"A certain innate taste for virtue": The paragon reader and the eighteenth-century British sentimental novel
Description
One of the most important literary conventions of the eighteenth century was the perception of a reading audience endowed with differing capacities to apprehend virtue. This hierarchy included reprobates as well as readers who needed only to reinforce a partially intact moral sense. Additionally, writers posited readers whose sensibilities already were completely perfected. Writers of sentimental novels often adopted techniques such as fragmented narratives to cater to this myriad of readers. Consequently, narrative hiatus, which often is seen merely as an attempt to represent emotion, became commonplace. An alternative interpretation is that narrative interruption was used to cater to the needs of the superior members of the reading hierarchy, who, it was believed, would welcome the abrogation of narrative in favor of the consideration of virtue it occasioned. By creating a subtext in Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, Samuel Richardson began a tradition using interruption of the narrative as a means of catering to superior readers. Subsequent novelists, having inherited from Richardson the supposition that the perfected reader should be taken into account, also attempted to manipulate their narratives, but their inept attempts to copy Richardson's techniques produced increasingly fragmented novels. These works remain important because they demonstrate the extent to which authors tried to cater to their superior readers. Henry Brooke's The Fool of Quality, which included inset stories designed to sway the minds of inferior readers, depended on a fragmented structure that allowed the discerning reader to abandon interest in the narrative's progress in favor of exploring a religious ecstasy. Similarly, Henry Mackenzie, using a secular agenda in The Man of Feeling, also attempted to abrogate his narrative. Eventually, the convention of the fragmented text was dismantled when Jane Austen concentrated on creating perfected fictional figures instead of attempting to cater to all members of the reading hierarchy. Consequently, Persuasion represents an important transition from the eighteenth-century authors' attempts to create text for the paragon reader and a step toward the nineteenth-century's fascination with the isolated, solipsistic experience of fictional figures who possessed a fully discerning sensibility