A literary history of emotions?

The history of emotions as a field of study has crystallized as individual projects by founding historians have begun to collectively set the boundaries and characteristics of what is now a field in its own right.⁷ There are a few ideas that can be considered central, chiefly that emotions, how they are named, described and even felt, have histories because emotion is culturally and socially constructed. This means that anger, fear, happiness and any other emotion for that matter are not hardwired or essentialized but shaped by particular cultures and societies at particular times, and no single emotion has persisted unchanged since time immemorial. Indeed, some emotions may have been brought into existence by particular historical circumstances.⁸ These insights have been derived in part from disciplines outside of history, especially anthropology and neuroscience.⁹ Recent advances in the sciences have suggested that brain plasticity and epigenetics might provide biological evidence for the impact of external influence on the human capacity to feel and express certain emotions.¹⁰

I wish to posit the usefulness of literary critical analysis as a tool to capture the idiosyncrasies of lived experience in history, and how these idiosyncrasies might develop into the kinds of systems and practices that historical study generally relies upon for analysis. To do this, we might incorporate approaches more commonly found in literary studies: close reading, critical theoretical analysis and a focus on affect as a medium for thinking through phenomenological experience. This last is less favoured by historians of emotion at present, while literary analysis has adopted affect theory as a key lens for discussing the emotions. Emotions history as a field has tended to be suspicious of affect because its roots in affect theory’s biological emphasis seem, in contrast to newer ideas around brain plasticity, to disavow the role of cultural and historical change in shaping how actors express and understand emotion. Affect theory derives largely from the work of psychologist Silvan Tomkins in his long project published as Affect, Imagery, Consciousness (1962, 1991). Tomkins’s core claim, that there are only nine affects, most hardwired from birth, and from which emotional experiences are formed, has been critiqued for being both narrow and poorly evidenced. Ruth Leys has critiqued affect theorists deriving their ideas from Tomkins, for example Brian Massumi, for formulating an analysis which essentially refuses intentionalism – the ability of humans to choose – in favour of an unscientific reading of human emotional experience as determinist.¹¹ Despite this, it has had some considerable impact in different disciplines, including psychology and the humanities, especially in literary and cultural studies. Leys finds this remarkable, contending that its anti-intentionalism implies ‘such a radical separation between affect and reason as to make disagreement about meaning, or ideological dispute, irrelevant to cultural analysis’.¹²

What Leys seems to suggest is that without intentionalism, there can be no analysis. While I agree that denying intentionality altogether would be a reductive move, I don’t believe that thinking affectively inevitably ends with the breakdown of analysis. In contrast, paying close attention to affect may enrich analysis further, allowing us to hypothesize about lived experience by including the unintentional along with the intentional to complicate our readings in productive ways. Rob Boddice presents a trenchant rebuttal of affect theory’s use in historical analysis, observing that ‘when scholars in the humanities bow down before certain influences from neurobiology’, the result is ‘throwaway analyses that beg more questions than they provide answers’.¹³ Paul Ekman’s application of affect theory is of particular focus in Boddice’s critique, and while his characterization of Ekman’s use of Tomkins is accurate in identifying its essentializing claims, there are other ways of using Tomkins that avoid Ekman’s over-determined approach.¹⁴ The work of Eve Sedgwick in the late 1990s up until her death in 2009 interprets Tomkins through literary readings of often historical literary texts.¹⁵ It is through her work that Tomkins’s true value as something akin to a philosopher of affect, rather than the architect of a viable psychological model, is established. It becomes clear that Tomkins’s model of affect is open-ended: it should not, as Ekman does, be used to judge definitively whether an actor is lying or to construct a gallery of standardized facial expressions. Rather, as Sedgwick notes, what his work offers is a series of hypotheses and theories about how affect might be experienced and expressed in different people in different places and at different times. His insistence that ‘an affect theory is a simplified and powerful summary of a larger set of affect experiences’ demonstrates the role of experience – that is, the interaction with environment, culture and society – that leads to an individual actor developing affect theories which they then use to navigate feeling.¹⁶

Take the affect in which I am especially interested, shame. Tomkins insists that this is a social emotion, a learned feeling, and one that is therefore shaped by cultural context. Despite Tomkins expressing his ideas in language including ‘feedback’, ‘general image’, ‘mechanism’ and even the seemingly damning term ‘innate’, the real value of his thinking is to be found in its flexibility and capacity for accommodating an unending range of possibilities for emotional expression: ‘Whatever one is excited by, enjoys, fears, hates, is ashamed of, is contemptuous of, or is distressed by is an object of value, positive or negative. Value hierarchies result from value conflicts wherein the same object is both loved and hated, both exciting and shaming, both distressing and enjoyable.’¹⁷ Throughout his work, Tomkins emphasizes that affect is analogue, not digital: all affects can plug into, coincide or coexist with, amplify or decrease any other affect. Thus, for Tomkins, interest in being a successful member of society would heighten the shame an actor might feel at their perceived failure to attain that goal. However, this will be modified, enhanced or characterized by a whole range of factors, including the historical moment in which that actor lives, the society in which the actor imagines themselves to be living and affect theories that actor might hold about what constitutes success for a person such as they understand themselves to be and what attainment of or failure to attain that success should feel like. These factors are all responsive to the historical moment, the sensing environment in which the actor lives their lives. I focus here on eighteenth-century Britain and the methods used by literary culture, broadly conceived, of the time to create a set of affect theories around success in fitting the ideal of polite masculinity. Key to this investigation is the role of shame in these literary texts, both as a rhetorical tool and as an affect that dwells in the very texts themselves. How do these texts explicitly shame their male readers for their efforts to attain polite masculine ideals? How do the texts themselves betray shame through being self-conscious with regards to message and form?

