Personal de Aseo y Limpieza

An enlightening, although infrequently used, cultural approach to emotion is the historical method. A hundred years from now scientists employing this method might study talk shows and soap operas, cell-phones, MTV, Facebook, video games, Internet chat rooms, and tweets to glean insights into the emotional lives of 21st-century Westerners. For different historical periods, other kinds of documents, such as religious texts (Menon & Shweder, 1994; Tsai et al., 2007), etiquette manuals (Elias, 1939), poems and love songs (Abu-Lughod, 1986), and popular music have been revealing of the emotional life of a culture at specific historical moments. Distinguished historians such as David Konstan (2006) and Barbara Rosenwein (2007) now conduct research on emotions, and see historical societies as based on cultures that can give us acute insights and contrasts with emotions of the modern world.

Consider what Stearns and Haggarty (1991) learned about the period 1850 to 1950 in their survey of 84 American advice manuals for parents and popular literature aimed at children. Before 1900, three features stood out: warnings to parents about dangers of arousing fear in their children, silence on the subject of childhood fears, and boys’ stories aimed at inspiring courage and acting properly despite fear. Then a change occurred: “Twentieth-century parents were told not only to avoid frightening their children as a disciplinary device but also to master their own emotions lest they give disturbing signals” (Stearns & Haggarty, 1991, p. 75). Benjamin Spock (1945) in his influential manual described childhood fears as requiring careful management. Separations from toddlers arouse fears in them and are to be avoided. If fears occur, they should be met with patience and affection. As to boys’ stories, by the 1940s the idea of acting well despite fear had disappeared and was replaced by adventures in which tough guys felt no fear at all. In U.S. society, the control of fear has been important, first because fear prevents one from being a good citizen, and latterly because it prevents one becoming an effective individual. As President Franklin Roosevelt famously put it in his 1933 inaugural address: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Consider another set of historical documents, related to the Western idea of falling in love. Here is a newspaper story from the early 1950s:

On Monday Cpl. Floyd Johnson, 23, and the then Ellen Skinner, 19, total strangers, boarded a train at San Francisco and sat down across the aisle from each other. Johnson didn’t cross the aisle until Wednesday, but his bride said, “I’d already made up my mind to say yes.” (Cited in Burgess & Wallin, 1953)

Corporal Johnson later explained that they had done most of the talking with their eyes. On Thursday the couple got off the train in Omaha, Nebraska. By that time they had made plans to be married but, because in Nebraska they would have needed to obtain the consent of Ellen Skinner’s parents, they crossed the river to Council Bluffs, Iowa.

More than 30 years after the events recounted in the newspaper, Averill (1985) showed the story to a sample of U.S. adults: 40% of them said they had had experiences conforming to the ideal embodied in the story. Another 40% said their experiences of love definitely did not conform to it, basing their responses on an unfavorable attitude to this ideal plus any single departure they had felt from it. In responding in this way, they, too, indicated that they were influenced by this ideal.

Averill argues that love of this kind has features that are distinctive to Western culture. Certainly, passionate sexual love occurs worldwide. It is experienced as joyful and energizing. It is enacted in courtship, and it includes a biological core, including increased levels of phenylalanine in the brain (Diamond, 2003; Liebowitz, 1983). To investigate its universality, Jankowiak and Fischer (1992) surveyed ethnographies of 166 societies, asking whether the writer, typically an anthropologist, made a distinction between love and lust and noted the presence of at least one of the following attributes of love occurring within the first two years of a couple meeting, irrespective of whether they married or not: (a) personal anguish or longing, (b) love songs and the like, (c) elopement due to mutual affection, (d) indigenous accounts of passionate love, or (e) the anthropologist’s affirmation that love occurred. In 147 of the 166 cultures (88.5%) there was evidence of this kind of passionate, sexual love.

The point that Averill (1985) makes, however, is that the Western ideal of love, eagerly taken up by Hollywood, enacted 50 years ago by Floyd Johnson and Ellen Skinner, and still very much alive today, is not just the same old worldwide story. It has features that are distinctive to the West and that started their development in medieval Europe.

