In the University of Melbourne Digital Studio Internships Program, Catherine Gay and Xingcheng Wang worked with Dr Tyne Sumner to create an interactive digital humanities project that tells the literary, artistic, and cultural history of the smile.
You can take a look at their incredible work here!
In this first of our guest blog posts for Literature & the Face we welcome the following discussion of the smile in children’s literature by Catherine Gay.
Catherine is a PhD Candidate in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. She is also a Digital Studio Internship fellow for Literature and the Face, where she is currently working on a digital humanities project about the cultural history of the smile. Stay tuned for more on this exciting project in the coming weeks!
Introduction: Reading the smile
Childhood is a period when a person’s emotional understandings and behaviours are cultivated and influenced. [1] Although children learn emotions through many channels, it has been well established that ‘texts for children and young adults are used as tools for emotional socialisation, enculturation, political persuasion, and moral or ethical education. [2] Whether children absorb or even employ the desired information, children’s texts are nevertheless often written by adult authors in an attempt to mold young minds.
In the English-speaking world, didactic texts emerged in the 1700s, charged with providing moral guidance for young readers and listeners. One such text is Sarah Fielding’s The Governess (1749), which follows nine girls at Mrs Teachum’s school. In each chapter a girl gives both an account of her life and a recites a moral story for the class. The story culminates with nine good, obedient pupils who have learnt their lessons. The Governess states in its opening pages, ‘The Design of the following Sheets is to endeavour to cultivate an early inclination to Benevolence, and a Love of Virtue, in the Minds of young Women.’ [3] Books such as these contained moral messages which could easily be drawn from the text.
Sarah Fielding, The Governess; or Little Female Academy 1749. Image
In the Victorian period, unambiguously instructive texts came to be replaced with narrative-driven material. Yet these children’s stories, from domestic tales to adventures in fantastical worlds, still sought to nurture and provoke normative emotional reactions in their readers. Charlotte M. Yonge’s 1856 domestic novel The Daisy Chain outwardly sought to influence its young readership. Described as a family chronicle, it was:
“a domestic record of home events, large and small, during those years of early life when the character is chiefly formed, and as an endeavour to trace the effects of those aspirations which are a part of every youthful nature. That the young should take one hint, to think whether their hopes and upward-breathings are truly upwards, and founded in lowliness, may be called the moral of the tale.“
So how did Victorian children’s novels seek to influence and inform ‘youthful nature’? By focussing on one facial trope, the smile, it is possible to see how the representation of this expression and its attendant meanings in texts had a considerable influence on the broad understanding and development of emotions in children. Examining where the word ‘smile’ (and associated words such as smiled, smiling etc.) appears across a range of children’s literary texts reveals a change in usage over time. Other notable changes in the use of ‘smile’ include genres that use the word, characters and situations that use the expression, and the gendered audiences that were encouraged to use the smile.
To reveal this finding I used data from 71 English-language children’s books, published between 1826 and 1911, and drawn from CLiC, a collaborative corpus analysis project between the University of Birmingham and the University of Nottingham. [4] By concentrating on one facial trope across a select cluster of texts, we can therefore begin to explore how nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century authors tried to influence children’s emotional formations. Fictional texts also provide examples of when someone should or should not smile, and the manner in which they should use the expression. This is often established through dialogue or speech wherein characters compel one another to smile or query why a smile is visible on another’s face. Children’s texts therefore not only presented instances of the smile to children but intimated through dialogue and prose types of appropriate or inappropriate smiling.
Smiling across a corpus
One surprising finding is the gendered distinctions in the smile. In general, male pronouns appear more frequently than female pronouns across the sample texts. This trend suggests that there are more male characters, or at least more active or central male characters, than female characters within the selected children’s books.
When we examine the data on the smile throughout the texts, however, the gap closes. ‘Smile’ as a noun, verb or adjective appears with female pronouns (she/her) 60 times, whereas it appears with male pronouns (he/his) 66 times.
From this data we can infer that female characters smile more than male characters—0.105% of the instances of female pronouns involve smiling, whereas this is the case for only 0.049% occurrences of male pronouns.
Looking at the context and adjectives surrounding the smile and the smiler across the texts paints a more nuanced picture. I examined the 564 instances where the noun ‘smile’ appears across the texts and noted 482 sentences where a clear gender could be ascribed to the smiler. Using adjectives and context to frame these findings, I labelled smiles as either positive, negative or neutral. Positive smiles for example, could be surrounded by adjectives such as ‘sweet’ or ‘beaming’. Negative smiles often used adjectives such as ‘grim’, ‘sad’ or ‘cunning.’ Neutral or ambiguous smiles were characterised as those with descriptors such as ‘strange’ or ‘queer’, in scenarios where it appears that a character is smiling for no obvious reason, had mixed emotions or the smile’s use was ambiguous in the immediate context of the surrounding sentences.
