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This is to certify that the
dissertation entitled

THE AFFECTIVE DILEMMA IN NINETEENTH CENTURY
BRITISH POETRY

presented by
RICHARD J. MANDERFIELD

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for the

PhD. degree in ENGLISH

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THE AFFECTIVE DILEMMA IN NINETEENTH'CENTURY BRITISH POETRY

BY
Richard J. Manderfield

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

2003

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and

 

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Abstract
THE AFFECTIVE DILEMMA IN NINETEENTH—CENTURY BRITISH POETRY
By

Richard J. Manderfield

This dissertation proposes an affective theory of
emotionality derived from the affect psychology of Silvan
Tbmkins. It then reads nineteenth-century British poetry as
a participant in a culturally constructed affective
economy. This theory proposes that biological imperatives
for the preservation of the Species include the imperative
for the preservation of the self through the perception of
approval from others. This inherent need for the positive
affect of approval grounds the co-operative predisposition
that is culturally actualized and organized for the adaptive
advantage of the species as a whole.

Because the mind inherently encodes all information
with the affect generated during culturally patterned
experience, all memory and perception carries affective
encoding, and literature can manipulate the recall of this
encoding into the reader's affective processes, eliciting
affective responses and participating in the affective
substantiation of selves.

In analyses of the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
William Wordsworth, Robert Browning and Arthur Symons, this
dissertation explores hOW'pOECIY engages readers in the

affective economy and also how the poetry participates in

changing that economy through the century as publicly shared
affect is suppressed in favor of an affectively muted, self-

reflexive compensation.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Professor A.C. Goodson for his
invaluable guidance and the accommodations without which
this dissertation could not have been completed. My thanks
also to the other members of my graduate committee whose
time and support have been sustaining: Professor Judith
Stoddart, Professor William Johnsen and Professor Scott
Juengel. A special thanks to Professor Douglas Noverr who
has generously given of his time to read and comment on this
dissertation after generously giving his encouragement
during its composition.

Looking back further into the history of this
enterprise, I must also express my appreciation to Professor
Eileen Barrett whose example and encouragement made graduate
school seem both attractive and possible when I was still an
undergraduate.

For the friendship of Maher Ben Moussa with whom
conversations about my work were always stimulating and
challenging, I will always be grateful.

My thanks also to my friends Mark Freed and Brooke
Harrison, for the intellectual stimulation and the moral
support that I have found in their home, on mountain paths
and in Michigan trout streams.

Finally, I am most grateful to Christine Levecq for her‘

steady intellectual and emotional support through the

iv

completion of this project.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION. . . . . . .

CHAPTER 1: AN AFFECTIVE MODEL OF
THE ”STRUCTURE OF FEELING". . .

CHAPTER 2: AFFECTIVE COMMUNITY IN
THE COLERIDGEAN IMAGINATION . .

CHAPTER 3: WORDSWORTH AND
THE LEVELING OF THE AFFECTIVE ECONOMY

CHAPTER 4: ROBERT BROWNING’S AFFECTIVE CRITIQUE

CHAPTER 5: ARTHUR SYMONS: AFFECT, EMOTION,
AND AESTHETICISM . . . . . . . . . . . .

WORKS CITED . . . . . . .

vi

 

Introduction

In this dissertation, I will examine the poetry of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Robert
Browning and Arthur Symons in the context of a
psychological model derived from the affect theory of
Silvan Tomkins. This theory holds that an essential,
biological imperative requires the preservation of a
communally created self by the unconscious perception of
positive affect either on the face of others or
symbolically represented in objects or ideas and directed
toward one so as to be understood as approval.

In a system that is here called the affective economy,
cultures organize this affective interaction is various
ways, but all cultural functions, including literature,
manifest the limitations of some biologically imprinted
Predispositions and participate in changing the system in
response to changing environmental conditions.

Such a theory, while speculative and exploratory, is
well suited to the reading of nineteenth-century British
POEtry, and is not only consistent with many current
theories of the mind, but also represents a twentieth-

Century expression of a line of thought developed during

the nineteenth century's struggle to understand the inter-

relatedness of thought, feeling, and culture. Parallel to

literature's preoccupation with these themes in the

nineteenth century is a post-Kantian, philosophical

tradition that Paul Redding argues establishes an affective

model of the mind fundamentally consistent with the recent

trends that ground the theory offered here. Tracing a line

of affective thinking through Fichte and Schelling to

Hegel, Redding concludes:
In Hegel, therefore, we see even further aspects
of the surprisingly contemporary-looking account
of feeling, its embodiment and its relation to
cognition that is common to the three major post-
Kantians. In this respect there are illuminating
parallels between Hegel’s theory of affect and
that found in the work of Silvan Tomkins, a
psychologist of affect who resisted the excesses
of cognitivism in the period of its triumph. In
Tomkins's work, we see re-emerge something of
what a post-Kantian psychology might look like in
the later twentieth century. (5)

The “something” that has re-emerged in Tomkins’s psychology

is Hegel’s
development and systematization of those
suggestive ideas from Kant, Fichte, and Schelling

linking together feeling, conceptualization, and

intersubjective recognition and communication
into a rich and powerful model of the mind (133).

At the heart of Tomkins's linkage of these functions is the
human affect system that is the medium of both internal
feedback and communication making affect stand, as Redding
puts it, “at the interface of the most private and public,
facing both ways” (135). The unconscious recognition of
affect, not only on the faces of people, but also in the
associational encoding of all information processed in the
brain creates a medium by which the material world is
integrated into a cultural affective system.

The reconciliation of realist and idealist thinking
that leads to this concept is part of the post-Kantian
legacy. Redding argues that “Fichte’s view of the
individual mind is unintelligible without the assumption
that it exists as embodied and located in the world” (4).
Then

Schelling's development of Fichtean ideas
showIs] how his attempted identification of
realist and idealist ways of looking at the mind
gave rise to pre-Freudian ideas about the nature
of unconscious mental function grounded in
feeling and subjected to its own peculiar logic.

(4)

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Once the mind and the material body are interdependent, the
mind and other material bodies become interdependent.
Redding explains that for Hegel, the “recognition of others
as agents, which allows the reflective recognition of
oneself in their expressions, thus becomes a condition of
mentality per se" (132). Tomkins credits the recognition of
facial affect with the sustenance of the human as a social
being. Redding quotes Tomkins:
Humans are among those animals whose individual
survival and group reproduction rest heavily on
social responsivenss, and the mutual enjoyment of
each other's presence is one of the most
important ways in which social interaction is
rewarded and perpetuated. (135)
I extend this insight to include the encoding of all
information with affective value so that not only
interpersonal interaction but all interaction of the
individual and the world function in affective processes.
The extension of Tomkins's affect theory to its
cultural implications in this dissertation is my own
extrapolation of his theory. That extension of affective
recognition to objects and concepts remains consistent,
however, with the “externalist” approach to the mind that

Redding identifies with the work of Daniel Dennett, who

attributes the “disproportionately greater intelligence" of
humans to our
habit of off-loading as much as possible of our
cognitive tasks into the environment itself--
extruding our minds (that is, our mental
projects and activities) into the surrounding
world, where a host of peripheral devices we
construct can store, process, and re-represent
our meanings, streamlining, enhancing, and
protecting the processes of transformation that
are our thinking. (127)
The mind’s use of external representation of its own
functions is also, Redding points out, consistent with the
post-Kantian tradition:
The externalist position exhibits broad
similarities to ideas about the nature of mind
put forward almost two centuries ago by Hegel in
his insistence on the dependence of individual
“subjective” mind on the historically accumulated
and culturally transmitted structures and
processes of the “objective mind.”
(128)
In the following chapters, I will explore how our

understanding of nineteenth-century British poetry might be

(’0

I

enhanced by a cultural theory built upon Tomkins's
psychology in which affective feedback, affective
communication and affective “peripheral devices” together
constitute an affective economy, culturally created and
sustained and changing in response to historical
contingencies.

Chapter 1 investigates the critical space an affect
theory would occupy and then presents a condensed
explanation of Tomkins’s affect theory, including my
extensions of Tomkins's insights to the concept of an
affective economy.

The metaphor of an eConomy is appropriate, for I will
argue that an essential function of culture is the
organization of emotional life so that the psychic
sustenance necessary to sustain the psychic health of the
population is systematically generated and distributed.
Because positive affect is an inherent need in the
individual psyche and is only attainable by the duplication
of affect seen on the face of another, individuals must
please others in order to attain it. Cultures exploit the
individual need for interpersonal interaction by organizing
interactions so as to sustain the large populations that
are an adaptive advantage in evolutionary terms.

The communal affective system is not only similar to

an economy, but has similarities to a capitalist economy in
that populations form consensuses about which behaviors
deserve the reward of positive affect and, by associatively
investing their collective affect in symbolic objects and
concepts, they create communal affective repositories that
are resources for individuals to access in exchange for the
performance of prescribed behaviors. When groups of people
obtain control of these symbolic concentrations of the
community’s positive affect, they can impose limitations on
its distribution so as to privilege themselves. They
achieve the greater substantiation of the self that we
recognize as the prestige and greater dignity associated
with the upper classes and the politically powerful. In
this sense, the political can be seen to be one level of
organization of the affective economy.

The ability of an affective theory to comprehend an
affective economy in culture is the primary advantage that
it has over the cognitively based theories that now
dominate the criticism that is concerned with emotion.

Allen Richardson, who is the leading voice for a criticism
that recognizes feeling, works in, and recommends an
emotional model drawn within the parameters of what is now
called cognitive neuro-science. I suggest the a cognitive

criticism faces the same shortcomings as a cognitive

psychology in that it sees emotion as a reaction to
thought, leaving thought without a systematized motivation.

With the work of Antonio Demasio, who is now commonly
cited in cognitivist criticism, it has been established
that an impairment of the neurological functions of the
nund that are responsible for emotion will disrupt the
logical functions of the brain. This gives hard evidence
that feeling influences thinking, but it only supports the
now common-sensical assertion that there is no absolute
objectivity. Until there is an identifiable pattern in the
limits and potentials that feeling imposes of thought so
that emotion’s role becomes predictive, there is no
practical application in criticism, and emotion remains a
troublesome byproduct of thought.

If cognitivism is to bring emotion into criticism as
more than an epiphenomenon of other processes, it will have
to theorize how feeling influences other processes in some
systematic way so that its influence can be discerned in
the texts in interaction with other elements.

Psychoanalysis preposes the family romance as such a
system, but psychoanalysis has never proven to be usefully
predictive at the cultural level and has been disappointing
in this regard even at the individual level.

If emotion is to be seen to have a significant

cultural influence, it will have to be understood to have a
crucial function that imposes limits on the other mental
functions with which it negotiates. One may not choose to
call the negotiating process an economy, but it will be an
intersection of co-operative and competitive motivations
with the essential hallmarks of an economy. Until emotion
is understood to participate in a systematic way in the
formation of thought, there is no need in criticism for
anything more than the ideological models that are now in
place. If and when cognitivism does adopt such a theory, it
will be affect theory of some kind. This disSertation
proposes that an affect theory is available and is useful
for exploring how such a model might work as a critical
tool.

The first chapter ends with an assessment of the
affective condition of British literature at the end of the
eighteenth century as it is evident in Fredric Bogel’s
analysis of the concern among writers with the
“insubstantiality” they perceive in Britain's modernizing
culture. I begin my consideration of affect in literature
with Bogel because his analysis points to a realization
that modernizing societies are changing the possibilities
of feeling. I wish to argue that they perceive a change in

the affective economy that I will trace through to the end

of the nineteenth century.

The conditions precipitating changes in the affective
economy are those that are typically associated with
modernization. Industrialization creates urbanization,
concentrating populations so as to increase the threat of
contagious emotion among the members of a large and
suffering working class. Also, capitalist economies create
a new wealthy class without the traditional ideological
cover of traditional aristocracies, opening the
possibilities of new resentments. These changing conditions
disrupt the traditional accommodations of what I call the
affective dilemma. An inevitable tension results from the
fact that there is a biological imperative for the
preservation of the psychic “self” that motivates
individuals to duplicate the affect they perceive on the
faces of others. There is, at the same time, a competing
imperative requiring that this sharing of affect take place
in a culturally regulated way so as to realize the adaptive
advantage of socially co-operative behavior.

The affective dilemma cannot be resolved; it can only
be accommodated by a negotiation of its competing
imperatives. When material conditions change in modernizing
cultures, traditional accommodations of the affective

dilemma must change. The necessary suppression of the

10

 

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public display of emotion requires a compensatory access to
the affective sustenance of selves, which in the nineteenth
century is accomplished by the cultivation of an

inaginative self-stimulation of affective responses. This
dissertation proposes that British literature in the
nineteenth century participates in a very significant way

in these cultural changes, and an affect theory is

necessary to bring this affective dimension into the

critical discourse.

Chapter 2 analyzes three poems by Coleridge to
consider how the Romantic imagination addresses the
affective dilemma. In order to place Coleridge’s work in
the affective economy within the discourse of culture, I
begin with Raymond Williams’s identification of a
“structure of feeling” at the ground of the nineteenth
century's social concerns and his focus on Coleridge’s
seminal position at the inauguration of this discourse.

In the three poems considered here, Coleridge
encounters both the promise and the limitations of
imaginative stimulation of affect. In “The Eolian Harp” the
speaker’s imaginative success is a domestic problem, while
in “Frost at Midnight” and “Dejection: An Ode,” the
imaginatively limited speakers painfully follow associative

chains to memories of positive affect and then return from

11

imagination to community. I will close this chapter with
thoughts on the place of such an “aesthetic” criticism in
current critical practices by considering some related work
on Coleridge by Susan Wolfson.

Chapter 3 examines the affectivity of the
Wordsworthian hero: the affective skills required of
Wordsworth’s readers; and an affective understanding of
WOrdsworth's program of redemptive sympathy as they
represent Wordsworth’s aspirations to shape a more
democratic affective economy.

Chapter 4 proposes that Robert Browning’s dramatic
monologues, “My Last Duchess” and “Bishop Blougram's
Apology,” be read as critiques of the affective economy.
These poems foreground the unconscious assumptions by which
people understand their places in the hierarchy of self-
substantiation. While “My Last Duchess” entertains the
nightmare scenario of an individual freed from psychic
dependence on the genuine approval of others, “Bishop
Blougram's Apology" stages a competition for affective
survival in the guise of a philosophical debate about
religious belief.

Chapter 5 considers the poems and prose of Arthur
Symons as they exemplify aestheticism’s attempt to refine

an affective essence out of the culture's conventional

12

emotionality. I argue that Symons's conversion from
Decadence to a mystic Symbolism is necessary as an
accommodation of the affective dilemma and contributes to
the condition of the affective economy as it is passed to

modernism.

13

Chapter 1

An Affective Model of the “Structure of Feeling”

In Culture and Society, an originative work of
cultural studies, Raymond Williams begins the history of
the concept of culture with some late eighteenth-century
thinkers who had the sense that modernizing societies were
newly neglecting some important function of communal life.
The concept emerges from a new appreciation of the depth to
which societies control the entirety of people’s lives.
From this new point of view, the function of societies is
the governance not only of political relations but also
private experiences. Williams follows the thoughts of
writers who stress that the psychological is “a mode of
human experience and activity which the progress of society
seemed increasingly to deny” (39). In his discussion of the
changes taking place, Williams associates this neglected
mode of experience with a societal “structure of feeling”
(31). There is no elaboration of what this structure is or
how it Operates, but it looms in the background because
Williams gives it significance when he writes that “changes
in convention only occur when there are radical changes in
the general structure of feeling” (31)-

In Culture and Society, Williams is trying to fill the

14

psychological gap in Marxism as a cultural theory. He needs
to show that economic and political structures create
emotional conditions in defense of the assertion that
ideology creates consciousness. In the end, he simply
defines emotion as politically subordinate.

Since the publication of Culture and Society in 1958,
no adequate explanation has emerged as to the nature of the
structure of feeling, and no theory has adequately placed
emotion within the cultural sphere. The post—structuralist
and post-modernist declaration of the “death of the
subject” makes problematic the whole notion of emotion,
raising questions about what a post-modern emotion might be
without a self to feel it. In a critical atmosphere in
which all other aspects of experience have become cultural
products, there is still no provision for the structure of
feeling with which Williams began the cultural
investigation.

Literary studies does not yet have an adequate theory
Of emotional complexity. Psychological assumptions derived
from the Freudian tradition may find complexity in the
escapist strategies of the individual unconscious, but the
emotional product is a predictable, pathological residue of
maladjustment. Freud tried to theorize the near infinite

CompleXity of human experience by internalizing complexity

15

in a proliferation of unconscious desires and strategies.
An alternative strategy would be to locate the complexity
in the culturally structured interactions in which evolving
organisms negotiate the satisfaction of relatively simple
desires. Because our present psychology cannot model how a
simple human motive creates complex interactions, our
critical strategies tend to displace agency onto cultural
structures of power, language or technology, and emotion
remains epiphenomenal. If emotion is merely a symptom, then
critical interest rightly looks elsewhere for literature’s
significance.

The simplification of psychology is most notable in
the negative characterizations of culture that dominate
criticism. Fredric Jameson says that “History is what
hurts,” suggesting that the desire for pleasure is not
significantly motivational except as it is frustrated
(102). There seems to be an assumption in some critical
discourses that culture and literature have nothing to do
with feeling good, or perhaps that Western cultures have no
right to feel good. For many in the emancipatory discourse
of literary criticism, injustice and oppression in western
cultures continue because pleasure provides an escape for
the comfortable. Jerome McGann criticizes Wordsworth for

his failure to respond with outrage to oppression after his

16

early participation in radical political protest (85). That
viewpoint is consistent with the Freudian rewriting of the
Garden of Eden myth in which a continued inability to
accept the truth of their lonely isolation after the loss
of blissful unity condemns humans to chronic anxieties,
relieved only by a cowardly escapism into temporary
pleasure purchased at the price of another’s suffering.

But interest seems to be returning to emotion and its
psychic structures led by discoveries that they were never
really gone. Rei Terada finds theories of emotion in
Jacques Derrida and Paul DeMan, among others, and suggests
that emotion has always been post-structuralist. George
Levine assembles essays that announce the return of the
self to critical consideration, and Jenna R. Bergmann
analyzes blushing in Austen’s Nbrthanger Abbey through the
neuro-scientific insights of Antonio Domasio’s “Somatic-
Marker Hypothesis” (44).

These changes reflect a convergence of new insights
from diverse fields that offer new ways of thinking about
Williams's observation, and this dissertation will make
use of some of these insights in order to suggest how we
might understand culture as a structure of feeling, and the
nineteenth century in British literature as a period

preoccupied with modifying this structure.

17

Williams gives great attention to J.S. Mill and the
impact his emotional crisis had on his subsequent

contribution to English social theory. Mill came to his
crisis when he realized that a life dedicated to social
reform did not provide for his own happiness. Only in the
self—conscious celebration that he found in the poetry of
Wordsworth was he able to regain a coherent sense of
himself and return to a concern with social issues. Mill's
subsequent social theory accommodates the resolution of his
personal emotional needs. He conceives of an artistic realm
within the social, but separate from the political and
economic, in which the community provides for the emotional
well-being of its members.

Mill exemplifies Williams's assertion that concepts
follow changes in the structure of feeling. Mill’s
political philos0phy accommodates the restructuring of his
emotional interactions so as to allow him to feel happiness
in a changing world. Williams’s major concern is the
historical consequences of separating the emotional from
the political or culture from society, and, in Mill, he
attributes this inclination to “the normal method of
intellectual organization, in minds of this kind” that tend
“to deny the substance of feeling" (67). Williams asserts

that Mill’s intellectualism causes him to deny a quality of

18

his own feeling that Williams labels its “substance.”

Williams's complaint is that the “substance of
feeling" which is denied by Mill is only produced by a
comprehensive experience of one’s whole life. To segregate
the emotional must inevitably produce feeling without
“substance.” It is in this sense that Williams insists that
regarding poetry as a separate ideal sphere of feeling
“makes poetry a substitute for feeling” (67). Williams is
working from a definition of emotion which requires that to
be authentic, in some undefined way, emotion must
comprehend the entirety of its social situation. This is
the structure of feeling: emotion’s dependence on social
systems. But why it is, in psychological terms, that real
emotion must be comprehensive is never explained, and
without that, no elaboration of the structure of feeling is
possible.

The ideological utility of Williams’s explanation is
clear in its implication that one who does not confront the
realities of political and economic injustice will only
know mere “substitutes” for real and healthy emotion.
Working for social reform is not one way to happiness, it
is the only way. Any good feeling produced outside of one's
social consciousness is without “substance.” And,

presumably, literature that participates in the delusional

19

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denial of this truth suffers the same shortcoming.
Williams, like others before and since Culture and
Society, faces the dilemma of how social reformers are to
motivate generally happy people to change social
structures. The theoretical strategy has been largely to
try to convince them that their happiness is a delusion and
they are really miserable, as Williams explains of Mill’s
experience. These theorists would have us believe that in
those moments when we might feel ourselves to be happy, we
are only sharing Mill’s delusion. This simplification of
the human condition has proved unconvincing to the vast
majority who experience happiness outside of social
struggle and find this denial of their happiness to be an
emotional extortion by a political phiIOSOphy.

A better strategy might begin with an understanding of
culture as a structure of feeling in which the political is
one manifestation of the generation and distribution of
feeling. That a government needs to be concerned about the
happiness of its people is obvious; ancient Rome
manipulated the structure of feeling with bread and
circuses in order to maintain a minimal allegiance to the
political structure that governed. This is an example of a
political power structure deferring to the deeper

traditional order that regulated emotional interactions and

20

allowed peOple to satisfy needs that were not just
material. In traditional societies, the happiness of the
people is a function of interactive traditions constructed
and sustained below the level of political power in the
structure of feeling. Political systems tend to recognize
the semi-autonomous nature of traditional orders.
Governance before the eighteenth century is primarily
a system for the control of the material products of a
society run largely by the traditional structure of
feeling. By the 19“‘century, happiness means more than
material subsistence, and democratizing populations are
creating changes in the traditional structure of feeling
that political philosophy is trying to comprehend. An
example could be the American Revolution and its scandalous
claim that the rights to life and liberty are equaled in
importance by the right to the pursuit of happiness. It is
the world's first conservative revolution because it is not
fought for the material necessities of life but for the
maintenance of a new structure of feeling, which allowed
for the dissemination of dignity and emotional conditions
that could not be integrated into the old political system.
Mill is mistaken not in seeing separate emotional and
political realms, but in underestimating the increasingly

unavoidable interdependence between them. Williams makes

21

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the mistake of collapsing an interdependent relationship
into one of identity.

In an exploration of how this theoretical gap might be
filled so as to provide insights on poetry, this
dissertation will extrapolate from Silvan Tomkins’s affect
theory to some possible consequences of that theory for the
understanding of culture.

Tomkins's psychology is in the somatic line of thought
of the James/Lange theory, but by locating somatic
importance in affect, he picks up the subject where
Charles Darwin left it in 1874 with the publication of The
Expression of Emotion in Animals and Humans. Tomkins finds
in the automatic functions of the affect system a
biological explanation for much of the complexity that
Freud assigned to drives (1.127) and cognitivists attribute
to cognitive “appraisals.” Tomkins began his affective
opposition to Freud’s drive-based theories with the
publication of what became the introduction to the four-
volume culmination of his work. This appeared,
interestingly, in 1956 in the premier issue of La
Psychanalyse, which was edited by Jacques Lacan (Tomkins
1:3). Through the 19603 and 19703, Tomkins was the lone
voice of the affective alternative to cognitivism. In its

current academic applications, the word “affect" connotes

22

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the somatic nature of emotional response but preserves the
cognitivist assumption that the body is responding to a
thought.

Alan Richardson surveys recent literary criticism
using cognitivist models in interesting and encouraging
ways, but their cognitive viewpoint imports into criticism
the affective limitations of cognitivism. Bergman’s
analysis of the blush that was cited earlier is in this
cognitivist line of thought.

The fundamental assumptions of Tomkins’s theory are
evolutionary (12150—70). Naturally selected survival
adaptations genetically embedded in biology interact with
environmental conditions but remain identifiable in their
cultural manifestations. In Tomkins’s theory, affect is the
body’s primary motivational system rather than a cathartic
and pathological by—product (1:28-87). The other
motivational systems, drive, pain, and some functions of
the reticular formation, are triggered independently but
rely on affective amplification in order to fulfill their
functions.

The model that is proposed here is derived from the
insights of Tomkins's theory, but my theory digresses from
his considerably in its scope. It is clearly a materialist

theory, assuming that humans are organisms and that all

23

mental processes are finally electro—chemical. No claim is
made for having eliminated the mystery of consciousness,
only that materialist explanations continue to extend their
predictive capacities, and literary studies should make use
of this work.

Furthermore, the essentialist claim made here of a
biological ground for human behavior is not seen to limit
the significance of cultural constructionism but to
facilitate it by finding its point of interdependence with
that which is outside it. This model is consistent with
what Edward O. Wilson calls a “gene—culture coevolution”
and he adds: “Genes and culture are in fact inseverably
linked" (110). Robert N. Emde acknowledges that
psychological research is “in the beginnings of a genetic
revolution” (6) in which “[g]enes work with the
environment, and genetic expression is influenced by
environmental co-actions at all levels of developmental
systems, from cell to society” (6). While the sciences are
embracing culture, Richardson notes that “Any account of
mental life that appeals to biology . . . will strike many
literary scholars as automatically suspect," and he adds:
“This stock dismissal of human biology is closely related
to a larger skepticism, bordering on hostility, toward

science altogether" (159). This dissertation offers a

24

biologically grounded theory in resistance to the current
theoretical inertia.

An evolutionary model begins with the premise that
natural selection has left humans with inherent motivations
for the survival of the species. In order to limit the
scope of this work, it is stipulated without argument that
the complexities of culture do not escape this imperative
and that at all levels of human experience, behavior
expresses this motive. While current evolutionary theories
do not require that all conditions of the organism are
adaptive, they do hold that none of the conditions can
obstruct adaptation. In other words, while we cannot assume
that every desire of an individual is an adaptation
necessary to its survival, we can assume that none of its
desires can negate survival adaptations. Humans may care
about some things that are not directly relevant to the
survival imperative, but they cannot stop caring about
those things that are.'

Tomkins’s affect theory greatly refines the somaticism
of the James/Lange theory of 1890, which first proposed
that physical changes precede thought. However, after
James, the search for the mechanism of initial bodily
feedback focused on internal systems whose physiological

changes are too slow to account for the rapidity of

25

emotional fluctuations. Tomkins locates the feedback
circuitry primarily in the skin and musculature of the face
which allow for very fast and subtle visceral feedback
(3.9).

Tomkins identifies nine specific affects of which six
are innately activated and three are auxiliary to either
affects or drives (3:18-25). Each affect is a coordinated
package of physical responses primarily in the face, and
each is triggered by a particular rate of neural firing or
change in the rate of neural firing. It makes no difference
to an initial affective response what the content of the
stimulus is; the density of the neural firing caused by
signals in the efferent nervous system will trigger one of
the affects. Two of the affects are inherently positive and
rewarding, and the others are inherently negative and
punishing. The grounding and evolutionary human motivation
is to maximize positive affect and minimize negative.
Affects are readily associated with any information so that
any affect can be associated with any perception or
behavior. Tomkins remarks that this characteristic is one
of the reasons that affect has been misunderstood:

There is literally no kind of object which has
not historically been linked to one or another of

the affects. Positive affect has been invested in

26

pain and every kind of human misery, and negative

affect has been experienced as a consequence of pleasure
and every kind of triumph of the human spirit.
(1:133)

Because the head and face are the primary sites of the
affects, each affect is labeled as a continuum between its
nuld and intense manifestations with the terms by which we
identify them as emotions. For example, the anger—rage
affect includes the frown, clenched jaw and red face. The
interest-excitement affect creates the lowering of the
eyebrows and intensity of visual tracking and listening.
The enjoyment/joy affect produces the smile or laughter.
Each innate affect has an accompanying vocalization, though
Tomkins asserts that this characteristic is the most
culturally suppressed, and least apparent. Shame-
humiliation is an affect auxiliary that limits positive
affects and includes the lowering of the eyes and head.

The interest/excitement affect and the enjoyment/joy
affect are the two positive affects and are inherently
pleasurable and desirable. The other affects are inherently
negative and punishing. The three affect supplements,
shame, disgust and dissmell, are negative in that they act
to limit positive affects.

The affect system is one of the body’s feedback

27

systems by which the organism monitors and regulates its
functions. The physical changes that affect creates are
themselves picked up by sensors in muscle and skin and are
fed back to the brain as stimuli that are combined with the
original signal so as to amplify it. Only when an initial
signal is combined with the amplifying signal_from the
affect in the body can it have enough intensity to compete
for transmission to the limited channels of consciousness
in the form that Tomkins calls a “report” (1:18). If all
stimuli went to consciousness, it would be overwhelmed. The
unconscious processing of affect allows only the most
urgent stimuli into conscious processes.

Affect from perception, memory and cognition is
assembled in the mind in what Tomkins calls the “central
assembly” in response to an initial, automatic affective
response to a change in the density of neural firing
(1:113). The central assembly is not an organ or even a
SPecific place in the brain but a function in which signals
from memory, cognition, and the senses are matched,
integrated and processed into a new affective response.

Tomkins specifies that humans remember affective
eXperiences and recall these into affective processes. He

also stresses the complexity of affective information

contained in facial expression:

28

The total set of facial responses shared in a
dyadic relationship is also embedded in still a larger set

which includes latent and unconscious motives,

and social conventions about how directly affects

may be expressed by the face, as well as

inferences about the conscious strategy of the

other. (1:215)
I propose that the ability to associate, remember and
recall affective values is a result of the fact that all
information in the brain acquires an affective encoding by
association. As quoted earlier, Tomkins specifies that any
affect can be associated with any object. I posit that all
information is encoded with some affect, which makes us
different information matter in different ways to us.
Information is affectively encoded in association with the
affective environment in which it is processed. This
encoding gives it importance or potency as it is assembled
with other signals in the central assembly. In this sense,
affective intensity gives meaning to simple information. We
care about information to the degree that we “feel" its
affective encoding.