The germ of the idea was courtly love, created in Provence in the 11th century and elaborated in many medieval documents. The word courtly originally meant occurring at a royal court; the later meaning of courtship is derived from it. The idea was that a nobleman might fall in love with a lady and become her knight. Courtly love had to occur outside marriage. The lady was at first seen at a distance, and was unattainable. The knight had to offer his service, do whatever she might wish, however dangerous or however trifling, and worship her. Although the knight had to be a paragon of Christian virtue, the very idea of worshiping a lady gave the extra frisson of bordering on blasphemy.

For several hundred years courtly love was the subject of some of Europe’s greatest poetry. Prototypical was the story of Lancelot and his love for Guinevere, the queen and wife of King Arthur at his court in Camelot, told by the French poet, Chretien De Troyes, in The Knight of the Cart (Chretien De Troyes, 1180).

Later came the Romance of the Rose (De Lorris & De Meun, 1237–1277). The first part, written by Guillaume De Lorris, is an extraordinary psychological allegory, in which the lovers are represented as a set of emotions and psychological characteristics, each of which is a distinct actor in the drama. The poem begins with the lover, a young man, falling asleep and dreaming. As interpreted by C.S. Lewis (1936), the reader experiences the story through the young man’s eyes. He strolls by the river of life, then enters the beautiful garden of courtly love, and sees a lady there. As the wooing proceeds, his consciousness is represented by the appearance in turn of distinct characters, Hope, Sweet Thought, Reason, and so on. The lady also does not appear as a whole. She, too, is a cast of characters: Bielacoil (meaning “fair welcome” from the ProvenScal belh aculhir) is something like the lady’s conversational self, pleasant and friendly, and it is, of course, via this aspect that the young man must first approach. Then there is Franchise (the lady’s sense of aristocratic status), and Pity. But then there are others: Danger, Fear, Shame. When the young man sounds a false note, Bielacoil disappears for hours, and only Fear or one of these others is present. Then, in addition, there is Jealousy, and the god of Love, not permanent characteristics of either the young man or the lady but able, in a somewhat unpredictable way, to take over either of them. As the young man reaches toward the Rose in the center of the garden, it is the god of Love who fires arrows at him and makes him Love’s servant.

One might argue that some elements in this pattern occur elsewhere. For instance, in the Bible, Jacob is devoted to Rachel for a long period before they can unite. Nonetheless, the Western idea

of being in love involves elements that do seem to be distinctive. Falling in love (in the Western way) happens suddenly, unexpectedly, involuntarily. In the full pattern, devotion becomes a kind of worship. It unfolds as a script (Schank & Abelson, 1977; see also Frijda, 1988). Some 400 years ago it was described rather exactly in another historical document: Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare (1623). Here is the script, in Schank and Abelson’s sense (Oatley, 2004b): Two people must be open to the experience. Each sees the other, a stranger, and is attracted. Looks pass between them, words are not necessary. Then there is an interval of separation during which fantasies build. Then there is a meeting at which there is confirmation that the fantasies are mutual. Ping! One is in love. The state includes devotion. Shakespeare has Romeo show this by touching Juliet and saying in his very first words to her:

If I profane with my unworthiest hand This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this, My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

(Romeo and Juliet, 1, 5, 90–4)

Here, Romeo speaks to Juliet as if she is a statue of a saint (“this holy shrine”), whom he comes to worship and whom he has just touched with his hand. The state of being in love includes the other within the circle of selfhood (Aron & Aron, 1997; Aron, Aron, & Allen, 1989; Aron et al.,

Photo Cr ed it: ©F in e A rt I m a g es/S UP ER S T O C K

FIGURE 3.5 The origin of the culturally distinctive version of romantic love that occurs in the West is traced from courtly love in medieval Europe. The most famous book depicting this was Roman de la Rose, for which this was an illuminated illustration from about 1500 depicting the garden of courtly love.

1991). It becomes a temporary role that enables people to overcome difficulties and to relinquish previous commitments and relationships. What made the story of Floyd Johnson and Ellen Skinner so newsworthy is that it fits this pattern so perfectly.

Averill (1985) argues that without such cultural elaboration, we would not experience love as we do today. La Rochefoucauld (1665) said: “Some people would never have fallen in love if they had never heard of love” (Maxim 136). Averill and Nunley (1992) go further: they doubt whether anyone would fall in love if they had not heard of it.

Integrating Evolutionary and Cultural Approaches