Kirsty Martin
In his essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ (1859–60), Charles Baudelaire suggests that to express and appreciate the experience of modernity we should try to imagine the perspective of a child or of someone recovered from an illness, who suddenly sees everything afresh and with new vigour:
Let us go back, if we can, by a retrospective effort of the imagination, towards our most youthful, our earliest, impressions, and we will recognize that they had a strange kinship with those brightly coloured impressions which we were later to receive in the aftermath of a physical illness […] The child sees everything in a state of newness […] Nothing more resembles what we call inspiration than the delight with which a child absorbs form and colour […] genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will. (Baudelaire, 1964, 8–9)
What the child and the convalescent share is a sense of heightened perception and feeling. Baudelaire proceeds to suggest that artistic success is born of ‘curiosity’:
It is by this deep and joyful curiosity that we may explain the fixed and animally ecstatic gaze of a child confronted with something new, whatever it be, whether a face or a landscape, gilding, colours, shimmering stuffs, or the magic of physical beauty assisted by the cosmetic art. A friend of mine once told me that when he was quite a small child, he used to be present when his father dressed in the mornings, and that it was with a mixture of amazement and delight that he used to study the muscles of his arms, the gradual transitions of pink and yellow in his skin, and the bluish network of his veins […] Need I add that today that child is a well-known painter? (Baudelaire, 1964, 8)
Baudelaire imagines modernism and modernity as consisting in a rich attention to newness: a type of responsiveness to everything, ‘whether a face or a landscape, gilding, colours, shimmering stuffs’, and a joy in things that might previously have been missed, ‘the muscles of his arms […] the bluish network of his veins’. Modern art is linked repeatedly to emotional response: ‘delight’, ‘deep and joyful curiosity’ and ‘amazement and delight’. It is defined here by feeling and by the capacity for being moved afresh by the world: it is defined by being able to feel that things are new and being able to respond emotionally to newness.
In recent years, an appreciation of modernism’s central concern with emotion has come ever more to the fore, from Suzanne Clark’s exploration of Sentimental Modernism (1991) to more recent discussions of modernism, affect and emotion by critics including Charles Altieri, Michael Bell, Anthony Cuda, Kirsty Martin, Sophie Ratcliffe and Julie Taylor.1 Such work has sought to overturn previous critical accounts of modernism that, far from seeing it as driven by curiosity and delight, argued that modernist literature defined itself by resisting emotion. Modernism, the argument went, defined itself in opposition to Victorian and Romantic sentimentality, adopting instead a stance of ‘ironic detachment’ (Whitworth, 2007, 14).2
It is possible to find some support for this traditional sense of modernism as privileging irony and coldness, and opposing sentiment.3 There are frequent denunciations of feeling in modernist texts – such as, to give just one example, T. E. Hulme’s attempt to attack and banish sentimentality in his essay ‘Romanticism and Classicism’ (1914). In this essay, Hulme criticizes tendencies to see literary merit as defined by literature’s ability to produce sympathetic feeling:
I object to the sloppiness which doesn’t consider that a poem is a poem unless it is moaning or whining about something or other […] The thing has got so bad now that a poem which is all dry and hard, a properly classical poem, would not be considered poetry at all. How many people now can lay their hands on their hearts and say they like either Horace or Pope? They feel a kind of chill when they read them. (Hulme, 1924, 126)
Hulme attacks the ‘sloppiness’ that defines poetry by emotional expression: ‘moaning or whining’. By contrast, he suggests that poetry in the future will be distinguished by this ‘kind of chill’ – he predicts a future consisting of just this kind of ‘dry, hard, classical verse’ (Hulme, 1924, 133).
The stark contrast between on the one hand a critical tradition suggesting that modernism might be defined by its lack of emotion, supported by statements of the need for ‘cold, hard verse’, and on the other hand the recent proliferation of literature focusing on modernism’s capacity for feeling can partly be explained by thinking about what modernism sought to do with emotion. Baudelaire’s ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ describes viewing everything with curiosity, seeing everything as new and strange. And one of the possible reasons that, until recently, modernism’s interest in emotion tended to be neglected is that modernist writers were attempting to see emotion itself in new ways and were interested in forms of emotion we might struggle to recognize or understand. D. H. Lawrence, in his essay ‘The Novel and the Feelings’ (1925), even specifically disowned the term ‘emotion’:
I say feelings, not emotions. Emotions are things we more or less recognise. We see love, like a woolly lamb, or like a decorative decadent panther in Paris clothes: according as it is sacred or profane. (Lawrence, 1985, 202)
What Lawrence is rejecting with the word ‘emotion’ is something ‘recognizable’ – he is rejecting what we think we know about emotions and rejecting comforting images of emotions: ‘like a woolly lamb’. The term ‘feelings’, Lawrence continues, allows one to discuss emotions which we might know less about, emotions which are written into our bodies in unsettling ways and which might disrupt the stability of our sense of self.
