Sick of Sickness! Recovering a Happier History

Posted on November 7, 2012 by

Dr Hannah Newton is a social historian of early modern England at the University of Cambridge, specialising in the experiences of illness, childhood, and the emotions. Hannah joined the Department of History and Philosophy of Science in 2011, as a Wellcome Trust Medical History Fellow. Her project is about recovery and convalescence from illness in England, 1580-1720. It developed out of her doctoral research, now a book, The Sick Child in Early Modern England, 1580-1720, which was published earlier this year by Oxford University Press.

Horrible histories are not just for kids. Adult historians also seem to have an unquenchable thirst for grim tales of disease, death, and suffering. Before the birth of modern medicine, people fell ill, took ineffective remedies, and died, so the story goes. A quick glance at newspaper headlines, bestseller charts, and TV listings, indicates that this penchant for pain pervades our society. Perhaps it stems from a desire to put our own troubles in perspective, or maybe we enjoy the odd mix of emotions that other people’s afflictions elicit in us. Whatever the reason, I don’t think the situation is healthy!

My new research project opens a window onto a happier side of history: recovery from illness in England between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries. Contrary to common opinion, most illnesses at this time did not end in death; as such, my project seeks to rebalance our picture of early modern health. Drawing on sources such as diaries, letters, and doctors’ casebooks,I ask how doctors and laypeople defined and explained recovery, while exploring the emotional and spiritual experiences of recovering patients and their loved ones.

Saint Elizabeth offers a bowl of food and a tankard of drink to a male patient in the hospital in Marburg, Germany: 1598; by Adam Elsheimer from the Wellcome Library, London creative commons collection.

I became interested in this subject whilst preparing my book, The Sick Child in Early Modern England. The recovery of one particular child, eleven-year-old Martha Hatfield from Yorkshire, provided the inspiration. In 1652, this girl had been suffering from a disease called ‘spleen wind’ for nine months. During this time her family had been ‘continually under sadnesse, and their sleep broken’. They longed for God to ‘ease her of her pain, [so] that [their] eares…might not be filled with such dolefull cries, nor their hearts with those fears and amazements’.

One December morning, Martha suddenly felt strength returning to her limbs. She told her father, ‘It trickled down, and came into [my] thighs, knees, and ancles, like warm water’. Seeing her mother ‘being set upon the bed by her’, Martha ‘rejoyced…with laughing and stroaking of her face, and clasping her armes about her neck’. The next morning, she ‘took some food without spilling’, and told her parents that she had had ‘a very good night’, not waking until ‘seven a clock’. In the afternoon, she ‘played with some odde toys…which Neighbours had brought her…in a little Basket’, and towards the evening, her sister Hannah, who had been ‘very tender of her’ during her illness, ‘took her up, and set her upon her feet, and she stood by herself without holding, which she had not done for three quarters of a year’. Over the next week, Martha ‘encreased in strength…beyond all expectation’, and at last announced to her family, ‘me is pretty well…I am neither sick, nor have any pain’. A day of thanksgiving was arranged to praise God for His ‘glorious end to this affliction’. One of the guests recalled that the sight of Martha ‘com[ing] forth into the Hall to meet and welcome us…was wonderfull in our eyes, so that our hearts did rejoyce with a kind of trembling’.

This narrative was written up by Martha’s uncle, James Fisher, and published a year later. It reveals the profound emotional and spiritual significance of recovery to patients and their relatives, and raises questions about early modern perceptions and experiences of recovery. How did people respond emotionally to the decline of pain and the escape from death? What did they think was happening inside their bodies during recovery, and how was it brought about? What were the signs and stages of recovery?

Recovery provides a unique opportunity for historians: it may help to find a solution to the long-standing challenge of accessing the everyday experiences and feelings of people from the past. In times of health, individuals rarely commented on the mundane aspects of life, such as eating, sleeping, and bodily sensation. In severe sickness, they were usually too unwell to be able to record their experiences. However, when recovering, all this changed – the dramatic transition from illness to health, and ‘sadnesse to mirth’, propelled the usually unnoticed facets of human existence to the forefront of people’s minds and personal writings. The act of writing – especially a letter – was ‘the first fruit of recovery’, a rite of passage on the ‘road to health’, and proof of the person’s physical fitness. As a result, recovery offers unrivalled insights into a whole array of social experiences, and especially those of the body and the emotions, two fields of history which my project seeks to bring together.

Mental exercise, long life, and letter-writing. Engraving illustrating the maxim that the life of mind and body is strengthened and prolonged by incessant toil. 17th century. Wellcome Images

All this is illustrated by a sermon delivered in 1626 by the Oxfordshire clergyman Robert Harris. He wrote, in the sickchamber, ‘you shall find silence, solitarinesse, sadnesse, light shut out…misery shut in, children weeping, wife sighing…husband groning, Oh my head, O my backe, O my stomach, sicke, sicke, sick…helpe me up, helpe me downe…I cannot stand, I cannot sit, I cannot lye, I cannot eate, I cannot sleepe, I cannot live, I can|not die, O what shall I doe?’ ‘Poore man’, cried Harris, ‘hee is not well, and therefore nothing is well about him; he is sicke, and so all the world is made of sickenesse to him’. Upon recovery, however, ‘O what a change is here!’, exclaimed Harris: the man will now say: ‘my stomach is come to mee, my sleepe, my flesh, my strength, my joy, my friends, my house, my wealth, all is returned’. He concluded, ‘this motion from sicke|nesse to health[,] from sadnesse to mirth, from paine to ease, from prison to libertie, from death to life, must needs be a happie motion, worthie [of] thankes [to God]’.

Thus, it was the extraordinary difference between the states of illness and health, that made recovery such a remarkable experience, and caused patients to comment upon other aspects of life, such as food, work, and sleep. The transition ‘from pain to ease’ elicited particular attention. William Walwyn, a medical practitioner from Worcestershire, wrote that a male patient of his, ‘being tortur’d with violent pains of the Strangury’ (difficult urination), ‘found instantly a perfect release, both from pain and stoppage, to his Extream joy & satisfaction’. Contemporaries believed that these happy feelings were contingent upon the intensity of pain that had preceded them: in 1671, the French philosopher Jean-François Senault explained, ‘Joy measureth it self so justly by sorrow, that the beauty of the Triumph depends upon the greatness of the Combat…so nothing adds more to Pleasure than the Pain that hath gon before it’. Put another way, ‘alterations and changes make all things more sweete and pleasant to our senses…as the returne of the Spring after the sharpenesse of winter, and the arrivall of a friend after along voyage’.

Studying people’s emotional reactions to the abatement of pain sheds fresh light on the mind-body relationship in early modern understanding: the soul and body were depicted as close friends who sympathised with one another’s feelings. Senault explained, ‘when the body is assaulted…[with] the rage of Sickness, [the soul] is constrained to sigh with it…the Cords which fasten them together, make their miseries common…For while [the soul] is in the body, she seems to renounce her Nobility; and that ceasing to be a pure spirit, she [interests] her self in all the Delights, and all the Vexations of her Hoste: his health causeth contentment in her; and his sickness is grievous to her’. Thus, the relief and comfort of the body brought relief and comfort to the mind, just as physical pain caused emotional pain. Historians have investigated the perceived effects of the passions on the body, but much less has been written about the other side of this relationship, namely the impact of the body on the emotions.

When I set out on this recovery project, I had expected to find an unwavering story of happiness. I was to be disappointed. After illness, recovery did not always bring full physical comfort. The sixteenth-century physician Lemnius Levinus wrote, ‘men newly recovered be weak and feeble, and…wasted with the disease…their body is lean and starved’. He compared the recovered person to a victim of a highway robbery, ‘a Traveller that is got out of Theives hands, he yet pants and trembles, and is not wholly restored from the great fear and danger of his life he was in,…so a sick man, though when his disease is gone, he begins to go abroad, and find all things better with him, yet some footsteps of the disease stay yet in his body’.  This term, ‘footsteps of disease’, denoted the remaining imperfections and pains that lingered after illness. The most common complaints were nausea, weakness, and relapse. In 1721, Lady Bristol told her husband John that their little daughter Peg ‘is better’ from her illness, ‘but so very weak you cant hear her speak without laying your head close to the pillow’. The expectation of relapse was even more troubling – the English poet John Donne declared that the fear of the return of illness far exceeded those anxieties which had come prior to the first bout of disease on the grounds that ‘wee can scarce fix a feare’ on an illness that had not yet come ‘because wee know not what to feare’. But the anticipation of relapse brings ‘the busiest and irksomest affection’ of fear, because the disease ‘is but newly gone, the nearest object’ to memory.

Perhaps I was a bit naïve in my hopes for uncovering an entirely happy history – as one early modern proverb succinctly states, ‘life is chequered with black and white mercies and miseries’. Nevertheless, I think that by paying greater attention to the more cheerful episodes in people’s lives, we can attain a more representative picture of what life was really like in the past.

