Reading the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Reading the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Juliet McMaster

Reading the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel

Previous publications by the same author: The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen (co-editor) Jane Austen the Novelist Jane Austen’s Business (co-editor) Jane Austen’s The Beautiful Cassandra (editor/illustrator) Dickens the Designer The Novel From Sterne to James (co-author) Trollope’s Palliser Novels Jane Austen on Love Jane Austen’s Achievement (editor) Thackeray: The Major Novels

Reading the Body in the Eighteenth-Century Novel Juliet McMaster

© Juliet McMaster 2004 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–3314–6 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McMaster, Juliet. Reading the body in the eighteenth-century novel / by Juliet McMaster. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 1–4039–3314–6 1. English fiction—18th century—History and criticism. 2. Body, Human, in literature. I. Title. PR858.B63M37 2004 823′.5093561—dc22 2003066658 10 9 13 12

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Contents viii

List of Illustrations

x

Preface

xvii

Acknowledgements

xviii

List of Abbreviations 1

The Body Inside the Skin: the Medical Model

1

2

The Body Illegible: Tristram Shandy

25

3

Physiognomy: The Index of the Mind

42

4

Facial Expression: The Mind’s Construction in the Face

69

5

Reading and Re-Encoding the Body: Clarissa

102

6

Gesture: Suiting the Action to the Word

121

7

Body Language Censored: Camilla

148

8

Epilogue: And On To Jane Austen

166

Notes and References

175

Works Cited

181

Index

189

vii

List of Illustrations

1

George Cheyne (1671–1743), Richardson’s sympathetic therapist, after Johann van Dienst 2 Leonine man and bovine man, from Gianbattista della Porta’s De Humana Physiognomonia of 1601. Porta followed Aristotle in developing analogies between human and animal characteristics, physical and mental 3 The portrait of Lavater from the frontispiece to his Essays on Physiognomy is surely identifiable with that of the unnamed citizen of Zurich, the central face in the row, characterized by an “inquiring eye, which seems to speak what all eyes easily understand” 4 Descartes as illustrated in Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy 5 The lion and leopard, epitomes respectively of man and woman, from della Porta’s De Humana Physiognomonia of 1601 6 Details from Hogarth’s “Garrick in the Character of Richard III” of 1746. The spread fingers and “legs in the action of running” follow Le Brun’s instructions on the representation of Fear and Horror 7 Benjamin West’s painting of 1771, “The Death of General Wolfe” (by kind permission of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa). In an impromptu performance, Garrick demonstrated the transition from dying agony to “transient rapture” 8 Detail from Hogarth’s “Characters and Caricaturas” of 1743, showing the portraits of Hogarth and Fielding in agreement 9 (a) Fielding co-opts Hogarth as illustrator for Tom Jones: Bridget Allworthy from “A Winter’s Morning;” (b) Mrs Partridge, from “The Harlot’s Progress;” (c) Thwackum, from “The Harlot’s Progress” 10 Hogarth depicts Corporal Trim, and “mutually illustrate[s] his System and [Sterne’s]” (Sterne, Letters 277) viii

18

47

54 55

63

77

79

83 85 86 87 89

List of Illustrations

11 “What a fine descent from the cross, or ascent to the gallows!” (HC 277). Rowlandson takes up Smollett’s challenge for an illustration (by kind permission of the Bodleian Library, from Miscellaneous Works of Tobias Smollett, 1790, press mark 12.0.1675) 12 “More upon the horrible, that the grievous” (Cl 676). Lovelace instructs Dorcas how to modulate her adopted expression from Le Brun’s “Horrour” towards “Sadness and Dejection” 13 Le Brun’s representations of “Weeping” and “Tranquility,” models for Lovelace’s constructions of Tomlinson’s face 14 John Bulwer’s dictionary of motions of the hand, from Chirologia (1644) 15 Siddons’ class-adjusted attitudes: “Vulgar Arrogance” and “Rustic Cunning” 16 James Parsons’ representation of “Contempt,” from Human Physiognomy Explain’d (1747)

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117

118 123 130 157

Preface “You will find more drawings than one on the subject of adminiration, in Le Brun,” wrote Henry Siddons, son of the great actress Sarah. “The first of these drawings is the most agreeable, and the most exact . . . The mouth and eyes are open, the eyebrows are slightly drawn upwards, the arms . . . somewhat extended” (71). Here is an authority on acting invoking an authority on painting to enage the reader in the intensely interesting and increasingly professionalized subject of the representation of the passions. Reading the mind through the body is an activity we are all involved in all the time. But during the eighteenth century, particularly, it was a highly conscious process, and the different languages of the body were not only being translated and analysed by the experts, but eagerly learned and interpreted by a growing population of keen and knowledgeable amateurs. The truth or otherwise of the doctrines of physiognomy – the study of the stable structures of face and body as indicators of lasting characteristics of the mind and soul – was hotly debated by laymen as well as by men of science and specialists in anatomy. Pathognomy, which contends that gestures, poses and facial expressions reveal passing states of mind, was accepted as a basic premise, but widely discussed as to just what each facial and bodily motion meant, how to translate it, and how it imitate it. “We are both great watchers of each other’s eyes,” Clarissa records; and an astonishing amount of Richardson’s huge novel consists of a minute record of who lifts which eyebrow, glances askance, casts eyes upwards or downwards, sighs or stifles a sigh, drops a tear or holds it back, reddens or turns pale. Richardson’s copious letter-writers often urge each other to “be particular” on such matters. The recording of these minutiae puts the reader (both the immediate correspondent reading the letter, and the reader of the novel) in the picture, and enables both to become interpreters in their own right. With the physical evidence before us, in verbal if not bodily form, we can reach our own conclusions on motive and psychology. As readers of novels we are of course quite used to this activity, and while reading perform it almost without thinking. We are trained, after all, in a long tradition: we know Macbeth’s desire to see “the mind’s construction in the face”; we are familiar with Jane Austen’s tell-tale x

Preface xi

blushes, revealingly examined in Mary Ann O’Farrell’s book on Telling Complexions; with Dickens’s theatrical emphasis on making emotion visible; with the convenient fictional tropes of meaning looks and signifying appearances. Both within and beyond fiction we find a revived interest in body language. In fact, in her study of Body Language in Literature, Barbara Korte contends that “NVC,” or nonverbal communication, is actually gaining ground in the aesthetic of the novel (16). Eighteenth-century readers, however, were trained to be intensely conscious of the process of reading bodies. “A man’s body and his mind,” wrote Tristram Shandy, speaking for his generation, “ . . . are exactly like a jerkin, and a jerkin’s lining,—rumple the one—you rumple the other” (TS 3.4.160). Readers were alert to the mind/body connection, and took seriously the business of interpreting the one through the other. Far from registering the signals without thinking, like modern readers, they were thinking all the time. The doctrines of physiognomy and pathognomy were hot topics of the day. Theatre audiences were connoisseurs of “actions,” the actor’s means of conveying emotional response through the body. Garrick, whose high status as actor and manager was unprecedented, was recognized as excelling by his actions rather than the delivery of his lines. And the critical awareness of the discourses surrounding the representation of the passions – whether on stage, in painting, or in literary texts – informed the reading of novels too, since narrators can be explicit and specific on these matters as playwrights and painters cannot. Since I turned from my more familiar field of the nineteenth-century novel to the eighteenth, a great deal has been written on the body in literature and culture. The Body in the Mind, Mark Johnson’s investigation of the ineluctable presence of the body and its experience even in our most abstract philosophical thinking, is a salient example out of many. My own approach, however, is to begin with eighteenth-century theories of the body rather than modern ones – the doctrines and assumptions that fed into the novel of that day. I have specialized my study towards contemporary discourses on the body that fed into fictional practice, especially those that produced codes of meaning in physical appearances. For eighteenth-century novelists it was the mind as manifest in the body, rather than the body as it inhabits the mind, that was the topic of impelling interest. For the eighteenth-century reader, the theory of the passions was the psychology of the day. If today we can readily make use of terms like trauma and complex and archetype, without reference to Freud or Jung,

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the reader of that day would employ the terms of the passions and their representation in order to articulate what goes on in the mind. To become familiar with those terms, and the set of assumptions and cultural practices that went with them, is to enrich our reading of the work of Richardson, Smollett, Sterne, Burney, and others. My project in writing this book is in some measure to recover the reading experience of the contemporary readers of eighteenth-century novels, by focusing on discourses on the expressive body that they knew very well, and following through the ways the novelists made use of them. I would like to be able to claim that this book is a history of ideas. But it would be more accurate to call it a study of the assimilation of ideas. It is more about the novels as dramatizations of concepts than the concepts themselves, more about ways of reading the body that coexist than a progress of interpretations that replace each other in a definable chronological sequence. Hippocrates and Galen lingered on in medical discourse, even though Harvey and Descartes provided new models for the way the body works. Chronology, in fact, is not my major concern; for in a given novel we might find reference to physiognomy that harks back to Aristotle, or anticipates Lavater; or, on gesture, Quintilian can be as useful as a contemporary theorist like Aaron Hill or a contemporary practitioner like Garrick. Making the body legible is just one part of that huge task of the novelist, characterization. But for the eighteenth-century reader it was a larger part than for the reader of our own times. As Gilpin on the picturesque was soon to inform both the painted landscape and wordpainting in literature, so the theories of Descartes on the manifestations of the passions, the physicians on the connections of mind and body, Le Brun on facial expression in the visual arts, and the actors’ manuals on the enacting of emotion, were all very much in the air, very consciously invoked as means of conveying those parts of character and reaction that a novelist teaches the reader to deduce. There was as yet no theory of the unconscious (Roach 55), and extended analysis of mental processes such as, say, George Eliot developed later was not yet accessible to the novelist. But of course complex psychology was as readily observable then as now, and was almost as fully dramatised by a novelist like Richardson as anything that novelists have accomplished since. It’s not surprising that those whose business it is to convey powerfully the workings of the human consciousness should turn to current theories that intimately connected mind and body, and that postulated the one was figured forth in the other. Such ideas were almost equally

Preface xiii

congenial to the physician, the physiognomist, the painter, the actor, and the novelist. And the relation of the sister arts is nowhere more apparent than in this confluence of discourses that suggest the strong significance of the visible, the rich suggestiveness of the physical. His eyes are of immense use to him [writes one character of another in Frances Brooke’s epistolary novel Emily Montague]; he looks the civilest things imaginable; his whole countenance speaks whatever he wishes to say; he has the least occasion for words to explain himself of any man I ever knew. (76) Notwithstanding the parodic tone of Arabella’s playful suggestion that an eloquent countenance may altogether obviate the need for speech, her value for the expressive face is one she clearly knows she can share with her correspondent; and as these characters play at reading character, the reader of the novel can engage in the same activity, secure in the knowledge that legibility is itself a virtue, that a clear text – a readily interpretable body – is a good text. Arabella’s is a usefully simple articulation of ideas that are capable of sophistication and subtle elaboration. What of the corrupt mind in the body beautiful, like Lovelace’s, or the generous mind in a body stunted, like Eugenia Tyrold’s? What of the necessary efforts to conceal or control a passion, the deliberate management of usually involuntary motions? If the visible language of the human body is physiologically determined and universal, how are local variations and individual nuances to find room? The theories of the physiologists on the manifestations of the passions, and of actors and painters on the representation of them, had to be enlarged and adjusted to account for such anomalies. And an increasingly knowledgeable readership enjoyed following through on the ways in which the novelists took account of the theories, and built them into their vision of character. In her fascinating and wide-ranging study of Body Language in Literature, Barbara Korte comments on “the limited literary functions with which body language tends to appear in prose fiction before the mideighteenth-century,” and makes the point that such body language as does appear “often derives from a conventional repertoire” (178). The notable increase in quantity and subtlety of gestural language that comes with the development of the novel through the century goes along with a more general increase in specificity. Defoe, for all his precise information on merchandise and price, is relatively unspecific on physical qualities of appearance, gesture, and expression. And Fielding’s

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aesthetic preference for the general over the particular, as well as his training as a dramatist, makes for some rather conventional deployment of coded gestures such as the folded arms of the lover, or brows knitted in anger. But the modulation of the merely conventional gesture to the more fully individiualized motion is one area in which the novelist, with his or her potential for precise narrative description, can develop nuance. In Richardson’s vast novels, with their inexhaustible appetite for the particular and their intense focus on the quality of individual relationships, there is room and attention for the richly legible body. Richardson fully exploits the potential of the meaning countenance, the signifying facial expression, the expressive gesture, the medically interpretable physiological organisation. And after Richardson readers who had followed the debates on physiognomy, pathognomy, and the representation of the passions had appetites developed for what novelists could now consider as a staple of their content. Sterne, though sceptical of the claims of the physiognomists about bodily features as indicative of character, makes a dialogue of motion and facial expression more communicative than words. Burney explores the potential of bodily motions to become indicators of unstable mental conditions. So much suggests development and unfolding through the century, and matter for a consistent history. And there are certain notable events, like the publication and translation of Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy in the 1770s, that form a watershed for before and after. But I have resisted the temptation to claim much causal relation either within the different branches of my subject – the separate codes of medicine, physiognomy, facial expression and gesture – or between one and another. In The Player’s Passion Joseph R. Roach, for instance,has brilliantly demonstrated the ways in which the changing models of the body affect the styles of representation on the stage. But because I am dealing with several distinct discourses, I find that coexistence rather than replacement best represents the ways the novel assimilated and deployed the contemporary theories on the body as a means of reading the mind. The novel is a large and comprehensive medium, with room to incorporate competing theories, and a generous tolerance for inconsistency. The development I do perceive is a growing awareness on the part of the novelists that they were catering to a readership that was becoming increasingly sophisticated in the theories of physical and mental correspondences, increasingly alert to the possibility of interpreting character from body. Barbara Korte’s expectation that “familiar texts may even appear in a new light if their use of body language can be seen more clearly” (15) is one I hope to fulfil.

Preface xv

Rather than postulating a factitious overall development among eighteenth-century novels, then, I have chosen to address separately the prominent codes for reading the body as parallel movements, and in each to draw on a range of examples that are not necessarily causally related. By outlining some contemporary discourses, I hope to enhance the experience of today’s readers of the eighteenth-century novel by furnishing them with some of the contextual knowledge that the initial readers possessed as a matter of course. I have chosen to discuss first the body as medically considered, the body inside the skin, since this might seem a foundational vision of the body, a model on which to develop further theories. This professional view of the body was the claimed territory of the physician, but the novelists connect their characters with medical discourse too, and the diagnosis, treatment, crisis and cure of a disease may often be the paradigm for the novelist’s narrative of a central character’s evolution, from the fall into error to the attainment of self-knowledge, forgiveness, and salvation. Sterne never fits neatly into any system. But Tristram Shandy, as a novel with a deeply psychosomatic view of character, provides a case study for the novelist’s engagement in the physicians’ discourse. Physiognomy comes next, since that system of ideas has a long prehistory and a continuing following through the nineteenth century, besides being the centre of lively debate in the eighteenth century itself. This is the closest I come to a historically positioned study, and it is intended to provide a kind of map or background for later chapters. From Aristotle’s Physiognomonica to Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, not to mention more recent attempts to categorize intelligence according to racial features, scientists and readers alike have insisted on the correlation of mental and physical features. And Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy, which became a rallying point for believers, provides a major impulse for the enormously popular study of phrenology in the nineteenth century. In the chapter on facial expression I connect the novel with Le Brun’s practical instructions on the representation of the passions in painting. “Picturing,” or providing developed verbal descriptions of scenes and characters, was a technique increasingly congenial to novelists, and in Fielding’s, Smollett’s and Sterne’s well-advertised relation to Hogarth, or Richardson’s co-opting of delineations of expression from Le Brun, we find salient examples of the novelists’ appropriation of terms and concepts from the visual arts. Clarissa becomes the novel I use to demonstrate in detail the chosen interdependence of the novelist’s craft

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with the painter’s, and the appropriation by characters in the novel of theories of the visual representation of emotion. The increasing professionalization of the arts was a movement not lost on the novelists, who drew on theories of the representation of passion in painting and on stage. In the chapter on gesture I emphasize the novels’ connection with the stage, where Garrick’s huge popularity prompted a new interest in actions, the expressive body movements that were often seen as more important than the dialogue. Novelists made it their business not only to be conversant with the stage practices outlined in the actors’ manuals, but also to use their narrative method to extend and differentiate the conventionally universal language of gesture. Burney’s Camilla, which fully engages the actors’ repertoire of gesture and also seems to augment it, is the novel I use to demonstrate the novelists’ participation in the professionalising of certain theatrical practices. Much of this is specific to the eighteenth century, and most vividly articulated in the novels of the day. But the concerns are perennial. In Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize for 2000, a privileged and unscrupulous woman of the 1930s delivers this set of instructions to her naïve sister-in-law elect: “It’s all right to show boredom . . . . Just never show fear. They’ll smell it on you, like sharks, and come in for the kill. You can look at the edge of the table – it lowers your eyelids – but never look at the floor, it makes your neck look weak. Don’t stand up straight, you’re not a soldier. Never cringe . . . . Always look as if you have something better to do, but never show impatience. When in doubt, go to the powder room, but go slowly. Grace comes from indifference.” Such were her sermons. I have to admit, despite my loathing of her, that they have proved to be of considerable value in my life. (Atwood 296) The instructions are laced with snobbery and callousness. Like Lovelace, this speaker has learned to make moves in a power game, to master and manipulate a semiotic system. The dialects and vocabulary of these bodily motions may change according to nation, class, race, and gender, but the body talk itself is always with us, for good or ill, and part of our animal and human inheritance of communication: vivid, complex, endlessly signifying, like language itself. JULIET MCM ASTER

Acknowledgements I am lastingly grateful to the Killam Program of Canada for a Research Fellowship that enabled me to extend my area of specialization in the English novel from the nineteenth century back to the eighteenth. It has taken me a lot longer than they or I imagined at the time to bring that research to fruition, and they have been patient and tolerant. I also thank the University of Alberta for grants that have allowed me to work in the British Library and the Bodleian, and my Department, for the chance to present much of this work as the Broadus Lectures for 1995. My students, as always, have been personally supportive and intellectually stimulating. I have picked many a brain in the course of my research, and I particularly want to acknowledge the ideas and encouragement of Karen Clark, Edward Copeland, Isobel Grundy, Gary Kelly, Jane Magrath, Ray Stephanson, Bruce Stovel, and Bruce Watson. Rowland McMaster has been my guide, philosopher, friend, and husband, and I hope he will remain in all those capacities. He has also helped enormously with making reproductions for the illustrations. Versions of some of these chapters have appeared as articles or been delivered as lectures, and I am grateful to David Blewett, the editor of Eighteenth-Century Fiction, for permission to incorporate, as Chapters 1 and 2, ideas first published there; and to AMS Press for permission to use here a version of my essay first published in Clarissa and Her Readers, edited by Edward Copeland and Carol Houlihan Flynn. I gave a version of Chapter 3, on Physiognomy, as the F.E.L. Priestley Lecture at the University of Lethbridge, a version of Chapter 1 as the Lahey Lecture at Concordia University, and a version of Chapter 7 to the Burney Society. My cordial thanks for the permissions granted. J.M.

xvii

List of Abbreviations For the titles of novels referred to frequently, I have provided the following abbreviations in the text. Full citations appear in the Works Cited. Am Cl Cam Cec E Ev FCF FQ Gr GT HC JA MP P Pa PII PP SJ SLG SS TJ TS

Amelia, by Henry Fielding Clarissa, by Samuel Richardson Camilla, by Frances Burney Cecilia, by Frances Burney Emma, by Jane Austen Evelina, by Frances Burney Ferdinand Count Fathom, by Tobias Smollett The Female Quixote, by Charlotte Lennox Sir Charles Grandison, by Samuel Richardson Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift Humphry Clinker, by Tobias Smollett Joseph Andrews, by Henry Fielding Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen Persuasion, by Jane Austen Pamela, by Samuel Richardson Pamela, Volume II, by Samuel Richardson Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen A Sentimental Journey, by Laurence Sterne Sir Launcelot Greaves, by Tobias Smollett Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne

xviii

1 The Body Inside the Skin: the Medical Model

“A Man’s body and his mind, with the utmost reverence to both I speak it, are exactly like a jerkin, and a jerkin’s lining: – rumple the one, – you rumple the other” (TS 3.4.160). Thus Tristram Shandy, in the midst of his troubles both mental and physical. Sterne as novelist had licence to write figuratively and analogically. But his homely trope of jacket and lining can take its place alongside many such analogies, as produced by painters, poets, and actors, as well as by philosophers and natural scientists; for the relation of mind to body, the way the body figures forth the mind and the mind impacts on the body, were subjects intensely interesting and endlessly debated in the eighteenth century. And novelists, consciously addressing a readership well read in such discourses, make their own contributions to them, adding new interpretations and creating characters with minds and bodies variously related, and constantly signifying. This is a book about the extent to which reading the novel, in the eighteenth century, was about reading the body. The conception of the body, like everything else in the century, was changing. And the dispute between authority and innovation, conservatives and radicals, ancients and moderns, raged here as in other contexts. Descartes addressed The Passions of the Soul, his treatise of 1649, to “all those whom the authority of the Ancients has not entirely blinded, and who have been willing to open their eyes enough to examine Harvey’s opinion concerning the circulation of the blood” (Descartes 22). At one stroke Descartes dismissed the long-accepted Hippocratic model of the body, with its four humours and their qualities of heat and moisture that determine the psychological as well as the physical complexion of 1

2 Reading the Body

the body. In its stead he proposed a radically new model, according to which the body in its operations is likened to “a watch or other automaton” (21), with the blood flowing through arteries and veins from the heart, and nerves communicating, from the soul in the brain to every limb and member, and all the muscles that move them. Communication is central to his view of “the machine our body” – a phrase he repeats often (26, 27, 37, 38). Alongside the circulation of the blood (which he believed moved on thermodynamic principles, propelled by heat in the heart) he accepted the much older doctrine of the animal spirits, a subtle fluid refined from the blood. These he saw as moving through the nerves, “which are like little filaments or little tubes,” and which all come from the brain (22). (Pipes and aqueducts for moving something from one place to another had long been familiar technology, and therefore presented a convenient model for communication; had electricity and its transmission been part of the way the world was perceived to work, perhaps the nerves would have been seen as wires transmitting signals, rather than as pipes transporting spirits.) Descartes saw himself as an iconoclast and an innovator. “I shall be obliged to write here as though I were treating a topic that no one before me has ever described” (19). His dismissal of “the authority of the Ancients” and his espousal of a modern authority like Harvey made his work a rallying point for those who saw themselves as new men with new ideas. And his ideas continued to be considered “new” all the way into the eighteenth century. Charles Le Brun, the prestigious painter of historical subjects, built his theory of the visual representation of the passions around Descartes’ model of the body; Garrick followed in his reconceptualizing of the enacting of the passions on the stage; and the doyen of physiognomical theory and practice, Johann Lavater, paid him respectful attention. For today’s reader Descartes’ concept of the interaction of soul and body is startlingly physical, because he firmly locates the soul within the body, in “a certain extremely small gland [later identified as the pineal gland], situated in the middle of [the brain’s] substance” (36), a place centrally situated, where a number of nerves converge. And it is this soul that is the seat of the passions, and not the heart, as classical authority maintained. I shall be returning often to Descartes because, as we shall see, his scientific theories were enormously influential in the visual and performing arts, and filtered through to the novel as well. But his model for the body, though influential among physicians too, didn’t take the medical profession by storm as it did the theory and practice of painters, actors, and some novelists. If for the nonce Descartes wrote as a physiologist,

The Body Inside the Skin

3

he made no claim to be a physician. He addressed the bodily machine in working order, and left it to the surgeons and medical men to write about how to fix it when it broke down. And those whose profession it was to intervene in bodily functions were notably conservative, and tended to resort to old practices, even while paying lip-service to Harvey and Descartes. The classical model of the four humours of the body persisted alongside the new ideas. And though Descartes’ model of the body as machine became a commonplace in eighteenth-century medical discourse, and doctors routinely wrote of Harvey’s discoveries with reverence, many of the same doctors continued to proceed along the old tracks, it seems, and with little sense of incongruity. Likewise the novelists, who also made the relation of mind and body their business, learned much from the medical men. In later chapters I shall be taking up Descartes and his influence again. Here I investigate the codes of reading the body that novelists derived from medical discourses. The medical model for the body and its coextension with the mind was familiar to readers, and adopted by novelists perhaps more often than one would expect. The novelist, like the physician, is in quest of what goes on inside, of the interior beyond the signifying surfaces of face and skin. ***

“Most men know when they are ill, but very few when they are well” said the eminent eighteenth-century physician George Cheyne (Letters 7n). We are most aware of the body when it is malfunctioning; but likewise we are least able to understand it at that time. That is when an interpreter is called for. And as interpreters of their bodies, people in life, characters in fiction, and the authors who create characters in fiction turn to the physician. The doctor becomes the interpreter; or, if he is not present, his lore, as gleaned from his visits and his writings, is applied by amateurs. People in the eighteenth century were used to doctoring themselves and each other (R. and D. Porter ch. 3). The physician, and the medical writing he purveyed, provided the model for what was going on inside the opaque skin. The skin is a significant organ in eighteenth-century literature, and recognized in various contexts as an important boundary. The fully exposed skin is the body naked, the body revealed – “with all the pride of ornament cast off,” as the lubricious critic Tickletext gloats over the exposed charms of Pamela (Shamela 305). Glimpses of the bare white skin

4 Reading the Body

of Joseph Andrews and of Humphry Clinker cause flutters of sexual excitement in Mrs Slipslop and Tabitha Bramble, the elderly women who perceive the young men as sex objects. Gulliver hides his skin from his master the Houyhnhnm, because he knows very well that it will betray him as a Yahoo. Being without a skin, on the other hand, is a condition vividly imagined by more than one writer of fiction. Sterne’s Yorick, in A Sentimental Journey, talks of Smelfungus – or Smollett – as having “been flea’d alive, and bedevil’d, and used worse than St. Bartholomew” during his travels (SJ 29). Smollett seems to have taken this analogue of the skinned saint to heart: was it in reference to Sterne that Matthew Bramble in Humphry Clinker, who is hypersensitive to human and environmental corruption, is said to be “as tender as a man without a skin” (HC 46)? The figure of the écorché may be said to have haunted the eighteenth-century consciousness. We all remember Swift’s narrator’s comment, “Last Week I saw a Woman flay’d, and you will hardly believe, how much it altered her Person for the worse” (Tale of a Tub 343). The body inside the skin is not always a congenial entity; and the passage from the inside to the outside of the skin is fraught with danger. It was often the physician’s business to promote and supervise that passage. Eighteenth-century medicine was not distinguished for its advances. Between Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood in the seventeenth century, and Jenner’s development of vaccination for smallpox late in the eighteenth, the medical profession was highly conservative: according to some, even regressive. 1 Hippocratic medicine was still the norm. In 1758 the physician James Mackenzie published The History of Health, and the Art of Preserving It. Today’s equivalent of such a book, especially if written by a doctor, would be full of indignant reference to outdated practices and former benighted times. But Mackenzie’s History is also intended as a current “family doctor” volume. He collects the doctrines of Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna and company as principles of treatment still viable. He pays tribute to “the immortal Harvey” (349); but for the most part, as a guide to healthy living and sound medical practice, he regards those regimens and treatments as best which are tried and true. Galen, writing in the second century, says Mackenzie, “has written one of the fullest and best treatises on the preservation of health that we have to this day” (9). It often seems that in medicine not much has changed since Hippocrates. Although there were enlightened practitioners who had non-invasive principles, bloodletting, emetics, and purges remained the norm. The close relation of body to mind was still assumed by eighteenthcentury doctors as it had been by the ancients. The familiar

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four humours were still part of the picture, although falling out of fashion in some quarters (as well they might after 24 centuries). The mental faculties were therefore still often seen as determined by the physical makeup of the body. And passions and affections of the mind were still considered as among the six “Non-naturals,” conditions beyond the body, such as air and food, which nonetheless affect it. “We know by daily experience,” wrote Mackenzie, “that the influence of the mind upon the body, with respect to health, and of the body upon the mind, with respect to the intellectual faculties, is very great. Sudden terrors have killed some, and distracted others. Anger and grief impair health, chearfulness and contentment promote it” (359). The physician was expected to be psychiatrist and moralist too. It is his business to teach the “habit of virtue,” for the governance of the passions is the best preservative of health (365). This very physical model of the emotional life coexisted comfortably with Descartes’ mechanical model for the body. George Cheyne described the human body as “a Machine of an infinite Number and Variety of Fluids, perpetually running . . . in a constant Circle, . . . to moisten, nourish, and repair the Expenses of Living” (Cheyne, Malady 4). His rival, Richard Mead, confirmed the concept.2 In France their contemporary, the doctorturned-philosopher La Mettrie, produced the most extended argument in L’Homme Machine, in which he proved that body and soul were co-extensive, and constituted of the same material. “The human body is a machine which winds its own springs. It is the living image of perpetual movement” (93). What makes this machine go wrong? The fluids corrupt, often by some intemperate action of the subject, and must be evacuated. A high proportion of diseases are the result of plethora, an excess of matter in the system. And this excessive or corrupted matter must be got out. It is the physician’s business to assist nature in ejecting the corrupt humours, in getting them outside that containing skin. “The usual practice of physick among us,” Johnson quotes Temple, “turns in a manner wholly upon evacuation, either by bleeding, vomit, or some purgation.”3 As John Armstrong emphasized, in his epic in blank verse on The Art of Preserving Health (which comes complete with an invocation to Hygeia, goddess of health, as muse), “for physic knows / How to disburden the too tumid veins” (II, lines 221–3). The process of disburdening was indeed what physic knew best. “Its therapeutic rationale,” confirms Roy Porter, “lay in expelling toxic substances from the body – by purging, sweating, vomiting and the ritual of bloodletting, performed by barber-surgeons – aiming thereby to restore ‘balance’ and fortify the constitution . . . Overall,

6 Reading the Body

medicine’s powers to save lives had barely advanced since antiquity” (Bodies Politic 21). This simple – not to say crude – principle of extracting and discarding infected or superfluous matter pertained in an astonishing variety of cases. It was available to the merest peasant, who could readily adapt to being bled and purged like the gentry (R. and D. Porter 170). The gentry did not always rejoice in the system themselves, however. Lord Hervey complained of physicians: “They all jog on in one beaten track; a vomit to clear your stomach, a glister to give you a stool, laudanum to quiet the pain, and then a purge to cleanse your bowels, and what they call ‘carry it off’” (Hervey, III 965–6). Gulliver’s satirical description of physicians’ practice to his master the healthy Houyhnhnm, then, is hardly exaggerated: “Their Fundamental [a characteristic pun] is, that all Diseases arise from Repletion; from whence they conclude, that a great Evacuation of the Body is necessary, either through the natural Passage, or upwards at the Mouth” (Swift, GT 206). Purges, vomits, and bloodletting were the primary remedies applied in a huge range of diseases; and sometimes they were employed when nothing was wrong, just by way of a healthy regimen. But evacuations procured by these means were not the only ones deemed beneficial. Urine, sweat, pus, and phlegm were all much sought after. Spitting of blood was considered a healthy sign in tubercular patients (Mead 40). The fluid in a blister was likewise a means of drawing infected matter out through the skin, so that physicians worked with vesicatories, agents that painfully raised blisters, in order to cure certain maladies. Under the verb “to blister” Johnson in his Dictionary quotes Richard Wiseman, physician to Charles II, whose Chirurgical Treatises was the main medical reference work for Smollett’s young doctor, Roderick Random (RR 31). Wiseman wrote of one case: “I blistered the legs and thighs, but was too late: he died howling.” Phlebotomy, or bloodletting, was going out of fashion during the eighteenth century, and a number of medical books caution emphatically against inappropriate bloodletting. But even by the end of the century bleeding was still considered appropriate for “all inflammatory fevers, such as pleurisies, peripneumonias, etc. It is likewise proper for all topical inflammations, as those of the intestines, womb, bladder, stomach, kidnies, throat, eyes, etc., as also in the asthma, sciatic pains, coughs, headaches, rheumatisms, the apoplexy, epilepsy, and bloody flux. After falls, blows, bruises or any violent hurt received either externally or internally, bleeding is necessary” (Buchan, quoted by King 318–19). The list is remarkably inclusive. The complaint of Wordsworth’s

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leech-gatherer notwithstanding, bleeding with leeches was still in practice well into the nineteenth century. Dickens, visited by his friend the cartoonist Charles Leech, recorded that after an accident his guest was “in bed, and had twenty of his namesakes on his temples this morning” (Letters, 5. 612). Cupping, which brought the blood to the surface by the application of heated cups to the skin, was a variant of bloodletting, where the blood would be drawn from shallow incisions over a wide area rather than from a single incision. Dropsical patients seem to have given doctors a degree of satisfaction, in that evacuating their oedematous condition was relatively simple, and produced spectacular results. The physician simply made a hole in the leg and let the excess fluid drain out (Mead 102). Richard Mead rejoiced in the cheerful disposition of one dropsical woman who ordered her own epitaph: Here lies dame Mary Page . . . She departed this life March 4 1728 in the 51st year of her age. In 68 months she was tapped 56 times, Had taken away 240 gallons of water, Without ever repining her case, Or ever fearing the operations. (Mead 116; Roman numerals changed to Arabic) One can hear a note of moral triumph in the record: anyone who has got rid of that much evil matter is naturally conscious of an unusually shining virtue. So, whether by emetics, diuretics, purges, blisters, phlebotomy, sweating, or tapping, it was the principal object of the eighteenth-century physician to get the inside disease out. And this applied to nervous and emotional conditions as well as to physical ones. Because of the crucial importance of evacuations, there was a parallel emphasis on vents, the orifices by which the evacuations made their exit. The term “vent,” both as noun and verb, maintains an amphibious status between the literal and the metaphorical. ***

Doctors mythologized the process of disease and cure, and turned it into a narrative that had its own beginning, middle and end, its own peripeteia, and certainly its own catharsis: (the purging metaphor goes

8 Reading the Body

back to Aristotle). The cause of the disease usually has moral significance; the progress may be hastened or retarded, according to the patient’s behaviour; the crisis, or determining moment of judgement, arrives when the patient, aided by the physician, succeeds or fails in evacuating the disease. And returning health is the fortunate conclusion, or death the tragic one. Virtue becomes its own physical reward. The physician George Cheyne, in his correspondence with Richardson, even adds a spiritual dimension to this myth, turning it into a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress. “This physician’s tale reads like a somatization of the conversion experience familiar from spiritual autobiographies,” comments Porter (Bodies Politic 60). Cheyne urges a moderate diet and frequent purging and vomiting on the novelist, whom he sees as an alter ego, with fat physique and apoplectic symptoms such as he used to have himself: Your Purification must be lighter than mine has been because you have never been so luxurious nor hurt your Constitution so deeply. But I must not flatter you that you will not have your Purgatory and Purification. They pass through Death who do at Heaven arrive, says the Poet; but I think I can lead you through the State having passed it, I hope. (Letters 83) So the Patient’s Progress, like the Pilgrim’s, goes through the Death of disease and the Purgatory of treatment and appropriate regimen, to the Heaven of convalescence and eventual health. “And the trumpets sound for him on the other side,” presumably. In this scenario, the Physician plays the role of Bunyan’s Evangelist. This useful myth of the patient, with its various suspenseful stages, appears often in fiction. As an available paradigm – a vivid and economical version – let me use the familiar lyric in Tennyson’s “The Princess.” The fact that this nineteenth-century version echoes a similar ballad of Scott’s suggests that the storyline is traditional, and would have eighteenth-century analogues. Tennyson’s rendering of the medical myth is so succinct that I can quote it whole: Home they brought her warrior dead: She nor swoon’d, nor utter’d cry: All her maidens, watching, said, “She must weep or she will die.” Then they praised him, soft and low, Call’d him worthy to be loved, Truest friend and noblest foe; Yet she neither spoke nor moved.

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Stole a maiden from her place, Lightly to the warrior stept, Took the face-cloth from the face; Yet she neither moved nor wept. Rose a nurse of ninety years, Set his child upon her knee – Like summer tempest came her tears – “Sweet my child, I live for thee.”4 For the moment, I shall linger over this lyric not as a literary critic, but as a physician. This lady’s malady is an affection of the mind, grief, one of the “non-naturals.” And it is a life-threatening condition. There are several physicians here to intervene in the condition. All are amateur, but skilled nonetheless. They agree on the necessity for purgation (“She must weep”) and the prognosis if it is not achieved (“or she will die”). But they differ on the treatment, the method of procuring evacuation. Praise of the lady’s dead warrior does not do the trick, neither does the sight of his face, though both treatments are explicitly calculated to effect the venting. It is the most experienced practitioner, the Nurse of ninety years, whose intervention procures the crisis, the needed evacuation: the tears let out the disease, so cleansing the mind and body, averting death, and achieving life. It is notable that this “nurse” is not the paramedic that the term suggests today, but rather the wet-nurse and long-time family retainer, whose long experience and knowledge of the lady’s early life give her the necessary wisdom and insight into psychology. The effective physician has needed to be skilled in ministering to the mind as well as to the body. Tennyson’s lyric may seem a little too highly wrought for prose; but the novel of sensibility can furnish case histories almost as classic. At the end of Laura and Augustus (the anonymous novel of 1784 which was Jane Austen’s principal butt in Love and Freindship) the heroine’s husband dies, his constitution ruined by manifold undeserved troubles. Her reason overset by grief, Laura goes mad. Although the doctor prescribes tears, she cannot weep, until her friends cannily try Tennyson’s second treatment, and show her Augustus’s corpse: “She gazed upon the lifeless body for a few moments; burst into tears, and sank upon my shoulder. This was what we wished, and they were the first tears she had dropped since the fatal moment of Montague’s death. I suffered her to vent her tears without interruption” (III 142). The tears come too late to save her life; but the fortunate venting does evacuate her madness and restore her reason, so that she is able to consign the care of her child to its grandfather.

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“Medicine was . . . a quasi-religious morality play,” Roy Porter notes (Bodies Politic 25). This medical myth, with its plot that turns on the physiological as well as the moral progress of the protagonist, is at the root of much eighteenth-century fiction, and continued as a paradigm well after medicine had ceased to rely on evacuation, the expelling of evil matter, as the crucial phase in curing disease. The novels of Richardson, Sterne, Smollett and Burney are full of incidents and episodes that are versions of the medical myth. The most obvious are recognizably medical, and often doctors are actually in attendance. But many slide off into moral and psychological fables that are presented in terms of malady, treatment, healing. Richardson’s Mr. B, in Pamela, suffers from a plethora of passion. He lusts after Pamela, his lust expands into love, his love is denied, and he has attendant passions of jealousy and anger as a result of his frustration. He has never developed a habit of restraint, nor a healthy regimen. Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy, a century earlier, would prescribe marriage as cure for this love melancholy; and Mr. B too grows to realize that this is his best cure. (Marriage eases love melancholy by evacuating the plethora of semen.) But Pamela distrusts and so rejects his first proposal of marriage. Mr. B resorts to surgery: he sends Pamela away, immediately goes into a decline, and has himself “blooded.” Now seriously ill, he sends after her, begging her to return and marry him. The crisis occurs after the bleeding, when Pamela returns and he falls into a “fine Sleep.” Soon, in her presence, his convalescence is well on the way. He tells Mrs Jewkes, “You need not . . . send for the Doctor from Stamford . . . for this lovely Creature is my Doctor, as her Absence was my Disease” (Pa 219–20). This moral purgation that coincides with a physical one becomes a standard storyline, both within and beyond the eighteenth-century novel: Smollett’s Matthew Bramble, Burney’s Mortimer Delvile, Jane Austen’s Marianne Dashwood; and onward to Dickens’s Dick Swiveller, Arthur Clennam, and Pip. All achieve a heaven of moral reform and spiritual regneration, after the trial and purgation/purgatory of physical illness. Disease in the novel is never morally neutral. ***

When Tristram Shandy is pondering the writer’s best means of characterization, of putting a person down on paper, he lays out certain alternative procedures for the difficult business. He wishes first for a “Momus’s

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glass,” a window into the screening skin through which to view “the soul stark naked” (TS 1.23.74). But failing that, he considers defining character by the physician’s means: “There are others . . . who will draw a man’s character from no other helps in the world, but merely from his evacuations” (1.23.76). Of course we are meant to laugh at the notion of Tristram’s poring over his uncle Toby’s evacuations with the intent scrutiny of a medical practitioner, analysing the separation of the blood or the exact colour and viscosity of the urine. But the notion is more than a joke. It reflects Sterne’s intense desire to get at what goes on inside, and his wishful suspicion that the doctor may have some more reliable access to it than the writer. Although he rejects this path, arguing that analysis of evacuations is no use unless you compare them with the repletions, the technique he finally settles for is also learned from a doctor. “In a word, I will draw my uncle Toby’s character from his HOBBY-HORSE,” he decides (77). George Cheyne, in The English Malady, had explained the efficacy of “Amusement and Exercise” in avoiding nervous disorders: “It seems to me absolutely impossible, without such help, to keep the Mind easy, and prevent its wearing out the Body, as the Sword does the Scabbard; it is no matter what it is, provided it be but a Hobby-Horse, and an Amusement, and stop the Current of Reflexion and intense Thinking, which Persons with weak Nerves are aptest to run into” (Malady 181–2). Tristram Shandy is full of medical lore, as we shall see more fully in the next chapter. The distinguished obstetrician, Dr John Burton, is embodied and satirized as Dr Slop. Many other prominent physicians are referred to, including Cheyne, Mackenzie, James Drake the anatomist, and Richard Mead (who receives the dubious appellation “Kunastrokius”).5 And the novel is crowded with medical incident, as we follow Tristram’s birth and subsequent flight from death, Toby’s and Trim’s wounds and the treatments of them, Walter’s humours and his dietary regimen, and the flux fever in the trenches; all followed through with learned consistency and accurate terminology. But the subject of Tristram Shandy, of course, is less the action described than the process of creation itself. And here too the medical model is evident. Tristram is like his father in being a man of ideas. “Little boots it to the subtle speculatist to stand single in his opinions,” he generalizes, “—unless he gives them proper vent” (1.19.55). That is, he must write them down and publish them. Opinions, like corrupt humours, must be purged. The publication of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, then, is the proper vent for Tristram’s opinions. Tristram Shandy itself is its author’s evacuation. Moreover, it can procure a similar

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therapeutic effect for the reader. And here Tristram becomes anatomically detailed: If ’tis wrote against any thing,—’tis wrote, an’ please your worships, against the spleen; in order, by a more frequent and a more convulsive elevation and depression of the diaphragm, and the succussations of the intercostal and abdominal muscles in laughter, to drive the gall and other bitter juices from the gall bladder, liver and sweet-bread of his majesty’s subjects, with all the inimicitious passions which belong to them, down into their duodenums. (4.22.301–2) In reading Tristram Shandy, we are taking a bolus (Porter, “Spleen” 90). A Sentimental Journey exhibits again Sterne’s aspiration to probe, almost literally, the recesses of the heart. Blood – its quality and its motion – is a frequent source of imagery. Yorick’s sentimental adventures, he says, “kept my senses, and the best part of my blood awake, and laid the gross to sleep” (SJ 28). Sentiment refines the blood, it seems. Relationships progress in physically measurable ways: while Yorick is holding the hand of the lady in Calais, we hear, “the pulsations of the arteries along my fingers pressing across hers, told her what was passing within me” (19). Here Yorick is the patient, the lady is the diagnosing physician. But later, in the famous incident with the beautiful grisette in Paris, Yorick makes the desired transition from pastor to doctor. In the episode called “The Pulse” he compliments her on the quality of her blood, and she invites him to feel her pulse. Nothing loth, he writes, I took hold of her fingers in one hand, and applied the two fore-fingers of my other to the artery— —Would to heaven! My dear Eugenius, thou hadst passed by, and beheld me sitting in my black coat, and in my lack-a-day-sical manner, counting the throbs of it, one by one, with as much true devotion as if I had been watching the critical ebb or flow of her fever—How wouldst thou have laugh’d and moralized upon my new profession? . . . Trust me, my dear Eugenius, I should have said, “there are worse occupations in this world than feeling a woman’s pulse.” (SJ 53) This for Yorick is the consummation most devoutly to be wished. Likewise the Yorick in Sterne, always aspiring towards new feats of intimacy, covets a “new profession” as a physician, acquainted with the ebbs and flows of blood and the parallel motions of heart and mind.

