The Paradox of Objectivity: New Perspectives in Mental Health History

Posted on June 29, 2016 by

A number of conferences, workshops and events in recent months have considered mental health history from various perspectives, beyond the standard history of psychiatry. At the annual British Psychological Society History and Philosophy of Psychology Section Conference (this year in partnership with the UK Critical Psychiatry Network), an entire symposium was dedicated to the changing role of nurses, social workers and clinical psychologists in the realm of mental health. In nineteenth-century asylums, non-medical staff are often more hidden from the historical record than their patients. Their names might appear in staff lists or wage books, or they could be mentioned in passing in patient records; however, their actions and motives were invariably described and interpreted by psychiatrists. Unlike with some patients, their personal letters and documents do not tend to appear in archives. Oral histories become an important source for more recent nursing history, such as those gathered by Niall McCrae and Peter Nolan, who offered some interesting reflections on the social and professional context of mental health nursing as it developed in the twentieth-century asylum from their recent book: Echoes from the Corridors.

More recently, an event at the University of Edinburgh, New Directions in Mental Health, looked at still more approaches to mental health research. Sociology and mad studies formed key components of this event. This breadth of approaches to mental health can help to raise some of the contradictions within the field itself. As organiser Martyn Pickersgill noted: neuroscience dominates mental health research, but not the practice. What’s more, as keynote speaker David Pilgrim explained, psychiatry cannot be described as a medical speciality like any other: mental health policy, in particular the process of detention, ensures that it sits within a very different context. Cultural narratives, and critique within the humanities and social sciences, then, is especially important in the field of mental health.

It is the service user voice, however, that is coming increasingly to the fore, whether within mental health (such as the Service User Research Enterprise at Kings College London, represented at both events by Professor Diana Rose) or outside it. Kirsty Maclean described the Lothian Oor Mad History project, set up in 2008 to reclaim and promote the history of activism and collective advocacy by people with mental health issues. This arose out of a widespread nostalgia for the impetus towards change that had existed in mental health services in the 1980s: these collective efforts to be heard seemed to many to have since dissipated and the project provided an opportunity to remember them and inspire others. The project developed into a course on Mad People’s History and Identity at Queen Margaret University, run by and for people with experience of mental health issues. Fifty people have graduated from the course so far, and some have participated in the Mad Studies stream at the Lancaster Disability Studies Conference, begun in 2014.  Further afield, a comprehensive online archive of mental health history is maintained by the Survivor History Group, while this weekend’s Radical Histories Conference at Queen Mary University of London includes events on mental health activism.

The theme of service user and survivor research continued with an event the following day: Mental Health and Reflexivity. In social science, reflexivity is considered to be an important part of rigorous research, considering the position, role and influence of the researcher. At this event, researchers from across the humanities and social sciences considered the role of personal experience in their work, raising both positive and negative elements. Many histories of medicine, after all, are still written as if from the perspective of a neutral observer, a style of writing common in science and medicine from the nineteenth century on. For medical writers, this style was adopted to suggest the objectivity of the clinician, absenting him or herself from his or her research ideas and outputs by an avoidance of personal pronouns and increasing use of the passive voice. In history, this artefact of objectivity is exacerbated by the use of the past tense. As Chris Millard has put it, in his recent history of self-harm in Britain, this style of writing implies that the past is a set of discrete and concrete facts, failing to acknowledge that there are multiple possible histories and ways of writing history. Moreover, it fails to make clear that history is about the time in which it is written (and the demands and ideals of that era which lead to a particular selection of sources or way of framing history) as much as the era it is about.

Ultimately, this can lead to conceptual confusion, whereby historians of medicine widely accept that their historical actors cannot be objective, and that their ideas and approaches are formed within their cultural and historical context and yet they write themselves out of the history. Yet personal material can be uncomfortably confessional: what Diana Rose calls ‘the pornography of first person accounts’, allowed to stand alone and unchallenged. So what does the future hold for mad studies? As Brigit McWade put it, while remaining acutely critical, researchers need to ‘unlearn what we have learned’ with a new paradigm of mad studies that is not identity based. The very category of experience is, after all, itself socially constructed.

Upcoming opportunities to debate this further:

Bodies, Emotions and Hamlet. Or, why I wrote This Mortal Coil.

Posted on June 23, 2016 by

Cj4Pas1WUAACIWk-1 (1)This is a guest post by Fay Bound Alberti. Fay is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in History at Queen Mary University of London, having taught previously at universities throughout the UK, including Manchester, UCL, and Lancaster. A founding member of the Centre for the History of Emotions, she has written extensively in the fields of history, medical history, and women’s history, including Matters of the Heart: Locating Emotions in Medical and Cultural History (2010), also published by Oxford University Press, which was shortlisted for the Longman History Today book of the year award. She is also an experienced philanthropy advisor who has worked as Head of Philanthropy for the Arcadia foundation and Head of Medical Humanities Grants for the Wellcome Trust. Fay also publishes posts on her website www.fayboundalberti.com . Her new book, This Mortal Coil, is published today.

To be or not to be-that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep

[…]

To sleep, perchance to dream. Aye, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil.

 

                                                                        William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1603)

References to Shakespeare are ubiquitous in 2016, which marks 400 years since the playwright’s death. But that’s not why I chose to quote from Hamlet for the title of my new book, This Mortal Coil: The Human Body in History and Culture (Oxford University Press). By referencing Shakespeare, I am drawing attention to key presumptions that have been made about the body in history. For centuries Hamlet’s body has been seen as our body, his emotions, our emotions, most notably for those writers who see passions like fear and anger as unchanging across times and cultures.[1] This slippage is understandable: like Hamlet we each inhabit a physical body, a mass of flesh, bones and blood that takes us through this ‘mortal coil’ that is the bustle and turmoil of everyday life. Like Hamlet too, we are tied to the world by our bodies and by all the concerns that ‘flesh is heir to’. Hamlet thus becomes our Everyman (or woman), representing existential angst in the modern age as readily Lady Macbeth’s archetype of female manipulation or Othello’s male sexual jealousy.

9780199793396And yet Hamlet’s body is not our own, any more than ‘our’ emotions are stable and unchanging entities across times and cultures. Drawing on religious, medical and scientific texts from the classical world to the present day, This Mortal Coil explores the myriad meanings we have placed on the body’s parts – from the spine, the skin and the heart to the brain, the genitals, tongue and guts. The book’s geographical focus is Britain and North America, with a specific focus on women’s bodies, since gender finds its way through the narrowest of gaps and ‘thrusting manhood’ is everywhere. Each chapter uses a case study to consider both the contemporary relevance of a body part according to medical, religious and scientific writings and the social and political functions that it carries in its wake – whether that be the unruly tongue of a seventeenth-century ‘nag’, the pockmarked face of a nineteenth-century poor boy, the well-padded rear of an eighteenth-century jail keeper, or the pumped-up breast of a twentieth-century factory worker.