It is this interest in what is less known and recognized about emotion that is central to modernism. Current interest in modernism and emotion has coincided with a revaluing of emotion taking place across philosophy, neuroscience and psychology. In discussing emotion in modernism, there have been attempts to show how modernism might illuminate questions about emotion that continue to be debated today: how close is emotion to thought? Might feeling itself be a type of thinking? How far can we understand emotion as embodied – is empathy, for instance, all due to ‘mirror neurons’?4 Modernism’s determination to show us feeling afresh suggests the possibility of looking again at what emotion might be. In this chapter, I will focus on three key modernist writers – Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot – and consider how their work illuminates some intricate and troubling aspects of emotion.
Virginia Woolf, Sensuousness and Abstraction: The Feeling of Seeing the Sea
In her essay ‘Poetry, Fiction, and the Future’ (1927), Virginia Woolf argued that writers should extend the emotional range of their novels:
For under the dominion of the novel we have scrutinized one part of the mind closely and left another unexplored. We have come to forget that a large and important part of life consists in our emotions towards such things as roses and nightingales, the dawn, the sunset, life, death, and fate; we forget that we spend much time sleeping, dreaming, thinking, reading, alone; we are not entirely occupied in personal relations; all our energies are not absorbed in making our livings. The psychological novelist has been too prone to limit psychology to the psychology of personal intercourse; we long sometimes to escape from the incessant, the remorseless analysis of falling in love or falling out of love, of what Tom feels for Judith and Judith does or does not altogether feel for Tom. (Woolf, 1994b, 435–6)
With this statement Woolf dismisses much of the staple subject matter of Victorian novels, discarding both the marriage plot, ‘the remorseless analysis of falling in love or falling out of love’, and the emphasis on what she calls in ‘Modern Fiction’ (1925) the ‘materialist’ tendency to focus on material and social context, on ‘making our livings’ (Woolf, 1994a, 159). In contrast, she is interested in things we experience by ourselves – in attention not to other people and relationships but to concepts, ‘life, death, and fate’, and to the non-human, ‘the dawn, the sunset’. She argues that what the modern novelist might try to capture is influences that are hard to explain: ‘the power of music, the stimulus of sight, the effect on us of the shape of trees or the play of colour, the emotions bred in us by crowds, the obscure terrors and hatreds which come so irrationally in certain places or from certain people, the delight of movement, the intoxication of wine’ (Woolf, 1994b, 439).
Focusing on such things, Woolf isolates for her attention obscure forms of feeling. Exploring ‘the effect on us of the shape of trees or the play of colour’, she seems interested in how our emotions are prompted and shaped all the time by everyday things, but in ways which might seem hard to understand, by influences which might barely have been noticed before. In previous literature, there had been attempts to think about such forms of response – one might think for instance of Wordsworth’s interest in the pleasure to be derived from the shapes and colours taken of the landscape, from ‘silver wreaths/Of curling mist’ (ll.564–5), to ‘the level plain/Of waters coloured by impending clouds’ (ll.565–6) (Wordsworth, 1979, 61). But what ‘Poetry, Fiction, and the Future’ argues for is a redirection of our attention to such subtle and complex feelings, suggesting that we need to look more closely at these forms of reaction.
How this might work can be thought about by turning to Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse (1927). This is a novel that leaves much out. While the Victorian novel might carefully have described slow changes and developments over time, in this novel swathes of time are passed over. Where in the Victorian novel there might have been pages of mourning and grief at the death of central characters, in this novel key characters (Mrs Ramsay, Prue Ramsay, cherished son Andrew Ramsay) die with only bracketed explanations.5 Instead of focusing on the emotions that previous novels might have considered central, Woolf’s novel redirects its attention.
