Towards the end of January 1761 an author whose identity has remained hidden in the shadows of history is sitting at his desk racking his brains and biting his quill, trying to think of a topic for the weekly article he has to produce for De Vrouwelyke Spectator. Since launching this journal a few months ago, the author is frequently tormented by writer's block. Vexed at his lack of ideas, he seeks inspiration in the pages of an English periodical. Suddenly he stumbles on an essay describing the invention of a mysterious female thermometer designed to measure the intensity of female passions, and inspiration strikes. The very thing! Though he will have to adjust the narrative to suit the Dutch situation, the anonymous writer is confident that the controversial theme of the female passions will guarantee good sales figures for this week's issue. Impelled by his own enthusiasm, he immediately starts translating the essay into Dutch. He begins with the Latin motto that supposedly characterizes women's emotional life: 'animorum impulsu et caeca magnaque cupidine' - by impulses and an immense, blind desire. This short (and partly fictionalized) anecdote introduces a study of gender in the emotional culture of a group of eighteenth-century Dutch writers. The writer described was one of a group whose anonymous texts have become known in Dutch historiography as the 'spectatorial papers' or simply the 'spectators', after the famous English journal The Spectator published in 1711-12 by Richard Steele and Joseph Addison whose formula they copied. The Spectator was one of the first of a sizeable number of popular journals that appeared in the eighteenth century, whose authors were united by a common purpose: to enlighten their contemporaries and improve society. The Dutch 'spectators' tell us a great deal about shifting views of sex differences and emotions. This book treats the spectatorial papers, their writers' ideas and the contexts in which they were produced as a unique historical constellation that can show us how historical circumstances and social mechanisms govern not only people's emotional lives and the way they experience femininity and masculinity, but also the ways in which these feelings are crystallized into cultural expressions. So the perspective adopted here is constructivist. The basic premise is that the nature of both sex differences and emotion is strongly influenced by changing cultural ideas about their meaning. Two concepts that are central to the research are introduced early on: emotional culture and gender. Emotional culture is defined as the total set of 'feeling rules', 'expression norms' and 'emotion words' as well as ideals, theories and popular convictions that guide the recognition, experience, evaluation, expression and knowledge of emotions and feelings within a certain group and period of time. Gender is defined as the social and cultural distinction between men and women, which is often attributed to universal biological differences between the sexes but is actually informed by constructions of femininity and masculinity that are both time and culture bound. In Western culture, emotions and gender are linked through various mechanisms in an intricate chain of meaning. The purpose of this study is to problematize, historicize and contextualize this cultural link between gender and emotion. This end is pursued through a close analysis of the emotional culture of the above-mentioned spectatorial essayists. Several key questions are therefore addressed in this dissertation. What are the distinguishing features of the emotional culture of these eighteenth-century authors? What place, meaning and function did gender have within this culture? What continuities and discontinuities manifested themselves in the different elements of this culture? And finally, what historical processes and socio-cultural mechanisms can help us to understand and explain these characteristics and developments? Chapter 1, 'Spectators and emotional culture', starts with a background sketch of the spectatorial genre, introducing the authors, the texts and their readers. At the centre of each essay in this genre is a fictitious author and editor - Mr Spectator - who critically observes his contemporaries and humorously comments upon their behaviour with the aim of edifying his readers and making them better members of society. Hidden behind the broad shoulders of Mr Spectator, the authors did their best to maintain their anonymity. Nevertheless, the majority of these essayists have since been named. They belonged to the intellectual heart of the middle classes; most were university-educated physicians, lawyers and - especially - clergymen. Among the dozens of writers who contributed to the genre, only two women have been identified. In addition, the journals published numerous letters supposedly sent in by female readers, but these are of doubtful authenticity. Many were probably made up by the spectatorial authors themselves or contributed by readers under a pseudonym. Although it is difficult to pinpoint the readership of these papers, many factors point in the direction of the well-to-do middle classes. They were written for both men and women, whose morals, attitudes and conduct were subjected to sharp scrutiny. As children of the Enlightenment, the authors believed in the reformative power of education and the natural virtues of the human race. Human society could and should do better than it had done thus far. Change was indeed believed to be imperative, since the Golden Age of the Dutch Republic was felt to be dimming. The Dutch spectatorial authors were the standard-bearers of a national culture of reform, directed against the declining morals that were blamed for the Republic's waning economic and political power. This message was reiterated not only in hundreds of spectatorial essays, but also in the emotional culture that can be distilled from them. The authors, convinced that emotions played an important part in human morality, set out to dissect the nature of these affective phenomena, revealing the viciousness of some