We live in an age where emotional literacy and legibility is highly desirable, and where so-called Emotion Detection technologies lead us to believe that, with enough data, we might crack the enigma of other people’s emotions. This chapter begins from a different proposition: what is it to want to remain emotionally inscrutable? Beginning with Darwin’s 1872 observation that studying other peoples’ emotions is ‘difficult’, the chapter then argues that ambivalence and illegibility is part of the nature of emotion itself. It then moves to consider a series of moments when people have deliberately used emotional inscrutability as a form of self-defence and defiance, including in ‘camp’ retorts by early twentieth century cross-dressers, and in Audre Lorde’s refusal to emotionally engage with white women about race because it came at such a high psychological cost to her. In this way, this chapter shines a light on those moments when emotional inscrutability becomes a powerful political tool.

Romanticism and realism are not diametrically opposed, and the history of the terms “romance” and “novel” reveal dialogical genre processes. Optative romanticism in Europe and America is in tension with negative romanticism. The principal American romance tradition is largely one of a dark romanticism, in which the gothic and grotesque merge with realism in the “romance-novel,” as in the fictions of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and later modernist and postmodernist writers. Four basic modes of Gothic can be identified ontologically as: indeterminate “historical” Gothic; determinate “rationalized” Gothic; determinate “supernatural” Gothic; indeterminate “equivocal” Gothic. The ambiguous fourth mode may involve questions of metaphysics, epistemological uncertainty, psychological instability, and textual indeterminacy. The fourth mode characterizes the fictions of Cormac McCarthy and Herman Melville – strikingly exemplified by the pervasive theme of “inscrutability” in Moby-Dick, McCarthy’s favorite book.