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Basic causes of emotional standards have been discussed less often than the standards themselves, both in historical work and to a substantial extent in sociology. Anthropologists, who deal extensively with emotional culture, pay even less attention to causation since, with rare exceptions, they pick up well-established patterns (or assume that they do) and do not emphasize change. For them, prior culture causes present culture, with other causes stretching back in the mists of time. Yet causal analysis is vital in dealing with emotions as social or cultural constructs, for we need to know what factors prompted particular patterns to emerge. Constructionist theory has emphasized the importance of changing social functions in reshaping emotional life, an approach that invites exactly the kind of causation assessment historians seek; but practicing constructionists have spent more time discussing their propositions in the abstract than providing concrete case studies.² Their approach has been brought to bear on twentieth-century change, and I will turn to it in due course, but middle-level generalizations, based on more than recent developments, are hard to come by. As a result, important debate among constructionists, about what kind of functionalism underlies emotional standards, has remained largely implicit. Constructionists would generally agree that emotions serve particularly to maintain the moral order and the social status quo, but this may beg the more precise question of which particular moral and social factors are involved. James Averill defines these factors as social and cultural, but practicing constructionists like Arlie Hochschild construe functionalism more narrowly, emphasizing primarily economic and organizational factors.³ Yet the anthropologists who have contributed to constructionist theory emphasize cultural functions as well. There are important issues here, which I will address in applying functionalist explanations both to Victorianism and to subsequent twentieth-century change; but there are no precise models to guide our inquiry.

Causation is a tricky concept in historical discussion, particularly in dealing with an already-slippery descriptive category like emotional culture. Explaining Victorian culture is a far more challenging task than assigning causes for the War of Jenkin’s Ear. Historians have no laboratory basis for testing replicability. They cannot present causation findings in the same manner as scientists, who do have this capacity. Yet, granting the imprecision and openness to further debate, historical change can be identified and it can be subjected to probabilistic evaluation, yielding a fair sense of the major factors involved.

One further issue requires some preliminary comment: the relationship between the causes of standards applied to individual emotions and the causes that generate a larger emotional style involves overlap but not complete identity. For example, the Victorian emphasis on parental love for children built on cultural trends that had been taking shape for some time, but there were also more specific reasons for it. The American middle class was busily cutting its birth rate from the late eighteenth century onward. Smaller family size often encourages a more intense relationship between parents and children and also, when it is first developing, a rather anxious concern to justify novel demographic behavior. Arguing in terms of great love and extensive maternal obligations helped Victorian parents ease their minds about having fewer children, on average, than their own parents had expected. While emphasis on love for children also fit, of course, in the larger Victorian style and indeed played a major role in some of its other ramifications, its specific origins must be acknowledged. It is also important to recognize that events may carry impact on some emotional standards without particularly altering others. For example, the Civil War obviously helped heighten earlier emphasis on channeled anger and courageous encounters with fear,⁴ but it had little impact on standards of love. Again, particular factors can be identified without contradicting the larger causal analysis, but they do add complexity. Explaining the Victorian style itself constitutes the most important analytical task, but it does not exhaust the process of evaluating factors relevant to more specific ingredients.

Two other illustrations highlight specific contexts applicable to individual emotions. Victorian grief, which served a central position in the larger culture, stemmed in part from the continuing high child mortality rates (all the more keenly felt with the birth rate steadily declining) in a culture that now saw children as more precious, child mortality as less inevitable. This specific formula for intense grief bore little relationship to channeled anger or several of the other Victorian staples.

Finally, Victorian romantic love ideals stemmed in part—possibly in large part—from the tension-filled combination middle-class couples attempted between extensive emotional exchange and pronounced restrictions on premarital sexuality. Courting couples were given considerable freedom for mutual contact in the United States—far more than outdated Victorian imagery had suggested. They were encouraged to think about love, and of course their culture had already prepared them, well before courtship, to expect some decisive emotional charge. Young men, for example, thought about women and love long before their economic circumstances permitted them to go courting.⁵ But they were not supposed to have sexual intercourse even as they built an intense relationship, and while a few couples crossed this barrier, most did not. It is hardly fanciful to see the emphasis on overwhelming but ethereal passion as in part a compensation for sexual limitations and an aid in enforcing restraint among couples who firmly believed that premature sex would sully their true love. Sexual constraint may indeed have informed other facets of the Victorian emotional style, providing a physical basis for the need to find channels for emotional intensity, but it applied most directly to the love connection. It is obvious that larger emotional cultures like the Victorian style result in part from the accumulation of smaller changes that relate to more specific parts of the emotional spectrum.

