Remaking Romantic Love in Maria Edgeworth’s 'Belinda'

Joseph Morrissey

doi:10.1080/10848770.2020.1836765

Remaking Romantic Love in Maria Edgeworth’s 'Belinda'

Joseph Morrissey

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

262 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

The emphasis on the unique self in the Romantic period resulted in representations of romantic love as an aspect of psychological depth. However, in Maria Edgeworth’s novel, Belinda (1901), love is represented as a function of visceral sensation and at best as automatic rather than reflective psychological processes. To some degree, Edgeworth was influenced by the scientific culture of her time in viewing love as a product of the external, observable world rather than of the interior mind. More surprisingly, perhaps, Edgeworth considers love as a function of high society, thus breaking down symptomatic associations of love and domesticity. In Belinda, love is a product of both the logical scientific method and the questionable morality characteristic of fashionable sociability. Standing partially outside the Romantic emphasis on psychological depth and the empirical insistence on rationality, Edgeworth theorises a love that questions the foundational concepts of subject/object and feeling/reason through which love has been understood from the Romantic era to the present day.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	170-187
Number of pages	18
Journal	The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms
Volume	26
Issue number	2
Early online date	30 Nov 2020
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2020.1836765
Publication status	Published - 2021

Bibliographical note

This is an Accepted Manuscript version of the following article, accepted for publication in [JOURNAL]. Morrissey, J 2021, 'Remaking Romantic Love in Maria Edgeworth’s 'Belinda'', The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 170-187.

It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Keywords

Belinda
Maria Edgeworth
Romantic
love
nineteenth-century literature

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Cultural Studies
History
Philosophy

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10.1080/10848770.2020.1836765

Post-PrintAccepted author manuscript, 1.3 MBLicence: CC BY-NC

Cite this

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title = "Remaking Romantic Love in Maria Edgeworth{\textquoteright}s 'Belinda'",

abstract = "The emphasis on the unique self in the Romantic period resulted in representations of romantic love as an aspect of psychological depth. However, in Maria Edgeworth{\textquoteright}s novel, Belinda (1901), love is represented as a function of visceral sensation and at best as automatic rather than reflective psychological processes. To some degree, Edgeworth was influenced by the scientific culture of her time in viewing love as a product of the external, observable world rather than of the interior mind. More surprisingly, perhaps, Edgeworth considers love as a function of high society, thus breaking down symptomatic associations of love and domesticity. In Belinda, love is a product of both the logical scientific method and the questionable morality characteristic of fashionable sociability. Standing partially outside the Romantic emphasis on psychological depth and the empirical insistence on rationality, Edgeworth theorises a love that questions the foundational concepts of subject/object and feeling/reason through which love has been understood from the Romantic era to the present day.",

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Remaking Romantic Love in Maria Edgeworth’s 'Belinda'

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

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