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Smollett was a doctor by profession, so the medical view of character came naturally to him. His jaundiced view of life is perhaps at its least jaundiced when he deals with the doctor–patient relationship. Roderick Random has a tender sojourn with Miss Williams, for instance, when he is curing them both of the clap. And his villain-hero Ferdinand Count Fathom is at his most sympathetic when he takes to doctoring. But there is a progression in Smollett’s art and in his view of human nature that pertains to him equally as physician and novelist. Smollett’s first novel, the partly autobiographical Roderick Random (1748), has a physician as its protagonist. Roderick belongs in the tradition of the physician-satirist, the doctor who diagnoses the ills and the vices of the surrounding society. 6 But Roderick is a rather crude conception for a central character, since all his powers of diagnosis and his violent treatments are applied to the symptoms of corruption in those around him; he is notably blind to his own symptoms. When he does examine himself, he is hardly a subtle diagnostician. “Pride and resentment . . . were the two chief ingredients in my disposition,” he claims (99). He is less a medical machine than a culinary recipe. As we shall see in the chapter on gesture, a mechanical conception of the body is, however, a major constituent of Smollett’s comic vision, particularly in his early work. But a more radical and more moving vision of the body, in the naval sections of Roderick Random, is as refuse. Treasured by the mind that directs it, the body is nonetheless viewed by outside authorities as expendable and, once spent, as waste matter to be evacuated from the state. During battle at sea, the ship’s surgeon, the brutal MacShane, fortifies himself with rum, and then, “Being thus supported, he went to work, and arms and legs were hewed down without mercy” (RR 32.183). The seaman Jack Rattlin, threatened with amputation, enters the eloquent plea, “Odd’s heart . . . [you] would not suffer Jack Rattlin’s leg to be chopped off like a piece of old junk” (28.164). But though Roderick manages to save Rattlin’s leg, other junk, other human waste, accumulates. The sick and wounded are “squeezed into certain vessels” – called hospital ships, though there is neither doctor, nurse, nor cook aboard; and they are left to rot and putrefy among “millions of maggots” (33.187). These vessels are essentially only extended body bags for the disposal of human garbage. The dead bodies are thrown overboard without weights or wrapping, “so that numbers of human carcasses floated in the harbour, until they were devoured by sharks and carrion crows” (33.189). Roderick’s (and Smollett’s) indignation here is fierce and real, and his very physical conception of human character becomes a telling rhetorical weapon. For he sees this process of purging

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as quite deliberate. The admirals and administrators hold life cheap, and take calculated steps to make the men despise their own lives and bodies, so that they will become willing cannon-fodder (33.186). Roderick, though here still cast in the role of doctor, himself becomes a part of what is being flushed through the system and discarded. 7 The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1770) is a pilgrimage in search of health. It is a more mature and subtle conception than Roderick Random. Instead of healthy young Roderick the doctor, driven by the fumes of indignation, diagnosing and purging the sins of others, we have hypochondriac old Matthew Bramble the patient – medically informed, certainly, and highly sensitive to the human corruption around him; but himself lacking health, and becoming aware of his shortcomings. The medical profession and medical practice are themselves under scrutiny. Matthew Bramble is both identified with and distanced from his doctor-author – a configuration that is realized in the epistolary layout of the novel, in which Matthew’s letters are all addressed to his physician, Dr Lewis. Health, ill-health, and medication are explicitly the major subject between them. The opening words of the novel set the tone: “DOCTOR,// The pills are good for nothing, . . . I have told you over and over, how hard I am to move; and at this time of day, I ought to know something of my own constitution . . . Prithee send me another prescription . . . indeed, I am equally distressed in mind and body” (5). This is a novel that deals with psychosomatic experience: Matthew is constantly taking his own physical and psychological pulse. Sometimes he seems like a perfect textbook case who might have walked out of the pages of a medical treatise by Doctors Mackenzie, or Cheyne, or Mead. “I find my spirits and my health affect each other reciprocally,” he explains; “—that is to say, every thing that discomposes my mind, produces a correspondent disorder in my body; and my bodily complaints are remarkably mitigated by those considerations that dissipate the clouds of mental chagrin” (146). Matthew’s physical complaints are those of plethora. He is costive, as his opening complaint makes clear from the first. He also has swollen dropsical ankles, and gout. But the doctors cannot do him any good. Dr Lewis’s pills do not work; and, moreover, the on-stage doctors, and the available treatments, such as the supposedly medicinal waters at Bath, promote disease and filth rather than health and hygiene. Sterne had satirized Smollett as “Smelfungus,” and probably had him in mind as the kind of writer who defines character by examining “evacuations.” And of course it can be argued that Smollett had as much of an anal fixation as Swift.8 Such a fixation might be said to be an occupational

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hazard for doctors. But here Smollett satirizes doctors for the obsession. The “famous Dr. L[inde]n” in Bath makes an elaborate case for excrement as sweet-smelling and healthful, and offers to drink a dropsical evacuation (16). And later in the novel another practitioner pores over the “egista,” or discharges, of a patient who is suffering the simultaneous effects of an emetic and an enema (280). (I spare the reader a quotation). Matthew too is both fascinated and appalled by various human evacuations. At Bath he perceives the world around him, particularly the air and water, as being constituted of a sort of soup of human discharge. In taking the waters at Bath, he says, “we know not what sores may be running into the water while we are bathing, and what sort of matter we may thus imbibe; the king’s evil, the scurvy, the cancer, and the pox” (42–3). The drinking water, he imagines, is drawn from the same source: “In that case, what a delicate beveridge is every day quaffed by the drinkers; medicated with the sweat, and dirt and dandriff; and the abominable discharges of various kinds, from twenty different diseased bodies” (43). Another source of drinking water is near an old burial ground, so that “as we drink the decoction of living bodies at the Pump-room, we swallow the strainings of rotten bones and carcasses at the private bath” (43). This is a ghastly vision of the recycling of human waste through the human body. It is a vision that haunts minds other than Matthew’s. Gulliver encounters the academician in Lagado whose project is to reconstitute human waste for human consumption, 9 and himself recommends the Yahoo practice of forcing dung and urine down the throat as a “Specifick against all Diseases produced by Repletion” (4.7.214). Even Sterne, in presenting the text of Tristram Shandy both as Tristram’s evacuation and as the bolus the reader must swallow, plays with the same set of images. Hamlet’s conceit of the king who goes on a progress through the guts of a beggar is hardly better calculated to rub the nose in the infirmities of the flesh. From aliment to repletion to evacuation is the normal mechanical process of the body. Evacuation to aliment is a kind of hellish inversion. But Matthew’s hypersensitivity to human corruption is shown to be a morbid condition. His nephew Jery Melford provides a shrewd diagnosis: “I think his peevishness arises partly . . . from a natural excess of mental sensibility; for, I suppose, the mind as well as the body, is in some cases endued with a morbid excess of sensation” (15–16). This morbid excess affects Matthew morally, and makes a misanthrope of him. He is disgusted by the human body and by humanity at large. He is particularly disgusted by the lower classes, and by women. “What have I to do with the human species?” he asks, apparently ready to write it off altogether (44).

16 Reading the Body

The most effective cure for this condition arrives in the shape of Humphry Clinker. His name signals his connection with poverty and dirt. “Clinker” means “turd.”10 On his first appearance as “a filthy tatterdemalion” (76), “a beggarly foundling, taken from the dunghill” (81), with pale skin and bare posterior, he represents what Tom of Bedlam is for Lear: “the thing itself: unaccommodated man . . . a poor, bare, fork’d animal.” In such company, Lear urges the well-fed gentry, “Take physic, pomp; expose thyself to feel what wretches feel” (III. iv). It is a lesson that Matthew needs too, and he does take physic. When he clothes Clinker and employs him, he takes a large moral stride forwards. Also, his constipation is alleviated. The birth-mystery plot takes the shape of an allegory of evacuation. At the climax of the novel Clinker saves Matthew from drowning, and soon afterwards is revealed as his son. As William Park has shown, when Matthew recognizes Clinker as his own offspring, he “comes to terms with his own filth and the sins of his youth” (Park 371). The hyper-fastidious man learns to accept humanity and its dirt and corruption. For the hypochondriac character and his morbidly sensitive author, the lesson is one worth learning. But this climax to Matthew’s progression is a surgical one too. When Clinker hauls him out of the flooded coach, old Matthew is unconscious and almost drowned. Clinker has already shown that he can turn his hand to almost anything. Now he manages resuscitation. First, he arranges that “a great quantity of water ran out at his mouth” – after which Matthew opens his eyes. Then Clinker binds up his arm, and “let him blood in the farrier stile” (288). Although Smollett has rejected the excretory obsession of the trained physicians, this back-to-nature surgical practice seems to be efficacious. Once Matthew’s “blood began to flow in a continued stream,” he is able to speak, and his life is assured. He has been successfully drained of his dropsy and relieved of plethora. Not satisfied with providing Matthew with a son who reconnects him with the human race, Smollett arranges that for full efficacy the son is a surgeon too. Clinker might say, like a renaissance child to another father, “I am that of your blood was taken from you / For your better health.”11 Matthew Bramble’s correspondence with his physician is one-sided: we do not have access to Dr Lewis’s replies. George Cheyne’s correspondence with Samuel Richardson reverses this pattern: here we have the doctor’s letters, but usually not the patient’s. The two stood in an interesting relation to each other. Cheyne was the older and, during the decade of their correspondence, 1733 to 1743,

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much the more distinguished and authoritative man. He was a doctor, and a famous one, and author of a number of well-known books – most notably The English Malady (1733), which Johnson praised to Boswell. But Richardson, at least at the outset of the correspondence, was only a printer. Cheyne’s reason for writing was to convey instructions on the printing of his various works. He patronized Richardson, telling him, “I . . . am convinced you are a Man of Probity and Worth beyond what I have met with among Tradesmen” (Letters 36). Richardson seems to have initiated a more personal dimension in the letters by asking Cheyne’s professional advice about his infirmities. Cheyne then adds diagnosis, prescriptions, and medical advice to his instructions about printing. And when he becomes aware that Richardson inclines to obesity and apoplexy, as he does himself (at one time Cheyne weighed 475 pounds), he takes Richardson more firmly under his wing as one who should walk in his footsteps and practise the same regimen (Figure 1). Cheyne’s distinction as an author no doubt made him a role model for Richardson, and his role as therapist made him all the more authoritative. Richardson sent Cheyne a copy of Pamela when it appeared, and received praise. He also received ample instruction on the desirable content of the second part of Pamela, advice which he followed almost as faithfully, it seems, as the medical prescriptions of emetics and purges. This hand-in-glove correspondence with a physician, it seems to me, was a strong influence on Richardson’s writing. He seems to have developed as intense an interest in the workings of his own innards as Matthew Bramble. Not everyone would rejoice in this kind of advice: “Your giddiness is from the Stomach and Fumes arising from the Primae Vitae, from a Thickness of Blood and Want of Perspiration. Not only a temperate but an abstemious Diet, Exercise and gentle Evacuation must relieve you most effectually” (Letters 42). But apparently Richardson couldn’t get enough of it. Cheyne’s commentary on his constitution was as irresistible as psychoanalysis for today’s psychiatric patient. He fairly wore Cheyne down with his requests for medical advice. In 1742, the year before his death at the age of 72, Cheyne wrote pathetically, “I have so exhausted all my medical Artillery in your case, and impoverished my Invention, that I can scarce find wherewith to furnish out a Letter” (117). The fact that all this advice came in epistolary form, like Richardson’s novels, also had some effect. Through the post, Cheyne kept his fingers on Richardson’s pulse, as Yorick did on the grisette’s. It is an analogy for what Richardson’s characters are doing – a prolonged examination and internal analysis of one another, conducted at a distance; but with minute attention paid to external signs

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Figure 1 George Cheyne (1671–1743), Richardson’s sympathetic therapist, after Johann van Dienst

and symptoms; and with bold intervention in one another’s bodily processes. Of course Richardson’s ample novels are replete with medical action. Sir Charles Grandison is no mean therapist himself, and he travels with a physician as his right-hand man, Dr Lowther; not to minister to his

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own medical needs, but to fix up other people. Sir Charles takes on the mission of physicking the erring populace into health and virtue. Physicians or surgeons are often in attendance. Richardson is a strong believer, too, in the physical effects of affections of the mind. Clarissa dies of a broken heart, and does it over some hundreds of pages. And the evil characters like Mrs Sinclair die ghastly deaths that are medically fitted to their crimes. What Richardson was primarily learning during his long correspondence with Cheyne, I think, was medical intervention as a technique, and one that could be psychologically as well as physically effective. I must content myself with one example. Early in the Cheyne–Richardson correspondence, Cheyne provides a prescription that begins with two ounces of tincture of ipecacuanha root, and one ounce of “cleansing emetic wine” (33). Ipecacuanha, the Brazilian name of which signifies “creeping plant that causes vomit,” is a spectacular emetic, and still in use under the trade name Ipecac. In another place Cheyne had memorably commented, “Vomits are in diseases what bombs are in besieging forts” (Letters 7n). (He seems to have been fond of military metaphors for his business, as in telling Richardson he had exhausted his “medical Artillery.”) So when Richardson followed that prescription, and took two ounces of ipecacuanha as well as some emetic wine, he is likely to have remembered the effect. Most readers will recall the incident of the ipecacuanha in Clarissa. Lovelace would like to procure the pity and love from Clarissa that Mr. B’s malady procured from Pamela. “I shall be very sick tomorrow,” he predicts to Belford (Cl, 672). He plans to work on her sympathies. Then he debates with himself, Well but, Lovelace, how the deuce wilt thou, with that full health and vigour of constitution, and with that bloom in thy face, make anybody believe thou art sick? How!—Why take a few grains of ipecacuanha; enough to make me retch like a fury. (673) It works. And as Lovelace comments on his own condition, he recalls the Cheyne allegory of sickness as hell. This ipecacuanha is a most disagreeable medicine! That these cursed physical folks can find out nothing to do us good, but what would poison the devil! In the other world, were they only to take physic, it would be punishment enough of itself for a mis-spent life. A doctor

20 Reading the Body

at one elbow, and an apothecary at the other, and the poor soul labouring under their prescribed operations, he need no worse tormentors. (676) Clarissa is stricken with compassion, especially since with the aid of some pigeon’s blood from a poulterer’s shop Lovelace makes her believe he is vomiting blood clots. “In short, Belford, I have gained my end,” he reports triumphantly. “I see the dear soul loves me” (677). Lovelace has some medical artillery of his own. Perhaps because they have been subject to medical artillery, Richardson’s characters, and Burney’s too, become adept at using their diseases as weapons, or at least as instruments of manipulation. Clarissa’s father rules over his family with an iron hand, partly because he wields the threat that anyone who crosses him will bring about the dread catastrophe of throwing the gout upon his stomach (Cl, 109). The physical debility is real; but the patient’s conscious manipulation of his surrounding family members, by extracting obedience out of their compassion, shows Richardson’s exploration of sickness as a kind of power. Another parent, the steel-willed Mrs Delvile of Burney’s Cecilia, similarly turns bodily weakness into strength. Balked in her desire to break off her son’s engagement, “Grief and horror next to frenzy at a disappointment so unexpected . . . rose in the face of Mrs. Delvile.” The plethora of passion has its violent physical consequences: “striking her hand upon her forehead, [she] cried ‘My brain is on fire!’” – and she bursts a blood vessel (Cec 8.6.680). Immediately she gets her own way. The symptoms are perfectly genuine; but the gestures of striking the head and rushing from the room are voluntary, perhaps even deliberate. Even when she has fallen on the floor and is speechless, “with her face, hands and neck all covered with blood,” she can shake her head “angrily,” and use her visible suffering as a means to get what she wants. These crossroads between involuntary debility and willed power are endlessly fascinating to the novelist who studies the mind in the body and the body in the mind. The intricate manoeuvring and manipulations that make up the significant action of Clarissa particularly, among Richardson’s novels, seem to me to bear more than passing resemblance to medical practice. If the body is a machine, it is a machine you can tinker with; and such activity can be pleasurable, absorbing indeed, if by tinkering with the machine you can also affect the mind that guides it. Lovelace is adept at manipulation, at calculating effects, foreseeing their consequences, and taking advantage of them. And he does manage to attain control of Clarissa’s body and to manipulate it. He drugs her and rapes her. But

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ultimately Clarissa exceeds the medical model. Despite Lovelace’s calculations, his control over her body still leaves him powerless over her mind. The epistolary novel brings the process of composition to the surface of the action, as also does Tristram Shandy’s hand-to-mouth narration. We often catch correspondents talking about the irresistible necessity they are under to record their latest perception, and to mail the next letter; and rejoicing in the beneficial effects of this unburdening. Matthew Bramble refers to his letters as “the overflowings of my spleen” (HC 31); and he assures his doctor, “it is no small alleviation of my grievances, that I have a sensible friend, to whom I can communicate my crusty humours, which, by retention, would grow intolerably acrimonious” (31). Richardson’s Pamela and Harriet Byron likewise refer to letter-writing as helpful therapy. To adapt Tennyson’s lyric, “They must write or they will die.” The same applies sometimes to speech. In the Shandy family it is Uncle Toby who is most vulnerable to any grief, because he is not ready with language. “Madam will get ease of heart in weeping,” says Trim, “—and the Squire in talking about it,—but my poor master [Toby] will keep it all in silence to himself” (5.10.365), and so brood and sicken. That is, characters in the grip of grief or anxiety, or other affections of the mind, need a vent for them. Language – written or spoken – becomes their necessary evacuation. The familiar phrases like “vent thy spleen” have perhaps become clichés for us, dead metaphors. But for the eighteenth century they were still metaphors very much alive; indeed, sometimes regarded as literal medical fact. We need to remind ourselves that the root meaning of “expression” is a physical “pressing out,” a sense we still have when we talk of expressing milk from the breast. Mary Wollstonecraft makes most effective use of the physical implication of a term we more commonly use metaphorically. Her fragmentary novel The Wrongs of Woman begins with a mother bereft of her newborn daughter and incarcerated in a madhouse. The child was abducted while actually at the breast (183). And the mother’s emotional trauma is made vivid through the physical consequences, as she struggles with the pain of her unused milk and her bereavement. In her mind, “She heard her speaking half cooing, and felt the little twinkling fingers on her burning bosom—a bosom bursting with the nutriment for which this cherished child might now be pining in vain” (75). The language representing her condition is vividly somatic: “tortured. ..bursting. ..sorrow rushed back . . . agony . . . overwhelming . . . stifled” (75–6). Although her committal to a madhouse is simply a plot by her husband to gain her property, in these circumstances she does go temporarily insane. The

22 Reading the Body

healing process for this plethora is a kind of unbosoming. As an essential step in unloading plethora she writes. “Addressing these memoirs to you, my child, . . . many observations will . . . flow from my heart” (124). The novel itself thus becomes a kind of prolonged maternal ex-pressing, the verbal account of the mother’s life being all the nourishment she can bequeath to her lost daughter. In fact that huge aspect of characterization in the novel that comprehends what the characters speak and write, their self-expression in language, is recurrently set in the context of their physical and mental health, and frequently seen in a medical light. “Concealment,” says Burney’s Evelina, “ . . . is the foe of tranquillity” (Ev 267). And the foe of health too, we learn as Burney’s novels progress. This theme has some demonstrable relationship to Burney’s own experience. When she underwent a full-breast mastectomy without anaesthetic in 1811, her doctor, she said, “charged me to cry [out]! to withhold or restrain myself might have seriously bad consequences, he said” (Journals VI 604). To withhold vocal expression is medically dangerous. In discussing the medical model in her novels, I want to focus on the psychological rather than the physical, and on the issue of verbal expression rather than of bodily evacuations. Cheyne’s most famous book was The English Malady, or, A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of All Kinds (1733). He estimated that nervous disorders make up “almost one third of the Complaints of People of Condition in England” (ii). Note the class bias. It is not only particularly English to be nervous, but rather distinguished too. Those of developed intellect were particularly prone, he said – thus lending a certain cachet to melancholy, spleen, and the vapours.12 Burney sometimes satirized the fashion for nervous disorders. The unsympathetic Madame Duval in Evelina, for instance, claims with pride, “I am nerve all over” (286). She is like Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, who is always claiming compassion for her “poor nerves.” But more often Burney takes nervous conditions very seriously. She creates characters with “nerves of the most irritable delicacy” (Cam 615). Elaine Showalter has shown how the English malady evolved into The Female Malady, but without the cachet: nervous disorders, grading through hysteria and various kinds of dementia, came to be associated particularly with women. As chronicles of “Female Difficulties,” (the subtitle of her last novel The Wanderer) Burney’s novels in part account for this evolution. The female difficulties Burney dramatizes are many and various, of course: they include lack of parents, lack of identity, lack of cash, lack of experience, lack of power. Lack of occupation is a major one; and

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Cheyne considers occupation and exercise to be important cures for nervous diseases. But the most notable difficulty of all is the lack of a voice. For reasons usually related to being a woman, Evelina, Cecilia, Juliet and especially Camilla (as we shall see in more detail hereafter) are likewise gagged:13 they must all let concealment, like a worm in the bud, feed on their damask cheeks – especially in the context of love. Elinor Joddrel, who refuses to be silenced, pays a severe social penalty; the heroines who let themselves be silenced pay the penalty in health and sanity. Burney reinforces the social message on the tax that propriety exacts from women with a medical warning too. To stifle expression, to deprive a woman of a proper vent for her nervous disorder, is to risk illness and insanity. The imperious demands of delicacy often issue in a physical impediment to the heroine’s speech: “I seemed choaked,” writes Evelina (Ev 303). Camilla’s voice becomes “so husky, the inarticulate sounds died away unheard” (Cam 619). And physical symptoms signal the plethora is not being evacuated: “Camilla again was silent; but her tingling cheeks proclaimed it was not for want of something to say” (Cam 507). Cheeks may proclaim what lips must conceal. Psychiatry was yet in its infancy, but Cheyne’s The English Malady is an early text; and Burney’s novels provide case histories that point towards the enormous developments in both psychiatry and the psychological novel in the nineteenth century. Our different twentieth-century models for how the body works make it easy for us to overlook the eighteenth-century model, or to dismiss it as quaint and outmoded. But for the novelists of the period this model was real; and a highly physical, even physiological, conception of character carried with it the pressure of necessity. If the mechanical model of the body as a machine, and the mind as only one of its subtler organs, is rather crude, the novelists were not stuck with it; by their own explorations of the human consciousness they could exceed the model. But it provides, for the Walter Shandys and Yoricks, the Pamelas and Lovelaces, the Rodericks, and Evelinas, a sturdy and memorable framework, a resilience that has made them wear well. Diagnosis is a conclusion based on a reading of physical signs. As the trained physician observes the body and interprets its symptoms in order to procure health for the patient, so the informed reader of a novel observes characters in their speech and bodily actions in order to arrive at sympathy, understanding, and moral judgement. In both cases much depends on the visibility of the signals and the training in the interpretation of them. The novelist-creators sought to make their fictional

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personnel as intricately complex in the relationship between mind and body as any patient, and they expected their readers to be as educated as a skilled physician in reading signs in the body to arrive at their conclusions about what goes on in the mind.

2 The Body Illegible: Tristram Shandy

From the general consideration in the last chapter of the body medically considered, and the ways it provided a model for the novelists, I move to a more detailed examination of a single novel, Tristram Shandy, as a meditation on the body and what it can – and can’t – tell us about the mind. “Our minds shine not through the body,” says Tristram, “but are wrapt up here in a dark covering of uncrystalized flesh and blood” (1.23.75). It is one of the more melancholy statements in this enduringly sad and immortally funny book. In the ongoing debate among eighteenthcentury novelists on the relation of the body to character, Sterne differs from those many contemporaries who tend to show a fortunate consonance between the two. Even Fielding, who as we shall see in the next chapter was highly sceptical about the tenets of physiognomy, insists of Sophia that “Her mind was every way equal to her person” (TJ 4.2.155–6). And at the climax of Fielding’s novel, Jones leads her to a mirror in order to show her the physical and moral beauty that is to be the “pledge” of his fidelity: “Behold it there, in that lovely figure, in that face, that shape, those eyes, that mind which shines through those eyes” (18.12.865–6). For Fielding, the mind does shine through the body. Smollett, Richardson, and Burney, as well as many others, routinely provide detailed physiognomical descriptions of their personnel, and appearance is always relevant in a judgement of their characters. The outward and visible aspect of Sir Charles Grandison perfectly matches his inward and spiritual grace (McMaster, Grandison), and this harmony has much to do with the fact that the novel in which he appears is a comedy, with a fortunate outcome. Lovelace, on the other hand, has a graceful exterior which belies his moral corruption, and it is partly this vitiation of nature’s true language of physiognomy which makes Clarissa a tragedy. For Richardson a character’s bodily appearance is always relevant and expressive, even if 25

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some of its appearances can be deceptive; and therefore describing it is a useful and much exploited means of characterization. But since the body in Tristram Shandy is viewed as a dark covering of uncrystalized flesh rather than as a lucid medium, we get little in the way of vivid physical description of faces, figures, and so forth. Apart from the Hogarthian figure of Dr Slop,1 and the set-piece description of Trim’s pose as he delivers the sermon on conscience, the characters are seldom visually realized. It is no accident that we are left to fill in the Widow Wadman’s description for ourselves. Sterne and Tristram go another way to work, and decide to do the business of characterization through defining their characters’ hobby-horses instead (1.23.77). This does not mean, however, that the body is not important. Far from it. “Humour, after all,” says Virginia Woolf, “is closely bound up with a sense of the body” (Woolf 56). Tristram Shandy certainly has both humour and a sense of the body, and in the highest degree. The book begins ab ovo, and with the homunculus; and Tristram reminds us that the homunculus “consists, as we do, of skin, hair, fat, flesh, veins, arteries, ligaments, nerves, cartilages, bones, marrow, brains, glands, genitals, humours, and articulations” (1.2.5). Already in the second chapter the emphasis is anatomical. And by the time we get to Ernulphus’s curse, we encounter a zestful attempt at exhaustiveness on physiological matters that is truly encyclopaedic. “May he be cursed inwardly and outwardly.—May he be cursed in the hair of his head.—May he be cursed in his brains, and in his vertex,” (that is a sad curse, quoth my father) “in his temples, in his forehead, in his ears, in his eye-brows, in his cheeks, in his jaw-bones, in his nostrils, in his foreteeth and grinders, in his lips, in his throat, in his shoulders, in his wrists, in his arms, in his hands, in his fingers. “May he be damn’d in his mouth, in his breast, . . . and in his groin,” (God in heaven forbid, quoth my uncle Toby) — “in his thighs, in his genitals,” (my father shook his head) “and in his hips, and in his knees, his legs, and feet, and toe-nails.” (3.11.177) As the inserted commentary suggests, the different characters are identified by their allegiance to particular parts of the body: Walter Shandy is loyal to the brain and mental operations, and disapproves of the genitals; Uncle Toby responds to the groin (which has equally had a share in developing his character). Trim might well have his own particular sensibilities about knees, Mrs Shandy about ears, Tristram about noses, Dr Slop about fingers and thumbs. The passage not only captures the

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body and its parts, from the hair of the head to the very toenails, but hooks in the novel’s characters along the way. Mind and body – with the indissoluble links between them, and their simultaneously tragic and comic discontinuity – are surely the major overarching subject of Tristram Shandy. The body is not taken for granted, as it may be for pages or chapters together in some fiction. It is insistently there, for all the characters, and in our conception of them, even if only as an embarrassing “sort of battered kettle at the heel” (in Yeats’s phrase). Even though the characters are not visually realized for us through their physical appearance, we are constantly reminded that they exist in the body, that it determines their responses and limits or enables their actions. They think about it, they have theories about it, they are embarrassed or elated by it, they express themselves through it by their gestures and facial expressions, they live in a constant relationship to with it, at peace or at war. And their bodies impinge on other bodies. Tristram tells us that the conjunction of the bodies of his parents is to affect their son Tristram permanently, and determine the “formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind” (1.1.4). In the preface to Joseph Andrews Fielding produced his famous poetics of comedy, as Aristotle had produced the Poetics of tragedy. The Ridiculous, he tells us, arises from the exposure of affectation, which strikes the reader with the comic emotions of “surprise and pleasure” (to balance Aristotle’s pity and terror), and thereby purges away “spleen, melancholy, and ill affections.” Tristram Shandy is likewise written “against the spleen” (Porter, “Spleen”). But Sterne, unlike Fielding, isn’t interested in the exposure of affectation. If he had written his own poetics of comedy, I suspect, he would have focussed on the discontinuity of mind and body as the most fertile source of laughter. Take the hot chestnut episode, for instance. I have witnessed an occasion on which a whole roomful of graduate students, called upon to read this passage aloud to one another, have been reduced to helpless tearful palpitating giggles, and unable to complete it. The idea of a hot chestnut in someone’s breeches is amusing, of course, in itself, and apt to prompt a guffaw, like other jokes that overthrow sexual dignity. But this is only the beginning of Sterne’s joke. His most characteristic humour lies in his elaboration of the situation. What is crucial to the comedy is that Phutatorius doesn’t know about the fall of the hot chestnut – he is aware of the physical sensation, but not of its cause: The genial warmth which the chesnut imparted, was not undelectable for the first twenty or five and twenty seconds,—and did no more than

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gently solicit Phutatorius’s attention towards the part:—But the heat gradually increasing, and in a few seconds more getting beyond the point of all sober pleasure, and then advancing with all speed into the regions of pain,—the soul of Phutatorius, together with all his ideas, his thoughts, his attention, his imagination, judgment, resolution, deliberation, ratiocination, memory, fancy, with ten batallions of animal spirits, all tumultuously crouded down, through different defiles and circuits, to the place in danger, leaving all his upper regions, as you may imagine, as empty as my purse. With the best intelligence which all these messengers could bring him back, Phutatorius was not able to dive into the secret of what was going forwards below, nor could he make any kind of conjecture, what the devil was the matter with it. (4.27.321) Sterne’s and Tristram’s artistry, of course, are to the fore, in the wonderful management of pace, rhythm, and contrast. The unfolding history of the gradual development of the sensation, from the delicate double negative of “not undelectable” to “the regions of pain,” and then the crowded list of mental faculties and their motions, keep the reader breathless for the next move. There is a fine balancing of Walter-ish pedantry with Tristram-ish impishness. We savour the contrast between the exhaustive listing of mental faculties and the tactful euphemism for the important body part as “the place in danger.” And the opposition of all those polysyllabic Latinate terms – “deliberation, ratiocination,” etc. – to the simple and intimate image “as empty as my purse” brings a hefty paragraph to an end with a charming tinkle. The same change of register enlivens the next paragraph, where the weighty “best intelligence” and “any kind of conjecture” winds up with the familiar and colloquial “what the devil was the matter with it.” And the carefully controlled modulation between vertical and horizontal motion in the sequence “dive into . . . what was going forwards below” is as apt and precisely weighted as a line in a Keats ode. Artistry aside, such a passage affords us – as Locke’s Essay and Tristram Shandy do – “a history . . . of what passes in a man’s own mind” (2.2.85); and the military manoeuvres of all the forces of Phutatorius’s brain, including the “battalions of animal spirits,” have their keen narrative interest. The history of what passes in his mind is the history of what passes in his body too, for the faculties of the mind are not confined, it seems, to the cerebral cavity, but may desert their posts. At this moment this particular army is in disarray, its personnel scattered and stumbling over one another like all the king’s horses and all the king’s men in

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Alice, its messengers scurrying to the wrong places, with the wrong information. The history is prolonged, so that we may savour the few seconds while Phutatorius’s senses tell him of the burning heat in his crotch, while his brain can’t divine “what the devil was the matter with it.” Phutatorius decides in his extremity to bear the pain like a stoic: the mind will vanquish the body. But a third force, his imagination, enters the battle, suggesting the idea that the pain is produced by the bite of “some . . . detested reptile.” Flesh and blood can bear no more, and they overthrow the command of the mind. Once Phutatorius has sprung to his feet, exploded with his memorable expletive “ZOUNDS!” and flung out the chestnut, that particular phase of the joke is over. But Sterne has surrounded the incident with further examples of the comic discontinuity of physical sensation and mental ratiocination. The other clerics at the visitation dinner hear Phutatorius’s exclamation and see him spring to his feet, and like Phutatorius himself they at once set their minds to interpreting these physical manifestations. And again we follow a series of little histories of what passes in each man’s mind. Each has a finely developed theory of the cause of their colleague’s exclamation, and all assume that his “mind was intent upon the subject of debate”; yet the debate is “never once in any one domicile of Phutatorius’s brain – but the true cause of his exclamation lay at least a yard below” (4.27.319). As so often in Tristram Shandy, the mind is vanquished by the body; and from the victory arises laughter. Meanwhile, further history is in the making, the history of what passes in yet another mind, the reader’s. The first-time reader, who encounters that potent “ZOUNDS! —” on the page, knows the cause of it no more than the other characters, or Phutatorius himself, and must follow the mistaken hypotheses of Yorick and company, digest the narrator’s aphorism, “How finely we argue upon mistaken facts!” and pick his or her own path towards interpretation among Tristram’s delicate circumlocutions. Somewhere along the route the reader is apt to collapse into that state of physical helplessness that pertained among the graduate students I described. Tristram Shandy engages the body as well as the mind of its readers, too (Josipovici 32–3). Walter Shandy has much ado to keep his mind and his body on the same track with one another. There is a moment at which Toby has exasperated him by interrupting an explanation of obstetrical technique that deeply interests him. The needful gesture to restore the discourse to the direction Walter prefers is to lift his wig and wipe the sweat from his head with his handkerchief. Walter is a rhetorician: he cares about

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appropriate gestures, and wants to perform them well. But he has made the mistake of lifting his wig with the same hand that is needed to pull his handkerchief from his pocket. As he has to reach across his own body, awkwardly groping in the deep right pocket with his left hand, his ideas pile up and bump into one another for want of timely articulation. Sterne dwells on this tableau for several chapters, while Walter’s face becomes suffused, Toby demonstrates his charity and his gentle responses, and Tristram can philosophize that “the circumstances with which every thing in this world is begirt, give every thing in this world its size and shape” (3.2.158). We are invited to contemplate the comic picture of Walter in his unlovely pose, while the flow of ideas that he is concerned to maintain is halted and dispersed. It is at this point that Tristram introduces that memorable aphorism that I quoted at the outset: A Man’s body and his mind, with the utmost reverence to both I speak it, are exactly like a jerkin, and a jerkin’s lining;—rumple the one—you rumple the other. (3.4.160). Mind and body are intimately interconnected, but likewise discontinuous; and from the connection and discontinuity arise the intricacies of the human condition. And it’s characteristic of Tristram to concentrate on the rumples, rather than on the pellucid shining through a mirror. Sterne, through Tristram, is always seeking the right metaphor for the relation of mind to body, one that will convey not simple equivalence, but the discontinuities and contiguities of flesh and spirit. Jacket and lining, man and clothing (5.7.361), rider and hobby-horse: he wants to suggest the intimate rub and relation, while still preserving the separate identities and antitheses. The shining mind and the dark covering of uncrystalized flesh suggest the loneliness and isolation of the one without the other. The mind has its heady intellectual independence, its untrammelled autonomy; and yet it must operate through flesh: it is trapped, or realized (depending on your point of view at the time) through incarnation. Tristram Shandy is a comic prose epic version of Donne’s “The Ecstacy,” and follows a similar progress from the detached intellect to the body: But O alas, so long, so far Our bodies why do we forbear? They are ours, though they are not we. We are The intelligences, they the sphere.

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Insofar as Tristram Shandy is about the relation of mind to body, the animal spirits, which mediate between the two, almost gain the status of characters in their own right (Myer, “Animal Spirits”). In The Anatomy of Melancholy Robert Burton refers to them as “the instrument of the soul” (Burton 1.1.2.3.129); Tillyard picturesquely characterizes them as “the executive agents of the brain” (64). The animal spirits are introduced in the first chapters as the intended escorts of the homunculus, who were “scattered and dispersed” by Mrs Shandy’s unseasonable question at the moment of Tristram’s begetting; and at that phase of the book they are beings subordinate in status only to Tristram himself and his parents: You have all, I dare say, heard of the animal spirits. . . . Well, you may take my word, that nine parts in ten of a man’s sense or his nonsense, his successes and miscarriages in this world depend upon their motions and activity, and the different tracks and trains you put them into, so that when they are once set a-going, whether right or wrong, ‘tis not a halfpenny matter,—away they go cluttering like hey-go-mad; and by treading the same steps over and over again, they presently make a road of it, as plain and as smooth as a garden-walk, which, when they are once used to, the Devil himself sometimes shall not be able to drive them off it. (1.1.4–5) The passage is a parody, surely, of the description in Paradise Lost of the beaten track that Satan establishes between hell and earth: Sin and Death amain Following his track, such was the will of Heav’n, Pav’d after him a broad and beat’n way Over the dark Abyss. . . . . . . by which the Spirits perverse With easie intercourse pass to and fro To tempt or punish mortals. (II.1024–32) Tristram is setting up his own comic microcosm, in which the animal spirits make their own road for easy travel between mind and body, sometimes even displacing the Devil himself. The adjective “animal” serves his purposes well, since it originally derives from anima, the soul, but has taken its own evolutionary path towards the beast in us. Tristram’s microcosm is a version of his father’s: Walter Shandy has strong principles against the movement of the rural population towards London for, according to Walter’s world view, the movement of the executive agents

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of the brain should be outwards to govern the body; the contrary motion would suggest that the body governs the brain. “He would run it down into a perfect allegory, by maintaining it was identically the same in the body national as in the body natural, where blood and spirits were driven up into the head faster than they could find their ways down;—a stoppage of circulation must ensue, which was death in both cases” (1.18.46). Much has been made of the influence of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding as an influence on Tristram Shandy; and Sterne himself gives authority for the influence by his respectful reference to the Essay as a history of what passes in a man’s mind (2.2.85).2 But a more congenial model for his novel was The Anatomy of Melancholy. The affinities between Sterne’s work and Burton’s go beyond their shared status as Menippean satires (Frye 309), and beyond the many shameless borrowings, to a kinship in narrative tone, authorial world view, subject matter, and even structure. Tristram, like Burton’s persona “Democritus Junior,” is a laughing philosopher, but one humiliatingly prone to the advances of age, mutability, and death. Born in the enlightened eighteenth century, Tristram nevertheless harks back, like his father, to the world picture of the seventeenth century and earlier, as collected from musty authors over twenty centuries, and chaotically rehashed by an Oxford scholar-pedant who gets all his experience and all his excitement out of books. Walter Shandy, as one of Sterne’s eighteenth-century critics noted, has “all the stains and mouldiness of the last century about him.” 3 As we have seen, the four humours, and the vision of the universe they belong to, were outdated by the eighteenth century, and physicians and scientists were beginning to construct new systems; but for Walter and Tristram Shandy the balance of the humours in the body still determines temperament: Toby’s character is “of a peaceful, placid nature,” because there is “no jarring element in it, — all was mix’d up so kindly within him” (2.12.113); whereas Walter is feisty and aggressive, because of his choler, and “subacid humour” (2.12.114). Mind and body are bound up together. It comes naturally to Tristram to say “Now, I (being very thin) think differently” (7.13.493). Tristram’s book, like Burton’s, is more than a history of what passes in a man’s mind: it is an Anatomy, a history of what passes in his body too, because the two can’t be separated. “The soul and body are joint-sharers in every thing they get: A man cannot dress, but his ideas get cloath’d at the same time” (9.14.616). Both books are about physiology and psychology, and at the same time. Both are the Life and the Opinions of their narrators. One could elaborate the analogy. For instance, Burton’s grand climax is his Third Partition on Love-Melancholy, while the declared goal of

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Tristram’s narrative, the “choicest morsel” he advertizes, is the account of Toby’s amours. Both authors provide a treatment of love that purports to be comprehensive and exhaustive, “one of the most compleat systems, both of the elementary and practical part of love and lovemaking, that ever was addressed to the world” (6.36.466). These two final sections contain much of the same lore about the kinds, causes, examples and cures of love, with vivid subsections on such matters as the power of the eye in creating love, and the uses of camphor and other refrigerants in allaying lust. (Walter secretly has a pair of Toby’s breeches lined with camphorated cerecloth, a recipe gleaned from Burton, which “membrum flaccidum reddit”! [6.36.468]). Burton produces an astonishing array of examples of love melancholy, drawn indiscriminately from history, myth, and literature; and Tristram likewise collects for his last book a whole set of sexual relationships, including not only Toby and the widow Wadman and the “beds of justice” of Walter and Mrs Shandy, but also the amours of Trim and Bridget, Trim and the Beguine, Tom and the sausage-maker’s widow, Tristram and Jenny, Obadiah and the maid, and the Shandy bull and cow. Love and sexuality turn out in both books to be the subjects best fitted for dramatizing the intricate interrelation of mind to body. Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the history of what passes in a man’s mind, and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, which deals largely with what passes in his body, can in fact be seen as dual sources for Tristram Shandy, the textbooks on the two great territories and the relationship between them that Sterne undertakes to explore. They are the jerkin, and the jerkin’s lining – with the utmost reverence to both I speak it. It is characteristic of Tristram that he has a highly physical conception of mental operations. He explains the relation of wit and judgement by likening them to the knobs on the back of a chair. Toby received his modesty, a moral attribute, from a blow from a stone. Walter makes an opinion his own as a man takes possession of an apple, by mixing up the sweat of his brow and the exudations of his brain with the object, so that it becomes mingled with himself, and therefore his own property (3.34.223). Minds are envisaged as physical spaces, with ideas bumping around in them. Susannah’s memory is a “leaky vessel,” spilling precious syllables (4.14.287). Dr Slop’s mind seems to be a sea navigated by thoughts which are not always well under way: But here, you must distinguish—the thought floated only in Dr. Slop’s mind, without sail or ballast to it, as a simple proposition; millions

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of which, as your worship knows, are every day swimming quietly in the middle of the thin juice of a man’s understanding, without being carried backwards or forwards, till some little gusts of passion or interest drive them to one side. (3.9.167) Again, as with Phutatorius’s inability to grasp “what is going forwards below,” there is some desire for a purposeful forward motion, but insufficient power to achieve it. The same might be said of Tristram’s narrative. “REASON is, half of it, SENSE,” argues Tristram. And he shows himself adept at translating mental processes into terms that can be physically apprehended. It is of a piece with the Shandy mentality that Walter has decided that the soul must have its local habitation in the body. But he rejects the Cartesian thesis on its location, largely because he resents any authority but his own. “He was satisfied it could not be where Des Cartes had fixed it, upon the top of the pineal gland of the brain” (2.19.147). Instead he fixes on the cerebellum, which is also placed centrally, but on the top of the head rather than deeply inside the brain. His only piece of evidence is that his son Bobby, who as the first-born “made way for the capacity of his younger brothers” by taking the brunt of the pressure during birth on his own cerebellum, turned out to be “a lad of wonderful slow parts” (2.19.151,153). For all his prowess as a speculative philosopher, Walter’s theories have their severe epistemological limitations. He likes to have empirical evidence for his theories, but a single instance will do for proof. So his son’s slow parts serve to prove the location of the soul in the cerebellum; his Aunt Dinah’s indiscretion with the coachman is the indispensable basis for his theory of names and his conviction of the raging concupiscence of the whole female species; and his grandmother’s inflated jointure is the foundation of his grand theory of noses. The mind responds, of course, to the body’s crises. One aspect of the relation between them that reaches the surface of Tristram’s narrative is the influence of health and disease on character and on literary composition. Here Tristram writes while seasick, with a developed articulateness about what is passing in his own brain: what a brain!—upside down!—hey dey! the cells are broke loose one into another, and the blood, and the lymph, and the nervous juices, with the fix’d and volatile salts, are all jumbled into one mass—good g—! every thing turns round in it like a thousand whirlpools—I’d give a shilling to know if I shan’t write the clearer for it. (7.2.481)

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Tristram and his father monitor their own health and maladies with the self-consciousness of hypochondriacs. The vision of character comprehends not only the vision of bodies and minds in good working order, but of bodies subject to all the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Toby with his unhealed wound, poring over his books, is exhorted to flee from knowledge as from a serpent: “Alas! ‘twill exasperate thy symptoms, – check thy perspirations, – evaporate thy spirits, – waste thy animal strength, – dry up thy radical moisture, – bring thee into a costive habit of body, impair thy health, – and hasten all the infirmities of thy old age” (2.3.90). Walter Shandy has his developed theory of “the whole secret of health” as “depending upon the due contention for mastery betwixt the radical heat and radical moisture” (5.33.394). The book is steeped in medical lore:4 not just the old-fashioned Burtonian adumbration of the operation of the humours, but up-to-date theories on genetics, 5 obstetrics, 6 pathology and diet. A fictional doctor, Dr Slop, is a prominent character, and ready at the drop of a hat to expatiate on the mysteries of his trade. His historical original, Dr John Burton, with his book on obstetrics, is often invoked. Another obstetrician, the famous Sir Richard Manningham, is knowledgeably referred to, and another doctor, Richard Mead, appears as the suggestively named Dr Kunastrokius (1.7.13). Dr John Smith’s theory on the benefits of an alcohol-free diet and a regimen of drinking water receives satirical attention.7 Various diseases – Tristram’s “vile cough,” the scullion’s dropsy, the flux fever in the trenches – and various treatments and specifics – bloodletting, the cataplasm, the lint and basilicon that Mrs. Shandy calls for after the accident with the windowsash 8 – all have their importance in the narrative, and keep before us the body as a fragile entity, vulnerable, like the mind that inhabits it, to attack, accident, and disease. The law that pertains among all these anatomically and medically conceived bodies is what Sigurd Burckhardt has described as the law of gravity. “A messy fatality attends the falling bodies of the novel, the things that stupidly plummet: they always land on the genitals. Rocks, sash windows, chestnuts do far more damage than bullets” (Burckhardt 72). In the same way, and with the same comic force, the faculties of the body are subject to a gravitational pull downwards. Soul, mind and brain have aspirations towards upward mobility, but are doomed to bathos. “Imagination, judgement, resolution, deliberation, ratiocination” all tumultuously crowd down; and while the Walters, Tristrams, and Phutatoriuses of the Shandy world would take off, if they could, on heady flights above the cerebellum, their actual course usually takes them “at least a yard below.” The journey taken by Phutatorius’s various mental faculties

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is in this respect typical. Language has the same tendency. Tristram can swear up and down that by “nose” he means nothing but “the external organ of smelling” (3.33.221), but the more he protests the more he suggests something at least a yard below. And so with all the multiple and continuous double entendres in the novel; there seems to be scarcely a word or an image that can be sustained at a purely intellectual level: everything tends eventually towards a bodily and sexual inference. Likewise every bodily excrescence – fingers, thumbs, whiskers, noses, ears, – as well as sausages, cannons, and so on – refer eventually to the penis; and every bodily orifice, indeed every crevice, pond, ditch, pocket, placket, slit, refer eventually to the pudend. Literally every “thing” does. The soul subsides to the mind, the mind to the body, the body to its lowest “end.” The very characters, as identified by their names, grow out of a synecdoche, the low part standing for the whole. “Toby” is slang for the buttocks,9 and the name calls attention to Uncle Toby’s function as the down-to-earth and practical Shandy brother, the body to Walter’s brain. 10 “Tristram,” the “child of . . . interruption,” recalls the triste of Aristotle’s quoted dictum, “omne animal post coitum est triste” (5.36.397) (Alter 322). “Jenny” is the name for the female of the species, especially of donkeys or (as Tristram prefers to call them) asses. That is, Tristram’s “dear, dear Jenny” is the female ass. And hereby hangs a tail. One of the most vivid incidents in St Jerome’s life of St Hilarion shows the sainted ascetic apostrophizing his body, which has been troubling him during puberty with some lascivious visions. “’You ass,’ he said to his body, ‘I’ll see that you don’t kick against the goad; I’ll fill you not with barley, but with chaff; I shall wear you out with hunger and thirst’” (Deferrari 248–9). Hilarion’s conceit of the lustful body as ass reaches Tristram Shandy (via The Anatomy of Melancholy) through Walter. He deliberately irritates Toby by “the perverse use my father was always making of an expression of Hilarion the hermit; who, in speaking of his abstinence, his watchings, flagellations, and other instrumental parts of his religion – would say – tho’ with more facetiousness than became an hermit – ‘That they were the means he used, to make his ass (meaning his body) leave off kicking’” (8.31.583–4). Walter asks the smitten Toby, “How goes it with your ASSE?” To which Toby, who is thinking of the blister on his nethermost part, serenely replies “My A—s . . . is much better” (8.3l.584–5). This explanation of the ass as the body (particularly the lowest end of it) comes late in the novel; but it accounts for the prominence of all those horses, hobby-horses, asses, mules, donkeys, jackasses and jennys that

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cavort their quadruped way through Tristram Shandy (Gysin 74–6): Yorick’s Rosinante, Tristram’s mule that he rides through France when he is in flight from death, and Don Diego’s mule, which he addresses alternately with his beloved Julia, in Slawkenbergius’s Tale. The Abbess of Andoüillets neatly reverses the story of St Hilarion by exhorting her mules to “bou-ger” and “fou-ter,” words which she has heard “will force any horse, or ass, or mule, to go up a hill” (7.24.508). Tristram holds a conversation with an ass in an entrance-way in Lyons: “with an ass,” he claims, “I can commune for ever” (7.32.523). Sterne’s characters, that is to say, are in constant communion with the flesh. Tristram implores his reader not to confuse his hobby-horse with Walter’s ass (8.31.584), but the request is about as disingenuous as the claim that a nose means a nose and nothing else. The relation of the rider to his hobby-horse, carefully explained, is yet another metaphor for the mind’s relation to the body; and both sink inevitably towards the unmentionable: A man and his HOBBY-HORSE, tho’ I cannot say that they act and re-act exactly after the same manner in which the soul and body do upon each other: Yet doubtless there is a communication between them of some kind . . . by means of the heated parts of the rider, which come immediately into contact with the back of the HOBBYHORSE.—By long journies and much friction, it so happens that the body of the rider is at length fill’d as full of HOBBY-HORSICAL matter as it can hold. (1.24.77) All these developed relations between characters and animals are intended to remind us again of the varied relations between mind and body. The ass and its variants are cherished, scourged, goaded, bitted, secreted and paraded. Mind and body, like Walter’s ideas and his conduct, are at “perpetual handicuffs.” Tristram, like the animal spirits, is constantly travelling between them, “cluttering like hey-go-mad . . . treading the same steps over and over again.” The focus of his interest is that hiatus and connection between the rider’s seat and the horse’s back, where all the friction is happening. And Tristram’s own hobby-horse, “the sporting little filly-folly which carries you out for the present hour” (8.3l.584), with its “just balance betwixt wisdom and folly” (9.12.614), is Tristram Shandy itself, the lasting and visible “Life” and “Opinions,” words in the process of taking on physical being as marks in oil and lampblack on paper sheets folded and collected in signatures.

