Status Updates From The History of Emotions: A ...

Emotions were vehicles of social and psychological meanings made possible only through particular modes of life and thought. As those modes of life and thought changed, the emotions experienced and expressed by people changed.

He (fabvre) was the first historian to see clearly how emotional experiences in the past were complex entities that could only come into existence through the particular social, linguistic, and mental systems that prevailed in a particular period.

Emotions can seem as if they are nowhere to be laid hands on, even when they have left their traces in documents, treasured objects, or physical spaces.

Whether we turn our ears to the cries of the oppressed or to the rallying calls of fired-up visionaries, we hear not just the tales of events long past, but the echoes of ancestral emotions. The beat of history is kept by the pulse of the human heart.

‘Linen bed sheet, embroidered by Anna Maria, Duchess of Derwentwater’ whose husband was executed for his part in the Jacobite rising of 1715. ‘Microscopic analysis revealed that it was sewn not in thread but in two different types of human hair, Anna Maria’s own locks intertwined with the gold hair of her recently deceased husband.’ Her emotions sewn into history - genuinely moving.

Unfeeling as a form of resistance!! ‘Supposed Oriental inscrutability’ as ‘an act of affective disobedience to an abusive emotional regime’, withholding, emotional unavailability. Sui Sin Par: ‘I have come from a race which is said to be the most insensible to feeling of all races, yet I look back and see myself as keenly alive to every shade of sorrow and suffering that it is almost a pain to live.’

‘Lucien Febvre urged, in 1941, his fellow historians to ‘plunge into the darkness where psychology wrestled with history’ - la sensibilité et la vie affective. ‘He wanted historians to create histories of love and joy, of fear, hatred and cruelty’ - all the sentimental and affective dimensions. [this handbook is going to help my diss so much - W uncle].

At the end of this book, I’ve come across a quotation apparently from a Marx’s essay I’ve never heard before:

“The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living”.

It has immediately reminded me of another one:

“History is a nightmare I am trying to awake”.

I now wonder did Joyce read Marx…

The history of emotions all around!

In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft described smiling as one of the characteristics of the submissive and servile ideal of womanhood that dominated her culture. She argued that women shouldn’t be duped by anidealization of a feminised figure of ‘gentleness’ which in reality was a poor and submissive creature ‘smiling under the lash at which it dare not snarl’.