The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy : Modernity and the Art of Ordinary Suffering

"The "rise of the middle class" in the eighteenth century has long been taken to usher in a prosaic age synonymous with the death of tragedy, an age in which the sheer ordinariness of bourgeois life was both antithetical and inured to the tragic. But the period's literature tells a very different story. Re-assembling a body of print and performance concerned with the misfortunes of the middling sort, The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy argues that these works imagined a particularly modern sort of affliction, an "ordinary suffering" proper to ordinary life, divested of the sorts of meanings, rhetorics, and affective resonances once deployed to understand it. Whereas neoclassical aesthetics aligned tragedy with the heroic and the admirable, this "bourgeois and domestic tragedy" treated the pain of common people with dignity and seriousness, meditating upon a suffering that was homely, familiar, entangled in the nascent values of capitalism, yet no less haunted by God. Hence, where many have seen aesthetic stagnation, misfiring emotion, and the absence of an idealized tragicness in the genre, this volume sees instead a sustained engagement in the emotional processes and representational techniques through which the middle rank feels its way into modernity. By attending closely to this long neglected subject, The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy turns the critical account of eighteenth-century tragedy on its head. It reads the genre's emergence in the period as a vigorous cultural conversation on whose life-and whose way of life-is grievable, as well as how mourning might be performed"-- Provided by publisher This book assembles a body of print and performance concerned with the misfortunes of the middling sort, arguing that these works negotiated tragedy’s vexed relationship to ordinary life. This “bourgeois and domestic tragedy” imagined a particularly modern sort of affliction, an “ordinary suffering” divested of the sorts of meanings, rhetorics, and affective resonances once deployed to understand it. Whereas neoclassical aesthetics aligned tragedy with the heroic and the admirable, bourgeois tragedy treated the pain of common people with dignity and seriousness, meditating upon a suffering that was homely, familiar, realistic, and entangled in the nascent values of capitalism, yet no less haunted by God. Hence, where many have seen aesthetic stagnation, misfiring emotion, and the absence of an idealized tragic__ness__ in the genre, this book tracks instead a sustained engagement in the emotional processes and representational techniques through which the middle rank feels its way into modernity. Describing this shift as an episode in the histories of both tragedy and emotion, it revises the standard critical account of eighteenth-century tragedy and reads the genre’s emergence in the period as a vigorous cultural conversation over whose life—and whose way of life—is grievable, as well as how that mourning might be performed. Cover 1 The Making of British Bourgeois Tragedy: Modernity and the Art of Ordinary Suffering 4 Copyright 5 dedication 6 Acknowledgments 8 Contents 10 List of Illustrations 12 An Introduction to Bourgeois Tragedy: Or, “Silently and Smoothly Thro’ the World” 14 1: The Bourgeois Revaluation of Tragedy: Dignity and the Ordinary in George Lillo’s London 42 2: Close to Home: The Uncanny of Georgian Domestic Tragedy 81 3: A Fine Subject for Tragedy: Providence, Poetic Justice, and Clarissa’s Real Affliction 118 4: Prosaic Suffering: Edward Moore, Diderot, and the Natural Picture of Drama 152 5: Tragic Sensibilities: Sentimental Fiction and the Serious Genre 185 Conclusion: Modern Tragedy and Ordinary Suffering 223 Bibliography 240 Index 262 A study of eighteenth-century dramatic and narrative tragedies that explores the relation between personal misfortune and the emerging values that would define the everyday experience of the middle class. The volume discusses the work of George Lillo, Samuel Richardson, Aaron Hill, and Sarah Fielding, among others.