To be clear, then, using affect is about recognizing the importance and value of embodiment and sensation to the experience of emotion. I follow Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth’s description of affect as arising ‘in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon’.¹⁸ Affect can address issues of feeling and emotion, but more properly describes the ways in which sensing bodies are exposed to, and receptive of, ‘force, or forces of encounter’, for example the ways emotional energy can ripple through a crowd in response to an event, or through a body at the touch of a lover, or the sight of something disturbing. Affect is useful as a concept because of its readiness to recognize and make room for the strange and unexpected ways that individual bodies and their environments – physical, social, intellectual – connect and impact on one another. This is vital if we wish to understand how Rosenwein’s communities, or Reddy’s regimes, work on a phenomenological level. Sara Ahmed, whose work has appealed to historians of emotion while also being deeply invested in affect studies, argues that emotions should be understood through how contact with those objects which elicit a feeling response is encountered and evaluated.¹⁹ Affect allows us to see ‘an ethico-aesthetics of a body’s capacity for becoming sensitive to the “manner” of a world’, as Gregg and Seigworth describe it. In the context of this essay, it helps us to be more aware of how polite discourse as an encountered and evaluated object has an impact on individual men and vice versa. It also collapses some of the barriers created by the gap of time and resists the imperative to believe too absolutely that the past is a foreign country. As Boddice observes, ‘there is an “empathy wall” between us and the past. It is not insurmountable, however. We can learn to “see” in the ways past actors saw’.²⁰ In other words, affect calls attention to the ways in which emotion is an embodied experience; felt in the body as much as understood in the mind, affect demonstrates how human experience, and its historicity, is mediated through the body’s capacity to be porous to and for the world in which it moves. Far more than just ‘unnamed’ emotion, affect is the state of receptivity to sensation and perception: the way the body and mind respond to touch, glimpse and tone, and in turn impress themselves upon the world.

How can this be accounted for historically, when our subjects belong to emotional regimes perhaps very different from our own? Some historians have begun to work towards this by paying attention to what historical accounts of the body and embodied emotions can tell us. The exploration of embodied gendered experience in history is a vibrant field, as demonstrated by the work of Joanne Begiato, Katie Barclay and Karen Harvey, among others. Begiato observes that ‘gender is not only performed, it is inhabited through one’s body’.²¹ Elsewhere, she demonstrates this through the changing notions of sailors’ bodies, what they can or should do, and what they can be used for, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Tears in particular show the sailor’s capacity for feeling, and the increased capacity of sailors in the lower ranks to cry meaningful tears demonstrates a democratization of the types of bodies that could be used to represent the emotional regime.²² Katie Barclay finds masculine embodied emotion used to influence the legal process in nineteenth-century Irish courtrooms. In her investigation, she finds a largely homosocial space in which men tell one another stories, drawing on ‘wider cultural discourses including literature and folklore, and different spatial and rhetorical strategies … to help bring meaning to the disparate events of everyday experience’.²³ Men in the period used narrativity and embodiment alongside one another to impress themselves upon the world; in the courtroom ‘displays of emotion were used as evidence of character’.²⁴ Barclay identifies the body’s capacity to receive impressions from the world as core to eighteenth-century understandings of character:

According to eighteenth-century science, the body interpreted the world through the senses, judging experience through the levels of pain or pleasure produced. When placed into a sophisticated moral value system, emotion became a central mechanism by which the body interpreted right or wrong.²⁵

It is Karen Harvey who points most directly to the relationship between gender, embodiment and affect when she aims at studying ‘the lived, embodied experience of gender’.²⁶ She has suggested combining the material experience of the historian with documentary evidence to aim at a more complete analysis.²⁷ Like affect theory, this approach relies on the commonality of bodily experience between the historian and their subjects in order to draw insights that would otherwise be impossible due to time’s flattening-out effect. While Begiato finds this too ambitious, preferring to aim at representation based on the historical record, I find Harvey’s invitation an intriguing one.²⁸ While Harvey herself does not explicitly invoke affect, the methodologies she gestures towards certainly lead us in affect’s direction. We can further our understanding of a historical period if we make the turn to affect, in particular by casting our eye over the literary mode’s privileged capacity for the expression of embodied experience, as I shall now begin to do.

Shame and eighteenth-century polite masculinity

My focus in this chapter is mostly on writing from the first half of the eighteenth century, at a point at which the emotional community of politeness is emerging.²⁹ This means that the moral and emotional values of the community are still volatile; as we will see, all sorts of perceived infractions are debated with a surprising degree of ferocity through the technique of literary form. I focus here on periodical and letter-writing, but of course this is the great age of Augustan satire, with Pope, Swift and others regularly deploying shame to subdue the commercial and artistic aspirations of others. The discursive foundations of polite culture are foregrounded, ironically, by virtue of their being debated in print, their presence on paper seeming to make them less unassailable than emotional communities formed over time without literacy as their primary mode. This instability was not lost on the men who attempted to write into being an ideal of masculinity for themselves and their peers, as we shall see as we turn now to an exploration of their work.

For Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, the ideal mental, emotional and physical state for a man to exist in was one of equilibrium. In his body of writing, completed in the first decade of the eighteenth century, he attempts to develop a ‘sensitivity to the “manner” of a world’ now often called ‘politeness’. Eighteenth-century politeness might be defined as ‘ “the art of pleasing in company,” or, in a contemporary definition, “a dextrous management of our Words and Actions, whereby we make other People have better Opinions of us and themselves”.³⁰ Already we can see an alertness to the community-building pressure of words and actions on others that affect emphasizes in identity formation. For Shaftesbury, as for other architects of polite culture, politeness was about the relationship between internal thought and feeling and external behaviour and action. His later work The Moralists (1711) foregrounds feeling and its relation to manhood in philosophical dialogue that turns repeatedly to shame. He points out the paradox in which politeness must function if polite masculinity’s ideals are to be attained: ‘will he who cries shame refuse to acknowledge any in his turn?’³¹ He considers shame in relation to personal conviction in conflict with popular opinion. He sees the aim of a polite man’s life to be secure enough in his private and public conscience that he is ‘free from the reproach of shame or guilt’.³² Until then, the polite man must ensure politeness functions as a social tool (here by crying shame against those who threaten it) while ensuring in turn that he utilizes shame on himself. Shame, for Shaftesbury and his followers, operates in polite writing by and about men in order to improve both self and society.

It is perhaps not a surprise that Shaftesbury uses the philosophical conversation as the structure on which to build his ideals of politeness. The conversation in The Moralists between two virtually identical men, Philocles and Theocles, who are cyphers of philosophical ideals but male nonetheless, is a dualistic construction that enables the basis of a community to flourish. Early eighteenth-century polite culture was structured around communities: male friendships such as that of Shaftesbury’s characters, along with those of Mr Spectator and his friends; the coffee-house culture of consumption and clubbability; religious sects. Most were reflected in and formed by writing in print, bought or shared between friends. All communities have emotional hallmarks, as Barbara Rosenwein has taught us, which might be new but might also be composed of aspects of older communities.³³ Polite male culture takes the anger and pride of honour-based homosocial emotional communities and begins to replace them with the shame of communities invested in what Dror Wahrman, borrowing a phrase from Sarah Knott, calls the ‘socially-turned self’. Shaftesbury demands that a polite man both cry shame against others and acknowledge the necessity of feeling his own. He is a creature of a society which, as Adam Smith and David Hume both later recognize, demands the individual incorporate society’s expectations in his own self-image.³⁴

Contemporaries of Shaftesbury understood this need to internalize the external. The century’s most famous periodical, The Spectator, references this act in its title, and the name of its fictional protagonist, Mr Spectator. This character records what he sees using his own emotional community made up of characters based on eighteenth-century urban types such as the Whig man of business Sir Andrew Freeport and the aging libertine relic Will Honeycomb, demonstrating the changing values of masculinity in doing so: Honeycomb, the representative of the older Restoration emotional community of indulgence, is safely married off in the course of the periodical’s three-year span. This narrative, such as it is, is always subjugated to the chief purpose of The Spectator, which is to provide observational vignettes that not only describe and reflect the tastes and values of the time but also set the boundaries and crystallize what it means to be polite. J.G.A. Pocock famously saw politeness as the ‘active civilizing agent’ which helped transform a new, mistrusted commercial phenomenon into a powerful and influential system of sociability.³⁵ The emotional community of writers like Shaftesbury and the authors of The Spectator, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, were attempting to forge an emergent collection of emotional values and styles into what Rob Boddice, borrowing from Lorraine Daston, calls a ‘moral economy’, a peculiarly Smithian term which nicely references both the moral and commercial imperatives of the masculinity under examination here.³⁶

To see the subtle formation of this moral economy playing out in print, we need look no further than a contribution by Steele to The Spectator of Thursday 23 August 1711. It takes as its subject ‘Men of Wit and Pleasure’. The piece is a meditation on the affective consequences of ‘Wenching, Liveliness and Vice’. Steele’s argument is made not from a censorious angle of emotional correction but from a nuanced analysis of personal, private shame. Starting with general comments on how ‘Men of Wit and Pleasure’ both shock reason and tickle the imagination, and how these men are ‘in every Body’s Mouth that spends any Time in Conversation’ (no. 151, II: 93), his writing then takes a different turn:

Pleasure, when it is a Man’s chief Purpose, disappoints it self; and the constant Application to it palls the Faculty of enjoying it, tho’ it leaves the Sense of our Inability for that we wish, with a Disrelish of every thing else. Thus the intermediate Seasons of the Man of Pleasure are more heavy than one would impose upon the vilest Criminal.³⁷

What is instantly striking about this passage is the level of empathy. Far from condemning the ‘Man of Pleasure’, Steele uses the self-proclaimed non-partisan voice of Mr Spectator to place his reader adjacent to the suffering coxcomb. This sensation of walking side by side with a man one is supposed to condemn is heightened as we are presented with the sight of him at his darkest:

Take him when he is awaked too soon after a Debauch, or disappointed in following a worthless Woman without Truth, and there is no Man living whose Being is such a Weight or Vexation as his is. He is an utter Stranger to the pleasing Reflections in the Evening of a well-spent Day, or the Gladness of Heart or Quickness of Spirit in the Morning after profound Sleep or indolent Slumbers. He is not to be at Ease any longer than he can keep Reason and good Sense without his Curtains; otherwise he will be haunted with the Reflection, that he could not believe such a one the Woman that upon Trial he found her. What has he got by his Conquest, but to think meanly of her for whom a Day or two before he had the highest Honour? and of himself for, perhaps, wronging the Man whom of all Men living he himself would least willingly have injured?³⁸

The affective proximity the reader might feel to the man supposedly being decried is striking. We are with him at his most vulnerable moment, when he awakes beleaguered by a hangover and regretting last night’s behaviour. Steele is appealing here to the experiences of his contemporary readers, urban men of polite society. His prose leaves open the possibility that his reader may well see himself in the description and feel shame as he begins to wonder whether or not the piece condemns him. The passage uses shame to create a surprising emotional community, one where bad feeling can be used to move towards a desirable identity. This is achieved through the peculiar ability of writing to bring public morality into the private emotional world of the reader. It is through the suggestive capacity of literature that Steele begins to assert the expectations of an emotional community, and through the affective response of the reader that we as historians can begin to parse this historically situated community for ourselves.

