“So Unlucky a Perspective”: The Critique of Moral Sentimentalism in The Man of Feeling
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Bahadir Eker
Abstract
Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) is commonly described as a typical sentimental novel, yet the work has many aspects that a straightforward sentimentalist interpretation cannot possibly account for. I argue in this paper that The Man of Feeling, far from being a straightforward sentimental novel, encapsulates a profound critique of both moral sentimentalism and the genre of sentimental fiction. This critical stance is established in the first instance, I claim, by the ironic distance to the sentimental material in the novel, which results from the complex, multilevel narrative structure, and is further reinforced by numerous satirical elements in the text. As I demonstrate, reading Mackenzie’s work as an antithesis of the sentimental novel that parodies the sentimentalist moral epistemology underlying this mode of fiction does a much better job at explaining several crucial aspects of the novel than the sentimentalist interpretation.
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“[T]he unfortunate decision to employ a fragmented, episodic plot” being among them (Burling 1988, 136–137). I shall argue that the complex, fragmentary narrative form of The Man of Feeling does indeed give rise to an ironic distance to the plot, but whether this constitutes an “artistic fault” on Mackenzie’s part, because it was not in keeping with his original intentions, is a question that I, unlike Burling, am not interested in and, accordingly, shall not try to answer.
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See Smith 1976 for an overview on the sentimentalist tradition in moral philosophy and D’Arms and Jacobson 2006 for recent sentimentalist theories.
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I call the fictional book edited by the Editor “The Man of Feeling,” in order to distinguish it from Mackenzie’s ‘actual’ novel The Man of Feeling.
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©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Articles
- “So Unlucky a Perspective”: The Critique of Moral Sentimentalism in The Man of Feeling
- Philip Larkin, Solitary Man: From Splendid Isolation to Remorse and Fear
- “To Make a History From This Kind of Material is Not Easy”: The Narrative Construction of Cultural History in Contemporary Fiction
- “Keep that Fan Mail Coming.” Ceremonial Storytelling and Audience Interaction in a US Soldier’s Milblog
- Book Reviews
- Shakespeare
- The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Volume Three
- Literature, Journalism, and the Vocabularies of Liberalism: Politics and Letters, 1886–1916
- The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945
- Modern American Poetry. Points of Access
- Rethinking the American City. An International Dialogue
- Books Received
- Books Received
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Articles
- “So Unlucky a Perspective”: The Critique of Moral Sentimentalism in The Man of Feeling
- Philip Larkin, Solitary Man: From Splendid Isolation to Remorse and Fear
- “To Make a History From This Kind of Material is Not Easy”: The Narrative Construction of Cultural History in Contemporary Fiction
- “Keep that Fan Mail Coming.” Ceremonial Storytelling and Audience Interaction in a US Soldier’s Milblog
- Book Reviews
- Shakespeare
- The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Volume Three
- Literature, Journalism, and the Vocabularies of Liberalism: Politics and Letters, 1886–1916
- The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945
- Modern American Poetry. Points of Access
- Rethinking the American City. An International Dialogue
- Books Received
- Books Received