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An area of the body in which Sterne specializes – the reader will not be surprised to hear – is the genitals. No other novelist had paid such close attention to the biological differences between male and female bodies, or incorporated so outrageously incidents that pertain to the intimate bodily functions of conjugal sexuality, generation, gestation, and childbirth. As a novel by one man, purporting to be the autobiography of another, who writes mainly about still other men – his father, his uncle, and his uncle’s manservant – Tristram Shandy deals largely with male anxieties, usually sexual ones. But Sterne is alert too to the women’s side of the picture, and has written a novel more sensitive to women’s issues than many of its predominantly male critics have suggested.11 Walter Shandy is presented, and judged, as an example not only of the intellect gone berserk, the philosophus gloriosus who according to Frye is the proper subject of Menippean satire (Frye 309), but of the mad misogynist. He blames women for most of the evil in the world; and his typical endeavour in his elaborated theories is to marginalize women, and if possible to make them redundant. As Louis Landa has shown, Walter espouses the male side in the scientific debate on the origin of individual life: he believes that the “bud” of life that becomes the foetus is located in the homunculus of the semen Marium, rather than in the mother’s egg (which according to this theory provides only a convenient and disposable “nidus” for the homunculus). He takes delight in the speculation “That the mother is not of kin to her child” (4.29.328), and argues “she is not the principal agent” (5.31.391) in procreation. Because of his theory that pressure on the cerebellum during labour is dangerous to the intellect of his son, he tries to persuade his wife to undergo delivery by caesarean – an operation always fatal in the eighteenth century (Cash 141): he is willing to have his wife cracked open like a nutshell for the safer delivery of his son. He bitterly resents the visible bonding of women on the great occasion of childbirth: “From the very moment the mistress of the house is brought to bed,” he complains, “every female in it, from my lady’s gentlewoman down to the cinder-wench, becomes an inch taller for it; and give themselves more airs upon that single inch, than all their other inches put together” (2.12.284). But Sterne also allows us glimpses of the woman’s angle. Against Walter’s espousal of the homunculus theory he balances the ovist’s view – for Tristram is proud of tracing his history ab ovo! Mrs Shandy turns “pale as ashes” at Walter’s proposing a caesarean, and will have no part of it. She resists his “man of science,” Dr Slop, who as a Catholic would be ready in a crisis to save the child’s life at the expense of the mother’s (presumably by caesarean). She is fighting for control of her body, and,

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limited as her resources are, she manages to bring it about “that both sides sung Te Deum” (1.18.48). She is a survivor. It is no news that Walter is a misogynist. But the source of his misogyny is curious, and intricately developed. He is moved less by dislike of women than by envy. Sex disgusts and humiliates him, partly because he is not very good at it, but also because it “couples and equals wise men with fools” (9.33.645). As a wise man himself (he thinks), he longs to do the whole job of procreation by himself. His model for love is “rational [love] . . . without mother – where Venus had nothing to do” (8.33.587). Figuratively at least, he can accomplish his fantasy of male conception: while his wife is gestating Tristram, Walter gets on with a pregnancy of his own: It is the nature of an hypothesis, when once a man has conceived it, that it assimilates every thing to itself as proper nourishment; and, from the first moment of your begetting it, it generally grows stronger by every thing you see, hear, read, or understand. This is of great use. When my father was gone with this about a month. . . . (2.19.151; my italics) This is the progeny that Walter most favours, one that is conceived and gestated, as well as begotten, by the male. This foetus/hypothesis comes to term at the same time as his wife’s pregnancy, and Sterne sustains the metaphor up to the unfortunate delivery, which parallels Tristram’s: Walter is in the process of delivering his hypothesis to Toby when “a devil of a rap at the door . . . crushed the head of as notable and curious a dissertation as ever was engendered in the womb of speculation” (2.7.102–3). The arrival of Dr Slop crushes the head of Walter’s hypothetical foetus as it crushes the nose of his wife’s biological one. A mate that Walter prefers to Mrs Shandy is the auxiliary verb: with Mrs Shandy he succeeds, with difficulty, in producing only two offspring, but with the auxiliary verb he can “make every idea engender millions” (5.42.405). By “conjugating” words instead of women, he announces triumphantly, “every word, Yorick, by this means, you see, is converted into a thesis or an hypothesis; – every thesis and hypothesis have an offspring of propositions” (6.2.409). In language he can achieve what he really wants to do: engendering millions without the trouble of a wife. He has as severe a case of ovary-envy as any in literature. As Raymond Stephanson has shown,12 the analogy of male creativity with female procreativity was ubiquitous in the eighteenth century, and

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in earlier literature too, including Harvey’s Exercitationes de Generatione Animalium of 1651, in which God is represented as releasing living creatures from a female egg. What distinguishes Sterne’s treatment of the same trope is the fact that Walter’s figurative conception and pregnancy are presented alongside Mrs Shandy’s actual labour and delivery of a very real baby Tristram. The male’s pregnancy and creativity in this case are not privileged over the female’s, but clearly shown up as a mad and ridiculous attempt at appropriation of the female role in procreation. Walter’s creative forays are nearly always aborted or misdelivered. Walter Shandy is not the only male who envisages childbirth as a masculine affair. Tristram frequently uses a generative metaphor for the creative process; and even Yorick says of a sermon, “I was delivered of it at the wrong end of me—it came from my head instead of my heart” (4.26.317). And indeed, their various hobby-horses function for all the men as masturbation, a substitute for lovemaking (“the body of the rider is at length fill’d as full of HOBBY-HORSICAL matter as it can hold”), and ultimately for women. Toby posts down to his model warfare on the bowling green like a lover to his “belov’d mistress” (2.5.98): for him fortification is an acceptable substitute for fornication (Towers 22). The recurring motif of the male longing to take over female biological functions and so to dispense with the woman is of course part of Sterne’s comedy: one of the latent jokes of the novel is that for all the anxiety about sexual potency that is endemic among the males, for all their fantasies about bigger, better and more indestructible sexual equipment, they seem really to want to have less and less to do with it. Sex in the head, that tantalizing entity that D.H. Lawrence so disapproved of, will do as well for Walter as sex in the body. And it is Sterne’s favourite and recurring joke, one further intricacy of the mind–body relation that he is constantly exploring. We have seen that the rider/ hobby-horse relationship is an analogy for the mind/body one. And just as Walter as male is committed to a mad enterprise to do without women, so Walter as mind, committed to cerebral activity, is also madly trying to dispense with the body. For Walter both woman and body are the “ass,” a beast deserving mainly of kicking, but grudgingly accepted as useful when you can’t get along without it. Dennis W. Allen, who has written on “Sexuality/Textuality in Tristram Shandy,” refers in passing to “the overall misogyny of the novel” (661). But though Sterne gives ample coverage to Walter’s misogyny, he by no means endorses it.13 He is not anti-woman, any more than he is anti-body. On the contrary, he not only laughs at Walter and satirizes him, but he

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inflicts on him the punishment that fits the crime: the Shandys are a dying race. The body, though it doesn’t directly figure forth the mind, is a concern of consuming and continuous interest to the narrator and the characters of Tristram Shandy. To Walter, it is exasperating and humiliating, an encumbrance he would rather be without; and he exists in a state of war with his own and other people’s. Toby, on the contrary, is at peace with his body: he has so little self-consciousness about it that he thinks the widow Wadman is talking about geography and not anatomy when she asks him where he received his wound; and his face and limbs settle themselves into attitudes that are naturally and eloquently expressive. For Tristram and Sterne, the very disjunction of mind and body furnishes a vision of life, and a source of pain and laughter. The body is variously viewed by the characters as a microcosm for the state, a castle of health, an object of learning and a field for theories and speculation. It exists, that is, in the mind as well as in the flesh. Consciousness of physicality is omnipresent in the novel, which figures forth in Tristram the narrator a mind that is constantly occupied with itself as incarnation. In Tristram Shandy, for the most part, Sterne rejects the neat schemes I shall be discussing whereby the body is decoded, read, and translated, whether by physicians or physiognomists. Nothing is simple or neat in this wild and complex novel, and for every authoritative system that is set up, two or three seem to be thrown down and dispersed in scepticism and laughter. But just as Tristram Shandy is a parody of the novel form which by breaking all the rules proves that they are there, so Tristram’s sad admission that our minds shine not through the body, that the body can’t be read off “like coarse print,” as Huck Finn puts it, is one more proof that for Sterne, as for his fellow novelists, the body matters, and that it signifies the mind it clothes even if the signification is often unfathomable.

3 Physiognomy: The Index of the Mind

“There are mystically in our faces,” wrote Sir Thomas Browne in Religio Medici, “certaine characters which carry in them the motto of our Soules, wherein he that cannot read A. B. C. may read our natures . . . The finger of God hath left an inscription upon all his workes” (2.2.138). For this seventeenth-century doctor who chose to write about his religion, the reflection of the soul in the face was an article of faith. But the doctrine of physiognomy, the science or art of reading the mind in the externals of face and body, had been hotly debated since classical times; and for most of the eighteenth century the sceptics prevailed over the believers. I will begin my discussion of physiognomy with a story cited in nearly all the books on the subject, one that dates back to respectable classical times. The story first appears in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations,1 but it concerns an authority more ancient and respectable still: none other than Socrates. Cicero narrates an encounter between Socrates and a physiognomist called Zopyrus. I quote Addison’s elaborated version of the story, in number 86 of the Spectator, in 1710, since this essay was widely known and was often referred to in the many debates on physiognomy during the eighteenth century. There chanced to be a great physiognomist in [Socrates’] time at Athens, [one Zopyrus] who had made strange discoveries of men’s tempers and inclinations by their outward appearances. Socrates’s disciples, that they might put this artist to the trial, carried him to their master, whom he had never seen before . . . . After a short examination of his face, the physiognomist pronounced [Socrates] the 42

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most rude, libidinous, drunken old fellow that he had ever met with in his whole life. Upon which the disciples all burst out a laughing, as thinking they had detected the falsehood and vanity of his art. But Socrates told them, that the principles of [Zopyrus’s] art might be very true, notwithstanding his present mistake; for that he himself was naturally inclined to those particular vices which the physiognomist had discovered in his countenance, but that he had conquered the strong dispositions he was born with, by the dictates of philosophy. (Addison 400–1) The anecdote is a pregnant one, and it is no wonder that it was cited both by those who believe that the mind may be truly read in the face, and by those who scorn the notion. We may situate ourselves with the students who scorn Zopyrus’s evident mistake, or with Socrates, who generously finds a way to justify the art. Though the physiognomists may rejoice to have Socrates on their side, the story still leaves much to argue about. If the face tells not what Socrates is, but what he might have been but for other factors, or what he may yet become, the conclusion may turn out to be too complexly qualified to convey useful information. If there is a grammar to physiognomical language, we want it to employ the verb in the present indicative mood, not the past or future, not the subjunctive or the conditional. Addison’s essay is typical of the eighteenth-century discourses on the subject in coming out both for and against physiognomy. On the one hand he asserts “I think we may be better known by our looks than by our words, and that a man’s speech is much more easily disguised than his countenance” (399). On the other hand he heavily qualifies: “a wise man should be particularly cautious how he gives credit to a man’s outward appearance” (401). He rejoices in the story of Socrates and Zopyrus because it is one of a triumph over physiognomy. “I think nothing can be more glorious than for a man to give the lie to his face, and to be an honest, just, and good-natured man, in spite of all those marks and signatures which nature seems to have set upon him for the contrary” (400). Socrates, by belying his own facial signature, refutes the implication of determinism in physiognomy. The subject of physiognomy has always produced its own brand of doublethink. We know that we all make judgements about character that are based on appearance, and that we do so all the time. But we still tell ourselves not to do it. When I began to work on this subject, a university “research report” carried a brief item on my work. The reporter who interviewed me, in writing for a popular audience, left out

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the literature, but fastened on my interest in physical and mental correspondences. She conveyed the impression that I am a physiognomist myself, able to detect the characters of the people I meet from their faces and to teach other people how to do that too. My research has never been so fascinating to the general public! Several radio stations and a TV station contacted me with requests for interviews. From the questions they asked, I realized that I could instantly have set myself up as an authority, and made money too, if I had been ready to produce some confident definitions of people’s personalities by reading such signs as cleft chins, thick lips, bushy eyebrows, wide eyes, and so forth. It is no accident that physiognomy, the science of reading the internal from the external, character and morality from the face and physical appearance, has been a popular topic from Aristotle’s Physiognomonica to Desmond Morris’s television series “The Human Animal” and his 1990s book Bodytalk. People want to believe in a correspondence between the physical and the psychological, bodies and minds. That is, they want to believe in physiognomy. A researcher who recently made news by purporting to define the mental capacity of racial types can no doubt find an eager audience somewhere. But we properly react from such assumptions too. Tristram Shandy, as we have seen, sadly concludes that “Our minds shine not through the body,” but he still has a wistful yearning for a closer equivalence of flesh and spirit: he wishes for a “Momus’s glass,” a window in the breast that will provide direct visual access to the secret motions of the human heart: Had the said glass been there set up, nothing more would have been wanting, in order to have taken a man’s character, but to have . . . look’d in,—view’d the soul stark naked; . . . —watched her loose in her frisks, her gambols, her capricios; and after some notice of her more solemn deportment . . . —then taken your pen and ink and set down nothing but what you had seen. (1.23.74) Even as he rejects the corporeal body as a source of wisdom about the mind or soul, he imagines the soul as body too, “naked,” and visibly cavorting, and with its own “deportment.” He wants character to be visible. He wants the mind to be figured forth in the body, even while he tells us it isn’t. In his combination of trust and distrust of the body as a reliable source of information about character Sterne is typical of his contemporaries;

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and also typical of us. We too have that wistful longing, in a world of binary oppositions, for a comforting world of correspondences. Physiognomical doctrine, at its most optimistic, offers us a semiology of the soul, or, as Carsten Zelle says, “a science of the truly authentic self” (Zelle 44). Those are things we sometimes like to believe in. For the novelist, particularly, the consonance of body and character is a convenient doctrine. It is useful to be able to convey inward and spiritual grace by a description of the outward and visible signs. A belief that faces “carry in them the motto of our Soules,” like Sir Thomas Browne’s, is an article of faith, part of believing in the doctrine that God made man in his own image. The religious suggestion is present also in Miranda’s naïve exclamation in The Tempest when she sees the handsome prince Ferdinand, the first young man she has ever set eyes on: “There’s nothing ill can dwell in such a temple” (I.ii). Such a sentiment befits the innocent Miranda, to whom the unfolding universe appears as a brave new world. It is the disillusioned Hamlet who discovers that “one may smile, and smile, and be a villain” (I.v) – a sentiment often quoted by those (like Fielding) who see the world as peopled by hypocrites. For them a man may lie with his face and physical appearance almost as readily as with his words. It is possible to read many eighteenth-century novels as documents in the ongoing debate on physiognomy. Stories of reading and misreading faces abound; they become the focus of the large subject of appearance and reality. The novelists all knew the respectable classical origins of physiognomy. Aristotle’s Physiognomonica was frequently cited. The authenticity of this text is now often disputed; and it would seem that the arguments as to whether or not it comes from Aristotle often depend on whether the scholar arguing the attribution believes in physiognomy or not (Frey 102). But for the eighteenth century this was very much a canonical text. The writer of this treatise, whoever he was, had no doubts about physical and mental correspondences. “The soul and body appropriate to the same kind always go together,” he announces, “and this shows that a specific body involves a specific mental character” (Aristotle 805a). His system for judging the character from the body was by analogy with animals: a man who looks like a lion, for instance, is apt to have a lion’s characteristics of courage and magnanimity; a man who looks like an ox will be bovine in character, and so on. The familiar Aristotelian mean operates in physiognomy as in other branches of knowledge: “Small eyes mean a small soul, by congruity and on the evidence of the ape: large eyes, lethargy, as in cattle. In a man of good natural parts, therefore, the eyes will be neither large nor small” (811b).

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However much physiognomists agree on the basic principle of the body as a sign of the mind, when it comes to reading the signs they diverge considerably. Many of what Aristotle calls “accepted doctrines of the semiotics of human character” (310a) seem capricious and quaint. His association of “a thick growth of hair about the belly” with “loquacity” (806b), for instance, is hardly a sign most of us would recognize. But it is also surprising how many of the terms in his dictionary of appearances are still in conventional use. “A small forehead means stupidity, as in swine” (811b) – this became a principle in phrenology, and was still in use by respectable criminologists for classifying the criminal type early in the twentieth century. “A face that reddens easily marks a bashful man . . . . But when the jowl goes red, you have a drunkard” (812a). Hairy legs signify lasciviousness; flaring nostrils show a fierce temper (Charles Le Brun confirmed this in his seventeenth-century treatise, A Method to Learn to Design the Passions),2 and so on. The Physiognomonica was the ancestor of many other books on physiognomy. The most authoritative was Giovanni Battista della Porta’s De Humana Physiognomonia of 1586, an influential Latin text that was translated into several languages. Porta supplemented Aristotle’s verbal analogies between human and animal physiognomy with graphic illustrations of people who look like beasts of various kinds (Figure 2), a device later elaborated by Lavater, who showed successive modulations between, for instance, a fish and a human countenance. Later still, Charles Darwin, though expressly “not concerned” with physiognomy (1), also stressed the continuum between man and “other animals” (as he characteristically puts it) in his 1872 study of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (12). In the eighteenth century itself, an important text in England, which I shall be discussing later, was James Parsons’ Human Physiognomy Explain’d, read before the Royal Society in 1746. In spite of his title, though, Parsons’ subject was more properly pathognomy than physiognomy, a distinction that was only beginning to be made at this time. That is, he was talking about reading the face in motion, as indicative of passing states of mind, as opposed to reading the permanent structural features as indicative of lasting traits of character. Although he asserted that “the countenance is the Nuncio of the Mind,” he scorned the notion that “the Length or Shortness of the Nose or Chin could be an indication of the Disposition of the Mind” (ii). Parsons exemplifies an interestingly recurrent aspect of the related discourses in physiognomy, gesture, and facial expression, and one that, like Aristotle’s treatise and the Socrates anecdote, contributed to the topic’s respectability: the anatomical.

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Figure 2 Leonine man and bovine man, from Gianbattista della Porta’s De Humana Physiognomonia of 1601. Porta followed Aristotle’s Physiognomonica in developing analogies between human and animal characteristics, physical and mental

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While any layman was apt to have his strong opinion on whether and how much the character can be read in the face, the scientist who brings specialized professional knowledge of physiological processes, or – as in Parsons’ case – muscular operations of the face, inevitably commands respect and belief. Fielding, as a novelist so consumingly interested in the truth that he is forever contemplating the hypocrites and truth-manipulators, constantly engages with the topic of physiognomy. In his fictional world it is only the naïve and gullible who believe in physiognomical doctrine: and yet because those believers are also generous and good-natured, like Parson Adams and Dr Harrison, he can’t reject the doctrine outright. In Joseph Andrews, he ponders physiognomical doctrine, and like Addison trots out the story of Zopyrus and Socrates. He constructs a resoundingly ironic context for it, however. The benevolent and optimistic Parson Adams is chagrined to have been deceived by a man who, he says, “hath in his countenance sufficient symptoms of that . . . sweetness of disposition, which furnishes out a good Christian.” But his sceptical host advises him never to “give any credit to a man’s countenance. Symptoms in his countenance, quotha! I would look there, perhaps, to see whether a man had had the smallpox, but for nothing else!” (2.17.154). Adams, in spite of his recent experience, warmly asserts “that nature generally imprints such a portraiture of the mind in the countenance, that a skillful physiognomist will rarely be deceived” (2.17.154–5). And he at once relates the anecdote about Socrates and Zopyrus to prove his point. That is, Fielding frames the dubious anecdote in a context that makes the doctrines of physiognomy more dubious still.3 Fielding follows Addison in the opinion that “we may be better known by our looks than by our words”; but then for Fielding that’s not saying much. He certainly finds people’s verbal claims about themselves an unreliable guide to character; but he has more to say than Addison on the delusions of a plausible appearance, inasmuch as the accomplished hypocrite can adopt false facial expressions just as he can use lying words. But in spite of such reservations, in his “Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men” Fielding acknowledges “That Nature gives us as sure Symptoms of the Diseases of the Mind as she doth of those of the Body” (161). In his fictional representations he is more sceptical. In Amelia the well-disposed Dr Harrison, who plays the Allworthy role in this novel, is shocked to hear of the villainy of a man he had trusted. The villainy is even compounded by the deceptive countenance. “He hath the fairest and most promising appearance I have ever yet beheld – A good face

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they say, is a letter of recommendation. O Nature, Nature, why art thou so dishonest as ever to send men with these false recommendations into the world!” (9.5.381). Dr Harrison, like Parson Adams, is another innocent who has been led astray by a promising face. The piece of classical lore that is routinely used to refute physiognomy is the tag from Juvenal, “Fronti nulla fides” – usually translated as “Trust not the countenance.” The ongoing debate about physiognomy is played out like a kind of whist game: Cicero’s story of Zopyrus and Socrates, a strong card, may fall to a timely citation of Juvenal’s ace, “Fronti nulla fides”; and that in turn may be trumped by Aristotle’s Physiognomonica. In his “Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men,” Fielding is inclined to take the physiognomist’s side against Juvenal: “I doubt whether the old Adage of Fronti nulla Fides, be generally well understood,” he ventures to suggest. As a good classicist, he refers it to its context in Juvenal’s second Satire. And though he doesn’t refute it outright, he throws doubt on the Roman authority by putting him in the balance against a weightier Greek one: “the Satyrist surely never intended by these Words, which have grown into a Proverb, utterly to depreciate an Art on which so wise a Man as Aristotle hath thought proper to compose a Treatise” (“Essay” 156). And he proceeds in this essay to offer, from his own store of physiognomical observations, some guidance on how to judge character from appearance, as well as how to see through false appearances. A “constant, settled, glavering, sneering Smile in the Countenance,” he says, though it is intended to signal goodness, in fact indicates the opposite. But other appearances may be relied upon: I would not be understood here to speak with the least Regard to that amiable, open, composed, cheerful Aspect, which is the Result of a good Conscience, and the Emanation of a good Heart; of both which it is an infallible Symptom; and may be the more depended on, as it cannot, I believe, be counterfeited, with any reasonable Resemblance, by the nicest Power of Art. (160) As one might expect, even in this essay where he is most positive about certain appearances as trustworthy, Fielding is constantly on the alert to detect the hypocrites who lie with their faces as readily as with words. Though he concedes that “Nature doth really imprint sufficient Marks in the Countenance, to inform an accurate and discerning Eye,” he promptly insists that such a discerning eye “is the Property of few” (161). He applies the term “Physiognomist” not to signify that rare expert, but rather some easily bamboozled would-be expert: “The true Symptoms

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being finer, and less glaring [than the ‘monstrous over-done Grimaces’ of a farcical actor], make no Impression on our Physiognomist; while the grosser Appearances of Affectation are sure to attract his Eye, and deceive his Judgment” (162). With Fielding scepticism is the keynote, even when he purports to be a believer. It may seem that Fielding here is like Parsons in talking more about facial expression than about stable facial characteristics; but there is an area where, even after physiognomy and pathognomy have been differentiated, there is real overlap. A habitual expression, Addison noted, may imprint itself permanently on the face: “Every passion gives a particular cast to the countenance, and is apt to discover itself in some feature or other” (398). In spite of his assertions as to the reliability of some appearances, Fielding chooses the Juvenal tag, “Fronti nulla fides,” as the epigraph for his essay in the Champion for 11 December 1739; and here he is at no pains to refute it. “The only ways by which we can come at any Knowledge of what passes in the Minds of others,” he declares firmly, “are their Words and Actions [he prefers the latter] . . . As to the Doctrine of Physiognomy, it being somewhat unfortunate in these latter Ages, I shall say nothing of it.” In degenerate modern days, apparently, it is safer to adopt Juvenal’s cynicism than Aristotle’s faith in the consonance of appearance with essence. Hogarth, as an artist whose business is appearances, might be expected to set store by physiognomy; and in his chapter “Of the Face” in The Analysis of Beauty he acknowledges that “we have daily many instances which confirm the common received opinion, that the face is the index of the mind” (Hogarth 136). But in this, as in other matters, Hogarth and Fielding are in agreement, and confirm each other, even in being of divided mind. Hogarth, like Fielding, notes that “the bad man, if he be an hypocrite, may so manage his muscles, by teaching them to contradict his heart, that little of his mind can be gather’d from his countenance” (137). And his faith in the veracity of appearance ultimately yields to his scepticism:

Least I should be thought to lay too great a stress on outward show, like a physiognomist, take this with you, that it is acknowledg’d there are so many different causes which produce the same kind of movements and appearances of the features, and so many thwartings by accidental shapes in the make of faces, that the old adage, fronti nulla fides, will ever stand its ground upon the whole. (137–8)

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The term “physiognomist,” we perceive, is here again used pejoratively, as of one who judges facilely by outward appearances, rather than of one whose skill in reading physical signs gives him access to spiritual truth. Hogarth’s distrust of his own medium of the visible nicely matches Fielding’s cognate distrust of language. And he is apparently not troubled by any sense of inconsistency in quoting and approving both “the common received opinion, that the face is the index of the mind,” and its opposite, “the old adage [Fielding’s phrase], fronti nulla fides.” The contested nature of the doctrine, as different authorities and novelists took up their positions – on the fence or on either side – created a space for a characteristic episode of the age, the mini-plot of the misread face. A good example is the narrative of the servant William Wilson in Sir Charles Grandison, who becomes a test case in that novel for the relation of mind to body. When Wilson applies for the position of footman in the Reeves household, we get some rather suspicious emphasis on his appearance. Harriet Byron says, “He is well-behaved, has a very sensible look, and seems to merit a better service . . . . I have a mind to like him, and this makes me more particular about him . . . . Hire him at once, Mrs. Reeves says. She will be answerable for his honesty from his looks” (Gr 1.97–8). The reader, who has hitherto proceeded safely on the novel-reader’s assumption that looks are indicative of character, is alerted by all this emphasis to switch to another, equally familiar convention, that appearance is deceptive. And sure enough, the plausible William Wilson turns out to be in the employ of Sir Hargrave Pollexfen, and a chief organizer of Harriet’s abduction. “Her servant is, must be a villain!” exclaims her distracted cousin, when she disappears (1.121). And when Harriet is safely rescued and home again, she reproaches herself for her gullibility. “One branch of my vanity is entirely lopt off. I must pretend to some sort of skill in physiognomy! Never more will I, for this fellow’s sake, presume to depend on my judgment of people’s hearts framed from their countenances” (1.150–51). So far the story of Wilson is a slap in the face for the physiognomists, like the Zopyrus anecdote before Socrates gets into the argument. It remains for Sir Charles Grandison to take the Socrates role and restore the credit of the science, and to renew Harriet’s faith in appearance as true. He gets a full confession from Wilson, and instead of punishing him gives him enough money to marry a virtuous young girl who loves him; and being so trusted Wilson proves that he is trustworthy. He was not innately wicked, but was only temporarily led into “vile ways . . . by excess of good-nature, and by meeting with wicked masters” (1.175).

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Once set in the way of being good, he gives reason to suppose that he will stay so, as his countenance denotes. As in the Socrates story, he shows that nature’s language is true if only you know how to read its grammar precisely, to recognize tense and modalities. A variation on the plot of the misread face is the plot of the face belied. Tom Jones’s good nature is legible in his face, but his various detractors present a different picture. “If half . . . be true,” exclaims Tom’s well-disposed landlady, when she hears the tale of his iniquities, “ Mr. Jones hath the most deceitful countenance I ever saw; for sure his looks promise something very different” (8.8.389). In this case then, “the old adage fronti nulla fides” notwithstanding, the countenance is more to be trusted than the false witnesses. So the veracity or otherwise of physiognomical readings continued to be very much in the air during the eighteenth century, with scepticism perhaps predominating. The time was ripe for a true prophet, a convinced proponent of the face and body as true outward signs of the inward and spiritual. And in the 1770s the prophet burst upon the western world in the person of the Swiss pastor, Johann Caspar Lavater. His Physiognomische Fragmente, or Essays on Physiognomy, published in German in four handsome volumes in the 1770s, and appearing in England in two different translations during the 1780s (Graham 62), made physiognomy a reputable as well as a popular science, and Lavater’s name became a household word. By 1810, his Essays had gone through twenty editions in England alone (Shookman, “Pseudo-Science” 2). There was no shilly-shally or sitting on the fence for Lavater. He declared his absolute faith in the correspondence of the body with the mind. He took his stand on both religious and scientific grounds, using Genesis as the epigraph on his title page: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”; and he boldly identified “the science of physiognomy” as “the proper study of man” (Lavater 7). Lavater was essentially a romantic, an enthusiast. Although he sounds Augustan enough in his assertion that the proper study of mankind is man, his view of humanity is too optimistic to be congenial to such novelists as Fielding and Smollett. “What a piece of work is man!” he exclaims, like Hamlet; but without Hamlet’s qualification about the “quintessence of dust”: We are unacquainted with any form equally noble, equally majestic, with that of man. . . . How much nobler, more astonishing, and more attractive will this form become, when we discover that it is itself the interpreter of all the high powers it possesses, active and passive! (8)

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The face is alphabet, the face is signature, the face is interpreter: the metaphors keep multiplying that call our attention to this endlessly legible text – “the most entertaining surface on earth,” as Georg Lichtenberg called the face (Siegrist 25). Or, to turn to a more recent critic, Mary Ann Doane, who writes on film theory, “The face . . . is the most articulate sector of the body, but it is mute without the other’s reading” (47). More than any other earthly or bodily surface, it calls for attention, reading, interpretation. The copious illustrations to Lavater’s Essays, some of them by such prominent artists as Fuseli, were a notable reason for the huge popularity of his work, since in furnishing examples of legible faces they provided a kind of “do-it-yourself” guide to facial interpretation. Surprisingly, perhaps, Lavater provides few cautions about the accuracy or otherwise of the artist’s likenesses, nor does he acknowledge the salient fact that three dimensions have been reduced to two, which one would suppose would call for large qualification. He tends to read each drawing as though it were the face itself, rather than a mere representation, and encourages the reader to do the same – with his firm guidance. His own physiognomical readings could be damning as well as laudatory. Occasionally he planted his own features among other faces of characters both recognizable and unknown. Of one profile inconspicuously placed in a bottom corner of a page of twelve faces, he admits, “This profile [his own], though imperfect, may easily be known. It must pass without comment, or rather the commentary is before the world – is in this book. Let that speak; I am silent” (129). But he is not always so reticent. For a second self-likeness on the same page, not as sharply drawn, he claims “benevolent serenity, a playful fancy, promptitude, fine understanding, sincerity, candour, and sensibility” (127–8). And alongside another recognizable likeness among an anonymous group of “Citizens of Zurich” he presents another physiognomical self-portrait (Figure 3): A sketch of a countenance such as will scarcely be found in any other nation [but Switzerland] . . . . The love of labour, innocent benevolence, tender irritability, and strength of imagination, are some of the ideas read in this short-sighted, and, apparently, enquiring eye, which seems to speak what all eyes easily understand. (427) The face matches Lavater’s own, as it appears in the frontispiece. The famous reader of other people’s faces characterizes his own face as eminently legible, with an eye that both penetrates and reveals.

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Figure 3 The portrait of Lavater from the frontispiece to his Essays on Physiognomy is surely identifiable with that of the unnamed citizen of Zurich, the central face in the row, characterized by an “inquiring eye, which seems to speak what all eyes easily understand” (Lavater 472)

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Lavater usefully supplies commentary on the faces of some historical personages who feature elsewhere in my study. Descartes, whose Passions of the Soul was the rock on which faith in physical and mental correspondence is founded, is almost godlike (Figure 4): One of the most original, productive, comprehensive countenances I have ever beheld. . . . What mind, what power, vigour, penetration! Never have I seen eyes with such broad eyelids, such curves, such openness, such environs; no nose so pregnant…. All betoken the

Figure 4

Descartes as illustrated in Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy

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most astonishing, inexhaustible, productive imagination; the stamp of daring genius and unshaken fortitude. (454–5) But Hogarth as artist (there is no reading of his face), who was as ready to concede “Fronti nulla fides” as to assert the truth of visible appearances, receives a similarly qualified approval. He was too much inclined to see man not as infinite in faculty but as a quintessence of dust: In Hogarth – alas! How little of the noble, how little of beauteous expression is to be found in this – I had almost said, false prophet of beauty! But what an immense treasure of features of meanness in excess, vulgarity the most disgusting, humour the most irresistible, and vice, the most unmanly! (154) Hogarth is too much the mid-century satirist, too little the late-century enthusiast. Sterne was more congenial. In a drawing of Sterne after the Reynolds portrait, “even the most unpractised reader” can hardly miss “the keen, the searching, penetration of wit, the most original fancy, full of fire, and the powers of invention. Who is so dull as not to view, in this countenance, somewhat of the spirit of poor Yorick?” (34–5). Lavater’s rhetoric, it becomes clear, is of the kind that requires unquestioning discipleship. If one does not see what the master sees, then one must be “dull.” Moreover, he has the tendency, as these examples show, to judge some faces out of his own preconceived judgements, and to read the faces to match the bias. It is perhaps for this reason that Dickens, who clearly believed implicitly in physical and moral consonance, is noticeably hostile in his rare references to Lavater. It is the sour Mrs Wilfer of Our Mutual Friend who characterizes herself as a “disciple of Lavater” (1.6.207): her physiognomical readings are disastrously wrong, and based on her own unacknowledged biases. Fiercely jealous of the warmly generous Mrs Boffin, she denounces her as having “a face teeming with evil” (3.16.616). Although Lavater claimed that physiognomy is a science, it is obvious that his own method is much more intuitive than empirical. Nevertheless, a large population turned to him as to an infallible authority. At one time, says John Graham, his volumes “were thought as necessary in every family as even the Bible itself. A servant would . . . scarcely be hired till the descriptions and engravings of Lavater had been consulted” (Graham 61). It was even jokingly suggested that society should lock up criminals in advance of the crime, on the evidence of their faces alone.

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Lavater had no qualms about judging character from the permanent structural features of the head and body, as opposed to their passing motions. In fact, in emphasizing cranial features in his study of character, he led the way to the phrenological studies of Franz Joseph Gall, the father of phrenology, which was to become the modish branch of physiognomy in the nineteenth century. Gall’s excellent physiological studies of the structure of the brain, like James Parsons’ studies of the musculature of facial expression, gave his work a scientific authority that his speculations on the various phrenological “organs” would not otherwise have commanded. 4 Phrenology, too, was an optimistic doctrine, and many of its proponents looked forward to a millennium in which the world could be perfected. If it is possible to determine character by examining the structure of the skull, one may avoid trusting the wrong clerk, hiring the wrong servant, or marrying the wrong spouse. 5 Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, the convinced phrenologist might have exclaimed. In these stirring times one declared one’s allegiances and world view according to whether or not one was a convert to Lavater’s beliefs in the truth of physiognomy. Now, alongside the tide of romanticism, belief replaced scepticism as the modish position. Henry Brooke’s immensely successful novel and compendium of current wisdom, The Fool of Quality, published in five volumes ante Lavater, between 1765 and 1770, underwent various revisions and enlargements, but it was not until 1782, post Lavater, that it reached its final form, which included a long episode in which the hero’s trustworthy uncle and mentor, “Mr. Fenton,” conducts a dialogue to prove that “the general tenor of a human countenance is made expressive of the nature of the soul that lives within, and to which it is ordained an involuntary interpreter” (Brooke 128). Fenton’s interlocutor advances the familiar eighteenth-century position of cautious acceptance: yes, truth may be found in the face, but only by the rare and exceptional expert. “He must be a very learned proficient in the study of physiognomy who can decide, with any kind of certainty, on an art that requires such attention and penetration” (129). But Fenton himself argues authoritatively for much wider accessibility, and universal practice: The science is much more obvious than you may imagine . . . . When nature is permitted to express herself with freedom by this language of the face, she is understood by all people; and those who never were taught a letter, can instantly read her signatures and impressions. (129)

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We are back with Sir Thomas Browne, and the contention that “he that cannot read A. B. C. may read our natures” from “certaine characters” in the face “which carry the motto of the soul.” And Fenton dismisses, one by one, the contrary arguments. The story of Zopyrus’s misdiagnosis of Socrates’ character from his face, which less confident physiognomists had been glad enough to cite on their side of the argument because of Socrates’ generous admission of his initial propensities, Fenton dismisses as “a mere fiction,” since “neither philosophy nor Christianity can make a new heart or a new nature in a man, without making a suitable alteration in his visage” (128). He likewise dismisses the objection to the determinism implicit in physiognomical doctrine. Far from a bad face requiring a bad character, any change, for better or worse, in a character will dictate “some suitable change of character in the aspect” (133). By adding this whole section to The Fool of Quality, Brooke was declaring himself to be, like many others, a convinced disciple of Lavater. Physiognomy had become a fashionable bandwaggon. By the 1790s belief or non-belief in physiognomy could be a means of identifying the good and bad characters. In The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Emily’s aunt complains of Emily’s father, “He was always so much influenced by people’s countenances; now I, for my part, have no notion of this, it is all ridiculous enthusiasm. What has a man’s face to do with his character?” (Radcliffe 111–12). One hardly needs to read further than this to know that Emily’s father is admirable, and her aunt isn’t. If Henry Brooke and Ann Radcliffe are converts to Lavater, Jane Austen occupies the opposite camp. Jane Austen grew up when Lavater was in his heyday, and physiognomy must have been a frequent subject of discussion in the Austen family. But theirs was a reactionary position. Prominent among Charlotte Brontë’s famous objections to Austen’s novels is the complaint that she provides “no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy” (letter to G.H. Lewes, 12 January 1848). When they were at Oxford, Jane Austen’s brothers James and Henry established and wrote a periodical called The Loiterer. (It is sometimes argued that young Jane occasionally contributed.) One essay is entitled “The Science of Physiognomy not to be depended on.” The Loiterer comments on the “fashionable” science, and the “reigning passion for feature-hunting,” and amuses himself by trying to judge a set of people by their faces and physical demeanours. But having made several resounding mistakes he concludes “that those who judge of the heart from the face, and draw conclusions from external appearance, as they believe without reason, and affirm without proof, so must they often repent their opinions, and retract their assertions” (James Austen 2.11). Jane Austen never uses the

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word physiognomy in her published works; but the delusive force of “first impressions” and the dangers of “love at first sight” are major themes. Physiognomy provides a rational justification for a love based on visible appearance alone. And Jane Austen had made fun of that convention since she wrote “Jack and Alice” in her childhood. There Alice Johnson falls for Charles Adams, smitten by “the beams which darted from his eyes,” and receives the earnest advice “Preserve yourself from a first Love & you need not fear a second” (Minor Works 14). Jane Austen is a minimalist when it comes to physical description, and leaves it to unsympathetic characters like Miss Bingley 6 or misguided ones like Catherine Morland, to make physiognomical judgements. As part of her humorous take-off of sentimental and Gothic novels in Northanger Abbey, Austen shows Catherine observing features, like Emily St Aubert, but drawing wrong conclusions. “The General certainly had been an unkind husband,” she decides, on the way to suspecting him of uxoricide. “ . . . And besides, handsome as he was, there was something in the turn of his features which spoke his not having behaved well to [his wife]” (180). Catherine’s erroneous gothic fantasies are bound up with erroneous physiognomical readings. But if Lavater failed to convince Jane Austen, he fared better with the Victorian novelists. Dickens and the Brontës invested deeply in the doctrines of physiognomy and phrenology. Dickens, though he objected to Lavater’s dogmatism, presents a huge array of visually legible characters. “Hunted Down,” his short story in Reprinted Pieces, features a narrator who insists “There is nothing truer than physiognomy, taken in connexion with manner”; and he calls the face “that book of which Eternal Wisdom obliges every human creature to present his or her own page with the individual character written on it,” and laments that more people do not study the art of reading it accurately (667). George Eliot is like the eighteenth-century novelists in making physiognomy a subject for debate rather than a doctrine to be subscribed to. She is heavily ironic about the male assumption that attractive girls like Hetty Sorrell and Gwendolen Harleth must be good because they are beautiful; but she still accepts the deep relevance of physical appearance to moral judgement: “Nature has her language,” says the narrator of Adam Bede, “and she is not unveracious; but we don’t know all the intricacies of her syntax just yet, and in a hasty reading we may happen to extract the very opposite of her real meaning” (15.198–9). George Eliot carries through the image of the face as Nature’s language by ruminating on the “intricacies of her syntax.” She reminds us again that the face is a text, and meant to be read. Sir Thomas Browne refers to

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the alphabet; Fielding’s Dr Harrison calls the face “a letter of recommendation.” We read constantly of what is “writ in the face.” Mrs Malaprop is surely at her least mal apropos in exclaiming, “His physiognomy so grammatical!” (The Rivals IV.ii). In Jane Eyre the facial features even have dialogue assigned to them: Mr. Rochester, in his character of the gipsy fortune-teller, reads Jane’s countenance aloud: “That brow professes to say, ‘I can live alone, if self-respect and circumstances require me so to do . . . ’ The forehead declares, ‘Reason sits firm and holds the reins . . . ”’ (211). Huck Finn makes his contribution to the argument when he tells Mary Jane Wilks, “I don’t want no better book than what your face is. A body can set down and read it off like coarse print” (Twain 28.149). So faces are sets of signs to be read. They clamorously assert and declare. They are harder to disguise than speech; but they can nevertheless lie, slander, and commit libel. The one thing they apparently can’t do is shut up. Given a readership that recognizes the face as a set of signs, it can’t be merely neutral. Socrates’ face either proves or disproves the truth of physiognomy; it can’t be considered simply irrelevant to the state of his soul. In this situation readers have become accustomed to different conventions, and the same reader may switch between them easily according to other signals delivered in the text of the novel to hand. According to one convention the visible is the true, and there are a number of proverbs and popular aphorisms to back up the position: seeing is believing; ocular proof; the mind’s construction in the face; the face is the index of the mind; the eye is the window of the soul; and so on. Novel-readers, once they are alerted that this program is in operation, busy themselves with interpreting the visual data that the novelist supplies, and foreseeing future developments. According to the other convention, the face and its expressions are a disguise for an identity that is essentially different. Novel readers are equally familiar with this convention, which flatters them, in the same way as irony does, by the assumption that they can penetrate a disguise. This convention has its own set of expressions in popular wisdom, besides Juvenal’s “Fronti nulla fides”: all that glistens is not gold; whited sepulchre; beauty is only skin-deep; handsome is as handsome does; and the more complete quotation from Macbeth, “There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face” (I.iv). A popular song of the last few years provided a new version of the familiar sentiment: “The way you look, it doesn’t matter . . . . It’s what’s inside that counts.” If by and large the canonical novelists of the eighteenth century took the sceptical position, novelists of the nineteenth century, at least the

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more romantic ones such as Scott, Dickens, and the Brontës, offer us appearance as truth. They had the benefit of Lavater and the discourses that followed him to bolster their faith. What are the signals whereby the reader is alerted as to which convention is operating in a given description? Let me supply an example from Richardson. Here is Pamela’s description of Mrs Jewkes: Now I will give you a Picture of this Wretch! She is a broad, squat, pursy, fat Thing, quite ugly, if any thing God made can be ugly; about forty Years old. . . . Her Nose is flat and crooked, and her Brows grow over her Eyes; a dead, spiteful, grey, goggling Eye, to be sure, she has. And her Face is flat and broad; and as to Colour, looks like as if it had been pickled a Month in Salt-petre: I dare say she drinks! (P 107). No problem here! One need not be an expert in della Porta or Lavater to get the moral message, because the rhetoric clearly signals that here ugliness is a reliable guide to moral turpitude. The visual description is not neutral, but is accompanied by morally weighted terms such as “spiteful” and “Wretch,” not to mention the suspicion about alcoholism. Even the visual terms have moral suggestions: “pursy” is almost never used of a pleasantly obese person, and “crooked” is a pejorative adjective in both the moral and visual spheres – another example of our automatic tendency to moralize the physical. The reader may be alerted that Pamela writes with a certain animus against Mrs Jewkes; but one is not likely to assume that here is a case in which appearance belies reality. It comes as no surprise when Pamela amplifies her description by commenting that Mrs Jewkes has “a Heart more ugly than her Face” (107). The signals for a deceptive appearance are likewise usually clear. Richardson’s Clarissa is aware of the general propensity to judge Lovelace too favourably because of his good looks, and dubiously quotes her friend’s opinion that he has “a soul and body . . . fitted for, and pleased with, each other” (Cl 184). But she can’t help being swayed by his appearance, even while she recognizes it as deceptive: It must, indeed, be confessed, that there is in his whole deportment a natural dignity. . . . Then that deceiving sweetness which appears in his smiles, in his accent, in his whole aspect and address, . . . how does this show that he was born innocent, as I may say . . . ! On all these specious appearances, have I founded my hopes of seeing him a reformed man. (545)

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It is easy enough for the reader to pick up the rhetorical signals as to which convention is operating at a particular time. Mrs Jewkes’s appearance is true, Lovelace’s is false. And Richardson’s lapsed faith in physiognomy is a major constituent in his world view. Pamela and Sir Charles Grandison, in which appearances are true, are romantic comedies; Clarissa, in which Lovelace’s appearance is false, is a tragedy. Clarissa draws a moral from her own experience: “My story, to all who shall know it, will afford these instructions: that the eye is a traitor, and ought ever to be mistrusted: that form is deceitful. In other words; that a fine person is seldom paired by a fine mind” (601). But (as we shall find when I look in detail at Richardson’s complex novel) the reader hardly draws the same conclusion. All along we have been assured that in Clarissa’s case the form is not deceitful. She has “in her whole aspect and air, a dignity that bespoke the mind that animated all” (1466). And here we come to the gender discrimination that is endemic to physiognomy. There is a double standard in appearances as in sexual mores. Just as the woman is expected to be more sexually chaste than the man, so she is expected to be more truthful in her countenance. Just as a man may be forgiven his wild oats – a ruined maid or two, and a few bastards – so some equivocation in the contract of his countenance may be charitably overlooked. Certain strong gender biases have always been visible in physiognomy, as one would expect of a doctrine that makes essentializing its business. Aristotle’s Physiognomonica shows a marked misogyny: masculine characteristics are essentially good and noble, feminine ones are relatively contemptible: the lion, which is seen as the type of the male, is admirable, but the panther, the type of the female, “in soul . . . is mean and thievish, and in a word, a beast of low cunning” (810a). Della Porta follows suit, as the following pictures and their Latin captions show (see Figure 5). Subsequent works on physiognomy often avoid the subject of women. Even Fielding, in “An Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men,” discounts “the Fair Sex, with whom indeed this Essay hath not any thing to do” (161). Lavater admits that he is “but little acquainted with the female part of the human race” (396), and women do not figure prominently in the pictures nor in his discussions of them. He is no misogynist, but some women would prefer outright misogyny to his tender admiration. I select a few instances: In general, . . . how much more pure, tender, delicate, irritable, affectionate, flexible, and patient, is woman than man. . . . [Women] are

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Figure 5 The lion and leopard, epitomes respectively of man and woman, from della Porta’s De Humana Physiognomonia of 1601

formed to maternal mildness and affection. . . . They are the counterpart of man, taken out of man, to be subject to man; to comfort him like angels, and to lighten his cares . . . . (400) A woman with a beard is not so disgusting as a woman who acts the free-thinker. (402)

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These are familiar strictures from a long tradition. A woman who thinks for herself, or who thinks differently from the standards accepted in male discourse, is exceeding the natural limitations of her sex, and hence is apt to become disgustingly mannish. Lavater admits that women have fewer flaws than men, but equally asserts that they lack man’s strength of virtue. He is clearly of the school that admires women in their place, and firmly believes that their place is subordinate. In the eighteenth century, an influential work with a strong gender bias was Steele’s pair of essays in The Tatler for 29 November and 3 December 1709. The essayist describes his vision of the Goddess Justice descending from the heavens with her mirror in her hand, an instrument “endowed with the same Qualities as that which the painters put into the hand of Truth” (115). The goddess has arrived to make a new division of the benefits of the world according to just deserts. The men are to be ranked according to their true titles to recognition, by birth and merit. The women are to take place according to their beauty – but their beauty is judged by its reflection in Justice’s mirror; and “It was the particular Property of this Looking-glass to banish all false Appearances, and show People what they are. The whole Woman was represented, without Regard to the usual external Features, which were made entirely comformable to their real Characters” (126). If justice could only prevail, muses the Tatler, things and people – but especially women – would be what they appear, and physiognomy would be a true science. This vision is invoked later by Sarah Fielding in The Adventures of David Simple of 1744. David is simple because he takes people at their face value, and believes what they say; so Sarah’s novel, like those of her brother Henry, focusses on false appearances, with an accompanying longing for true ones. The heroine describes the process by which she learns to see through the specious charms of her stepmother. “I soon found out that all the Softness and Tenderness I once imagined her possessed of, was entirely owing to her Person; the Symmetry and Proportion of which gave so pleasing an Air to every thing she said or did, that nothing but Envy could have prevented her Beholders from being prejudiced in her favour” (143). In her bitterness over this deception, the narrator wishfully imagines the metamorphosis that would be effected if her stepmother were seen in Justice’s mirror: I often thought, could she have beheld herself in the Goddess of Justice’s Mirror of Truth, as it is described in that beautiful Vision in the Tatler, she would have loathed and detested, as much as now she admired herself. . . . Her large blue Eyes, which now seemed to speak

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the Softness of a Soul replete with Goodness, . . . would have lost all their Amiableness, and have looked askew an hundred ways at once, to denote the many little Plots she was forming to do mischief: Her Skin would have become black and hard, as an Emblem of her Mind; her Limbs distorted, and her Nails would have been changed into crooked Talons . . . . Not a Metamorphosis in all Ovid could be more surprizing than her’s would have been, was this Mirror of Truth to have been held to her. (143–4)

Properties of beauty and ugliness, it seems, can never be morally neutral. The passage is daunting for its savagery. For it is not the ill-judging interpreters who are punished for mistaking beauty for virtue, but the beautiful woman herself – although she can hardly be blamed for the misreadings, however she has traded on them. And the punishment, with its sensuous explicitness about the blackening skin and hooking talons, is painfully effected on the body by the body. It is apparently hard – even for a woman – to forgive another woman for being speciously beautiful. The bad woman who is beautiful is apparently the more bad for being so, because she has added a somatic mendacity to her other vices. Richardson’s Pamela, in her role as moral guide, lectures little Miss Goodwin on this subject, when she admires the beauty of Pamela’s baby daughter. “‘Beauty! my dear,’ said I; ‘what is beauty, if she be not a good girl? Beauty is but a specious, and, as it may happen, a dangerous recommendation, a mere skin-deep perfection; and if, as she grows up, she is not as good . . . she shall be none of my girl’” (PII 427). The tone, of course, is didactic and patronizing, befitting the adult mentor who simplifies a complex proposition for a childish understanding. The same Pamela knows the complexities of the topic. Though she has good reason to be jealous of her roving husband, she nevertheless rejoices in his good looks, “for as I love his person, as well as his mind” (246). There’s no moralizing about his specious and dangerous recommendation. The convention that beauty and goodness go together applies more regularly to heroines than to heroes. Sophia Western apparently needs no Mirror of Justice, for when Tom Jones shows her her reflection in the glass, it already reflects not only a lovely figure and beautiful eyes, but a matchingly beautiful “mind which shines through those eyes” (18.12.866). The same is true of Pamela, Clarissa and Harriet Byron. Wicked women are likewise ugly: witness Mrs Jewkes in Pamela, Mother Sinclair in Clarissa, and Mrs Partridge in Tom Jones.