‘Shag’: A Shagpile Carpet Made from Hair

Posted on November 7, 2012 by

Dr Bharti Parmar is an artist who has exhibited nationally and internationally for 20 years.  Her PhD, “A Grammar of Sentiment: thinking about sentimental jewellery towards making new art about love and loss” explored the poetics of nineteenth-century museological artefacts.  She lives in Birmingham.

Her current concern is human hair as sculptural material.  Hair is material matter.  It is a hyper-realistic portrait of an individual. It provokes a physical and emotional reaction by its sight and smell. It serves memory through touch, handling and contact with the human body and as such, warrants cultural and artistic enquiry.

Here, Bharti shares with the History of Emotions Blog an edited discussion with curator Charlie Levine of the philosophical and technical processes of the making of ‘Shag’, a 5ft2 human hair shagpile carpet made using traditional wigmaking techniques.

‘Shag’ was commissioned by Charlie Levine for Aedas Presents and formed an artwork intervention in the corporate office spaces of architects Aedas.  It was exhibited in the Aedas Birmingham office in May 2012. 

‘Shag’. Human hair. 2012. ©Bharti Parmar

CHARLIE LEVINE:  For your new piece of work, ‘Shag’, you have used real human hair to make a carpet.  Why is hair, as a medium, important within your work?

BHARTI PARMAR: In ‘Shag’ human hair is sculptural material.  The hair has been sourced from wigmakers’ suppliers and originates from Europe and China. Quality human hair has always been expensive to purchase; in the 19th century, the highest prices were paid for golden and, surprisingly, grey hair for use in hairpieces.  ‘Shag’ contains over £700 worth of hair.  Hair from suppliers is costly because of the laborious processing involved; it is washed, de-loused, colour matched, cuticle corrected (strands pointing the right direction) and double drawn (it is as thick at the bottom of the bunch as at the top). The carpet contains approximately 90% human hair, the rest is high quality Japanese heat-resistant modacrylic fibre used by wigmakers (also as expensive as real hair), which I have used to build up the texture and pile within the carpet.

‘Shag’ (video).  2012. ©Bharti Parmar

I have been interested in human hair, its cultural symbolism and its potential as sculptural material for a very long time. In the early 1990s many artists of my generation – largely those who have undergone a diasporic experience – used hair to act as a metaphor for addressing issues of identity and the self (e.g. Sonia Boyce, Zarina Bhimji and Simryn Gill).

I also drew inspiration from Serbian artist Zoran Todorovic’s profound work ‘Warmth’ (2009) whereby stacks of felted blankets industrially produced from human hair “created from two tons of hair collected from hairdressing salons, prison and military barracks … create[d] an imprint of hundreds of Serbian people”.[1]

‘Shag’ develops ideas within my doctorate in which I examined the poetics of Victorian jewellery – the ways in which hair stimulates remembrance and acts as a powerful instrument of evocation.  As a material expression of emotion, hair has been a longstanding preoccupation of my artistic practice – dead, but simultaneously “the vital surrogate of the living person” it appears to embody a curious paradox.[2]

‘Shag’ is a complex work which attracts and repels in equal measure.  It is full of paradoxes: it is gigantic in scale but its construction involved a painstakingly detailed process; it’s a carpet but it’s fragile; it elicits desire but also elicits disgust as attested by its vulgar double-edged title.  And it suggests the body through its absence and evokes a sexual animalistic response in the viewer with its nod towards fetishism and excess.

CL: In terms of premiering this piece at Aedas Presents, how has the venue affected the making, design and concept behind this work?

BP: In placing ‘Shag’ within a minimal controlled space where, ostensibly, it does not belong brings to mind feelings of discomfiture and awkwardness.  The carpet is accompanied by a video which provides insight into the process of its making.  It is an artwork which derives from the Surrealist tradition of exploiting unexpected juxtapositions of objects, materials and words to challenge our preconceptions of what is ‘acceptable’.

‘Shag’ (video installation). 2012. ©Bharti Parmar

Within the canon of art history, ‘Shag’ may be termed a ‘sensational’ work as it raises many interesting questions: slowness, scale, hair and cultural symbolism, art and craft, fetish, and some difficult ones: the use of hairpieces for chemotherapy patients and other medical conditions and the misuses of hair during the Holocaust.  It is ultimately a work about physicality; this artwork comments on physical space – just as architects fashion space for the physical body to inhabit.  It is essentially corporeal – it is of the body, from the body and for the body.  Incidentally it is exactly the same arm span and height as my body.  It was modelled on the original carpet of 6’ feet sq. but is just short of that at 5’ 2”.

CL: Describe the technical challenges of learning unfamiliar wigmaking techniques for this piece.

BP: Undoubtedly, ‘Shag’ is a physical piece of work.  Much preparatory time was taken up with pondering on the technical means of making something on a scale hitherto unheard of by the wigmakers I approached.  I watched YouTube videos of Chinese women in wigmaking sweatshops knotting wigs at tremendous speed, I located hair suppliers and wigmaking tools and I researched wigmakers in the Midlands who might be open to the idea of helping me.

Wigmaking tools. 2012. ©Bharti Parmar

I started my work on the carpet on the principle of ‘ventilating’ (knotting) a wig – albeit on a larger scale and flatter surface – using a lace-making cushion rather than a traditional wig block.  However, unlike a wig, ‘Shag’ is knotted in such a way as to give it height.  After many false starts and trial runs the hand movements started to come more naturally and I felt in tremendous awe of the Chinese wigmakers who worked long shifts that I was unable to emulate.

‘Shag’ (profile). Human hair. 2012. ©Bharti Parmar

My initial plan was to diagonally blend the colours of hair from dark to light across the carpet but, in fact, I began from the centre and the carpet developed in a much more organic way with blends forming instinctively.  Each evening I removed the carpet from its cushion and hung it on the wall to reassess how it was forming.  And I cut it to a pile of a set measurement.  I used a magnifying lamp to save my eyes and spent approximately three hours a day working on the carpet spread out over intervals.  It was physical to make – this extended to how I held my body, that is, how I sat, the position of my shoulders, the relaxation of my jaw, etc. otherwise my right hand would begin to ache.

When I neared the end of knotting, the carpet became ‘alive’; I thought of it in anthropomorphic terms – it had a total gestation of 9 months with 2 spent on researching and 7 months making.  Furthermore, I began to liken each hair type with the personality of its owner: blond hair was unruly when dry, tamed when wet; grey alluring and silk-like but coarse to work with.  The carpet was then backed and professionally bound at the edges by a carpet firm in Kidderminster, the traditional home of carpets in England.

CL: What is next for this piece and your practice?

BP: This commission has been a turning point my practice.  ‘Shag’ is an ambitious ‘sculpture’ and positions itself art historically within the Surrealist-derived engagement with the ‘overlooked’ (once popular artforms or amateur art practices).  Like Todorovic’s ‘Warmth’, it is an imprint of humankind – a hybrid mix of people, it has a personality as individual as the hair it contains.

This project is the precursor for a new body of work which develops my knowledge of the memorial function of hair within nineteenth-century European jewellery to examine broader cultural and material concerns.  Not only was hair used within jewellery but the Victorian cult of hair grew to huge proportions: ‘parures’ or whole sets of jewellery were made from it.  Ornamental and practical applications for hairwork included kneepads, scent-bottles, and walking sticks.  I have begun work on exploring ideas of incongruity and uselessness in making a series of finely crafted miniature objects from human hair entitled multum in parvo (‘much in little’ or ‘worlds in miniature’).[3]

‘Shag’ has been shortlisted for the Celeste International Art Prize. 1-9 December 2012, Centrale Montemartini, Rome, Italy.

A full transcript of this text can be found at www.bhartiparmar.com 

[1] What Next for the Body December 2010-Feb 2011, exhibition pamphlet, Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol.

[2] Charles Berg (1951) The Unconscious Significance of Hair, p. 37.

[3] A term use by cultural theorist Susan Stewart to describe notions of the miniature in relation to, for example, language (micrographia etc.), Stewart (1993) On Longing, p. 52.

Making Love with Constance Maynard

Posted on November 7, 2012 by

Dr Thomas Dixon is Director of the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions. Here he reflects on the meanings of love, as discussed at a recent one-day conference inspired by the writings of Constance Maynard, and hosted by the Centre.

According to Saint Augustine of Hippo, in The City of God, all the passions of the soul are manifestations of a single principle, which he referred to as ‘love’ (amor) or ‘will’ (voluntas). Each of us, on this view, has either a good, divine love or a bad, worldly love, driving all our feelings and actions.

This week the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions hosted a one-day event to mark the completion of the digitisation of the autobiographical writings of Constance Maynard (the downloads take some minutes each, but it is worth the wait as the materials are extraordinary). The day was entitled ‘Love, Desire, and Melancholy: Inspired by the Writings of Constance Maynard‘ and was organised by a committee chaired by Lorraine Screene, who is responsible for the Queen Mary archives.

