Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Are our feelings reliable?

That is a pretty normal question for us moderns. We think of feelings as coming from inside, welling up uncontrollably in response to some outward stimulus. We might worry about controlling our feelings and we might worry about whether we can trust them; anyone who has seen children play will know that children have feelings of jealousy and anger that often work against their best interest.

We don't imagine feeling as being something we should cultivate, as something we have to learn to have in the first place. Some people in the last half of the 18th century, and first half of the 19th, thought we have to learn to cultivate our feelings. Others disagreed and thought all this sentimentalism was a bad thing, especially for men; they were a little more likely to tolerate it in women.

Some people have read Austen as belonging to the anti-sensibility camp (with some encouragement from her family who were very keen to associate her with anti-sentimental thinkers such as Samuel Johnson). Others have seen her as part of the modified sensibility camp; that is they see her as arguing that sense needs to be controlled or even subjugated by sense.

As I hope is clear, I think both those views are wrong. I think the character Isabella shows us what goes wrong when a character does not have sensibility and that Catherine shows us what the challenges a young woman learning to develop her sensibility faces.

But how can we trust these sensibilities? The answer to this is to develop the right kind of sensibility along with other virtues. And what is the right kind of sensibility? It is the sort of sensibility that a certain kind of heroine has?

Want to keep going?

Okay, how do we recognize this heroine? We will recognize her because her life is a certain kind of story.

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