; Beethoven, Ludwig van, 207n. 15
Pride and Prejudice, 142, 182, Bender, John, 238n. 36
195, 232n. 78, 238–9n. 43; Benedict, Barbara, xvii, xx, 164–5, 167,
Sanditon, 237n. 17, 238n–9. 43; 180
Sense and Sensibility, 13, 99, Benjamin, Walter, 72
158, 167–82, 190–4, 238n. 42, Bernardin de St. Pierre, Jacques-Henri,
238–9n. 43, 241n. 62, 241n. 68, 5, 18
242n. 85, 243n. 92, 243n. 101, Betz (landscape garden), 32
245n. 136 Blair, Hugh, 57, 60, 219n. 103
authenticity, xvi, 11, 69, 103, 187; false Blondel, Jacques-François, 73, 74, 75
historical, 14, 32, 69, 145, 151, blushes, 113, 184, 241n. 69
203, 246n. 14; inauthenticity of body, 74–5, 162, 268; as basis of emo-
authority, xvii, 6, 13, 52, 82, 94; tion and virtue, 1, 14–5, 16,
of feeling, 18, 56, 67, 183, 228n. 182, 184; physical responses of,
23; of language, 95, 112, 123, 133–4, 154–5, 156, 162; semiot-
163; pursuit of, 27, 103, 114–6, ics of, 63, 87, 88, 91, 183, 225n.
120, 170, 204; supported by 78. See also blushes; eyes; heart;
artifice, 62, 65, 109, 117, 125, nervous system; sensorium;
135–6; threatened by conven- sighs; sight; tears
tion, 13, 17, 81, 94, 97, 114, Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus, 59
169, 209n. 37 Boswell, James, 151
authority, xv-xvii, 230n. 53, 232n. 77; Bougainville, Louis Antoine de, 17, 102
ambivalence toward, xvi, 7, 21, Boyd, Elizabeth, 161
123, 126–8, 135, 168, 220–1n. Boyle, Nicholas, 227n. 128
17; Biblical, 20, 25–6, 46, 53, Bredvold, Louis, xvii, 4
108; centralized, 11, 34, 107, Brissenden, R. F., xvii, 102
116, 227n. 1, 227n. 2, 238n. 36; Brooke, Charlotte, 5
of the passions, 48, 60, 217n. Brooke, Henry, 5, 184
69; reason’s loss of, 2, 49, 50, Brown, Lancelot “Capability,” 9, 10,
64, 133; shift from external to 34, 67, 110
internal, 2, 13, 27, 41–2, 108, Brown, Marshall, xx
208n. 25. See also authorship; Buck-Morss, Susan, 72
masking of authority Burke, Edmund, xvii, 7, 15, 39, 68,
authorship, xv, 111–6, 168; democratic 133–5, 157, 180, 226n. 113,
approach to, 21, 64, 107–9, 152, 232n. 74; on taste, 231n. 69
173, 195; God’s, 9, 108, 212n. Burnet, Thomas, 23–24, 29, 37
4, 227n. 4; of landscape, 9. See Burney, Frances, 162
also audience; authority; mask- Butler, Joseph (bishop of Durham),
ing of authority 208n. 25
Butler, Marilyn, xx, 166, 177
B
Babel. See Tower of Babel C
Bach, C. P. E., 4 Cervantes, Miguel de, 86, 205–6n. 2;
Bander, Elaine, 76 Don Quixote, 90
Barbauld, Anna Laetitia (née Aikin), Chambers, Sir William, 9, 43, 44, 220n.
235n. 2, 236n. 13, 237n. 21 11
 Index 263
Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon, 186 Diderot, Denis, 100, 147, 151, 186; on
Chatterton, Thomas, 139 human nature, 10, 18, 102–3,
chromaticism, 7, 25 174; on incompletion, 66–7, 94,
Clairon, Mlle. (Léris de La Tude, Claire- 115; on language, 51–2, 54, 56,
Josèphe-Hippolyte), 219n. 105 82–3; on ruins, 28, 69. See also
classicism, 15, 42, 186; architecture, Encyclopédie
73–6, 74, 145; conception of distance, 96, 128, 131, 141, 166, 167,
reason, 11, 27, 54; imitation 174; aesthetic quality of the
ruins, 76, 78, 119, 123–4, 145; picturesque, 68, 136; require-
language, 128, 217n. 66, 219n. ment for delight, 134, 180; “safe
103; ruins, 30–32, 66, 142, 146, distance” characteristic of pic-
213n. 24. See also neoclassicism turesque viewing, 136, 138, 146,
Claude glass, 138, 233n. 84 160, 232n. 76, 233n. 85
Cohen, Ralph, 49 distress. See suffering
Cole, Thomas, 28 Duckworth, Alistair, 177
Column House, 123–125, 126, 127, Dyer, John, 28
201, 229–30n. 46
Combe, William, 138–41, 140, 233n. E
85. See also Rowlandson, earthquakes, 22, 29
Thomas Eden. See garden of Eden
comédie larmoyante, 5, 13 editors, fictional, xx, 6, 21, 107, 129,
common sense, 211n. 52 147, 152, 171; Austen’s, 152,
Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 13, 18, 175, 179–81; Goethe’s, 118,
50–2, 56, 75, 81–3, 177 128, 130–1, 150, 180, 231n.
