The Era of Sensibility and the Novel of Self-Fashioning

Summary

Empfindsamkeit” (sensibility), a cultural trend underpinned by Shaftesbury’s theory of an innate moral sense and influenced by the confessional literature of Pietism, encouraged the frequent expression and analysis of emotion as a means of exercising and demonstrating virtue. In the novel of sensibility, authors focused more on the private and inner lives of characters than on external adventures or wider social developments, and emphasized those values, such as friendship, domestic harmony, and sympathy, that were particularly prized by the emerging middle classes. In the challenge it posed to the “immoral” ways of the courtly aristocracy, the sentimental novel at first had progressive implications. As critics have argued, however, its progressiveness was limited: the sentimental novel was ultimately a symptom of the retreat of the middle classes from any sphere of public influence into the safe haven of the family.

Sentimental novels bear witness to the polarization of gender roles that accompanied this retreat into the private sphere. Early Enlightenment thinkers argued that both sexes should be guided by their reason, and advocated improved education for girls, but by the end of the eighteenth century, under the influence of Rousseau, medical writers, educationalists, and philosophers had come to associate traits such as sensitivity, sympathy, and closeness to nature with the female sex in particular. They argued that women were “undivided,” plant-like creatures, whose role was to offer emotional succor to their families, and who had little need of formal learning.

“Empfindsamkeit” was most prevalent in German literary culture between the 1740s, when Klopstock and Gellert’s first works appeared, and the 1770s, the decade that marks the highpoint of the trend. Sentimental elements can be found in novels both before and long after these dates, however. This essay traces the history of the sentimental novel by examining six exemplary works from the time of Johann Gottfried Schnabel (1692–ca. 1750), author of Wunderliche Fata einiger Seefahrer (Strange Fates of Some Seafarers, 1731–43) to that of Friederike Helene Unger, who wrote Bekenntnisse einer schönen Seele (Confessions of a Beautiful Soul, 1806). In doing so, the essay does not provide a revised evaluation of the political impact of the sentimental novel. Rather, it illustrates how “Empfindsamkeit”—often dismissed by today’s readers as moralizing and overly self-conscious—allowed authors to depict characters and their fashioning with increasing psychological sophistication.