Literary uses of shame

Something that remains difficult to parse is where, if anywhere, there is a shift between the emotional community of a few periodical writers and their readers and what William Reddy has called an emotional regime which sets the tone for wider society.³⁹ In many ways, this is a fruitless effort, both because to draw too sharp a distinction between an emotional ‘community’ and a ‘regime’ leads to over-simplification and because it erases what is central to emotions history and to affect: communities and regimes are always in flux, always incorporating remnants of old orders and the outriders of new ones. Despite the shift in power and influence in British society, politeness still imposed hierarchies remarkably similar to those of older orders, especially those related to the notion of hierarchy itself. In other areas, other values gained greater emphasis. One of these areas was masculine self-presentation, especially in relation to effeminacy. Prior to this period, the spectacular male body, especially that of the king, was a locus of desire in a way that was rejected in later eras, as Thomas A. King has demonstrated.⁴⁰ As Philip Carter defines it, effeminacy in the eighteenth century did not carry the overt suggestion of queer sexualities that it later would, but instead an over-investment in luxury and the performance of manners which spectacularized the male body to an unacceptable extent. This, he argues, threatened not just the integrity of individual manhood but also that of the nation state: ‘attachment to the fashionable world denoted an unacceptable dependence in individual men who collectively as citizens sacrificed their nation’s political independence to absolutism’.⁴¹ As Matthew McCormack has outlined, independence became one of the defining markers of virtuous action especially in the political sphere.⁴² To be trustworthy, and to have one’s nation’s and society’s best interests at heart, a man had to be independent of influence from others, whether that be financial or social. Effeminate men, known by a range of names including dandies, beaux, fops and macaronis, were perceived to be slavishly dependent on fashion and a conduit of decadence especially from France, with whom Britain was at war for most of the eighteenth century.

I turn again to The Spectator for an example of the ways shame was deployed to place the effeminate man beyond the reach of politeness. In one of Joseph Addison’s more lurid entries, Mr Spectator recounts a dream, during which he observes the dissection of a beau’s head. Mr Spectator finds himself gazing upon a brain ‘stuffed with invisible Billetdoux, Love-Letters … and other Trumpery of the same Nature’.⁴³ The organ is filled entirely with the symbols of excess, including snuff and sonnets. The beau’s brains are partly composed of liquids such as quicksilver for venereal disease, orange water as scent and ‘Froth’. In abundance, we find fabric and textiles, including ‘Ribbons, Lace and Embroidery, wrought together in a most curious Piece of Network’.⁴⁴ A spongy substance, meanwhile, is discovered to be composed of ‘Nonsense’ (572).⁴⁵ Addison’s piece is fascinating for several reasons. Firstly, its appropriation of the language of science brings into sharp relief the inadequacies of the beau. Mr Spectator and his fellows are men of science; they inspect, probe and discover truth. Meanwhile, the beau is not just led astray by excess; by nightmarish mutation, he is composed of it. Becoming an object of inspection and invasion by other men denaturalizes – or even unmans – him even further; he is displayed, sliced open, poked at, sniffed at and preserved by a team of men who clearly believe themselves to be his moral superiors. This is highlighted by Addison’s reference to the unused ‘Elevator’ muscle, apparently needed to ‘turn the Eye towards Heaven’.⁴⁶ Writing brings the unacceptable body too close for comfort, initiating disgust and the shame of recognition in those men given to fashionable pursuits. To feel that one might be a beau or a fop, and that others might have seen that in you without your realizing it, leaves one exposed, vulnerable and ashamed. The most popular periodical of the century’s key message for its male readers, then, was to warn them that excess of corporeality, whether in dress and deportment as for the fop or drinking and sex as for the man of pleasure (and in truth the two were often linked or commensurate types), would lead to shame, as these were threats to the polite ideals of masculinity in the newly commercial world of early eighteenth-century Britain.

Writing the male body: shame in Lord Chesterfield’s letters

In ‘The Mass Public and the Mass Subject’, Michael Warner describes a moment in which we, as individuals, ‘adopt the attitude of the public subject, marking to ourselves its nonidentity with ourselves’.⁴⁷ Simultaneously, we are both subjective individuals and the subjective public. Adopting the attitude of the public subject involves an affective shift. We are, in this moment, absorbed into an imagined body known as ‘the public’ and are thus in intimate contact with unidentifiable, indefinably numerous others. The community of consumption that mass print culture allowed for meant that even if one spent the majority of one’s time behind a shield of one’s own making – as of course Addison does with Mr Spectator – one was still strongly aware of the ideas and opinions of others. This was a virtual community with very real effects on its members. It became increasingly important to individuals at this time to know what those they had never met thought and felt about given topics. That means that nothing the architects of politeness such as Shaftesbury, Addison and Steele could write could make them immune to the same process of normalizing via shame to which they subjected the fops and men of pleasure they wrote about.