Conger, Syndy, 4 64, 232n. 76; Mackenzie’s,
Constable, John, 206n. 9 119–20, 122, 129–30, 151, 152;
Cook, Captain James, 17 Marivaux’s, 162–3; Richard-
Coop Himmelblau, 200 son’s, 120–1; Sheridan’s, 121–2;
Corelli, Arcangelo, 134, 231–2n. 71 Swift’s, 229n. 36. See also
Cowper, William, 28, 170 frames
Cox, Stephen, xvii, 98 Eisenman, Peter, 246n. 14
Crane, R.S., xvii ellipses, 80, 95, 112
Cromwell, Oliver, 160–1 Ellis, Markman, xvii, xviii, xx
curiosity, xix, 153–4, 160, 173 Ellison, Julie, 4
emblematic gardens, 42–3, 144, 146
D Empfindsamer Stil, 4
Darwin, Erasmus, 184 Empfindsamkeit, 4, 112
dashes, 21, 80, 83, 92, 95, 120, 172, enclosure acts, 39, 41
181. See also aposiopesis Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné
decomposition, 51–2, 56, 83–4 des sciences, des arts et des
deconstruction, 199–200, 246n. 14 métiers, 1, 50
Defoe, Daniel, 5 English gardens, xvi, 7–10, 38–45,
Deist shift, 12, 59–60, 64 44, 157, 186–8, 199; art of
delight, 134, 180 accident, 107–9; forerunner of
Derrida, Jacques, 199, 218n. 88 amusement parks, 188, 189,
Descartes, René, 129 190; hermits in, 137, 197–8;
Désert de Retz (landscape garden), 43, innovations of, 34; picturesque
44, 123–4, 132, 187, 201. See style, 141–6, 143; ruins in,
also Column House 67–8; status symbol of sensibil-
detachment, 136, 167, 174, 178, 181, ity, 76; style emulated in Europe,
182, 203, 208n. 30. See also nar- 22, 23, 30, 32, 123
rative: detachment Enlightenment, xvi, xx, 4; methods
Dézallier d’Argenville, Antoine-Joseph, used by sensibility, 29, 48, 57,
135 59, 63; rationalism, 11, 14–5,
264 Index
19, 48, 152, 167. See also man frames, 27, 59, 200; discovery as, 8, 21,
of letters 117, 126, 128; framing nature’s
Enright, D. J., xix, xx wildness, 23, 30, 134, 232n. 76;
epistolary novel, 80, 92, 120–2, 157, in painting, 71, 147–9; narrative,
162, 164–7, 238n. 42 8, 48, 86, 117–23, 128–36, 156,
Ermenonville (landscape garden), 32 161–9, 178–81, 229n. 36; pic-
eroticism, xx, 16, 91, 111, 154, 159, turesque, 133–8, 169, 233–4n.
181; architectural, 73; eroticiza- 86. See also editors, fictional
tion of suffering, 157 Franz. See Leopold III Friedrich Franz,
Erskine, Andrew, 151 Fürst von Anhalt-Dessau
eyes, 146, 150, 173, 178; “picturesque free indirect discourse, 163–4, 167,
eye,” 139, 142, 219n. 115; 238n. 36
speech of, 47, 61, 88, 119, 186; French baroque gardens, 10, 34, 39,
testimony of, 174, 182. See also 40–43, 82, 109, 224n. 67
sight French Revolution, 15, 16–7, 20, 22,
25, 39, 230n. 47
F Fried, Michael, 147
fabriques. See follies Früh Romantik, 4
Fergus, Jan, 238n. 42 Frye, Northrop, 4, 92
Fielding, Henry, 91, 108, 129, 166,
230n. 53 G
fire, 178–9, 242n. 91, 243n. 92 gaps, 19, 90, 96, 110, 128, 131;
follies, 32–33, 145, 197, 199, 213n. between sign and meaning, 50,
26, 213–4n. 28; architecture 55, 63, 64, 67, 81; filled by
of, 76, 77, 78, 79; compared to reader, 6, 86, 106, 150, 173–4,
novel of sensibility, xvi-xvii, 8, 175, 187; requiring imagination
80, 94, 107, 131–2, 135, 176; and sympathy to fill, 86, 99,
fragmented narrative, 70, 72, 105–6, 150, 174, 175; textual, 6,
109–10, 117, 228n. 9; parodied, 88, 92, 112, 121–2, 129–30. See
139–140; rhetoric of ruin, 19, also incompletion
21, 86. See also Column House; garden of Eden, 24, 35, 36, 41, 144;
ruin model for gardens, 34; reinter-
Foucault, Michel, 6 preted, 25, 27, 53–4, 55
fragmentation, 7–8, 21, 33, 65–8, 199– gardens. See emblematic gardens;
200, 203, 227n. 1; aesthetic of, English gardens; French baroque
xvii, 27–8, 80, 168; as feminiza- gardens; landscape garden-
tion, 163, 164, 165; Austen’s use ers; landscape gardening; Betz;
of, 167–8, 173–7, 181; geologi- Désert de Retz; Ermenonville;
cal, 23–5, 29; Goethe’s use of, Hampton Court; Hartwell
81, 95, 104–6, 111, 116, 126; House; Hohenheim Park; Kew
in art, 67; in landscape gardens, Gardens; Méréville; Parc de la
9, 27, 30; in novel of sensibility, Villette; Rambouillet; Ruin-
6, 48, 80, 87, 94–6, 116–23, enberg; Sanssouci Park; Shug-
126–30; inviting reader par- borough Park; Tsarskoe Selo;
ticipation, 75, 83, 86, 106, 109, Versailles; Volksgarten; Wimpole
111, 151; multivalence, 72, 105, Park; Wörlitz Park
110, 128, 176; of ruins, 30–2, Garrick, David, 60, 186
70–2, 109–10, 125; of speech, Geertz, Clifford, xix
18–9, 57, 81, 112, 128, 235n. gender, xv, 161–7, 180, 182, 184, 195,
2; Sterne’s use of, 81, 83–4, 86, 237n. 27; feminized male hero
91–2, 105, 111–3, 126. See also of sensibility, xix, 17, 165; in
incompletion architecture, 73
Fragonard, Jean-Honoré, 28, 139 Genesis, 12, 22, 23, 134, 204; lan-
Frail, Robert, 5 guage, 45, 49, 55–7, 64, 80;
 Index 265
reinterpreted, 20, 25–7, 29, Green, Donald, 235–6n. 4
33–4, 45–6, 65, 90, 107–8; Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, 186, 206n. 9
Rousseau’s interpretation, 46, Grimm, Melchior, 147
52–3, 212n. 4 Gubar, Susan, 176–7
Gibbon, Edward, 30
Gilbert, Sandra, 176–7 H
Gillray, James: Tales of Wonder, ha-ha, 135–6, 222n. 42, 232n. 77
192–193 Hagstrum, Jean, xvii
Gilpin, William, 37, 38, 139, 150, 169, Hamilton, Lady Emma Hart (born Amy
206n. 9; author of travel guides, Lyon), 60, 185, 186, 244n. 120
141, 142; influence on Austen, 9, Hampton Court, 39–40, 143
21, 176; on ruins, 66, 69, 76–7, Handel, George Frideric, 134, 231–2n.
