The Power of Feelings

Two new books from quite different positions take up the questions of the importance of emotions, selfhood, personality, and the body to the study of American literature. However distinctly they each raise these questions, together the books signal the emergence of a new development in textual appraisal that places affective response at the forefront of analysis.

In her study of Reconstruction-era American literary production, Affecting Fictions, Jane Thrailkill examines the emotion work of culture. A lively and valuable study whose ambitious intelligence bounces off every inexhaustible page, Affecting Fictions takes as its central premise the importance of emotions—or, more properly, emotional response—to reading literature. Thrailkill’s central dispute is with the New Critics and their theory of the “affective fallacy,” which influentially put forth the view that emotional response was, and should be, a secondary concern in literary criticism (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1954). Thrailkill restores the importance of the question of affective responses to literary study. In chapters that treat works both famous (Chopin’s The Awakening, Crane’s Red Badge of Courage, James’s Wings of the Dove) and largely unknown (Oliver Wendell Holmes’s Elsie Venner and A Moral Antipathy), Thrailkill makes the insistent case that literature not only actively engages us on a corporeal level, but also that both literary production and reading practice during the Reconstruction period and after understood this to be true.

Thrailkill joins the ranks of such current thinkers as E. O. Wilson who strive to unite the humanities and the sciences. She positions her work at the intersection of the neurosciences, literary and cultural studies, and the history and philosophy of aesthetics, embodied for her by the thought of pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. Thrailkill joins the feminist rediscovery of neglected nineteenth-century texts—which led to “an explosion of scholarship on affect and theories of emotional experience”—to a neuroscientific approach that allows her to make a case for the “centrality of feeling to cognition” (27). Drawing on Wai Chee Dimock and Priscilla Wald’s call for an active cross-fertilizing of the humanities and the sciences (Dimock and Wald 2002), Thrailkill writes that her book “engages with scientific work, not only through analyzing its rhetorical and ideological force but also by taking seriously its range of ideas, models, and practices pertinent to the biological human body” (6–7).

To give an example of Thrailkill’s approach, her chapter on Holmes’s A Moral Antipathy “draws on contemporary theories about the human nervous system, reflex physiology, and the body’s susceptibility to shock, as [Holmes] negotiates the compromising diagnostic categories of insanity, effeminacy, and hysteria” (86). In an intriguing discussion, Thrailkill explores the connections between the Reconstruction medical condition known as “railway spine” and Holmes’s fiction. Holmes, for Thrailkill, prefigures Freudian trauma theory in his conception of “unconscious embodied memory.” The “physiology of affect that emerged in the 1880s” rescued masculinity from effeminizing associations with hysteria, but “it also elevated the testimony of the body, posing a challenge to traditional conceptions of willpower and rationality on which masculine character had been built” (86). Thrailkill proceeds to present a sympathetic portrait of Holmes as an innovative thinker who, in his dual capacities as novelist and physician, “imagined that works of literature might effectively realize” the kinds of “corporeal collaborations” that made the “caregiver a collaborator with the body’s intelligence and healing processes” (89).

One of the most suggestive of Thrailkill’s formulations in Affecting Fictions is her concept of a “forensic self.” “The act of calibrating a person’s story with the testimony of his body, modeled here by the physician,” she writes, “is essential for a forensics of self; first, it establishes the centrality of formal debate or argumentation, not only between the individual’s conscious and unconscious memory; and second, it installs the use of science and technology as essential for the elaboration...