Wonderworks Chapter 11: Ward Off Heartbreak & Energize Your Life
Ward Off Heartbreak
Jane Austen, Henry Fielding, and the Invention of the Valentine Armor.
Jane Austen, at 21, met Tom Lefroy, a Trinity College graduate, at a Steventon market arcade.
They bonded over the comic novel Tom Jones.
Tom even dressed up like the hero from Tom Jones.
Austen was inspired to become a novelist.
Their romance ended after a few weeks.
Austen had a lightly ironic approach to love.
She found the "antidote to heartbreak" in her copy of Tom Jones.
The antidote was invented in Valladolid, Spain, by Miguel de Cervantes.
Don Quixote Sallies Forth
Cervantes drafted Don Quixote in 1604.
His purpose in writing the novel was to rid the world of the pain caused by literary romance.
Literary romance originated 24 centuries ago with Homer's Odyssey.
The Odyssey is a 12,000-line song about Odysseus outwitting gods, talking to the dead, and spending years with a nymph and a witch, ultimately returning home to his faithful wife.
Literary romances suggest our desires will be fulfilled.
This is achieved through the "Almighty Heart," which creates the feeling that the cosmos cares for our desires.
Our neurons feel inner yearnings are rooted in the outer laws of physics.
Literary romances were popular in ancient Greece and medieval Europe.
Examples include La Chanson de Roland, El Cantar de Mio Cid, Willehalm, Amadís de Gaula, Le Morte d'Arthur, and Orlando Furioso.
These stories are about knights, dragons, damsels, banquets, and treasures.
According to the transcript, this was all a disaster.
The disaster is chronicled in Don Quixote.
The novel's main character has spent his days imbibing literary romances.
He falls victim to the brain-altering machinery of the Almighty Heart.
The main character sees the world as a chivalric fantasyland where he is the second coming of El Cid.
He sets out to save damsels in his barrio La Mancha.
His reward is physical hurt: being chewed by lions, outmuscled by pilgrims, and thwacked by windmills, ending up bone bruised in ditch after ditch.
The readers are rescued by Cervantes's romance reengineer, which dismantles the Almighty Heart and replaces it with a very different narrative technology.
An example of Cervantes use of irony:
Imaginary fluff of romance: "No sooner had rosy-cheeked Apollo stretched the strands of his beautiful hair".
Actual truth: "And it was true that he was walking there".
The ironic style hoists us out of the don's earthly delusions, restoring our wits to God's-Eye sobriety.
Don Quixote was instantly popular and translated into many languages.
The book has sold a staggering half billion copies, becoming the second most popular book in history, behind only the Bible.
The book helped break the medieval spell of chivalry, enabling the methodological reason of René Descartes and Sir Isaac Newton.
A quote from Isaac Newton: "We moderns have endeavored to dismiss numinous forces and call back nature to mathematical law."
However, the world relapsed.
Descartes decided that wizardry was, in fact, a science: "The occult powers of sympathy and antipathy will be traced to mechanical causes.”
Newton forgot his calculus and joined the alchemists in their chase of the philosopher's stone: “This is the sphere of & the living gold.”
The madness of literary romance re-erupted, more violent than before.
The Madness Returns
The madness officially returned in November 1740 with Samuel Richardson's Pamela.
Took the private letters and journal entries of Pamela Andrews and stretched these personal revelations to an enormous 225,000 words.
Richardson novel was called a lyric of epic proportions.
Pamela expanded the Secret Discloser until it became an original form of Almighty Heart, engineering a potent new combination of intimate disclosure and wish fulfillment that convinced our gray matter that the whole world was a sonnet teeming with amorous prospects.
This romantic enthusiasm seemed cheerful and inspiring initially.
Soon, Pamela was breeding a new species of Don Quixote.
To these new Quixotes, every man was a dashing gallant; every woman, a would-be bride; every waking second, a summons to nuptial bliss.
The new Quixotes suffered a fate worse than the original.
The original had merely gotten broken of body, but the new Quixotes got broken of heart.
They dashed again and again into love-only to discover to their miserable shock that the world was not, in fact, filled with would-be spouses.
It was populated instead with carnal con artists, polite uninterest, and mismatched affections.
Over and over, the new Quixotes rushed into kissing too fast.
Over and over, they got dumped at the altar, their dreams ending in tears.
The pain-causing nonsense of Pamela had to be dosed away with healing medicine.
Henry Fielding, a literary doctor in London, possessed a restorative prescription.
The Doctor Gallops to the Rescue
Henry Fielding was a playwright, a newspaperman, and a father of ten.
Fielding was an avid reader of Don Quixote.
As a twenty-two-year-old playwright, he drafted the comedy Don Quixote in England.
When he turned later to writing novels, he inked the subtitle Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote.
When Fielding read Pamela, he at once diagnosed the problem: an excess of romance produced by epic-length intimate disclosure, leading to foolish sentimentality and broken-heartedness.
Fielding also had no doubt about the cure: irony.
Irony had saved the chivalry-addled readers of Don Quixote, and it could now do the same for Pamela's love-besotted readers.
In April 1741, Fielding published an ironic parody titled Shamela.
It wasn't nearly as popular as Pamela.
Its curative irony went largely unheeded by the literate masses, who continued to pervert their heads with further romance novels.
Samuel Richardson kept toiling over his romance technology, extending its blueprint and adding new circuitry.
