Baillie’s Diagnostic Sublime

ABSTRACT

This essay argues that Joanna Baillie adopts a medical framework for dramatic spectatorship because she found the “medical gaze” a surprising way to solve some problems in theories of sympathy and social concern. After situating Baillie’s “Introductory Discourse” within eighteenth-century arguments about natural sociability, the essay reads her aesthetic theory alongside another text of 1798, Alexander Crichton’s Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Mental Derangement, to show what medical classification and diagnosis seemed to offer her account of the social mind.

ORCID

John Savarese http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6770-1413

Notes

1 The phrase “operating theater” is James Allard’s. He uses it to acknowledge Baillie’s embeddedness in medical culture, even as he shifts the focus to Baillie’s more metaphorical emphasis on the embodied nature of spectatorship (54). For an introduction to Baillie’s medical contexts see Burwick and Richardson. On the specific context of medical exhibitions and displays, see Dwyer.

2 Those popular assertions were associated respectively with Samuel Johnson’s prefaces to Shakespeare (62) and Joseph Addison’s Spectator papers on “The Ballad of Chevy Chase.”

3 Matthew Smith has similarly referred to Baillie’s aesthetic philosophy as a “vision … of discipline in extremis” (original emphasis 28).

4 On Romantic writers’ dissatisfaction with the idea of an autonomous or isolated mind, see Yousef.

5 On the ways this pre-conscious or physiological account of mind-detection revises Romantic accounts of sympathy, see Richardson 133–34.

6 The analogy between children’s early abilities and scientific methods has resurfaced in studies of cognitive development, notably in Alison Gopnik’s notion of the “child as scientist,” which, like Baillie’s theory, emphasizes surprising sophistication of the mind even in early life.

7 For an overview of affect studies and romanticism see Favret. On the passions as “transsubjective entities,” see Pinch 19. On the transsubjective passions in Baillie, see Murray.

8 Baillie does think that we take other people’s perspectives, but for the opposite reason: rather than knowing them by imagining ourselves in their shoes, she argues that knowledge of other people lets us imagine “what we ourselves might have been” in different circumstances (“Introductory Discourse” 74). We do not know others by relating them to ourselves, but rather “in examining others we know ourselves” (74). For a discussion of Baillie’s mediated account of self-knowledge and its scientific contexts, see Richardson 134–35. For the argument that Baillie anticipates cognitive approaches to social intelligence, see Bergen.