Personification and Embodied Emotional Practice in Middle English Literature

Abstract

A pressing question facing literary scholars who are working on emotion is that of what literary analysis and literary history can bring to the history of emotions. While disciplines such as psychology, anthropology, linguistics and various branches of history have made notable contributions to the study of emotions past and present, precisely how imaginative literature might fit into emotion studies remains unclear. This essay suggests that attention to the tropes and forms with which literature performs its imagining may be the best way to incorporate literature into the history of emotions. I focus in particular on how personification in Middle English texts translates abstract emotions into bodily terms in order to represent them as embodied phenomena and to elicit emotional responses. By examining the personification of emotions in these texts, we can see how imaginative literature might both shape and constitute emotional practice.Truth cantering on a powerful horse, Chastity, eyes downcast, fluttering with veils. Each one was marble come to life, a thought in a coat, Courtesy bowing with one hand always extended, Villainy sharpening an instrument behind a wall, Reason with her crown and Constancy alert behind a helm. They are all retired now, consigned to a Florida for tropes. A pressing question facing literary scholars who are working on emotion is that of what literary analysis and literary history can bring to the history of emotions. While disciplines such as psychology, anthropology, linguistics and various branches of history have made notable contributions to scholarship on emotions past and present, precisely how imaginative literature might fit into emotion studies remains unclear. One way of demonstrating imaginative literature's value to the study of emotions would be to consider its tools and building blocks: how do specific forms and tropes enable authors to evoke, represent or stimulate emotion, and what can this tell us about how emotion is perceived to operate? In this essay, I propose that one particular literary device used frequently in mediaeval literature -personification -demonstrates how imaginative literature might shape (or even function as) 'emotional practice' (Scheer). As a literary trope that relies in part on a shared understanding of sensory and bodily phenomena, personification represents emotions as something brought into being by the body as well as the mind and uses sensory language to shape the emotions of readers.

Drinking Sorrow and Bathing in Bliss: Liquid Emotions in Chaucer

“…In the same journal issue, an article deals with embodied practice in personified emotions (Flannery, 2016) and a whole book has been dedicated to the study of emotions in Arthurian literature (Brandsma, Larrington, Saunders, 2015). Most of these studies, however, primarily focus on embodiment and do not consider the metaphorical writing of emotion.…”

Afterword

“…4 But literary texts also provide opportunities for experimentation and play with emotional practices, and for imagining how the interior processes associated with emotions might work (for instance, by giving them 'a body, a face, and a personality' in a personified figure within an allegorical narrative). 5 At the same time, reading across literary and non-literary texts can help us better understand the ways in which texts of all kinds contribute to the construction of emotional practices and the social and cultural values to which they are attached.…”