EMOTION, n. In addition to being a fantastic Carly Rae Jepsen album (in the singular) and a soaring Mariah Carey song (in the plural), this is also a word we use to talk about our inner lives. It comes to English from French émotion, which is from Latin ēmovēre, “to move out or away.” The prefix ē- is linked to ex- (out of, away from) and movēre is “to move.” Nothing too complicated, linguistically. The semantic shift from physical movement to feeling happens sometime in Old French, when esmovoir (and other spelling variations) can mean either “to move (physically)” or “to move (emotionally).”
When emotion enters English in the sixteenth century, it first means a strong feeling. One that rouses you, one that moves you, one that comes out. Eventually its emphasis lessens and it comes to mean any feeling. This is a common pattern in language change. We’re constantly seeking out new words and switching things up to provide more emphasis—not just a feeling, an emotion—but eventually they lose their power. Everybody’s using that word all the time now, it’s not special anymore.
The inadequacy of language to express emotion is the subject of my favorite passage in Madame Bovary, one I’m so obsessed with that it’s astonishing it’s taken me five weeks to bring it up. Here we go, a little bit of bored rake Rodolphe misunderstanding Emma’s declarations of love:
Il s’était tant de fois entendu dire ces choses, qu’elles n’avaient pour lui rien d’original. Emma ressemblait à toutes les maîtresses ; et le charme de la nouveauté, peu à peu tombant comme un vêtement, laissait voir à nu l’éternelle monotonie de la passion, qui a toujours les mêmes formes et le même langage. Il ne distinguait pas, cet homme si plein de pratique, la dissemblance des sentiments sous la parité des expressions. Parce que des lèvres libertines ou vénales lui avaient murmuré des phrases pareilles, il ne croyait que faiblement à la candeur de celles-là ; on en devait rabattre, pensait-il, les discours exagérés cachant les affections médiocres ; comme si la plénitude de l’âme ne débordait pas quelquefois par les métaphores les plus vides, puisque personne, jamais, ne peut donner l’exacte mesure de ses besoins, ni de ses conceptions, ni de ses douleurs, et que la parole humaine est comme un chaudron fêlé où nous battons des mélodies à faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les étoiles.
He had heard these things so many times that they no longer held any originality for him. Emma resembled all mistresses; and the charm of novelty, falling away piece by piece like clothing, left naked the eternal monotony of passion, which always has the same forms and the same language. He did not distinguish, this man of so much experience, the disparity of feeling under the uniformity of expression. Because libertine or venal lips had murmured similar phrases, he believed only weakly in the candor of these; we ought to lower, he thought, the exaggerated discourse hiding mediocre affections; as if the plenitude of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest of metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of their needs, their ideas, or their sorrows, and that human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we beat tunes to make bears dance, when we would like to inspire tenderness in the stars.
I have nothing to say about that—and it would all be empty metaphors and exaggerated discourse, anyway—but trust that I’m having an emotion.
This week in Capital-R Romance, I finished Volume IV of Les Mis, which means only Volume V remains. My Kindle says it will take me 8 hours to read, which is 2-3 standard-length romance novels, so hardly anything at all. A pamphlet!
My notes for the last few books of Volume IV are mostly a list of which characters die, a trend I assume will continue through the remainder of the novel. Despite having seen the recent movie version of Les Mis, I can’t remember who makes it. I don’t have high hopes for anyone, but I can tell you the character I am most deeply attached to is my small revolution son Gavroche, that little whirlwind of chaos. It is unclear to me how old Gavroche is, but he’s at an age where he thinks of himself as an independent man while everyone else thinks of him as a child, so probably 11 or 12. He fends for himself on the streets of Paris and has no respect for authority, even the young revolutionaries you might expect him to idolize. Here is an incomplete list of things Gavroche has done:
rob an older and more experienced thief in order to give the money to a poor old man
make his home inside a giant model of an elephant in Place de la Bastille
adopt two younger street kids who are worse off than him
rescue his worthless criminal father from prison
demand that the revolutionaries at the barricade arm him, a child, with a rifle
throw a rock at a streetlight (for the revolution!)
sing drinking songs at the top of his lungs while walking through a deserted bougie neighborhood in the middle of the night (for the revolution!)
steal a wooden handcart from a sleeping drunk (for the revolution!)
hurl said handcart at a police officer to escape questioning and arrest
I feel intensely set up by all this. There are several essays within Les Mis about the “gamins” (kids, in this case street kids) of Paris, and how they’re the soul of the city, so I know it’s an important theme or what the fuck ever, and then Victor Hugo introduces us to a kid, and I love him, and now I am convinced my small revolution son is going to die and I am afraid. I want him to throw rocks forever. If Gavroche dies, I will riot.