The history of emotions runs through each chapter – whether in terms of literal embodiment, such as the skin’s display of emotional experience in blushing or blanching, or the emotive significance given to particular body parts, or even the emotionally-charged rhetoric used to describe the body itself. The siting of emotions in the body has shifted throughout history as the heart and the brain have competed as the centre of our emotional selves. Despite the fact that we live in an age dominated by the neurosciences, the brain has not necessarily ‘won out’ in the battle for supremacy.[2] The heart and more recently the gut has been framed as a ‘second brain,’ responsible for retaining memories, emotions and lived experiences. The very structure of the body, its nerves and fibres, its cells and tissues, have also been used at varying times, to ‘prove’ difference. Thus the brain and the skull and even the hips have reinforced ideologies of race and gender that underscore social and political hierarchies. Today’s body politic might run on hormones rather than humours, but the effects are no less powerful.[3]

The languages of the body are also rich with metaphor. Hamlet’s Denmark is ‘rotten’ and rancid. Mind and body alike are corrupted by a poison that spreads through the king’s body and across the land. There was no easy division in Shakespeare’s time between mind and body, and the soul mediated between both. Today, even if we don’t believe in the soul, few of us see reason and emotion absolutely distinct, though the mind and the body are separated in both philosophical thought and modern healthcare systems.[4] Historians often root that separation in the French philosopher Rene Descartes’ famous division between the material body and the immaterial mind, first published less than forty years after Hamlet.[5] Indeed, the mechanistic body of Descartes (and of William Harvey, popularizer of blood circulation), gave rise to a range of hydraulic metaphors about emotions as well as the image of the heart as a pump with which we are all familiar. Metaphors matter because they reinforce conventions and ideas about the body and – by extension – the roles and responsibilities of men and women in society. This language is often highly moralistic: the ‘incompetent cervix’ of a woman destined to be a productive baby maker, for instance, or the visible wastefulness of a fat body in an ‘epidemic of obesity.’

Medicine is filled with metaphors, especially relating to battles between health and disease, which is structured as an invader.[6] From the mid nineteenth century this language formed part of the rise of scientific medicine, which was based on the classifying gaze of reason and a series of increasingly narrow specialisms through which each body part (and ailment) was compared, catalogued and scrutinized. Today that medically pathologized body has arguably been turned into a socially pathologized body. We worry that we are too fat, too thin, too old. Some of us spend hours in the gym in search of a more socially acceptable ‘look.’ This shift towards seeing our bodies as consumer objects – changeable, perfectible extensions to the ‘real’ selves that live in our heads – is arguably only possible in our compartmentalized, brain-centred age.

To understand this process of distancing and objectification, and the subtle ways that beliefs about the body impact on our experience, This Mortal Coil unravels the differences between Hamlet’s body and our own. For this ever-unfolding pursuit of physical perfection, no matter what that does to the mind (or the soul), is a relatively new phenomenon, made possible only by the development of cosmetic surgery since World War I. Yet it looks set to have a long-term impact on our individual self-image and collective well-being. Those people (usually women) who do go ‘under the knife’ in pursuit of some narrowly prescribed bodily ideal, do so in the hope that it will improve their emotional lives and make them happier. All the evidence suggests that it will not. Like the Prince of Denmark, we have our own existential crises, then, and they also centre on the limits of the human body. This mortal coil is ever binding.

 

Follow Fay on Twitter: @fboundalberti

Read more about Fay and her work on her website.

References

[1] For Gail Kern Paster, for instance, ‘many important emotions are both transhistorical and transcultural’. Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: The University of Chicago press, 2014), 245.

[2] Fernando Vidal, Brainhood, anthropological figure of modernity.” History of the Human Sciences 22.1 (2009): 5-36. The imagery I am using here is deliberate, reflecting the militaristic tone in which the ‘battle’ between hearts and minds (or minds and bodies) is typically framed.

[3] Emilia Sanabria, ‘From Sub-to Super-Citizenship: Sex Hormones and the Body Politic in Brazil,’ Ethnos 75 (2010), 377-401.

[4] Antonia R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (London: Picador, 1994).

[5] René Descartes (1641) Meditations on First Philosophy, in The Philosophical Writings of René Descartes, trans. by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, vol. 2, pp. 1-62.

[6] A classic work on this subject is Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, and AIDS and its Metaphors (New York: Picador USA, 2001, c1989).

John Clare’s Address to Health

Posted on June 10, 2016 by

erin laffordThis is a guest post by Erin Lafford and the fourth, and final, in this week’s ‘Romantic Voices’ series. Erin is a final-year DPhil student (AHRC funded) at the University of Oxford, writing a thesis on ‘Forms of Health in John Clare’s Poetics’.  Her research explores how various medical discourses and understandings of physical and mental health emerge within Clare’s work, and how poetic form offers him a way to negotiate and re-work these understandings as well as to attend to more experiential and imaginative conceptions of health.  Erin will be talking more about her research at the British Association for Romantic Studies’ conference taking place 22-23 June in Oxford.

What can a labouring-class poet who spent the last twenty-seven years of his life in an asylum tell us about health?  This blog post draws on some ideas from my doctoral research on John Clare to introduce him as a poet whose intense preoccupation with his own mental and physical well-being reveals him as a key, if overlooked, figure in Romantic poetry’s interactions with medicine and medical culture, as well as with more experiential aspects of health.  What I offer below is a reading of Clare’s early poem ‘To Health’ as a site for thinking about how poetry and its forms of address offer a means for Clare to explore and question what health is, and how it is experienced.

Contemporary phenomenological accounts of health and illness attest to health as a state that cannot be known or felt by the subject.  Havi Carel argues that a healthy body is defined as unobtrusive; it is always ‘transparent’ and part of our daily ‘background’.[i]  Carel’s argument is similar to that made by Hans Georg Gadamer in The Enigma of Health (1993; trans. 1996):

We need only reflect that it is quite meaningful to ask someone ‘Do you feel ill?’, but that it would border on the absurd to ask someone ‘Do you feel healthy?’  Health is not a condition that one feels introspectively in oneself.  Rather, it is a condition of being involved, of being in the world.[ii]

Contrary to these phenomenological accounts of health are the regimens of Enlightenment medicine that Romanticism inherited.  Regimen conceived of health, not as unknowable or enigmatic, but as precisely within the realms of human knowledge and control.  Under the strict instructions of hygiene manuals and treatises on regimen, health became, as Guenter Risse argues, a ‘positive value’ and natural state attached to ‘a condition of bodily and psychological well-being conducive to a more enjoyable and longer life’.[iii]  Health materialised as attainable via a set of rules on the regulation of diet, exercise, environment, sleep, and mental and physical excitement.

How does Clare’s exploration of health negotiate or stray from this pervasive medical culture of rules and regimen?  In a journal entry from 1828, he wrote:

Greatly distressed today and uncommonly ill O what a blessing is health     we know not how to prize it till we loose it     Dr Darling restored me to health but my foolish follys has compelled her to leave me again and I fear for ever[iv]

By claiming ‘we know not how to prize it till we loose it’, Clare conceives of health as an engimatic and even unknowable state more akin to the above phenomenological accounts than to the dominant ideas of regimen he would have been surrounded by.  The task of trying to ‘know’ health in the face of losing it also captures Clare’s poetic imagination early on in his career.  In ‘To Health’ (composed in the early 1820s), he invokes health as a ubiquitous phenomenon manifested in the natural world:

Hail soothing balm – ye breezes blow
Ransack the flower and blossom’d tree
All, all your stolen gifts bestow
For health has granted all to me

And may this blessing long be mine
May I thy favour still enjoy
Then never shall my heart repine
Nor yet thy long continuance cloy

And tho I cannot boast, – O! health
Of nothing else, – but only thee
I would not change this bliss for wealth
No not for all the eye can see

[…]

Ah well may they who do posess
Sweet health thy joy-inspiring balm
Lavish thy praise in such excess
‘Hail hail, wild woodlands native charm!’

