Unlike most histories of emotion which focus on intimate interactions, Nicole Eustace's book Passion Is the Gale investigates the power of emotion in both the private and public spheres in order to develop a more nuanced understanding of power structures in eighteenth-century Philadelphia. She draws from a wide variety of sources, including newspapers, journals, poetry, pamphlets, intimate correspondence, cartoons, philosophical treatises, and so on.
Eustace demonstrates that displays of emotion are always about power. She investigates the subtleties of language in order to uncover the ways in which emotions “mask[ed] continuing inequalities of power even as they maintained them” (69). Each chapter opens with a sort of case study which is eloquently woven into a larger discussion about authority and power. Passion Is the Gale complicates the idea that the nineteenth century was purely the age of reason and reminds us of the power of emotion. Her work is refreshingly interdisciplinary and while the focus is largely on language, she takes great pains to incorporate the relevant historiography. Despite the impressive nature of her book, I must confess that the length, density and richness of the examples sometimes overshadow the larger points. I often felt that I would be pleased to have seen many of the detailed examples moved to the endnotes in order to allow for more precise focus on the unique contributions of Eustace's argument. Based upon the title, I expected the Revolution to take center stage, but instead she opts for a less teleological approach and demonstrates the ways in which emotional language made revolutionary sentiment possible rather than asserting the inevitability of the conflict.
The book opens with the debates that ensued at the North American publication of Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man, from which the phrase “passion is the gale” derives. At stake in these debates was the relationship between self-interest and the community. As a bookend, Eustace provides a new take on Thomas Paine's germinal pamphlet Common Sense, challenging more traditional readings that understand his appeals to emotion as simply part of his rhetorical style. She convincingly argues that the language of emotion Paine uses elucidates eighteenth-century discourses on power. In fact, she sees his deployment of emotional language as fundamental to the pamphlet's importance in the Revolution because it put forth the radical notion that emotional capacity unites humanity. Earlier writers often asserted that one's emotional capacity directly correlated to one's station in life, thereby reinforcing aristocratic power.
Eustace pays close attention to the ways that class, race, gender, and religion shaped expected emotional responses, but is obviously not quite able to tell us how effectively internalized these emotions were. Thus her focus is not on the internal experience of emotion, but on the representation of emotion through language, although at times she does seem to slip between them. This allows Eustace to expose the ways that colonists consciously deployed emotive language in order to manipulate and affect power dynamics.
Of particular interest to this reader are her careful readings of negotiations between Anglo-Americans and Native peoples. Eustace reveals that competing understandings of appropriate emotional responses had an enormous impact on the already strained relationships between these groups. More broadly, however, she establishes that eighteenth-century emotional discourse reveals much about the negotiation and maintenance of power in early America and beyond. Passion Is the Gale reminds us not to neglect the sentimental for the political, for politics and sentiment go hand in hand.
