| This dissertation examines the relationship between language and emotion in literary theory, philosophy, and fiction between 1680 and 1740 in England. John Locke's Essay (1689), I argue, sets the terms for discussions of language and the passions for the eighteenth century. Locke replaces the Cartesian relationship between the passions and the understanding with a new paradigm that substitutes language for the passions as the primary mediator between the senses and the understanding, inaugurating new and newly gendered ways of policing language. I then examine Aphra Behn's fiction as representative of literary theories that see language as a passionate medium that conveys images between the minds of authors and readers. Shaftesbury's Characteristicks (1711), I contend, reveals new eighteenth-century paradigms of authorship antagonistic to Behn's. His stoic model of authorship sets itself against the relationship between language and emotion in early fiction. The following chapter examines David Hume's popular essays and his Treatise (1739), taking up the relationship between Hume's concept of sympathy and the affective language of literature and concluding that the imagination in contact with literature is Hume's model for his theory of the self. I then argue that Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740), like Behn's fiction, maps the prevailing cultural concern with the relationship between language and emotion onto the relationship between image and letter, spectacle and text. Richardson's exploration of the problems of authorship seems to answer Locke's formulation of language and passion by forging a new intensity of connection between the mind and the text, and moving the emotions further inward as language increasingly determines the boundary of selfhood. I conclude that if women come to be seen as having a particular relationship to what Locke calls "romance language," and that "romance language," as it occupies the boundary between sense and understanding, mind and world, comes to make the distinction between feminine and masculine selfhood, then the modern self in its totality may be defined in relation to the gendered language of fiction. |
