What is a Violent Emotion?

Abstract: This article illuminates an important yet overlooked subhistory of emotion in the nineteenth century: the development of "violent emotion" as a category of intense emotional experience. Looking back from a key turning point in the history of psychological thought—William James's 1884 article "What is an Emotion?"—it begins by tracing the roots of the term in the seventeenth century to its use in two kinds of texts in the nineteenth century: medical literature and novels. It argues that whereas medical literature throughout this period remained convinced of the negative effects of violent emotion on the body and mind, mid-nineteenth-century novelists began to experiment instead with its productivities. In exploiting the elusive capaciousness of violent emotion, they were able to conceive of complicated psychological states that pushed the boundaries of definable emotion, and legitimize them, for the first time, within the affective lives of middle- and working-class characters. Tracing both signposted moments of violent emotion and their long-term effects on character psychology in three novels of the period, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847), George Eliot's Romola (1862), and Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848), this article accounts for the special relationship between violence, emotion, and narrative.