Most stereotypes have to carry at least a grain of truth in them to make them work, and the well-worn cliché of Scottish men being unable to express their emotions is no exception: the idea that our feelings are on mute covers is present from an early age.
It is especially true during the teenage years, when the full gamut of emotions can historically be covered by one word: “Fine”. Unfortunately, this coincides with the time in life when they have to be emotionally literate to be literate in the traditional sense, certainly in terms of the English syllabus.
When teaching literature to senior male pupils, generally the problem had been not their grasp of literary techniques or the ability to analyse but the vocabulary to accurately describe the emotions and behaviours of the characters in the text. It’s not that the students couldn’t recognise the negative behaviour, they just didn’t have the appropriate language to describe it that would satisfy the Scottish Qualifications Authority.
Yet, I can’t be the only English teacher to have noted a gradual opening up by our male pupils, illustrated most recently to me when working with one teenager on his Higher critical essay that examined the complex character of John Proctor from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. In one scene he casually described Proctor’s actions of adding salt to the rabbit stew made by his wife as “coercive control”. His confident use of the language of emotional literacy took me by surprise; with students in the past, I would have had to probe continuously to get something more profound than that Proctor was being “snide”. Similarly, another male student wrote about Jay Gatsby “gaslighting” Daisy when he tried to compel her to deny her past feelings for her husband Tom.
And further examples keep cropping up: Lennie Small, the impulsively destructive character in Of Mice and Men, has been described as being “unable to self-regulate” by one pupil; another writes about Roger slowly becoming desensitised while on the deserted island in Lord of the Flies. Such is our current crop of students’ familiarity with the language of the emotions that I have even heard one describing Linda Loman as an “enabler”, facilitating her husband to keep his destructive fantasies alive in Death of a Salesman.
Perhaps boys respond more readily to examining characters in print, rather than in real life. Putting the actions of a fictional character under the microscope over a period of weeks may be far easier than examining your own behaviour or that of those around you.
I suppose everyone has become more emotionally literate. Society as a whole is moving on from the idea that repressing our emotions is a sign of strong masculinity and a desired character trait, towards a growing awareness of the damage that not understanding or expressing our behaviour can do to our own and others’ mental health.
And this is something we can build on with the help of literature: there is a growing wealth of evidence that reading novels, plays and poems supports good mental health and can help alleviate anxiety and depression.
Schools should consider formalising the link between personal and social education (PSE) and English, as part of interdisciplinary learning. Bibliotherapy - an approach to improving mental health treatment that relies on books - could be used in PSE lessons, with a focus on literature that has examples of resilience or dealing with challenges.
And PSE lessons in emotional literacy could use fictional characters to describe real-life situations, which can take the emotional heat out of a scenario - after all, what makes literature worth engaging with is the veracity of the human emotions displayed within. I imagine the complex reaction of the barman to the sudden violence at the conclusion of William McIlvanney’s short story At the Bar would invigorate a lesson on the Scottish male psyche.
It goes without saying that the wider benefit of the language of the emotions being used in English goes far beyond writing better critical essays. Being able to recognise and put into widely understood vocabulary the emotions of fictional characters makes it easier to name and understand our own feelings - a lesson which will remain long after the memory of the specifics of a literary character’s tribulations have been long forgotten.
Gordon Cairns is a teacher of English who works in Scotland