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The tale of “Beauty and the Beast,” in its familiar form an eighteenthcentury story, reinforces the moral that the woman is more stringently required to live up to her appearance than the man. Beauty, the heroine and youngest daughter, “as she was handsomer, was also better than her sisters.”7 The Beast has no difficulty in interpreting this text. Beauty’s name is her appearance, and her appearance is her nature. It is the heroine who has a long lesson to learn about how appearances may be deceptive. She must come to love the Beast in spite of his grisly looks, because his looks belie his moral nature. And for males, that is allowed.8 As might be expected, women haven’t always accepted this double standard. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, readily recognizable as an early feminist, tells a tale in which the roles are reversed, and it is the handsome young knight who must learn that the loathly lady he has married is worth loving and obeying. In 1796, during Lavater’s heyday, Frances Burney in Camilla insists on a variety of relations between the physical and the moral, and exposes the facile male assumption that the beautiful equals the good. (I shall provide a more detailed study of Camilla in a later chapter.) Her three principal young women are symmetrically opposed. The heroine, Camilla, has both beauty and goodness, and would be a good case study for Lavater or Steele. “Her face seemed the very index of purity, which still more strongly was painted upon it than beauty” (8.1.611). Justice’s mirror need not be invoked to correct this appearance. But the other two young ladies challenge the orthodox views. One represents beauty without virtue, and the other virtue without beauty. Although we hear of the stunningly beautiful Indiana that her “capacity . . . was as shallow as her person was beautiful,” the captivated Melmond rhapsodizes, “Are not those eyes all soul? Does not that mouth promise every thing that is intelligent? Can those lips ever move but to diffuse sweetness and smiles?” (3.6.207, 2.5.104). Melmond must learn to see “with mental eyes,” and he eventually marries the hunchbacked but morally superior Eugenia, whose virtue makes her “nearly beautiful” in spite of her physical deformity (10.1.794–5). Burney, like Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and other women novelists, is resisting the male tendency to exclaim, “Behold the first in virtue as in face!” Nature has her language, after all, and she is not unveracious. The signs are still there, even for the cautious Frances Burney and George Eliot, if you know how to read them. Alongside the specious beauties, Indiana and Hetty, appear the true beauties, Camilla and Dinah, and inside the apparently ungrammatical Eugenia is a text of clarity and truth. As we proceed in discovering the intricacies of nature’s syntax,

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we learn that the relation between the signifier and the signified is complex, not simple. Lovelace’s physical grace signals the good man he might have been, rather than the licentious reprobate he is, as Socrates’ coarse appearance tells of his libidinous appetites rather than of his virtuous restraint of them. Women as texts have been read comparatively crudely, as women themselves have made clear: they urge us to allow for the same intricacy in the relation between beauty and virtue in women as in men. Reading faces, then, was a major subject of the novel in the eighteenth century, and continued to be so in the nineteenth. And although the word physiognomy may sound quaint and outdated in our times, the practice is going on as vigorously as ever. I quote from a prominent modern novelist: What is a perfect nose!—We only know that a short snub nose goes with an over-sympathetic nature, not proud enough; while a long nose derives from the centre of the upper will, the thoracic ganglion, our great centre of curiosity, and benevolent or objective control. A thick, squat nose is the sensual-sympathetic nose, and the high, arched nose the sensual voluntary nose, having . . . the proud curve of haughtiness and subjective authority. The nose is one of the greatest indicators of character. That’s Lawrence: not Laurence Sterne, as one might suppose, but D.H.! (63). To bring the subject further up to date: Desmond Morris addressed many of the issues of gaining access to the mind through the face in his television series “The Human Animal,” and in his more recent book, Bodytalk. An article from the New York Times of recent years addresses the issue of putting friendly faces on computer screens in order – yes – to make them more user-friendly. Indeed [runs the article], facial information science, as it might be called, is becoming a discipline in its own right, attracting not only computer scientists and animation experts, but psychologists, whose knowledge is needed to understand how people make facial expressions and interpret them. (Pollack C7) So we continue to find ways to read the mind from the body. The doctrines of classical physiognomy sound quaint and old-fashioned now, and the once-respected “science” of phrenology has been discredited. But swift advances in the scientific readings of DNA, for example, show

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a new way to read “the motto of our Soules.” This new blueprint for an essential identity is so far used mainly for physical purposes – as Fielding’s sceptical host will look in a man’s face to see if he has the smallpox, but not to judge of his moral character. But as DNA is increasingly used to predict certain mental dispositions and psychoses, it’s not hard to imagine a “new-age” Lavater who will diagnose moral and spiritual characteristics from bodily fluids. A new debate on determinism is already launched. Today’s microbiologist, like Sir Thomas Browne, can equally claim – albeit employing different language – that “the finger of God hath left an inscription upon all his workes.”

4 Facial Expression: The Mind’s Construction in the Face

From physiognomy to pathognomy. Physiognomy is the study of stable facial and bodily features, such as the cranium, the forehead, the nose, and the eyes and mouth in a state of repose, as signs of lasting traits of character. Pathognomy is the study of passing facial expressions and bodily motions as signs of passing emotions and states of mind, such as anger or fear or shame. “Physiognomy therefore teaches the knowledge of the character at rest,” as Gilbert Austin put it in 1806, “and pathognomy, of the character in motion” (Austin 87).1 The pathognomist must track process, and observe passion on the wing. Though both disciplines purported to take the whole body as their province, both specialized in that endlessly fascinating territory, the face. During the eighteenth century the doctrines of pathognomy were less disputed than those of physiognomy. The arguments against physiognomy – the issue of determinism, for instance, or the physical snobbery implied in the equation of the good and the beautiful – were not applicable to the study of the manifestations of the passions. In general, the process by which passion issues as expression and gesture, the mental motions being physically manifested, was read as good and satisfactory, whether or not the passion being manifested was approved of. For in pathognomy as in physiognomy one can register a direct pleasure in reading for its own sake, that familiar satisfaction in a comforting system of signs and correspondences. As students and professors of literature, we are all familiar with the pleasure of literacy, a certain delight that through poring over little black marks on a white sheet we have access to a whole world of complex signification. We congratulate ourselves on cracking a code, and all the more so as the code gets more complex. 69

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As words are the signs of things, so motions of the face and body are the legible signals of what passes in the mind. As with literacy in letters, literacy in these other systems brings its satisfaction, and its concomitant ambition to elaborate the language, to discover or invent new subtleties of signification. This is a process I shall be tracing when I get to the novelists. But for the moment I want to consider the different disciplinary discourses on facial and bodily motions and their meaning. Like physiognomy, pathognomy was an established discipline well before the eighteenth century, with a number of treatises on it. A notable home-grown authority was John Bulwer, whose matched treatises of 1644 on Chirologia and Chironomia address, respectively, “the Natural Language of the Hand” – the untaught communication by gesture that comes naturally to everyone – and the “Art of Manual Rhetoric” – as learned and practised by the professional orator. Although he specialized in motions of the hand, Bulwer addressed the whole large subject of body language, including facial expression. Like Lavater, Bulwer was an optimist, an enthusiast who believed in visible bodily signs as a direct and unmediated path to the truth. His is a vision of the body and its motions as a trustworthy means of communication, exempt from time and fashion, purer and more universal than verbal languages with all their dissimulations, incomprehensibilities and exclusions. “As the tongue speaketh to the ear, so gesture speaketh to the eye,” he says; and seeing is believing (5). Body language, unlike verbal language, is relatively exempt from the fall, for “it had the happiness to escape the curse at the confusion of Babel” (19). Hence it is universal and accessible, and readily understood not only among all civilized nations, but by the veriest savage. “For after one manner almost we . . . shake our head in distain, wrinkle our forehead in dislike, crisp our nose in anger, blush in shame” (5). The very beasts can understand this basic and natural language. In his engaging seventeenth-century prose, Bulwer cites Montaigne in support of the proposition that: there is a society and communion of justice, fellowship, good-will, and affection between us and brutes, they being not so remote from good nature, gentleness, and sweet converse, but they that can express their desire of honor, generosity, industrious sagacity, courage, magnanimity, and their love and fear. (18) Bulwer may sound quaint, but he wrote in a tradition that had remarkable lasting power. In the nineteenth century, just as we have George Eliot who still ponders ideas on physiognomy first laid down by Aristotle

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and still feeding debate through the eighteenth century, so we have a committed scientist like Darwin still accepting certain basic premises of pathognomy. In his 1872 study of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin too is concerned to demonstrate that human races and the other animals share an expressive system in the bodily manifestations of fear, rage, delight, and so on. He gathered information on expression among Aborigines, Malays, Maoris, and Africans by consulting European scientists who were in a position to observe them. Though he intends to gather unbiased responses, his assumptions about which bodily motions signal which emotions are already built into his questions to his colleagues abroad. (“Emotions” is Darwin’s updated term for what the seventeenth century called “passions.”) (1.) Is astonishment expressed by the eyes and mouth being opened wide, and by eyebrows being raised? . . . (3.) When a man is indignant or defiant does he frown, hold his body and head erect, square his shoulders and clench his fists? . . . (11.) Is extreme fear expressed in the same general manner as with Europeans? (Darwin 15–16) For expression in animals Darwin observed many species on his travels, in his home, and in zoological gardens. And the parallels he was able to draw between different races and different species were sufficient evidence for his premise that “with mankind some expressions, such as the bristling of the hair under the influence of extreme terror, or the uncovering of the teeth under that of furious rage, can hardly be understood, except on the belief that man once existed in a much lower and more animal-like condition” (12). Over many centuries, then, the commitment to the principle that bodily signs are a universal expressive system, common to all human cultures and even to animals, has remained constant, though so much else has changed. But to return to the authority whose work was in time to be influential in the eighteenth century: the Frenchman, René Descartes, was more scientific than the enthusiastic Englishman John Bulwer, but he too saw the operations of the body as innate, universal, and exempt from change. In The Passions of the Soul, as we have seen, he had presented his concept of the body as machine. And his description of the process by which a certain external stimulus is registered in the soul and ineluctably produces an action in the body carries on the concept of mechanism.

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The example he provides is the reaction to the approach of some potentially dangerous animal. First, light reflects from the animal to project its image in each of the eyes. The animal spirits carry the two images to the central gland that is the soul, which unites them into one, and allows the soul to see the animal. (The central position of the pineal gland as a receptor of nerves from both eyes and both sides of the brain was a major reason for his choice of the gland as the seat of the soul.) If the animal is recognized as “frightful,” the soul’s apprehension of it excites boldness or fear, “according to the differing temperament of the body or strength of the soul.” The soul then sends its message by the animal spirits through the nerves to activate the muscles, “serving to turn the back and move the legs for running away,” as well as to alert the heart. And as with fear, so also “with all the other passions” (39). The passions, it seems, are generic, so that the same cause will prompt the same passion in everyone. Where people differ is in the disposition of their wills, and hence in the resulting action. The same frightful animal that disposes one man to flee may prompt another to prepare for self-defence, according to the control of the individual will. “The principal effect of all the passions in men,” writes Descartes, “is that they incite their soul to will the things for which they prepare the body, so that the sensation of fear incites it to will to flee, that of boldness to will to do battle, and so on for the rest” (40–1). He is minute and particular about the movement of blood and animal spirits in various passions, and their external signs. “Among these signs,” he explains, “the principal ones are actions of the eyes and face, changes in colour, trembling, languor, fainting, laughter, tears, groans, and sighs” (79). As the fine scientific accuracy of Gall’s anatomical studies of the brain was to give authority to his theory of the “organs” of phrenology, so the physiological basis of Descartes’ theory of the passions authenticated his model, and helped to provide its lasting power. Bulwer on the natural language of gesture and Descartes on the manifestations of the passions both purported to be writing of reality, of actual processes common to all humanity when actually moved by these passions. But their theories of how human beings work, and how human emotions are manifested, were eagerly adopted by theorists of the representation of the passions in art. Descartes, as an authority on the body and its language, was particularly influential among painters of historical subjects, who sought to capture and freeze a signifying moment on their canvases, with the actions of the personnel in the pictures all visibly rendered. But he was also taken to heart, so to speak, by directors

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and actors, whose business it was to enact a sequence of changing states of mind. Such connections of the arts with science immensely added to their prestige, and were part of a process of professionalizing and raising the status of both painting and acting. And the same theories were frequently resorted to and could be modified by the novelists, who also considered the delineation of the passions to be their province, and who sought to make their narratives both pictorial and dramatic. The work of the theorists on the physical manifestations of the passions pertains to body motions, whether generally of the hands, head, torso and limbs, or specialized to that “most entertaining surface on the earth,” the face (Lichtenberg, quoted in Siegrist, 25). But for the convenience of discriminating between the different influences of discourses in painting and the stage, here I attach my discussion of facial expression in the novel to theorists of painting, and in a subsequent chapter I shall discuss the connections of the novel with theories of gesture and representing the passions on stage. Admittedly the distinction is somewhat factitious, since of course the actor makes play with the mobile face as well as the gesturing body, and the painter represents bodily motions as well as facial expressions. But there is some justification for the division, since the long view to the stage calls for wide gestures and attitudes with the whole body, while the facility for close examination of a painting allows for close-up observation of more contained and subtle changes of the countenance. ***

“If there be a Part, where the soul more immediately exercises her functions, and if it be the Part mentioned, in the middle of the brain, we may conclude that the Face is the Part of the Body where the Passions more particularly discover themselves.” Thus Charles Le Brun, the academic French painter of the seventeenth century, in his enormously influential little book, A Method to Learn to Design the Passions.2 My subject for the rest of this chapter, then, is facial expression, and some of the contemporary theorizing about it that fed into painting, the novel, and culture generally in the eighteenth century. There are vivid moments in many novels where fiction seems to be striving towards the condition of visual art, just as there are moments when pictures become texts and deploy language. The doctrines connected with facial expression were eagerly shared by painters and writers alike. Le Brun clearly follows Descartes’ Passions of the Soul in viewing actions of the face, particularly of the eyes and eyebrows, as triggered

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automatically by motions of the soul. Where John Bulwer of England provided a dictionary of motions of the hand and their definition, it was Charles Le Brun of France, first painter to Louis XIV and mastermind behind the grand scheme of Versailles, who became the lexicographer of facial expression. Le Brun’s stature nowadays is not high, and his name is associated with the worst of “academic” French painting. But for two centuries his authority was enormous. He is historically important for his major role during the seventeenth century in founding and promoting the French Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Painting as dominated by the old guilds was treated as a mechanical art; the foundation of an Academy represented a marked step upwards in prestige and public recognition. 3 Writings about painting became part of a discourse of the Fine Arts, which engaged the great minds of the day and earned royal patronage. Louis XIV conferred a title and a royal pension on Le Brun, and as first painter to the King he occupied a position of considerable political and artistic authority. Like the Académie Française, which was to undertake a dictionary of the French language and a systematic organization of knowledge, the Academy of Painting and Sculpture was to “assume the function of codifying the rules of art” (J. Montagu iii). It was as part of this enterprise that Le Brun published his little treatise on facial expression, his Method to Learn to Design the Passions, which worked its way into England during the first few decades of the eighteenth century. The translation I use is that of John Williams, of 1734. It came, as Williams assured his readers, with Le Brun’s own drawings, which considerably added to the book’s vividness and authority. Le Brun’s treatise assumes the hierarchy of genres already familiar in the seventeenth century. The mere copying of nature, however skilful, was considered simply the mechanical part of the painter’s art. It was the choice of subject that defined the status of the work, and therefore of the artist. An adviser to the French Academy, André Félibien des Avaux, laid it down: “As different practitioners of this art apply themselves to various subjects, the more difficult and noble their choice of subject, the further they move away from what is common and base, and the more they distinguish themselves by a more illustrious kind of work.” The painter of still life, “only fruit, flowers or shells,” has not advanced much further from the merely mechanical craftsman; the painter of landscape and of live animals in motion is of a higher order, and the painter of the human figure, “God’s most perfect work on earth,” higher still. But the portrait painter himself is subordinate to the painter who makes his figures appear alive and moving, by painting them in

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groups, in action, and relating to one another. Most distinguished of all is the artist who presents “historical and legendary subjects and . . . the great actions recounted by historians” (quoted in Edwards, 35). In eighteenth-century England too the artistic establishment, as represented by Reynolds as the first President of England’s Royal Academy of Art, laid it down that the highest achievement of the painter was to depict “the great events of Greek and Roman fable and history, which early education, and the usual course of reading, have made interesting to all Europe, without being degraded by the vulgarism of ordinary life in any country” (117). Le Brun’s instructions, then, on how to depict great men, with their passionate actions and expressive motions, in the great events of history, were apt to be eagerly absorbed. And the doctrine of the passions as universal, and as manifested according to unchanging physiological laws, fitted the age’s aesthetic preference for the general over the particular. “An History-painter paints man in general; a Portrait-Painter, a particular man, and consequently a defective model,” wrote Reynolds (131). Though the novelist typically deals in such “defective models” and “the vulgarism of ordinary life,” he or she could, like the history painter, raise the status of the art by turning to such authorities. Following Descartes, Le Brun lays it down that “Commonly, whatever causes Passion in the Soul, creates also some Action in the Body” (13). The face, and particularly the eyes and eyebrows, are affected most directly, because they are closest to the soul. So, for instance, in the passion of love, “the Spirits, . . . warming and animating the whole, give a lively vermilion to the complexion, particularly a blooming blush to the Cheeks, and redness to the Lips, which may seem bedewed with a moisture occasioned, probably, by some vapours arising from the Heart; the mouth must be somewhat opened, and the corners a little turn’d up” (34). These expressions are viewed as automatic and natural, and therefore timeless and universal. Le Brun’s authorities on the passions go back beyond Descartes as far as Aristotle. What was new about his treatise was his context of representation, of designing the passions. By his systematic codification of the visible expression of the passions he was supplying instructions for painters, particularly academic ones; and at the same time raising the status of the profession. His drawings of the facial expressions, coming from an artist of such prestige, vividly augmented his little book, and enormously increased its impact as an authoritative mapping of the ways in which the mind makes its operation visible through the countenance. Some of the

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illustrations are mere diagrams of the basic facial movements. Others are more elaborate, and adapted from his own finished paintings. They appear in different versions in different editions. He elaborated his system by distinguishing between “simple Passions” and “compound Passions” (15), and noted that expressions could readily modulate from one manifestation to another as the passions evolved and succeeded one another. The high status of history painting guaranteed serious attention from the artistic establishment. And one of the most important aspects of this prestigious genre came to be this delineation of the passions, the convincing rendering of the different emotions of the figures in the composition. It was expected that the delineations should be done by the book: painters and critics agreed that there was a right and a wrong way to proceed. For instance, a noted mid-century French artist-theoretician, Michel-François Dandré-Bardon, thus described the correct way to render a battle scene out of classical history: The pride, so natural to the Roman ambassadors, the majesty of the Carthaginian senators who believe themselves to be insulted, are emotions which must mainly be manifested in their eyes and on their faces. What movements of the soul; what passions; what looks which breathe audacity; what mouths which speak with pride; what attitudes taken without grimacing, animated with decency; what gestures interpreting feeling; what expressions to render! In a word, each figure must say in his way, but nobly, “It is war, it is war that we desire.” (L’année littéraire, 1757, quoted in Wilson 43).4 The English art establishment of the eighteenth century seems to have taken Le Brun’s system very seriously indeed. In his artistic manifesto, The Analysis of Beauty of 1753, Hogarth explained that “we receive information from the expressions of the countenance”; and he seeks to provide “a lineal description of the language written therein.” He also makes respectful reference here to “Le Brun’s passions of the mind” (Hogarth, Analysis 138) – thus significantly conflating Le Brun with Descartes. Hogarth’s engraving and painting of “Garrick in the Character of Richard III” of 1746 (Figure 6) does homage to the work of “that great master” (138). The scene is Richard’s tent before the Battle of Bosworth – and the tent is already a respectful “quotation” from a painting of Le Brun’s. Richard has just woken from the nightmare in which his many murder victims have cursed him. Garrick rendered a passion between

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Figure 6 Detail from Hogarth’s “Garrick in the Character of Richard III” of 1746. The spread fingers and “legs in the action of running” follow Le Brun’s instructions on the representation of Fear and Horror

“Horrour” and “Fright.” Here is Le Brun’s verbal description of their manifestations: [In Horrour] The Mouth will be half open; . . . the face will appear of a pale colour; the Lips and Eyes a little upon the livid (30) . . . The Hands quite open, and the Fingers separated wide from each other . . . Fright indeed causes somewhat of these motions; but they appear more violent and extended: for the Arms will be upon the full

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stretch forward; the Legs in an Action of running away with all their strength; and All the parts of the Body in the utmost disorder. (48–9) Step by step, from the spread fingers to the legs in the action of running, Garrick as depicted by Hogarth follows through on the academic instructions. 5 Clearly Hogarth made it his professional business, as Garrick did also, to follow the authorities very closely. Garrick, who was not restricted to the painter’s frozen moment but had the actor’s advantage of performance through time, actually specialized in swift transitions, as Joseph Roach points out: “During his visit to Paris in 1763–64, Garrick astonished the regulars at the salon . . . by poking his head out from behind a screen to demonstrate the passions in rapid-fire succession” (Roach 111). A rival actor, Samuel Foote, recorded that in one scene “Garrick’s countenance was observed to evince consecutively, in five seconds, the distinct signs of wild delight, temperate pleasure, tranquillity, surprise, blank astonishment, sorrow, ‘the air of one overwhelmed,’ fright, horror and despair, with spectacular transitions between each passion” (Lynch 72). Such accounts demonstrate the developed body-reading powers of the contemporary audience. If Garrick’s brilliant facility in adopting the definable expressions and changing from one to the next is a sign of his virtuosity, the audience’s feat in following and recognizing them – in the space of five seconds! – is almost as impressive. In the fourth of his Discourses on painting, delivered in 1777, Sir Joshua Reynolds takes it as axiomatic that expression is of the utmost importance in history painting; but his strong sense of decorum and of the dignity of the mode leads him to stress the need for appropriateness of the expression to the heroic register. Those expressions alone should be given to the figures which their respective situations generally produce. Nor is this enough; each person should also have that expression which men of his rank generally exhibit. The joy, or the grief of a character of dignity is not to be expressed in the same manner as a similar passion in a vulgar face. (Reynolds 120–1) Notwithstanding Bulwer’s claims that expressive actions are a universal language, and Reynolds’ own principled adherence to the general rather than the particular as the proper province in art, the discourse of expression and actions was becoming increasingly qualified and elaborated.

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Reynolds also registers the particular importance of this visual means of communication to the painter, who, unlike the historian, cannot augment his representation by speech. “He cannot make his hero talk like a great man; he must make him look like one” (120). He must make the whole being fully visible: not only the body, but the mind and the passing states of mind that the body signals. His most famous tribute to Le Brun’s system of designing the passions is his painting of “Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse.” Here the Muse’s pose is borrowed from one of Michelangelo’s sibyls on the Sistine Chapel ceiling; but the dim figures who accompany the Muse of Tragedy (forms too shadowy for reproduction here) are appropriately Aristotle’s Pity and Terror, in the guises of “Compassion” and “Fear” as designed by Le Brun. Benjamin West’s painting of “The Death of General Wolfe,” exhibited in 1771 (Figure 7), caused a sensation as the moving and appropriate rendering of the final hour of a national hero. Garrick was in the crowd assembled to view it in the Royal Academy. Because it was well known that Wolfe had died rejoicing in the news of the British victory on the Plains of Abraham, an articulate young woman in the crowd, who

Figure 7 Benjamin West’s painting of 1771, “The Death of General Wolfe.” In an impromptu performance, Garrick demonstrated the transition from dying agony to “transient rapture”

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otherwise admired the painting, objected to the languid expression on Wolfe’s dying face. In compliment to the lady, Garrick undertook to justify West’s painting. Supported by two gentlemen he placed himself in the attitude of Wolfe, and “displayed in his features the exact countenance depicted by the artist.” He then assumed the expression of the transient rapture felt by the dying general when he heard the [news of the French retreat].6 At this the crowd, hugely appreciative, burst out into applause. At the same time Garrick displayed his mastery of facial expressions and the transitions between them, and the crowd demonstrated a high degree of literacy in facial readings. This was a population thoroughly versed in the scholarship of designing the passions, and proud of registering their nuances. In painting, then – and in acting too, as we shall see – we find a process of elaboration and codification as part of the professional upgrading of an art. If anything, painting took the lead, and the acting profession increased its status by hanging onto the coat-tails of the painters with their new-found professionalized status. But as these examples show, the two professions drew on each other by a mutually beneficial cross-referentiality. And the major concern that they shared, and which was instrumental in their professionalizing process and their prominence in the privileged discourses of the day, was this matter of the representation of the passions through the body. No wonder the novelists were eager to display their sophistication in the same discourses, and to cater to the tastes of a public so educated. To be informed on the art of designing the passions, and literate in reading them, was to demonstrate your status as among the cognoscenti, and to pay your readers the compliment of assuming they were likewise sophisticated. In my next chapter, I shall look in some detail at one novel, Richardson’s Clarissa, and the ways in which one novelist makes the subject of facial expression a major concern, with its articulation by the theorists in painting and its consequent availability for manipulation by a keen amateur. Here, however, I write more generally about the registering of facial expression in a number of novels, and the ways in which artists in a purely verbal medium – and a written one at that – showed themselves alert to the major cultural fashion of reading faces, and adapted it to their purposes.

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The scientific exploration of the passions and their bodily manifestations purported to be morally neutral, simply a process of describing the physical reactions to certain mental stimuli. But as the arts and humanities develop the discourse, predictably it becomes aestheticized and moralized. The doctrine of the passions has its ethical consequences, which the novel deals in. In Amelia, for instance, Fielding makes the doctrine of the passions and its implied determinism a central concern of the novel. His hero, Booth, who is not notable for his powers of resisting temptation, rather piques himself as a philosopher. He rejects the fatalism of the prison inmate who contends “all things happen by an irresistible fatality” (Am 1.3.22), but espouses instead an individual and somatic determinism whereby “every man acted merely from the force of that passion which was uppermost in his mind, and could do no otherwise” (1.3.24) – a convenient belief for one all too ready to give way to the impulse of adultery or extravagance. He pooh-poohs the relatively humdrum morality of Amelia and her belief in the exercise of virtue and self-restraint, and makes “the doctrine of the passions . . . his favourite study” (3.3.103). This is taking Descartes altogether too far. And as the story of Socrates and Zopyrus refutes the implied determinism of physiognomy, so Booth must learn the error of his ways and accept moral responsibility for his actions. In the aesthetic rulings, as both acting and painting came to specialize in the speaking appearance, so did the novel. One doesn’t have to read very far in the eighteenth-century novel to discover that a readily expressive body and face, one that eloquently and transparently reflects the mind in the body, is valued highly, both morally and aesthetically. The novel developed a discourse not just on the semiotic system of appearances, but on the moral value of full and legible expressiveness. The virtue that transcends all others is legibility itself. The common concern with a legible body made for an unusually ready exchange between the arts. And the audience educated in the conventions of reading the mind through the body could enjoy the satisfaction of that skill in reading novels, as in reading painting or attending the theatre. As Garrick was famous for his expressive actions, so Hogarth was famous for his expressive countenances, his speaking pictures, his legible sequences. Just as today there are novelists who write novels ready-made for certain current kinds of theoretical analysis, so artists like Hogarth, Garrick and Fielding addressed audiences and critics ready primed in their techniques. Hogarth, particularly, was congenial to novelists. His paintings, swiftly made accessible and popular in engravings, themselves partake

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of narrative, both as coming in chronological series like The Rake’s Progress and as being highly legible in individual canvases. The extended commentary on his works became a familiar mode. Moreover, though he did occasionally venture into the grand mode of historical painting, he was best known for his scenes of low and middle-class life, and his taste for comedy and satire. (Hence Lavater’s strictures about his presentation of “vulgarity the most disgusting” [154]). He suited the low mimetic mode of Fielding, Smollett and Sterne, who were not given to standing on their dignity. The conventions of painting, drama, and the novel, then, seem to be playing leapfrog with one another, each taking on the other’s successfully articulated theories and applying them to their own discipline. Le Brun, the academic painter, following on from Descartes, develops a system for the representation of passion in the face, and articulates it formally; and painters adopt the system and incorporate his codified appearances in their paintings. Le Brun has of course already drawn on established conventions both of medical science and of representing the passions in acting – gnawing the lower lip, and so on. Acting similarly formalizes the stage representations of the passions, in face as in body, and draws on the scientific authorities. It is to be expected that literature should enter into the exchange, assimilating the conventions and developing them for its own purposes. Cross-referentiality among the arts had never been more prevalent than on this eagerly shared subject of the signifying face and body. Novelists often cite, and sometimes introduce, “the Soul-moving Garrick” (FQ 4.3.148). Frances Burney sends her fictional Evelina to the theatre where Garrick performs the lead role of the Ranger in Hoadley’s The Suspicious Husband, and allows her to enthuse, “Such ease! such vivacity in his manner! such grace in his motions! such fire and meaning in his eyes! . . . His action – at once so graceful and so free! . . . every look speaks!” (Ev 26). The motion that bears meaning is a constant preoccupation, especially when authenticated by a dramatic performance by an acknowledged master – or mistress. In an interesting digression in Laura and Augustus (the novel chiefly parodied in Jane Austen’s brilliant burlesque Love and Freindship), the author (probably Eliza Bromley) announces a feminist stance by denouncing Garrick for failing to recognize the talents of Mrs Siddons. And her dramatic powers are again admired in the same terms: “She is undoubtedly a most admirable actress, and plays the most to the feelings, of any woman I ever yet beheld. Her attitudes and actions seem the result of nature, and to proceed from the sensibility of her heart” (2.109).

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So also with the visual arts, where Hogarth was invoked as the pastmaster of expressiveness, as Garrick and Siddons were for the stage. In his famous Preface to Joseph Andrews of 1742, where he delivers his Poetics of comedy, Fielding cites “the ingenious Hogarth” as one who will never sink to “caricatura,” but rather depicts “characters” that even “appear to think” (JA 9–10). And in his engraving of 1743, “Characters and Caricaturas” (Figure 8) Hogarth returned the compliment by adding to his caption, “See ye Preface to Jos. Andrews” (Engravings pl. 188), and by providing portraits of Fielding and himself among the “characters.” 7 Public interest in these matters of visual interpretation of face and body was intense. After his popular “Progress” series, Hogarth complained, “The whole nest of Phizmongers were upon my back every one of whome has his friends” (Analysis 218). The Phizmongers were evidently a recognizable crew, who seem to have done some of their own professionalizing. The theories of gesture and facial expression, as developed by Descartes, Le Brun, and others, gave the reading public a vocabulary and mode of discussion for aspects of experience and representation which were familiar, but which they had not hitherto found means to articulate. The newly codified practices of acting enabled novelists to tap this

Figure 8 Detail from Hogarth‘s “Characters and Caricaturas” of 1743, showing the portraits of Hogarth and Fielding in agreement

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developing interest of the literate public. Rendering actions and expressions became for them not just a shorthand for communicating emotion – between narrator and reader, or between one character and another – but a major subject for debate, a way of showing they were conversant with current discourses, and had something of their own to add to them. Novelists and their readers became Phizmongers too: the novelists busily wrote in the visual clues, the readers zestfully interpreted them. We often see the novelists appropriating the territory of the painters, and finding ways to invest their verbal sequences with the authenticity of a visible appearance. With Fielding, reference to Hogarth’s engravings becomes a handy visual shorthand, such as we might use today in saying someone looks like Mel Gibson or Michelle Pfeiffer. Some version of “Had I the pencil of a Hogarth” becomes almost a catch-phrase for the novelist who invites the attention of the Phizmongers. In Tom Jones alone we have several borrowings; for example, of the spinster Bridget Allworthy, we hear: The lady, no more than her lover, was remarkable for beauty. I would attempt to draw her picture; but that is done already by a more able master, Mr. Hogarth himself, to whom she sat many years ago, and hath been lately exhibited by that gentleman in his print of a Winter’s Morning, of which she was no improper emblem, and may be seen walking . . . to Covent-Garden church, with a starved foot-boy behind carrying her prayer-book. (1.2.79) The narrator’s careful attention to chronology and the relation of Bridget’s age to the publication of the print are part of a game of referentiality the novelist plays with his attentive reader. Similarly, Mrs Partridge “exactly resembled the young woman who is pouring out her mistress’s tea in the third picture of the Harlot’s Progress” (2.3.91); and the sadistic tutor, Thwackum, “did in countenance very nearly resemble that gentleman who, in the Harlot’s Progress, is seen correcting the ladies in Bridewell” (3.6.139; see Figures 9a–c). Fielding is doing more here than providing a useful visual extension to his characterizations. In importing familiar images from Hogarth’s hugely popular prints into his text, he is importing at the same time a set of visual meanings, widely-discussed moral characteristics in which Hogarth in the visual arts, like Garrick on the stage, was recognized as a master. Smollett, too, makes frequent and pointed reference to Hogarth as a delineator of expressive figures, by way of demonstrating his own

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Figure 9a Fielding co-opts Hogarth as illustrator for Tom Jones: Bridget Allworthy from “A Winter’s Morning;”

developed expertise in reading and writing the body. Being a more vividly visual novelist than Fielding, he sometimes tries to go one better than Hogarth. “It would be a difficult task for the inimitable Hogarth himself to exhibit the ludicrous expression on the commodore’s countenance,”

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Figure 9b

Mrs Partridge, from “The Harlot’s Progress;”

we read in Peregrine Pickle (16.75). In a reference in Sir Launcelot Greaves Smollett imports a whole scene, including its burlesque elements, when he writes of his innocent hero’s exoneration before a judge who has wrongfully detained him.

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Figure 9c

87

Thwackum, from “The Harlot’s Progress.”

The justice . . . was seized with such pangs of terror and compunction, as a grovelling mind may be supposed to have felt in such circumstances; and they seemed to produce the same unsavoury effects that are so humourously delineated by the inimitable Hogarth in the print of Felix on his tribunal, done in the Dutch stile. (SLG 12.133)

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Here is a means for attaching the reader’s visual memory to a pre-existing set of expressive images. Sterne was the novelist privileged to be actually illustrated by the great Hogarth. The first volumes of Tristram Shandy had already burst on the town and made him a celebrity when he wrote eagerly, “I would give both my Ears . . . for no more than ten Strokes of Howgarth’s witty Chissel, to clap at the Front of my next Edition of Shandy . . . The loosest Sketch in Nature, of Trim’s reading the Sermon to my Father &c; wd do the Business—& it wd mutually illustrate his System & mine” (Letters 99).8 The newly famous Sterne, who had already dined with Garrick, still talks of Hogarth as almost a deity, and wouldn’t dare to ask the favour himself. Still, the strokes of the Engraver’s witty chisel were forthcoming, and Hogarth did indeed provide an illustration of Corporal Trim delivering the Sermon (Figure 10). In his accompanying text Sterne playfully elaborates a physical attitude as exactly balanced as the theoreticians of oratorical delivery would have it. He makes, in effect, his own picture. [Trim] stood – . . . to take the picture of him in at one view, with his body sway’d, and somewhat bent forwards, – his right-leg firm under him, sustaining seven-eighths of his whole weight, – . . . his knee bent, but that not violently, – but so as to fall within the limits of the line of beauty. (2.17.122) Sterne was fulfilling to the letter his promise that he would mutually illustrate Hogarth’s system and his own. “The line of beauty” was a polite reference to Hogarth’s thesis, elaborated in his Analysis of Beauty, that the S-shaped curve is the essential factor in all graceful form. Sterne is self-consciously making his fiction dance to the tune of the visual arts, and thereby claiming a certain prestige for it. The precision of his calculations on the physics of Trim’s pose, moreover, is intended to “shew us, by the way, – how the arts and sciences mutually befriend each other” (2.17.122). Trim’s attitude, described in exact detail, says Tristram, “I recommend to painters.” His facial expression receives similar attention, although in the event Hogarth decided to picture him from the back: “Corporal Trim’s eyes and the muscles of his face were in full harmony with the other parts of him;—he look’d frank,—unconstrained,—something assured,—but not bordering upon assurance.” Congratulating himself on his pictorial creation, Tristram calls the “critic’s” attention to it. Standing

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Figure 10 Hogarth depicts Corporal Trim, and “mutually illustrate[s] his System and [Sterne’s]” (Sterne, Letters 277)

back, as it were, he surveys the whole visual effect of his verbal creation: So he stood before my father, my uncle Toby, and Dr. Slop,—so swayed his body, so contrasted his limbs, and with such an oratorical sweep throughout the whole figure,—a statuary might have modell’d from it. (2.17.123) There! there’s hardly anything left for even the great Hogarth to do, Tristram seems to claim, since I have done virtually the whole job with

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my words – and in three dimensions for a sculptor, too. So Sterne locates the novel in the currently prominent discourses, albeit with a touch of parody on the side. With or without invoking Hogarth, the novel constantly strove for visual effects by overt references to painting, particularly in this area of representing the busily signifying human face and figure. (The vogue for verbal landscape painting, such as we find in Ann Radcliffe, was to come later, and another William, William Gilpin, was to be its prophet.) Sarah Fielding’s David Simple has “a Benignity in his Countenance, which would baffle a Painter’s Art to imitate” (7.9.426–7). Charlotte Lennox’s Female Quixote delivers “a Look, on which Disdain and Fear were visibly painted” (FQ 5.5.198): it sounds as though she too had been reading up on how to “Design the Passions”. When Tom Jones and Partridge discover that the luscious woman Tom has spent a vigorous night with may have been his mother, we hear that “the pencil, and not the pen, should describe the horrors which appeared in both their countenances” (18.2.816). These instances pertain to individual figures and their visible emotions. But the novel sometimes strove towards the condition of art in presenting the complex figure composition, too – the “groupe” (to use what was then still a technical term pertaining chiefly to historical painting). Take this set-piece from Laura and Augustus, designed to set the icon of mother and newborn child before the eyes, almost as a picture on the wall: O Madam, what a beautiful scene have I just been a witness to! permit me to give you a sketch. Mrs. Montague was seated in a large chair of white dimity fringed, herself, as you may suppose, in spotless white; the smiling angel in her arms, receiving the nourishment which Providence ordained it; she had hold of one of its little hands, which she kissed with the greatest marks of maternal tenderness. The delighted husband, hanging on the back of her chair, seemed to behold them with a kind of ecstatic delight: the tenderest love and affection teemed in his expressive eye. At a small distance sat the good Mr. Worthy: . . . his eyes were fixed on the lovely groupe, and the most lively complacency sat on his venerable countenance. (II 78–9) The description is evidently written for a readership learned in the conventions and terminology of historical painting, for whom such phrases as “maternal tenderness,” “ecstatic delight,” and “benevolent complacency” would instantly conjure up the correct representations in

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Le Brun and other authorities. There is some sophistication in the nesting of pictures within pictures. The central icon of mother and child, the madonna lactens, is rapturously viewed by the husband; and this larger family “groupe” is in turn gazed upon by the benevolent family friend, Mr Worthy, who is permitted by the sanctity of the image to view the mother’s bared breast. The whole forms the “sketch” of the present narrator, an elegant verbal composition which is to be viewed both by the immediate correspondent in this epistolary novel, and by the larger viewing public, the novel’s readership. The pleasure of reading emotions is to be shared, presumably with accumulating degrees of connoisseurship, by each circle of viewers. The implication is that an expressive scene gathers in significance and import the more it is deemed worthy of an educated viewership. The act of seeing, or rather of earnestly gazing, confers importance on the matter seen. The prominent theorizing of Le Brun and the academic painters had advanced the professionalization of the visual arts, and the novel too could gain in prestige by living up to those standards. Smollett, indeed, extended the analogy of the novel with painting even to the extent of defining one genre in terms of the other. In the prefatory dedication to Ferdinand Count Fathom he provides this definition of his medium: A Novel is a large diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life, disposed in different groupes, and exhibited in various attitudes, for the purposes of an uniform plan, . . . to which every individual figure is subservient. (FCF 4) The characteristically episodic nature of Smollett’s narratives, paticularly when contrasted with Fielding’s elaborate architectonics in Tom Jones, has led to an assumption that structure is not his forte. By his chosen analogy with painting, however, he would persuade us that composition was a strong concern, and that his apparently random collections of striking characters was a calculated device, a deliberate opposition of diverse elements, as in the artistic concept of the “groupe.” His figures are “exhibited in various attitudes,” posed, in signifying gestures, with a view to creating a discordia concors, harmony within discord, unity within diversity. In one way or another, then, novelists were frequently in the business of mutually illustrating the painters’ systems and their own. The examples I have been supplying have mostly been from commentary by the narrators of novels, to elucidate their characters’ appearances for the

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reader and so to convey their emotional reactions. But as the century unfolded, and with increasing frequency, I think, novelists are showing how their characters became expert in reading each other. The narrator of Tom Jones urbanely refers the reader to Hogarth’s engravings, with the genial assumption that the reader is equally well read in this shared cultural iconography. But in Fielding’s Amelia, only four years later, it is his cultivated character Dr Harris who makes a point of stocking his simply furnished house with “books, and the prints of Mr. Hogarth, whom he calls a moral satirist” (139). Characters become critics and connoisseurs in this subject, as we shall see in detail when we look at Clarissa and Lovelace in the next chapter. One of Smollett’s practical jokers, Sir Thomas Bullford in Humphry Clinker, has a taste for comic spectacle, and he is not above casting his guests in roles that will afford him a feast for his discerning eye. When the bony Scots lieutenant, Lismahago, comes to stay, Sir Thomas arranges for his clothes to be stolen in the night, and a fire set in the stairwell outside his room. The host takes care to have a front row seat for himself as Lismahago, dressed only in his nightshirt, makes a terrified descent by a ladder at his window: The rueful aspect of the lieutenant in his shirt, with a quilted nightcap fastened under his chin, and his long lank limbs and posteriors exposed to the wind, made a very picturesque appearance, when illumined by the links and torches which the servants held up to light him in his descent. (HC 276) Sir Thomas has deliberately created this spectacle for his own delectation, and he (like Smollett) has paid attention to the painterly aspects of this “picturesque” scene, such as angle of vision and sources of light. He launches into a veritable orgy of artistic appreciation of his own created spectacle. He can hardly reel off his connoisseur’s terms fast enough: “Crown me with oak, . . . or what you will [he says], and acknowledge this to be a coup de maitre in the way of waggery—ha, ha, ha!—Such a camisicata, scagliata, beffata!—O, che roba!—O, what a subject!—O, what caricatura!—O, for a Rosa, a Rembrandt, a Schalken!—Zooks, I’ll give a hundred guineas to have it painted!—what a fine descent from the cross, or ascent to the gallows!—what lights and shadows!—what a groupe below!—what expression above!—what an aspect!—did you mind the aspect? . . . —and the limbs, and the muscles—every toe denoted terror! (HC 277)

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Although Smollett relies on his words to create sufficient images, the passage cries out for illustration, and the engraving by Rowlandson was added in 1793 (Figure 11), with due attention paid to Sir Thomas’s verbal prompting. If Smollett’s Sir Thomas Bullford goes about creating his own scene and becoming its most appreciative critic, Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison goes one step further in the painterly manipulation of appearances. Sir Charles has a mission to reconcile a warring husband with a recalcitrant wife. Sir Harry and Lady Beauchamp have just been quarrelling when he arrives. Throughout an extended scene, we are to read facial expressions, and Sir Charles is to adjust them. He narrates the scene: In swam the lady; her complexion raised; displeasure in her looks to me, and indignation in her air to Sir Harry; as if they had not had their contention out, and she was ready to renew it. With as obliging an air as I could assume, I paid my compliments to her. She received them with great stiffness; swelling at Sir Harry: Who sidled to the door, in a moody and sullen manner, and then slipt out. (Gr 2.273) The situation is far from propitious. Sir Charles has plenty to do, and he goes to work on the wife first, working on the principle that by adjusting the facial expression, you can work back to adjust the passion that it signals: Let me, madam, see less discomposure in your looks. I want to take my impressions of you from more placid features: I am a painter, madam: I love to draw lady’s pictures. Will you have this pass for a first sitting? She knew not what to do with her anger. She was loth to part with it. (2.274) Cunningly working to placate her, he keeps her appearance to the fore in their conversation: I see with pleasure a returning smile. O that ladies knew how much smiles become their features! (2.274) A little more diplomatic persuasion that in being gracious in the point at issue with her husband, she will triumph over him, and Sir Charles succeeds in adjusting her face in the right direction: she shows “features

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Figure 11 “What a fine descent from the cross, or ascent to the gallows!” (HC 227). Rowlandson takes up Smollett’s challenge for an illustration

far more placid than she had suffered to be before visible” (2.278). But then the husband marches in, and Sir Charles is almost back to square one: Sir Harry came in sight. He stalked towards us with a parade like that of a young officer wanting to look martial at the head of his company.