Thy voice I hear, thy form I see
In silence, Echo, stream or cloud
Now that strong voice belongs to thee
Which woods and hill repeat so loud

The leaf the flower the spirey blade
The hanging drops of pearley dew
The russet heath the woodland shade
All all can bring thee in my view

(EP, II, ll. 1-36)

The forms of address permitted by the ode here bring poetic utterance into play as a means through which Clare can feel around for health.  Apostrophe not only personifies health, but also assumes it as a presence that is away from the speaker and needs to be addressed in order to be invoked.  Presence, absence, distance, and proximity all interact in this poem, where emphatic claims of health’s potential abundance (‘All all can bring thee in my view’) also belie its diffuse and uncontrollable nature, as though it were everywhere and nowhere at the same time.  Rooted in the world of natural elements and phenomena, health is made material and accessible but, at the same time, its ubiquity troubles the subject’s ability to pin it down.  Invocation and apostrophe take on the sense of the conditional: ‘may’, ‘shall’, ‘would’, and ‘can’ construct an approach to health as an abundant possibility rather than a state that has actually been achieved by the speaker.  With the progression of each stanza, a new constitutive exercise unfolds that perhaps enacts the dialectic of  ‘prizing’ and ‘losing’ found in his later journal entry.  Each subsequent stanza is a new attempt to grasp the slipperiness of health and to invoke it before it shifts into a different guise.  By making health the subject of repeated intimate address, Clare approaches it as both knowable and unknowable, a shifting ‘form’ that poetic address might help him to grasp momentarily at the same time as it bears witness to health’s formlessness.

You can find out more about the Centre’s interest in health at the website for our Wellcome Trust-funded project ‘Living with Feeling’.

 

References

[i] Havi Carel, Illness (Durham: Acumen, 2008), p. 26.

[ii] Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘On the Enigmatic Character of Health’, The Enigma of Health: The Art of Healing in a Scientific Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 103-116 (p. 113).

[iii] Guenter Risse, ‘Medicine in the age of Enlightenment’, Medicine in Society, ed. Andrew Wear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 151.

[iv] Clare, John Clare: By Himself, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (Manchester: Carcanet, 1996), p. 243.

The Monstrous Vegan

Posted on June 9, 2016 by

Emelia QuinnThis is a guest post by Emelia Quinn and the third in this week’s ‘Romantic Voices’ series. Emelia is a Wolfson Foundation DPhil student in the English Faculty at the University of Oxford. Her thesis aims to both establish a ‘vegan’ mode of reading texts, and trace a cross-period vegan literary canon, from 1818 to present. Emelia will be giving a paper based on the material discussed in this blog post at the British Association for Romantic Studies’ conference taking place 22-23 June in Oxford.

Despite a remarkable, and welcome, growth of animal studies criticism in the humanities across the last few decades, there has seemed to be a marked reluctance to critically engage with the term “vegan.”

However, whilst initial assumptions might suggest that there has been little scholarly work produced on veganism until relatively recently, the emerging field of “vegan theory” does have a wide array of overlap, and takes a significant amount of influence from work across ecofeminism, ecocriticism, postcolonialism, posthumanism, deconstruction, and queer theory. The publication of Laura Wright’s The Vegan Studies Project last year, synthesising many of these interdisciplinary connections, alongside the growing sense of veganism’s urgent relevance to current ethical and environmental debates outside of the academy, seems to signal the contemporary period as a seminal moment in the emergence of veganism as a significant field of critical enquiry and study.

On the 31st May 2016, my colleague, Ben Westwood, and I organised the Towards a Vegan Theory conference at the University of Oxford. Showcasing speakers from across multiple continents and disciplines, including literature, history, history of art, sociology, anthropology, and psychology, the success of the event appeared to confirm veganism’s increasing prominence within the academy. Across such a wide berth of disciplines, the recurrence of the theme of failure, from failed witness to failed writing practices, came to bear on an equally palpable emphasis on personal stories, visceral responses, emotions and crying. Establishing veganism then, as both an identity and practice engaged with human oppression and consumption of the nonhuman, as an academic practice, appears to directly question how we might reconcile the seeming antagonism between emotions and rigorous scholarship.

In this blog post, I’m going to briefly discuss my current work, establishing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a key text for the study of vegan literature and historically situating it within the emerging vegetarian ideals of the Romantic period. As I prepare for the BARS Romantic Voices conference at the end of June, I have been considering what a vegan mode of reading texts, or an analysis of vegan structures of feeling, might have to contribute to Romantic scholarship.

The relation between new scientific knowledge and the abuse of nonhuman animals through practices such as vivisection and meat-eating gave rise to poignant debates increasingly brought to the literary fore in the post-Revolution ideals of the Romantic period. The adoption of vegetarian diets, towards the end of the eighteenth-century, was often associated with the radical principles of the French Revolution and the potential to transform and defamiliarise what had previously appeared to be divinely ordained. Mass social change and the industrial revolution, increasing the distance between the urban population and nonhuman animals, as well as the influence of Hinduism and the translation of ancient Brahmin texts, on soldiers and imperialists returning from India, also appears to have played a part in an increasing body of radical vegetarian discourse. For example, the polemical writings of John Oswald, Joseph Ritson, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, contributed to a rich body of vegetarian and vegan literature in the period, variously promoting its medical, environmental, social and moral benefits.

spomCarol J. Adams’ seminal The Sexual Politics of Meat was one of the first works to draw on this history in order to expose the striking blind spot in critical evaluations of Frankenstein, which fail to comment on the creature’s meat-free diet. She notes the narrative’s allegiance with lapsarian Romantic discourses which “uncoded all tales of the primeval fall with the interpretation that they were implicitly about the introduction of meat eating” (Adams 112). Indeed, there are clear intertextual allusions that validate the influence of contemporaneous vegetarian tracts on Shelley’s novel. For example, Oswald’s 1791 The Cry of Nature posits scientific ambitions as a male endeavour, with his address to the “sons” of modern science expressing a patriarchal heritage held in contrast to the feminine pronouns attached to the abstract notions of wisdom and nature (n.p). Further, this masculine gendered science is seen to violently attack and rupture the “maternal” aspect of nature, an element much discussed in scholarship regarding Victor’s usurpation of the female role in creating life. Oswald’s polemic also critiques the idea that humans are by nature carnivorous, attacking those who use such contested arguments as justification for the cruelty inflicted by practices such as vivisection. As Adams notes, the creature’s composition from the herbivorous animal remains of the slaughterhouse allows Shelley to “circumven[t] the anatomical argument that vegetarians of this time found compelling and their critics ludicrous” (117) in order to renegotiate relations to the body.

