The Card, The Gale, and the Linguistic

In Passions of the Gale, Nicole Eustace takes a new approach to studying the events leading up to the American Revolution and the state of mankind. Focusing on emotions/passions as the lens of study seems, initially, paradoxical. How can one begin an intellectual voyage into the fray of passion? Couldn’t reason and emotion be seen as mutually exclusive notions? After reading Eustace, I am convinced this is not the case. Beginning with the first chapter on Alexander Pope, Eustace beautifully sets the stage for a discourse on 18^th century emotions. Even the title of her book is taken from a quote by Pope, “On life’s vast ocean diversely we sail, Reason the card, but passion the gale.” (56) Being a bit skeptical of a discourse on something like emotions/passion (how exactly do you quantify such notions for study, especially when so broad and all encompassing), Eustace focuses on more intricate aspects of emotions such as the power relations tied with emotional expression, 18^th century concepts of virtue and how they are tied to benevolence/stoicism, and finally she details how these all changed in 18^th century Pennsylvania leading up to the American Revolution. She ties such changes to the rising egalitarianism and the individual. As Pope mentions, passion is a virtue in itself for it is an avenue for social good. These concepts, like that of reason/passion, are not mutually exclusive. Such distinctions were revolutionary and highly contentious in implications, especially in relation to social order and harmony. Something such as passion was seen as a direct obstacle to God and the social good, especially in Quaker Pennsylvania.

In the introduction, Eustace begins with invoking the works of Thomas Paine to exemplify this turn and utility of emotions. Emotions are the biggest agents of change in Eustace’s work. In the postlude she continues that notion by dissecting Common Sense and its context. She says that historians all too often discredit the vernacular and style of Paine’s work.  “When Paine claimed that ‘the passions and feelings of mankind’ were granted by nature equally to all and were intended to provide a moral touchstone accessible to all, he argued implicitly for the natural right to political participation.” In an essence “In Paine’s work, the medium was the message” (440) Emotional individualism and self-love, such passions are directly linked to egalitarianism and the fundamental beliefs which allowed for the American Revolution to transpire.

One thing that I find, perhaps, troubling about this work can be found from the very beginning. Eustace states “History can intervene in running debates between contemporary scholars of ‘universalist’ and ‘constructionist’ orientations, who have staked out sharply opposing views on the constancy of human emotional capacities across time and space…a historical approach can eschew such extremes” (11) I am not convinced that she is trying to placate the extremes in her work. Rather, from what I read, she seems to almost wholly accept the universality of emotion and only apply critical analysis to this when it comes to the effects and contexts of its universality. She follows the mentality of William Reddy in that emotion is universal, yet the approach/descriptors vary across time and culture. She claims that the only reason we can study emotional history is that we, ourselves, experience such emotions. (12) I fear that such an understanding, which is still highly plausible, may be poorly founded.

After delving into Gender History for my final paper and Poststructuralism, I must begin to wonder if the emotional dialogue as a means of studying 18^th century emotions becomes flawed when we utilize ourselves as a sort of comparative primary source. Perhaps an anthropologist or psychologist may be better adept to answering such a question. If, as Eustace states, Emotion = Power/Power Relations and is understood by a study of linguistic emotional expression, then language = emotion and thus emotion is nothing more than a concept and idea derived from language. I believe that poststructuralists would surely take such a position in countering Eustace. Perhaps our context and understanding of what love, or hate, or anger, or joy is vastly different from what 18^th century Pennsylvania’s interpreted as such concepts. I imagine that Eustace would most likely agree with this notion, however at what point can we assuredly attest to the universality of emotion? Even deducting the extremes, such as sociopathy, from the equation, how can we be so sure that our language and our culture don’t have a direct constructionist function to emotions? Where is the line drawn? Is there a line? Typically I wouldn’t have brought such a case to light, yet Eustace maintains such universality throughout her work. Even in the discussion of Thomas Paine she infers that Paine’s medium of notions should be interpreted as something like “we all feel and thus can participate, we are all equal”. The philosophical implications vary, but the general message is the same. So I ask, do we all actually feel the same? If not, do Eustace’s arguments still hold water?