Review: Playthings, by Alex Pheby

Posted on October 28, 2015 by Jules Evans

This is a guest-post by author and psychologist Hilda Reilly.

Playthings, Alex Pheby’s second novel, is based on the case of Daniel Paul Schreber, a 19th century German judge afflicted by schizophrenia. Unusually for a patient of that era, he wrote an extensive account of his psychotic experiences and long periods of hospitalization, later published as Memoirs of my Nervous Illness. The case has been made famous by Sigmund Freud who wrote his own interpretation of Schreber’s illness, although the two never met in person.

Crucial to the case is a knowledge of Schreber’s family background. His father, Moritz Schreber, was a medical doctor and child-rearing expert whose many books on the subject achieved a popularity which seems astonishing when judged by today’s standards of child care. He it was who devised the harsh and punitive regime of upbringing imposed on his own children from the age of just a few months, a regime described by Morton Schatzman, author of Soul Murder – an analysis of the Schreber case – as ‘household totalitarianism’.

Freud’s and Schatzman’s are probably the most prominent of the analytical works published on Schreber and they are at odds with each other, Freud linking his psychotic condition to repressed homosexual desire for his father and his brother, Schatzman imputing it rather to his father’s repressive disciplinarianism. In Playthings Pheby seems to subscribe to the latter theory.

The question of whether or not any author can adequately represent the reality of another person by attempting to think himself into that person’s consciousness and portraying the findings in a work of ‘faction’ is a controversial one. Yet any rendering of the past is mediated through the specific consciousness of the narrator, with all that that implies in terms of formative forces acting on the narrative produced. Indeed we might question to what extent Schreber himself was a reliable narrator.

Memoirs was written towards the end of Schreber’s second hospitalisation, when he was trying to secure his release. There is undoubtedly something of the splendid in Memoirs, with its magnificent architecture of exuberant hallucinatory imagery and its elaborately surreal cosmology. Yet it is recorded with almost an air of detachment, as if written by a third person rather than directly by the experiencer himself. There isn’t the sense of confusion, disorientation, menace even, that might be expected to flavour a first-hand account. As Rosemary Dinnage comments in her Introduction to the New York Review Books Classics edition: ‘What remains missing up to the end is feeling itself: no tears are recorded.’ Was this a deliberate strategy on Schreber’s part, adopted to help him secure his release? At the very least, we should bear in mind that, although based on notes made while his illness was at its height, it was rendered into its final form when he was in the recovery stage, when some of the vigour of the original experiences would be lost, even in his own memory.

Pheby could have chosen the time frame of the novel to correspond with Schreber’s first or second hospitalisation, the periods covered by Memoirs; he could then have produced a dramatisation of Schreber’s own testimony which would, of course, have resulted in an entirely different kind of novel, and one possibly less challenging for both writer and reader.

He opted instead to set it in Schreber’s third, and last, hospitalisation, for which we have no reports from Schreber and little other information. This, of course, gives Pheby greater creative freedom and, given his stated aim of ‘exploring the psychological structure of fascism, the cancer of anti-Semitism, and the abuse of institutional power’, it is understandable why he would have felt the need for this freedom.

The style Pheby has adopted for Playthings seems to be inspired by that of Memoirs. As with Memoirs, I found it curiously devoid of emotion. There is a similar sense of dry detachment in the narration. Schreber’s mind never seems quite out of control. His conversations with hallucinated individuals struck me as too measured and coherent to be consistent with the kind of dialogue experienced in psychotic conditions. Even Schreber himself, for all his control, goes further; for example, in Memoirs he refers to the voices as “nonsensical twaddle”; or again, “……..the talk of the voices had already become mostly an empty babel of ever-recurring monotonous phrases in tiresome repetition; on top of this they were rendered grammatically incomplete by the omission of words and even syllables.” There is none of this raggedness of speech in Playthings, little of the flamboyant surreality that is found in Memoirs.

There is also surprisingly little of the religious preoccupations that feature so prominently in Schreber’s own writing. Instead much of the action is devoted to filling in Schreber’s backstory as he remembers or relives events from his strict childhood. Some of those events are based on known fact, such as his father’s accident, and others invented; for example, when the young Schreber put his baby sister to his own nipple. But whether real or fictional, they are designed to provide an explanatory framework for Schreber’s later condition.

The writing style is almost minimalist, but also studded with idiosyncratic descriptive detail. Pheby is master of the eloquent phrase: a hand ‘that was thin to the point of brittleness – like a twig one finds on the forest floor late into the autumn‘; anger which ‘filled the room like steam from an untended kettle‘. The menace is allowed to grow quietly, particularly via the person of Muller, the aggrieved and sinister orderly, who comes into his full sadistic own when Schreber is confined, helpless, in an isolation cell for recalcitrant patients.

In reading Playthings I found that I had to stop fairly early on to find out more about Schreber, his illness and his work before reading any further. In fact, throughout the book I had to keep checking the record in this way and I feel that without that background information I would have had less appreciation of the book. As yet Pheby has no information about Playthings on his website. I hope this will be rectified. It would be fascinating to get more insight into the author ’s thinking about both Schreber himself and the creation of the novel. It would also be illuminating to have the book reviewed by someone who has experience of a psychotic condition similar to Schreber’s. Only such a person can truly judge to what extent Pheby succeeds in conveying ’what it’s like’ (in Nagel’s sense) to have this kind of mental disturbance.

But perhaps the novel form is unsuited to accommodating a full-blown representation of schizophrenia. We expect a novel to make some sort of sense; we expect to be able to arrive at some understanding of the characters; we expect, however loosely, a beginning, a middle and an end. Playthings provides all this, and given the difficulty of finding these criteria realised in actual cases of psychosis we can hardly expect fiction to achieve it without a degree of compromise.

Although I can’t say I enjoyed reading Playthings in any recreational sense – it’s not a novel I would recommend for a long-haul flight – I found it stimulating to read in the context of the wider Schreber literature and as a spur to further reflection on the validity of the biographical novel as a literary genre.

Hilda Reilly has an MSc in Consciousness and Transpersonal Psychology and an MA in Creative Writing. She is the author of Guises of Desire, a biographical novel about Bertha Pappenheim, aka Anna O, the ‘founding patient‘ of psychoanalysis.

The politics of public weeping in North Korea

Posted on October 12, 2015 by Jules Evans

A satellite photo showing North and South Korea at night

I’ve spent the last few days at a conference in South Korea, at somewhere called Paju Book City, yes a whole city (well, more like a town) devoted to books. Paju is a few miles from the North Korean border, so visitors at the conference got the opportunity to travel up there and peer over the border, just as North Korea celebrated its 70th birthday with a big military parade.

We didn’t see much, but it brought home the strange reality of this situation, where a country was abritrarily divided overnight by the US state departent, separating families and loved ones and consigning them to completely different fates. North Korea has barely any electricity, is the only country in the world without internet, 43% of the children born there in the 1990s are shrunken from malnutrition, and it has one of the most brutal and repressive regimes in the world – you can be executed merely for making a joke about the Glorious Leader. Meanwhile, South Korea has boomed into one of the ten biggest economies in the world, a fun-loving and hedonist young democracy, with the highest global percentage of homes with broadband, streets jammed with Hyundais, and the Noreabang bars blaring with K-Pop.

The border visit prompted me to read Nothing To Envy: Real Lives in North Korea, an account of life inside North Korea written by American journalist Barbara Demick. The material, skilfully weaved together into themes and stories, is made up of interviews she’s done with various people who defected. She follows a handful of stories – a student, a street-vagrant, a doctor, a housewife – as they go through the hopeful early years when North Korea outpaced the South, people’s lives, loves, work, dreams, the fall of the USSR, the awful mid-90s famine, the traumatic death of ‘our father’ Kim Il-Sung in 1994, the subsequent brutal crackdown by Kim Jong-Il, the dawning realisation that North Korea wasn’t the leading country in the world, and finally the interviewees’ disillusion with the regime, decision to defect, and daring escapes.

