LOOK BACK ON ANGER

Abstract

Although widely regarded as the most negative of emotions, anger is nowadays acknowledged to be a normal human reaction to personal grievance or grief. In a post-Freudian world, its channelled expression is associated with health, its repression with psychological disorders. Nonetheless, whether one is experiencing it oneself or witnessing it in others, it is a painful emotion – frightening, because it involves loss of control; alienating, because it thrives on disproportion. Literary representations of anger through the ages have emphasised its ‘mad’ or ‘bestial’ features. Seneca writes of the ‘marks’ of the angry man: ‘his eyes blaze and sparkle, his whole face is crimson with blood that surges from the lowest depths of his heart; his lips quiver, his teeth are clenched; his hair bristles and stands on end’. The iconography of anger has remained remarkably consistent, representing it as a raging fever or an act of possession. During a ‘fit’ of anger, the demented savage drops his civilised mask, like Dr Jekyll revealing Mr Hyde. From Spenser's Furor grimly gnashing his iron teeth to Basil Fawlty apoplectic with rage, the angry man has been an object of fear and ridicule – his exaggerated, self-destructive responses setting him outside the sphere of human sympathy.