(RE)DEFINING GENDER IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH DRAMA [87] “HOW EMOTIONS WERE USED AS STRATEGIES OF POWER AND SHAPED LANGUAGE IN THE PLAYS AND MEMOIRS OF MARGARET CAVENDISH” MARIA JOSÉ ÁLVAREZ FAEDO 1 UNIVERSITY OF OVIEDO (SPAIN) Somewhere between excitement and uncertainty, there is a thrill that grips the reader in the midst of reading. The encounter is vital, stiring, its pull intensely pleasurable. Pervading the literary works in an affective element, a strange weather both subtle and wild. (Marsden 2019, 183) Emotions 2 can be defined as a combination of thoughts and feelings, and, in some sense, they are socially constructed. Therefore, they are of great importance for understanding character, vice and virtue, to the extent that, sometimes, an uncontrolled emotion might be a hindrance to morality. Ella Wheeler Wilcox (2017, 12) affirms that “all strong emotions proceed from and derive their strength from Love” and discerns the following kinds of women, according to their emotions: 1 This paper has been written within the framework of AEI. I+D Research Project entitled: “Women’s Emotional Life: Experiences of the World, Forms of Sensibility. Europe and America, 1600-1900” (Ref: I+D HAR2015/63804-P). 2 For criticism about emotions, see Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth- Century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Jan Pampler, The History of Emotions: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Susan Broomhall, Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2016) and Aleksondra Hultquist, “New Directions in History of Emotions and Affect Theory in Eighteenth-Century Studies.” Literature Compass, 13, no. 12, December (2016): 762-770. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/lic3.12371. We do find excellent overviews of the insights of affect theory in Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth: The Affect Theory Reader (2010), Nicholas Manning: “Why Study Unknowable Intensities? On Contemporary Affect Theory, with an Interview with Rachel Greenwald Smith” (2017), Donald R. Wehrs and Thomas Blake (eds.): The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism (2017) or Stephen Ahern: Affect Theory and Literary Critical Practice: A Feel for the Text (2019).