It’s the reaction to Kim Il-Sung’s death that really struck me. The Glorious Leader had built up a religious cult around himself – children were given candy on his birthday, every house had his photograph and would say thank you to it – so when he died, it was like God dying. Here’s Demick’s account of the reaction in Chongjin, a big regional city:

People didn’t want to be alone with their grief. They burst out of their homes and ran towards the statues [there are 34,000 statues of the Great Leader in the country] which were in fact the spiritual centres of each city…People started to surge forward, knocking down those in line…’Abogi, Abogi’, the old women wailed, the Korean honorific used to address either one’s father or God. ‘How could you leave us so suddenly?’ the men screamed in turn.

Those waiting in line would jump up and down, pound their heads, collapse into theatrical swoons, rip their clothes, and shake their fists at the air in futile rage. The men wept as copiously as the women. The histrionics of grief took on a competitive quality. Who could weep the loudest? Who was the most distraught? The mourners were egged on by the TN news, which broadcast hours and hours of people wailing, banging their heads on trees, pilots weeping in cockpits, and so on.

Many older North Koreans suffered heart attacks and strokes during the period of mourning. Others showed their distress by killing themselves.

But was all the grief real? For some, certainly. Others may have just used the occasion as an opportunity to let out the emotion and exhuastion of several years of hardship, famine and tragedy. And some had to fake it to avoid suspicion. One such was Jun-Sang, a young student in Pyongyang, who would later defect. We read:

Nobody knew quite what to do [when they were told the Great Leader was dead]. So one by one each of the three thousand students sat down on the hot pavement, head in hand. Jun-Sang sat down, too, unsure of what else to do. Keeping his head down so nobody could read the confusion on his face. He stole glances at his grief-stricken classmates. He found it curious that he wasn’t crying…What was wrong with him? Why wasn’t he sad that Kim Il-Sung was dead? Didn’t he love Kim Il-Sung? He wondered: if everybody else felt such genuine love for Kim Il-sung and he did not, how would he possibly fit in?…That revelation was quickly followed by another, equally momentous: his entire future depended on his ability to cry. Not just his career and his membership in the Worker’s Party, his very survival was at stake.

And then, 17 years later, Kim Il-Sung’s son, Kim Jong-Il, died too. This time the reaction was broadcast around the world. Probably by that time a higher percentage were faking it. Demick asked a recent defector how many people were ‘true believers’ these days. ‘Zero’, she answered firmly. ‘It’s not belief in the system that keeps us going. It is belief in life.’ I hope the situation for North Koreans improves soon.

JOB: Project Manager for ‘Living With Feeling’

Posted on September 17, 2015 by Thomas Dixon

Below is the text of a forthcoming job advertisement, which is also posted on the QMUL vacancies page. To apply for this post you will need to follow the appropriate links from that page. The closing date for applications is 15th October 2015.

Feel free to contact Thomas Dixon with any informal inquiries.

Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions

Telemedicine illustration The Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London seeks to appoint a Project Manager to co-ordinate the activities of a new Wellcome Trust Humanities and Social Science five-year Collaborative Award: ‘Living With Feeling: Emotional Health in History, Philosophy, and Experience’. The award will support an ambitious programme of inter-disciplinary research and public engagement into the history and meanings of ‘emotional health’. An announcement of the new award was made recently on the QMUL website.

The successful applicant will hold an undergraduate degree and will have experience of organizing large events, managing complex projects, and supporting public engagement activities in the arts, sciences, or both. The post might suit an early career academic with an interest in public engagement, or alternatively a candidate with significant experience in administration, media, or arts management.

The post will start on 2 November 2015, or as soon as possible thereafter. Starting salary will be in the range of £31,735 – 35,319 per annum inclusive of London Allowance subject to experience. The post is full time (1.0 fte or 5 days a week), however flexible working and part time candidates will be considered (please state preference in application).

Benefits include 30 days annual leave, a defined benefits pension scheme and an interest-free season ticket loan.

Candidates must be able to demonstrate their eligibility to work in the UK in accordance with the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006. Where required this may include entry clearance or continued leave to remain under the Points Based Immigration Scheme.

Further details are available in the Project Manager job profile [PDF].

Informal enquiries should be addressed to Thomas Dixon at t.m.dixon@qmul.ac.uk.

History in British Tears

Posted on September 10, 2015 by Thomas Dixon

Dr Thomas Dixon is the Director of the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London. Here, on the occasion of the publication of his new book, he reflects on his experience of researching and writing about the history of weeping in Britain…

Today is the official publication day for my book Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears (Oxford University Press). It’s the culmination of a process of researching, thinking, and writing about crying that began in 2009.

Before I move on to a few years of anger, rage, and temper tantrums (my next research project), I thought I’d mark this occasion with a stock-taking sort of a blog post. After summarising some of the aims and ideas of the weeping book, and sharing a few of its examples, I’ve listed some of my favourite books about crying, and also gathered together a list of links to some of the other outputs that my thinking about tears has contributed to over the last few years.

So, what’s my book all about?

Weeping Britannia is an experimental book, trying to explore a nation’s history through its tears and its feelings, including its feelings about its tears, and its feelings about its feelings. I wanted the book to be both scholarly and accessible, and to connect the experiences of individuals to a larger historical narrative about emotions and ideas ranging from the late middle ages to the present. On reflection, that was a pretty ambitious set of aims, and readers will no doubt vary in the extent to which they think I’ve succeeded!

The history of emotions is where the history of ideas meets the history of the body. Weeping is an intellectual activity, and yet it is also a bodily function like vomiting, sweating, or farting. Even the lowly fart, incidentally, has been subjected to enlightening historical analysis, by Sir Keith Thomas, in an edited collection of essays on The Extraordinary and the Everyday. In my book, I locate accounts of tearful moments – moments in the lives of celebrated men and women, everyday folk, and a few fictional characters – among more reflective writings, whether in the form of literature, philosophy, science, or journalism, setting out theoretical and moral ideas about weeping in the period in question. In this way I hope to show how ideas and culture produce and shape emotions, and to bring to life a story of long-term religious, cultural, and intellectual change.

The really central idea here is that the interpretation and meaning that an individual gives to their own emotional experiences is a constitutive part of those experiences, not a secondary afterthought. So if we want to try to access the emotional experiences of the past we need to do so primarily not through 21st-century psychology, neuroscience, or affect theory, but through the available mental frameworks of earlier periods – whether those be found in medicine, moral philosophy, fiction, drama, movies, or television.

So, while I was trying to uncover some of the deeper roots of the emotions we feel today, I was also tracing the inextricably linked histories of how we represent, express, and interpret them. That included tracing the origins of the surprisingly persistent idea that there is such a thing as the British ‘stiff upper lip’ – a phantom physiological feature that continues to haunt British national identity. You can read a little more about my approach in the Introduction, which is available via the OUP website.

Of the many examples in my book, I have selected seven for this extended blog post, one from each of the centuries that Weeping Britannia covers, to give a flavour of how particular tearful individuals fit into the bigger picture, and of how an emotional archaeology such as this one has the potential to reveal the complex, often forgotten cultural and political meanings in something as simple as a tear…

Margery Kempe

The author of the earliest surviving autobiography in English, Margery Kempe was a businesswoman, wife, and mother living in King’s Lynn in the fifteenth century whose dramatic religious visions – including hearing beautiful heavenly music and conversing with Jesus and the Virgin Mary – inspired her to a life of devotion and pilgrimage. The hallmark of Margery’s boisterous style of devotion was loud and prolonged weeping – sometimes over the fallen world, sometimes over her own sins, sometimes over the passion of Christ, and sometimes triggered indirectly by the sight of a suffering animal or young man who reminded her of Jesus. Her weeping irritated many, even among the clergy. The Archbishop of York asked Margery, ‘Why do you weep so, woman?’, to which Margery replied firmly, ‘Sir, you shall wish some day that you had wept as sorely as I.’ Margery is described in a comprehensive recent study of tears as the all-time ‘weeping champion’ of recorded history. Her crying was certainly extreme, but it also reflected practices that were common features of medieval piety, including tearful affective meditation over the sufferings of Christ, and the shedding of tears for souls in purgatory.

