Affect, Perfume, and Early Modern Sensory Boundaries

Part 1: The Circuit of Fear

In late November 1623 when English poet and Anglican priest John Donne was fifty-one, he developed a life-threatening illness. It may have been typhus, or perhaps relapsing fever, which was sweeping London at the time. The sickness confined him first to his room and then to his bed, where he wrestled with his symptoms and the strong possibility that he would not survive. When Donne eventually recovered, he anatomized his experience of mental and physical suffering and his passionate conversations with God in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, a powerful account of his sensory and emotional body poised on the threshold of death. At the nadir of his illness, Donne tells us that he notices the physician's grave concern:

I observe the Phisician, with the same diligence, as hee the disease; I see hee feares, and I feare with him: I overtake him, I overrun him in his feare, and I go the faster, because he makes his pace slow; I feare the more, because he disguises his fear, and I see it with the more sharpnesse, because hee would not have me see it.¹

In this extraordinary passage, we can witness what Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis recently termed the intersubjective nature of affect.² Donne watches and registers his physician's fear; and as he does so, the fear becomes contagious, transmitting itself to the patient as infectiously as contamination or the relapsing fever travels between bodies. Donne's trepidation quickly outstrips its origin; when he thinks the physician conceals his worry, the secrecy augments both the poet's apprehension and the certainty that his increasing dread is founded in the medical observation of his progress. The insistent repetitions of the word fear magnify its presence, scattering it through the text just as it replicates and intensifies in the sickroom. The trajectory of affect is reciprocal; in Donne's account, fear becomes an emotional conversation that articulates and responds in an increasingly urgent fashion. Donne matches each manifestation of fear with a mirroring ("I see hee feares, and I feare with him"), and the escalation is accelerated and intertwined with corresponding fervency.³

Crucially for my argument, no actual words are spoken. Instead, the exchange takes place through sensory traffic that is primarily, although not exclusively, visual. How, we might ask, is fear apprehended and transmitted? How do the senses join with affect to create sensory and emotional conversations that shape social relations? We have observed over the past two decades the emergence of sensory studies as a rich field of exploration, and we now understand the operations of the senses in complexly augmented ways. I explore here an appendix to this influential research: how early modern sensory experience and emotion are coupled on the one hand and, on the other, how this sensory-affective pairing circulates within a social ecology that is at, or just below, the threshold of consciousness. Donne's heightened sensitivity to interactions at the boundary of sensory apprehension tunes his readers to the affective and bodily nuances that mold human and environmental relations. He catalogs here and in the poem I examine next, "The Perfume," how the senses traverse and disrupt somatic autonomy, an interaction that is often hidden from awareness but that continually shapes human experience. I aim here to investigate how sensation and emotion travel together through subliminal social consciousness.

The exchange between Donne and his physician creates an environment, an affective domain that encompasses, lies between, and joins the two men. The Oxford English Dictionary records the first appearance of the word environment in Philemon Holland's 1603 English translation of Plutarch's Moralia.⁴ In the section "Naturall Questions," Holland Englishes a long passage on why the polyp fish, or cephalopod (octopus, squid, cuttlefish), changes color. According to Theophrastus, the polyp fish is a "fearfull and timorous creature by nature." When it is "troubled or amazed," it alters its color, "even as men do." The polyp becomes an allegory of human behavior under the influence of fear; for just as the fish seeks...