A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Age of Romanticism, Revolution, and Empire

Susan J. Matt, Susan J. Matt

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350090965
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Greek Ancient History
• Index: History

Between 1780 and 1920, modern conceptions of emotion-conceptions still very much present in the 21st century-first took shape. This book traces that history, charting the changing meaning and experience of feelings in an era shaped by political and market revolutions, romanticism, empiricism, the rise of psychology and psychoanalysis. During this period, the word emotion itself gained currency, gradually supplanting older vocabularies and visions of feeling. Terms to describe feelings changed; so too did conceptions of emotions' proper role in politics, economics, and culture. Political upheavals turned a spotlight on the role of feeling in public life; in domestic life, sentimental bonds gained new importance, as families were transformed from productive units to emotional ones. From the halls of parliaments to the familial hearth, from the art museum to the theatre, from the pulpit to the concert hall, lively debates over feelings raged across the 19th century.

CHAPTER ONE

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Medical and Scientific Understandings

ROB BODDICE

The long nineteenth century witnessed the birth, in English, of “emotions” as a signifier for all those affective states, internal movements or motions, passions, feelings, and sentiments that had come before.¹ This was not mere semantics, but a substantive and fluid alteration of knowledge about the nature, function, and meaning of emotions and how they are experienced. It was mirrored all along the scientific avant-garde, throughout Germany, France, Italy, and North America. This compound shift went together with the emergence of “science” as a pursuit distinct from natural philosophy, and the raft of increasingly professionalized “scientists” that came with it.² A recognizably modern science, defined by increasingly controlled experimentation, the rise of mechanical objectivity, positivism, materialism, and a novel biological cosmology (evolution), was instrumental in categorizing and defining emotions anew. This was complemented by an analogous shift in medical knowledge and practice, away from humoral categories of temperamental imbalance toward emerging knowledge of nerves and viscera, with emotions becoming the province of biomedical research in two rapidly evolving scientific disciplines: psychology and physiology.³ These developments were contemporaneous with insights on the nature and function of emotions from other new scientific disciplines, such as anthropology, criminology, biometry, and psychiatry. By no means do all of these different threads come together in the period in question. On the contrary, a plurality of diverse notions of what emotions were, how they worked, and what they did emerged in this period. As scientific and medical disciplinary boundaries hardened, the range of approaches to the study and interpretation of emotions became increasingly incommensurate with one another. Although the rapid explosion of physiological, psychological, and anthropological work seemed at one point to find common ground and common purpose in the work of Darwin, by the beginning of the twentieth century there were large chasms between distinct epistemologies of emotions.⁴ This chapter surveys these developments thematically.

EMOTIONAL UPHEAVAL, OR THE LOST SENSE OF HUMOR

Galenic humoral categories endured throughout the eighteenth century, surviving and informing the emergence of nerves, sensibilities and vapors, and undergirding the principal “emotional” category of the age: passions. The essential quality of the passions is indicated in the word itself. They occurred passively, happening to a person rather than emanating from a person. In this fundamental regard, passions were the opposite of emotions, which literally project movements (from inside the body) outward. Passions could be generally understood as afflictions of the viscera, imbalanced mixtures of bodily humors (the word “temperament” comes from the Latin tempere, to mix), or exposure to noxious elements.

Prior to a raft of physiological and psychological innovations that would put emotions variously in the body, in the mind, and under the control of the civilized individual, a person was more likely to be a victim of their passions. The disorders arising from ill humor were heavily gendered as female in the decades immediately preceding and following the turn of the nineteenth century. Insofar as they fell under the province of medicine to administer, they were nevertheless not diseases or pathologies per se, and were rooted in the simple fact of being a woman. Attacks of the “vapors,” which saw women swooning and languishing in melancholic torpor, were particularly common among the more well-to-do and associated with a delicacy of body/mind, susceptible to over stimulation or affectation. Hence the dangers of education and reading and, in particular, the sentimental novel.⁵

Female maladies were part of the structure of gender dynamics that medical opinion helped to support. The hysteric—afflicted in the original sense of the word with a wandering womb—was necessarily female.⁶ The affliction, which manifested in all manner of affective disorders, was still fundamentally physical in origin and was marked by physical signs.⁷ In rare cases of male hysteria (Micale 2008), which increased toward the end of the nineteenth century, new physical theories had to be constructed for the obvious disruption of medical epistemology. The need to ground affective disorders in bodily trauma was reaffirmed as new technologies threatened to make “nervous” dispositions more widespread. From the 1840s, “railway spine” emerged as a new form of malady directly resulting from a hitherto untried mode of transport (Erichsen 1867). The hysteria-like symptoms of the victims of railway accidents, which also occurred among accident-free passengers, were presumed by some to be linked to some form of lesion in the spine that, at that moment, could not be detected.

As the nineteenth century progressed, hysteria increasingly came to be associated with a disorder of the emotions or, at least, a problem of the mind. This has become forever associated with the work of Freud and Breuer (1974), who sought a “psychichal mechanism” of hysteria based on a suppressed traumatic event. Crucially, “trauma” here was configured emotionally, not physically, and Freud would pursue a course of unlocking the secrets of the unconscious mind in order to explain physical manifestations of emotional pathologies. The rise of urban illumination, electrification, and round-the-clock stimulation led to further new theories of neurosis. The modern city, inhabited by the particularly sensitive, civilized man and woman, was itself destabilizing the emotional balance of citizens.⁸ The neurasthenic, overwhelmed by his or her environment, lost emotional control. Moreover, this loss, which manifested in strange postures, seizures, and contractures, as well as headaches and chronic fatigue, seemed to be contagious. The hysteric or neurasthenic individual risked society by example. Sympathetic cases were not uncommon, and were considered especially dangerous when they interrupted factory or office efficiency, or disrupted fragile communities in hospitals, on ships, or, most alarmingly, on the military front line.

