Outlining the history of emotions in Vietnam: The case of Cao Ba Quat (1809-1855)

Abstract

The emotional history of the Vietnamese people remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, this article analyses the literary works of Cao Ba Quat, a prominent figure in Vietnam’s sentimentalist movement during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The study examines his emphasis on emotion, his methods of emotional expression, and the tension between emotional liberation and emotional restraint in his writing. It also highlights contradictions between his theoretical perspectives and practical applications, attributing these tensions to the influence of centralised power on Confucian scholars in medieval Vietnam. Through the case of Cao Ba Quat, the article shows how literature could become a medium for articulating personal emotions, including grief, frustration, familial affection, and desire, while still remaining shaped by political, cultural, and literary constraints. By examining this case, the article delineates the limitations of the sentimentalist movement, which ostensibly liberated Vietnamese literature from the emotional constraints that dominated from the tenth to the seventeenth century, but did not fully overcome inherited norms of indirect and restrained expression.