Redefinig Historical Identities: Sexuality,Gender,and the Self
This chapter is a contribution to the debate about how to ‘do’ the history of emotions. It explores how contemporary understandings of emotions are influencing historical narratives and the scope for historical revision wrought by the ‘affective turn’. The chapter is divided into five sections. The first examines how historians have engaged with the work of psychologists, anthropologists and neuroscientists in seeking to define emotions. The second section sets out how various historians have envisaged a history of emotions, looking at methodologies employed to enable the historian to chart continuities and changes over time. This specifically centres on the questions of ‘emotionology’ or emotional style, emotion and power, the concept of an ‘emotional community’ or ‘regime’ and emotional ‘suffering’. These concepts, which form the mainstay of history-of-emotions jargon, are explicated and directed towards a discussion of the most important concept that the history of emotions has created: ‘emotives’. The third section deals extensively with William Reddy’s concept of ‘emotives’ as a way of describing the process of translation that takes place between culture and body in order to form emotional expressions, or in Reddy’s terms ‘utterances’. Central to the notion of ‘emotives’ is the idea that humans always fail in their efforts, at least to some degree, to match feeling states to conventional modes of emotional expression. The more complete the match, the greater the continuity in emotional regime; the greater the failure, especially if experienced by many people at the same time, the more likely this is to drive historical change. The fourth section digs deeper into the question of emotive failure, exploring a late nineteenth-century case study of what might happen under extreme cases of emotional uncertainty, where conventions of emotional expression and perceptions of inward feelings are most jarringly out of sync. Using the evolutionary psychology of Darwin, and the encounter with it of T. H. Huxley, commonly known as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ for his fierce defence of Darwinism, and George John Romanes, Darwin’s young disciple, I explore how evolutionary scientists sought to renegotiate how they should feel and how they should act in the light of new understandings of the historical development of emotions. I posit here the potential for a history of ‘emotional crisis’, and demonstrate the possibilities for a re-imagining of social and cultural history from the point of view of emotional displacement.