Niccolo dell’Arca’s late fifteenth-century representation of the mourning Marys, in the church of Santa Maria in Bologna. (Jenny Audring/Flickr)

Thomas Cranmer

One of the deeper roots of the twentieth-century ideology of the ‘stiff upper lip’ was the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Weeping had been central to several aspects of Catholic religion, including penitence, confession, the cult of the Virgin, and the mourning of the dead. In the Catholic worldview, tears could do things, including having real consequences for the souls of the wept-for departed. For Protestant reformers, both the domain and the power of tears were reduced. Weeping became primarily a solitary act of grief over sin rather than a collective act of mourning, and it had no power over the fate of the dead, or the will of God. Tears featured very rarely in Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer. By contrast, the Sarum Missal (the most widely used Catholic rite in England prior to the Reformation) had included an entire votive mass designed to draw forth ‘abundant rivers of tears’, and references to the tears of sinners assuaging the anger of God. The Protestant attitude was embodied in Thomas Cranmer’s behaviour as well as his liturgical reforms. It was said of Cranmer that he never allowed his demeanour to reveal his feelings in public but ‘privately, with his secret and special friends, he would shed forth many bitter tears, lamenting with the miseries and calamities of the world’. Archbishop Cranmer, it would seem, was a defender of the view that if you really have to cry, you should do it in private. Not all Protestants were so restrained as the Anglican Cranmer, however, and though they continued to disdain Catholic ‘wailing’ over the dead, they developed their own distinctive, charismatic forms of tearful religion, weeping in response to open air sermons, in despair at their sinfulness, or in the exquisite joy of Christ’s love.

Ann Bodenham

In researching the history of tears I also wanted to investigate those who did not, could not, or would not weep, and what was thought of them. According to early modern sources, for instance, those who were unable or unwilling to weep included Stoics, Vikings, the Swiss, tigers, bears, wolves, werewolves, and witches. At the trial of the elderly cunning woman Ann Bodenham in Salisbury in 1653, two women were examined: a maid who claimed she had been bewitched by Bodenham, and who shed tears as the verdict was read out, and Bodenham herself who was found guilty of all sorts of extraordinary acts of devilry, including turning herself at different times into a dog, a lion, a bear, and a wolf. The account of the case described Bodenham as ‘a woman much addicted to Popery, and to Papistical fancies’. Yet she lacked the Catholic’s ability to shed tears. Bodenham would ‘make a noyse as if she wept’ but under close observation ‘she was never seen to let fall a tear’. However, even if Ann Bodenham had managed to produce a few tears at her trial, they would most likely have been met with the claim that these were not true tears revealing a contrite inner nature, but rather a mere pretence turned on and off at will. This is the witch’s dilemma, an insoluble conundrum for women who have been subjected to it in various forms ever since: tears are signs of female cunning, dry eyes of devilish inhumanity.

Robert Burns

The eighteenth century saw the rise (and fall) of the ‘cult of sensibility’ – a broad movement which encompassed everything from sentimental novels and weeping plays to paintings of dead birds and sermons about fallen women. The Edinburgh lawyer and writer Henry Mackenzie’s novel The Man of Feeling, featuring a sensitive hero named Harley who weeps in sympathy with beggars, prostitutes, orphans, and lunatics, was published in 1771, at the peak of the wave of literary sensibility. It remains the most famously tear-soaked text not only of the sentimental genre, but in all of English literature. One of the book’s most ardent admirers was the young poet Robert Burns, who carried his copy around with him constantly, until it fell to pieces. Burns described The Man of Feeling as ‘a book I prize next to the Bible’. Later critics of all the lachrymose poetry, prose, pictures, and performances of this period claimed they were tainted by a shared ancestry with the ideals of the French Revolution – a dangerous philosophy teaching that sympathetic feeling was a natural, in-born virtue found in all men and women regardless of rank, and felt towards all living things, human and animal. A Victorian edition of Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling included a satirical ‘Index to Tears (Chokings, etc., not counted)’, which ran to forty-seven cases, inviting readers to laugh rather than cry over the book.

Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling, ed. Henry Morley (London: Cassell and Co., 1886), pp. iv–v.

The introduction to this 1886 edition described the novel as a rehearsal of the ‘false sentiment’, borrowed from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which had led directly to the French Revolution.

Queen Victoria

The Victorian age has a dual inheritance in our collective imagination – an emblem of both sentimentality and repression. These two Victorian legacies correspond to two different images of the woman for whom the age is named. First there is the eighteen-year-old whose accession was proclaimed at one of the windows of St James’s palace in 1837. As soon as Victoria appeared, the crowd responded with cheers and applause, at which, it was reported, the new monarch ‘burst into tears, which continued, notwithstanding an evident attempt on the part of her Majesty to restrain her feelings, to flow in torrents down her now pallid cheeks, until her Majesty retired from the window.’ The early Victorian age was baptised in tears. Its most successful writer was the sentimental creator of Little Nell and Paul Dombey, Charles Dickens, and the young queen’s journal entries record tears forever welling up and overflowing from the eyes of her first Prime Minister, the beloved Lord Melbourne. By the end of her reign, however, Victoria had become a forbidding widow and Empress of India, a title conferred on her in 1876. The 1870s marked a turning point not only in Britain’s history but also in its dominant emotional style, as pathos gave way to restraint. It was into a world of militarism and imperialism that the ‘stiff upper lip’ would be born, a characteristic affectionately mocked by a Gershwin song of that title in the 1937 movie A Damsel in Distress.

Anna Neagle

When I started the research for Weeping Britannia, I already knew that I would need to say something about the rise of reality television as a conduit for emotional tears in the twenty-first century. During the twentieth century, television programmes, along with movies, pop music, and sporting events, replaced other public spectacles, including hangings, sermons, trials, political gatherings, and state ceremonies, as the most important occasions for the shared experiencing of communal emotion. What I was surprised to discover, however, was how far back the trend for lachrymose ‘reality’ television can be traced. Even by the 1950s, American culture had a reputation for greater emotionality, and its influence was discernible in the slow and gradual work of dismantling the British ‘stiff upper lip’. In 1953, the Daily Express reported that the most popular show on American TV was a new ‘weepie’ called This is Your Life. The format was imported and broadcast by the BBC from 1955 onwards and it immediately gained a reputation as a tear-jerker. In 1958 the film star Anna Neagle was the ‘victim’. ‘Anna Neagle Weeps Before TV Millions’ was the Daily Express headline (the main cause of her tears had been a clip showing her friend and colleague Jack Buchanan, who had recently died, singing to her in one of their early films). Press coverage denounced the programme for its unforgivable intrusion into the star’s private emotions.

Daily Express, 19 February 1958

Neagle herself, however, was quoted as saying that she had reacted with a ‘genuine emotion’, adding ‘I know the public is not adversely affected by genuine emotion – it’s only false emotion which makes them shy away.’ The descendants of such programmes still fill our prime-time schedules, and provide plenty of opportunity for emotion, whether artificial or genuine.

George Osborne

During the several years I was working on this book, it was hard to keep up with all the regular and various news stories about weeping athletes, weeping politicians, and weeping celebrities. One of the contemporary events that particularly resonated with my historical research was the much-discussed tear that made its way down the cheek of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, as he listened to the eulogy to Margaret Thatcher at her funeral in 2013.

