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That Victorian leaders liked to claim adherence to new emotional standards is no surprise. The new policies that resulted were significant, but they beg basic questions about the extent of real belief. Did Victorians internalize the new standards—not uniformly or completely, to be sure, but sufficiently to make a difference in their own emotional lives?

The answer is yes, though again there can be no claim of precise measurement. Many Victorians clearly enjoyed the possibility of analyzing their emotional state, though there is evidence as well that the demanding rules of the culture made this process more than a bit bewildering. Henry Adams described a woman’s process in his 1880 novel, Democracy:

Madeleine dissected her own feelings and was always wondering whether they were real or not; she had a habit of taking off her mental clothing, as she might take off a dress, and looking at it as though it belonged to someone else, and as though sensations were manufactured like clothes.³⁹

While women were most vocal about their emotional inventories, men too, as we will see, frequently offered comments, particularly in the throes of love or highly charged friendship. The evaluation process reflected the importance of the emotional culture in many private lives.

Several historians have already developed a convincing case concerning the internalization of restrictions on anger on the part of some middle-class women. Barred from expressing their real emotions, or even admitting unladylike sentiments to themselves, some women converted anger into psychosomatic illness, with such manifestations as hysterical paralysis. Intense familial love could have its pathological side as well. Smothered by parental affection that they could neither deny nor fail to reciprocate, some girls began to develop anorexia nervosa as a means out of the emotional trap. Here, Victorian standards showed their repressive edge and their reality, however distorted, in the experience of a minority of middle-class women.⁴⁰

Certainly there is widespread evidence of women’s concern about living up to the emotional ideal by working sedulously against impulses of anger or jealousy. Lucilla McCorkle, a southern minister’s wife, urged the following duties on herself in her private journal: “Self-denial—in food & clothing & keeping the tongue, early [sic] rising—industry—economy system—cheerfulness & sobriety—keeping down & quelling the spirit of malevolence, fault finding—covetousness or rather jealousy,” adding that she feared she suffered from “that disease.” Many women recalled specific attempts to keep anger under control when they were girls: “As I grew up I learned to keep intact a second self … who walked in tranquil beauty … [who] maintained her place unruffled when the other self was annoyed, dismayed.” Elizabeth Parsons Channing noted in a diary entry in 1874: “Irritable. Ashamed of myself when I am so alive to the desirableness of a sweet temper.” Or Lydia Sigourney, anxious about feeling unpleasant the day before: “I’ll try to carry a sunbeam in my heart today.” Many women claimed in private diaries to feel no anger against their spouses, though some would single out a particular issue—such as policies toward slaves—that allowed some indignation to be expressed. Many reported both the goal of repressing anger and the real difficulties encountered en route, including the complication of guilt when anger was discerned, even privately. As Charlotte Gilman put it: “The task of self-government was not easy. To repress a harsh answer, to confess a fault, and to stop (right or wrong) in the midst of self-defence, in gentle submission, sometimes requires a struggle like life and death.” Many women reported, in sum, a temperament hardly as magically anger free as some advice writers ascribed to femininity, but a very definite effort in that direction. A few even reported gleeful triumphs in which errant husbands were cast down through their own unjustified rage while the wife stood calmly by. As Mrs. Abigail Bailey put it in her memoirs, “I felt obligated to bear my faithful testimony to him against his wickedness; which I repeatedly did.” Here of course was the suggestion of very real anger, but carefully manipulated both to fit the Victorian norms and to use those very norms to confound the offending spouse.⁴¹