I didn’t enjoy writing academic literary criticism because you are not supposed to have these feelings, or you are not supposed to talk about them. Emotional investment in fictional characters is a weakness to be brushed aside in favor of real analysis, which is detached and logical, but arcane enough that it cannot be done by just anyone (it requires a degree, your initiation into the priesthood). Most of all, literary criticism is divorced from the simple foolishness of feelings.
Brief aside: our culture’s whole “emotions bad, logic good” thing is really just emotions are for women, logic is for men, which is obviously wrong and bad and sexist, but you see its effects everywhere. Men aren’t allowed to cry. Too girly, not logical enough. Women can’t be trusted with political power or believed when they report what happens to them; they’re always overreacting. And anybody who doesn’t fit neatly into either category, well, their very existence screws with the whole system so we gotta pretend they’re not real.
Ahem. Sorry. I’m having a feeling or two about that. (Rage. Both of the feelings are rage.) Let’s go back to fiction and literary criticism.
There is a Saul Bellow essay on this very subject, and it is so good I’m going to quote a huge chunk of it:
To the serious a novel is a work of art; art has a role to play in the drama of civilized life; civilized life is set upon a grim and dangerous course—and so we may assume if we are truly serious that no good novelist is going to invite us to a picnic merely to eat egg salad and chase butterflies over the English meadows or through the Tuscan woods. Butterflies are gay, all right, but in them lies the secret of metamorphosis. As for eggs, life’s mystery hides in the egg. We all know that. So much for butterflies and egg salad.
It would be unjust to say that the responsibility for this sort of thing belongs entirely to the reader. Often the writer himself is at fault. He doesn’t mind if he is a little deeper than average. Why not?
Nevertheless deep reading has gone very far. It has become dangerous to literature.
“Why, sir,” the student asks, “does Achilles drag the body of Hector around the walls of Troy?” “That sounds like a stimulating question. Most interesting. I’ll bite,” says the professor. “Well, you see, sir, the Iliad is full of circles—shields, chariot wheels and other round figures. And you know what Plato said about circles. The Greeks were all made [sic] for geometry.” “Bless your crew-cut head,” says the professor, “for such a beautiful thought. You have exquisite sensibility. Your approach is both deep and serious. Still I always believed that Achilles did it because he was so angry.”
Achilles did it because he was so angry. Like, duh.
Literary critics are not supposed to trouble themselves with statements like these, ones that any old peasant could come up with. “Achilles did it because he was so angry” is barely more than summary, and it commits the sin of sympathy, thinking of a fictional character as if they’re a real human being, someone like you. Never mind that such a connection might be what attracts people to stories in the first place. Achilles didn’t have feelings or make choices; Homer did.
And yet some schools of literary criticism would forbid us from talking about the author, too. There is only the text, composed of words that can be disassembled until there are no secrets left. No human beings have ever gotten their gross feelings-cooties on this sacred object of rational, scientific study.
Look, I’m not saying there’s no use for that perspective. I like to unravel a knot of rhetorical devices as much as the next person who spends literally all their time producing and consuming fiction.* It’s important to know how texts work. But we do ourselves a disservice when we pretend that texts aren’t written by and for people, and that people aren’t absolutely fucking full to the brim of feelings at all times, even—especially—when they don’t want to be.
Saul Bellow knew :
Perhaps the deepest readers are those who are least sure of themselves. An even more disturbing suspicion is that they prefer meaning to feeling. What again about the feelings? Yes, it’s too bad. I’m sorry to have to ring in this tiresome subject, but there’s no help for it. The reason why the schoolboy takes refuge in circles is that the wrath of Achilles and the death of Hector are too much for him. He is doing no more than most civilized people do when confronted with passion and death. They contrive somehow to avoid them.
