Francis Steen
The significance of the emotions in the eighteenth century culture of sensibility is widely accepted. In the Foucauldian framework of New Historicism, the innovative contributions of the period are highlighted; against the glib universalism of humanism's atemporal human nature, scholars seek to explain feelings of empathy, love, and fidelity as recent cultural constructions. The task of historicizing the emotions is an important one; however, this 'localism' produces its own incongruities. If a history of the emotions extends back only a few centuries, they become marked as belonging to a minority of humankind. Cultures temporally or geographically outside of the European Enlightenment, we are asked to imagine, did not have, say, the feeling of empathy, or a sensitive aesthetic appreciation. These claims lack conviction and are presented without evidence. A blinkered parochialism is too high a price to pay for the act of historicizing. What we need is a history of the emotions that acknowledges the known shared past of human beings. In this talk, I argue that the emotions enlisted in the novels of Behn, Haywood, Richardson, and Fielding have characteristics that suggest they were designed to solve basic problems of cooperation and community formation, problems credibly situated in humankind's ancestral environment and common past. The humanities, I propose, have a responsibility to engage with a range of scientific approaches to negotiate the cultural significance of the natural mind. Understanding how the Age of Sensibility relies on a historically contingent human nature is an important part of such a negotion, and a continuation of the eighteenth century's explicit attempts to situate cultural innovations in the context of an anthropology of the state of nature.