Ogawa Kimiyo

This essay aims to examine the relationship between erroneous judgments and the function of sensibility observed in the medical discourse of the late eighteenth century, and to see how it affected Jane Austen's ideas about "pride" and "self-complacency" in her Pride and Prejudice (1813). The novel can be read as a moralistic tale about a young woman who, in gaining new experience in the world, comes to see the virtue and vice of other characters, but it can also be interpreted as a philosophical inquiry into the human mind. Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine, is endowed with a keen perception and acute sensibility which allow her to detect the slightest feelings and intent of others, but the novel also exposes the vulnerability of a feeling woman. Her emotional reaction (such as anger) to events that take place around her frequently blinds her to the truth, and consequently gives rise to erroneous judgments. According to Coleridge, "a man whose moral feelings, reason, understanding, and sense are perfectly sane and vigorous, may yet have been mad." Perhaps sharing the same concern about the unstable and unpredictable nature of the mind, Austen explores the possibility of a "perfectly sane" person having delusions or errors of "fancy" in an ordinary setting. Mrs Bennet's ridiculous remarks about other characters best exemplify this theory. Thomas Arnold's theory of notional insanity and his concept of "fancy" in Observations on the Nature, Kinds, Causes, and Prevention of Insanity, Lunacy, or Madness (1782) is relevant in understanding Mrs Bennet's self-complacency and Jane Bennet's "error of fancy." While Arnold's theory about insanity is based on the Lockean theories of "idea" and "notion" which are more conceptual than corporeal, Alexander Crichton's theory of mind introduced in his An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Mental Derangement (1798) has a more corporeal basis which is also shared by the contemporary medical men such as Lavatar, Gall and Spurzheim. The new development of brain science and nerve theory suggested an embodied approach to human subjectivity. It is clear from Austen's frequent mention of "nerves" and "feelings" that she was under the influence of these medical discourses. In these medical texts, bodily sensibility increasingly takes over the functions of reason such as making judgment about the situations s/he encounters or perceiving truths.