Affective Deception: Experiencing Genderplay in Louisa May Alcott

Abstract

Speaking about the emotionality of texts, how they move us, generating effects, bodily sensations, Sara Ahmed points out that it is crucial to look at the ways texts name or perform emotions, how "[n]aming emotions often involves differentiating between the subject and object of feeling" (13), which in my case is myself feeling about a text but also a character's feelings about another character. This naming emotions also entails the different ways that figures-figures of speech but also figures of characters-"get stuck together, and how sticking is dependent on past histories of association that often 'work' through concealment" (13). Along with Ahmed, I want to refocus not necessarily on any emotion as being "in" a particular text, but on the "effects of the very naming of emotions" (13). This naming obviously revolves around words, but not only. These words are not cut off from bodies, instead "the work of emotion involves the 'sticking' of signs to bodies" (13), shame, disgust, joy, desire, etc., these are words for feelings, stuck to objects of feelings, generating effects and yet more affects. According to Ahmed, feelings "move, stick, and slide. We move, stick, and slide with them" (14).