Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Introduction: Victorian Emotions

2008; Indiana University Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2979/vic.2008.50.3.375

1527-2052

Rachel Ablow,

History of Emotions Research

Introduction: Victorian Emotions Rachel Ablow (bio) The emotions provide an especially appropriate subject for a journal committed to interdisciplinary inquiry. Those diverse feelings and sensations commonly grouped together as “the emotions” almost invariably fall between apparently stable domains—whether of the physiological and the psychological, the individual and the social, or the human and the nonhuman. As a result, they challenge the stability and autonomy of those categories, as well as the separability of the historical and literary tools we ordinarily use to understand them. In recent years, historians, art historians, literary critics, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, biologists, and others working on the emotions have all been encouraged by the nature of their object of study to discover new ways to work across disciplinary boundaries. Despite the wide range of disciplines and fields that have recently been engaged in work on the emotions, Victorianists possess a privileged relation to the subject. The nineteenth century is often described as the moment when the emotions were domesticated. While eighteenth-century philosophers such as Lord Shaftesbury, David Hume, and Adam Smith regarded emotional experience as a key component of social and political life, by the mid-nineteenth century, Jeremy Bentham’s claim that the “principle of sympathy and antipathy” is essentially a “principle of caprice” was largely accepted (15). As a result, while emotional experience continued to be valued as a pleasure and benefit of domestic life, the public sphere came to be identified with a form of rationality to which the emotions stood opposed. This is the story most commonly told about the nineteenth century, the story the period tended to tell about itself. Yet as the essays in this issue demonstrate, the emotions continued to function as a central epistemological tool throughout the era—a way of defining not just male and female, public and private, but also subject and object, human and nonhuman, determined and free. As a consequence, the [End Page 375] emotions cannot simply be relegated to one sphere or another or to one gender or another; instead, they constitute the means by which the distinctions between these categories are made. Each of the essays published here takes up this question of the epistemological function of the emotions. Jed Mayer, for example, examines how both vivisectionists and antivivisectionists used compassion to differentiate between human and nonhuman animals. Joanna Bourke shows how marital advice manuals used love and lust to define male and female, normal and abnormal, healthy and unhealthy. And Richard Higgins demonstrates how H. G. Wells used recklessness and desire to distinguish between those able to escape social expectations and those bound by them. Essays like these reveal how emotional experience could be used to define, reproduce, and ultimately reify central social, political, and scientific categories. In so doing, they expand our understanding of the domains to which the study of the emotions is relevant. But they also expand our sense of the kinds of emotions that constitute important objects of study. Love, sympathy, and compassion all appear in this issue, but so do less commonly studied feelings. Thus, while Grace Kehler demonstrates how social reformers used anxiety, disgust, and repulsion to maintain a supposedly healthy distance between potential philanthropists and their impoverished objects, Adela Pinch shows us how Victorian poetry imagines the feeling of thinking about the object of feeling. Just as the study of the emotions challenges disciplinary boundaries, so too does it pose problems for historicization. Victorian commentators themselves were fascinated by the historical status of the emotions. To what extent are emotions innate and to what extent are they social? Can we control or train them? Does the experience of the emotions change over time? These are questions to which the Victorians returned repeatedly, questions that contemporary scientists, historians, and literary scholars continue to puzzle over. That said, the essays in this issue make a strong case for the historical specificity of not just how we think about the emotions, but how we experience them—as demonstrated, for example, in Higgins’s interest in the new kinds of emotion that emerged at the end of the century. Kehler’s attention to the precise phenomenological goals of gothic pedagogy begins to suggest this commitment, and...