George Osborne crying at Margaret Thatcher’s funeral. Photo: @michaelsavage

At the time I was immersed in research into pre-Reformation mourning rituals, which included the tearing of clothes and hair, keening lamentations, and the kissing of the corpse. In comparison, Mr Osborne’s tear, shed for the former leader of his party, seemed a mild response. It is suggestive of a persistent strand of Protestant austerity in the matter of mourning that George Osborne’s funeral tear caused a national inquisition. Osborne was grilled on BBC Radio 4’s The Today Programme by John Humphrys who wanted to know whether Osborne was generally the ‘sort of person’ who wept, rather than being too ‘macho’ to show his feelings. The Chancellor replied, guiltily and defensively that he was caught on camera so there was no point denying it, but that the occasion was a ‘powerful’, ‘emotional’ and ‘moving’ one and that the combined effects of the sermon, the music, and the ritual of a state occasion did make him ‘well up a bit’, although he thought ‘weeping’ was a bit strong. The wider response to Thatcher’s death also revealed the long afterlife of centuries-old beliefs about tears and their absence in hard-hearted women, when opponents of Thatcher started a campaign to get the song ‘Ding Dong the Witch is Dead’, originally from the film The Wizard of Oz, to the number one spot in the music download charts, even though, in fact, Thatcher had been one of the twentieth century’s most lachrymose politicians. The witch’s dilemma is still alive and well.

My favourite books about crying:

I’ve included Amazon links for these books, although some of them are less affordable than others. These are just a few favourites and good starting points:

Return to the top of this post.

Links to some other tearful outputs from the last few years…

Return to the top of this post.

Follow Thomas on Twitter: @ThomasDixon2015

Tears and Smiles, Medieval to Early Modern, Conference Programme

Posted on September 7, 2015 by Hetta Howes

This page provides the conference programme. To read more about the conference, including how to register, and the ideas and themes behind the event, you can visit the main conference page.

Wednesday 7th October, The Court Room, Senate House, UoL

9:30 – 10:00 – Registration, welcome, tea and coffee

10:00 – 11:30 – Panel I. Visualising Laughter and Weeping

To Weep Irish: Keening and the Law, Prof. Andrea Brady (QMUL)

Donato Bramante’s Double Portrait of Democritus and Heraclitus: The Laugher and the Weeper, Prof. Nadeije Laneyrie Dagen (École normale supérieure)

Stop your Sobbing: The Politics of Early Modern Melancholy on the Twenty-First Century Stage, Dr. Bridet Escolme (QMUL)

Chair: Julia Bourke (QMUL)

11:30 – 12:15 – Keynote I

The Smile and the Selfie: Some Pre-Modern Perspectives, Prof. Colin Jones (QMUL)

Chair: Prof. Quentin Skinner (QMUL)

12:15 – 1:15 – Lunch

1:15 – 2:45 – Panel II. Laughter: Religious, Philosophical, Political

The Radical Laughter of the Early Franciscans, c.1210-1310, Dr. Peter Jones (NYU)

Tears and Smiles – but what about laughter?, Prof. Quentin Skinner (QMUL)

Serious Business: Laughter and the Problem of Legitimacy in the National Convention of the French Revolution, 1792-1794, Dr. Jacob Zobkiw (Hull)

Chair: Prof. Colin Jones (QMUL)

2:45 – 3:15 – Tea and coffee break

3:15 – 4:45 – Panel III. Reading Emotion: Tears in Medieval Literature

Margery Kempe’s Tears, and Other Signs of Emotions in The Book of Margery Kempe, Prof. Anthony Bale (Birkbeck)

Read it and Weep: The Textual Face of the Middle English Poet, Dr. Stephanie Downes (Melbourne)

(Mis)Reading the Crying Face: Problematic Tears in 13th-Century Hagiographies, Dr. Kimberley-Joy Knight (Sydney)

Chair: Stephen Spencer (QMUL)

5:00 – 6:00 – Keynote II

William Hogarth’s Sigismunda: A Tragicomic Tale, Dr. Thomas Dixon (QMUL)

Chair: Hetta Howes (QMUL)

6:00 – 7:30 – Wine reception and book launch: Thomas Dixon’s Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears (OUP)

Exploring #emomedia

Posted on September 1, 2015 by Thomas Dixon

Dr. Mary C. Flannery is maître assistante (lecturer) in medieval English at the University of Lausanne. She is the author of John Lydgate and the Poetics of Fame, and is currently completing a book on shame in medieval English literature. In June 2015, she organized a two-day workshop at the University of Lausanne (UNIL) on ‘Emotion & Medieval Media’ (programme available here). In this post, Mary reflects on the findings and the format of the event…

‘FORT EN EMOTIONS!’ in Lausanne Gare. Photo by Mary Flannery.

Upon arrival in Lausanne this summer, you might see the billboard advertisement above, which declares the nearby destination of Mont-Fort to be ‘Fort en émotions!’. Emotions seem to be ubiquitous in Swiss advertisements these days. Advertising for the 2015 Tour de Suisse included the catchphrase ‘Experience emotions’. Neuchâtel’s Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle is currently running a temporary exhibition on emotions. Posters throughout Geneva Airport invite travellers to make the most of ‘EMOT!ONS Airport Shopping’.

This flood of emotion-laden Swiss advertising coincides with an ongoing project based at the University of Lausanne (UNIL) on ‘Emotion & Medieval Media’ (EMMe), which led to a workshop on the subject on 19 and 20 June. Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and UNIL, EMMe included participants drawn from the fields of manuscript studies, literature (Old Norse, and Old and Middle English), linguistics, drama, art history, and musicology. Participants were given a list of some suggested reading before the workshop, as well as a handful of articles on different approaches to the history of emotions; these were intended to provide the group with a common grounding in terminology and recent debates in the field of emotion studies in order to facilitate exchange between the different disciplinary perspectives represented in the workshop.

The two days of the EMMe workshop comprised similar line-ups of different session formats. Each day began with a session of three twenty-minute panel papers, followed by discussion. These sessions enabled presenters to receive feedback on their work-in-progress. After a short break, workshop participants returned for a session of ‘guided analyses’, in which scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds led discussion of selected texts and artefacts (a passage from a literary text, a short play, carved ivories, and a liturgical vestment). On both days, lunch was followed by a performance: a concert of medieval music on the first day, and a performance of the Historie van Jan van Beverley on the second day. These performances concluded with group discussion, in which both audience members and performers participated. This variety of session formats encouraged lively discussion, enabled participants to experiment with methodologies and media from different disciplines, and gave everyone the opportunity to experience medieval music and drama either as performers or as audience members. Each day concluded with a different wrap-up session: a roundtable and discussion on the first day, and a concluding keynote on the second day (in which Professor Rita Copeland had the unenviable task of responding to both days of the workshop!). All sessions were live-tweeted using the hashtag ‘#emomedia’.

The first aim of the EMMe workshop was to consider how medieval theories of emotion and cognition informed the creation and reception of different medieval media. The workshop’s second objective was to consider how attention to different media forms could inform the study of medieval emotion. As the organiser of the event, I had anticipated that both of these questions would drive the majority of workshop discussion. What actually transpired, however, was rather different.

Although discussion occasionally touched on the relationship between medieval theories of emotion and different media, we more frequently talked about the kinds of emotional impact different medieval media could have, and how creators, consumers, and scholars of various media engaged with (or denied the existence of) these emotions. Daniel DiCenso’s opening paper noted that emotion is something of a taboo subject in Gregorian chant scholarship; his enumeration of the arguments he has encountered against the study of emotions in plainchant made clear that, if the precise role of the arts in the history of emotions is unclear, emotions can also be uneasy subjects in arts research. Through their led discussion of A Talkyng of the Love of God, Camille Marshall and Diana Denissen drew our attention to the directive role that medieval texts could play in inspiring religious devotion in their readers. Denis Renevey demonstrated how a medieval lyric used the name of Jesus as a starting point for the practice of affective piety. Catherine Yvard showed us how carved ivory combs might have been used to inspire or reflect love between an affianced couple in medieval Europe. Michaela Zöschg’s guided analysis of the Syon Cope led participants to consider the role of emotion in the production, the wearing, and the viewing of the vestment (Michaela brought along paper cut-outs of the cope for us to model on water bottles, in order to have a better sense of how it would have looked while worn). Charlotte Steenbrugge argued that the performed emotions in Middle English Abraham and Isaac plays, as well as audience responses to them, encouraged a surprisingly critical response to the Biblical story. And as the presentations of Marcel Elias and Lucie Kaempfer made clear, different literary genres were accompanied by different expectations related to emotional content, some of which individual texts might conform to and some of which they might subvert.