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Could I have seen him before he enter’d, my work would have been easier. But his hostile air disposed my Lady to renew hostilities. She turned her face aside, then her person; and the cloudy indignation with which she enter’d at first, again overspread her features. (2.278–9) But nothing daunted, he goes to work again, recurrently reminding his subjects to make appearance into essence, and by appearing good, to become beautiful (2.280). Magnanimously he takes the blame of the dispute upon himself: “I met you both, with a discomposure on your countenances. I was the occasion of it. .. .I will not leave you discomposed” (2.281–2). Presently the two are competing on which shall make the grandest concessions. “Generous, charming Lady Beauchamp!” Sir Charles congratulates her. “Now are you the woman, whom I have so often heard praised for many good qualities: Now will the portrait be a just one!” (2.283). Sir Charles’s developed trope of being a portrait painter is addressed to an audience familiar with the conventions on the way the passions of the mind are externalized in the countenance; and by a sophisticated adaptation he reverses the process, and suggests that the countenance can work back on the mind. The causal relation between mind and body can be called on to work in either direction. Facial expression can even become a contractual issue between characters. In the stormy marriage of Sir Charles Grandison’s sister Charlotte and her husband Lord G. the issue again comes to centre on the face. Charlotte is high-spirited and playful; her newly-wed husband is inclined to stand on his dignity, and take offence. Charlotte humorously complains to her friend, who is trying to mediate between them: I told him, Miss Byron, There he stands, let him deny it, if he can; that I married a man with another face. Would not any other man have taken this for a compliment to his natural undistorted face, and instantly have pulled off the ugly mask of passion, and shewn his own? (2.398) It comes easily to a cultivated mind, learned in Le Brun and the means to design the passions, to think of an expression and the passion it signals as a mask, which may be readily removed. By thinking in these terms Charlotte can maintain her serenity, and adjust her countenance; while her husband is exasperated, and shows it, and she can continue to have the best of the argument: “Lord G. presents me with a face for his, that I never saw him wear before marriage: He has cheated me, therefore. I shew him the same face that I ever wore,” she argues calmly (2.399).

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Harriet Byron, the mediator, like a good lawyer, settles the dispute by calling for concessions from both sides, and draws up a new contract whereby the faces are enabled to negotiate with one another. My Lord shall forgive you; and promise that he will, for the future, . . . sit down to jest with your jest, and never be disturbed at what you say, when he sees it accompanied with that archness of eye and lip which you put on to . . . every one whom you best love, when you are disposed to be teazingly facetious. (2.399) Reading faces, and appropriately writing the text of your own face, becomes the path to peace and a key to civil society and pleasant coexistence. The face, skilfully directed towards gracious interchange, becomes a sufficient and effective synecdoche for the whole personality; and disciplining the face in its motions is tantamount to self-discipline. ***

When one pays attention to reading faces while reading novels, as I have suggested, one picks up a related morality. As Gilbert Austin claims of drama that that “performance will be the most brilliant in which [significant gestures] abound most” (Austin 496), so there seems a general assumption that the most admirable character is the one who is most physically expressive. Being virtuous or intelligent or sensitive is not enough; you must be seen to be so, and on an ongoing basis. When charms of mind and person meet, How rich our raptures rise! carols Sir Charles Grandison to his betrothed, Harriet, at the joyous climax of their engagement (Gr 3.274). Harriet has all along been especially prized for her consonance of mind and body, and Sir Charles was early captivated by it: “She has a fine mind: And it is legible in her face,” he pronounces (I, 424). To be fully and richly legible is the virtue that transcends all others. On the same subject, a paragon heroine, Fielding too resorts to verse. On Sophia in Tom Jones he quotes Donne: Her pure and eloquent blood Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought, That one might almost say her body thought. (TJ 4.2.155)

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This interinanimation of mind and body is nature’s last, best gift. Although Lovelace’s specious good looks are an addition to his villainy, Sir Charles Grandison can claim with justice, “My looks . . . generally indicate my heart” (2.464). And Evelina notes of the paragon Lord Orville, “His person is all elegance, and his countenance the most animated and expressive I have ever seen” (Ev 30). Burney is more insistent than most on the desirability of a physical appearance that figures forth the mind and soul. Beauty is one attraction, and virtue another, but the capacity to make the beauty expressive of the virtue seems more irresistible still. Cecilia is admirable because “her countenance announced the intelligence of her mind, her complexion varied with every emotion of her soul” (Cec 6). In Camilla, Indiana impresses “the admirers of beauty,” but the heroine is better appreciated by “the developers of expression” – a phrase that implies a certain professional and even academic expertise. The context suggests that the “developers of expression” are notably more refined and discriminating than mere “admirers of beauty.” Harleigh of The Wanderer rhapsodizes over the heroine Juliet for her transcendent legibility. “Those eyes that so often glisten with the most touching sensibility,— those cheeks that so beautifully mantle with the varying dies of quick transition of sentiment,—that mouth, which so expressively plays in harmony with every word,—nay, every thought,—all, all announce a heart where every virtue is seconded and softened by every feeling!” (63.595–6). Such an announcement is convincing even though Juliet has concealed everything about her personal circumstances, including even her name. The expressive countenance stands as the most reliable “letter of reference,” in Dr Harrison’s phrase. It is possible to have too much of a good thing, however. Late in the century, in Eliza Fenwick’s novel of sensibility Secresy, we encounter a hero whose face and body are so finely attuned to figuring forth his intensely refined emotions that he virtually crumples up, like a musical instrument too tightly strung. So acutely does Murden vibrate to each passing emotion that he becomes unfit for company. Here he arrives late in the ballroom: At length he came, but not with the smile of pleasure, nor with the soft tread of politeness . . . No: he actually rushed upon us, his features almost distorted with some species of passion, his hair deranged, and the powder showered on his dress as if he had been dashing his head against some hard substance in a paroxism of rage. (Fenwick 151)

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When he speaks it is to utter “horrid imprecations” through closed teeth. His countenance varies “from the deepest red to a most livid paleness.” Murden is a kind of eighteenth-century Heathcliff, but less sturdy; and he is almost literally shaken to pieces by his own passion and his direct and uncontrolled manifestations of it. This is not simply overwrought writing. It is part of the characterization of this hero, and a matter noted by surrounding characters, that his is a body galvanized and driven by emotions, and that he has little choice but to let them charge through his trunk, limbs and face until the machine collapses. After his death, “a smile of something more than peace illumines even now the face from whence animation is gone for ever” (357). He is still remembered most vividly for the mobile and exhaustingly animated countenance. If in this semiotic scale of values the truly signifying face and body, the richly legible text, represents the Good, the deceptive body represents evil. It is typical of Blifil, the villain-hypocrite of Tom Jones, that “he did not . . . outwardly express” his various emotions of disgust and envy (4.3.157). Monckton, the sinister mentor-villain of Cecilia, is like Lovelace in being both highly skilled as a reader of other people’s faces, and adept at concealing emotion in his own. He is always a jump ahead of Cecilia in “reading” her (257), with a view to profiting by the knowledge of her emotions, and scaring off her other suitors to keep her for himself. Likewise he can conceal his schemes from her, for in him, “by long practice, artifice was almost nature,” so that he can spread his face with any emotion that he wants her to believe in (719). This uneven distribution of legibility between villain and heroine is one more factor in her painful and total vulnerability. Fenwick’s Secresy furnishes a developed villain of this kind too, and one more fully professionalized in the matter of managing facial expressions. Clement Montgomery, a sensualist who wants to convince his puritanical guardian of his moral probity, seems to be well versed in methods to design the passions. Half an hour or so [he writes], I stood before the looking-glass, to find what face was fittest to carry to the castle. The glances I have of late been used to . . . will not suit the library. They speak a promptitude for pleasure. I must hide them under my cloak, and borrow something, if I can, of Mr. Valmont’s sallow hues. (117) It is part of this character’s self-training in “the cynical science,” as he puts it, to try on expressions in front of a mirror as though they were detachable masks, to “hide” and to “borrow.” For him, preparing a face

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to meet the faces that he meets is almost a profession. He works on his face as today’s politician works on what clothes to wear. The image-makers of that day specialized in faces. Another villain who intervenes in nature’s true language is Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom. Fathom is often aligned with actors, as the vocabulary here reminds us: “He on this, as on all other occasions, performed his cue to a miracle, expressing confusion and concern so naturally, in his gestures and exclamation, that no man could possibly suspect his sincerity” (FCF 19.78). He practises manifold kinds of hypocrisy; but he specializes in crocodile tears. He is shown at crucial moments in his bamboozling career as “shedding a flood of tears (of which he had always a magazine at command)” (46.215). The military metaphor reminds us of the aggressive uses to which Fathom puts his tears. They are supposed to be signs of pity and compunction, but he mows down his victims with them as though they were bullets. It is worth lingering a moment over those special facial manifestations. As readily visible signifiers of sensibility, tears occupy considerable space in eighteenth-century fiction. “Tears, idle tears” weren’t conceived of as being idle at all. Tears save lives. “Tears have their great use in human Life,” Parsons contends; “they are often the strongest and most persuasive solicitors of Mercy” (79). They flow plentifully, of course, in the novel of sentiment: Richardson’s Pamela calls them “precious water that spr[ings] from a noble and well-affected heart” (PII 143). As there are many shades and different causes of blushing, so tears too can be minutely discriminated. In The Governess Sarah Fielding carefully distinguishes the quiet, trickling, “melting” drops of her schoolgirls, which are a “Token of their Repentance,” from “those Tears which burst from their swoln Eyes, when Anger and Hatred choaked their Words” (11). Besides signalling repentance and compassion, tears can be healthful and indeed life-saving for the person who weeps them, as we saw in Tennyson’s lyric from “The Princess”. The advice to “Have a good cry, dear” may still be familiar today. But the therapeutic value of tears was officially recognized in the period, and novelists were very serious in presenting weeping as a crucial vent to emotion. Fielding’s narrator in Amelia records how one character’s passion “discharged itself in tears,” and comments, “To say the truth, these are, I believe, as critical discharges of nature, as any of those which are so called by the physicians; and do more effectually relieve the mind than any remedies with which the whole materia medica of philosophy can supply it” (1.6.34). Tears, and the capacity (or lack of it) to shed them, provide the climax to Fenwick’s Secresy. The heroine Sibella, betrayed by her sweetheart

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Montgomery, gives birth to his dead child, but cannot weep. “She delivered up the infant without shedding one tear,” records her friend; “but the oppression she endured for want of this salutory relief was dreadful to behold” (353). All means to unlock her tears are tried, but to no avail. Only when they have given her over does “the melting sufferer burst into tears” (358). It is too late to save her life; but she now dies a good death, we gather, one that is watered and sanctified by tears. Other facial and bodily signs, such as pallor, the blush, the sigh, the trembling lip, and the shaking knee could each furnish matter for a chapter or more. Indeed, on the blush and its “implicit promise to render body and character legible,” Mary Ann O’Farrell has already provided a fascinating book, though it principally addresses the nineteenthcentury novel (O’Farrell 4). In the next chapter I shall be examining the significance of kneeling, for instance, in some detail. Each such physical sign had a recognized passion as its cause, and its own exploitable uses in rendering emotion visible, and hence enriching characterization by suggesting complex and sometimes conflicted psychology. But one must call a halt somewhere. To wind up this chapter, I cast a look forwards to two later fictional treatments of gesture and facial expression, to see how the conventions are developing and changing. In Thackeray’s partly autobiographical novel of 1849, Pendennis, the hero falls in love with an actress, and spends his evenings watching her in the glow of the footlights. It was her hand and arm that this magnificent creature most excelled in [writes the narrator], and somehow you could never see her but through them. They surrounded her. When she folded them over her bosom in resignation; when she dropped them in mute agony, or raised them in superb command; when in sportive gaiety her hands fluttered and waved before her, like—what shall we say?—like the snowy doves before the chariot of Venus—it was with these arms and hands that she beckoned, repelled, entreated, embraced her admirers. (chapter 4) As theatrical performance this is highly effective; and eighteen-year-old Pendennis is not the only man who is head over heels in love with this emotive siren. But the episode is set up ironically. We soon learn that this actress’s actual range of emotions runs the full gamut from A all the way to B. She has no conception of the passions she plays, but is coached in every little lift of the finger by an old fiddle-player, and

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performs each gesture mechanically, and exactly the same every evening. Somehow the arm and hands lose their lustre when they are seen to belong only to a lovely automaton. Nature’s language has been taken over by the Mountebanks, and emptied of real signification. Later still in the nineteenth century, George Eliot in Adam Bede treats us to a highly effective piece of oratory, the stirring address of a woman Methodist preacher. Dinah Morris’s strongly inspirational sermon on the village green holds the attention of the sceptical rustics around her, and reduces some to tears. But the narrator insists on the low key of the performance: “There was no change of attitude, no gesture; the effect of her speech was produced entirely by the inflections of her voice” (chapter 2). And Le Brun too has lost his authority among the artists. Edward Burne-Jones, writing in the 1880s of his principles in portraiture, is dismissive: “Of course my faces have no expression in the sense in which people use the word. How should they have any? They are not portraits of people in paroxysms – paroxysms of terror, hatred, benevolence, desire, avarice, veneration, and all the ‘passions’ and ‘emotions’ that Le Brun and that kind of person find so magnifique in Raphael’s later work” (Burne-Jones 2.140). Burne-Jones has done his homework in the recognized textbooks of his profession, and he discards the outdated principles. Historical painting, which required the visible rendering of great men in moments of crisis, has lost its status, and Le Brun’s designed “passions,” now considered outré, are not required for portrait-painting. Gestural overstatement is out; gestural understatement becomes the more reliable sign of sincerity and truth. We are on our way to the twentieth century, the strong silent hero, method acting, minimalism, and the stiff upper lip.

5 Reading and Re-Encoding the Body: Clarissa

“Pathognomy has to combat the arts of dissimulation,” wrote Lavater; “Physiognomy has not” (Essays 12). An authority like Parsons might scorn the notion that the shape of the head or the length of the nose are indicators of character, prefering to read what he considers the more informative language of the movements of face and body as chronicling passing emotions. For Lavater the permanent structures of the body were more reliably Nature’s true language, since they are less amenable to adjustment by the hypocrite. By the 1770s the century had seen how gesture and facial expression were fast going the way of verbal language and “the crafty brocage of the tongue” (in Bulwer’s phrase). But at the mid-century it was still possible to have faith in them as visible and trustworthy. Clarissa is situated between the contending positions. “The natural signs of emotions, voluntary and involuntary, being nearly the same in all men, form an universal language, which no distance of place, no difference of tribe, no diversity of tongue, can darken or render doubtful.”1 So wrote, with authority and conviction, Richardson’s acquaintance Henry Home, Lord Kames, in his compendium of contemporary critical doctrines, Elements of Criticism. He was not alone, as we have seen, in elevating the semiotic system of gesture and facial expression as a language more universal and more trustworthy than words. He was collecting and articulating the received doctrines of his day. Richardson’s Harriet Byron, the heroine of Sir Charles Grandison, seems to be well read in the same doctrine. “Do not love, hatred, anger, malice,” she writes – “all the passions, in short, good or bad, shew themselves by like effects in the faces, hearts and actions of the people of every country? . . . And is not the language of nature one language 102

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throughout the world, tho’ there are different modes of speech to express it by?” (Gr I 185). Clarissa Harlowe, for one, seems to have accepted this doctrine of body language as significant and true. Clarissa is no fool. Though she is young and inexperienced, she is shrewd, and markedly acute in perception. She cannot be won over by mere verbal protestations, and she early learns that Lovelace’s are not to be trusted. She is alert also to the bodily signals that her culture teaches her are more reliable and less subject to falsification than words. “I have not the better opinion of Mr. Lovelace for his extravagant volubility,” she says, still early in her acquaintance with him. He is too full of professions: he says too many fine things of me, and to me: True respect, true value, I think, lies not in words: words cannot express it. The silent awe, the humble, the doubting eye, and even the hesitating voice, better show it by much, than, as Shakespeare says, —The rattling tongue Of saucy and audacious eloquence. (397) Like many before her, she believes body language to provide a truer representation of the heart than words, because it is direct and unmediated, and less subject to control and manipulation. The faltering tongue, the downcast eye, the sigh, and the give-away blush, are signs spontaneous and reliable, and not to be counterfeited. For her, tears are “beautiful proofs of a feeling heart” (699). To some extent, the text of the novel confirms her in this; and it is one of Richardson’s recurring themes to contrast verbal language with body language, at the expense of the former. For whatever the puritan distrust of the flesh that enters the text and colours Clarissa’s thinking, the body is recurrently endorsed as a site of truth. Clarissa adduces many reasons why Solmes is an unacceptable husband; but her basic and irrefutable reason is physical, not moral: her body shrinks from his. No paternal decree, despite all her principles of obedience, and despite her ready admission that “person” should not carry undue weight in matrimony, can overcome the absolute authority of that physical revulsion. In this, as in other physical signals, she is disposed to trust the information that comes direct from the body. Richardson’s massive and endlessly intriguing epistolary novel Clarissa is deeply imbued with the discourses I have discussed above. The action is set at the crossroads between the old and innocent

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assumptions about bodily manifestations as universal and true, and the new professional discourses about how they may be classified, catalogued, and ultimately synthesized. The scientists and scholars like Descartes, Bulwer, and Kames purported to be only observing the data and communicating their findings. But their useful taxonomies of the terms of body language, once taken over by the professionals in representation, are presently turned into manuals on how to fake it. By the time the actors and painters have taken over from the anatomists and academics, the true and visible language of the passions becomes much less trustworthy. Hence Lavater’s preference for physiognomy, with its trust in the stable bodily features, over the discourses on the changing signs of the passions, which could be consciously simulated by the unscrupulous. An influential example of the actors’ manuals that I shall have occasion to draw on again is Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action, by Henry Siddons, son of the great actress. It is based on an earlier work in German by Johann Jacob Engel. Although it postdates Richardson, it is a useful compendium of conventions that were familiar to him. Siddons would agree with Delsarte, the famous proponent of a nineteenth-century system of physical expression: “True passion, which never errs, has no need of recurring to such studies, but they are indispensible when we wish to express pretended passion” (Delsarte 17; my italics). This distinction is crucial to the characters’ readings of each other in Clarissa. On the one hand, Clarissa herself shares the set of assumptions about gesture and facial expression as the true and direct language of the heart: once she has discovered that Lovelace’s verbal protestations are not to be trusted, her culture justifies her in looking to visible physical signs as her best source of truth. Lovelace, on the other hand, is apparently acquainted with the professional manuals on the representation of the passions, and during the course of the novel he perfects himself in the skill of bringing the involuntary reactions of his body under the control of his will in order to perfect an art of deception. All the educated characters, it seems, are learned in the sign systems of bodily motions (as is their author), and can participate in the business of reading and interpreting body language with zest and developed expertise. They would be like the audience that appreciated Garrick’s corporal demonstration in front of Benjamin West’s painting of the death of General Wolfe. Richardson writes, too, for a similarly sophisticated audience. He expects full literacy in the matter of reading bodies, and he feeds our

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interest by devoting many thousands of words in his long novel to the detailed recording of physical signals, and the characters’ readings of them: to gestures of hand and body, movements of eyes, sighs and tears and faints, tones of voice, pallor, blushing, and trembling. When his characters urge each other, as they often do, to be “particular” in their epistolary accounts, they are usually, it seems, calling for full reporting on these minutiae. For to a large extent Clarissa may be said to be about body language, and about the competing sign systems of speech, written language, and the language of gesture and facial expression. Most of the characters are fully literate in the visible language of the body, and can conduct articulate conversations while “speaking only to each other by their eyes and by their working features” (307). Readers of Clarissa were expected to be well versed in the important distinction between voluntary and involuntary bodily signals. In the manuals that Richardson seems to have known, gestures and other bodily manifestations on which he supplies such ample information were classified as one or the other, with some degrees in between. In the voluntary group are included the readily recognizable and universally useful deliberate motions of courtesy and social accommodation – curtseying, bowing, the welcoming flourish, the repelling hand, nods and becks and shakings of the head. Clarissa’s body is naturally and gracefully expressive, and she makes frequent use of such gestures, without risking the imputation of affectation. The middle range of motions are partially subject to control, though not usually fully so. Breathing, for instance, may be voluntarily suspended; but such manifestations as sighs and catchings of the breath are generally involuntary, and therefore deemed trustworthy as spontaneous and unpremeditated signs. Clarissa’s mother provides a sigh that usefully illustrates this partially-voluntary range of manifestations: “She . . . gave half a sigh—the other half, as if she would not have sighed could she have helped it, she gently hemmed away” (102). There is a whole history of emotion and its repression in that stifled sigh. Motions of the eyes, too, are a frequent give-away. “The soul speaks . . . most frequently in the eyes,” says Siddons (22); and his authority goes all the way back to Cicero. 2 Clarissa is enabled to see through the acts of Dorcas and Mrs Sinclair by their shifty eyes. Belford elaborates on the popular wisdom of the eye as the window of the soul when he describes Thomasine’s eyes: “To say the truth, I always suspected her eye: the eye, thou knowest, is the casement, at which the heart generally looks out. Many a woman who will not show herself at the door, has tipped the sly, the intelligible wink from the windows” (1099). In the duel of

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reading each other that Lovelace and Clarissa are frequently engaged in, they fence with their eye movements, each seeking the advantage of learning more about the other’s tactics than they intend to reveal. “We are both great watchers of each other’s eyes,” writes Clarissa (460). In meditating on the distinctions between real emotion and the actor’s feigned reproduction of it, Henry Siddons notes that “the man who wishes to conceal the predominant passions of his soul, ought to guard, above all things, against allowing them to fix in his eyes” (23). Lovelace might well have dictated these passages, since he is very well informed in both the theory and the practice of the conduct of the eyes. As an illustrative incident – and one that determines the future course of the action – take the issue of where Lovelace is to take Clarissa after her rash step of eloping with him. He secretly hopes for London and Mother Sinclair’s, but declares Clarissa shall choose. Watching him carefully (because his eagerness would make her more cautious) she mentions, “I should not be disinclined to go to London.” As he had several times proposed London to me [she writes], I expected that he would eagerly have embraced that motion from me. But he took not ready hold of it: yet I thought his eye approved of it. (460) Here is Lovelace’s account of the same moment: I wanted her to propose London herself. This made me again mention Windsor. If you would have a woman do one thing, you must always propose another! the sex! the very sex! . . . [On her mention of London] I could hardly contain myself. My heart was at my throat.—Down, down, said I to myself, exuberant exultation! A sudden cough befriended me: I again turned to her, all . . . indifferenced over. (464) His fouling of the gestural record – emphasized by the suggestion in “indifferenced over” of some laying on of pigment – is successful: the show of indifference convinces Clarissa that she would be safe to choose London; and so she is headed for Mother Sinclair’s brothel. Lovelace rejoices not only in the outcome, but in the skilled duplicity that achieved it, even in the teeth of her caution: “The dear sly rogue looking upon me, too,” he recalls delightedly, “with a view to discover some emotion in me: that I can tell her lay deeper than her eye could reach, though it had been a sunbeam” (472). We know that Lovelace

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exults in his successful verbal deceptions. But he exults even more over his lying body language, because to lie in this universal and – relatively – unfallen language is a feat more difficult still. After these bodily signals that are partially within the subject’s control, the breath and the movements of eye and mouth, come what Henry Siddons calls the physiological gestures: “The tears of grief, the paleness of fear, and the blush of shame, or modesty, are all of this involuntary kind,” he explains (45). The actor, he acknowledges, cannot be called on to feign these, since they are beyond the realm of control. For this reason, one might expect them to be completely reliable. And Clarissa can hardly be blamed for believing such signs when Lovelace reproduces them – as he successfully does, Siddons’ assertions notwithstanding. As an example of a gesture that seems to have evolved from the involuntary to the voluntary, in the long process by which these reliable signs from the body become corrupted and colonized by the vocational deceivers and professional actors, it is worth examining the convention of kneeling (a gesture that we have all but done away with today). Richardson presents a whole sociology and politics of kneeling; and this particular gesture serves well to demonstrate the erosion of truth that is part of his theme in his long and close consideration of body language. “Bended knees,” according to Gilbert Austin, who collected the lore on gesture from classical times to his own nineteenth century, signify “timidity or weakness”: one kneels “in submission and prayer” (Austin 484). 3 Kames was more authoritative still: “Prostration and kneeling have been employ’d by all nations and in all ages to signify profound veneration,” he asserts (II 120). As a gesture of submission kneeling presumably had its origin in an involuntary physiological response, the trembling and collapse of the knees in fear. Lovelace experiences such fear when he nervously anticipates his planned rape attempt during the fire: “Limbs, why thus convulsed!—Knees, till now so firmly knit, why thus relaxed? Why beat ye thus together?” (722). But such an uncontrollable and genuine physical origin is usually only vestigial in the kneeling that is practised in the novel, for kneeling has evolved beyond this physiological origin. Clarissa, indeed, does kneel to her parents in genuine submission. She approaches her mother, she says, “trembling and my heart in visible palpitations”; and “as soon as she took her dear cheek from mine, dropped down on my knees” (88, 89). We may assume from the trembling and the dropping down that this kneeling is indeed involuntary on the part of the kneeler; but as received by the audience, kneeling seems already relegated to a category of untrustworthy gestures, ones that are simply part of a rhetorical repertoire applied

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at will for effect. “Your heart, not your knees, must bend,” her mother responds sternly. This sign has ceased to be accepted as genuine. It is read as simply part of an actor’s box of tricks. “No kneeling!” her mother commands her presently; “—limbs so supple; will so stubborn!” (103). As the motion ceases to be dictated by the body, and becomes a chosen gesture, it ceases to be rhetorically effective. The Harlowe parents have good reason to suspect other people’s kneeling as less an act of submission than a power play, since they employ the manoeuvre themselves. After her elopement, Clarissa hears that her father had decided that since all else fails in his plan to get her to marry the man she hates, his final stratagem is to kneel to her. This reversal of the order of nature can be trusted to bring her to heel. “A father to KNEEL to a daughter!” exclaims Clarissa breathlessly. “ . . . I had deserved annihillation had I suffered my father to kneel in vain” (506). Although her kneeling to her parents is received as an empty gesture, her father’s kneeling to her, however premeditated, might consummate what no words could. So the signifier has more or less power, according as it is received as genuine or otherwise. Although we are expected to receive her own kneeling as genuine, Clarissa is sceptical when suitors kneel to her. (A father is another matter.) Solmes’s kneeling cuts no ice with her. When “down the ungraceful wretch dropped on his knees,” she recognizes a power play, and is unmoved. “I have kneeled too, Mr. Solmes: often have I kneeled: and I will kneel again—even to you, sir, will I kneel, if there be so much merit in kneeling” (318). Nor does Lovelace’s kneeling fare much better. “This man, you know, has very ready knees,” she drily comments to Anna Howe, even early in her acquaintance with him (166). Kneeling has become the gestural equivalent of the verbal cliché, which is ineffective language among the sophisticated, whatever it may accomplish among those who are only semi-literate in judging the quality of body language. Lovelace has used the motion with success among other women, and is piqued that it hasn’t its usual effect on Clarissa. “Too-ready knees, thought I!—Though this humble posture so little affects this proud beauty, she knows not how much I have obtained of others of her sex . . . by kneeling” (653). He continues to deploy the posture, divested of all its original meaning of submission, to get what he wants. He manipulates the women at Hampstead, who begin by supporting Clarissa, but are won over to his side, he says, “so much had my kneeling humility affected them.” In fact, he proceeds to theorize glibly on the matter: “Women, Jack, tacitly acknowledge the inferiority of their own sex in the pride they take to behold a kneeling lover at their feet” (796).

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And presently, such is his confidence and persistence, his kneeling gains him some advantages from Clarissa herself. But this time he has needed some assistance: he gets “Captain” Tomlinson to kneel, too, and the duo’s act as two importunate kneelers almost forces her to accede. Perhaps because Tomlinson affects the avuncular he reminds her of her father. “Neither of us would rise without some concessions,” Lovelace records cynically (844). He has succeeded in a total reversal of the gesture from submission to coercion. Clarissa becomes wearily aware of the irony. After the rape and her subsequent agonies she asks him bitterly, “Why kneelest thou to the wretch whom thou hast so vilely humbled?” (929). On this occasion, as she sweeps off, leaving him in on his knees with no audience, he aptly calls himself “the reptile kneeler” (930) – foreshadowing his grovelling posture in the penknife scene when, like Satan among the fallen angels, he seems metamorphosed into a snake, and lies writhing and “prostrate on the floor” (951). It is part of the effective vertical imagery that reinforces a moral hierarchy. Though Lovelace perverts the gesture to a reversal of itself, wrenching power from pretended submission, his “too-ready knees” finally figure him as indeed morally prostrate, and as physically realizing Clarissa’s judgement, “My soul is above thee, man!” (646). The study of the politics of kneeling in Clarissa that I have just provided could be matched by similar mini-essays on a whole range of gestures and physical manifestations – such as trembling, blushing, or turning pale. One reason that Clarissa’s soul is immeasurably above Lovelace’s, as the text figures them forth, is that her body is a true representation of her soul, as Lovelace’s is not. For in his heroine Richardson presents the paradisal consonance of truth and beauty; and the language of her body is indeed visible and unfallen. Belford calls her “all mind” (555): that is, her body completely figures forth her soul, with no residue of the merely physical. “I never saw so much soul in a lady’s eyes, as in hers,” he elaborates (1072). It seems that her internal virtue passes naturally and without hindrance to inform her physical presence; and her beautiful body seems simply a pellucid medium for her untainted soul. According to Lovelace himself, Clarissa has “the most meaning and most beautiful face in the world” (492). The more meaning, the more beautiful, we are to understand. It is largely this dazzling consonance of her appearance with her essence that gives her her extraordinary moral authority. At one point, the narrator records, when Lovelace is just on the point of laying violent hands on her, “he was checked in the very moment, and but just in time, by the awe he was struck with on again casting

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his eye upon her terrified but lovely face, and seeing as he thought her spotless heart in every line of it” (602). As we have seen in other contexts, this personal legibility, and the degree to which the body is a clear and lucid text, is itself a shining virtue. Clarissa is transcendently admirable for looking exactly what she is, for being soul incarnate. She is like Spenser’s Una, one and indivisible, a shining embodiment of Truth. As one would expect, her emotions similarly issue in untaught and unmediated physical expression. Like the crowd in front of Benjamin West’s painting of Wolfe, the surrounding characters stand back and read her, as though she were a fine piece of calligraphy. After first seeing her, Belford exclaims ecstatically to Lovelace, “What a piercing, yet gentle eye, every glance I thought mingled with love and fear of you: what a sweet smile darting through the cloud that overspread her fair face; demonstrating that she had more apprehensions and grief at her heart than she cared to express!” (555). And yet, without language, she does express it: and such reticent expression is the more valued for being silent. Lovelace too watches the way in which her emotions naturally pass into gestures, with the appreciation of a connoisseur. For instance: “Now that I have escaped from you,” she tells him, “ . . . [I will] wrap myself up in my own innocence (and then she passionately folded her arms about herself).” His own gesture is more contrived, and more hackneyed: “I lifted up my hands and eyes in silent admiration of her!” (797). This is a man who has learned to appreciate the natural physical extension of a mental condition as matter for high art. “Her eye never knew what it was to contradict her heart,” he says of her admiringly, in spite of admiring also his own developed expertise in such contradiction (558). She herself is proud of being totally visible, totally legible; and is even capable of boasting about it. “You know, my dear,” she writes to Anna Howe, “that I have an open and free heart, and naturally have as open and free a countenance; at least my complimenters have told me so” (531). No poker face for Clarissa, and no secrets. “I should be glad that all the world knew my heart,” she claims (822). And she means it. Even after the rape, when according to all precedent she should cover up in shame, she refuses to conceal the fact or its effects; and the lingering collapse of her violated body becomes a prolonged visual demonstration for a circle of fascinated spectators. With an appearance so trustworthy, it is not surprising that she should trust other people’s appearances, too. And as we saw at the outset, she is disposed to trust Lovelace’s bodily signals even after she has learned to distrust his verbal protestations. She shares, in fact, John Bulwer’s

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optimistic vision of body language as natural and truthful: a means of communication that has escaped the curse of Babel, and is exempt from “the crafty brocage of the tongue.” For if the passions set off a physiological process that issues in a legible physical action, what room is there for lying? Lovelace learns how. His body does deliver to him the genuine physical signals of his strong emotions; but he works hard to resist them, and to intervene in the process by which emotion issues in action. On one occasion we are shown his strenuous resistance, and his success, in some detail. For Clarissa, tears are “beautiful proofs of a feeling heart” (699), because they are among the physiological signs that can’t be counterfeited. Tears are the one emotional manifestation that Lovelace doesn’t cultivate, perhaps because the suggestion that they are unmanly outweighs the other uses he might put them to, and he is always chary of having his masculinity questioned. The occasion on which he weeps despite himself, and provides those “beautiful proofs,” is a signal instance of direct and reliable guidance from the body. He has just witnessed Clarissa’s transport of joy when she believes that through Tomlinson’s mediation she may be happily reconciled with her family; and he is genuinely moved. In short, I was—I want words to say how I was—My nose had been made to tingle before; my eyes have before been made to glisten by this soul-moving beauty; but so very much affected, I never was—for, trying to check my sensibility, it was too strong for me, and I even sobbed—Yes, by my soul, I audibly sobbed. (695) This strong signal from the body, a manifestation over which he has no voluntary control, puts him in contact with his own best self, the aspect of him that allows Clarissa to believe he is redeemable. But his restless consciousness, his habitual need to bring everything and every body under the control of his will, make him resist the message and the impulse, and fight back the tears and the genuine compassion they signal. It is not usual for Lovelace to “want words,” for when he lacks words he is also conscious of lack of control. On this occasion he exerts himself to regain his readiness in language. By a strong exercise of his will he proceeds to bring the unruly impulse of his heart, like the true signal from his body, under habitual control. I want, methinks, now I have owned the odd sensation, to describe it to thee [he tells Belford]—The thing was so strange to me—something

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choking, as it were, in my throat—I know not how—yet, I must needs say, though I am out of countenance upon the recollection, that there was something very pretty in it; and I wish I could know it again, that I might have a more perfect idea of it, and be better able to describe it to thee. (695) The two paragraphs I have quoted, which are contiguous, are a vivid example of a process that goes on all the time with Lovelace. His initial and spontaneous reaction is to respond warmly and compassionately to Clarissa, and to act accordingly. But his conscious principles as a rake make him quell the emotional response, by submitting it to a deliberate process of verbal analysis. First he responds, and weeps, and is wordless; then he takes cognizance of the emotional response, and halts it. Presently, instead of lacking words, he proceeds to wrap the response in language – “I want . . . to describe it to thee.” Once he has distanced it, he can savour it with a more critical appreciation – “There was something very pretty in it.” By now he feels safe enough to become a scholar and a connoisseur of his own sensation: to wish to feel it again, and to be ready to provide a taxonomy. Through language he successfully deconstructs his own emotion. We see this process over and over again. For Lovelace is two Lovelaces, as the central male in Pamela is two Mr Bs. By and large, their identities change according as they are in presence of the woman they love, or apart from her. In Pamela’s presence, Mr B is consumed with lust, and sees her as all body for the taking. It takes Pamela’s letters, which he reads at a distance from her, to awaken him to her subjectivity, to convince him that she is a human being, with a mind and responses of her own, who deserves free choice. Lovelace, on the other hand, perhaps because he is a writer rather than a reader, is a better man in Clarissa’s presence. He responds to her soul, and her pellucid figuring forth of it, and not just to her body. But in her absence, and with the pen in his hand, he analyses away his compunction and his compassion, and is a rake again. “When I am from her,” he explains to Belford, “I cannot still help hesitating about marriage. . . . But when I am with her, I am ready to say, to swear, and to do, whatever I think will be most acceptable to her” (915). In her absence, his conscious will reasserts itself, and language becomes his instrument of domination over his other self, and the more compassionate responses of his body which manifest it. If Clarissa is like Spenser’s Una, then Lovelace is like Duessa, double and duplicitous, a master of manipulated appearances. But the chief of

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all his dupes is himself. To the extent that he becomes a tragic figure it is for the conflict between the genuine impulse of his heart – his strong and undeniable love for Clarissa – and his conscious principles as a rake which dictate his resistance to it, against his own best interests. This war is interestingly dramatized through the physical language of his body as well as his speech and the written language of his pen. Richardson’s familiarity with the discourse of action, the motion that enacts emotion, becomes evident in his rendering of anger, including Lovelace’s. Lovelace himself is something of a connoisseur of actions, as we have seen; and he is copious in his descriptions of some physical manifestations. When Mother Sinclair throws soul and body into intimidating Clarissa just before the rape, he records the occasion with the measured appreciation of an art critic: The old dragon straddled up to her, with her arms kemboed again— her eye-brows erect, like the bristles upon a hog’s back and, scowling over her shortened nose, more than half-hid her ferret eyes. Her mouth was distorted. She pouted out her blubber-lips, as if to bellows up wind and sputter into her horse-nostrils; and her chin was curdled, and more than usually prominent with passion. (883) This is an elaborate set-piece description which can be aligned with Le Brun’s description of anger: When Anger seizes the Soul, it is expressed by red and fiery Eyes; . . . the Eye-brows alike, either lifted up or depress’d . . . the Nostrils open and extended; the Lips pressing together, the Under One rising above the Upper . . . the Veins of the Forehead, Temples and Neck also swelled and extended . . . The Person thus affected will seem rather to pant than breath, the Heart being oppressed by the abundance of blood flowing to its relief. (Le Brun 45)4 Siddons, with the civilized restraint of the Enlightenment, suggests that the actor should dispense with some of these more violent signs of anger, for “The rage, which . . . throws the whole visage into the distortions of grimace, which pants till every muscle swells . . . may, perhaps, be a true representation of nature, but is very, very disgusting in the imitation” (45). The painter who designs the passions, and even the novelist who describes them, may present the full set of repellant characteristics of the state (Richardson and Lovelace clearly intend this representation of

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Mother Sinclair’s anger to be disgusting). The actor who enacts, however, may usefully cultivate some decorous understatement. Lovelace himself shows anger at a less repulsive extreme; but still his manifestations are in line with scholarly authority. Siddons presents the received opinion that “Anger frequently quits its real object, and fixes on others,” and elaborates on it to explain that this “furious passion . . . will fly to objects different and innocent, and wreak its fury by trampling, beating, tearing, and defacing them—and when it cannot be satisfied in this manner, it resembles canine hunger, and hurries the individual even to violence upon himself” (122, 127–8). Lovelace is a classic example. He is not a patient man, and on the many occasions on which he is exasperated, he is inclined to use his servant as a punchbag: Will is missing several teeth as a result (1214). Sometimes, too, his rage turns on himself. After he has been humiliatingly dismissed by Clarissa, he records, “I retreated to my own apartment with my heart full. And my man Will not being near me, gave myself a plaguy knock on the forehead with my double fist” (573). This is in fact a characteristic gesture with Lovelace when things are not going well; and it is another signal of his self-divided nature as his own worst enemy. When Clarissa (as she records) refuses him a kiss he considers himself entitled to, she sweeps away, leaving him with “his clenched hand offered in wrath to his forehead” (600). Anna Howe takes sides with his suggested selfhatred: “His clenched fist offered to his forehead on your leaving him in just displeasure; I wish it had been a poleaxe, and in the hand of his worst enemy” (603). When Lovelace, in an extremity of rage and selfloathing, is awaiting news of Clarissa’s death, Belford calls on Mowbray to attend him in order to prevent mischief. “Your being with him may save either his or a servant’s life,” he instructs him (1358). Ultimately such precautions cannot prevail. Lovelace seeks out Colonel Morden and death, as the ultimately self-destructive gesture. Richardson can use even such hackneyed stage gestures as the clenched fist to the forehead to figure forth Lovelace’s deeply conflicted psychology. Though gnawing his lips and beating his forehead seem to be involuntary gestures with Lovelace, for the most part he is thoroughly in control, and adopts stage gestures deliberately, as an actor does, and with a facility in expressiveness and nuance that are beyond the powers of all but the best actors. An early episode illustrates his remarkable powers in deliberately hanging out intricately legible signals. When he is persuading Clarissa to elope with him, he needs to use her fear of his duelling with her brother to his advantage. Here he effectively uses two different layers of

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body language, first employing aggressive actions, and then making a show of trying to control them; and Clarissa reads from his motions as exactly as from verbal dictation. “I was hastening from him when, with a solemn air, looking upon his sword but catching as it were his hand from it, he folded both his arms as if a sudden thought had recovered him from an intended rashness” (377). He adopts a series of signs, and makes her read them. He knows that she is more likely to trust gestures than words, and hence he deploys physical motions to convince her as no protestations can. She can’t resist the calculatedly legible text he dangles before her: “his arms still folded, as if (as I thought) he would not be tempted to mischief” (377); “he started and looked as if he had heard somebody near the door, on the inside, clapping his hand on his sword” (379). This set of contrived gestures is the better calculated to bring Clarissa onto his side, because they suggest restraint, a control of his passions; and hence serve to confirm her secret hopes that he can be reformed. Lest readers may be fooled along with Clarissa into believing that the gestures are true, we are next given Lovelace’s letter to Joseph Leman, which was written before the elopement, though it appears after it; and here we discover the elaborate plan to terrify Clarissa into eloping by making her fear bloodshed between Lovelace and her brother. “If she wavers, a little innocent contrivance will be necessary,” he explains; and proceeds to instruct the servant in how to personate an enraged brother in pursuit (383). He also gives him careful instruction about putting the key to the inside of the gate, so that the Harlowes will suppose Clarissa let herself out, and escaped by her own choice and initiative. Even at this early stage of our knowledge of him, we are shown that Lovelace is a skilled semiotician, a manipulator of signs. And it is his effective lying with gestures and signs, rather than any verbal protestations, that persuades Clarissa to the decisive step that she so bitterly regrets. “Observe to keep at such a distance that she may not discover who you are,” he instructs “honest Joseph”: Take long strides, to alter your gait; and hold up your head, honest Joseph; and she’ll not know it to be you. [Apparently Joseph’s deportment is habitually slouching.] Men’s airs and gaits are as various, and as peculiar, as their faces. . . . These airs will make you look valiant and in earnest. You see, honest Joseph, I am always contriving to give you reputation. (384) This letter is the first occasion on which we see Lovelace’s skill as a director. He not only manages his own gestures and postures; he is