In particular, it redirects its attention onto subtle responses to things and situations that are difficult to describe. This is evident throughout the novel, but might be illustrated through the descriptions of the interactions of the artist Lily Briscoe and Mr William Bankes. Mrs Ramsay watches these two together and considers them the stuff of a love plot: ‘an admirable idea had flashed upon her this very second – William and Lily should marry’ (Woolf, 2008, 25). But in To the Lighthouse the marriage plot, and the emphasis on ‘falling in love and falling out of love’, is resisted by Lily, who imagines pleading with Mrs Ramsay: ‘she would urge her own exemption from the universal law […] she liked to be alone; she liked to be herself’ (43).
And Woolf’s novel echoes Lily’s protest: instead of focusing on developing Lily and William’s relationship, Woolf lavishes time on other stories and emotions. One form of emotion that receives much attention is the feeling provoked by looking at the sea, the response one has to suddenly seeing expanses of water. Lily Briscoe and William Bankes are impelled by such emotion, as they suddenly decide to walk down to the sea:
‘It suddenly gets cold. The sun seems to give less heat’, she said, looking about her, for it was bright enough, the grass still a soft deep green, the house starred in its greenery with purple passion flowers, and rooks dropping cool cries from the high blue. But something moved, flashed, turned a silver wing in the air. It was September after all, the middle of September, and past six in the evening. So off they strolled down the garden in the usual direction, past the tennis lawn, past the pampas grass, to that break in the thick hedge, guarded by red-hot pokers like brasiers of clear burning coal, between which the blue waters of the bay looked bluer than ever.
They came there regularly every evening drawn by some need. It was as if the water floated off and set sailing thoughts which had grown stagnant on dry land, and gave to their bodies even some sort of physical relief. First, the pulse of colour flooded the bay with blue, and the heart expanded with it and the body swam, only the next instant to be checked and chilled by the prickly blackness on the ruffled waves. Then, up behind the great black rock, almost every evening spurted irregularly, so that one had to watch for it and it was a delight when it came, a fountain of white water; and then, while one waited for that, one watched, on the pale semi-circular beach, wave after wave shedding again and again smoothly a film of mother-of-pearl. (Woolf, 2008, 19–20)
This passage describes, as Woolf puts it in ‘Poetry, Fiction, and the Future’, ‘those influences which play so large a part in life, yet have so far escaped the novelist’ (Woolf, 1994b, 439). Lily is attentive to the play of colour around her, the grass a ‘soft deep green’, ‘the purple passion flowers’. And then her responsiveness to such things becomes deepened as she watches the sea. The sea seems to separate out parts of Lily and William’s cognitive life: ‘set sailing thoughts which had grown stagnant’. Their bodies are aligned with the sea – it itself seems like a heart, with a ‘pulse of colour’, and in turn their hearts ‘expanded with it’. Lily and William seem to travel emotionally across the water, to be given over to it: ‘only the next instant to be checked and chilled by the prickly blackness on the ruffled waves’.
There is an absorbed oddity to this moment in To the Lighthouse. Woolf is suggesting one might be propelled by minute adjustments of feeling of which one is barely conscious. It is not clear why Lily and William feel impelled to move towards the sea, with the non sequitur ‘It was September after all […] So off they strolled’, and later Woolf refers vaguely to what brings them to the sea, describing them as ‘drawn by some need’. There is an oddity to the entire scene – Lily’s initial words ‘It suddenly gets cold’ are a strangely unnatural form of speech, with a reflective quality which seems almost to suggest she is beginning to narrate the novel herself. And there’s something uncanny about William and Lily’s uniformity – as they move towards the sea they both feel the same things and seem unified in their responses: ‘They came there […] gave to their bodies’. Their uniformity escalates to the point at which they seem merely figures for a generalized emotional response, with the anonymized phrase: ‘the heart expanded with it’.