Richardson emerged from his workshop with Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady in 1748.
Clarissa very nearly reached a million words, and all of it in private letters, aflood with personal revelations.
This was intimate disclosure on a more than epic scale.
This was the love poem colossus.
The reading public lost what remaining sense it had.
Smitten by the amorous fictions of Clarissa, legions of new Quixotes swooned across Europe.
Denis Diderot, co-inventor of the encyclopedia, rhapsodized that he would not part with the novel under any circumstance, even if his dear friends needed food or if his children needed schooling.
Fielding knew that he had to concoct a more effective prescription than the simple irony of Shamela.
He had to be more gallantly doctorly than ever before.
Fielding took up a pharmacological stylus and withdrew into his apothecary chambers.
In a feat of medical heroism, he wrote Tom Jones.
The Medicine of Tom Jones
Tom Jones, like Shamela, was a mock romance.
It was also a genuine romance, spinning the comically heartwarming tale of a young couple who, after tumbles and spills, eventually found their way to the chime of wedding bells.
Had he decided to give up his scruples and make a quick shilling?
Fielding constructed Tom Jones as a love story because he'd gotten smarter.
He'd realized why Shamela hadn't really worked: irony alone wasn't enough to doctor up the general public.
To be healthy of heart, the public needed more than unremitting fantasy debunkment.
It needed a little warmth, a little hope, a little joy.
It needed, in short, a little romance.
Two kinds of romance: Bad and Good.
Bad romance recklessly inebriated us with delusional hope.
Good romance raised our spirits without intoxicating them.
There was no precedent that existed on all the world's bookshelves, so in Tom Jones, Fielding boldly invented a new blueprint, alternating between Almighty Heart ("It is impossible to conceive a more tender or moving scene than the meeting between the uncle and nephew") and lightly satiric narration (“Jones went up to Blifil’s room, whom he found in a situation which moved his pity, though it would have raised a less amiable passion in many beholders”).
A mix of epic-length intimate disclosure and mock-epic irony, a back-and-forth between Pamela and Don Quixote, that elevated our heart while also restraining it.
Fielding's sentimental-ironic concoction was a great publishing success.
Tom Jones dramatically outperformed Shamela, becoming a best seller and earning a place in many of the world's most level-headed libraries.
Adam Smith turned its pages before crafting the materialist doctrine of The Wealth of Nations.
Thomas Jefferson dallied in its paragraphs before drafting the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence.
Edward Gibbon delighted at its droll amours before authoring his sagacious opus The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
The novel would be plucked off a shelf by another discerning reader.
That reader inhabited the greeny shire of Steventon, amid garden hedgehogs and dog rose blooms, about seventy miles southwest of London.
Her mother, Cassandra Leigh, was a wit who'd adventured to see an almost-royal uncle, Theophilus, in his master's office at Oxford University.
Her father, George Austen, was an Anglican rector whose sister, Philadelphia, had odysseyed to India in pursuit of a spouse.
She, herself, in April 1776, was carried as her parents' seventh child to the quiet parish church beside the oaks, where she was baptized with the common name of Jane.
Jane Austen Diagnoses Tom Jones
Jane Austen was deeply impressed by Tom Jones.
The novel was a literary breakthrough.
Its blueprint was ingenious-and it worked just as Henry Fielding had imagined, restraining romance without killing it off.
There was a further breakthrough to be made.
Tom Jones hadn't captured as vast an audience as Pamela and Clarissa.
To reach the full readership of Clarissa and give that readership a complete hospital treatment, a novel couldn't go half-and-half like Tom Jones.
Instead, every one of its pages would have to be entirely romantic and entirely ironic.
A novel could be a sonnet or a satire or it could do a Tom Jones and flip back and forth between.
It couldn't treat its readers to sentences that were simultaneously love stirring and disenchanting.
All it would take was a new/old kind of literary technology. Or rather, all it would take was an old kind of literary technology that had been known to Fielding and generations of earlier ironists but that possessed a secret potential they had failed to grasp.
Prior to Austen, this old technology was so disregarded that it didn't even have a formal name.
But in the years after Austen made the technology famous, that slight would be corrected and the long-neglected nuts and bolts would gain a portentous scholarly appellation: free indirect discourse.
Free Indirect Discourse
Free indirect discourse was invented almost two thousand years before Jane Austen.
The inventors were ancient satirists who wanted a literary mechanism for combining irony with self-disclosure.
Here's an early prototype from Horace's first satire, which wryly exposes Rome's golden age as less than golden.
Short passage contains three independent voices: the voice of the satirist, the voice of the soldier, and the voice of the trader.
In fact, all three voices are spoken by the satirist; he imitates the voices of the soldier and the trader, ventriloquizing them.
Since the satirist is always talking, and since the satirist is always ironic, every word of the passage is ironic.
The satirist parrots the inward emotions of the sailor and the soldier.
The passage also offers a glimpse into the hearts of two characters, mingling its constant irony with bursts of private sentiment.
As employed here by Horace, the technique is fairly crude.
At this stage in its development, it is not yet free indirect discourse; it's a precursor known as double voice.
Horace would refine the technique into full free indirect discourse in his later satires, and that refinement would enter English literature at its earliest morrow.
Geoffrey Chaucer's fourteenth-century story collection The Canterbury Tales.
The Canterbury Tales begins by introducing us to a procession of religious pilgrims.