Women continued to work toward appropriate anger control throughout the nineteenth century. Winifred Babcock, admitting fury when her boyfriend dumped her, quickly returned to the party line in her memoirs: “But rage! What has it ever done to heal even the slightest hurt or wound. Oh I could tramp up and down … and wring my hands … but alas! would that bring me any comfort?” Adults, particularly men, increasingly applied teasing to anger in young girls, who registered the idea that they were being laughed at. While this suggests a slight loosening of the strictest rules concerning girls and anger consistent with a generally more permissive approach in end-of-the-century childrearing, girls nonetheless learned that grownup dignity and displays of temper were incompatible. A middle-class Pittsburgh girl’s memoir notes admiration at an oath by a peer—“Oh, the dickens”—while quickly adding that “since even the mildest oaths were discouraged at home, I never dared to use such a vigorous expletive.” And there were mothers who managed to provide role models of apparently complete mastery over temper. Whatever the realities of the case, their daughters could discern no chink in mother’s emotional perfection, and under her tutelage they also learned not to quarrel with any frequency or bitterness. Mother was simply never angry.⁴²

Whether blessed with sunny dispositions or not, Victorian women showed other signs of contact with the goals of controlling the dangerous emotions. Vocal concern about dealings with servants was a staple of nineteenth-century domestic life. Among other things, these concerns expressed a very real anxiety that it was impossible in practice to preserve the calm demeanor that the emotional culture required. Many servants were simply too trying, too willing to resort to anger in confrontations with their mistresses. The domestic side of Victorian emotionology urged “equable and cheerful temper and tones in the housekeeper” as part of the larger atmosphere that should inform family life. Servants were vital to this atmosphere but were often criticized for improper emotional signals to the children in their charge. In fact, many housewives found it difficult to “refrain from angry tones” in dealing with servants, and their resultant guilt often worsened the atmosphere still further. Inability to live up to stated goals contributed to the tension in the mistress-servant relationship throughout the century, and to the decline of live-in service toward the century’s end.⁴³

Finally, girls imbibed the messages about restraint of anger well into the early twentieth century. Even if they displayed a temper later as adults, they concealed it in childhood, in contrast to boys, whose adult personality was in this regard much easier to discern.⁴⁴

On the repressive side, in sum, many women were deeply affected by the Victorian norms, fighting for control when the standards proved difficult, often conveying considerable success, sometimes suffering psychosomatic ailments because of the strain involved.

In actuality as in culture, however, repression was not the whole story. Men and women alike expressed deep commitment to the ideals of intensity in love and grief. They spoke about their fervor, wrote of it in letters, and gave it a prominent place in many diaries.

Expressions of love could start early. A child’s letter from 1899:

My dearest Mother,

Words cannot express how I miss you.

[then some chitchat]

(I love you with all my heart with all my soul and all my body.)

[more chitchat]

Your most devoted daughter,

Sweetest Mother,

And from a recollection years later: “We all loved Mother with all our hearts, with all our souls and with all our bodies, and when she went away we missed her more than tongue could tell. In later years, she said that she was afraid she had let us love her too much, that she sometimes thought we had put her in place of God. If we did, we might easily have had a less worthy idea of God.”⁴⁵

Mothers could respond in kind. Although women’s magazines late in the nineteenth century began trumpeting a crisis between mothers and daughters, in which the former could no longer approve of the lifestyle changes of youth and/or the latter had lost the affectionate respect due their elders, actual middle-class mothers and daughters shared a deep emotional bond, with apparently few exceptions. When their daughters left for work or college, their mothers wrote them with ardent support, visited often, and in some instances actually stayed with them for a time. Disputes occurred, to be sure, but they were usually surrounded with reassuring love. As one wrote, “Your life must not be stunted by us [the parents]. … Our love can make any leaps of time and distance.”⁴⁶ Reciprocating, even the “new” young women who were building careers referred to their mothers as “the anchor” of their lives. Both the depth of this feeling and the willingness to express it in ardent terms reflected real correspondence with the emotional culture of child- and motherlove, even at a time when middle-class women’s lives were changing noticeably.