Woolf is intent on exploring forms of emotional response which are difficult fully to understand, and throughout the novel she is interested in questions of how we respond to things like pure colour and shape and to the sudden movement of waves. These questions are thought through in the novel in terms of visual art. Lily defends her painting of Mrs Ramsay and James from the accusation that ‘no one could tell it for a human shape’ by arguing that ‘There were other senses, too, in which one might reverence them. By a shadow here and a light there, for instance’ (Woolf, 2008, 45). In this suggestion that arrangements of shadow and light might express one’s feelings for another person and constitute a type of reverence, Lily has been seen as partly expressing the Post-Impressionist ideas of art explored by Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell and by Woolf’s friends Roger Fry and Duncan Grant.6 Contemporary theories of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art sought to explore how we respond to mere pure shape, pure colour or ‘rhythm’. Roger Fry argued that:
Particular rhythms of line and particular harmonies of colour have their spiritual correspondences, and tend to arouse now one set of feelings, now another. The artist plays upon us by the rhythm of line, by colour, by abstract form, and by the quality of the matter he employs. (Fry, 1996, 105)
Fry’s account of our response to art touches on elements of emotional response that are difficult to understand – raising questions of why we might respond to things as abstract as the ‘rhythm of line […] colour […] form’. His allusion to ‘spiritual correspondences’ reaches after the reasons for such responses, grasping for some transcendent explanation for why we would respond in particular ways to different colours and patterns. The difficulty of thinking about how we understand response to ‘rhythm […] colour […] abstract form’ still prompts questions today. Christopher Butler discusses the issue in thinking about the pleasure of painting:
Much of the turn from representation to abstraction in the history of painting […] depends on our learning to derive a pleasurable emotional response from what becomes simple or geometric or irregular shape or ‘pure colour’ in many later paintings. But how can such non-representational elements and their colour combinations alone cause within us emotions which give us pleasure? They do not engage us in a drama; they are not representations of objects or situations […] For abstraction in art […] by definition plays with and denies us our wish to rationalize our responses by naming and analysing situations and natural objects. (Butler, 2004, 122–3)
This question ‘how can such non-representational elements and their colour combinations alone cause within us emotions which give us pleasure?’ suggests ongoing concern about why we would respond to things that are purely abstract, or purely sensuous, and suggests how such emotions still deny us ‘our wish to rationalize our responses’.
Woolf’s novel persistently focuses attention to these types of ungraspable emotions. She redirects attention from some of the mainstays of Victorian fiction onto sudden moments of rapture, prompted by things like colour, light and movement. Her work echoes Baudelaire’s depiction of how one might be moved by anything: ‘whether a face or a landscape, gilding, colours, shimmering stuffs’ (Baudelaire, 1964, 8). Her work also continually suggests that such responses might be difficult to explain. It remains unclear why Lily and William should be impelled by the change of light over the sea or the expansiveness of the water, and Lily struggles to explain how her relationship to Mrs Ramsay might best be captured by a light here and a shade there. But while Woolf does reach for a language and form for such emotions, her novel also just emphasizes their importance. Woolf returns repeatedly to how the heart might expand on seeing an expanse of water – as when Mrs Ramsay sees the sea on walking into town with Charles Tansley:
but here, the houses falling away on both sides, they came out on the quay and the whole bay spread before them and Mrs Ramsay could not help exclaiming, ‘Oh, how beautiful!’ For the great plateful of blue water was before her; the hoary Lighthouse distant, austere, in the midst; and on the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them, which always seemed to be running away into some moon country, uninhabited of men. (Woolf, 2008, 14)
There is a sudden instant responsiveness to the sea here and a sense again of an intense, obscure response. Mrs Ramsay is impelled by something – ‘Mrs Ramsay could not help exclaiming’ – and Woolf’s mode of explaining her response is just to show us the scene: ‘For the great plateful of blue water was before her.’ The sea itself seems to move away from human understanding, and such emotions in Woolf’s work move away constantly from our own full comprehension: they ‘always seemed to be running away’.
Gestures and Emotion
In turning away from the habitual focus points of emotion in the novel and exploring instead things like responses to colour and light, Woolf’s work suggests a further way in which modernist writers thought afresh about feeling. Modernist writers not only deflected emotions onto the non-human, but also explored the possibilities of making discussion of emotion less explicit, more focused on subtle and fleeting moments. In To the Lighthouse, as mentioned above, key characters’ deaths are recorded only in brackets. Most notably, the death of the central character, Mrs Ramsay, is recorded thus: ‘[Mr Ramsay stumbling along a passage stretched his arms out one dark morning, but Mrs Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before he stretched his arms out. They remained empty.]’ (Woolf, 2008, 105). Grief, here, is presented through the eeriness of outstretched, empty arms – gesture and movement stand in for a full and direct account of emotion.