The amplifying feedback function of the system

accounts for the fact that a genuine smile, for example,

does make us feel better and genuine anger in our

29

expression will make us feel worse. In experience this
simple connection becomes complicated as will be explained
below, but the important point is that the affect system is
matched to cognition in a way that makes information matter
without a conscious apprehension of semantic meanings. We
can care in any way about any thing because any affect can
encode any information.

While the affect system can act independently of the
drives, the drives rely on affective amplification. The
best example of this is the sex drive, which relies on the
amplification of the interest and enjoyment affects to
achieve its motivational potency. The sex drive alone is a
weak motivator as is evidenced by the ease with which
sexual arousal can be extinguished by distractions or
insecurities. The social complexities of sexuality that
Freud attributed to the sex drive are actually the work of
the cultural embededness of the affective amplification of
the sex drive. The pain drive system is similarly amplified
by affect, which explains why even serious wounds can be
ignored if other conditions produce enough affect to block
pain's access to consciousness at the central assembly

The startle affect is the best example of the
automatic function of affect. In its evolutionary history,

the human body has learned that stimuli of rapidly

3O

increasing intensity are the most likely to be an immediate
threat. Therefore, when the rate of neural firing increases
rapidly enough, the startle affect is triggered and we
respond quickly and without cognitive intervention. An
object moving quickly toward one's head, for instance, will
cause one to startle, activating the rapid and orchestrated
response of ducking, raising the hands, and other hormonal
and muscular changes. Whatever may have occupied
consciousness before is displaced by the affective
intensity of the startle affect, and our attentive
capacities are quickly focused on this dangerous stimulus.
The other affects involve a great deal more cognitive
participation and are far more culturally conditioned. I
stress that all affects originate in an initial biological
response because this characteristic imposes the
imperatives that I will later claim can be seen in some
cultural and poetic phenomena as they negotiate
accommodations with these imperatives.

Tomkins began develOping his theory after observing
the intense facial displays of his newborn son, and in this
pre- cultural responsiveness we have the clearest
manifestation of the biological conditions of the affect
system that become acculturated through learning. The

infant’s crying response, for instance, is part of the

31

U.

‘v

o.

[‘J.

.(3

 

distress-anguish affect and is triggered by “a general
continuing level of non-optimal neural stimulation”
(1:255). Some negative stimulus of a particular intensity,
be it discomfort from the hunger drive or a tactile signal
from the pain system, inherently activates the distress
affect. Such a trigger will activate the muscles in the
face, respiration and other systems according to
genetically inherited programs and produce the crying"
response. The affective facial and bodily response is fed
back to the brain so that it amplifies the original
discomfort which then increases the affective response
again. This circular system continues to a preset limit.
Positive affect is inherently rewarding, and equally

automatic in the infant. The pleasure of the smile is
quickly associated with the reciprocal smile of others.
Paul Redding quotes Tomkins on this subject to indicate the
Hegelian nature of the sociality built into his theory:

The smiling response and the enjoyment of its

feedback along with the feedback of concurrent

autonomic and hypothalamic responses make

possible a kind of human social responsiveness

that is relatively free of drive satisfaction, of

body site specificity of stimulation, and of

specific motor responses other than that of the

32

 

smile itself. (135)
The satisfaction of the shared smile is produced by the
internal duplication of the affect perceived on the face
of the other. Extrapolating now from Tomkins, I propose
that sharing positive affect with others not only gives the
infant pleasure, it also activates an inherent mental
predisposition for the formation of the self. In
evolutionary terms, the preservation of the self is,
literally, the preservation of the psychic self. Selves
have existence or substance proportionate to the degree
that a people feel positive affect directed toward them.
Because the only source of positive affect is through the
duplication of that affect perceived on the faces of
others, the only source of self-preservation is the co-
operative behaviors that earn the approval of others. In
this way individuals are dependent on the affective
cooperation of the other members of a community. The
affectively constituted self and an inherent imperative to
substantiate that self make humans communal beings.
Contrary to notions of the self as the essence of the
individual, the self is here seen as the bio-cultural
phenomenon that ensures the individual’s service to the
collective.

Tomkins does not theorize the self in this affective

33

 

V‘

role, but he does consider the recognition of affect as
central to our communal nature. Redding notes that while
“Freud saw love primarily as sublimated sexual drive,
Tomkins’s account of love is far more Hegelian in that it
is dealt with in terms of the mutual reinforcement and the
mutual recognition of affect” (135). Redding quotes
Tomkins: “‘This dyadic interaction is inherently social
inasmuch as the satisfaction of the self is at the same
time the satisfaction of the other’” (135).

In the child, positive affect is first generated only
by the direct perception of the same affect on the face of
care-givers. However, affect in all of its forms quickly
becomes associated with the experiential contingencies that
accompany the recognition of the smile on the face of the
other.

All information in the brain that is remembered or
comes to consciousness is first encoded with the quality
and potency of the affect that accompanies its processing.
In effect, all information in the brain is encoded with
feeling by association with the infant's experience of
matching its affects to the affect perceived on the faces
of others. Memories are retrieved with their affective
encoding and this affect is duplicated in the mind as if it

were perceived on the face of another. Affective encoding

34

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gu-

uv

~19

va-

PF

UL

is the intentionality or personification that perception
necessarily assigns to objects.

Frances Ferguson traces the hiStory of literary
criticism’s attempt to expunge the intentionalization of
non-human objects but concludes finally: “Trying to have
objects without intentions turns out to be having no
objects at all" (122). She continues:

Our pleasure in nature and our scientific
knowledge of it are alike important for
identifying not reality but reality production as
an inescapable process of supplying intentional
states to the very matter that we identify as
incapable of having intentional states.
(122)
We can imagine objects without intentionality, but the
unconscious processes of the affect system ensure that we
respond to them as if they were people looking back at us
with human intentions.

The intentionalization of perception ensures that all
behavior serves communal interests by making all
interactions with the environment subject to the co-
Operative imperative built into the affective needs of the
self. Even when not in direct interaction with humans, the

need for their positive affect directs an individual’s

35

’5'

'von

‘ V‘

at.

 

-o-v'
-

 

vs-

behavioral choices. It also frees the affectively needy
individual from the necessity of being constantly in direct
interactions. Even when alone, the performance of certain
approved behaviors gives one access to the positive affect
encoded on the memories of objects and ideas.

The environment is made to be an extension of the
affect system. This is an example of Redding's assertion
that current discussions of the nature of mind “have
surprisingly overt Hegelian aspects" (127). Redding quotes
Daniel Dennett’s proposed explanation of the
“disproportionately greater intelligence” of humans over
related species. Humans, Dennett stresses, have a

habit of off-loading as much as possible of our
cognitive tasks into the environment itself--
extruding our minds (that is, our mental projects
and activities) into the surrounding world, where
a host of peripheral devices we construct can

store, process, and re-represent our
meanings, streamlining, enhancing, and protecting
the processes of transformation that are our
thinking. This widespread practice of off-loading
releases us from the limitations of our animal
brains.

(127)

36

.o.

‘r‘

Vi

(I)

People are constantly generating positive affect through
the recall of its encoding on the material and conceptual
environment. Imagination brings images to mind so that
their affective encoding can generate an affective
response.

Imagination is the function by which the mind
constructs scenarios of possible futures so as to test them
by responding affectively to them. If a planned action is
to satisfy evolutionary needs, then planned behaviors must
be tested by the affect system in the present. In effect, a
person’s body with both its inherent and learned
capabilities must be virtually present in the imagined
scenario. In order to do this, we imagine the future by
assembling images from memories and then respond to the
affective encoding we find on those memories.

The ability to plan for the long-term is an adaptive
advantage. In order to do this, the organism must be able
to make a prediction of its future affective needs in
relation to some standard that is not just the immediate
affective condition. The self is the generalized history of
the organism's affective condition. We feel that we have a
unified self, when we do, because the script of the self
carries this generalization of our affective life. We can

also access memories of the self in the past and note the

37

f..-

it

Or

-fiv

.I

'r?!

g

comparison to the generalized self, giving the sense of
fragmented or multiple selves. The model of the self being
argued here is obviously not the unified, autonomous
concept associated with modern individualism and now
rejected in most critical discourse. The self is more
accurately the record of the organism's success in
satisfying the imperative for the survival of the species.
under this model, if there is no self, there is no human
being.

Because imagination stimulates an affective response,
it can serve to substantiate the self by the generation of
positive affect. While this is, in a sense, self-
substantiation, it can be so only to the extent that direct
interaction has provided the affective potency by which
memories become affectively encoded. With time and use, the
affective encoding of memory loses its potency if not
reinforced by new associations with direct interaction.
Even in the most imaginatively isolated and seemingly non—
communal behavior, the individual is accessing the positive
affect of some group of significant others.

People can do without the approval of those in the
present only to the extent that they have memories of
approval that can offset the present and provide for

positive affect. Direct affective sharing is particularly

38

V“

...

‘ I

a.

.4: .

potent, but we need not be blindly obedient to those in the
present. Still, the self can survive the displeasure of
some only to the extent that the approval of others is
available in memory to sustain the self. The
unsunderstanding of the ability to utilize remembered
approval gives rise to the fallacy of the autonomous
individual.

In Tomkins's explanation, the fundamental social
motive is the sharing of positive affect. Redding quotes
Tomkins's assertion that the “dyadic interaction is
inherently social inasmuch as the satisfaction of the self
is at the same time the satisfaction of the other” (135). I
suggest that affective sharing is not only dyadic, but
becomes social by the mind’s categorizing function in which
affective stimuli are grouped together in memory. The
perception of affect becomes so mediated by cultural
learning that it ceases to be meaningful to speak of a
dyadic relationship, even in dyadic interactions. The
affective encoding of communal objects, including the
individual smile, elicits the mind’s understanding of the
consensus that is represented by the perceived affect and
the prerequisites by which one gains access to its
duplication.

I add to Tomkins’s theory, then, that the encoding of

39

0’:

on.

AF

vs.

A-H

ML

.Fb

objects and thoughts with affect is proportionate to the
“community” of people that we understand to be in agreement
about the encoding of an object. The intensity of the
affect that we recall with a memory of an object reflects
the size and importance of the “affective community" that
encoded the object remembered. In this way the interaction
with natural objects that is so important to Romanticism
especially, can be seen to be culturally generated by
virtue of the individual's knowledge of the object as a
symbol of communal values. When we recall an object or idea
and share affect with the community symbolized by it, we
join or ally ourselves affectively with that community, and
. by our behavior, others note this and alter their
understanding of the affective communities in their own
memories.

Affective communities exist only in the individual
memories by which we understand which behaviors on our
parts will allow us to duplicate the positive affect of
others directed toward us. While there are institutions of
cultural value in moral codes and laws, these are only
gross generalizations of the complexity by which
individuals know which behaviors give them access to
positive affect.

The concept of the affective community is important

40

(I)

m;-

(D

(T

because it models how the seemingly co-operative imperative
for individuals to share self-substantiating affect becomes
a competitive system in which coalitions and classes form
so as to gain advantage in the struggle to maximize

positive affect and minimize negative affect. We need to
have positive affect directed toward us, but we do not need
everyone to do so. The disapproval of others can, itself,
become associated with positive affect if the affective
communities of which one is a member gives their approval
to the act of being disapproved of by others.

I have suggested that affective communities exist in
order to require a particular behavior in exchange for
access to the community's positive affect. This requires
that there is in the mind a function rather like a
conscience that precludes us from unconsciously sharing the
positive affect of affective communities whose behavioral
quid pro quo we have not satisfied.

This is linked to the limitations of the potency of
imagination to elicit affective responses. Imagination is a
system for testing possible futures. Unconsciousness does
not cede control to consciousness for extended periods of
time.

I have described an affective model of a cultural

“structure of feeling” as it can be seen to operate

41

“v“
fin“

F!

v.

an

an

v‘

-c|

II

 

5
a

 

unconsciously. This model can help clarify an essential
characteristic of nineteenth—century British poetry. These
posts are not trying to simply increase the frequency or
intensity of feeling. They are trying to identify and
cultivate a type of feeling that they feel has been
excluded from modern life by modernizing societies.

When thinkers like Coleridge and Wordsworth envision a
cultural sphere separate from the political, as Williams
asserts, they do so not only to remove emotional life from
the political but to create a sphere in which to cultivate
this new mode of feeling that includes Wordsworth’s “spots
of time" or the feeling qualities of the rural poor that
contrast to conventional, urban emotionality. An essential
problem in Romanticism is to understand this quality of
feeling that Wordsworth asserts is to be found in “emotion
recollected in tranquility.”

Tomkins’s affect theory provides an insight that can
clarify the distinction that Romanticism intuits. As
explained earlier, Tomkins specifies that when unconscious
processes amplify an affective response adequately, it
gains access to the limited circuits of consciousness and
we become conscious of it as a feeling. Tomkins addresses
the fact that affective states produce different levels of

conscious awareness, but he does not theorize affective

42

proceses after they come to consciousness. However, it is
in this realm that imagination and thought intervene in
affective amplifications, so I will again extend my own
theory from his insights.

If all information processing in the brain includes
the processing of the affective encoding that inevitably
attaches to information, then conscious processes such as
imagination and thought also participate in the development
of affect. In other words, feeling as it first comes to
consciousness, changes under the influence of conscious
processes, and we can feel this difference. This allows for
a useful distinction to be drawn between affect and
emotion.

Emotions are particular, culturally prescribed
affective packages that conscious cognition imposes on
affect as it first comes to consciousness. Cultures create
an acceptable repertoire of affective displays so as to
make co-operative interactions simpler and more
predictable. Without a cultural consensus to standardize
affective displays, the complexity and possible intensity
of individual affective combinations as they come from
unconsciousness would overwhelm communication.

Affect changes after coming to consciousness because

thought and imagination work with different memories than

43

do unconscious processes. Unconscious memory serves the
need for the mind to react quickly to initial affect. To
this end, unconscious cognitive processes draw on a highly
generalized, accumulative memory so that the most broadly
relevant affective information is processed first and is
available to initiate responsive actions quickly. When this
affect rises to consciousness, conscious cognition
retrieves information from the short-term memory in which.
more detailed information of highly socialized behaviors is
stored. Among this information are the scripts that direct
the development of pre-emotional affect into one of the
emotions in the cultural repertoire. Conscious thought
finishes the socialization of pre—emotional affect,
standardizing affective displays in the public realm.

This distinction is crucial, for, as I will argue
below, beginning in the late eighteenth century, literature
becomes preoccupied with feeling as it first comes to
consciousness and before the cultural scripts of conscious
memory can develop it into the conventional emotions. The
literary traditions against which Romanticism rebels are
marked by the attempt to produce ever more powerful
emotions until the conventions begin to parody themselves.
In the Preface to the 1802 Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth

famously identifies the public taste for these emotional

44

stimulants as “this degrading thirst after outrageous
stimulation” (Wu 359). Instead, he recommends to the reader
dissatisfied with his own poetry “that the powers of
language are not so limited as he may suppose, and that it
is possible that poetry may give other enjoyments, of a
purer, more lasting, and more exquisite nature” (Wu 363). A
refinement of feeling response is the goal.

All feeling is affect, but we can feel the difference
between pre-emotional affect and the emotional product of
cultural scripts. The turn to imagination in Romanticism is
a strategy by which to cultivate the imaginative creation
of affective stimuli. Later in the century, aestheticism
will try to refine pre—emotional affect out of cultural
emotion entirely.

All times have been aware of the feeling of pre-
emotional affect as distinct from “normal" emotion and have
sought to explain it, usually in spiritual terms. In common
experience it is intuition, mood, premonition, or impulse.
In extremely powerful and positive instances it can be felt
as a mystic communion with non-earthly realities. When this
pre-emotional affect is intensely positive, it is
powerfully self-substantiating, and is the condition of
euphoria or bliss that often exceeds the terminology of the

emotions. This state is typically very brief because it is

45

 

quickly integrated into a cultural emotion so as to make it
suitable to interaction.

Slowing or arresting the emotionalization of affect is
part of the poetic project of the nineteenth century and is
consistent with the larger changes in the affective economy
in which public affect must be muted so as to accommodate
the urbanization and democratization of society. In
traditional societies, the public sharing of affect
constitutes a large proportion of the positive affect that
substantiates selves. As populations become dense and, in
their democratic aspirations, make ever greater demands for
access to the affective economy, the public generation of
positive affect becomes problematic. The solution cannot be
to simply suppress public affect because this leaves an
essential biological imperative unsatisfied. A source of
positive affect must be instituted to replace that lost in
the suppression of public affect. The growth of rationality
and self-reflection answer this need by turning cognition
to the recall of memories so that affect is internally
generated. In effect, the use of imagination allows people
to be more affectively self-substantiating. This is the
ability that leads to the illusion of the autonomous self.
However, this strategy is of limited efficacy because the

affective encoding of memory cannot provide the intensity

46

 

of direct interaction, and the encoding of memories fades
with time and use.

Modernity’s self-reflectiveness is an accommodation,
not a resolution, of an essential tension that I will call
the affective dilemma. Humans have a biological need for
the positive affect that is generated by duplicating and
amplifying communally generated positive affect. The co-
operative systems that grow in order to facilitate this
mutual generation of necessary affect are always under the
threat that the appetite for shared positive affect will
turn into an amplifying contagion that cannot be contained
by the system- This tension is the affective dilemma.
Cultures accommodate and contain the affective dilemma, but
they do not resolve it.

The most obvious example of dangerous affective
contagion for the nineteenth century is the French
Revolution, but Jon Mee details the numerous events in
British history that explain the pervasive concern with
“enthusiasm” in the 17908. This concern was warranted, he
points out, because across the political spectrum there
were elements who promoted emotional intensity with the
view that it was a vital source of connection with
something essential and true.

I have explained that individuals learn to read both

47

 

objects and concepts as symbolic representations of
communal attitudes to particular behaviors so that the
performance of a behavior allows one to duplicate the
affect encoded on the relevant object or concept. In the
case of emotions, individuals know that communal approval
accrues to those who use the prescribed affective displays.

A particularly significant cultural institution is
especially relevant in the affective economy and poetry of
the nineteenth century. Religion and spirituality in
general function as affective transactions. As affect comes
to consciousness its origins are mysterious, but it feels
like the product of interaction that it is. Religions are
the institutions by which communities assign a personality
to the mystery so that they can organize their affective
economies through that symbol. Once the communal standards
for the exchange of behavior and affect are encoded in the
divine personality, individuals can imagine the divinity
smiling at them and be substantiated by duplicating that
very potent affect.

The divine personality is a potent symbol by which
communal affective values can be disseminated to individual
memories so as to require communal behaviors in exchange
for communal affect. As the affective economy diversifies

and affective communities proliferate during the nineteenth

48

 

century, the crisis of faith grows as the affective
communities symbolized by religion lose some of their
dominance in the affective economy. The secular
inclinations of poetry participate in the redistribution of
affective potency to secular objects and concepts.

Central to the affect theory proposed here is the
definition of the self as the monitor of the participation
of the individual in the preservation of the collective.
Selves have existence to the extent that individuals can
perceive, directly or imaginatively, that others are
smiling in approval of them. I have referred to the
affectively healthy self with the metaphor of “substance.”
I borrow this metaphor from the work of Fredric Bogel who
writes of “insubstantiality” to describe the quality of
experience that increasingly alarms writers in the late
eighteenth century. I suggest that these writers and Bogel
perceive the muting of public affectivity and intensity and
the sense of lost meaning that results as selves find it
more difficult to find substantiating affect.

Besides producing a useful metaphor, Bogel's
Literature and Insubstantiality in Later Eighteenth-Century
England identifies the growing dissatisfaction with the
condition of feeling that is addressed by the nineteenth

century. His work also identifies some of the theoretical

49

 

p:
y.

it

 

’-
)-

gaps that I have proposed to fill and offers a critical
context in which to clarify how an affect theory might
address some important critical issues.

Bogel finds a preoccupation with insubstantiality in
the generations of writers just preceding those that
Williams credits with the intuition of a structure of
feeling at the foundations of culture. In affective terms,
Bogel studies the late eighteenth century’s diagnosis of
the need for experience to produce a sense of the
substantiated self, and Williams studies the nineteenth
century’s social adaptation to changes in substantiating
strategies. In both cases, I hope to show that an affective
economy is structuring the cultural phenomena that are
being studied and that the terms of the theory previously
sketched are useful in clarifying the questions they raise.

Bogel does not claim that a troublesome sense of
insubstantiality is new to the eighteenth century. He
contends instead that poets in the late eighteenth century
are the first to make visible the dimension of the

substantial that “is pretty clearly a permanent category of

 

human consciousness” (54). But the insubstantial has become
important enough that Bogel sees it contributing to the
historical transition from the religious concentration on

transcendence to “a new attitude toward commonplace

50

 

ov

.0.-

‘F

‘l

()

(W

reality” (50). Even religiously committed writers “exhibit
the strain that the religious imagination underwent in the
later eighteenth century, a strain that signals the
emergence of the modern period” (51) These writers make the
insubstantial visible by reacting with a new “rhetoric of
substantiality” (47). Bogel, like Williams, is grounding an
historic shift in a reaction to a feeling.

Bogel is emphatic that the transition he is interested
in is not explainable in the usual terms that oppose new
scientific ideas to religious doctrine and institute a
crisis of belief or a secularization of society. Rather, he
uses the metaphor of substantiality to indicate a
characteristic of experience beyond issues of logical
consistency. Bogel explains:

Faith, belief, metaphysical argument and

conviction--these work to convince us of the

existence and attributes of God, or indeed of man

and the world, but they cannot prescribe the
manner in which we shall experience them. They
cannot ensure that what we believe to exist we
shall also feel to be present. (53)
Bogel does not oppose thought and feeling, and skepticism
does not win an intellectual debate in his assessment.

Rather, the literature of the later eighteenth century

51

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presents a model of consciousness that “requires that we
distinguish between two dimensions of experience” (53). On
the one hand we determine that things of a certain kind
exist, and on the other hand, we “note how substantially
they present themselves, how forcefully or variously or
richly they impinge on consciousness” (45). These poets are
not drawn away from their devotion to the transcendent by
its intellectual deficiencies. Instead, they intuit that
the perception of transcendent truths leaves some
essential experiential need unsatisfied.

In this distinction Bogel's analysis matches Tomkins’s
distinction between information in the brain and the affect
necessary to give it importance. Without information affect
is blind; without affect information is weak. Bogel
stresses that he does not wish to make the distinction of
thought and emotion. A better distinction, perhaps, is
between thought (cognition) and affect.

An affective reading understands that the necessary
substantiality is in the self’s perception of positive
affect. The insubstantial experience is so because it does
not involve the positive affective response necessary to
imbue it with significance even though the ideas are
logically consistent and satisfying. Such an experience

does not “impinge on consciousness” because its affective

52

(n

encoding does not compete well in the central assembly for
transmutation into a conscious report.

Bogel's descriptions of the strains on religious
belief reflect the declining affective potency of the
Christian myth as other concepts win communal approval. But
the decline in the potency of the myth does not displace
the myth as an idea. While materialist explanations may
strain the religious belief and pose an intellectual
contradiction, the two can coexist because they pose no
fundamental contradiction for the substantiation of selves.
In the affective economy, an idea is potent to the degree
that it carries communal approval. Its logic does not
Operate affectively.

Bogel explains that the search for a rhetoric of
substantiality leads the eighteenth century from the
understanding of reality as a relationship between the
common human realm and a transcendent realm to an
understanding of reality as a relationship between aspects
within the common realm. This is a disappointing transition
at the time because these poets discover that within the
realm of the common, there are contradictions and
disharmonies between self and other much like those between
the self and the transcendent other. Bogel’s study finds in

the rhetoric of substantiality new encounters and

53

understandings of contradiction and paradox, but not the
degree of substantiality hoped for. He notes that by this
standard, the century's literary project could be judged a‘
failure. But the reappearance of these obstacles within the
realm of the nontranscendent raises questions for these
poets and for Bogel about the nature of the unhappiness
they feel as insubstantiality. Does the unhappiness result
from a lack of substance in the external world, or are the
insubstantiality and its unhappiness an unavoidable
condition of human nature? This question moves the subject
from ontology to psychology, and, therefore, to Freud.

Bogel notes the similarity of insubstantiality and
melancholia and investigates the Freudian notion as an
analog of insubstantiality. He finds the Freudian reading
limiting in many of the same ways as do other critics of
Freud. Psychoanalysis grounds motivation in the psychic
scaring of a primal loss and the fantasy life that escapes
it. All experience thereafter shares the escapist pathology
of its origins, and the dominance of the unconscious
ensures that all motivation thereafter is limited to this
narrative. Applied to literature, Bogel finds that

the analogy with melancholia tends to erode the
distinction between imagination and fantasy,

artistic illusion and neurotic delusion. What

54

begins as an analogy, that is, ends as an
assimilation of one term to another, imagination to

fantasy, art to pathology.

(218)

Bogel would rather see the tensions between self and
other “as the initial or generative condition and its
derivation from loss as itself only a special case" (219).
He would prefer to begin with the assumption that

lostness, absence, and deep uncertainty about the
distinctions between self and other . . . be
experienced not just as the endpoints of a
regressive or degenerative process, individual or
cultural, but also as categories no less
primordial and no more escapable than the
clearcut fixities and sharp demarcations that a
degenerative explanation views them as
subverting. (220)
Under such an assumption, the sense of insubstantiality
results from an inherent tension between self and other,
and our discovery of inevitable unhappiness “need not be
projected into a myth of initially possessible happiness
fractured by later loss; the pattern of discovery must not
be taken for the structure of reality” (220). The Freudian

motive is not basic enough; its motivational flow chart

55

does not begin at the top. Freud grounds motivation not in
the tension which leads to its discovery, but in the
discovery itself. The problem is that the discovery is an
interpretation of the tension, and Freud imposes a single
interpretation of what the tension means.

Bogel does not reject the Freudian reading out of
hand, but he finds the conclusion of eighteenth—century
writers more convincing. Freud grounds psychology in a
primal loss which presumes that there is an initial
possession. The complexities of self and other then follow
as a result of unconscious evasions and compensations for
the loss of that which was possessed. But Bogel sees in the
literature that these writers never felt in possession of
external objects in the first place. The search for
substantiality revealed to them that lostness is a category
of experience and not a relation to particular experiences.
There is no initial substantiality to be lost.

Bogel wishes to credit these writers with perceptive

 

abilities that psychoanalysis labels illusion, and he

 

concludes by asking how melancholia can be accommodated in
the reading “without implying that later eighteenth—century
writers characteristically functioned in what might be
called a sublimely unconscious state?” (219). In this

complaint, Bogel echoes many critics of psychoanalysis in

56

 

many fields. The same psychoanalytic predetermination of
behavior that Bogel sees blocking agency in individuals
blocks their collective agency in culture.

With an affect theory there is no need to ground
emotional complexity and its pain in a narrative of
primordial loss in the mind of the infant. Negative affect
is inevitable in the normal fluctuations of the rates on
neural firing that in turn trigger changes in affective
responses. In fact, neural firing must fluctuate because a
sustained level will trigger either the distress or anger
affect in response. In Tomkins’s scheme, for instance,
shame “is an innate auxiliary affect and a specific
inhibitor of continuing interest and enjoyment” (2:123).
Any stimulus that inhibits a positive affect without
completely extinguishing it will trigger the negative shame
auxiliary. It may need to be clarified that having the
shame affect is not the same as feeling the emotion of
shame. The affect is known most often as a subtle and
passing movement of mood in which interest or pleasure
wanes even momentarily. The point is that the experiential
tension of which Bogel speaks is a normal function of
changing rates of neural firing. Cognition can intervene in
these processes to maintain as positive a response as

possible, but the experimentation necessary to evolutionary

57

 

success is disruptive of complacency. The seemingly
inevitable return of the negative is a motivational
necessity that will likely become associated with losses in
experience, but every negative affect is not the resurgence
of the primal loss.

Psychoanalysis reduces the complexities of the
literature to an inevitable narrative of failure as writers
attempt to compensate for an infantile experience of
traumatic loss. There is in such a reading a moral
reductionism which does not account for positive and
creative imagination. This limits our understanding of
individual texts, but just_as significantly, it limits our
ability to see changes in culture’s management of
emotionality. The Freudian model offers little room for
cultural diversity; what was true of interaction for
Oedipus is true of interaction today and universally so.
Freud hoped to create a cultural theory, but instead, he
universalized a cultural behavior and_foreclosed on the
possibility of a theory which could accommodate the
diversity of cultural behaviors.

As a result, psychoanalysis cannot account for
psychology as a cultural phenomenon. It is significant that
while Bogel begins by noting that the sense of

insubstantiality was widespread and significant in the

58

eighteenth century, his conclusions about the literature
pertain only to the thoughts of the individual writers.
They participate in the dissemination of ideas, but this is
the realm of ideas that he earlier discounts as a source of
the change in which he is interested. He begins by noting
the cultural context but narrows his conclusion in keeping
with the limitations of his psychological theory.

The cultural participation of the literature becomes
more visible within the context of an affective economy
which satisfies Bogel’s stated preference for a theory in
which the complexities of perception and interaction are
psychological characteristics rather than products of
psychological trauma:

Within an affective model, the human condition is not
the individual, futile quest for the reclamation of a lost
union, but the communal nurturing of interdependent selves
within a flexible social structure. There is no communal
frustration of an individual desire for a return to a lost
substantiality, but rather an ongoing maintenance of
substantiated selves as a function of communal interaction.
Culture then becomes not merely the place in which the
individual searches for the lost object, but a place in
which a community negotiates the production and

distribution of a communal resource. The basic value that

59

o l

the affective economy creates and distributes is the
positive affect of approval, whether by individuals or
symbols of collective approval. Such a negotiation is
visible in Bogel’s analysis.

Bogel's explanation of the rhetoric of substantiality
must take into account that religious beliefs survived as
writers turned away from the transcendent in search of more
substantial experience in everyday life. The coexistence of
belief in the transcendent and the conviction of its
troublesome insubstantiality appears to be a contradiction.
Bogel finds in the literature that many writers reconciled
the contradiction by assuming a split in the nature of
experience between the fact of existence and the degree of
existence. Religious belief continues to establish the fact
of existence even as it fails to establish an adequate
degree of existence. The first way of knowing is regulated
by the criterion of logical consistency; religion makes
sense to these thinkers. But what is the criterion by which
we know the degree of existence? The writers that Bogel
studies assume that the feeling of insubstantiality can be
addressed by a literature with more material and immediate
objects and subjects. But this approach does not produce
more substantial experience. So they conclude that

contradiction is inevitable. Affect theory offers another

60

“way to resolve the contradiction.

