Emotions through Literature

Fictional Narratives, Society and the Emotional Self

Mariano Longo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780415793384
• eBook ISBN: 9781351811705
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Engaging with the wide sociological literature on emotions, this book explores the social representation of emotions, their management and their effects by making reference to creative sources. With a specific focus on literary narrative, including the works of figures such as Dante, Austen, Manzoni, Tolstoy and Kundera, the author draws out the capacity of literary works to describe and represent both the external aspects of social relations and the inner motivations of the involved actors. An interdisciplinary study that combines sociology, narratology, philosophy, historical analysis and literary criticism, Emotions through Literature invites us to re-think the role of emotions in sociological analysis, employing literary narratives to give plausible intellectual responses to the double nature of emotions, their being both individual and social.

1 By way of introduction

A sociology of emotions through literature

The very possibility of a sociology of emotions lies not in homologies but in differences. If emotions were experienced and managed in the same way across historical times, cultures and the different strata of the same society, any attempt at a sociology of emotions would be frustrating. In order for a specific sociological interest in emotions to emerge, the idea had to be overcome, according to which emotions are the sole irreflexive output of some interior drive, a mechanical response to the environment directed by our genetic make-up. Approaches which consider emotions as universal, transcultural and homogeneous, based as they are on some essentialist conception of human action, are endowed with a cogent persuasiveness. Essentialism (so one could plausibly call this trend) may be detected in biology, in psychology and even in the social sciences. The specific features of the approach were defined by Charles Darwin (1872) in his The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, in which he contested the idea of a divine origin of human expression, justified by the resemblance of humans to God, and, in so doing, established a substantial continuity between animal and human emotions. Thus, according to Darwin, emotions and their expression are inborn, part of our inherited qualities:

That the chief expressive actions, exhibited by man and by the lower animals, are now innate or inherited, that is, have not been learnt by the individual, is admitted by every one. So little has learning or imitation to do with several of them that they are from the earliest days and throughout life quite beyond our control.

(ibid., p. 351)

The evidence of the inborn character of emotions is to be traced, according to Darwin, in the spontaneous (hence non-imitative) capacity of young children to express feelings. One more quotation may explain Darwin’s position:

We may see children, only two or three years old, and even those born blind, blushing from shame; and the naked scalp of a very young infant reddens from passion. Infants scream from pain directly after birth, and all their features then assume the same form as during subsequent years […] We can thus also understand the fact that the young and the old of widely different races, both with man and animals, express the same state of mind by the same movements.

(ibid., p. 352)

Learning as an aspect of emotional expression is not utterly denied by Darwin, but it is reduced to a complementary character of hereditariness and is given the ancillary role of training in the appropriate use of innate qualities: “it is remarkable that some [emotions], which are certainly innate, require practice in the individual, before they are performed in a full and perfect manner; for instance, the inheritance of most of weeping and laughing” (ibid.).

Charles Darwin’s approach has been highly influential, chiefly in the field of psychology (Ekman, 1984; 1992), even though traces of essentialism may be detected in some sociological treatment of emotions (see infra, Chapter 2). This should not surprise, for at least two reasons: the first is the power of Darwin’s argument, which destabilized the long-held idea of a peculiar position of man in the universe, producing a paradigmatic change according to which the human being is a product of natural evolution and cannot be utterly distinguished from the rest of nature. The second is due to the apparently incontrovertible character of Darwin’s reasoning: after all, it is part of our experience of the world that we all express (and probably feel) emotions in the same way. Yet, if emotions are conceived as innate, the operating space for the development of a sociology of emotions is, by necessity, limited: emotions are pre-given; hence, emotional behaviour appears as the field of investigation of other disciplinary fields, such as psychology. The sociological perspective on emotion must, by necessity, start from a different set of premises. Some 30 years after Charles Darwin had issued his book on the expression of feeling, Charles Horton Cooley published his Human Nature and Social Order (1902). The American sociologist and social psychologist owes his fame chiefly to the idea that our self is the product of a looking-glass effect, by which we construct our personality as a reflex of our fellow people’s reaction to our conduct. Sociality is relevant for the individual, and this holds as well for the emotional component of the individual’s psychology. Cooley does not deny that some human dispositions (e.g. anger and fear) are genetically determined. Nonetheless, although emotions may be inborn as Darwin stated, we learn how to use and manage them properly in the process of our socialization (see infra, Chapter 2). The space for a properly sociological investigation of emotions (the complex relation between raw emotionality and its cultural and social definition) is therefore already traced at the beginning of the 20th century. Yet sociology disregarded Cooley’s insights and specialized throughout the 20th century chiefly in the analysis of the rational actor, removing emotions as an object of investigation. The actor is a sociological construct intended as being able to interpret action either as a choice among alternatives, or as the adjustment to social norms and values, which need to be cognitively understood before being translated by the social agent into effective action, or, eventually, as an interpretative process of construction of the meaning of the social scene. In this theoretical framework, emotions have at most a residual or marginal role.

