Nerve Theory and Sensibility: ‘Delicacy’ in the Work of Fanny Burney

Abstract

Fusing literary studies with the history of medicine and the history of ideas, from the late 1960s George Rousseau, John Mullan, John Dussinger and others have sought to emphasise the importance of nerve theory in providing a physiological underpinning to the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility. Trawling the treatises of eighteenth-century physicians, they documented a category known as 'nervous distempers', what we might today call 'psychosomatic illness'. Through the late twentieth century, the results of these surveys were applied to novels of sensibility, providing a new lens for the exploration of Samuel Richardson's, Laurence Sterne's and William Godwin's characterisation. This article suggests that the same methodology is useful in illuminating the novels of the writer, Fanny Burney (1752-1840). It explores Burney's assimilation of nerve theory, with particular attention to the nervous constitutions she attributes to male and female characters in her novels. Weak or delicate nerves are shown to be characterised by Burney as both a hindrance and a help and as operating differently between the genders. It is argued that Burney uses nerve theory in a sophisticated way, linking her characters' medical constitutions with their social behaviour by use of the word 'delicate'. It is shown that in Burney's work, characters with 'delicate' nerves are more at risk of disorders commonly regarded in the eighteenth century as nervous, such as fainting and apoplexies, but are also those most likely to exhibit a benevolent generosity to others. It is concluded that Burney uses delicate nerves as a marker for non-gender-specific intellectualism and sensitivity.