Paper cut-out of the Syon Cope, provided by Michaela Zöschg for the EMMe workshop. Photo by Mary Flannery.

Similarly, the question of how research on various media might contribute to the history of medieval emotion raised the related issue of methodology. Each medium posed different methodological challenges and opportunities. Amy Brown tested out word searches in her presentation on ‘friendzoning’ in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur, while Anita Auer married quantitative with qualitative analysis in her proposal for a corpus-linguistic approach to medieval emotions research. Tamara Haddad, who both researches and stages medieval and early modern drama, spoke about the challenges and questions raised by site-specific performance. A scholar working in manuscript studies, Marleen Cré, pointed out the complications one encounters when looking for evidence of emotional engagement in the traces left by manuscript readers. And Sarah Baccianti and Sarah Brazil explored how different literary tropes might be used to convey or cultivate emotion, focusing respectively on somatic descriptors and on metaphors. The range of presentation formats enabled us not only to absorb and comment on each other’s scholarship, but also to be guided through analytical processes in each other’s disciplines and to participate actively in investigating media with which we might not all, as individuals, have had considerable previous experience.

The two performances featured in the workshop enabled us to witness medieval music and drama in action. Singers, actors, musicians, directors, and audience members shared their perspectives on the role of emotion in performance. Both the concert of music performed by Shauna Beesley, Rachael Beesley, and Minna Harlan and the performance of the Historie van Jan van Beverley staged by Elisabeth Dutton and Tamara Haddad prompted us to ask whose emotions were involved, and how. As Shauna noted, the physical experience of singing the trills in Jacopo da Bologna’s ‘Non al suo amante’ gives the singer a shivery sensation that might be likened both to the feeling of the chilly waters described by the lyrics and to the amorous ‘chill’ the song’s narrator claims to experience….

Elisabeth pointed out the importance of looking for implicit stage directions regarding what kinds of emotional gestures might be employed at particular moments within a medieval play (a particularly important point in relation to the creative decision she and Tamara made to base a number of the actors’ gestures on the woodcut images accompanying John of Beverley’s story, which may or may not have been a play after all).

Historie van Jan van Beverley (Brussels: Thomas van der Noot, around 1512) Picture credit: Digital Library of Dutch Literature (DBNL).

Watch a recording of the performance:

From such a varied group of topics, presentations, and performances, it might seem impossible to pull together any kind of response that was at once coherent, critical, and constructive. Yet this is precisely what Rita Copeland proceeded to do at the end of the second day of EMMe. In an outstanding concluding keynote, Rita responded to each of the presentations and performances individually while also touching on the key themes that had dominated workshop discussion. Crucially, she noted that the workshop’s presentations and performances had tried to shift away from an emphasis on ‘extra-textual reality’ (an emphasis that researchers of emotion in the arts have perceived as characteristic of most historical approaches to emotions) and towards approaches that take the artistic forms that engage with emotion as the objects of their inquiry.

It is impossible to do justice to Rita’s keynote here (even the recording doesn’t seem to capture how galvanizing it was), and the brief mentions of the presentations and performances that I have provided above can only provide a sketch of the rich variety of subjects we covered in the EMMe workshop. But I find myself returning to a question that Rita mentioned had been at the back of her mind throughout the event: were we talking about the history of emotions, or about emotions in the history of various disciplines? Or both?

These questions lie behind the biggest change that I would make to the workshop, if I could do it all over again: I would make sure to include historians among our presenters and audience members (as Amy Brown noted on the Australian Medievalists blog, this was one notable gap among the disciplines represented). The EMMe workshop was a wonderful opportunity for arts scholars to exchange ideas and to draw on each other’s methodologies and areas of specialisation. But bringing our work into more direct conversation with the work of historians would get us much closer to incorporating the arts more fully into the history of emotions.

As a literary scholar interested in the history of emotions, one of the questions that I continually grapple with is that of how the study of literature and other arts can contribute to the study of past emotions. To what extent can we employ art as evidence in this history, and what is it evidence of? In the case of my own discipline, I have become increasingly convinced that the answers must be found in the ‘literariness’ of literature, in its forms, genres, and tropes. And indeed, instead of making literature and other arts transparent—aiming to look through them to find historical truth—I think we are finding ways of investigating emotion by looking at art, at its surfaces and forms. But the only way that this will happen successfully is via real exchange, not just among the arts, but between those working in the arts and those working in history, the life sciences, and the social sciences.

Port de Pully, Switzerland. Photo by Mary Flannery.

Reading Emotions: Memoirs of Emma Courtney

Posted on August 30, 2015 by Jane Mackelworth and Sally Holloway

Dr Sally Holloway and Jane Mackelworth report on the second meeting of their community book group, exploring love and its history through literature…

The second meeting of our ‘Reading Emotions’ book group focused on Mary Hays’ semi-autobiographical novel Memoirs of Emma Courtney, published in two volumes in 1796. Hays (1759/60-1843) was born into a Dissenting family of middling status in Southwark. She saw herself as being ‘sheltered too much’ in the family home ‘like a hot-house plant’.[1] In 1792, a friend sent her a copy of Mary Wollstonecraft’s landmark treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which she embraced as ‘a work of full truth and genius’.[2] Hays marked up passages where Wollstonecraft attacked the subordinate position of women, and their trivialization in being denied education and exercise, then blamed for being physically and mentally weak.[3] She then contacted the author to thank her and seek guidance on her own works, becoming one of her most ardent disciples. The themes of female education, agency and proscribed conduct play out in Hays’ first novel.

Memoirs of Emma Courtney traces the heroine’s passionate and obsessive love for her unattainable friend Augustus Harley in part through a series of letters to him. We selected this book for our group because the heroine breaks convention in her bold pursuit of love, and is unlike the Elizabeth Bennett or Elinor Dashwood character types who readers may be more familiar with. Emma pursues Augustus determinedly through both volumes, repeatedly declaring her love and demanding to know ‘Is your heart, at present free?’[4] In one eight-page letter, she sets out the four possible ‘mysterious obstacles’ that could prevent their union: that he loved another, did not love her, had insufficient funds to marry, or sought a woman of fortune.[5] Members of our group noted that in modern Britain such behaviour could lead to the threat of a court injunction or restraining order.

Emma Courtney’s letters are both inspired by and taken verbatim from genuine missives Hays exchanged with her friend and mentor William Godwin (1756-1836) and the Cambridge mathematician William Frend (1757-1841). Her friendship with Frend began on 16 April 1792, when he wrote to her expressing his admiration for ‘Eusebia’.[6] She confessed her love to him in 1796, but was rebuffed. On the advice of Godwin, Hays channelled her disappointment into a novel, just as her heroine creates a manuscript to ‘beguile my melancholy thoughts’.[7] The resulting novel is a faintly disguised tale of Hays’ pursuit of Frend. It introduced our members to the interconnected nature of early novels and the world of letters, as letters and prose are interspersed throughout the story.

by Andrew Birrell, after Sylvester Harding, stipple engraving, published 1793

The object of Hays’ affection William Frend. Stipple engraving by Andrew Birrell, after Silvester Harding, 1793, National Portrait Gallery, London.