Feelings are hard to talk about (that whole cracked cauldron thing, you know) and sometimes viscerally hard to experience. How do you pick apart which parts of the Iliad or Les Mis make you angry or sad? It’s tricky to do that if you don’t know why you feel angry or sad in the first place—some cocktail of neurotransmitters, probably, I am but a simple humanist—let alone in response to something you know is fiction.**
In defense of academic literary criticism, the study of emotions is a burgeoning field. Good. Will I be reading any of those papers now that I’m out? Hell no. I’ll be busy crying over the end of Les Mis and tweeting “a;skdja;dslghsdg” any time a romance novel makes me feel something. That’s a genre that suits me way better.
As I stare down the end of Les Mis, knowing more of these characters I’ve spent ~487,500 words getting to know are going to die, and that the sadist Victor Hugo is going to inflict every detail of that pain on me, I’m anxious. If next week’s newsletter is just “a;skdja;dslghsdg,” you’ll know why.
**Okay, re: cocktail of neurotransmitters, that’s the “how” of the feelings situation and not the “why.” [There used to be recommendations of some academic nonfiction about cognition and literature, something my 2019 self felt confident enough to recommend. But now that many years separate me from those readings, my 2024 self has doubts, so I have made this edit to remove them.]
In small-r romance, since right now the World Cup Final is on, it would be remiss not to recommend this wonderful essay: “So the President F*cking Hates My Girlfriend” by Sue Bird (f/f, contemporary, sports). If you said “that’s not a romance novel,” you’re right, but also you’re wrong. Please read it. It’s delightful.
The other romances I read this week were MacRieve (m/f, paranormal) and Shadow’s Seduction (m/m, paranormal), both by Kresley Cole. If you’re not a resident of Romancelandia and don’t know who Kresley Cole is, she’s famous for writing absolutely the most bonkers, over-the-top paranormal romances, a series called Immortals After Dark that follows a giant cast of characters in “the Lore,” which is the secret magical realm sort of superimposed over contemporary Earth but also beyond it. Everyone is either a thousand years old or twenty-five, but either way they all have an entire DSM-5 worth of trauma, and the Lore’s favorite recreational sports are murder and sex, and also they’re all superhumanly strong and physically perfect. Everybody’s feelings are cranked to 11 all the time. The major feelings—and indeed, the plots of most IAD books—are hatred, lust, angst, love. Sometimes lust before hatred, but you get the idea.
Because of her spectacular and expansive worldbuilding, Kresley Cole can get away with a level of drama and bad behavior that, as a reader, I would never accept in a contemporary romance. Then again, nobody in a contemporary romance novel is physically capable of cutting out their own heart and mailing it to the lover who spurned them (a thing that actually happens in one of the IAD books! Kresley Cole is always having a grand ole time).
Oh, and the ongoing series is up to… book 17? I’ve lost track.
Almost a decade ago, when I was very anxious and depressed (this is, unfortunately, not a helpful way to mark time in my life), these WTF books with their fuck-or-die fated mates and sorority houses full of killer Valkyries painting each other’s nails provided a nice distraction. I read ten or twelve in a row and then moved onto to other things and didn’t come back for years. They don’t have quite the same appeal now, not because Cole is less of a writer, but simply because I used to have a much higher tolerance for the particular flavor of sex that Cole writes, where every dude is Ultra Dominant Alpha Muscle-y King of All Badasses. Nothing wrong with that, if it’s what you’re into. (On the subject of this newsletter, one thing Cole does have going for her is that her male characters are just as overcome by emotion as her female characters. She never stints on that.)
I thought maybe Shadow’s Seduction would explore a different perspective since it’s the first and so far the only queer romance of the series. These books are so bonkers in every other way, surely a few of these immortals have discarded traditional gender roles! Instead the romance is fairly standard for the series, in that the partner who is physically larger, stronger, and more conventionally masculine is also the dominant one in the bedroom. In addition, for the more masculine of the two characters, it’s an example of the “I’m not bisexual, I’m only gay for you” trope. I’m sure that describes someone’s real-life experience, but its prevalence in m/m romance troubles me. Bisexuals exist! We’re everywhere, actually!
It stretches my credulity that all these 900-year-old mythical creatures are out here dreaming of hetero monogamy where the dude is in charge in the bedroom (except for the one m/m couple in Shadow’s Seduction, fine). I can suspend my disbelief for immortality and magic and fate, but a sorority house full of eternally youthful sisters-in-arms Valkyries and none of them are into each other? Too much for me.
