Performance, Embodiment, and Nervous Sympathy in Maria Edgeworth's Harrington

In eighteenth-century moral philosophy sympathy underwrites sociality by ascribing authentic reality to others. Critics have discussed how this can, however, backfire misleading reason. It might also intensify into invasive obsession. What remains understudied, though, is sympathy's physiological dimension. Physicians in the period posit a form of nervous communication that operates intra- and intersubjectively, bypassing consciousness and--problematically--moral will. Maria Edgeworth's novel Harrington (1817) brings these different forms productive conflict. Her story reformed anti-Semite turns on modes imagination (or affect) fail align with emotion. Hence, affects such as anxiety disgust generate (and haunt) love desire. Sensibility becomes "morbid": instead resolving questions identity reality, excessive, embodied feeling sponsors play simulation woven together at level anatomy.