The Frown
One of my friends is an American author, married to an Irishman. She told us the other day that they think of frowning as two different emotions—for her, it’s a show of sadness, a downturn of the lips; for him, it’s more or less the same thing as furrowing the brow. Last night, I had the same conversation with a New Zealander and another American. We concluded the same thing—frowning isn’t the same expression everywhere, nor does it convey the same sentiment. To me, frowning indicates anger, annoyance, or even confusion. My friend from New Zealand perceives it as a reflection of anger. To my American friend, frowning is about sadness. This got us thinking about how different cultures express the same emotion, how culture shapes not only language but the physicality of feeling.
For a moment, I panicked. How can I ever hope to reach an audience which does not express their feelings the same way I would? Frowning, in my language, translates into furrowing the brow. We furrow our brow to express disapproval or distaste. Downturning the lips doesn’t come easy to me. And pouting is mostly perceived as childish.
Thanks to this, I ended up reading an article about the function of the eyebrows in communication and social relationships. It explores the spatial and mechanical hypotheses to explain the browridge of a Homo heidelbergensis, which is much larger than the Neanderthal’s. Both hypotheses were not the right explanation, since it didn’t need to be as large to simply bridge the distance between the orbits and frontal bone, and it also didn’t affect biting. The study then proposes a social explanation—a larger, lower browridge constricted the range and subtly of movement, which is a vital part of social signalling and non-verbal communication. Eyebrow movement can indicate trustworthiness or deception, and reduced mobility of the forehead (for example, because of the use of botox) affects empathy and identification of others’ emotions.
So, we do have a commonality across cultures—the brow is a tool to express emotion. Does it matter how my readers perceive my characters’ emotions? Well, I guess if it were something as drastic as it meaning euphoria in a determined context but despair in another, it would greatly impact the reader’s experience. As it stands, my English speaking readers will probably always associate a frown with an unpleasant feeling, be it anger or sadness. It’s even funny to me. Depending on who you are, you could either find my characters too angry or too depressed. And it is what it is, death of the author and all—once the work is out of my hands, so is the meaning; it belongs to you, now. Isn’t that fascinating? These are not my characters anymore, but rather what my readers make of them. A book is, in that regard, a collective work of art.
In the end, the meat of a book is the human experience, the situations a reader will be able to relate to in some way. Maybe we wouldn’t express our pain and joy the same way, but we’re both capable of feeling them, and that’s the connective tissue between author and reader.