mary shelleyI suggest that Frankenstein’s hybrid creature, through his composition from slaughterhouse remains, forces a confrontation with the monstrous realities of the contemporaneous meat industry and blurs the boundaries between the human and nonhuman. It thus seems as important to uncover the neglected cultural history of Romantic veganism, embedded within philosophical traditions and emerging ethical questions about ‘the animal’, as it is to trace the literary representation of veganism as a site of anxiety and radical difference. In particular, it seems productive to examine how this speaks to contemporary media representations of, and vitriol against, vegans. Indeed, just as the Towards a Vegan Theory conference centred around a confrontation with failure, inconsistency and inarticulable emotions in relation to nonhuman animals, the figure of Shelley’s monstrous vegan, as an embodiment of anxieties around the human, humanity and humanism, suggests the importance of such confrontations for critical evaluations of the novel. For example, the creature’s repeated association with cannibalism throughout the novel, defined as a “savage” (26) by Walton whilst the young William accuses “you wish to eat me” (144), ties him to contemporaneous fears of cannibalism within the colonies whilst presenting characters with both the animated remains of slaughtered animals and the contingency of the boundaries of the edible.

At the upcoming BARS conference I will be providing a close analysis of Frankenstein to explore the ways in which the creature invokes anxiety in the novel as well as his relation to sympathy and the body. By presenting a monstrous creation whose veganism appears as both an articulable difference, where his diet is defined as “not that of man” (148), and an inarticulable relation to the body, seemingly innately drawn to a herbivorous diet, Shelley’s novel raises questions of whether veganism is to be seen as a humanist mode of self-discipline, or an ethical response outside of the prosthetics of language. As Laura Wright tentatively suggests in The Vegan Studies Project, veganism might perhaps be best viewed as much as an orientation as a social choice; “a delicate mixture of something both primal and social, a category — like sexual orientation or left- or right-handedness — that constitutes for some people, just perhaps, something somewhat beyond one’s choosing” (7).

You can find out more about the Centre’s interest in health and wellbeing at the website for our Wellcome Trust-funded project ‘Living with Feeling’.

 

References

Adams, Carol J. The Sexual Politics of Meat. New York: Continuum, 1990. Print.

Oswald, John. The Cry of Nature; Or an Appeal to Mercy and to Justice, on Behalf of the Persecuted Animals. London: J.Johnson, 1791. Ivu.org. Web. 2 Feb 2016.

Ritson, Joseph. An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food, as a Moral Duty. London: R.Phillips, 1802. Archive.org. Web. 20 Oct 2015.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Print.

Shelley, P.B. A Vindication of Natural Diet. London: Smith & Davy, 1813. Print.

Spencer, Colin. The Heretic’s Feast: A History of Vegetarianism. London: Fourth Estate, 1993. Print.

Stuart, Tristram. The Bloodless Revolution: Radical Vegetarians and the Discovery of India. London: HarperPress, 2006. Print.

Wright, Laura. The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror. London: University of Georgia Press, 2015. Print

 

Shame, Affect and the Literary Self

Posted on June 8, 2016 by

20160523_151043 (2)This is a guest post by Merrilees Roberts and the second in this week’s ‘Romantic Voices’ series. Merrilees is a second year PhD Student in English at Queen Mary. Her thesis explores ‘Reticence in the Poetry of Percy Shelley’ and develops a phenomenological approach to reading Shelley’s verse which shows how that which is unspoken, withheld, or made to speak in a register other than the discursive is a key tactic in Shelley’s poetics. Merrilees will be giving a paper based on the material discussed in this blog post at the British Association for Romantic Studies’ conference taking place 22-23 June in Oxford.

In the early 1960s psychologist Silvan Tomkins, pioneer of ‘affect’ theory, wrote:

Shame is both an interruption and a further impediment to communication, which is itself communicated. When one hangs one’s head or drops one’s eyelids or averts one’s gaze, one has communicated one’s shame and both the face and the self unwittingly become more visible, to the self and others.[1]

shameShame, described in this way, has been considered by many to be the central affect of ‘self’ psychology because of its unique propensity to induce self-consciousness. Shame provides its subject with a self-reflexive glimpse of how the ‘self’, as Tomkins conceives it, is constructed by a combination of external triggers that produce involuntary autonomic responses and the interpretation of such response. As Adam Frank and Eve Sedgwick imply in their introduction to Shame and its Sisters, an edited collection of Tomkins’ work, understanding shame as an affect provides ways of identifying the presence of a self or subjectivity in literary texts. This is because shame has a unique relationship to a kind of rhetoric that uses reticence and ambiguity to limn subjectivity. Even where such rhetoric seems to resist direct expression, aspects of the self may still be revealed and communicated despite this withdrawal, and not just because shame cathects the values we believe we have denigrated or transgressed, which is how shame is often accounted for in moral philosophy. Shame-as-affect creates a kind of cross-section of how selfhood is shaped by moments of reflexivity that also seem to force an experience of inter-subjectivity.

This is perhaps not a new concept. The nineteenth-century philosopher Hegel wrote in his ‘Early Theological Writings’ that shame induces the feeling that we are reserving our innermost selves from complete loving union with another. Though he sees this as undesirable he also perceives that it is the very awareness of the impending risk of self-absorption inherent in shame that makes us yearn for reconciliation: love demands we are ashamed of shame:

There is a sort of antagonism between complete surrender or the only possible cancellation of opposition (i.e., its cancellation in complete union) and a still subsisting independence. Union feels the latter as a hindrance; love is indignant if part of the individual is severed and held back as a private property. This raging of love against [exclusive] individuality is shame.[2]

In being a gatekeeper for the self, shame can be both a destructive assertion of autonomy and a means of opening up the self to being shaped by others. It is this kind of self-reflexive, but also inter-subjective affective energy that I suggest modern affect theory can open up for literary studies. I also propose that it is the same kind of feeling that interiority is made excessively visible in moments of awkward inter-personal exchange which Brian Massumi, another central figure in affect theory, draws upon when he conceives affect as what is “left over” from the socio-linguistic designations of behaviour we call ‘emotions’.

parablesMassumi’s affects create gaps between the content and the effect of an emotional stimulus. Because such gaps create the space for a text to make connections at a meta-level between expected responses to narrative or plot that are ‘normally indexed as separate’, Massumi believes affect can illuminate such apparent contradictions as why, for example, tragedies can induce pleasure.[3] Affects challenge narrative consistency (of the self, as well as of a text) without completely re-routing it, and this also has rich potential for interpreting texts which use reticence to intimate interiority. Massumi’s ideas provide ways of thinking about how multiple interpretive explanations for such complex rhetoric might arise and then in some measure be savoured by the reader at an intuitive level before a more obvious sense of narrative continuity reasserts itself. Massumi’s model of affect also challenges the ‘Romantic Expressivist’ concept of poetic voice associated with the work of M. H. Abrams and Charles Taylor. Romantic Expressivism theorises a nineteenth century aesthetic which created its own criteria for authenticity by giving free reign to personal expressions of feeling which supposedly manifest the vibrancy of Nature itself. Implicit in this idea is that a poetic ‘voice’ can channel and unify great emotional and spiritual depths, which are themselves multiple and various, drawn from an organic combination of Natural forces and the human capacity for self-determination. But Massumi’s affects reverse the direction of this flow, demonstrating instead that a singular poetic or narrative voice can be disrupted by the emergence of readerly affective experience which creates multiple interpretive currents, and inter-subjective perspectives on the self, that are triggered (as Tomkins might say) by the text’s style and conceptual structure.