The dominant theme of the day was undoubtedly love: sexual love, romantic love, religious love; love between women, love of God, love of humanity; love reaching across social, physical, and metaphysical divides. And it was clear, from talks given by the first keynote, Pauline Phipps, and by several others during the day, that Maynard’s own view of love had much in common with that of St Augustine.

Maynard’s autobiographical writings (the ‘Green Book’ daily diaries, and the much later unpublished Autobiography which she constructed from them) narrate a struggle between worldly and divine passions, which were played out especially in her relationships with other women. In 1882, Maynard became the first Mistress of Westfield College: an institution designed to prepare Christian young women to take BA degrees from the University of London. Westfield was one of the institutional ancestors of Queen Mary. Maynard held this post for thirty-one years, and during that time had several intense loving relationships with the young women under her authority, which had both physical and spiritual dimensions. Before her death, Maynard’s instruction to her biographer, Catherine Firth, was ‘don’t forget the love’.

Historians struggle to reconstitute and understand the emotional lives of the people they study. Indeed, most of us struggle to understand our own emotions, let alone those of long-dead individuals who lived and moved in radically different cultures. So what can we say about love lives of the past? Other speakers at the conference provided further fascinating examples. Helena Whitbread has spent nearly thirty years working on the nineteenth-century diaries of Anne Lister, which were partly written in a secret cipher, and often concerned Lister’s loves for other women. Whitbread’s talk outlined the rationalist and religious, as well as romantic motivations behind Lister’s voluminous autobiographical writings. At one moment of despair over an unrequited passion in 1832, Lister wrote in her diary, ‘Flow on, my miserable, foolish tears.’

Muriel Lester in 1938.

Seth Koven is currently working on a book entitled The Match Girl and the Heiress about the loving relationship between an East-End factory worker, Nellie Dowell, and a well-to-do pacifist, feminist, humanitarian, and friend of Mahatma Gandhi, Muriel Lester. His keynote address introduced some of  the extraordinary sources from which he is working, especially the arrestingly direct, intense, ungrammatical, and yet fluent letters written over many years from Nellie to her beloved Muriel. Koven brilliantly compared these letters with some of the experimental modernist writings of Gertrude Stein.

Nellie and Muriel were united by their commitment to a particular devotional vision described by Koven as a ‘God is love’ theology, as well as by their ‘epistolary erotics’. ‘In loving one another’, he said, ‘they sought to remake the world’. They did this by their work founding Kingsley Hall, in 1915, a Christian revolutionary people’s hall located in Bow, in the East End of London, as a centre for social reform and brotherly love.

The historian, then, sits down with these handwritten and printed words, diaries and letters, memoirs and autobiographies, and tries to imagine the  emotions of the past, to feel forgotten feelings afresh. And, judging by the many shared aims and concerns of the speakers at this conference, this itself is a collaborative endeavour, fuelled by a desire faithfully and carefully to reconstitute the minds of the past, while offering inspiration and liberation to minds in the present. Carol Mavor emphasised the role of creativity and imagination in trying to revivify past feelings; her presentation reflected on the layers of homoerotic and incestuous imagery detectable in the ‘Paul and Virginia’ photographs made by Julia Margaret Cameron.

In all of this, two themes that are close to my own heart emerged: the need to pay close attention to the language and categories of historical actors (which was emphasised by Laura Doan and others); and the importance of understanding theological and devotional terms and genres when trying to comprehend the lives of Victorian and post-Victorian subjects. Angharad Eyre’s analysis of the place of love, emotion, and tears in the literatures of evangelical conversion, and Sue Morgan’s account of Maud Royden’s 1921 book Sex and Common Sense, her campaigns against ‘anti-somatic theology’, and her own unusual love life, both illustrated the complex but reinforcing relationships between theological and secular forms of love.

In thinking about the meaning of ‘love’, and how love has been made and remade in the past, the historian needs to keep all these complexities in mind. And my parting thought from the conference this week, as an historian of emotions, was that ‘love’ is not best thought of as an emotion at all. Perhaps Saint Augustine’s approach is better: to think of ‘love’ as an almost unknowable, underlying substance, out of which particular passions, feelings, emotions and experiences might arise.

Constance Maynard, in the page from her ‘Green Book’ shown below, written in December 1881, asks whether a  ‘spiritual love and energy’ directed towards Christ can find its expression in a secular vocation. The passage discusses a student, Mabel, and the ‘powers and tastes’ she has been given by God. The historian of emotions, then, will need to ask what Maynard meant by ‘spiritual’, ‘energy’, ‘power’ and ‘taste’, as well as ‘love’, and how these terms functioned, when used in particular times and places, in producing and interpreting feelings in herself and others.

A page from Constance Maynard’s ‘Green Book’ for December 1881

Love is made in many ways, all of them at some level linguistic. The historian needs to listen carefully to the languages and dialects of the heart, through which love is called forth, expressed, made, and reinterpreted. Writing in her autobiography towards the end of her life, in her late seventies, Constance Maynard wrote that she supposed that psychoanalysts would say of her feelings that they revealed as ‘thwarted sex instinct’. Maynard rejected this language, preferring to write of the ‘hunger’ she had felt, which needed satisfying. That was clearly a spiritual need – a hungering and thirsting after righteousness – as much as a psychological one. To the end she feared that her great fault had been to prefer human to heavenly love.

One passage of Maynard’s writing, quoted by Pauline Phipps in her lecture, has particularly stayed with me. It encapsulates the intensity and complexity of Constance Maynard’s experiences of love, desire, and melancholy. This was written at the end of her life, looking back at a relationship with the twenty-five year old Marion Wakefield, thirty years earlier:

I feared that I might love Marion! The colours grew more brilliant as I thought of it. Meanwhile Christ stood beside me, offering me white, pure white. I must choose white, and I will. I dread love … Am I a Minotaur that I must eat a maiden’s heart?

 

“Sisu”: The Finnish for “Stiff Upper Lip”?

Posted on October 30, 2012 by

Dr Tuomas Tepora is a visiting postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary during the academic year 2012­–13 and holds a postdoctoral position at the University of Helsinki. His research deals with emotions and the cultural history of war in Finland in the early 20th century. His particular interest is the concept of sacrifice in a modern framework. This includes the various notions, symbols and memories of modern war-related sacrifice and also the psychology behind the feelings and experiences of sacrifice, self-sacrifice and victimisation. His current project includes a wide array of collective emotions experienced in a society at war. These include love, attachment and hate; trust and uncertainty; collective honour and shame; public calls for chastity and experiences of social decadence. Tuomas is also interested in new research within the field of critical neuroscience. In this post for the History of Emotions blog, he explores the history of the distinctively Finnish quality of ‘sisu’.

A fascinating series on the emotional history of Britain was recently broadcast on BBC Two, entitled Ian Hislop’s Stiff Upper Lip (the subject of several earlier posts on this blog). In line with a Western trend of moving away from emotional restraint, we learned that the stiff upper lip isn’t perhaps considered the most valued British quality today. Nor, in earlier periods, was it the most prevalent emotional style. In fact, the era of the stiff upper lip in Britain coincided with certain changes in society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Nevertheless, it seems that the ‘stiff upper lip’ still hasn’t gone away for good. The concept and the idea live on as a widely recognised symbol of Britishness, and as a repository of cultural meaning.

For someone like me who did not grow up in Britain and who thus has not been emotionally trained to keep a stiff upper lip, keep calm and carry on, the series was perhaps even more illuminating. In my native Finland a comparable national characteristic is familiar, although it has evolved in a quite different environment and from different historical experiences. There is a famous word for this quality: “sisu”. And, as with the concept of the stiff upper lip, sisu has a history of shifting meanings and its cultural, social and political significance has seen highs and lows.  Sisu certainly represents a national symbol in Finland and like all national symbols, it is contested and debated, celebrated and scorned.

Sisu translates as “having guts”. Etymologically the word means quite literally the insides (of a person) or interior. What does sisu denote, then, and how and when did it become such a powerful concept?

A painting by Eero Järnefelt from 1893,entitled “Burning the Brushwood”
(or, in Finnish something more like “plodders under material pressure”), capturing the grim and harsh yet idealized Finnish national spirit of the nineteenth century.

The dictionary definition of sisu tells us that it has to do with perseverance and resoluteness. As a quality of a person it signifies long lasting and silent courage in the face of every possible obstacle and overcoming even repeated failures. Having sisu does not just imply heroism under pressure, but also composure in the midst of joyful celebrations; perhaps something similar to the spirit of Rudyard Kipling’s famous couplet: 

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same…

Sisu denotes also the acceptance of a usually grim reality without complaint but it doesn’t mean submission to it. On the contrary, a person with sisu calmly but sturdily navigates him or herself in the midst of life’s difficulties. If one overcomes them, he or she takes the victory without making too much noise about it. If one fails, things go on as usual. Sisu may in some rare occasions refer to noble and gentlemanly attitudes but it’s more commonly understood in relation to rough and physical labour, bushwhacking and breaking new ground.