Accumulation, however, is not the only explanatory approach. Just as individual factors involved in particular emotional reactions informed the Victorian style as a whole, so the style had roots of its own that helped shape particular emotional reactions. Interestingly, despite the recent flurry of attention to Victorian emotionality, we have only incomplete glimpses of the larger causation. Just as the style itself has not previously been synthesized, so the causes of the style have not been directly addressed.

Victorian emotional culture contrasted with eighteenth-century styles in several key respects, particularly in the decades of maturity after the 1840s. Indulgence of grief was novel, for while individuals grieved in the eighteenth century, the public interest in this emotion was limited.⁶ The mature Victorian definition of romantic love, while it built on prior trends, went well beyond eighteenth-century precedents. The idea of channeled anger meshed neither with traditional indulgence in certain kinds of anger—in defense of hierarchy or religious orthodoxy, for example—nor with growing eighteenth-century concern about keeping anger in bounds. Attacks on disciplinary uses of fear emerged specifically in the early nineteenth century, and in this case were quite consciously directed against prior standards. The same holds true for some of the new uses of guilt. The Victorian emotional style was not, then, simply a carryover from prior standards or even from some of the newer cultural trends, though it involved the latter. Thus it is necessary to isolate the causes of the Victorian emotional style, for such analysis will in turn facilitate exploration of the reasons for yet another, more profound, post-Victorian set of shifts.

The simplest basic explanation of overall Victorian culture would focus on combining an understanding of emotionological trends that had been part of the transformation of mentalities throughout Western society from the late seventeenth century onward with attention to the impact of industrialization and urbanization in the nineteenth-century United States. According to such a reading, the Victorian emotional style was not a fundamental departure from eighteenth-century trends, themselves rather new. We have already seen that in highlighting explicit concern about anger, in attacking traditional disciplinary uses of fear, and in emphasizing various kinds of love, Victorianism amplified currents already present in American culture a century before. Victorianism thus built upon the reorientation of family functions toward greater emotionality and the attempt to introduce greater restraint in manners; it had no need to create. But while not fundamentally innovative, it did introduce its own flavor—the idea of motherlove, for example, while an outgrowth of the familial emphasis, was a distinctive Victorian product⁷—and this is where the new functional demands imposed by the growth of industry and the city made their mark.

The origins of the preindustrial cultural transformation are themselves not entirely clear. Several historians have cited the role of growing commercialization in prompting new concern about family emotional rewards as public life, in many communities, became increasingly competitive. Protestantism, as it transmuted into a wider belief system in the seventeenth century, unquestionably encouraged greater focus on family ties, emotional ties included. English writers pushed this theme hard and had obvious impact on attitudes across the Atlantic as well. Sources for the increasingly rigorous definition of civilized manners are not as easily pinned down. European upper classes grew increasingly suspicious of popular crudeness under the impact of Renaissance styles, which provided them a clear alternative to the prevailing version of mass culture. Growing prosperity brought a taste for refinement of habits. Capitalism also exacerbated divisions between propertied and unpropertied classes, which in turn generated an interest in habits of emotional restraint that would allow the former to distinguish themselves while conveniently blaming the latter for their own miseries. None of this bore fruit as quickly in the American colonies as in Europe, but, with the added effect of European cultural imitation, it began to have an impact by the later eighteenth century.⁸ Thus, well in advance of Victorianism per se, American emotional norms had been shifting, and these changes prepared the response to the challenges of a new economy.

By the 1830s the impact of an increasingly commercial economy was becoming clear. Victorian emotionology reacted, as we have seen, by seeking to enhance the special emotional role of the family; here was part of the functional charge behind the redefinition of motherlove. In the slightly longer term, the increasing absence of husbands and fathers, as work separated from the home, added fuel to the fire, and emotional standards had to be intensified simply to protect the established value of family life. Concern about the taints of commerce, present even among people who embraced commercial opportunities,⁹ provided yet another function for family-enhancing intensity and an emotional style that would clearly separate private from public activity.

But this was only an initial functional reaction in emotional culture. By the late 1840s, people began to realize that the same industrial world that required the family as emotional haven also required new emotional motivations for competitive work. (The lag behind actual economic change was interesting, as it meshed with other delayed reactions, for example, in schooling styles;¹⁰ but it was not acute.) The resultant response explains why Victorianism introduced its most distinctive emotional emphases in arguing for channeled anger and courageous encounters with fear. Military interests played a role, but the vision of emotions necessary to succeed in new entrepreneurial and professional roles was preeminent. Family values were preserved—and the virtual sanctification of motherlove preserved this goal even as other purposes were embraced—but the emotional range expanded as understanding of functional necessity broadened. Victorian emotional standards were meant to enshrine family while also providing the spur to achievement in public life.