The novel explores the symptoms and characteristics of Emma’s (seemingly) unrequited love. Members of our group commented that the intensity of Emma’s ‘love’ can be seen as representative of anger, frustration or repressed rage, in part due to women’s position, and lack of choice, in society at this time. It is not necessarily Augustus that she desires, but love itself. Emma is desperate to be beloved. She falls for his portrait miniature before Augustus is even present:

You may tell me, perhaps, “that the portrait on which my fancy has dwelt enamoured, owes all its graces, its glowing colouring – like the ideal beauty of the ancient artists – to the imagination capable of sketching the dangerous picture”. – Allowing this, for a moment, the sentiments it inspires are not the less genuine.[8]

Her paramour almost partakes in their romance in absentia. After discovering he was already secretly married, Emma ‘shrieks’ when confronted with his portrait, and falls ‘lifeless’ into the arms of a friend.[9]

Emma’s behaviour flouts prescribed feminine conduct, seeking to free herself from the ‘magic circle’ which maintained a ‘powerful spell’ over her sex.[10] As Hays’ biographer Gina Luria Walker argues, Emma ‘cares less for chastity and constancy than for self-fulfilment’.[11] She rejects needlework in favour of romances which fuel her sensibility. There are rumours circulating around the neighbourhood that Emma has eloped with her mentor Mr. Francis due to the partiality she shows him, which leads to her ejection from her uncle’s estate Morton Park. Emma brazenly asks both Mr. Francis and Augustus Harley to correspond with her, which was understood to invite a romantic attachment.[12]

Members of our book group felt that the intense interiority of the novel makes it a difficult read. Characters such as Emma’s father are simply used to move her onto the next stage of the plot. Even Augustus remains a shadowy character, and readers are left with little impression of his personality. Much like a diary or journal, characters are presented in terms of the impulses they stir in the heroine. Readers compared the text with modern autobiographical-style works such as Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996), where the protagonist obsesses at length about her romantic entanglements. They agreed with the author’s reasoning that her heroine lacked an occupation or profession in which to channel her energy.

Our readers disagreed about Hays’ purpose in writing the novel; was she writing for herself or for readers? Was she criticising romantic fiction and its perceived impact on women, or partaking in romantic fantasies herself?[13] In the novel, Emma discovers on Augustus’ deathbed that he had loved her all along. In reality, Hays remained unmarried, while Frend married Sara Blackburne in 1808. Some saw the novel as a way for Hays to work through her own feelings, allowing her to make sense of her own disappointment and justify her pursuit of Frend. Luria Walker has argued that ‘Hays’ first impulse as a nascent scientist without credentials, colleagues or laboratory was to investigate herself’.[14] Having said this, Hays ultimately remains non-critical of her own behaviour.

Others understood the novel predominantly as a warning of the dangers of overindulged sensibility. Emma’s obsession is often portrayed in an unsympathetic light. As Hays notes in the preface, Emma is supposed to be a flawed human being: ‘the errors of my heroine were the offspring of sensibility; and that the result of her hazardous experiment is calculated to operate as a warning, rather than as an example’.[15] Scholars have argued that Hays intended to use the heroine’s place in society to demonstrate ‘how deeply and pervasively we are shaped by our social institutions and experiences’.[16] Emma’s sensibility is a result of her education, and the limited opportunities available to her within the ‘magic circle’. She has been ‘rendered feeble and delicate by bodily constraint, and fastidious by artificial refinement.’[17]

Contemporary reviews of the novel varied significantly according to their politics. For conservative publications such as the English Review and Anti-Jacobin Review, it was ‘in all points reprehensible, in the highest degree’. Worst of all was Emma’s offer to live with Augustus as his mistress, affording her love for him the same status as that of his wife:

If such a sentiment does not strike at the root of everything that is virtuous, that is praise-worthy, that is valuable, in the female character, we are at a loss to discover by what wickedness they are to fall.[18]

Friends reassured Hays that these hostile reviews were the work of ‘some narrow-hearted bigot, who is a sworn enemy to Mrs. Wollstonecraft and her disciples’.[19] More liberal publications such as the Monthly Magazine – to which Hays was a contributor – praised the novel as ‘the production of a well cultivated and enlightened mind’.[20] The Analytical Review extolled it as ‘the vehicle of much good sense and much liberal principle’.[21]

Love in Memoirs of Emma Courtney is a capricious, unstable and destructive force. It is presented as an essential part of marriage, with Emma initially refusing to ‘marry any man, merely for an establishment, for whom I did not feel an affection’.[22] Her bold pursuit of love led both Emma Courtney and her creator Mary Hays to become viewed as ‘sexually aggressive’ women. This reputation stayed with Hays in the years after her novel was published; her enthusiasm for Godwinian philosophy was seen to have led her into ‘embarrassing and illicit sexual extravagances’.[23] After her mentor and friend Mary Wollstonecraft died in 1797, Mary Hays remained one of her most staunch defenders.

Our next session will explore love and relationships in Charlotte Dacre’s neglected Gothic novel Zofloya, or The Moor (1806), driven by the equally controversial heroine Victoria di Loredani.

Follow Sally Holloway on Twitter: @sally_holloway

Follow Jane Mackelworth on Twitter: @jane__victoria

References

[1] Letters of Mary Hays, Pforzheimer Library, New York, cited in Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution 1790-1827 (Oxford, 1993), p. 92.

[2] A. F. Wedd (ed.) The Love-Letters of Mary Hays (1779-1780) (London, 1925), p. 5.

[3] Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution, p. 84, note 10.

[4] Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (Oxford, 2009), p. 82.

[5] Hays, Memoirs, pp. 118-125.

[6] Hays adopted this pseudonym to publish the pamphlet Cursory Remarks on an Enquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of Public or Social Worship. Inscribed to Gilbert Wakefield (1791).

[7] Hays, Memoirs, p. 138.

[8] Hays, Memoirs, p. 82.

[9] Hays, Memoirs, pp. 150-1.

[10] Hays, Memoirs, p. 85. The term was also used to refer to the romantic imagination in Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, Letter 10, p. 100.

[11] Gina Luria Walker, Mary Hays (1759-1843): The Growth of a Woman’s Mind (Aldershot, 2006), p. 146.

[12] Emma’s uncle Mr. Morton demands to know: “I will speak more plainly: – Has he made you any proposals?’, Memoirs, p. 44.

[13] Scholars have described a similar paradox in how the novel claims ‘to be a warning against the over-indulgence of feeling’ but actually ‘celebrates and validates the heroine’s own infatuated, coercive effusions’, Nicola Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel, 1790-1825: Intercepted Letters, Intercepted Seductions (Oxford, 1994), p. 45.

[14] Luria Walker, Mary Hays, p. 134.

[15] Hays, Memoirs, p. 4.

[16] Brian Michael Norton, ‘Emma Courtney, Feminist Ethics, and the Problem of Autonomy’, The Eighteenth Century, Vol. 54, No. 3 (2013), p. 301.

[17] Hays, Memoirs, p. 32.

[18] The Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine; or Monthly Political Literary Censor, Vol. 3 (1799), pp. 54-7.

[19] [John?] Evans to Mary Hays, in Wedd, Love-Letters, pp. 222-3.

[20] Monthly Magazine 3 (1797), p. 47.

[21] Analytical Review 25 (1797), pp. 174-8.

[22] Hays, Memoirs, p. 56.

[23] Luria Walker, Mary Hays, p. 160 and Miriam L. Wallace, ‘Mary Hays’s “Female Philosopher”: Constructing Revolutionary Subjects’ in Adriana Craciun and Kari E. Lokke (eds) Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution (Albany, 2001), p. 238.

‘Tears and Smiles: Medieval to Early Modern’. 7th October 2015.

Posted on August 19, 2015 by Hetta Howes

We are delighted to announce that registration for the one-day conference, ‘Tears and Smiles: Medieval to Early Modern’ is now open.

From this page you can register for the conference and find out more about its themes and speakers. You can also preview the Conference Programme

When: Wednesday 7th October, 9:30-6:00pm (followed by a drinks reception)

Where: The Court Room, Senate House, University of London

Fee: £15 waged, £10 unwaged (including MA and PhD students)

Registration: Online at the QMUL e-shop

Hearaclitus and Democritus, the weeping and laughing philosophers, published by John Smith, after Egbert van Heemskerck the Elder, mezzotint, circa 1683-1729. National Portrait Gallery.

