The Bodily and Cultural Roots of Emotion Metaphors

Recent theories of emotion take different stands on how greatly language can influence emotional experience. William James’s peripheral feedback theory, Paul Ekman’s basic emotions theory, Magda Arnold’s appraisal theory, and Lisa Feldman Barrett’s conceptual act theory offer distinct frameworks for understanding how physiology and culture interact in human emotions. The research of Max Black, George Lakoff, and Zoltán Kövecses indicates that emotion metaphors have bodily and cultural roots. Dante Alighieri’s Inferno and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress illustrate the religious origin of metaphors for culturally “banned” emotions. Traces of these religious origins can be seen in the metaphors of self-help books such as Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence, Travis Bradberry’s and Jean Greaves’s Emotional Intelligence 2.0, and Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese? A long-standing cultural tradition presumes there is a self separate from the emotions that is responsible for controlling them, but scientific studies point toward emotional regulation within a self.

Introduction

Who benefits, and who loses, when emotions are represented in particular ways? Banned Emotions analyzes the ways that biology and culture combine in metaphors for socially undesirable emotions. These emotions include self-pity, prolonged crying, chronic anger, bitterness, grudge-bearing, and spite. In recent novels and films, metaphors represent these emotions through darkness, filth, impaired motion, and foul smells. These metaphors have obvious bodily sources associated with poor health, but they also draw on a Western religious and literary tradition that associates unsavory emotions with sin. Banned Emotions challenges recent cultural mandates to “let go” and “move on,” pointing out that people who have been hurt by an economic and political system may cherish their emotions as evidence of their humanity, and that calls to suppress their emotions may silence their voices.

Detached and Circling

Psychological studies of human attachment describe relationships metaphorically, but the attachment metaphor excludes some aspects of emotional bonds. It suggests that detachment is a simple, mechanical process, and it rules out the intermeshing that many people experience in loving relationships. Some male poets, fiction writers, and filmmakers who depict women resisting rejection have characterized them with metaphors of circling, constriction, and violent cutting. Virgil’s Aeneid, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Rudyard Kipling’s “The Phantom Rickshaw,” Clint Eastwood’s Play Misty for Me, and Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction portray rejected women with images of darkness and destruction. Novelist Siri Hustvedt and director Andrea Arnold use different metaphors of shattering, dancing, riding piggyback, and flying free. Metaphoric descriptions of rejected people matter because they can shame people into suppressing emotions that they need to consider cognitively.

The Sound and Smell of Suffering

Despite cultural pressures to “suck up” one’s pain, some rebellious literary characters make their suffering known. In E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View, the aging spinster Charlotte Bartlett makes her unhappiness audible through well-timed sighs. Forster represents his characters’ emotions through metaphors of frozen or flowing water, darkness and sunlight, and rushing electric trams. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, history tutor Doris Kilman resents her unjust dismissal from school due to her Germanic background. Woolf describes Doris’s emotions through metaphors of awkward movements, sensations of bursting, and bad smells. Doris and Charlotte make sure that the more prosperous, conventional characters in these novels can see, hear, and smell their unhappiness. By making their misery known, they remind readers of the injustice in societies where the main characters are enjoying privileges that others do not.

Wallowing in Self-Pity

The United States and some other Western cultures discourage adults from crying and publicly expressing pain. Metaphors for self-pity show the cultural pressures brought to bear on people who try to make their suffering known. In recent novels and films, metaphors of enclosure, paralysis, and filth depict self-pity as so shameful that they may drive people to suffer in silence. The films G. I. Jane and Bridesmaids illustrate the social rewards offered to women who shun self-pity and the peer pressure directed toward women who “wallow.” Findings in the field of self psychology raise doubts about whether self-pity is as detrimental as popular metaphors indicate. Depictions of self-pity as filthy and entrapping probably have physiological roots but can serve political ends by making injured people feel too ashamed to speak out.

Conclusion

Recent studies of emotion regulation show that reappraisal modulates emotion more effectively than suppression, which can impair memory, raise blood pressure, and inhibit social interactions. Lisa Feldman Barrett and her colleagues offer an alternate psychological construction model of emotion regulation in which emotions shift as ongoing sensations are compared to different patterns of past sensory activity. All of these scientific studies indicate that emotion and emotion regulation involve the same neural processes and that emotion is best understood as occurring within a human self, not in opposition to a self that is separate from the emotions. Metaphors of darkness, paralysis, filth, and foul smells will likely lead to suppression rather than reappraisal because they encourage self-censorship. Emotion metaphors need to catch up with science, since they can drive people to stifle emotions that reassure people of their human value.

Making Suffering Visible

Attempts to manifest one’s suffering visually can turn aggressive if the people who have supposedly caused one’s pain refuse to see the results. Metaphors that suggest how pain looks can convey the cutting, wounding aspects of emotional anguish. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground associates spite and vengefulness with darkness and dirt and shows how painful encounters can be when a hidden creature reveals himself to others. Franz Kafka’s representation of Gregor Samsa as a monstrous vermin in The Metamorphosis forces Gregor’s family to see the emotions they have aroused by exploiting him. Michael Haneke’s 2005 film Caché depicts a marginalized family determined to make a privileged man see how he has benefited from their deprivation. With a violent literal and metaphoric “cut,” the poor man ensures that the rich one will never stop witnessing the pain he has caused. Manifested visually, emotional pain can show itself through violent transformations of bodies.