Introductory Essay: Emotion, Affect, and the Eighteenth

Century
Aleksondra Hultquist

The Eighteenth Century, Volume 58, Number 3, Fall 2017, pp. 273-280 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/ecy.2017.0024

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/671641

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 Introductory Essay:
Emotion, Affect, and the Eighteenth Century

Aleksondra Hultquist
Stockton University

The long eighteenth century, sometimes called the Age of Enlightenment

(1660–1830), appears to give precedence to rationality and the scientific
method, insisting that feeling could and should be tamed by reason. But closer
examination demonstrates that it was also a time of contention between
thought and feeling. The rational and irrational, the intellectual and the emo-
tive conflicted, competed, and combined to shape eighteenth-​­century thinking
and experience on many levels. In the last twenty years or so, scholars of the
humanities have been discussing “the affective turn,” that is, a changing inter-
est in understanding humanities disciplines through the lens of emotional ex-
perience and theory.1 New work in the history of emotion and affect theory has
challenged and complicated old binary models of the opposition of thought
and feeling, revealing the eighteenth century to be a period in which thinking
and feeling, rationality and emotion, science and art were paradoxically con-
ceptualized as increasingly separate modes of experience that nevertheless in-
escapably overlapped and converged.2
Rather than emphasizing political movements, dynasties, trading arrange-
ments, military conquests, and constructions of social class as the basis of in-
quiry, the history of emotions asks how an historical analysis of feeling
reconfigures our view of history and contributes to individual, national, and
community identities.3 History of emotion also challenges and augments emo-
tion theory as ahistorically theorized by the social sciences. In the past, emotion
theory has tended to revolve around the universalist claims of Paul Ekman and
Wallace V. Friesen, who identified six major emotions that could be determined
by “display rules.”4 Every culture supposedly communicates the basic emo-
tions of happiness, sadness, joy, surprise, fear, anger, and disgust through facial
expression. Building on these theories of the “basic emotions,” neuroscientists
identified brain areas in which these specific emotions are activated. These uni-
versalist theories have been challenged on scientific grounds (e.g., there is no

The Eighteenth Century, vol. 58, no. 3 Copyright © 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.
274 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

“joy” center in the brain that always lights up in every joyful human).5 More-
over, because neuropsychological studies have only marginally taken history
and culture into account, historians have argued against Ekman’s display rules
of emotion by documenting how the emotional standards of modern society
are shaped by cultural items such as advice manuals. Carol and Peter Stearns,
for example, argue that facial expressions can mask as well as display an inter-
nal emotion, and that a culture will read that expression within its own con-
texts.6 The latest work in the history of emotion is especially interested in what
emotions mean at a given time, how they are performed and in what context,
how they change over time, and how they shape our contemporary under-
standing and expression of emotion; scholars asking history of emotion ques-
tions are interested in the cultural, psychological, and historical contingencies
of how we feel what we feel.
Affect theory focuses on theorizing pre-​­discursive emotions, on unconscious
bodily responses rather than on mental awareness of emotion.7 Affect theory is
not necessarily interested in history and emotion, but in embodiments of emo-
tion. Affect denotes that responses are pre-​­cognitive, or “anti-​­intentional”; af-
fects are “inherently independent of intentions.”8 For Brian Massumi, “Feelings
are personal and biographical, emotions are social, and affects are prepersonal.”9 In
such a specification (one, by the way, which is not universally accepted), affects
are those aspects of emotion that are biological, pre-​­cognitive, or, as Melissa
Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth have argued, the “sticky inbetweenness” of
emotional experience.10 Margaret Wetherall explains social scientists’ methodol-
ogy for studying affect as “highlighting difference, process and force.”11 Stepha-
nie Trigg has argued that the difference between “affect” and “emotion” is a
question of ontological, even physiological precedence: “In such contexts, ‘af-
fect’ can signify an unconscious, pre-​­discursive bodily response in quite precise
terms: the beat of the heart; the rush of blood to the face; the flow of tears from
the eyes. The consciousness of emotion, so often mediated by language, is seen
as secondary.”12 To study the history of the emotions is to examine how we his-
torically and socially read our affects.
Clearly, the meanings of these terms are still contested, and as participants
in the discussion of emotion and affect, we still need to delineate clearly and
thoughtfully their provenance and how we use them. The contributors to this
special issue wrestle with, examine, and specify their language as much as pos-
sible in deference to their authors, subjects, and texts. Stephen Ahern and Jean
Marsden center their arguments on the word “affect” as a way to communicate
the non-​­textual moment of feeling in the novel of sensibility and in the theater,
two literary forms often derided for their failure to achieve literary value, but
that have an emotional sophistication and value. They require affect to delin-
eate emotional value in the absence of formal “perfection.” For Katie Barclay,
“affection” best describes the loving relationships between family members as
manifested in inheritance law in England and Scotland. M. Wade Mahon and
HULTQUIST—EMOTION, AFFECT, AND THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 275