The consolidated idea of the inborn character of emotionality accounts both for the marginal role of emotions in classical sociology (where they represented, with relevant exceptions, a collateral topic) and for the substantial exclusion of emotions and emotionality in post-classical sociology (see infra, Chapter 2). One had to wait until the late 20th century for an embryonic sociology of emotions to develop. This was due chiefly to the long-lasting search for a theoretical and epistemological autonomous profile for sociology, in which sociologists had applied themselves at least since Durkheim’s methodological investigation (Durkheim, 1895). Emotionality was excluded from the field of disciplinary relevant objects, so much so that even individualistic approaches, although conceiving the social actor as the triggering element of social processes, tended to consider the individual as a rational, cogitative, constantly interpreting agent. This sociological conception of the social actor is an evident over-simplification. Indeed, the process by which we understand reality is not exclusively based on intellectual processes, utterly separated from what we feel and perceive. Emotions – so has been stressed by recent accounts (Nussbaum, 2001) – have a relevant function in determining our reasoned reaction to the environment. One of the tasks of the sociology of emotions is actually to avoid an ill-posed separation between the emotive and the cognitive, the instinctual and the rational, the objective and the subjective. In most circumstances, emotions are, in fact, the premise of cognition. As Arlie Hochschild convincingly states, the opinion is diffuse according to which:

emotion is dangerous in the first place because it distorts perception and leads people to act irrationally which means that all ways of reducing emotion are automatically good. Of course, a person gripped by fear may make mistakes, may find reflection difficult, and may not (as we say) be able to think.

(Hochschild, 1983a, p. 31)

Yet, emotions are essential as a way to find one’s bearings:

But a person totally without emotion has no warning system, no guidelines to the self-relevance of a sight, a memory, or a fantasy. Like one who cannot feel and touches fire, an emotionless person suffers a sense of arbitrariness, which from the point of view of his or her self-interest is irrational. In fact, emotion is a potential avenue to “the reasonable view”.

(ibid.)

Emotions are thus essential in our perception, comprehension and assessment of the social world, in so far as we relate to our fellow people chiefly through emotional display. One more quotation from Arlie Hochschild:

[l]ike hearing or seeing, feeling provides a useful set of clues in figuring out what is real. A show of feeling by someone else is interesting to us precisely because it may reflect a buried perspective and may offer a clue as to how that person may act.

(ibid., p. 31)

Yet, regardless of the apparent self-evident significance of emotions for our understanding of the social world, sociology has neglected their role, by generally expunging emotionality from the analysis of action and interaction. The awareness of the importance of emotions in our understanding of the world is a later gain, one which general sociology owes to the development of the sociology of emotions. Chapter 2 is devoted to a short review both of the location of emotions within classical and post-classical investigation and of the chief developing trends of the sociology of emotions, since its emergence as a well-defined disciplinary sub-area in the late 1970s. The chapter analyzes the refreshing effect that the novel interest in emotions as a proper sociological topic produced on sociology. Two things may be anticipated here. Sociology needed a theoretical effort, as well as a keen capacity of observation, in order to dismantle the apparently solid relation between our genetic make-up and emotions. The emergence of a branch of the discipline devoted to the topic shows the capacity of sociology to detect new possibilities and take new routes. Moreover, dealing with subject matters which are the specific field of other disciplines (e.g. psychology, neurosciences) implies a strong disciplinary and methodological awareness. Sociologists may deal with emotions, may make reference to interdisciplinary sources, and yet remain aware of the boundaries and possibilities of their discipline.

It is a matter of fact that the way emotions are dealt with within the sociological perspective is specific to the disciplinary methodological and theoretical reference framework. Emotions are part of our perception of other fellow people; they are aroused and managed in social intercourses. Moreover, emotions do not only belong to the micro-situations of face-to-face interaction. They are also relevant for a wide variety of social processes that operate both on the meso-level of social organization and social movements and on the macro-level of social systems (e.g. the political or the economic system). Sociology looks at emotions as both a cause and an effect of social processes (Barbalet, 2004, p. 9). In the first case, an essentialist trend is at work: emotions are conceived as part of a biological and psychological substratum, able to produce or codetermine social phenomena. In the second case, which one could call constructivist, emotions are intended as aspects of a specific culture and social context which determine when, and in which social circumstances, they may be properly manifested and how they should be managed. This second approach is chiefly interested in the multiple forms by which emotions become socially visible and the plurality of ways society comes to term with (hence controls and drives) what one could call the asocial component of emotionality (Hochschild, 1990; Thois, 1990). Thus, emotions are an inescapable component of the social life, and this is reason enough for every society to detect original, distinct ways to tame their potential disruptiveness. It goes without saying that the relevance of emotions for the social sciences has, by necessity, to do with their sociality. A psychologist or a neuroscientist may be interested in the individual or physiological component of emotions; a sociologist may not.