The love theme pervaded courtship, again leading to expressions, from men as well as women, fully in keeping with the most soaring versions of Victorian culture. Byron Caldwell Smith, pressing Katherine Stephens in letters between 1874 and 1876, urged, “Oh write, write I am perishing to see on paper the words—I love you.” Describing the “great passion that fills me,” his “great life-passion,” he distinguished his love from mere romance, assuring her of “true” love and constancy. “It [true love] is to love with all one’s soul what is pure, what is high, what is eternal.” “A tender true heart that loves unselfishly, and seeks and understands a love which is not the mere surprise of the senses … but why should I go on to describe what I love to her I love.” And of course the religious connection was ever present: “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.” Women could respond in kind, as Angelina Grimke did to Theodore Weld: “Yes my heart continuously cleaves to you, deep of my nature is moved to meet the reaching agonies of your soul after me.” “Why does not the love of my own dear sister … satisfy. … Why do I feel in my inmost soul that you, you only, can fill up the deep void that is there?” And Theodore answered flight with flight: “How many times have I felt my heart… reaching out in every agony after you and cleaving to you, feeling that we are no more twain but one flesh.”⁴⁷

From at least the 1830s until 1900 thousands of middle-class couples, during their courtship years and sometimes afterward when separation necessitated letter writing, tried to describe the deep, spiritual love that filled them. The themes were almost commonplace. Granting of course that the letters still available today may not be fully representative of courtship sentiments, studies of middle-class youth reveal a virtually unquestioned assumption that intense, spiritual love would be the basis for engagement and marriage. Autobiographies and other commentaries echo these sentiments, while the Mosher survey, addressing upper-middle-class women at the end of the century, reveals similar, if somewhat less ethereal, beliefs in the centrality of abiding love in marriage.⁴⁸ A central tenet of Victorian emotional culture, in sum, corresponded to the real emotional aspirations of much of the middle class and to the felt experience of a sizeable number within it. Childhood experience (including deep love for siblings as well as for mothers), encounters with the standards of love through fiction and advice books, and the promptings of religious feeling and sexual deferment all combined to create this relationship between belief and reality.

Furthermore, the quest for deep emotional fulfillment in love also spilled over into friendship and many lifelong relations among sisters. The searing language used in letters between women friends has been frequently noted as a Victorian characteristic; it obviously transferred into friendship much of the intensity with which the culture surrounded love in general. “Dear darling Sarah! How I love you and how happy I have been! You are the joy of my life. … I cannot tell you how much happiness you gave me, nor how constantly it is all in my thoughts. … My darling how I long for the time when I shall see you.” Marriage did not necessarily interrupt these outpourings, in some cases, no doubt, because the emotional expectations brought to wedlock were not fulfilled. References to kissing, eternal love, and devotion pepper the letters of women to each other. “I wanted so to put my arms round my girl of all the girls in the world and tell her … I love her as wives do love their husbands, as friends who have taken each other for life—and I believe in her as I believe in my God.” Religiouslike qualities helped women identify their emotions, as Mary Grew wrote: “Love is spiritual, only passion is sexual.”⁴⁹

Young men developed similar passions in the period of life during their early twenties when they had separated from parents but were not yet positioned to launch courtship. In letters and journals they described themselves as “fervent lovers” and wrote of their “deep and burning affection.” Like the women, they commented on their physical contacts with each other and dreamed of a life of mutual intimacy. When the time came to separate, usually when one friend married, the emotionality of friendship came to the surface again: “[0]ur hearts were full of that true friendship which could not find utterance by words, we laid our heads upon each other’s bosom and wept, it may be unmanly to weep, but I care not, the spirit was touched.”⁵⁰

Male intimacy almost always ended with marriage, and most men, even in their passionate youth, knew that this would be so. Women, in contrast, might preserve the passion or might use it to generate intense resentment against the marital threat. Thus in a letter of congratulation to a newly wed couple, one friend addressed the husband: “Do you know sir, that until you came along I believe that she loved me almost as girls love their lovers. I know I loved her so. Don’t you wonder that I can stand the sight of you?” Here, real experience not only gave substance to the fervent love preached by Victorian culture but also to the common theme of separation emotions that sustained so many short stories dealing with sisters or friends adjusting to the marriage of one of their number.⁵¹

