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Agreement on the goal of controlled intensity allowed major features of the Victorian emotional style to transcend, though not to obliterate, two key cultural divisions within the nineteenth-century middle class: region and gender. It is not yet possible to offer definitive statements about these segmenting factors, particularly where region is concerned; but it is possible to suggest how emotionology relates to the larger cultural debates involved.

Recent work on gender and family has revived the question of the distinctiveness of southern culture, particularly around the middle of the nineteenth century. Regionalists appropriately insist that too many “American” studies, even when carefully confined to the middle class, have relied disproportionately on materials from the Northeast. It is unquestionably true that most of the advice literature and popular magazines privileged authors from New England, the Midwest, and the Middle Atlantic states. But several important studies on middle-class values in the South have argued that families in this group read much of this material and shared many similar goals.⁵⁵ The principal features of Victorian emotional culture also suggest that there were more shared standards, stemming in part from shared reading, than images of hotblooded Rhett Butlers and calculating New England moneychangers might suggest. While further research explicitly focused on the South is essential, it is clear that regional factors affected but did not hopelessly entangle the Victorian style.

Southern distinctiveness did shine through in emotional criteria that related to honor. While Americans generally could still resonate to jealous intensity in defense of honor (at least when the intensity involved men disputing the sexual activities of “their” women), southern standards were more single-minded than was true in the rest of the nation. Thus southerners preserved habits of dueling or at least fighting in order to vent their jealous reactions against the claims or slights of others. Men sought to redress wives’ infidelity through private, emotionally charged action, as southern law castigated any “degrading” behavior on women’s part. Courtship rivalries were common. The law in southern states articulated the idea that jealousy could legitimately excuse violence, well past the point at which northern states began to rein in this particular emotional approach to justifiable homicide and crimes of passion.⁵⁶

Some historians have argued that southern culture supported passionateness in general, not just passion related to gender and honor. Michael Barton, for example, in an impressive analysis of letters by Civil War soldiers, concludes that the upper class in the South displayed an emotional articulateness and vivacity that markedly contrast with the careful, almost disembodied control that ran through letters by Union soldiers from virtually all social groups. He concludes, not surprisingly, that emotional style constituted one additional arena in which, whether they knew it or not, southerners and northerners disagreed.⁵⁷ Again, the existing state of research does not permit decisive dismissal of Barton’s approach,⁵⁸ though most available evidence points in the other direction. Southern Victorians wanted control along with their passion—this was one of the changes in upper-class culture in Virginia by the early nineteenth century, as Rhys Isaacs has shown. And, as I have insisted, northerners wanted passion along with their control. It is probable, in fact, that differences in emotional culture were greater in the colonial period than in the nineteenth century, precisely because many southerners came to accept the idea of targeting emotionality more carefully while northerners rediscovered the usefulness of channeled anger and insisted on the delights of soaring love.⁵⁹

Southern families, in the middle and upper classes, certainly shared with their northern counterparts an interest in respect and obedience from children, which logically led to some emotional constraint. But they did not seek abject docility, and fathers seem generally to have aimed at a rapport in which sons could discern the legitimacy of appropriate emotion, including affection. Dickson Bruce, while emphasizing some distinctive southern features, notes an ambivalence toward passion in the South—a desire to promote strong emotional attachment to family and a belief in the legitimacy of a passionate nature combined with a real concern lest emotion overwhelm reason. The same ambivalence, defined as an attempt to juggle control and intensity, effectively describes the emotional style of the Victorian North. Middle-class families in both regions generated a related ambivalence toward male violence. After the greater pacifism of early Victorianism, northern childrearing manuals (often read in southern cities as well) stressed the necessity of encouraging the emotional impulses that would lead boys to fight when the goals were just. Southern culture similarly taught its boys that, while sheer hot-headedness represented a fatal loss of control, violence was often inescapable.⁶⁰

It is wrong to assume either a southern nonchalance about restraint or a northern emotional turgidity, or both. Northerners were a bit more wary of jealousy than southerners seem to have been, though there was some inconsistency even in the North. Both regions valued targeted anger, though northerners might speak more about its uses in competition than in defense of honor. Both regions claimed adherence to ideals of love, and both showed some acceptance of its concomitant, intense grief. Soldiers from both regions displayed intense and unembarrassed family affection. While northern Civil War soldiers tended to conceal emotions experienced in battle from their wives and mothers, they wrote more freely of their fear and their efforts at courage to their fathers, so that even here the idea of uniform emotional control is off the mark. Thus Charles Francis Adams, in the best boys’ story fashion, wrote proudly of his first response to combat, when he displayed “a vigor and power which, under the circumstances, I had never hoped [I] possessed.”⁶¹ Such articulations of the concept of facing and mastering fear were also common in southerners’ accounts.

