Fashionable feelings
I spent most of my 20s teaching myself how to take pleasure in reading 18th century novels, so every now and then I try to read another one to stay in practice. So recently I started in on Camilla; or, a Picture of Youth, a behemoth of a novel by Fanny Burney, originally published in five volumes in 1796. My Oxford World's Classics edition comes in at a brick-like 957 pages of vanishingly small type. As I work my way through, the spine keeps cracking further, and it spills tiny chunks of dried glue from the desiccated binding all over my lap every time I sit down with it.
I've had the copy I'm reading since I was a teenager, when I bought it in a used book store in New Hope, Pennsylvania, because its existence totally startled me. In high school I was an overeager achiever in my English classes and operated under the arrogant assumption that I had at least knew about all the important "classics." Yet here was a massive tome that I had never heard of, and it had even found its way to the New Hope bookstore, which ordinarily didn't have much of a selection. I took Camilla as a kind of affront — I need to read this so I can pretend I knew about it all along!
Though I bought the book with the intention of conquering it, I never even got around to starting it. Instead it ended up traveling with me from home to home, through college and afterward, serving eventually as a reminder of my questionable motives, the clumsy mix of ambition and myopia that's driven me over the years. That lingering perception of Camilla's obscurity, and that feeling of being intimidated by its length, eventually pushed me toward studying 18th century novels in graduate school, though by that time I had also discovered the even longer and even less approachable works of Samuel Richardson.
I thought that studying extremely long and repellantly dull novels would testify to my unusual fortitude, and offer me terrain to try to redeem with my ingenious readings the seemingly unredeemable — even J.M.S. Tompkins, who wrote The Popular Novel in England 1770–1800, declared books like Camilla "tenth-rate." But mainly I wanted to be different. I thought reading books no one else reads would mark me as original and unique. Yet I would then become disappointed when I'd discover, after slogging through them, that there was no one with whom I could to talk to about them. In reading Camilla now, and writing about it to no one in particular, I'm not sure if I'm indulging or exorcising those sorts of isolating impulses.
The way I learned to enjoy books like Camilla was to project my own learning process backward in time and assume that 18th century readers themselves had to teach themselves how to enjoy reading novels, which were more or less a new entertainment experience then. These novels are at least as alien to me as novels in general would have been to 18th century audiences. But those audiences were new to consumerism as a whole, and I think that probably colored their entire experience of novels, which were among the first widely distributed consumer goods — some of the earliest branded objects that you could buy to specifically give yourself pleasure. (No wonder they were mocked or condemned at the time as being masturbatory.)
But it's a mistake, I think, to assume that the stories in novels were inherently pleasurable and merely awaited the printing press and the means of distribution to become ubiquitous. (Similarly, there's no reason to assume any consumer good is inherently desirable and taps into pre-existing desire.) Readers had to learn how to enjoy these stories, learn to surrender themselves to feelings inspired by lifeless print — feelings that might have seem contrived, fake, even reprehensible in their detachment from "real" sociality. So the novels had to teach readers how to read them and take pleasure in them; I just need to be alert for the way that instruction was encoded. In novels like Burney's, it's usually a matter of taking note of when a character is described as weeping. Such cues are like the laugh track in sitcoms.
Novels taught people how to feel on demand. They sharpened the ability to experience emotions vicariously, and to regard such pleasure not as secondhand and degraded but as a "sensibility" that one could cultivate in its own right and impress people with. Novels helped impart the valuable skill of being able to respond emotionally and appropriately to consumer goods, which ultimately translated into "taste"—cultural capital. You put yourself in a position to teach others how to feel the right things.
But novels were also understood as inherently antisocial, isolating, a way to reject the company of others in preference for the company of figments who were not really there. Novels were sort of like phones in that way.
I can't help but feel that long, long books like Camilla are fundamentally about being alone — or more precisely about wanting to be left alone while yet being afraid of being lonely. They seem designed to keep readers company for a long, lonely time. Camilla's interminable length speaks of unbroken periods of lassitude and solitude, an imposed tedium that the novel's narrative appears to anticipate — it is absorbed into its mode of dilated suspense, its moral themes of reticence and patience and frustrated avenues of emotional communication.
The plot of Camilla appears negligible — Camilla and Edgar love each other and socially suited for each other but can't express their love to each other for fear of determining the other's choice and foreclosing on the possibility of knowing whether the other "really" loved them. So they spend five volumes oscillating back and forth between "s/he really loves me" and "s/he is totally indifferent to me," all the while studiously avoiding showing any form of public preference for anyone. The problem is succinctly encapsulated at the end of Book II, when Edgar's tutor Dr, Marchmont tells him that he is too eligible and Camilla too powerless in the world to be capable of ever directly expressing "real feelings" for him. How could he ever tell that she wasn't being coerced by her family or tempted by his estate? For women in particular, any form of public expression is held as inherently suspicious.
Tompkins would probably assess Camilla's protracted story as padding designed mainly to fill more volumes and earn more money for the publishers. But I think the fussing over "real feelings" and how to express them is not merely a matter of extending the page count but is also directly related to the novel's status as an on-demand feelings generator. Camilla deploys all sorts of narrative strategies to elicit specific emotional responses, but readers must learn not only to decode the cues but to express their responses properly — in a way that isn't as contrived as the novel itself. Burney seems extremely preoccupied with how one could read others' behavior for signs of their true feelings, which becomes conflated with the question of how to read the book itself, and the overriding issue of whether there is any difference between the two kinds of reading.
Many 18th century "sensibility" novels are about the ramifications of this dilemma — how to be responsive and make one's responsiveness come across as genuine even though one is merely responding to the way the text is programmed to extract certain emotions. Once there are emotion-generating commodities and status attached to exhibiting those emotions, the status of natural, unsolicited emotions becomes extremely confused. They become hard to isolate; they seem to disappear because one starts to look for them. One is always subject to the suspicion that one is faking a fashionable feeling, but at the same time, "artless" feelings that are only accidentally in line with what's fashionable are not to one's credit either. Are true feelings the ones that are instigated against our will, or the ones we have chosen, or the ones we have prepared ourselves to feel? Can you "really" feel something that is to your social and economic advantage to simulate?
So much of Camilla is given over to this question of controlling how one expresses emotion so that one doesn't betray one's hopes or designs. Total disavowal of all ambitions and intentions was the ideal, especially again for women. Camilla's father writes her a note in which he tells her to never reveal her feelings for Edgar through any sort of observable behavior, but also to "discriminate, nevertheless, between hypocrisy and discretion." How? It's not clear when deliberately hiding your feelings becomes tantamount to lying about them, or when performing tranquility becomes a deception and not a exercise of politeness. It demands living with a fractured consciousness, a stranger to oneself. "To appear natural," her father concedes, "is, however, an effort too difficult to be long sustained."
Etiquette apparently dictated that no one had the right to impose their emotions on anyone and that sociality ideally should unfold as an even, unruffled surface — a long, dreary expanse of predictability and propriety. In Camilla, it's represented as a harmonious condition, but experiencing it vicariously, alone with a book in your hand for hours at a time, it seems like a lonely enough place.
On the surface, the concern for emotional propriety seems like it's about preserving people's reputations, but in effect it more clears the space for consumer goods to be affective, and for the emotions they produce to have currency. We've inherited a similar concern with how to express one's "true" feelings without compromising them with strategic designs, in the form of a preoccupation with "authenticity." We know we can be made to feel things, that we can elect for experiences with a fair certainty of how they will make us respond. But we pretend social interaction can't unfold this way, through calculated performances using crystallized feelings as props. We like to think we are perfectly legible to others without ever having been composed.