Both Tomkins’ and Massumi’s theories have potential use in the study of narratology and hermeneutics as they are fundamentally interested in how knowing and feeling might be internally differentiated by the subject of emotional experience, as well as how this question is itself mediated by interpretive acts (both voluntary and involuntary). In describing these theories I have briefly sketched some ideas for how the process of reading and interpreting texts might have therapeutic and philosophical purchase on feelings that, discomfortingly, seem unaccounted for by both our current beliefs about ‘emotions’ and by linguistic expression per se. Considering affect as a residual emotive presence which literary texts both incite and contain can reveal specific ways in which writing can be as a process of self-construction; ways which demonstrate the limits of the idea of a ‘core’ or essential self or voice.

Interested in shame? Read more posts from the Centre’s 2012 shame week.

References:

[1] Silvan Tomkins, Shame and its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Selections from the four volumes of Affect, Imagery, Consciousness), ed. by Adam Frank and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 137.

[2] G. W. F. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, trans. by T.M. Knox and Richard Kroner, 3rd edn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), p. 306.

[3] Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 24.

 

Political Economy and the Language of Feeling: Rereading Jane Marcet

Posted on June 7, 2016 by

Sarah Comyn PhotoThis is a guest post by Dr. Sarah Comyn and the first in this week’s ‘Romantic Voices’ series. Sarah is Literature Lecturer at Trinity College, University of Melbourne in Australia. Her research focuses on the transhistorical relationship between political economy and literature. She is currently a Visiting Fellow at Chawton House Library where she is researching the political economic writings of Jane Marcet, Maria Edgeworth and their literary networks, in a project called, “Blue Ladies and Political Economy: Women Writers, the Popularization of Political Economy and the Discourse of Happiness.” Sarah will be giving a paper based on the material discussed in this blog post at the British Association for Romantic Studies’ conference taking place 22-23 June in Oxford.

Maria Edgeworth exclaimed, in a letter to Mrs Ruxton in March 1822, that “[i]t has now become high fashion with blue ladies to talk Political Economy” and make “a great jabbering on the subject, while others who have more sense, like Mrs. Marcet, hold their tongues and listen.”[1] Mrs. Jane Marcet, author of more than ten books, ranging from natural philosophy to grammar, arguably did much more than simply listen. Admired by Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo while dismissed by Joseph Schumpeter as “economics for what we should call high-school girls” there is no doubt that Marcet’s Conversations on the Political Economy (1816) was widely read, not only by Schumpeter’s school girls but by adults and those who we would now describe as the forefathers of economics.[2] Labelled as a populariser or more damningly a propagandist, Marcet receives very little critical attention today. My research attempts to recover Jane Marcet’s influence on political economy from her current obscurity.

Beginning with Edgeworth and Marcet, my research aims to explore the networks of influence and reading economies established by authors such as Margracia Loudon, Mary Leadbeater and Harriet Martineau. It will investigate the relations between gender, literature and political economy at the vital early nineteenth-century moment when political economy was being consolidated as a discipline. The discussions of happiness and political economy that occur in the texts provide an intriguing perspective upon the question of how emotions were understood and expressed in the nineteenth century within the discipline of political economy that is often assumed to be antithetical to the conception and expression of emotion.

title page of Marcet's 'Conversations on Chemistry'

Credit: http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Jane_Marcet

Born Jane Haldimand in 1769, Jane Marcet was the “only surviving daughter to the Swiss merchant and banker Anthony Francis Haldimand.”[3] Her brother William would also become a merchant banker and eventually the director of the Bank of England. Elizabeth Morse argues that Jane “shared in the excellent home education provided for her brothers” and when her mother died when she was fifteen “she took over the running of the family household.”[4] Her introduction to economics, at least in its domestic form, therefore started at a young age. In December 1799 she married the physician Alexander John Gaspard Marcet, who exposed her to the world of science (more broadly) and would later encourage her to write and publish her books. Jane Marcet attended Sir Humphrey Davy’s lectures at the Royal Institute and invited Davy and his wife to dine at their house. It is these lectures, conversations and the assistance from her husband that are said to have inspired the writing and publication of her most famous work, Conversations on Chemistry, Intended more Especially for the Female Sex, which she published anonymously in 1805 and would eventually go to 16 editions. Michael Faraday claimed it was this book that encouraged him to study science. The Conversations on Chemistry sets up the educational writing style of “conversations” or dialogues between a Mrs Bryan (later Mrs. B. in political economy) and Caroline and Emily (Emily disappears by the time Marcet is writing the Conversations on Political Economy). According to Bette Polkinghorn, Richard Lovell Edgeworth is said to have encouraged Marcet to change the student, Caroline, to a boy for her work on political economy in order to improve sales. Marcet, however, refused.[5]

Marcet’s concern with the gendered power of feeling, and the impact it may have on her readers’ understanding of political economy is expressed early in her work. In her preface to the Conversations of Political Economy, she argues that the “colloquial form” is an appropriate format for the content of her book because the dialogue illustrates the questions that are “likely to arise in the mind of an intelligent young person, fluctuating between the impulse of her heart and the progress of her reason, and naturally imbued with all the prejudice and popular feelings of uninformed benevolence.”[6] During the conversations between the ebullient student Caroline, and her teacher Mrs. B., the reader is taken on a journey through Caroline’s introduction to political economy in which her charitable and poetic impulses are continually dismissed by Mrs B’s commitment to the ‘truth’ of political economy. Despite Caroline’s inability to withstand Mrs B.’s “attacks” on Caroline’s reasoning, Mrs. B is careful to respond to the emotional reactions of her student. When Caroline dismisses political economy as “the love of riches,” Mrs. B argues, “political economy is particularly inimical to the envious, jealous and malignant passions; and if ever peace and moderation should flourish in the world, it is to enlightened views of science that we should be indebted for the miracle.”[7]

Marcet_Jane

Credit: http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Jane_Marcet

Throughout her text, Marcet is arguing for the credibility of political economy as a science, a courageous undertaking as economics as economics had not been “a gentleman’s subject since it dealt with trade.”[8] Her strategy for exerting the scientific qualities of political economy while writing an accessible text is at once complex and quite simple: she attacks literature, poetry more specifically and Oliver Goldsmith in particular. And yet the conversations are not a form of catechism, there is something quite intoxicating and seductive about them and I’d like to suggest it’s the use of a more figurative writing style and her constant attention to the power of feeling that allows for this. As Jane Marcet rereads and rewrites the “masters” of political economy, it seems we too must return and reread Jane Marcet. Is she populariser, propagandist or political economist?