An affect theory identifies the criterion of
existential degree as positive affect generated by communal
approval and associated with the self. The substance of
experience is directly or indirectly a function of communal
approval. The value of an idea in the affective economy is
the degree of cultural approval that it enjoys, not the
logical consistency of the idea.

Bogel points out that atheism was very fashionable in
some circles at the end of the eighteenth-century, To
espouse atheism was to identify oneself among the
adventurous, non-conformists and to gain approval and
positive affect for doing so. At the same time, the culture
maintained the value of religious belief, and it was widely
understood that most skeptics maintained fundamental
religious beliefs. The intellectual contradiction is not a
problem in affective terms. The culture gives its approval
to both religious and skeptical ideas and this makes
cultural approval available to individuals who can
cognitively associate the self with either idea. Their
ideas may be logically contradictory, but they are not
affectively contradictory. When retrieved as scripts and
assembled with other stimuli in the central assembly, both

ideas carry the positive affect of communal approval.

61

The complication arises when logical consistency
itself gains communal approval, and contradiction becomes
associated with negative affect in a script in memory. Then
the affective contradiction neutralizes both terms in the
central assembly. In order to gain the positive affect
associated with the approval for logical consistency, one
must refuse to embrace logically contradictory scripts;
otherwise, their affects simply cancel each other. Cultures
are full of contradictory myths and evaluative associations
as sub—cultures compete for control of the economy. The
work of cognition and the central assembly is to perceive
and compare the culture’s complex distribution of its
collective approval. The central assembly only adds and
subtracts intensities of affect carried by scripts in
memory; whether or not one values logical consistency
determines what scripts are in memory for retrieval.

We gain a new perspective on the work of ideology
generally when we appreciate the difference between
information in the brain and the competition to associate
positive affect with particular information. Logical
consistency is not inherently a value as it is often
mistaken considered by intellectuals.

A cultural theory that includes an affective economy

moves much of the complexity of self/other interactions

62

into the structure of cultural values—~the structure of
feeling. With such a theory, the real complexity of
cultural values can be brought into the system. Cultures
. have layers of contradictory value systems created and
cultivated by a multitude of subcultures both cooperative
and competitive. Individuals make and break allegiances
with many groups and communities within the collective.
Each of these subcultures has its own evaluative
distribution. The calculus by which the individual mind
selects and introjects some number of these is another
layer of complexity. In order to find patterns in this
complexity, an affect theory looks for culture's
organization of inherent affective responses in fulfillment
of its self-substantiating imperative.

Bogel's book, like Williams’s book, identifies a
structure of feeling operating below and behind the subject
of its analysis. Both document literature’s response to
changes at this psychological level but neither has a
psychological model that can accommodate this level. Bogel
and writers of the late eighteenth century identify a felt
component of experience that is not explainable in
traditional terms. Williams and the writers of the
nineteenth century ascribe this feeling to a communal

structure and look for ways to integrate it into the

63

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political. Today, critics who are committed to cultural
constructionist models are returning to the subject of
emotion in the same pursuit. This dissertation hopes to
make the case that Tomkins’s affect theory and related
ideas are the logical place to look.

Coincident with challenges to economic and political
hierarchies in the nineteenth century is a challenge to the
traditional distribution of the communal approval that is
necessary to the substantiation of selves. Social class not
only distributes wealth and power unequally: it also
distributes positive affect unequally through its
associations of class with individual dignity. In their
democratizing sympathies, poets try to imagine how cultural
practices might be adjusted so as to make the affective
economy more democratic without increasing the danger of
contagious affect.

The role of culture in containing emotional contagion
within a social order is clarified when the emotional goal
is seen to be the substantiation of selves within an
affective economy. Nineteenth-century British culture faces
an affective dilemma in its need to create ample positive
affect for all at the same time that it contains the
competition for affect, and the amplifying tendencies of

affect, within its hierarchical organizing structure.

64

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Behind the hunger of the poor and their emotional
volatility in the street is the more destabilizing assault
on the traditional affective economy by the bourgeoisie
after the model of the American Revolution. The call for
liberty is a demand for a new affective economy in which
class distinctions no longer give privileged access to
social respect and dignity. The appearance of concern with
both emotion and social structures at the beginning of the
nineteenth century reflects the social disruption spreading
outward from changes in the affective economy.

The poets considered in the following chapter are
challenged by their cultural situations to imagine
meaningful experience within a contracting repertoire of
affective interactions. The analysis here will focus on the
ways in which they resist and encourage changes in the

affective economies within which individuals negotiate the

substantiation of their communal selves.

65

 

 

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Chapter 2

Affective Community in the Coleridgean Imagination

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, often disparaged for his
German idealism, can be seen to be the first to bring into
literature the affective line of thought that Redding finds
in the post—Kantians and seeks to rehabilitate. Coleridge’s
debt to Schelling is well known, but just as Redding finds
Hegel’s affectivity to have been misunderstood, the same
nusunderstanding can be seen in critical treatments of
Schelling’s influence on Coleridge.

As Tomkins's affect theory is consistent with, and
illustrative of, Hegel’s “intersubjective recognition”
(133), so, I will argue, an affect theory modeled on
Tomkins is helpful in clarifying Romantic affectivity as
Coleridge brings that line of thought from Schelling into
Romanticism. In the affective context, Coleridge's use of
imagination is a pursuit of positive affect through access
to communal resources stored in memory. In the three poems
considered in this chapter, I will examine the variations
of this basic pattern that occur as the conditions of the
Speakers vary, but in each case, the pattern is consistent:
the speaker's imagination is triggered to affective

sensitivity, stimulating the retrieval of affectively

66

potent, communal memories, which amplify his positive
affect and make it possible for him to return to
sympathetic, direct interactions with people around him.
These poems demonstrate the place of imagination in an
affective economy both in the advantages that this presents
and in the limitations that imagination imposes. In
Coleridge’s poems present, imagination is neither an
idealist escape from self nor an individualist self-
satisfaction, but an access to culturally generated
affective resources that lead him back to a living
community. I propose that an affective reading contrasts to
readings of Coleridge that focus on imagination and feeling
as individual phenomena.

David Vallins calls Coleridge “the ultimate exemplar
of Romantic psychology in most important senses we can give
to that expression" (10). He continues:

His emphasis on the internal or subjective,
indeed, is reflected in his adoption of
Schelling’s theory of a single productive process
underlying all aspects of consciousness, whereby
the act of perception is explained as an earlier
or lower form of the imaginative power expressed
in works of philosophy and art. Through this

theory, the external world . . . becomes merely

67

another aspect of subjective experience.

(2)
Vallins assumes that Coleridge has adopted the subjectivism
attributed to Schelling and that Coleridge’s poetry and
prose therefore
assert the overwhelming importance of subjective
experience as against the objective worlds
described by natural science and empiricist
philosophy. In so doing, however, they also
express with unusual intensity a
characteristically Romantic sense of alienation,
and an associated desire to rediscover a sense of
unity between the self and its social or physical
environment. (2)
Clearly, Coleridge is seeking a sense of unity, but Vallins
identifies the turn to Schellingian subjectivism as an
escape from reality rather than as a search for the source
of the sense of unity. Where Redding finds in Schelling an
affective line of thought that necessitates communal
experience, Vallins finds an escapist idealism and
concludes:
That the flight from alienation into ideals of

unity plays so central a part in Coleridge's

68

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writing, indeed, is among the factors which make
it particularly representative of the psychological
patterns that characterize Romanticism more
generally. (3)
Vallins does not see the intersubjective significance of
Schelling’s subjectivism just as Redding predicts when he
points out that some of Schelling's work “can seem to
reflect a complete abandonment of that ‘realistic’
dimension of his thinking reflected in his philosophy of
nature for a type of mystical platonism” (138). However,
Redding's reading of Schelling, like his reading of Hegel,
recommends that critics not
lose sight of the continuing connection here to
[Schelling’s] more realistic thought about the
natural world. Schelling’s focus on art,
symbolism, and myth is bound up with a concern
with finding the objective, material forms within
which those mental processes dealt with as
embodied within the organism could gain an extra-
organismic or cultural form. (138).
Redding's reading of Schelling suggests that Coleridge was
likely pursuing a more materialist philosophy toward the
source of the communal. I will argue that an affective

reading demonstrates that the turn to imagination leads to

69

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communal experience regardless of intentions otherwise and,
in Coleridge's case, imagination delivers the speaker from
alienation back to community.

Using “The Eolian Harp,” “Frost at Midnight” and
“Dejection: an Ode," this chapter will argue that
Coleridge's poetry demonstrates a consistent response to
the need for positive affect. Each of these poems explores
the possibilities and limitations of the imaginative
satisfaction of this need and has to access what David S.
Miall calls an “internal logic of feeling beyond the
delineation of states of ‘passion’ or ‘pathos’” (37).

The tension in “The Eolian Harp” stems from the
speaker’s facility with imaginatively stimulating his own
affective responses. His self-stimulation of positive
affect exemplifies the Romantic ideal of imaginative
creativity but also exemplifies the destabilizing potential
that makes affect a public danger. In this case, the
threatened public is Sara, the wife of the speaker who does
not share his exhilaration with his imaginative creativity.
The contrast in what constitutes two different affective
economies is clear in the juxtaposition of the first two
stanzas, the first being poetically and morally
conventional and the second being Coleridge's Romantic

alternative. I will return to a more thorough examination

70

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of the conventionality of the first stanza, but first, I
would like to consider the affective processes in the
second passage in which the speaker celebrates his
imaginative virtuosity.

In line 15 the affective shift in Coleridge's strategy
begins with the personification of the eolian harp in the
simile comparing it to a coy maid in the arms of her lover.
The eolian harp on the windowsill sounds “Like some coy
maid half yielding to her lover” whose “sweet upbraiding

must needs/Tempt to repeat the wrong” (15-7); the
affective potency of the image overwhelms the ostensible
poetic intention of modifying an aural image of the wind.
This is an example of the prosopopoeia that will, late in
the century, earn Romanticism criticism for its indulgence
in the “pathetic fallacy.” However, the feelings associated
with objects is elicited by the affective encoding that
allows those objects to be processed by the affect system.
The image of the coy maid recalls the affective intensity
of a cultural courting ritual that is associated with that
phrase.

The sexual connotations of the coy maid’s “sweet
upbraiding" are the feature of the simile that is likely to
gain attention. However, Coleridge does not need such an

erotic image to describe the sound of the wind in the

71

 

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eolian harp. In fact, there is a promiscuous implication
that he must mute or risk being merely vulgar. The value of
a seduction ritual to the poem is its affective intensity,
not its sexual suggestion. As was explained in the previous
chapter, the sex drive is a rather weak and fragile
motivation without the support of the interest and
enjoyment affects which bring it into association with the
self in ways that make it compelling and complexly

cultural. Seen in terms of this psychology, the maid’s coy
response is most importantly part of a cultural courting
ritual that negotiates the affective complement to the

sexual drive.

Communities have a stake in the affective
compatibility of reproductive couples because, while the
sexual drive might be adequate for creating offspring in
some primal ancestor of humans, the sex drive cannot create
the psychologies that we recognize as human. While it is
generally recognized that the develOpment of the nuclear
family was an economic accommodation of an industrializing
workforce, it is often not noted that industrialization
altered interactive possibilities and that changes in
marriage and the family are also explainable as an
accommodation of an increasing privatization of the need

for positive affect. This need is the point of contention

72

between the speaker and Sara in “The Eolian Harp.”

The visible and aural expressions of coyness are parts
of an ensemble of affects that are culturally scripted so
as to facilitate the affective transaction that is
courting. The synesthesia of sound and sight in Coleridge’s
comparative figures suggests their association in affective
expressions. The affective combination that most people
would identify as coy involves a combination of affects
that represent the complex interaction of the maid’s
pleasure and her awareness that her behavior is culturally
marginal. The coy maid's head is turned down in the shame
affect while her eyes look up to maintain the eye contact
of the interest affect, and a smile, though perhaps faint,
communicates approval and the enjoyment affect. It is part
of the definition of the word “coy” that the shame affect
in the coy expression is at least somewhat “affected,”
meaning that her affect is not the automatic response
usually associated with emotion but is a mixed
communication of automatic and conscious responses. A
complicated communication is taking place in which the maid
is tempting her lover to “repeat the wrong” of his caress
while both know that a cultural transgression is possible.

Coyness is, then, a cultural ritualization of what on

the surface appears to be the violation of cultural codes.

73

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If we understand the maid's behavior to be a self-serving
act of individual desire, it can be dismissed as that of a
morally compromised seductress enticing her lover across
moral boundaries. But our immediate recognition of the coy
expression and Coleridge’s intention that it should
contribute to his poetic image of “joyance every where”
(29), indicates that it is common and culturally endorsed.

What appears a contradiction of moral values in both
the maid and her lover is better understood as a
negotiation of affective communities between them. Moral
codes announce the affective potencies that dominant
communities bring to the negotiation, but minority
communities can displace them with affective intensity
disproportionate to their size. Any instance of deviancy
indicates that there are affective communities, however
small, that are supporting the individuals who deviate.

The maid's coyness indicates that she wants more
affective amplification but is withholding consent for a
sexual consummation and that she has communal approval for
that behavior. It is misleading to see this as primarily
sexual. Coyness is primarily and intensely affective; its
Whole purpose is the intensification of affect without its
dissipation in sexual consummation. The non-sexual essence

Of Coleridge’s simile is clear also in the fact that the

74

moral violation that is foregrounded by the coy expression
need not be a sexual one. A child caught with her hand in
the cookie jar might opt for a coy interaction if she felt
that to be affectively advantageous. The child who does so
is not seeking satisfaction of Oedipal impulses; she is
seeking an interaction of intense positive affect and has
learned a ritual script that facilitates it. To read
Coleridge’s simile without this affective significance is
to miss the importance of its cultural work.

The seduction ritual also exhibits the conditions of
the affective dilemma. There is a communal constituency
for suppression of the social dangers presented by the
affective appetites of the lovers, and another constituency
that is more permissive in its recognition of the psychic
need for intense affect. The culture has authorized an
accommodation of this dilemma and the maid’s coy expression
Of “sweet upbraiding" signals that she has chosen that
affective transaction.

It may be noticed that the phenomenon I have analyzed
here bears some resemblance to the attraction of the
forbidden fruit. As commonly understood, it is the
violation of restrictions that produces the emotional
PaYoff and makes the forbidden fruit attractive. I would

argue that we are never attracted to the loss of approval.

75

 

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Instead, we choose one community of approval over another.
The forbidden behavior is attractive when it earns one the
approval of a more valued community of approval. The
pleasure of the forbidden fruit is the expectation that the
gain in approval will more than compensate for any possible
loss. The coy maid is attracted by the forbidden fruit to
the extent that the expected approval of the more
permissive community, in which her lover is included, can
be balanced against the disapproval of the larger
community. Behavior is always a choice between communities,
not a denial of community.

I am suggesting that the resolution of contradiction
that Coleridge attributed to the unifying Spirit acting
through organic form can be modeled as the psychology of
the affect system. The production of joy in the face of
contradiction is the evidence from which Coleridge
concludes that the human mind is connected to the unifying
and universal Spirit. In affective terms, this joy is
explained by the fact that the affect/cognition system
operates unconsciously to align the self with the most
advantageous assemblage of affective communities for that
individual. Behaviors seem contradictory because cultural
generalizations of values can never represent the

complexity of the system.

76

The affective conflict of the coy maid simile is
followed in the poem by the simile of the elfin world. Here
too, there is an accommodation of an affective conflict
that Coleridge wishes to resolve in favor of positive
affect. The eolian harp's “floating witchery of sound" (20)
is “As twilight elfins make, when they at eve / Voyage on
gentle gales from fairy-land" (21-2). As with the seduction
simile, this one is not purely innocent. In British
folklore, the spirit entities were responsible for much of
the disorder in common life including that caused by the
puzzling spontaneity of human emotion. These spirits are
often mischievous, inhabiting the moral gray areas where
playful enthusiasm approaches the mean spirited. These are
gray areas of the affective economy in which there are
competing affective communities of roughly equal affective
potency that makes it difficult to predict how individuals
will behave. An example is Robin Goodfellow, the Puck in
Shakespeare's .A.Midsummer.Night’s.Dream. Puck’s mischief
in the forest explains the emotional volatility of the
young lovers as their affective alliances shift
unpredictably and amplify to unreasonable proportions.

The Puck personifies the unconscious source of affect
in a way that accommodates the tension of the affective,

dilemma. The elves are joyous because they are free of

77

 

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human moral restraints and punishments that would suppress
the free amplification of positive affect. This makes them
disruptive of social order in the natural world and a
recurrent annoyance for humans. Still, they are also the
personification of the “Goodfellow” who is always approving
and smiling. While they personify minor disorder, they also
signify that this disorder is the act of a fun-loving force
that likes us. This approval redeems the disorder so that
people can find some positive affect in negative
circumstances.

The spirits of English folklore do not deny suffering,
but they make available an affective transaction that aids
individuals in restraining the amplification of negative
affect. They give people an approving personality behind
negative events. Coleridge’s fantasy is not an individual
escape into pleasant illusion, but an individual access to
the culturally constructed scripts that are there to
generate the positive affect that is necessary to psychic
survival. The coy maid simile is also a script by which
individuals gain access to the culture’s source of positive
affect in organized ways.

Signifiers acquire and deploy potent affective
encoding by virtue of their cultural use. There is a

constant negotiation and competition between subgroups over

78

this encoding as each tries to maximize its access to the
community’s positive affect. But the use of affectively
potent Signifiers is not the only way in which poetry can
manipulate the affective responses of readers.

Poetic form can increase affective responses by
directing the unconscious mind to process stimuli in ways
that strategically suppress the cognitive component of the,
affect/cognition interaction. Poetic content selects which
affects are triggered while poetic form adjusts the
participation of cognition in the processing of that
affect.' I

In the passages of “The Eolian Harp” previously
described in terms of their affective content there are
three parallel formal effects that combine in the affective
result. The first of these is a movement toward increasing
imaginative abstraction in the poem's first two stanzas.
The poem begins in the real interaction of Coleridge and
Sara, moves to an imagined human interaction in the
seduction simile, then to the semi-human realm of elves,
and finally to the ideal, utopian realm of fairyland. As
the degree of abstraction increases, there is an increase
in the freedom of the imagination to select and combine
affectively evocative images.

However, while increased abstraction increases the

79

 

number of objects available for recall into the affective

 

mix, it also diminishes their affective potency because
cognition exerts the control that Freud called “the reality
principle.” The more abstracted the image is from
experience as recorded in memory, the more likely it is
that cognition will retrieve the negatively encoded
memories with which culture suppresses escapes into
imagination. The more abstracted from experience the images
become, the harder it becomes to suspend disbelief, to use
Coleridge's own terms. In order to do this, the poetic
movement that eases restrictions on the retrieval of
affective memories must also ease the cognitive testing of
the imaginative scenario. Coleridge’s passage uses its
second parallel effect for this purpose.

As a complement to its imaginative freedom, the poem
subjects the reader to an increasing rhetorical complexity.
Here is a paraphrase of the string of comparisons of
Coleridge’s imaginative flight in lines 13—25: the eolian
harp is clasped by the window's casement and is caressed by
the wind as a coy maid is embraced and caressed by her

lover. The sound of the wind in the harp is like the voice

 

of the coy maid until the breeze builds and its sound
becomes like that of elves flying from fairyland where

melodies are like birds hovering around flowers.

8O

Besides the logical difficulty of so many shifting
vehicles in so few lines, there are changes in the figures
that further frustrate any attempt to logically follow the
associative chain. Including the first stanza, the poem
moves from the prosaic description of the environment of
the speaker and Sara, to the similes of the coy maid and
the elf that synthesize the wind’s motion and its sound, to
the symbolic representation of the organic source of life
in the synthesis of sound and motion in the melodies in
fairyland, which is, in turn, modified by the simile of the
birds. Each step increases semantic and interpretive
complexity until it is untenable to a reading that is also
attentive to scansion. The passage is not an example of
what some critics have charged is Coleridge's imaginative
confusion; it is an example of Coleridge’s strategic
collapse of semantic cohesion in the service of the_
affective intensity that is the third parallel effect.

In “The Eolian Harp,” affective intensity is
established with the easy recognition of that intensity in
the seduction ritual, one of culture’s most affective.
While the images become more and more imaginative, they
maintain the same sense of action suspended in a tension of
sheer, generative vitality, straining for realization.

Fairyland is a place “Where Melodies round honey-dropping

81

flowers,/Footloose and wild, like birds of Paradise,/Nor
pause, nor perch, hovering on untam’d wing!” (23-25). The
sense of pleasurable tension is enhanced by separating the
subject, Melodies, from its verbs, “pause” and “perch," by
two lines. Between the coy maid's “sweet upbraiding" and
the birds hovering round honey—dropping flowers, the
affective intensity remains as the sexuality of the image
becomes abstract.

Coleridge’s rhetorical complexity frustrates the
formation of cognitive scripts that might intervene as
consistent affective intensity opens into the increasing
imaginative freedom of fantasy. This is not a suspension of
logic but a selection of affective logic that allows the
mind to make the “willing suspension of disbelief.” Even in
the most imaginative vehicles, Coleridge works within the
affective, cultural logic of his images.

The affective dilemma expresses itself in every level
of interaction as the need for positive affect strains the
cultural accommodation of that need. “The Eolian Harp"
enacts this dilemma in Sara’s displeasure with the
speaker’s intimation of the logical consequences of his
imaginative success. The denouement of the poem's drama is
in line 44 when the speaker asks:

And what if all of animated nature

82

Be but organic Harps diversely fram'd,
That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps,

Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,

At once the Soul of each, and God of all? (44-8)
This is the first place in the speaker’s revery that Sara
responds because this is the point at which he proposes
that his self-cultivated euphoria is, in fact, a
manifestation of the divine in human experience. As a
personal imaginative enjoyment, the exercise does not
trouble Sara. However, when Coleridge asks “And what if,”
he proposes that far—reaching consequences follow from his
discovery of an imaginative access to the divine source of
joy. If he is right, then promoting the practices that can
elevate humans to this communion with God must surely be
the moral obligation of the society as a whole. Sara is
most concerned not about the theological significance of
the speaker’s imagination but about the practical
consequences of his desire to extrapolate from his psycho-
spiritualism to the political.

If we consider the poem for its autobiographical
implications, then the Sara of the poem is Sara Fricker who
married Coleridge in preparation for his Pantisocracy
scheme at the same time that Coleridge's co-enthusiast,

Robert Southey, married Sara's sister, Edith. At the time

83

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of the poem’s composition, Sara and Coleridge are living
apart from Edith and Southey because Coleridge and Southey
had an angry falling-out over money and politics while
trying to plan their radically egalitarian community.

In the emotional failure of Coleridge and Southey, the
Pantisocracy scheme mirrors the historical pattern of other
ill—fated, enthusiastic movements. Foremost at that time,
of course, was the recent history of the infighting among
the French Republicans that degenerates into the Reign of
Terror, but as Jon Mee points out, the fear of “enthusiasm”
has deep roots in Britain’s history of internal civil
strife and was widely associated with destructive unrest.
What Sara sees in the speaker's imagination in the poem is
a familiar progression in which he begins in personal
affective amplification and then projects into a social
theory that he expects will institutionalize that affective
intensity. This progression would be neither surprising nor
welcome to Sara, and the speaker's acceptance of her
correction in the poem testifies to his own appreciation of
the danger.

The poem ends with the speaker’s rejection of the
universal spirit and a humble acceptance of a traditional
relation to the Christian God in which he is to limit

himself to praising God in awe. This is not hypocritical.

84

 

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His use of both pagan and Christian theologies begins from
the same premise. What the speaker says about his
fundamental belief in the Christian God is equally true of
his belief in the Universal Spirit. In both concepts he
knows “The Incomprehensible . . . with Faith that inly
feels" (60). The difference between this Christian
orthodoxy and Coleridge's universal spirit is the degrees
of imaginative abstraction necessary for an individual to
access the communal approval symbolically invested in the
communal myth. This is the difference that the poem’s first
two stanzas enacts.

The speaker acknowledges that the Christian God is to
be perceived in “awe” (59) and that this stance is
appropriate for a person “wilder’d and dark" (63) as he is.
He embraces Christianity for its utility as a redemptive
myth by which one revalues negative affect through communal
approval of heroic suffering. But while redemption is
essential, it is also limited. When one looks to God with
awe, one looks with the fear that is an inescapable
component of awe. The speaker's access to positive affect
must begin with the negative affect of fear from which the
Christian affective economy promises that one will be‘
rescued. The redemptive myth rescues him from “the fall"

into amplifying negative affect, promising that his

85

suffering will earn enough approval to arrest the fall but
not enough so that he will lose his obligatory fear when he
looks in awe upon God. The contrast between the speaker's
awe for God and the exuberanCe of the passage previously
analyzed exemplifies the different transactions that can
operate in the same affective economy.

At stake for Sara and the speaker is not a theological
disagreement about the future of his immortal soul; it is
the conduct of their lives within their society. Indeed,
what would happen if this seductive ability of the
imagination were disseminated across the population and all
lovers were given public sanction to freely compromise
moral standards on the rationale that the intensity of
their interaction was a communion with the divine? Or if
God’s presence were associated with “idle flitting
phantasies” (40) traversing “indolent and passive brainisl”
(42)? The Burkean fear of theoretically driven social
disorder looms large in the poem's context, but this
political fear reflects the destabilization of the
discipline of cultural emotion.

“The Eolian Harp” is an explanation of the waning of
Coleridge’s radical politics, but it is also a nascent
manifesto of a new mode of feeling and its social

cultivation. “The Eolian Harp” demonstrates the imaginative

86

manipulation of the affective responses that initiate the
development of cultural emotion. The problem in the poem is
that the speaker is quite competent to self-stimulate and
threatens the social order by that ability.

The poem is usually read as a confrontation of
pantheism and Christianity. When spiritual belief is
understood as a symbol of affective communities, however,
the confrontation over religion takes place as a
confrontation of two visions of the affective economy: the
'traditional in which dominant cultural scripts quickly co-
opt the energies of pre-emotional affect into emotional
categories, or the new Romantic mode of feeling in which a
much larger repertoire of symbolic objects and a slowed
development of pre-emotional affect into emotion produce a
more intense but less acculturated affective economy.

In “The Eolian Harp,” nature is an imaginative
resource with which the speaker seems to have an inherent
facility, but the exuberant use of that resource is
communally problematic. In 1797, Coleridge’s collaboration
with Wordsworth begins, and in the conversation poems that
follow, the problem in the poem changes. In “Frost at
Midnight,” the speaker does not have immediate access to
imaginative stimulation. He is self—conscious about his

declining ability and is more aware of the unconscious

87

components of affective responses. He cannot generate
positive affect from the stimuli around him, but must
return to a time in the past where potent affective
nomories are still available. .

When the poem begins, the speaker is alone with his
sleeping child on a winter night that is so still that it
“vexes meditation with its strange / And extreme
silentness" (9-10). He is discomforted by this mental
paralysis and laments that his mind fixes on a fluttering
bit of soot on the fireplace grate, which a superstition
calls a stranger and claims is a harbinger of a visit by a
friend. The speaker, inspired by the stranger, reflects on
his mind's indolent state and the fact that it “transfuses
into all its own delights” (23) so that the bit of soot on
the grate becomes “a companionable form / With which I can
hold commune. Idle thought” (19-20). The triviality of the
mind’s occupation with a bit of soot reminds him of the
folklore of the stranger and the time in his past when he
was a schoolboy and had a “most believing superstitious
wish” (29) that made him take the stranger's promise of a
visitor very seriously.

When he was a boy at school, he believed in the
superstition, and in that harsh, friendless environment

typified by “the stern preceptor's face" he would dream

88

about fair—day in the village of his early childhood and
derive pleasure and comfort from the memory of the church-
bells that
rang

From morn to evening all the hot fair-day,

So sweetly that they stirred and haunted me

With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear

Most like articulate sounds of things to come!

(34)
He would fall asleep dreaming of these “soothing things"
and in class the next morning would still be waiting for
the promise of the stranger to be fulfilled by the visit of
a “Townsman, or aunt, or sister” (47). No such visits
occurred judging from the fact that the speaker turns
abruptly from his memory to his plans for a better life for
his son who, he promises, will grow up in intimate
interaction with a natural environment.

The psychology of the poem develops from the contrast
of its two harbingers of communal nurturance. In describing
the bells as “articulate sounds of things to come” the poem
contrasts the bells to the stranger on the grate. The bells
give him “wild pleasure" while the stranger has negative
associations because it never produced the visit of a

friend that could have relieved the speaker's loneliness.

89

 

The sound of the bells has a positive association because
they rang in announcement of the village fair-day during
which the boy enjoyed the festive communal attentions of a
village celebration. The people whose attention is
associated with those bells are the same that he wishes the
stranger would bring to him in his later years in school.

The peculiar logic of “Frost at Midnight” is that the
speaker's plans for his son make no mention of the need for
him to have intense exposure to a loving community.
Instead, while the speaker is thinking of the
disappointment he suffers for believing in the stranger, he
declares that his son “shalt learn far other lore / and in
far other scenes” (55). He will have direct access to the
“Great universal teacher” (68) who “shall mould / Thy
spirit, and by giving make it ask” (68-9). The universal
teacher will give his son an intense spirit that will
always seek communion with its source. This is the spirit
that the speaker lacks as he narrates the poem. His mind
will not seek the essence in the objects around him, so he
is not able to be moved by the “secret ministry” (1) of the
frost. His son, however, will see the intentionality of the
Spirit in the icicles “Quietly shining to the quiet moon”
(79).

