A. Philosophical and Medical “Sympathy”
William Gilpin’s ambivalence toward the marginal figure lies in sharp contrast to sentimental literature, which, instead of refraining from showing feelings, encourages sympathetic expression. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, interest in and concern for moral philosophy and medical discourse converge in the idea of pain.
Moral Sentiment philosophers from the Earl of Shaftsbury to Adam Smith held the belief that the origin of vice derived from the incurring of pain, the elimination of which is a symbol of virtue; meanwhile, contemporary neurologists, from Thomas Willis to John Hunter, identified the mechanism of the nervous system as based in pain, implying not only the pain of oneself but also the pain of others. The two seemingly parallel discourses were current in the age of sensibility in the second half of the eighteenth century, laying the theoretical framework for literary works to further explore and describe the bodily responses towards pain.
Whether one can really feel another’s pain or not represents two opposed ontological premises concerning the nature of human beings. In the tradition of the social contract, philosophers such as John Locke and Thomas Hobbes believed that men were born to fight for the possession of property, and the possibility of endless fighting until human extinction required the formation of the social contract to protect individual’s property from wayward, endless robbery. In Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, human beings are described as animals waging endless war to satisfy their needs;
therefore, a powerful, awe-inspiring government, or the Leviathan, is required for.
As Nancy Yousef notes, the moral sentiment of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, Bishop Butler, David Hume is directly opposed to that of Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan “represented human beings as naturally egoistic and hostile towards one another” (206). The concept of the malignant nature of human beings was strongly opposed by the Earl of Shaftesbury12, who held a totally different view. In his moral philosophy, human beings are animals of affection, benevolence and sympathy. As John Locke’s tutored student, though, Shaftesbury rejected the agnostic implication in Lockean empiricism and believed in the possibility of knowing others, including their pain.13 For him, virtue and moral sense are innate and transcendent. The “sense of right and wrong,” he argues, “[is] as natural to us as natural affection itself” (179).
This innate moral sense is the foundation of “fellowship” and “love,” which are no less natural than the “sense of right and wrong”: “If eating and drinking be natural, herding is so too. If any appetite or sense be natural, the sense of fellowship is the same” (51). This comparing of moral sense to biological functions are prevalent in his writings: the “affection of a creature towards the good of the species is as proper and natural to him as it is to any organ, part, or member of an animal body… to work in its own known course…. It is not more natural for the stomach to digest, the lungs to breathe” (192). The “sense of fellowship,” or “affection of a creature towards the good of the species,” for Shaftsbury, requires no empirical process from experience to the formation of ideas as its foundation. Rather, it is as innate a human trait as parental care for offspring.
Shaftsbury’s argument is dogmatic in the sense that he avoids empirical
reasoning to justify the legitimacy of fellowship. Lockean empiricism, based on the
12 Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury.
13 Both a trusted friend and doctor of the 1st Earl of Shaftsbury, John Locke kept a long-term friendship with the Ashley family and was entrusted with the supervision of the education of the 3rd Earl of Shaftsbury.
operation of sensation and the formation of ideas in the self, fails to prove and ensure the reality of another’s objective existence, which could be real as well as a dreamlike illusion. In this sense, the other’s pain is not able to cross this subject/object
boundary and constitute stable knowledge. That is why Adam Smith, another eighteenth century moral philosopher, wavered between the dilemma of the necessity of moral sentiment and the self-question of validity of knowledge. In Theory of Moral Sentiment, he affirms that the knowledge of another’s sorrow is always matter-of-fact and needs no proof: “By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him” (9).
Though the difficulty of imagining or knowing another’s pain is never resolved by the Moral Sentiment philosophers, that being indifferent to another’s pain indicates the absence of morality was commonly accepted in the eighteenth century.