[1] Maria Edgeworth, “To Mrs. Ruxton, 9 March 1822,” in Letters from England, 1813-1844, ed. by Christina Colvin (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 364.

[2] Bette Polkinghorn, “Popularises as contributors to economics: The unappreciated tribe,” in Joseph A. Schumpeter: Historian of Economics: Perspectives on the History of Economic Thought, ed. by Laurence S. Moss (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 39.

[3] Elizabeth J. Morse, ‘Marcet, Jane Haldimand (1769–1858)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/18029, accessed 3 June 2016]

[4] ibid.

[5] Bette Polkinghorn, Jane Marcet: An Uncommon Woman (Aldermaston, UK: Forestwood Publications, 1993).

[6] Jane Marcet, Conversations on Political Economy; in which the elements of that science are familiarly explained, 6th ed. revised and enlarged (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1827) p. vi.

[7]  Jane Marcet, pp. 23-25.

[8] Hilda Hollis, “The Rhetoric of Jane Marcet’s Popularizing Political Economy,” in Nineteenth Century Contexts, 24:4, December 2002, pp. 379-396 (p.381)

Edward Lovett: an Emotional Collector?

Posted on June 1, 2016 by

This is a guest post by Ross MacFarlane who is Research Engagement Officer in the Wellcome Library, where he is heavily involved in promoting the Library’s collections.

 He has researched, lectured and written on such topics as the history of early recorded sound, the collection (and collectors) of Henry Wellcome and notions of urban folklore in Edwardian London.  He has also led guided walks around London on the occult past of Bloomsbury and on the intersection of medicine, science and trade in Greenwich and Deptford.

This blog post is an edited version of a talk – From amulets to apps: an emotional biography of Edward Lovett’s folklore collections – given at the Emotional Objects: Touching Emotions in Europe 1600-1900 Conference on 11th October 2013.  A version of that talk is available here: http://www.history.ac.uk/podcasts/emotional-objects-touching-emotions-europe-1600-1900/amulets-apps-emotional-biogaphy-edward

 

Increasingly, Edward Lovett (1852-1933) is being recognised as one of the most interesting collectors of the early 20th century. Through the amulets, charms and talismans he amassed – one of the largest collections of its kind ever assembled in the British Isles – Lovett was recognised by his contemporaries as one of the most active folklorists of his time.  But if we think about the nature of these objects – particularly through the accounts Lovett gives of why they were created or purchased in the first place – perhaps we can think of Lovett as not just a collector of folklore but a collector of emotions.

Objects

The objects Lovett collected ranged from cheap, mass-produced items, to items that were adapted from their original purpose (for example, by inscription).  They are objects that capture the differing fears and hopes of those who owned.  There’s often an intimate relationship between owner and object: many were handled or worn, or generally hidden from public view and kept close to the body. Indeed, the longer the item was worn, seemingly the more powerful the object was.

Some examples, taken from Lovett’s summation of his collecting practice in the capital, Magic in Modern London published in 1925, will help to flesh this summary out.

A pockmarked piece of coral, similar in feel to damaged skin, was said to help lessen the chances of catching smallpox; moles feet were carried as a cure for cramps; horseshoes tied above beds were said to stop children having nightmares and a range of herbal remedies were employed for different curative purposes (orris root, for example was used to aid the teething of Jewish babies).

In one account offered by Lovett, a fearful mother in Bethnal Green was advised – by him – to cut hair from her daughter who was ill with whooping cough.  The hair was put between two bits of bread and thrown onto the street, where it was eaten by a dog.  When Lovett next visited the family, the child had recovered (although the health of the dog was not recorded…).

However, the best example from Lovett’s collection of this intermingling of medical fears with tactile objects, are a series of beaded necklaces. In 1914, Lovett learnt from the Medical Inspector of Schools, Urban District Council of Acton, of children wearing necklaces consisting of blue glass beads to ward off bronchitis.

Lovett followed up this information by travelling to the East End: there one of his contacts, a shop owner, revealed she herself wore one of these necklaces.  Lovett obtained the following information, that the necklaces “must never be taken off, even to wash [the] child.  [They are] often worn a whole lifetime, only being removed to renew the string if broken or rotten” and that the wearers had “a profound confidence in them as a cure for bronchitis”.

Sketch of London where amulet necklaces were found Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Sketch of London where amulet necklaces were found. Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images. Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Lovett investigated in 26 districts in London, drawing up a map of his travels, recording the shops where he was offered one of these necklaces for sale when he said he wanted something to cure a child suffering from bronchitis.  His search for the necklaces resulting in this visual representation of his travels across London:

 

 

 

 

Blue Bead Map of London

Aside from the amulets to protect against ill-health, Lovett described and collected materials which could be said to work against other afflictions which would traditionally be seen to be more ‘emotional’ in their conception.

In particular, Lovett comments on the use of plants as love remedies.  For instance, “Dragon’s Blood”, which was the nickname for the resin from the Dracaena tree, was sold by East End herbalists as a “love philtre”.  The notion being it would be offered by girls to boys who they had a crush on: drink the philtre and the boy instantaneously fell for the girl.  Similarly, the root of the Tormentil plant was sold by herbalists to girls: the belief being that the root, burnt at midnight, would induce such strong torments on an ex-boyfriend that he would soon return to his sweetheart.

Similarly, Magic in Modern London, published in 1925, features many accounts of tokens, charms and small mascots carried by soldiers for good luck during World War One.  Whilst the accounts given in Magic in Modern London relate to British soldiers, Lovett’s collection included charms from soldiers from the continent. Such accounts and objects offer an entry point into the experience of fighting in the Great War and of the strong emotions and superstitions which were a large part of “trench culture”.

Lovett believed the outbreak of war led to an increase in superstition: a child’s caul was traditionally believed by sailors to protect them against drowning.  After the increase in British shipping being attacked by German U-boats, Lovett noticed that such an item increased in price in the docks of East London.

How much emotional investment did Lovett have in his collection?  Lovett was very keen to promote himself and from surviving correspondence, there is a strong sense of him using his collection to enhance his status and recognition as an expert on Folklore.  As such, he passed on to different museums, a great number of pieces from his collection during his lifetime – often with the caveat that it should be clear that he was the donor to the museum.

This is a slightly different conception to the popular image of the collector-as-hoarder: with Lovett, we have a collector with a more dispassionate, less emotional, relationship to his collection.  Indeed, we have an instance of objects imbued with ‘magical’ powers by their owners, becoming acquired by Lovett and being used to increase his social capital.

Fay Bound Alberti has asserted that “Analyzing emotions as experiences and representations situated in the practice of everyday life, helps us to move away from the construction of emotions as abstract entities” [1].  By looking closer at the amulets and charms collected by Lovett from believing Londoners, we can see differing emotions imbued in and even inscribed upon these objects.

[1] Fay Bound Alberti, “Bodies, Hearts, and Minds: Why Emotions Matter to Historians of Science and Medicine,” Isis 100, no. 4 (December 2009): p802.

Enjoyed this blog post? Come to the Centre for the History of the Emotions’s ‘Carnival of Lost Emotions’ on June 4 where you can find out about the objects our researchers invest with emotional meaning and show us your own – we’ll photograph them for our gallery of emotional talismans. Also see more #emotional talismans on Twitter by following @emotionshistory You can find out more about our interest in emotional health at the project website for our new grant ‘Living with Feeling’.

