Emotional Bodies

The Historical Performativity of Emotions

Dolores Martín-Moruno, Beatriz Pichel, Dolores Martín-Moruno, Beatriz Pichel

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780252051753
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

What do emotions actually do? Recent work in the history of emotions and its intersections with cultural studies and new materialism has produced groundbreaking revelations around this fundamental question. In Emotional Bodies, contributors pick up these threads of inquiry to propose a much-needed theoretical framework for further study of materiality of emotions, with an emphasis on emotions' performative nature. Drawing on diverse sources and wide-ranging theoretical approaches, they illuminate how various persons and groups—patients, criminals, medieval religious communities, revolutionary crowds, and humanitarian agencies—perform emotional practices. A section devoted to medical history examines individual bodies while a section on social and political histories studies the emergence of collective bodies.

Contributors: Jon Arrizabalaga, Rob Boddice, Leticia Fernández-Fontecha, Emma Hutchison, Dolores Martín-Moruno, Piroska Nagy, Beatriz Pichel, María Rosón, Pilar León-Sanz, Bertrand Taithe, and Gian Marco Vidor.

PART I

Diseased Bodies under Construction

The first section of this volume explores emotions from the point of view of the history of science and medicine. As chapters in this section reveal, physiologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists have conceptualized emotions and their effects on the body in diverse ways, and scientific and cultural understandings of emotions have influenced each other. Our contributors follow recent publications such as the special issues in Isis (“The Emotional Economy of Science”) and Osiris (“History of Sciences and the Emotions”), which have argued that historians of medicine and science should pay attention to the history of emotions and vice versa, favoring an “integrated approach.”1 For instance, Otniel Dror has demonstrated that scientific definitions of emotions have historically depended on the technologies used in laboratory research and the conditions in which experiments were carried out.2 But historians of science have examined not only the scientific theories of emotions. While the scientific ideal of mechanical objectivity as described by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison presented the detached self as the greatest aspiration for scientists, Paul White has argued that emotions have been integral both to the construction of the scientific self and to scientific practice.3

One of the fields in which the scientific and the cultural elements of emotions has featured more prominently is the historical study of pain. Historians have dedicated themselves to understanding how people in the past have made sense of and expressed pain, once characterized by Elaine Showalter as a subjective experience that cannot be communicated to others.4 In this line, Rob Boddice and Joanna Bourke, among others, have examined both the scientific definitions and the cultural practices that have shaped our experience and language of pain.5 Bourke’s focus on metaphors and Boddice’s chapter in this book show that historical experiences of pain offer privileged points of entry to explore the entanglement of scientific theories and cultural practices of the past.

This integrated approach to the emotions and the sciences has been particularly important in the cultural history of medicine. As Fay Bound Alberti and Elena Carrera have argued, emotions have often been understood in relation to health and disease.6 In particular, historians have frequently studied emotions in the context of pathologies—that is, when the presence of an emotion is a pathogen that makes the body (or the mind) sick. Anne Harrington has recently criticized that “most scholarship on the medicalization of emotions has focused on projects that locate emotions, one way or another, within individual brains and minds,” proposing instead a relational model in which mother love is both “a pathology (for the mother) and a pathogen (for her vulnerable child).”7

All these approaches have favored the understanding of emotions as practices that do things in the world. Chapters in this section take up these debates, examining medical and cultural understandings of emotions, particularly in cases where the embodiment of emotions results in morbid or abnormal states. Either an unspeakable pain, a personality trait, or exaggerated excitability, emotions in these chapter produce particular kinds of bodies, providing examples of Scheer’s “knowing body,” bridging the mind and the body as two essential components of the emotions.8

In chapter 1, Rob Boddice’s history of the gendered diagnosis of hysteria and tetanus shows how experiences of pain that were incommunicable under a particular emotional regime translated into bodily performances, which followed a cultural and medical script, that of hysterical attacks. Boddice reconstructs and analyzes the patients’ emotional experiences from the point of view of their own bodily expressions and performances, rather than from the testimony of medical accounts. This approach offers new and productive insights into nineteenth-century hysteria and demonstrates that pain was a performative practice that turned patients into emotional bodies. How this practice manifested in bodily performances depended on the dominant emotional regimes of the context in which the attack took place.

Gian Marco Vidor approaches the concept of “emotional bodies” through the figure of the nineteenth-century “criminal of passion.” Vidor’s research on Italian psychiatry and criminology shows that in order to define who was really a “criminal of passion” (as opposed to other kinds of criminals), the medical and legal establishment engaged in a discussion about the nature and the effects of emotional phenomena. The main characteristic of the “criminal of passion,” often illustrated by the literary figure of Othello, was the performative aspect of his or her emotions and passions, which made the criminal commit the offense but also led to feelings of remorse and, occasionally, even to suicide. Emotional bodies are here considered as liminal bodies, existing halfway between insanity and normality, only to be discovered through their criminal acts.

