D O I N G E M O T I Edited by O N S SUSAN J. MATT and PETER N. STEARNS H I S T O R Y DOING EMOTIONS HISTORY HISTORY OF EMOTIONS Editors Susan J. Matt Peter N. Stearns D O I N G E M O T I O N S H I S T O R Y Edited by SUSAN J. MATT and PETER N. STEARNS UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield © 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 c p 5 4 3 2 1 ∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Doing emotions history / edited by Susan J. Matt and Peter N. Stearns. pages cm. — (The history of emotions) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-252-03805-1 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-252-07955-9 (paper) ISBN 978-0-252-09532-0 (ebook) 1. Emotions—Sociological aspects. 2. Emotions—Social aspects—History. 3. Ethnopsychology. I. Matt, Susan J. (Susan Jipson), 1967– II. Stearns, Peter N. HM1033.D65 2014 152.4—dc23 2013024439 CONTENTS Introduction 1 Susan J. Matt and Peter N. Stearns PART I: BASIC ISSUES: ASSESSING CHANGE Chapter 1. Modern Patterns in Emotions History 17 Peter N. Stearns Chapter 2. Recovering the Invisible: Methods for the Historical Study of the Emotions 41 Susan J. Matt PART II: REGIONAL ANALYSIS Chapter 3. The Skein of Chinese Emotions History 57 Norman Kutcher Chapter 4. Emotions History in Eastern Europe 74 Mark D. Steinberg PART III: PROBING SPECIFIC EMOTIONS Chapter 5. Finding Joy in the History of Emotions 103 Darrin M. McMahon Chapter 6. Advertising for Love: Matrimonial Advertisements and Public Courtship 120 Pamela Epstein PART IV: EMOTIONS IN SOCIETY Chapter 7. Religion and Emotions 143 John Corrigan Chapter 8. Emotion and Political Change 163 Nicole Eustace Chapter 9. Media, Messages, and Emotions 184 Brenton J. Malin Afterword 205 Susan J. Matt and Peter N. Stearns Contributors 209 Index 211 INTRODUCTION SUSAN J. MATT AND PETER N. STEARNS Why did early modern Europeans believe the world to be a vale of tears? In con- trast, how and when did Americans come to be so cheerful? Why did homicidal husbands in the eighteenth century kill their wives out of anger, while husbands in the nineteenth were more likely to claim they murdered out of jealousy? How did Americans learn to manage their anger to increase productivity and profits?1 These questions, and others like them, are topics that historians of the emotions have been raising for the last several decades. While concerned with the most personal of subjects—human feelings—their investigations have demonstrated that emotions have larger social and political implications and can shape public realities. Rather than examining merely the external behaviors of individuals—the traditional subject of history—scholars of the emotions explore the anger, the envy, the love, and the greed that prompted such behaviors. They strive to know how history felt to those who lived through it.2 This represents a fundamentally new direction in history, for as one scholar of the emotions has noted, “history began as the servant of political developments. Despite a generation’s worth of social and cultural history, the discipline has never quite lost its attraction to hard, rational things. Emotions have seemed tangential (if not fundamen- tally opposed) to the historical enterprise.”3 That the history of emotions has overcome such traditions and prejudices and become a flourishing and rapidly SUSAN J. MATT AND PETER N. STEARNS expanding field shows just how worthwhile an approach it has proved to be. By studying feelings, historians are uncovering the worldviews and the most fundamental assumptions about life, culture, and personality that people in the past carried in their heads. These investigations have shifted the discourse of history—away from the construct of the rational actor, whose behavior supposedly reflected only cal- culating self-interest. Self-interest was always a catch phrase, always vaguely defined, but was presumed to be a mental category devoid of “irrational,” emo- tional content.4 In questioning such concepts, and bringing emotions back into the story, historians have enriched what were fairly impoverished explanations of human motivation and offered more nuanced discussions of why men and women in other eras did what they did. As a result of such labors, they have demonstrated not only that emotions shaped history but that emotions them- selves have a history. This idea—that emotions have a history—was once controversial. It has been gaining ground over the last several decades, as historians, anthropolo- gists, sociologists, psychologists, and at least some cognitive scientists have come to recognize the role that culture has in shaping feeling. Few in these disciplines would argue that emotions are constant across space and time. In- stead, there is an emerging consensus that emotions have both biological and cultural components and that societies influence the expression, repression, and meaning of feelings by giving them names and assigning values to some and not others. For instance, marital love, which many once regarded as a fairly constant emotion in human history, actually shows great variability in different contexts. Some classicists contend that in ancient Greece, there was no roman- tic jealousy between partners, for the ideal of a love-based marriage did not yet exist. Love, however, could be found in friendships. The ideal of romantic, love-based marriages emerged haltingly, evident in some places in the Western world by the seventeenth century, spreading rapidly in the eighteenth, and be- coming deeply rooted in the nineteenth. So for instance, while many colonial New England couples loved each other, they tried not to do so excessively, lest they put earthly joys ahead of their love of God. Nineteenth-century Americans shed such worries and came to idealize the love-based marriage, seeing it as an instantiation of the sacred. Twentieth-century Americans celebrated it as well, but discovered gaps between the ideal of romantic love and the often more prosaic forms of actual relationships. In fact, love became such a powerful ideal that it supplanted all other rationales for marriage; its absence in a marriage justified the dissolution of the partnership, leading one historian to conclude that in the late twentieth century, love had essentially killed marriage.5 2 Introduction Scholars have come to recognize that such transformations in emotional standards shape not only family relationships but also work life, class relations and identity, religious devotion, and political expression. As the significance of the field has become apparent, interest in it has grown, so much so that in 2010, a scholar announced that the field of history had taken an “emotional turn.”6 Once a small subfield, the history of the emotions is suddenly quite popular. From studies of the emotions in ancient Rome to explorations of sentiment in modern China, feelings seem to be everywhere. Even more significantly, historians of many stripes who did not think of themselves as students of the emotions are nevertheless beginning to incorporate them into their analysis of more traditional topics. As a result, the history of business, politics, science, and religion are being examined from the standpoint of feelings. This volume obviously reflects many of the achievements of this new and important field. But Doing Emotions History ventures beyond a sampling and a celebration. The intent is to focus on some leading issues and opportunities in the field, to spur further discussion, and advance what is already exciting scholarship to even greater heights. ORIGINS Although the field has gained momentum only relatively recently, it is based on almost a century of exploration. Among early scholars to broach the sub- ject were Johan Huizinga, who in his 1919 book, The Waning of the Middle Ages, examined the emotional climate of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and Norbert Elias, whose classic 1939 work, The Civilizing Process, took up the sub- ject of emotional control. The scholar most credited for first launching the field, however, was Lucien Febvre, who, in a series of essays first published in the 1930s and 1940s, called on historians to see human psychology not as universal and constant but as fluid and historically contingent. He told histo- rians that their goal should be “to establish a detailed inventory of the mental equipment of the men of the time.” From there, “by dint of great learning, but also of imagination,” they would be able to “reconstitute the whole physical, intellectual and moral universe of each preceding generation.”7 Febvre was part of the Annales School, which emphasized the longue durée, the slow rhythms of change that altered daily life and social structure. Begin- ning in the 1940s, and continuing to this day, Annales historians, including Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel, Philippe Ariès, and, more recently, Roger Chartier, have studied the history of daily activity, private life, and the mentalités of earlier generations. They pioneered the historical investigation of emotions. 3