160; on viewing nature, 68, 138; 71
theorist of the picturesque, 10, Harding, D. W., 177
34–8, 136, 231n. 70 Hardwicke, Philip Yorke, first earl of,
God, 23–4, 57, 61, 64–5, 124, 154, 32
220n. 118; author of “Book Harkin, Maureen, 235n. 2
of Nature,” 9, 108, 227n. 4; Harries, Elizabeth, 72, 92
authority figure, 26–7, 31, 45–6, Hartwell House, 42–43
49; corruption and ruin caused Haydn, Joseph, 4, 134, 206n. 9, 207n.
by, 53–4, 212n. 4; place in gar- 15, 231–2n. 71
den design, 34, 38, 40 Hayley, William, 186
Godwin, William, 168 Hazard, Paul, 182
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 5, 10, Hazlitt, William, 100
21, 25, 108, 123, 149–51, 209n. Hearne, Thomas, 147, 148
37; influenced by Sterne, 63, heart, 61, 80, 87, 88, 100, 113, 145,
80–1; on limitations of language, 237n. 22; Harley’s, 47, 108,
46–8; pedagogy of seeing, 141; 119, 120, 129; language of, 48,
picturesque structure, 232n. 57, 60, 110; reader’s, 150, 151,
76; Sturm und Drang move- 152; Werther’s, 96, 102–5, 154,
ment, 5; Tischbein portrait, 31, 224n. 54; Yorick’s, 63, 82, 83,
146; Werther, xvii, 17–8, 80, 85, 86, 223 n. 51
144, 154, 203, 204, 224n. 54; Heinse, Wilhelm, 5
Werther as model for Marianne Henry VIII (king of England), 160–1
Dashwood, 168–72, 174–6, Herculaneum, 22, 28
178–80, 192; Werther’s exag- Herder, Johann Gottfried, 18, 83, 91,
geration, 129, 230n. 55; writing 105, 173; influence on folklore
of Werther, 132, 231n. 64; Die movement, 14; on origins of
Leiden des jungen Werthers, language, xvii, 25, 27, 55–6, 67,
13, 94–106, 111–8, 120, 121, 219n. 103
126–33, 158, 239–40n. 46 hermitages, 123, 136–137, 145,
Goldsmith, Oliver, 28 197–198, 232n. 78
Gothic, xvi, 144; architecture, 31–33, hermits, 21, 197–198, 245n. 4
66, 145, 213n. 24; literature, 5, Herries, John, 57, 219n. 103
192–3 Hill, Aaron, 182–3
grammar: books, xviii, 49–50; sen- Hirschfeld, C. C. L., 76–78, 136, 137,
sibility’s rejection of, 54, 56, 143–5, 152, 187
79, 82–83, 111–2, 143, 163; Hobbes, Thomas, 13, 15–7, 20, 25, 46,
terminology borrowed from, 62, 100, 211n. 53, 217n. 72
88–9, 224n. 70; Werther’s views Hobbesian world, 46, 92, 168; Shaft-
on, 95–7, 114–5, 204. See also esburian soul in, 16–7, 38, 130,
syntax 172, 202
Grand Tour, 27, 28, 30, 66, 84, 141 Hoffman, E. T. A., 5
Gray, Thomas, 30 Hogarth, William, 91
266 Index
Hohenheim Park, 137, 143, 145, 187, Iser, Wolfgang, 225n. 78
232–3n. 79 isolation, 25, 26, 55, 57, 60–4, 112,
Holmström, Kirsten Gram, 219n. 103, 173, 176; deconstruction’s resig-
226n. 110 nation to, 199; men of feeling’s,
Homer, 108 11, 16, 47, 113–4, 129, 170,
Hooper, William, 29 181; sensibility’s fear of, 20, 64,
human nature, xvi; dark side of, xix, 98; sign of unappreciated genius,
153; Hobbesian view of, 15–6, 234n. 102
20, 26; redemptive reinterpreta-
tion of Genesis, 20, 25–7, 46, J
53; sensibility’s view of, 7, 20, Jaucourt, Louis de, 1
41, 67, 98, 110; traditional Jean Paul (Johann Paul Friedrich Rich-
Christian view of, 26–7, 154. See ter), 5
also virtue Jefferson, Thomas, 123–5
Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 30, 69 Johnson, Claudia, xvii, 157, 161,
Hume, David, 10, 11, 16, 75, 98, 135, 176–7
208–9n. 31 Johnson, Samuel, xx, 15, 99, 154,
Hunt, John Dixon, 39, 40, 41 208n. 25, 235–6n. 4; influence
Hussey, Christopher, 6, 9, 68, 135, 142 on Austen, 166, 181; views on
language, 47–8, 50, 55
I Jones, Barbara, 32
imagination, 7, 67, 98–9, 104–5, Jones, Robert W., xx
108–9, 142, 187, 198; danger-
ous, 193–194; essential for com- K
munication, 48, 63, 86, 99, 105, Karl-August, Herzog von Saxe-Weimar,
111, 173–4, 241n. 73; evoked 144
by ruins, 19, 69–70, 72–3, 90–1, Keats, John, 100
109, 130–1, 228n. 9; role in Kelly, Gary, 5
sympathy, 60, 75, 105–6, 135, Ketcham, Diane, 124, 229–30n. 46
150, 226n. 97; Romantic view Kew Gardens, 43, 44, 187
of, 14, 207n. 19 Kircher, Athanasius, 124
imbedded fragments in text, xvii, 48; Kliger, Samuel, 39
letters, 6, 122, 167, 194, 227n. Knight, Richard Payne, 10, 108, 135,
1; tales, 48, 238n. 37. See also 231n. 70
model audience; tableaux
incompletion, 56, 57, 67, 68, 70, 78, L
86, 117. See also fragmentation; lacunae, 80, 83, 92, 117
gaps Lafayette, Marie-Madeleine Pioche
“interesting,” the, xix, 21, 157–9, de La Vergne, Comtesse de,
186–93, 195–6, 202, 245n. 136 205–6n. 2
intimacy, 88, 91, 96, 105, 113, 169 Lambert, James, 147, 149
irony, 100, 105, 116, 133, 136, 138, landscape gardeners, 9. See also Brown,
175, 182 Lancelot “Capability”; Cham-
irregularity, 7, 22, 23, 38–9, 117, 130, bers, Sir William; Hirschfeld, C.
