Eighteenth-century sensibility and the subversive female body
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Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Subversive Female Body argues that bodily actions of sensibility (i.e. feminized actions, such as trembling and fainting) were employed to subversive effect by women writers of the eighteenth century. My work relies on an original database I created that catalogs actions of sensibility in hundreds of novels, poems, and diaries in the period. Each text I read becomes a new row in this database. This project is thus more than a dissertation: it is an ever-expanding hybrid of distant reading and close reading in which I collate data as a means of considering the various ways women characters deployed actions of sensibility. Scholars have not yet addressed how extensively literature of sensibility depicts the body's response to oppression. Given that oppression's core resides in controlling human bodies, the body has to have a role in the means through which the oppressed create space, and eventually manifest power. Actions of sensibility were far different from men's actions: indeed they were behaviors that marked women as feminine and that women were expected by men to perform. This allowed women a covert means through which to access and increase their power. Actions of sensibility became part of a common body-based language that women could deploy to create space and agency for themselves and for one another. This work illuminates how women writers explored the potential power of feminized bodily responses in literature of the period. It also operates as a feminist recovery project, charts women's agency over time, and maps a feminist progression into the twenty-first century. Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Subversive Female Body moves us forward in understanding subversive bodily actions and traces the prehistory of modern feminism.
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Ph. D.