Michael Edson use “emotion” in the eighteenth-​­century sense of ­“movement”—​

f­ or both scholars, the motion inherent in text, whether in the presentation rhe-
torically or in the creation poetically, helps to specify the way in which emotion
stirs through early modern subjects and texts and how such traffic is crucial to
textual meaning. Jean McBain and Robert Phiddian are more specific in their
emotion words: the production of contempt and disgust is revealed through
close readings aided by comparative book history. For Kathryn Temple, “agita-
tion” best describes how she reads Mary Wollstonecraft’s seemingly binary ex-
istence as a rationalist writer and a passionate human. Our words are ever
changing, ever malleable, and we must be ever specific in our uses, both in our
own time and in the historical register of feeling.
The eighteenth century in particular was a period in which changing no-
tions of science, self, and feeling resulted in a vast reconfiguration of what it
meant to be human, to be an artist, to write literature, and to explore the natu-
ral world. Canonically, we need only be reminded of David Hume’s 1738 dic-
tum: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never
pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”13 Or Alexander Pope’s
1734 theory of the “ruling passion” as “the mind’s disease” in An Essay on
Man.14 Thomas Dixon has gone so far as to argue that “the debate about the
proper relationship of reason with the passions, sentiments and affections was
one of the characteristics concerns of eighteenth-​­century thought.”15 The dis-
course of feeling was powerful and specific in the eighteenth century, and each
word that we now place on the rubric of “emotion” had both distinctive spaces
in the spectrum of emotion and implications for the modern shape of the con-
cepts of affect. The passions offer a basis for the developments of modern phil-
osophical, political, religious, scientific, linguistic, rhetorical, poetic, and
economic thought. Sentiment shapes modern understanding of feeling. Sym-
pathy connects politics to art, humans to things. Clearly then, the long eigh-
teenth century is the perfect era in which to explore, theorize, examine, and
challenge what we know about modern emotion.16
Emotion offers a powerful approach to questions of the form, interpretation,
and reception of literature. This manifests in recent work in literature and the
history of emotion, which notes that literature is particularly able to represent
aspects of emotions concerned with movement, change, ambiguity, multiplic-
ity, process, complexity, instability, and creativity. As Jon Elster has argued,
“we can read plays and novels as the closest thing to a controlled experiment
involving high-​­stakes human emotions,”17 implying that literature is a labora-
tory of feeling. According to scholars, depictions of emotion in the literature of
the eighteenth century provided not only a space for experiment and a plat-
form for social change, but also a way to articulate and understand the early
modern individual.18 The history of the eighteenth century has also been recon-
figured politically and historically through the lens of emotion, so that the tri-
umvirate of emotions, history, and the eighteenth century articulates “effortful
276 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