emotions and illustrating the virtue of others. In this way they hoped to reform the emotional lives of their fellow citizens, men and women alike. In the historiography of emotion, ambitious attempts to reconstruct the real emotional experiences of our ancestors are superseded nowadays by more moderate approaches which give priority to the analysis of the cultural framework that regulates the meaning, and indirectly the experience, of the full range of emotions. Building on the research of others, this study into the emotional culture of the spectatorial authors distinguishes, on a theoretical level, three distinct but interrelated elements in this cultural framework: 'emotionology', psychology and emotional vocabulary. The theoretical survey is followed by an overview of the most important 'emotion words' in the eighteenth-century Dutch language: hartstocht (passion), drift (impulse, desire), gevoel (feeling) and sentiment (sentiment). All these words had wider meanings in the days of the spectators than in present-day Dutch. This changing vocabulary is an initial indication that the emotional culture of the spectatorial authors differed from our own. The final methodological problem to be tackled in this chapter is the fictional character of many of the spectatorial essays. How can we use these texts as historical sources when their authors' imagination is such a characteristic element? The answer lies in three features of early modern fiction that often receive too little attention: first, the explicitly rhetorical and moralistic function of many of these texts; second, their authors' use of well-known categories and patterns that must have been familiar to their readers; and third, the discursive power to determine the meaning, status and reality of phenomena by representing them in a certain way. Viewed from this perspective, we can bridge the gap between historical fiction and historical reality. This is demonstrated in Chapter 2, 'Gender and the tyranny of the passions', which presents a case study centring on Grietje Kenouil, an assertive woman who wrote a letter to the editor criticizing the ideals of feminine behaviour represented in De Hollandsche Spectator (1731-35). This letter and the reply published by the editor (the famous journalist Justus van Effen) are analyzed with the aim of revealing characteristic elements in the emotional culture of the age. Grietje Kenouil turns out to be the invention of another male author, whose letter to the editor was signed with this pseudonym. 'Grietje' ridicules herself in this letter by showing her anger in a way that was considered at the time to be irrational, vicious and typically working-class. Justus van Effen uses her letter to prove that women are more emotional than men and therefore in need of male control. Women who foolishly believe that they need not listen to their husbands should be persuaded otherwise by Grietje's example. To make sure that the reader properly interprets the text and continues reading in spite of the compelling moralistic message, there is copious embroidery in the form of editorial comments, nicknames, intertextual allusions and sexual innuendo. Grietje Kenouil is not the only woman to be singled out as a bad example. The wicked wife is a very common motif in the spectatorial literature. She is seen as a woman who terrorizes her husband, children and servants because she is incapable of controlling either her fits of anger or her desire for power. For the spectatorial authors, these latter urges exemplify the tyrannical power that emotions can exert. Furthermore, they believe anger and lust for power are particularly despicable when displayed in subordinates, since these emotions are only legitimate for persons at the top of the social hierarchy. The wicked wife was not an invention of the spectatorial authors. Indeed, as a literary topos, she dates back to Socrates' wife Xantippe, and crops up in numerous early modern discussions on 'who wears the trousers' in the family. The obsession with this theme is related to the changing power relations between the sexes, as a result of social and economic developments in early modern times. The struggle for power in the household manifested itself most overtly in the lower strata of the middle classes - possibly more vigorously in the Dutch Republic than in neighbouring countries, because of women's relatively emancipated position there. This case study hence shows that historical circumstances profoundly influence the concrete image of the archetypal emotional woman. It also shows that emotions cannot be examined without taking into account the role played by relationships of power. Above all, this chapter underlines the importance of gender in the spectatorial emotional culture, since emotionality is directly linked to women and composure to men. However, the theoretical survey of the notion of gender at the end of this chapter suggests that the mechanisms of gender are often much less direct, and are not confined to the relationships between men and women. They also influence the relationships between other social groups. This theoretical observation is taken as the starting point for the analyses in the third chapter. In 'Typology of the Personae Intemperantes' the investigation is extended to the spectatorial representation of other types of emotional persons, using the pervasive fictional character sketches in these journals. It was typical of the emotional culture of the spectatorial authors that men as well as women were deemed vulnerable to the tyranny of the passions. Besides coquettes, savantes and female pious zealots, the spectators chastised male fops, rakes, onanists, misers, lachrymose clergymen and melancholic scholars. The emotional behaviour of these male personae jeopardized their masculinity: with the exception of the rake and the melancholic scholar, they were characterized as effeminate, immature, childish or senile figures. As men of letters, the spectatorial authors possibly identified too strongly with the melancholic scholar to depict him as unmanly. This was not the case with