As with love in its principal forms, so, logically enough, with grief: the Victorians who expressed themselves in letters, diaries, and often in ritual commonly expected, articulated, and felt the sharpness that grief was supposed to generate.⁵² The intensity resulted above all from the attachments of love, but it was heightened by emotionological approval of grief itself, such that its presence was expected, its absence a potential occasion for guilt. Grief applied most poignantly to death but also to departures and other separations. Nellie Wetherbee recorded in her diary as she left her family to head west, “I only cried as the steamer sailed away—bitter, bitter tears.” The death of children produced almost overwhelming emotion, as an 1897 diary reported: “Jacob is dead. Tears blind my eyes as I write … now he is at rest, my little darling Jacob. Hope to meet you in heaven. God help me to bear my sorrow.” Here, clearly, not only the pain of grief but also the conscious handling of grief with references to reunion and divine support reflect the currency of the larger Victorian culture. Men as well as women expressed their sorrow. A Civil War soldier leaves his family in 1863, crying for days before the final departure, then musing in his diary both on his great love and on the “cruelty” of the separation. A minister, coincidentally in the same year, asks Jesus to “support me under this crushing blow”—his brother’s death. Another man, recording in 1845 the death of a brother-in-law, ended his entry: “Oh! What sorrow burst in upon us at the melancholy news of his death. … All is sorrow and weeping.” Even nostalgic recollection brought grief, as when Sarah Huntington recalled a loss of two years earlier: “Reading these letters revived all the exclusiveness and intenseness of my love for him I once called husband.”⁵³

Some facets of grief varied, to be sure. Different personalities responded differently to death. Death could still call up diary entries dwelling on the transience of life and the uncertainties of God’s judgment. Some diaries report that intense grief followed death for a month or so, then tapered off; others record a fresh renewal of grief well over a year after a death or separation. In the main, however, the obligation to record grief and the felt intensity of grief as a direct reaction to love rather than to fears of death reflected real-life experiences of the culture’s emotional standards. Deep loss, hopes for reunion in the afterlife, bittersweet recollections of the ongoing love—all were commonplace in the private reportage.

Of course grief intensities also varied with the level of acquaintance and the kind of death. Deaths that were lingering, providing the chance to prepare, sometimes caused less grief than sudden departures; the concept of a “good death” may have cushioned grief in the former instances. Where sheer pain dominated, as in the unexpected death of a child, the bittersweet theme might be absent entirely. But efforts to see beauty in death, to emphasize the sharing of grief by friends as well as the consolation of a better life in heaven, expressed some of the qualities urged in the more general commentary on this emotion. Christian resignation entered into the formula, along with frequent references to the “happier world” beyond and the beauty of the dead body (a clearly Victorian theme expressed for example in death kits for children’s dolls), but so did hopes for reunion—a child “spends this Sunday in Heaven with all her departed relatives,” wrote a Schenectady Protestant—and a sense of propriety in the love shared, through grief, in the family circle and beyond.⁵⁴

Prescriptions against unacceptable expressions of dangerous emotions, particularly by women, were thus matched by even more open references to fervent love and grief. The final ingredient of the Victorian amalgam, successful channeling of fear and anger, received less frequent comment, but here too there was real experience.