One of whom is perhaps not quite so religious: A Monk there was, a mighty one, Who rode about and loved to hunt.
Like Horace's satires, this little couplet is imbued with irony.
Hunting is not, after all, on the list of approved activities for monks.
That list contains things such as prayer and manual labor and reading holy books, not keeping hawks and chasing red foxes and arrowing bucks.
Free indirect discourse: voice of the parroted character isn't formally marked off with punctuation.
the narrator dips freely in and out of the character's inner psychology, allowing Chaucer to give us a dash of the monk's interior sentiment while fully maintaining the narrator's ironic voice.
Constant irony prompts us to snicker at the monk's ridiculousness, while its pivot into self-disclosure stirs us with an affable warmth for the monk's ebullient disobedience.
Our brain feels wryly outside and emotionally inside the monk at the very same time.
Opens up a remarkable literary possibility: an ironic romance that inspires us to care about its characters.
A satiric love story that genuinely touches our heart.
So remarkable was this possibility that it never appears to have occurred to Horace or Chaucer.
Nor is there any sign that it occurred to the many other satirists who dabbled in free indirect discourse, on and off, for almost two thousand years.
But it did occur to Jane Austen.
Jane Austen Goes Free Indirect
In 1811 a new novel appeared.
It was published anonymously, its title page revealing only that it had been authored "by a Lady."
It sold slowly yet steadily; after two years, all 750 copies of its first print run had been purchased, so a second printing was ordered.
The novel was Sense and Sensibility.
Its secret author was Jane Austen.
Austen had begun drafting Sense and Sensibility in her late teens.
Back then, she'd copied the blueprint of Samuel Richardson's epistolary romances, constructing her novel as a sequence of fictional letters exchanged between the Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne.
When Sense and Sensibility finally appeared in bookstores, it didn't read like Pamela or Clarissa.
Like the satires of Horace and Chaucer, this passage uses free indirect discourse to mock a clueless character.
The clueless character here is Mr. John Dashwood, whose inner thoughts (marked in italics) reveal that he's a little too pleased with his own "generosity."
Austen became the first author to deploy free indirect discourse in a romance novel.
Quickly, she began to innovate further.
She gentled the free indirect discourse, making it feel less like a broad satiric caricature and more like a character's unique inner disclosures.
In 1816, five years after Sense and Sensibility, Austen published Emma.
The free indirect speech marked in italics is Emma Woodhouse's inner voice.
It's her consciousness, what's in her head.
It could be read by us, if we wanted, in a slightly melodramatic tone.
It's not comically absurd in the way that Mr. John Dashwood's inner feelings are.
In Emma, there are hundreds of these light pivots toward Emma's personal sentiments.
Our brain begins to experience something that literature had never made a brain feel before.
The Neuroscience of Austen's Novels
Prior to Jane Austen, no novels had drawn us into feeling irony and love at the same time.
The most they'd done was to alternate between ironic detachment and sentimental romance, like Tom Jones.
We're perfectly capable of experiencing irony and love simultaneously.
Irony and love exist in different parts of our brain.
Irony occurs in the perspective-taking circuitry of our outer cortex.
Love dwells in the inner emotion zones of our amygdala.
By focusing our cortex and our amygdala on different narrative objects, literature can inspire a neural mix of wry perspective and romantic feeling.
Austen's ironic narrator focuses our brain's perspective-taking circuitry on one narrative object: the novel's storyworld.
Her free indirect pivots focus our brain's emotion zones on a second narrative object: Emma.
The ironic focus on the storyworld precisely reverses the effect of the Almighty Heart.
Where the Almighty Heart lures our brain into feeling that the sky and the trees pulse with human sentiment, Austen's irony disenchants the world, reducing its laws of physics to Cartesian logic and Newtonian calculus.
The sentimental focus on a character, stirs our heart (or more precisely, our amygdala) with love for an individual.
The cortex-amygdala blend draws us into experiencing an intimate human connection alongside a wry detachment from the greater world.
It opens our heart to other people without duping us into mistaking our own desires for the laws of reality.
Gives us all the psychological benefits of love-joy, energy, enthusiasm for life-while protecting us from the heartbreak suffered by romantic Quixotes.
Helps us care-with care.
The free indirect style of Emma fosters a very different kind of love than Pamela does.
Richardson's love technology makes our brain feel that Pamela is an extension of our own feelings.
Austen's invention encourages our brain to recognize that Emma loves different things, in different ways, than we do.
Austen's stylistic fusion of intimate disclosure and ironic detachment inspires us to embrace other people while acknowledging that those people have their own distinct needs and desires.
Our neural circuitry is guided into loving others for who they are, not for what we want them to be.
Emma is a romantic Quixote; convinced that her own feelings echo the world's Almighty Heart; Emma spends most of the novel meddling in the love life of her friend Harriet Smith.
Emma manages to accept that Harriet desires the man that she herself does not.
Austen's style has helped us feel the same about Emma, caring for her even when she does things we never would.
Improves the health of our relationships, eliminating the friction and resentment that come from expecting our loved ones to be perfectly in sync with our own desires.
Carries us a step closer to true love.
Forgetting our self-involved fantasies to embrace a different heart?
Using the "Valentine Armor" Yourself
If you want more pure romance in your life, you can walk into almost any public library and find shelves full of Samuel Richardson's swoon-inducing offspring.
None is more legendarily potent than Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel Jane Eyre, which updates Richardson's technology in two dexterous ways.
First, it exchanges Pamela's fanciful catalogue of real-time letters for the more plausible fiction of a retrospective "autobiography."
Second, it does away with Richardson's efforts to restrain romance; where Richardson constructs Clarissa as a tragedy and ends Pamela with a God Voice sermon against desire, Brontë crafts a judgment-free conclusion that keeps our heart open in full.
Beneath these updates lies Richardson's original pulse-elevating blueprint: an epic-length self-disclosure.
So similar are Pamela and Jane Eyre that Brontë seems guilty at times of the most flagrant plagiarism.
Both novels contains similar plot devices: a female servant cares for her master's illegitimate child and a gypsy fortune-teller dispenses marriage advice.
You can also find Richardson's technology in a wealth of modern romance novels, from Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, to Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, to Nicole Krauss's The History of Love, to André Aciman's Call Me by Your Name.
Should you ever feel your days bereft of ardor, you can get them re-aflutter with an extended literary confessional.
Should you find yourself suffering from the opposite affliction-an overromanticizing of life that Don Quixotes your heart-you can find a remedy in Austen.
Read the opening line of Pride and Prejudice ("It is a truth universally acknowledged"), feeling the narrator's lightly wry tone.
Then keep that tone going, through all the inner self-disclosures of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, so that you care for their individual hearts while accepting that they inhabit an unsentimental world.
There are plenty of modern novels that use Austen's invention to inspire more sensible and more generous amours.
Try Ian McEwan's The Children's Act. Or The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. Or "Brokeback Mountain" by Annie Proulx.
Their free indirectness will help you be wiser in romance and kinder too.
The next time you dance with your own Tom Lefroy, you keep your heart safe-and help it love true.
Energize Your Life
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Modern Meta-Horror, and the Invention of the Stress Transformer.
Dr. Frankenstein wanted a way to quicken the pulse.
He
Ward Off Heartbreak
Jane Austen, Henry Fielding, and the Invention of the Valentine Armor.
Jane Austen, at 21, met Tom Lefroy, a charming and charismatic Trinity College graduate, at a Steventon market arcade. This initial encounter left a significant impression on Austen.
They bonded over the comic novel Tom Jones, finding common ground in its witty and insightful portrayal of human nature.
Tom even dressed up like the hero from Tom Jones, showcasing his playful and theatrical personality, which further attracted Austen.
Austen was inspired to become a novelist, fueled by her experiences and observations of the society around her, as well as her personal interactions.
Their romance ended after a few weeks due to social and financial constraints, a common occurrence in Austen's time.
Austen had a lightly ironic approach to love, which is reflected in her novels, where she often satirizes the romantic ideals of her era.
She found the "antidote to heartbreak" in her copy of Tom Jones, using the novel's realistic portrayal of love and relationships to cope with her own disappointment.
The antidote was invented in Valladolid, Spain, by Miguel de Cervantes.
Don Quixote Sallies Forth
Cervantes drafted Don Quixote in 1604, a time when literary romances were highly popular.
His purpose in writing the novel was to rid the world of the pain caused by literary romance, which he believed led to unrealistic expectations and disappointment.
Literary romance originated 24 centuries ago with Homer's Odyssey, a foundational work of Western literature that has influenced countless stories about adventure and love.
The Odyssey is a 12,000-line song about Odysseus outwitting gods, talking to the dead, and spending years with a nymph and a witch, ultimately returning home to his faithful wife, highlighting the epic scope and fantastical elements of early literary romances.
Literary romances suggest our desires will be fulfilled, creating a sense of hope and anticipation in readers.
This is achieved through the "Almighty Heart," which creates the feeling that the cosmos cares for our desires, suggesting a universe that is aligned with our personal wishes and dreams.
Our neurons feel inner yearnings are rooted in the outer laws of physics, blurring the lines between our emotions and the natural world.
Literary romances were popular in ancient Greece and medieval Europe, shaping the cultural and social values of these societies.
Examples include La Chanson de Roland, El Cantar de Mio Cid, Willehalm, Amadís de Gaula, Le Morte d'Arthur, and Orlando Furioso, all of which feature heroic characters, mythical creatures, and grand adventures.
These stories are about knights, dragons, damsels, banquets, and treasures, elements that captivated audiences and reinforced certain ideals about love, honor, and bravery.
According to the transcript, this was all a disaster, as these romances often led to disillusionment and unrealistic expectations.
The disaster is chronicled in Don Quixote, which satirizes the genre and exposes its flaws.
The novel's main character has spent his days imbibing literary romances, leading him to lose touch with reality.
He falls victim to the brain-altering machinery of the Almighty Heart, which warps his perception of the world.
The main character sees the world as a chivalric fantasyland where he is the second coming of El Cid, a famous Spanish hero.
He sets out to save damsels in his barrio La Mancha, driven by his distorted view of reality.
His reward is physical hurt: being chewed by lions, outmuscled by pilgrims, and thwacked by windmills, ending up bone bruised in ditch after ditch, illustrating the consequences of his delusions.
The readers are rescued by Cervantes's romance reengineer, which dismantles the Almighty Heart and replaces it with a very different narrative technology, offering a more realistic and balanced perspective on love and life.
An example of Cervantes use of irony:
Imaginary fluff of romance: "No sooner had rosy-cheeked Apollo stretched the strands of his beautiful hair".
Actual truth: "And it was true that he was walking there".
The ironic style hoists us out of the don's earthly delusions, restoring our wits to God's-Eye sobriety, allowing us to see the world as it truly is.
Don Quixote was instantly popular and translated into many languages, appealing to a wide audience.
The book has sold a staggering half billion copies, becoming the second most popular book in history, behind only the Bible, demonstrating its enduring appeal and influence.
The book helped break the medieval spell of chivalry, enabling the methodological reason of René Descartes and Sir Isaac Newton, paving the way for modern science and philosophy.
A quote from Isaac Newton: "We moderns have endeavored to dismiss numinous forces and call back nature to mathematical law."
However, the world relapsed, as romantic ideals continued to persist.
Descartes decided that wizardry was, in fact, a science: "The occult powers of sympathy and antipathy will be traced to mechanical causes.”
Newton forgot his calculus and joined the alchemists in their chase of the philosopher's stone: “This is the sphere of & the living gold.”
The madness of literary romance re-erupted, more violent than before, leading to even greater disillusionment and heartbreak.
The Madness Returns
The madness officially returned in November 1740 with Samuel Richardson's Pamela, a novel that celebrated sentimentalism and emotional excess.
Took the private letters and journal entries of Pamela Andrews and stretched these personal revelations to an enormous 225,000 words, creating an immersive and emotionally intense reading experience.
Richardson novel was called a lyric of epic proportions, highlighting its focus on personal feelings and experiences.
Pamela expanded the Secret Discloser until it became an original form of Almighty Heart, engineering a potent new combination of intimate disclosure and wish fulfillment that convinced our gray matter that the whole world was a sonnet teeming with amorous prospects, creating a sense that love and romance were everywhere.
This romantic enthusiasm seemed cheerful and inspiring initially, but it soon led to problems.
Soon, Pamela was breeding a new species of Don Quixote, individuals who were overly idealistic and prone to disappointment.
To these new Quixotes, every man was a dashing gallant; every woman, a would-be bride; every waking second, a summons to nuptial bliss, highlighting their unrealistic expectations of love and relationships.
The new Quixotes suffered a fate worse than the original, experiencing emotional pain and heartbreak.
The original had merely gotten broken of body, but the new Quixotes got broken of heart, highlighting the emotional toll of their romantic delusions.
They dashed again and again into love-only to discover to their miserable shock that the world was not, in fact, filled with would-be spouses, leading to repeated disappointment and disillusionment.
It was populated instead with carnal con artists, polite uninterest, and mismatched affections, illustrating the harsh realities of love and relationships.
Over and over, the new Quixotes rushed into kissing too fast, making impulsive decisions based on their romantic fantasies.
Over and over, they got dumped at the altar, their dreams ending in tears, highlighting the devastating consequences of their unrealistic expectations.
The pain-causing nonsense of Pamela had to be dosed away with healing medicine, requiring a more balanced and realistic approach to love and relationships.
Henry Fielding, a literary doctor in London, possessed a restorative prescription, offering a cure for the romantic madness.
The Doctor Gallops to the Rescue
Henry Fielding was a playwright, a newspaperman, and a father of ten, a multifaceted individual with a keen understanding of human nature.
Fielding was an avid reader of Don Quixote, which influenced his own writing and his views on romance.
As a twenty-two-year-old playwright, he drafted the comedy Don Quixote in England, showcasing his early interest in Cervantes's work.
When he turned later to writing novels, he inked the subtitle Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote, acknowledging the influence of Cervantes on his own style.
When Fielding read Pamela, he at once diagnosed the problem: an excess of romance produced by epic-length intimate disclosure, leading to foolish sentimentality and broken-heartedness, recognizing the dangers of unrealistic expectations.
Fielding also had no doubt about the cure: irony, which he believed could help people see the world more realistically.
Irony had saved the chivalry-addled readers of Don Quixote, and it could now do the same for Pamela's love-besotted readers, offering a way to counteract the harmful effects of romantic fantasies.
In April 1741, Fielding published an ironic parody titled Shamela, satirizing Pamela and its sentimentalism.
It wasn't nearly as popular as Pamela, failing to reach a wide audience.
Its curative irony went largely unheeded by the literate masses, who continued to pervert their heads with further romance novels, indicating the enduring appeal of romantic fantasies.
Samuel Richardson kept toiling over his romance technology, extending its blueprint and adding new circuitry, continuing to refine his sentimental approach.
Richardson emerged from his workshop with Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady in 1748, an even longer and more emotionally intense novel than Pamela.
Clarissa very nearly reached a million words, and all of it in private letters, aflood with personal revelations, creating an overwhelming sense of intimacy.
This was intimate disclosure on a more than epic scale, pushing the boundaries of sentimentalism.
This was the love poem colossus, an immense and all-encompassing exploration of love and emotion.
The reading public lost what remaining sense it had, succumbing to the novel's emotional power.
Smitten by the amorous fictions of Clarissa, legions of new Quixotes swooned across Europe, further spreading the romantic madness.
Denis Diderot, co-inventor of the encyclopedia, rhapsodized that he would not part with the novel under any circumstance, even if his dear friends needed food or if his children needed schooling, highlighting the novel's addictive quality.
Fielding knew that he had to concoct a more effective prescription than the simple irony of Shamela, requiring a more nuanced approach.
He had to be more gallantly doctorly than ever before, taking on the challenge with determination.
Fielding took up a pharmacological stylus and withdrew into his apothecary chambers, immersing himself in his writing.
In a feat of medical heroism, he wrote Tom Jones, creating a literary masterpiece that offered a cure for romantic madness.
The Medicine of Tom Jones
Tom Jones, like Shamela, was a mock romance, satirizing the conventions of the genre.
It was also a genuine romance, spinning the comically heartwarming tale of a young couple who, after tumbles and spills, eventually found their way to the chime of wedding bells, offering a more balanced and realistic portrayal of love.
Had he decided to give up his scruples and make a quick shilling? No, he had a higher purpose.
Fielding constructed Tom Jones as a love story because he'd gotten smarter, understanding the complexities of human emotion.
He'd realized why Shamela hadn't really worked: irony alone wasn't enough to doctor up the general public, requiring a more comprehensive approach.
To be healthy of heart, the public needed more than unremitting fantasy debunkment, needing a dose of warmth and hope.
It needed a little warmth, a little hope, a little joy, elements that were often missing in purely satirical works.
It needed, in short, a little romance, but of a different kind.
Two kinds of romance: Bad and Good, each with its own effects.
Bad romance recklessly inebriated us with delusional hope, leading to disappointment.
Good romance raised our spirits without intoxicating them, offering a more sustainable and fulfilling experience.
There was no precedent that existed on all the world's bookshelves, so in Tom Jones, Fielding boldly invented a new blueprint, alternating between Almighty Heart ("It is impossible to conceive a more tender or moving scene than the meeting between the uncle and nephew") and lightly satiric narration (“Jones went up to Blifil’s room, whom he found in a situation which moved his pity, though it would have raised a less amiable passion in many beholders”).
A mix of epic-length intimate disclosure and mock-epic irony, a back-and-forth between Pamela and Don Quixote, that elevated our heart while also restraining it, creating a balanced and realistic perspective.
Fielding's sentimental-ironic concoction was a great publishing success, appealing to a wide audience.
Tom Jones dramatically outperformed Shamela, becoming a best seller and earning a place in many of the world's most level-headed libraries, demonstrating its enduring appeal and influence.
Adam Smith turned its pages before crafting the materialist doctrine of The Wealth of Nations, finding inspiration in its realistic portrayal of human behavior.
Thomas Jefferson dallied in its paragraphs before drafting the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence, drawing on its themes of individual freedom and happiness.
Edward Gibbon delighted at its droll amours before authoring his sagacious opus The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, appreciating its wit and insight into human nature.
The novel would be plucked off a shelf by another discerning reader, a woman who would further refine its approach.
That reader inhabited the greeny shire of Steventon, amid garden hedgehogs and dog rose blooms, about seventy miles southwest of London, in a quiet and idyllic setting.
Her mother, Cassandra Leigh, was a wit who'd adventured to see an almost-royal uncle, Theophilus, in his master's office at Oxford University, a woman of intelligence and curiosity.
Her father, George Austen, was an Anglican rector whose sister, Philadelphia, had odysseyed to India in pursuit of a spouse, a family with a history of adventure and unconventional choices.
She, herself, in April 1776, was carried as her parents' seventh child to the quiet parish church beside the oaks, where she was baptized with the common name of Jane.
Jane Austen Diagnoses Tom Jones
Jane Austen was deeply impressed by Tom Jones, recognizing its literary merit and its innovative approach to romance.
The novel was a literary breakthrough, paving the way for future writers.
Its blueprint was ingenious-and it worked just as Henry Fielding had imagined, restraining romance without killing it off, offering a balanced and realistic perspective.
There was a further breakthrough to be made, a way to refine Fielding's approach and make it even more effective.
Tom Jones hadn't captured as vast an audience as Pamela and Clarissa, indicating that there was still room for improvement.
To reach the full readership of Clarissa and give that readership a complete hospital treatment, a novel couldn't go half-and-half like Tom Jones, needing a more consistent approach.
Instead, every one of its pages would have to be entirely romantic and entirely ironic, creating a unique and compelling reading experience.
A novel could be a sonnet or a satire or it could do a Tom Jones and flip back and forth between, but it couldn't achieve the same level of emotional depth.
It couldn't treat its readers to sentences that were simultaneously love stirring and disenchanting, requiring a more subtle and nuanced approach.
All it would take was a new/old kind of literary technology, a technique that had been used before but never fully realized.
Or rather, all it would take was an old kind of literary technology that had been known to Fielding and generations of earlier ironists but that possessed a secret potential they had failed to grasp, a hidden gem waiting to be discovered.
Prior to Austen, this old technology was so disregarded that it didn't even have a formal name, lacking the recognition it deserved.
But in the years after Austen made the technology famous, that slight would be corrected and the long-neglected nuts and bolts would gain a portentous scholarly appellation: free indirect discourse.
Free Indirect Discourse
Free indirect discourse was invented almost two thousand years before Jane Austen, originating in ancient times.
The inventors were ancient satirists who wanted a literary mechanism for combining irony with self-disclosure, seeking a way to express both critical distance and personal feeling.
Here's an early prototype from Horace's first satire, which wryly exposes Rome's golden age as less than golden, revealing the flaws and contradictions of society.
Short passage contains three independent voices: the voice of the satirist, the voice of the soldier, and the voice of the trader, creating a complex and multi-layered narrative.
In fact, all three voices are spoken by the satirist; he imitates the voices of the soldier and the trader, ventriloquizing them, showcasing his skill and versatility.
Since the satirist is always talking, and since the satirist is always ironic, every word of the passage is ironic, creating a sense of detachment and critical distance.
The satirist parrots the inward emotions of the sailor and the soldier, revealing their inner thoughts and feelings.
The passage also offers a glimpse into the hearts of two characters, mingling its constant irony with bursts of private sentiment, creating a unique and compelling effect.
As employed here by Horace, the technique is fairly crude, lacking the subtlety and nuance of later examples.
At this stage in its development, it is not yet free indirect discourse; it's a precursor known as double voice, a stepping stone to the more refined technique.
Horace would refine the technique into full free indirect discourse in his later satires, and that refinement would enter English literature at its earliest morrow, paving the way for future writers.
Geoffrey Chaucer's fourteenth-century story collection The Canterbury Tales, a foundational work of English literature.
The Canterbury Tales begins by introducing us to a procession of religious pilgrims, each with their own unique story and personality.
One of whom is perhaps not quite so religious: A Monk there was, a mighty one, Who rode about and loved to hunt, revealing the monk's worldly interests.
Like Horace's satires, this little couplet is imbued with irony, creating a sense of humor and critical distance.
Hunting is not, after all, on the list of approved activities for monks, highlighting the monk's deviation from religious norms.
That list contains things such as prayer and manual labor and reading holy books, not keeping hawks and chasing red foxes and arrowing bucks, emphasizing the contrast between the monk's behavior and his expected role.
Free indirect discourse: voice of the parroted character isn't formally marked off with punctuation, creating a seamless blend of voices.
the narrator dips freely in and out of the character's inner psychology, allowing Chaucer to give us a dash of the monk's interior sentiment while fully maintaining the narrator's ironic voice, creating a complex and nuanced portrayal.
Constant irony prompts us to snicker at the monk's ridiculousness, while its pivot into self-disclosure stirs us with an affable warmth for the monk's ebullient disobedience, creating a sense of empathy and understanding.
Our brain feels wryly outside and emotionally inside the monk at the very same time, creating a unique and compelling effect.
Opens up a remarkable literary possibility: an ironic romance that inspires us to care about its characters, a combination that had never been fully explored before.
A satiric love story that genuinely touches our heart, creating a lasting emotional impact.
So remarkable was this possibility that it never appears to have occurred to Horace or Chaucer, highlighting the missed potential of the technique.
Nor is there any sign that it occurred to the many other satirists who dabbled in free indirect discourse, on and off, for almost two thousand years, indicating the difficulty of fully realizing its potential.
But it did occur to Jane Austen, who recognized its hidden power and transformed it into a literary revolution.
Jane Austen Goes Free Indirect
In 1811 a new novel appeared, changing the course of literary history.
It was published anonymously, its title page revealing only that it had been authored "by a Lady.", adding to its mystique.
It sold slowly yet steadily; after two years, all 750 copies of its first print run had been purchased, so a second printing was ordered, indicating its growing popularity.
The novel was Sense and Sensibility, a masterpiece of English literature.
Its secret author was Jane Austen, a woman who would become one of the most beloved and respected novelists of all time.
Austen had begun drafting Sense and Sensibility in her late teens, showcasing her early talent and ambition.
Back then, she'd copied the blueprint of Samuel Richardson's epistolary romances, constructing her novel as a sequence of fictional letters exchanged between the Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne, following the conventions of the time.
When Sense and Sensibility finally appeared in bookstores, it didn't read like Pamela or Clarissa, offering a fresh and innovative approach to romance.
Like the satires of Horace and Chaucer, this passage uses free indirect discourse to mock a clueless character, creating a sense of humor and critical distance.
The clueless character here is Mr. John Dashwood, whose inner thoughts (marked in italics) reveal that he's a little too pleased with his own "generosity.", highlighting his self-deception.
Austen became the first author to deploy free indirect discourse in a romance novel, transforming the genre and paving the way for future writers.
Quickly, she began to innovate further, refining the technique and exploring its full potential.
She gentled the free indirect discourse, making it feel less like a broad satiric caricature and more like a character's unique inner disclosures, creating a more subtle and nuanced portrayal.
In 1816, five years after Sense and Sensibility, Austen published Emma, another masterpiece of English literature.
The free indirect speech marked in italics is Emma Woodhouse's inner voice, giving readers access to her thoughts and feelings.
It's her consciousness, what's in her head, allowing readers to understand her motivations and desires.
It could be read by us, if we wanted, in a slightly melodramatic tone, adding to the character's charm and complexity.
It's not comically absurd in the way that Mr. John Dashwood's inner feelings are, offering a more empathetic and nuanced portrayal.
In Emma, there are hundreds of these light pivots toward Emma's personal sentiments, creating a rich and immersive reading experience.
Our brain begins to experience something that literature had never made a brain feel before, a unique and transformative effect.
The Neuroscience of Austen's Novels
Prior to Jane Austen, no novels had drawn us into feeling irony and love at the same time, a groundbreaking achievement.
The most they'd done was to alternate between ironic detachment and sentimental romance, like Tom Jones, lacking the seamless integration of Austen's work.
We're perfectly capable of experiencing irony and love simultaneously, as these emotions exist in different parts of the brain.
Irony and love exist in different parts of our brain, highlighting the complexity of human emotion.
Irony occurs in the perspective-taking circuitry of our outer cortex, allowing us to see things from different angles.
Love dwells in the inner emotion zones of our amygdala, creating feelings of warmth and connection.
By focusing our cortex and our amygdala on different narrative objects, literature can inspire a neural mix of wry perspective and romantic feeling, creating a unique and transformative experience.
Austen's ironic narrator focuses our brain's perspective-taking circuitry on one narrative object: the novel's storyworld, allowing us to see the world critically.
Her free indirect pivots focus our brain's emotion zones on a second narrative object: Emma, drawing us into her inner world.
The ironic focus on the storyworld precisely reverses the effect of the Almighty Heart, offering a more realistic perspective.
Where the Almighty Heart lures our brain into feeling that the sky and the trees pulse with human sentiment, Austen's irony disenchants the world, reducing its laws of physics to Cartesian logic and Newtonian calculus, creating a sense of detachment and objectivity.
The sentimental focus on a character, stirs our heart (or more precisely, our amygdala) with love for an individual, fostering empathy and connection.
The cortex-amygdala blend draws us into experiencing an intimate human connection alongside a wry detachment from the greater world, creating a balanced and nuanced perspective.
It opens our heart to other people without duping us into mistaking our own desires for the laws of reality, fostering genuine connection and understanding.
Gives us all the psychological benefits of love-joy, energy, enthusiasm for life-while protecting us from the heartbreak suffered by romantic Quixotes, offering a sustainable and fulfilling experience.
Helps us care-with care, fostering empathy and understanding without sacrificing our own well-being.
The free indirect style of Emma fosters a very different kind of love than Pamela does, creating a more mature and realistic perspective.
Richardson's love technology makes our brain feel that Pamela is an extension of our own feelings, blurring the lines between self and other.
Austen's invention encourages our brain to recognize that Emma loves different things, in different ways, than we do, fostering respect for individual differences.
Austen's stylistic fusion of intimate disclosure and ironic detachment inspires us to embrace other people while acknowledging that those people have their own distinct needs and desires, creating a foundation for healthy relationships.
Our neural circuitry is guided into loving others for who they are, not for what we want them to be, fostering genuine acceptance and understanding.
Emma is a romantic Quixote; convinced that her own feelings echo the world's Almighty Heart; Emma spends most of the novel meddling in the love life of her friend Harriet Smith, highlighting her flaws and imperfections.
Emma manages to accept that Harriet desires the man that she herself does not, demonstrating her growth and maturity.
Austen's style has helped us feel the same about Emma, caring for her even when she does things we never would, creating a sense of empathy and understanding.
Improves the health of our relationships, eliminating the friction and resentment that come from expecting our loved ones to be perfectly in sync with our own desires, fostering greater harmony and connection.
Carries us a step closer to true love, a love that is based on acceptance, understanding, and respect.
Forgetting our self-involved fantasies to embrace a different heart, a step towards greater empathy and connection.
Using the "Valentine Armor" Yourself
If you want more pure romance in your life, you can walk into almost any public library and find shelves full of Samuel Richardson's swoon-inducing offspring, immersing yourself in sentimental stories.
None is more legendarily potent than Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel Jane Eyre, which updates Richardson's technology in two dexterous ways, offering a modern twist on the sentimental romance.
First, it exchanges Pamela's fanciful catalogue of real-time letters for the more plausible fiction of a retrospective "autobiography.", creating a more believable narrative.
Second, it does away with Richardson's efforts to restrain romance; where Richardson constructs Clarissa as a tragedy and ends Pamela with a God Voice sermon against desire, Brontë crafts a judgment-free conclusion that keeps our heart open in full, embracing the power of love and emotion.
Beneath these updates lies Richardson's original pulse-elevating blueprint: an epic-length self-disclosure, creating an immersive and emotionally intense experience.
So similar are Pamela and Jane Eyre that Brontë seems guilty at times of the most flagrant plagiarism, highlighting the enduring influence of Richardson's work.
Both novels contains similar plot devices: a female servant cares for her master's illegitimate child and a gypsy fortune-teller dispenses marriage advice, demonstrating the shared themes and motifs of the genre.
You can also find Richardson's technology in a wealth of modern romance novels, from Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, to Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, to Nicole Krauss's The History of Love, to André Aciman's Call Me by Your Name, showcasing its lasting impact on contemporary literature.
Should you ever feel your days bereft of ardor, you can get them re-aflutter with an extended literary confessional, immersing yourself in the world of romance.
Should you find yourself suffering from the opposite affliction-an overromanticizing of life that Don Quixotes your heart-you can find a remedy in Austen, seeking a more balanced and realistic perspective.
Read the opening line of Pride and Prejudice ("It is a truth universally acknowledged"), feeling the narrator's lightly wry tone, setting the stage for a witty and insightful story.
Then keep that tone going, through all the inner self-disclosures of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, so that you care for their individual hearts while accepting that they inhabit an unsentimental world, fostering empathy and understanding.
There are plenty of modern novels that use Austen's invention to inspire more sensible and more generous amours, offering a contemporary take on her themes.
Try Ian McEwan's The Children's Act. Or The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. Or "Brokeback Mountain" by Annie Proulx, exploring complex and nuanced relationships.
Their free indirectness will help you be wiser in romance and kinder too, fostering greater empathy and understanding.
The next time you dance with your own Tom Lefroy, you keep your heart safe-and help it love true, embracing love while protecting yourself from heartbreak.
Energize Your Life
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Modern Meta-