In other words, the sisu denotes something of a stereotypical concept of Finnishness. This stereotype is well propagated and recreated by Finns themselves who always feel free to tell foreigners about their sisu. Sisu has thus been coined as a collective quality of a small northern nation who has been forced to endure harsh climate and hostile neighbours. As it is, sisu has very positive connotations for people but historically, this was not always the case. Finns might brag about their sisu for foreigners and celebrate it as a r national quality but when it comes to acknowledging fellow Finns’ sisu the word may lend itself to rather malevolent connotations.

Looking at the history of the word tells us why. The first literary remarks on sisu date from the 16th century. The Finnish written language had only recently been developed for religious purposes after the Reformation. According to Maija Länsimäki at first sisu referred only to a temper of any kind, but in the hands of Lutheran clergy the word quickly developed to mean “bad”. “Having sisu” further denoted a tendency of behaving badly. The word derived straight from the person’s insides, intestines (sisucunda).  In fact in 1745 Daniel Juslenius defined “sisucunda” in his dictionary as the location in human body where strong affects originated.  It seems that until the end of the 19th century the word had rather negative meaning in literature and, moreover, it implied strong and disturbing emotions and feelings, which weren’t kept at check. This definition seems to be quite the opposite from the definition of the positively valued perseverance and courage the concept denotes at present, although we cannot know for sure how the people outside the literati felt sisu before the late 19th century.

But even today the word sisu is a double-edged sword. As a quality of one’s own it may be celebrated but at the same time as another person’s quality it may have dubious qualities. Terms like “sisupussi” (shrew; fighter) and “pahansisuinen” (bad-tempered) imply that having sisu is something which requires strong emotional navigation. Sisu must be tamed and directed to productive behaviour. The same source which gives rise to outbursts of disturbing and defiant behaviour is also the source of determination and equanimity. Interestingly, it may well be the defiance sisu denotes that made it so popular a concept and a symbol of Finnishness in the early 20th century and at the same time transformed the word’s connotation into a positive one.

Sisu was in high fashion in the 1920s and 30s. The newly independent nation celebrated its sovereignty by consciously looking for and reinventing its roots. The national romantic nation-building efforts begun in the late 19th century with the “invention” of national costumes and heroic history echoed in establishing sisu as something uniquely Finnish. The sports and sisu became close acquaintances testifying of Finnish endurance and determination in the international arena. The word came to denote a national character apart from its simple meaning of certain kind of temper. Sisu’s older connotation of ill-temperedness was transformed into virtue. The resolute defiance in the face of external hardships became a hoped for quality in the individual and the nation as a whole. This is the period when the modern definition of sisu originated.

Part of the Finnish war effort, 1942.

During the Second World War sisu experienced an elevation to an almost sacred status. Interestingly the authorities didn’t explicitly use it so much in internal propaganda but as a showpiece for foreign reporters. One of the earliest depictions of sisu in English can be traced to that period. The Winter War (1939­–40) in fact made sisu somewhat famous in the English-speaking world. The international press portrayed Finland’s battle against the powerful enemy as a display of that peculiar sense of perseverance. The following excerpt from Time Magazine is illuminating (and tells a lot about the American way of seeing the gutful emotion, too):

The Finns have something they call sisu. It is a compound of bravado and bravery, of ferocity and tenacity, of the ability to keep fighting after most people would have quit, and to fight with the will to win. The Finns translate sisu as “the Finnish spirit” but it is a much more gutful word than that. Last week the Finns gave the world a good example of sisu by carrying the war into Russian territory on one front while on another they withstood merciless attacks by a reinforced Russian Army.

(Time Magazine, January 8, 1940, retrieved from Time Magazine Archives)

The Reader’s Digest, in turn, titled its report on the war in March 1940 as “Sisu: A Word That Explains Finland”. The Finnish government played a major role in propagating sisu for foreign reporters. It was in fact something the foreign liaisons officers were instructed to tell to their foreign contacts. In terms of promoting the term, the propaganda proved successful. The foreign reporters bought it and sisu briefly gathered the world’s attention and added to the mythical status of the word in describing the Finnish character.

The emotional reality of the war was, inevitably, much more nuanced than the “bravado and bravery” of sisu. Finland was defeated and the result lead to a new, longer and bloodier conflict called the Continuation War (1941­–44), which was part of the German offensive to the Soviet Union. Perhaps sisu helped to overcome the defeats, traumas and other spoils of the war or at least it acted as a cultural reservoir of meaning in the times of crises. Nevertheless, when talking about war, it always seems a little banal to explain survival and recovery from the hardships with concepts like sisu or the ‘stiff upper lip’. Sometimes fortunately, other times less so, not every emotion was held in check.

A Finnish soldier during World War II

As with the ‘stiff upper lip’, the post-Second World War decades saw the gradual decline of the lure of sisu. The expression of one’s feelings has become much more desirable in the last few decades, therapy culture flourishes, and with Finland eagerly integrating to Europe since the constraints set by the Cold War vanished, the national chararacteristics have perhaps been downplayed in public discourses and values in favour of some, quite obscure “European values”. Although the concept experienced a brief renaissance in the early 1990s along with neo-patriotism following the collapse of the Soviet Union (see for instance the book Suomalainen sisu, The Finnish Sisu, from 1994, a collection of essays portraying chapters in Finnish history as manifestations of sisu!), the word has also become to denote a set of emotions appropriate for local patriots or provincialists. Sisu’s status as a national symbol has also sparked contest over its appropriate use. For instance with right-wing populism on the rise all over Europe, one of the Finnish right-wing associations adopted the name Suomen Sisu (The Finnish Sisu) in 1998 and has acted against multiculturalism and immigration. Four members of the association are members of parliament at the moment. Whereas sisu’s popularity isn’t perhaps in its highest at the moment in Finland, expat Finns seem to enjoy the concept. The state-sponsored radio station in Sweden serving the large Finnish population in the country is called Sisu Radio and there are Sisu media elsewhere, too.

The story of sisu isn’t complete without perhaps its most intriguing features. What seems to be the most remarkable and quite unique quality in the concept is its commercial value from early on. Two brands were initiated during the heyday of sisu and nationalism in the interwar period: Sisu pastilles (established in 1928) and Sisu trucks (established in 1931, later also military vehicles under the same brand). Both brands are still going strong. Sisu pastilles, which are sort of throat lozenges, had gained a huge popularity already by the 1930s and the brand has retained its desirability. Its popularity tells us also that the word is not entirely lost for political extremism.

The Sisu trademark has effectively utilised the classic qualities of the emotional concept in its advertising. I think it’s a good way to finish this entry by posting a link to the classic Sisu pastilles advert from 1975. The ad can be watched as an exercise in self-irony, but admittedly seeing this it isn’t perhaps so difficult to see why some people might want to distance themselves from the things sisu represents. The line “Alussa olivat suo, kuokka ja Jussi” in the advert refers to the beginning of the trilogy Under the North Star (1959–1962) by Väinö Linna, and reads “In the beginning there was the marsh, the hoe, and Jussi”. The reference is obviously to the biblical creation story, but it implies that the Finnish way of beginning didn’t exactly include the Word. The beginning included sisu, though, and the ad ends with a line “Finnish Sisu since 1928”.

 

The Theatre of Pain

Posted on October 30, 2012 by

Dr Rob Boddice is Marie-Curie CoFund Fellow at the Cluster of Excellence ‘Languages of Emotion’, at the Freie Universität Berlin, and Honorary Research Fellow at the Birkbeck Pain Project, London. Here he reviews Javier Moscoso’s new book Pain: A Cultural History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

To Javier Moscoso, all the world’s a stage on which a continually revised performance is, and always has been, taking place. The performance is Pain, and humanity variously assumes the role of actor and audience.

In medieval Europe the actor was a religious icon, a visual representation of equanimity undergoing extraordinary bodily violence, stimulating an emotional response in the audience in the form of devotion or piety, exemplifying the route to salvation through a refusal to suffer, an absence of pain. The early modern actor was an impassive martyr, who closely guarded the secrets of her suffering as she strove to emulate the passion – literally the pain – of Christ, the audience being let in on the secret through the scarred body and the scratched page of a life in and for pain. Cervantes’ erstwhile knight-errant of the early seventeenth century then took the stage to demonstrate the inevitability of pain in the struggle for freedom, followed by the eighteenth-century actor, suffering torture or gruesome death for his crimes, casting the pall of his brutality onto the audience, whose ribaldry betrayed a callousness, an animality, that spoke to all the classically perceived dangers of tragedy. In the same period the actor, now imaginary, affected pity from a distance, stimulating the social emotions of civilised fellows, for whom sympathy – literally the capacity to suffer with – involved the audience in the economy of pain and the desire for its limitation. In the early nineteenth century, the ‘century of pain’, the lead actor suffered for the good of civilisation, while a supporting cast of scalpels revealed for the audience the physiological truths of pain, the knowledge of which was to lead to their abolition.