The speaker's associationism understands that

90

childhood happiness has attached itself to the sound of the
bells so that years later that memory remains affectively
potent. He assumes, however, that the happiness is a

natural condition of the child's state. If the speaker made
the Hegelian connection between the sound of the bells and
the “intersubjective recognition" that created the
pleasure, it would not make sense to assume that a natural
environment by itself could enrich his son's imaginative
life. Pleasure is associated with the sound of the bells,
but the pleasure must first be created by the duplication
of positive affect found in communal interaction. In the
speaker's childraising strategy he reveals the affective
limitations of the Romantic program of affective
manipulation. The affective encoding of memory fades with
time and use until it is no longer capable of contributing
significantly to the substantiation of the self. Direct
interaction, like that he had as a small child, is the more
potent affect and is the source on which all affective
encoding depends.

There is an intuition of the communal nature of affect
in the speaker's imagination of his sonhs future. He
attributes the advantages of rural life to the spirit in
nature. In effect, he replaces the human contact in which

he has no faith with the individuals' interaction with a

91

deity. With this he enacts the affective strategy in which
individuals align themselves with the affective community
that symbolizes its collective affect in the personified
abstraction of a deity. In the case of the speaker’s
intentions for his son, the affective potential is even
less than in a traditional church, for there is no real
community of others in his nature religion. The lone
Romantic, communing with nature is reprocessing the
affective encoding of previous experience, which loses its
intensity with time and use. The speaker’s “self-watching
subtilizing mind” (27) is the modern compensation for the
need to suppress the kind of publicly shared affect that is
celebrated in a village fair-day, and the speaker
exemplifies the limits of imaginative self-substantiation
as compensation for the modern suppression of public
affect.

“Frost at Midnight” demonstrates the Romantic
intention to encode natural objects with affective potency.
It demonstrates also that the speaker has to return in
memory to the time when he had enough positive experience
to affectively encode the environment for future reuse.
After he traces his own imaginative abilities to the
community of his childhood, he can newly imagine the frost

moving his son’s imagination. At the poem's beginning, he

92

knows of but is unmoved as “The frost performs its secret
ministry” (1). At the poem's end, he can imagine the frost
through a child’s eyes in a feeling interaction as “silent
icicles, Quietly shining to the quiet moon” (78). The
speaker begins in a muted affective state. He follows
associations to the distant past in which there were potent
communal experiences, and when those experiences trigger
affective amplification, he returns to the present to
sympathize with others.

“Dejection: An Ode” differs considerably from its
origins as the “Letter to Sara Hutchinson.” J. Robert Barth
S.J. reviews the critical assessment of the two versions so
as to contextualize his own reading. Among those critics is
Reeve Parker who, as Barth reports, finds that the ode is
“in effect and even perhaps in intention, a kind of
therapy” (181). In explaining why Parker finds the poem to
be “a much more positive poetic experience than do many
other critics,” Barth quotes Parker’s contention that

readers . . . have presumed a greater continuity
than actually exists between the concerns of a
poet like Coleridge, at the turn of the nineteenth
century, and the characteristic preoccupation of
many twentieth-century writers with alienation,

self-doubt, and distrust of the artful

93

imagination. (182)

I would like to follow Parker's positive reading with an
analysis of the affective process of the lines in which
Parker locates the affirmative turn in the poem and where
he finds a “‘correlative to a mind that, having gone
through the process of deliberately exploring the
melancholy grief with which the poem opens, is winning its
way to a substantial calm'” (182). Like the previous two
poems considered, “Dejection: An Ode” follows the speaker’s
imaginative path to positive affect. The process is far
more difficult and the affective reward more muted, but the
pattern is the same. Unconscious affective processes are
triggered. One significant difference is that in
“Dejection: An Ode,” at the crucial moment, the speaker
does not recall images of his past so as to elicit a
positive affective response. Rather, he calls up images
from the theater, emphasizing more the communal nature of
the resources that produce a change in his affective
condition.

A turning point in the speaker's feelings occurs in
the act of will with which he expels the “viper thoughts

Reality’s dark dream!" (94-5) that have oppressed his
Spirit and turns to “listen to the wind” (96) in the eolian

harp. He first hears in its strength a frightening, chaotic

94

 

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sound “of the rushing of an host in rout, With groans of
trampled men with smarting wounds—- / At once they groan
with pain, and shudder with the cold!” (110). This passage
announces the passing of the speaker's imaginative
paralysis, but finds in the wind the negative affect of a
collapsing community. Then the wind slows and tells
A tale of less affright
And'tempered with delight,
As Otway’s self had framed the tender lay--
‘Tis of a little child
Upon a lonesome wild
Not far from home, but she hath lost her way,
And now moans low in bitter grief and fear,
And now screams loud, and hopes to make her mother
hear. (121-25)
The delight elicited by the child’s story is the first
expression of positive feeling in the poem and indicates
that the speaker’s mind, which first returned to
sensitivity with a horrible association of the strong wind,
has now become capable of a positive affect. However, Barth
asks the important question: “How can a tale that tells of
the suffering of a frightened child-~her moans and grief
and fear-—be a cause of ‘delight’ for the poet, or indeed

for anyone?” (187). This is precisely the question that has

95

 

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brought the subject of sympathy a great deal of scrutiny
recently from critics who find it questionable as a
socially relevant act because the “delight” of the
sympathizer indicts its supposedly altruistic intentions.
Barth‘s explanation of the speaker's delight, however,
reveals the weakness in conventional psychologies that open
sympathy to a critique of emotional escapism. Barth
explains that through art the grief in the experience of
the child “is transformed into a tale, an artistic form,
which distance the listener from the actual experience,
giving it shape and meaning.” From this distance
The terrifying experience is sublimated to another
level of reality . . . . For myth universalizes
our experiences, showing them to be part of the
larger experience of mankind; and by binding us to
each other through our common humanity, especially
through our common experience of suffering, myth
allows us to draw strength from each other. (187)
This explanation has some consistencies with the affective
theory proposed here. It recognizes that evaluative
transactions take place in “another level of reality” which
in affective terms is unconsciousness. Barth’s reading also
recognizes that the speaker’s pleasure is found in a

perception of community that results in a mutual

96

 

substantiation that he calls “strength.”

However, Barth does not explain how the “common
experience of suffering . . . allows us to draw strength
from each other" except to imply that there is some
realization that is “binding.” The idea is likely to feel
right because we intuit that suffering is lonely and
pleasure is communal. But Barth’s psychology is a
cognitivist one that assumes that there must be an idea in
the mind that “allows” us to feel, so ideas that only
rationalize feeling become adopted as causes of the
feeling.

An affect theory explains the speaker’s, and readers’,
delight by the fact that the story of the lost child is
told so as to counter the image of her suffering with an
image of nurturing community. Barth describes the child as
“irretrievably lost” (187), but the poem says she is “not
far from home” (123). As the child cries for her mother,
the contrast between her fear and the proximity of her
mother points to the existence of a nurturing community as
strongly as it does to the frightened child. The image of
the child’s suffering elicits in the reader the sympathetic
sharing of her negative affect. But the experience is
“tempered with delight” by the positive affect that enters

the affective assemblage in the mind by the image of her

97

 

safe return to the nurturing approval of her community. The
delight felt by the speaker is generated from the positive
affect he shares with the community that cares for the
child. I argue that there would be no delight in this story
were it only about a child “irretrievably lost” as Barth
understands. That story calls up an image of a child slowly
dying of exposure and a failure of community that leaves
her suffering unredeemed.

There is a need for the speaker to imagine a community
of others who share his sympathy for the child, but there
is no need to believe that this “universalizes our
experience.” In fact, our experience tells us the opposite.
There are many people who do not care for this child, or
any child, and would not approve of us for doing so. The
idea of a common humanity is a cultural ideology that
symbolizes an affective community that is, in fact, in
competition with many others in the affective economy.
There is ample evidence that the idea of common humanity
has a limited effect on the motivations of cultures who
continue to tolerate unnecessary suffering.

It may be that the delight felt by the speaker in
“Dejection: An Ode" is attributable to his introjection of
the humanist ideology, but besides the proximity of the

child’s community, there are other affective images that

98

 

build a communal context behind the child’s suffering. The
reference to Otway, combined with the speaker's address to
the wind as “Thou actor," (108) moves the affectivity of
the passage from the negativity of destruction and “frenzy”
that it has when the wind is strong to the communal
environment of a theater.

In his study of Coleridge’s reference to Otway, David
V. Erdman notes that some critics have read this passage as
a parody of the complaint genre directed at Wordsworth.
While he does uncover the possibility that the reference is
to the overwrought qualities of Otway’s emotion, he
concludes that this argument is not conclusive. I suggest
that a less obscure connection is more meaningful to the
internal meaning of the poem.

Otway was first a playwright of popular tragedies,
notably The Orphan, which connects his name to both the
wind as actor and the lost child. The image of the child
not only places her close to home, but she is on a stage
and the speaker and readers are in the audience, which is
an affective community mutually concerned for the welfare
of the child and mutually approving of their shared
Sympathetic suffering with the child. The suffering of the
child, or the orphan, is redeemed by the positive affect

the community directs to her and as an affective community

99

among themselves.

The amplification of positive affect initiated in the
nuxed affect of the image of the lost child amplifies
quiCkly when assembled with the image of Sara who is being
addressed by the poem's speaker. The last stanza is the
speaker's hopeful blessing of Sara who needs to be visited
by “gentle sleep, with wings of healing” (128). While the
speaker indicates that the night will remain for him an
unpleasant “vigil" (126), he has achieved a considerable
degree of imaginative healing.

As in “Frost at Midnight,” the speaker in “Dejection:
An Ode” revives his memories of the child/community
interaction and then makes sympathetic, imaginative contact
with people in the present and future. When understood as a
function of an affective economy, an explanation of feeling
in the poem does not need to repeat the ideology of common
humanity in order to explain its ability to elicit positive
affect..

In order to read “Dejection: An Ode” as affirmative,
it is necessary to be sensitive to the mode of feeling that
is being promoted. While the speaker’s wishes for Sara are
in the terms of conventional hyperbole: “Thus may’st thou
ever, evermore rejoice" (139), the speaker’s change is

better understood in the terms of pre—emotional affect.

100

Wishing her joy does not make him feel joy. We are told
that his night will be a vigil. But that vigil will be
spent with an imagination that is again producing
affectively potent images in which the speaker can access
positive affect.

For all of the negative affect that is found in the
“Dejection: An Ode” and “Frost at Midnight,” these poems
chart a path to the recovery of positive affect by the
stimulation of imagination and invite readers to
sympathetically share that experience. In each of the
‘three, Coleridge investigates the conditions that allow for
imagination to intervene in unconsciousness so as to
cultivate positive, affective amplifications. If readers
also respond unconsciously to Signifiers that are
unconsciously encoded, there will be aesthetic responses,
and an affective reading of Coleridge will share the same
obstacles that aesthetic readings have recently.

Affect theory alters questions of aesthetics by making
the unconscious response to objects of all kinds part of
the substantiation of the self. In Fbrmal Charges, Susan
Wolfson argues for changes in the anti-formalist critique
so as to allow for the possibility of a non-complicit
aesthetic response to poetic form. The chapter that she

dedicates to Coleridge focuses on his use of comparative

101

figures, especially simile, as does each of the analyses
above.

Wolfson begins with the conviction that something
important is being lost from the reading of Romantic poetry
in the anti-formalist dismissal of formal aesthetics. Her
attempt at a limited rehabilitation of the aesthetic
encounters but does not engage the assumption at the heart
of issue because to do so requires that she prove a
negative. She must prove that her aesthetic pleasure is not
politically complicit. While Wolfson’s sincerity is
compelling, her argument is logically unconvincing as any
such attempt must be if it begins, as hers does, from the
psychological premises of the dominant discourse. The terms
of her attempt are informative of the larger critical
dilemma and the relevance of Coleridge to that dilemma.

In order to establish the possibility of an aesthetic
but non-complicit reading of Coleridge, Wolfson makes the
case that his poetry’s rhetorical self-critique is so
evident that he must have intended it to undermine the
theory of textual organicism that critics contend
authorizes the escapist and complicit Romantic aesthetic.
This is a problematic conclusion for a number of reasons.

In most of her chapter on Coleridge, Wolfson argues

that his use of form is clearly self-deconstructing. If

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this were true, it would discredit the entire anti-
formalist critique that is grounded on the premise that
formalism is complicit because the rhetorical
contradictions are obscured by the pleasures of an
organicist illusion. It is only by the unconscious function
of the poetry that it is able to seduce the population into
complicity in the perpetuation of an unjust social order.
If Wolfson is correct that the self-critique is
foregrounded, then it is hard to argue that it has been
deceptive for two hundred years.

Wolfson could be understood to be making the simpler
argument that the self-critique is apparent to an
ideologically informed reader whose continued aesthetic
experience is therefore not complicit because not self-
mystifying. In other words, if I am not misled by the
organicist illusion of Romantic formalism, then my
aesthetic pleasure is not self-mystifying. This is
problematic for two reasons. First, it ignores the question
of whether anyone can ever be safe from the seductions of
her own unconsciousness. Wolfson's argument that the
ideologically enlightened can be trusted with an aesthetic
response may feel right to the similarly enlightened, but
the non-complicity of her pleasure is no more assured under

the theory than is any other aesthetic pleasure. It is

103

reasonable to assume that her intellectual discipline may
reduce the risk, but it is the pre-rational, unconscious
appetite for pleasure that makes it seductive. The critique
of complicity is replete with well—intentioned people who
are found to be victims of their own self-serving
unconscious needs. Why should it be assumed that Wolfson's
pleasure is not also an expression of the insidiousness of
the dominant, hegemonic power? This is the unassailable
psychological assumption at the foundation of anti-
formalism. Wolfson is limited to arguing that her
theoretical acumen makes it highly unlikely that her
pleasure is complicit, but she cannot prove this negative.
Secondly, Wolfson’s confidence in rhetorical
sophistication ignores that it is the poetry’s social
impact that is at issue. While critics may be inclined to
grant an aesthetic dispensation to Wolfson as a member of
critical theory’s Lukacsian vanguard, it is the pleasure of
the popular masses that remains important to social
reformers; it is their mystification that preserves the
status quo. Wolfson argues that Coleridge intended a self~
critique, but it is hard to see what difference his
intention makes. He remains culpable under the terms of the
critique for having disseminated an escapist pleasure to

the masses who were not ideologically conscious enough to

104

resist its seduction into complicity. His poetry remains as
dangerous as ever, regardless of his intentions.

The passivist agenda of Coleridge and the Romantics is
indefensible in a critical atmosphere dominated by a
logically unassailable negativism. The roots of this
critical hostility to the positive reading grows from a
kind of post—modern reworking of theodicy. While
theologians attempt to explain how a world with evil does
not preclude the existence of a benevolent and omnipotent
God, critical theorists try to explain the prevalence and
perpetuation of social injustice in societies ostensibly
committed to benevolence. The answer that is always
available is that the susceptibility of humans to the
pleasures of their own self-interests provides them an
escape from the sacrifices required by their values.
Culture becomes the mechanism of this escape, and the
hostility to culture that Eric Auerbach recognized in the
high-modernists extends to the pleasure that facilitates
the escape in the post-modern.

The problem with this logic is not that it is untrue,
but that its simplification has become habitual and
exclusionary of any attempt to understand literature as a
participant in a necessary cultural production of positive

affect. Without a theory that comprehends the necessity of

105

the positive, there is no constituency for the complication
of what appears to be a polemically efficient argument.

The result is that a simple logical formula finds
pleasure culpable in all situations. Even the pleasure that
one might take in real social progress can be found
complicit by connecting the lack of more progress to
pleasure’s inevitable self-serving essence. Until there is
utopia, there is a need to do more, and the self—serving
nature of pleasure is always available as an explanation
for the failure to do more.

For example, this logic underlies the recent interest
in the role of sympathy in political oppression. A recent
analysis of American racism by Christopher Castiglia
concludes that the pleasure that abolitionists take in
their social status as the sympathetic champions of
suffering victims becomes a reason to covertly, and
unconsciously, support the status-quo and limit the relief
of the victim's suffering. Castiglia credits abolitionist
Sympathy for ending slavery, but finds that the sympathetic
become so emotionally dependent on the prestige of their
moral rectitude that they later surreptitiously condone Jim
Crow. The comfortable seduction of pleasure halts the
movement toward justice.

Again, I have no argument with Castiglia’s conclusion

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that, in this case, the pleasure of the oppressor can be
complicit; my argument is with the dominance of this
approach and the result that literary criticism comes to
ground its socially progressive agenda on the suppression
of positive affect in the reading of literature. Castiglia
acknowledges that there was a positive result from a
sympathetic response, but his critique cannot help us
understand how sympathy produced positive results in that
case and might be cultivated in the service of further
progress. Such an investigation might find that texts
employed aesthetic forms to elicit positive affect which
substantiated selves capable of progress. If we wish to
explore this possibility, we will have much to learn from
Coleridge.

Just as writers in the late eighteen-century perceived
that substantiality was missing from their experience,
Wolfson understands that something essential is being lost
when Romantic poetry is read within these interpretive
confines. In both cases, there is a reaction to the
suppression of positive affect. Without an alternative
model of the nature of positive affect, Wolfson can argue
only that a little pleasure is not a threat; however, a
little pleasure means only a little meaning, and we are

again on the horns of the affective dilemma.

107

 

The political opposition to Coleridge's early
thinking, including Sara Fricker’s, wished to limit his
ability to trigger positive affect that could threaten the
social order. Coleridge's political opposition today wishes
to limit his ability to trigger positive affect that does
not threaten the social order. I do not propose that an
affect theory can adjudicate the question of Romantic
formalism's complicity, only that an affect theory justly
complicates the discussion and brings it into contact with
the real work of culture. Affect theory places the question
of complicit pleasure in its proper context as part of an
historical struggle over how the affective economy should
generate and distribute the very stuff of self-
preservation. In that context, the limited nature of
Wolfson's ambitions for the rehabilitation of aesthetics
appears as a symptom of criticism’s withdrawal from
engagement in the realm of culture’s primary function.

In its adopted role as the cultural watchdog of
complicity, literary criticism is avoiding the difficult
work that Coleridge confronted when, realizing his own need
for positive affect, he set out to imagine how the
dissemination of this sustenance could become the primary
work of culture. There is no better place to begin a

reconsideration of literature's participation in this

108

function than in Coleridge's poetry, which as much as any
other, inaugurates that study. This chapter has intended to

make an exploratory attempt at that reconsideration.

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Chapter 3

Wordsworth and the Leveling of the Affective Economy

When, at the bicentennial of the Lyrical Ballads,
James A.W. Heffernan assesses the status of Wordsworth
criticism, he notes the shift from William Hazlitt’s
characterization of Wordsworth’s “leveling muse" to the
political critique typified by the work of Jerome McGann,
whose case against Wordsworth Heffernan summarizes as an
indictment of Wordsworth's “failure to face the material
facts of British life” in favor of a “harmonizing,
idealizing, self—reflecting ‘picture of the mind’” (237).
Heffernan agrees that Hazlitt overstated the case for
Wordsworth’s radicalism, but he points out references to
social conditions in the poems that, he argues, refute the
claim that Wordsworth was avoiding these issues.

Still, it is primarily in Wordsworth’s preoccupation
with suffering and sympathy that Heffernan finds reason to
credit Hazlitt’s assertion that a “leveling muse” is at
work in the poetry. Heffernan concludes that there is
something significantly egalitarian at work in the poems,
but he concedes that it remains “[dJifficult if not

impossible to translate into practical political reform”

(247).

110

Heffernan’s difficulty highlights the current lack of
an adequate critical theory of the interface of individual
psychology and social life. Without that connection,
Heffernan cannot argue that there is a politically
significant effect from Wordsworth’s sympathy. His
intuition is easily dismissed as another “self-reflecting
‘picture of the mind’” (237) as McGann claims.

In the discussion of Wordsworth that follows, I will
explore how an affective psycho-cultural theory might
clarify the larger social significance of Wordsworth’s
sympathetic program by making visible some of the phenomena
that complicate McGann’s critique and give substance to
Heffernan’s intuition. It is not my intention to argue that
Wordsworth intended political consequences to follow-from
his work in the Years after his abandonment of clearly
radical politics. Rather, I will argue that an affective
reading illuminates the communal nature of psychology so as
to clarify how a “leveling” in the psychological might
affect other spheres of life. The historicist attempt to
create political consciousness by discrediting aesthetics
as an escapist complicity is most problematic for leaving
unexplored the interdependence of these spheres at the root
of social consciousness. If we look for Wordsworth's

significance in either aesthetics or politics, we will

111

likely face the same conflicted conclusion as does
Heffernan. This essay proposes that in the interface of
Romantic aesthetics and Romantic ideology is a Romantic
affectology.

My thesis is that Wordsworth's poetry makes a seminal
contribution to changing the culture’s affective economy to
a greater dependence on individual imagination for the
generation of positive affect. By identifying pre-emotional
affect as a separate mode of feeling, and nature as a
symbolic realm in which there is access to affective
feeling, he creates a poetry that demonstrates by example a
practical, psychological discipline for the utilization of
nature as an affective resource available to the entire
population, and tends to encourage egalitarian access to
those resources and the sympathetic organization of the
oppressed around those resources.

The elevation of nature is one of the most obvious
characteristics of Romanticism. Wordsworth’s work is
heavily concentrated on understanding the associative
processes that make natural objects so potent in his own
perception. The associative heart of his psychology gives
it an affinity with the psychology proposed here that
credits the mind’s affective encoding of objects and

concepts with its ability to then respond to them

112

affectively.
Wordsworth makes an accommodation of the affective
dilemma that is consistent with the modern need to suppress
the contagion of public affect and provide an alternative
affective resource. Nature is promoted as a symbolic
repository of communal affect that allows individual,
cognitive interventions into affective processes,
compensating for reduced public affect by a more private
and imaginative generation of affect.
The affectivity of Wordsworth's poetry offers an
alternative to what are now traditional psychological
approaches. Alan Richardson observes of the “spot of time”
in the story of the discharged soldier in Book IV of the
Prelude that:
The problems in the account of the father's death
in The Prelude have led a number of critics to
resort to psychoanalysis and speak of the event in
terms of an Oedipal conflict, a resort that seems
nearly inescapable if the passage is read along
dramatic lines. (18)

In the passage at issue the speaker tells of a time when,

at school, “The day before the holidays began, / Feverish

and tired and restless, I went forth / Into the fields,

impatient for the sight / Of those three horses which would

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bear us home” (331). Climbing to the summit of a crag, he
watches a crossroads “With eyes intensely straining” (347)
on a windy, misty day. We get no report of the arrival of
the horses, only the news that before he had been home ten
days, his father dies:
the event

With all the sorrow which it brought, appeared

A chastisememt; and when I called to mind

That day so lately passed, where from the crag

I looked in such anxiety of hope,

With trite reflections of morality,

Yet with the deepest passion, I bowed low

To God who thus corrected my desires. (Wu 353—60)
He then reports that the conditions of weather and terrain
in which he had waited for the horses remained “spectacles
and sounds to which / I often would repair, and thence
would drink / As at a fountain” (368-70). This experience,
he says, is one of those that “Left a kindred power /
Implanted in my mind” (329—30) by which “our minds /
(Especially the imaginative power) / Are nourished, and
invisibly repaired” (292-94). The problem is to understand
how an apparently negative experience so encodes the
environment of its occurrence that it remains a healing one

thereafter. In other words, how does the natural

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environment of that night retain its positive associations?
Richardson reads the passage in terms of the Oedipal
complex in which the pleasure of imaginative power remains
in tension with repressed guilt:
Like Oedipus, . . . the boy has arrived at a
crossroads . . . and there caused his father’s
death through the strength and impatience of his
desire; and although he speaks in terms of
chastisement, the memory oddly persists as a
source of strength. . . . Yet at the same time,
the experience gives rise to guilt and sorrow; the
illusion of imaginative power maintains itself at
a considerable psychic cost. (18)
'Richardson concludes that a feeling of omnipotence for
having affected his father’s life remains associated with
the environment, but with a conflicting source of guilt.
The Freudian reading of the boy’s guilt in this case
rests on the assumption that the boy desires to displace
the father so that he is guilty for having willed the
death. However, I propose that the boy has the opposite
interest. He is desperate for his father’s approval. This
is the reason for his “anxiety of hope” (357), and for his
imagining that his father's approval will be lavish. That

image amplifies the pleasure of his anticipation, but it

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also constitutes the moral transgression that he sees in
his “trite reflections of morality” (358). This moral
reservation reminds him that he is being arrogant to think
himself worthy of such value in his father’s eyes. He is
chastised for his affective overreaching by the loss of his
most potent source of positive affect.

The speaker has violated the culture’s requirements
for access to positive affect that include restrictions on
exercises of imaginative self-substantiation. It is
critical that the community retain control over
individuals' ability to operate psychically outside of the
community's cooperative order. The speaker imagines himself
more approved of than is allowed and is aware of the
violation as he does it. When his father dies, the lessons
he has been taught about the inevitability of punishment
supply the connection.

One of the problems in the account of the father's
death that Richardson says leads critics to psychoanalysis
is that “the memory oddly persists as a source of strength"
(18) after the boy feels chastised. More precisely, I
contend, it remains significant as a source of imaginative
strength. The question is why does the natural environment
retain positive associations with such a sorrowful real

experience? Richardson’s argument is that the negative

116

associations are repressed so that the positive can be
enjoyed. My answer is that the boy feels chastised for an
excessive exercise of his imaginative abilities in the
realm of human interactions, and this does not extend, for
him, to his relationship with the non—human. He feels that
he has wrongly tried to impose his will on his relationship
to his father. But this does not impugn his imaginative
manipulation of the meanings he finds in natural objects.
In fact, his description of nature as a source of
sustenance directly follows his acceptance of God’s
correction.

The contrast between human and non-human realms in the
speaker's mind is emphasized by the fact that while on the
crag “in the deepest passion" (359), he has non-human
companions. He remembers: “Upon my right hand was a single
sheep, A whistling hawthorn on my left, and there, / Those
two companions at my side, I watched” (344-46). These non~
human entities retain the positive affect that is encoded
on them while they share his passion, and they remain
sustaining companions when human companions prove
inadequate. The correction that he receives from God for
his desire for human approval emphasizes his need for
companionship in the natural world.

I agree with Richardson that “the illusion of

117

imaginative power maintains itself at a considerable
psychic cost” (18), but I attribute the cost to the
inevitable inadequacy of imagination to satisfy affective
needs in the long run. The speaker's experience does not so
much create a guilt that has a psychic cost as it exposes
the inadequacy of his access to positive affect through
human interaction in the first place. Wordsworth’s program
aims to develop the compensatory affective resources in
nature that the poem's speaker has found and the perceptive
abilities that he displays. The spots of time in the
Prelude require an appreciation of the affectivity that is
Wordsworth’s intention. That quality and its appreciation
by readers help explain the characteristics that Jack
Stillinger finds to be of historic significance in the
Lyrical Ballads.

Stillinger notes that the study of English literature
is still typically split into two parts at the publication
of the Lyrical Ballads, and he argues that poetry since
then has perpetuated four characteristics that are among
its innovations. Since the Lyrical Ballads, he concludes:

Our poems have tended to be about ordinary people
and events; the language has tended to be simpler,
plainer, more conversational, more down-to-earth

and concrete than it had been before; the poems

118

 

have become puzzles of ambiguity, unresolved
questions, and inconclusiveness; and, most important, the
place where the meaning is determined has
conspicuously shifted from author to the reception
side of the transaction—~the individual reader.
('74)
I will argue that all of these factors contribute to making
the reader’s participation more affective than emotional,
and that the characteristics that are called “ordinary,”
“simpler" and “inconclusive” are better understood as
stimuli of pre-emotional affect without accompanying
emotional scripts.

Critics, including Coleridge, have taken exception
with Wordsworth's description of his subjects and language
as ordinary. Rather, Wordsworth’s more oral poetry captures
the degree to which speech relies more on affective cues to
establish affective content than do eighteenth-century
poetic conventions that tend to deliver scripts of
emotional culmination. Wordsworth's language rebels against
the literary rush to emotional completion in favor of an
invigoration of the affective process preceding that
culmination. Lyrical Ballads is new because it pursues this
new mode of feeling. The incertitude of the endings does

not only leave readers rationally puzzled; it leaves

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'i

cognition scrambling to resolve the mind’s unconscious
generation of affect into emotion. The uncertainty that
Stillinger documents is not simply an intellectual puzzle;
feeling is also denied an emotional completion, leaving the
reader in a state of pre-emotional affect and exemplifying
the changes in the affective economy in which Romanticism
is a major influence.

Stillinger, referring to the ending of “Simon Lee,”
asserts that “[t]he reader is left hanging--feeling

tricked, perhaps-«trying to understand how the story

connects to the feelings” (72). The scene in question is

that in which Simon Lee, who was once a model of physical
vitality, is now old and weakened. While trying futilely to
chop through the root of a stump, he is assisted by the
speaker who easily severs the root with one blow. Simon
thanks him tearfully. The puzzle in the poem lies in the
speaker's reaction to the event:

—I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds

With coldness still returning,

Alas! The gratitude of men

Has oftener left me mourning. (101-5)
Stillinger finds this “an extreme or irrelevant reaction to
an event in which nothing more impressive has occurred than

severing the root of a tree stump" (72). Simon's thanks are

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out of proportion and the speaker’s “mourning” seems
inappropriate. Resolving the ambiguity requires that the
reader analyze the logic of the feelings involved. A
solution will need to intuit the logic of the affective
economy. In order to understand why the speaker mourns in
the poem, the reader must, either consciously or
unconsciously, trace the logic of the affective
significations that have passed between Simon and the
speaker.

The speaker mourns because Simon’s excessive
gratitude gives evidence of the impending death of his
self. Social conventions of thanks communicate the subtle
negotiations of relative positions in the affective economy
after it is disrupted by one person doing a service for
another. Doing a service earns one the conventional show of
positive affect from the thankful person, increasing the
substantiation of the giver's self. Saying “you’re welcome”
acknowledges that one has affectively advanced for having
received the thanks. Depending on subtleties of delivery
and circumstances, these conventions are manipulated to
communicate a myriad of variations in their affective
meanings, but in the poem, it is clear that Simon’s thanks
reveal the desperate condition of his self. The speaker

mourns because the quality of Simon’s gratitude indicates

121

that he is dangerously in need of positive affect. That he
is so grateful indicates that Simon’s self is dying along
with his body. The desubstantiation of Simon's body is
visible. The desubstantiation of his self is perceivable in
his use of affective conventions. The speaker mourns for
the death of Simon’s self and its example of the
precariousness of any self in such an affective economy in
which the community sees the death of the self in the death
of the body.