This way of presenting emotion, through fleeting gestures, through movement, is something that runs throughout Woolf’s work. It has been picked up most recently by Abbie Garrington’s work on Haptic Modernism, which focuses on The Years as a ‘peculiarly gestural novel’ (Garrington, 2013, 119). Garrington suggests that Woolf’s intense interest in gesture can be understood in the context of then-current thinking about the significance of body language, and she draws attention in particular to Charlotte Wolff, a psychoanalyst and palm reader whom Woolf herself consulted (despite the disapproval of Leonard Woolf) (2013, 125–6).7 Charlotte Wolff, in her work A Psychology of Gesture, detailed the emotional import of bodily movement: ‘The way in which a woman opens and shuts the door, how she walks, gives you her hand, takes a chair, remains seated, gets up, the way she lights a cigarette, tears up a letter, turns the pages of a book, arranges flowers – all these things contribute to a picture of her personality’ (Wolff, 1945, 5).
In modernist works, gesture often seems central: both embodying and expressing the emotions and personality of an individual, and prompting emotion in the observer. This is apparent throughout Woolf’s work, but is perhaps most clear in the work of D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence today is perhaps best known for his sexually explicit writing and for his banned novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). Yet his work is also notable for the significance he allots to the inexplicit, to the ways in which feeling might be enfolded in the smallest things, in gesture and in movement. Lawrence’s attention to gesture is evident from his early novel, Sons and Lovers (1913). This novel pays exceptional attention to first impressions. As Paul Morel meets Miriam, he watches her intently:
Miriam was moving about preparing dinner. Paul watched everything that happened. His face was pale and thin, but his eyes were quick and bright with life as ever. He watched the strange, almost rhapsodic way in which the girl moved about, carrying a great stew-jar to the oven, or looking in the saucepan. The atmosphere was different from that of his own home, where everything seemed so ordinary. When Mr Leivers called loudly outside to the horse, that was reaching over to feed on the rose bushes in the garden, the girl started, looking round with dark eyes, as if something had come breaking in on her world. There was a sense of silence inside the house and out. Miriam seemed as in some dreamy tale, a maiden in bondage, her spirit dreaming in a land far away and magical. (Lawrence, 1992, 176)
Here, personality is expressed by the most everyday things – so that Miriam’s way of ‘looking in the saucepan’ might in a mysterious way express her personality. The narrative contemplates what Miriam’s way of moving might mean, with the language becoming gesturative in its attempt to describe the ‘strange, almost rhapsodic’ way she moves. Paul constantly guesses at the significance of her movements, with the language of conjecture, moving into simile ‘as if something had come breaking in on her world’.
This focus on detail is not in itself modernist – indeed it is a characteristic of the Victorian novel – but the way in which gestures, movements, seem to stand in for other and more explicit descriptions of the characters’ emotions does come to be characteristic of Lawrence’s writing and of the modernist novel more generally.8 When Paul later meets Clara, he is again captivated by movement, especially her manner of shaking hands, which is highly suggestive: she seems ‘at once to keep him at a distance, and yet to fling something to him’ (Lawrence, 1992, 270).
Such descriptions of gesture transfer attention from the conscious aspects of the relationship to something unvoiced, and below the surface of ordinary communication. And attention to gesture in this way suggests a form of feeling that is intricately embodied. Lawrence considered this further in his essay ‘The Novel and the Feelings’, as he wrote about
listening-in to the voices of the honorable beasts that call in the dark paths of the veins of our body, from the God in the heart. Listening inwards, inwards, not for words nor for inspiration, but to the lowing of the innermost beasts, the feelings, that roam in the forest of the blood, from the feet of God within the red, dark heart. (Lawrence, 1985, 205)
Feeling for gesture in Lawrence’s work suggests this ‘listening-in’. It also suggests the complexity of the relationship between emotion and the body. In Lawrence’s description of how one listens in for the ‘feelings that roam in the forest of the blood’, emotions become animalistic, and the blood forms forests.
In Lawrence’s descriptions of gesture and Woolf’s discussions of responding to shape, colour and movement, the body is intricately involved. There is a giving over of the body in To the Lighthouse as Lily and Mr Bankes watch the sea and ‘the heart expanded with it and the body swam’, and there is a sense of emotion being infolded into gesture in Lawrence’s work, of feeling situated in the ‘dark paths of the veins of our body […] within the red, dark heart’. Part of modernism’s curiosity about emotions, and part of the modernist reimagining of emotion, is related to the way in which then-contemporary ideas of feeling and thought suggested the need to rethink the relationship between emotion, the body and the self.
