Wrestling sensibility: Male anxiety, sentimentality, and British eighteenth-century narrative

My dissertation examines how eighteenth-century ideas about masculinity emerged primarily in response to apprehensions about male roles in the Cult of Sensibility. Thus, I investigate the changes in constructions of masculinity from the late-seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth century. I then I examine the parallel changes in the cultural view of sensibility and masculinity that ultimately dictated the literary constructions of male behavior. In Chapter One, “Men of Reason,” I investigate the cases of Boswell and Johnson to explore the ways in which male literary figures processed the particular historical contradictions of eighteenth-century masculinity as they weave sentimental values into their biographical and autobiographical accounts of exemplary men. While Boswell and Johnson are not customarily linked to the sentimental movement, works such as The Life of Johnson constantly exploit sentimental tropes and indicate a willingness to embrace new models of behavior that could help sustain social and sexual order. I discuss in Chapter Two, “Men of Longing,” how nostalgia is used in eighteenth-century novels both as a tool to reinterpret general definitions of sentimental masculinity and as a means to evoke an individual masculine image of self. Through a reading of Fielding's Tom Jones, I show how nostalgia indicates a disenchantment with traditional masculine identities rather than a yearning for the perceived tranquility and morality of the past. Then I analyze Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison to show how, in contrast to Fielding's Tom Jones, longing for the past allows men to discover their individual identities. I examine the ways in which males manipulate sensibility in order to deflect its power in Chapter Three, “Manipulating Men.” Focusing on Sterne's Yorick and Smollett's Roderick Random, I analyze the degree to which male characters manipulate sensibility in order to gain sexual advantage over women and thus maintain their dominance. In Chapter Four, “Men of Parts,” I turn my focus toward Smollett's novels of excursion. Here, I analyze how societal fragmentation, symbolized by the diversity that Smollett's touring heros encounter, actually encourages a new form of ideal masculinity. Lastly, in Chapter Five, “Excessive Men,” I suggest that the perversity of the central male figures in Walpole's The Castle of Otranto and Beckford's Vathek is both a response to sensibility and an extension of the libertine rake. Ultimately, I argue that even as a contested concept, sentimentality provides the fulcrum from which major themes and movements in the eighteenth century revolve. While Boswell, Johnson, and others call for a rational and conservative embrace of new ideas, narratives of fragmentation and novels of Walpole and Beckford pose radical reactions against subtlety, decorum and verisimilitude. Furthermore, while the redefinition of the ideal male is in part the impetus behind the wrestling over sentimentality, the multiple forms that masculinity takes are a result of male anxieties about power.