The Need for a Language for the Passions

Abstract

The ability of discursive language to communicate the passions begins to be questioned in the early eighteenth century. Are words “a dead Carkass,” lacking life, soul, and essence, “like quicksand,” an easily shifting, yielding mass engulfing and entrapping meaning? Some eighteenth-century philosophers thought that, with its gradual secularization, poetic language had become emasculated and weak, bereft of its ability to express and incite the passions. Conversely, literary critics such as John Dennis theorized that “never any one, while he was wrapt with Enthusiasm or ordinary Passion, wanted either Words or Harmony.”¹ A growing ambivalence over the ability of words to relate effectively one’s passions, and hence one’s subjectivity, develops over the eighteenth century, with some believing that literature too blithely elicits passions from readers and others contending that language has lost its efficacy. The purpose of this study is to explore how three authors—Aaron Hill, Eliza Haywood, and Martha Fowke, making up the nucleus of the London literary group, the Hillarian circle, from 1720 to 1724—attempt to develop a language for the passions that clearly conveys the deepest felt emotions. In essence, these three authors endeavor to transcend human separateness and bind one soul to another through words.

Our Discourse is imperfect, unless it carry with it the marks of the Motions of our Will: It resembles our Mind (whose Image it ought to bear) no more than a dead Carkass resembles a living Body.

—Bernard Lamy, The Art of Speaking

[W]ords give way, like quicksand, beneath too weighty a pile of building.

—Aaron Hill to Martha Fowke