PASTORAL AND “THE MAN OF FEELING”

Sentimental fiction's refusal to engage with the progressivism variously endorsed by contemporary writers such as Fielding and Richardson has consistently been read as the expression of a highly conventional set of gendered oppositions in which the Man of Feeling's passive effeminacy implicitly contrasts with the realist hero's confrontational masculinity. G. A. Starr thus argues that sentimental narrative substitutes for the Bildungsroman's emphasis on education and process a regressive or static protagonist, whose behavior his culture “associates with infancy or femininity, but not with masculine adulthood”. More recently, Michael McKeon has historicized this hero, suggesting that the Man of Feeling needs to be understood in terms of a double strategy: seventeenth-century aristocratic honor internalized in the early decades of the eighteenth as feminine virtue is in turn at mid-century claimed by the hero as a “distinctively male possession”. When this gendered reading is supplemented by one that invokes what are for Henry Mackenzie the complementary terms of genre, however, a more sceptical understanding of “feminine virtue” emerges. At key moments in The Man of Feeling, pastoral is used in ways that signal not the internalization, but rather the displacement of the feminine.

In The Man of Feeling, pastoral stands for the consolations of an exclusively male communion that can be discovered only by repressing awareness of present exigencies and focusing on the past. I will argue that these affiliations between pastoral, male communion, and the elite culture of the past prove to be crucial to the working out of the narrative reflexiveness that is so consistent a feature of sentimental literature.