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Later Victorianism also built growing fervor into the vision of love, particularly romantic love. This was another area in which intensity won active support, here involving women equally with men. The early Victorian definition of romantic passion was not fully revised, as were those of anger and fear. But there was change, as calm sentimentality was supplemented by a transcendent emotional charge.

Continued emphasis on motherlove formed part of the framework for the growing attention to emotional goals between the sexes. Its potent impact on boys as well as girls established a link between motherlove and children’s ability to form deep affective ties. In fulfilling her varied special tasks—“it is the province of the mother, to cultivate the affections”—mother set standards for all her offspring. As Catharine Beecher put it, “the mother holds, as it were, the hearts of her children in her hand.” And while mothers offered a host of qualities, including serenity and morality, the central ingredient was “disinterested love, … ready to sacrifice everything at the altar of affection.” Not only family but also the community and the wider world would be transformed by this deep, redeeming passion. As Mother’s Magazine gushed, “Love—flowing from the hidden spring in a mother’s heart … [flows] deeper and wider as it goes, till neighborhood, friends, and country are refreshed by its living waters.” Instructing by example, the mother “teaches our hearts the first lesson of love … around [her] our affections twine and closely and surely, as the young vine clasps itself about the branch that supports it: our love for [her] becomes so thoroughly a part and portion of ourselves, that it bids defiance to time and decay.” Children of a loving mother would come to “revere her as the earthly type of perfect love … they cannot but desire to conform themselves to such models.”³⁹

Motherlove was intense; it knew no bounds. It was “untiring,” “imperishable,” “unquenchable,” and “irrepressible.” Its very intensity imprinted the mother indelibly on her offspring: “Yes! You will live in your children.” “Working like nature … she … sends forth from [her] heart, in pure and temperate flow, the life-giving current … her warm affections and irrepressible sympathies.” The religiouslike qualities of this love were no accident; they were deliberately signaled by many advice writers, evangelical and secular alike.

As with other intense emotions, motherlove required self-control. While expressions of love itself could be fervent, a more generalized emotionality was not recommended; mothers must be calm, avoid anger, shun displays of fear. Here, too, at least in the domestic realm, motherlove showed its relationship to the broader Victorian emotional style: “We must bring our own feelings and our own actions under a rigid system of discipline, or it will be in vain for us to hope to curb the passions and restrain the conduct of those who are looking to us for instruction and example.” The resulting tension between praise for women’s natural, perfervid emotional endowment and suspicion of women’s potentially excessive emotionality was never fully resolved. Maternal self-control was essential in conveying the good qualities of motherlove to the child without the complications of idiosyncratic emotionality or disconcerting emotional expressions. Intensity should underlie, not dominate. Here, too, the relationship with the general Victorian style was apparent in the recommendation that natural impulse combine with focus and control.⁴⁰

Along with the growing emphasis on men’s ability to utilize anger and fear, masculine emotion was increasingly connected to motherlove in middle-class popular culture in the later nineteenth century. (Girls required less attention because they presumably shared their mothers’ natural emotional endowment and easily followed the maternal model.) A standard popular story, common in boys’ fiction and adult fiction alike, involved men who strayed from home in youth or young adulthood, sometimes causing their mothers great pain in the process, but who retained the fervent image of motherlove throughout their wanderings, only to find how it sustained them and ultimately brought them to redemption. Love, here, was salvation. Even at his most reprobate, the young man retained his mother’s love as “the only humanized portion of my heart. … I shall never be an infidel while I can remember my mother.” Many men wrote to women’s magazines precisely in this vein, carrying fiction into fact: S., for example, recalled how his mother’s love and prayers brought about his religious conversion, bringing salvation quite literally. In a lower key, the same message was transmitted in boys’ stories that referred to mother and prayer in the same breath, as sustained in the face of fear.⁴¹

The sublimity of mother’s love was echoed in the growing literature on love between man and woman. In all the advice literature in the later nineteenth century, motherlove contrasted with, although it did not necessarily preclude, sexual attraction. As Eliza Duffey claimed in The Relation of the Sexes, while granting the importance of sexuality, “Is it not possible that there may be a love strong enough and abiding enough, untinged by [sexual] passion, to hold a husband and wife firm and fast in its bonds, and leave them little to desire? I believe it; I know it.” “I believe in marriage all through—the soul, the mind, the heart, and the body, and I would make the last the weakest and least indispensable tie.” And the popular medical adviser Henry Chavesse added: “But while we thus speak of pure and passionate love, we may refer to the animal passion, which in no way is akin to love.” The phrenologist Orson Fowler tried his hand at the same topic, distinguishing love from mere physical attraction. “True love … appertains mainly to … this cohabitation of soul with a soul. … It is this spiritual affinity of the mental masculine and feminine for each other.”⁴² Religiouslike intensity was love’s hallmark, though proper incorporation of physical expression was allowable. Popularizers disagreed about how openly to acknowledge sex in the equation, but they united in distinguishing love from sex and in highlighting the soulful fervor of love.

Writers addressing women sometimes presented the goals of love with a special gender twist. Because of their sacrificing, maternal propensities, women could more readily live up to the love ideals than men, whose greater carnality was a constant distraction. Again, Eliza Duffey: “Women are not like men in sensual matters. They … do not love lust for lust’s sake. Passion must be accompanied … with the tender graces of kindness and … self-denial or they are quickly disgusted.” “Women … have more of the motherly nature than the conjugal about them.”⁴³ But beneath the agreed-upon focus on a transcendent, essentially spiritual, certainly selfless love, there was disagreement over women’s sexuality among the Victorian popularizers. Stories in the women’s magazines frequently addressed the ennobling power of love, but they did not necessarily distinguish men from women in this emotional area, and they were widely read by both genders. Furthermore, advice literature directed to middle-class men picked up the same focus on fervent, spiritual love. A religious tract noted: “Love is the secret element or power in universal life,” with spiritual love serving as “the bond of wedded souls in heaven.” A few popularizers commented not only on men’s distracting sensuality, which caused men to spoil love by failing to discipline lust, but also on their tendency to lapse from the most fervent devotion after marriage or their failure to show deep feeling in contrast to women’s greater frankness. “Men who feel deeply, show little of their deepest feelings.” But this motif had been common even in the early Victorian decades, and after about 1850, the male control/female fervor theme became too simple. T. S. Arthur noted that men and women loved different objects because of their different natures but claimed that the love itself was equally deep. Love is “the richest treasure of our nature, the most human, and yet the most divine, of our aspirations.” As Frederick Saunders put it, pure and refined love is “unequaled by any other emotion.” “When there is great love, and it is shared by two … every difficulty is cleared away, and concord ends by hoisting its banner over a man’s house”; “love is the strength of strengths.” Arthur himself noted how love perfected both genders through the “mystical and holy” union it provided.⁴⁴

Love was, for mature Victorian culture, a universal emotional solvent. Properly spiritual, it knew no bounds. It united the otherwise different emotional natures of men and women in deep communion. It constituted one of life’s greatest goals. Here, as Karen Lystra has pointed out, is decisive evidence of the central role of open, intense emotion in Victorian culture. In discussions of love the Victorians built on an eighteenthcentury definition as they castigated not only selfishness but also restraint. The pleasure of love lay in openness, revelation, and, ultimately, the emotional transcendence involved in union with the other. More even than motherlove, this definition of romantic love (and some Victorians disputed the term “romantic” as too prosaic) required no limits. Even publications by previously dour religious groups, like the Pittsburgh Presbyterians, carried love’s banner with poems about couples in a swirling mountaintop fog, “their pale cheeks joined.”⁴⁵ Love became a panacea.