Sensibility and suffering in Rhys and Nin

Andrew Gibson

pp. 184-211

in: Andrew Hadfield, Dominic Rainsford, Tim Woods (eds), The ethics in literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999

Abstract

This chapter will partly contend that it is time for a revival of the concept of sensibility in literary theory and criticism, and that the concept itself is of ethical importance. The term is a richly suggestive one. On the one hand, in its philosophical sense, from Kant onwards, it designates the power or faculty of feeling, the capacity of sensation and emotion together as distinguished from cognition and will. But from the early eighteenth century onwards it also meant quickness or acuteness in apprehension or feeling; a particularly keen susceptibility to emotional influence. It indicated, not merely a capacity for emotion, but a specific kind or quality of emotional capacity. In the later eighteenth century, of course, this sense of the term engenders another that is familiar in English literature from Sterne to Austen: sensibility as what Mackenzie refers to, in The Man of Feeling, as "the soft sense of the mind" and regards as feminine or feminising.¹ This is sensibility as a capacity, in particular, for refined or delicate emotion, crucially including compassion for suffering. Taken together, these three senses of the word lend it a peculiar power, point and effectiveness at the present time. An elaborated theory of sensibility, for instance, might question, perhaps even serve to limit what always threatens to prove to be a hegemony of cognitive assumptions and values in literary theory and criticism.

Cited authors

Kant Immanuel