Patient’s experience is also a key topic in Pilar León Sanz’s contribution, focused on the emergence of psychosomatic research in the 1950s. For key theorists Seymour Fisher and Sidney E. Cleveland, emotions were personality forces that had an impact on the development of body image, which in turn played a fundamental role in the genesis of diseases such as cancer. The boundaries between emotional and physiological processes blurred in psychosomatic research, as the emotions felt by the patient in relation to the living experience of his or her own body affected the kind of disease he or she experienced. León Sanz demonstrates, therefore, that the idea of an “emotional body” that is the result of the performative work of emotions can already be found in twentieth-century psychological research.

Notes

1. Paul White, “Introduction,” Focus: The Emotional Economy of Science, Isis 100, no. 4 (2009): 792–97; Otniel E. Dror, Bettina Hitzer, Anja Laukötter, and Pilar León-Sanz, “An Introduction to History of Sciences and the Emotions,” Osiris 31, no. 1 (2016): 1–18. Fay Bound Alberti, Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine and Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 13.

2. Otniel E. Dror, “The Affect of Experiment: The Turn to Emotions in Anglo-American Physiology, 1900–1940,” Isis 90, no. 2 (1999): 205–37, Otniel Dror, “The Scientific Image of Emotion: Experience and Technologies of Inscription,” Configurations 7, no. 3 (1999): 355–401.

3. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone, 2007); White, “Introduction.”

4. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

5. Joanna Bourke, The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Rob Boddice, ed., Pain and Emotion in Modern History (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2014); Louise Hide, Joanna Bourke, and Carmen Mangion, “Perspectives on Pain: Introduction,” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 15 (2012); Daniel S. Goldberg, “Pain, Objectivity and History: Understanding Pain Stigma,” Medical Humanities, 43, no. 4 (2017): 238–43; Dolores Martín-Moruno, “Pain as Practice in Paolo Mantegazza’s Science of Emotions,” Osiris 31, no. 1 (2016): 137–62.

6. Alberti, Medicine, Emotion and Disease; Elena Carrera, ed., Emotions and Health: 1200–1700 (Leiden: Brill, 2013). See also Penelope Gouk and Helen Hills, eds., Representing Emotions: New Connections in the Histories of Art, Music and Medicine (London: Routledge, 2005).

7. Anne Harrington, “Mother Love and Mental Illness: An Emotional History,” Osiris 31, no. 1 (2016): 95.

8. Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (And Is That What Makes Them Have a History?): A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion,” History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012): 199.

1.Hysteria or Tetanus?

Ambivalent Embodiments and the Authenticity of Pain

ROB BODDICE

Hysterical Passage

On Friday, December 4, 1874, the emigrant ship Earl Dalhousie set sail from London, picking up passengers at Plymouth on her way to Adelaide, South Australia, where she arrived February 23, 1875. The Times of London had boasted on her departure of the superior berths for married couples “on a newly patented system” to” “afford privacy and ventilation.”1 There were thirty-nine married couples aboard, as well as ninety-six single women, seventy-one single men, fifty-two children under age twelve, and ten infants. The report of her arrival in the South Australian Chronicle suggested all was well: “During the passage, the utmost good feeling has prevailed, and this due mainly to the attention bestowed by the captain and officers, Dr. J. Hudson, R.N., and the matron, Mrs. Thompson, a lady well qualified for the task entrusted to her.”2 It would be another eight months or so before the reasons for the particular mention of the staff surgeon and the ship’s matron would become clear. In the doldrums and tropical heat, it had not all been plain sailing for the Dalhousie.

Things had gone awry around the twenty-fourth day of the journey, shortly after the Dalhousie crossed the equator. We know the details from John Hudson’s report of the voyage to The Lancet in October 1875. Susan Bickford, age twenty-two, was described as being “of spare habit, intelligent, and healthy looking.” She had given birth at age fifteen and since that time had endured “parental harshness and … restraint in a workhouse asylum.” She was discovered lying prostrate and unconscious on December 5, one day into the voyage. Hudson found that Bickford was a “victim of nymphomania,” with “long, strong, frequent” attacks brought on either by sudden shocks, such as loud noises or “flashes of light,” or without due cause at night. The root cause was masturbation. If we trust the account of John Hudson, Susan Bickford masturbated intermittently from December 5 until February 7, that period being punctuated by “various remissions or intervals of calm, rational, and good behaviour, alternating with threats and feigned attempts to commit suicide.” She was “peevish, quarrelsome, perverse, deceitful … pulling her hair and malingering, in order to excite sympathy.” Under the effect of chloral hydrate, at the time a fashionable sedative, Bickford “would betray signs of good and evil training, such as bad language and pretty hymns.”

“Intolerance of light,” a symptom Bickford described as “fire in the head,” combined with “hyperaesthesia of [the] left side of face, neuralgia, temporary paralysis and spasms of eyelids, face, neck, throat, &c., involving the muscles of expression, speech, deglutition, and voice, on one or both, but mostly on the left side.” When seized by an attack, convulsions “extended to the chest, the arms, and more or less to the whole body, lasting from a few minutes to half an hour, and merging into complete and general rigidity (opisthotonos), the body being arched backwards, so as to rest on the head and heels, but rarely inclined to the right side.” What could only be described as “tetanus” would last a few minutes or a few hours. In “a few instances the patient remained still and unconscious, as in a state of catalepsy, fo...