Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution (review)

Nicole Eustace's Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution offers fresh insight into colonial Pennsylvania society and will likely influence future interpretations of early American studies. Eustace uses emotion—or, as the title states, "passion"—as her frame of analysis. Eustace does not claim to uncover individual experiences of emotional feeling. Instead, she traces the meaning of emotional expressions through language and displays intended to reify a hierarchical social order. Nevertheless, emotions became hotly contested in colonial Pennsylvania, a colony of great social and economic mobility.

Eustace emphasizes the tension between self and society and demonstrates how expressions of emotion captured a contest between those who embraced communal values and those who supported more individualistic ones. She dubs the mid-eighteenth century the "era of the passion question" (21) and casts the period as a transition from "communal visions of the self" to "modern individualized notions of the self as autonomous and independent" (12). She concludes that the American Revolution ushered in an era that emphasized the universality of emotional feeling, which symbolized the rise of individualism. "Emotion," she writes, "contributed as much as reason to the structure of eighteenth-century British-American power and politics" (3).

Eustace begins her study with a chapter on Alexander Pope's poem Essay on Man. Pope's poem had a particularly wide readership in colonial Pennsylvania, perhaps more so than anywhere else in the Atlantic World. Pope's Essay was imported, reprinted in the colony, and portions also appeared in almanacs and newspapers. So widespread was the poem that Eustace finds lines from it popping up in commonplace books and letters without any attribution. The poem may have been popular, but it was not without controversy and criticism. As Eustace demonstrates, Pope's attempt to "reconcile civic virtue and personal passion" exposed the conflict between self and society. Where those who embraced Pope's creed believed that embracing passions—or "self-love"—could lead to "social good," critics, often Quakers, countered that "selfish passions could fatally undermine communal bonds" (24).

Eustace then explores the contestation of emotion in public and private settings in chapters focusing on a specific set of passions. She demonstrates clearly that public expressions and performances of emotion carried significant social weight and that people used contests over expressions of emotion to negotiate the boundaries of legitimate authority and status. Higher ranked members of Pennsylvania society tried to demonstrate refinement and control over their emotions. For example, individual elites expressed resentment rather than anger. The elite believed that the lower sorts, on the other hand, lacked the same social refinement and were thus thought to be prone to show extremes of passion. But when the lower orders showed emotional control, elites viewed their behavior as submissive.

Cheerfulness provides an example of how uses of emotions maintained social control. "Cheerfulness" Eustace shows, "signaled contentment with one's rank" (68). Thus, political officials deployed the language of cheerfulness to describe how subordinates should work, turning demands for their labor into "benevolent dictates of . . . superiors whose task it was to protect the common interest" (68). The construction of such an idea "helped to soften the sharp edges of hierarchy even as it strengthened them" (69).

The use of emotions to establish relations of power also played into cross-cultural interactions and conceptions of racial others. The language of love, for instance, often dominated treaties between Indians and Pennsylvanians, but, as Eustace points out, "the veil of love" often elided "the ensuing naked struggle for power" (141). Many whites believed that African-Americans did not have the potential for refined emotions that whites possessed, which essentially dehumanized African-Americans and thus justified their enslavement.

But because emotions were so central to reaffirming social order and establishing relations of power, they could...