The Victorian emotional style crossed regional boundaries in the nineteenth century. Later developments, in which southern culture proved more durably wed to Victorian standards than was true in the North, reopened gaps between the regions for a time, and these later differences help explain contemporary scholarly confusion about regional differences in the nineteenth century itself.

If Victorian popularizers dwelt little on regional factors, they were profuse in identifying emotional differences between the genders—again, particularly after the somewhat androgynous early Victorian interlude. No summary of emotional style can ignore the profound contrast between the standards assigned to men and those applied to women. In fact, Victorian emotional standards depended explicitly on gender differences. Women were supposed to supply an emotional charge that men lacked while accepting men’s greater rational sense as a constraint; and at the same time men needed women to help them achieve certain kinds of control that they might naturally lack. Only through the very different contributions of both genders could the twin goals of passion and restraint be met. Yet despite these contrasts, the underlying goal of emotional intensity under control did apply to men and women alike.

Unquestionably, the passion/control dualism in the mature Victorian emotional style applied most literally to men. While women were clearly regarded as “more emotional,” both in popularized literature and in scientific renderings such as those of psychologist G. Stanley Hall, actual discussions of emotional force concentrated on men. Anger was regarded as unfeminine in women, but men were supposed to be able to use anger. Children’s stories, such as the Uncle Wiggily books popular during the early decades of the twentieth century, routinely assumed the sweetness of little girls (whether in human or in personified animal form) while often noting temper problems of boys. The result was a clear image of girls as emotionally preferable; but, translated to adulthood, the same imagery held that men had far more drive. Correspondingly, the boy or man lacking the emotional spur was shockingly feminine, a sissy. Similarly, within marriage, while popular literature occasionally cited the justified wrath of a much-abused wife and certainly commended patient husbands, the dominant tone urged particular care on the female side. Within the sacred confines of family, men were supposed to keep their temper, but it was acknowledged that their nature and their cares at work might expose some rough edges. Women were much better suited to the kind of self-control necessary to keep the home a tranquil place. “If there isn’t one person in the house who simply shoulders more than his share and goes on quietly saying nothing about it, there are going to be friction and unhappiness”—and that one person was characteristically the wife, particularly in depictions after 1850. More simply put, “the average American girl believes that womanly, domestic methods are most effective.” And more directly still, from an early Victorian address to young ladies, “An enraged woman [is] one of the most disgusting sights in nature”—a theme that etiquette books repeated through the century.⁶² Whether this devotion to calm followed from women’s real lack of anger or simply from their greater effort at self-control was not always clear, but the message came through regardless: women had no legitimate need for anger. All the devices developed to ritualize channeling that were urged on middle-class families, particularly aggressive sports like boxing, were concentrated on boys; girls remained confined to the anger-free models developed early in the Victorian period.

The passionate encounter with fear was another male preserve. Nineteenth-century popularizations did not mention courage as a female attribute; this was true even in the early scouting movements, extended past 1900. Boys were routinely told to face fear and conquer it. Girls were simply not discussed, or at most were advised not to be more fearful than necessary. Advice to mothers, to hide fears from children, assumed that women could manage some control but had not undergone the transforming emotional experience that would really make them brave. Thus T. S. Arthur, urging adult women to conceal fear, clearly implied that they would suffer from it. In his twin manuals directed respectively to girls and to boys, only his boys’ book includes the characteristically long section on moral courage; the girls’ pamphlet is mute on this subject.⁶³ Boys’ stories, like the Rollo series, liked to show girls paralyzed by fear while their brothers dealt with danger. Courage was nice, but courage in front of trembling females was even nicer. Again, the word “sissy” clearly showed the distinctions between gender standards where the encounter with fear was concerned.⁶⁴

The basis for the gender-specific rules on handling the dangerous emotions lay, obviously, in assigned roles. Women, being domestic creatures, did not need and, regarding anger, could not afford the emotional range men required because of their work in the world. Public-private emotional divisions were crucial to Victorian culture, and these provided gender markers as well. The home was a haven in which disruptive emotions had no place. Women should therefore be emotionally gentle. The burden on men was in some ways greater, as they had to develop two emotional faces, one domestic and the other economic and political. But this same dualism gave them a far greater range for emotional intensity.