187; aesthetic of, 28, 35, 57, C. L.; Le Nôtre, André; Miller,
108; in music, 231–2n. 71; of Sanderson; Repton, Humphry;
language, 58–9, 64; of nature, Vanbrugh, Sir John; Whately,
20, 25, 27, 29, 213n. 25; of Thomas
ruins, 21, 27–8, 70, 76, 110, landscape gardening, xviii, 9–10, 30,
215n. 40; picturesque, 7, 10, 46, 135–6, 180; compared to
37, 65, 77, 134–5, 141, 215n. novel of sensibility, 7–8, 19, 146,
40; revaluation of, 25, 27, 65, 187; language of nature, 21, 27,
213n. 25 68, 146, 187. See also English
Irving, Washington, 39 gardens
 Index 267
Lange, Victor, 114, 219n. 117 logic. See grammar; reason
language, 45–65, 75, 216n. 64, 222n. Lorrain, Claude, 28, 138, 206n. 9. See
34; abuse of, 8, 49, 172, 173, also Claude glass
191, 224n. 70, 241n. 68; artifi- Louis XIV (king of France), 32
cial, 19, 54–6, 59–60, 114, 129, Louis XVI (king of France), 201
176–7; distrust of, 8, 18, 46–9, Louis Philippe II, Duc d’Orléans, 123
54, 79–80, 105–6, 119–20, Lovejoy, Arthur, xviii, 6
238n. 43; fallen, 46, 91, 183; Lugar, Robert, 76, 79, 201
gendered, 164–5; inadequacy of,
18–9, 47–50, 81, 94–5, 99, 151, M
170, 177, 232n. 74; inimical to Macaulay, Rose, 66
intimacy, 18, 88, 91, 96, 105, Mackenzie, Henry, 10, 18, 108, 123,
169; irregularity of, 58–9, 64; 145, 162; Harley, xvii, 28, 96,
linearity of, 10, 51, 81–4, 95–6; 102, 103, 111, 133, 181, 229n.
multivalent, 105, 176; natural, 32; narrative techniques, 94,
67–9, 81–4, 87–8, 109–11, 111–2, 117, 128–31, 168, 170,
128, 144–6, 183; non-verbal, 192; novelist of sensibility, 5, 18,
46–7, 56, 57–8, 62, 67, 173; 47; on Hamlet, 105; silence, 17,
of feeling, 48, 64–5, 109, 111, 47, 170, 176; Julia de Roubigné,
186; of gestures, 46, 61–2, 63, 122, 162; The Man of Feeling,
88, 91, 232n. 74; original, 22, 6, 107, 119–20, 129–30, 145,
27, 45, 55–9; public vs. private 150–2, 235n. 110
discourse, 50, 85, 113, 164–8, Macpherson, James, 14, 139; The
175, 182, 238n. 43; referential, Poems of Ossian, 14, 31–2, 104,
49–50, 57, 64, 87, 94, 216–7n. 108, 115, 141, 150, 151, 179,
66, 217n. 69; used to describe 232n. 76
its own failure, 89, 113, 131. madness, 18, 99–100, 105, 170, 192,
See also decomposition; rhetoric; 199–200, 209n. 37
Tower of Babel; words Maillet, Arnaud, 233n. 84
Latapie, François de Paule, 73 man of feeling, 8, 10–1, 89, 155–6,
Le Camus de Mézières, Nicolas, 75 234n. 102; Austen’s, 168,
Le Nôtre, André, 39 172–3, 237n. 17; author as,
Le Rouge, Georges-Louis, 44, 125, 126, 131, 156, 163; authorship,
127, 189 111–3, 128, 132, 134, 150, 178;
Ledoux, Claude Nicolas, 73, 200 civil war, 101–3, 114, 174–5;
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 27, contemporary counterparts,
227n. 128 xv-xvi, 202; failure, xx-xxi, 11,
Leighton, Angela, 175, 178, 181 17, 82, 86, 101–3, 115; Hamlet
Lennox, Charlotte, 161 as, 105; helplessness, 20, 132–3,
Leopold III Friedrich Franz, Fürst von 162, 170–1, 180, 226–7n. 121;
Anhalt-Dessau, 30, 41, 144 narrator, 81, 101, 107, 118, 129;
Leroy, Julien-David, 75 parodied, 159, 190; sensibil-
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 10; Emilia ity of, 1–2, 14, 64, 141, 150,
Galotti, 240n. 48; Laokoön, 52, 183; silence, 18, 80, 131, 170,
83 180; victimization, 165, 172;
Lewis, M. G., 192, 194 woman of feeling, 162, 182. See
Lichfield, Lord Patrick, 198 also Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
Litz, A. Walton, 177 von; Mackenzie, Henry; Sterne,
Locke, John, 26, 54, 59, 103, 208n. 24, Laurence
227n. 128; Condillac’s response man of letters, xv, 17, 111. See also
to, 13, 50–1; influence on sen- man of words
sibility, 11, 14, 18, 56, 81, 90; man of the world, xv, 1, 17, 20, 202
on language, 49–50, 217n. 69, man of words, 87, 118–9, 231n. 64;
217n. 72 vs. man of feeling, 18, 103, 107,
268 Index
111, 128, 132, 173; woman of Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secon-
words, 175, 182; Yorick as, 84, dat, Baron de Brède et de, 73
118 monuments, 32, 79, 91, 105; imagina-
Mandeville, Bernard, 155 tive recreation of original, 19,
Marie Antoinette (queen of France), 32, 69–70, 131, 174, 229–30n. 46;
123, 157, 201 improved by ruination, 68–72,
Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de: La Vie de 106, 157, 160, 188; literature
Marianne, 162–3 as, 94, 117, 128, 130; symbol
Marmontel, Jean-François, 5 of authority, xvii, 66, 72, 177,
Marshall, David, 98, 136, 208–9n. 31 221n. 17; tension between
masking of authority, 45, 117, 135, monument and ruin, 8, 86, 117,
146, 152, 155–6, 161, 201–3; 123, 128, 165–6, 176, 199
agency and responsibility in Monville, François Nicolas Henri
Austen, 171, 173, 177–8, 181, Racine de, 43, 123–5, 131, 187,
192, 194–5; architects disguis- 201, 229–30n. 46
ing their own artifice, 21, 125, More, Hannah, 9, 14, 67, 113
126, 127, 128, 135–6; disguis- Morel, Jean-Marie, 10
ing narratorial authority, 107, Moritz, Karl Philipp, 5
112–3, 118–20, 129–33; female mountains, 7, 20, 25, 29; as pictur-
unmasking and male cross-dress- esque, 35, 37, 145; as ruins,
ing, 161–5; gardeners hiding the 23–4, 27. See also Alps
“marks of the scissors,” 41–5, Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 206n. 9,
108–9, 135–6, 180; masking 207n. 15
of artifice in painting, 147, Mudrick, Marvin, 177
149; masking of authorship in Mullan, John, xvii, xviii, 48, 87, 98,
the novel of sensibility, xv-xvi, 113
107–8, 111, 117, 121–3, 125–8,
131–2; picturesque concealment N
of order, 128, 135–9, 161, 165, names, 48, 89–91, 104, 113, 216n. 65,
215n. 40, 232n. 76, 233–4n. 86 216–7n. 66, 217n. 69; as signs
masochism, 155–6, 193. See also of sensibility, 4, 151
sadism narcissism, 65, 101, 146, 155,
McGann, Jerome, xx, 6 166, 170, 203; Marianne
Melmoth, William (the younger), Dashwood’s, 174, 177, 192;
209–10n. 38 Werther’s, 98–9, 154, 174, 192
Melzer, Arthur, 52 Nardin, Jane, 177
Méréville (landscape garden of), 32 narrative, 245n. 7; authority, 7, 67,
Michasiw, Kim Ian, 147 118, 178; detachment, 112, 129,
Miller, Sanderson, 32, 33 164–7; drive, 89, 97, 109–10,
mimosa, 141, 184 116–7, 139, 158, 173, 180, 200;
model audience, 141, 164; artists as innovations, xix, xxi, 5–8, 33,
model spectators in paintings, 94, 120, 166–7; line, 84–85,
146–9; author as model reader, 143–4, 215n. 43, 223n. 52,
157; hermits as model specta- 224n. 54; modernist, 85, 92,
tors in landscape gardens, 21; 165; of gardens and ruins, 7, 9,
model readers imbedded in text, 67, 70, 72–3; of sensibility, 6,
120, 122, 130, 150, 175; model 79–87, 218n. 81; voice, 166,
spectators imbedded in text, 175–6, 180–1. See also anti-
150, 174. See also audience; narrative; narrative techniques;
participation of audience narrators
Monboddo, Lord (James Burnett), narrative techniques, 6, 7, 67, 100,
219n. 103 116, 117, 141, 142; Austen’s,
monodrama, 99–100, 226n. 110 21, 162, 168, 173, 194. See
Montaigne, Michel de, 92, 205–6n. 2 also anti-narrative: techniques;
 Index 269
aposiopesis; asterisks; dashes; paratextuality, 92–3, 116, 121, 225n.
