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Psychology
The Social Psychology of Cheerfulness
Does cheerfulness enhance selfhood and/or social advancement?
Posted May 24, 2022 Reviewed by Abigail Fagan
This post is a review of Cheerfulness: A Literary and Cultural History. By Timothy Hampton. Zone Books. 267 pp. $29.
A moderate uptick in mood, cheerfulness is not nearly as intense as anger, joy, or depression. However, according to Timothy Hampton, it can constitute a fleeting force, with a capacity to manage our emotional lives and influence other people that “has, perhaps, been overlooked and undervalued.”
In this book, Hampton, a professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Bob Dylan: How the Songs Work, provides an informative and engaging cultural and literary history of cheerfulness in Western Europe and the United States. Ranging across five centuries, he examines cheerfulness in Protestant theology, Enlightenment philosophy, modern advertising and aesthetics.
Along the way, Hampton illuminates how the concept accrued “psychological nuances,” as it shaped selfhood, personality traits, temperament, manners, and social advancement.
For Calvinists, cheerfulness served as a visual clue of engagement in a community of believers, while retaining its association with hospitality and goodwill. And it became “a policing tool,” to assess the inner promptings of the heart of each individual.
Sixteenth and seventeenth century physicians, we learn, believed that “cheerful music,” exercise “which makes the blood a cheerful juice,” and “cheerful sights, agreeable to virtue and piety,” could counteract melancholy.
Shakespeare’s tragedies, Hampton reveals, undercut idealism about cheerfulness as naiveté. Richard III, a social climber and seducer, used cheerfulness to “invent a royal personality for his most unroyal self.” Although in The Tempest, Prospero declares that cheerfulness is a check on revenge and violence, Hampton reminds us that he “lives on an enchanted island.”
Michel de Montaigne, Shakespeare’s contemporary, saw cheerfulness as partly performative, and partly private disposition. For Montaigne, as opposed to Calvin, it allowed individuals, although limited by “civility,” to be relatively unconstrained by duty or social convention.
Enlightenment thinkers emphasized the important role played by cheerfulness in building relationships between people. By pleasing both the possessor and those around him, it was a glue holding society together, at a time in which virtue was no longer represented by heroic actions. Involving exchange, cheerfulness, Hampton argues, also became an external marker of inner strength, signaling the emergence of capitalism and bourgeois sociability.
In The Polite Lady, a widely circulated text in the late eighteenth century, a mother advises her daughter to avoid anger by maintaining a “constant cheerfulness,” even if it involves the appearance but not the reality of this virtue. Doing so can keep a person going, despite the vagaries of fortune: “by a kind of innocent deceit, you may not only cheat the world into an opinion of your good nature, but what is more, you may even cheat yourself into the actual possession of this amiable quality.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, writers also laid bare the dangerous qualities of cheerfulness. The cheer of Charles Dickens’ Mr. Micawber, Hampton reminds us, is excessive and blind; Uriah Heep’s is unctuous and fake. In contrast to these minor characters, and as evidence, perhaps, of growing ambivalence, Dickens’ heroes act cheerfully, but do not talk about it.
As consumer culture expanded in the 20th century, Hampton demonstrates that cheerfulness remained a useful concept. Even as the Boy Scout Handbook dispensed advice about how to build a fire, it listed cheerfulness as one of its 12 virtues. In 1927, the University of Minnesota formed the first squad of female cheerleaders. The Power of Positive Thinking, Norman Vincent Peale’s runaway bestseller, told generations of readers, be cheerful and you will be successful. The marketers of Cheerios, which entered the cereal market in the 1940s, taught boys and girls to see the doughnut, not the hole.
Appalled, it seems, by presentations of the self for the purposes of manipulation and profit, Professor Hampton features attempts to use cheerfulness to “subvert and disrupt social and economic forces.” He places the interplay of song, vocalese, and commentary in the performances of Louis Armstrong, the great jazz musician, in the context of hideous mis-readings of Black slaves, sharecroppers, servants, singers, and comedians, as “cheerful and apparently happy creatures.” If “Cheerios absorbs the concept of cheer into a single object,” Hampton writes, “Armstrong opens it up again, generating gaiety out of the distance between himself and himself, between his dead serious virtuosity and his performing persona.” In a rendition of the tune “Shine,” for example, Satchmo takes the clichéd lyrics apart, murmuring, “Oh, chocolate drop, that’s me,” and breaking into scat singing to avoid reciting the final word of “That’s why they call me ‘Shine.’” Because he is both cheerful and playing someone who is cheerful, Hampton adds, “it is impossible for us to dismiss his cheer.”
Although the language of cheerfulness – its metaphors and images – remains much the same and is evoked endlessly, Hampton concludes that the concept has “been drained of its power to bind humans together.” In the 21st century, its emblem is a smiley face, an emoji that removes the “’countenance’ from cheerfulness and leaves us with a face – in the reduced sense of that word, a surface, like a rock face or the face of a watch.”
And the best Hampton can do is leave us with the hope that cheerfulness can “provide an instant of solace” during a crisis, to get us through the next few hours, to connect us to a neighbor: “You can’t build a politics on it. But you probably can’t build a world without it.”