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sufficiently expert to take on the management of other people’s too, and to school them in effective deception. To this vocation he brings considerable expertise, and an almost professional knowledge of the niceties of the subject. He has a strong sense of the lineaments of the countenance, and describes them almost as though he were drawing them: so he can remember Belford’s dismal expression of compunction, and put it graphically before us in the Le Brun manner: “Thy strong features glowing with compassion for me; thy lips twisted; thy forehead furrowed; thy whole face drawn out from the stupid round into the ghastly oval; every muscle contributing its power to complete the aspect grievous” (718). No wonder he has developed a fine connoisseur’s sense of the facial expressions that would become “a glory to the pencil.” Lovelace’s complex deceptions involve his suborning many associates into acting roles before Clarissa. On these occasions, as with Joseph Leman, he takes infinite pains to direct their performance and adjust their countenance. Sometimes his instructions are so elaborate that he is less an actor or director than a painter, composing a countenance after the manner of Le Brun and his followers in the art of designing the passions. As though he were wielding a pencil or a modelling tool, he can deftly supply a hitch to the eyebrow or a requisite curl to the lip. When Lovelace prepares to extract a visible sign of love from Clarissa by convincing her that he is very ill, he not only adjusts the signs of his own body (taking a strong emetic to make himself vomit); but also minutely coaches Dorcas on the appropriate management of her countenance. His instructions are detailed and informed. Dorcas is to announce the news of his violent sickness with just the right facial expression: Come hither, you toad; . . . Let me see what a mixture of grief and surprise may be beat up together in thy pudden-face. [He is mixing facial expressions according to recipe.] That won’t do. That dropped jaw, and mouth distended into the long oval, is more upon the horrible, than the grievous. . . . A little better that; yet not quite right: but keep your mouth closer. You have a muscle or two which you have no command of, between your cheek-bone and your lips, that should carry one corner of your mouth up towards your crow’s-foot, and that down to meet it. There! Begone! (676–7) It is possible to relate these minute instructions fairly exactly to Le Brun’s methods. The effect Lovelace wants to attain, “a mixture of grief

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and surprise,” may be imagined as a combination between Le Brun’s figures 2 and 23, “Astonishment” and “Sadness and Dejection” (Figure 12). Instead Dorcas has clumsily produced a face more like figure 11, “Horrour,” with “mouth distended into the long oval.” Le Brun explains, “the Mouth will be half open, but more compressed in the middle than at the corners, which will seem drawn back” (30). Lovelace instructs Dorcas on how to compose her face for an emotion she does not feel. In the case of Tomlinson, his instructions are to remove the expression of an emotion he does feel. Tomlinson is so moved by Clarissa’s noble sincerity that he breaks down in the role he is playing, and gives way to grief. “His eyes glistened,” and he looks “sorrowfully” (836, 838). Lovelace, exasperated, delivers a brisk lecture, half brutal, half bracing; and extracts the acknowledgement from his pliable subordinate, “Well, sir, I can only say that I am dough in your hands, to be moulded into what shape you please” (838). With this inspiring permission, Lovelace proceeds with his sculpture: Dry up thy sorrowful eyes. Let unconcern and heart’s-ease once more take possession of thy solemn features. . . . If thou art dough, be

Figure 12 “More upon the horrible, than the grievous” (Cl 676). Lovelace instructs Dorcas how to modulate her adopted expression from Le Brun’s “Horrour” towards “Sadness and Dejection”

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dough; and I slapped him on the shoulder – Resume but thy former shape. . . . He bowed assent and compliance: went to the glass; and began to untwist and unsadden his features: pulled his wig right, as if that, as well as his head and heart, had been discomposed by his compunction; and once more became old Mulciber’s and mine. (838) That is, in Le Brun’s terms, he translates his countenance from figure 28, “Weeping,” to figure 1, “Tranquility” (see Figure 13). The spectacle of the man composing his features before a mirror is an icon of complex and calculated villainy. Lovelace’s passing analogy with adjusting the wig emphasizes the way that he has managed to devalue the direct language of the heart to a set of assumed terms; the exalted clothing of the soul to the debased appurtenances of the body. And in the same episode Richardson gives him another passage on verbal language as an instrument to dismiss the truth rather than to express it. Tomlinson’s opposition, he says, instead of augmenting his own compassion, simply induces him to make a speech in self-justification: “and when the excited compunction can be carried from the heart to the lips, it must

Figure 13 Le Brun’s representations of “Weeping” and “Tranquility,” models for Lovelace’s constructions of Tomlinson’s face

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evaporate in words” (837). Likewise, when its expression can be erased from the countenance, the emotion is successfully expelled from the heart. By bringing body language within the realm of control, he almost succeeds in annihillating the truth it is meant to figure forth. Lovelace’s most elaborate and creative foray in gesture management occurs at Hampstead, where he works with Tomlinson to bewilder and deceive Clarissa by a thorough scrambling of gestural language. It is notable that at Hampstead his usual compunction activated by Clarissa’s visible soul, which has induced him to postpone consummation so long, is in abeyance; and even Clarissa’s presence has lost its usual authoritative influence. One reason, we infer, is that he has a new audience; and like an actor, Lovelace is inspired to greater heights by a new challenge. The ladies at Hampstead have heard Clarissa’s story ahead of his; his cause would seem lost. All the more does he exert himself in providing a spell-binding performance, to bring the ladies onto his side, and to fool Clarissa by one more outrageous deception. With so much in his hands to manage, with so many different people to bamboozle, he can’t spare the attention to be moved afresh by Clarissa in her increasing desperation. Now “Captain Tomlinson” is his last, best card, and he plays him skilfully. She sat down. Pray, Mr. Tomlinson, be seated. He took his chair over against her. I stood behind hers, that I might give him agreed-upon signals, should there be occasion for them. As thus – A wink of the left eye was to signify Push that point, captain. A wink of the right, and a nod, was to indicate approbation of what he had said. My forefinger held up, and biting my lip, Get off of that as fast as possible. A right forward nod, and a frown – Swear to it, captain. My whole spread hand, To take care not to say too much on that particular subject . . . And these motions I could make, even those with my hand, without holding up my arm or moving my wrist, had the women been there. (832) Lovelace now is less an actor or director than a card sharp, delivering signals in secret that are not a language but a code. He has rewritten the “universal” language of gesture so as to make it unintelligible to all but his co-conspirator. The layout of his instructions even recalls a dictionary of natural motions of the hands that John Bulwer provided in

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Chirologia (23). Lovelace is creating his own dictionary, or, rather, codebook. It was one of Kames’ points about gestural language that while “words are arbitrary signs,” gestures are “natural,” and have an inherent connection with the emotions they express. So joy elevates, grief depresses; “humility, for example, is expressed naturally by hanging the head” (Kames II 119–21). Lovelace, of course, changes all this. A wink of the left eye to signify “Push that point, captain” is about as arbitrary as a signal can be. As the included “captain” suggests, it is intended as a secret code accessible to one interlocutor only. Lovelace’s intervention into the universal and true language of gestural actions is a devilish corruption, defining its speakers as belonging to “old Mulciber.” Clarissa is the less to be blamed for being fooled by one who has so mastered body language as to be able to rewrite it. Even the so-called involuntary gestures, the physiological ones, he has mastered and brought under control. When she delivers her account of the rape, she meditates on “the specious looks of the vile deceiver”: How was it possible that even this florid countenance of his should enable him to command a blush at his pleasure? For blush he did, more than once: and the blush, on this occasion, was a deep-died crimson, unstrained-for, and natural, as I thought – But he is so much of the actor that he seems able to enter into any character; and his muscles and features appear entirely under obedience to his wicked will. (L313, 1003). She may be forgiven for being deceived. She has imbibed, and she represents, a stream of discourse that endorses the motions of the body as the natural and true extension of the mind. But Lovelace has mastered another body of discourse, the manuals of the professionals who instruct painters and actors in the synthesis of emotion and the willed reproduction of its signs. His intervention in the natural processes, his colonization of the true language of gesture and facial expression, becomes an analogy for his rape of Clarissa, and he uses the one to accomplish the other. In each case he performs an assault on the integrity of the body. Richardson, clearly, is as much an expert in the professional discourse as his creature, Lovelace, and he too demonstrates his mastery in the creation. But he looks back with admiration and nostalgia to a golden age in which the body was pellucid, and its motions truly figured forth the mind. That is the ideal that he incarnates in his limpid heroine, Clarissa.

6 Gesture: Suiting the Action to the Word

“In all the declarative conceits of gesture whereby the body, instructed by nature, can emphatically vent and communicate a thought, and in the propriety of its utterance express the silent agitations of the mind, the hand, that busy instrument, is most talkative” (Bulwer 15). Thus John Bulwer, in his treatise on “the natural language of the hand.” Insofar as it is possible to separate the discourses on facial expression from those on gesture – and I acknowledge it isn’t really possible – in this chapter I shall concentrate more on expressive motions of the limbs and torso than on the face, and on the analogies between novels and theatre rather than novels and painting. Theorists of gesture, like lexicographers, are necessarily conservative. In assembling authorities in a long tradition, they have an investment in stressing stability and consistency. Not so the practitioners: they must be a step ahead in the game; they like to extend boundaries, not observe them; stretch rules, not reinforce them. So theoretical authorities, like Bulwer, Kames, Austin, and Siddons, are apt to lay down the law rather too firmly about body language as timeless and universal. They may insist on general principles that Shakespeare the actor-playwright or Garrick the actor-manager choose not to follow. But there is no excitement in breaking a rule unless you know it’s there; so that we find the inventive artists both exploiting and exceeding the general principles that the theorists lay down. If Bulwer says body language is true and trustworthy, Richardson provides a visibly good woman who deploys her body with an exemplary integrity, but also a speciously handsome man who specializes in managing the involuntary bodily signals. If the actors’ manuals lay it down that a certain passion may be represented in 121

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one way and one way only, Garrick demonstrates that there are other routes to dramatic representation. In appropriating and elaborating the professional discourses of art and theatre, the novelists were extending their territory and sophisticating their narratives. The less inventive ones do gesture by the book. But the more creative find their own ways to exploit and extend the rules: to make use of the convention of universality, while adapting it to novel personnel highly individualized, to invoke the timelessness of certain bodily motions while also contributing an intimate topicality. Those are the novelists’ strategies I want to examine in this chapter. In one sense, their verbal medium determines a difference, and an extra step in creativity, since they are not showing the motions but telling them. The narrator must know the correct action, imagine it, and assert its expressive content, explaining its effect on the immediate readership of the legible body in the novel; but he or she has likewise to make it verbally convincing. The skills of the narrator differ from those of the actor, but both can draw on the same repertoire of conventions and vocabulary of motion, which both may assume their audience shares. Bulwer backs up his claim that the gestures of the hand transcend geographical and temporal boundaries by the claim, “after one manner almost we clap our hands in joy, wring them in sorrow, advance them in prayer and admiration” (5). And when he provides his dictionary of manual gestures (see Figure 14), he is almost convincing, since many of them are still with us today. To supply some examples: TO HOLD UP THE THUMB is the gesture . . . of one showing his assent or approbation. (123) [“Two thumbs up” is a current verbal adaptation.] THE PUTTING FORTH OF THE MIDDLE FINGER, THE REST DRAWN INTO A FIST . . . is a natural expression of scorn and contempt. (132) [Hence “giving the finger.”] TO JOG ONE ON THE ELBOW is the usual intimation of those who put others in mind, and take upon them the part of a remembrancer. (69) [Or “Nudge, nudge!” as they say in the Monty Python skit.] Other gestures are now still perfectly recognizable, but we associate them with outmoded theatrical conventions: TO THROW THE HANDS UP TO HEAVEN is an expression of admiration, amazement, and astonishment. (33)

123

Figure 14 (1644)

John Bulwer’s dictionary of motions of the hand, from Chirologia

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By way of updating Bulwer’s body of accepted doctrine to the eighteenth century, I turn again to Kames’s lastingly influential Elements of Criticism, first published in 1762, but reprinted some forty times over the next century and a half (vi). His authoritative chapter on “External Signs of Emotions and Passions” echoes Bulwer at many points; but he has incorporated Descartes too. So intimately connected are the soul and body, that there is not a single agitation in the former, but what produceth a visible effect upon the latter. (II.116) (Or, in Tristram’s terms, “Rumple the one—you rumple the other” [3.4.160]). There is a certain element of physical necessity about the scientific position that is less cheering than the optimistic humanist doctrine of a universal language. But we get Bulwer’s doctrine from Kames too: “The external expressions of passion form a language understood by all, by the young as well as the old, by the ignorant as well as the learned” (II.118). Kames provides the familiar distinction between “voluntary and involuntary” external signs (II.119). These signs, he says, are not merely arbitrary, as words are: he emphasizes (like Bulwer) that gestural language is natural, and also (like Descartes) that every violent passion hath an external expression peculiar to itself . . . Thus fear, shame, anger, anxiety, dejection, despair, have each of them peculiar expressions; which are apprehended without the least confusion. Some of these passions produce violent effects upon the body, such as trembling, starting, and swooning. (125) He adds a piece of advice: “Dramatic writers ought to be well acquainted with this natural manner of expressing passion” (119). And in fact dramatic writers, including of course Shakespeare,1 and dramatic performers too, made sure that they were well versed in the theory as in the practice of expressive gesture. The issue of representing emotion deliberately, in a system that assumes a direct physiological and involuntary manifestation, introduces a further level of complexity; some theorists of dramatic representations of the passions take pains to explain the relation between the naturally manifested and the adopted set of actions. Another friend of Richardson’s, the actor and director Aaron Hill, wrote An

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Essay on the Art of Acting, in which he lays down as his first dramatic principle: To act a passion well, the actor never must attempt its imitation, ‘till his fancy has conceived so strong an image, or idea, of it, as to move the same impressive springs within his mind, which form that passion, when ‘tis undesigned, and natural. (Hill 4.339) That is, the actor must perform a kind of self-hypnosis, by which he convinces himself he actually feels the passion. Then his body will take over, and perform the appropriate action. “The muscles of the body . . . must, in their natural and not to be avoided consequence, by impelling or retarding the flow of the animal spirits, transmit their own conceived sensation . . . to the disposition of the gesture” (4.340). One imagines that this self-hypnosis, by which the actor must conceive the idea of the various passions in order to act them out, must impose a considerable strain on him. And Hill kindly works out a “shorter road,” by which the actor can first imitate the effect of the passion, in order sufficiently to conceive the idea. That is, like Grandison managing other people’s facial expressions, you adjust the sign, in order to achieve the thing signified: a very useful short-cut for an actor. Predictably enough, the theory was apt to linger behind the practice; and there is a counter-tradition of irreverent satire in the drama. Aaron Hill was writing, rather ponderously, in the mid-eighteenth century. But actors and dramatists alike had been faking it from time immemorial, and could readily joke about the various means to enact a passion or condition, and the manuals that recorded them. In The Man of Mode of 1676, Etheredge’s character Medley invents a manual of instructions for a woman on how to appear young when she is old. MED[LEY.] Then there is The Art of Affectation, written by a late beauty of quality, teaching you how to draw up your breasts, stretch up your neck, to thrust out your breech, . . . to toss up your nose, to bite your lips, to turn up your eyes, to speak in a silly, soft tone of voice, and use all the foolish French words that will infallibly make your person and conversation charming. (II.ii) The art of dissembling, clearly, predates the learned authorities on rhetorical gesture and the representation of the passions. Aaron Hill’s complex theorizing notwithstanding, actors were already adept at short-cuts.

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Nevertheless, to a degree surprising today, the actions, or appropriate gestures, were regarded as comprising almost the whole art of acting. The eighteenth century had inherited an anecdote derived from Plutarch’s account of the orator Demosthenes. Asked to name the three most important elements of his discipline, he replied, “Action, action, and again action” (Roach 32). 2 An actor’s main business is to represent the passions, and his or her means of doing that was by the movements of the body. Relatively little attention was paid, at least in the theorizing guides, to the modulation of the voice or the delivery of the lines – particularly after Garrick, with his extraordinarily mobile face and physical volatility, had set the fashion. At the end of the century Gilbert Austin collected the lore on gesture from the ancients to the moderns, and tried to establish a system of notation of gesture so that actors could develop a classic performance that could be inherited by generations of actors. Austin makes a representative statement on the central importance of this part of an actor’s business: “Significant gestures appear thus to be the great ornaments of dramatic exhibition, and it must be admitted that the performance will be the most brilliant in which they abound most” (Austin 496). Acting by this time was a very busy activity. Perhaps, indeed, too busy. As Deirdre Lynch explains, while “For some, these moving pictures imaged nature more precisely than ever before, for others Garrick overdid it, and this was so much ‘grimace’” (Lynch 32). A “poor player” in The Vicar of Wakefield complains that the public has come to care nothing for a play’s composition; it is only “the number of starts and attitudes that may be introduced into it, that elicits applause” (Goldsmith 17.103). A plethora of actions could prompt reaction. During the eighteenth century, as Angelica Goodden3 has shown, the acting profession was making great advances in professionalizing its practices. Because actors don’t invent their lines, but deliver other people’s speeches, they had been traditionally placed in a lower caste than, say, orators. But the elaborate theorizing and codifying of their procedures, and the active engagement of the actors themselves in this process, did much to raise the status of the mere player to that of professional actor. It was the theory and practice of the action, or appropriate gesture, that was critical in this improved status. Garrick was a master of actions as of facial expressions, and also a respected writer on his art. From his definition of acting, one would assume that actions were the whole of an actor’s business: Acting is an Entertainment of the Stage, which by calling in the Aid and Assistance of Articulation, corporeal motion, and ocular Expression,

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imitates, assumes, or puts on the various mental and bodily Emotions arising from the various Humours, Virtues or Vices incident to Human Nature. (Essay 7–9) Not a word about delivering speeches, except as suggested in “Articulation,” and that could well refer to the body rather than the voice. Indeed, by subordinating his lines to his motions, as Deirdre Lynch notes, Garrick in one sense “effaced textual meaning” (72). At the same time, however, in his capacity as theatre manager, his innovations in staging, which included darkening the auditorium and removing audience members from the stage, marked the different realms of stage and auditorium, actor and audience, more sharply, and had the effect of increasing the analogy between spectators and readers. The dialogue on the page recedes, and what the reader/spectator is perusing instead is the passions as they play over and through the performers’ faces and bodies. “The individuating particularities of the players’ persons were supposed to be subordinated to the common language of the passions that their delivery made legible” (Lynch 72). Textual meaning is thus to a large extent replaced by corporeal meaning. Most famous for his actions – his extraordinary command of his body for expressive purposes –, Garrick made his performances first and foremost visual experiences. Here, for example, are his instructions, based on his own performance, on the way to play Macbeth: When the Murder of Duncan is committed, from an immediate Consciousness of the Fact, his Ambition is ingulph’d at that instant, by the Horror of the Deed; his Faculties are intensely riveted to the Murder alone . . . He should at that Time, be a moving Statue, or indeed a petrified Man; his Eyes must Speak, and his Tongue be metaphorically silent; his Ears must be sensible of imaginary Noises, and deaf to the present and audible Voice of his Wife; his Attitudes must be quick and permanent; his Voice articulately trembling, and confusedly intelligible; the Murderer should be seen in every Limb, and yet every Member, at that Instant, should seem separated from his Body, and his Body from his Soul. This is the Picture of the compleat Regicide. (Essay 8–9) The “Picture” is what the actor deals in, and in Garrick’s case it seems that every attitude he struck was a “compleat Picture” in itself. As with his sequential display of facial expressions, he was also famous for his transitions from one bodily attitude to another. It is to these transitions that he refers, I take it, in saying Macbeth’s attitudes must be “quick and

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permanent.” The transitions would be swift, and the succeeding attitude held long enough to make that picture he strives for – as the best ballet dancers make us believe they actually pause in mid-leap. Garrick was infinitely adaptable, and had a sure sense of different modes of gesture. If for Macbeth he called on the heroic register of actions, for Ben Jonson’s Abel Drugger, in the scene where he breaks the priceless urinal, Garrick provides actions in the low mimetic mode. When Abel Drugger has broke the Urinal, . . . how are the different Members of the Body to be agitated? Why thus,—His Eyes must be revers’d from the Object he is most intimidated with, and by dropping his Lip at the same time to the Object, it throws a trembling Langour upon every Muscle, and by declining the Right part of the Head towards the Urinal, it casts the most comic Terror and Shame over all the upper Part of the Body, that can be imagin’d; and to make the lower Part equally ridiculous, his Toes must be inverted from the Heel, and by holding his Breath, he will unavoidably give himself a Tremor in the knees, and if his Fingers, at the same Time, seem convuls’d, it furnishes the compleatest low Picture of Grotesque Terror that can be imagin’d by a Dutch Painter. (7–8) The picture invoked for “Grotesque Terror” is from the demotic register of Dutch genre painting, whereas the “Horrour” of the regicide calls for the grand manner of Reynolds. Garrick’s attention to detail left nothing out: the whole body had to be involved in the representation. One anecdote records his response to a French comedian who was playing a drunkard: “‘Permit me to make one slight critique’—said Garrick; ‘— your left leg was too sober’” (Siddons 185). His attention to the “lower Part” of the body is notable, where other authorities paid so much attention to the hand. Drugger’s toes “inverted from the Heel” mark his humble status and lack of dignity. Siddons lists “turned-out feet” as a mark of “the proud man,” part of what makes for his “extended dignity” (51). This too is one of the more lasting signs, and reaches popular culture. English nannies of the Victorian period taught their charges to turn their feet outwards, as “rich people” do, not inwards, “like poor people.” Actors had taken on the theory of the anatomists of gesture, and made the most of it for their own representations. In his memorable burlesque of the theatre as professionalized to the hilt, The Critic of 1779, Sheridan sends up the mystique attached to actions in a memorable

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exchange. The stage direction reads: “BURLEIGH comes forward, shakes his head, and exit.” SNEER: He is very perfect indeed – Now, pray, what did he mean by that? PUFF: You don’t take it? SNEER: No; I don’t upon my soul. PUFF: Why, by that shake of the head, he gave you to understand that even tho’ they had more justice in their cause and wisdom in their measures – yet, if there was not a greater spirit shown on the part of the people – the country would at last fall a sacrifice to the hostile ambition of the Spanish monarchy. SNEER: The devil! – did he mean all that by shaking his head? PUFF: Every word of it – If he shook his head as I taught him. (III.i) The self-evident impenetrability of the meaning action troubles its inventor not a whit. It is not those who launch complex actions with their heavy freight of meaning who are at fault, but the dull souls who don’t know how to receive and interpret them. An audience is meant to stay abreast of such developments in the actor’s profession. It is notable that during the century, although one still hears of the innate, natural, and universally comprehensible language of gesture, there was also a developing discourse of gesture as particular to a nation or to a class – that is, a recognition that gestural language is not all innate to the species, but socialized, learned. Garrick describing the motions of Abel Drugger is offering what he calls a “low Picture,” not to be confused with the heroic representation of Macbeth, who is a general and a king, however wicked, and appears in a tragedy, not a comedy. Thomas Wilkes, in A General View of the Stage of 1759, explains that every station in life has “a propriety of voice and action peculiar to it” (Wilkes 115). The passion may be general, he says, “yet the expression and action must vary according to age, station, and circumstance . . . Anger, Resentment, Love, &c. appear very differently in the prince and the peasant” (115). By the early nineteenth century Henry Siddons, son of the great Sarah, adapts (rather than translates) the German work of J.-J. Engel on Rhetorical Gesture and Action for the English stage, recognizing the differences in national conventions. Likewise he discriminates Italian gestural practice from British. “The Italian, who generally converses by gesture in a very animated manner, has, (among others) a very expressive one” (38). And in his ample illustrations Siddons provides pictures of “Vulgar Arrogance” and “Rustic Cunning” (opp.148, 378; figure 15) – distinct

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Figure 15 Siddons’ class-adjusted attitudes: “Vulgar Arrogance” and “Rustic Cunning”

from the more patrician “loftiness” (opp.251). That universal language may be affected by the curse of Babel after all. ***

My citing of contemporary authorities on theatrical gesture provides background for the subject of gesture in the eighteenth-century novel. What I have tried to establish is that gesture is a prominent subject of the time, which exercised the minds of scientists and philosophers, humanists and anatomists, and the theoreticians and practitioners of

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acting as well as painting. They all addressed an informed audience, who had grasped that paying close attention to visible manifestations of states of mind, and developing opinions on their quality, were necessary parts of being artistically and scientifically in the know. Novelists located themselves in this discourse in various ways. Words, of course, are their only medium. They can no more act out their meaning on the boards than they can paint it. But in spite of their commitment to language, or more likely because of it, they are fully aware of the specious uses it can be put to. Fielding, particularly, in Joseph Andrews makes a whole comic aesthetic out of the contrast of verbal profession with actual performance. For him the word is very far from being, in Chaucer’s phrase, “cosyn to the dede.”4 A tradition of a more truthful and unmediated means of communication than words can be very useful to novelists, even though words are all they have for describing it. And in fact novelists make full use of the gestural tradition, often implying, and sometimes saying, that the look is more to be trusted than the word. Fielding shows there is much to be learned from the “lingo of the eyes” (TJ 7.5.311): Of Sophia’s unadmitted love for Tom Jones, we hear that “What her lips . . . concealed, her eyes, her blushes, and many little involuntary actions, betrayed” (5.2.205). Charlotte Lennox’s Sir George in The Female Quixote explains conventionally, “Though I continued obstinately silent with my Tongue, yet my Eyes spoke intelligibly enough” (FQ 6.9.245). Richardson’s Pamela, overcome by an act of generosity on the part of her husband, cannot speak her gratitude, but expresses it “in a manner he was pleased to call more elegant than words—with uplifted folded hands, and tears of joy” (PII 56). Smollett privileges look over word in the matter of speed, and suggests eyes as an effective synecdoche for bodies: “The lovers feasted their eyes more than their appetite, by a tender intercourse of glances, which needed not the slow interpretation of speech” (FCF 65.335). The sentiment is familiar and perennial. A popular song of the last few years invokes “the smile on your face” and “the truth in your eyes,” and asserts “Old Mr. Webster could never define / What’s going on between your heart and mine . . . . You say it best when you say nothing at all.”5 Webster’s Dictionary is no better than “the slow interpretation of speech” when it comes to the most essential communication. The body does it better. While to a large extent these external manifestations are used to inform witnesses and the reader of the otherwise secret operations of the mind, on occasion the character herself may learn from her own body what has not yet reached her consciousness. Burney’s Camilla, who is in love with Edgar but doesn’t yet know as much, finds her body

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reacts painfully when she hears that he is to marry someone else. “The sound alone of the union struck as a dagger at her heart,” we hear. “She grew pale, she became sick,” and she needs support. It is such “sensations” that “told her, incontrovertibly, who was [her heart’s] master” (Cam 191). The body’s legibility extends even to the subject, for whom it can be a necessary source of information. The same access of knowledge about her own mental state from the physical signals delivered by the body occurs in Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story. The proud and beautiful Miss Milner is the ward of Dorriforth, a Roman Catholic priest. Erotic love for such a guardian is doubly forbidden. Although she is courted by several highly eligible suitors, Miss Milner is unmoved, and seems guarded from any susceptibility. In a dramatic moment characteristic of a novelist who is also a playwright, the company hears the news that Dorriforth is involved in a duel. Mrs. Horton exclaimed, “If Mr. Dorriforth dies, he dies a martyr.” Miss Woodley cried with fervour, “Heaven forbid!” Miss Fenton cried, “Dear me!” While Miss Milner, without uttering one word, sank speechless to the floor. (Inchbald 67) The action speaks louder than the words, as it is meant to do. This is the point at which the first-time reader learns of Miss Milner’s “fatal attraction” (79) to her guardian. Within a couple of pages she discovers it herself: “Here the trouble, the affright, the terror she endured, discovered to her for the first time her own sentiments – which till that moment, she had doubted” (69). It seems the passion of the soul must be communicated to the limbs, so that the limbs can deliver back the signal the soul needs in order to take cognizance of its own passion. These are the necessary negotiations between consciousness and the unconscious, as the eighteenth century typically presented them. As these examples show, the novelists, like the painters and the actors, made full use of the concept that gestural language can be more direct and trustworthy than speech. But novelists don’t rejoice in a monological discourse. They are not likely to be satisfied with an uninflected language, or merely knee-jerk reactions. It is useful for them to have to hand a convention of a true and unmediated mode of expression, to contrast with the tricky but delicious unreliability of language. A lastingly direct and unqualified declarative mode would be like the language of the Houyhnhnms, who don’t know how to say “the thing which is not.” Houyhnhnm poetry, like Houyhnhnm diet, disastrously lacks

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salt. Novelists make it their business to represent contemporary culture and accepted conventions, and hence the pellucid language of gesture is one of their concerns. But they will also stretch the language, make space for irony, nuance, counter-culture. Despite the authoritative claim of Lord Kames that even education, or an increasingly refined civilization, “hath not power to vary or sophisticate” the true and unvarying language of gesture, varying gestural language, and sophisticating it, is precisely what we find the novelists doing. They invoke the doctrine of gesture as true and natural communication, because there is an artistic pleasure to be had from the presence of a simple and striking pattern. But they go on to vary and elaborate the pattern to achieve their new and intriguing design. ***

It is useful to begin with Smollett, because as a doctor and man of science he is a novelist who prominently foregrounds the physiological causes of bodily actions. “We should sometimes increase the motion of the machine, to unclog the wheels of life,” advises Matthew Bramble, when from exercise he has gained in health (HC 311). And a mechanical view of the body is a trademark of Smollett’s characterizations. “Terror, shame, joy, and anger have a great influence on the body, and determine it to actions correspondent to their respective natures,” wrote the physician James Mackenzie; “thus the sudden sight of a serpent will make the countenance pale; and to walk on the edge of a pit will make the legs tremble.” According to Descartes, fear causes pallor because it contracts the heart’s orifices and “makes blood flow more slowly into the veins” (80). Fear also causes trembling, because it prevents the flow of animal spirits into the veins which control the limbs (81). Smollett as a physician was familiar with this kind of lore. Roderick Random’s friend Strap is often fearful; and sure enough, according to physiological prescription, “His fear . . . appeared in the paleness of his face, the wildness of his looks, and the shaking of his limbs” (RR 44.251). Strap’s body is an instrument that vibrates predictably as his feelings are played upon; and Smollett dwells on his immediate and correct reactions with an amused attention. When Roderick relates his adventures, he says, Strap started with surprize, glowed with indignation, gaped with curiosity, smiled with pleasure, trembled with fear, and wept with sorrow, as the vicissitudes of my life inspired these different passions. (44.253)

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And in producing these bodily reactions so punctually, Strap is made comic. Nothing so moves Roderick to laughter as watching Strap go through all the correct symptoms of a hair-raising terror. “He looked so foolishly aghast,” Roderick tells us genially, “that no unconcerned spectator could have seen him, without being seized with an immoderate fit of laughter” (58.357). Other people’s fright fairly breaks Roderick up. In another place he describes a rustic who has just discovered a bloodstained body in a hayloft. “[He] started back, and . . . stood trembling, with the pitch-fork extended before him, his hair erect, his eyes staring, his nostrils dilated, and his mouth wide open.—At another time, I should have been much diverted with this figure” (38.212). And so on, for the other passions. In Sir Lancelot Greaves, for instance, we hear how the knightly hero reacts when reminded of his lost love: “His countenance changed: a torrent of tears gushed down his cheeks: his head sunk upon his bosom: he heaved a profound sigh; and remained in silence with all the external marks of unutterable sorrow” (SLG 2.53–4). The sorrow may be “unutterable,” but the body knows very well how to express it, and does it strictly by the book. The hyperbole, if nothing else, is a present signal that these manifestations are presented for our amusement rather than our sympathy. It is part of Smollett’s highly visual mode to be precise and graphic about these signs, and he exaggerates them for further comic effect. Amusement at other people’s fear is a familiar if somewhat primitive form of humour. But fear isn’t the only passion he finds funny. He delights in the almost mechanical way in which his personnel produce their reactions, almost as at the flipping of a switch.6 The transmission of the passion to the bodily action is his most characteristic route to laughter. Smollett would have agreed with Bergson on the irresistible risibility of mechanical man. “The laughable element,” says Bergson in his now classic study of laughter, “ . . . consists of a certain mechanical inelasticity, just where one would expect to find the wide-awake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being” (Bergson 10). Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle make great and memorable play with this mechanical factor of the human body. Man as machine, however serious a concept for Smollett the doctor, is for Smollett the novelist a perpetual-motion mechanism for laughter. But by the time he comes to write Humphry Clinker, I would argue, he is seeking out other effects than the belly laugh at slapstick and hyperbolic actions. Here he makes gesture conduce to irony. In Humphry Clinker the bodily manifestations are still often hyperbolic, even grotesque; and Smollett still enjoys them with the simple satisfaction

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that we all take in the exact correspondence of sign with signified. But he involves his characters more fully in enjoying the responses, thus adding some further dimension to the mechanical operations of the body. When Lismahago escapes out of the window from the fire in the middle of the night, an appreciative audience savours the effect. He makes a picture in which “every toe denoted terror!” rejoices one delighted spectator (277). The commentator is almost as much of a connoisseur as Garrick when he objected to the performance of a drunk in which the actor’s “left leg was too sober.” Proper professional attention to these matters requires that the whole body come into play, with all its parts. As in Humphry Clinker we have not just first-person narration by a single protagonist, but multiple letter-writers writing to one another, so the language of gesture gathers complexity too. It is not simply that passion A triggers action B. In this novel characters adopt motions deliberately, and for effect. For instance: Tabitha Bramble and Lady Griskin, two older women, are about to do battle about the affections of a man they both have designs on. “Lady Griskin’s face was like the full moon in a storm of wind, glaring, fiery, and portentuous; while Tabby looked grim and ghastly, with an aspect breathing discord and dismay” (134). No double meanings here: the signification is straightforward and monologic. Presently, however, when discriminating spectators come on the scene, the ladies work up some finesse. “Madam, your most obedient, and devoted humble servant,” said [Lady Griskin], advancing close up to my sister, and curtseying so low, that I thought she intended to squat herself down on the floor—This salutation Tabby returned with equal solemnity; and the expression of the two faces, while they continued in this attitude, would be no bad subject for a pencil like that of the incomparable Hogarth. (135) There we have “the curtsey ironic,” duly savoured by the curtseyers as well as an appreciative and educated spectator. We are supplied with a contrast of modes of bodily actions when Humphry Clinker is released from prison, and comes to gush out his thanks to Matthew Bramble. Here his elocution failed him, but his silence was pathetic; he fell down at his feet, and embraced his knees, shedding a flood of tears, which my uncle did not see without emotion —He took snuff in some confusion. (148–9)

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Humphry’s gestures are untutored and direct, part of the old universal language available naturally to every peasant. But Matthew, though he is moved, only takes snuff. He has managed “the gestural understatement.” The body language proceeds to take on the nuances and modulations, as well as the disguise and indirection, of verbal language. ***

Charlotte Lennox, in The Female Quixote, shows herself to be thoroughly alert to the conventions of what she calls “visible Emotion” (4.8.172). This phrase of hers reminds us how useful the convention of the bodily manifestations of the passions is. The eighteenth-century novel, for all the subtleties of its moral vocabulary, has not yet fully developed a vocabulary for psychoanalysis. That was to come later, with the gropings of the phrenologists, with the character analyses of George Eliot and Henry James, and the popularization of terms from Havelock Ellis, Freud, and others. Meanwhile, a great deal of what we know about the inner workings of characters in eighteenth-century fiction is limited to what we can find out by tracking their bodily signs. Information on who blushes, sighs, turns pale, trembles, stammers, and faints is crucial for following psychological action, and often it is our only means of knowing who feels what. Lennox is thoroughly learned in the gestural convention. She even wrote an article on the passions. 7 Moreover, she is sensitive to the convention as convention. That is, she doesn’t simply subscribe to the rules, and accept that this emotion produces that reaction; she recognizes different modes, different mimetic levels for gesture as for narrative. Her heroine Arabella, the female Quixote, has fed on a diet of heroic romances by Madame de Scudéry and others. And just as she reads everyday ordinary events as highflown romantic episodes, so she must read and perform gestures in the grand manner. Sir George, a knowing parodist of the romance mode, knows he must provide emotional manifestations on the grand scale. He could even have been using Le Brun on designing the passions as his authority. Of “Admiration,” Le Brun lays it down, “All the effect of this Passion is an entire suspension of motion, to give the Soul Time to deliberate upon what she has to do, and attentively consider the object that presents itself to her” (Le Brun 24). Thus when he wants to impress Arabella, Sir George describes his meeting with “the incomparable Sydimiris” thus: I was so lost in Wonder, at the Sight of the many Charms I beheld in her Person, that I could not unlock my Tongue, or remove my Eyes

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from her inchanting Face; but remained fixed in a Posture, which at once expressed my Admiration and Delight. (6.4.227) Although the reader can be amused at Sir George’s first-person commentary on his actions, which sounds as though he were watching himself in a mirror, Arabella is duly impressed. Lennox knows her authorities, but chooses, through Sir George, to send them up. She shows up the hyperbole in the gestural tradition, and makes bathos a tool. Arabella asks her maid Lucy about the behaviour of someone she has cast in the role of despairing suitor: And didst thou not observe the Tears trickle from his Eyes, which, haply, he strove to conceal? Did he not strike his Bosom with the Vehemence of his Grief; and cast his accusing and despairing Eyes to Heaven, which had permitted such a Misfortune to befal me? Indeed, Madam, I did not, resumed Lucy; but he seemed to be very sorry. (3.1.109) “Very sorry” is understandably not an acceptable substitute for the grander manifestations that Arabella has been constructing. Arabella likewise requires Lucy, who plays the role of Sancho Panza in this version of Quixote, to take minute cognizance of her own gestures and expressions. Lucy is expected to “relate exactly every Change of my Countenance; number all my Smiles, Half-smiles, Blushes, Turnings pale; . . . every Motion of my Eyes; and every Gesture which I have used for these Ten Years past.” Lucy’s only response, and by Arabella’s standards it is still inadequate, is to wish she had never “gone into Service” (3.5.122). Bathos serves again. In an attempt to correct the regrettable lapses of Lucy and the other unheroic characters around her, Arabella does all she can to provide a model of correct gestural motions; but she has a dull and resistant audience to work with: Arabella, supposing he meant to importune her still more, made a Sign with her Hand, very magestically, for him to be gone; but he, not able to comprehend her Meaning, stood still, with an Air of Perplexity. (7.1.256) The language of the hand turns out not to be as universally comprehensible as the authorities claim. The high mimetic mode of gesture is above the heads of these dull, mundane beings, as much as Arabella’s heroic

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register in language is above Lucy’s familiar colloquialisms. Lennox knows how to make the most of the comic cross-purposes that Arabella’s heroic gestures create. And the reader, privileged with access to Arabella’s mind as well as the other characters’ responses, can become an appreciative spectator as Arabella gestures all by herself, sending out signs that no one knows how to receive or respond to. After reluctantly dismissing a man she believes to be her hopeless adorer, With one of her fair Hands she cover’d her Face, to hide the Blushes which so compassionate a Speech had caus’d—Holding the other extended with a careless Air, supposing he would kneel to kiss it, and bathe it with his Tears, as was the Custom on such melancholy Occasions, her Head at the same Time turned another Way, as if reluctantly and with Confusion she granted this Favour.—But after standing a Moment in this Posture, and finding her Hand untouch’d, she concluded Grief had depriv’d him of his Senses, and that he would shortly fall into a Swoon . . . : And to prevent being a Witness of so doleful a Sight, she hurry’d out of the Room without once turning about. (8.2.313–14) Gesture, as the educated Arabella might inform John Bulwer, did not escape the curse of Babel after all. Gesture, like language, has its different registers, its diverse vocabulary; and one person’s authoritative turn of gestural phrase can be another’s gesturebabble. ***

Laurence Sterne, in both Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, sets up as a specialist in gesture: one who is working at the growing edge of the discipline, and could readily write a treatise on Chironomia and Chirologia too. As we have seen, he is not a physiognomist: for him the body in stasis presents no “Momus’s glass” by which you can look into the soul (TS 2.13.74). The body in motion, however, is another matter. Sterne – again like Tristram – is a pathognomist: and that dark uncrystalized flesh and blood, once set in motion, can indeed be read to discover what is the most compelling content of any story, the “history . . . of what passes in a man’s own mind” (2.2.85). Sterne takes on the lore of gesture, the discourses I have been talking about, and elaborates the more or less crude systems into whole new areas of suggestion and nuance.

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“There are certain combined looks of simple subtlety,” Yorick tells us in A Sentimental Journey, “where whim, and sense, and seriousness, and nonsense, are so blended, that all the languages of Babel set loose together could not express them” (SJ 55). Like John Bulwer, Yorick here privileges the language of appearances over the language of words: he finds this visible language more expressive and more universally accessible than what we try to convey by “the unsteady uses of words” (TS 2.2.86). In the large fable of Tristram Shandy, we learn that Uncle Toby’s body talk of facial expression and physical extensions is more effective than the verbal flourishes of that wizard of words, Walter Shandy. 8 As Bulwer and other authorities present it, gestural language is simple, universal and monolithic, and admirable for being so. For Sterne, visible language is the more valued for being infinitely complex, adaptable, nuanced; available for irony and qualification; particularized to person and occasion; variable by vocabulary, tone, and register. That is, he takes even further the process I have been examining in Smollett and Lennox. His phrase “certain combined looks of simple subtlety” already contains an oxymoron. By the time this certain look has been made to incorporate “whim . . . and seriousness,” “sense . . . and nonsense” we know that we are dealing with no crude or univocal discourse. This language is fully inflected, and capable of achieving multiple degrees of modulation. To take the crudest and most basic part of the subject first, the mechanized operation of the body – the aspect that Smollett chose to emphasize and exaggerate for comic effect: Tristram Shandy sets up as quite an expert in physiology. As James Parsons, M.D., wrote an anatomical study on the muscular motions that produce various facial expressions, we find Tristram being comically learned on these matters too: when Uncle Toby whistles, he “direct[s] the buccinatory muscles along his cheeks, and the orbicular muscles around his lips to do their duty – he whistled Lillabullero” (3.6.164). When the reader laughs, it is done “by a more frequent and a more convulsive elevation and depression of the diaphragm, and the succusations of the intercostal and abdominal muscles” (4.22.301). Tristram as narrator demonstrates his expertise in the anatomists’ lingo. Descartes provides clear information on the causes of colour change in the face: Now it is certain that the face’s color comes solely from the blood, which, as it flows continually from the heart through the arteries into all the veins and from all the veins into the heart, colors the

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face more or less, in proportion as it fills the little veins near its surface. (80) Sterne could hardly be more expert and finely discriminating on the “capillary action” and “dermatological history” that Barbara Korte makes her subject in her study of Telling Complexions in the nineteenth-century novel (Korte 50–3). Richard Mead, a physician who concerned himself with extreme passion as a pathological condition, adds that passion affects the pace of the circulation of the blood: “Grief and Fear slacken its pace; anger, indignation and intemperate lust drive it on at full gallop” (Mead 186). In the light of this medical information, Tristram tries to be medically exact. When Uncle Toby tactlessly interrupts a fascinating discourse on birth with a hobby-horsical comment on the armies in Flanders, Tristram tells us, “My father knit his brows, and as he knit them, all the blood in his body seemed to rush up into his face—my uncle Toby dismounted [from his hobby-horse] immediately” (3.3.160). We are not left with this simple sign of anger on Walter Shandy’s part; Tristram elaborates on the exact degrees of his colouring, so that we can almost count those little veins on the surface of his face: “he must have redden’d, pictorically and scientintically speaking, six whole tints and a half, if not a full octave above his natural colour” (3.5.162). Tristram has even coined a new pseudo-scientific word, “scientintically,” to establish his authority in this discourse. (The word reaches the OED on the strength of Sterne’s single nonce formation.) Nor does he rest with this sally. He follows through the matter of Walter’s intemperate reaction to make it part of his narrative and his characterization. Anyone but Uncle Toby, Tristram explains, observing the colour change, together with the violent knitting of my father’s brows, and the extravagant contortion of his body during the whole affair,—would have concluded my father in a rage; and taking that for granted, . . . — he would instantly have screw’d up his [rage], to the same pitch; – and then the devil and all had broke loose. (3.5.162–3) Toby, however, “whose heart interpreted every motion of the body in the kindest sense the motion would admit of” (3.5.163), is blessedly slow to take offence; and so the peace is preserved for this time, even with such a touchy and irascible machine as Walter. In such an incident – and Tristram Shandy is full of them – we see how “the physical cause” of the passion (2.5.98), the precise mechanism of its bodily manifestation, the issue of its interpretation, and the viewer’s response are all intricately

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part of Sterne’s subject matter: he explores with delighted curiosity the histories of what passes in his characters’ minds – along with the histories of what passes in their bodies. Walter Shandy, like his son Tristram, likes to be a scholar of physical manifestations. He lays down doctrines on the matter which seem close to Tristram’s heart, and his author’s too: There are a thousand unnoticed openings, continued my father, which let a penetrating eye at once into a man’s soul; and I maintain it . . . that a man of sense does not lay down his hat in coming into a room,—or take it up on going out of it, but something escapes, which discovers him. (6.5.414–15) So far so good: the body in motion has much to tell. But like the physiognomists, who can agree that appearance is significant but fall out on how to read it, Walter is not so good at the practical application of his doctrine: It is for these reasons, continued my father, that the governor [for my son] I make choice of shall neither lisp, or squint, or wink, or talk loud, or look fierce, or foolish;—or bite his lips, or grind his teeth, or speak through his nose, or pick it, or blow it with his fingers.— . . . Nor (according to Erasmus) shall he speak to any one in making water,— . . . Now this is all nonsense again, quoth my uncle Toby to himself. (6.5.415) The list of disqualifications grows apace; and Walter, though persuasive that such matters count, cannot get agreement on precisely how or why they count. He knows there’s a language there, but he hasn’t mastered its vocabulary. In his own gestural practice he seeks to be learned and authoritative.9 In argument with Toby, we hear, My father instantly exchanged the attitude he was in, for that in which Socrates is so finely painted by Raffael in his school of Athens; which your connoisseurship knows is so exquisitely imagined, that even the particular manner of the reasoning of Socrates is expressed by it— for he holds the fore-finger of his left-hand between the fore-finger and the thumb of his right, and seems as if he was saying to the libertine he is reclaiming—“You grant me this—and this: and this, and this, I don’t ask of you—they follow of themselves in course.” (4.7.278)

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This fine point of Chirologia, or “the art of manual rhetoric,” is elaborately borrowed indeed, and one can multiply authorities. We the readers certainly do need to live up to the title of our “connoisseurships,” for Sterne here is not only alluding to Raphael’s famous painting in the Vatican, but also lifting a quotation (unacknowledged, as usual) from Jonathan Richardson, the commentator on Italian painting. 10 The gesture of taking the left forefinger with the right finger and thumb has a long and respectable history. John Bulwer explains, “The upper joint of the index apprehended . . . hath a rhetorical force in disputations” (Bulwer 200). Gilbert Austin, later collecting this lore, takes it all the way back to Quintilian: “This finger also when its upper joint is lightly held at both sides . . . is proper for disputation” (Austin 328). Both authorities provide diagrams. Pedantry – as appears from my own fine display of authorities on this point – is catching: it is difficult to follow the Shandean “tradition of learned wit”11 without finding oneself moving into footnote mode. The point here, though, is that Walter’s correct and authoritative gesture of taking hold of his left index finger achieves nothing at all in its context apart from the opportunity it provides for annotators. The gesture is lost on Toby, the immediate audience; and Walter doesn’t succeed in getting anyone to grant him any point whatever in the disputation. The classical rhetorical gestures, that is, are a dead language. Tristram and Sterne are more interested in a growing and evolving expressive system. By the time the gestures have reached the dictionaries they have lost their appeal for all but the learned pedant in Sterne. Tristram seeks rather to make up a language of gesture and expression as he goes along. He develops, for instance, gestures that are particular not just to nations or classes, as the theatre was doing, but to individuals. They are spontaneous and idiosyncratic, but nonetheless characteristic and significant. When Tristram accidentally throws a good page he has just written into the fire, he records, “Instantly I snatch’d off my wig, and threw it perpendicularly, with all imaginable violence, up to the top of the room . . . Nor do I think any thing else in Nature, would have given such immediate ease” (4.17.293). That is a gesture we are hardly likely to find in the manuals: it is unique and particular to Tristram. Similarly of Walter we hear, “my father clapp’d both his hands upon his cod-piece, which was a way he had when any thing hugely tickled him” (7.27.514). These are what one might call gestural idiolects. Sterne proceeds with his principle that anything language can do gesture can do better. Corporal Trim, of course, is the genius of expressive gesture. When he flourishes his stick, he can convey all the freedom of the unmarried

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state (9.14.604); when he drops his hat in just the right manner he impresses his audience with the essence of mortality (5.7.361). But we don’t find these motions in any book but Tristram Shandy itself. On one occasion, Trim is a great coiner of gestures, a master of nonce-formations. I can think of only one instance in which he is out-gestured, and that by a woman. Trim and Bridget are discussing the inexhaustibly intriguing matter of Uncle Toby’s potency, or lack thereof. Just how much significant flesh did he lose when he suffered that painful wound in the groin, she wants to know; and she makes a radical suggestion:

Come – come – said Bridget – holding the palm of her left-hand parallel to the plane of the horizon, and sliding the fingers of the other over it, in a way which could not have been done, had there been the least wart or protuberance – ‘Tis every syllable of it false, cried the Corporal. (9.28.639)

Bridget’s delicate gesture to suggest Toby’s total castration is enormously powerful, in that it makes visually explicit the whole reverberating suspicion that no one has been able to put into words since the novel began. And she has done it without speaking a word. Trim is so staggered that he is surprised out of his usual control. His contradiction “Tis every syllable of it false” leaves out of account the fact that no syllable has actually passed her lips. The word and the gesture are here completely imbricated. Tristram enjoys conversation which is verbal on one side, visible on the other. A donkey is a sympathetic interlocutor, and one who won’t argue. Whenever he meets one, he claims, “I generally fall into conversation with him; and surely never is my imagination so busy as in framing his responses from the etchings of his countenance.”12 He proceeds to describe these etchings.