Celebrating two recent Queen Mary publications: The Smile Revolution in 18th Century Paris, by Prof. Colin Jones and Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears, by Dr Thomas Dixon, this conference invites expert speakers to consider the significance, representation and somatic expression of tears and smiles, laughter and weeping from 1100-1800. A collaborative event hosted by the School of English and Drama, the School of History, and the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London, the conference will draw on a number of different fields, including emotions history, physiognomy, art history, and theatre.

In the sixteenth century, the essayist Michel de Montaigne observed that we often ‘weep and laugh at the same thing.’ Although much independent research has been carried out on the role of tears and smiles in literary and historical culture individually, the two areas of enquiry are rarely considered alongside one another. This conference brings experts together to reflect on these two facial expressions independently but also their relationship to one another, and the myriad of emotions and contexts that can produce them.

Tears, smiles, weeping and laughter will all be discussed. Why is the medieval English poet so concerned with the face? How reliable did medieval scribes believe the face to be as an index of emotion? Why did some early modern writers sometimes argue for the avoidance of laughing in favour of the smile? How was laughter, in its various forms, used to legitimise the Republic during the French Revolution? These are just a few of the questions speakers will engage with.

Refreshments will be provided throughout the day, including lunch, and we are also pleased to be launching Dr Thomas Dixon’s new book, Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears, at a wine reception after the conference (included in the registration cost). This will take place 6-7:30pm in the Jessel Room, Senate House, University of London.

Keynotes:

Professor Colin Jones
“The Smile and the Selfie: Some Pre-modern Perspectives”

Dr Thomas Dixon
“William Hogarth’s Sigismunda: A Tragicomic Tale”

We hope many of you will join us to reflect on the role of tears and smiles in medieval and early modern cultures. For updates in the meantime you can follow us on Twitter: @tears_smiles2015

REVIEW: Inside Out and the democracy of the modern mind

Posted on July 30, 2015 by Thomas Dixon

As we drove to our local cinema to see Inside Out, my five year-old son asked me: “So what is this film going to be about?” “Feelings,” I said, “the feelings that live inside our heads”. He thought for a moment, before replying: “That sounds pretty boring.” It’s true that I could have done better with the pitch, but the film held his attention, and mine, and gave us both a few laughs. While my son giggled at the good old-fashioned slapstick, I could chuckle knowingly at references to Freud, evolutionary psychology and the emotional turmoil of puberty.

Inside Out is the tale of 11-year-old Riley and her traumatic move from Minnesota to a new home in San Francisco. It’s a pretty run-of-the-mill story, but there’s a twist: it’s all seen through the eyes of the five emotions that control the girl’s mental life, from a console inside her brain. Riley’s mental steering committee is headed up by Joy at the start, but as the narrative unfolds, Joy, who has previously tried to keep the four more negative emotions – Anger, Fear, Disgust, and Sadness – away from the controls, gradually learns the special value and importance of sadness.

The psychological model used by the film is essentially the one already popularised with stunning success over several decades by the American psychologist Paul Ekman, the leading proponent of the theory that all human beings, regardless of their historical and cultural milieu, share a repertoire of identical “basic emotions”. Quite understandably for the purposes of an animated movie aimed at children, Inside Out simplifies things further still.

Ekman’s list of cross-cultural basic emotions is longer, including, in addition to the five in the film: contempt, surprise, shame, amusement, satisfaction, contentment and relief, among others. Ekman’s particular concern has been to show that there are certain innate facial expressions, whose emotional meaning can be discerned by anyone, regardless of their culture and education. In this special interest in the bodily and facial accompaniments of feeling, Ekman is a descendant of pioneer emotion theorists of the 19th century, including Charles Darwin and William James.

Inner landscapes

But the story of Inside Out is not a story of bodies and faces: it is much more inside than out.

Glowing glass bowling-ball memories, each with its own emotional hue, are handled and stored by the myriad helpers in Riley’s mind. That mind is visualised as a combination of the high-tech factory of dreaming and perception, the organic archipelago of personality traits, the vast storehouse of memories and the psychedelic soft-play area of the imagination.

The various regions are joined up by tubes and wires as well as the very literal “train of thought” railway. It’s a wonderful mess of mental metaphors, even including a dark subterranean unconscious, albeit one tame enough for a U certificate. But there’s more missing from Riley’s mind than emotional complexity, psychodynamic drives, or nascent sexuality.

What Inside Out reveals, beyond the obviously attractive simplicity of the idea of having just five basic emotions, is the triumph of a psychologised view of the self: one that lacks any ruling faculty. This is the epitome of the modern, democratised mind, a mind in which there is no higher authority than the collective but unguided outcome of a melée of sensations and feelings.

Whatever name and characteristics one might choose from the history of thought for a putative higher mental faculty, Riley’s mind lacks it: reason or intellect; conscience or reflection; will or love. All are missing. The role of abstract thought is reduced to one entertaining cameo.

Slave of the passions

Considering this, I would say Inside Out shows the influence more of the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and David Hume than it does of the science of Paul Ekman. For Hobbes, the moralists’ faculty of the will was replaced by whatever happened to be the prevailing passion, while for Hume the divine power of reason was reduced to a mild emotion which was and ought only to be the slave of the other passions. I found the absence of either love or conscience as any kind of force in Riley’s mind to be the most striking.

“Honesty” is one of the several islands of her personality, but has no special role. Even in Darwin’s writings about the human mind, the faculties of love and conscience, evolved from earlier social instincts, were the most highly prized of all. When Riley steals her mother’s credit card and boards a bus to run away from home, her mental state is portrayed as dead and emotionless. Her change of heart comes about through an ability to articulate her sadness. She is saved, then, by a kind of advanced emotional literacy rather than by an attack of conscience or the power of love. This is the world according to a purveyor of emotional intelligence such as Daniel Goleman rather than a Victorian moralist like Charles Darwin.

Although the happy ending of the film is presented as being about the importance of recognising the emotion of sadness, in fact it is about the power of tears. This is not quite the same thing. The film’s explicit focus remains on the inner emotion, while the real action is in fact in the outward performance. It is the girl’s tears that have betrayed her in front of her classmates and caused her shame and dismay, but also her tears that reconcile her to her parents, restoring the bonds of familial sentiment that had become stretched and frayed.

As I wiped away my own tears, I asked my son what he thought of the film. “Good,” he said. I asked him what he thought it was about. “Feelings?”, he asked tentatively. “Can we go and play now?”

Thomas Dixon is Director of the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London

Follow Thomas on Twitter: @ThomasDixon2015

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Read the original article.

Reading Emotions: Cheerful Weather for the Wedding

Posted on July 15, 2015 by Sally Holloway and Jane Mackelworth

Dr Sally Holloway and Jane Mackelworth report on the first meeting of their community book group, exploring love and its history through literature…

Our new ‘Reading Emotions’ community book group aims to engage members of the public with the changing nature of emotions in history, focusing firstly on love in novels by British women c. 1750-1950. As a group, we will be exploring how love has a history, and has ‘meant different things to different people at different moments and has served different purposes’.[1]

Our first text is Julia Strachey’s Cheerful Weather for the Wedding, initially published in 1932 and since re-issued by Persephone Books. Strachey is perhaps best-known to historians as the niece of Lytton Strachey, founding member of the Bloomsbury Group and author of Eminent Victorians (1918). Cheerful Weather is one of only two novels she completed, written after the breakdown of her first marriage to Stephen Tomlin. It is at once romantic, tragic and funny, creating a number of vivid sketches of relationships between lovers, spouses, mothers and daughters, siblings, and friends.