“Sympathy” was believed to be the cornerstone upon which a society binds itself together. When Edmund Burke explicates the factors for social consolidation,
“sympathy” is deemed to be the first requirement. In his acceptance of Shaftesbury’s
“fellowship” as opposed to Hobbesian “indifferent spectators,” Burke further
elaborates moral philosophy and solves the empirical dilemma with the physiological knowledge prevalent in A Philosophical Enquiry. Through imagination, man recollects his experience of pain to mimic those who suffered before him. In his physiological explanation and personal experience, medical or physical pain causes correspondence through the whole body: “a man in great pain has his teeth set, his eye-brows violently contracted, his forehead is wrinkled” (119).14 This
14 Edmund Burke’s physiological knowledge may possibly derive from his father-in-law, the Bath physician, Christopher Nugent (1698-1775). Aris Sarafianos suggests that the composition of A Philosophical Enquiry coincides with Burke’s period of convalescence under the medical supervision of Christopher Nugent (61).
correspondence between organs shows that the nerves in our body are interconnected, therefore one contraction due to either sublime feeling or corporeal pain leads to agitation of the whole body.
When Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry was published in 1757, medical science had undergone a drastic change in physiology. The burgeoning of neurology, a term coined and practiced by Thomas Willis, had gradually unmasked the mystery of soul and mind, which for centuries had been under the sway of religious interpretation.
In his Cerebri anatomi of 1664 and Pathologicae cerebri, et nervosi generis specimen of 1667, Thomas Willis uncovers the nervous system of the human body and the pathology and neurophysiology of the brain. The newly discovered information challenged the mind-body dualism of Christianity, because under Willis’ study, the mind (or soul) has its material embodiment in the brain, acting as the center of the nervous system to command the movements of nerves. In the eyes of G. S. Rousseau, Willis is the “first scientist clearly and loudly to posit that the seat of the soul is
strictly limited to the brain, nowhere else” (qtd. in Alan Richardson British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind 8).
After Thomas Willis, Robert Whytt further challenged the authority of Descartes and explained “pain” and “sympathy” in neurological terms. Before the 1750s, nervous movement was generally understood through the model provided by René Descartes, for whom the pain is a purely reflex action from the site of injury to the brain and back to the injured part. In Descartes’ dualistic separation between soul and body, the soul is an immaterial substance that is in contact with the body through the pineal gland at the base of the brain, the material agent for the soul. When the body is injured, the nerves transmit signals to the brain, where animal spirits are channeled back to the part of the body hurt to command movement away from the danger. According to this scheme, a reflex is a uni-directional movement between
special parts of the body and brain. In 1751, Robert Whytt challenged both this immaterial/material dichotomy of soul/body as well as the mechanic reflex of Descartes. In his Essay on the Vital and Other Involuntary Motions of Animals, Whytt hypothesizes a different physiological picture of the human body: the soul is not isolated from the body and situated in the ambiguous “pineal gland” to control the brain; rather, the soul extends from the brain down the spinal column, connecting all parts of the body through the nerve endings. While this “coextension” materializes the mysterious soul (with the implication that the soul in the brain is material), the
“sentient principle” of the nervous system connects all parts of the body: “Nerves are endued with feeling, and … there is a general sympathy which prevails through the whole system; so there is a particular and very remarkable consent between various parts of the body” (qtd. in Steven Bruhm, 11). This “general sympathy” drags down the soul unto the discernible material space, and also wakes visible the unseen and the inner part of the body. For Whytt, “sympathy” is not just a physiological function working in a single body because “there is a still more wonderful sympathy between the nervous systems of different persons, whence various motions and morbid
symptoms are often transferred from one another, without any corporeal contact” (ibid, 14). These hypotheses of bodily sympathy and inter-personal sympathy were later endorsed by John Hunter at the end of the eighteenth century. As Hermione de Almeida notes about the clinical experiment, John Hunter’s teachings on the
“sympathy” between organs and parts commonly observed by clinicians in the hospitals of England led him in 1794 to address a parallel “sympathy of the mind”
vital to the study of life by the creative artist and physician:
One of its [sympathy’s] chief uses is to excite an active interest in favour of the distressed, the mind of the spectator taking on nearly the same action with that of the sufferers, and disposing them to give relief or consolation: it is
therefore one of the first of the social feelings. (35)
Robert Whytt’s hypothesis of “sympathy between the nervous systems of different persons” provides Moral Sentiment philosophy with a persuasive argument from the field of medicine. If moral imperative resorts to a non-empirical sense of virtue and vice, medical discourse in the latter half of the eighteenth century fills in the gap between obscure human nature and empirical science. Sympathy therefore gains its momentum from the hypothesis of an inner movement of the nervous system and becomes a facticity.15 This double confirmation of corporeal feeling for another’s pain from the philosophical and medical fields works together to help us envision a society in which man cares about not only his status of “self-preservation” but also that of others.