the rake, whose ostentatious virility preserved him from becoming classified as effeminate but whose immoral behaviour nevertheless linked him to the female sex. In addition, the spectatorial authors took great pains to stress that emotional patterns of behaviour were far from typical of the middle classes. Middle-class people who could not control their immoral passions were presumed to have been badly influenced by either the vulgar customs of the masses or the 'frenchified' and italianized customs of the aristocracy. Thus the social and psychological profile of these Personae Intemperantes shows that the creation of a virtuous group identity played an important role in these authors' emotional culture. Their aim was to construct a superior Dutch middle-class identity. One way of doing so was to project immoral, emotional features onto other social groups. In this process, gender, class, nationality, religion and age all interacted with each other. At the same time these character sketches illustrate that the eighteenth-century mind was preoccupied by different emotional phenomena from those that obsess our own age. The despised characters were thought to be driven by a range of unseemly passions: coquetry, amour-propre, lust, extravagance, greed, religious zealotry, hypochondria and a mania for reading. These were seen as extreme desires that exercised permanent control over these people's behaviour. The question of why the spectatorial authors should have singled out these particular emotions is addressed in the next chapter. Chapter 4, 'Civilization in excess', is subtitled 'Psychology as cultural criticism'. It is the first of two chapters that seek to contextualize the emotional culture described above by examining the psychological theories that the spectatorial authors themselves employed to understand and explain the force of the passions among their contemporaries. These theories - which I have called the cultural, medical and philosophical psychologies - are used as a way of gaining access to the social, economic, political and cultural characteristics of this period that made the spectatorial emotional culture so different from ours. The cultural psychological scheme that can be inferred from the spectatorial papers centred on one key notion: excess. The authors of these journals believed that Dutch society had come adrift because of the luxury it had acquired in the Golden Age of the seventeenth century. This luxury had given rise to unnatural desires and bore within it the seeds of national disaster. Excess manifested itself not only in the conspicuous consumption of the well-to-do, but equally in the undemocratic concentration of political power in the hands of an incompetent oligarchy, in the overrefinement of manners in the middle classes and their tendency to display 'frenchified' and aristocratic immoral behaviour, in the bad influences that were apparent in the education of the young, and finally in a collective preference for 'dangerous books' such as the popular romantic fiction of the age. These developments cannot be laughed away as the phantasms of unworldly moralists. Other studies reveal that economic, cultural, political and social processes did indeed transform the everyday life of the middle classes in the Dutch Republic. That is not to say that the spectatorial authors' interpretations were objective; there was a strong bias in their tendency to blame the disintegrative working of the passions for the malaise, and to project the origin of the negative developments described onto other social groups. Here, too, gender was a crucial category in their thoughts: it was the feminine propensity for excess that had caused all the trouble. The decline of the nation was due to a feminization of Dutch culture that had made it vulnerable to dangerous emotions. Yet the cultural criticism that was inherent in this 'excess psychology' did not represent a despair of civilization. The spectatorial authors did not give up the Enlightenment idea of progress. They still believed that mankind was capable of improvement, and many suggestions were put forward as to how to reverse the decay. This optimism is also reflected in their popularization of the medical and philosophical emotion theories of their time. The chapter entitled 'Body and Soul. The medical and philosophical psychology' examines what was believed to be the interaction between body and soul in the development and functioning of emotions. Pursuing this theme, this fifth chapter also shows the influence of popular convictions and scientific ideas on the emotional culture of the spectatorial authors. As men of wide reading, these writers thought it useful to inform their readers of the latest scientific insights into the emotions. Understanding the working of emotions could help control them. The spectatorial authors held that both body and soul had important parts to play in the genesis and development of emotions. In line with this belief, they frequently pointed to the effects of the bodily fluids. Blood, phlegm, black and yellow bile had been identified as the central forces in many physical and psychological processes since the classical theories of Hippocrates and Galen had expounded the effects of the humours on body and temperament. In the popular psychology of the early modern time, the bodily fluids made frequent appearances. At the same time, however, the spectatorial texts contained many references to the new theories of the nervous system which were emerging in the eighteenth century. Although the spectatorial authors believed that much was explicable in terms of humours and nerves, they stressed that the psychological effects of these bodily elements partly depended on people's conduct: living a moral and moderate life would stabilize the physical and consequently the mental condition. In addition, these writers subscribed to the philosophical emotion theories of their time, which perceived the interaction between body and soul in the correlation between sensory perceptions and intellectual processes. Emotions were conceived as ideas about