The gradual conceptual shift of hysteria from female malady to a pathology of emasculation was emphatically sealed by the First World War. Military politics made justifiable terror into a crime when it led to desertion or malingering. Refusal to fight was a form of hysteria that betrayed a weakness of character in the soldier, or else it was a pathological cowardice in the conscientious objector. The sights, sounds, and experiences of warfare disabled many with “shell shock”—a forerunner of post-traumatic stress disorder—that marked its victims as damaged men. Many who suffered serious injuries, often losing one or more limbs, were treated for their physical complaints but with scant attention to the emotional or psychological consequences of having been through a war and having come out of it damaged in more ways than one (Bourke 1996). The First World War represents a watershed moment in the history of chronic pain, with thousands of men across the world dealing with the long-term consequences of amputation, disfigurement, shrapnel injuries, and so on. Physical torment was inextricably bound with emotional torment, but medical approaches to the long-term care of the war-wounded tended to isolate bodies from minds, downplaying complaints of pain when they seemed to arise from emotional weaknesses in character or disposition (Bourke 2014: 66–89; Moscoso 2012: 203–206). Coupled with only a rudimentary understanding of, for example, phantom limb pain, the medical establishment saw no advantage in providing veterans with emotional succour, and often dismissed chronic complaints of pain in limbs that were missing as hysteria.

THE SCIENCE (AND POLITICS) OF EXPRESSION

At the end of the eighteenth century it was commonly assumed that physical expressions, not just facial expressions, but the whole range of postures and gestures, were a direct representation of inner states. In a sense, these outward signs were themselves literally emotions, e (Latin for out of, or from) motio (Latin for movement). They described the ways in which people were internally moved. If one wanted to find out the secrets of the ways in which feelings were transmitted, communicated, and received in society, the answers were not in internal, physiological investigations, but in structural anatomical studies. The shape and structure of the musculature and skeleton both limited and, by a certain reasoning, universalized human expressions (and therefore human emotions).

Until Charles Bell intervened, however, the emotions were the province of the philosophers and the expressions were the province of painters and sculptors, who operated without the up-to-date anatomical insights of those who worked with the dead, under the mask of the flesh. Bell (1806; 1824) attempted to bridge the gap between art and anatomy, appealing essentially for more realistic depictions of human expressions of emotion. Bell was looking for verisimilitude in artistic representation, but more broadly he was looking for the truth of human expression—a key for accessing how we know how someone else is feeling.

His key contribution, therefore, was not to artistic practice but to a science of human emotions. His work was to be profoundly influential, both in biology and in medicine, and continues to resonate today in the debate over the universality of human expression.

Underlying Bell’s approach was an assumption, perfectly in keeping with his time, that the anatomical continuities among humans that delimited the range of emotional expression were put there by design. Humans were made in God’s image, and if outward signs of passions were readily accessible to all alike, it was because they had been made that way to serve human communication and understanding. A fundamental shift in the science of expression would come with the attempt to remove God from the machine. Charles Darwin thought that it fell to him to provide an alternative account, and in the process he thoroughly confused his earlier thesis of natural selection.

FIGURE 1.1: Charles Bell, Muscles of the Face, 1806 (Wellcome Library, London).

Darwin ([1871]2004; 1872) came at the emotions from two angles. On the one hand, it was essential that emotions could be accounted for according to his theories of natural selection, sexual selection, and (though this was implied) species selection. Digging for information from colleagues and contacts around the world, Darwin found both striking similarities in the ways in which emotions were represented expressively and gesturally and marked differences in the ways in which emotions were elicited, interpreted, and controlled. Necessary to the narrative of his particular brand of Victorian evolutionism was a natural-historical account of the progressiveness and supremacy of his own civilization, of Victorian politesse and social conscience, of sovereign greatness and imperial ascendancy. Among his own society, Darwin had to account for the apparent gentleness of emotional dispositions among the refined, compared with the rough and immediate outbursts of the laborer, the “savage,” and the animal (children and women also both had to fit in this “lower” scheme) both in his midst and elsewhere.⁹

On the one hand then, Darwin found reasons for the primacy of civilized society in the evolution and social reinforcement of sympathy, a social emotion that bound each individual to the community, defining and situating moral action within a natural-historical process.¹⁰ Those communities with the highest degree and most acute refinement of sympathy would prosper. But, on the other hand, Darwin found it necessary to reject the notion that emotional expressions (facial and gestural) were evolved modes of emotional communication. Sympathy, which inevitably involved an appreciation and understanding of the whole range of emotional experiences, was instinctive; but the actions that followed from it in civilized society were always reinforced and shaped by public opinion. In this way, Darwin demonstrated the human capacity for domestication—contriving with nature—at work in human society itself. Whatever nature selected as “fit,” humans could isolate to speed up the process of evolution. By such means, Darwin explained the importance of religion, which involved the institutionalization of the sympathetic refinement of an elite so that it could be deployed to shape the conduct of those whose natural state left something to be desired. Darwin clearly saw, in The Descent of Man (2004: 118–119), that religion had run its course as the key stakeholder of public opinion, precisely because it had become evident that clerics were not the best arbiters of domestication; scientists were.

That Darwin’s biological science was also a proto social science is often overlooked, but dom...