The novella is set on the wedding day of twenty-three year old Dolly Thatcham to the Hon. Owen Bigham, who worked in the Diplomatic Service and was eight years her senior (spoilers ahead). As guests arrive for the wedding, the bride considers whether or not to go through with it while gradually draining a bottle of rum. The source of her conundrum is Joseph Patten, an impetuous anthropology student with whom she had spent the previous summer. The novella was recently adapted as a film starring Felicity Jones:

Events are situated in the Thatchams’ country house in Dorset, within a space of roughly six hours. Members of our group commented how the restricted time-frame and single location create a sense of claustrophobia. Dolly spends most of the book shut in her ‘white-enamelled Edwardian bedroom’, while guests arrive downstairs. The house is almost a character itself – readers know far more about it than most of the guests. In one scene, Joseph runs manically around the house looking for Dolly

He clattered off down the main stairway. The landing was empty. He ran despairingly, first to the right, into the sewing-room; then to the left, into the nursery; then back and on down the main stairs into the big hall. There, at last, was Dolly (p. 74).

One of Strachey’s key strengths lies in building suspense. Dolly spends over half of the book preparing for the wedding, leaving our members avidly leafing through the pages to discover whether or not it goes ahead.

Felicity Jones as Dolly in the 2012 film version of Cheerful Weather for the Wedding

Very little detail is provided about the interior lives of characters. This meant our readers did not generally sympathise with Dolly’s predicament, and found the characters to be unlikable. In our discussion, guests were said to be almost zombie-like, as we meet so many people at the wedding but know so little about them. This may have been a deliberate strategy by Strachey, with the wedding party described as ‘more dead than alive’ (p. 90). Conversely, she describes particular objects in excruciating detail, such as a homemade tasselled lamp crafted as a wedding present by a guest (pp. 30-5). Much of the emotional content of the story is carried by objects, such as a Dolly’s long wedding veil ‘stretching away forever’ like her married life (p. 52), and a ‘fusty and repulsive’ Chinese robe hanging before Joseph at the moment of the wedding (p. 78). Meanwhile, Dolly carries her bouquet in one hand and rum in the other (p. 68), representing her two options: an unstable passion with Joseph or respectable married life with Owen.

The novel can be seen as part of a wider movement of middlebrow literature by women, which became popular in the interwar years in Britain. Nicola Humble has shown how these novels were a way for women to explore the changing class and gender identities that middle class women were facing at this time and as such they focused almost exclusively on domestic space, courtship and marriage and class.[2] Humble shows that middlebrow authors such as Elizabeth Bowen used detailed descriptions of the home, and of objects within it, to explore its characters, and particularly female characters.[3]

This can be seen in a scene of sexual tension, highlighted by book group members, in which Dolly knocks an ink bottle over herself, leading Joseph to kneel down and pin a scarf to cover the stain (pp. 75-7). Much like trying to forget her sexual awakening during their summer together, she cannot put the cork back in her bottle of rum. Cheerful Weather brims with tensions that never fully erupt to the surface. One refreshing aspect of the book is that it lacks the dramatic showdown that modern readers might expect.

Ellie Kendrick as Kitty in the 2012 movie version.

Throughout the book, characters question the nature of romantic love. Dolly’s awkward seventeen-year old sister Kitty bluntly informs Joseph that “an Englishman in love lacked poetry”:

I told Joseph I envied Barbara McKenzie her Spanish naval officer, who plays to her on his ukulele in the moonlight, and is not ashamed of his love for her. (pp. 57-8)

He retorts that it’s “un-English” for women to seek out such “Continental” romance. Kitty is clearly developing a sense of sexual awareness, discovering how to interact with men. A kind of ‘desperate intenseness’ is said to be her ‘style of the moment with the male sex’ (p. 29).

Kitty’s behaviour is contrasted with Dolly’s. In deciding to go ahead with her marriage to the Hon. Owen Bigham rather than declare her love for Joseph, Dolly can be seen as selecting duty and respectability over love and passion. In some ways this makes her typical of a time when duty was often put before love. Claire Langhamer has argued that while love has always been a factor in selecting a marriage partner, it was only over the course of the twentieth century that the selection of a partner for love alone begun to take precedence over other more practical or material concerns.[4] Langhamer argues that it was during the middle decades of the twentieth century that it became more usual to pursue love alone. She suggests that during these years romantic love also began to be seen as providing transcendental or self-actualizing properties, meaning that it became even more valued above duty.[5] This novel, written in the 1930s takes place just before these shifts in sensibility.

Yet while these more dramatic changes may not have come into place until later in the century, and certainly not in people’s everyday lives which is the focus of Langhamer’s research, this period had nevertheless begun to see a refashioning of marriage and of its potential. The importance of equality and companionship in marriage was emphasised by a number of writers and marriage was increasingly idealised. Marcus Collins has shown that the importance of ‘mutuality’ – which became emphasized in early twentieth century writing on marriage – was based on the idea that true ‘intimacy’ was not possible without equality.[6] This urge to reform marriage had begun in the late eighteenth century. For example, Mary Wollstonecraft, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) denounced the separation of men and women, arguing that young people should be educated alongside one another and calling for the notion of companionate marriage.[7] Later thinkers, such as Edward Carpenter, and feminist writers expanded this idea. Carpenter argued at the close of the nineteenth century that marriage should be about seeking the ‘deepest soul union’ between a man and woman.[8] The importance of a shared home life in creating a companionate union was also emphasized. For example, Jane Hume Clapperton wrote in Shafts;

Although essential differences must always exist the sexes will become far more closely united in relations of friendship and sympathy within the safeguarded freedom of a wide home-life full of mutual interests and reciprocal duties.[9]

Yet, what little we know of Dolly’s impending marriage does not appear to offer up a vision of an impending equal or companionable marriage. We know very little of Bigham, and the novel does not paint a picture of intimacy, companionship nor cosy domesticity between Dolly and Bigham. The two seem marked by separateness. And nor does their marriage appear to offer up an example of potential sexual intimacy which was highlighted in changing representations of marriage. Increasingly the role of marriage as a source of sexual union, and sexual pleasure, particularly for women, was emphasised. Elinor Glyn’s popular novel The Philosophy of Love (1923) highlights the spiritual and sexual aspects of marriage, arguing that ‘no union can be perfect without equal capacity for sexual satisfaction in both men and women, as well as capacity for elevation of the soul.’[10] In fact, as Langhamer asserts, marriage was increasingly positioned as a place in which to contain sexual desire and intimacy.[11] Yet Strachey writes against this as she appears to be positioning sexual desire and intimacy outside of marriage, placing it in Dolly’s affair with Joseph, and highlighting her sexual pleasure outside of marriage. In this way the novel can be seen as relatively transgressive, writing against the promised potential of marriage and also against the increasing idealisation of love, and especially married love.

The group’s next book is Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796), a semi-autobiographical tale of unrequited love by the essayist and radical feminist Mary Hays.

Read Claire Langhamer’s post for this blog on the history of emotions from below.

[1] Claire Langhamer, The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution (Oxford, 2013), p. 4.

[2] Nicola Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s, Class, Domesticity and Bohemianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 5, 11.

[3] Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, p. 100.

[4] Langhamer, The English in Love, pp. 6, 13.

[5] Langhamer, The English in Love, p.11.

[6] Marcus Collins, Modern Love: An Intimate History of Men and Women in Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Atlantic Books, 2003), p. 5.

[7] Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792 cited in Collins, Modern Love, 2003, p. 4.

[8] Edward Carpenter, Love’s Coming of Age, 1896, revised 1913, p. 15 in Collins, Modern Love, pp. 1-4.

[9] Jane Hume Clapperton, ‘Reform in Domestic Life’, Shafts, 15 June 1893 cited in Collins, Modern Love, p. 26.

[10] Elinor Glyn, The Philosophy of Love, (New York: The Author’s Press, 1923), p. 17.

[11] Langhamer, The English in Love, p. 6.

The History of Emotions Blog

Conversations about the history of feeling from www.qmul.ac.uk/emotions