Later, the actor was anaesthetised, a mere prop, whose objective state freed the fellow players from the trauma of sympathy, allowing for the aesthetics – literally, the sensitivity – of the operating theatre to change beyond recognition, and the plot to morph from tragedy to comedy; or she was an object of beauty, reduced to bondage, a figure of pain to be consumed by the lascivious and guilty bourgeois – the literal aesthete – whose masochistic compulsions enhanced the experience of beauty as a kind of pain. Then came the masochist proper, whose lonely life in search of pain as pleasure was collected, scrutinised, and fetishised by his counterpart, the sexologist or psychiatrist, and spotlighted by a new pathological drama, popularly consumed: deviance.

The narrative builds to a point at which the body is eliminated from the question of pain, and shifts from the history of identifying (with) bodily pain to mistrusting or denying pain. Non-corporeal, purely affective, emotional disorders or syndromes, resistant to physical observation and therefore lacking veracity through the articulation of either the mouth or the body, are subjected to a comedy of naming, disavowing, and excluding. While on the one hand a ‘new form of testimonial trust’ emerges in which the patient, and not the patient’s body, tells the story of pain, and the meaning, the significance, of pain finally enters medical practice (179), on the other hand the institution of medicine repeatedly fails to find the cause of the pain, leaving the sufferer to assume responsibility for it, reduced to her own consciousness, a lonely actor on an empty stage with an audience that cannot see. And finally comes the sufferer of chronic pain, whose part depends on the collective narrative of fellow sufferers in order for it to be endowed with emotional credibility, but whose performance singly lacks a plot, being a suffering with no end.

Whether or not you buy into the theatrical idiom, Moscoso’s narrative of pain is compelling. The book is arranged chronologically, its content ranging such that the particular exemplifies the general, and the general makes sense of the particular. This circular balancing typifies Moscoso’s reasoning, through which we learn of  the ‘history of pain’ and the ‘pain of history’ (18), and of a story that transitions from the ‘image without emotion’ in the era of the medieval martyr, to the ‘emotion with no image’ in our world of technological artifices (35), and to the physician ‘who knows but doesn’t feel’ and the patient who ‘feels but doesn’t know’ in the novel and mutually mistrusting script of nervous and psychological pain (173). The history of pain, in another balanced equation, is that of the translation of affective experience in context, and of the formative effect of context on affective experience. That equation does not necessarily demand a stress on ‘performance’, for William Reddy (author of a recent post on this blog) already formulated the same equation and captured it in the term ‘emotive’, while explicitly denying the language and experience of performativity. But Moscoso’s examples are generally dramatic, focussing on the work of art, the novel, the execution, the operation, and orientating the narrative around the ways in which these dramas unfolded, were received, appropriated, and acted out again and again. The essence is this: ‘there is no suffering that does not entail a social appraisal and, by extension, a form of expression linked to cultural guidelines and expectations’ (56).

The most stunning revelation of this book, therefore, is that the history of pain, while documented on the bodies, the canvases, and the pages of the past, is a history of the emotions, and emphatically so. A more lucid example of the historian’s ability to recover ‘lost’ emotions, to render them in all their brilliant strangeness, and then to present them to us as intrinsically but mysteriously formative of our own ways of thinking, acting, and feeling, would be difficult to imagine. The body in pain is nothing, or at least, is not to be trusted, without the affective experience that gives that pain meaning. Moscoso delights in entangling the histories of pleasure, of sexual excitement, of cruelty, of piety, of liberty, and of truth, with the history of the infliction or the experience of pain, shattering the possibility of glib overtures along the lines of ‘all pain is bad’, and thrusting us into a gallery of painful images mediated by a narrative that cannot fail to induce our own aesthetic response in the form of pleasure. The book, not without irony, stages what it documents. So much is signposted early on, for ‘we have learned to represent our pain within an inherited framework, consisting of values and practices that we no longer recognize as our own. We have changed the sheets, but we have our dream of violence in the beds of others’ (20).

This book serves as a valuable corrective, not only to historians whose appreciation of the historicity of the emotions is only just awakening, but also to those who denounce pain without critical reflection, and to those who treat pain, perhaps clinically, without entering into its affective, historical, cultural, experiential context. It is a story that demonstrates the extraordinary extent to which the languages, expressions, and performances of pain have undergirded, directed, and stimulated culture, while at the same time being subjected to cultural restraints of tolerance and taboo and the limits of meaning-making in historical context. The extent to which the world makes pain is matched by the actions of those in pain, or those inflicting it, on themselves or on others, in making worlds. Worlds are never unmade for Moscoso – he is far from the world of Elaine Scarry’s creation – because the person in pain, one way or another,  is always on stage. This is a story not devoid of horror, but that horror has nevertheless proven to be fundamental to who we, we sufferers, are and have been. Moscoso exhorts us to remember this but, also far from the Freudian therapeutic narrative that he ably relays, hardly so that we might forget.

 

 

Episcopal emotions: Weeping in the life of the medieval bishop

Posted on October 25, 2012 by

Dr Katherine Harvey is as Associate Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London. Here, in a blog post adapted from her paper at the recent SSHM 2012 Conference hosted at the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions, she explores why tears were such a ubiquitous accompaniment to the activities of medieval bishops.

In his classic history of medieval Europe, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, Johann Huizinga claimed that ‘Modern man has no idea of the unrestrained extravagance of the medieval heart.’ This picture of the Middle Ages as an era of emotional incontinence has been substantially revised in recent decades, not least by the work of Barbara Rosenwein. Nevertheless, many medieval texts do contain far more accounts of powerful individuals engaging in public displays of violent emotion than a modern audience expects.

One of the most common forms of emotional behaviour found in medieval texts is weeping, especially by religious men and women. I am currently exploring the significance of the tears of one particular sub-section of this group: the bishops of late medieval England, with a focus on the twelfth- and thirteenth-century saint-bishops for whom detailed contemporary biographies survive. Without exception, each of these men is depicted weeping, usually with great frequency and incredible volume.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, medieval bishops most commonly wept (or were recorded as weeping) during the course of their religious devotions. Virtually every twelfth- or thirteenth-century English bishop with a reputation for sanctity (whether canonised or not) is said to have wept copiously as he celebrated mass. Archbishop Winchelsey of Canterbury (1293-1313) allegedly wept so much that the altar cloths were soaked with tears. More tears were shed when the bishop was able to pray privately, and most saintly bishops are said to have spent much of their time in tearful prayer. Deathbed tears, associated with prayers and/or the administration of extreme unction, were also a standard feature of the saint-bishop’s life.

Why were tears such a marked feature of episcopal devotions during this period? Religious weeping was recorded by hagiographers, and reported in canonisation proceedings, because of the perceived link between tears and sanctity- our sources wanted to show that the bishop had been blessed with the gift of tears. Ever since the Sermon on the Mount (‘Blessed are they that weep now, for they will laugh’), Christians had wanted to weep. The ability to shed copious tears whilst at prayer or at mass could not be taught or imitated, but was granted by God. Such tears proved God’s love for the holy man, and had the capacity to wash away sins. Thus bishops who had been granted the ‘miracle’ of tears, and who could – almost literally – weep buckets, were much admired, and their tears would greatly enhance their chances of being canonised.

Tears of this kind also relate to some of the key spiritual developments of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Increasingly, emphasis was placed on Christ’s humanity, rather than his divinity, with his sufferings on the cross being a particular focus of devotions. Shedding tears at mass (the ceremony which commemorated the passion) enabled the bishop to demonstrate his identification with God.

Ascetic religious practices were also widespread. The saint-bishop, unable to live the simple life for which medieval saints typically yearned, could compensate for his comfortable life in his religious devotions, by privately practising self-denial, and engaging in the mortification of the flesh. Weeping was part of this set of behaviours. Contemporary medical theory stated that excessive weeping weakened the sight, and could lead to blindness. So, by shedding copious tears, the bishop was prioritising his spiritual well-being over his bodily health- but, because most of his weeping was done in private, he was doing so in a way which was compatible with the dignity of the episcopal office. To scourge the eyes in this way was completely appropriate, since sight was widely thought of as a source of temptation. And if the holy man did become blind, then, as in the case of Francis of Assisi, this could be explained through his religious weeping.

Episcopal tears were not all about piety; there also existed a strong tradition of tears as the bishop’s weapons, used to fight in the service of God. Medieval bishops used their weapon-tears in two ways. Firstly, tears were a powerful weapon against temptation by the Devil. Tears of this sort are prominent in the life of St Hugh of Lincoln, who struggled with ‘temptations of the flesh’ for many years, and combated such temptations with ‘the tears and groans expressive of a tormented heart.’ Episcopal tears were also used in defence of the Christian faith and the liberties of the Church. Bishops wept when talking about the threats posed to English ecclesiastical liberties by the actions of the king or the papacy, and when confronted by heretics and infidels.