This imperative for sympathy, dispersed across the field of philosophy and medicine, constitutes the paradigm of object-relatedness. However, sympathy for human nature is not without its problems, even if one does not adopt a Hobbesean stance. In his A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume believes that sympathy is not always universal; rather, sympathy is confined to the familiar. One is always more caring for his/her family and friends:
[E]very particular man has a peculiar position with regard to others; and ‘tis impossible we cou’d ever converse together on any reasonable terms, were each of us to consider characters and persons, only as they appear from his peculiar point of view. (10)
The degree of sympathy, or partial favor, is the real fact of human nature, according to Hume. The idea of universalism of passion or sympathy not only distorts human
15 This hypothesis on imaginative suffering is further developed in the late twentieth century.
Neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti at the University of Parma in 1996 discovered mirror neurons, the function of which is to stimulate the action observed in the brain. According to this discovery, the possible result of sympathy derives from the observation of another’s pain.
nature, but also exposes more conflicts and contradiction. As Gilles Deleuze summarizes Hume’s idea, sympathy “does not transcend the particular interest or passion” (Empiricism and Subjectivity 38). Transcendence of sympathy demands the sacrifice of personal interest for the harmony of society and consolidation of social order, which goes largely against human nature. Sympathy is not arbitrary, but select.
The reason why sympathy becomes orthodox resides in its historical context. “Since the deposing of James II,” Rick Incorvati points out, “authority could no longer be represented unproblematically as issuing from a central source,” and sympathy
“became useful to represent deference as immanent within the relationships that constituted the social order” (2). Sympathy in the eighteenth century took on the duty of interrelating social members through the detection of others’ pain and expressing emotion to keep the sufferer from leaping out of the social chain. By showing pity to others, one fashions himself as a man of morality, a subject position endorsed by medico-philosophical discourse.
B. The Age of Sensibility and the Fashionable Melancholic
Speaking for another in pain became fashionable in the age of sensibility. The
“Age of Sensibility,” as it is known in today’s literary history, spans from the early 18th century to the early 19th century. Famous figures include Helen Maria Williams, Anna Seward, William Bowles, Vicesmus Knox, Hannah More, Charlotte Smith, and Ann Yearsley. The keyword “sensibility,” as Michèle Plaisant points out, “came into fashion in the 1750s,” and “meant the power of sensation or perception and was closely related to Locke’s tenet that sense perception is the ‘inlet of all knowledge in our minds’” (243). With the philosophical and medical basis as summarized in the previous section, writers of sensibility applied the aestheticized medical term to explore their own melancholic mood or reaction toward others’ suffering. James H.
Averill sums up this trend: “A contemporary heroine feels her compassionate heart
soften, melt, or dissolve with tenderness, enthusiastic sentiments, or sensibility indiscriminately at the sight of a ruin, a waterfall, or an appropriate representative of suffering humanity” (23).
One good example of the virtue of sensibility is Helen Maria Williams’ “An Ode on the Peace,” a metanarrative describing Anna Seward’s lamentations over the death of Major André in her “Monody on Major André”:
While Seward sweeps her plaintive strings, While pensive round his sable shrine, A radiant zone she graceful flings, Where full emblaz’d his virtues shine;
The mournful loves that tremble nigh Shall catch her warm melodious sigh;
The mournful loves shall drink the tears that flow From Pity’s hov’ring soul, dissolv’d in woe. (18)
The description of one’s lament over the other functions as an ideal chain of sympathy.
Anna Seward’s sorrow over the death of Major André, the “plaintive strings,”
ennobles the virtues of Major André. The tears of pity shed by the imagined Anna Seward and expected by the reader are the symbol of the virtue that is elicited by the other. In its exaggerated emotional expression “mournful loves,” “melodious sigh,”
“dissolv’d in woe,” sympathy highlights bodily sensation to designate the virtue of the sympathizer.