Again, the data reveals more male smilers (304) than female (178). But when we look to the percentages of types of smile, we can see that female characters show a significantly higher proportion of positive smiles, with a similar number of neutral/ambiguous smiles.
As these findings show, a distant reading approach is useful in revealing larger patterns of facial expression. Delving into individual texts through close reading and analysis adds further granularity as to how the smile is used.
Genre and the Smile
When individual texts are closely examined with other information in mind, such as characters and genre, further gendered patterns emerge. The gender of protagonists can have an effect of the frequency of the smile in literary texts. Fantastical stories, centring around medieval royalty or magical lands, appear to employ a gendered use of the smile. The word ‘smile’ appears 11 times in The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald (1872), in which the main character is a princess. By comparison, in Prince Prigio by Andrew Lang (1889), which follows the adventures of a know-it-all protagonist prince, the smile only appears once. Tellingly, it is a female character that bears the expression: ‘Lady Rosalind came sweeping down, with a smile on her kind face.’
George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin 1872. Image
Comparing domestic and adventure novels (the latter usually aimed at boys and the former at girls) reveals different uses of the smile. In the above-mentioned The Daisy Chain, smile, smiles, smiled and smiling appears 228 times. Though a large novel, at nearly 700 pages, the relative frequency of smile is high, at 767.67 per million words. The novel follows a doctor’s eleven children, but centres on the third daughter Ethel. The Daisy Chain includes a ‘smile of assent’, ‘smiling sweetly’, ‘a half smile’, ‘grateful smile’, ‘amused’ smiles and many others amongst the cohort.
The 1857 adventure novel The Coral Island by R. M. Ballantyne contains numerous instances of smiling. The book was explicitly written for a male audience as evidenced by Ballantyne’s remark: “I present my book specially to boys, in the earnest hope that they may derive valuable information, much pleasure, great profit, and unbounded amusement from its pages.”
With an all-male cast of characters, the smiles present do not always hold positive connotations. A conniving villain captures the protagonist:
“So, youngster,” he said, with a Sardonic smile, while I felt his grasp tighten on my shoulder…”
The text also exhibits ‘bitter’, contemptuous and ‘cold sarcastic’ smiles, alongside ‘joyful’ and ‘friendly’ ones. The relative frequency of the smile and smiling is 481.38 words per million in The Coral Island.
As this brief foray in distant reading shows us, the smile holds an influential and revealing place in nineteenth-century children’s literature, with clearly gendered uses and subtle shifts detectable across variations in genre. The frequency and positivity of female smiles speaks to the gendered socialisation of Victorian-era children and the extent to which authors of the period were enmeshed in social and cultural traditions that shaped and informed children’s emotions. Finally, examining instances of the ambiguous smile in these texts, gives an indication of the complexity of the smile as a facial trope. Despite being commonly associated with positive or happy emotions, the smile can also be vexed, vague, troubling, or used as a curious mask to conceal an otherwise turbulent inner state.
Notes:
[1] Olsen, Stephanie, ed. Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History: National, Colonial and Global Perspectives. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
[2] Kristine Moruzi, Michelle J. Smith, and Elizabeth Bullen, eds., Affect, Emotion, and Children’s Literature: Representation and Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults (New York: Routledge, 2017), 2, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315266961.
[4] Mahlberg, M., Stockwell, P., de Joode, J., Smith, C., & O’Donnell, M. B. “CLiC Dickens: Novel uses of concordances for the integration of corpus stylistics and cognitive poetics.” Corpora 11, no. 3 (2016): 433–463. clic.bham.ac.uk
Reflecting on cinema’s love of the close-up, in 1924 the Hungarian film critic and poet Béla Balázs observed:
‘In close-ups every wrinkle becomes a crucial element of character and every twitch of a muscle testifies to a pathos that signals great inner events.’
When we think of close-ups of the human face, cinema is often the medium that comes to mind. On film, enlarged faces take audiences into a different reality, transporting us to the ‘inner events’ of another person’s emotions and psyche. Although cinematic close-ups focus our attention and senses, bringing us face-to-face with another person and another world, they are also heightened from life in that they convey an intimacy normally reserved for those with whom we are most closely acquainted.
Jean Dorothy Seberg in Breathless (À bout de souffle) 1960, Jean-Luc Godard
Over the past year and a half, the uncanny intimacy of the facial close-up – usually the domain of cinema and TV – has become a dominant feature our everyday lives with the pandemic requiring us to replace in-person faces with those on a screen. At once there but not there, imitate yet distant, affective yet detached, up-close yet far away, the faces we encounter in videoconferences are most unlike the faces we see in the supermarket or in passing on the street. Appearing in a tessellated grid of juxtaposed frames with eye gaze at close range, the faces in videocalls are both real and alien, distorted in size and metonymically rendered as an exaggerated visage standing in for the human whole.