Come Honesty! [he addresses a laden donkey that is standing in a gateway] . . . – art thou for coming in, or going out? The ass twisted his head round to look up the street – Well – replied I – we’ll wait a minute for the driver: – He turned his head thoughtful about, and looked wistfully the opposite way – – I understand thee perfectly; answered I – if thou takest a wrong step in this affair, he will cudgel thee to death – (7.32.523)

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Perhaps herein lies one of the attractions of body language for Sterne, particularly the kind that has not yet reached the dictionaries. Besides being a more intimate communion between individuals, because less policed and legalistic than words, it allows for a wide range of interpretation. Tristram’s conversation with the donkey, in which he deduces the donkey’s responses from its bodily motions, and proceeds as though the answer were audible, is a playful analogy for his one-sided but sensitive communication with his reader. In A Sentimental Journey the protagonist, Yorick, pays minute attention to gesture and all forms of body language, from the universal to the highly individual. Charlotte Brontë, as we saw in the chapter on physiognomy, assigns dialogue to parts of the face – eyes, forehead, and so on. Yorick assigns dialogue to bodily motions. When Yorick is let in to a box at the theatre in Paris, he tells us, “a kindly old French officer” is the only other occupant. The play in the box seems to be more expressive than the drama on the stage: The old officer was reading attentively a small pamphlet, it might be the book of the opera, with a large pair of spectacles. As soon as I sat down, he took his spectacles off, and putting them into a shagreen case, return’d them and the book into his pocket together. I half rose up, and made him a bow. Yorick proceeds to meditate on this exchange of courtesies: Translate this into any civilized language in the world—the sense is this. ‘Here’s a poor stranger come in to the box—he seems as if he knew no body; and is never likely, was he to be seven years in Paris, if every man he comes near keeps his spectacles upon his nose—’tis shutting the door of conversation absolutely in his face. . . . That’s a lot for a simple action of putting away one’s glasses to say; but Yorick insists he is not over-interpreting. The French officer might as well have said it all aloud; and if he had, I should in course have put the bow I made him into French too, and told him, “I was sensible of his attention, and return’d him a thousand thanks for it.” (SJ 57) The theatre setting makes this brief exchange into a little play within a play, highlighting the dumb show that is not so dumb after all.

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And Sterne teases the mind with his interplay of the verbal and visual languages. Verbal language, subject to the curse of Babel, and so worn down in the long process of exchange that the words have ceased to represent their face value, is replaced by gesture, the universal language that transcends barriers of nation, and so acts as a kind of oil whereby civilization is made to run smoothly; then the gestures are translated back into words. And in the process verbal language seems in some way to have been cleansed and purified, and reinvested with a full freight of meaning. Yorick goes on to explain: There is not a secret so aiding to the progress of sociality, as to get master of this short hand, and be quick in rendering the several turns of looks and limbs, with all their inflections and delineations, into plain words. For my own part, by long habitude, I do it so mechanically, that when I walk the streets of London, I go translating all the way; and have more than once stood behind in the circle, where not three words have been said, and have brought off twenty different dialogues with me, which I could have fairly wrote down and sworn to. (SJ, “The Translation” 57) Here it is the words that are “plain,” and the “several turns of looks and limbs, with all their inflections and delineations” that are nuanced, modulated, aesthetically pleasing. But these faint “fallings from us, vanishings” of body movement, facial adjustment, and tonal range are here envisaged as available for “translation” back into vocal speech, and thence to written documents written down and “sworn to,” which thereby achieve a virtually contractual force. Sterne makes it his business to explore the range among these modes, and to blur the boundaries between them. In both written language and described gesture, Sterne finds ways to notate the subtleties rather than the grand sweeping movements. In punctuation he plays with length of dashes, in letterpress he famously uses italics, asterisks, gaps, blank pages, pointing hands, and the whole range of typographical high jinks at a printer’s command – all of which are kinds of gesture. So in the notation of gesture he wants to be precise about the exact shade of blush, tone of voice, and delicate qualification. Sterne and his characters rejoice in legibility and the pleasures of reading the body. Tristram reads the donkey, and Yorick reads the old officer in the theatre, with the conscious pleasure that a connoisseur takes in a fine literary text. But the body being read doesn’t necessarily participate in the pleasure. Frances Burney, particularly with her women

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characters (who are often texts unwillingly submitted to the readings of others), is deeply committed to the principle of the legible body, but her central characters, in being “read off like coarse print,” often suffer a kind of violation. The secret that Burney’s heroines, characteristically, would rather than die than reveal, is their love. When Cecilia sees an anonymous letter informing Delvile “at the sound of your name, she blushes; at the mention of your illness, she turns pale,” she is stricken with more than embarrassment. “To find herself thus by her own emotions betrayed, made her instantly conclude she was universally discovered: and turning sick at the supposition, all her spirit forsook her” (Cec 4.4.558). Her pride and dignity being bound up in concealing and renouncing her love, she is agonized by every involuntary sign of it that escapes her. In the big scene where she renounces Delvile for his mother’s sake, we are to read her emotions by her irrepressible body movements, which themselves double her anguish. “You are weeping!” cried he, “you are pale!” . . . “I am very well,—“ cried she, not knowing what she answered, “I am quite well,—pray go,—I am very—“ her words died away inarticulated. . . . Cecilia again moved on, and reached he stairs, but tottered, and was obliged to cling to the banisters. “O suffer me to support you,” cried he; “you are not able to stand,—whither is it you would go?” “Any where,—I don’t know, —“ answered she, in faltering accents, “but if you would leave me, I should be well.” And, turning from him, she walked again towards the parlour, finding by her shaking frame, the impossibility of getting unaided up the stairs. (Cec 8.6.678–9) The specificity and moment-to-moment chronicling of Cecilia’s incapacitating corporeal distresses make this much more than a routine display of signals of sensibility. And the actions are in painful counterpoint with the unconvincing declarations of well-being, as Cecilia agonizedly struggles to conceal the force of her emotions by verbally insisting that nothing is wrong, while her body rocks with trauma. Burney is in fact telling her story the dramatist’s way, putting all her emphasis on the body’s signification rather than on the import of her speech. In a satiric frame of mind it would be easy to dismiss such a scene as part of the absurd exaggerations of the novels of sentiment. Young Jane Austen, who clearly knew her Cecilia very well indeed,13 couldn’t resist

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burlesquing such sentimental flights in the juvenilia. But Burney is adept at communicating the complex anguish of the secret emotion which, forcibly extracted by involuntary motions of the body, lays the subject open as though by vivisection. The visible signs – the tottering, the pallor, the giddy head, the forced smile – however painful for Cecilia, have their strong erotic appeal for Delvile, in reassuring him of the strength of the love which makes renunciation so agonizingly debilitating. “Loveliest and most beloved Cecilia!” he exclaims, before refusing to give her up (679); so that her whole ordeal has to be suffered again. Burney keeps us on the same rack on which she stretches her heroines. My subject in these chapters, though literary, hovers on the edge of theatre and the visual arts. The novelists I have been addressing often invoke Garrick and Hogarth, by way of importing some tang of the stage and the canvas, with all their visual heightening, to their texts. Their subject of gesture allowed them not only to ponder the inherited discourses on visual language, but also to endow their novels with the particular vividness that Conrad strove for when he identified his task, “by the power of the written word . . . to make you see.” In writing of the eighteenth-century humourists, Thackeray made it a point of his praise of Hogarth that “His graphic representations are indeed books: they have the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of words. Other pictures we look at – his prints we read” (Thackeray, Humourists 622). A focus on gestural language in Smollett, Lennox, Sterne, and Burney allows me to reverse Thackeray’s maxim. Their novels are indeed pictures. And they too invest their representations with the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of gestures.

7 Body Language Censored: Camilla

To explore the developed conventions of bodily signification, as I have been doing in the previous chapters, is to discover further levels of meaning in individual novels. The discourses of gesture inherited from classical oratory and developed in contemporary dramatic theory were there for all to draw on. Frances Burney was particularly interested in the large subject of somatic expression, and of her four novels Camilla most repays close study for its passionate engagement in the idea of the body as a source of meaning. Camilla is a sustained meditation on the relation of mind to body, and the ways in which the one can be figured forth in the other. It is more especially a meditation on woman’s body: its determining force, its value in the market, its status as a system of signs. As we have seen, Frances Burney’s trio of ingénues, young girls on the threshold of society and of maturity, provide together a symmetrical arrangement. Indiana Lynmere represents beauty without virtue, Eugenia Tyrold virtue without beauty; Camilla herself has virtue and beauty, though neither in so high a degree as the others. These three nieces of the benevolent but misguided baronet Sir Hugh Tyrold “come out” together, and at certain recurring points in the novel we are informed of the stir that each makes in the same social circle, and the varied responses they elicit. For the society they inhabit judges constantly by appearances, and is used to assuming that a woman’s “person,” her physical being, is the most essential constituent of her identity. As Deirdre Lynch has shown, such occasions of fashionable display “render the woman conspicuous only to make the ‘real’ woman disappear. They entail an experience of excessive embodiment, of being misrepresented as someone who is all body” (166). Camilla certainly experiences this particular agony. 148

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Beauty alone is an asset, but even in a society obsessed with appearances it is not all-powerful. Indiana has her one card to play, her beautiful face and form, and she plays it constantly. At the Northwick ball, which marks the entry of the three cousins into society, we hear first of her début: “Indiana, fluttering with all the secret triumph of conscious beauty, attended by Edgar, . . . walked up the room, through a crowd of admiring spectators . . . Camilla and Eugenia followed rather as if in her train, than of her party” (60). Indiana’s beauty is a solid and visible asset, and it procures her instant admiration. But this society, being materialistic as well as obsessed with appearance, looks for the added charm of a fortune, which she does not possess. Beauty alone, “mere beauty,” the kind that is only skin-deep, is in fact rather severely treated in this novel, by Burney as by her characters. In Indiana it is if anything a moral flaw, since we are made to understand that her worst failings in character are a direct result of her stunning looks. Because she is beautiful, we hear, she is fretful and spoilt. Indiana gets the most out of her beauty when it is assumed to be the sign of something else. The poetic Melmond is aesthetically susceptible to her, but he too cannot be satisfied by simply gratifying his eyes. He must assume that the beauty is the external reflection of a moral perfection. He calls her a “divinity,” and exclaims, “Are not those eyes all soul? Does not that mouth promise every thing that is intelligent? Can those lips ever move but to diffuse sweetness and smiles?” (104). Of course Melmond has a lot to learn, and by the end of the novel, when he has been engaged to Indiana and then deserted by her, he learns it. It seems “mere beauty” can never be simply admired for itself alone. Even Macdersy, the rather thick-headed Irishman whom she eventually marries, must sustain his admiration for Indiana’s looks with the illusion that they stand for something else: “O what a beautiful creature she is!” he enthuses; “her outside is the completest diamond I ever saw! and if her inside is the same, which I dare say it is, by her smiles and delicate dimples, she must be a paragon upon earth!” (250). Indiana herself cannot be held responsible for the inanities of her admirers; but she certainly doesn’t come off very well. The visible beauty that is free-floating and unattached to moral meaning is indeed insignificant, in the senses of being both trivial and lacking in meaning. It may even be considered as a kind of lie. Indiana is the ancestress of a number of unpleasant beauties rather severely treated in nineteenthcentury novels: Charlotte Brontë’s Blanche Ingram and Ginevra Fanshawe, George Eliot’s Rosamond Vincy, Trollope’s Lady Dumbello. In fact beauty itself is valued in Camilla not much more highly than by the

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ill-bred and exasperating Dubster: “As to being pretty or not, it’s no great matter in a wife. A man soon tires of seeing nothing but the same face, if it’s one of the best . . . . I thought no more of my wife that was pretty, than of my wife that was ugly, after the first month or so. Beauty goes for a mere nothing in matrimony, when once one’s used to it” (91). Sir Hugh Tyrold, in his muddled way, also denigrates beauty. He thinks he can compensate Eugenia for her mutilated body by leaving her a fortune instead. “Now thank Heaven, I have no need to care about the matter; for as to the mere loss of beauty, pretty as it is to look at, I hope it is no such great injury, as she’ll have a splendid fortune, which is certainly a better thing, in point of lasting. For as to beauty, Lord help us! what is it? except just to the eye.” (33) There is constant association and opposition of beauty with money in this novel. Sir Hugh’s assumption that his money is a sufficient substitute for his distortion of Eugenia’s body is only a degree less crude than Dubster’s callousness. Observing a fortune-hunter who is dancing with “the little lame duck,” Dubster comments, “He’d be in a fine hobble when he found he’d got nothing but her ugly face for his bargain. Though, provided she’d had the rhino, it would not much have signified” (91). Eugenia’s face not being a satisfactory fortune, a fortune in pounds, shillings and pence is deemed compensation sufficient, at least by some of the surrounding society. Eugenia herself sees things differently. Burney doesn’t so abandon the tenets of physiognomy that she makes the virtuous Eugenia innately ugly. Eugenia’s deformity is not the reflection of inward vice; rather it is the result of human intervention. Sir Hugh, in first exposing her to smallpox and then causing the accident on the see-saw that puts out her shoulder, dislocates her knee, and inhibits her growth, has accidentally interfered with the natural beauty that should have reflected her mind. Scarred in face and distorted and stunted in body, Eugenia becomes a sort of female Toulouse-Lautrec, a great soul in a dwarf’s body. Sir Hugh’s attempt at financial compensation only makes things worse, as she becomes the object and victim of fortune-hunters. Her “privileged” position as heiress hardly ever conduces to her happiness. Her dependent position as woman and eventually wife means that she lacks control over her money, and so can get no good of it. Sir Hugh’s other gift to Eugenia is the gift of learning. Having a spare pedant on hand whom he can’t occupy, he devises a scheme that

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Eugenia will be educated in the classics, with a view to marrying her to her cousin Clermont. This part of the scheme is a failure. “What gentleman will you ever find that will bear with a learned wife?” asks the sour Miss Margland; and she is certainly right that Clermont won’t. “This learning is worse than her ugliness,” he declares when he hears of her classical studies. “’Twould make me look like a dunce in my own house” (579). “The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl,” Jane Austen was to write drily in Northanger Abbey, in respectful allusion to Burney, “have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author” (NA 101). Camilla, as we learn early on in the novel, does have the kind of beauty that is a mirror of her virtuous mind. Her looks are transparent, and directly reveal what is deeper. As she advances in Indiana’s train at the Northwick ball, Camilla has “a graceful simplicity, a disengaged openness, and a guileless freedom from affectation, that rendered her, to the observant eye, as captivating upon examination, as Indiana, from the first glance, was brilliant and alluring” (61). Camilla’s beauty and vitality are expressed in movement, and often associated with imagery of light and colour. “The tide of youthful glee flowed jocund from her heart, and the transparency of her fine blue veins almost shewed the velocity of its current. Every look was a smile, every step was a spring, every thought was a hope” (13). She is healthy, even athletic: she was probably a model for Jane Austen’s sparkling and vital Elizabeth Bennet, who jumps stiles and springs over puddles. Like Virgil’s Camilla, and Pope’s (who “skims the plains”), she moves swiftly and lightly, with her limbs as with her thoughts. “Her form and her mind were of equal elasticity” (15). As a child she captivates her uncle by her youthful physical exuberance. Burney dwells on her untrammelled spontaneity with a romantic spirit worthy of Wordsworth: She exhilarated him with pleasure, she supplied him with ideas, and from the morning’s first dawn to the evening’s latest close, his eye followed her lightspringing figure, or his ear vibrated with her sportive sounds; catching, as it listened, in successive rotation, the spontaneous laugh, the unconscious bound, the genuine glee of childhood’s fearless happiness, uncurbed by severity, untamed by misfortune. (15) With light upon her from her uncle’s eyes, and trailing her clouds of glory, Camilla is Burney’s “Picture of Youth.” But the shades of the prisonhouse close even more readily on Burney’s girl than on Wordsworth’s

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boy. Though at this early stage she is “uncurbed by severity, untamed by misfortune,” social restraints, and Edgar’s severity and mistrustfulness, will soon proceed to apply the curb and tame and break her to misfortune. There is a certain foreboding in the early passages on Camilla’s youthful glee that haunts the alert reader with a refrain of “Not for long.” At many points Camilla reads like a Hardy novel. Trivial causes lead to dire effects. Like Tess, Camilla is constantly misread and misunderstood. Like Tess, she is almost destroyed by an undelivered letter. And her innocence is punished by a seemingly malevolent destiny. Edgar Mandlebert, her mentor-suitor, purports to be skilled in reading Camilla’s radiant and significant beauty. Early in the novel he learns that Indiana’s beauty doesn’t correspond to any admirable moral attributes, whereas Camilla’s does. He reads the two girls’ bodies with a moral eye. When Indiana fretfully complains of her uncle’s partial treatment of Eugenia, Edgar “wondered to find how much less her beauty attracted him from the failure of her good nature”; whereas, when Camilla speaks generously, “Edgar . . . thought she was grown a thousand times more beautiful than Indiana” (32). At this point in the novel Edgar is still reading correctly. But presently his skill in physical semiotics deteriorates. The reading of men’s bodies is less crucial. The carefully structured contrast of Indiana, Eugenia and Camilla which presents the different relations of body to mind is partially duplicated among the men. Edgar, like Camilla, is both handsome and moral; Clermont, like his sister Indiana, is beautiful but morally contemptible. There is no male equivalent to Eugenia, the admirable mind in a stunted body. The implication is that appearance for men is by no means as important as it is for women. Clermont’s beauty, in fact, though he is immensely vain about it, and surrounds himself with mirrors, is if anything a social handicap rather than an advantage. The brilliant fairness of his forehead, the transparent pink of his cheeks, the pouting vermillion of his lips, the liquid lustre of his languishing blue eyes, the minute form of his almost infantine mouth . . . far from bearing the attraction which, in his sister, rendered them so lovely, made him considered by his own sex as an unmanly fop, and by the women, as too conceited to admire any thing but himself. (569) To be beautiful, for a man, is to be feminine, unmanly. Men are properly judged by other criteria. But all the more is beauty essential to the

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women; all the more are their faces their fortune (though never fortune sufficient), their bodies their capital. While personal vanity in a man is contemptible, in a woman it can be a necessary strategy for survival. With pellucid beauty, with youth, health, energy, the favour of her benevolent uncle and her loving family, and the dawning love of Edgar, Camilla seems to have everything, including a clear path to happiness. But for all its propitious opening, the novel chronicles a painful descent into anguish and eventually madness. The unfortunate, downward turn of Camilla’s destiny is largely the result of a series of disastrous failures in communication. As her beauty is directly communicative of her virtue, so her words are normally a pellucid medium of her thoughts. “Speech and truth were always one with Camilla,” we hear. But this happy consonance of word and thought, appearance and essence, can no longer be allowed. In the prison-house into which she grows as she leaves her childhood behind her, her speech must be stifled. “As she could not in this instance declare what were her feelings, [she] remained mute and confounded” (343). This is a recurring situation in which expression or explanation is called for, but simultaneously forbidden. Here her father asks her to explain her melancholy, but because she knows that a woman may not admit her love, she must remain silent. The situation is a microcosmic version of Camilla’s progress at large: for her, happiness involves love and union with Edgar; but while Camilla is forbidden to reveal her love before the man proposes, Edgar separately resolves not to propose until she has revealed her love. It is Catch-22.1 Several critics, and most notably Margaret Anne Doody and Julia Epstein, have much to say on Burney’s silenced heroines, and Camilla in particular.2 For many reasons, Burney’s women are deprived of the right and the power to speak openly or to write directly. It is the fact that Cecilia and Camilla are deprived of the means of expression that dooms them to undeserved suffering and insanity. The impediments to expression are gender-specific: it is the women, and not the men, who are silenced by the multiple rules of decorum that they may not declare their love, or voice their preferences, or reveal male plots against themselves. Because of her pellucid beauty, her supple limbs, and her speaking looks, Camilla is particularly fitted to communicate well by bodily gestures and facial expression. At the outset we learn that as Indiana is delightful to “the admirers of beauty,” so is Camilla to “the developers of expression” (61). An expressive countenance is clearly an approved attribute of women. Eugenia’s face, we hear, “had forfeited nothing of

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expression, though every thing of beauty” (192). Indiana’s beauty, on the other hand, is static and expressionless. She is only a “beautiful automaton” or “beautiful doll” (191, 221), incapable of speaking her feelings through facial or gestural means – partly because her feelings are in any case minimal. Indiana seems to be an illustration of Hogarth’s maxim, “How soon does a face that wants expression, grow insipid, tho’ it be ever so pretty?” But Camilla lives up to Hogarth’s praise of the expressive countenance: “The face indeed will bear a constant view, yet always entertain and keep our curiosity awake . . . because vast variety of changing circumstances keeps the eye and mind in constant play, in following the numberless turns of expression it is capable of” (Analysis 53). Camilla, then, is thoroughly qualified to enact body language, the language of gesture and facial expression. Like the authorities on gesture, and like Richardson in Clarissa, Burney discriminates the different kinds or dialects of gesture. She explores the deliberate bodily discourse of motions derived partly from the elaborated discipline of classical rhetoric, with its well understood conventions of motions of the hand, modulation of the voice, and adjustments of the countenance, and partly from the theatre, which as we have seen had devised its own terminology of significant gestures. The vocabulary of this branch of the language includes bows and curtseys, nods and becks and sneers and winks; and as such signs are delivered deliberately by the performer, so they are clearly understood by an informed viewing audience. The second kind of communication is involuntary rather than deliberate. The audience – both characters within the novel and readers outside it – can understand this discourse, and gathers signification from such terms as blushes and sighs and tears; but the person sending the signs would withhold them if she could. The vocabulary for this dialect comes largely from physiology, medicine, and theories of anatomy. The third dialect is a range of significant bodily signals that are neither voluntary at source nor fully intelligible by an audience; they are a kind of gestural babble, significant but not explicit. Burney explores all these dialects, and becomes a skilled diagnostician of the third. Of the first and deliberate dialect of body language, Burney supplies many examples. There is even some parody in the description of the rustics’ production of Macbeth, where the men routinely approach each other with arms a-kimbo or doubled fists, and the women throw their arms about so violently that they tear the sleeves out of their gowns (318–19). This kind of body language, like Lovelace’s, may be not only hackneyed but deceitful, since it can be adopted for effect and used for

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lying as effectively as words. When we hear of “the grief painted on the fine features of Bellamy” (my emphasis), we know that the grief is only an assumed appearance, like makeup (312). The elegant gestures of the dandies and fops are to the fore. Clermont, examining Eugenia and clearly disapproving of what he sees, holds “his head high and back, as if measuring his superior height, while every line round his mouth marked that ridicule was but suppressed by contempt” (565). There are more homely and engaging gestures too, such as that of old Mr Westwyn, who puts “his forefinger upon his nose in sign of silence and secrecy” (697). Such physical demonstrations would seem to be largely a male language – Eugenia, for instance, could not return Clermont’s haughty stare because she is not tall enough. But although men have mainly had control of the vocabulary of rhetorical language, women could become expert in it too: they too could study Le Brun in his guidance on facial expression, and even Parsons’ anatomical studies on how eyebrows are made to scowl, nostrils to dilate, and teeth to clench. The more the vocabulary of this kind of body language was listed and defined, the more it became available for deliberate adoption. To demonstrate her grasp of this discourse, and to establish the potential for a woman to exploit body language effectively, Burney provides a set-piece episode chronicling a duel between two socially prominent women. The duel is a public affair, and indeed spectators are necessary to this aggressive exchange of manifestations. But they must be informed spectators. Neither of the combatants would want to waste her best facial sallies on a set of Philistines too uninformed to appreciate them. The affair of honour is fought over the issue of social recognition. The seconds are a baronet and a general. The chosen weapon is the face. And the principals fence by the skilful deployment of expression and gesture. At a society gathering in a shop in Tunbridge Wells, Lady Alithea Selmore converses with a fashionable baronet, and finds a way to hold centre stage. Her strategy is to raise her own status by putting down everyone else, deploying the recognizable signals of “contempt.” What she says, we gather, is far less important than her manner of delivery: By a certain toss of the chin, a short and half scornful laugh, and a supercilious dropping of the eye, [she] gave to every sentence she uttered the air of a bon mot; and after each, as regularly stopt for some testimony of admiration, as a favourite actress in some scene in which every speech is applauded. (411)

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James Parsons elaborates anatomically on the expression of contempt: The Risorius [muscle] draws back the Corner of the Mouth; and the action of the Aperias Palpebram is remitted, . . . so that, tho’ one Eye is moderately open, and the other almost shut, the Pupils are carried obliquely downwards . . . looking downwards and backwards at the Object of Contempt. (65) And he supplies a vivid if not accomplished illustration (Figure 16). The sneer of contempt is so thoroughly established, in fact, that Darwin still invokes it in 1872, in asking his research associates on other continents whether races far from Europe also deploy it: “When a man sneers or snarls at another, is the corner of the lip over the canine or eye tooth raised on the side facing the man whom he addresses?” (Darwin 16). Calling the tooth “canine” helps him to establish the link between human beings and animals in this expression. The animal that snarls, like the human being who sneers, has reason to make a display of the physical sign, since prompting a retreat would avoid an aggressive engagement. Lady Alithea’s rival, the spritely Mrs Arlbery, who is used to being in the limelight, admits to her faithful comrade, General Kinsale, “We are terribly in the back ground, General! . . . What must be done to save our reputations?” The General, laughing, said, he feared they were lost irretrievably; but added that he preferred defeat with her, to victory without her. “Your gallantry, my dear General,” cried she, with a sudden air of glee, “shall be rewarded! Follow me close, and you shall see the fortune of the day reversed.” (412) Mrs Arlbery has accepted the challenge; and she is adept in the use of the weapons she employs. She makes the strategic decision to match contempt with contempt, but adds gesture to facial expression. She first moves in close, “and fixing herself just opposite to Lady Alithea, with looks of the most profound attention, stood still, as if in admiring expectation” (412). At her rival’s next sally, she deploys what Parsons calls several Gestures of the Body, which consent to, and favour, this villainous, ungenerous Passion of Contempt; as, looking back at the object with a Toss of the Head, and a Shrug of the Shoulders . . . which

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Figure 16 James Parsons’ representation of “Contempt,” from Human Physiognomy Explain’d (1747)

is as keen as an Arrow, and stabs as deep . . . : and sometimes it is attended with a grinning Laugh. (65–6) Or, to turn to a later authority, Henry Siddons: “The shoulders rise, a disdainful smile, mixed with pity, announces the contrast we feel between our own imaginary grandeur, and his real insignificance” (164).

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Mrs Arlbery seems well acquainted with these tactics; but, recognizing the high level of sophistication in her enemy and her audience, she uses finesse: she modulates the signs, and pretends to try to suppress them. Mrs. Arlbery, gently raising her shoulders with her head, indulged herself in a smile that favoured yet more of pity than derision; and, with a hasty glance at the General, that spoke an eagerness to compare notes with him, hurried out of the shop; her eyes dropt, as if fearful to trust her countenance to an instant’s investigation. (413) The victory is decided. Lady Alithea is “completely disconcerted,” and her admirers dwindle away, while Mrs Arlbery triumphs. Both combatants are skilled in these weapons; for instance, both have their necessary “stander-by, who joins in the contempt” (Parsons 65), off whom to bounce responses. Lady Alithea can hold the field by a thorough knowledge of the weapons of contempt, until Mrs Arlbery manages to turn the tables by her superior finesse in the same game – even managing to seem to score a moral victory, by her show of suppressing her derision. And although in this scene we cheer for the intelligent Mrs Arlbery, and rejoice at her victory, Parsons’ moral judgement about this “ungenerous Passion” comprehends her as well as her opponent. The episode ends with the narrator’s comment, “Rudeness [Mrs. Arlbery] could have despised without emotion; but contempt had something in it of insolence; a commodity she held herself born to dispense, not receive” (413). The discourses of gesture and facial expression inform this exciting episode, and being familiar with them provides an extra level of understanding and entertainment. It would be a pity to read Camilla and miss the nuances of this blow-by-blow account of an exciting affair of honour between ladies, a duel of countenances as action-packed as any with swords. Mrs Arlbery, however ungenerous, is expert in such weapons as women must learn to use if they are to announce and perform themselves effectively. Camilla, however, in her youth and inexperience, has not learned control of this armoury. Her body language is more frequently in the second dialect, the somatic signals that are involuntary – beyond her control and indeed contrary to her intention. We see this most clearly when the information to be communicated is her own love. According to the Richardsonian law, of course, the last thing a woman is allowed to do is to reveal her love for a man first. “That a young lady should be in love, and the love of the young gentleman undeclared, is an heterodoxy which prudence, even policy, must not allow.”3 The dictum is from

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Richardson’s guest essay in the Rambler, which was reprinted separately and issued in large numbers as a guide to courtship practices. Camilla knows this rule, having been well trained in the Tyrold family. But her parents, who themselves enforce the rule of reticence, nevertheless want to get at the information she is trying to conceal. She finds that her body becomes agonizingly legible. In two developed scenes, Camilla’s parents investigate the state of her affections, and Burney presents a counterpoint of speech, silence, and bodily signals in which the bodily signals carry most of the meaning. Camilla, as yet barely aware herself of her love for Edgar, tries to repress it because she considers him pledged to Indiana; she knows in any case that she must not confess it, though she also knows that she should not withhold information from her parents when they ask for it. But while she makes no verbal pronouncement, the text makes clear that she simultaneously communicates volumes. She “tried vainly to speak,” but “changed colour” (218). “She stammered,” but “tears again flowed down the burning cheeks” (220). Mrs Tyrold has no difficulty in translating Camilla’s bodily signals to her husband. “Alas! . . . Do you not perceive that our lovely girl . . . has given her whole heart to Edgar Mandlebert?” (221). Soon the father wants to extract the information for himself. “Hesitate not, my dear girl,” he urges her disingenuously, “to unbosom your griefs or your apprehensions” (343) – when he knows perfectly well that unbosoming her unhappy love is precisely what is most difficult for her, and moreover what he himself forbids. Camilla, as he can see very well, is “wholly overcome by the deeply distressing confusion, with which wounded pride and unaffected virgin modesty impress a youthful female, in the idea of being suspected of a misplaced, or an unrequited partiality” (344). Camilla is ashamed and silent. But nevertheless she is involuntarily expressive. “Her silence, a suffocating sigh, and her earnest endeavour to hide her face, easily explained to Mr. Tyrold all that passed within” (344). It seems hardly worth the effort of staying silent if silence itself is a give-away. But the secret that he and his wife have discovered by Camilla’s involuntary body language is not one that Mr Tyrold wants to go further. Now he writes his famous sermon on the necessity of a woman’s concealment of her love. Love becomes “what you would rather perish than utter.” And because he has extracted her secret without her verbal admission, he is careful to cover non-verbal means of communication too. “There are so many ways of communication independent of speech, that silence is but one point in the ordinances of discretion” (360), he tells her. These ordinances are elaborate indeed. She must “neither shun nor

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seek” the company of the man she secretly loves. She must behave with “the same open esteem” as before she knew she loved him. She must not be cold or resentful, though she may not speak openly. She must “shut up every avenue by which a secret which should die untold can further escape you” (360). Such a set of restrictions would seem to call not only for silence but for paralysis. Mind and body alike must be gagged. It is not surprising that for the frank and nimble Camilla such mental and physical restraints produce severe nervous disorder. As she progresses from Northwick to Tunbridge to Southampton to London, and always under the judgemental eye of Edgar, it seems more and more as though nothing that she does is right; and like a top at the end of its spin, she begins to reel, to rock dangerously, and ultimately to lose her mental and physical balance altogether. The somatic signals match. A typical sequence occurs when Camilla hears an account of how the unfortunate episode in the bathing-house has caused a challenge to a duel: “At the words a bathing house, the blood forsook the cheeks of Camilla with sudden personal alarm; but it mounted high into them again, upon hearing the nature of the dispute; though yet again it sunk, and left them wholly pallid . . . ” (636). These visible manifestations are not without physical cost. According to the accepted medical doctrine on the passional causes of these signs, pallor is the result of fear, during which the heart contracts, withdrawing blood and heat from the extremities of the body in order to comfort the heart (Bevington 87). Such violent and frequent contractions as Camilla undergoes place considerable strain on the whole physical system. Burney, then, is presenting and contrasting two orders of bodily and facial gesture: the deliberate, indeed calculated gestures used by Mrs Arlbery and Lady Alithea in their duel, and the involuntary but still meaningful signals of pallor, blushing, sighs, and the like that are typical of Camilla. Since Camilla is doomed to be announcing herself whether she wants to or not, clearly it would be desirable for her to graduate from the naïve and involuntary kind of body language to the deliberate, to master the vocabulary and syntax of gesture as Mrs Arlbery has. Camilla does try her hand at deliberate and calculated gestural communication, but she is inexperienced and usually unsuccessful. The fault is not only in her want of skill. Skill is also deficient in Edgar’s reading of her text. A salient example occurs in Southampton, where Camilla’s graces have attracted the elderly but well-heeled Lord Valhurst. She is surprised by his proposal, but disposed to be delighted that Edgar, who as usual has been hanging around and eavesdropping, has overheard her rejection of the Lord. Now, she believes, Edgar will at last be convinced that

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she is no fortune-hunter; if she turns down the superior fortune and title of the peer, Edgar will surely perceive that she is loving and disinterested. This enlivening belief produces “a renovation of animal spirits,” and a visible gaiety, “which made every idea dance to a happiness new even to her happy mind” (705). This charming consonance of mind and body, her “varied grace, and winning vivacity, which seemed instinctively sharing with the beholders its own pleasure and animation” (706), are irresistibly attractive to most of the company. Only Edgar, to whom she chiefly wishes to communicate her joy, gloomily misreads her. Is this, thought he, Camilla? Has she wilfully fascinated this old man . . . , and has she won him but to triumph in the vanity of her conquest? How is her delicacy perverted! . . . Is this the artless Camilla? modest as she was gay, docile as she was spirited, gentle as she was intelligent? O how spoilt! how altered! how gone! (705) In Edgar’s eyes, Camilla can’t get it right. And the paired characteristics which he purports to find attractive in her are a clue to the reason. He believes he likes her “gay . . . spirited . . . intelligent,” but in fact he can approve of her only if she is “modest . . . docile . . . gentle” instead. Mrs Arlbery’s characterization of him as “a watcher” who “infests all he pursues with uneasiness” is shrewd and accurate (483). The third dialect of body language is not so easy to read. If the first dialect is developed from acting and rhetoric, and the second derives from physiology and theories of the physical affects of emotion, the third belongs to abnormal psychological states not yet fully diagnosed. Burney was groping her way, I believe, towards a theory of the unconscious. This body language is what we would call obsessive-compulsive. It is not fully articulate, but it does signal a severe mental strain, and a dangerous loss of control. The other dialects I have discussed belong to well-understood and long-established conventions. This seems to be one Burney is more original in identifying and describing. Locked into her enforced silence and her censored range of physical expression, Camilla develops a set of irrational tics that are symptoms of her mental distress, though not legible signals. After an unpleasant scene in which Indiana and Miss Margland accuse her of trying to steal Edgar’s love, she bravely decides to act as normal. But mind and body creak under the strain. At the meal that follows, she fills up plates at random, and passes them to the footman without direction as to which dinnar guest he should take them to. She gets up suddenly to leave the room; “but ashamed of her plan, seated herself the next moment, though

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she had first overturned her plate and a sauce-boat in the vehemence of her haste” (169). Presently she is making a mess of carding silk: She pulled the silk the wrong way, twisted, twirled, and entangled it continually; and while she talked volubly of what she was about, as if it were the sole subject of her thoughts, her shaking hands shewed her whole frame disordered, and her high colour betrayed her strong internal emotion. (171) On another occasion, when she is trying to disguise her feelings from Edgar, we see her in the carriage “pulling one of the green blinds up, and again letting it down, twenty times in a minute” (182). As a sign of agitation these repetitive and compulsive motions can have their dramatic force. Jane Austen borrowed these symptoms from Burney, I suspect, when she showed Edward Ferrars in intense anxiety and embarrassment in Sense and Sensibility, cutting up a leather sheath with the pair of scissors that belongs in them, and spoiling both sheath and scissors in the process. That incident stands out in Jane Austen, because she seldom chronicles moments of such extreme mental perturbation. But in Camilla, where the heroine is often on the brink of nervous breakdown, such unbalanced and spasmodic movements are frequent. And it is notable that they occur most often when Camilla is trying most to control her words and conceal her feelings. Burney knew whereof she wrote. Her experience as lady in waiting at court had acquainted her forcibly with “the ordinances of discretion.” Anne Josie Van Sant, in a study of the experiencing female body, quotes Burney’s “fiercely ironic” “Directions” for behaviour in the royal presence (Van Sant 96): “In the first place, you must not cough,” Burney begins. “Nor must you sneeze, nor, upon any account, stir either hand or foot.” If a pin is run into your head, and “the agony is very great,” you may, privately, bite the inside of the cheek . . . for a little relief; taking care, meanwhile, to do it so cautiously as to make no apparent dent outwardly. And, with that precaution, if you even gnaw a piece out, it will not be minded, only be sure either to swallow it, or commit it to some corner of the inside of your mouth, till they are gone – for you must not spit. (Burney, Diary 252–3) Women have continued to agonize over the Spartan endurance expected of them in suppressing the visible signs of their mental and physical anguish. In the same tradition is Charlotte Brontë’s reflection

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in Shirley, in the context of a woman’s never-to-be-declared love. She too uses the familiar second-person address, as to a reader already acquainted with these ordinances: You expected bread, and have got a stone; break your teeth on it, and don’t shriek because the nerves are martyrized: . . . the stone will digest . . . Nature . . . is an excellent friend in such cases; sealing the lips, indicting utterance, commanding a placid dissimulation. (1.7.117–18) The startling violence of the imagery seems to be a kind of compensation, once some kind of expression is allowed, for the long suppression. And the oral locus of the agony in both the Burney and Brontë passages has reference both to the painfully unspoken word and to tortured sexuality. Later in Burney’s novel, as Camilla’s situation and her physical twitches get worse, these local spasms become more generalized in her behaviour at large. She becomes unable to rid herself of Mrs Mittin, who continues to involve her in pointless expense for ornate dresses that she doesn’t want and doesn’t notice. She breathlessly rockets about the country in a coach, hastening to the side of her parents, and then not daring to visit them once she gets there. It is as though some physical vibration is in process which rocks the body and the mind with increasing violence, until it oversets them, and Camilla is insane. The issue here is one of control, or rather of women’s lack of it. Camilla loves a man who, she thinks, does not love her. That in itself is not what puts her into her headlong course; it is the decree of silence about her love, and the enforced course of deception. She may not speak, nor write, nor show visible sign. And yet while she concentrates all her energy in remaining silent and retaining her secret, her own body betrays her: her mother and her father can read her like a book; and other people read her too, though not so accurately. She is laid bare, involuntarily, before a firmament of eyes. As we know, it is particularly incumbent on women not only to control their speech but also to control their bodies. According to Hannah More, in Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, a woman’s best eloquence in conversation is silence: she should leave the speaking roles to the males; but she may sufficiently participate by conveying her approbation of the male’s discourse through her facial expression. An inviolable and marked attention may shew that a woman is pleased with a subject, and an illuminated countenance may prove

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that she understands it, almost as unequivocally as language itself could do; and this, with a modest question, which indicates at once rational curiosity and becoming diffidence, is in many cases as large a share of the conversation as it is decorous for feminine delicacy to take. (More 1.71) All that is left to women in the way of approved participation is apparently to illuminate their countenances. Hence the exact control of gesture and expression, a finely nuanced management of their bodies, is crucial to them if they are to achieve moral approbation. And because Camilla yearns for Edgar’s approval, her physical conduct is all-important. But control of their bodies is what the young women in this novel signally lack. In a number of painful scenes, Burney shows a nightmarish takeover and subjection of the female body by alien forces. The most prominent of these is the memorable episode of Dubster’s summerhouse. The two sisters, Camilla and Eugenia, are persuaded by the vulgar fortune-hunter, Dubster, to ascend by a ladder to his unfinished summerhouse. Once up, they are stranded by their brother Lionel, who runs away with the ladder as a prank, and goes hunting. So far the suitor and brother – tradesman and gentleman – have combined to deprive the women of privacy and the power of motion. “Hoisted up in this cage” (283), they have no means of escape. Dubster, angry and sorry for himself, has no sympathy to spare for his fellow-sufferers, and justifies himself on grounds of gender: “‘Don’t mind it, young ladies; you can have no great matters to do with your time, I take it; so it does not so much signify. But a man’s quite different. He looks like a fool, as one may say, poked up in such a place as this, to be stared at by all comers and goers’” (284). The women are expected to be victims, and to like it. They shouldn’t mind the physical danger, either. “If one should break one’s leg, it’s but a hard thing upon a man to be a cripple in the middle of life. It’s no such great hindrance to a lady, . . . because ladies can’t do much at the best” (289). To make the humiliation before all social groups complete, the sisters now become a spectacle for the lower classes too. The delicate and sensitive Eugenia is pilloried, virtually set in the stocks for general mockery. “What were you put up there for, Miss? [call out the peasant women] to frighten the crows?” (286). Eugenia, thus brutally acquainted with the world’s opinion of her body, becomes almost catatonic. Burney draws out the incident so as to involve a larger community still in the guilt. Major Cerwood, who fancies Camilla, climbs up to them, but says he can’t climb down, and so takes harrassing advantage of her helplessness.

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Even Edgar, who until now could be relied on to help the girls out of the dangers to which their brother exposes them, holds aloof because he blames Camilla for Cerwood’s unwanted attentions. The pattern becomes familiar, because it is often repeated in this long novel. By the ill-judged actions of her brother and uncle, Eugenia has been pathetically deprived of the power to externalize herself effectively through her body; and yet by her body she is judged. Camilla finds herself in predicaments that are not of her own choosing, and over which she has little or no control; her physical presence and her comportment are observed and judged, usually by Edgar, whose judgement she cares most about; and she is found guilty, and blamed. Those protracted five volumes show us a Camilla who is constantly deprived of choice and control, but nevertheless severely judged; enjoined to secrecy and concealment, but nevertheless constantly read and interpreted; prompted to agonies of response, but nevertheless deprived of verbal and physical modes of expression. No wonder she goes insane. Such critics as Margaret Anne Doody and Julia Epstein have amply explored the “silencing [of] the heroine,” and Camilla’s terrifying incapacity to wield and control the “iron pen” of her nightmare. An exploration of the prominent theme of body language, a genre of expression that is even more essential to women than to men, suggests that this branch of women’s expression is similarly censored, and all too often similarly removed from their control. Camilla is Burney’s dissertation on the censoring of the body as well as the speech. No wonder that the self-assured heroine of Austen’s last fragment of a novel, Charlotte Heywood, has “no intention of having [Camilla’s] Distress” (Minor Works 390). Charlotte is the kind of heroine, like Emma, who plans to stay in control. Such a luxury isn’t available to Burney’s Camilla.

