In Making Love: Sentiment and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century
British Literature, Paul Kelleher revises the history of sexuality
from the vantage point of the literary history of sentimentalism.
Kelleher demonstrates how eighteenth-century British philosophers,
essayists, and novelists fundamentally reconceived the relations
among sentiment, sexuality, and moral virtue. It is his contention
that sentimental discourse, both philosophical and literary,
posited heterosexual desire as the precondition of moral feeling
and conduct. The author further suggests that sentimental writers
fashioned the ideal of conjugal love as an ideological antidote to
the theories of self-love and self-interest found in the works of
Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Mandeville. Heterosexual desire and its
culmination in conjugal love, in other words, were represented as
the privileged means for an individual to transcend self-love and
to develop a moral sensibility attuned to the thoughts and feelings
of others. At the same time, Kelleher suggests, other pleasures and
desires-particularly those rooted in same-sex eroticism-were
increasingly depicted as antithetical to conjugal love and, thus,
were morally devalued and socially disenfranchised. Kelleher's
argument unfolds through close readings of a variety of texts,
including Shaftesbury's Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions,
Times, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's the Tatler and the
Spectator, Eliza Haywood's Love in Excess, Samuel Richardson's
Pamela, and Henry Fielding's Tom Jones. Although these texts embody
diverse rhetorical strategies and thematic concerns, he shows how
they collectively reinforce an overarching sentimental ideology: on
the one hand, heterosexual desire and conjugal love become
synonymous with sympathy, benevolence, and moral goodness, while on
the other hand, same-sex desire is pathologized as a selfish
withdrawal from procreation, domesticity, sociability, and
ultimately, "humanity" itself.
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