Sensibility, Sincerity, and Self-Interest in Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde

This essay argues that Charlotte Smith’s little studied novel, “Ethelinde,” presents sensibility in a way which complicates the opposition between virtuous and corrupt femininity. In this text, Smith breaks down the association of sincerity of feeling with virtue by showing how authentic emotions could be managed for self-interested purposes. Sensibility in “Ethelinde,” therefore, exceeds the logic of sentimentality. I historicize this self-interested function of feeling in relation to the work of Gillian Skinner and Harriet Guest, who argue that the emergence of political economy inflected discourses of feminine feeling with the language of commerce. At the same time, I demonstrate that Smith’s
mobilization of sensibility represents a proto-feminist intervention into the
patriarchal order, participating in the ideological agenda that Diane Hoeveler
has identified in women’s gothic literature. Smith’s presentation of feeling as
a possible mode of agency for women is, however, deeply conflicted, and I
suggest this might be due to the author’s real-life battles with patriarchal law.
In order to theorize the ambiguous status of sensibility in the text, I engage
with Arlie Hoschild’s twentieth-century theory of emotion, which allows an
articulation feeling in terms that move beyond the familiar constructions of
feminine virtue and vice.