self-​­management (and its failures) in relation to political power.”19 Emotion,

according to these lines of thought, is the motivation for political, social, and
artistic change in the long eighteenth century. The study of emotion by “new
affect” scholars like William E. Connelly, Massumi, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
Eric Shouse, and Nigel Thrift is motivated by “the desire to contest a certain
account of how, in their view, political argument and rationality have been
thought to operate.”20 This connection between politics, emotion, and rational-
ity is especially potent in the long eighteenth century because of its intense en-
gagement in political thought, as well as its emphasis on rationality and the
scientific method. In some instances, the political thought of the era occurred
only through engagement with the passions.21
The conversation I’ve curated here attempts to elucidate major discoveries
made when applying history of emotion and affect theory to scholarship of the
long eighteenth century. It communicates how emotion theory applied to and
combined with other theories rearticulates what we thought we knew about
the eighteenth century. Far from rehashing tried and true readings, the applica-
tions of the history of emotion and affect studies reshape how we read, under-
stand, and think about eighteenth-​­ century literature, history, politics, and
philosophy. These essays best demonstrate the dynamic emotional life flourish-
ing during the Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason. While, retrospectively, the
reason/feeling binary was supposedly “created” in the eighteenth century,
these essays reiterate the collapse of that binary. They demonstrate the change
in perceptions of literature and ideas of the long eighteenth century.
The essays are in three distinct groups. The first three essays take on the
larger questions of literature, politics, emotion, and affect theory and estab-
lished genres and ideas. These essays consider what changes about established
norms of literature and history if the lens of feeling is applied to tried-​­and-​­true
notions. Ahern takes a cross-​­disciplinary approach, revising eighteenth-​­century
sensibility through sociological affect theory, “the consequences of adopting
the underlying assumptions of affect studies as a guide for critical practice”
(281). With a similarly wide lens, Marsden approaches feeling in theater stud-
ies, and wrestles with the idea that theater is one of the most emotional and
most ephemeral of all literary forms. She argues that one cannot think about
the fleeting aspect of theater, without understanding the fleeting emotional life
it produced, and her essay demands we retrain ourselves in feeling, text, and
extra-textual presences. Barclay revises long-​­standing aspects of family and pa-
triarchy in her essay, which reworks the idea of “natural affection” in Lawrence
Stone’s classic thesis regarding the family, sex, and marriage. She points out
how emotion was central to family structures, but not because of the rise of the
affective family as much as the ways in which legal negotiations had to become
emotional. For Barclay, changing emotional ideals and emotions themselves
were the drivers of significant social change throughout the long eighteenth
century.
HULTQUIST—EMOTION, AFFECT, AND THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 277

The articles by Edson and Mahon consider emotion in terms of eighteenth-​

­century practices themselves, and how change over the long eighteenth century
demonstrates, time and again, the dynamics of emotion in rhetorical and poetical
constructs. Practices of speaking and writing were emotionally charged and de-
mand rethinking in terms of basic skills of the education in gentility in the long
eighteenth century. Edson uses poetry to chart the change of emotional reading
over the early half of the long eighteenth century, as demonstrated by transla-
tions of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura. Through the emotional experience of a
speaker watching a shipwreck, and its various iterations published over a ninety-​
­year period, the translations demonstrate the unsuccessful but characteristic ten-
dency of eighteenth-​­century writers to reduce ambiguous affects to discreet
identifiable emotions. His argument—​­that the differences that the translators try
to make between emotion and feeling repeatedly collapse back upon one an-
other—​­demonstrates that there is no real binary between the two. Similarly,
Mahon points out how rhetoric moves from writing to speech, from style to de-
livery, in the latter half of the long eighteenth century. Through Thomas Sheri-
dan’s theories of elocution, Mahon charts how emotion changed the practice of
rhetoric itself, which began to rely on speculative intuition regarding the emo-
tional state of the character and/or the author being read. He shows that eigh-
teenth-​­century speakers believed they could not properly convey meaning
without proper attention and communication of emotion written into a text.
The last two essays are exercises in close reading the particular emotional
context of two representative eighteenth-​­century authors: Jonathan Swift and
Wollstonecraft. By taking a wider view of the emotional context of both writers,
these essays provide new readings of these canonical authors through emo-
tional reconsideration. In these rereadings, satire is a vessel for the expression
and containment of volatile emotions. Swift’s two self-​­written exercises in epi-
taphs anticipate and direct eventual post-​­mortem emotional reactions through
their implications of negative emotions. But, as McBain and Phiddian discuss,
hostile emotions run much deeper than in satirical executions; they also rest in
book historical excavations. Their article conveys a more accurate reading of
emotional reception in the eighteenth century by scrutinizing points of view
available through the lens of book history. They insist that “satirical reception
occurs in communities of text circulation as well as communities of satirical
feeling,” and call for more studies that examine emotional and textual histories
of genres and modes (364). Temple’s examination of the term “agitation”
demonstrates how the supposedly deeply conflicted Wollstonecraft was coher-
ent in her political aspirations and her personal passions. Wollstonecraft’s agi-
tation made a political statement of its own—​­but only if one fully explores
what agitation meant to both Wollstonecraft and eighteenth-​­century minds.
Temple’s reading of Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel Maria underscores how
it is a “manifesto in support of a new agitated and thus revolutionary form of
legal subjectivity” (376).
278 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