As the century wore on, the emotional community of polite masculinity began to adapt and to become more overtly responsive to the importance of the male body and its affective and political potential. We see this when we turn to the private letters of Lord Chesterfield to his son, Philip Stanhope. In one of his most striking one-liners, amidst a variety of advice on manners, Chesterfield tells his son, ‘My object is to have you fit to live; which, if you are not, I do not desire that you should live at all.’⁴⁸ Harsh as it may sound, this sentence underlines the importance men of the eighteenth century placed on the ability to deploy politeness. Chesterfield’s son was illegitimate, heightening the importance of the visible display of manners further as he lacked birthright. The failure to embody polite masculinity indicated a shameful failure to be a man and could present a significant threat to Stanhope’s future social and economic wellbeing. However, it also offered unprecedented opportunities to a man in his position. It is for this reason that Chesterfield’s letters to Stanhope, which make up the bulk of his published correspondence, are so heavily preoccupied with the latter’s social education. Chesterfield was a strong believer, avant la lettre, in the socially turned self, and his letters are thick with exhortations to Stanhope to turn towards society, not just mentally but bodily too. He emphasizes the importance of the dancing master – often a figure treated contemptuously by ‘men of sense’ – as teaching important lessons for polite society: ‘Do you mind your dancing while your dancing-master is with you? … Remember, that the graceful motion of the arms, the giving your hand, and the putting-on and pulling-off your hat genteelly, are the material parts of a gentleman’s dancing.’⁴⁹

This strikes a different tone from Addison, despite both having strong investment in the polite commercial world. The attention paid to the masculine body and how it conducts itself demonstrates Chesterfield’s understanding of the ways in which surface was believed to communicate depth in shorthand: ‘The world is taken by the outside of things’, he observes in a later letter.⁵⁰ Chesterfield frequently refers to ‘polish’ and ‘shine’ as desirable effects that his son must achieve through practice, rather than evidence of shameful falsity as they are for Addison: ‘My plan for you, from the beginning, has been to make you shine equally in the learned and the polite world.’⁵¹ However, Stanhope sometimes fell short of Chesterfield’s expectations, and the response could often make quite explicit use of parental and societal shaming strategies. In a letter of 22 September 1749, sent from London and addressed to Stanhope, at that point in Verona, Chesterfield chastises his son for careless dining habits:

I know no one thing more offensive to a company, than that inattention and distraction. It is showing them the utmost contempt; and people never forgive contempt. No man is distrait with the man he fears, or the women he loves; which is a proof that every man can get the better of that distraction, when he thinks it worth his while to do so … For my part, I would rather be in company with a dead man than an absent one.⁵²

The language is theatrically overstated, but hardly unrepresentative of writing about masculine behaviour in the period. Chesterfield alludes to social death through permanently withheld forgiveness, and the image of the dead man as preferable company to a gauche Stanhope. Bad manners were an insensitivity to the manner of the world, as affect theorists might have it. As with effeminacy, part of the threat presented by poor manners was that politeness required others not to make one aware of where one had crossed the line. The great lengths Chesterfield goes to in these letters to educate Stanhope are therefore readable as an attempt to rescue him from this horrifying fate. He frequently uses the language of paternal care to frame the repeated advice on behaviour in company and cites his age and greater experience as reasons to be taken seriously. He makes use of proxies in Europe to act as his eyes and ears while Stanhope is out of the country; indeed, the above example is based on reports by Sir Charles Williams, at this point envoy to Saxony, who otherwise speaks of Stanhope’s ‘character and learning’ in glowing terms.⁵³ This dispersed surveillance allows Chesterfield to continually assert his authority, not just as a father but also as an arbiter of politeness. He understands the polite world, and the letters work to reiterate this fact. As Ann C. Dean notes: ‘The letters repeatedly describe the earl as part of an audience for his son’s performance, an audience imagined as an extension of the group one might find in any drawing room where “good company” is assembled. He writes … in a rhetorically constructed and strategic relation to a late-eighteenth-century social imaginary.’⁵⁴ We might also call this an emotional community. Shame becomes not just easy but also appropriate to deploy from this position of unassailable rightness. It is perversely admirable, then, that Stanhope continues to act distrait even when he knows his social failings will get back to his father, communicated by the very men he is required to pass his time with.

What Chesterfield demonstrates through his use of shame in the letters is what Silvan Tomkins recognizes two centuries later, namely that shame is both a measure and condition of civilization.⁵⁵ One should be appropriately ashamed of one’s social transgressions as this is what prevents the breakdown of society; people are hindered from indulging their own selfish desires by what might blandly be called ‘consideration for others’, but as several eighteenth-century thinkers recognized might be more accurately called a fear of the social consequences of this behaviour.⁵⁶ These experiences are the extreme end of what Gregg and Seigworth call ‘forces of encounter’: sociability and civilization felt as pressure on the individual. Although shame was more explicitly applied to women in the eighteenth century, through misogynistic ideas of female sexual and social behaviour, a male discourse of shame, as I have shown here, did exist. Much of this comes via the responsibility men expected themselves and others to bear to a society of, generally speaking, other men. This homosociality is no better demonstrated than by Chesterfield’s assertion of the separateness of masculine experience from feminine: ‘as women are a considerable, or at least a pretty numerous part of the company; and as their suffrages go a great way towards establishing a man’s character in a fashionable part of the world (which is of great importance to the fortune and figure he proposes to make in it), it is necessary to please them’.⁵⁷ In other words, although women were important enough to please, this importance rested entirely on their function in men’s identity construction. Rarely does Chesterfield assume commonality between men and women; men, therefore, are alone among themselves in society.