Early industrialization and growing cities generated other functional concerns as well, which further shaped the Victorian style. Boundaries of social class became more vivid, even if American democratic values muted some of the conflicts that developed in the European version of industrialization. A recent article has shown how increased concern for cleanliness—a form of bodily discipline potentially related to emotional constraints—was in part a response to the need to formalize class divisions. Just as the middle class separated itself through the use of soap, so it prided itself on emotional restraints and subtleties whose absence marked other social groups as inferior.¹¹ Channeled anger thus differed from the emotional propensity to brawl and certainly from real or imagined lower-class anger released within the family. Comments on fear routinely distinguished between what middle-class folks could aspire to and the baser emotions of the hoi polloi. Thus Dick, in an Oliver Optic story, spews out class pride when he contrasts his sort of courage with the actions of a host of deserters:

I can pity without blaming them, for it was a fearful ordeal for men such as you describe. As I heard my father say … , it requires a moral force behind the physical to enable a soldier to stand up before the enemy, facing death and mangling wounds, without flinching. We have always found that the most ignorant and ruffianly men make the most unreliable soldiers. As father said, it is the soul, rather than the body that makes the true soldier.¹²

Similarly, intense, properly spiritual love could serve as a differentiator. When late-nineteenth-century divorce law came to enshrine this quality through the concept of mental cruelty, provable through the absence of appropriate affection as well as blatant nastiness, the middle class was correspondingly privileged. Divorcing working-class couples could not point to absence of love as an excuse, for their natures precluded the finer sentiments in the first place. Mental cruelty grounds of this sort were denied them until after 1900.¹³

Emotional culture had begun to take on qualities of class identification even earlier, at least in the minds of middle- and upper-class proponents, as in late-eighteenth-century Virginia.¹⁴ It became part of a larger dispute over respectability throughout much of the nineteenth century. And while respectability claims focused in part on workers’ and immigrants’ lack of civilized restraints, they also highlighted some subtle intensities that were open only to people of refinement.

Class boundaries aside, urban and commercial life required rules that would assist in the identification of strangers. As familiar community monitoring proved increasingly inadequate, Victorian culture responded to the need to provide cues that would help people distinguish the trustworthy from the unreliable.¹⁵ Identification of correct responses was a result of this need.

Finally, and even more obviously, Victorian culture served gender purposes, and new functional demands also impacted this arena. Emotional arguments helped justify confinement of women to the home, which was seen by men and many women as a functional necessity given changes in the location of work. Beliefs about motherlove as well as female lack of motivating anger did not cause gender division, but they certainly helped support it. Men welcomed special emotional badges, like their aptitude for channeled anger and courage, not only because they put women in their place but also because they bolstered male qualities at a time when certain aspects of industrialization created masculine insecurities. With property ownership and traditional skills now threatened, with family role complicated by new work demands, it was comforting, perhaps truly functional, to have an explicit, if demanding, emotional identity.¹⁶ Emotional masculinity in this sense complemented increasing reliance on men’s role as economic provider, which replaced a more traditional and less anxious gender definition. Here, too, function was served.

Growing industrialization, in sum, created new needs for family enhancement, for personal motivation, for justifications for class boundaries, and for gender roles. The Victorian emotional style responded faithfully, particularly in its fuller version after the 1840s.

Yet the functionalist approach should not be pressed too far, for the emotional adjustments to industrialization were based on cultural preparation. For example, the value of intense family ties had to be established before they could be further emphasized. Functional logic, here at least, was prepared by beliefs, which is one reason why Victorianism did not fully break away from emotional patterns set up the century before.

