Читать книгу American Cool - Peter N. Stearns - Страница 17

Victorians approved of passion, and they used the word frequently. They wanted men to have the passion to impel them to great deeds, and they wanted women to share with men a certain spiritual passion in love. The blander word “emotion,” which has gained currency in the twentieth century, appeared rarely in Victorian discussion, where certain kinds of quiet, moral impulses were described as sentiments and the equally important, more vigorous surges came under the heading of passion. Word use is tricky, of course, and Victorians used the word “passion” more generally than we do. But they also used it openly, without an inevitably accompanying caution and without confining it to the sexual realm. In this respect, their vocabulary corresponded to the real values culturally ascribed to targeted anger, courage, love, and grief.

Contrary to some bloodless stereotypes of the nineteenth century, the Victorians even associated passion with civilization. They saw what they termed more primitive societies (by which they meant every society but their own) as calmer and more restrained. They granted that tight-knit, sedate communities avoided certain problems, like frequency of suicide, but they found the stimulus of modern urban life—where “all human passions are exercised with more fourfold constancy and intensity”—both inevitable and desirable on balance.⁷⁴

Victorian emotionality surely included more standards than those applied to the dangerous emotions, to love, to grief, and to guilt. It certainly emphasized disgust, when moral disgrace, uncleanliness, or odor was encountered. It could include, particularly in early Victorianism and later among women, a proclivity to tearful sadness that deserves exploration in light of the larger emotional culture. The emotional charge behind the rise of humanitarian sentiment, which ultimately became part of the Victorian emotional style broadly construed, also needs further assessment, for its promptings of intense empathy with distant peoples readily connected to other features of the emotionology. We know that humanitarian urges were novel, arising in part from changes in philosophical beliefs and economic systems. Their fit with the new emotional culture needs more attention, for humanitarianism served as an additional outlet for vigorous feeling. The full range of Victorian emotional criteria has yet to be probed, and there may be some further surprises. The main point is clear, however. Underlying the extensive discussions of various kinds of emotional goals was a desire to prevent untoward expression or excess combined with equal insistence on the importance of appropriate emotional vigor. Northerners, men, middle-class Victorians in general were told to expect to experience passions, beginning in childhood, that they must learn to direct, use, and savor. Victorian relish in intense, if focused, emotionality related to a host of other interests—in strong wills, in romantic idylls, in evocative cemeteries, in tales of heroism, and of course in true, loving womanhood. The Victorian era began with the recognition of emotion’s central role—such that a leading Unitarian could seek to dispel charges of dry rationalism with appeals to a “heart-stirring energy”—and the same theme picked up momentum in subsequent decades.⁷⁵

The emotional culture was purveyed in a variety of forms. Advice to parents was intended to launch appropriate socialization, for after the early period, in which childish innocence seemed only to require parental restraint, Victorian prescribers judged that parents had more positive lessons to impart, providing models of love and guidance in handling the essential but risky emotions. The emotional culture did not, however, assume that early childhood ended the process of emotional development. This is why children’s stories assumed such a hortatory aspect, offering models for courage and warnings against both loss of control and emotional vapidity. A related genre of youth advice manuals, some authored by the same people who wrote children’s fiction, drove the same lessons home and added pointers on love. Adult fiction, as found in the women’s magazines that were popular among men as well, and marital advice completed the picture.⁷⁶

Variations existed, to be sure. Advice manuals differed considerably in the amount of space they gave to particular emotional issues. Jealousy, for example, might be passed over completely in youth advice materials, or it might receive a few cautionary paragraphs. But mainstream middle-class literature did not vary much in content, and when variations did occur, they seemed to involve an author’s judgment about whether or not her audience needed to be reminded of the basic rules. There were no widely circulated dissenting views on the necessity of properly directed emotional spark.

Not surprisingly, Victorian emotional culture interacted extensively with formal scientific comment on emotion, as it began to emerge under the aegis of Darwinian theory by the 1870s and 1880s. The chronological relationship was clear: popularized Victorian culture came first. Psychologists like James and Hall added a formal evolutionary twist in looking for species functions for particular emotions, but they did not create the underlying tone. Rather, knowingly or not, they echoed established wisdom, and of course gave it added authority in the process. James commented scientifically on the link between emotions and the body, but then lapsed into standard advice about mastering emotions through diligent practice without destroying passion.⁷⁷ Hall, as we have seen, precisely delineated the dangers but also the necessity of anger in men. Like the larger culture around him, he equivocated somewhat on jealousy, seeing in it female pettiness but also some motivation for action and for family solidarity. Divisions in emotional characteristics between men and women were faithfully replicated, though the Darwinian experts discussed gender distinctions somewhat more formally than the more popular materials did, dwelling more extensively on female frailty. But Hall could praise women’s affectionate warmth as well as their docility, if in somewhat less rigorous scientific terms than those he applied to the emotions behind masculine achievement. Overall, however, what had begun as a moralistic, half-Christian, half-secular advice literature informed a generation of scientific research on emotion as well. In the first formal study of emotion after the decline of comprehensive philosophies that had, through the seventeenth century, worked on elaborate emotional definition, scientists sponsored direct research on emotion, and they generated findings that would actually help undermine the Victorian synthesis later on. But the established wisdom on the importance of emotional vigor, qualified by differing gender traits, was if anything amplified by the initial new scientific pronouncements.

