Law and Morality in the Sentimental Novel(Tohoku Review of English Literature)

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  • Law and Morality in the Sentimental Novel

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The aim of this paper is to analyze some eighteenth-century literary and theoretical texts in an attempt to clarify the relation between morality and law. I pay attention to this problem because a principle expected to guarantee social unity ought to have a coercive power of law, and, as we shall see below, both moral philosophers and sentimental novelists considered the complicated relationship between the spontaneity of moral sentiment and the formal or impersonal power of law. The texts analyzed in what follows are Francis Hutcheson's Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, and Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling. Firstly, I briefly look at a jurisprudential argument of Hutcheson, which subordinates the legitimacy of laws to moral judgment. What we witness in his argument is a consistent endeavor to found the justice of laws on the basis of morality. Next, I proceed to examine Richardson's Clarissa in terms of the opposition between moral and legal judgments. Although Richardson thematizes the antagonistic relation between morality and law, he never describes their relation as a simple opposition. In Richardson's novel, their relation is described as a very complex and contradictory one, in which they are mutually exclusive and supportive at the same time. Finally, I discuss Mackenzie's novel, in which the opposition between moral judgments and the formal power of law emerges as sheer incompatibility. In each of these texts, the theme of the opposition between morality and law assumes various forms, but the central issue is the same. These writers' texts thus reveal the difficulty inherent in the leading project of eighteenth-century British thought and literature-the project of finding a governing principle of civil society in individual moral sense.

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