my twitter died bc I didn’t have a number to confirm it so here is an art x-post until I get that stuff figured out lol…………………… pls I think about this twi thread so much
I drew this on a whim but later on when I was doing research on public crying I found a cool book about the history of crying in Britain, and after reading it I was struck with some thoughts on how this famously stoic boy feels about having cries. I think I’ve come across a few headcanons about sadboy Arthur Kirkland, based on stereotypes of the attitudes English people generally have towards being emotional. I wanted to explore a bit on how the history of norms about the general expression of emotions have influenced how England would have comported himself throughout time… what entails is some discussion of savoury subjects such as masculinity, dependency and British insularity as well...
(Disclaimer: norms around emotions and their expressions are obviously gendered in a country like the UK, so this discussion will be only applicable to a male-identifying England. CW for mentions of colonialism.)
In the present day, England is likely to keep himself from putting on displays of tears in public. He’s self-aware of the stereotype of the English able to uphold a “stiff-upper lip” in trying circumstances, and to a degree, adheres to it himself. This articulation of the myth of English stoicism arose recently, crystallized in the public mind through the propaganda of the First and Second World Wars, and packaged as an export of a stereotype (America being the most eager consumer of this, always happy to construe anything British to a way to patronize England. As you can imagine, he comported himself as eternally carefree as a moral counterbalance to England’s anal agedness).
The later Victorian years preceded the synthesis of this stereotype, when the association of tears with weakness and foreignness antagonized their shedding by English men. As Britain was reaching the peak of global geopolitical dominance, the physical and mental conditions as well as characters of its men became a matter of national security. A boy whose upbringing did not involve a disciplining with the Stiff Upper Lip ethic would become a man that threatened the upholding of imperial activities. Though Arthur later became a bit more aware of how the norm of the Stiff Upper Lip spawned from this ideology, at the time it wasn’t a matter for questioning, given the alibis granted by scientific inquiry. Darwinism and psychiatry shaped anthropological theories of weeping, which were made available for use to identify a human society’s proximity to either primitivity or civility – English/British society’s supposed exceptional ability to strictly regulate emotional expression marked them as superior, most obviously to non-white (or non-WASP), colonised societies, as well as to other Europeans. The incapacity to restrain passions was in turn pathologized as “emotional incontinence.” During this time, Arthur was most extremely committed to the repression of tears as a matter of conforming to the Age of Reason. But the sought-for clever, unsentimental disposition came at the cost of pre-emptively devaluing empathy. Furnishing the imperial superiority complex with the view that fellow Europeans were more prone to emotional excess, island-hood came to represent independence from the need for friends rather than the inability to keep friends at all.
Around the close of the Victorian era, the intertwined agonies of loneliness and repression of empathy -- particularly poignant when witnessing his state calibrate its technologies to wage violence and inequality at home and abroad -- inclined Arthur to take seriously complaints about the British “undevelopment of the heart” coming from perspectives of the British cultural elite, many of whom were already critically exploring other social mores. Intellectually, he had a general awareness of the conventions that bound himself and the English people, specifically those who were middle class. Yet, even in circumstances where he was in a place of repose and privacy, with the opportunity to weep – e.g. when affected by the catharsis spurred by the climax of a tragic play, after a gruesome battle on a foreign land, after attempting to comfort a struggling family – he’d find that he couldn’t. At that point he could not even be affected by stories of child suffering -- which were archetypical of Victorian heartrending stories, and which once could have evoked some adequate tears from him when it was popular to be evoked as such. By that point, he’d been comfortable for too long being held captive to his idea of masculinity. Meanwhile, amongst his fellow semi- or fullblown-alcoholic European peers, he gained a reputation as a weepy drunk -- in spite of weepy drunkenness having been a sign of foreignness. Inebriation was an easy escape from those terrible scruples. His drinking companions would have little sympathy to afford England during those fits of incoherent, pity-and-alcohol-fuelled blubbings.
Only with the social upheaval following World War II could norms have the chance to slacken, at least relative to British standards, which by that point were world-famously tight as straitjackets. Psychiatric support for weeping, trickling in primarily from America, encouraged discussion, at least, that recognized that the Stiff Upper lip ethic would be obsolete in the post-war era. Tears provoked by passion no longer were obviously the symptoms of a national traitor. For instance, Arthur came to find release in partaking in collective tear-shedding at emotionally-charged football matches, or during events symbolic of the decline of his empire. Despite his roughly century-long period of restraint, engagement in public rehearsals of catharsis didn’t always come without embarrassment or strangeness.
The period of the stiff upper lip was one of the most hostile to tear-shedding, but prior to this, Arthur had a liberal understanding of what it meant to cry. Throughout history, English society had variously regarded crying as a pious act, or as an intellectual act of sympathy, or a pathetic display of paternal affection, etc.. And with centuries’ worth of “maturing,” having more interactions with other nations, and becoming more self-aware, it became more important to Arthur to take these norms seriously, and more tactfully regulate the expression of emotion. With the 16th century reformation, he learnt from Anti-Catholics to avoid certain forms of weeping that represented the blasphemous and excessive frivolities that Catholicism spoiled religious Christian practices with. (This strengthened the foundation for anti-Europe feeling, but also further justified the feeling of superiority over the Irish). In the aftermath of the French Revolution and the 25 years of war that came with it, a triumphant yet jaded England harboured a special disdain for the seeming unrestrained passion and sentimentality that characterized France’s revolutionary condition. Since the onset of the 19th century, the restraint of emotion would last, to varying degrees, as an aspect of a certain kind of cultural conservatism.
Especially with hindsight, England did appreciate that the correlations of weeping with weakness, effeminacy, foppery, self-indulgence, madness, primitiveness, or degeneration etc. were not natural, and were products of ideological interests. But, having harboured a lifelong insecurity as an island situated a stone’s throw away from an unpredictably violent continent, it tended to seem necessary to adopt any behaviour that could defend him from the machinations of the outside world. His overall habits to repress feelings would be a difficult habit to discard, mostly because he couldn’t be motivated enough to be rid of it anyway. This made it tricky for the unexpected moments when the need for catharsis became too much. The reflex to smother instances of agonised feeling could be discomfiting due to the obsolete moral value the habit stands for. He occasionally indulged in some weeping so long as it’s appropriate and in private, but the sense of comfort that resulted would now be alien too.
And in turn, he couldn’t help his continued alienation from others. While it became more normal to be sceptical of the Stiff Upper Lip’s place in the world post WWII, and Arthur adopted more liberal gender norms, he couldn’t completely abandon old associations of maudlin sentiment so long as they persisted with some strength in English society. Being methodically uncomfortable in sharing these rare feelings with others, these days he’d find real comfort instead in his own geography, as he’s often done so in the past. He is always proximate to the ocean, or if not, to rain, or to sombre crowds of people -- with which he convenes, to observe the latent signs of their confident grieving in lieu of what he himself cannot express.
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Tl;dr what if Arthur is just a boy about emotions but you also used English history to explain it.
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