The speaker says that he has heard of peOple who are
so unkind that they disapprove of others who do them a
service. Aiding one of these unkind people and being denied
one's due of positive affect in return could cause one to
regret or resent that loss of self-substantiation. But the
speaker says that he more often mourns when he earns the
approval of thanks than when it is denied, meaning that he
sympathetically shares the negative affect of those whose
thanks indicate that they are below him in the hierarchy of
the affective economy.

The reader must resolve the poem, as Stillinger points
out. I contend that its resolution requires an affective
logic, consciously or unconsciously exercised. The same
conditions that Stillinger sees in Lyrical Ballads appear

in the Prelude. The story of the discharged soldier in Book

122

 

IV of the 1850 Prelude, is an example of an emotionally
ambiguous ending requiring the reader's logic of feeling.
The speaker of the story, while walking along a rural road,
encounters a veteran who is destitute. The speaker solicits
the soldier's descriptions of his dangers and privations,
and is answered “in demeanour calm, / Conscise in answer”
(440-41) but not “solemn and sublime” (441). For much of
their time together, they are silent. The speaker leads him
to shelter for the night and then reports: “And so we
parted. Back I cast a look, / And lingered near the door a
little space; / Then sought with quiet heart my distant
home” (467-69). The speaker suspects this conclusion to be
ambiguous and addresses the reader: “He who deigns to mark
with care / By what rules governed, with what end in view /
This Work proceeds, he will not wish for more” (470-72).
The evidence by which to understand the growth of the
Speaker's mind is in the poem.

The story begins when the speaker sees the soldier at
a distance and says, “in his very dress [the soldier]
appeared / A desolation, a simplicity / To which the
trappings of a gaudy world / Make a strange background”
(404). This is a case in which Wordsworth’s description of
a common character in “ordinary” language cues readers to

respond affectively to Signifiers that are more affective

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than emotional and, therefore, more likely to elicit less
scripted affective responses. The soldier's simplicity is
made to stand out proudly from the belittled gaudy
trappings of the world. The contrast of the simple and the
gaudy is an affective one. The gaudy is more attractive to
the eye than is the simple, not only because of the novelty
of its form, but because it carries a bold intentionality,
a clearer emotional script, in its affective encoding. The
gaudy is attractive, when it is, because its perception
makes easier the amplification of affect into emotion.
Gaudiness hijacks and simplifies affective amplification,
delivering the perceiver quickly to a completed but
simplified and shallow emotional culmination. The
description of the soldier foregrounds his simple
appearance, cueing readers to respond affectively to the
less affectively developed encoding that they will find in
his simplicity.

The affective is foregrounded again when the soldier
“Issued low muttered sounds, as if of pain / Or some uneasy
thought; yet still his form / Kept the same awful
steadiness” (405). He is suffering either painor
unsteadiness of thought, but giving it no clear expression
in bodily changes. If the speaker is to “read” the

soldier's feelings, he will have to see more than the

124

 

affective displays of emotion.

In contrast to the soldier’s pre-emotional affect
condition, the speaker is clearly emotional when he first
sees the soldier. On the road, at a distance, the soldier
is only “an uncouth shape” (387). Frightened by this shape,
the speaker hides himself in the shade of a tree so that he
can observe the man without being seen. He confesses: “From
self-blame / Not wholly free, I watched him thus; at length
/ Subduing my heart’s specious cowardice, / I left the
shady nook where I had stood, / And hailed him” (408—12).
The speaker blames himself for “specious cowardice,"
meaning that he finds his own emotion to be somehow
disingenuous, but it still directs his behavior until he
can consciously intervene in his own emotion and subdue it.
Seeing the soldier, his fear affect quickly amplified into
an emotion, and he trusted that emotion “at length” (409)
even after he felt “self-blame” (409) for doing so. The
speaker's reaction is identifiable as an emotion by the
degree to which it has taken a predetermined form that he
recognizes as inappropriate. The speaker’s emotionality
contrasts with the soldier's affectivity.

The speaker registers the soldier's detachment. When
addressed by the speaker, the veteran's reply “Was neither

slow nor eager; but, unmoved, / And with a quiet

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uncomplaining voice, / A stately air of mild indifference,
/ He told, in few plain words, a Soldier’s tale” (418-21).
In telling of his life of privation and danger, the soldier
all the while was in demeanor calm,

Concise in answer; solemn and sublime

He might have seemed, but that in all he said

There was a strange half-absence, as of one

Knowing too well the importance of his theme,

But feeling it no longer. (440-45)
The soldier does not feel the solemnity or sublimity of the
emotion that is conventionally thought appropriate to the
importance of his subject. He knows that it is important,
but he has chosen not to respond with the conventionally
expected emotion. Still, he is not without feeling. When
the speaker “entreated” (454) him to seek the help he needs
from others, “He said ‘My trust is in the God of heaven, /
And in the eye of him who passes me’” (459—60). He is not
concerned with conventional associations of physical well
being and happiness. He has faith that what is important in
life he will find in the faces of others. Psychological
interaction sustains him.

When the poem ends, the speaker has a quiet heart like

that of the soldier and unlike the emotionally turbulent

one with which he started. Still, there is an intensity in

126

 

his quiet-hearted condition. Before he leaves the cottage
where the soldier has found shelter, the speaker stops and
reports: “Back I cast a look,/ And lingered near the door a
little space; / Then sought with quiet heart my distant
home” (467-469). The differentiation of affect and emotion
can help explain how it is that we can have intensity in
tranquility and why Wordsworth cultivated this state. The
complexity of the affective response is lost when co-opted'
by culture's simplifying emotional forms. Heightening
conscious awareness of pre-emotional affect increases its
contribution to self-substantiation while accommodating the
social imperative for the suppression of contagious public
affect.

I began this chapter with an instance of the debate
over the political relevance of Wordsworth's poetry,
suggesting that an affective reading addresses the concerns
about the function of sympathy that are at the heart of
that debate. In the poems considered thus far, there is no
overt reference to sympathy. The nature of the narrator's
concern for both Simon Lee and the Discharged Soldier are
left in the ambiguities to be discerned by the reader. In
order to situate my affective reading of Wordsworth's
sympathy as close to the debate as possible, I will examine

a poem that has been a frequent subject of that debate: The

127

Ruined Cbttage.

John Rieder argues that when Jonathan Wordsworth
succeeded in canonizing The Ruined cottage text of Ms. D in
substitution for Book I of The Excursion, he

brought The Ruined Cottage very much into the
center of the attempt to reevaluate the Romantic
ideology by relocating Shelleyan accusations of
Wordsworth's apostasy to the crucial moment of
Wordsworth’s career represented by his work on The
Ruined Cottage in early 1798." (147)
The central issue in the poem is the narrator’s feeling
response to the suffering of Margaret. Rieder quotes Jerome
McGann:
[T]he story of Margaret produces in the narrator a
sense of shame and humiliation before great
suffering, and an overflow of sympathy and love
for the sufferer rather than, as in 1793—4, a
sense of outrage, and an overflow of angry
judgment upon those whom Wordsworth at the time
held accountable. (147)
This criticism, in slightly modified form, could be made
against two of the texts already analyzed here in that both
Simon Lee and the soldier are left painfully unsupported by

a social system. But The Ruined Cottage enacts in much more

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detail the crucial moment of sympathetic conversion that is
left ambiguous in “Simon Lee” and the story of the soldier.
An affective reading understands sympathy differently.
I argue that Wordsworth’s poem is consistent with an affect
theory, and that this reading explains aspects of
Wordsworth’s intentions that are missed by conventional
understanding. The essential problem in the debate about
Wordsworth’s turn from politics to psychology is whether
the reaction of his sympathetic heroes performs any
ameliorative social function or is simply an psychological
method of withdrawal. McGann implies that the only
appropriate response for these heroes is “a sense of
outrage, and an overflow of angry judgment” (147). Many
critics consider that subversion can operate legitimately,
and perhaps more effectively, in less obvious ways. I am
proposing that the intuition of a “leveling” effect that
Heffernan and other critics express is a sensitivity to the
fact that the political is finally an expression of the
larger negotiation of the production and dissemination of
positive affect. The intuition that Wordsworth has a
leveling effect is the perception that the dissemination of
pleasure is, at its foundations, a political gesture. My
argument is that by expanding access to positive affect, he

is changing the affective system.

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Sympathy is a function of the same economy of feeling,
and the associationism that informs Wordsworth's thoughts
about sympathy are understandable as intuitions of an
affective economy. McGann’s reading finds that no
significant service is done for the suffering in The Ruined
Cottage. I propose that a service is done, but its possible
political ramifications must be found in affective
transactions.

In the first eighteen lines of The Ruined Cottage, the
speaker describes what early nineteenth century readers
would immediately recognize as a conventionally Romantic
landscape. The speaker is aware that it has the potential
to give pleasure but only to one who feels differently than
he does at the moment. It would be “Pleasant to him on the
soft cool moss” (10), but he reports that “Other lot was
mine” (19). He is toiling “Across a bare wide common” where
his “limbs from very heat / Could find no rest” (20-3). He
is aware that the association of the scenery with
pleasantness is dependent on the way one feels when looking
at it. He is also aware that he can access this association
if he behaves in a particular way. The pleasant landscape
is so to the man who first “Extends his careless limbs”
(11) while “dreaming” (14) and “Half—conscious" (15) and

then sees pleasant nature “With sidelong eye” (16).

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In these lines with which Wordsworth begins framing
the story of Margaret, he describes an affective community
symbolized by a particular interpretation of a particular
landscape. The speaker is aware of a conventionalized
access to positive feeling even as he is aware of his
limited ability to access it in his current condition. We
will see that the image performs its motivational purpose
when he seeks out the shade and its “cool moss.”

While the speaker’s memory of pleasant associations
with the landscape does not change his disposition
entirely, it does mildly and briefly alter his affective
condition. In order to imagine the future, the speaker must
generate an image and then sympathize with the image of
himself in that future scenario. I have suggested that in
doing this, the affect system performs a testing function
on possible future behaviors. This is visible in the
speaker’s description of the comfortable man lying on cool
moss in a dreamy state. With that image in his mind, the
speaker sympathetically duplicates the affect that he
imagines in the image. He explains that the man looks
through branches to the distant scenery, and that scenery
is “By those impending branches made more soft, / More soft
and distant" (17). The repetition of “more soft” reveals

that he has crossed over from a description of another's

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feelings to the expression of his own. For an instant, the
affect generated by his imagination displaces the affect
associated with his physical discomfort and he feels the
enjoyment affect of an imaginatively generated image.

The speaker cannot sustain his imaginatively altered
feeling. The negative affect triggered by the pain in his
body displaces the positive affect of imaginative cognition
and comes to consciouSness as an abrupt return to reality
in the somewhat resentful declaration: “Other lot was mine"
(19). With the failure of his imaginative intervention, his
affect is again dominated by the affect accompanying his
pain, and his description of his condition is that of
negative affective communities that do not approve of him.

When he turns his attention to his own suffering, he
represents it as an alienation from an indifferent, if not
hostile, natural world. He says that he “toiled / With
languid feet which by the slippery ground / Were baffled
still” (19). Also, in lying on the earth his arm is too
weak to disperse “The insect host which gathered round
[his] face / And joined their murmurs to the tedious noise
/ Of seeds of bursting gorse that crackled round" (24).
Gorse are prickly plants whose seed pods are bursting in
the heat, sowing the next generation of tormenting plant

life in malicious cooperation with the insect host. Nature

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is being negatively intentionalized to represent the
negative affective communities that are being recalled into
his affective processes to amplify his motivation to seek
relief from the physically threatening circumstances.

While the speaker's mind recalls positively encoded
images so as to have a positive image by which to generate
a behavioral goal, he also recalls negatively encoded
images so as to amplify his motivation to escape the
conditions of his suffering. Just as the image of a
positive affective community will amplify positive stimuli
so as to increase motivation for a future goal, so also
will the image of a negative affective community amplify
motivation for the avoidance of some behaviors.

The speaker may be physically alone on the common, but
he is not alone in the mental processes that monitor his
contributions to the perpetuation of the species. His
thoughts reveal that he is immersed continually in
complicated transactions over the place of his self in the
affective economy. He calls up images of nature as both
positive and negative, assembling their affective encoding
with that of his physical condition in order to find a
communal source of positive affect that will resubstantiate
his self. The affective encoding he finds in the images

brought to mind reflects the encoding they obtained during

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previous experiences.

The feelings of the speaker in The Ruined Cottage are
influenced by his imagination, but he cannot determine his
feelings by an exercise of imagination, and such a simple
escapist strategy is not Wordsworth’s intention. Wordsworth
clearly appreciates the lessons to be learned from
negative, or even traumatic, experiences and sees the
negative as an essential component of growth. In the first
scene, we see the speaker interacting with the culture
through its affective system with only his own interests in
mind. In the rest of the poem his exercise of the same
affective processes come to involve others, and his
interactions with the affective economy become
consequential for the community. Wordsworth’s perceptive
discipline is not the advocacy of simple positive thinking
in opposition to any negative feeling. Rather, there is a
pattern in which the negative must be engaged so as to be
overcome. This, I will argue, is the important
characteristic of his treatment of sympathy.

The speaker moves from the discomfort of the open
ground to the cool shade of a stand of trees around the
ruins of an old cottage. In that comfort, he comes upon
Armytage, an elder, fellow peddler and a dear friend. He

reacts to this sight with “instantaneous joy” (36) and

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describes the old man as “That pride of nature and of lowly
life” (37) and “a friend / As dear to me as is the setting
sun” (38). The speaker's feelings shift quickly from the
misery of his struggle on the open ground to the physical
pleasure that he takes in the comfort of the shade, which
is dramatically and instantly amplified by the sight of the
old man. The speaker's “instantaneous joy” is proportionate
to the affective potency that Armytage has for him, which
is expressed by the image of nature and all of the people
of the “lowly” class. Armytage is a trigger of potent,
positive response for the speaker because the speaker’s
memory of him is linked to a large and vital affective
community of mutually approving people.

Armytage is a mentor to the younger man because his
approval registers for the speaker as the approval of the
many that he represents. In this Armytage fulfills the
larger role of the mentor that is to teach the initiate how
to participate in the affective communities of his new
social circumstances. In this situation where there is only
the speaker and the sleeping old man, the speaker's report
of his feelings reflects that they reflect the positive
affective communities he has learned to access through the
older man.

To this point in the poem, we have seen the speaker

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try and finally succeed in reversing his own negative
affect. He has demonstrated his possession of communally
constructed affective resources, both positive and
negative, and, following the motivation he found there, he
'has displaced his negative affect with positive affect.
However, his interactions with the affective economy have
not yet included sharing the negative affect of another
person. He has participated in the affective economy, but
he has not yet acted to change that economy. Sympathy
alters the economy, by giving access to people previously
excluded. Armytage intuits that it is time for his student
to learn the more difficult discipline of sympathy. He must
become an activist in the competition of affective
communities.

After greeting Armytage, the speaker relieves his
thirst and then returns to his friend near the ruins.
Armytage then delivers a long soliloquy beginning: “I see
around me here / Things which you cannot see" (67). He
laments that “Even of the good is no memorial left” (72).
Armytage’s point is not that the speaker cannot see that
people have lived there; obviously, he can; there is a
ruined cottage. Rather, for the speaker, the cottage is not
a memorial because it does not trigger the recall of

memories that are properly encoded with affect. Margaret’s

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story functions to encode the environment of the ruined
cottage.

In his description of Margaret, Armytage stresses her
role as a catalyst of positive affect as he recalls that

Many a passenger

Has blessed poor Margaret for her gentle looks
When she upheld the cool refreshment drawn
From that forsaken spring, and no one came

But he was welcome, no one went away

But that it seemed she loved him. (98-104)

Margaret symbolizes an affective community of mutual
approval that is still potent for Armytage, though its
affective potency is fading as is the “garden-ground now
wild” (55). Retelling the story serves to reinvigorate the
affective encoding in his memory and to implant that memory
in the mind of the speaker.

The fading of the physical evidence of habitation is
only symbolic of the lack of intentionalization of those
objects in the mind of the speaker. Without these symbolic
markers of positive, affective communities around him, the
speaker's affective possibilities are limited; he is
isolated, and the community is weakened.

Armytage tells the speaker the story of Margaret in

order to make the natural surroundings a symbolic marker of

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Margaret and the community of people like her. His purpose
is to ally the speaker to the affective community of the
poor. When the poem begins, the speaker has few resources
by which to defend himself against his suffering. The
affective community that is recalled in his memory of
pleasant landscape is not affectively potent enough, and he
has no other positive associations, so the negative image
of hostile nature amplifies his negative affect. He cannot
imagine that his suffering could align him with the
supportive affective community of fellow sufferers. This is
the significance of Wordsworth's sympathetic discipline.

When Armytage tells the story, Margaret has already
died. It would seem reasonable, if one wanted to elicit
sympathy, to tell the story of a sufferer who is still
living and can more easily be identified with. But the
intent of the poem is to rehabilitate a communal
allegiance, not an interaction between individuals. Because
she is dead, Margaret can symbolize a communal reality that
is captured in the elegiac form of Armytage's story.

‘Elegy is a ritual in which an affective community,
destabilized by the loss of a member, reaffirms its mutual
approval by recommitting itself to the symbols that ground
the community’s affective economy. Armytage makes this

point when he reflects that elegiac poets who are “Obedient

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to the strong creative power / Of human passion” (78) “call
upon the hills and streams to mourn, / And senseless rocks-
nor idly” (75). To invoke human emotion in objects in the
natural world is to intentionalize them and disseminate
this image of a repopulated affective community. The
solidarity of the mourning community signals mutual
approval and the abiding presence of positive affect. The
more who mourn, the more positive affect becomes available
to all with which they can arrest the amplification of
their negative affect. The objects of the natural world
symbolize the reestablished affective community of
mourners.

The elegiac poets remind individuals that by creating
a concrete and visible symbol of their mutual approval, the
social community strengthens.itself as an affective
community. The poet’s invocation of nature to share human
sorrow does not comfort because it draws the mind away from
reality, but because it draws the mind to the reality of
its affective needs and the environmental resources
available. Any suffering is a loss of access to an
affective community, but elegy is specifically a call for
communal solidarity in the repair of the affective
community that has loss a member.

When Armytage notes that these passionate poets “call

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upon the hills and streams to mourn, / And senseless rocks—
nor idly" (75-76), he stresses that the ancient, passionate
form was successful in bringing nature to aid a suffering
population. However, he says also that while such strong
passionate invocations have value, “Sympathies there are /
More tranquil, yet perhaps of kindred birth, / That steal
upon the meditative mind / And grow with thought" (79).
Wordsworth is recommending the suppression of passionate,
public affect and its replacement by a more private,
tranquil and meditative, affective life. He is recommending
the modernization of the affective economy.

This alteration of the culture’s affective behavior is
the phenomenon that this dissertation seeks to articulate
in the psycho-cultural terms of an affect theory.
Wordsworth’s position, in this poem, is that the public
passion of ancient poets was an appropriate affective
example in their time, but poets in the late eighteenth
century must create a communal affective life by other
means. In modern society, public passion is too dangerous
both for the public and for the poet. Wordsworth's plan for
a compensatory sympathy is the subject of The Ruined
Cottage.

In the process of telling the story of Margaret,

Armytage models how one monitors one's own affect. After

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introducing his elegiac purpose, Armytage tells the first
part of the story of Margaret's suffering. He stops mid—
story to note that he has been made sad by the story, and
that this does not make sense when there is so much
“natural wisdom” (195) that should lead them to “natural
comfort” (196). The speaker notes that Armytage then
immediately returns to “Such easy cheerfulness, a look so
mild, / That for a little time it stole away / All
recollection, and that simple tale / Passed from my mind"
(201-04). This is the behavior that critics condemn as a
disregard of Margaret’s suffering (Wu 289 note). However,
Armytage’s ability to share the suffering of others but
then return quickly to positive affect solves an essential
problem of sympathy.

If sympathy is only the ability to duplicate in the
self the affect perceived in others, then it can only
multiply the number of people suffering. In fact, people
cannot choose to desubstantiate their selves. When we
choose pain, we choose a pain with which we can associate
positive affect. In other words, there must be a redemptive
turn available to the sympathizer by which to reclaim
positive affect after the initial sympathetic sharing of
the victim's negative affect. McGann insists that the

sympathizer’s shared suffering should be transmuted to

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anger on the presumption that anger is politically
effective. Anger itself is a negative affect, which is why
McGann’s insistence implicitly supports the myth of
enobling anger, or that of the angry hero, which seeks to
make anger attractive by creating an affective community
that approves of the angry response to oppression.

The negative affect of the angry display is redeemed
by the mental image of communal approval for enacting
anger. If enough people praise anger, the display of the
negative affect of anger on the face can be displaced by
the positive affect that is imaginatively perceived in
one's image of oneself as the admired hero. However, such
a reversal of affective value suffers the same shortcoming
as any imaginative affective sustenance. The positive
affect that is needed to positively encode the otherwise
negative affect of anger must itself be generated by
smiling faces. A community that elevates anger faces the
contradiction that the majority of people in that community
have to forego anger so as to smile at the angry heroes in
order to make them heroic. The question that McGann needs
to answer is: How does a community that enobles anger
generate enough positive affect to substantiate its
members? The history of political change motivated by anger

argues that such a community cannot be sustained because

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when anger becomes admirable, people compete for positive
affect by trying to be the most angry.

The inherent tendency to duplicate the affect of
others can be only a first step if sympathy is to have the
creative, positive effect of building emotionally
democratic communities.

In Armytage’s thoughtful control of his own affective
recovery, Wordsworth makes clear that the challenge for the
sympathetic cohesion of communities is to provide for the
sympathizer's return to positive affect after the initial
sympathetic response. Negative affect will amplify until
the self is destroyed unless cognition intervenes with
counteracting positive affect. Armytage's cyclic
sympathetic suffering and cheerful recovery is not
escapist; it is unavoidable. He can choose to stop
suffering by allying himself with a community that will
redeem his anger, or he can return to positive affect by
the system that the poem elucidates. How one returns to
positive affect from the initial duplication of suffering
is the important question. Early in the poem Armytage
exemplifies that it can be done. In the remainder of the
Poem, he ushers the speaker through the process.

The affective control that allows Armytage to return

to cheerfulness after telling Margaret’s story contrasts to

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the speaker’s lack of this same ability in the poem's early
passages. The speaker’s volatile affect is emphasized
again, when Armytage regains his cheerfulness, and the
speaker immediately duplicates his mentor’s return to
positive affect. He says of Margaret’s story: “that simple
tale / Passed from my mind” (201-04), and he felt better.
The speaker is revealing the affective volatility that
cultures seek to control. He was easily led into the
sadness of Margaret’s story, and he was easily led back to
positive feeling by Armytage’s appearance. This positive
affect is also short—lived. His curiosity about the
unfinished story of Margaret revives, and he asks Armytage
to continue the story. At each step, he responds
affectively to the affect he perceives and his thoughts
follow that affect.

The undisciplined nature of the speaker’s interests
leads Armytage to consider that his desire to hear more of
Margaret's sad story may be a sentimental exploitation of
suffering in much the same way that a reader of a
sentimental novel savors the intensity of suffering
characters. If the speaker is enjoying the story, then
Armytage would be participating in the degeneration of
sympathy into the sentimental exploitation of the suffering

of others. Armytage considers this but concludes that they

144

 

 

are not among those who would enjoy a “vain dalliance with
the misery / Even of the dead" (223-24). Such a sentimental
exploitation is “A momentary pleasure, never marked / By
reason, barren of all future good” (225-26). Furthermore,
such a dalliance with Margaret’s story is unlikely because
hers is “a common tale / By moving accidents uncharactered

and to the grosser sense / But ill adapted--scarcely
palpable to him who does not think” (231-36). The contrast
explained here describes the emotional exploitation against
which the Romantics promoted their innovations.

The innovation that is stressed is the necessity of
thought to intervene in the process of sympathy. It is the
lack of thought that characterizes the “vain dalliance” and
is contrasted to Armytage’s assessment of himself and the
speaker as people who “have known that there is often found
/ In mournful thoughts, and always might be found, / A
power to virtue friendly” (227-229). Those with a “grosser
sense” (234) need the “moving accidents” (232) of the
contrived and extraordinary incidents that move those who
will nOt think “mournful thoughts.” The willingness to have
mournful thoughts is only possible if one has a way to
redeem that negative affect, and return to positive affect.

Satisfied that Margaret’s story will have the

redemptive effects intended, Armytage continues telling of

145

 

the slow, progressive decay of her life after her husband’s
weaving is made obsolete by industrialization, and he
leaves her for the army so as to obtain the enlistment
bounty for his family. One child leaves, and her infant
dies, but Margaret maintains to her death the futile hope
that her husband will return.

Again, Armytage pauses in the story to express how
she and her story have saddened him. These references to
the suffering Armytage sympathetically shares with Margaret
have a special meaning now because they repeat the pattern
we have seen already in which Armytage moves between his
sympathetic suffering and a cheerful recovery. Each time,
before recovering his positive composure, he chastises
himself for being unwisely sad in the presence of joy in
the natural world. Armytage does not use thought to prevent
his sympathetic suffering. He uses thought only to extract
himself from sorrow when it is “barren of all future good.”
The question of this sympathy’s possible influence on the
larger social sphere lies in what future good can be
expected from this process of shared suffering and
recovery. If we see the sustenance of affective communities
as an essential work of societies, then a service to those
communities can be that social effect.

The virtue in sympathy is in its ability to produce a

146

“future good." However, how is sympathy for a dead person a'
future good? And if we assume, as I have here, that all
motivation is for positive affect in the present, then what
affective reward can there be in the present for sympathy?

In affective terms, sympathy for any suffering makes
one a member of an affective community, which, in itself is
a communal good because it increases the integration of
individuals into co-operative groups. Unconsciously joining
an affective community gives one access to the positive
affect of that community in the present. In other words,
sympathizing makes one a member of the affective community
that shares one's concern for the sufferer and one shares
the positive affect of that community in the present.

The speaker, having heard the story of Margaret,
enacts the sympathetic pattern that is implied in
Armytage’s description. When Armytage completes the story
of Margaret’s decline into a lonely death, the speaker
“turned aside in weakness, nor had power / To thank him for
the tale which he had told” (495). The speaker’s
Sympathetic sharing of Margaret’s suffering has left him
with the sense of being physically weakened. The negative
affect he has duplicated from his image of Margaret has
desubstantiated his self, which registers in his mind as

the ebbing of life from the whole organism. The speaker is

147

 

in need of the self-redemptive skills of Armytage, and the
recovery of positive affect that Armytage previously
enacted is now enacted by the speaker:
I stood, and leaning o’er the garden gate

Reviewed that woman’s sufferings; and it seemed

To comfort me while with a brother’s love

I blessed her in the impotence of grief

At length towards the cottage I returned

Fondly, and traced with milder interest

That secret spirit of humanity

Which, mid the calm oblivious tendencies

Of Nature, mid her plants, her weeds and flowers,

And silent overgrowings, still survived. (497)

The speaker’s redemption takes place in this moment.

His thoughts are focused on Margaret while he looks upon
the natural environment that Armytage’s story has
intentionalized by its association with the caring attitude
of Margaret’s peers. The garden, especially, has come to
symbolize Nature's participation in Margaret's generosity.
So the speaker concentrates on thoughts of Margaret that
are contextualized by an environment filled with the
symbolic markers of the affective community with which
Margaret had shared positive affect.

The suffering that the speaker has endured by his

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sympathetic sharing with Margaret is replaced by comfort in
the moment that he blesses Margaret. Bestowing a blessing
gives him a positive affective response because it is the
moment that he accepts his membership in Margaret’s
community. To bless is “[t]o pronounce words that confer
(or are held to confer) supernatural favor and well-being."
This one of the OED’s definitions associates as cause and
effect God’s.favor and the sense of well-being that God’s
favor imparts to the blessed. In affective terms, the
approval of God gives one a sense of well being for the
same reason that any approval does so: the approved of
person unconsciously shares the smile of those who approve
of him. The approval of God is particularly potent for
members of religious communities because, in their
memories, the image of God is invested with the positive
affect of the whole community whose consensus creates the
image. God is the religious community’s most potent symbol
of its consensual values, making God’s favor the most
potent symbol of the community’s approval. To be favored by
God is to be smiled on by the community.

The act of blessing loses no significance when seen in
affective, secular terms. A person bestowing a blessing
acts as a member and agent of an affective community in

announcing that its cumulative favor is directed to some

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person in recognition of that person's behavior.

Most important for the poem is to see that in acting
as the agent of an affective community, the blessor
includes himself as a member of that community, and he too
duplicates the positive affect mutually Shared by the
community. The speaker’s change from negative to positive
affect--his redemption--is, then, the result of his
acceptance of membership in this affective community that
gives its approval to Margaret.

When the speaker blesses Margaret, he is redeemed, but
he also does a communal service by joining an affective
community that is specifically a resource to people in
Margaret’s condition. This is the “power to virtue
friendly” that Armytage said would result from genuine
sympathy. The speaker has aligned his psychic well-being
with the community of the destitute, increasing the
affective potency of that group for all of its members.

Wordsworth's discipline of the sympathetic impulse
resolves the dilemma of how the sympathetic person is to
avoid sympathy's degeneration into the self-service that is
implied when it is called a “vain" dalliance. To be
genuine, the sympathizer must maintain a commitment to the
interests of the victim while also arresting his own

suffering. Conscious thought keeps his recall of memory

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focused on Margaret so that the positive affect that
redeems the speaker also adds to the positive affect that
is available to the community of which Margaret is a
member.

Nature in the above sympathetic discipline symbolizes
the affective community that makes the positiVe affect of
Margaret’s community available to the speaker. The function
of nature in an affective community depends on the brain’s
affective encoding of information so that the retrieval of
information can elicit a feeling response. Spiritual
explanations explain the mysteries of the unconscious
processing of these affective potencies. I do not mean to
suggest that Wordsworth shares the materialism of this
affect theory. I do, however, suggest that the theory
allows an alternative explanation of his intuitions in
places where he leaves the participation of spiritual
forces ambiguous. The role of nature in this poem is much
less transcendent than is often claimed.