Modernist Emotion and the Body: The Red Dark Heart
The intricate relationship between emotion, the body and the self in the modernist novel can be seen especially clearly by turning again to Woolf, and in particular The Waves (1931). In this novel, the character Jinny runs through the garden as a child:
‘I was running,’ said Jinny, ‘after breakfast. I saw leaves moving in a hole in the hedge. I thought “That is a bird on its nest”. I parted them and looked; but there was no bird on a nest. The leaves went on moving. I was frightened. I ran past Susan, past Rhoda, and Neville and Bernard in the tool-house talking. I cried as I ran, faster and faster. What moved the leaves? What moves my heart, my legs? And I dashed in here, seeing you green as a bush, like a branch, very still, Louis, with your eyes fixed. “Is he dead?” I thought, and kissed you, with my heart jumping under my pink frock like the leaves, which go on moving, though there is nothing to move them.’ (Woolf, 2011, 8)
Jinny’s emotions are aligned, unsettlingly, with the movements of her body. As Woolf describes how she ‘cried as [she] ran, faster and faster’, the word ‘as’ suggests at once simultaneity, that she cries while she runs, and also that her tears are somehow like her running, and indeed that they are running out of control. Jinny’s emotions, and her movements, seem oddly to be compelled, like the way in which the leaves are moved. What alarms her about the leaves moving is that nothing seems to move them: ‘there was no bird on a nest. The leaves went on moving’, and her running and sobbing seem also to be without cause or control, and thus like the leaves: ‘What moved the leaves? What moves my heart, my legs?’ As she kisses Louis ‘with my heart jumping under my pink frock like the leaves’, Jinny’s emotions seem at once intimate to her person, something she inhabits and moves within, and yet foreign to her.
This awareness that emotion might depend on the body in ways that are beyond our control, and which remain insufficiently understood, is something that runs through modernist literature, from Woolf’s The Waves, to Lawrence’s discussions of bodies, emotions and sexuality, to moments such as that in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (1924–28) where Valentine notes that the whole of her love affair with Tietjens so far has depended on bodily subtlety, that it had ‘passed without any mention of the word “love”; it passed in impulses; warmths; rigors of the skin’ (Ford, 1982, 267). And concern about the embodiment of emotion and such things as ‘impulses; warmths’ is especially evident when one turns to the way in which modernism thinks about feeling in relation to the heart. The heart is traditionally linked with thinking about emotion and love – yet modernist accounts of the heart often emphasize a strange disconnection between feeling and the heart, or a sense that the heart registers emotions which we do not consciously recognize. In Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924), Hans Castorp is shocked by how his racing heart suggests an emotional excitement that he does not feel and later seems almost relieved to fall in love – as then his emotion falls in line with his bodily symptoms. He reflects that this meant that ‘he felt within himself the emotion proper to his heart beats’ and no longer has to feel his emotions and body as strange to himself: ‘For now he need not feel that it so beat of its own accord, without sense or reason or any reference to his non-corporeal part’ (Mann, 1999, 138–9). In his sense of the problematic relationship between feeling and the body, and his anxiety that the heart ‘might beat so of its own accord’, Mann is touching on contemporary debate about whether emotions might take us over in this way, whether they might seem to possess us ‘without sense or reason or any reference to his non-corporeal part’.
