Romantic Sensibility :: Romantic Period

In life as well as literature, some sought to display their sensibility by weeping and fainting and color and reacting extravagantly to scenes of poverty or illness. Sensibility was understood as a capacity intimately connected with the physical nature of nerves. Essential to its existence was its cognitive process on the body as well as the mind. Thus a propensity to blush and weep might be taken as evidence that the weepers, full of sensibility, loved their neighbours as themselves. (Spacks 141)During the wild-eyed period, the Sensibility movement began as a result, the conduct of private affections, charity, education, sympathy, genius, honour, and even the use of reasonbecame political statements (Jones 13). Romantic Sensibility essentially moralized the enactment of sensitivity towards others (Spacks 127), arguing that empathetically-based relationships bring individuals together to form a unified, respectful, and moral social sphere. Key characteristics of the movements lit erary adaptation admit anti-rationalism, a focus on emotional response and somatized reactions (tears, swoons, deathly pallor), a prevailing mood of melancholy, fragmentation of form, and set-piece scenes of virtue in distress (Manning 81). The relationship amid the novel of Romantic Sensibility and the Gothic novel is worth further academic inquiry as, similar to the genre of the Gothic, there is often a movement in novels of Romantic Sensibility to play with excess and arousal (with all the connotations of uncontrollable sexual excitation implied) (Manning 90).