In a recent article on what is now known as ‘zoom fatigue,’ Jeremy Bailenson observes how on Zoom, ‘behavior ordinarily reserved for close relationships – such as long stretches of direct eye gaze and faces seen close up – has suddenly become the way we interact with casual acquaintances, coworkers, and even strangers.’ In this digital milieu, the irregular size of faces on the screen, combined with the inordinate amount of time spent looking at the ‘front-on view’ of other people’s faces, produces an uncanny and exhausting cognitive effect.
Adding to this strangeness, regardless of who is speaking at any given point, each person present in a Zoom videocall is usually looking directly at the eyes of several other people at the same time. In face-to-face interaction, direct eye contact is rarely sustained, unlike the compounding effect of seeing multiple sets of eyes, expressions, and faces without interruption. The intensity and persistence of this gaze – indirect and yet focused at the same time – effectively transforms social interaction into a predominantly observational exercise.
The Zoom Call: A Familiar Scene (Image credit: Compare Fibre, Unsplash)
How can we explain the psychological effect this is having? Is close, sustained observation of each other’s faces in this way changing the very nature of our relationships and how we understand each other and the world? Afterall, the ways in which we structure our gaze in face-to-face interactions is dependent upon a myriad of contextual factors such as the number of people in the room, the nature of our immediate setting, the tone and social atmosphere of our environment and so on. To take this away means placing disproportionate emphasis on the minute, often coded subtleties of facial expression and gesture, often with interpretive consequences that aren’t intended.
Take for example the sidelong glance, which carries significant and subtle social meaning, depending upon the range of contextual factors at play. A glance – fleeting, encoded, strategic – is often used to signal an unspeakable truth, surveil another’s mood, or suggest a complex social cue. The charged domestic scenes of Jane Austen’s novels contain numerous exemplary glances, each giving readers insight into a network of interpersonal social dynamics at work. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet’s sidelong glance registers a range of cross-relational observations and changes in the mood of a single room:
“She could not help frequently glancing her eye at Mr. Darcy, though every glance convinced her of what she dreaded; for though he was not always looking at her mother, she was convinced that his attention was invariably fixed by her. The expression of his face changed gradually from indignant contempt to a composed and steady gravity”
In literary texts, authors employ precise facial signs such as Elizabeth’s ‘glancing eye’ to draw us into the intersubjective dynamics of a social scene. The rhetorical glue that holds these scenes together, though, is context: where Darcy is sitting, who else is in the room, what has happened immediately prior, and what remains unspoken. The implicit social meaning of a close-up sidelong glance is therefore contiguous with a multitude of contextual markers (frowns, blushing cheeks, smiles, body posture, dress) that we use to understand the nuances of social relationships.
‘The side-long glance’ (Pride and Prejudice, 1995 film adaptation)
To return to my study of the close-up face online, it follows then that the deeply condensed meaning of the sidelong glance in Zoom risks profound misinterpretation when divorced from its necessary adjacent social clues. In the close-up world of the videocall, we are bombarded with nonverbal cues that would otherwise have highly specific meaning in a face-to-face context. Moreover, the face’s nonverbal synchrony is largely unconscious and effortless but at the same time mediated by our unfortunate ability to see our own faces reflected back on screen.
Although we can change the settings in Zoom to ‘hide self view,’ the software’s default setting shows us our own real-time camera feed. Self-monitoring our idiosyncrasies, we are presented with a mirror-image of our facial expressions and gestural signs. Subtle eye movements, an inclination of the head or a raised eyebrow are cast in full view, giving us a live-feed of our individual attempts at sociality, both subtle and direct. This peculiar self-evaluation – seeing one’s face as if in a mirror as we interact with others – generates a bizarre performative mimesis: interaction becomes secondary to performing the self for our very own approval.
Finally, in getting a closer view of the facial images in front of us, both of other’s faces and our own, we lose a sense of the necessary distance that characterises encounters in the real. In Theory of Film, Siegfried Kracauer, reflects on the distortion of reality that close-ups of faces bring about:
“Any huge close up reveals new and unsuspected formations of matter; skin textures are reminiscent of aerial photographs, eyes turn into lakes or volcanic craters. Such images blow up our environment in a double sense: they enlarge it literally; and in doing so, they blast the prison of conventional reality, opening up expanses which we have explored at best in dreams before.”
The visual impact of the close-up face, as Kracauer describes it, could be thought of in terms of abstract imagery or metaphor. At close range, facial features take on different rhetorical meaning; as if each existed distinct from the whole. Working in a different mode to cinema or the descriptive prose of the novel, poets frequently engage evocative images and metaphors to describe discrete elements of a single face. In ‘Tulips’ Sylvia Plath evokes the image of a single eye ‘between two white lids that will not shut’ as that of a ‘head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff’ while in ‘An Eye, Open’ Paul Celan breaks the image of the eye into a set of discrete images, personifying its various parts:
‘Aching depth of the eyeball:
the lid
does not stand in its way, the lash
does not count what goes in.