Furthermore, three kinds of cultural shifts during the nineteenth century itself added to the imperatives of industrial work and urban social stratification in promoting the full-blown Victorian emotional style. The first involves implications from emotionological change itself: until interrupted by other factors, shifts in emotional culture tend to cause additional modifications in the same direction. Thus an emphasis on motherlove contributed directly to the heightened intensity attributed to romantic love. Hypertrophied maternal love increased the need for strong adult passion to aid products of emotionally intense upbringing in freeing themselves from maternal ties; love of a new sort must counter the love into which both boys and girls had, at least according to Victorian standards, been socialized. This aid in emotional weaning, particularly important for girls, was functional in a broad sense, helping to form the emotional underpinnings for new families, but it would have been far less necessary with a cooler familial background. Not surprisingly, Victorian fiction picked up elements of this motif in stressing the emotional anguish that young women might encounter in breaking, through ardent courtship, the bonds that had tied them to parents and to siblings.¹⁷

New emotional rules that urged more intense love, along with those that proscribed anger and fear in the discipline of children, obviously expanded the realm of guilt. While the culture urged socialization toward guilt as part of childrearing, adults readily expanded the connection—which heightened their own emotional response to guilt and further legitimated efforts to instill guilt in their offspring. By the later nineteenth century many parents reported guilt when they inadvertently shouted at or frightened their children. The sense of being morally monitored against spontaneous impulse both contributed to and complicated the task of living up to some of the Victorian norms.

A second strand of cultural causation stemmed from a source outside emotionology: changing conceptions of the body made emotions far more separate from somatic function than they had been in traditional conceptions or would be again in the twentieth century. Prior to the nineteenth century, dominant beliefs, medical and popular alike, attached anger, joy, and sadness to bodily functions. Hearts, for example, could shake, tremble, expand, grow cold. Because emotions were embodied, they had clear somatic qualities: people were gripped by rage (which could, it was held, stop menstruation), hot blood was the essence of anger, fear had cold sweats. Emotions, in other words, had physical stuff. But during the eighteenth century, historians increasingly realize, the humoral conception of the body, in which fluids and emotions alike could pulse, gave way to a more mechanistic picture.¹⁸ And in the body-machine, emotions were harder to pin down, the symptoms harder to convey. Of course physical symptoms could still be invoked, but now only metaphorically. And although women’s emotional makeup was tied to the body in medical literature through discussions of how uterine development weakened the nervous system (and the brain) and so enforced a domestic emotional role, in popularized advice women’s emotions, like men’s, were discussed largely as independent entities. Popular stories could refer to the impact of emotion in causing blushing or sudden paleness, and in some stories, dire illness could follow from emotional experiences like love or anger, but in the United States, accident rather than illness seems more commonly to have befallen certain kinds of emotional victims in fiction.

Despite some evidence to the contrary, it is safe to say that a traditional and automatic connection between emotional experience and physical sensation was challenged by the new, mechanistic idea of the body. Cultural adjustments resulted. Emotions in a sense became more abstract, and we are only now coming to grips with the consequences of this basic change in outlook. Victorians were unaware of their involvement, but they reflected it. Their recurrent tendency to see certain emotions as animal-like reflected a desire to achieve distance from the physical. Certainly their delight in ethereal emotional encounters—such as true spiritual love or the moral courage that could face down fear—reflected a desire to find a new basis for emotional intensity outside the corporal shell. Changing ideas of the body did not clearly cause basic adjustments in emotionology, but they contributed to the desire for regulation and to the particular Victorian version of soulful (not bodily) intensity. This same adaptation helps explain why Victorians, bent on disciplining the body through demanding clothing, posture requirements, and sexual constraints, did not see the relationship between these structures and their fascination with emotional fervor. Emotions came now from the spirit; they need not be constrained just because the body was regulated. Similarly, twentieth-century observers tend not to perceive the Victorian distinction between emotion and the body because they are accustomed to a more complete relationship between the two (though not, one hastens to add, a traditional, humoral relationship).¹⁹

Finally, and in relation to the spiritualizing of key emotions, Victorian emotional style depended heavily on rapid changes in religious culture and in turn contributed to these changes. Here we see most clearly the inadequacy of defining functional requirements only in terms of economic structure and urbanization. A richer mixture of factors prevailed.

Religious change intertwined with the Victorian version of emotional culture in two ways. First, several changes in mainstream Protestantism supported Victorian optimism about the consequences of vigorous emotion and were in turn supported by this optimism. The concept of a benign God stood behind motherlove, helping to explain the common association between the maternal image and prayer. The idea that God is benign also affected presentations of anger, further reducing any claim that wrath could be used to enforce hierarchy though not, ultimately, undercutting the notion of righteous anger against evil. God’s benignity also reduced the credit given to fear, for a more rosy-hued religion no longer saw an association between this emotion and true piety. Terrorized children, indeed, would not be able to discern God’s sweet mercy. One of the key arguments in early-nineteenth-century Protestantism focused on precisely this point, with the partisans of religion as an emotionally positive experience triumphing clearly, even in such previous bastions of dour Calvinism as Presbyterian Pittsburgh.²⁰ Solace for intense grief related to the declining attention paid to hellfire and the unprecedented notion of heaven as a divinely organized reunion of loved ones.

