Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 6 Number 2, August 2005
Special Issue: Literary Universals
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Paster, Gail Kern, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2004, 288p., ISBN 0-226-64847-8, Cloth $35.00, £25.50
Reviewed
by
University
College Cork
Humoring
the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage
is an important and timely addition to the ongoing evaluation of how early
modern notions of the body impact on subjectivity. Crafted with attentive wonder
and respect for the depth and curiousness of its subject, Paster’s book is an
enlightening and engaging read for any scholar interested in the complex
interaction between mind and body, emotion and reason, in the early modern
period. It is poignant in its achievement of fleshing out the early modern
emotional self, as Paster encounters a past ontology on its own humoral terms.
The
“Introduction” draws from a rich range of primary texts in order to
emphasize historical differences in the understanding and expression of
passions. Early modern thought did not create a distinct line between the mind
and the body the way post-enlightenment ontological thought does. In early
modern humoral psychology the passions are embodied. Physiological and
psychological experience is inseparable. The psycho-physiological self that
Paster identifies is contiguous with the world it inhabits. The passions,
closely aligned to the fluidity and porous boundaries of the humoral body, are
experienced as elements, such as wind and water, that have the power to rage and
literally force changes to occur both inside and outside the early modern
subject. Paster compels us to marvel at a past ontology that is now alien to us,
persuading us that the emotions are indeed culturally constructed, and in the
early modern period both physiological and psychological. By focusing on the
crucially important role of the emotions as part of how early modern individuals
experienced and constituted the world, Humoring the Body offers a dense
and appealing study that aims to recover a historical phenomenon, and seeks to
shed light (successfully, I think) on our understanding of the period’s
literature.
Shakespeare’s language of affect, Paster argues, embodies emotion in a way that is richly representative of his period. In Chapter One, “Roasted in Wrath and Fire”, Paster concentrates on contextualising key moments in Hamlet and Othello in terms of early modern materialism. The phrase in Hamlet, from which this chapter takes its title, represents how wrath, as a material substance, diffuses into the natural order. Paster’s focus on Desdemona’s fear that something “hath puddled” Othello’s “clear spirit” (3.4.143), on the other hand, illustrates how substances from nature were felt to penetrate the early modern embodied self. Paster thus highlights the historical embeddedness of these plays in a post-medieval, pre-Cartesian understanding of the reciprocity of subject-object, self-world, relations.
In Chapter Two, “Love Will Have Heat”, Paster expands on her earlier
argument in “The Unbearable Coldness of Female Being” that
in Galenic discourse sexual identity
was not limited to an individual’s genitalia but extended throughout their
entire physical and mental being.[1]
While the temperature of a body determined its sex, it also determined the
mental attributes associated with that sex. Paster reads Galenic physiology as a
“totalizing” theory of human temperaments, which explained the female
sex’s “limited capacity for productive agency” (79). This argument serves
to modify Schoenfeldt’s recent claim that humoral theory was relational rather
than absolute and could in fact be used to undermine patriarchal discourse.[2]
In this chapter Paster focuses
on representations of female affectivity in some textual instances in
Shakespeare’s As you Like it, Othello, and The Taming of the
Shrew, to argue convincingly that the female, due to her lack of heat, was not accorded the control deemed
necessary for the regulation of desire. Although,
in tracing Rosalind’s and Desdemona’s journey from maidenhood to marriage
Paster notes their significant increase in both bodily heat and agency, this
transformation, she argues, occurs within a “natural” paradigm of
femaleness. Rosalind’s and Desdemona’s increase in heat “registers not as
a masculinizing threat to sexual difference but rather as their powerful
emergence from a condition of physical and emotional lassitude, understood not
quite as, but in terms of female—indeed virgin—melancholia”
(88).
Chapter Three, “Melancholy Cats, Lugged bears, and Other Passionate
Animals”, closely analyses Shakespeare’s representation of how the embodied
passions are commonly shared by both animal and human alike by focussing
microcosmically on the opening scene from Henry IV, and scene one, act
five, from Anthony and Cleopatra. (136). This chapter demonstrates how
the individual subject’s humoral body corresponded analogously with higher
animals, revealing in the process how easily apparently unbiased biological
discourse merges with the over-determinations of moral discourse. At the same
time, Paster’s detailed analysis of these two scenes from Henry IV and Anthony
and Cleopatra highlights how the embodied self was positioned “within a
universe understood to be filled with desire and moved by the strivings of
appetite” (187). That is to say, the unruly emotion of desire itself is
expressed as an intimate part of the natural order.
Chapter Four, “Belching
Quarrels”, moves from this premise to investigate how an early modern
hierarchical society attempted to enforce the disciplines of scrutiny and
regulation on the appetitive body by encouraging (normatively male) self-control
over the embodied emotions. By
following “the trail of male humors in and out of several play texts,
Shakespearean and not”, Paster illustrates how this “lure of autonomy”
involved, paradoxically, both the regularization and utilization of bodily
forces. However, Paster points out with reference to Shakespeare’s Henry IV,
that the power of the self’s embodied emotion is of value only when yoked to
the civilising process of larger political interests, as Hal’s early portrayal
of his own humor as “unyok’d” (1.2.196) indicates. The
psycho-physiological and the social intermingle as “an unstable but necessary
instrumentation of complex social performances” (200). Although Christ served
as the supreme example of the positive possibilities of passion once moderated
through the use of perfect reason, this theological significance, as Paster
makes particularly clear in this chapter, does not cancel the overriding
practical importance of the passions for personal and political rule, but rather
highlights their functionality in determining well-being in both body and
body-politic.
It
is the empowering aspect of embodied emotion that Paster emphasises, and it is
this characteristic of her book that sets it apart from others in this field.
However, if there is one limitation to this book it is the lack of emphasis
given to religion in the construction of the early modern embodied self, male
and female, despite Paster’s recognition of theology’s key role in
validating the emotions.
I cannot end without mentioning the many beautiful medieval and early modern illustrations in Humoring the Body, which serve to add a certain tactile quality to a subject already couched in the language of corporeality. Also, Paster’s impressive bibliography of both primary and secondary works is a valuable resource for scholars interested in this period, while her detailed index secures the book’s promise as a reference guide as well as a very engaging read.
[1]Gail
Kern Paster, “The Unbearable Coldness of Female Being: Woman’s
Imperfection in the Humoral Economy”, (ELR,
1998): 416-440.
[2] Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999).