8 Epilogue: And On To Jane Austen

Burney’s Cecilia Beverley, we read, is in every way fit to be a heroine: Though thus largely indebted to fortune, to nature she had yet greater obligations: her form was elegant, her heart was liberal; her countenance announced the intelligence of her mind, her complexion varied with every emotion of her soul, and her eyes, the heralds of her speech, now beamed with understanding and now glistened with sensibility. (Cec 6) A generation later, Jane Austen (who had already had some fun about the kind of girl who is “born to be an heroine” [Northanger Abbey 13]) was to convey much the same basic information about her heroine; but she put it more succinctly: Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence. (Emma 1) There is much to be said for this more forceful and summary style, as well as for the irony already implied in that “seemed.” “Handsome” is open to some question as applied to a woman, for whom “lovely” or “beautiful” would be the less loaded descriptors. “Rich” is rather cruder than “thus largely indebted to fortune,” and intentionally so; and “clever,” too, often suggests an intelligence that over-reaches itself. These incipient ironies are not present in Burney’s description of Cecilia, whom we are meant to accept without question as being beautiful, kind, and intelligent. The irony in this novel is substantial rather than verbal, and resides in the long account, stretching over hundreds of pages, of how 166

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notwithstanding all these gifts of fortune and nature, Cecilia’s course through life is to touch tragedy before she can snatch some measure of qualified happiness. But the principal difference between the two introductions lies in Burney’s deliberate insistence that all Cecilia’s advantages of mind and heart show. She is not only intelligent: her countenance announces the intelligence. She is not only feeling: the varying emotions are made visible in her complexion. Like the admirable Rivers in Brooke’s Emily Montague, whom I invoked at the outset of this study, she has the less need for speech, since her eyes are already her “heralds” of it. And even in this short passage we get some indications of the terminology of the visible language: understanding “beams” in the eyes, whereas sensibility “glistens.” With beauty, virtue, and intelligence, Cecilia is already favoured; but – for the readership Burney was addressing – legibility, the fact that all these qualities can be perceived by those around her as well as by the reader, is nature’s last, best gift: it ensures her outstanding moral value, though not necessarily her happiness. Without a knowledge of the complex discourses on reading and interpreting the body in the eighteenth-century novel we miss appreciating what was enormously important to its immediate readers. Burney is not unaware of the dangers inherent in this set of values. And in her novel at large it becomes clear that Cecilia’s pellucid legibility, like Clarissa’s, also constitutes her vulnerability. Monckton, “in whom by long practice, artifice was almost nature” (719), is like Lovelace in being able to lie with his countenance; and at the same time he has developed the skill to read hers with accuracy. Since he has a secret agenda of taking her over that she knows nothing of, she is completely available for his manipulation. She has less chance of winning the game than a poker player with her cards on the table against one who plays close to the chest. Mrs Delvile, though more sympathetic, can likewise by her reading lay Cecilia bare and steal her secret: “The state of her mind seemed read by Mrs. Delvile, who examined her with eyes of such penetrating keenness, that they rather made discoveries than enquiries” (Cec 501). Cecilia is left with little of her self that she can call her own. In such ways bodily legibility becomes not just a premise of many novels, but in large part their subject. The novelist in one way had the advantage of the physiognomist, the painter and the actor, in that the novelist could authoritatively declare that the expression is legible, without having to make it so. Lavater the physiognomist, who made it his business through his pictures and commentary to inform others how to read faces, has to enter too literally

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into matters like the signification of eyebrows straight or arched, and so lay himself open to argument and divergence. The actor, being stuck with his own physique (however adjusted), must work with other codes by which to convey emotion, and may visibly work too hard. The painter likewise has to rely on his viewer’s understanding of his visible actions; and he cannot, as the novelist can with words, convey the contrast of appearance with essence. Perhaps the need to explore this contrast was one reason for the novelist’s exploration not only of his characters’ bodies as legible, but also of their skills – or lack of them – in reading the bodies around them. Parson Adams’ engaging naïveté in assessing the rogues and hypocrites who surround him, Lovelace’s finally destructive sophistication as a connoisseur of body language, and “the watcher” Edgar Mandlebert’s disastrously confident but erroneous readings – all are matter for the reader’s appreciation and assessment. The same holds true, to a large extent, for Jane Austen in the nineteenth century. Reading the body for information on what is passing in the mind is still a constant occupation, and characters are judged according to their skill (or lack of it) in the enterprise. Nevertheless, much has changed, as I have suggested. The repeated insistence on a character’s admirable legibility as a marker of beauty and virtue has disappeared. We are seldom assured of the beauty of a mind that shines through the eyes, or of the countenance that announces this and that. On the whole matter of physical appearance, in fact, Austen remains a minimalist: besides a few hints about Emma’s “true hazle eye” (E 39) and Elizabeth’s “dark eyes” and “light and pleasing” figure (PP 23), she leaves the reader to fill in the picture of what each character looks like. As we have seen, she was no believer in physiognomy, and wouldn’t supply details on the tilt of the nose or the thickness of an eyebrow – such as Dickens and Charlotte Brontë habitually provided – as clues for physiognomically-inclined readers. And her cautions about delusory “first impressions” based on physical appearance outlast the novel originally so titled. What of the other codes of meaning I have been exploring? She had early poured scorn on the conventional repertoire of stage gesture.1 In Love and Freindship, the outrageous parody of the novel of sentiment that she wrote at 14, she provides a recognition scene in a wildly implausible birth-mystery plot. Lord St. Clair has just recognized two long-lost grandchildren in as many minutes, when a third appears: “On perceiving him Lord St. Clair started and retreating back a few paces, with uplifted Hands, said, ‘Another Grandchild!’” (MW 91). The gestures have their

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textbook authority. Henry Siddons had laid it down that “a man generally starts back from . . . astonishment, whilst surprising and incredible ideas take possession of the soul” (111); and Bulwer in his dictionary of gestures of the hand defines “TO THROW UP THE HANDS TO HEAVEN is an expression of admiration, amazement and astonishment” (33). But Austen at 14 had already recognized an outworn convention, and could joke about it. In her last novel, too, she can make more sophisticated play with the same gesture. When Elizabeth Elliot of Persuasion professes to believe that Mr Elliot’s attentions to her are not particular, her obsequious friend responds:“’My dear Miss Elliot!’ exclaimed Mrs. Clay, lifting up her hands and eyes, and sinking all the rest of her astonishment in a convenient silence.” Anne, the focalizer, notes the display with irony, and “admired the fine acting of the friend” (P 213). Such a display could only be a matter of “acting,” as this character reads it at this time. The time-honoured signs are now threadbare and outmoded. In an earlier novel, however, Austen did try her hand at the more theatrical convention. The scene of Willoughby’s late-night visit, in Sense and Sensibility, to the house where Marianne may be on her death-bed, shows a number of traits of the kind of performance Garrick had made famous. 2 The chapter begins: Elinor, starting back with a look of horror at the sight of him, obeyed the first impulse of her heart in turning instantly to quit the room, and her hand was already on the lock, when its action was suspended by his hastily advancing . . . (SS 317) Here we find the classic start back in surprise and astonishment, the view of the body as reacting to emotional stimulus (she “obeyed the first impulse of her heart”), and even the deployment of the term “action” almost in its technical sense. And the scene goes on in this heightened vein, with frequent abstract nouns for the various emotions, and full reference to their bodily manifestations. I extract and collect the phrases which actually come scattered through the chapter: a voice rather of command than supplication . .. replied with firmness . . . cried with vehemence . . . the utmost amazement . . . an attitude of deep meditation . . . a deeper glow overspreading his cheeks . . . looked at him with greater astonishment . . . an expressive smile . . . Elinor bowed her assent . . . turning her eyes on him with the most angry contempt . . . looking at her with an heightened colour and an enquiring eye . . . colouring likewise . . . an heavy sigh . . . He held out

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his hand. She could not refuse to give him hers: – he pressed it with affection . . . And with these words, he almost ran out of the room. (SS 317–32) The carefully registered bodily motions, separated from the dialogue, nevertheless provide a vivid and visible summary of the changing emotions of the two participants in this scene. And the signs get fewer, and spaced more widely, towards the end of the scene, as the passions are vented and the antagonists reach a stage of reflection and relative calm. Jane Austen has done it well, of course. But this is not her characteristic mode, at least not in the degree of emphasis on these passions and these actions. Some of the dialogue, too, is uncharacteristically heightened: “God be praised! . . . For God’s sake . . . Upon my soul it is . . . the violence of her passions . . . Oh! How infinitely superior!” (318–22). These fragments, at least, are stage lingo – though of course the speeches in between are less stagy and more nuanced. Willoughby himself, for all his deployment of the stage conventions, occasionally shows an awareness of his own theatricality: “Thunderbolts and daggers! – what a reproof [Marianne] would have given me!” (325). If the character is self-conscious about such language, the author is even more so. Austen was making an experiment in high rhetoric, but her heart, or rather her head, wasn’t really in it. She makes the most of Willoughby’s rhetorical skill, however, in his gestures as in his language. And she allows us to speculate whether his command of theatrical performance is not part of his villainy as well as part of his charm. Elinor seems trapped into more sympathy with him than she rationally deems appropriate. Austen came to distrust and reject the more showy stage actions that Garrick had made famous and for a while almost obligatory. For her the best acting was relatively understated, without “tear-floods or sightempests.” In Mansfield Park, where acting holds the stage for the first half of the novel, Fanny Price picks Henry Crawford as the best actor, though the more bombastic Mr Yates “exclaimed against his tameness and insipidity” (165). And she can’t resist his readings from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII: “Whether it were dignity or pride, or tenderness or remorse, or whatever was to be expressed, he could do it with equal beauty. – It was truly dramatic” (337). The “passions” are still separately identified (though the word in this sense has become somewhat dated by this time), and the power to express them separately is also valued. But this is a reading only. It must all be done with the words and the modulation of the voice. That is what for Fanny – and, one can reasonably guess, for Austen too – is “truly dramatic.”

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And yet, for all her rejection of the tenets of physiognomy and the busy actions and overstatements of the stage, Jane Austen’s novels can be considered as being all about reading minds and motives from physical signs. Her plots are about readings. Her characters’ skill in reading one another – their alertness to the signs, their accuracy in interpreting them – is always a crucial constituent in our judgement of them, and sometimes determines the narrator’s choices in presentation. In Sense and Sensibility, for instance, the physically and verbally reticent Elinor schools herself in suppressing the signs of her feelings, while the vividly expressive Marianne, in contrast, wears her heart upon her sleeve, and believes that’s the right place for it. Hence for fullest information the narrator’s stance allows us to look at Marianne, and read the visible signs of her emotions; while we look through Elinor, reading with her the feelings of others, and learning of her feelings by more direct narrative description of her internal thoughts. Elizabeth Bennet as a “studier of character” watches people for entertainment, and also in order to assess them; and her story is one of disastrous misreadings: she has to learn of Darcy and Wickham that “one has all the goodness, and the other all the appearance of it” (PP 225). Darcy, trained in the discourses I have been examining, confidently assumes that by careful observation of Bingley and Jane Bennet he will be able to deduce with accuracy the quantity and quality of their feelings for one another. He reads Bingley with accuracy, but not Jane; on the other hand, he reasonably asserts that “the serenity of [her] countenance and air was such, as might have given the most acute observer, a conviction that, however amiable her temper, her heart was not likely to be easily touched” (197). And he is somewhat justified in his reading by the narrator’s careful inclusion of the discussion on how good Jane is at suppressing signs of her attachment. There are good and bad readings of the signals delivered by the body; but nobody doubts that the signs are there, and can be read accurately by “the most acute observer.” Austen’s other novels likewise chronicle readings and misreadings of the body, and approve or adversely judge major characters according to their skills: Fanny Price can see Maria’s response to Henry Crawford’s blandishments, but Edmund is almost deliberately blind to them. Emma reads the eagerly delivered signs of Mr Elton’s courtship, but misapplies them; and in the same way she recognizes the signs of a clandestine attachment of Jane Fairfax, but lights on the wrong object. Mr Knightley, on the other hand, notes and correctly interprets “certain expressive looks” and “the blush on Jane’s cheek” as “symptoms of attachment” between her and Frank Churchill (348, 350).

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The blush on the cheek in Austen’s novels, indeed, furnishes matter for two substantial chapters in Mary Ann O’Farrell’s book on Telling Complexions. And as her study shows, it is largely the passing facial motions and colour, rather than the permanent bony features and cranial structures that the physiognomist analyses, or the sweeping gestures and pronounced attitudes of the acting manuals, that enable the reading of one character’s emotions by another. Persuasion, perhaps, has most to offer for the observer of body language, since Anne Elliot is an astute reader, observing the frankly expressive facial motions of Wentworth, and herself vividly legible, though no one but the reader is observing the signs: “Anne’s shudderings were to herself, alone” (P 66). And since the two principals in this love story are estranged and cannot relate through speech – except through overhearing speech addressed to others – the body motions and signals are their best route to understanding and reconcilement. Like Lovelace and Clarissa, Anne and Wentworth are “great watchers of each other’s eyes”; and the eye motions, as well as the blushes and pallor, provide their best means of communication. True to the “perpetual estrangement” that pertains between them, the eyes can meet only obliquely. At their first meeting, years after the broken engagement, “her eyes half met Captain Wentworth’s; a bow, a curtsy passed” – and at once Anne is asking herself, “Now, how were his sentiments to be read?” (59–60). Because she knows him well, she reads him well. She can correctly interpret “a certain glance of his bright eye, and curl of his handsome mouth” (67). We learn, too, that the searching observation is mutual: “Once she felt that he was looking at herself – observing her altered features, perhaps, trying to trace in them the ruins of the face that once charmed him” (72). This is intricate indeed: Anne reads him reading her. And gradually, through the fine increments of insight gained through blushes and glances, they move towards mutual understanding. William Elliot’s look of “earnest admiration” in Lyme, which Wentworth intercepts, surprises him into a reassessment of Anne’s “wretchedly altered” appearance: “He gave her a momentary glance, – a glance of brightness, which seemed to say, ‘That man is struck with you, – and even I, at this moment, see something like Anne Elliot again’” (104). Here indeed is a speaking look, and one that even has dialogue assigned to it. And finally, as he overhears her talking to someone else, and writes his impassioned letter, he asks for “a word, a look” to decide his fate. She chooses the look. As he hesitantly approaches her and her escort in the street, he “said nothing – only looked. Anne could command

Epilogue: And On To Jane Austen 173

herself enough to receive that look, and not repulsively. The cheeks which had been pale now glowed, and the movements which had hesitated were decided. He walked by her side” (239–40). She delivers her acceptance of his proposal by a look, he registers his delight by his glowing face and decided motions. Like Edward Rivers in Emily Montague, whose description I quoted at the outset of this study, they look their civil things, their whole countenances speak what they wish to say, and they have, at this point at least, little occasion for words to explain themselves. Has nothing changed, then? Clearly Jane Austen inherited a developed tradition, and though she mocks what to her are its excesses, she makes subtle and telling use of selected parts of it. The physicians’ assertions about the body as the determinant of the mind, Lavater’s enthusiasms about the face as the index to the soul, and Garrick’s galvanic stage business were not congenial to her. But a deep and instinctive sense of the body as an indispensable signifier was part of the equipment she brought to her study of human relations, and used with subtlety and finesse in her fiction. Earlier novelists like Richardson, Smollett and Burney took to the doctrines of the correspondence of the physical with the mental as an exciting and relatively new body of knowledge, and enjoyed displaying their expertise in it. They described physical signs of blushing and fainting, facial expressions strictly codified, and vigorous gestures defined as the ineluctable manifestation of this or that passion, with a certain academic zest, sometimes almost footnoting authorities. They focus on this and that definable bodily motion and its passional and physiological causes, and they display their facility in a newly-documented and complex language in which they are proud to be conversant. Their characters are all busy reading each other and being read, with their various and fully explored literacy and legibility. And the reader too is invited to participate in the keen activity of reading those various and endlessly legible bodies. As the century goes on, the emphasis shifts from a display of the significant signs to the pleasures, problems, and varying skills in reading them. The best body is still the most legible body; but the legibility is problematized, as by Burney, and the readings become over-determined. Austen could take what she wanted from the tradition, refine it, and leave the rest. Cecilia’s most admired characteristic, and also her most dangerous liability, is her legibility; but Austen’s characters are judged less for their legibility than for their skill in reading. Her namesake and contemporary, Gilbert Austin, still claimed “significant gestures appear

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thus to be the great ornaments of dramatic exhibition, and it must be admitted that the performance will be the most brilliant in which they abound the most” (496). But Jane Austen, looking forward rather than backward, chose selection and understatement. Nevertheless, she shared with her predecessors that lesson of Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi, 3 a full conviction of “the value and significance of flesh.”

Notes and References

1

The Body Inside the Skin: The Medical Model

1. See Albert S. Lyons, p. 467 ff. The great scientific discoveries of Harvey and of Robert Hooke (Micrographia, 1665) in the seventeenth century had less impact on eighteenth-century medical theory and practice that one would expect. According to Lester S. King, “Hooke laid out a path for medical enlightenment but physicians were slow in treading it” (King 176). Roy Porter notes “the healer’s art” still drew on “the legacy of Hippocrates and Galen” (Bodies Politic 21). 2. Mead called the body “a hydraulic machine contrived with most exquisite art, in which there are numberless tubes properly adjusted and disposed for the conveyance of fluids of different kinds” (Medical Precepts and Cautions 2). 3. Quoted in Johnson’s Dictionary under evacuation. 4. Alfred Tennyson, “The Princess” (1847), V,vi, in Christopher Ricks’ edition. Ricks also provides an analogue from Scott. 5. According to a scurrilous pamphlet probably of 1748, Mead at the age of 75 fell in love with a patient, a young married woman. He procured co-operation from her and her husband, but at the crucial moment “the Youth of seventyfive” was unable to consummate. “From this time he contents himself with surveying Dona Maria’s naked Beauties, pressing her secret Charms.” Hence “Kunastrokius.” See The Cornutor of Seventy-Five, supposedly about the adventures and amours of “Don Ricardo Honeywater,” p. 29, and Roy Porter (Bodies Politic 138). 6. See John F. Sena, “Smollett’s Matthew Bramble and the Tradition of the Physician-Satirist.” Significantly, though, Sena does not mention Roderick as belonging to this tradition, perhaps because Roderick is a rather glib diagnostician. 7. See Carol Houlihan Flynn: “In their attempts to regulate and rationalize the body, theorists as dissimilar as Mandeville and Woodward, Cheyne and Swift, all perhaps following Locke following Pythagoras, experimented with the idea of a temperance that would cleanse the body, as well as the body politic, of its ills” (Flynn 45). 8. A contemporary reviewer of Humphry Clinker accused Smollett of a “stercoracious” style and aligned him with Swift as a writer “who has taken the liberty to be filthy.” Gentleman’s Magazine, 41 (July 1771), p. 317, as reprinted in Thorson’s edition of Humphry Clinker, p. 330. Robert Adams Day has elaborated the connection between scatology and sex in Smollett’s fictional vision in “Sex, Scatology, Smollett.” 9. Isaac Asimov presents this projector as a figure much maligned, and one whose project must be appreciated and put into practice in today’s threatened ecology (Asimov 170). 10. “‘To dine with Duke Humphrey’ was a proverbial phrase for doing without a meal, and ‘clinker’ was a slang term for a piece of excrement” (Note by 175

176 Notes and References James L. Thorson, HC 76n). Eric Partridge does not record the term in this sense until the nineteenth century; but the dating of slang is a difficult matter. Wyn Jenkins’s misspelling of “third” as “turd” when she refers to Clinker (p. 309) tends to confirm Thorson’s reading. 11. Middleton and Rowley, The Changeling (V iii 150), p. 942. 12. Johnson criticized him for this, advising Boswell, “Do not let him teach you a foolish notion that melancholy is a proof of acuteness” (Life of Johnson, p. 782). 13. See Julia Epstein: “Something always stays Camilla’s tongue. Language is forever confounded, stunned, or forced underground in Camilla” (40).

2

The Body Illegible: Tristram Shandy

1. This description stands out as the only such precise visual delineation in the novel, and in deliberate compliment to Hogarth, who provided an illustration in which Dr Slop is prominent (2.17.121): “Imagine to yourself a little, squat, uncourtly figure of a Doctor Slop, of about four feet and a half perpendicular height, with a breadth of back, and a sesquipedality of belly, which might have done honour to a serjeant in the horse-guards. . . . Such were the outlines of Dr Slop’s figure, which, – if you have read Hogarth’s analysis of beauty, and if you have not, I wish you would; – you must know, may as certainly be caracatur’d, and convey’d to the mind by three stokes as three hundred” (2.9.104–5). Sterne’s other characters are not caricatures, and require by contrast both “great out-lines” and “familiar strokes and faint designations” (1.22.72–3). 2. But see W.G. Day, “Tristram Shandy: Locke may not be the Key,” in Myer, 75–83. Day lists the critics who have pursued the Sterne–Locke connection (including Henri Fluchère, John Traugott, and others), but demonstrates that Sterne’s references to, and paraphrases from, Locke’s Essay are far from respectful. 3. John Ferriar, Illustrations of Sterne &c (1798), p. 57. Ferriar documents at length Sterne’s ample borrowings from Burton; see pp. 56–95. 4. “Medicine .. . provided [Sterne] with the language, the medium, through which he sought to understand his own, and the human, condition” (Porter, “Spleen” 94). 5. See what is to my mind the most fascinating single paper on Tristram Shandy: Louis A. Landa’s “The Shandean Homunculus: The Background of Sterne’s ‘Little Gentlemand’” (44–68). 6. See Arthur H. Cash on “The Birth of Tristram Shandy.” 7. In Chapter 5 of Volume 8, which contains the apostrophe “O ye water-drinkers!” I suspect Sterne is alluding to John Smith’s The Curiosities of Common Water, or the Advantages thereof, in Preventing and Curing Many Distempers (Dublin, 1725). 8. See Leigh A. Ehlers, “Mrs. Shandy’s ‘Lint and Basilicon’: The Importance of Women in Tristram Shandy.” 9. See Eric Partidge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional Usage. Ian Watt, among others, has pointed out that “Toby” had long been established as “a euphemism for the posterior” (xxiii). 10. See Frank Brady: “Toby, who did not philosophise but felt, represents the feelings and the body” (42).

Notes and References 177 11. I have developed this argument elsewhere, in “Walter Shandy, Sterne, and Gender: A Feminist Foray.” 12. See his “The Sympbolic Structure of Eighteenth-Century Male Creativity: Pregnant Men, Brain-Wombs, and Female Muses (with some comments on The Dunciad).” 13. For the importance of women in Tristram Shandy, see Ruth Marie Faurot, “Mrs. Shandy Observed,” and Leight Ehlers, cited above.

3

Physiognomy: The Index of the Model

1. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations (c. 45 BC) trans. J.E. King. IV xxxvii.80. 2. See A Method to Learn to Design the Passions, John Williams’ translation of Charles Le Brun’s Le conférence de M. Le Brun sur l’expression générale et particulière (Paris, 1698), reprinted in facsimile as numbers 200–201 in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.With an introduction by Alan T. McKenzie. 3. See Graeme Tytler, “Letters of Recommendation and False Visors: Physiognomy in the Novels of Henry Fielding,” p. 105. I am also indebted to Graeme Tytler’s more extensive treatment in Physiognomy and the European Novel: Faces and Fortunes. 4. See the comments of Dr John Elliotson, a respected member of the medical profession, and founder of the Phrenological Society: Human Physiology, 5th edition, p. 374. 5. For instance, see the article on “Cerebral Physiology” (another name for phrenology) by “L.E.G.E.” “Onward! is the cry of our race. Progressive improvement and happiness should be the sum total of our aspirations, and the universal inculcation of the truths of cerebral physiology is one of the means to hasten this advent.” The Zoist: a Journal of Cerebral Physiology and Mesmerism, and their Applications to Human Welfare, I (March 1843 to January 1844), p. 13. 6. Miss Bingley declares that Elizabeth Bennet has “no stile, no taste, no beauty,” and concludes, “She has nothing, in short, to recommend her, but being an excellent walker. I shall never forget her appearance this morning. She really looked almost wild” (Pride and Prejudice 35). 7. I quote from the version of Madame Leprince de Beaumont, translated into English in 1761, and reprinted in The Classic Fairy Tales, ed. Iona and Peter Opie, p. 139. 8. Cf. Margaret Anne Doody on Camilla: “When speaking a physical language, men do not regard themselves as speaking a real language. Looks, actions, attentions do not commit them” (Frances Burney 252).

4

Facial Expression: The Mind’s Construction in the Face

1. Although Austin postdates the writers I am concerned with, his book is useful as a collection of previous lore on the bodily motions, from classical times to his own. 2. Charles Lebrun (sic), A Method to Learn to Design the Passions was translated by John Williams in 1734, and is issued in a facsimile edition under the

178 Notes and References

3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

5

editorship of Alan T. McKenzie. It was first published as the Conférence de M. Le Brun sur l’espression générale et particulière (Paris: E. Picard, 1698). “Editions of Le Brun’s treatise with engravings of his illustrations abounded in eighteenthcentury France. Leclerc engraved fifty-seven heads on twenty plates in 1696 and these appeared in eight different editions in the eighteenth century. Picart’s 1698 edition includes, with the complete text of the treatise, over forty illustrations. This edition reappeared in French seven times” (Wilson 28n). A version was also published in the Encyclopédie. See Richard Wrigley, “The Afterlife of an Academician,” in Courage and Cruelty: Le Brun’s Horatius Cocles and The Massacre of the Innocents; and Angelica Goodden, Actio and Persuasion: Dramatic Performance in Eighteenth-Century France, p. 9. L’année littéraire, 1757, VI, pp. 272–3. I use John Montgomery Wilson’s translation, p. 43. Joseph Burke and Colin Caldwell, Hogarth: The Complete Engravings, plate 199. William T. Whitley, Artists and their Friends in England: 1700–1799, I, p. 282. Alan T. McKenzie uses this incident as an opening anecdote to his book Certain, Lively Episodes, p. 1. For a sophisticated discussion of the “Characters and Caricaturas” engraving, see Deirdre Lynch, “Overloaded Portraits: The Excesses of Character and Countenance.” Letter to Richard Berenger of ?8 March 1760 (Letters 99).

Reading and Re-Encoding the Body: Clarissa

1. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism (1762), II, p. 127. Kames had classical authority for the claim. According to Quintilian, the hands speak “the universal language of all mankind” – omnium hominum communis sermo (Instiutionis Oratoriae, l.xi.c.3). See Gilbert Austin, Chironomia, or a Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery (1806), p. 322. For Richardson’s knowledge of Kames, see T.C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimple, Samuel Richardson: a Biography, p. 365. Kames’ chapter 15, “External Signs of Emotions and Passions,” was an impressive collection of contemporary knowledge, and quoted amply by subsequent authorities. According to the editor, Robert Voitle, “Over forty editions have appeared, including abridgements and translations” (v.1). 2. Gilbert Austin also quotes Cicero: “Animi est enim omnis actio: et imago animi vultus est, indices oculi, says Cicero”: “For all action is from the mind, and the image of the mind is the countenance of which the eyes are the index” (De Oratore 1.iii.c.59), quoted in Chironomia, pp. 99–100. 3. Austin’s major endeavour, besides collecting what ancient and modern authorities had written about gesture, was to develop a notation system for bodily actions, so that performances could be recorded. He believed that “Significant gestures appear thus to be the great ornaments of dramatic exhibition, and it must be admitted that the performance will be the most brilliant in which they abound most” (496). 4. Le Brun’s A Method to Learn to Design the Passions was translated by John Williams in 1734. I have no evidence that Richardson used Williams’ translation, but its date brings it relatively close to his day.

Notes and References 179

6

Gesture: Suiting the Action to the Word

1. See especially David Bevington, “The Language of Gesture and Expression,” in Action is Eloquence: Shakespeare’s Language of Gesture, 67–98. 2. Joseph Roach reproduces the original title page of Bulwer’s Chironomia, in which Demosthenes is depicted with his watchword, “Actio – Actio – Actio” (35). 3. Angelica Goodden, Acting and Persuasion: Dramatic Performance in EighteenthCentury France. Although she writes principally of the acting profession in France, she acknowledges the parallel movement in England. 4. “One might even go so far as to say that his novels are very parables on the contradiction between appearance and reality,” says Graeme Tytler, in a study of Fielding and Physiognomy (“Letters” 105). 5. “When You Say Nothing at All,” lyric by Don Schlitz and Paul Overstreet, in “Now that I’ve Found You,” a collection performed by Alison Krauss. 6. See John McAllister, “Smollett’s Use of Medical Theory: Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle,” 121–30. 7. According to Alan T. McKenzie (McKenzie 87) she published an article “On Reading Hutchinson on the Passions.” I have not yet managed to trace this. Certain, Lively Episodes, p. 87. 8. I elaborated on these alignments in “Experience to Expression: Thematic Character Contrasts in Tristram Shandy.” 9. For treatment of Sterne’s handling of rhetorical gesture, see William J. Farrell, “Nature versus Art as Comic Pattern in Tristram Shandy,” 16–35. My view of Tristram is more sympathetic than that of Farrell, who sees him as an inept bungler. 10. See Roger Jones and Nicholas Penny, Raphael, p. 77, who also quote from Jonathan Richardsons’ (father and son), An Account of Some of the Statues, Bas-reliefs, Drawings and Pictures in Italy (London, 1722), p. 212. James Work did not annotate this borrowing. But see The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New, III, p. 303. 11. My reference is to D.W. Jefferson’s article, “Tristram Shandy and the Tradition of Learned Wit” (1951), 225–48. 12. Tristram does seem to subscribe to Bulwer’s contention that “brutes” too are amenable to “good nature, gentleness, and sweet converse” (Bulwer 18). 13. Besides the famous reference in chapter 5 of Northanger Abbey – “’Oh! It is only a novel! . . . It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda” – there are several reminiscences of Cecilia in Austen’s juvenilia, including the masquerade scene in “Jack & Alice,” which clearly burlesques that in Cecilia, and the importunate coachman in “The Beautifull Cassandra,” who recalls the one at the end of Cecilia. I am tempted also to consider the hilarious lament in “Jack & Alice” (“Oh! Cruel Charles to wound the hearts and legs of all the fair” (MW 22) as a parody of a passage in Cecilia. After a carriage accident, “the inimitable Miss Larolles” (P 189) exclaims, “I’ve been so squeezed you’ve no notion. I thought for a full hour I had broke both my arms.” “And my heart at the same time,” said Mr. Gosport; “I hope you did not imagine that the least fragile of the three?” “All our hearts, give me leave to add,” said Captain Aresby . . . (7.9.592–3).

180 Notes and References

7

Body Language Censored: Camilla

1. See Margaret Anne Doody on the two rules in courtship that are “totally at odds.” Frances Burney: the Life in the Works, pp. 230–2. 2. Doody, as above; and Julia Epstein, The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women’s Writing, p. 131 ff. 3. See Rambler 97, for Tuesday 19 February 1751. Jane Austen provides a satirical note on Richardson’s maxim (her only footnote in her six novels) at chapter 3 of Northanger Abbey.

8

Epilogue: And On to Jane Austen

1. I draw here on some of the material in my essay on “Reading Body Language: A Game of Skill,” in Persuasions. 2. See Judith Fisher, “All the ‘Wright’ Moves: or, Theatrical Gesture in Sense and Sensibility”. 3. “Fra Lippo Lippi,” in Men and Women, 1855.

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Index Addison, Joseph Spectator, 42–3 Allen, Dennis W., 40 Alter, Robert, 36 animal spirits, 2, 31–2, 161 Aristotle, xii, 27, 70, 75 Physiognomonica, xv, 44–6, 48 Armstrong, John, 5 Art of Preserving Health, 5 Asimov, Isaac, 175 astonishment, 169–70 Atwood, Margaret Blind Assassin, xvi Austen, Henry, 58 Austen, James, 58 The Loiterer, 58 Austen, Jane, x, 162–74 Love and Freindship, 9, 82, 168–9 Sense and Sensibility, 10, 162 theatrical gesture in, 169–70 Pride and Prejudice, 22, 151, 168, 171 on physiognomy, 58–9 “Jack and Alice,” 59, 179 Northanger Abbey, 59, 151, 179, 180 Sanditon, 165 Emma, 165, 166–7, 168 inheritance from eighteenth century, 166–74 theatrical devices, 168–70 Persuasion, 169 body language in, 172–3 characters reading bodies, 171–3 Mansfield Park, 170 Persuasion, 172 Austin, Gilbert, 69, 96, 107, 121, 173, 178 Avicenna, 4 beauty, 64–7, 149–51, 152–3 Beaumont, Leprince de, 177 “Beauty and the Beast,” 66 Bergson, Henri, 134 Bevington, David, 179

blistering, 6 blood, 3, 5–7, 12, 17 blood-letting, 5–6, 16, 35 blushing and pallor, 96, 109, 171–2 body/mind relation, x ff., 1–5, 51 in medical theory, 1–24 adopted by novelists, 10–24 in Tristram Shandy, 25–41 Boswell, James, 17, 176 Brady, Frank, 176 Bromley, Eliza Nugent, 82; see Laura and Augustus Brontë, Charlotte, 58–9, 66, 168 Jane Eyre, 60, 149 Villette, 149 Shirley, 162–3 Brooke, Frances Emily Montague, xiii, 167 Brooke, Henry The Fool of Quality, 57–8 Browne, Sir Thomas Religio Medici, 42, 45, 58, 59, 68 Browning, Robert, “Fra Lippo Lippi,” 174, 180 Bulwer, John, 74, 102, 104, 138 Chironomia, Chirologia, 70–1, 78, 102, 119–20 dictionary of manual gestures, 122–4 Bunyan, John, 8 Pilgrim’s Progress, 8 Burckhardt, Sigurd, 35 Burne-Jones, Edward, 101 Burne-Jones, Georgiana, 101 Burney, Frances, xi, 25 Camilla, xvi, 22, 23, 66, 97, 131 body–mind connection in, 148 ff. on beauty, 149–53 “picture of youth,” 151–2 voluntary/involuntary gestures, 154–61 duel in gestures, 155–9 gesturebabble, 161–4 189

190 Index Burney, Frances – continued Cecilia, 10, 20, 23, 97, 98, 146–7, 153 Cecilia as heroine, 166–7, 173 Austen’s references to, 179 Evelina, 22, 23, 82, 97 The Wanderer, 22, 23, 97 “female difficulties,” 22–3 on mind/body, 97 on gesture, 146–7 Diary, 162 Burton, Robert Anatomy of Melancholy, 10, 31–3, 36 Burton, John, M.D., 11, 35 Cash, Arthur, 38, 176 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de Don Quixote, 137 Charles II, 6 characterization, 10, 22 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 66, 131 Cheyne, George, 3, 5, 23 The English Malady, 5, 11, 17, 22–3 Letters, 8, 16–18 and Richardson, 16–19 Cicero, 105, 178 Tusculan Disputations, 42, 49 Clark, Karen, xvii Conrad, Joseph, 147 contempt, 155–7 Copeland, Edward, xvii cupping, 7 Dandré-Bardon, Michel-François, 76 Darwin, Charles Expression of the Emotions, xv, 46, 71, 156 Day, Robert Adams, 175 Day, W.G., 176 Deferrari, Roy J., 36 Defoe, Daniel, xiii della Porta, Gianbattista De Humana Physiognomonia, 46–7, 61, 63 Delsarte, François, 104 Demosthenes, 126, 179 Descartes, René, xii, 55–6, 82, 104, 139–40 Passions of the Soul, 1–3, 5, 34, 55, 71, 73–4, 76

Dickens, Charles, xi, 6, 61, 168 Old Curiosity Shop, 10 Little Dorrit, 10 Great Expectations, 10 Our Mutual Friend, 56 “Hunted Down,” 59 disease, 10, 20, 48 Doane, Ann, 53 Donne, John, 30, 96–7 Doody, Margaret Anne, 153, 165, 177, 180 Drake, James, 11 drama and the novel, xvi dropsy, 7 Eaves, T.C. Duncan, 178 Edwards, Steve, 74–5 Ehlers, Leigh A., 176, 177 Eliot, George, xii, 66, 71–2, 136 Adam Bede, 59, 101 Daniel Deronda, 59 Middlemarch, 149 Elliotson, John, 177 Ellis, Havelock, 136 Engel, Johann Jacob, 104, 129 epistolary novel, 21, 112 Epstein, Julia, 153, 165, 176, 180 Etheredge, George Man of Mode, 125 evacuation, 5–7, 11, 14–17, 21 eyes, x, 49, 59, 105–6, 131, 172–3 facial expression, xiv–xvi, 69–101 pathognomy/physiognomy, 69–70 Descartes’ Passions, 72 Le Brun’s A Method . . . , 73–8 passion and action, 73 ff. Hogarth and passions, 76–8 Garrick and passions, 76–80 novelists’ renderings, 80–101 novelists’ use of Hogarth, 81–4 “pictures” in novels, 91–6 Farrell, William J., 179 Faurot, Ruth Marie, 177 Félibien des Avaux, André, 74 Fenwick, Eliza Secresy, 97, 98–100 Ferriar, John, 176

Index Fielding, Henry, xiv, 45, 52, 81 Shamela, 3 Joseph Andrews, 4, 27, 48, 68, 131, 168 Tom Jones, 25, 52, 65, 84–8, 90, 92, 98, 131 on physiognomy, 48–51 “Essay on . . . Characters,” 48–9 Amelia, 48–9, 60, 81, 99 Champion, 50 and Hogarth, 50–1, 83–8, 92 Fielding, Sarah Adventures of David Simple, 64–5, 90 The Governess, 99 Fisher, Judith, 180 Fluchère, Henri, 176 Flynn, Carol H., xvii, 175 Foote, Samuel, 78 Freud, Sigmund, xi, 136 Frey, Siegfried, 45 Frye, Northrop, 32, 38 Galen, xii, 4 Gall, Franz Josef, 57, 72 Garrick, David, xi, xii, xvi, 2, 121, 135, 147 depicted as Richard III, 76–8 rendering passions, 77–8, 81 and West’s painting, 79–80, 104 and novelists, 82–3 and actions, 127–8 gesture, xvi, 30, 121–47 voluntary and involuntary, 105, 124, 154 ff., 160 authorities on, 121–30 actions, 124–9 particular to nation, class, 129–30 novelists and actions, 130 ff. Smollett, 133–6 Lennox, 136–8 Sterne, 138–46 Burney, 146–7 gender discrimination in, 155, 164–5 Gibson, Mel, 84 Gilpin, William, xii Goldsmith, Oliver Vicar of Wakefield, 126 Goodden, Angelica, 126, 178, 179

191

Graham, John, 52, 56 groupe, 91, 92–3 Grundy, Isobel, xvii Hardy, Thomas, 152 Harvey, William, xii, 2, 3, 4, 40, 175 Hervey, John, Lord, 6 Hilarion, St, 36 Hill, Aaron Essay on . . . Acting, 124–5 Hippocrates, xii, 1, 4 history painting, 74–6, 101 Hoadley, Benjamin Suspicious Husband, 82 hobby-horse, 11 Hogarth, William, xv, 26, 57, 81, 147 Analysis of Beauty, 50–1, 76, 88–9 and Fielding, 50–1, 84–8 “Garrick . . . Richard III,” 76–8 and novelists, 81–90 Harlot’s Progress, 84–8 Rake’s Progress, 82 “Characters and Caricaturas,” 83 and Sterne, 88–90, 176 Home, Henry (Lord Kames), 104 Elements of Criticism, 102, 107, 120 Hooke, Robert, 175 Inchbald, Elizabeth A Simple Story, 132 James, Henry, 136 Jefferson, D.W., 179 Jerome, St, 36 Johnson, Mark, xi Johnson, Samuel, 6, 17, 176 Dictionary, 6 Jones, Roger, 179 Jonson, Ben, 128 Josipovici, Gabriel, 29 Jung, C.G., xi Juvenal, 49–51, 60 Kames, Lord (Henry Home), 104, 121 Elements of Criticism, 102, 107, 120, 124, 133, 178 Keats, John, 28 Kelly, Gary, xvii Kimple, Ben D., 178

192 Index King, Lester S., 6, 175 kneeling, 107–9 Korte, Barbara Body Language in Literature, xi–xiv lactation, 21–2, 90–1 La Mettrie, Julien Offrey de L’homme machine, 5 Landa, Louis, 38, 176 language as evacuation, 21–3 language of the body, 70 ff., 78, 102–4 Laura and Augustus, 9, 90–1 Lavater, Johann Caspar, xii, 2, 46, 52, 61, 70, 102 Essays on Physiognomy, xiv, xv, 52–7 illustrations in, 53–6 gender in, 62–5 self-portrait in, 53–4 Lawrence, D.H., 67 Le Brun (Lebrun), Charles, x, xv, 2, 82, 91, 95, 101 A Method . . . to Design the Passions, 46, 73–7, 116–20, 136 Leech, Charles, 7 Lennox, Charlotte Female Quixote, 90, 131 gesture in, 136–8 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 73 Locke, John, 28 Essay . . . Human Understanding, 32–3, 176 Louis XIV, 74 Lynch, Deirdre, 78, 126, 178 Lyon, Albert S., 175 Magrath, Jane, xvii Mackenzie, James, 4–5, 11 History of Health, 4–5 machine, body as, 2–3, 5–6, 13 Manningham, Richard, 35 McAllister, John, 179 McKenzie, Alan T., 177, 178, 179 McMaster, Rowland, xvii Mead, Richard, 5, 6, 7, 11, 35, 175

medical model of the body, xiv, 1–24 Descartes’ machine, 1–5 skin, 3 evacuation, 6–12 moral purgation in novels, 10–11 Sterne, 11–12, 21 Smollett, 13–16 Richardson and Cheyne, 16–21 language as purgation, 21–4 Burney, 22–3 Menippean satire, 32, 38 Milton, John Paradise Lost, 31 Montagu, Jennifer, 74 Montaigne, Michel de, 70 More, Hannah Strictures on Female Education, 163–4 Morris, Desmond Bodytalk, 44, 67 Myer, Valerie Grosvenor, 31 O’Farrell, Mary Ann Telling Complexions, xi, 100, 172 Opie, Iona and Peter, 177 Overstreet, Paul, 179 painting and the novel, xv, 83–96 Park, William, 16 Parsons, James, 50 Human Physiognomy, 46–8, 99, 139, 156–7 Partridge, Eric, 176 passions, 5, 20, 74–6 horror, 76–8, 116–17, 128 compassion, 79 fear, 79, 133–4 anger, 113–14 astonishment, 136–7, 169–70 passions, representation of, x–xi, 5, 72–81, 101 pathognomy, x, 46, 69–70, 102 Penny, Nicholas, 179 Pfeiffer, Michele, 84 phlebotomy, 5–6 physiognomy, x, xv, 42–68, 102, 150 language of the face, 42, 59–60 Socrates anecdote, 42–3, 46, 48, 58, 60, 81

Index eighteenth-century debate on, 42–52 man/animal analogy, 46–7, 63 and pathognomy, 46 Fielding on, 48–9 Lavater’s Essays, 52–7 and phrenology, 57 novelists’ use of, 59 ff. gender discrimination in, 62–7 phrenology, 57 plethora, 5–6, 14, 20 Pollack, Andrew, 67 Pope, Alexander, 151 Porter, Dorothy, 3, 6 Porter, Roy, 3 Bodies Politic, 5–6, 8, 10, 175 professionalization of the arts, xvi, 73–6, 80, 104–5, 122, 126 purging, 6–8, 10 Quintilian, xii Radcliffe, Ann Mysteries of Udolpho, 58, 90 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 75 Discourses, 78–9 Richardson, Jonathan, 179 Richardson, Samuel, x–xii, 8 Clarissa, x, xv, 25, 80 and medical practice, 19–21 mind/body correspondence in, 61–2, 65, 67 reading bodies in, 102–20 gestures, voluntary and involuntary, 105 Clarissa’s legibility, 109–12, 120 Lovelace’s illegibility, 104, 107, 112, 114 ff., 120 kneeling in, 107–9 Lovelace as director, 115–20 use of Le Brun, 116–19 Pamela, 10, 17, 61, 65, 99 and George Cheyne, 16–19 characterization, 17–18 Sir Charles Grandison, 18–19, 21, 25, 65, 102 and physiognomy, 51 and painting, 93–6, 125 language of gesture, 102

193

Pamela II, 65, 131 physiognomy in, 51–2 Rambler essay on courtship, 158–9, 179 Ricks, Christopher, 175 Roach, Joseph R., xii, xiv, 78, 126, 178 Rowlandson, Thomas, 93–4 Schlitz, Don, 179 Scott, Sir Walter, 61 Scudéry, Madame de, 136 Sena, John F., 175 Shakespeare, William, 103, 121 Tempest, 45 Hamlet, 45, 52 Macbeth, 60, 154 Henry VIII, 170 Sheridan, Richard B. The Rivals, 60 The Critic, 128–9 Shookman, Ellis, 52 Showalter, Elaine The Female Malady, 22 Siddons, Henry, x, 104, 121 Rhetorical Gesture, 104, 105–6, 128, 157 Siddons, Sarah, x, 79, 82–3,129 Siegrist, Christoph, Curiosities of Common Water, 73 sigh, 105 skin, 3–4 Smith, John, 35 Smollett, Tobias, xi, xv, 13, 25, 52 Humphry Clinker, 4, 10, 14–15, 21, 92–3, 134–6 Roderick Random, 6, 13–14, 133–4 Ferdinand Count Fathom, 13, 91, 99, 131 comic vision, 13, 133–4 and Hogarth, 84–6 Peregrine Pickle, 86, 134 Sir Launcelot Greaves, 86–8, 134 and painting, 91–3 and gesture, 133–6 Socrates, 42–3, 48–9, 58, 60, 81 spleen, 12, 21, 27 Steele, Richard The Tatler, 64–5

194 Index Stephanson, Ray, xvii, 39–40 Sterne, Laurence, xv, 1, 14, 56 Tristram Shandy, xi, xv, 1, 10–12, 15, 21, 138 body/mind connection, 25–41, 44 homunculus/egg, 26, 38–9 body parts, 26–7 hot chestnut, 27–9 hobby-horse, 36–7 gender in, 38–40 and Anatomy of Melancholy, 32–3 and Hogarth, 88–90 gesture in, 138–44 Sentimental Journey, 4, 12, 56, 138 gesture in, 144–6 comic vision, 27–9 Stovel, Bruce, xvii Swift, Jonathan, 14 Gulliver’s Travels, 4, 6, 15, 132 Tale of a Tub, 4 tears, 9–10, 99–100, 103, 111–12, 117–18 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 8–9, 21, 99 Thackeray, William Makepeace, Pendennis, 100–1 English Humourists, 147 Thorson, James L., 175, 176

Tillyard, E.M.W., 31 Traugott, John, 176 Trollope, Anthony, 149 Twain, Mark, Huckleberry Finn, 41, 60 Tytler, Graeme, 177, 179 venting, 7, 11 Virgil, 151 Watson, Bruce, xvii Webster’s dictionary, 131 West, Benjamin “Death of General Wolfe,” 79–80, 104, 110 Williams, John, 74, 175 Wilson, John M., 76, 178 Wiseman, Richard, 6 Chirurgical Treatises, 6 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 42–3 Wrongs of Woman, 21 Wolfe, General James , 79–80 Woolf, Virginia, 26 Wrigley, Richard, 178 Zelle, Carsten, 45 Zoist, The, 177 Zopyrus, 42–3, 49, 58, 60, 81