That the bishop’s concern for the church and the faith was sufficient to move him to tears was another indication of the depth of his religious faith. But the presentation of the bishop as warrior had a deeper significance. From the mid-twelfth century onwards, the church required all priests to be celibate- a rule which precipitated something of a crisis in clerical masculinity. Clergymen, who were now forbidden to engage in sex or warfare- the two defining activities of the medieval nobleman- were forced to find new ways to retain their masculine identity whilst complying with canon law. In part, this was done by presenting the cleric as a soldier, but in a metaphorical rather than a literal sense. The chaste life was transformed into a ‘battle for chastity’, allowing religious men to overcome an enemy, and to display military prowess without actually going into battle and shedding blood.

Thus Hugh of Lincoln’s nocturnal tears, shed as the Devil tormented him with sexual temptation, were not signs of weakness, but of strength; they indicated that, although he was a celibate bishop with no military experience, he was also a fully-fledged adult male, armed and engaged in conflict. The bishop’s deployment of tears in defence of the church and faith should be seen in a similar light; the use of this motif allowed him to be cast as a masculine figure, using different weapons (tears not swords) to fight different battles, but still armed and defined by fighting.

In what I have said so far, I may have given the impression that medieval bishops shed an awful lot of tears, and that Huizinga’s account of medieval emotions is not that far from the truth. However, episcopal weeping was carefully controlled, and there were many occasions on which it was emphatically not expected that a good bishop would shed tears.

Tears of self-pity, for example, were certainly not acceptable. Robert Bloet of Lincoln (1094-1123) wept as he contemplated the lawsuits in which he had become embroiled, but he was a courtier-bishop, not a saint-bishop. Potential or actual saints were presented rather differently. When a house belonging to Richard Wyche of Chichester (1244-53) burnt down, his household wept but he did not, for he understood their good fortune: they still had the necessities of life, and should give more alms as a token of their gratitude. Similarly, whilst laypeople might weep at a bereavement, a good bishop would not fear death, but welcome it. He might weep as he prayed for the soul of the deceased, but sorrow could be expressed only if it was feared that the soul had gone to Hell.

Even tears which were shed for good reasons could not stand alone as proof of the bishop’s virtues. In order to make the right impression, tears needed to be accompanied by appropriate behaviour in other spheres- otherwise their sincerity and value might be questioned. The issue of public and private spheres was also key to the interpretation of episcopal tears. Some tears needed to be shed in public, but devotional weeping was best done in private. Hugh of Lincoln (1186-1200) was criticised  for engaging in tearful prayer in ‘public places where everyone could see him’, and those who flaunted their piety were often thought insincere.

Despite their admiration of religious weeping, medieval Christians did not simply take those who wept at face value; there was much concern about hypocrisy, and a corresponding willingness to challenge those who were believed to be feigning pious emotions. On the other hand, a bishop’s tears could not be entirely private. By the late thirteenth century, it was virtually impossible for a potential saint to achieve canonisation if he did not possess the gift of tears. Ideally then, a bishop’s devotional weeping needed to be done in a quasi-domestic environment such as his chapel or bedchamber, where his activities would be observed by his closest associates- who would be certain to mention them if canonisation proceedings were opened.

At a distance of several hundred years, it is almost impossible to say exactly what these medieval bishops were thinking and feeling as they shed their many tears. But the thought processes of those who recorded their weeping are much more accessible. For them, tears were certainly not a sign of uncontrolled passions, but a means by which a reputation could be built and secured- tangible proof that their episcopal subject was a model man, a model bishop and, above all, a model saint.

New publications, July-October 2012

Posted on October 20, 2012 by

If you would like to review or write about any of these publications for the History of Emotions Blog, then please get in touch with me (Thomas Dixon).

A book listed in the previous round-up on this blog – Joanne Bailey’s Parenting in England 1760-1830: Emotion, Identity, and Generation  – was recently enthusiastically reviewed on the IHR Reviews in History website.

Happy reading!

1. BOOKS

William M. Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900-1200 CE

Javier Moscoso, Pain: A Cultural History

James Kennaway, Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as Cause of Disease

Rebecca Tierney-Hynes, Novel Minds: Philosophers and Romance Readers, 1680-1740

Shahidha Bari, Keats and Philosophy: The Life of Sensations

Valerie Purton, Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition

Gabriella Turnaturi,  Vergogna: Metamorfosi di un’emozione (Shame: Metamorphosis of an emotion) 

Aaron Ritzenberg, The Sentimental Touch:The Language of Feeling in the Age of Managerialism

Thomas A. Kohut, A German Generation: An Experiential History of the Twentieth Century

Keith Oatley, The Passionate Muse: Exploration of emotion in stories

Robert R. Provine, Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond 

Katherine Angel, Unmastered: A Book on Desire Most Difficult to Tell

2. EDITED BOOKS

S. Lambert and H. Nicholson (eds), Languages of Love and Hate: Conflict, Communication, and Identity in the Medieval Mediterranean

Martin Pickavé and Lisa Shapiro (eds), Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy

Michael Laffan and Max Weiss (eds), Facing Fear: The History of an Emotion in Global Perspective

Sarah Coakley (ed.), Faith, Rationality and the Passions

3. SPECIAL ISSUES OF JOURNALS

Shakespeare: Shakespeare and the Culture of Emotion

Criticism: Shakespeare and Phenomenology

Science in Context: The Varieties of Empathy in Science, Art, and History

Feminist Theory: Affecting Feminism: Questions of Feeling in Feminist Theory

Research Papers in Education: Emotional well-being in educational policy and practice: interdisciplinary perspectives

Emotion Review: Defining Emotion

4. JOURNAL ARTICLES

Christian Maurer and Laurent Jaffro, ‘Reading Shaftesbury’s Pathologia: An Illustration and Defence of the Stoic Account of the Emotions’, History of European Ideas (2012)

Brett D. Wilson, ‘Bevil’s Eyes: Or, How Crying at The Conscious Lovers Could Save Britain’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 45 (2012): 497-518.

Morgan Strawn, ‘Homer, Sentimentalism, and Pope’s Translation of The Iliad‘, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Volume 52, Number 3, Summer 2012, pp. 585-608.

Paul Kelleher, ‘Reason, Madness, and Sexuality in the British Public Sphere’, The Eighteenth Century 53 (2012): 291-315.

Sarah Horowitz, ‘The Bonds of Concord and the Guardians of Trust: Women, Emotion, and Political Life, 1815–1848’, French Historical Studies 35 (2012): 577-603.

Rochona Majumdar, ‘Love and Marriage in the Public Sphere’ (Review Essay), Journal of Women’s History 24 (2012): 182-194.

Anne C. Rose, ‘Animal Tales: Observations of the Emotions in American Experimental Psychology, 1890-1940’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 48 (2012): 301-317.

Anne C. Rose, ‘An American Science of Feeling: Harvard’s Psychology of Emotion during the World War I Era’, Journal of the History of Ideas 73 (2012): 485-506.

Andrew Beatty, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart: Conversion and Emotion in Nias’, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 77 (2012): 295-320.

Melissa J. Belanta, ‘Australian Masculinities and Popular Song: The Songs of Sentimental Blokes 1900–1930s’, Australian Historical Studies 43 (2012): 412-428.

David Hendy, ‘Biography and the Emotions as a Missing “Narrative” in Media History: A case study of Lance Sieveking and the early BBC’, Media History (i-First) (2012).

Ian Gazeley and Claire Langhamer, ‘The Meanings of Happiness in Mass Observation’s Bolton’, History Workshop Journal (online first, 2012).

Chris Millard, ‘Reinventing Intention: “Self-Harm” and the “Cry for help” in Postwar Britain’, Current Opinion in Psychiatry 25 (2012): 503-507.

Thomas Akehurst, ‘Ayer and the Existentialists’, Intellectual History Review (i-First, 2012).

Noah W. Sobe, ‘Researching emotion and affect in the history of education’, History of Education 41 (2012): 689-695.

Ian Grosvenor, ‘Back to the future or towards a sensory history of schooling’, History of Education 41 (2012): 675-687.

Carolyn Korsmeyer, ‘Disgust and Aesthetics’, Philosophy Compass 7 (2012): 753-761.

Kristen A. Lindquist, et al., “The Brain Basis of Emotion: A Meta-Analytic Review,”Behavioral and Brain Sciences 35(2012):121-143 — with 28 comments and a reply from the authors in this issue, on pp. 144-202

Set the controls for the heart of happiness

Posted on October 19, 2012 by

I have recently returned from a journey deep into the warm, pulsating heart of the happiness movement. Last Thursday I took part in a conference on Positive Psychology at Wellington College (the pioneer of well-being classes), and then I went down to Dartington Hall, in Totnes, Devon, to take part in an Action for Happiness two-day happiness festival. I left Dartington, I kid you not, while a choir stood on the misty lawn singing ‘happy, happy, happy clappy!’ I felt like a rehab patient leaving the Priory.