One evidence of the non-transcendent condition of
nature in the poem is the fact that nature has no
consistent character. Nature exists for the characters with
the intentionality of whichever remembered image is
functioning in their affective processes at the time. They

do not commune with a fixed, natural essence outside their

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minds. In the beginning of the poem, nature is hostile and
plagues the speaker. This changes when he finds Armytage in
the comfort of the shade, and imagines nature sharing human
pride. After the speaker’s blessing of Margaret and his
return to positive affect, he sees the human spirit amid
Nature’s “calm oblivious tendencies” (504). Nature, which
has been hostile and proud, is now oblivious to human
concerns.

Similar changes in nature's intentionality occur for
Armytage. In an early passage he describes standing beside
the spring at Margaret’s cottage where he “eyed its waters
till we seemed to feel / One sadness, they and I” (83-4).
This is in contrast to the passage cited earlier in which
Armytage compares his uneasiness of mind to nature’s “image
of tranquility, / So calm and still” (517). The image of
tranquil nature inspires him to shed the very sadness that
nature had earlier shared with him. In this last case, he
specifies that he has an “image” of tranquility,
emphasizing his consciousness of subjective perception.

Again, I am not arguing that Wordsworth saw no
spiritual essence in nature, only that his psychology is
too readily identified as a theology. Some critics of
Wordsworth's mysticism begin with mystical assumptions

about his philosophy and create self-fulfilling prophesies

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that contribute to the image of his poetry as a mystic
escape from the political. An example is found in Duncan
Wu’s footnotes to The Ruined Cottage in his anthology of
Romantic poetry.

In an observation much like McGann’s, Wu finds the
poem’s conclusion “astonishing” (289, note) for the
meagerness of the consolation that it offers for the
injustice and suffering that people endure. But
characterizing Wordsworth's intention as a “consolation”
derived from a kind of heavenly reward reveals that Wu is
reading the poem with a psychological model appropriate to
his Pantheistic interpretation of Nature in the poem.

Wu concludes that the poem has

an astonishing ending, all things considered. The
philoSophy of consolation and, ultimately,
redemption, that underlies this work asks that we
regard injustice and Suffering as an‘idle dream’,
mere shadows of a higher, and brighter, reality to
come. (289, note)
There is no reference in the poem to a “reality to come.”
Wu is imposing on Armytage's conclusion the conventional
Christian consolation of a heavenly reward. This follows
from the premise that the characters are discovering a

transcendent and benevolent reality in Nature, and that

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they are encouraged to see the contrast between this
“heaven” and earthly suffering.

In the passage at issue, which is also cited by Rieder
as the most objectionable to recent critics, Armytage sees
tranquility in the plants around him and observes that they

looked so beautiful

Amid the uneasy thoughts which filled my mind,

That what we feel of sorrow and despair

From ruin and from change, and all the grief

The passing shows of being leave behind,

Appeared an idle dream that could not live

Where meditation was. (518-24)
Wu reads “idle dream” as a reference to the sufferings of
life. But the “idle dream" refers to the “grief” that
experiences “leave behind,” not to the grief that is lived
in the moment. This distinction is made repeatedly as
Armytage moves from his sympathetic sharing of suffering to
his refusal to continue suffering when there is no good to
come of it. The idle dream is the “uneasy thoughts" that
“could not live where meditation was.” After we have
suffered from ruin and change there are thoughts that
perpetuate sorrow and grief unnecessarily. Wordsworth
recommends consciously intervening in the affective inertia

created when negative affect retrieves negative memories.

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This is not a consolation for enduring injustice and its

suffering; it is an earthly remedy for an unnecessary
perpetuation of one's suffering.

Armytage is Wordsworth's example of one who has freed
himself from the self-perpetuating tendencies of suffering.
He neither shirks from sympathetic suffering nor dwells in
it. He genuinely shares the suffering of others for as long
as it produces the “power to virtue friendly” that he knows
“is often found / In mournful thoughts, and always might be
found” (227-28). When the virtuous potential of suffering
has been attained, “the purposes of wisdom ask no more"
(509), and he returns to cheerfulness wiser and stronger.
Redemption follows from the communal allegiance that
constitutes the virtuous power, not from a heavenly
consolation.

Armytage’s last statement is a summation of this
process of affective manipulation. He is comparing natural
images that contrast to his uneasy thoughts. He reports
that the plants “did to [his] mind convey / So still an
image of tranquility" (517). The ability to selectively
retrieve memories gives Armytage the choice of living with
the support of an affirming, affective community or living
With the rejection of a condemning community. Why, he

implies, should he choose to suffer with the latter?

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The affective skills that Armytage exercises are not
only relevant to those who sympathize with others but to
anyone who suffers. Above, I suggested that early in the
poem the speaker’s inability to control his affect makes
him an example of the limiting psychology that Wordsworth
intends to address, and this makes him an excellent student
for Armytage. Margaret also acts as a negative affective
example in contrast to Armytage.

Margaret’s unending pining for her lost husband is
self-destructive. She is aware of this but is powerless to
correct it. Armytage repeats Margaret’s statement on this
subject: “‘About the fields I wander, knowing this / Only,
that what I seek I cannot find, / And so I waste my time:
for I am changed, And to myself' said she, ‘have done much
wrong, / And to this helpless infant'” (350-54). Wordsworth
represents Margaret's emotional paralysis as a disease of
her mind that is responsible not only for her own mental
decline but for the wasting death of her child who “from
its mother caught the trick of grief, / And sighed among
its playthings” (410-411). Margaret is clearly a victim in
the poem, but she is not blameless, and she is not one to
be emulated. She refused to leave her deathly isolation at
the cottage because “one torturing hope endeared, / Fast

rooted at her heart” (498-90) that her husband would

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return. She cannot escape the mental dominance of one-
memory, so what at first appears to be loyalty becomes a
torturing and destructive disability.

Had Margaret the psychological skills of Armytage, she
would be no less a victim, but she and her child could be
expected to suffer less than they do. Margaret is a
sympathetic character only because we recognize her
psychological limits. She not only has the suffering of a
victim, she has the disabling psychology of the helpless
victim.

Wordsworth’s heroes demonstrate the ability to sustain
their psychic selves by being intensely affective rather
than intensely emotional. The legacy of the Lyrical Ballads
is to disseminate this affective alternative to the
culture. The reader’s increased responsibility for finding
meaning in ambiguity cultivates a sensitivity to
unconscious affective responses as an alternative to the
simple recognition of emotion in the poem. The possibility
of conscious, cognitivecontrol of affective processes
exemplified in the poems and cultivated in the reader
encourages Wordsworth’s vision of a society transformed by
sympathy under this affective discipline. What Wordsworth
believed to be an access to a universal essence is here

understood to be the mind's participation in a communal

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system of psychic sustenance. The strengths and weaknesses
of Wordsworth's vision can be seen as the horns of the
dilemma that he does not resolve, but for which he
contributes a new accommodation.

The affective dilemma is no less significant in our
time when just claims for equal participation in affective
economies increase proportionately to the destructive
potential of passionate public affect. Wordsworth’s
sympathetic program remains, at the very least, a landmark

engagement with the affective processes of this dilemma.

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Chapter 4

Robert Browning’s Affective Critique

Isobel Armstrong begins her rereading of Victorian
poetry by rescuing it from its identification as a
transitional phase between Romanticism and Modernism. She
credits this dismissive classification to the Modernists'
anxiety about their Victorian predecessors: “The modernists
are haunted by the Victorians because they are haunted by
the plenitude of content which eludes them” (7), and in
their suppression of the Victorian evidence of their
deficiencies, Modernists have obscured the fact that “The
effort to renegotiate a content to every relationship
between self and the world is the Victorian poet's project”
(7). Armstrong reassesses this project for its political
content as it negotiates two lines of political thought
beginning in C.J. Fox's radicalism and Arthur Hallam’s
conservatism.

However, it is difficult to see the content that
Armstrong finds in the poetry of Robert Browning after she
credits him with so thorough a critique of the very ground
of meaning, and with an anarchic emotionality that defeats
the democratizing effects that Fox attributed to poetic

emotion, Armstrong identifies Robert Browning with Fox’s

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radical camp by virtue of his dramatic monologues, which
incorporate Fox’s ideas of drama as fundamentally
democratic forml At one level, Browning's poems fulfill the
political purpose, for their “dramatic form decentres both
speaker and reader, questioning the authority of both”
(288). It “is also a post-teleological and post—Kantian
form” whose critique of language and representation
contributes by questioning “the possibility of absolute
judgment and coherent subjectivity” (289). However,
Browning’s poems take the form beyond this challenge to
authority to a more essentially destabilizing status. In
“Bishop Blougram's Apology” for instance, Armstrong
recognizes that
the inherent instability of language is
manipulated here for ideological purposes as the
Bishop contends for the meaning of ‘belief'. But
if we are to have a chance to ‘read’ a text it is
essential to a democratic reading that language is
not deprived of signification. In showing that we
can and cannot ‘read’ the Bishop’s language the
Grotesque treads the dangerous edge of the
democratic interpretation. (313)
Still, it is not the lack of reason in Blougram’s argument

that manipulates “the inherent instability of language,”

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for “many of the arguments are acute at a rational level.
It is their juxtaposition and their context of emotion
which distorts them. In order to ‘read’ the text ‘right’,
we are forced back on the reading of an emotional subtext”
(311). In fact, Armstrong finds in many of the poems of Men
and WOmen
what seem to be two incompatible and incongruous
propensities, an extreme intellectual and
epistemological sophistication and an extreme
commitment to the voracious power of anarchic,
libidinal emotion and desire. (287-8)
While I propose that this emotional power is central to the
poem and to Browning’s intention, Armstrong, considers the
emotion a problem to be overcome in the interest of a
democratic reading. She contends: “the decay of language
which . . . exposes the irrational subtext is thus of
crucial importance" (313). Armstrong see that “the
irrational subtext" is here in the service of the “Bishop’s
daemonic conservatism” (312-3).

I will argue that feeling in these poems is not a
subtext but is Browning’s primary interest and that the
poem’s critique includes the exposure of the logic of
affect that is revealed after “the decay of language.” The

dramatic monologues perform the critiques of language and

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representation as Armstrong demonstrates. But the

 

persistence of feeling after the critical deconstruction of
the rational does not make feeling “anarchic” (288). This
chapter will consider that the affect theory prOposed here
can be useful in understanding the “subtext” the analysis
of which would seem to be Browning’s reason for
deconstructing everything else in the poem.

When a meaning is necessary for the survival of the
self, the brain creates that meaning by a calculus of
affective potencies and not directly by the logic of
consciousness. The free-play of signifiers ends when the
mind chooses the significations with the most advantageous
affective potencies and generates motive energy
accordingly. Browning not only considers the possibility of
the affective freed from the rational, as Armstrong does,
but the affective freed from its own controlling
limitations.

In the early dramatic monologues, Browning creates
some nightmare scenarios from the Romantic dream of the
imaginatively, self-substantiating individual. When in,
“The Eolian Harp," Coleridge asks “What if" his imagination
were actually a perception of a greater reality behind
worldly appearances, he raises a frightening possibility.

That scenario is attractive to him because it would mean

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that he could substantiate his self entirely from the
positively encoded images that he brings to mind in
imagination. He would no longer be limited to the positive
affect he can gain through co-operation with others. If the
unconscious mind could not distinguish between perceptions
of the genuine positive affect that is directed toward one
in reward for a behavior, and any representation of
positive affect directed toward one could elicit the same
positive affect, then individuals could substantiate
themselves with representation of approval directed toward
them.

In other words, if there were no understood quid pro
quo requiring a co-operative behavior in exchange for the
smile of approval, individuals would no longer be compelled
to participate in the communal affective economy because
they could self-substantiate by merely perceiving a smile
and duplicating its positive affect. Carlyle worried that
the ubiquity of representation was distancing people from
genuine experience. But Browning wonders what would happen
if the ubiquity of representation created people whose
unconsciousness lost the ability to tell the difference
between the genuine smile of approval and its
representation in the affective encoding of objects. This

is precisely the case in some of Browning’s most famous

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dramatic monologues.

The macabre effect of the Duke in “My Last Duchess” is
attributable to his ability to duplicate positive affect by
his perception of that affect in a painting. He is
pathological because he needs no cultural mediation to
authorize his affective response. He is, in effect, like
the infant who duplicates the smile on the face of the
care-giver automatically and without any of the
interpersonal negotiations that conStitute social life.

The two characteristics of the Duke’s personality that
make him bizarre are both directly attributable to the way
that he perceives affect in the external world. First the
lengths to which he goes in order to discipline the Duchess
in her public display of affect, and second, the fact that
he finds a painting of her to be eminently more satisfying
than her living presence. Both of these exceed the limits
of normal emotionality but make good sense as the pursuit
of positive affect outside of the obligations of an
affective economy. The larger part of “My Last
Duchess” is occupied with the Duke’s incredulity at the
Duchess’ subversive disordering of his affective
environment. The Duchess is a Wordsworthian ideal
innocently and thoughtlessly challenging an affective

economy of the ancien regime just as Wordsworth intended

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that it should. The Duchess responds spontaneously with joy
to nature and ordinary people and the life of the country:
“The dropping of the daylight in the West, The bough of
cherries some officious fool / Broke in the orchard for
her, the white mule / She rode with round the terrace—
(Ricks 26-9). This is a problem, for in the Duke’s presence
she is “too soon made glad, / Too easily impressed; she
liked whate'er / She looked on, and her looks went
everywhere” (22-4). The result is that “all and each /
Would draw from her alike the approving speech . . . as if
she ranked / My gift of a nine-hundred years-old name /
With anybody’s gift” (29-34). The Duke has allowed the
Duchess to share in the benefits of his aristocratic
status, and in exchange he expects that her smile should be
reserved to him. The significance of this assumption is its
revelation of an even deeper assumption that the system
that gives him wealth and power is built upon the
hierarchical order in which people smile on one another.
When the Duke, in his disgust at her profligate
expression of approval, asks, “Who’d stoop to blame / This
sort of trifling?" (34-5) it might first be understood to
mean that her joyful exuberance is only a trifle not to be
troubled about. But the opposite is the Duke’s meaning. The

Duchess is trifling with something that is of enough

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importance that it must be taken for granted. Even “if she
let / Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set / Her wits to
yours, forsooth, and made excuse, / -E'en then would be

some stooping; and I choose / Never to stoop” (39-43). The
standards by which one understands who is to be smiled at
must be unconsciously held. To make these standards
conscious and a matter of negotiation is to concede their
constructed nature and to invite the question as to why a
nine-hundred-years-old name should regulate the
emotionality in one’s environment.

The importance of the affective environment finally
requires that the Duke act to control it: “This grew; I
gave commands; / Then all smiles stOpped together. There
she stands / As if alive”(45—7). That the Duke replaces
the Duchess with a painting makes clear that his interest
is not simply in being rid of her. He wants and needs her
smile, but the living Duchess cannot be integrated into his
affective economy because she is affectively egalitarian;
she does not recognize his status in the class dominated
affective economy. She is useful to him only after her
smile has been freed of its association with her feelings
and can be reassigned an intentionality that is consistent
with the affective economy that is necessary to him. The

Duke’s pathological obsession with his affective

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environment gives the poem its macabre effect, but our
recognition of that economy also allows his behavior to
make sense as more than an individual pathology.

In the simplest terms, the need to be smiled at makes
humans social because others will not smile at us unless we
cooperate with them. However, the smile itself acquires
complicated cultural referents as its associations bring
extended populations into the affective environments of
people who can have direct contact with only a small
proportion of the population with which they need to
cooperate. In other words, we must feel the need to please
people who will never show us positive affect directly, so
cultures intentionalize symbolic concepts and objects so
that they function with affective potency in motivating
abstractly cooperative behaviors. But the facility with
which affect can be associatively attached to any
information also makes it possible to extend associations
until a person’s affect takes on referents other than that
person's feelings.

The Duke exemplifies this. He enjoys a painting of a
person that he did not enjoy in life. In order to enjoy the
positive affect of the painting, he must associate it with
something other than the feelings of the living woman. The

importance of the Duke’s nine-hundred-years-old name

167

indicates that his affective economy is dominated by the
interactive patterns of the social class system in which
subordinates fill a symbolic role for those superior to
them. The Duke turns the Duchess into a representation so
that her smile can function in his aristocratic affective
economy as she cannot.

For the socially dominant person, the smile of a
subordinate is not dependably representative of genuine
approval. Instead, members of the lower class become
generalized representations of their place in the system as
admirers of their superiors. Social class structures the
affective economy into a hierarchy of affectively, non—
negotiating groups so as to increase the affective security
for the superior classes by removing the need to constantly
negotiate self-substantiation with the population that is
subordinate. The Duke reduces the Duchess to this role as a
representation, associating her affect with a meaning other
than her feelings so that she fits nicely into his
affective economy.

A similar shift in the referent of an affect was
explained in the previous chapter in which sympathy becomes
exploitative sentiment when the negative affect of the
victim becomes associated with an affective community that

does not include the victim. When the sympathizers find an

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affective community that supports them simply for the
affectation of shared suffering, the socially ameliorative
effect of sympathy is lost. The sentimental response does
not require sympathizers to make an affective alliance with
the victim that gives them an incentive to alleviate the
victim's suffering. For the sentimental observer, the
negative affect of the victim does not represent the
suffering of the victim; it represents the positive affect
of an affective community other than the victim’s. In the
case of sympathy, it is the negative affect of the victim
that loses its reference to the victim’s suffering. In the
case of the Duke, the Duchess’ smile loses its reference to
her egalitarian benevolence so that it can be affectively
compatible with his affective economy.

When the Duchess' smile becomes a representation and
can function affectively for the Duke, it also becomes more
lifelike for him, and the Duchess becomes more a flawed
representation of what he believes to be her proper self.
Part of the eerie quality of the Duke’s monologue is its
subtle linguistic transfer of life from the Duchess to the
painting.

The role of Fra Pandolf in the creation of the
painting exemplifies the Duke's vivification of the

representation. As the Duke introduces the painting to the

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agent, he mentions that Fra Pandolf is the artist who
painted it. He then explains that he named the artist
because he anticipates that the agent will look at “that
pictured countenance” (7) and ask him “How such a glance
came there” (11). This implies that the question as to the
origin of the “glance” refers to the origin of the
representation, so the Duke names the artist. But the Duke
immediately adds “Sir,‘t was not / Her husband’s presence
only, called that spot / Of joy into the Duchess' cheek”
(13-15). Now the Duke seems to be answering the agent’s
question as if he were asking who inspired the Duchess’
smile during the creation of the representation. We
understand now that Fra Pandolf's presence is significant
not only because he created the representation but because
his presence explains who besides the Duke inspired the
living smile. Pandolf is equally significant as creator of
both the representation and the original smile. This makes
the smile and its representation less distinguishable by
attributing the agency behind both to Pandolf. And the fact
that Pandolf easily elicits the Duchess’s smile with a
trivial comment diminishes her agency in favor of his. He
becomes the agent of her affect both in life and in art,
but in his art, the Duchess’s affect serves the Duke's

affective needs.

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The reader is led by the Duke’s language to share his
transposition of reality and fiction again in the first
lines of the poem in which the Duke declares: “That’s my
last duchess painted on the wall, / Looking as if she were
alive”. The Duke’s sentence is grammatically constructed so
as to create ambiguity as to the referent of the word
“That.” The caesura in the first line allows “That’s my
last Duchess” to be read as the identification of the
living Duchess. Because “painted on the wall” is an
adjectival, participial phrase, readers first respond to it
as a descriptor of the living Duchess. Initially, the mind
superimposes the two images and the reader imagines a
woman, somehow, stuck to a wall with paint. We find the
image distressing because of the negative affect encoded on
the memories that are retrieved by such an image. Quickly,
cognition searches for other possibilities and finds that
easing its grammatical expectations changes the referent of
“that” to the painting and not the living Duchess and the
image is altered so as to be consistent with normal
experience. However, the next line of the poem repeats the
effect. Another participial phrase: “Looking as if she were
alive” seems at first to refer to the living Duchess, not
to the painting of the Duchess. We do not know that there

is a semantic difficulty until we respond with negative

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affect to the image of the living Duchess who only looks as
it she were alive. Even after the grammatical confusion is
rectified, and attributed to the Duke's unorthodox use of
the language, the initial, negative affective response
lingers in the body.

The poem is bizarre because Browning is making readers
experience the affective pathology of the Duke. The Duke
responds positively to the Duchess’s affect without the
limiting scripts of cultural conventions. Readers also
respond initially to the image of the Duchess’s affect and,
when that response is negative, then discover that the
image to which they have reSponded defies all the
expectations they have learned in cultural experience. For
an instant, the reader holds in the mind the image of the
Duchess, hanging on a wall, looking as if she were alive,
but perhaps actually dead, and the reader responds
affectively to this image. For that instant, the body’s
unconscious response to the image is unmediated by the
memory recall that will discover the perceptive error. For
that instant, the reader shares the affective pathology
that is the Duke's full-time experience. The affect that
readers feel in that instant of suspended affective
development is pre-emotional affect. It is affect as it

comes from unconsciousness into the conscious circuitry

172

that matches it in detail to of communal experience.

Contributing to the poem's containment of feeling in
pre-emotional affect is the lack of conscious awareness on
the part of the participants as to their own motivations or
those of others. The Duchess is childlike in her affective
response, smiling, like an infant, to anyone who smiles at
her and naively unaware of the social conventions of the
hierarchical, affective economy in which she lives. The
Duke insists that his environment adapt to his unconscious
affective responses. In passages examined earlier, the Duke
insists that he will not ask that the Duchess to behave
differently because that would be to “stoop.” He has a
negative affective response to her behavior and will not
consider that he should intervene in this response with a
cognition about cultural conventions. Both the Duke and the
Duchess live, to an unconventional degree, in their pre-
emotional affect, without acceding to the cultural scripts
that would channel their initial affect into a more
cooperative emotional form.

In “My Last Duchess,” Browning investigates the
pathologies of the affect system that allow a person to be
freed from the co-operative imperative of the normal
affective system so that the affect of others is a

commodity to be accessed without reciprocal obligations. In

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“Bishop Blougram’s Apology," Browning examines the
affective economy in the more normal terms in which the
need for positive affect creates a competition over how
ideas and objects are affectively encoded. “Bishop
Blougram’s Apology” depicts the competition between the
socially and politically superior speaker and Gigadibs, his
common, middle-class auditor over who will be in the
superior position in the affective economy. In the guise of
a debate about religious belief, Blougram and Gigadibs
reflect the larger cultural struggle over how positive
affect is to be distributed in the Victorian affective
economy.

The poem is an apology in the sense that Blougram
defends the conduct of his life against the disparaging
attack of Gigadibs, finally admitting his shortcomings but
never conceding superiority to Gigadibs. While the subject
is superficially the question of religious belief, Blougram
perceives that he has been challenged to defend his sense
of his own worth. The energy with which he responds is
evidence not that he is simply narcissistic, but that he is
desperate to maintain the access to positive affect that
substantiates his self and gives him psychic existence.

While we never learn precisely what it is that

Gigadibs has written that leads Blougram to invite him to

174

 

the dinner and conversation in which the poem is set, it is
clear that Gigadibs has at least implied publically that
the Bishop is not truly a believer in church doctrines and
is, therefore, dishonestly enjoying the privileges of his
position in the church. Blougram understands at the poem's
beginning that the moral and political questions are
grounded in some more fundamental issue of self-worth. He
tells Gigadibs: “you deepise me" (Browning 13). The poem
ends with Blougram's expression of his satisfaction with
having caused Gigadibs to “discontinue--not detesting, not
/ Defaming, but at least--despising me!” (968). Blougram
claims to have changed Gigadibs' opinion of him so that
while he is still “detested” he is not “despised.” The
difference is that “despies” carries the connotation of
looking down on one with contempt. To “detest” is to
dislike strongly, but there is no connotation of superior
worth. In the end, Blougram believes he has succeeded by
ensuring that while Gigadibs still dislikes him, he can no
longer look down on him. This point is reinforced in the
narrator’s conclusion in which he reports Blougram’s
thoughts:

“On the whole,” he thought, “I justify myself

His ground was over mine and broke the first:

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So, let him sit with me this many a year!" (997-
1005).
In order to maintain his ground, Blougram must build a case
for his self-worth in the terms of the affective economy.
He must establish that more of the society’s affective
communities are aligned behind him than behind Gigadibs. In
this way, the poem is an examination of the condition of
the affective economy as Blougram's defense of himself
takes place within the terms of social, and philosophical
issues.

One of the assumptions of this affect theory is that
individuals acquire an unconscious understanding that
cultural signifiers, both objects and ideas, carry
affective values that signify the community’s proportionate
approval or disapproval for particular behaviors. These
intentionalized objects and ideas have affective potency in
proportion to the number or importance of the people that
one understands to be in consensus that a particular
behavior will receive a particular affective response. I
have called these consensual groupings affective
communities. In effect, the affective values of the
culture become invested in affective communities symbolized
by signifiers so that behaviors involving those signifiers

can extend the affective economy into behaviors not

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involving direct affective exchanges. When people act or
even think, they access their memory of the community’s
affective responses by reading it in the signifiers
associated with that behavior. People are dependent,
therefore, on consensus to create the affective communities
that provide them with positive affective stimulation. We
acquire our knowledge of affective communities
unconsciously. We select from among those we have as it is
advantageous to us, but we have only those that experience
has given us. People are important to us to the degree that
they have affective potency among our affective
communities.

I have found it important to review the nature of
affective communities because it sheds light on the
importance that Blougram assigns to Gigadibs’ opinion of
him. Blougram needs not only to convince himself that he is
as good as Gigadibs; he needs Gigadibs to share that
conviction. After delivering what he finds a compelling
argument, Blougram says to Gigadibs: “Enough; you see, I
need not fear contempt. / —Except it’s yours! Admire me as
these may, / You don’t” (431). This may be sarcastically
delivered, but Blougram has invited Gigadibs to this
conversation specifically for this purpose, and he pursues

this end through a long and concerted effort. Gigadibs

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signifies a potent affective community for Blougram because
he is of the educated middle-class that is rapidly eroding
the traditional affective economy in which Blougram has
acquired a high place. Blougram is not the Duke in “My Last
Duchess”; he cannot ignore the negative affect of those who
do not approve of him. As indicated by the line previously
quoted, Blougram needs Gigadibs to acknowledge Blougram’s
superiority. It is not enough that he knows himself to be
better because, like all of us, he does not know himself to
have value except as others show us that it is so. Blougram
is satisfied at the poem’s end because they both know that
Gigadibs can no longer deSpise him.

Blougram makes repeated assertions of the
commonsensical superiority of his life, condescendingly
comparing his prestige and power to Gigadibs’s life as the
writer of “That lively lightsome article we took / Almost
for the true Dickens” (949). However, Gigadibs refuses to
concede that social status is a good and claims instead to
have higher motivations than the prestige and comfort that
Blougram has acquired. Blougram meets him on this point
with a simile meant to undermine Gigadibs' traditionalist
assumptions about his own motivations.

Blougram compares their lives with a simile of life as

a sea voyage for which people must furnish their own

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cabins. Blougram offers it as common sense that one is wise
to consider the limitations of space that are inherent on a
ship. He makes an analogy between Gigadibs' dedication to
truth and a person showing up on the dock with furnishings
that are impossible to accommodate on shipboard. leaving
him with nothing of comfort for the sea voyage of life.
Superficially , the intent of the simile is to make clear
that Gigadibs’ disdain for the worldly pleasures of comfort
and public esteem is simply a mistaken idealism producing
no reward. But, more importantly, Blougram’s simile exposes
that there is a desire for the reward of public esteem that
is implicit in Gigadibs’ claims of a selfless ideal.

The simile of life as a sea voyage emphasizes the
context of public attention in which Gigadibs’ ideal is
enacted. Blougram tells him: “you can cut a figure at first
/ While sympathetic landsmen see you off” (127). Then he
would be badly equipped because his ideal, which is an
“abstract intellectual plan of life / Quite irrespective of
life’s plainest laws” (92) would leave him badly suited for
the real conditions of life. Blougram’s simile belittles
the “landsmen" who do not understand the conditions of life
and are impressed with Gigadibs’ splendid intentions only
because of their ignorance. Blougram predicts that even

while suffering for being so ill prepared, Gigadibs will

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claim: “I've the better notion, all agree, / Of fitting
rooms up” (137) and Blougram mockingly concludes: “You've
proved your artist-nature” (142). Gigadibs’ claim to
disdain public esteem is belied by the fact that there is a
public that approves of characters who affect such disdain.
The allusion to his artist's nature mocks the Romantic
tradition of artists as a priestly, enlightened class who
represent themselves as suffering for the communal good
even as they seek fame and fortune.

Blougram is making conscious a normally unconscious
transaction of the affective economy that I refer to as a
redemptive turn or the myth of the suffering hero. Charles
Taylor refers to it as it became known in the nineteenth
century as the “ethics of belief” (404). In Sources of the
Self, Taylor argues that when proponents of instrumental
reason find it necessary to argue the worth of a life lived
by that philosophy, they contend that “the manly
confronting of the universe in its vast indifference,
itself frees us from our petty egoism” (410). It does so
because the contribution they make will earn them “the
gratitude of future generations” (352). Posterity's
“recognition is their great consolation” (352). I wish to
argue that the communal approval associated with “the manly

confronting of the universe” is more than a consolation.

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The desire for this approval motivates the proponents of
instrumental reason to take up that philosophy in the first
place.

Blougram’s simile of the sea voyage in which the ill
prepared Gigadibs will represent his suffering as the price
of his artist nature identifies the ethics of belief in
Gigadibs' claim of a higher ideal, contradicting the
assertion that he does not share Blougram’s desire for
prestige. By Blougram's standard, Gigadibs’ high ideals are
no more selfless than his and, furthermore, offer no reward
but the admiration of a small, untrustworthy constituency
characterized in the simile as the landsmen on the dock.

