Sensibility
From Freepedia
Sensibility is keen intellectual or emotional perception or responsiveness toward something, such as the feelings of another.
The novel of sensibility
At the mid 1700s, Pamela and The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling spawned the novel of sensibility. In it, the protagonist, most often a young woman, naively encounters the world and learns to refine her natural goodness. Sensibility was a character trait important in the mid- to late-eighteenth century. A person with sensibility was attuned with nature and was easily, and rightly, affected by the feelings of others; the "sensible" person noticed the hurt of others and was a barometer of social morality. An excellent example of this type of novel is Frances Burney's Evelina (1778), wherein the heroine, while naturally good, in part for being country-raised, hones her politeness when visiting London she is educated into propriety. This novel also is the beginning of "romantic comedy".
At the end of the eighteenth century, sensibility's value was questioned, as it made its bearers, particularly women, too overwrought and too prone to imagining worlds beyond their appointed ones. These anxieties are in the rise of the Gothic novel, at century's end. The Gothic novel's story occurs in a distant time and place, often Renaissance Italy, and involved the fantastic exploits of an imperiled heroine. The classic Gothic novel is Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). As in other Gothic novels, the notion of the sublime is central. Eighteenth-century aesthetic theory held that the sublime and the beautiful were juxtaposed. The sublime was awful (awe-inspiring) and terrifying while the beautiful was calm and reassuring. The characters and landscapes of the Gothic rest almost entirely within the sublime, with the heroine the great exception. The “beautiful” heroine’s susceptibility to supernatural elements, integral to these novels, both celebrates and problematizes what came to be seen as hyper-sensibility.
Finally, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the overwrought emotions of sensibility, as expressed through the Gothic sublime, had run their course. Jane Austen wrote a Gothic novel parody titled Northanger Abbey (1803), reflecting the death of the Gothic novel. Moreover, while sensibility did not disappear, it was less valued. Austen introduced a different style of writing-the comedy of manners, but her novels often are not funny, bur are scathing critiques of the restrictive, rural culture of the early nineteenth century. Her best known novel, Pride and Prejudice (1811), is her happiest, and has been a blueprint for much subsequent romantic fiction; her other novels feature heroines for whom the modern reader has little sympathy, and may dislike.
