Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature (review)

Jennifer C. Vaught's monograph is a welcome addition to the study of gender and emotions in Early Modern culture, a field to which she has already contributed with the important co-edited collection Grief and Gender: 700-1700 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature makes a significant addition to the study of affect, feeling, emotions and mood in various disciplines over the last fifteen to twenty years. Vaught's study also contributes to the scholarship on sexed and gendered bodies and spaces in Early Modern culture; gender, like emotion, 'is a sociocultural construct' (p. 12, n. 28). One particularly welcome aspect of Vaught's book is its attention to genre as the site where competing ideas about gender and emotion can be put to the test. Masculinity and Emotion examines prose, poetry and drama in order to map the prehistories of the eighteenth-century 'man of feeling', helping us revise our understanding of this figure and suggesting new ways to investigate his afterlives.

An Introduction sets the scene, simultaneously charting the methodological contexts and intellectual aims of Vaught's study. Stated as generalisations, her propositions may sound rather bland: emotional displays sometimes have positive outcomes and sometimes have negative outcomes for men; different genres privilege different emotional registers for men and women. Her study proposes to dismantle any vestigial binary thinking about emotion, demonstrating that there can be no hard-and-fast rules about the cultural valuation of, for example, reason and emotion and the gendering of those categories. In fact, reason and emotion are perhaps less useful conceptual categories for this study than the distinction between inherited Augustinian and Stoic attitudes to what might be called the 'decorum of demonstrativeness'. Vaught uses the positive valence of moderate emotional expressivity in Aristotelian philosophy and Augustinian theology, and the negative valence of strong feelings in the Stoic philosophers as an initial structuring device for her study. Spenser's 'passionate Protestantism' and Jonson's 'Stoical anger' are the focus for a fascinating analysis of the attitudes of these two scholars to literary authorities, their inter-texts figured as arboreal 'motifs that stand for the literary and cultural matter that has shaped and informed their poetics' (p. 25). This opening section shows how reading masculinity and emotion together can yield new insights into familiar, though unconventionally paired Early Modern texts.

Part II also develops the dialectic relationship of Augustinian and Stoic positions, this time focusing on the politics of emotion in Marlowe's Edward II and Shakespeare's Richard II in an exploration of 'Emotional Kings and their Stoical Usurpers'. This pairing is perhaps more conventional than the choice of texts discussed in Part I, but Vaught's crisp discussion ensures the argument is lively. Part III is a study of 'tearful shepherds' in Pastoral Romances by Sidney (New Arcadia) and Spenser (Book VI of the Faerie Queene). Indeed, Spenser's Faerie Queene and Shakespeare's Richard II and The Winter's Tale are 'pivotal works', examined 'in dialogic relation to those by their contemporaries in order to explore how male figures … express emotions' (p. 17). Part IV concerns texts by Shakespeare, Lanyer, Cary, Donne, Walton and Garrick. The range of examples and the relations between them are skilfully handled and this discussion, like Part I is full of interest and insight.

In effect, Masculinity and Emotion offers a historical formalist investigation of the prehistory of the Sentimental 'man of feeling'. While one might not agree that Mackenzie's novel is the triumphant keynote of this affective register (instead, marking its spluttering extinguishment, as Maureen Harkin has argued) in any case, the literary man of feeling is clearly not an eighteenth-century 'invention'. Vaught makes a strong case for the nuanced valuation of masculine emotional expressiveness (strong or otherwise) in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English culture. She brings the man of feeling up close and personal...