Articulating and Silencing “Misery”: Against the Insensitive Culture of Sensibility in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility
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Despite the rich history of the employment of the term “misery” in literary representation, authors of novels of sensibility have conveyed the term restricted to the demonstration of misfortune of sentimental heroines. As the eligibility of women writers was contested in the 1790s when the cult of sensibility began to wane after the French Revolution, however, the term began to be resorted to in more periphrastic ways, often in separation from the broken-hearted heroines. This article rethinks the gendered use of the term in the later novels of sensibility, revealing how the nuanced use of it can pave the way for the articulation of female narrative authority by tracing how the term is explored in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. The exploration of the novel’s engagement with the term provides insight into the way Austen establishes her narrative authority in the period when the culture of sensibility was contested, illuminating the ways in which Austen’s free indirect style shapes a particular kind of vigilant narrative voice that has a vision of sensible community. The sensible community explored in Sense and Sensibility attempts to strike a balance between variable sentiments of different bodies to resolve disparity of power distributed among genders created through conventional spectatorship. The novel locates the source of one’s sensibility in each specific body and questions the mechanism of watching and appropriating the feelings of other bodies rooted in the culture of spectatorship. Sense and Sensibility predicates sensibility on the individual body’s awakening to its leverage to produce or shatter spectacles.
Abstract
Despite the rich history of the employment of the term “misery” in literary representation, authors of novels of sensibility have conveyed the term restricted to the demonstration of misfortune of sentimental heroines. As the eligibility of women writers was contested in the 1790s when the cult of sensibility began to wane after the French Revolution, however, the term began to be resorted to in more periphrastic ways, often in separation from the broken-hearted heroines. This article rethinks the gendered use of the term in the later novels of sensibility, revealing how the nuanced use of it can pave the way for the articulation of female narrative authority by tracing how the term is explored in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. The exploration of the novel’s engagement with the term provides insight into the way Austen establishes her narrative authority in the period when the culture of sensibility was contested, illuminating the ways in which Austen’s free indirect style shapes a particular kind of vigilant narrative voice that has a vision of sensible community. The sensible community explored in Sense and Sensibility attempts to strike a balance between variable sentiments of different bodies to resolve disparity of power distributed among genders created through conventional spectatorship. The novel locates the source of one’s sensibility in each specific body and questions the mechanism of watching and appropriating the feelings of other bodies rooted in the culture of spectatorship. Sense and Sensibility predicates sensibility on the individual body’s awakening to its leverage to produce or shatter spectacles.
참고문헌 (22)
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