ellipses; fragmentation; frames; 83
gaps; imbedded fragments in Parc de la Villette, 199–200
text; lacunae; model audience; parody, 146, 184, 192, 235–6n. 4;
tableaux Austen’s, 99, 158, 160, 166,
narrators: conflated with author, 6, 179, 220–1n. 17, 237n. 17,
131–2, 176; feminine, 21, 162– 238n. 43, 243n. 92; of the
3, 164, 165, 182; first-person, “interesting,” 159, 190; of the
6, 100, 155; masculine, 163–5, man of feeling, 165, 170; of
167; multiple, 116, 121–2, 129– the picturesque, 139, 171, 187,
30; omniscient, 7, 67, 94, 108, 210n. 43; Sterne’s, 84, 89, 90
118, 120, 141, 163–7; protago- participation of audience, 8, 9, 96,
nists as, 80–1, 84–6, 89–90, 101, 111–2, 141, 146, 151; invited by
111–6, 118–9, 122, 130–1, 143, incompletion, xvii, 67–72, 83,
179–80; self-conscious, 6, 84–6, 144, 146, 173; necessitated by
100, 114, 118, 128, 131, 166 ruined language, 63–4. See also
natural man, 10, 55, 102–3; savage audience; model audience
man, 18, 41, 53, 95, 98 passion, 208n. 24; elevation of, 7, 11,
nature, 14, 32, 79, 147–9, 169; as 19–20, 48–9, 60; source of vir-
architect of ruin, 76; book of, 9, tue, 11, 16. See also reason
49, 108, 227n. 4; changing views pattern books (of garden architecture),
of, 20, 29, 34–5; destructive xviii, 76, 77, 78, 79
forces of, 23, 28–31, 232n. 76, pedagogy of seeing, 8, 19, 145, 175,
233n. 85; fallen, 24–5, 27–9, 35; 187; model spectators, 120, 141,
imitation of, 43, 65, 108–9; lan- 150, 164, 174; revised by Aus-
guage of, 21, 27, 34–5, 45, 65, ten, 167, 173–4, 195. See also
68, 109–10, 144–5; picturesque sight, spectatorship
approach to, 10, 37, 136–9, 171; Percy, Thomas, 14
political interpretations of, 39, “perioddity,” 47–8
41, 43, 45, 213n. 25. See also perspective, 40, 43–44, 227n. 2
earthquakes; language: natural; Petrarch (Petrarca), Francesco, 144
volcanoes; wildness picturesque, the, 34–38, 67–71,
Nebot, Balthazar, 43 75–9, 108–9, 133–43, 145–7,
neoclassicism, xx, 7, 14, 45, 69, 79, 175–6, 180–2, 187–90; as third
165. See also classicism aesthetic category, 37, 133–5,
Neptunists vs. Volcanists, 30 207–8n. 22, 210n. 43, 231n. 70;
nervous system, 14–5, 25, 61, 154–5, 162 codification of, 10, 136, 138,
non finito, 67, 72, 135 176; cult of, 10, 15, 34–5, 75,
novel of consciousness, 5 192; etymology, 9, 135; frag-
novel of sentiment, 5 mentation, 65, 203; incomple-
tion, 68, 70; influence of, 8, 10,
O 37–8, 142, 202–3; irregularity,
Oakeshott, Michael, 211n. 53 7, 10, 35–7, 65, 77, 141, 215n.
obscurity, 68, 70, 134–5 40; parodied, 139, 171, 238n.
O’Farrell, Ann, 241n. 69 43; ruins, 32, 68–71, 215n. 40;
origins, 22, 26, 32, 69; of earth, 23–4, sensibility’s relation to, 7, 10,
29, 37; of ideas, 14, 51; of lan- 38, 60, 117, 136, 138–9, 164,
guage, 27, 52, 54, 55, 56. See 187–8, 192; travel, 9, 10, 136–9,
also Genesis 141–2, 187; visual elements,
ownership, 26, 169 10, 32, 37–8, 155, 176. See also
Gilpin, William; Knight, Richard
P Payne; Price, Sir Uvedale
Paine, Thomas, 39 Pietism, 15
Panofsky, Erwin, 6 Pinch, Adela, 161
270 Index
Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 28, 206n. 9 sensibility, 13, 101, 211n. 52,
Pizzoni, Filippo, 40 224n. 70; of silence, 55, 100,
Plato, 205–6n. 2 113, 119–20, 133, 151, 174
pocket watches, 223n. 51 rhetoric of ruins, 7, 86; architectural,
Pocock, J. G. A., xviii 67, 72, 135, 176, 214n. 28; Aus-
Pompeii, 22, 28 ten’s, 173, 174, 178; Goethe’s,
Poovey, Mary, 176–7 21, 130; literary, 19, 28, 75,
Pope, Alexander, 9, 39, 95 108, 117, 128, 151; Sterne’s, 21,
Port-Royal Grammar, 49–50 84, 118, 233n. 80
Poussin, Nicolas, 28, 206n. 9 Richardson, Samuel, 4, 92–4; influence
Pratt, Samuel Jackson, 61 of, 5, 14, 86, 120, 166; Clarissa,
Preromanticism, xix-xx, 4–5, 205–6n. xvii, 5, 92–4, 93, 121, 151, 155,
2, 206n. 7, 206n. 8, 207n. 15. 225n. 83, 236n. 13, 237n. 22;
See also Romanticism Pamela, 92, 121, 182
Prest, John, 34, 40 Richter, Johann Paul Friedrich [pseud.