This is a concern that is not peculiar to modernism. Kirstie Blair has noted that images of the heart in Victorian poetry are often highly fraught with anxieties about affect, because the heart is both ‘active and passive; the most intimate part of an individual yet the most detached, in the sense that its actions cannot necessarily be controlled’ (Blair, 2006, 4). Yet the complexity of the perceived relationship between the body and emotion in the early twentieth century was also shaped by pressures specific to the modernist moment. As Sally Shuttleworth and Jenny Bourne Taylor have shown, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw ongoing debate about ‘the complex relationship between the mind and the body’, about whether feeling was the property of some immaterial part of the person, a type of immortal soul, or whether it could all be explained with reference to the material properties of the body (Shuttleworth and Bourne Taylor, 1998, xiii). In the early twentieth century, advances in neuroscientific understanding seemed to suggest that all of our emotions might be explained with reference to our nervous system – but the heart was never displaced entirely as a centre of emotion, and in thinking about the interplay of the heart and the nerves there was particular concern about how emotion was embodied.9 In The Science of Life (1931), H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley and J. P. Wells suggested that there was ongoing uncertainty over how much of feeling might depend on the heart and the blood, and how much on the nerves:
Twenty or thirty years ago it was thought that the co-operation of part with part was ensured through the nervous system alone, either consciously through the brain or unconsciously by the subordinate systems of nervous communication […] nowadays we are beginning to realize that a very large part of the harmonizing task is done through substances emitted by one organ and reaching another by way of the blood. (Wells et al., 1931, 35)
There is a sense in this book of the uncertainty about how feeling and impulse travel about the body, and how different parts of the body seem to harmonize. This passage suggests that the transport of feelings in the body depends on both the heart and the nerves, but the book also gives a sense of a constantly colliding flurry of feeling, arguing that: ‘If we could see the whole living web of the nervous system laid out before us, and if a nervous impulse was a visible thing, we should get a picture of continual thrilling and rippling activity’ (Wells et al., 1931, 71).
The ongoing uncertainty about the workings of emotion in the body, coupled with a perception of feeling as ‘continual thrilling and rippling’, is reflected in moments in modernist literature where the energies of the body create emotions that run beyond a character’s control or even their conscious perception. Throughout The Waves, hearts beat faster and beyond control. As Neville reaches London at the end of a train journey, he feels that ‘as we approach London, the centre […] my heart draws out too, in fear, in exultation’ (Woolf, 2011, 55); Louis feels ‘impulses wilder than the wildest birds strike from my wild heart’ (45); Jinny senses her heart pounding and her blood ‘bright red, whipped up, slapping against my ribs’ (34). As the characters in The Waves sit together at lunch, they seem to be possessed of one heart, ‘Comfort steals over us. Gold runs in our blood. One, two; one, two; the heart beats in serenity, in confidence, in some trance of well-being’ (107), and then the hearts and nerves seem again to suggest the extent to which emotion disturbs and shapes the modernist novel: ‘The nerves thrill in their thighs. Their hearts pound and churn in their sides’ (112).
T. S. Eliot and a ‘Moment’s Surrender’
This essay began with the acknowledgement that modernism’s engagement with emotion had at one stage been neglected because so many modernist writers seem to go out of their way to disown expressions of unfettered emotion or sentimentality. Of all modernism’s protestations against emotion, it is probably T. S. Eliot’s which is most often quoted. In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), T.S. Eliot wrote that ‘[p]oetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality’ (Eliot, 1975, 43). Critics seeking to restore an awareness of emotion’s centrality to modernism have argued that this statement is far from straightforward: as I have argued elsewhere, Eliot’s poetic practice ‘mitigates this principle’; Taylor has noted that the lines are ‘notoriously vexed and ambiguous’; Michael Bell has noted that ‘his phrasing revealed an emotional subtext, a fear or condescension towards feeling, underlying the general literary principle’ (Martin, 2013, 13; Taylor, 2012, 6; Bell, 2000, 162).10 Eliot’s work suggests the complications inherent in modernism’s attitude to emotion and reveals how what might seem to be a rejection of emotion reveals instead its intricate revaluing.
Eliot’s statement that poetry provides an ‘escape from emotion’ can be complicated by turning to almost any examples of his own work. To give just one, towards the end of The Waste Land (1922) there is a famous question-and-answer section:
Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands. (Eliot, 1969, ll.418–22)
These lines, like Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, suggest how one might respond to things like colour, light and expansiveness. In the declaration, ‘The sea was calm, your heart would have responded’, emotional response seems to be guided by the expanse of water but also by things beyond one: ‘the hand expert with sail and oar’. The body seems to be moved without the control of a mind: ‘your heart would have responded’. And the reference to this form of emotional response is at once wistfully conjectural and absolutely definite. As A. D. Moody has emphasized that this response is only hypothetical, that while ‘[t]he form of the verse implies a parallel’, the words ‘“would have responded” make the second statement nearly the opposite of the first’ (Moody, 1979, 103). Yet while ‘would have’ is nearly the opposite of the first, it is also importantly not quite the opposite. While the line is in the conditional tense, it nevertheless evinces a surety about this form of emotional response – there’s a certainty that it would have taken place.
