Concluding Remarks

I am grateful for the comments offered by these three expert and insightful readers, and for the opportunity to take part in this conversation about my book. The scholar of early-modern rhetoric Walter J. Ong once wrote that “the writer’s audience is always a fiction,” as we imagine who might read our work and what they might get out of it. I know that as I wrote, my imagined audience shifted back and forth between legal historians, lawyers, and historians full stop, and the finished book probably has some changes in tone and focus because of that. These readings by Jeffrey McNairn, Elsbeth Heaman, and James Muir — a real, rather than imagined, audience — are welcome precisely because they come from outside my own fields of Quebec civil law history and the history of emotions, and they take what I did and push it in new and rich directions. I cannot do justice to all, or even most, of the insights they offer, so I will focus on three themes that arise from the discussion, which I think provoke important methodological and conceptual challenges to the (legal) history of emotions and allow me to make public some debates I had in my head while writing the book. If what follows do not fully answer those challenges, I hope at least that articulating these issues shows some of the ways that the history of emotions touches vital questions in Canadian historiography. The first is the perennial issue of the relationship between emotion and reason, which has occupied historians of emotions from the beginning, but which is particularly relevant when law is in the picture. As Heaman suggests, in the legal context the feelings/reason binary was never two fixed categories, and emotions could serve as a rhetorical position to neutralize the privileged position of reason and the “white, propertied men” who were its exemplars. And as McNairn points out, in the legal realm the supposed “objectivity” of reason and the rational powerfully reinforced judges’ and, more generally, the legal system’s restrictive definitions of what counted and what did not. This skewing of the field towards reason perhaps mattered little when two merchants were litigating a delayed shipment of timber, though the world of commerce was never as entirely coldly materialist as liberal theory would have it. For individuals complaining of emotional injuries, however, orienting the forum towards reason and its demands meant forcing those plaintiffs onto unfamiliar and often hostile terrain. This particularly affected women, who were more often dismissed as bringing forward “mere feelings,” but it also affected men who could see their masculinity questioned for litigating rather than living with emotional injuries. Lawyers were important here, a point all three commentators rightly bring up. Lawyers worked right at the fluid emotion/reason interface, and their job was to figure out how to turn plaintiffs’ emotion-drenched narratives (which historians can usually see only by reading between the lines of the rationalized court file) into the available legal categories. To do this, they had to negotiate the formal requirements of rationality without sacrificing the visceral power of emotion. But emotion was more than a rhetorical intensifier: it could itself be the substance of a case, and part of the historian’s challenge in studying how emotions were litigated is to see how feelings were “translated” into legal objects. This meant translating feelings into the rational categories of law, of course: into legally cognizable complaints or defences. But it also meant translating feelings into the emotional categories of law. By this I mean characterizing emotional responses in ways that would tap into the emotional …