Eustace - Passion and Reason

After doing some minimal research on “Emotional History” and reading the jacket cover of this week’s book, I wasn’t sure what to expect regarding Eustace’s book, Passion is the Gale, but I ended up really enjoying it.  While not as exciting or “fun” as Scandal at Bizarre or Malintzin’s Choices, I thought Eustace’s book was very readable and engaging, and as one of the reviewers on the back cover said, I will never read history again without considering the expression of emotions and their social/political implications.  I always considered 18^th century speech and narratives to be very “flowery” but I never considered the deeper social meanings and implications, which Eustace illuminates quite nicely.

I particularly enjoyed her discussion of the relationship between passion and reason through expressions of love and anger.  Prior to Pope’s An Essay on Man, there existed a binary relationship between passion and reason; an upper-class elite person demonstrated their status by mastering and controlling their emotions while the lower-class rabble showed their lack of status by having less control (or no control) of their emotions.  Pope obliterated this binary opposition by stating that passion and reason were complementary and mutually compatible, even mutually beneficial (p. 54).  Pope argued that people could be swayed by passion into virtuous actions (p.53) and that “….reason acted to transform passion, giving it a useful edge.” (p. 55)

Eustace describes the careful balance particularly the upper-class had to negotiate when showing emotion, but at the same time demonstrating that they were the master of their emotions and not ruled by those passions. I thought the change of public opinion regarding the emotion of anger was a good example of this.  Eustace describes that initially showing any outward or public expression of anger was considered a lack of personal control (predominantly for the upper-class) and expressing anger was even linked to criminal behavior (p. 159).  However, as the controlled expression of emotions became socially accepted, elites permitted themselves to express anger because they (being the upper-class elite) were able to temper their anger with reason – implying that they could control their passions and hence it was safe and acceptable to expression their emotions while the lower-classes did not have the benefit of tempering their emotions with reason and their expressions of anger were described as “unbridled” and uncontrolled (p.159-160).  Later, anger even became an acceptable and “manly” virtue and a sign of masculinity particularly during times of war or personal/cultural defense (p. 180).

And not to go off topic too much, but the timing is too perfect to pass up.  I just finished reading a book for my final paper about Cleopatra which was published in 1757 and it is one long rant of the dangers and consequences of unbridled passions.  It is filled with diatribes describing Cleopatra as selfish, completely out of control, amoral, and setting no boundaries to her passions – and the “fatal catastrophe” of consequences due to her behavior.  The author, Sarah Fielding, does not mention Pope or the transatlantic debate about passion and reason in her introduction, but I believe her book is a commentary on and a response to this transatlantic debate and she is clearly on “Team Reason” and not on Pope’s “Team Passion.”