Читать книгу American Cool - Peter N. Stearns - Страница 11

One general index of mature Victorianism emerged about midcentury, when standard setters displayed a growing interest in putting dangerous emotions to good use. The bad-good dichotomy remained, still defined mainly by compatibility with family solidarity, but the later Victorians became more interested in emotional challenge and emotional motivation, and this caused them to reevaluate desirable emotional range.

The emergence of a more nuanced approach to anger was a key component in this change. Even in the early period, a few advice writers, while hewing to the party line on anger as a family scourge, suggested that complete absence of anger was undesirable in men. William Alcott wrote, “I should not envy those, who were so indifferent—so wanting in sensibility—as never to have a single feeling of displeasure”; and he criticized those who felt that the best temper was one “incapable” of being moved. A story in Peterson’s drove home a similar point, as a young wife mused that “Tom was spirited and quick-tempered—great, loving hearted men always are.”²⁷

From the late 1840s—T. S. Arthur’s 1848 manuals for young men and women signaled some of the change—these themes were more explicitly picked up, as Victorian culture developed a new ambiguity where anger was concerned. The basic message was simple, though its ramifications were potentially complex: anger was a bad emotion at home, but it was a vital emotion in the world of work and politics. Women should remain anger free, in keeping with their domestic roles, but men were set the challenging task of curbing their anger within the family while utilizing its potential to spur actions necessary to competition or social justice. At the same time, invocations of childish innocence began to decline as popularizers saw a real and vital natural anger that, at least in men, must be tamed without being excised. Darwinian findings played a role in this redefinition of childhood from the 1860s onward, as popular literature began to acknowledge a “natural” anger that must be confronted, not simply preached away.²⁸

Some early Victorian advice persisted, notably in the constant concern that parents curb their anger in dealing with children. Emotional control remained essential, and it was up to parents to initiate this control by regulating their reactions.

Anger could still be excoriated, though the demonic imagery tended to fade. And while family harmony remained a crucial reason for anger control, the justifications now broadened to a wider social realm. Anger was now a public problem as well, a shift that would be extended further after 1920. Thus childish anger necessitates serious “counsel and punishment, an atmosphere of grief and disapproval,” for it can lead to “wars, rapine and misery.” “Anger is not lovely,” and children’s rages create such ugly physical symptoms that the person seems “a child no longer, but a creature under demoniacal possession.” Children must not be permitted to gain anything by showing anger, for they must learn to solve problems by other means. Motherlove was still invoked, but childrearing manuals began to pay more attention to practical advice on how to avoid irritations and insufficient sleep. Etiquette books, in contrast to family advice manuals, continued to stress the importance of temper control, particularly avoiding arguments and monitoring conversational style.²⁹

The crucial revision, however, involved the notion of anger’s usefulness. Even the etiquette books distinguished between polite conversation (“general society”) and other social settings, such as earnest discussions with friends. Other literature, however, suggested the crucial norms more clearly. Horatio Alger’s books on work and mobility urged the importance of aggressive, competitive behavior, in which serenity had little place. Darwinians like G. Stanley Hall simultaneously condemned anger’s destructive potential, even its threat to physical health, while also urging that “a certain choleric vein gives zest and force to all acts.” In the same vein, early in the twentieth century the American Institute of Child Life warned against anger in a pamphlet directed toward the parental role in temper control, while simultaneously venturing that the emotion should be “a great and diffuse power in life, making it strenuous, giving zest to the struggle for power and rising to righteous indignation.” Boys’ stories and children’s advice literature pushed the same theme: “the strenuous soul must fight or grow stagnant or flabby”; “better even an occasional nose dented by a fist … than stagnation, general cynicism and censoriousness, bodily and psychic cowardice.” A child-study manual in 1903 took up a similar view toward anger and fighting; a boy with no tendency to fight would be unnatural, a “nonentity”: for, in the long run, “competition is a form of fighting that is very permanent all their life.” Pushing more toward social justice, the National Congress of Mothers urged girls to maintain good cheer and prepare a tranquil home but wanted mothers to school their sons in “righteous indignation”; for with such training, even a violent temper can be a “splendid force” providing “royal service.”³⁰

The key was proper control and direction, which gained pride of place over the earlier blanket cautions. Parents were urged to react strictly to defiant childish anger but to avoid breaking their sons’ spirits. Stories showed boys angrily attacking bullies and other legitimate targets, while sports such as boxing were specifically recommended as an ideal means of preserving anger while channeling it into healthy activity. The goal was to teach controlled use, so that properly socialized adults would be masters of a fund of anger, with the experience to target it appropriately. In the mid-1890s G. Stanley Hall approvingly cited a teacher who argued for more anger in schools, in precisely this spirit: “There is a point where patience ceases to be a moral or pedagogical virtue but becomes mere flabbiness.” Into the 1920s childrearing manuals combined sincere condemnations of anger’s role in crime and violence, which should be prevented by proper discipline and large doses of maternal affection, with praise for anger’s role in motivating and energizing. Here, the emotion had value for individual and society alike: “If he is stirred, if he reacts powerfully, out of that very stirring may come achievements and performance of a high level.”³¹

Along with the reassessment of anger, fear was also reevaluated from the late 1840s onward. The early Victorian admonitions against using fear to discipline persisted, but they were now supplemented by active praise for the fearless child. In 1847 Horace Bushnell urged that children must not be taught to fear parent or God, but he added a new and explicit note on the “natural state of courage” that children could utilize in their familial and religious lives. Not merely absence of terror, but active courage now served as the goal, and while parental caution played a role in developing this more active emotional stance, it must be supplemented by children’s own encounter with, and triumph over, the power of fear. Family writers rarely expounded on this theme at great length. T. S. Arthur’s uplifting but curt appeal, “Train up your children to be virtuous and fearless. Moral courage is one of the surest safeguards of virtue,”³² was a characteristic sample. Yet the idea of active engagement with fear as a source and test of emotional bravery became an increasingly common staple.