Anyway, abandoning my usual dour demeanour, I admit that both events were great fun, and encouraging. My sense is that the Positive Psychology / happiness movement is becoming less positivistic (in other words, not less dogmatic in its claims to objectivity and scientific truth) and more responsive to the role of philosophy and ethical reasoning in the search for the good life. (On that point, it’s sad that Christopher Peterson, one of the more philosophical voices within Positive Psychology, died this week. Here’s his beautiful last blog post).

I organised a philosophy discussion circle at Dartington – the first time I’ve facilitated one – and I think everyone involved really felt the benefit of that sort of open Socratic inquiry into what the good life means for us. As the Quakers well knew, there’s something very egalitarian and democratic about a discussion circle – there’s no expert or priest or higher authority ‘up there’ while the masses kneel beneath them. Everyone is equally at the front or at the centre. And facilitating a circle discussion seemed to involve letting go of control and letting silences happen – both quite difficult for me!

I also came away from the events hopeful that the Positive Psychology / happiness movement is aware of the risk that, in deifying certain emotional states or personality types as ideal, you pathologise their opposites. If you say that happiness is ideal, there’s a risk that sadness becomes an unacceptable failure. If extroversion is absolutely good, then introversion could be deemed absolutely bad. If optimism is always healthy, then pessimism becomes toxic. That sort of thinking is far too black-and-white, and I believe it actually causes suffering rather than mitigating it, by making introverts or pessimists feel worse about themselves. After all, introverts and pessimists have important social roles to play too, particularly in chronically optimistic short-term societies like ours.

We have many different moods and dispositions, and sometimes the best way to transform the difficult ones is to accept them rather than demonise them. In the words of Rumi, in what I think might be my favourite poem:

Learn the alchemy true human beings know: the moment you accept what troubles you’ve been given, the door opens.
Welcome difficulty as a familiar comrade.
Joke with torment brought by a Friend.
Sorrows are the rags of old clothes and jackets that serve to cover, and then are taken off.
That undressing, and the beautiful naked body underneath, is the sweetness that comes after grief.

I gave a talk at Dartington on the relationship between ancient philosophy and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), and as is often the case, someone in the audience criticised CBT for being shallow, simplistic, mechanistic, capitalist and ‘not dealing with root causes’. Usually (but not always) such critics are therapists or counsellors in other traditions, annoyed that they didn’t get any public money. My answer is typically that I expect other forms of therapy to get public funding in the future – it’s already happening for approaches like mindfulness therapy – but you can’t expect to get any government funding without a convincing evidence base. Anecdotal case studies by psychologists simply won’t cut it anymore. As Freud proved, they’re too easy to fake.

It is also clear to me, however, that CBT is not for everyone and the research still has a long way to go to find out how to help people better. But what saddens me is that some therapists fail to find anything to celebrate in the government’s new support for talking therapies. Nor do many lay-people see the young national mental health service as something to fight for. The Improved Access for Psychotherapies (IAPT) policy is still very young, and vulnerable (as Paul Burstow MP, former minister for care services, recently emphasised). We shouldn’t assume it will stay in existence without our protection.

Richard Layard, the economist who more than anyone helped get IAPT funding, warned at Dartington that not all allocated funding is coming through and that as much as half of all children’s therapy services are being closed (I’ve asked him for stats to back up that claim). It is a very recent phenomenon for government to take mental illnesses like depression and anxiety seriously. If you believe in talking therapies, not just CBT but any talking therapies, then please support IAPT. I am all for expanding the range of therapies available on the NHS, as long as they are evidence-based.

Idealistic champions of adult education like RH Tawney are long gone.

Meanwhile, one thing that struck me as we discussed various ‘happiness policies’ at Dartington, was how little anyone spoke of adult education. Likewise, not one political party mentioned adult education at their conference. Schools, academies, universities – they’re all in the news constantly. But adult education is completely off the political radar at the moment. Adult education was a central part of the socialist vision for thinkers like RH Tawney. But no one in parliament cares about it now, none think it worth fighting for. At least Action for Happiness is trying to do something for adult education, albeit in a rather informal and unstructured way. It is a noble attempt to spread ideas about the good life and the good society – inspired, I believe, by Richard Layard’s experience of attending a Quaker reading group for many years.

Talking of reviving adult education, we had a seminar at Queen Mary, University of London yesterday evening, in the beautiful Octagon Room, which was once a library for East End workers back in the 19th century when Queen Mary was known as the People’s Palace. We had a great group of participants come and talk about their work – from Philosophy Now, Philosophy In the Pub, Skeptics In the Pub, Pub Psychology, Sapere (a charity that does a lot of work with Philosophy 4 Children), Niki Barbery Bleyleben (good name!) who runs discussion groups for mums, and many others. We videoed the presentations and will put them up soon, along with the report I’m writing on philosophy clubs, and the website, thephilosophyhub.com, which will finally launch next week, I promise!

One of the things I suggest in the report is that the contemporary grassroots philosophy movement is in part a product of the 1960s, and that decade’s radical reformation of academia and demand that it ‘look beyond the campus’ (in the words of the Port Huron Statement). In that spirit, here is a 2008 BBC Radio 4 documentary by Nick Fraser on ‘1968: Philosophy in the streets’, with contributions from philosophers including Simon Critchley and Alain Badiou.

The history of the stiff upper lip. Part 3

Posted on October 16, 2012 by

Today, for me, promises to be emotional. This afternoon I’m giving a talk on ‘The Logic of the Moist Eye: Tears and Psychology in the Twentieth Century’ at a history of psychology symposium in London organised by the British Psychological Society. Much of my talk will be about Arthur Koestler’s theory of tears in his 1964 book The Act of Creation, and its relationship with the Freudian approach, which tended to see weeping as evidence of the repression of affect, a regression to infancy, or both. I will almost certainly well up at the sentimental and melodramatic conclusion of my talk, although I expect to stop short of repeating the “tear-sodden juddering climax” announced by Mayor Boris Johnson at the conclusion of London 2012:

In the background of my talk on Koestler is a question, made all the more pertinent by the emotional outpourings of our recent sporting summer, which will be tackled by Ian Hislop in the third and final part of his Stiff Upper Lip – An Emotional History of Britain, this evening on BBC Two. This series finale, directed and produced by Tom McCarthy, asks how, when and why British upper lips started to relax, flex, and wobble during the twentieth century. One of the highlights is a review of the popular ‘Pont’ cartoons on British character published in Punch in the 1930s:

That the era of the stiff upper lip in Britain is now over would seem to be obvious, but YouGov thought it worth commissioning an opinion poll on the subject this month. They found that a majority (57%) of Britons say that British people no longer have a stiff upper lip, and 62% that we Brits have become more emotional in recent decades, although the ghost of the stiff upper lip clearly still haunts these views, since 57% think that British people are less given to emotional display than other nationalities. The detailed results reveal that the main factor affecting the results of this poll seems to have been age. Only among those aged 18-24 did over 40% of those questioned think that these days British people generally have a stiff upper lip (compared with 29% among the over-60s). It is understandable, I suppose, that people born since 1988, with few memories of a pre-Oprah, pre-Diana, pre-X-Factor, pre-Boris Britain, might believe that the status quo represents some sort of emotional containment. To older people the contrast with earlier periods presumably makes the idea less plausible.

To me, the most striking thing about the history of the stiff upper lip over the past fifty years is its refusal to go away. A significant number of writers and commentators, from professors of psychology to agony aunts, in every post-war British generation has lamented the emotional repression of earlier generations and exhorted the nation to let out their feelings and express themselves, for the sake of their mental and physical health. As I suggested at the end of my blog post on episode two, it was not until the 1960s that the balance of argument seemed to shift decisively away from the stiff upper lip mentality and towards the kind of emotional and aesthetic individualism championed by the Bloomsbury writers and others in the early decades of the twentieth century.

In 1965, the year that Churchill died and was mourned by the nation with a mixture of emotion and reserve, the social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer published a book on Death, Grief and Mourning in Contemporary Britain, lamenting the harmful impact of the continued denial of feeling, especially feelings of grief. In the same year, the Daily Mirror carried a column on the harm done to children by denying them the opportunity to mourn dead parents, concluding that the ‘stiff upper lip’ mentality was good for the battlefield but not for bereavement, and that it could cause physical and emotional illness.

Large-scale changes of demographics and social and sexual attitudes reinforced this trend, offering opportunities for public displays of passion, pride, and emotional flamboyance of a kind which would have astonished the characters in those ‘Pont’ cartoons. The first Notting Hill Carnival took place in 1965. London hosted a Gay Pride march for the first time in 1971.  The picture below, including the banner ‘We are nature’s children too’, is from the march the following year.

