“The Passions and Literary Love in the Eighteenth Century”
I am interested, and have been for a long time in the idea of love and desire in
literary fiction of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and how the
experience of desire/love and engagement of love creates identity in female
characters—“I love (I have sex?), therefore I am.”
SLIDE: ELIZA HAYWOOD
What I thought I would do today is run through the methodology that I used in
order to work out my last project on Eliza Haywood and her “philosophy” of the
Passions in first half of the 18th century—what I have decided to call on “ethics of
passions”—by “ethics” I mean, the moral conduct of love (which may be at odds
with socially acceptable conduct)
So first chose my texts:
SLIDE: AMATORY FICTION
SLIDE: CRITICAL HISTORY AND CRITICAL REVISION
SLIDE: CHOSEN TEXTS
Partially due to their titles; chose “fictions”; original works; “definitional” works
Then did heavy close readings of what “passions” seems to mean in these texts
(concentrated on Love/desire specifically)
Came up with some really interesting fact/ideas for what passions mean to
Haywood in her work
SLIDES: OF INDIVIDUAL TEXTS
SLIDE: HAYWOOD”S “ETHICS” OF PASSIONS (LOVE)
Noticed that definitions do not change over time, but rather become sharper, the
examples more extended, the commentary on those examples more deliberate
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Discovered intricate algorithm for how the passions affect people: gender, age,
circumstance, past experience, ability to learn from mistakes, other passions that
are present when new passion arises
Next, I wanted to know, was this useful? What was the 18th conversation about
the passions and idi this seems to fit together with what Haywood was saying?
SLIDE: DOCTRINES OF THE PASSIONS
So I read “other” doctrines of the passions about the same period: Thomas
Hobbes, John Locke, Rene Descartes, Adam Smith, David Hume (interestingly few
go on about love: wrath, anger, political)
SLIDE: RESEARCH GROUPINGS
In doing my secondary research on these authors I’ve come up with some
“groupings” of the passions and thematic approaches to them that worked pretty
well for what I was doing:
HISTORICAL METHODS/CONCERNS
“…the history of feeling and the history of the individual are not the same thing”
(Pinch 13)
“a formal theory that establishes emotions as largely (not entirely) learned.”
(Reddy Navigation xi)
TEXT AND EMOTION
“…we seek access not to the workings of their [eighteenth century prose writer’s]
minds but to the meanings of their prose, in which the passions form separable,
observable, and impressive occurrences.” (McKenzie 16)
IDENTITY AND EMOTION
“Emotion and subjectivity are straightforwardly linked.” (Tierney-Hynes (book) 8)
“Attempting to deepen emotion while denying the self was a difficult if not
impossible task. For every person wary of the anatomizing influence of personal
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passions, there was another who saw in individual emotion, not the potential for
social corrosion, but the simple opportunity for self-enhancement.” (Eustace 239)
THE PASSIONS
“on one hand the passions are functional characteristics essential to our survival
and flourishing; on the other hand they are painful and destructive impulses
which drive us to pursue the very ends liable to do us harm,” (James 14)
“Passions…have a close relation to personifications” (Pinch 18) (specifically in the
way that Hume construct them in Treatise of Human Nature and Enquiry
Concerning Human Understanding.)
“Passions often act like persons: the form of personhood is assumed by many
mental entities” (Pinch 23)
THE BODY AND EMOTION
Rosenwein: “I find it helpful to think of our nerves, muscles, and physiology in
general as the foundation of what, for want of a better term, I call affective
potential. This potential is universal, but it manifests itself in different ways at
different times in response to the conditions, assumptions, values, goals and
everything else that makes up human society and political life.” (AHR
Conversation 1505)
“the distinction between soul and mind was beginning to blur and that the
passions had entered the mind instead of just interfering with it from somewhere
nearby” (McKenzie 97)
GENDER AND EMOTION
“When women write about emotion, however, it appears to be especially
difficult, and especially necessary, to scrutinize the relationship between
aesthetics and experience: emo- / tion often appears to us to belong to
definitively to the realm of experience. It appears as the subjective point at which
women can testify to difference and oppression as material facts” (Pinch 54)
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18TH CENTURY EMOTION
“three widespread eighteenth century beliefs about emotions: that they were
the source of human motivation, that they were the mechanism of collective
affiliation, and that they were the surest means of moral valuation.” (Eustace,
AHR Conversation 1525)
“the constellation of ideas, feelings and events which comprised the culture [of
sensibility] was a central feature of eighteenth century Britain.” (Barker-Benfield
xix).
