Affected Eyes: Seeing and Feeling in the Sentimental Tradition

Abstract

The eye has varied functions as an organ of both perception and expression; it can see, but it can also show, and what it often shows is a person’s emotions. This project considers these different functions in the tradition of literary and philosophical sentimentalism, where it is particularly attuned to moments of tension that arise between them. It takes up these concerns in the moral treatise of Adam Smith, as well as the novels of Samuel Richardson, Frances Burney, Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. While Enlightenment thinking subscribed to a connection between seeing and knowing, and established observation as a cornerstone of empiricism, the sentimental novel offers a very different conception of the eye. Working from this genre’s close association with one of the organ’s most explicit forms of emotional expression – the tear – I consider the ways in which this literary tradition is far more invested in the affective affordances of the eye. By rethinking what it might mean to cry, I argue that sentimentalism shows how eyes can know the world in ways that do not depend on vision. In the process, I draw on a range of scientific discourse on the eye, and aim to think about how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century developments in physiology and ophthalmology may have shaped literary depictions of both tears and vision. Even though this project is interested in the many eyes that are depicted in this literary tradition, it is also concerned with the eyes that have and will be used to read it, because when a reader is confronted with a sentimental text, their own eyes must necessarily partake of the same functional multiplicity that this thesis maps out. If sentimental literature is read with these organs in mind, it can offer useful insights into some of the ways that affect is mobilised between text and reader, as well as demonstrating that there are approaches to reading with feeling that were always already written into the body.