An Individual of Feeling: Emotion, Gender, and Subjectivity in Historical Perspectives on Sensibility

This chapter explores the intricacies of analyzing emotions as historical and cultural phenomena. Focusing on gendered assumptions that conflate emotions with women and the private, the chapter examines the contradictions between scholarly views of a wide-spread, public sensibility movement (in politics, economics, philosophy, aesthetics) and a more specific cult of sensibility associated with novels, a female readership and a separate domestic sphere. It argues that sensibility was pivotal to the development of Enlightenment emotional as well as rational subjectivity. Approaching emotions as complex cultural and historical formations clarifies how an individual of feeling was central to the emergence of the modern subject.