The distinction is interestingly revealed in the recurrent popular comments on jealousy. Men and women were held to differ here as well, as jealousy became feminized. With regard to female jealousy, a certain ambiguity developed that was not granted to men in Victorian culture: a bit of jealousy might be expected from dependent, emotional women, and a loving man might respond by changing behaviors even though the emotion was petty and potentially disruptive. Men were more constrained with respect to low-level jealousy; there was no acceptance of a jealous male in routine commentary. But when jealousy rose to heights of passion, motivating vengeance, men alone held the keys. Women could not, in law, use the claim of jealous rage to excuse attacks on their spouses’ lovers. The few who attempted this defense were uniformly convicted. Even where defense of family was concerned, intensity, again, was male.⁶⁵

Thus women were seen as emotional but not passionate. The intensity that would lead to dramatic, effective action was a masculine preserve. As part of the larger imagery of female passivity, women’s emotions were often seen as soft and desirably gentle. Men were not only more highly sexed but were also possessed of more driving emotions, which served both for economic competitiveness and as a foundation for broad social action. Women, as befit their domestic sphere, had no such range. Songs of grief persisted in using examples of women’s deaths, which served to emphasize a male role in grief but also reminded the audience of female frailty. Beliefs about female hysteria, though not commonly discussed in the popular prescriptive literature, may have added to the sense of women’s emotional boundaries.

Even motherlove, that deep wellspring that women alone possessed by nature, was a sacrificing, subterranean emotion more than a driving force. As Jan Lewis has demonstrated, motherlove lived in the children, but it must not overwhelm them. Mothers “must beware of disclosing [their] feelings, or at least, let there not be an apparent attempt to exhibit them. … This would be most ruinous. Rather let [the child] feel that there exists in your bosom a well spring of feeling and anxiety, which others know nothing of, and which even he cannot fathom.” Women’s maternal intensity, in sum, must be self-effacing; it did not motivate powerful action. A woman endowed with “warm feelings” and “quick apprehension” must exercise “self-control” so that she might display only a “calm good sense.” Emotion was not an unqualified good, and to the extent that women were particularly emotional, they could complicate their own maternal tasks. As John Abbott insisted, in discussing “The Mother’s Difficulties,” “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.”⁶⁶

Unquestionably, male and female emotions were held to differ, as were the functions of their emotions. The same rules that defined a combination of passion and control also clearly specified areas where women could not tread. Criticisms of women’s excessive, debilitating emotionality surfaced recurrently.

Yet a full differentiation was not attempted, and even the male passion/female sentiment distinction should not be pressed too far. Men, too, could fail through emotional excess, as when they displayed ungovernable temper. They, like female hysterics, could be subject to medical controls. Women, for their part, though disbarred from channeled anger or the passions of courage, had intensities of their own. The fact that mothers must monitor their display did not automatically differentiate them from men, who were also required to be watchful. Though manipulated for the child’s good, deep emotional expression could be part of maternalism: “Another outlet for thy womanly heart: a mirror in which thy smiles and tears shall be reflected back; a fair page on which thou, God-commissioned, mayst write what thou wilt; a heart that will throb back to thine, love for love.”⁶⁷ Here was some female equivalence for the male joys of channeling anger toward a justified target or conquering the pangs of fear through courage triumphant.

The point is that pronounced gender separation and a passion/control combination coalesced in Victorian emotional culture. Control for women was more severe, as it enforced domesticity and was constantly associated with the insistence on sweetness and calm. But a version of the characteristic tension applied to both genders.

In romantic love, finally, men and women shared the field. Love was the intense emotion meant to unite two different characters, but in this case with equal fervor. While some Victorian advice suggested a slight concern that men might not love as well as women (because they were too reserved or distracted by other things and of course because their lusts might get the better of them), the injunction for men to love deeply was a standard fixture in the emotional culture. Women’s capacity to love was seldom doubted, though an interesting subgroup, in men’s advice literature after 1870, began to worry about women’s “other” interests, including incipient feminism, as a distraction from love: “Why do not women marry?” The idea of love, however, burned brightly still, for the same author who fretted about rising divorce and distracted women praised a pure love that was “unequaled by any other emotion.” No restraint was necessary. Men and women could and should love with equal, unbounded intensity. It was this very fervor, indeed, that could bridge the gaps between the genders and reconcile different emotional natures with the equal necessity of a tight marital bond. With the same intensity, in effect, men and women would love different things. As T. S. Arthur put it, a woman would fall deeply in love with the “moral wisdom of her husband,” while men would fall just as deeply in love with the affectionate nature of good women.⁶⁸

The passion/control combinations ascribed to emotionally correct men and women differed greatly. They unquestionably privileged men in a host of ways. Yet the formulas suggested for each gender were nonetheless somewhat comparable. Each had needs and outlets for intensity, each must of course learn important management controls. And the whole package was assembled by the one kind of intensity that could be sincerely enjoined on men and women alike: the intensity of a deeply spiritual, faithful, consuming love.