Читать книгу American Cool - Peter N. Stearns - Страница 16

Victorian emotional culture capped its central themes by developing a growing reliance on guilt as the central enforcement mechanism for proper behavior, including suitable expressions of feeling. John Demos has outlined the process by which middle-class Americans shifted from primary reliance on shame to primary reliance on guilt between the mideighteenth and the midnineteenth centuries.⁶⁹ While the change entailed a host of ramifications, reflecting declining reliance on community cohesion in the northern states and the need to provide more family-based and ultimately internalized emotional discipline, the relationship to the larger evolution of emotional style was vivid. Guilt may be seen as a reaction to the possible loss of cherished relationships, with expression of guilt helping to restore those relationships. The intensity of family emotional ties in Victorian culture created precisely the environment in which the intensity of guilt could itself receive new emphasis.

The enforcement of shame in colonial New England went beyond the fabled stocks, pillories, and badges that exposed offenders to public ridicule. Even whipping, though producing physical pain, was carefully scheduled in public to inflict scorn as well. Thus on one occasion a female offender who was spared the whip because of infirmity was ordered to stand at the whipping post “that she may in some measure bear the shame of her sin.”⁷⁰ Concern about shame is revealed in many lawsuits designed to avenge wounded honor, for the culture urged one to measure up to external standards, and hence vigorously to redress false assertions that one had failed to do so. The orientation to shame began in childhood, as wrongdoers were abundantly exposed to the mockery of siblings and peers, and continued in the insults that pervaded neighborhood life.

This orientation shifted by 1850. Even a bit before this, Catharine Sedgwick had offered a paradigmatic tale of family punishment.⁷¹ A boy attacks a family pet with boiling water. The father sternly orders the boy to go to his room—by this time, a form of punishment greatly preferred over physical discipline. Aside from the act of removal, there is no attempt to encourage shame even within the family. Indeed, after initial horror over the scalded cat, the family expresses sympathy, “grief,” and support. The point is for the boy to look within himself, to punish himself, during a period (in this story, two full weeks) of removal from the family, and then to disclose his internal process by a sincere apology. Internal emotional turmoil, not externally applied scorn, becomes the central disciplinary theme.

The reform movements that proliferated during the nineteenth century hung heavy with the themes of guilt. Temperance literature emphasized personal degradation and material and moral damage to family. Realization of guilt was intended to motivate sincere commitment to change—“conscience-stricken” was a favorite term used to convey the passage through guilt. It was the harm done to others, particularly those whom the drunkard loved most, rather than the scorn emanating from others that gave substance to the message of guilt. New movements in penology, particularly the idea of isolating criminals in prisons, and sometimes within prisons through solitary confinement, similarly moved from shame to guilt. One advocate of the solitary confinement system wrote that “each individual [convict] will necessarily be made the instrument of his own punishment; his conscience will be the avenger of society.”⁷²

Guilt did not, of course, fully replace shame, and an element of shame continued to inhere in both family reprimands and public chastisements. Guilt and shame are not entirely discrete in emotional terms, in any event, nor need it be argued that shame is necessarily less intense emotionally than guilt. It can be superficial, laughed off, as was not infrequently the case in colonial New England; but it can be deeply anguishing as well. The inculcation of guilt, however, was intended to make intense emotional and moral wrestling part of the fundamental experience of recognizing one’s own wrongs; and the wrestling was internal, part of an emotional arsenal that was teaching people to acknowledge, manage, and, finally, utilize the intense passions of which they were capable. Indeed, inculcation of guilt could simply add to the depths of shame. Victorian etiquette books, as John Kasson has demonstrated, multiplied rules of dress and bodily control, thereby increasing the number of occasions on which private shame might be felt in public. When these occasions were magnified by a conjoint feeling of guilt at the omission, the overall emotional intensity, and its designed deterrent effect, could be greatly heightened.⁷³ Finally, inculcation of guilt, particularly at the familial level, depended on the larger loving environment that Victorian emotionology preached. Isolation from family plus consciousness of damage to loved ones was now experienced as a separation from a deeply positive emotional environment. Guilt, as an experience of self-hate, flourished readily in this context, and again it differed from the reactions that simple scorn from the outside world could generate.

Guilt, then, must be added to the other intense emotional attributes encouraged by Victorian culture. The person who could not react profoundly to his or her own shortcomings—the person who might depend simply on regulation from the outside—was emotionally inadequate. Just as a man of good character had the anger necessary to spur achievement, the courage to face fear, and the capacity to love, so he must, as needs be, have the ability to feel guilt. The woman of good character needed the capacity to love in several forms, and she also needed to be capable of feeling guilty when other emotional norms like serenity of temper escaped her. The harsh bath of guilt did not mean being overwhelmed—for like other intense emotions, guilt must finally be mastered through action, apology, and correction; it should not paralyze. Again we see real consistency in Victorian emotional culture, in which capacity for guilt related readily to other emotional goals.