 

 

The Literary Form of Emotion

Posted on May 31, 2016 by

Aleks-059BWThis is a guest post by Dr. Aleksondra Hultquist who is a Lecturer at Stockton University and an Honorary Researcher for the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.  She has worked as an Assistant Professor in the United States and a Lecturer in Australia.  Her scholarship focuses on the literature and culture of the long eighteenth-century, especially women writers, and she has published articles in Philological Quarterly, The Eighteenth-Century Theory and Interpretation, and several edited collections.  She is a Managing Editor of ABO: Interactive Journal for Women and the Arts 1640-1830 and is currently finishing her monograph, The Amatory Mode.

What does emotion look like in literature?  How does one “close read” emotion in a play, a poem, or a work of prose?  My current project, The Amatory Mode, considers these questions in terms of the emotional journey that fictional characters undergo in a lesser-known genre of early prose called amatory fiction.  These tales, written by British women between 1680 and 1750, detail illegitimate love affairs gone wrong and have been derided for their excessive use of emotion words, physical descriptions of desire, and overblown dramatic scenes of love lost.  Since the 1950s, the aesthetic of fiction has been valued by its connection to realism, the presence of “round” characters, the values of a rising middle class, and the triumph of reason over feeling.  These values were developed based on fiction written by male authors after the 1740s and are often read backwards to evaluate all prose genres prior to this definitive year; thus amatory fiction is aesthetically unpleasing; these texts fail.  But the eighteenth-century, especially the latter half, was a time of feeling.  Sentimental novels and plays were popular and connected heightened emotional sensitivity to moral standards—if one felt genuinely, one was a genuinely upstanding character.  Because of this tendency, amatory fiction is a natural place to look for the beginnings of the eighteenth century’s preoccupations with states of feeling, as Stephen Ahern has previously argued.  The long eighteenth century in Britain was simultaneously an Age of Reason and an Age of the Passions.

In the eighteenth-century, the passions were a system of response to stimuli, and those responses manifested in a variety of literary forms.  Much like the current term “psychology,” the passions explained why a person reacted the way that s/he did in a range of overlapping categories: political, corporeal, spiritual, intellectual, aesthetic, and emotional.  Passions included concepts such as love, anger, and melancholy, but other passions included curiosity, revenge, or avarice, ideas that post-twentieth century subjects do not label as emotions.  While some twentieth-century critics read amatory fiction as formally distasteful (John J. Richetti) or begrudgingly influential (William B. Warner) and others have read the genre as politically relevant to the fall of the Stuart line (Ros Ballaster and Toni Bowers), increasingly scholars are reading amatory fiction as a sophisticated dialogue about the experience of feeling.  Kathryn R. King and Earla Wilputte have argued that, in the 1720s, extreme emotional expression of feeling was a sophisticated literary exploration of heightened emotional states, and that contemporary audiences recognized this complexity.  My work extends these scholars’ ideas to argue that the exploration of the passions occurred throughout eighteenth-century literature.

NinaouLaFolleparAmour

Nina, ou, La Folle par Amour by Jean-François Janinet (1787). Credit http://www.clarkart.edu/Art-Pieces/10438

Rather than thinking in terms of a sub-genre of fiction, then, it makes sense to think of these texts as a central example of what I call the amatory mode.  Many of the authors of amatory fiction—Aphra Behn, Delariver Manley, and Eliza Haywood, to name the original core of writers who carried this nomenclature—were also poets, dramatists, political propagandists, and journalists.  To understand how emotion works in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries, it is logical to look for emotional structures throughout these women’s oeuvres.  The amatory mode, then, is recognizable across genres and explains how emotional investigation and expression occurred in written form.  The amatory mode describes the technique of a piece, not through generic expectations, authors, or received notions of aesthetic values, but in terms of how emotional experience is articulated and processed.  A mode is a manner in which something is experienced or occurs, a method, style, approach, technique, or practice of expression.  A satiric mode, for instance, signals that the important part about satire is not its particular genre (verse, prose) or even necessarily its particular literariness, but its ability to accomplish the task of paradoxical instruction.  Similarly, the amatory mode signals a method and style of delineating complex emotional states of being through the specific case of the passion of love.  This spectrum includes a variety of passions that are set off by the passion of love, including passions such as curiosity, jealousy, and revenge.  When considered in this light, the amatory moves beyond preoccupations with heaving breasts and thin silk shifts in gardens at night. Instead, such scenes become emblematic of the ways in which humans wrestle with and understand emotional growth.  As delightful (or as excruciating) as such episodes may be, their importance lies in sustained repetition of the process of passionate experience and the emotional lessons of love.  The amatory mode, then, is a technique for evaluating emotional articulation in literature across many genres and authors. There are amatory scenes in plays, amatory techniques in poems, and amatory authors other than marginalized women; there is an amatory Pope, an amatory Richardson, an amatory Goldsmith, an amatory Austen.

My hope is that my work acts as a starting point for other scholars who are interested in negotiating emotion in literature as a way to augment conversations of form and aesthetics.  I argue that fiction can be valued for its realism, round characters, and dedication to reason, as well as through extreme emotional expression and the lessons that can be learned from giving way to the passions.  I believe that this way of thinking about organizational method will open many new avenues to both marginalized and canonical authors and works.

Further Reading

Ahern, Stephen.  Affected Sensibilities: Romantic Excess and the Genealogy of the Novel, 1680-1810. New York: AMS Press, 2007.

Ballaster, Ros.  Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684-1740. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.

Bowers, Toni.  Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance 1660-1760.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

King, Kathryn R. “New Contexts for Early Novels by Women: The Case of Eliza Haywood, Aaron Hill, and the Hillarians, 1719-1725.” A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture.  Edited by Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia.  Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.

Richetti, John J. Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700-1739. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.

Warner, William B. Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading on Britain,1684-1750. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Wilputte, Earla.  Wilputte, Earla.  Passion and Language in Eighteenth-Century Literature: The Aesthetic Sublime in the Work of Eliza Haywood, Aaron Hill, and Martha Fowke.  New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2014.

 

‘Why I sing the blues’ – emotional healing and Southern ecstasy

Posted on May 25, 2016 by

On the 27th of May (ie this Friday), the Centre has a one-day conference on music, medicine and emotions. Details here.)

What’s the point of music? Evolutionary psychologists have come up with various answers – Steven Pinker famously declared music was like cheesecake – ultimately pointless, an evolutionary side-effect or spandrel of other functional aspects of consciousness. Others have suggested the ‘function’ of music is sexual display and courtship, language learning and maternal bonding, collective identity or well-being and emotional healing. The answer is it’s all these things – music is whatever we want it to be. There may be times when music saves our life, and other times when it’s just cheesecake.

