The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (review)

This is an exceedingly ambitious, complex, rewarding, and frustrating book. It has two basic parts. In the first, Reddy provides a masterful overview of psychological, anthropological, and poststructural views on emotion. It is a superlative introduction to a rich literature, but Reddy intends more. What he undertakes is a reconciliation of the psychological and cultural approaches, around a phenomenon that he ultimately terms emotives, which combine beliefs about emotions and their appropriate roles intertwined with display or concealment of emotions as expression.

In the book's second part, Reddy sketches a broad history of two emotional regimes in France—the first in the eighteenth century, ultimately terminated by the excesses of the revolution, and the second characteristic of the nineteenth century. In the first regime, sentimentality held sway, dominated by assumptions that the whole self could be emotionally expressed and guided, even in the political domain. This view helped to prompt the revolution but also led to its undoing. In its stead, a more segmented type of emotional management developed, characteristic of bourgeois liberalism. Reddy persuasively argues that this new regime cannot be captured by such typical divisions as male-female or public-private. But it was characterized by an insistence on emotional flexibility and, in public, the subordination of emotion to reason. Reddy also sees the separation of art, as a safe sphere for emotional expression, as a key to this formulation. The system functioned well, providing a basic stability to French legal structures, but at cost of considerable emotional suffering and, of course, periodic political conflicts.

It is easy to offer objections. In Part II, particularly the initial chapters, emotion is treated as part of intellectual history, of formal ideas about emotion and reason (spiced by a few more penetrating quotations). It is not easy to see how this treatment links up to the richer panoply of emotions discussed in Part I. Aside from a few references to love, specific emotions are conspicuous by their absence. From a more purely historical standpoint, the nineteenth-century regime is described in so much greater detail than the eighteenth that pinpointing the change becomes difficult. Notably, Reddy offers a highly original interpretation of court cases presented in the Gazette des Tribunaux (and attendant records), dealing with property and family litigation, rating them according to their emotional or dryness quotient. On the whole, the emotional incidence corresponds to his liberal schema. But without comparable cases for the eighteenth century, the nature and extent of change remain unknown. There is also, inevitably, the question of social class. Reddy is writing mainly about upper-class intellectual and political formulations, but he occasionally delves elsewhere, without any sense of representativeness beyond his apparent assumption that, in each period, emotional regimes became socially uniform.

The opportunity to use history to add to the analysis of emotion is valid. The attempt to discuss the relationship between emotional systems and political development is valid as well, though it is immensely complicated. I worry about attributing too much French revolutionary causation to a particular emotional regime, until the emotional bases of other revolutionary outbursts elsewhere can be compared with it. Simply in its nuanced statement of the nineteenth-century system, however, this book is immensely valuable. The real question is, Can the approach be replicated to provide a fuller sense of the historical utility of the emotives concept and some additional case studies about emotional- political-legal links? I'm not sure of the answer.