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The delicate sensibility required in civilized nations sometimes destroys the masculine firmness of character. -Adam Smith
Sei ein Mann und folge mir nicht nach [Be a man: do not follow me]. -J. W. von Goethe
In an essay on the culture (or "cult") of sensibility that flourished in Great Britain and Germany in the late eighteenth century, Leland Warren notes the prevalence of eighteenth-century assertions that women are naturally capable of a much greater degree of sensibility than men and concludes that the literary "tendency to endow women with superior sensibility was also a means of declaring them fragile, unsuited to positions of power" (32).1 While it is true that an individual's degree of "sensibility" was portrayed as inversely proportional to the suitability for traditional, "masculine" authority, it is not clear that women were the only political victims of this moral aesthetic that rewarded passivity and victimization. The "men of feeling" created by male novelists such as Laurence Sterne, Henry Mackenzie, and J. W. von Goethe prove equally "fragile" and "unsuited to positions of power." And while it is true that these characters (Yorick, Harley, and Werther) do not themselves long for positions of power, the surrounding characters and occasionally the authors themselves betray the wish that these men of feeling could assume more traditionally masculine roles and characteristics, including exhibiting self-discipline. The opposition, therefore, between the "man of feeling" and the "man of the world" provides an insight into sensibility's interesting ambivalence about traditional connections between masculinity and authority.
Sensibility's new masculine ideal, typified by the "man of feeling," renounces traditionally masculine roles such as those exemplified by the Roman citizen, orator, patriot, and patriarch. Instead, the new men of sensibility hover on the edge of illness, madness, impotence, inactivity, silence, and death and leave themselves open to the constant charge of "effeminacy"a charge leveled at them by some of their contemporary readers, both male and female. And yet, through their delicately refined sensibility and their never-waning sympathy for the undertrodden, the characters Yorick, Harley, and Werther satisfied the moral aesthetic of sensibility to such a degree that their immense popularity inspired young male imitators all over Europe. Whereas Nancy Armstrong, quoting Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, claims that "Unlike their male counterparts,...