Throughout the letters, Chesterfield contextualizes his advice to Stanhope in terms of gender. Much discussion of politeness and morality in eighteenth-century discourse uses the universal masculine ‘man’ to stand in for society as a whole, while still describing a social world that was, in practice, a male one. Chesterfield’s letters consider politeness in its relationship to a gendered world where the masculine and feminine are the two poles. In this, he is typical of a period that saw the rise in understandings of the social world being divided into two discrete genders with differing but mutually compatible motivations and goals.⁵⁸ This shifted the emphasis and responsibilities for certain characteristics onto one or other of the two genders, with the body being an interesting case in point. Emphasis on the female body as an object of spectacularization had always existed, but this was redoubled in the eighteenth century, while the male body began to retreat from view behind the privileging of the male mind and its capacity for reason. The Spectator enacts this through Mr Spectator, whose position as the unassailable arbiter of politeness is crafted in part from his absence-in-presence, his ghost-like lack of corporeality and evaluative gaze.⁵⁹ Chesterfield’s letters demonstrate that while this disembodiment of masculinity may have been an ideal, the reality was more complex. People have bodies, and no matter how they are biologically configured, those bodies can provide both opportunities and barriers in the way they move through the world. Chesterfield’s close attention to how Stanhope behaved at the table, on how he entered a room, how he moved through space, all undermine the idea that the male body was not still the object of spectacle. Of course, everyone, male or female, was always watching everyone else, especially in this period of hyper-visualization.⁶⁰ Chesterfield is remarkably – and characteristically – candid in the letters in terms of how male embodiment and its subsequent inevitable and necessary self-consciousness should work. He encourages Stanhope to observe other men and model his own dress on those he calls ‘men of sense’: ‘A man of sense carefully avoids any particular character in his dress; he is accurately clean for his own sake; but all the rest is for other people’s.’⁶¹ This consideration for others is standard fare in polite discourse, but for Chesterfield it is vital because of the advantage it ultimately brings the individual in his worldly business.

Chesterfield finds remarkably little shame in performing politeness as a man. Unlike Addison, he is mostly unfazed by effeminacy, observing at one point to Stanhope that ‘I would rather have you a fop than a sloven’ (158).⁶² He champions what he calls ‘une certaine douceur’, which he defines as ‘not so easily described as felt … a complaisance, a flexibility, but not a servility of manners; an air of softness in the countenance, gesture and expression’, all feminine traits which, in a man, could attract the suspicion of effeminacy but are nonetheless absolutely essential for Chesterfield, especially in the handling of difficult people or those you need to refuse.⁶³ His concept of masculinity is largely unaffected by the effeminacy panic of the time or the ongoing concerns over the state of that emblem of British brute strength, the army, which at several points in the period was perceived as weakened by apathy, dissipation and even sodomy.⁶⁴ What he is offended by is the opposite of effeminacy: distracted or inattentive behaviour in public, a careless approach to the presentation of the self and vulgarity. He also disapproves as we have seen of ‘absence’, the man who may be physically present in company but does not participate. For Ann C. Dean, politeness in Chesterfield is always an active principle, one that engages with society in an ultimately self-promoting mode: ‘By guiding Stanhope’s behaviour and circulating him among various audiences, the earl was in a sense publishing his son.’⁶⁵ In doing so, he is able to insert himself, as Stanhope’s author-father, into the polite conversation and company of Europe while remaining himself at a distance. This is the only kind of absence Chesterfield deems acceptable, but with it comes anxiety. Stanhope’s tendency for distracted or absent behaviour means that the message he gives out about his father always threatens to undermine the older man’s reputation. This is why the same advice is repeated over and over in the letters, and why, when anxiety gets the better of Chesterfield, he resorts to shame.

Conclusion

It is clear that eighteenth-century male writers had the capacity to use shame to develop and maintain the ideals of polite masculinity. Effeminacy was a powerful and lurid weapon to shame men out of seemingly impolite attachments to fashion above manly sense and reason, as Addison’s beau passage demonstrates. Effeminophobia was merely the most visible when it came to coercive strategies for defining acceptable masculinity. Chesterfield’s letters demonstrate the importance of the socially turned self and the successful negotiation of a world of sociability in which every gaze was a critical, evaluative one. Errors in judgement of manners could mean social death, and so Chesterfield’s advice, ranging from the philosophical to the exasperated, attempted to imply the shame of this failure in a variety of ways. That these men made use of linguistic craft and the emerging literary forms of the eighteenth century, in particular the periodical, is not merely evidence of language’s generalized ability to exert force on those who encounter its fracturing multiplicity of meaning, but also demonstrates the peculiar susceptibility of masculine self-understanding at this historical moment to affective suggestion.

Polite culture was a community with unstable but developing norms, but rising emphasis on individualism complicated its coherence as a recognizable group. Addison and Steele’s character Mr Spectator writes eloquently and passes judgement on social practice, but as the fop episode discussed above demonstrates, neither he nor his friends always behave with decorum or restraint. Rather it is style, specifically Addison’s and Steele’s writing styles, that provides the paradigm for the polite self, further highlighting that polite masculinity is a discursive, even literary, construction. It is unsurprising, then, that these texts make use of shame to provide stability through evocative and emotive descriptions of transgressions, the fop being the most obvious. This shaming betrays the anxieties of its authors, however, with the threat of the fop’s appealing performativity undermining their work to use him as a figure of shame. Chesterfield’s rehabilitation of foppishness to some extent in his letters to his son, where attractive dress, manners and deportment become a key political tool, seems to confirm these fears. An emotional community based on writing is ultimately too likely to be reshaped by rhetorical and literary style.

Notes

1. 1.  Peter N. Stearns, Shame: A Brief History (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017), p. 13.

2. 2.  Stearns, Shame, p. 63.

3. 3.  Stearns, Shame, p. 71.

4. 4.  Stearns, Shame, p. 71.

5. 5.  Stearns, Shame, p. 18.

