The Pendulum of Passion and the Linguistic Turn

Passion in the Gale is a tale of the struggle in 18th century colonial America between individual freedom, as viewed through the exercise of and attitudes toward emotional expression; and the practice of emotional control as an element of social structures of class, power, and governance. Eustace identifies the Pennsylvania colony of the mid 1700's as a particularly poignette vignette to examine this transformation and leveraged a rich collection of written sources, including letters, diaries, books, business correspondence, newspapers and government council minutes.

I found Eustace's approach to this emotional history to have strong characteristics of the linguistic turn examining the role of language and expression in the written form to demonstrate the colonies emotive evolution, "From tying passion to servility and feeling to gentility...to connecting feeling to civility and passion to virility ...through at last to defining all emotion as the basic attribute of humanity...Pennsylvanians had undergone an utter transformation in their attitudes."  

As Eustace explains, in summarizing the perspective of fellow Historian William Reddy, "To study emotional expression, then, is necessarily to investigate power relations."  An aspect of Eustace's approach that I found quite interesting is that the role and interpretation of emotion in society is both enduring (think long duree), and immediate.  As she puts it, "On the one hand we are able to analyze eighteenth-century emotion today only because of the existence of a shared physiology of feeling that stretches over the centuries.  On the other hand, we cannot simply assume that eighteenth-century emotional expression can now be understood transparently and without emotion."

The book concludes with a great discussion of the influence and impact of Thomas Paine's Common Sense, which, "cast passions and feelings alike as the common trait of all people, the basis of natural equality."  loyalist writers like James Chalmers would attempt to, "discredit Paine's progressive politics as being too 
base for serious engagement."

We all know how the story ends, but reflective of both the immediate and enduring shifts in emotional expression over the long course of history, the passions of revolution would moderate.  As Eustace concludes, "Still neither Common Sense nor the Declaration itself could bring an end to a distinctively American dilemma...As a people, we have never agreed how best to sit astride that awkward balance between personal advancement and community enhancement, between the pursuit of selfish passion and the promotion of social feeling."