Wordsworth’s first published work, Sonnet, on Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress, was published anonymously in the European Magazine 11 in 1787. In this poem, Wordsworth shows the strong influence of poems of sensibility. Helen Maria Williams became the imagined persona, and the imagined scene of seeing Williams weeping reveals Wordsworth’s literary ambition
when he was in his seventeenth year. Not only do the style and diction follow the current trend, the popular writer is imagined to be the observed viewed by her potential literary successor:
She wept. —Life’s purple stream began to flow In languid streams through every thrilling vein;
Dim were my swimming eyes— my pulse beat slow, And my full heart was swelled to dear delicious pain.
Life left my loaded heart, and closing eye;
A sigh recalled the wanderer to my breast;
Dear was the pause of life, and dear the sigh That called the wanderer home, and home to rest.
That tear proclaims― in thee each virtue dwells, And bright will shine in misery’s midnight hour;
As the soft star of dewy evening tells
What radiant fires were drowned by day’s malignant power, That only wait the darkness of the night
To cheer the wandering wretch with hospitable light. (Poems I, 47; my italics)
In this Shakespearean sonnet, Wordsworth envisions a scene wherein he sees Williams weeping at a “tale of Distress,” presumably a Richardsonian tale. This double frame, one seeing the other seeing, imitates William’s “An Ode on the Peace.”
Three works of sensibility are presented: the first level, the Richardsonian tale; the second, Williams’ sentimental response, possibly to result in another sentimental literary work; the third, Wordsworth’s response to that of Williams. The metalanguage suggests Wordsworth’s literary heritage and his attempt to fashion himself as a writer of sensibility. His use of fashionable diction derives directly
from popular phrases of contemporary works of sensibility. As Averill states,
“Purple flood” is [Helen Maria Williams’] favorite epithet for blood, and
“delicious tears” are her characteristic way of describing the response to
“aching pleasure.” “The soft star of dewy evening” could be straight out of a poetess whose descriptions continually dissolve into talk of things “soft,”
“tender,” “mild,” “gentle,” “sweet,” and “melting.” (34)
Such usage of conventional jargon provides a picture of Wordsworth in 1786. The delineation of an exaggerated corporeal response, “an elaborate, highly artificial, and conventional literary system camouflaging itself in the guise of nature and
spontaneous feeling” (Averill 30), explores the somatic possibilities that result in aesthetic pleasure, at the same time presenting the persona as “man of feeling.”
These bodily terms, “purple stream” flowing “through every thrilling vein,”
“swimming eyes,” “pulse beat slow,” “heart was swelled,” are all aestheticized to create the effect of “dear delicious pain.” The envisioned pain of a “wandering wretch” at “misery’s midnight hour” in a double literary frame, is not the real pain of human suffering but a fabricated, exaggerated misery from reading a sentimental work. This aesthetics of “dear delicious pain” sounds the keynote of this sentimental work.
Exaggerated a sentimental gesture though it is, the poem is quite an exemplar of the practice of “sympathy” in philosophical and medical discourses in the eighteenth century. The reading of suffering in a Richardsonian tale arouses a sympathetic somatic response in the imagined Helen Williams, with her blood’s gradual
suspension of flow symbolizing the thrilling shock a story of suffering brings. In the implications of Robert Whytt’s “sentient principle,” heart and eye combine to create the somatic possibility of sorrowful expression. In turn, Helen Williams’ piteous figure engenders sympathy from the persona, whose tearing eyes and aching heart
show both an individual organic resonance and sympathetic feeling of pain for Williams. The personified life, itself the symbol of sympathy, is named the place where “each virtue dwells,” a catchy word Moral Sentiment Philosophers attach to sympathy and the motivation to alleviate the pain of others.
Another of Wordsworth’s contemporary works, Written in Very Early Youth, composed in 1788, also fashions the persona as a “man of feeling” in its exploration
Another of Wordsworth’s contemporary works, Written in Very Early Youth, composed in 1788, also fashions the persona as a “man of feeling” in its exploration