6. 6.  Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989); Michael Warner, ‘The Mass Public and the Mass Subject’, in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 377–401.

7. 7.  This is demonstrated by the increase of ‘textbooks’ summarizing and laying out the past, present and future of the field, for example Jan Plamper’s The History of Emotions: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), Barbara Rosenwein and Riccardo Cristiani’s What Is the History of Emotions? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017) and Rob Boddice’s The History of Emotions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018).

8. 8.  In particular, Tiffany Watt Smith’s work on schadenfreude argues for specific historical and cultural origins for this emotion. See Watt Smith, Schadenfreude: The Joy of Another’s Misfortune (London: Profile, 2018).

9. 9.  William Reddy’s The Navigation of Feeling (2001) is one of the earlier books to devote considerable space to the ways in which these two disciplines conceive of emotion and how this might inform a historical case study, in Reddy’s case late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France. Reddy makes the case for how anthropology’s efforts to decentre its Western universalism have demonstrated how differently emotions can be expressed and valued in different cultures.

10. 10.  See Boddice, History of Emotions (passim), for a useful example of how these new areas of research are influencing emotions history.

11. 11.  Ruth Leys, ‘The Turn to Affect: A Critique’, Critical Inquiry, 37, 3 (spring 2011), 434–72.

12. 12.  Leys, ‘The Turn to Affect’, p. 472.

13. 13.  Boddice, History of Emotions, p. 112.

14. 14.  See Boddice, History of Emotions, pp. 111–20. Ekman has successfully packaged affect theory’s insights reductively enough to sell products such as the ‘Facial Action Coding System’, a way of reading emotions through combinations of facial movements: www.paulekman.com/facial-action-coding-system (accessed 23 February 2023).

15. 15.  Sedgwick begins to draw on Tomkins in earnest after her co-editing of Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (edited with Adam Frank; Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). Her subsequent works foreground or demonstrate the influence of Tomkins: A Dialogue on Love (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1999), Touching Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003) and The Weather in Proust (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

16. 16.  Silvan Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank (eds.) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 121.

17. 17.  Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters, p. 68.

18. 18.  Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, (eds.), The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 1.

19. 19.  Summarized by Boddice, History of Emotions, p. 183.

20. 20.  Boddice, History of Emotions, p. 131.

21. 21.  Joanne Begiato, ‘Between Poise and Power: Embodied Manliness in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Culture’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6, 26 (2016), 125–47.

22. 22.  Begiato, ‘Tears and the Manly Sailor in England, 1760–1860’, Journal for Maritime Research, 17, 2 (2015), 117–33.

23. 23.  Katie Barclay, Men on Trial: Performing Emotion, Embodiment and Identity in Ireland 1800–1845 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), p. 3.

24. 24.  Barclay, Men on Trial, p. 94.

25. 25.  Barclay, Men on Trial, p. 113.

26. 26.  Karen Harvey, ‘Men of Parts: Masculine Embodiment and the Male Leg in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of British Studies, 54 (October 2015), 797–821.

27. 27.  Harvey, ‘Craftsmen in Common: Objects, Skills and Masculinity in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, in Hannah Greig, Jane Hamlett and Leonie Hannan (eds.), Gender and Material Culture in Britain since 1600 (London: Palgrave, 2016), p. 83.

28. 28.  Begiato, ‘Between Poise and Power’, p. 130.

29. 29.  I am defining this emerging community by following Barbara Rosenwein’s definition of an emotional community, namely as ‘groups – usually but not always social groups – that have their own particular values, modes of feeling, and ways to express those feelings … They … share important norms concerning the emotions that they value and deplore and the modes of expressing them’. See Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 3.

30. 30.  Lawrence Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 3.

31. 31.  Shaftesbury, The Moralists, in Lawrence E. Klein (ed.), Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 328.

32. 32.  Shaftesbury, The Moralists, p. 334.

33. 33.  Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling, p. 9.

34. 34.  Of course, many emotional communities in various periods of European history have asked their members to do this. It is no coincidence, however, that it is the so-called ‘Enlightenment’ that produces a moral philosophy like that of the Scottish Enlightenment type, summed up by Smith’s concept of the impartial spectator: a ‘man within’ who plays the role of societal expectation, fully amalgamated into the sensing, thinking and feeling body. See Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Ryan Patrick Hanley (ed.) (London: Penguin Classics, 2009), p. 159.

35. 35.  J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 236.

36. 36.  Boddice, The History of Emotions, p. 195.

37. 37.  Richard Steele, The Spectator, no. 151, II, ed. Donald Bond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 94.

38. 38.  Steele, The Spectator, no. 151, II, p. 94.

39. 39.  Reddy defines an emotional regime as ‘a normative order for emotions’ which can be general to a society or political state or specific to certain institutions, such as ‘armies, schools, priesthoods’. The key defining factor here seems to be that emotional regimes are inherently power-orientated, regulatory and perhaps hierarchical. See Reddy, Navigation of Feeling, pp. 124–5.

40. 40.  See Thomas A. King, ‘Gender and Modernity: Male Looks and the Performance of Public Pleasures’. in Laura J. Rosenthal and Mita Choudhury (eds.), Monstrous Dreams of Reason: Body, Self, and Other in the Enlightenment (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002), pp. 25–44.

41. 41.  Philip Carter, ‘An “Effeminate” or “Efficient” Nation? Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Social Documentary’, Textual Practice, 11, 3 (1997), 433.

42. 42.  See Matthew McCormack, The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in Georgian England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).

43. 43.  Addison, The Spectator, no. 275, II, p. 571.

44. 44.  Addison, The Spectator, p. 571.

