Читать книгу American Cool - Peter N. Stearns - Страница 18

Major features of Victorian emotional culture have been well described in recent years. Despite persistent and erroneous oversimplifications about blanket repressiveness and hostility to spontaneity, in fact the picture painted in the previous chapter blends a host of familiar portraits.¹ Victorian interest in emotional intensity combined with greater strictures concerning sexuality and bodily control, with emotion actually offering some relief from the more rigorous standards applied to other areas.

The causes of the Victorian style are, however, less well known, partly because the emotional culture has not previously been addressed in its entirety. Furthermore, although we will see that some of the specific consequences have been traced, analysis of effects can be improved by looking at the impact of the whole culture rather than individual parts such as love or gender norms.

Cause-effect evaluation of the Victorian style is essential, for without it, the purely descriptive summary provided in the previous chapter may prove deceptive. Despite widespread and substantial concordance in the cultural prescriptions to the middle class, emotional standards must be considered mere window dressing if they did not respond to real needs in Victorian society; pinpointing causation is vital. Even more obviously, if the emotional norms had no demonstrable consequences aside from filling up advice literature and moralistic fiction, they could well be dismissed as meaningless. In fact, however, despite incomplete evidence on private beliefs and behaviors, it is possible to trace a number of results that issued from the widely preached culture and to conclude that, like the culture itself, these results were persistent. Finally, cause-effect evaluation is essential in preparing for analysis of subsequent change; for change could occur only as causation shifted, and the impact of causal shifts had to be formulated in contest with previous cultural impacts.