Sorry, that all sounds crankier than I intended. Kresley Cole is a master of worldbuilding, she writes complicated intersecting plots like nobody’s business, and they’re paced perfectly, which is no small thing. Shadow’s Seduction isn’t a bad book (listed as a novella, but it’s ~200 pages). But it suffers from its placement as the only queer romance in a long series of relentlessly straight romances. If you read a lot of queer romance, the Gay For You trope will make you sigh, as will the general straightness of the world (queer people seek out queer friends!). If you don’t read queer romance, you’re likely to leave a homophobic one-star Amazon review, which will in turn make me buy the book out of spite. That’s how we got here.
In books that are neither Romance nor romance, I also read Mallory O’Meara’s The Lady from the Black Lagoon, a non-fiction account of the extraordinary life of Milicent Patrick, the woman who designed the iconic monster in The Creature from the Black Lagoon and then subsequently had her artistic contributions to the film erased. A friend recommended this book, so I picked it up even though it’s on a subject I know nothing about (horror, film, Hollywood history—take your pick). Regardless of field, I do care about recognizing women artists who have been deliberately forgotten so men can take credit for their work, and this is a hell of a story. The retelling of Patrick’s life is intertwined with the story of O’Meara’s present-day research, and not only am I a huge nerd for stories of research with all its seeming dead-ends and serendipitous coincidences, but it underscores how deeply all acknowledgements of Milicent Patrick’s work were buried. I’m glad O’Meara decided to shine some light on this.
It’s heartbreaking to think of all the women in history who have had to keep silent and make themselves smaller and shut off their own feelings in order not to upset volatile, insecure men in power. O’Meara is able to cite memos from Universal Studios about Milicent Patrick and from the man who stole her work. He gets a voice in the record, and meanwhile Patrick spent her whole life speaking very carefully and politely about him, not saying what really happened. Much of the book is about the search for traces of Milicent Patrick’s inner life. Who was she? How did she feel about everything she lived through?
O’Meara answers that question, but it requires dogged research, whereas the jealous tantrums of the man who got Milicent Patrick fired and ended her career in Hollywood are amply recorded. When we do make space for feelings, it’s clear whose feelings matter.
Back to Les Mis for a sec. Hugo loves to write about people’s inner lives, being a Romantic—not capital-R Romance as in Romance languages, or small-r romance as in romance novels, but a third meaning for this word, one associated with the 19th-century artistic movement that was, well, basically all about feelings.
Hugo often spends multiple chapters at a time lavishing attention on Jean Valjean or Marius’s emotional torment and subsequent decisions (seriously, there is an early chapter that could be retitled “Jean Valjean Thinks about Opening a Door,” and there’s the series of chapters I wrote about a couple weeks ago, which we could call “Marius Can’t Work Because He Yearns for Cosette”).
Fantine and Cosette’s interiority is rarely examined. When we do get to see Cosette’s thoughts, they’re about her own beauty. Women do have insides, but even those are mostly concerned with our outsides. Or, in Fantine’s case, when she’s no longer a babe, she thinks about being a mom. That’s it, ladies—either you’re a babe or you’re a mom. Don’t even think about anything else.
Jennifer Weiner @jenniferweiner
Her breasts entered the room before her far less interesting face, decidedly maternal hips and rounded thighs. He found her voice unpleasantly audible. As his gaze dropped from her mouth (still talking!) to her cleavage, he wondered why feminists were so angry all the time.
Doc Sensei @whitneyarner
@kateleth new twitter challenge: describe yourself like a male author would
April 2nd 2018 209 Retweets 1,513 Likes
I thought about this while reading O’Meara’s book, since almost every newspaper article O’Meara cites about Milicent Patrick describes her face and the size of her breasts, but treats her artistic career as a sort of sideshow exception. Amazing! This beautiful woman isn’t just an object to look at! There’s something going on inside her head!
I love romance novels for many reasons, but one is that they’re a genre of fiction where women’s interior lives are consistently given the same kind of rich attention that we grant men’s. Everyone’s feelings matter. Feelings are the whole thing. Or, as romance novelist Nora Roberts has famously said, “Character is plot.” The best romance novels offer a deep dive into someone else’s mind, and female characters in romances always have thoughts and feelings about things other than their own breasts. They’re whole human beings, with all the mess that entails, and they’re still allowed to live happily ever after. That shit makes me emotional.