The same theme resounded in popular boys’ fiction through the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century. Oliver Optic, one of the most widely sold writers in the boyhood genre, offered a representative story: a lad stops a plunging horse, shrieking lady atop, without considering his own danger. He has had neither time nor wish for deliberation, but he has emerged with a new kind of emotional confidence. “He was a boy who would not fight even in self-defense, but he had the courage to do a deed which might have made the stoutest heart tremble with terror.” Harry Castlemon’s boy in the pilot house exhibits similar bravery: “We have seen that he felt fear. Had it been otherwise he must have possessed nerves of steel, or have been utterly destitute of the power of reasoning; but that fear did not so completely overpower him as it had but a short time before. … On the contrary, it nerved him to make the greatest exertions.” Courage involved control over emotion amid great intensity. Fear became an essential experience in the inculcation and testing of bravery.³³

In the aftermath of the Civil War, military settings routinely drove the message home in boys’ stories. An injured lad was urged to “keep up a good heart. … A little pluck does more for a wound than a good many bandages.” Invocations of mother and prayer provided the basis for courage in this and other cases. In another instance, a boy faces a mad dog, “cool and courageous in the moment of danger,” then in a later trembling reaction realizes that a kindly God had sustained him.³⁴

Fear differed from anger, of course, in that its role in character development was more indirect. Whereas anger could be usefully channeled, fear had no direct utility. Its role was more subtle, providing the test that allowed males to learn their own moral and emotional courage. The links between fear and anger were nevertheless real. Both emotions provided moments of great intensity vital to effective living. Both could be used for motivation and moral development, if properly mastered. The spirited Victorian boy was one who did not avoid fear, but faced it and triumphed over it, while using anger as a spur to action.³⁵

The connection between fear and anger showed clearly in the evolution of the word “sissy,” which by 1900 had clearly come to mean an effeminate boy who was too cowardly or unaggressive or both. The word had been coined in the 1840s as an affectionate term for “sister,” but in the 1880s it began to become a derisive term for spineless boys and men, almost exclusively in the United States.³⁶

As the role of fear evolved in the Victorian emotional lexicon, it was seen as less problematic. While parents were still reminded not to frighten infants unnecessarily, no elaborate discussions were considered necessary. Most late Victorian prescriptive writers, like Felix Adler (the last popular childrearing manualist who wrote in an almost purely Victorian mold), assumed that older children could learn essential goals through literary example and appropriate parental advice. The goal was moral courage, an emotional resource that could overcome physical cowardice and so conquer the “paralyzing” effect of fear “by a powerful effort of the will.” Character training, derived from good reading and good teachers, would do the trick.³⁷

The Victorian reversals on fear and anger were not matched by a revised outlook on jealousy. Because this emotion was more feminine and more fully attached to love, earlier warnings largely prevailed, tempered by some practical advice on the need to help a partner overcome jealousy by reassurance. Even with jealousy, however, the later Victorians evinced a strange, almost anachronistic fascination with emotional power that, without establishing a really new emotionology, was linked to the larger preoccupation with intensity.

Typically, the setting was a murder trial in which a man had killed the lover of his wife or fiancée. The period between 1859 (the Daniel Sickles trial) and about 1900 saw a series of such courtroom dramas, widely publicized and greeted by general popular acclaim, in which well and expensively defended men argued that jealousy had overcome them to the extent that they could no longer control their actions. While the specific defense rested on loss of control and technical insanity, the larger argument suggested that here was another emotion whose power could lead to just and vigorous action. “For jealousy is the rage of a man; therefore he will not spare in the day of vengeance. … Those who dishonor husbands are here warned of their doom. … Jealousy, which defies and bears down all restraint, whether it be what we technically call insanity or not, is akin to it. It enslaves the injured husband, and vents itself in one result, which seems to be inevitable and unavoidable.” So argued the successful attorney for Daniel McFarland, whose acquittal in 1870 won warm approval from hundreds of well-wishers. Daniel Sickles’s lawyer, while duly noting how jealousy took possession of his client like a “consuming fire,” similarly pointed to the justness of jealousy: “He would have been false to the instincts of humanity if that rage of jealousy had not taken possession of him.” Here, too, the jury accepted the plea.³⁸

The mature Victorian emotional style accepted and admired the power of passion, for this emotional arsenal underlay the strong wills and vigorous actions that identified good and successful male character and that yielded positive economic and political results. Untrammeled passion that mastered a person’s reason was not acceptable; in this regard the use of jealousy defenses, rare in any event, was genuinely exceptional—though this exception may be explained by the role of jealousy in protecting home and family. But where emotions brought fire to the person who controlled them, and where they entailed no disruption to a calm and loving family, they were positively courted. Management, not repression, was the key, so that dangerous emotions were kept in their proper place—largely away from the hearth—and used to achieve rationally chosen ends.