Prévost, Antoine François (Abbé Pré- Jean Paul], 5
vost), 5 Riskin, Jessica, xvii, 4
Price, Martin, 207–8n. 22 Robert, Hubert, 28, 32, 139, 220n. 11
Price, Sir Uvedale, 10, 37–8, 108, Roman Catholic church, 13, 237n. 21
134–5, 155, 231–2n. 71 roman sensible, 5
primitivism, 21, 31, 136, 168, 198, Romanticism, 24, 105; and Preromanti-
201, 219n. 103 cism, xix, 205–6n. 2, 206n. 7;
Prix, Wolf D., 200 and the monstrous, 7, 15, 207n.
prudence, 13, 14, 17, 175, 191, 196, 15; and sensibility, xx, 4–5, 20;
209n. 34 interest in ruins, xvi, 160, 221n.
punctuation, 9, 80, 83, 114, 199; rhe- 17; Jena school, 4; role of imagi-
torical, 59, 61–2, 219n. 111. See nation, 14, 207n. 19. See also
also dashes; ellipses; narrative Preromanticism
techniques Romney, George, 184, 185, 186
Rosa, Salvator, 28
R Rosen, Charles, 6
Rabelais, François, 86 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 4, 5, 11, 32,
Racine, Jean, 205–6n. 2 47–8, 104–5, 129, 209n. 37;
Radcliffe, Ann, 235n. 106 influence of Locke and Condillac
Rambouillet (gardens and dairy), 189, on, 14, 18, 50–2, 56; influ-
201 ence on Austen, 21, 166, 173;
reader. See audience invention of monodrama, 226n.
reason, 208n. 30; censorship by, 64, 110; on civilization, 221n. 28;
83, 95, 103, 132, 134, 164; on human nature, 10, 18, 52,
distrust of, 7, 19, 48, 112, 163, 92, 98, 103, 153; on natural
209–10n. 38; fall of, 11–4, 27, language, 54–5, 59, 81–3, 91,
49, 50, 52, 133, 182; passion 95–6, 114, 183, 219n. 103; rein-
vs., 12, 49, 52, 75, 103, 208n. terpretation of Genesis, 25–6,
24; Werther’s, 102–3, 226–7n. 45–6, 52–4, 67, 212n. 4; Julie,
121. See also passion ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, xvii, 5,
Reiss, Timothy, 47 122–3, 143
Repton, Humphry, 41, 108, 177, 206n. Rowlandson, Thomas, 187–188, 190;
9 The Man of Feeling, 159; The
Revett, Nicholas, 147, 149 Tour of Doctor Syntax, in Search
revision, xv, 83, 94–5, 112, 116–7, of the Picturesque, 138–41,
225n. 86; Goethe’s, 132 140, 233n. 85. See also Combe,
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 135 William
rhetoric, 48, 64, 73–5, 96, 144, 186; ruin, 7–8, 20–5, 27–33, 66–72, 75–80,
guidebooks, xviii, 45, 57–62; of 104–5, 108–10, 123–8, 145–6,
 Index 271
160–1, 166–74, 186–90; aes- 173, 176–7, 179–81, 238n. 43;
thetic of, xvi-xvii, 25, 27, 160, difficulty of, 6, 55, 91, 131, 176;
171, 186–7; as feminization, 72, Johnsonian view of, 48; theat-
165; civilization as, 221n. 28; ricality of, 90, 97, 101, 182;
deliberate pursuit of, xix, 170, Werther’s crisis of, 95–6, 100,
187, 193, 198–9, 203, 246–7n. 113–5, 168, 224n. 54
15; domestication of, 30, 33, 76, Sensibilité, 5, 205–6n. 2
79; fake ruins, xvi, 21, 32, 76–9, sensibility, 1; Austen’s relationship
128, 139, 213–4n. 28, 233–4n. to, 166–174, 178, 182, 192,
86; Goethe’s appropriation of, 195–196, 238n. 43, 242n. 85,
30–31, 146, 170; Gothic, 31–33, 245n. 136; codification of, 89,
66, 145, 213n. 24; human, xix, 138, 151–2, 158, 166, 176, 206n.
8, 21, 155, 160, 166, 167, 193, 3; contradictory impulses in, 7–8,
203; in painting, 28, 31–32, 19, 46, 72–3, 110, 123, 176; cult
146–147, 149, 220n. 11; invita- of, 2–4, 100, 139, 158, 174–5,
tion to imaginative completion 186, 203–4, 206n. 3; didacti-
of, xvii, 69–70, 72, 90, 130, cism, 8, 19, 141, 164; excesses
146, 174; Marianne Dash- leading to insensibility, 99, 166,
wood’s, 169–72, 177, 241n. 62; 170, 179, 235n. 2; hypocrisy, 80,
multivalence of, xvi, 18, 32, 45, 111, 136, 155, 187, 201, 246–7n.
67, 105, 110, 176; of Babel, 15; icons of, 3–4, 5, 144, 156;
45–7, 65; of fallen world, 24–5, major figures, 5, 10–1, 14, 206n.
27, 35, 212n. 4; picturesque, 9; moral aesthetic, 14, 16, 56,
10, 32, 68–71, 160, 187, 215n. 108, 146, 155, 173, 234n. 87;
40, 233–4n. 86; redemption of, negative criticism of, xix-xx, 155;
25, 27, 35, 213n. 25; ruin-hunt- novel of, 7–8, 21, 67–8, 72, 111,
ing, 28, 160, 170, 213n. 24; 151, 165–6; parodied, 89, 98–99,
ruined language, 83, 173; ruined 139, 158–160, 165–166, 238n.
ruins, 78–9, 139, 233–4n. 86; 43, 246–7n. 15; philosophical
Werther’s, 97, 103–5, 114, 133, insecurity, xvi, 12–3, 20, 26, 62,
169–72. See also classicism; 65–67, 133, 197; psychology of,
follies; monuments; rhetoric of 14, 17, 19, 60, 97, 146, 162, 197;
ruins; suffering; Tintern Abbey related cultural movements, 4–5;
Ruinenberg (landscape garden), 32 relationship to Enlightenment, 11,
Ruoff, Gene, 177 19, 29, 48, 57, 59
sensorium, 1, 2, 61, 64, 108, 220n. 118
S sentimental traveler, 10, 18, 84, 91,
Sade, Donatien Alphonse François de 113, 142–3, 183. See also man
(Marquis de Sade), 155, 157 of feeling
sadism, xvii, xix, xx, 21, 155–7, 166, shabby chic, 202–3
203. See also masochism Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper,
Saint-Aubin, Gabriel-Jacques de, 28 third earl of, 10, 16, 47, 105,
Sanssouci Park, 32 203, 208n. 25, 224–5n. 76; eth-
Scarlatti, Domenico, 134, 231–2n. 71 ics of feeling, 11, 14, 158, 234n.
