Gross, Daniel M. The Secret History of Emotion:

Gross, Daniel M. The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science. Chicago UP: Chicago IL. 2007

“The contours of our emotional world have been shaped by institutions such as slavery and poverty that simply afford some people greater emotional range than others, as they are shaped by publicity that has nothing to do with the inherent value of each human life and everything to do with technologies of recognition and blindness” (4).

“Following Aristotle and Hume, it is useful to think about how the scope of anger afforded a social subordinate is strictly limited to the vanishing point in a world where pride is also limited (as it is, for instance, in Hume’s and Fielding’s Britain, where pride is considered a function of property and strictly limited by custom and law to a narrow segment of the population)" (5).

Emotions have as much to do with social standings as with personal feelings. The women of the conduct books were allowed pride over limited areas of their life. Their social standing (created by family or marriage) their appearance (luck) and their use of manners. Socially they were limited in the emotions they were “allowed” to partake in.

“Aritstotle’s Rhetoric and Thomas Hobbes to outline a “political economy’ wherein passions are (I) constituted as differences in power, and (2) conditioned not by their excess, but by their scarcity” (6).

“Even the recent theoretical turn to “constitutive rhetoric” typically fails to integrate the rhetoric of emotion with the effort to develop a more sophisticated model of persuasion that situates rhetoric in culture rather than in the intention of the orator or author” (10).

“giving up the category of emotion completely would make some important theoretical work and even some historical work impossible” (19).