This dissertation argues that the nineteenth-century construction of “emotional susceptibility” turned a much-derided quirk of psychology—the long retention of one’s earliest affective impressions—into a basis for radical interventions into thinking about attachment, ethics, and the Victorian novel. I focus in particular on the work of Henry Mackenzie, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy—writers who depicted and sometimes reconceived the lived experience of susceptibility, a rigorously other-oriented disposition defined by a tendency to form intense and durable ties. The dissertation positions their fiction within a charged cultural debate about sympathy and demonstrates that susceptibility presented a strong conceptual alternative to that normative code of feeling, not only for nineteenth-century Britons but also for scholars today. Examining the formal and conceptual rethinking of this disposition across the century, from experimentation with susceptible narrators to applications for intractable social inequities and emergent anxieties around Darwinism, I establish susceptibility as a central axis of the Victorian imagination and an abiding preoccupation of the period’s major intellectual novelists. My study identifies an underexamined strain of character in nineteenth-century fiction and shows how writers mobilized it as a generative source of literary invention and ethical analysis.

Creator

• Cogswell, Clay

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-8cdj-8s74

Subject

• English literature

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15641
• etdadmin_upload_832383

Keyword

• Ethics
• Impressibility
• Susceptibility
• Affect

Date created

• 2021-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright