Machines, mechanism and the making of the English novel in the eighteenth century

Authors of eighteenth-century narratives often compared their plots to machines. They used mechanical metaphors because in the wake of the scientific revolution the machine became the dominant model for understanding the organization of nature and because machines were becoming increasingly prominent in everyday cultural life. But the idea that the world was a great piece of clockwork in which human beings were so many cogs and wheels challenged both traditional religious conceptions of the freedom of the will and newer political principles protecting the right of the individual to resist the domination of absolute power. As a result, many of the important innovations in narrative form that came to define the novel as a genre in the eighteenth century resulted from attempts to reconcile the contradictions between notions of individual freedom and the new mechanical understanding of nature. In her novels of intrigue written in the early eighteenth century, for example, Eliza Haywood adopted a Hobbesian ontology of mechanistic materialism but sought to contain its dangerously libertine tendencies by emphasizing the deliberative freedom of her heroines in the scenes of their seduction. Henry Fielding\u27s Tom Jones, meanwhile, though celebrated for its “clockwork” form, was in fact written as a response to the mechanization of the theatre by pantomimes, which seemed to be threatening the professional integrity of actors and authors and the illusion of authenticity in the human subjects they portrayed. In Tristram Shandy likewise, Laurence Sterne repeatedly invoked machines as metaphors for narrative, but then showed that the “sunshine” and “soul” of the reading experience was to be found in those moments when the narrative machine broke down into digressions. Finally, the supernatural machinery of Gothic fiction was designed to trigger a set of internal mechanisms in the mind, but the readers of Ann Radcliffe\u27s novels were also meant to reflect on the means by which the despotic power of the culture industry could exploit these mechanisms in order to place limits on human freedom and philosophical enquiry