In general, as several historians of middle-class religion have pointed out, American Protestantism shifted increasingly toward providing a positive emotional experience as its commitment to rigorous theology declined. The resulting assumptions undergirded common beliefs about the viability of courage in the face of fear and the bittersweet experience of grief while also encouraging restraint on some traditional uses of emotion such as fear in childrearing, now regarded as dangerous. Variant religious strands dissented from the norm, particularly in the case of the Evangelicals, who maintained a more traditional approach to anger and fear, seeking a more anxious piety and generating unacknowledged anger.²¹ Mainstream Protestantism, however, shared the directions of emotional culture, supporting the combination of control and intensity.

Emotional intensity derived also, however, from the very process of weaning from traditional Protestant doctrine. Many middle-class Americans questioned their own religious commitment, aware that the theology of their forebears was being watered down; some, no doubt, simply became less religiously active given the growing hold of science and the bustle of the urban, industrial world. Thus emotional intensity could be sought as an equivalent to a religious experience that many Americans realized was slipping away. Motherlove, as Jan Lewis has pointed out, took on Christlike overtones: it was consuming, it expressed itself in self-sacrifice, it served as a beacon through life even when mother herself had passed from the scene. Indeed, many popular stories about male redemption featured an errant son, rescued from wicked ways by the inspiration of his mother’s love, returning to find his mother dead and vowing to devote his recovered purity to her memory; only the crucifix was missing. Ideals of romantic love picked up the same theme: in intense, spiritualized passion, couples hoped to find some of the same balm to the soul that religion had once, as they dimly perceived, provided. A few worried that their love contradicted the primacy of faith in God, but more concluded that true love was itself a religious experience. Byron Caldwell Smith put it this way in letters to his Katherine in the mid-1870s: “I feel somehow that the Holy power which sustains and moves the ancient universe … reveals itself to me as love. … To love you … and to sink my life in the Divine life through you, seem to me the supreme end of my existence. … Love is a cult and our love shall be our religion. … To each other we shall reveal only the divine attributes of tenderness and patience.” Karen Lystra has plausibly suggested that many young men, apathetic toward conventional religion, imbibed the commitment to intense love as a direct surrogate during the second half of the nineteenth century. And the words they used in love letters, soaring beyond the more cautious romantic spirituality of the advice manuals, point precisely in this direction. But men were not alone in this regard, despite women’s greater religiosity. Angelina Grimke worried about love and religion in her letters to Theodore Weld: “Am I putting thee in the place of Jesus? I am alarmed and confounded by my feelings. … I feel at times as if I cannot live without thee. … Am I sinning or would the Lord our Father have it so?” She answered in the affirmative, arguing that “our Father has enjoined us together, he has given us to each other” as both she and Theodore convinced themselves that their love was effectively a religious duty. Angelina again: “True love … is the seeking of the spirit after spiritual communion, … the union of heart and mind and soul.” ²²

Victorian emotional culture stemmed in part, then, from an unusual moment in middle-class religion, when effective doctrinal changes created an environment in which God could be seen as supporting positive emotions but also in which many individuals came to regard intense, earthly love as a spiritual experience in itself as they made a transition away from more conventional religious commitments. Other cultural currents, notably social Darwinism, also supported the dominant emotionology after it had been established, providing it some new vocabulary and a scientific aura; but the link with religious adjustments remained more crucial.

The causes of Victorian emotional style were thus varied, which is no surprise. Despite the temptation to seek a single main ingredient in a functionalist interpretation of emotionological change, historical reality suggests that a larger emotional culture requires a number of overlapping factors for its genesis and dissemination. The Victorian style built clearly on prior cultural change, combining a host of specific factors, such as the new need for greater sexual abstinence in the interest of birth control, that impelled particular emotional formulations as part of the larger framework. It adapted emotional trends to the apparent needs of an industrial work environment and the tensions of social class relations in the growing cities. But it also incorporated important cultural shifts, including a new and puzzling distance between emotion and the body and two kinds of religious imperative that reflected a distinctive combination of confidence and concern. No one of these ingredients suffices to explain the Victorian mixture. Correspondingly, as we will see, when this skein began to unravel, the process responded to changes in most of the supporting elements as both social and cultural functions shifted ground.