Chapter 3 - The punishment of singularity

Summary

The increasing complexity and narrative importance of Henry Fielding’s heroines from the 1740s to the 1750s point the direction for much subsequent eighteenth-century fiction. But the high note of affirmation on which Amelia closes is rarely repeated. That novel’s ending, by subordinating Amelia’s individual struggles to the reassertion of traditional hierarchies, makes Booth’s commitment to the government of his family appear the object of, and reward for, her much-tested faith in him. This chapter opens with a series of works that respond with more skepticism than Henry Fielding does to the social implications of women’s capacity for refined emotion: Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752), Sarah Fielding’s Ophelia (1760), Frances Sheridan’s Sidney Bidulph (1761), and Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811). In each, sensibility complicates even as it confirms existing hierarchies, at once exposing the gender inequities on which social authority rests and insisting on the need for the heroines’ final and self-conscious compliance with that authority. This double schema means that alongside the depiction of excessive feeling as untenable – variously conveyed through the novels’ use of tragic endings, satire, irony, or overt didactic commentary – runs a sympathetic examination of the deep appeal of sensibility for young unmarried women. When Austen’s Elinor Dashwood regrets “the too great importance placed by her [sister Marianne] on the delicacies of a strong sensibility,” the error is thus notably one of degree, not kind. From Lennox to Austen, this registering of culpability is achieved by setting personal failings within the contexts of institutional ones.