After the ship simile and more allusions to the
prestige and comfort afforded him by his accommodation of
worldly conditions, Blougram asks Gigadibs flatly: “What’s
wrong? why won't you be a bishop too?” (149). The ship
simile does not win a concession from Gigadibs. If living
in the real world means being a bishop, he cannot, for he
cannot believe and to be a bishop without belief would be
unacceptable. Gigadibs is claiming superiority by the
ethics of belief. He will accept the suffering of his
higher ideal in the faith that progress will be the
eventual consequence. The implication is clear that

Blougram's acceptance of belief is a dishonest and cowardly

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opportunism. In order to defend himself, Blougram must
alter the affective associations of the concept of belief.
Blougram cannot argue that he is honest by the
traditional definition of belief because he also wishes to
maintain the status he has by virtue of his intellectual
work. In comparing himself to Gigadibs, Blougram points out
that he enjoys the comforts and prestige of his life “While
writing all the same my articles / On music, poetry, the
fictile vase / Found at Albano, chess, Anacreon’s Greek”
(913-5). This is clearly meant to compete with the
“lightsome” article that Gigadibs published. He must defend
his religious belief while maintaining his intellectual
superiority. For this reason he acknowledges: “I too, not a
fool, you please to think, / Must find believing every whit
as hard” (157-8). Blougram must concede that he does not
believe, but, of course, the bishop cannot be a disbeliever
without exposing himself to the accusation of dishonesty,
so he quickly qualifies his admission of disbelief with the
proviso that he can say that he has no faith only “If
you’ll accept no faith that is not fixed, / Absolute and
exclusive, as you say" (162-3). Blougram needs to redefine
religious belief so that it can be associated with both
Enlightenment thought and religious tradition while

discrediting Gigadibs’s claim that disbelief is the more

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noble disposition.

Blougram has the solution in the guise of a thought
experiment in which they both discard all dogmas of belief
and stand as ideal examples of Gigadibs’ disbelieving hero
of disengaged, instrumental reason. Blougram predicts that
in their hypothetical state of unbelief there will be some
inevitable experience of spontaneous emotion that will lead
to belief:

Just when we are safest, there’s a sunset-touch,

A fancy from a flower-bell, some one’s death,

A chorus-ending from Euripides,--

And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears

As old and new at once as nature's self,

To rap and knock and enter in our soul,

Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring,

Round the ancient idol, on his base again,--

The grand Perhaps! (182-5)
Spontaneous hopes and fears enter the soul and construct
there an idol of belief, but for what purpose? The pagan
dance suggests a fertility rite in worship of a
representation of the entity that is their source of
spontaneous hopes and fears. The personified emotions seek
to invoke the source of the aesthetic experience. The

metaphor declares the inevitability of belief in answer to

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Gigadib’s skepticism, but it also fittingly represents the
communal creation of a religion by the consensual
organization of seemingly individual experiences of
perception.

The metaphor suggests the affect system. The dancers
in Blougram's metaphor are an affective community
consensually intentionalizing an object so that it becomes
a symbolic repository of their collective approval from
which each individual can draw the affective stimulation
necessary to the continued amplification of affect. The
dancers look to the communally created idol for the
positive affect that allows them to influence the
amplification or reproduction of themselves.

While Blougram's metaphor conceives of the aesthetic
response as originary, if we understand that an emotion is
an affect amplified by information recalled from memory,
then it is clear that the response to the aesthetic object
is already a response to some “beliefs.” The aesthetic
object, like the idol, is a product of consensual
intentionalization of the environment for the purpose of
disseminating the community’s affect in an organized and
organizing way.

The strength of Blougram’s argument is his ability to

keep himself aligned with communal interests. Gigadibs, the

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individual, has trouble doing this. Blougram’s tactic
succeeds in deflecting Gigadibs’ moral attack on the
grounds of honesty because Gigadibs must concede that
Blougram cannot be expected to have absolute belief.
However, Gigadibs then argues that if belief and disbelief
inevitable produce each other, then his commitment to
disbelief must be at least as valuable as Blougram’s
commitment to belief because, he says, “where I drop the
faith / And you the doubt, that I’m as right as you?” (215-
6). Blougram counters that religious belief is obviously
the better choice because it allows one access to the
cultural resources by which to satisfy the natural desire
for public esteem. The metaphor of the pagan ritual is
intended to give naturalist support to his participation in
the church, but the image of Hopes and Fears communally
dancing around an idol also suggests the need for feeling
to have a communal organization. The communality of the
dance suggests the need for mutual approval and Blougram’s
position in the church gives him access to it. Blougram has
affective resources on his side of the argument. But,
again, Blougram meets resistance from Gigadibs because if
Gigadibs concedes that prestige is superior, he has to
concede Blougram's superior worth. He refuses this

concession, claiming again that a higher ideal than

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prestige sets him above Blougram.

While it is easy to dismiss Blougram’s need to be
admired as arrogance or even megalomania, his acceptance of
self-worth as a legitimate motivational ground is on the
progressive side of nineteenth-century phiIOSOphical and
literary debates about the nature of the good. Maura
Spiegel tracks the place of this self—consciousness in the
literary treatment of virtue, beginning in the eighteenth
century with Adam Smith’s response to Hutcheson’s
insistence that virtue must be strictly selfless:

Dr. Hutcheson was so far from allowing self-love
to be in any case a motive of virtuous actions,
that even a regard to the pleasure of self-
approbation, to the comfortable applause of our
own consciences, according to him, diminished the
merit of a benevolent action.
(241)
Hutcheson is trying to prevent approval from becoming an
accepted motive of behavior. Smith’s incredulity registers
the increasing difficulty this produces in light of
introspective psychology. He stresses the extreme that is
evidenced by Hutcheson’s disqualification of “even” the
pleasure of self-approbation as virtuous motive. The

implication is that Smith finds it difficult to understand

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virtue without the approbation of others as well.

Smith’s moral theory begins to incorporate self-
interest into moral philosophy, but it remains a problem
for narratives in the nineteenth century. Spiegel follows
changes in the novels of Dickens and demonstrates the
nineteenth century’s slow acceptance of the inevitability
of self-interest in motivation. She writes that in his
early novels, “Like Hutcheson, Dickens applies a rigorous
conception of selflessness or disinterestedness, not
accepting Smith's dictum that self-interest can be regarded
a ‘laudable principle of action’" (241). However, “Dickens,
in the later works, is led to a larger conception of
‘emotional need,’ a less selfless ideal of virtue, and a
more self-conscious engagement with the problem of
rendering them” (247). The challenge to selfless virtue
reveals the extent to which introspective psychology is
forcing recognition of imperatives coming from the nature
of the self. Blougram is redefining belief with the same
“less self-leSs ideal of virtue.”

The growing awareness of pre-emotional affect and its
unconscious source is consistent with an acknowledgment of
self-interest in motivation. Browning can be expected to
have been very sensitive to the debate about self-interest

as a motive. The hostile reception of “Pauline" for being

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morbidly self-centered is credited by Abrams et. al for
leading Browning “to write plays instead of soul-searching
narratives or lyrics” (1183), and suppressing his
publication of poems for years.

Ekbert Fass analyzes the simultaneous growth of the
dramatic monologue and psychiatry and contends that the
development of the dramatic monologue out of the greater
Romantic lyric occurs in part so as to avoid the stigma
that had become attached to the the self-revelatory
excesses that Romantic expressivism attained in the poetry
of the Spasmodics. The critical distaste for self-serving
behavior helps explain the development of the dramatic
monologue in which the analysis of pathological others is a
way of deploying Romantic introspection without the censure
that both Browning and Tennyson suffered for the self—
revelations of their early work.

Fass describes the growth of psychiatry out of the
general popularity for the analysis of psychology in the
mid-century. (Interest in psychological analysis is also
consistent with the cultural suppression of public affect
in favor of affect contained within the limits of an
imaginative exercise. The intense emotionality that is
found distasteful in personal expression becomes the pre-

emotional affect of “emotion recollected [and analyzed] in

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tranquility" when the reader becomes an analyst rather than
an empathic sharer of the speaker’s emotional intensity.
The inevitable self-service that is the acquisition of
positive affect must take place, and culture must direct it
to cooperative purposes. The dramatic monologue can be seen
to be a formal accommodation of the affective dilemma in
this sense.

Gigadibs, ironically the more politically progressive
of the two, is the moral traditionalist on the issue self-
serving virtue because his leverage against Blougram must
be his ability to align himself with the greater social
good that his ideals are meant to produce in Opposition to
Blougram’s self-service. While he cannot refute the
contention that everyone has self-interests, he has no
psychology by which to explain how self-interest and the
interest of others can be mutually pursued. He cannot deny
that he seeks pleasure, but he cannot concede that this
makes him morally equivalent to Blougram. Blougram exploits
this manifestation of morality’s inability to resolve the
affective dilemma.

To this point in the poem, Blougram has tried hard to
keep control of the standard of their comparison. He
concentrates on undermining what he sees as Gigadib's

pretentious high ideals so as to win in their competition

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by the evidence of his success in the winning of public
approval. This is not successful, however, and late in the
poem, Gigadibs remains committed to his ideals and
declares, “All special-pleading done with--truth is truth,
/ And justifies itself by undreamed ways” (807—9). Gigadibs
claims that his ideal of action cannot be judged by any
standard; rather, he has faith that it will eventually
justify itself. Gigadibs is invoking the ethics of belief,
claiming that his present suffering is acceptable because
of some unknown but presumably benevolent future
consequence. Blougram is incredulous and presses the point:
“My shade’s so much more potent than your flesh. / What's
your reward, self-abnegating friend?” (932). Blougram
insists that there must be a reward in the present. The
claim for a motivating ideal in the future is not adequate.
Again, Gigadibs is without a psychology by which to explain
self-serving altruism. Gigadibs is at a disadvantage
because there is a system of feeling that is not consistent
with the cultural conventions that he embraces, and he
cannot reconcile the two. The cultural conventions only
accommodate the affective dilemma; they do not resolve it.
Blougram exposes the sense of prestige behind the
ethics of belief as the motive for Gigadib’s ideals. Still,

Gigadibs will not concede that this is his motive, and he

190

will not recognize Blougram as the superior of the two.
Gigadibs remains committed to his ascetic ideal, so
Blougram must win by contrasting himself in these terms. If
Gigadibs finds positive affect in his image of himself as
the devotee of a high ideal, then Blougram will have to
claim ascendence by the superiority of his motivational
intensity itself:

Stood you confessed of those exceptional

And privileged great natures that dwarf mine-

A zealot with a mad ideal in reach,

A poet just about to print his ode,

A statesman with a scheme to stop this war,

An artist whose religion is his art-

I should have nothing to object: such men

Carry the fire, all things grow warm to them,

Their drugget’s worth my purple, they beat me.

But you,—you’re just as little those as I. (932-

43)
Blougram's heroes are not admirable for their social.
success or even for their communal contribution but for the
fact that they “carry the fire” of a passionate commitment
to some personal goal, and this fire infuses all of life
with some intensity of meaning. While the first three of

Blougram’s examples suggest the ethics of belief in that

191

they make communal contributions that can be expected to
earn them recognition by the community, Blougram’s
description foregrounds the intensity of their individual
efforts before they attain public recognition so that the
role of public approval in their motivation is muted or
obscured. Blougram’s heroes are not those who have attained
to great notice but those who live in the intensity of a
great and noble effort on the eve of its public
recognition. His fourth example, “An artist whose religion
is his art,” is detached from community to such an extent
that he has transcended human interaction; his efforts are
relevant only to a spiritual order.

Blougram is trying now, as Gigadibs's ideal has, to
detach his desire from any reward other than the sensation
of its own motive energy. He is describing as an ideal the
autonomous self that can imaginatively generate the
positive affect needed to free it from dependence on
communal resources.

Blougram admits that he does not share the motive
intensity of his ideal examples; he only claims that
Gigadibs does not exceed him. Still, Blougram does claim a
uperiority by virtue of the more rigorous demands of his
ideal. The condescension of his exclamatory address in the

last line: “But you, you're just as little those as I”

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implies that Gigadibs is even less like those than Blougram
for the fact that does not even understand such a high
ideal.

Blougram has mocked Gigadibs throughout the poem for
the meagerness of his earthly rewards, implying that he was
foolish for passing up a more intense satisfaction of his
desires. Late in the poem, when Blougram is claiming
superiority as a suffering hero of intensity, he takes
pains to point out that Gigadibs' acceptance of a modest
life does not amount to heroic suffering. Instead, it is
merely sheeplike complacency and indicates Gigadibs’ lack
of motive intensity. Blougram tells him:'

You find
In this the pleasant pasture of our life
Much you don’t eat because your maw objects,
Much you would eat but that your fellow-flock
Open great eyes at you and even butt,
And there upon you like your mates so well
You cannot please yourself, offending them:
Though when they seem exorbitantly sheep,
You weigh your pleasure with their butts and
bleats
And strike the balance. Sometimes certain fears

Restrain you, real checks since you find them so;

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Sometimes you please yourself and nothing checks:
And thus you graze through life with not one lie,

and like it best.
I quote at length here because the passage is a mocking
parody of the kind of communal negotiations that constitute
the normal operation of the affective economy. Gigadibs is
living an ordinarily satisfying life in the cooperative
production of approval. This is the model that Gigadibs is
holding as an ideal in preference to Blougram’s high status
and power. Blougram belittles it by comparison to his own
more demanding ideal.

Blougram is incredulous that Gigadibs could be happy
acquiescing to the will of others compared to him “Who
needs must make earth mine and feed my fill / Not simply
unbutted at, unbickered with, But motioned to the velvet of
the sward / By those obsequious wethers’ very selves”
(893). He holds up his political power for approbation on
the grounds that it indicates a superior intensity of
motivation. When he says that his power is something he
“needs must" have, he implies that he is only seeking
relief from the intensity of his own desire.

Blougram is now the one making a claim to the ethics
of belief. He is the more heroically suffering of the two,

not because he shares the intensity of his heroes but

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because he suffers for his understanding of his own failure
to achieve that intensity. Gigadibs is ignorant of his own
failure in the face of this ideal, which means that
Blougram is more courageously facing the harsh realities of
life. In effect, Blougram suffers intensely for the
knowledge of his own lack of intense experience.

The intensity in this poem that Armstrong
characterizes as an anarchic libidinal energy, is better
understood as Blougram’s desperate manipulation of the
Victorian proliferation of affective communities as the
affective economy decentralizes in the process that is
often referred to as cultural fragmentation (288).

The organizing logic of the poem is summed up by
Blougram's proud description of his argumentative strategy
in the narrator’s conclusion:

“On the whole,” he thought, “I justify myself
On every point where cavillers like this

Oppugn my life: he tries one kind of fence,

I close, he’s worsted, that’s enough for him.
He’s on the ground: if ground should break away
I take my stand on, there's a firmer yet
Beneath it, both of us may sink and reach.

His ground was over mine and broke the first:

So, let him sit with me this many a year!" (995-

195

1005)
The ground to which Blougram refers is the assemblage of
affective communities by which he compares his worth to
those like Gigadibs who “Oppugn” his life.

Blougram knows the workings of the new, decentralized
affective economy and consciously manipulates the emotional
sensibilities that it manifests. The old clear-cut classes
of value judgments no longer apply. Instead,

Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things,
The honest thief, the tender murderer,
The superstitious atheist, demirep

That loves and saves her soul in new French books-

We watch while these in equilibrium keep

The giddy line midway: one step aside,

They’re classed and done with. I, then keep the

line. (396-401)
The advantage of keeping “the line” between clear moral
classes is that it allows one to access the affective
communities on both sides. Blougram demonstrates that it is
possible to find communal approval for behaviors that are
generally thought immoral. His ideal includes the artist
who makes his art a religion, who is a heretic and a

recluse, but also an adventurer on the frontiers of psychic

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intensity. The “honest thief” holds to fundamental communal
values even as he rebels against the moral limits forced on
human appetite. Blougram’s own argument for being a
disbelieving bishop is that his doubt only makes his faith
stronger. This allows him to be both the intellectual
skeptic and the keeper of communal order and sustenance.

Blougram is describing the modernizing affective
economy with its concentration on the positive affect of
novelty and the positive affect of conscious self-
stimulation. The complicated moral ground of humanism is
attractive because it offers broader access to positive
affect than did the theistic economy in which access was
“classed” into a smaller repertoire of affective
communities.

In order to take advantage of this new economy, one
must know and access the subtleties of the representational
system below the level at which values operate as a clear
moral code. In the affective economy one finds the
redemptive turn of the ethics of belief and the myth of the
heroic sufferer as these change in response to social
conditions. Blougram is well aware of the historical
instability that he is exploiting as liberal humanism has

destabilized the old affective economy without yet

replacing it:

197

It’s through my coming in the tail of time,
Nicking the minute with a happy tact.

Had I been born three hundred years ago

They’d say, “What's strange? Blougram of course

believes;”

And seventy years since, “disbelieves of course.”

But now, “He may believe; and yet, and yet

How can he?” All eyes turn with interest. (412-

418)
And in their interest is the smile of approval that is his
source of the positive affect he needs to substantiate his
self.

Bishop Blougram is a complex, cautionary example of a
mind freed by the modern proliferation of affective
communities as traditional centralization collapses and
these new communities compete to dominate the cultural
consensus that assigns affective value to representations.
The modern affective economy is fundamentally more
democratic than the traditional, theistic model, but, as
Blougram illustrates, it is not immediately or necessarily
so. While Armstrong claims Browning for Fox’s radical camp,
she also concedes that Browning takes critique beyond Fox's
vision of aestheticized politics into the realm of

representation where its politics become problematic. Let

198

me quote again what she writes of “Bishop Blougram’s

Apology”: “But if we are to have a chance to ‘read’ a text

it is essential to a democratic reading that language is

not deprived of signification” (313). I have tried to

suggest that in Browning’s poetry we need to read in

signification the affective meanings not typically

associated with the ideological.

199

Chapter 5

Arthur Symons: Affect, Emotion and Aestheticism

In the book in which Isobel Armstrong rehabilitates
Victorian poetry to political significance, she follows
poetry’s radical and conservative political allegiances
through the period. When she gets to the 1860s, she
confronts the conventional critical assumption that “the
so-called aesthetic movement initiated by the Pre-
Raphaelites and theorized by Pater constitutes an
epistemological break” (382). Armstrong's objection to this
characterization is that it has led to selective treatments
of the late century that subsume all of its poetry into the
aesthetic project, excluding the voices who continue the
political traditions that are her focus. She convincingly
continues her recovery of the ideological dimensions of the
poetry through early aestheticism. Her reading of the
apolitical poetry, however, is grudging and finally.
dismissive. Aestheticism becomes in Yeats “the poetics of
the privileged and aristocratic individual imagination, the
cult of aura” (481). These writers “carry to extremes the
strategies outlined in Hallam’s much earlier account of the
poetry of sensation” (480). The developments of

aestheticism are “defensive moves to preserve a unique mode

200

of utterance for poetry in the face of a political and
technological culture which largely ignored it” (480). The
implication is that one can only escape the political into
the emotional, a realm Armstrong equates with cultural
irrelevancy.

As Armstrong pursues her ideological critique through
Pater and Swinburne, she finds only less and less political
relevance in the poetry until “the history of the 1890s and
fin-de-siecle poetry seems to belong rather to the history
of modernism than to that of Victorian poetry” (479).
Armstrong begins her book by faulting modernism for
subsuming the political into the aesthetic. Her political
reading seems to invert the prejudice.

I have no argument with Armstrong's seminal and
invaluable reading of the political in Victorian poetry. I
suggest only that her reading exemplifies the need for a
critical model that can comprehend the reality of cultural
power in aestheticism. A weakness in the ideological model
is that it pictures power originating and organized in the
ideological realm, projecting down to organize the
psychological without consideration that the psychological
might exert a reciprocal influence.

This chapter presupposes that the organizing structure

of interpersonal life is the affective economy and that

201

this economy generates the motive energy that at one
organizational level is the political, which, in turn,
exerts a reciprocal influence on the affective process. The
nature of the affect system remains as influential in the
political as the political is influential in it. While it
is true that there is no escape from the political, it is
equally true that the political cannot escape from the
affective. Political power like any other power is coveted
and wielded, finally, so as to make people feel existent.
It does this by securing advantages in the system that
distributes the currency of existent feeling: positive
affect.

An affective complement to Armstrong’s political
concentration can broaden our understanding of the
aesthetic and the political as interdependent in the
poetry’s engagement with the whole phenomenon of culture.
When aestheticism withdraws from political discourse, it
does not withdraw into a realm without culture even though
that is its hope. Even in the “cult of aura” aestheticism
finds the fundamental cultural struggle of which the
political is a manifestation.

According to Armstrong, Symons was so effective a
promoter of aestheticism that his Introduction to The

Symbolist Movement in Literature “made the work of the

202

nineteenth century seem the product of a shallow,
positivist culture” (383). Armstrong does not intend this
to be praise, but it suggests the effectiveness with which
Symons made aestheticism a cultural force. In this chapter
I will examine the affectivity of aestheticism as Symons
develops it and passes it to Modernism. In short, I will
argue that the characteristic that distinguishes aesthetic
poetry from that of the early century is its concentration
on one stage in the normal development of feeling from an
initial affective response to a culmination in cultural
emotion. Aestheticism’s project is to refine pre-emotional
affect out of the developmental system so as to protect it
from the simplifying and muting tendencies of the emotions.
The muting of the complexity and intensity of pre-
emotional affect is part of culture’s function in
organizing social behavior. In effect, the intensity of
positive, pre-emotional affect is exchanged for the
duration of the corresponding emotion. This exchange is an
accommodation of the affective dilemma, not a resolution.
The potency of pre-emotional affect ensures that there will
be resistance to a culture’s emotional regime so that
adaptive experimentation continues on the margins of the
social order. The need for both experimentation and social

order are regulated in the tension between the comparative

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affective potency of the more intense pre-emotional affect
and the more durable emotion that requires more individual
acquiescence to cultural scripts.

The qualities that Symons ascribes to Decadence all
point to the preoccupation with finding the stimuli of pre-
emotional affect: “an intense self-consciousness, a
restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing
refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral
perversity” (Decadent MOvement 858-59).

The concentration on self follows from the necessity
of concentrating on the subtleties of one’s own responses
as soon as they can be discerned and then arresting that
feeling so that it is not co-opted into a conventional
emotion. Aesthetes are connoisseurs of their own affect,
but are repelled by conventional emotions. This is the
sense in which Symons speaks of the “spiritual and moral
perversity” of Decadent writers. To turn one’s attention
away from the feelings of others so as to concentrate
solely on one's own is, in conventional moral terms,
perverse and unhealthy. Symons’s use of these negative
terms needs to be understood in the context of his
rejection of the conventionality that is being
transgressed.

R.K.R. Thornton documents the widespread acceptance of

204

the view that British culture was in a degenerate state in
the late nineteenth century. Symons refers to this in “The
Decadent Movement in Literature” when he justifies
Decadence as a logical product of its time:
For its very disease of form, this literature is
certainly typical of a civilization grown over—
luxurious, over-inquiring, too languid for the
relief of action, too uncertain for any emphasis
in opinion or in conduct. (859)
But “its very artificiality is a way of being true to
nature: simplicity, sanity, proportion-~the classic
qualities--how much do we possess them in our life, our
surroundings, that we should look to find them in our
literature” (859). Symons is not just saying that the
literature reflects its society. He is saying that the
perversity in art reflects the true nature of the human. In
a degenerate society, truth must be found in those places
where the imposition of false behavior is breaking down and
genuine vitality is emerging through the cracks.
Simplicity, sanity and proportion are part of the
oppressive regime. As these break down in the culture, a
vital rebirth takes place in the transgressive behaviors
that appear immoral only if one continues to defend the

suppression of the truth.

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The aesthetes know when they have found vitality
rising through the cracks in the decaying conventionality
by the qualities of one’s feelings as Pater described them
coming from genuine art: “For art comes to you proposing
frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your
moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake”
(qtd. in Armstrong 389). In order to elicit and sustain
these moments, one must find the right stimuli and be
attentive to the affective response when it comes.

The focus on isolating pre-emotional affect from the
normal development of emotion helps explain Symons’s
inclusion of writers under the Decadent label that critics
have found incompatible. Joseph Bristow is especially
perplexed with the comparison of Paul Verlaine and W.E.
Henley. He asserts that “when, in the closing paragraph,
Symons characterizes the work of Henley . . . in exactly
the same terms he uses to describe Paul Verlaine’s work

, then something has gone awry” (69-70). Bristow stresses
Henley’s political conservatism as against the bohemian
example of Verlaine. However, Symons makes specific
reference to Henley’s poems in In HOspital in which Henley
speaks in stark, honest terms about physical sensation.
There Henley writes poetry of “‘The ache and throb of the

body in its long nights on a tumbled bed, and as it lies on

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the operating-table awaiting ‘the thick, sweet mystery of
chloroform’" (867). Henley's attention to the body is
important because he presents sensation to the reader’s
imagination without any of the cultural scripts that would
direct one to decide how one should feel about those
sensations. Henley’s poem is of interest to Symons because
it does not report that the person feeling these sensations
is sad or angry or confused about having the sensations.
Still, he is not simply a body in pain. The speaker in
Henley’s poem is contrasting the night of suffering to the
“sweet mystery of chloroform” that awaits him. He is
conscious of feeling intensely, but he is not feeling an
emotion. The quality that links Henley and Verlaine is
that, with all of their dissimilarities, both are
successful in eliciting pre-emotional, affective responses.

Symons is aware when writing “The Decadent Movement”
that the new literature will be found objectionable in
England for its honest treatment of the body. He concedes
this point and tries to clarify that a particular mode of
feeling and not the desire to shock is behind Decadent
poetry. The poetry does not have to be about the body or
about suffering. He asserts that the admirable quality in
Henley’s poetry is not only in his “poetry of the

disagreeable, as in In HOspital"(867). Henley also writes

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poetry of personal romance “that is exquisitely frivolous,
daintily capricious, wayward and fugitive as the winged
remembrance of some momentary delight” (867). This poetry
of romance may not be explicitly about bodies, but it too
evokes exquisite and capricious moments of delight which
never become emotion because they are wayward and fugitive.
The delight one feels in reading the poems remains a
fugitive from the conventional world of emotional
culmination. In these poems, Henley represents the body’s
initial affective responses to romance without their co-
optation into emotion, and, by doing so, he elicits the
same pre-emotional response in the reader.

All aesthetic poetry is about the body, for the
connoisseur of pre-emotional affect, whether poet or
reader, must know how that nascent response feels in the
body, and how to prevent its degeneration into emotion. The
aesthete is one who knows the difference between a body
that feels like the soul and a body that feels like a mass-
produced, cultural machine.

Bristow refers to Symons's comparison of Verlaine and
Henley in which he states that both share the achievement
of “the ideal of the Decadence: to be a disembodied voice,
and yet the voice of a human soul”(867). The use of “yet”

gives this statement a counterintuitive sense. We assume

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that in order to be the voice of the soul, a voice would
have to be disembodied, yet Symons implies the opposite
when he says that it is remarkable that Henley’s voice is
both disembodied and of the soul. But, if we understand
that in order to have aesthetic experience as Symons
understands it, one must become sensitive to the presence
of pre-emotional affect in one’s own body, then the poet's
“voice" must know the body as an object and speak with
sensitivity of its pre-emotional affect. The point is not
just to describe feeling as it is commonly known. The value
of pre-emotional affect is that it makes known to us the
nature of the soul from which it comes. In order to be the
voice of the soul, Henley's voice speaks of the body as an
object. Even when writing about romance, Henley writes
about the responses of the body so as to manifest the life
of the soul.

Previous to this new literature, poets could only
describe feelings in their emotional forms with the limits
of those recognizable categories. The life of the soul as
it can be known in pre-emotional affect was not accessible.
The new literature evokes in the body a manifestation of
the individual soul, but in order to do so, the poet must
describe the body dispassionately as an object in order to

avoid becoming a lyric voice, limited to the expression of

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emotional categories. The soul is not known in our emotions
because emotions tell us mostly about culture.

Self-consciousness is necessary to know and cultivate
pre-emotional affect as it is felt in the body. The other
Decadent qualities that Symons specifies--“a restless
curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon
refinement” (858)--are necessary to finding the stimuli
that will elicit positive pre-emotional affect in the first
place. Both of these phrases describe strategies for
finding the novel stimuli that tend to produce a pre-
emotional affective response in the reader. Research
uncovers new objects and refinement narrows one’s
perception of a familiar object to new details.

The characteristic that most readily elicits positive
pre-emotional affect is novelty. There are two positive
affects: interest/excitement and enjoyment/joy. The
interest affect is an inherent reward for attention to
novel stimuli. It is critical in a complex, changing
environment in which preparatory behavior is a crucial
adaptation that the organism search continually for
predictive information in the environment. The novel
stimulus triggers cognitive searching for matching memories
so as to contextualize the new information. If this memory

search locates the novel stimuli among positively encoded

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memory, this recognition triggers the positive enjoyment
affect that replaces interest affect until another novel
stimulus continues the reciprocation between the two.
Interest affect often works in concert with enjoyment
affect to amplify positive affect. The ideal stimulus of
positive pre-emotional affect is the novel stimulus that is
cognitively recognized for its positive affective encoding
without the cognitive recall of cultural scripts that
continue the development of the response into an emotional
package of responses.

The aesthetic fascination with artificiality is the
discovery of the artificial as a class of objects that
lends itself to the individual imagination. Romanticism
intentionalized nature so as to create an alternative
affective community to that of the urban environment, which
was already potently encoded. By the end of the century
Romanticism’s “nature” was thoroughly encoded with
conventionalized emotional scripts. Artificial objects,
made specifically for their appearance, function
specifically to receive individual affective encoding.
Without utilitarian functions, these objects readily take
on the affect the individual associates with.

An example in Symons's poetry of the attraction of the

artificial is “Maquillage”:

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FF:-

The charm of rouge on fragile cheeks,
Pearl-powder, and, about the eyes,

A voice of violets that speaks

Of perfumed hours of day, and doubtful night

Of alcoves curtained close against the light. (1-

6)
As opposed to the natural colors of the complexion that
have fixed associations with emotions and conventional
behavior, make-up elicits the images of “doubtful night”
and the curtained, darkened alcoves in which conventions
hold little sway and novel stimuli are free of the cultural
scripts that predetermine narrow emotional outcomes.