Schlegel, Friedrich von, 72, 128 87; influenced by Burnet, 24;
Scott, Sir Walter, 170 parodied, 235–6n. 4; Shaftesbu-
Scudéry, Madeleine de, 205–6n. 2 rian soul in Hobbesian world,
Sedaine, Michel-Jean, 13 17, 38, 92, 130, 172, 202
Seifersdorfer Tal (landscape garden), Shakespeare, William, 186; Hamlet,
144 89–91, 94, 104–5, 174
self-control, 97, 101, 167, 168; lack of Sheridan, Frances, 5, 151; The Memoirs
seen as a virtue, 13, 132, 171 of Sidney Bidulph, 121–2
self-representation, 64, 107, 151, 173, Sheridan, Thomas, 45, 57, 59, 61–2,
174; Austen’s treatment of, 168, 151, 186, 219n. 103
272 Index
Shugborough Park, 197 21, 80, 123; anti-narrative
Siebers, Tobin, 132 characteristic, 117; emphasis on
sighs, 19, 83, 88, 120, 156–7, 184 spontaneous feeling, 14, 111,
sight, 10, 14–5, 83–4, 173, 238n. 43; 155, 180; Genesis reinterpreted
artists seen seeing, 146, 147, to legitimize, 25, 27, 46; sponta-
148, 149; Goethe’s appropriat- neous order found in nature, 30;
ing gaze, 30–31, 146; more spontaneous speech valued, 101,
reliable than words, 174, 182; 112, 163
visual language, 61, 75, 91, 186; Stafford, Barbara, 232n. 76
visual sensitivity, 11, 19, 141, Steele, Richard, 166, 181
156. See also pedagogy of seeing; Stephens, Edward, 79
spectatorship Sterne, Laurence, 14, 16, 30, 154,
silence, 48, 58, 101, 112, 131, 197–8; 156, 169, 184; autobiographi-
Austen’s use of, 169–70, cal elements in work, 131, 149;
172–4, 176–81, 243n. 101; eroticism, 16, 25, 154, 181;
more expressive than words, 46, French imitation of, 4–5; limita-
75, 80, 83, 88; multivalence of, tions of language, 18, 22, 46–7,
18, 176–8, 243 n. 101; narra- 63–4, 81, 94, 113–4; narrative
tive, 68, 110–1, 129; rhetoric techniques, 80–1, 84–85, 91–2,
of, 55, 100, 113, 119–20, 133, 100, 143, 168, 223n. 51, 228n.
151, 174; translation of, 46, 10; novelist of sensibility, 5, 10;
63, 87–8, 91; Werther’s, 96–7, parodied, 139, 159; pedagogy
102–4, 106, 114, 133 of seeing, 121, 150–2; problems
Smith, Adam, 10, 11, 68, 75, 97, 219n. of authorship, 21, 108, 117–8,
103; on imagination, 99, 135; on 123, 128–31; role of reader, 108,
sympathy, 62, 98, 153–4, 226n. 110–1, 173; self-conscious nar-
97, 241n. 73; Theory of Moral rator, 101–6, 114, 118–9, 179,
Sentiments, 9, 60–1, 105, 167, 192; solipsism, 1–2, 88, 99–101,
243n. 98 116; sympathy, 60–1, 174–5,
Smith, Charlotte, 5; Emmeline: Orphan 183, 225n. 79; Woolf’s criticism,
of the Castle, 239–40n. 46 118; Yorick, 5, 64–5, 96, 133,
Smollett, Tobias, 86, 88, 91, 142 139, 144, 170–1, 176; A Senti-
solipsism, 12, 18, 26, 50, 55, 97–100; mental Journey through France
Austen on, 99, 180, 195; fear of, and Italy by Mr. Yorick, 80–91,
2, 64, 154, 166, 199; Sterne on, 107, 112–3, 126, 141–3, 153,
88, 105, 116, 236n. 10 190, 222n. 37; Tristam Shandy,
Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 5, 119, 161, 85, 87, 88, 100, 113, 120, 121,
190 131, 222n. 37
spectacle. See acting; theatricality Stonehenge, 31–2
spectatorship, 21, 60–1, 145, 146, Stuart, James, 149
154–7, 186–7. See also audience; Stuart, Lady Louisa, 151, 235n. 110,
pedagogy of seeing; sight 236n. 11
speech, 19, 54, 84, 129, 218n. 76; Sturm und Drang, 4–5, 207n. 15
authentic, 112, 163; elocution sublime, the, 7, 82, 195, 207n. 15,
guidebooks, 57–60, 64; frag- 207–8n. 22, 231n. 70; and the
mented, 19, 80–1, 83, 112, 120, beautiful, 37, 39, 133–5, 210n.
128, 172–3, 235n. 2; inadequacy 43, 231–2n. 71, 237n. 27; Mari-
of, 46–7, 94, 176, 219n. 117, anne Dashwood and, 178–80;
224n. 70, 232n. 74; linearity of, Werther and, 114, 232n. 76
51, 82–3; public, 55, 105, 128, successful failure, 48, 63, 116, 128, 202
168, 176, 177. See also lan- suffering, 11, 16, 19, 60–1, 134; aes-
guage; rhetoric thetic enjoyment of, 153, 155,
spontaneity, xv, 2, 13, 108, 112, 117, 157, 168, 192, 201, 236n. 13; as
246–7n. 15; and control, xvi, luxury, 188, 201–3, 246–7n. 15;
 Index 273
authentic grief in Persuasion, taste, 11, 134, 141, 158, 208–9n. 31,
196, 240n. 57; criticism of sen- 231n. 69, 234n. 87
sibility’s interest in, xx, 235n. 2; Tave, Stuart, 242n. 85
deliberate indulgence in, 169–72, Taylor, Charles, 6, 12
181, 192, 240n. 58, 241n. 61, tears, xx, 4, 88, 98, 120, 153–8, 181;
246–7n. 15; emphasis on wit- as test of sensibility, 151–2, 154,
nesses’ reactions to, xix, 14–5, 171, 187, 235n. 110, 236n.
