The cult of sensibility in the eighteenth century celebrates delicate emotional responses. Such susceptibility to emotion, however, has to rely on somatic representations such as sighs, tears, convulsion, and faints. So, paradoxically, interiority is known to others only by outer bodily signs, signs that could just as easily reflect an affectation of sensibility as sensibility proper. The attempt to control the slippage in the reference between interiority and appearance becomes an anxious cultural feature of eighteenth-century men and, especially, women, of the higher classes. If sensibility requires such careful control and practice, its assumed spontaneity becomes a fiction. The performing body of sensibility turns into a screen that veils one¡¦s true interiority rather than a transparent reflection of it. The performing body is theatricalized¡X placed on the stage as a spectacle, examined by spectators. Sensibility falls prey to insincere, artificial, and affected performances. Emotional representations are constantly facing inroads of theatricality. When emotional expressions are rendered formulaic and reproducible, they lose their naturalness. Moreover, sensibility requires witnesses, spectators who can vouch for its authenticity (but never validate it beyond all doubt). Sensibility cannot proclaim itself because such proclamation would violate sensibility¡¦s principle of sheer sincerity and spontaneity. Theatricality, as an abstracted concept of theater, points both to the formulaic performances and to the model of spectator and spectacle in the theater. Sensibility is closely related to theatricality in these terms. This thesis aims to reveal the dynamics of the interplay between theatricality and sensibility in two eighteenth-century British novels. Both novels present a young heroine making her debut in the world after spending her formative years in seclusion with a male guardian. The Introduction reviews the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility. Chapter One discusses the theoretical and contextual relations between theatricality and sensibility. Chapter Two deals with Charlotte Lennox¡¦s novel The Female Quixote (1752), and how the heroine¡¦s sensibility is ridiculed as a form of self-theatricalization. Lennox gives the clash between sensibility and ridicule a generic dimension by blaming romance for the heroine¡¦s delusions. Chapter Three examines Frances Burney¡¦s epistolary novel Evelina (1778) and argues that the heroine¡¦s sensibility is both sealed and revealed in Burney¡¦s epistolary form since it enables Evelina to switch between being both spectator and spectacle. The conclusion briefly sums up the previous chapters and points out how, more generally, interpretations of literature can benefit from a recognition of the dynamics of theatricality and sensibility.

This dissertation focuses on mid-eighteenth-century British periodicals and their claims to educate middle-ranked women in natural philosophy, modern history, and vernacular literature. I argue that articles published in female-penned periodicals are comparable to articles in male-penned periodicals and therefore allowed women to pursue an informal education through reading. I propose that female periodicals also illustrate how women formed counterpublics of learning through correspondence that rivaled the conversations that took place in the male-dominated public spheres, such as in coffee houses and meeting halls. As formal classical education was reserved for elite men, women learned through reading books and periodicals, and through conversation. Given the cost of books, periodicals became the main source for informal learning for middle-ranked women. I call attention to the periodical form that allowed women to complete feasibly short lessons between their daily domestic duties and amusements. Female-penned periodicals encouraged women to diversify their interests by deploying literary depictions of the moral pitfalls of women’s focus on the beautification of the body. Driven by the financial and social rise of the merchant class, middling-ranked women with small dowries sought to gain advantage in the marriage market by distinguishing themselves as suitable wives for merchant or even gentry husbands. Periodicals thus made an economic as well as a moral case for their single female readers to balance fashionable amusements with intellectual pursuits. By examining not only how mid-century female-penned periodicals defined themselves in relation to male-penned periodicals but also the impact of broader changes in formalized education, my thesis uncovers an important and under-discussed aspect of the rise of the middling ranks in eighteenth-century Britain. I show how female-penned periodicals encouraged women's involvement in discussions about the development of the modern disciplines of education. My thesis is organized chronologically and follows the work of three notable periodical editors and authors with chapters on Eliza Haywood's The Female Spectator (1744-46), Frances Brooke's The Old Maid (1755-56), and Charlotte Lennox's The Lady's Museum (1760-61). The purpose of my thesis is not only to chart the changes in representations of women's learning over time, but also to reveal how Haywood, Brooke, and Lennox propose that women share their proto-disciplinary knowledge beyond their counterpublics in order to encourage intellectual discussions between like-minded males and females in the public spheres.