The need to escape from predetermined emotional
patterns elevates ambiguity. In “Liber Amoris,” the speaker
finds that the subtle affective encoding of finely nuanced
meanings has fewer of the cultural scripts that quickly co-
opt affective complexity into conventionalized emotion. The
speaker narrates the stages of his search to understand
precisely what it is that he desires. He discovers finally
with Bianca that “Man is mostly man / In that , his will
being sated, he / Wills ever new variety" (66-8). He
desires not fulfillment in any form. Neither Paradise where
“the spirits of men burn pure” (98) nor hell “where souls

endure / An equal ecstacy of fire” (99-100), is satisfying

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because both of these produce a “repletion of desire”

(101). Rather, he seeks “a subtlier intense / Unsatisfied
appeal of sense, /Ever desiring, ever near / The goal of
all its hope and fear, / Ever a hair’s-breadth from the
goal” (102-106). He wishes to live continually in a
condition of intense fascination with novel stimuli without
reaching the culmination of that desire. This recalls the
ideal of Browning’s Bishop Blougram whose heroes are all on
the threshold of accomplishment. Bianca satisfies him
because she is “ambiguous” (73). He tells her it is her
“strange reticences, strange / Concession, your elusive
change, /The strangeness of your smile” (86-9). Her
mutability makes her a source of novel stimuli.

When Aesthetes refer to beauty as their goal, they are
naming the stimulus of the psychological reaction that they
desire to have. “Beauty” is a stimulus that elicits potent
pre-emotional affect without also scripting its co-optation
into conventional emotion. In other words, those objects or
concepts are beautiful that are affectively encoded so as
to produce a recognizable pre-emotional affective response
in the perceiver. Impressionism and Symbolism both produce
this effect, and Symons considers these classes of
Decadence in “The Decadent Movement.” Impressionism, as in

the example of Henley, foregrounds and celebrates the

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sensational life of the body free of emotional co-Optation,
eliciting in the reader a duplication of that affective
quality. Impressionism describes how the body feels, free
of traditional references to emotion so that cognition is
not cued to follow emotional scripts. Symbolism, on the
other hand, does not describe feeling so as to elicit a
sympathetic response in the reader; it places images in
juxtaposition so that their affective encoding is recalled
into memory with as little of their semantic encoding as
possible.

Armstrong describes the 1860s as a time when “the
double poem begins to disappear. The ambiguity of the
discrete word or phrase supersedes it” (385). Pater’s work
“produces the symbol with a disappearing referent, a sign
whose meaning is behind or beyond the word” (385).
Armstrong notes that “Symons’s own poetry presents
experience as a series of impressions whose referent seems
almost on the point of disappearing. That juxtaposition of
entities without c0pula which is one of the forms of
modernism is approached in his work” (383). The frustration
of reference allows cognition to retrieve the affective
encoding from the memories that are elicited by the text
without the cultural scripts that are encoded on its

semantic reference. In effect, the symbol frustrates

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semantic recall long enough for affective recall to aid in
the amplification of affect without the referent's
scriptural intervention co-opting the affective response
into an emotional form.

As a counterpart to the conventional understanding of
aestheticism as an “epistemological break,” I suggest that
a component of this break is affective. Romanticism and
aestheticism share a quality of the Post-Enlightenment
generally in that they are both grounded in epistemologies
of feeling. They are differentiated by the fact that
Romanticism's is an epistemology of cultural emotion in
which the judgment about the truth value of an affect is
withheld until it is developed into an emotional form.
Romanticism hopes to invigorate an oppressive cultural
emotionality by newly intentionalizing “Nature” as a
democratic repository of communal affect. Coleridge’s
concern with culture and Wordsworth’s concern with sympathy
are exemplary. Romanticism feels the difference between
pre-emotional affect and emotion, but still understands
emotion as the goal.

Aestheticism's epistemology of feeling is affective;
the truth value of a feeling is judged before affect is co-
opted by culture's enervating emotionality. Aestheticism

deSpairs of the Romantic dream of a revitalized

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emotionality. It turns instead to the isolation of the pre-
emotional state of feeling from the cultural scripts of
emotionality. Pre-emotional affect is Aestheticism's
antidote to modern self-consciousness that habitually
intervenes in positive affect with scripts of affect
controlling disillusionment. Aestheticism hopes to
transcend cultural emotionality by making pre-emotional
affect psychically sustaining in itself. Symons, in his
Decadent poetry, follows aesthetic thought to its logical
conclusions and rebels specifically against the social
obligation that is the obstacle to the affective perception
of reality.

Ultimately, the escape of culture that is hoped for is
impossible, as the functions of the affect system are
fundamentally cultural. However, the cultural systems
devised by humans accommodate the imperative functions of
the affect system without humans understanding accurately
how the system operates. I stipulate that I use the word
“successful” in the evolutionary sense in which a
successful accommodation of the affective imperatives is
only one that continues the existence of the species. I
will follow the accommodations made by Arthur Symons so as
to clarify the meaning and significance of his poetry and

his legacy as a transitional figure in the development of

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Modernism.

Symons is most known, as a critic, for the Symbolism
he bequeaths to Modernism, primarily through his influence
on T.S. Eliot. His turn to mystic Symbolism makes it easy
to view his Decadent physicality as an expression of
youthful and perverse sexuality. I contend, however, that
Symons was honest and accurate in his insistence that his
poetry was first an expression of the nature of
Aestheticism. He, and all Aesthetes, are connoisseurs of
pre-emotional affect. Attention to the subtle life of the
body is the ground of the whole program.

It makes perfect sense, in affective terms, to attend
to sexuality if one wishes to cultivate affect. As Tomkins
points out, the drives work in humans by triggering a
complementary affective amplification. Of the drives, sex
is most dependent on affective amplification, and it is the
cultural nature of that affective participation that links
sex with every other aspect of social life. The sex drive
is one of the most dependable triggers of intense affect.
Moral questions, then and now, turn primarily on how or
whether this affect becomes emotion.

The poems of London Nights are Symons’s most notable
contribution to Decadent poetry, and Bristow comments that

“more than any other contribution, Symons’ ‘Stella Maris’

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was found truly distasteful” (74). Among these critics are
some whose complaints reveal that their displeasure was not
with the thought that a gentleman might, as a dalliance,
enjoy an illicit sexual diversion. Symons’s offence was in
his estimation that his feelings about the experience were
worthy of public endorsement. Bristow quotes a reviewer in
the National Observer who Opined:
It is given to a majority of mankind at one time
or another to have some such experience as Mr
Symons describes, but for the most part, thank
heaven! They do not gloat over them, and roll them
on the tongue, and write about them in a style
which recalls the cold-blooded catalogues of a
semi-educated house-agent.(75)
Symons is transgressing against the standards by which
culture decides who gets to feel good about what.

“Stella Maris” begins with the speaker’s apostrophic
address to the eponymous Stella Maris, a prostitute of his
earlier acquaintance whom he asks, “Why is it I remember
yet / You, of
all women one has met, / In random wayfare, as one meets /
The chance romances of the streets, / The Juliet of a
night?” (1-5). The speaker is aware of a conflict between

the behavior of his memory and the moral assumptions that

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should mitigate against such a memory. He should not
remember her, but he does, indicating that the experience
has more significance for him than conventional assumptions
would allow. As the speaker considers the assumptions in
his own mind that should preclude this memory, we see that
in each case those assumptions are social conventions that
value feelings by their adherence to the emotional
compromise in which the intensity of pre—emotional affect
is exchanged for the duration of emotion offered by
cultural scripts. The bargain allows the individual more
security and the community the suppression of the
disruptive contagion of affective intensity.

The cultural assumption that such an affair is trivial
is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because the culture
disseminates scripts that offer no positive affective
encoding that can transform the brief intensity into
emotional duration, people who have such affairs will not
have experiences of emotional duration. Because the
duration of a feeling is the cultural criterion of value in
feeling, the memory of such an affair will not be recalled.
But in Symons’s poem, it was recalled, and vividly so. The
speaker is aware that conventional logic asserts that such
an experience does not have the potential for significance,

but he does not judge his experience is wrong. Rather, he

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judges the moral convention to be wrong.

The complexity of the speaker's personal experience of
culture has given him access to positive associations with
this behavior that displace the negative affect that is
encoded in the moral code of the larger community. The
dominant moral code is consistently violated because enough
opposing, minority communities exist so that their positive
responses to a behavior, when assembled, overcomes the
negative response of the dominant moral code. However, in
assessing his own feelings, the speaker judges that some
special quality in the brief experience must explain its
potency and the fallacy of the cultural conventions. He
feels pre-emotional affect, and tries to understand why it
is culturally shunned.

The reference to Juliet in the opening lines is
repeated twice more in the poem. Shakespeare's characters
represent the cultural expectations that make it seem
strange to the speaker that he remembers Stella Maris. It
places the speaker’s memory of his night with a prostitute
in contrast to a cultural ideal of conventional romantic
love.

The speaker’s experience with Stella Maris is
different from that of Romeo and Juliet in that the speaker

rejects the emotional compromise, preferring the brief

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intensity of the one night. Shakespeare's characters
believe in the possibility of never-ending love. When they
feel intensely, they imagine that this can be extended
indefinitely, and they turn to the convention of marriage
to realize that cultural promise. In the conventional view,
the tragedy grows from the presumption that, if allowed to,
Romeo and Juliet would have been happy together forever.
Shakespeare’s couple enact the culture's criterion for
judging the value of feeling. Important feelings are those
that one is driven to give duration, and cultural
conventions are in place to assist. Experiences that are
not impOrtant or valuable are forgotten. In the play, the
small-mindedness of political interests causes the families
involved to violate their own interests in helping the
lovers join the community’s emotional affective economy.
Romeo and Juliet are frustrated conservatives. They are not
wiser than their families because they love more intensely.
In fact, communities have limited interest in intensity.
Rather, the young lovers are wiser than their communities
because they value the duration of their feelings above all
else. It is emotional duration that sustains selves and is
culture’s primary responsibility.

The speaker in “Stella Maris” is similar to the young

lovers in that his feelings while with her are as intense,

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or more so, than are Romeo’s while with Juliet. The speaker
knows the “Rapture of the embodied soul”(49) in a night “So
infinitely full of life”(59). What he does not share with
them is the desire to give this feeling duration. That

would require him to make the emotional compromise with the
culture. In his case, that would mean never having met with
Stella Maris in the first place. Having done so, however,

he discovers that it is significant without the duration
that the conventions insist is a necessary legitimation of
feeling.

The speaker discovers in his thoughts other cultural
evaluations of his behavior encoded in his environment. He
notes that the return of her memory is inappropriate to the
surroundings in which it returns. He addresses Stella Maris
saying that he is “In so serene a pausing—place, / Where
the bright pure expanse of sea, / The shadowy Shore’s
austerity, / Seem a reproach to you and me” (8-11).
Austerity requires the exclusion of pleasure in favor of a
disciplined stability in which intensity does not distract
attention from the stern endurance that is required by
life’s critical necessities. Austerity does not imply the
lack of feeling, only a consistency of feeling that allows
focused attention over a considerable period of time.

In specifying that this austerity is a reproach to

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their pleasure, Symons acknowledges that his brief pleasure
is commonly thought morally inferior to feelings that have
the more socially contributive duration of an emotion.
Symons uses the sea to symbolize the harsh realities of
life that require austerity. Just as the sailor at sea must
be austere in order to be attentive, so it is necessary to
communal survival that emotional duration be preferred to
brief intensity.

It is interesting that the speaker is distracted from
the lighthouse light when his memory of their intense
pleasure rises into his mind, demonstrating precisely the
susceptibility to distraction that a naval society might
discourage. An austere emotionality is socially valuable
for its suppression of the volatility and mutability of
pre-emotional affect. Still, her memory comes to him,
indicating that there is something in that experience that
has not succumbed to the co-optation of the emotional
compromise.

The speaker, acknowledging that his experience has
lacked the expected duration, is left to explain why it has
remained important enough so as to have been spontaneously
recalled. He is not concerned with the illicit nature of
their sex. Rather, he is intrigued to discover that a

briefly intense experience has defied conventional logic

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about value in feeling. In this sense, “Stella Maris”
narrates the fundamental aesthetic discovery that there is
a mode of feeling outside of conventional emotionality in
which meaningful intensity is still possible-

Symons is not just declaring that the brief experience
has value; he is proposing a different evaluative criterion
of feeling, one that doeanot involve the duration of the
feeling. It needs to be stressed that remembering Stella
Maris does not constitute duration; it is a repeat of an
isolated moment. That he is surprised to remember her
indicates that he has not thought of her since their night
together. When she ceased to be an immediate stimulus for
him, she ceased to be meaningful to him. When he remembers
her, he can feel and see her body, but he expresses no
significant concern for her otherwise, and she is not
associated in any way with his life outside of that night.

The speaker’s emotional detachment from Stella Maris
is the quality that critics commonly note as perverse
without appreciating how this is redeemed for Symons. The
poem is about Symons's proposal that there is an
alternative to that conventional emotional standard.
Bristow, for example, points to this lack of romantic
feeling as evidence of the fundamental perversity of

Symons’s heterosexual desire. I agree, and will argue

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below, that the assumption that it is possible to live in
detachment from the long-term interests of others is the
fundamental flaw in Decadence. But Symons’s significance is
not his mistaken assumptions about the function of
emotionality, but his vision of an alternative to those
conventions, which is the intense moment that displaces the
need for the romantic feeling that Bristow values. The
alternative vision enhances our understanding of
aestheticism, and that vision, not his personal sexuality,
is passed to Modernism.

Twice in the speaker’s description of his night with
Stella Maris, he places their experience in opposition to
“oblivion.“ Her memory returns to him to affirm the value
of their brief time together as a moment of existence. He
describes “That nuptial night too briefly borne / To the
oblivion of morn. / Ah! no oblivion, for I feel / Your lips
deliriously steal / Along my neck, and fasten there” (38-
42). Later he tells her: “I / Remember you thus strangely,
won / An instant from oblivion. / And I remembering, would
declare / That joy, not shame, is ours to share" (51-55).
The intense moment defies oblivion and in doing so is the
legitimate criterion by which to value their brief
encounter. This is Symons’s alternative to emotional

duration as a measure of value in feeling. He is building a

225

theory in defense of pre-emotional affect that does not
become emotion. -

The opposition that Symons creates between the
experience that rescues one from oblivion and the
experience that culture promotes for its duration is
critical. It allows us to appreciate that aestheticism is
not an attempt to use new stimuli in order to have more or
better “normal” experience. It is an attempt to promote to
normalcy an experience that has always been present, but
has never been sustaining.

For Symons, the moment, and its pre-emotional affect,
displaces emotional duration because its intensity gives
assurance of an existence in comparison with which earthly
love is not significant. In the poem’s conclusion, the
speaker implores:

Why should I grieve, though I forget
How many another Juliet?
Let us be glad to have forgot
That roses fade, and loves are not,
As dreams, immortal, though they seem
Almost as real as a dream.
It is for this I see you rise. (62-68)
In his experience with Stella Maris, she is the stimulus

that elicits the dreamlike state of pre-emotional affect.

226

In that feeling state he knows an eternal reality. He not
only does not need the emotional duration of conventional
emotionality, the conventions that are signified by the
allusion to Juliet are obstacles to this vision of reality.
His experiences with “many another Juliet” should not cause
him to grieve, although they are violations of the moral
code.

In London Nights, Symons does not inquire deeply about
the nature of the “dreams” that are discovered in his
escape from culture. He is trying to foreground the value
of the potency of existence that relieves the fear of
oblivion. Whatever the nature of this feeling, it stands in
opposition to conventional emotionality. In Symons’s view,
culture’s insistence on emotional duration is a system of
denial that only blocks access to the experiences that can
make people know the reality of their place in eternity.
Love, in the conventional sense, is only part of the
emotional compromise that is disseminated in myths like
that of Romeo and Juliet to perpetuate the status quo. He
has discovered an access to the true realm of eternity in
the transgressive pre-emotional moment of intensity, and in
this realm, love in its earthly emotional sense is simply
irrelevant. When we know that there is eternal life, we do

not need the delusion that earthly connections will last

227

forever.

In the passage quoted above, there is a reference to
love that can confuse Symons’s commitment to the feeling of
eternal existence if we are not sensitive to Symons's
proclivity for arranging sequential ideas non-sequentially
on the page. In the second couplet, he declares that they
should be glad “to have forgot" that loves are not
immortal. One might read this as an endorsement of
pretending that love is never-ending. But this delusion is
the function of the conventions that he is rejecting. It is
necessary to see that the verb here is a past infinitive,
referring to his state of mind before their night together
when he held conventional, negative feelings.about the
brief affair they were about to have. He needed to forget
the inhibiting conventions of love in order to have the
experience which makes known to him the eternity that makes
love irrelevant.

The first couplet refers to his condition after that
experience, when, knowing of his own eternity, he has no
reason to grieve that he has had so many passing loves. He
does not need to remember them because the significance of
the experience is to make him aware of a reality that
transcends the concerns of this life. The dedication to

grounding one’s feelings outside of culture is emphasized

228

 

as the speaker concludes that her memory comes to him
“Where calm hours weave, for such a mood / Solitude out of
solitude; / For this, for this, you come to me"(70-72). Her
memory affirms the wisdom of his solitude, for it is in the
solitude of pre-emotional affect that he again knows the
intensity that tells him of an eternal reality.

By making culture an obstacle to the individual’s
knowledge of his transcendent reality, Symons’s
aestheticism becomes anti-cultural and radically
individualist. Symons is selective in acknowledging this
logical consequence of his assumptions. But this underlying
reality is the ground of the perversity that marks the
poems of London Nights and marks his Symbolist legacy as
well.

While the speaker in “Stella Maris” expresses some
sense of social solidarity with his partner when he
declares “That joy not shame, is ours to share”(55), this
is undermined by the fact that the only continuing
significance of that night for him is the memory of a
moment of intense existence. The fact that the moment
happened with another person does not significantly bind
him to that person. In The symbolist Mbvement, Symons
states flatly that the saint, the lover, and the artist

each have “an incommunicable ecstasy which he esteems as

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his ultimate attainment, however, in his lower moments, he
may serve . . . men”(326). The priority of the
“incommunicable ecstacy” displaces communal responsibility.

Symons represents Decadence as a liberationist
aesthetic, seeking to escape or subvert an oppressive
social system. But it also tries to escape the fundamental
psychological conditions that make humans social beings.
While we may find in Decadent transgression a legitimate
resistance to an oppressive social order, we also find in
the motivation behind that resistance the reasons for its
weakness as a resistance and its eventual complicity in
even greater oppression. An affective theory can help
clarify what differentiates the Decadent resistance to a
particular culture from the Decadent aspiration for an
individualist transcendence of culture entirely.

In “Stella Maris,” the speaker assumes that freeing
himself from the culture’s co-optive system of emotional
duration gives him a direct experience of real existence.
Because pre-emotional affect comes to consciousness without
apparent reference to anything outside of the direct
perception of its eliciting object, the response is assumed
to be an interaction between the self and the essence of
that object. An affect theory argues that the essence that

is relevant to the self has been culturally associated with

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the object in unconscious memory, so that the self is
always interacting with the collective. Symons’s embrace of
Mystic Symbolism needs to be understood at the level at
which the unconscious organizes the interaction of self and
collective, so I will take a moment to review the concept

of the affective community.

Decadence exists in the alliances of small affective
communities at the experimental fringes of the larger
affective consensus. These small communities exist because,
for individual reasons, their members find an intensity of
positive affect in a small community that outweighs the
negative affect of the larger community.

We know the affective shape of our environment by
learning it from the expressions of others. In Symons’s
poetry his affective alliances are evident in the language
he uses in trying to describe his own pre-emotional affect.
His language betrays the communal structure of the
unconscious processes that produced the feeling. When he
wishes to evoke the reader’s sense of the origin of his
memory of Stella Maris and its intense positive affect, he
describes her image rising from the sea like a Neried. The
myth is a cultural signifier with potent affective
encoding. The image of the Neried is not likely the

specific one that Symons retrieved into his unconscious

231

affective processes while he was with Stella Maris;
however, I am suggesting that the reversion to communally
encoded language in the effort to make a text affectively
potent mimics that use of imagery in the unconscious to do
the same. In the company of Stella Maris, his sexual drive
mechanism was amplified by the affect retrieved from his
unconscious memories of the affective communities formed
from his previous cultural experiences.

Symons accesses a communal repository of positive
affect again when he describes his pre-emotional condition
as dreamlike. “Dream” as a signifier has potency because,
as he uses it, it elicits an image that the culture has
invested with affective potency. A poet cannot communicate
or feel value without accessing the affective communities
that are held in the memories of his readers. Symons’s
declaration of independence from the conventional life in
which “roses fade, and loves are not, / As dreams,
immortal”(65-6) seems feasible in the moment of self-
substantiating positive affect, but it cannot, finally, be
sustaining for him or acceptable to the community.

I have stressed the functions of the affective
community in the interdependence of individuals and
collectives because I wish to argue that Symons's critical

shift from Decadence to Symbolism is best understood as an

232

adjustment he makes in his alliances with the affective

communities that the culture makes available to him. His
Symbolist literary theory is a rationalization of the
affective strategies that become necessary as his Decadent
affective alliances prove insufficient, in spite of the
optimistic declarations of its superiority in London
Nights.

A significant shift in Symons’s approach occurs with
the publication of The Symbolist Movement in Literature in
1899. In “Stella Maris," we hear the confident declaration
that the momentary delight is enough. But between the
publication of London nghts in 1895 and The symbolist
Mbvement, there is, in 1897, the collection of poems
entitled Amoris Victima. These poems about the suffering
that loving causes the speaker indicate that he did not
enact in his life the kind of emotional detachment that was
praised in “Stella Maris.” However, the pessimistic
conclusions of Amoris Victima combined with the facts of
Symons's biography confirm the assertions made in “Stella
Maris" that, for Symons, earthly love is no more than

“vague nights, and days at strife”(58). The new approach to

 

poetry in The symbolist Movement in Literature indicates
that while Symons has not lost his commitment to aesthetic

poetry, he made a larger concession to the emotional

233

compromise than was allowed for under Decadence.

 

The shift to Symbolism occurs because Decadence is an
untenable accommodation of the affective economy. It cannot
affectively sustain selves because it restricts itself to
the meager affective resources of the far margins of the
culture’s affective economy. Symons's embrace of literary
Symbolism retains its conscious commitment to
individualism, even as it moves him closer to the cultural
mainstream where he finds more affective resources.

In the Introduction to The Symbolist.MOvement, Symons
states that the time during which the new literature was
called Decadence was a time of waiting for critics to
recognize Symbolism. But Symons and others had recognized
symbolism in the literature before he labeled it Decadence.
In “The Decadent Movement” in 1893, he notes that the new
literature is sometimes referred to as Symbolism, which he
identifies as the seeking for “the truth of spiritual
things to the spiritual vision”(859). But these spiritual
truths are subordinated in 1893 to his interest in the more
culturally transgressive posture of Decadence. Symbolism
comes to the front because Decadence fails affectively.
Symons makes the famous declaration: “The interlude, half a
mock-interlude, of Decadence, diverted the attention of the

critics while something more serious was in preparation”

234

 

(7). The implication is that a new appreciation of a
literary technique was in preparation. But there is only
one significant characteristic in Symons’s Symbolism that
is not present in Decadence as it is found in the poems of
London Nights: mysticism. Mysticism is not a literary
technique, of course; it is a concept that gives Symons an
interpretive context. Symons states in The Symbolist
Mbvement that the new writing “is all an attempt to
spiritualize literature”(8). In the Conclusion, Symons
states that it is “the doctrine of Mysticism, with which
all this symbolical literature has so much to do, of which
it is all so much the expression" (327). And “on this
theory alone does all life become worth living” (329).
. Symons needs mysticism to address the diminishing
potency of pre-emotional affect. The confident denial of
oblivion is no longer tenable. In the Conclusion to The
Symbolist Mbvement, Symons states flatly that the fear of
death is the central reality in human life: “all our lives
are spent in busily forgetting death"(325). Because of this
fear, “there is a great, silent conspiracy between us to
forget death"(325). The denial is possible because we
accept happiness as a comforting illusion, but in fact
“that life should be happy or unhappy, as those words are

used, means so very little . . . Only very young people

235

 

want to be happy" (326-27). The hope of happiness does not
change the fact that “it is with a kind of terror that we
wake up, every now and then, to the whole knowledge of our
ignorance, and to some perception of where it is leading
us” (324). The conventional illusion inevitably fails,
leaving us again facing our terror of the mystery of death.
In “Stella Maris," sustained happiness is made
irrelevant by the moment of “the whole / Rapture of the
embodied soul” (48-9), which felt so intensely existent
that is defies oblivion and is the real and immortal
“dream” (67) against which love is seen to be transient. At
the writing of The Symbolist Mbvement, the intensity of
pre-emotional affect has lapsed and oblivion again looms
large. Symons now insists that “the fear of death is not
cowardice; it is, rather, an intellectual dissatisfaction
with an enigma which has been presented to us" (326). In
affective terms, Symons has lost a portion of the pre-
emotional, positive affect that has substantiated his self,
and he is subject to the desubstantiation of negative
affect, which feels like and warns of the approaching death
of the self. With the loss of the pre-emotional, affective
intensity that is evident in London Nights, Symons has
nothing to lose by accepting the emotional bargain with

culture. He aligns himself with a conventional affective

236

 

 

community symbolized by mysticism that gives him access to
its scripts of emotional duration in exchange for
appropriate behavior on his part.

Symons explains that Symbolist mysticism reduces our
fear of the mystery of death because it is “a theory of
life which makes us familiar with mystery, and which seems
to harmonize those instincts which make for religion,
passion, and art, freeing us at once of a great bondage"
(327-28). By revealing the previously “unseen reality
apprehended by the consciousness” (2) in the “once
terrifying eternity of things about us” (328), symbols make
us “familiar with mystery.” Presumably, the things about
us are terrifying because conventions convince us that they
have fixed and eternal meanings in comparison with which
our own brief existence is so perplexing as to cause us to
fear death and live tormented by that fear. When the symbol
reveals the unfixed nature of meaning in our environment,
“we come to look upon these things as shadows, through
which we have our shadowy passage” (328). Symbolism allows
us to see that the world is as “shadowy" as we think our
own nature. All is equally mysterious, and we lose our fear
of the mystery.

The question, then, is: Why would mystery everywhere

give us less “intellectual dissatisfaction” than mystery

237

 

 

only in our own future? The answer, I propose, is that the
sense that there is mystery everywhere is the culturally
endorsed concept of mysticism that carries the potent and
positive affective encoding of a sizable affective
community. When Symons changes his philosophical allegiance
to mysticism, he makes an unconscious alliance with a new
affective community for the positive affect that it makes
available to him. Mysticism feels true because its
affective scripts process his positive, pre-emotional
affect into a positive emotional duration.

Symons's argument reveals the mystic personification
that makes the idea compatible with the unconscious
affective community that produced his pre-emotional affect:

As we realize the delight of feeling ourselves
carried onward by forces which it is our wisdom to
obey it is at least with a certain relief that we
turn to an ancient doctrine, so much more likely
to be true because it has so much the air of a
dream. (328)
In his understanding, he is obeying the benevolent “forces”
that control things in the mystery. I would argue that he
is obeying the affective community, as he knows it in
memory, that has affectively encoded the concept of

mysticism. He is correct in arguing that the concept of

238

mysticism has made it possible for him to feel more
“delight." That is not, however, because the idea is
logically consistent with reality but because the idea
calls up conscious memories that are affectively compatible
with the unconscious memories that produced the pre-
emotional affect. With the affective encoding of mysticism,
he can process the pre-emotional affect that is stimulated
by the textual symbol into emotional duration.

Symbolism is a different accommodation of the
affective dilemma than is Decadence. In Decadence, the
moment of intensity, in realitya moment of access to
cultural affective resources, is thought to be a self-
generated, self-substantiating moment of autonomy. In
Symbolism there is no longer the Decadent faith that pre-
emotional affect will be adequate. The solution, however,
is not to abandon the split between the two affective
states and seek to reintegrate the pre-emotional with its
emotional fulfillment. Rather, Symons embraces mysticism so
that he can explain the unconscious effects of the symbol
as an interaction with a divine intentionality. In this he
gives up the entirely autonomous self, and claims that his
self is reliant only on a divinity. He covertly increases
his access to the culture's affective economy but obscures

that source with the intellectually generated image of

239

supernatural forces.

Aestheticism set out to create powerfully evocative
poetry by trying to isolate one stage of the affective
process. I have argued that this effort fails, for there is
no substitute for the duration of emotion, as muted as its
intensity may be. While nineteenth—century aestheticism
failed to realize the promise that it first saw in pre-
emotional affect, it left its accommodation of the
affective dilemma to the twentieth century.

When Symbolism is passed to Modernism it is not only
the symbol as literary technique that is passed. While I
cannot make an argument in support of these speculations
here, I will end with the suggestion that Modernism
inherits Symbolism with its separation of pre-emotional
affect and emotion intact in its conscious accommodations
of unconscious affective processes.

As quoted earlier, Armstrong notes that Symons’s
poetry “presents experience as a series of impressions
whose referent seems almost on the point of disappearing.
That juxtaposition of entities without copula which is one
of the forms of modernism is approached in his work" (383).
Symons discredits the copula so as to fragment the process
of feeling in the hope of cultivating intensity. He patches

his affective resources back together with mysticism as

240

well as he can and passes that affective accommodation to
Modernism, which reasons that a fragmented way of feeling
seems appropriate in a fragmented culture. Aestheticism is
subsumed into modernism, and the non-aesthetic Victorians
are found to be “lumpenly ethical or theological”
(Armstrong 7).

Armstrong sees that the rejection of the copula in
Symons’s poetry is adopted by the moderns who ”celebrate
the elimination of content” (7), but also “are haunted by
the [non-aesthetic] Victorians because they are haunted by
the plenitude of content which eludes them” (7). They
reject content, but are then haunted by its loss. I would
clarify Armstrong’s formulation by suggesting that the
moderns celebrate the elimination of political and cultural
content and lament the loss of emotional content. In this
they enact Symons's tense accommodation: the elimination of
the copula produces a strangely meaningful but still
unfulfilling experience. They have avoided a political
dilemma only to find the affective dilemma behind the

political.

241

 

 

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