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Sensibility, sincerity, and self-interest in Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde
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Morrissey, Joseph (2019) Sensibility, sincerity, and self-interest in Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde. Women's Writing, 26 (3). 342-357 . doi:10.1080/09699082.2017.1355513 ISSN 1747-5848.
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09699082.2017.1355513
Abstract
This essay argues that Charlotte Smith’s little studied novel, “Ethelinde,” presents sensibility in a way which complicates the opposition between virtuous and corrupt femininity. In this text, Smith breaks down the association of sincerity of feeling with virtue by showing how authentic emotions could be managed for self-interested purposes. Sensibility in “Ethelinde,” therefore, exceeds the logic of sentimentality. I historicize this self-interested function of feeling in relation to the work of Gillian Skinner and Harriet Guest, who argue that the emergence of political economy inflected discourses of feminine feeling with the language of commerce. At the same time, I demonstrate that Smith’s mobilization of sensibility represents a proto-feminist intervention into the patriarchal order, participating in the ideological agenda that Diane Hoeveler has identified in women’s gothic literature. Smith’s presentation of feeling as a possible mode of agency for women is, however, deeply conflicted, and I suggest this might be due to the author’s real-life battles with patriarchal law. In order to theorize the ambiguous status of sensibility in the text, I engage with Arlie Hoschild’s twentieth-century theory of emotion, which allows an articulation feeling in terms that move beyond the familiar constructions of feminine virtue and vice.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||
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Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > English and Comparative Literary Studies | ||||||
SWORD Depositor: | Library Publications Router | ||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Women's Writing | ||||||
Publisher: | Routledge | ||||||
ISSN: | 1747-5848 | ||||||
Official Date: | 2019 | ||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 26 | ||||||
Number: | 3 | ||||||
Page Range: | 342-357 | ||||||
DOI: | 10.1080/09699082.2017.1355513 | ||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access |
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