Abstract
In the opening pages of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Mary: A Fiction, we encounter the fluctuating mental state of the eponymous heroine. Neglected by a tyrannical father who ‘always exclaimed against female acquirements’ and a sickly mother whose limited energies are devoted to her son, Mary’s ‘understanding is strong and clear’, but it is sometimes ‘clouded by her feelings’. ‘[H]er sensibility’, we are told, Mary’s sense of hardship and anguish seems at least partially genuine. Her mother continually ‘disappoint[s]’ her and causes her pain by exhibiting a preference for Mary’s brother. The pain is tinged with pleasure, though, and her ‘melancholy’ is apparently less debilitating than ‘habitual’. Mary basks in ‘tales of woe’, and her hardships are partially alleviated by an idealistic longing for love.
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Notes
- 1.
(2009) Mary and the Wrongs of Woman, G. Kelly (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, rev. edn), pp. 9–10.
- 2.
P. M. Spacks (1995) Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), p. 14.
- 3.
(2005) Experience Without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press), pp. 109–10.
- 4.
Cheyne ties the epidemic proportions of such conditions to England’s ‘Wealth and Abundance’ (i–ii). The ‘Rich, the Lazy, the Luxurious, and the Unactive’, he writes, ‘those who fare daintily and live voluptuously, those who are furnished with the rarest Delicacies, the richest Foods, and the most generous Wines’ are most susceptible (p. 20). Though Cheyne emphasizes the susceptibility of women indirectly, he does not do so as forcefully as many of his contemporaries, such as Thomas Sydenham, who suggests that ‘very few Women, which Sex is the half of grown People, are quite free from every Assault of this Disease, excepting those who being accustomed to labour, live hardly’ (303). See G. Cheyne (1733) The English Malady: Or, a Treatise of Nervous Diseases of all Kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal, and Hysterical Distempers, &c. In Three Parts (Dublin: Powell); and T. Sydenham (1712) ‘An Epistolatory Discourse to the Learned Doctor William Cole, Concerning Some Observations of the Constuent Small Pox, and of Hysterick Diseases [1682]’, in J. Pechey (trans.), The Whole Works of That Excellent Practical Physician, Dr. Thomas Sydenham. Wherein Only the History and Cures of Acute Diseases are Treated of, After a New and Accurate Method; But Also the Shortest and Safest Way of Curing Most Chronical Diseases (London: R. Wellington), pp. 266–339.
- 5.
The verb ‘to bore’, Spacks points out, at least as a ‘psychological description’, did not come into use until after 1750, and it does not appear in Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary (p. 13). She goes on to explore meanings and usages of the term under the premise that ‘[n]o single definition can compass the meanings of so culture-bound a term, a word that in less than two and a half centuries has accrued multifarious ideological associations and complicated emotional import’ (14).
- 6.
Ennui also had less definitive class markers in the latter part of the eighteenth century than it did in the earlier period, therefore reflecting Goodstein’s claim that the term had been undergoing ‘a process of democratization’ since the early part of the century (Experience Without Qualities, p. 110).
- 7.
(1963) ‘The Rape of the Lock’, in J. Butt (ed.), The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Pope (London: Routledge), III.147, 153–54; p. 231.
- 8.
(1987) ‘Belinda’s Hysteria: The Medical Context of The Rape of the Lock’, in C. Fox (ed.), Psychology and Literature in the Eighteenth Century (New York: AMS), pp. 129–46 (p. 129).
- 9.
(1725) A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours: Or, Hypochondriacal and Hysterical Affections. With Three Discourses on the Nature and Cure of the Cholick, Melancholy, and Palsies (London: Pemberton), pp. 259, 99.
- 10.
(1729) A New System of the Spleen, Vapours, and Hypochondriack Melancholy (London: Bettesworth), pp. 175, 185, 407–8.
- 11.
(1992) Anne Finch and Her Poetry: A Critical Biography (Athens: University of Georgia Press), p. 169.
- 12.
(1903) ‘The Spleen’, in M. Reynolds (ed.), The Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), ll. 114, 64–65, 91–92, 94–95; pp. 250–51.
- 13.
M. Reynolds (1903) ‘Introduction’, in M. Reynolds (ed.), The Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. xvii–cxxxiv (p. xliii).
- 14.
B. McGovern and C. H. Hinnant (1998) ‘Introduction’, in B. McGovern and C. H. Hinnant (eds), The Anne Finch Wellesley Manuscript Poems (Athens: University of Georgia Press), pp. xv–xl (p. xvii).
- 15.
(1998) ‘An Hymn of Thanksgiving After a Dangerous Fit of Sickness in the Year 1715’, B. McGovern and C. H. Hinnant (eds), The Anne Finch Wellesley Manuscript Poems (Athens: University of Georgia Press), l. 53; p. 38.
- 16.
(1903) ‘Ardelia to Melancholy’, in M. Reynolds (ed.), The Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), ll. 1, 31, 7, 15, 30, 8, 34–36; pp. 15–16.
- 17.
(2015) Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 3rd edn), p. 40.
- 18.
(1993) ‘“A Strange Pathology”: Hysteria in the Early Modern World, 1500–1800’, in S. L. Gilman, H. King, G. S. Rousseau and E. Showalter (eds), Hysteria Beyond Freud (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp. 91–221 (pp. 158, 163–64).
- 19.
(2005) Flesh in the Age of Reason (New York: Norton), pp. 401–2.
- 20.
(1985) ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Depression and Diagnosis: The Relation Between Sensibility and Women’s Susceptibility to Nervous Disorders’, Psychohistory Review, 13:4, 15–31 (pp. 21–22).
- 21.
(2012) Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Palgrave MacMillan), p. 3.
- 22.
(1988) Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 201.
- 23.
(1787) Medical Cautions: Chiefly for the Consideration of Invalids (Bath: Crutwell), p. 12.
- 24.
Adair explains earlier in his essay his use of the term ‘bile’. He suggests that ‘bile’ is, along with ‘nerves’, the fashionable term that has replaced ‘spleen, vapours, [etc.]’, which were the ‘fashionable disease[s]’ earlier in the period (pp. 13–14). But, he adds, in the second half of the eighteenth century these terms were replaced by ‘nervous’ and then ‘bilious’ (p. 14). He sarcastically observes that before the publication of Robert Whytt’s medical treatise, which uses the term ‘nervous’, ‘people of fashion had not the least idea that they had nerves’ (p. 14).
- 25.
(1966) The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, R. Halsband (ed.) 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press), II, p. 397.
- 26.
(1792) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (London: Johnson), pp. 55, 54, 60.
- 27.
Wollstonecraft reinforces the fatal consequences of sickly sensibility through another character, Mary’s friend Ann, who is far more virtuous than Eliza but equally damaged by her excessive sensibility, which is also tied to her consumption and eventual death.
Bibliography
Adair, J. M. (1787) Medical Cautions: Chiefly for the Consideration of Invalids (Bath: Crutwell).
Cheyne, G. (1733) The English Malady, or a Treatise of Nervous Diseases of all Kinds (London: G. Strahan and J. Leake).
Wollstonecraft, M. (1792) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (London: Johnson).
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Meek, H. (2016). ‘[F]ictitious [D]istress’ or Veritable Woe?: The Problem of Eighteenth-Century Ennui. In: Ingram, A., Wetherall Dickson, L. (eds) Disease and Death in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59718-2_2
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