Gender and emotion in eighteenth-century Britain

Gender and Emotion in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Raging Women and Crying Men investigates emotional excess from the perspectives of performance studies, gender studies, and cultural studies. For the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Britain, “raging women” and “crying men” illustrate how gender affects an audience’s willingness to accept emotional performances. Female rage and male despair were both associated with the stage where their excessiveness was singularly allowed—if often also criticized. When these emotions appeared in prose works, they were often portrayed as exaggerated, manipulative performances. In this monograph, Anne F. Widmayer argues that female rage and male despair are both precipitated by power inequities. Female rage defies gender inequality, whereas male weeping reinforces gender ranking. Women’s rage assumes men’s power; men’s grief reveals their feminine weakness. Angry women and grieving men were thus viewed as equally monstrous because they upset contemporary gender roles. Employing the figures of Medea, Odysseus, and Achilles, Widmayer surprisingly delineates how stoicism and sentimentalism coexisted for much of the eighteenth century. As the far more taboo emotion, women’s rage had to be suppressed in order to maintain a distinction between masculinity and femininity. To sometimes cry like women did not significantly lessen men’s privilege, but to allow angry women to act like men risked endangering the gendered power structure of the eighteenth century.