Michael Bell has argued that ‘[t]here is no alternative within a self-conscious modernity to the primordiality of feeling’, and Eliot’s poetic practice chimes with this statement (Bell, 2000, 207). Despite all of modernism’s disavowals of particular types of emotion, feeling remains central to modernism – and indeed seems to provide modernist literature’s driving impulse. Modernist literature and art is shaped by an interest in feeling for the slightest things, by approaching emotions at new angles and revealing new aspects of experience. As intimated in Baudelaire’s predictions concerning modernity, modernist literature offered ways of considering how we might respond emotionally to light, colour and gesture – and it also explored how such emotions troubled the idea of human autonomy, suggesting that we were controlled by our bodies in ways that we might still struggle to understand.
Emotion in the modernist novel sometimes seems displaced – focused not on direct discussions of relationships or events, but on things like the changing light, fleeting gestures and intricate bodily mappings. Yet even while emotion might be focused onto small things, or small moments, it seems finally that the intensity of modernist literature’s engagement with emotion means that such moments override all its famous protestations against emotion. The moments of feeling seem to matter more than all the moments of restraint. An idea akin to this is explored in The Waste Land, again with reference to the heart:
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract. (Eliot, 1969, ll.401–4)
This is a description of being given over to emotion – with the heart in control, ‘blood shaking my heart’. As the description of this ‘moment’s surrender’ proceeds, the lines from The Waste Land indicate how we might view moments of emotional intensity within a modernism often concerned with defending itself against emotional excess. Such moments, Eliot suggests, count for more than any amount of moderation – they provide something that ‘an age of prudence can never retract’.
Notes
1 See Clark, 1991; Altieri, 2004; Bell, 2000, especially 160–204; Cuda, 2010; Martin, 2013; Ratcliffe, 2008, especially Chapters 3 and 4; and Taylor, 2012, which discusses modernism and emotion primarily in the light of ‘affect theory’, arguing for the value of the word ‘affect’ rather than ‘emotion’ (Taylor, 2012, 18–20). An essay collection, Modernism and Affect (Taylor, 2015), further pursues the interpretation of modernism in the light of affect theory.
2 For other examples of critics downplaying the importance of emotion to modernism, see David Trotter’s focus on a ‘will-to-abstraction’ in Paranoid Modernism (2001, 3), and the opening of Peter Nicholls’s Modernism: A Literary Guide which emphasizes ‘ironic distance’ (1995, 3). For discussion of these and other examples, see Modernism and the Rhythms of Sympathy (Martin, 2013, 10–14).
3 See, for instance, Jessica Burstein’s Cold Modernism, which identifies a strand of modernism which ‘dispenses with’ ‘[p]sychology […] the unconscious’, and dispenses with ‘emotion, with its emphasis on affect and binding relations to the world’ (2012, 12).
4 For a discussion of such questions in relation to modernist literature, see Martin, Modernism and the Rhythms of Sympathy (2013, 14–23 and passim), as well as Ratcliffe, On Sympathy (2008, 13–16 and Chapters 3 and 4). For a discussion of developments in thinking about emotion across disciplines and their relevance to literature, see Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (2007, passim).
5 For further discussion, see Alan Warren Friedman’s Fictional Death and the Modernist Enterprise which discusses Victorian deathbed scenes (Friedman, 1995, 74–7), and how in contrast in To the Lighthouse, ‘in a sense, Mrs. Ramsay’s death […] never happens’ (224). Friedman’s argument is extended to consider the treatment of death and corpses in modernist literature in David Sherman, In a Strange Room (2014).
6 See, for instance, Jane Goldman’s discussion of The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism and the Politics of the Visual (1998).
7 For further discussion of Woolf and Charlotte Wolff, see Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (1997, 667–8).
8 See Lowe’s chapter on ‘Other People’s Shoes: Realism, Imagination and Sympathy’ in Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy: An Alternative to the Hermeneutics of Suspicion (Lowe, 2007, 61–121), for a discussion of detail and emotion in the Victorian novel.
9 Laura Salisbury and Andrew Shail show that ‘neurological conceptions of the self were primary components of the ways in which “modernity” […] conceptualized itself and its subjects’ (2010, 1). For a discussion of the competing roles of the nerves and the heart in understanding emotion, see John Gordon, ‘T.S. Eliot’s Head and Heart’, English Literary History (1995, 979–1000).
10 For another discussion of Eliot and emotion, see Taylor, Modernism and Affect (2015, 3–5).
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