Thus a characteristic Victorian advice giver of 1870 and a modern purveyor of science around 1900 agreed in their emotional recommendations. Jacob Abbott, author of twenty-eight Rollo books and several advice manuals, was a Congregational minister bent on practical interpretations of Christianity, combining moral lessons with various kinds of factual information. He was big on courage tested by fear, on controlled anger, and on redeeming love. Alice Birney, writing in the early 1900s, was a consumer of the new psychology, having trained with Hall. She participated in various organizations designed to provide mothers with the latest expertise. Explicit moralisms and applied Christianity were not for her. But the emotional content of her work was scarcely different from that of Abbott. She too wanted loving mothers, sweet daughters, morally indignant sons, and courageous boys (though as we will later see she did complicate this last goal slightly).⁷⁸

The relationship between Victorian emotionology and other aspects of Victorian culture was complex, which is one reason why it has frequently been misconstrued. As Victorians sought to preserve emotional depth while inculcating appropriate targeting and control, they were also involved in a progressive attack on poor bodily discipline. Their etiquette books, another expanding cultural genre that arose with the other kinds of advice literature and attempted to meet similar needs in guiding middle-class families amid strangers and in unfamiliar urban settings, pressed for increasing civilization. Spitting, lack of cleanliness, sloppy posture, brazen stares, drumming of fingers—all were brought, in principle at least, under growing control. Not only etiquette books but also costume itself added to bodily discipline, providing tight collars for men and tight bodices for women along with a host of rules about proper accoutrements from head to toe. Far more space was devoted to proper bodily control when walking and to proper clothing and manners—“If there is any man whom you wish to conciliate, take off your hat to him as often as you meet him”—than to comments on emotion. Concerning the body and its etiquette, a theme of increasing discipline and repression prevailed without significant qualification—except insofar as middle-class people might modify or ignore the rules in actual practice.⁷⁹ Where emotion had physical manifestations, the standards were again severe, as in the disapproval of public laughter and other conversational excess in the nineteenth-century manners books.

Emotions themselves, however, were different. The etiquette books preached control of anger and other impulses, to be sure, though we will see that even they allowed exceptions for issues like politics that followed the more general emotionology. But the control theme overall was combined with the positive emphasis on passion—which means that the standards applied to emotional life were, quite simply, different from those addressed to the body. Severe physical discipline might in fact have prevailed precisely because emotional life offered so many opportunities for compensatory fervor that purely corporal regulation seemed rather trivial by comparison. Many a tightly dressed, respectable young man or woman could pour out his or her passion with no sense of contradiction—indeed, their physical rigors could be endured precisely because the emotional outlets seemed so much more important. Twentieth-century observers, looking back on Victorian dress and manners, might readily assume that emotional cramping was just as severe, particularly on discovering that there were indeed some strict emotional rules of real importance. But the equation would be wrong; indeed, as we will later see, such an assumption reveals a characteristic twentieth-century confusion about what constraint means.

As noted, sexuality rested somewhere between constraint of bodily habits and emphasis on appropriate emotional fervor. Sexuality had its place, according to most Victorian advice, though it was potentially even more dangerous than the riskiest emotions and even more hemmed in by age and frequency restrictions. As emotional prescriptions themselves made clear, however, sexuality should supplement, never rival, emotional intensity. Again, the power of true love could make the merely physical limits that were part of the Victorian concept of respectability seem readily endurable. Here too, twentieth-century views about the centrality of sexual standards should not lead to confusion about the Victorians; repression in one area did not mean repression across the board. In fact, sexual “repression” actually could facilitate the emotional sparks the Victorians cherished; keeping sex in check, though not to the point of complete neglect of its pleasures, aided love and vice versa. Correspondingly, while sexual constraints produced clear attempts to establish compensatory outlets—in pornography, for example—no such catharsis was needed in the area of emotion, where intensity was allowable.⁸⁰ Despite their undeniable concern for respectable behavior and their attacks on rudeness, the Victorians did not see the body, sexuality, and emotions as cut from the same cloth. They approached each with varying degrees of rigor and in the end heightened their reliance on emotional intensity precisely because their goals in managing body and sexuality were so demanding.

The mature Victorian emotional culture served advice literature and uplifting fiction from its emergence in the 1840s until well past 1900. The culture was complex, asking men and women to relate to each other emotionally but also to differ, insisting on emotional intensity amid injunctions of strict etiquette and family discipline, informing men that emotions absolutely essential in the public sphere needed to be suppressed at home. Yet, clearly, it was also serviceable. It met Victorian cultural needs. Its very complexity promoted its durability: themes of control could be emphasized against uncivilized behaviors, while themes of passion could drive home the sanctity of family or the joy of action (this last lest the middle class become too stuffy). While we will shortly turn to the demise of this culture, it will be no surprise that elements of the Victorian amalgam persisted in the new synthesis. Ideals of motherlove, intense romance, or anger-propelled social crusaders continued to inspire, complicating the process of change. Before addressing this process, however, I must complete my presentation of the Victorian baseline by discussing the causes and effects of this rich emotional culture. After all, claims of relative consistency and persistence—the themes of this chapter—mean little if the emotional culture is only loosely related to the driving forces of middle-class life, or if it did not connect to real beliefs and behaviors. To be taken seriously, emotional culture must be caused, and it must cause; the Victorian version met both tests.