The tear, half,
the sharper lens, movable,
brings the images home to you.’
As in these lines, the experience of seeing a face up-close is unquestionably poetic, as much as it is, at times, disturbing, exhausting and strange. From the abnormal self-evaluation that persists with the Zoom self-camera view, to the daily oddness of seeing our friends, colleagues and stranger’s faces close-up and sustained on screen for periods far longer than could perhaps ever be tolerated in person, there is still a great deal for us to learn about the social, psychological and cultural consequences of our shift to observing so many faces online. There have, of course, been some advantages to this sudden and dramatic change for but many of us, just like Austen’s Elizabeth, ‘every glance convinced her of what she dreaded.’
Tyne Daile Sumner
Austen, J. Pride and Prejudice. London: Penguin Books, 2014.
Bailenson, J. ‘Nonverbal Overload: A Theoretical Argument for the Causes of Zoom Fatigue.’ Technology, Mind, and Behaviour, 2021.
Balázs, B. Early Film Theory: Visible Man & The Spirit of Film, edited by Erica Carter, translated by Rodney Livingstone, 1924,
Celan, P. ‘An Eye, Open.’ Poetry, 1971.
Kracauer, S. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960. p. 48
Plath, S. ‘Tulips.’ Collected Poems. Harper Collins, 1992.
Early in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Great Gatsby (1925),readers encounter the strange, disembodied gaze of the fictional oculist Doctor T.J. Eckleburg, looking out over the ‘grey land and spasms of bleak dust’ of West Egg, a town modelled on Great Neck in Long Island, New York.
Peering out from an imposing billboard – the quintessential symbol of early twentieth-century material culture – Eckleburg’s eyes are ‘blue and gigantic – their retinas are one yard high.’ Fitzgerald writes:
‘They look out of no face, but, instead from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness, or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.’
Eckleburg’s eerie eyes (The Great Gatsby, Baz Luhrmann film adaptation)
For many readers, the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg leave a sharp and lasting impression on the imagination, not just because they reappear throughout The Great Gatsby’s key scenes or even necessarily because of Fitzgerald’s evocative exaggerated prose. Rather, it is the eerie incongruity of the giant blue eyes against the backdrop of whitewashed railroad fences, commercial wastelands and ash-heaps that seems to haunt most people.
For some, Eckleburg’s persistent stare represents scientific rationality and the specialized knowledge of a trained physician, while for others the eyes stand in for the all-seeing eye of God. Fading in and out of sight against the mise en scène of Fitzgerald’s eerie industrial hellscape, the eyes have become synonymous with the novel itself, appearing on book covers, in films and in other iconography.
The Great Gatsby (cover image) Wikimedia Commons
The textual impressions of a memorable face are quite different from those we recall of the faces we pass in the street or see on TV. The ability to remember faces we see out in the world even has its own scientific designation under the category of ‘super-recognizers,’ a term that researchers have used to describe people who have ‘superior face recognition abilities’ (Russell et al. 2009).
When it comes to literary texts, why do we remember some faces better than others? And what techniques do writers use to impress upon us a lasting image of a memorable face? Unlike in cinema, where we usually instantaneously take in the complete visual frame of a character’s face, writers must construct a descriptive mosaic that pieces together various facial components to form an imaginative whole. These could be thought of as ‘faciality traits,’ to use Deleuze and Guattari’s term; parts that ‘the face holds within its rectangle or circle.’
In contrast to the disembodied eyes of Fitzgerald’s billboard, the well-remembered portrait of Satan in Dante’s Inferno is conjured through symbolic colours (red, black and whiteish-yellow), that move in and out of one another as if in a state of decay amid grotesque configurations of facial parts:
When I beheld three faces on his head! The one in front, and that vermilion was; Two were the others, that were joined with this Above the middle part of either shoulder, And they were joined together at the crest; And the right-hand one seemed ‘twixt white and yellow; The left was such to look upon as those Who come from where the Nile falls valley-ward.
Many readers recall the strangeness of the figure’s three heads, one gazing outwards while the other two rise from each shoulder. Later, from three chins and six eyes trickle ‘tear-drops’ and a ‘bloody drivel.’ The poet and critic T.S. Eliot found this literary face so disturbing to the modern sensibility that he even advised students reading the Inferno for the first time to ‘omit the last canto and return to the beginning of Canto III.’
Inferno 34 (Digital Dante)
Whether we recall heightened individual features or remember Satan as a single, epic spectacle, it is the dramatic interplay between parts that Dante enacts in these lines that nevertheless leaves a lasting impression on the mind.
And yet, some literary faces are etched into the reading consciousness not because of their descriptive intensity but instead because they present us with an enigma. Charlotte Brontë’s heroine Jane Eyre captivates the literary imagination precisely because of Brontë’s ability to use conflicting and contrasting perspectives to enchant us with her plainness. Self-described as ‘poor, obscure, plain and little,’ Jane is at one point complimented by Mr. Rochester for her ‘hazel eyes and hazel hair,’ only to inform the reader that her eyes ‘are in fact green.’
Later in the novel, as she stands in front of a mirror arranging her hair, Jane’s characteristic introspection further complicates the mental image readers have of her visage:
‘I looked at my face in the glass, and felt it was no longer plain: there was hope in its aspect and life in its colour; and my eyes seemed as if they had beheld the fount of fruition, and borrowed beams from the lustrous ripple.’
As we see Jane through her own eyes, the impression of the face becomes mutable or is, at the very least, brought into question as we consider the accuracy of impressions encountered in earlier pages. Jane views her face differently after Rochester has declared his love for her and we are led to believe that her physical appearance comes to mirror her internal state. And yet Brontë’s choice of language – borrowed beams and lustrous ripple – is highly dreamlike and ethereal. Readers are positioned to question the veracity of this visual display and wonder whether Jane has been swept up in an illusion of her own making.
Orson Welles & Joan Fontaine (1943 adaptation, Jane Eyre)
But perhaps the impression of Jane’s face in this scene is less to do with specific visual markers and more to do with how it makes us feel. A great deal of what we remember about significant faces in literature is indexical to the emotive response we have when we first encounter them on the printed page.
Like Tom Buchanan, who exchanges a frown with the static glare of Doctor Eckleburg, the imaginative interchange made possible in literary texts means that we often interact with the faces in them as if we were actually there.
Tyne Daile Sumner
Brontë, C. Jane Eyre. London: Penguin, 2006.
Dante, A. The Divine Comedy. Translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 1867.
Deleuze, G. and Félix Guattari. ‘Year Zero: Faciality.’ In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987: 167-191.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. London: Penguin, 2013.
Russell, R., Brad Duchane and Ken Nakayama. ‘Super-recognizers: People with extraordinary face recognition ability.’ Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 16.2(2009): 252-257.
One of the key aspects of our project is the study of the silent discourse of the face: the way literary texts characterise the face as communicating a message or a feeling to others. Our shorthand phrase for this is the “as if to say….” trope. Sometimes faces “speak” in complex sentences; at others their expressions are simpler. We will probably blog about this expression several times, so I have numbered this post as first in a series.
Our blog’s epigraph features the “glance of brightness” that Captain Wentworth gives to his old love Anne Elliot when he sees a stranger admiring her. This glance
seemed to say, “That man is struck with you, and even I, at this moment, see something like Anne Elliot again.”
Jane Austen, Persuasion, 1818.
In this highly emotional narrative context, this trope has a temporal immediacy. The glance is the work of a moment; it is a gift; and it recalls a older, but still strong connection between the characters.
The trope is very familiar from other forms of popular culture. Many readers will think of these lines from Toto’s song Africa, from 1982.
I stopped an old man along the way Hoping to find some old forgotten words or ancient melodies He turned to me as if to say, “Hurry boy, it’s waiting there for you”
Toto, Africa, 1982.
One of the reasons this trope fascinates our research team is its capacity to conjure the effect of a visual image, entirely through text.
At the same time, we are equally interested in the intersection of text and image.
This morning on Radio National’s “Art Show” I was listening to the Australian photojournalist Stephen Dupont, who has spent many years in Afghanistan as a war photographer. Dupont speaks about the personal ethics of taking photographs in time of crisis and moments of trauma, and the experience of an “underlying connection” with subjects who implicitly allow him to take their photograph in the split second when asking for formal permission is not possible.
He says you can feel if they give you a spiritual “yes” or the connection that says, “Take my photograph.”
A minute later he revisits the same trope, speaking of a “subtle spiritual” thing, as people give their blessing.
They kind of look at you in a way and it says, “Do it.” Or they’ll look at you in a way that says, “You take my picture I’ll kill you.”
The grammatical form of these examples of the speaking glance, or look, is the imperative, or the command. In effect, Dupont transfers the agency and decision-making to the potential photographic subject.
Dupont’s use of this trope captures the temporal urgency and immediacy of the “as if to say”, but in the context of this interview, it is fascinating for us as the verbal representation of a moment that either precedes the actual photograph, or indeed, that prohibits a photograph being taken.
Text and image wind around each other in these emotional moments. A powerful image is produced, but the drama of that image is captured in the silent discourse of the face.
In the song “Happiness”, from her 2020 release Evermore, Taylor Swift articulates the break-down of a relationship. She asks a bitter rhetorical question:
Tell me, when did your winning smile Begin to look like a smirk?
In one of those uncanny moments when popular culture addresses our historical research interests, these lyrics jumped out at me. I have been working on the history of the gesture we know as smiling. Curiously, this history intersects and overlaps with the very different trajectory of the word smirk.
The verb to smile — originating in a hypothetical Middle Low German word smilen — is not recorded in English before the fourteenth century. And when it does appear, it does so in a very specific, remarkably tentative way, as if people really are “beginning” to smile.
Here is a telling example.
In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1386), Pandarus has been trying to persuade his niece Criseyde to accept the love of Prince Troilus. Finally, she overcomes her initial hesitation, and asks if Troilus can speak well of love.
‘Kan he wel speke of love?’ quod she; ‘I preye, Tel me, for I the bet me shal purveye.’ [so I may prepare myself the better]
Tho Pandarus a litel gan to smyle, And seyde, ‘By my trouthe, I shal yow telle….’
(Troilus and Criseyde, II. 503-506)
Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 061, Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, f.37r, Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Pandarus’s smile is described only briefly; and it is minimal. Yet to the attentive reader, it signifies Pandarus’ unspoken pleasure and knowledge that Criseyde has started to unbend and warm towards the idea of Troilus.
Middle English is notoriously slippery in its use of the verb onginnen, from Old English onginnan. When used in the past tense (gan)as an auxiliary verb, as here, it sometimes carries the full meaning of “began to do something…”; though at other times it is simply a short-hand auxiliary verb to signify the past tense. Here, does Pandarus begin to smile a little, or does he smile a little? Either way, the gesture calls up a world of understanding between narrator and reader as we observe Criseyde responding to Pandarus’s powers of persuasion. This slow-moving smile is a good example of what I think we might call intimate faciality: the close-up examination of the face.
Most other uses of smile in Middle English are modified in this way, as characters begin to smile, or smile a little, or in part. This use of the verb smile corresponds in meaning to French sourire, Italian sorridere, from Latin subrideo, a sub-laugh: a smile on the way to becoming a laugh.
But what did medieval people do before they used the verb to smile? The Old English verb for smiling is smearcian, and this appears several times in Middle English as smirken. This is the same word as modern English “smirk”, but the modern associations with a malicious or contemptuous expression aren’t part of its medieval meanings at all. These associations don’t enter English until about the sixteenth century. In effect, it was only as smiling became more widespread that smirk developed its current meaning of a malicious or smug gesture.
Conversely, the word “grin” from Old Norse grenja, “to howl”, enters English as a word that describes the particular physical gesture of opening the mouth and baring the teeth. It is used in Old English and Middle English of demons, the devil, monsters, and wild animals. It does not develop the modern sense of a less threatening and more cheerful gesture until the sixteenth century.
It’s not surprising that words in English change their meaning and usage. But these semantic and textual histories are important documents in our history of facial rhetoric and facial gesture. They add another dimension to the cultural history of the smile by Colin Jones, for example, who writes illuminatingly about the social and cultural difference made to the public meaning of the smile by hygiene and dentistry in eighteenth-century France.
For example, if fourteenth-century poetry starts to show interest in the slow-motion movement of a smile associated with private knowledge and inner understanding, we might develop the hypothesis that this kind of intimate facial gesture becomes more apparent and of greater interest in the increasing use of private rooms in late medieval domestic architecture, where instead of eating and spending their lives in the public hall, the noble family would increasingly retreat to a private chamber. This social phenomenon was noted by Chaucer’s contemporary, William Langland.
Unhappy is the hall, every day in the week, Where the lord and the lady have no liking to sit. Now has each rich man a rule to eat by himself In a private parlor to avoid poor men, Or in a chamber with a chimney-corner, and leave the chief hall empty That was made for men to eat their meals in.
William Langland, Piers Plowman, B.X.97-102, trans. E. T. Donaldson.
Reading poetry in English might well have taken place in this smaller, more close-up setting, where facial expression might also have been studied with closer attention.
Taylor Swift’s question about a smile becoming a smirk also raises issues of temporality, sociality and private knowledge on a small and intimate scale. Was this a particular smile that began to change into a smirk? Did the outer edges of the person’s mouth move upwards? Or did her perception of the smile change? Perhaps it was not a smile on a particular occasion but a characteristic facial gesture, at first attractive, and now less so? Is a smile an intentional act of communication, or something perceived and remembered by another? Swift’s ingenuous address, “Tell me … ”, plays on this ambiguity of perception: how could it be possible for the smiler to answer her question? And what is a “winning” smile? That’s another word with rich shades of meaning from something that might be charming, to something that might be triumphant, on the way to becoming an unpleasant smirk.
We are finding that in modern culture, from the late medieval period on, people read faces closely all the time, not just in literary texts, but also, in popular lyrics and in political culture.
The current Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, sometimes wears a facial expression that has become known as a smirk. It was the work of only a few minutes on Twitter to find close analysis of the Prime Ministerial face. Here is just one gloss on some video footage of Scott Morrison from March 2021, when Liberal MP Andrew Laming was charged with taking photographs of a woman in a shop as she bent down. The accompanying tweet reads:
Chin raised up because he feels superior looking down his nose at the journo, smug and arrogant. Covers his face to try & hide his smirk because he sees upskirting as being funny probably everything else. This shows he only responded when people protested.
Smiles and smirks are mutable, both in the case of particular gestures, and in semantic histories. Whether it’s in the analysis of political images, the finely wrought lyrics of popular song or the incidental plot machinery of late medieval romance, the vocabulary and semantic history of the smile — and the smirk — are rich topics for the cultural history of facial gestures.
The triggers of laughter in spoken language or conversation can often be very simple, such as a change in gesture, or in vocal tone or tempo. Speakers and listeners understand these dynamics of gesture through motor cognition and use them to great effect. The causes of laughter and the experience of humor in written texts, however, are less well understood. Kinesic Humor offers a cognitive poetics-based study of triggers of laughter in texts, focusing in particular on tonic shifts and gesture in plot and narrative.
Bolens shows how literary texts from a variety of periods provide remarkably precise information concerning kinesthesia, the role of tonicity in communication, and the impact of momentum, timing, and tempo on the way in which gestures are processed in human exchanges. She investigates the narrative use of such parameters and how they prompt laughter in a wide-ranging corpus of major authors that includes Chrétien de Troyes, Cervantes, Milton, Saint-Simon, Rousseau, Sterne, and Stendhal. Using the theory of embodied cognition, Bolens shows how thwarted perceptions and expectations of movements and sensations produce the cognitive shifts typical of humor. Bringing together narratology, cognitive studies, gesture studies, humor studies, and historical context, this book offers original perspectives on important artworks and represents a major contribution to cognitive poetics.
Originally published in French as L’Humour et le savoir des corps in 2016, this volume not only brings the work to an English-speaking audience for the first time but expands significantly on the original by analyzing a new corpus of texts and engaging with recent advances in the field to develop a cutting-edge theory of kinesic humor.
Tyne recently published an article in the University of Melbourne’s Pursuit. It discusses some of our broad project concepts and aims. You can read it here!
Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece, the ‘Mona Lisa’ in Paris’ Louvre Museum. Picture: Getty Images
Stephanie and Tyne recently spoke on a panel in a new series by the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Ethics (CAIDE) at the University of Melbourne entitled ‘Technology and the world around us.’ Alongside Dr Vanessa Bartlett and Dr Marc Cheong, we explored the theme of Art, Literature & Technology: Understanding Human Experience, Expression & Emotion in the Datafied Age.
Here you can read Stephanie’s thoughts on the crucial role of Literature in helping us navigate pressing contemporary concerns around privacy, affect-recognition technology and human emotion.
The face has long been considered a privileged site for conceptualising the human. Our faces help us articulate relationships with each other, with different forms of cultural, racial and ethnic alterity, with other species, and also, according to many philosophers, with the divine.
We observe faces all the time, assessing them according to changing cultural standards of beauty, normality or disfigurement, and through a series of complex cognitive, perceptual and increasingly technological modalities.The most obvious way of analysing facial emotion and expression is through visual images. Facial emotion in art, sculpture, cinema and other visual media is dramatic and immediate. Equally, in more self-conscious and analytic studies, in the long history of physiognomy, for example, images of human faces are consistently used to illustrate the differences between emotions. This history stretches from medieval and early modern manuals, to the drawings of Charles le Brun in the seventeenth century, and Johann Lavater in the eighteenth, to Charles Darwin’s treatise on emotions in the nineteenth century, and the influential work of psychologist Paul Ekman in the late twentieth century.
In contrast, literary texts offer far more layered and indirect representations of the face, facial gesture and emotion. These representations are less immediate, but have the advantage of slowing us down to consider some of the cognitive, affective and cultural pathways by which we understand each other’s faces.Fiction and film are sometimes referred to as “empathy machines.” I think “empathy” is only one of many things these media offer, but the idea of literature as a kind of “machine”, with its own systems and patterns for showing and teaching us about emotions is an intriguing one.
I’m going to share just one example that shows how literature both appeals to, and also teaches us about these patterns and processes of emotional understanding. It is a very famous example, from Jane Austen’s Persuasion, written in 1818.
Several years before the main action of this novel begins, the heroine, Anne Elliot, was encouraged by her friends to reject the marriage proposal of a man who was not of the right wealth or class. Anne’s health and appearance suffer, but she eventually recovers her sense of self. In the novel, the former lovers are thrown together again by circumstance, and their relationship is strained. But one day they are out walking in a group and encounter a stranger, who is obviously struck by Anne’s appearance:
It was evident that the gentleman, (completely a gentleman in manner) admired her exceedingly. Captain Wentworth looked round at her instantly in a way which shewed his noticing of it. He gave her a momentary glance, — a glance of brightness, which seemed to say, “That man is struck with you, — and even I, at this moment, see something like Anne Elliot again.”
Austen does not describe faces here; Wentworth’s head moves, but Austen does not describe any specific movement of eyes or mouth. There is no obvious named emotion here, either. But it is a very powerful moment of recognition and acknowledgement through the medium of two glances. Wentworth “sees” Anne anew through the eyes of another man – and it is important that this man’s gaze is not lubricious or improper. The stranger’s class and bearing are completely gentlemanly, so his admiring look is validated by the narrator as worthy of our attention, and consonant with the cultural and class-based ethics of proper behaviour in the novel.
Wentworth’s own quick glance has three components. First, it is a gift to Anne; something he gives her. As such it recalls their previous intimacy as well as opening up the possibility of renewing such intimacy. Second, it is a glance of brightness that we may imagine as lighting up his own face, as he also looks with renewed interest on her own. Third, and most importantly, Austen then deploys what I call the ‘speaking face’ trope.
In this trope, a face is not only expressive; it seems to speak its own silent discourse. The face is given its own rhetoric and syntax. Wentworth’s face here speaks in a complex sentence that moves from what Wentworth seems to see in the other man’s expression, to what he sees as he looks anew at Anne, and the comparison with what seems to be his memory of “Anne Elliot”, the woman he used to love.
Three times Austen stresses how quickly this happens: it is instantaneous, it is “momentary,” and it is transient, “in this moment”. Yet narrative time slows down here, as this glance of brightness is analysed in detail. This slowness gives the readers time to work their way into the understanding of this expression and its significance. At the level of dramatic action, it is just a quick glance as the stranger passes; at a narrative level, action slows down to emphasise and reveal the workings of the gaze and the way a glance between two people can carry a tremendous weight of mutual recognition, understanding, and feeling.
This trope is first used in English by Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth century and has a long, though unwritten history, in English literature.
From what we have found so far, when the face speaks in this “as if”, or “seeming to say”, the face always speaks in the first person, and in the present tense. And it is always truthful. Faces can express all kinds of emotion in fiction; they can tell stories that are true or false. Faces may express or mask true feelings, but the rhetorical conventions of the speaking face suggest that facial discourse does not lie. This is not to say that all characters can read faces accurately: but readers of fiction can. Literature creates an artificial world, if you like, in which readers are interpellated as perfectly reliable face-readers.
The rhetorical trope of the speaking face is also naturalised in everyday speech, in political commentary, the way we put captions on photographs of our pets and babies, and in popular song. But it is nevertheless a complex one that has been developed in tandem with the conventions of the novel, and one that also performs a pedagogical function. It is not a translation of a visual image; rather it seems to produce a visual image through its appeal to a common understanding of how a face might seem to speak, and more precisely, what a face that could be said to say “That man is struck with you… etc.” might look like. Equally, this trope also encourages the reader to feel how their own face might move if it expressed such a feeling, in what Guillemette Bolens calls kinesic knowledge. And in this romantic context, this trope encourages us to think what it might feel like to receive such a glance: in this case, as a gift from an old lover.
This is a very different world from the simple equivalence of a static image of a face paired with a single emotion word: happiness, anger, etc. Austen’s is a particularly complex example of the speaking face, but it demonstrates how literary expression and the textures of language can produce layers of mediated intelligence that combine emotion, expression and the rhetoric of the face. Through that very simple tag — “seemed to say” — the reader’s emotions and embodied cognition are thus brought into play as full participants in the production of meaning.
To read more about our panel or listen to the recording, head to the CAIDE event page here.
Welcome to the blog of Literature and the Face: A Critical History! We are a research team based at the University of Melbourne and the University of Geneva.
Our project aims to chart and analyse the representation of the human face in literary texts from the medieval to the contemporary era. It expects to generate comprehensive new knowledge about changing literary and textual discourses about the face by combining rhetorical analysis, the insights of cognitive literary theory, and digital methodologies.
Jane Austen, Emma (cover image)
This blog will cover our progress on the project over the next three years. We will share interesting updates about our research, as well as observations and insights from key texts and source material. We’ll feature guest posts from researchers working on topics related to our project as well as interviews, creative writing, event and workshop summaries, reflections and literary analysis.
Our blog is aimed at anyone interested in the textual, social, cultural, artistic, visual, cinematic, ethical or political history of the face, gesture and emotion. We welcome readers from academia as well as other fields and want to engage with fields as diverse as the visual arts and cinema through to psychology and the Medical Humanities. We also welcome readers from technical and scientific fields that intersect with the history of the face such as Artificial Intelligence and facial-recognition technology.
Take a look around our site and we can’t wait to connect with you!
