‘His Mind moving on no other Axis but that of Love’: The Power of Narrative and Caring Strategies in Sarah Fielding’s David Simple (1744) and Volume the Last (1753)

Abstract

The pervasiveness of the sentimental ideology in eighteenth-century in Britain has been extensively documented and analysed. On the surface level, sentimentalism dealt with human feelings and their excesses. On a deeper level, it stemmed from complex philosophical and moral theories that voiced serious criticism of the developing capitalist society of the time. Literature – the novelistic tradition of sensibility in particular – was one of the mediums through which the dissatisfaction with a consumerist form of society was either implicitly or explicitly expressed. Relying on the notion of care as an ethical category, this thesis attempts to show how Sarah Fielding’s novels of sentiment promote alternative bonds of sociality and solidarity as a response to the rapidly changing economic scene that was transforming the eighteenth-century notions of sociability. The purpose of this work is to highlight the anti-capitalist, care-centred, utopian impulse of the texts here analysed and to show the manner in which these fictional spaces shed light on the potential dangers of living in a world ruled by money. The initial chapter of this work will present a general overview of the sentimental vogue in English society and literature of the eighteenth century. The focus will then shift from the general socio-cultural context to sentimental fiction and novel writing, particularly their subversive potential in the context of British commercial capitalism. The concepts of 'care ethics' and ‘radical imagination’ will be employed to highlight how refusing to imagine human existence as essentially competitive and profit-driven is a revolutionary exercise in imagination that characterises Sarah Fielding’s sentimental work The Adventures of David Simple (1744) and its sequel David Simple, Volume the Last (1753). Finally, the dynamics that underlie the dissolution of the utopian communitarian project in Volume the Last are examined by stressing the notion of vulnerability implicit in the caring spaces the novel envisions.