By the 1970s, most social commentators would have agreed that the British ‘stiff upper lip’ was a thing of the past. Forty years on, though, we are still asking ourselves what happened to it and wondering whether it might be saved.  I think that Virginia Woolf’s comment about the Victorian ‘angel in the house’ applies equally to the ‘stiff upper lip’:  a phantom is harder to kill than a reality.

Adam Curtis’s brilliant study of the rise of the TV hug, illustrated with fascinating archival footage from the last fifty years, investigates the gradual throwing off of emotional restraint on our behalf by TV producers. Curtis concludes with a cautionary note: ‘If we can be taught to hug we can just as easily learn to march and chant.’ In other words, the rise of a culture of televisual weeping and hugging should not be understood as evidence of increased emotional expressiveness, let alone psychological authenticity, but rather as worrying evidence of the manipulability of our emotions. Mass, populist emotionalism has indeed often been a hallmark of fascist regimes.

Herd emotionalism is certainly a worrying prospect, but not as worrying as herd repression. In a review of Ian Hislop’s series for the Telegraph, Charles Moore describes the stiff upper lip as a ‘powerful moral and cultural idea’ because it ‘helps those who are uneducated and inarticulate’.

In a world in which the expression of personal emotion is considered the highest good, those with the gift of the gab have an unfair advantage…The Bloomsbury Group was great fun for Cambridge graduates with a private income. But the “egotistical sublime” offers less to the great mass of us who start gulping when asked to heave our hearts into our mouths.

This is quite an unexpected outburst of egalitarianism from a former editor of the Telegraph. It is hugely modest of Moore to count himself a member of the ‘uneducated and inarticulate’ classes, and touching that he thinks attributes which can be developed and improved by education should be suppressed and hidden in order to avoid giving the educated an ‘unfair advantage’. Perhaps Moore would have maths graduates pretend to be innumerate and trained opera singers hit bum notes, so as to not have an ‘unfair advantage’?

There are many reasons why, if I had to choose, I would side with Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, E. M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf against Charles Moore on this point. Here is Pater’s famous rallying cry for aestheticism, from the Conclusion to his 1873 book on the Renaissance:

Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

And here is Charles Moore:

By contrast, the stiff upper lip, with its emphasis on others rather than self, exalts humble lives. By your actions – your hard work, your courage in war, your good humour, your readiness to be part of a team – you can live nobly, whatever the circumstances of your birth.

Suffer in silence, accept the ‘circumstances of your birth’, don’t complain, and under no circumstances develop an individual self. Remain uneducated and inarticulate. To live for others may sound pious but it is in fact one of the cornerstones of totalitarianism. Think of the regimes in which the emotional demands of the individual self have been most successfully subjugated to the greater good. Would you like to live under such a regime? If so, then ‘stiff upper lip’ is the motto for you. For myself, I’m going to stiffen my selfish sinews by re-reading Oscar Wilde’s 1891 essay on ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, which starts:

The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others…

 

The history of the stiff upper lip. Part 2.

Posted on October 9, 2012 by

Image for Heyday

Tonight sees the broadcast of the second episode of Ian Hislop’s Stiff Upper Lip – An Emotional History of Britain on BBC Two. As I explained in an earlier post, I have had a minor supporting role in this series as a consultant and interviewee.

Tonight’s episode, produced and directed by Sally Benton, really gets to the heart of the matter, investigating the cultural and political contexts in Victorian Britain which saw extreme emotional continence become established as a national characteristic. An important part in that story is played by the English public school – an institution that specialised in producing young men, as E. M. Forster once lamented, ‘with well-developed bodies, fairly developed minds, and undeveloped hearts’. The episode also includes the exploits (ranging from the entertaining, via the admirable, to the deranged) of Victorian and Edwardian explorers who tried to outdo each other in their capacity for sang-froid, stoicism, and suffering. But how do these tales of repression, endurance and derring-do relate to the history of a concept, if such a thing exists, of the ‘stiff upper lip’?

I have long been an advocate of the importance of words as historical witnesses. Linguistic change can be a motor as well as a mirror of social change, and often a very simple question about the origins and history of a word or phrase can provide illuminating results. In my own previous research I have subjected the words ‘emotion‘ and ‘altruism‘ to extensive, some might say excessive, historical scrutiny. One reviewer of my book on The Invention of Altruism, referring to the several pages I devoted to unearthing the identity of an obscure 1880s gas engineer who wrote a pamphlet under the pen-name ‘Altruism’, politely suggested that I had provided ‘at least as much detail as we need’.

Words and phrases that come to shape individual and national identities have their own histories. Word-history is not necessarily easy to do on television, but I was pleased to see Ian Hislop studying the OED definition of ‘sentimental’ to help shed light on the culture of sensibility in episode 1. In the case of ‘stiff upper lip’, the phrase has American origins (as was also mentioned in the first episode). The earliest uses I have found come from early nineteenth-century American sources, including military marching songs, religious poems, and works of physiognomy and phrenology (the sciences of face, skull, and character). The following is a lovely illustration of both the physical appearance and moral meaning of a stiff upper lip in the middle of the nineteenth century, when it denoted self-esteem, egotism, and bombast. The picture comes from Outlines of a New System of Physiognomy published in New York in 1849, but doesn’t that picture look a little bit like Ian Hislop?The phrase ‘stiff upper lip’ was unknown to British readers as late as the 1870s. It is a pleasing irony that it was introduced to them in a magazine founded by Charles Dickens, the great master of Victorian pathos and sentimentality. Dickens died in 1870. The following year, his journal All the Year Round, carried an article on ‘Popular American Phrases’ in which to ‘keep a stiff upper lip’ was explained as meaning ‘to remain firm to a purpose, to keep up one’s courage’.

Even by end of the nineteenth century the phrase still appeared in quotation marks, and was sometimes explained as an Americanism. But I think it is fair, nonetheless, to say that a culture of emotional restraint and stoical determination was on the rise in Britain, even before the phrase, ‘stiff upper lip’, which became attached to it during the first decades of the twentieth century, came to prominence. It was in 1937 that a Gershwin song of that title attributed stiffness, stoutness, and the ability to muddle through to the English race since the time of ‘Good Queen Bess’ (performed in the clip below by Gracie Fields with Fred Astaire and George Burns).

Among the powerful social and cultural forces that contributed to the rise of this ethos in Britain were science and imperialism.  Darwin’s pioneering study, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), popularised a racial hierarchy of emotional expression, with restrained Englishmen at the top and primitive ‘savages’ at the bottom. Darwin asserted that ‘savages weep copiously from very slight causes’, whereas ‘Englishmen rarely cry, except under the pressure of the acutest grief’. Not all Europeans, Darwin noted drily, were so restrained: ‘in some parts of the Continent the men shed tears much more readily and freely’. A fuller picture of Darwin’s own emotional life emerges, however, in an article by the historian of science Paul White, entitled ‘Darwin Wept: Science and the Sentimental Subject‘, which is currently available freely online in a recent special section of the Journal of Victorian Culture on Victorian sentimentality.

As the programme this evening brings out, the expectation that emotions should be contained rather than expressed was extended to people of all classes and both sexes in various ways during the later Victorian period. Women were praised for suffering in silence, and men were mocked when their feelings were displayed. Although it had previously not been unknown for lawyers and even judges to weep in court, by the late Victorian period the prevailing ethos had changed. The tale of ‘Robert Emotional’, which features in episode 2 this evening, illustrates this perfectly. A Victorian policeman who wept while giving evidence against a former colleague in 1888 became the subject of national mockery in a satirical ‘Play of the Period’ (pictured right) in Funny Folks magazine rather than a hero of sentimental sympathy.

On the other hand, Edith Cavell, a nurse who was prepared to die for a patriotic cause during the First World War, and whose sacrifice is commemorated by a monument on St Martin’s Place in London, embodied exactly that combination of stoical discipline and dutiful self-denial, which came to be signified by the formula ‘stiff upper lip’ once it had become a naturalised term in British English. Cavell was executed by a firing squad of German troops on 12 October 1915 for helping prisoners escape from Belgium. On the night before her execution she said ‘Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone.’ At home the reaction to the shooting of Edith Cavell was one of national grief and moral outrage, but one periodical, The Academy, chided the public for their response:

The hysterical outburst which followed the execution of Miss Edith Cavell is one among many signs of the flabbiness of certain people’s minds. The sentence on Miss Cavell was a brutal sentence, and the manner in which it was carried out appears to have been brutal beyond words. But that England should be kept rocking on its base, as it were, for a whole fortnight over such a tragedy is, in our opinion, to be deplored; and probably nobody would have been more startled or distressed by the public attitude in the matter than Miss Cavell herself, who, when all is said, died not in the spirit of sentimental patriotism but because she was a firm woman and insisted on the stiff upper lip.

The voices of those, like E. M. Forster and some of the Bloomsbury Group, who questioned this ideology of stiffness, firmness, and emotional repression, during and after the First World War, only started to win the argument after a resolute nation had emerged, blinking back their tears, from another World War, almost half a century later.

To be concluded…