153–7, 183–7, 203; female, xix, 11; Burke’s, 157, 226n. 113;
8, 21; parallel to ruin, xix, 130, multivalence of, 2, 18, 110;
155, 187, 203; relation to the Werther’s, 115; Yorick’s, 82, 85,
“interesting,” xix, 188–91, 196. 236n. 10
See also sympathy Thackeray, William Makepeace, 230n.
suicide, 104, 170, 209n. 33, 241n. 53
62; imitation of Werther, 80; theatricality, 2, 6, 18, 146, 154–5,
Werther’s, 97, 102, 106, 114, 183–4; architecture as theater,
172, 209n. 37, 232n. 76 73, 75, 200; of communication,
Swiczinky, Helmut, 200 97–8, 173, 182; landscape as
Swift, Jonathan, 86, 91; Tale of a Tub, stage, 136, 188; performance
92, 229n. 36 of identity, 90–1, 104; primitiv-
sympathy, 7, 10, 64–5, 97, 166, 243n. ism as spectacle, 21, 132, 136,
99; and the “interesting,” 197–8, 201; of ruins, 110, 146,
190–191; as virtuous passion, 203; Werther’s, 99–101, 103–4,
11, 98, 154; author’s in Sense 172, 240n. 48; Yorick’s, 118–9.
and Sensibility, 175–9, 180–1, See also acting
196; based on curiosity, xix, Thomas, Sophie, 72
153–4; based on imagination, Thompson, James, 49
60, 75, 105–6, 135, 150, 226n. Thomson, James, 5, 41, 170
97; based on nerves, 14–5, 61; Thouin, Gabriel, 76–77
based on observation, 167, 174, Tieck, Ludwig, 100, 118, 146
195; based on sight, 14, 61, 130, time, 112, 169, 203; as destructive
234–5n. 105, 238n. 43; based force of nature, 28, 69, 160,
on speech, 57, 183; evocation 212n. 4; impersonation of, 21;
of reader’s, 108, 111, 112, 141, preservation of moment in, 94,
146; importance of background 97, 115, 147, 224n. 54, 233–4n.
knowledge for, 61–2; narcissistic, 86, 240n. 48; simultaneity of
xix, 21, 100–1, 150–2, 154–7, thought, 51, 83; Sterne’s por-
183–8, 201, 203; necessary trayal of, 85, 223n. 51
for interpretation of ruins, 68, Tintern Abbey, 31, 70–71, 139, 160,
75, 173–5; parodied, 157–60; 228n. 9
Sterne’s treatment of, 63, 65, Tischbein, J. H. W., 28, 30–31, 146,
84–6, 88, 90, 94 170
syntax, 48, 199; Austen’s, 164, 181; Tocqueville, Alexis de, xvi
fragmented, 18, 67, 83, 141, Todd, Janet, xvii, xx, 4, 183
186; of gardens, 7, 9, 67–8, Tower of Babel, 60, 67, 75, 80, 83,
144–5; Sterne’s, 92, 118, 223n. 101, 124, 222n. 34; fortunate
51. See also grammar fall of, 46, 55, 60; new Babe-
lian projects, 48, 50, 65, 204;
T post-Babel, 87, 177, 183; rein-
tableaux, 10, 75, 156–7, 169, 183, terpretation of Babel’s fall,
198; dramatic, 186; imbedded 25, 27, 45–8, 56–8, 63–5;
in text, 6, 8, 15, 141, 144, 234– universal language, 27, 45, 56,
5n. 105; Marianne Dashwood’s, 58–9, 63, 87
192, 196; Werther’s death, 172, translation, 5, 89, 104, 105, 115; of
240n. 48. non-verbal language, 46, 63, 82,
274 Index
87–8, 91, 109, 118; Sternean Volksgarten, 40
translation in Austen, 168, 173, Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 10,
174, 183 18
travel: Alpine, 35, 42; literary, 80,
139, 142–3; picturesque, 9, 10, W
136–9, 141–2, 187. See also Walker, John, 45, 57, 58–9, 61, 219n.
Grand Tour; sentimental traveler 103
Trilling, Lionel, 94 Walpole, Horace, 9, 10, 30, 34
Trollope, Anthony, 204 Walsh, Francis, 29
Tsarskoe Selo (landscape garden of), Warton, Joseph, 108
190 Watson, Caroline, 184–185
Tschumi, Bernard, 199–200 Whately, Thomas, 42, 112, 206n. 9;
Tuite, Clara, 177 influence in France, 67, 73; on
Turner, J. M. W., 70–71, 206n. 9 ruins, 21, 69–70, 76, 109–10,
135, 169
V wildness, 41, 108; domestication of,
Van Sant, Ann Jessie, xvii, xviii, xix, 23, 30, 42, 134–6, 138, 232n.
87, 155, 162 75, 233n. 85; element of the
Vanbrugh, Sir John, 135 picturesque, 37, 231–2n. 71;
Vernes, François, 3, 4, 5 Marianne Dashwood’s, 170,
Vernet, Joseph, 28 178, 180; Werther’s, 97,
Versailles (gardens of), 32, 39, 201 232n. 76
viewer. See audience Willey, Basil, 211n. 51
Villette, Parc de la, 199–200 Williams, Helen Maria, 156–7, 236n. 9
virtue, 11, 13, 17, 52, 60, 132, 209–10n. Wimpole Park, 32, 33
38, 238n. 43; ineloquence as Wolfgang, Aurora, 162
proof of, 112, 120; physical basis Wollstonecraft, Mary, 5, 15, 153, 162,
of, 1, 14–5, 16; rarity of, 16, 17, 163, 168, 183–4, 241n. 61
19, 67; sensibility as, 1, 60, 61, Woolf, Virginia, 118, 165
64, 141, 146; sympathy as, 11, words, 86, 90, 103, 114, 115, 217n.
154, 158; universal accessibil- 72. See also language
ity of, 2, 14, 19. See also human Wordsworth, William, 28, 49, 156–7
nature; prudence; reason Wörlitz Park, 22–23, 30, 41, 144
vision. See sight
Volcanists vs. Neptunists, 30 Y
volcanoes, 20, 25, 28–9, 232n. 76; Yearsley, Ann [pseud. Lactilla], 14
artificial, 22–23, 29–30 Young, Edward, 5, 144, 209n. 37