Word: 18th
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...book chronicles the evolution of the concept of boredom in England from the 18th century to the present, drawing its conclusions from close-readings of personal records (ie. correspondence, memoirs, diaries) and canonical works of fiction. Spacks limits her sphere of investigation to a boredom understood as "the kind that appears to be caused by not having enough to do, or not liking the things one has to do, or existing with other people or, in a setting one finds distasteful," that is, she disregards boredom as symptom of depression, anger, anxiety, or other malaise. She focuses on the upper...
Spack explains that the word boredom did not exist until the mid-18th century; thus, far from being the universal condition that we tend to assume, it is a fairly recent social construction. The popular idea (voiced by Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, and others) that "all endeavor of every kind takes place in the context of boredom impending or boredom repudiated" presents boredom as a universal like fear or desire; its linguistic history, documented by Spacks, suggests otherwise. Boredom, then, appears as "an explanatory myth of our culture" whose linguistic appearance in the 18th century was linked to an increase...
...concept of boredom developed from being perceived as a moral failure in the 18th century, to an index of class arrogance and inadequate responsiveness to others in 19th century and finally to the universal motivating force it is seen as today. Specifically, Boswell and Johnson warned against the moral failing of dullness; Dickens blamed a morally bankrupt society for the boredom of some of its members and 19th-century women accepted the necessary tedium of their position and resigned themselves to needlepoint; we today think it our right to be entertained and are offended by boring people and things...
Before this time the idea of boredom was not necessary for an understanding of existence: athough people in the early 18th century may have led lives which from our standpoint would appear boring, they did not think of them as such. Spacks traces the term's appearance and development as conjunctive with evolving concepts of the individual's place in society. The religiosity and community of pre-modern times, which discouraged individualism, gradually gave way to the fragmentation and alienation of modernity and post-modernity, which encourages individualism...
Some of Spacks' most interesting observations surround boredom in women's lives and fiction. In both the 18th and 19th centuries, women's lives were defined by predictable routine. Reading offered an escape, but the dangers implicit in that escape were well known: unless novels were written in accordance with an unyieldingly moral ideology they could engender in their readers unsalutory desires and vicissitudes of emotion. Yet women's actual existence--their good works, the various musical and artistic talents with which they embellished themselves, their letter-writing and social calls--offered little fodder for fiction, except in the hands...