“Taken together, the central decades of the eighteenth century might well be
called the “era of the passion questions,” when concerns about the optimal
development of personal passions became a matter of the most pressing public
importance.” (Eustace 21)
“The subject of this study then, is not the internal experience of emotion, but
rather the external expression of emotion through language.” (Eustace 12)
“The books I study here also reveal the period’s concomitant tendency to
characterize feelings as transpersonal, as autonomous entities that do not always
belong to individuals but rather wander extravagantly from one person to
another” (Pinch 3)
“CLOSE READING” THE EMOTIONS
“One would logically pick a group and read everything that its members wrote,
carefully noting the emotions.” (Rosenwein in Plamper 253)
Hume’s use of “narrative plot and philosophical example”—formal qualities that
are similar to Haywood’s own especially in LPtP. (Pinch 27)
LOVE
“Yet ambiguity about the true nature of love allowed it to perform important
functions, enforcing social distinctions with exquisite subtlety.” (Eustace 113)
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Defining romantic love: “First, romantic clove involves a preoccupation with
another person….Second, romantic clove involves, or at least allows the
involvement of, the whole person. The relationship between lovers can be free,
open, and unrestricted….The feeling of romantic clove calls forth energetic
involvement from the lovers. (Pope 5-6)
“Romantic love is the recognition and affirmation of both the self and someone
else, no matter how flawed both may be.” (Pope 24)
“Romantic love is not only a mark of freedom but an assertion of finer feeling and
superior social status; no wonder that it becomes important to deny that social
inferiors have any experience of it.” (Sarsby 33)
“People can be drawn together emotionally for many reasons and many needs,
and the social personality of the loved on include the facets of his social
background, position and potential. Passion, on the other hand, is conventionally
defined by its disregard for social considerations—by affinities which go beyond
boundaries of rank or wealth—and is therefore more likely to sharpen the view in
those social classes or situations were the boundaries are more rigid, but the
opportunities for meeting people outside them still exist” (Sarsby 60)
“For Bacon, in this religiously inflected critique of the idolatry of love, the danger
of being subjected to the image is born of the power of sensation and passion to
dominate reason” (Tierney Hynes book 12)
EMOTION AND KNOWLEDGE
“convert erotic feeling into self-knowledge and sociable behavior are explored
most fully during the first half of the eighteenth century in prose fiction, especially
in texts that examine domestic and amatory matters.” (Lubey 2)
“This prose experiment, which we’ll see most explicitly in Eliza Haywood’s writing,
is the first expression of an eroticism committed to aligning literary
manifestations of sexual arousal with endeavors of abstract reasoning.” (Lubey
71)
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“The remainder of this chapter argues that Haywood’s amatory fiction celebrates
this very premise—that the body’s pleasures, through aesthetic textual
engagement, can uphold moral clarity regarding desire and seduction.” (Lubey 92)
PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS
Four kinds of emotional practice: mobilizing, naming, communicating, and
regulating emotion that have consequences for method in historical research
(Scheer 193) Can we consider the novel as a kind emotional practice…?
I think that my big challenge now is the integration of the “theory” and the “close
readings” that I have found. My task, here, then it to think about how to best
make sense of the ideas that I am interested in within these vocabularies. I’m
interested in engagement with the ideas that exist, the vocabularies that exist,
rather than the creating new ones.
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