I’m in the middle of a trip through the Mississippi Delta to listen to and think about music and its connection to modern spirituality. It’s a research trip but for some reason I’m paying for it myself – it seems too much fun to be funded. I started in Nashville, drove to Memphis and am now heading down Highway 61, through the cradle of the Civil War, to New Orleans. I’ve visited the Grand Ole Opry (home to America’s oldest radio programme and the showcase of country music), the Country Hall of Fame, Studio B in Nashville, Sun and Stax Studios in Memphis, I’ve seen the pilgrims cry at Elvis’ grave in Graceland, I’ve heard the blues on Beale Street, I’ve even seen Reverend Al Green preach at the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church (he sang like an angel and then gave the most homophobic speech I’ve ever heard in public). Next stop New Orleans.

This area, still often poor and downtrodden, was the Silicon Valley of the 1930s to 60s. It was the site of the most intense cultural innovation, giving us the cultural technologies of gospel, blues, country, bluegrass, rock & roll and soul music, and creating the engine which drove the counter-cultural revolution (my travelling companion, Joseph Drury of Villanova, has a book coming out soon on the novel and technology, which gave me this idea of music as a cultural technology).. But what’s the precise function of the technology? As BB King puts it: ‘Everybody ask me, why I sing the blues’. Exactly, BB. Why?

You can see lots of reasons. Certainly one reason is sexual display – think of Muddy Waters’ Hoochie Coochie Man or Mannish Boy. But another reason is courtship, begging, and apology for misdemeanours – think of James Brown’s Please Please Please. Another is civic identity – one of the first blues songs was  Memphis Blues by WC Handy in 1912, which was a campaign song for the election of Mayor Crump. Think also of Georgia on My Mind or Sweet Home Chicago. Songs also serve as places of ethical and social reflection – from sexual ethics (‘If lovin you is wrong, I don’t wanna be right’ is about the ethics of adultery for example) to social justice songs like The Staple Sisters’ Respect Yourself or Sly Stone’s Stand. Songs were the Spectator essays of the 1960s – places where people debated ethical behaviour in a time of rapid social change, and a lot of that debate was by female singers, demanding better treatment and better rights.

Travelling medicine shows often featured musicians

But one of the biggest reasons why people sing and dance, it seems to me, is emotional healing. These days the southern states have the highest rates of anti-depressant use in the US, but before the 1980s, there were no anti-depressants and no therapists. So if you were emotionally suffering, what were your options for emotional healing? You had the Southern comfort of food (as Professor Aziz of QMUL has found, high-fat food numbs physical and emotional pain, and no food is higher fat than Southern food), of booze, of sex, of drugs, you had the ‘miracle healing’ remedies of travelling medicine shows, you had the church, and you had music. And chief of these was music – in fact, music features as part of all these avenues to emotional healing. There’s music in the juke joint when you’re getting drunk and dancing with your girl, music in the medicine shows, music in the church, music in the soul food restaurants.

How does music heal? It helps people work – a lot of blues and gospel songs started as work songs for sharecroppers or prisoners doing back-breaking work from sunrise to sun-down. It helped them synchronize their movements, get into a trance, and feel less pain. It helps people express themselves and cut loose after work – the classic site for music in the 1920s was the porch, where sharecroppers could show their stuff on the guitar. It helps people re-assert their dignity and wholeness in a system which humiliated, abused and commodified them. As H C Speir, a record-shop owner who helped launch the careers of many blues musicians, put it: ‘the Negro for over a hundred years has been deprived of all his privileges – they could get in the field and feel more satisfied with themselves – they’re singing off something that happened to them’.

A great photo of Tina Turner by Jack Robinson

As David Byrne argued in a previous interview I did, music heals because it’s cathartic – something is within us, some grievance, some humiliation, some wrong, some mishap or a sin, and it weighs on us. And we may not be able to express it, to articulate it, to exorcise it, to shake it off. Music, because it is pre-rational, because it takes us into a sort of trance, helps to connect us to these deeper sufferings, and to shake them off, through singing and through dancing. And that helps us to ‘get happy’ as they put it in Pentecostal churches, to feel good, to feel re-connected to our deeper self. You could see it as a pressure release – that’s how Aristotle thought of it. Robert Morganfeld, the brother of Muddy Waters, says: ‘A boiler has a pop-off whenever the pressure is too high. We use blues as a pop-off for those that were depressed.’

But it’s not just hydraulic pressure release, I think. It’s also a sense of connecting to your deeper self, your soul, your connection to God. And through that, you get a vision of a better world – a lot of gospel and soul is about moving higher and making progress, like Reverend Brewster’s Move On Up A Little Higher or Curtis Mayfield’s People Get Ready. It’s about personal transcendence and social transcendence.

Of course, southern music offers different types and arenas of emotional release – there’s the church, and there’s the juke joint. There’s God’s music, and there’s the Devil’s music. But actually the church and the juke joint are subterraneously connected, and many musicians worked in both arenas – Little Richard was a Pentecostal healer as a boy, for example, supposedly blest with healing power. Then he left the church and became a profane rock & roller. But he still insisted that his music healed – he said in a Rolling Stone interview:

I believe my music is the healin’ music. Just like Oral Roberts says he’s a divine healer, I believe my music can make the blind see, the lame walk, the deaf and dumb hear and talk, because it inspires and uplifts people. I’ve had old women tell me I made them feel they were nineteen years old. It uplifts the soul, you see everybody’s movin’, they’re happy, it regenerates the heart and makes the liver quiver, the bladder spatter, the knees freeze.

Today, there are other avenues to healing – the Southern states have some of the highest uses of anti-depressants in the world. Young Southerners are less likely to go to church and more likely to meditate. But I think young people are still turning to music for emotional release – take recent two songs by Nashville residents, Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off and Justin Timberlake’s Can’t Stop the Feeling, both celebrating music’s cathartic and liberating power, or Pharrell Williams’ Happy, which is straight out of the church. And it’s interesting that the videos for Happy and Can’t Stop the Feeling both avoid the worship of the front-man. Instead, they celebrate ordinary people (or at least non-musicians) singing and dancing. In the age of the internet, music may be returning to its more participatory and democratic roots.

What the South did, I’d suggest, in that white hot Soul-icon Valley, is create a technology, or group of technologies, that helped people find release, healing and ecstasy – by which I mean a way to go beyond their ordinary ego-consciousness and feel a sense of release and connection to something bigger than them. The blues, rock & roll, soul, and country  gave us avenues to what Peter Guralnick (America’s finest music writer) calls ‘secular ecstasy’ – the ecstasy of Southern churches in secular contexts. So many of the pioneers of blues, country, rock & roll and soul came from the church and learned their ecstatic techniques in the church – Elvis, Tina Turner, BB King, the Isley Brothers, Curtis Mayfield, Sly Stone, Little Richard, Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, and so on.

The ecstasy connects us to other people beyond our egocentric ‘buffered’ selves. It connects us to our deeper selves, the emotions that civilization requires us to repress. And it connects us to the spiritual dimension, whether you think of that as God, the Devil, or Elvis. That ‘secular ecstasy’ spread out over the world, in part thanks to white British bands like the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. The fire may have died down somewhat since then. But it’s still so important to our well-being. I honestly think the South saved our soul, at a time when Christianity was declining and the West was facing a crisis of meaning, it gave us what Bruce Springsteen called ‘a reason to believe’.