Sentimental Novel: From Defoe to Richardson

Against the prevailing ideology (or philosophy) of the XVIIIth century –also called ‘The Age of Reason’, the epoch of the enlightenment, the time of the exaltation of the norm, science, logic, etc–,  the sentimental novel exalted feeling above reason. By doing so, it paved the way to the romanticism literature, becoming a forerunner of the gothic novel itself.

This fact does not imply that the sentimental novel was not a bourgeois genre, or that it did not serve the interests of the ideology of that social class that gave rise to the novel, or that it is not a realist genre; in my modest opinion, it was indeed a realist genre. Richardson, for example, responded to the concerns and needs of the middle classes, and used the language and the topics of the middle classes. But probably, the middle classes of the 1840s were more interested in intimate and human ‘transactions’ than in commercial transactions, that is, more interested in human relationships than in economic relations. Perhaps –and if it is allowed to add a note of sarcasm– people at this time had enough money and wealth and did not have to worry about those “materialistic” and “chrematistic” values. They finally had time for their sentiments, for human and private ‘transactions’. Their parents, the older generation, the Defoes and the novelists and middle classes of the early Augustan Age did probably not have so much time for this private and intimate “business”: they were too busy creating the economic and political establishment or system that their children –the new middle classes, the Richarsons, for instance– were now enjoying. In other words, the older generation had to spend all their time with, and based their novels on, economic and commercial transactions and, maybe not public or political affairs. To some kind of reading public, this change of topics make probably the sentimental novel more interesting than ‘the realist novel’ written in Defoe’s times. The next clip explains --even though it does it in Spanish-- what the sentimental novel is.

These observations are by no means intended to undervalue the sentimental novel. Neither are they intended to reduce the realist value of the sentimental novels written at that time. They shared with the rest of the realist novels not only style and content, but also a firm teaching purpose. As a matter of fact, they were welcomed by politicians, intellectuals and even clergymen as an ethical project, as a very efficient instrument for the sentimental education of the new society. The fact that they paved the way to the romantic rebellion of the following generation of artists and intellectuals is once again evidence of an undisputed truth: in each literary movement, trend, fashion... grows the seed of its overcoming or, sometimes, its destruction.

Samuel Richardson remains a vital figure in the history of the novel and of ideology. He initiates a discourse on sexual roles which, with all its ambiguities, is as important to nowadays’ reading public as it was in the mid-eighteenth century. His epistolary novel, Pamela (1740), was not a sudden innovation; novels in the form of letter were of fashion in France, and they had been popular for several decades, like Aphra Behn’s Love Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister. Richardson wanted to raise the tone of the literary works from the level of this kind of subject matter, and in doing so; he created a heroine for the times, a woman of feelings. Poor but virtuous, Pamela suffers a series of trials at the hands of Mr B, culminating in attempted rape. The contrast between female submission, which becomes a paragon of virtue and chastity admired by all in the novel, and male domination, with its implied sensuality, was immediately criticised as hypocritical, and parodied by Henry Fielding in Shamela.

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Works Cited

Armstrong, Nancy. "The Rise of the Domestic Woman." Rpt. in The Ideology of Conduct: Essays on Literature and the History of Sexuality, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse. New York: Methuen, 1987.
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction : A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press 1989, 1987.
Samuels, Shirley, ed. The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century England. New York : Oxford University Press, 1992. PS 217 S55 C85 1992.