This implies that in the limited perspective of the social sciences, emotions are social regardless of the self-evident fact that they emerge from within. The sociality of emotions does not imply a neat separation of biology or psychology and the social sciences. It implies a change of perspective, a distancing from the object we observe. When objecting to the substantialist idea that society is only an abstraction, since what really exists are the individuals, Simmel (1917) suggested that even individuals are, in principle, aggregates of cells, organs and processes. Thus, the relevant question is not whether society as such exists or not, but what is the perspective an observer has to assume in order to behold social phenomena. Let us read Simmel:

when we look at human life from a certain distance, we see each individual in his precise differentiation from all others. But if we increase the distance, the single individual disappears, and there emerges, instead, the picture of a “society” with its forms and colors […] It is certainly no less justified than is the other in which the parts, the individuals, are seen in their differentiation […] The difference between the two merely consists in the difference between purposes of cognition; and this difference, in turn, corresponds to a difference in distance.

(ibid., p. 8)

Simmel’s approach is an elegant critique of any essentialist conception of social phenomena, which felicitously applies to the questions of emotions. “The right to sociological study” – Simmel writes – “thus is not in the least endangered by the circumstance that all real happenings only occur in individuals” (ibid.). Emotions may biologically or neurologically occur in individuals, yet a perspective distancing from the physiological or biological processes may allow an accurate analysis of the relational, communicational, cultural aspects of emotions, which in turn strongly justifies a specifically sociological approach to what people feel and how they manifest what they feel. And a way of distancing from the mere physiological processes is to focus on the culturally determined procedures by which we define and control our emotions, conforming our emotionally driven behaviour to collectively defined standards. Here is a meaningful quotation, taken from Arlie Hochschild:

If we conceive of feeling not as a periodic abdication to biology but as something we do by attending to inner sensation in a given way, by defining situations in a given way, by managing in given ways, then it becomes plainer just how plastic and susceptible to reshaping techniques a feeling can be. The very act of managing emotion can be seen as part of what the emotion becomes. But this idea gets lost if we assume, as the organismic theorists do, that how we manage or express feeling is extrinsic to emotion. The organismic theorists want to explain how emotion is “motored by instinct” and so they by-pass the question of how we come to assess, label, and manage emotion.

(Hochschild, 1983a, p. 27)

Another clear-cut description of the relevance of emotions for the social scientists (including sociologists) differentiates the conception of emotions in the social sciences from the idea, so typical of other branches of knowledge, that emotions are raw materials of our individual experience. The description has been proposed by an historian, Barbara Rosenwein, who, in an essay about the complex methodological question of studying emotions historically, writes:

Although we tend to speak of the emotions of individuals, emotions are above all instruments of sociability. They are not only socially constructed and “sustain and endorse cultural systems,” but they also inform human relations at all levels, from intimate talk between husbands and wives to global relations. Expressions of emotions should thus be read as social interactions. The emotional give and take among people form “scripts” that lead to new emotions and readjusted relationship.

(Rosenwein, 2010, pp. 19–20)

This quotation puts emotions in a sociologically appropriate relational dimension. It, moreover, hints at a relevant topic of this monograph: the idea that emotions are based on short, prototypical scripts, for example on sketchy stories of what it means to feel, manifest, observe emotions or be involved in emotional interactions. Any essentialist conception should take into account that even if emotions were the sole manifestations of internal events, scripts (hence narratives) of emotions are necessary to intend properly their meaningful dimension. And even if we assume that our capacity to narrate is innate, actual narratives are always the social output of a cultural construction. In order to come closer to the topic, a short detour is required here.

The question of narrative has been tackled by a wide variety of perspectives. Structuralist semiotics intend narrative as a mode of communication: it is transculturally diffuse, and as a shared structure, it makes the question of translation less problematic than other linguistic patterns (Barthes, 1966). A narrative may be translated into another language with less difficulty than, say, a joke or a metaphor. As the historian Hayden White (1980) writes by making reference to Barthes:

far from being one code among many that a culture may utilize for endowing experience with meaning, narrative is a metacode, a human universal on the basis of which transcultural messages about the nature of a shared reality can be transmitted.

(ibid., p. 6)

Narrative as a structure is strongly connected with meaning, so that “the absence of narrative capacity or a refusal of narrative indicates an absence or refusal of meaning itself” (ibid.). What White is aiming at is showing the substantial artificiality of historical narratives, their being an instrument by which the disordered events of human vicissitudes are connected in a story, with a beginning and an end, and in so far as they are structured (since they connect events and give them interrelated meanings), they are endowed with a strong explicative value. Yet the artificial construction of historical narratives, being similar to the invention of fictive plots, h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 By way of introduction: A sociology of emotions through literature
• 2 Sociology and emotions: An overview
• 3 Emotions and their history: A sociological perspective
• 4 Emotions and literature
• 5 Action, emotions and emotional control: A reading of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral
• 6 The emotional crowd
• 7 Envy, social order and social change
• 8 Of love, its semantic and its social function
• References
• Index