Chapter I By Way of Introduction. A Sociology of Emotions through Literature (original) (raw)

2019, Emotions though literature. Fictional narrativ, society and the emotional self

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 an 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 contrasted 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 hereditary and is given the ancillary role of a 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 even in some sociological treatment of emotions (see infra, Chapter II). This should not surprise, for at least two reason: the first, is the power of Darwin's argument, which destabilised the long-held idea of a peculiar position of man in the universe, producing a paradigmatic change by 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 thirty years after Charles Darwin had issued his book on the expression of feeling, Charles Horton