While each article can stand on its own, the conversation produced by setting
them side by side brings to the forefront some major concerns of both emotion
and the long eighteenth century. Ahern and Barclay tackle large, established
ideas through the lens of affect theory and history of emotion to rewrite our
understanding of the “old standards” of sentimental fiction and patriarchy.
Marsden addresses specific generic issues of emotion in the eighteenth century,
such as the development of drama and emotional authenticity. Her essay is in
conversation with Edson as they both attempt to pin down in textual and histor-
ical experience what is impossible to record; their studies uncover these fleeting
proofs of the conversation of emotion. Mahon, too, examines the hidden aspects
of emotion in text and performance—​­following elocutionary training in the
eighteenth century allows him to track fleeting emotional commonalities. Mc-
Bain and Phiddian and Temple use the lens of emotion in combination with
other theoretical approaches (history of the book, feminist criticism) to re-​­view
well-​­known works by Swift and Wollstonecraft. Their application of emotion
history to what we thought we knew about these canonical figures provides us
with new insights: that Swift’s satires are more than political and personal pro-
tests, but rather a way to channel volatile emotion; that Wollstonecraft’s per-
sonal emotion was absolutely critical to her political personae. Barclay and
Temple think about emotions in terms of law. Temple argues for the need for
feeling to be a legal subject, while Barclay argues for the ways in which feeling
operated on inheritance law. Barclay and McBain and Phiddian think about spe-
cific emotions within the eighteenth century: disgust, happiness, and love.
There are some obvious limitations to this conversation. First, the main
works under consideration are (almost embarrassingly) canonical. There are
few minor writers, women writers, and writers outside of the London metropole.
This is not because there ­aren’t important conversations to be had about lesser
known, or at least less widely canonical authors, ideas, and works, but because
this particular collection demonstrates how different our view of the eighteenth
century can be when it is seen through the emotional/affect lens. Secondly, it is
Great Britain–​­centric. There are extraordinary arguments to be made, espe-
cially regarding French philosophy and literature, German opera and music,
and American literature and politics.22 All three areas have been recently
rearticulated through the affective turn in history, musicology, political theory,
philosophy, and literature. The politics and expression of transcontinental
emotion simply couldn’t fit in this particular collection. Finally, all are text-​
­centered. I have done my best to attend to the major literary genres of the pe-
riod: fiction, drama, poetry, and other prose forms. Unfortunately I did not
have room for music, art, dance, opera, and many other ephemeral forms of
emotion that lie outside of my particular expertise. But I hope that these limita-
tions demonstrate how diverse and dynamic affect theory and history of emo-
tion approaches can be when applied to noncanonical writers, to the continental
eighteenth century, and to all aspects of the humanities, not just written forms.
HULTQUIST—EMOTION, AFFECT, AND THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 279

A final note: this collection would not have been possible without my in-
volvement in the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence in the
History of Emotions in Europe: 1100–1800. Without the C.H.E., I would not
have had the time to immerse myself in this burgeoning field, one which con-
tinues to be profoundly informative to my own work as well as many other
scholars I know. Through the C.H.E., I had access to several established schol-
ars, many new ones, and various personages in between. Phillipa Maddern,
the original director of the Centre wanted very much for “Emotion” to be an
approach in the humanities, much the way that feminist theory is now a cross-​
­disciplinary approach to the humanities. Her enthusiasm for her own work
and the work of others was an inspiration to me and many other participants at
the Centre. This special issue is dedicated to her memory.

