Download Laura J. Rosenthal (University of Maryland, USA) Mandeville, Smith

Laura J. Rosenthal (University of Maryland, USA)
Mandeville, Smith, and Sentimental Drama
In the eighteenth century, Mandeville was attacked for both his economic theory and for his
assault on conventional morality, a dichotomy that has continued to shape Mandeville criticism.
Yet, Adam Smith addresses Mandeville most extensively not in his Wealth of Nations, but in his
Theory of Moral Sentiments, which not only responds through philosophy rather than economics,
but also departs from the reliance on Christian scruples found in the period’s most visible antiMandeville moralists. In this paper, I will discuss Smith’s analysis of Mandeville as way to gain
insight into the kind of challenge Mandeville posed. Smith, who frequently turns to the theater
for examples of moral sentiments, responded to The Fable of the Bees through recourse to
sympathy at the same moment that a new kind of sentimental drama was flourishing in the
theater. E.J. Hundert was right, I believe, to note that Mandeville created such a stir because he
identified a new social and economic mode that was distinctly modern and that had not been
fully accounted for yet by moralists or economists. Certain practices once considered sinful, such
as usury, had now become the foundation of a new economy. From an economic or even a moral
perspective, then, Mandeville’s argument was profoundly disturbing and difficult to dismiss.
Perhaps because of this, sentimentalism, rather than moral or economic analyses, became the
response that may have gained the most traction in the long term and that attracted audiences to
the theater. Sentimentalism became popular in the theater well before it made its way into
fiction and philosophy. To be sure, we cannot credit Mandeville with inspiring 18th-century
sentimental drama. But sentimentalism, I will suggest, rose at least in part in response to the
kinds of contradictions that Mandeville identified. (Thus, prominent sentimental plays tell
economic stories, commonly exploring global trade, business, and gambling.) Mandeville
presents a world devoid of sentiment in the same moment that playwrights were remaking the
literary landscape by rejecting the harsh cynicism of Restoration drama and drawing crowds
through the exploration and inspiration of emotions. For Mandeville, feelings remain grounded
in physiology, a view that makes possible his radical stance on prostitution as a commercial
exchange little different from any other. The true scandal of his solution to the problem of
sexual irregularity in his Modest Defense of Publick Stews (1724) may have been less the
acceptance of sexual activity outside of marriage than his representation of sentimental
attachment as potentially irrelevant to sexual relations, a possibility that sentimental drama
seems designed to refute. Debuting only two years before the initial publication of the Modest
Defense, Richard Steele’s blockbuster sentimental comedy, The Conscious Lovers, hinges on
whether Bevil Junior’s financial support of Indiana implies prostitution, charity, or restrained
romantic passion. Respecting Indiana’s sexual virtue would have satisfied moral demands, but
in itself would not have satisfied audiences. Sentimentalism itself, as Ann Jessie Van Sant has
discussed, had strong roots in bodily response, and certainly much attention to sentimentalism
and sensibility concentrated on physical reactions to particular kinds of stimulation, including
those that were unfiltered and outside of the framework of moral choice. The most interesting
responses to the Mandevillian challenge, I believe, hinge on the distinction between an
understanding of sentimentalism and sensibility as essentially visceral, or alternatively as a set of
responses that can be shaped, cultivated and controlled. Within Steele’s Conscious Lovers and
Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, both models appear. In order to demonstrate the potential
transition from visceral responses to moral sentiments, Smith turns to the theater as a model,
which was nevertheless itself continually haunted by Mandevillian possibilities.