Godwin, Provocation, and the Plot of Anger

Abstract

I was angry with my friend I told my wrath my wrath did end I was angry with my foe I told it not my wrath did grow --Blake, A Poison Tree WILLIAM BLAKE'S A POISON TREE SUGGESTS THAT ACTING UPON ANGER puts an end to plot; whether we tell or wreak our wrath, its expression is antithetical to calculated narratives. As Philip Fisher says, anger is a fundamentally rash emotion precisely at odds with the world of plots.(1) On the other hand, the same poem presents the cultivation of angry passions as dependent upon the secret plotting of the speaker, whose hunger for vengeance grows in proportion to the narrative's deferral of satisfaction. In other words, in Blake's poem, anger both requires plots and disables them. This double vision is symptomatic of a broader, historically-specific oscillation in British conceptions of anger during the 1790s, due primarily to the influence of the French Revolution and the ways it was discussed. In English political, medical, and legal discourse of the period, we find a remarkable alignment of changing attitudes towards rage in the wake of the Revolution, as if the fear of popular anger washed over the entire culture and altered the landscape of the mind. As revolutionary anger was being demonized as irrational, destructive rage in conservative political discourse, inflammation (of the body and body politic) was being reconceptualized as a dangerous disease in metaphorical and medical terms.(2) To this extent, the plot of anger was being written as a blind and rash trajectory--the arc of shrapnel in the explosion. On the other hand, a parallel discourse depicted the radical leaders as pursuing a conscious, calculating program of wrath against the state, a plot of anger as sharply directed as a knife in the back. Furthermore, it remained a question of some importance to the revolution debates whether British subjects were discontented (i.e., angry) because of rational causes, such as their lack of representation in parliament, or because they had been inflamed by radical rhetoric that blinded them to their best interests. Was their anger a rational exercise of the will to advance the nation towards reform, or a mindless response to demagoguery, one that followed only a trajectory of destruction? These questions underlie much of the rhetoric surrounding the issue of reform in England during this period, and answers to them overspill the bounds of political debate into other disciplinary arenas. More specifically, and for our purposes here, changes in the way English courts judged cases of provocation follow the contours of the debate, suggesting a large-scale shift in national consciousness. As Jeremy Horder has shown, a new legal situation at the end of the eighteenth century had its basis in a changing conception of anger: in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the law ceased to describe anger in terms of outrage, the conception of anger in which reason plays the dominant role in guiding action. The law instead described it in terms of a loss of self-control ... according to which passions overwhelm the power of reason, leaving people at the mercy of their desires for retaliatory suffering.(3) As a result, defendants who could establish that they killed in anger were assumed to have been out of control and thus not fully culpable for their actions. Just as medical doctors were redefining inflammation from curative symptom to irrational disease, lawyers and judges were rethinking outbursts of anger as fits of madness rather than exercises of the will. In this account, anger's narrative logic--a perceived injury followed by a desire for retaliation and an expression of that desire--becomes an automatic reaction that usually thwarts one's larger interests, rather than a rationally-pursued path in keeping with the self and its desires: the angry man kills his best friend; the British worker pulls down the political structures that have sustained him. …