ABSTRACT
Men will necessarily grow milder, and life will be embellished by the quieter feelings, purified and enlarged, while the rougher, turbulent emotions will die away. In terms of Victorian emotionology, then, it is not change but continuity which distinguishes the discourses on emotions. On the level of the individual, emotional expression was considered essential for individual health, as long as it was kept in strict bounds. It is no accident that Charlotte Bronte focused her contribution to the debate on women and their attempts at dealing with the central problem of expression and control. Fiction and non-fiction converge in the discourses on emotions, because literary quotations allowed non-fiction authors to express what exceeded their rigid ‘scientific’ classification or physiological description. The attractions of passion outweigh the need to control it and the focus for that kind of attraction is again the body.