45. 45.  Addison, The Spectator, p. 572.

46. 46.  Addison, The Spectator, pp. 572–3.

47. 47.  Warner, ‘The Mass Public and the Mass Subject’, p. 377.

48. 48.  Lord Chesterfield, Lord Chesterfield’s Letters, David Roberts (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), p. 63.

49. 49.  Lord Chesterfield, Lord Chesterfield’s Letters, p. 99.

50. 50.  Lord Chesterfield, Lord Chesterfield’s Letters, p. 185.

51. 51.  Lord Chesterfield, Lord Chesterfield’s Letters, p. 159.

52. 52.  Lord Chesterfield, Lord Chesterfield’s Letters, p. 155, emphasis original.

53. 53.  Lord Chesterfield, Lord Chesterfield’s Letters, p. 154.

54. 54.  Ann C. Dean, ‘Authorship, Print, and Public in Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son’, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 45, 3 (2005), 694.

55. 55.  Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters, p. 121.

56. 56.  For example, Smith discusses shame and remorse as the consequence of social transgression in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, pp. 100–102.

57. 57.  Lord Chesterfield, Lord Chesterfield’s Letters, p. 91.

58. 58.  See Tim Hitchcock and Michele Cohen (eds.), English Masculinities 1660–1800 (Harlow: Longman, 1999).

59. 59.  See Manushag N. Powell, ‘ “See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil”: Spectation and the Eighteenth-Century Public Sphere’, Eighteenth Century Studies, 45, 2 (2012), 255–77.

60. 60.  There is perhaps too much emphasis in modern criticism on the Enlightenment’s supposed obsession with the visual and ocular as a rational tool for evaluating the external world, but it is undeniable that many theorists and commentators of the time did make frequent use of the visual, from Addison’s discussion of the imagination in The Spectator (p. 144) to Smith’s society of surveillance in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. A useful discussion of ocular culture in the eighteenth century is still Peter de Bolla’s The Education of the Eye, but more recent work by historians like William Tullett in emphasizing the other senses has helped to improve our understanding of the eighteenth-century sensorium. See William Tullett, Smell in Eighteenth-Century England: A Social Sense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

61. 61.  Lord Chesterfield, Lord Chesterfield’s Letters, p. 128.

62. 62.  Lord Chesterfield, Lord Chesterfield’s Letters, p. 158.

63. 63.  Lord Chesterfield, Lord Chesterfield’s Letters, p. 217.

64. 64.  See Carter, ‘An “Effeminate” or “Efficient” Nation?’, pp. 429–43.

65. 65.  Ann C. Dean, ‘Authorship, Print, and Public in Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son’, p. 696.

References

• Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. by Donald Bond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965).
• Katie Barclay, Men on Trial: Performing Emotion, Embodiment and Identity in Ireland 1800–1845 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018).
• Joanne Begiato, ‘Tears and the Manly Sailor in England, 1760–1860’, Journal for Maritime Research, 17, 2 (2015), 117–33.
• ________, ‘Between Poise and Power: Embodied Manliness in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century British Culture’. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6, 26 (2016), 125–47.
• Rob Boddice, The History of Emotions (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018).
• Philip Carter, ‘An “Effeminate” or “Efficient” Nation? Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Social Documentary’, Textual Practice, 11, 3 (1997), 429–43.
• ________, ‘Men about Town: Representations of Foppery and Masculinity in Early Eighteenth-Century Urban Society’, in Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (eds.), Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities (Harlow: Longman, 1997), pp. 31–57.
• Lord Chesterfield, Lord Chesterfield’s Letters, ed. by David Roberts (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2008).
• Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. by Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
• Ann C. Dean, ‘Authorship, Print, and Public in Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son’, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 45, 3 (2005), 691–706.
• Peter De Bolla, The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).
• Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
• Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989).
• Karen Harvey, ‘Men of Parts: Masculine Embodiment and the Male Leg in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of British Studies, 54 (October 2015), 797–821.
• ________, ‘Craftsmen in Common: Objects, Skills and Masculinity in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, in Hannah Greig, Jane Hamlett and Leonie Hannan (eds.), Gender and Material Culture in Britain since 1600 (London: Palgrave, 2016), p. 83.
• Tim Hitchcock and Michele Cohen, eds., English Masculinities 1660–1800 (Harlow: Longman, 1999).
• Thomas A. King, ‘Gender and Modernity: Male Looks and the Performance of Public Pleasures’. in Laura J. Rosenthal and Mita Choudhury (eds.), Monstrous Dreams of Reason: Body, Self, and Other in the Enlightenment (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002), pp. 25–44.
• Lawrence Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
• Ruth Leys, ‘The Turn to Affect: A Critique’, Critical Inquiry, 37, 3 (2011), 434–72.
• Matthew McCormack, The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in Georgian England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).
• Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
• J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
• Manushag N. Powell, ‘ “See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil”: Spectation and the Eighteenth-Century Public Sphere’, Eighteenth Century Studies, 45, 2 (2012), 255–77.
• William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
• Barbara Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
• Barbara Rosenwein and Riccardo Cristiani, What Is the History of the Emotions? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017).
• Eve Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1999).
• ________, Touching Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
• ________, The Weather in Proust (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
• Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. by Ryan Patrick Hanley (London: Penguin Classics, 2009).
• Peter N. Stearns, Shame: A Brief History (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017).
• Silvan Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, ed. by Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).
• William Tullett, Smell in Eighteenth-Century England: A Social Sense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
• Michael Warner, ‘The Mass Public and the Mass Subject’, in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 377–401.
• Tiffany Watt Smith, Schadenfreude: The Joy of Another’s Misfortune (London: Profile, 2018).