NOTES
1. Influential studies specific to emotion in the long eighteenth century include works
by Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Cate-
gory (Cambridge, 2003); Margaret Doody, A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Sam-
uel Richardson (Oxford, 1974); Jon Elster, Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions
(Cambridge, 1999); Nicole Eustace, Passion Is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of
the American Revolution (Williamsburg, 2008); Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emo-
tions in Seventeenth-​­Century Philosophy (Oxford, 1997); Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book:
Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 1998), see esp. chap. 6; and Adela Pinch,
Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford, 1996). See also
Laura Mandell, ed., “Histories of Print, Histories of Emotion,” special issue, The ­Eighteenth-​
­Century: Theory and Interpretation 50, nos. 2–3 (Summer–Fall 2009), as well as recent collec-
tions on emotion and the early modern period: Passions, Sympathy and Print Culture: Public
Opinion and Emotional Authenticity in Eighteenth-​­Century Britain, ed. Heather Kerr, David
Lemmings, and Robert Phiddian (New York, 2016); and Spaces for Feeling: Gender, Affect
and Sociability in Britain, 1650–1850, ed. Susan Broomall (New York, 2015).
2. Two studies that examine the importance of passion over reason are Christopher
Tilmouth’s Passion’s Triumph Over Reason (Oxford, 2007), and Earla Wilputte, Passion and
Language in Eighteenth-​­Century Literature: The Aesthetic Sublime in the Work of Eliza Hay-
wood, Aaron Hill, and Martha Fowke (Basingstoke, 2014).
3. See especially historical studies by Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Intro-
duction, trans. Keith Tribe (Oxford, 2015), William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A
Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, 2001); Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional
Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca, 2007); Monique Scheer “Are Emotions a
Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)?: A Bourdieuan Ap-
proach to Understanding Emotion,” History and Theory 51, no. 2 (May 2012): 193–220; and
Carol Zisowitz Stearns and Peter N. Stearns, Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in
America’s History (Chicago, 1986).
4. See Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen, Unmasking the Face: A Guide to Recognizing
Emotions from Facial Clues (Los Altos, 2003).
5. See Richard J. Davidson and W. Irwin, “Emotion, Plasticity, Context, and Regula-
tion: Perspectives from Affective Neuroscience,” Psychological Bulletin 126 (2000): 890–
909; and Juan F. Dominguez Duque et al., “Neuroanthropology: A Humanistic Science
for the Study of the Culture-​­Brain Nexus,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 5
(2010): 138–47.
6. See esp. Stearns and Stearns.
280 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

7. See the essay by Stephen Ahern in this special issue, as well as Sara Ahmed, Cul-
tural Politics of Emotion (New York, 2013); Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds.,
The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, 2010); Brian Massumi, The Politics of Affect (Cambridge,
2015); and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity
(Durham, 2003).
8. Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (2011): 434–72, 465.
9. For an overview of Massumi’s theories, see Eric Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, Affect,”
M/C Journal 8, no. 6 (2005), available at journal.media-​­culture.org.au/0512/03-​­shouse.
php.
10. Gregg and Seigworth, “An Inventory of Shivers,” in The Affect Theory Reader, 1–25.
11. Margaret Wetherell, Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding (Los
Angeles, 2012), 2.
12. Stephanie Trigg, “Introduction: Emotional Histories—​­Beyond the Personalization
of the Past and the Abstraction of Affect Theory,” Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, The-
ory 26, no. 1 (2014): 3–15, 5.
13. David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature [1738], ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J.
Norton (Oxford, 2000), Book 2, Part 3, Section 3.
14. Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Man: Epistle 2” [1734], in Alexander Pope: The Major
Works, ed. Pat Rogers (Oxford, 2006), 280–89, line 138.
15. Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 72.
16. While often used as an analogy for the modern term “emotion,” the eighteenth-​
­century use of “the passions” is more complex. The term delineates a systemic approach
to feeling in the eighteenth century that explains a variety of responses: medical, intellec-
tual, emotional, public, individual. (We might use the term “psychology” as a more ap-
propriate analogy to answer how and why people react to stimuli.)
17. Elster, 108.
18. See, for example, Eustace; Julie K. Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-​
­American Emotion (Chicago, 1999); Alan T. McKenzie, Certain Lively Episodes: The Articula-
tion of Passion in Eighteenth-​­Century Prose (Athens, Ga., 1990); Julia A. Stern, The Plight of
Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Chicago, 1997); and Rebecca
Tierney-​­Hynes, Novel Minds: Philosophers and Romance Readers (Basingstoke, 2012).
19. William Reddy, quoted in Plamper, “The History of Emotions: An Interview with
William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Sterns,” History and Theory 49 (2010): 237–
65, 249.
20. See William E. Connolly, A World of Becoming (Durham, 2011); Massumi; Sedgwick;
and Nigel Thrift, Non-​­Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (London, 2008). See
also Leys, 436.
21. See especially Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Argu-
ments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton, 1977); James; and Victoria Kahn, Neil
Saccamano, and Daniela Coli, eds., Politics and the Passions, 1500–1850 (Princeton, 2009).
22. For instance, see www.mpib-​­berlin.mpg.de/en/research/history-​­of-​­emotions.
This URL, supported by the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence in the
History of Emotions in Europe: 1100–1800, offers a regularly updated list of the most re-
cent books, articles, blogs, and conference papers on emotion and affect research that
have been produced by scholars from the Centre.