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Pain, Anger and Revenge in Early Modern Culture

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Pain, Anger and Revenge in Early Modern Culture GREEN WOUNDS: PAIN, ANGER AND REVENGE IN EARLY MODERN CULTURE Kristine Steenbergh Recent research argues that, in early modern culture, the passions were experienced as bodily phenomena. The emotions were produced by the humours. These four fl uids should not be seen as metaphorical concepts; rather, choler, melancholy, blood and phlegm are material substances that literally travel through the body.1 As a consequence, the emotions in this psychological materialism are physically felt: a passion is a bodily sensation. In the words of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, the passions ‘are drowned in corporeal organs of sense’.2 One sensation that the passions could be experienced as, is the feeling of pain.3 Richard Strier recently argued that this material approach to the emo- tions, which studies the bodily processes associated with the passions in early modern texts, will not render any insights into actual experience. Emotions may be described as physical phenomena in medical texts of the period, but that does not mean that early modern subjects also felt the emotions as such. ‘When an early modern person got angry’, he writes, ‘he or she did not say to her/himself: “Oh dear, my liver is heating up; my choleric humour is being activated, etc.” [. .] Instead, then, as now, people said, “That makes me mad, and I’m going to retaliate, or remember”, or something along those lines’.4 A proper historical phenomenology, in Strier’s view, should not concentrate on the operations of the body, but on the mental processes of anger. Research ought to focus on the reasons that made people angry as well as on the decisions that result from the passion: ‘To make a phenom- enology historical, one needs to reconstruct the kinds of things that 1 See Paster G.K., Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: 2004). 2 Burton R, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford, John Lichfi eld: 1621) fol. H8v. 3 Babb L., The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580 to 1642 (East Lansing: 1951) 13. 4 Strier R. – Mazzio C., “Two Responses to ‘Shakespeare and Embodiment: An E-Conversation’ ”, Literature Compass 3,1 (2005) 17. 166 kristine steenbergh made persons at some time react (anger, in both men and women, to continue the instance, was often tied to ideas about honor)’.5 In Strier’s view, a history of ideas would bring us closer to past experiences of anger than a reconstruction of early modern ideas about the bodily operations of passion. This article is not a defence of historical phenomenologies based on bodily experience, simply because they do not need defending.6 Many characters in early modern literature do precisely what Strier denies: they remark on the heat in their liver or the boiling of their blood. Other characters do in turn proclaim that they will remember or retali- ate. The distinction Strier makes between bodily experience and what we could call intentionality (‘I am going to retaliate’) should not lead to an exclusive choice between these two approaches to the experience of the emotions. In fact, I would argue that the distinction is one that was made in the early modern period itself, and it was a distinction that functioned politically. Rather than argue for either approach to the role of anger, it interests me to see how these two perspectives on anger operated in early modern culture, and in which institutional and political circumstances the choice between these two views was made. In what follows, I will explore representations of the role of pain in the anger of the avenger to trace the ways in which this distinction between the bodily experience and the goal-orientedness of anger is used politically in different discourses. As I will argue, the confl icts between these discourses in their outlook on anger centre in part around their understandings of pain. Pain in Aristotelian and Senecan Views of Anger The division that Strier makes between anger as a purely physical expe- rience and as a means unto a goal is inherent in two confl icting views of anger from antiquity current in the early modern period. Whereas 5 Strier – Mazzio, “Two Responses” 16–17. 6 Recent works on the passions from a material perspective include Schoenfeldt M., Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert and Milton (Cambridge: 1999); Paster G.K. – Rowe K. – Floyd-Wilson M. (eds.), Reading the Early Modern Passions (Philadelphia: 2004); Paster G.K., Humoring the Body, and Floyd-Wilson M. – Sullivan G.A. Jr. (eds.), Environment and Embodiment in Early Modern England (Houndmills, Basingstoke: 2007). The introduction to the latter work includes a longer list of recent works on the ‘ecology of the emotions’ in note 5..
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