what was good and what was bad, resulting from complex experiences in which personal sensations and cognitive reflexion were interwoven. They were also thought to be universal natural phenomena, essential for human happiness and a gift of the Almighty. From an Aristotelian point of view, emotions were considered to be useful drives, both for individuals and for society at large, given that they were controlled by reason - another of God's gifts to mankind. With these ideas, the spectatorial authors maintained a balance between three tendencies in their scientific orientation: Enlightenment, humanism and Christianity. Dutch Enlightenment was partly rooted in the humanistic culture of the preceding centuries. Classical authors were well-known and still respected, provided that their theories did not clash with the central tenets of Christianity. The same applied to foreign authors of the Enlightenment. With the spectatorial authors as spokesmen, the Dutch Enlightenment was in general far less radical than its counterpart in France, for instance. The Republic displayed a national variation of Enlightenment culture that endeavoured to reconcile reason, religion and revelation. This explains why quotations from the works of Locke, Leibniz, Sulzer, Lavater, Bonnet and Haller outnumbered those of the French philosophes: the latter were frowned upon as deists and materialists of whose dangerous ideas the spectators' readers were best left in ignorance. The dynamic interplay between their own heritage and new external developments is the keynote of Chapter 6, 'The new sensibility'. While the spectatorial authors tried to combat the tyranny of the passions during the first half of the century by being critical of the emotions, around the 1750s they changed tack. Following the philosophical theories of their time, they began to accentuate the positive value of certain emotions, especially the so-called social passions. Love, friendship, sympathy and compassion were praised as indispensable moral sentiments. This new approach was linked to an international cult of sensibility, imported to the Republic in translations of sentimental novels. This new attitude again demonstrated the spell exerted by gender and class patterns. Emotional susceptibility, previously connotated with the female sex and with aristocratic qualities, was now amazingly claimed as a characteristic of the male bourgeoisie. Stories about the heroic, self-sacrificing deeds of extraordinary men-of-feeling taught readers how to behave in a Christian, charitable way. The man-of-feeling was a man-of-healing, who solved the problems of the needy and dedicated himself to the good of his country. He distinguished himself from weaker, emotional natures by coupling sense to sensibility. His manly tears were always followed by action that revealed strong character. This contrasted sharply with the unworldly, 'enthusiastic' lad who wrote romantic poems. The latter's self-professed sensitive heart was in truth a sort of sentimentality that the spectatorial authors criticized as self-centred and effeminate. Still, the masculinity of the philanthropic, susceptible hero was too artificial to be sustained, since at the end of the century sensitiveness came to be linked more exclusively to the female sex. A new ideological trend among the vanguard of the middle classes represented the woman as a tender, loving creature and the man as a strong, rational character. God and Nature had destined woman for a life at home because of her inborn soft and feeling nature. This trend has become known in historiography as the polarisation of sex characters. In contrast to earlier Enlightenment theories, the feminine character was no longer believed to be formed by socialization processes or external factors but was instead thought to derive naturally from the female body, especially from the weaker condition of the female nerves and fibres. Although in theory the alleged feminine and masculine qualities were equal, in practice this new theory of the sexes served to impede women's full participation in society and culture. It is argued that this new development was a reaction to the intellectual, scientific and political ambitions of women in the eighteenth century, who began in growing numbers to claim equality to men. Thus gender functioned as a fundamental category of meaning in the emotional culture of the Dutch spectatorial authors. To be sure, gender was of minor importance in the philosophical emotion discourse, the humoral theory of the temperaments, the emotional vocabulary and the general standard of reasonable self-control that applied to both sexes. But gender strongly influenced the more specific feeling rules and expression norms as well as later medical theories of the nervous system. Above all, gender was a central category in the 'excess psychology', which was a cultural theory of emotion with social and political implications. As such, gender played an important role in the spectatorial construction of emotional identities, developing in close interaction with the social relationships and political-economic circumstances within the Dutch Republic. Furthermore, this study of a specific emotional culture in the eighteenth century reveals that the easily swayed heart can be regarded as a historical perpetuum mobile: although it was nearly always classified as feminine, the contents of this classification changed substantially. Dangerous passions gave way to salutary feelings, the wicked wife to a desirable loving spouse, the immoral rake to a sensitive youth. The man-in-control became a man-of-feeling, passionate emotionality changed to sentimentality, and sentimentality ended up provoking a sense of unease. What remained was a continuous anxiety about the individual and societal effects of the emotions, in a heavily gendered system of meaning. In the final pages of this study it is suggested that we can still discern the results of this emotional climate in present-day society, which is so unlike and yet in so many ways resembles the eighteenth-century world of the spectatorial authors.