Courage and controlled anger showed most openly in what Anthony Rotundo has called Victorian middle-class boy culture. Groups of boys, fiercely independent of their mothers, developed a host of games to test aggressiveness and courage. They teamed up to throw stones at each other. They developed hazing rituals to test their ability to withstand fear—a habit that was institutionalized by the 1830s in male fraternities and lodges, where hazing challenges were extended into young adulthood.⁵⁵ These activities and the emotional values that underlay them contrasted magnificently with the maternally dominated domestic sphere, which was precisely their purpose. Yet they also corresponded, in tenor if not in cruel specifics, to the advice being offered about male ability to use and channel dangerous emotions. A game of “soak-about” involved boys hitting one of their number in a vulnerable spot with a hard ball—a test of the ability to endure fear and pain. “Dares” were endemic—“the deeper the water, the thinner the ice, the longer the run, the hotter the blaze, the more certain [was] the challenge.” Again, Victorian courage found a daily puerile expression. The taunts of “crybaby” and “sissy” awaited any who could not pass the tests. Anger was tested as well, as boys preferred to settle “a personal grievance at once, even if the explanation is made with fists.” And while cultural pundits clucked about boys’ wildness, they, too, approved of hearty play that would assure, as “Mrs. Manners” put it, that no male child turned into a “girl-boy.”⁵⁶ This boy culture began to be curtailed somewhat by the 1880s, as length of schooling extended and new, adult-run institutions like scouting introduced more supervision and regulation into boys’ lives. But even these institutions, as we have seen, maintained an emotionology that valued and tested courage in the face of fear and the ability to summon up channeled anger. The culture had real impact on the ways Victorian boys lived.

Adult men manifested their adherence to the dominant emotionology as well. Men may have been fearful in the face of business innovations and intense competition, as one author has recently argued, but the commitment to express courageous joy in facing down the odds was high. This was one reason why many businessmen and professional people were open to the doctrines of social Darwinism, which provided a scientific basis for the values of male conquest of fear or of anger-fueled rivalry. Middle-class soldiers in the Civil War, like Oliver Wendell Holmes, delighted, as we have seen, in writing about their reactions to battle in terms of heroic boys’ stories, expressing wonder at their coolness under fire. Adherence to the ideal of channeled anger showed in at least two settings. Male politicians and reformers routinely used angry invective and anger-inspired moral fervor in debate, with no sense of inappropriateness or need for subsequent apology. They, like the larger culture, shared the view that anger in a just cause was useful; calm, rational presentations would not alone suffice. Businessmen showed their anger too. A foreman angrily replied to complaining workers in Chicago, “Quit if you want to. You are welcome to quit.” Worker protest brought anger into the open, with employers frequently “raging like tigers,” as one employee put it around 1900.⁵⁷

Documentation of male commitment to utilizing the dangerous emotions is hardly voluminous, and of course, quite apart from the question of individuals’ adherence to cultural standards, personalities varied. References to fear and justifiable anger were frequent, however, suggesting genuine correspondence between the dominant emotionology and the ways in which many men perceived their own emotional responses. Not surprisingly, the same atmosphere produced frequent real-life conflicts between emotional standards at work and those desired at home. Many a man, like the harassed coal company manager described in a Pittsburgh memoir, came home irritable, repairing to his library (and its bottles) in silence—not living up fully to the domestic ideals so much as carving out a certain solitude in their midst. Precisely because the dangerous emotions were tried at work, the cultural tension applied to manhood in principle could prove difficult in the daily experience.⁵⁸

Emotional reality is a complex entity, and its historical documentation is maddeningly elusive. In contrast to the institutional expressions of emotional culture, personal experience admits of tentative generalizations at best. Available diaries and letters provide strong evidence that the standards for intense love and grief were internalized, but obviously most people’s emotions, even within the middle class, went unrecorded. Whether the experience of love, guilt, or grief (or, for men, anger or courage) differed from experiences in the past cannot be decisively determined. Individuals’ descriptions of experience did change, but emotions are more than verbal reports. They also involve behaviors and physiological changes, and the latter, in particular, do not permit historical measurement.⁵⁹ Furthermore, individual variation around norms is impossible to track. We know, in contemporary society, that some individuals are more anger prone than others, and experiments show that anger-prone people respond differently to the same stimuli. Such personality variation surely occurred in the past as well. Nevertheless, cultural norms may affect the available range of personality types, as well as the way individuals present their personalities. Norms clearly affect the verbal presentation and self-evaluation aspects of emotional experience, even if other reaches remain unclear.

Thus, Victorian emotional culture did shape real emotional life, though it did not describe it perfectly or completely. The way people loved or grieved or encountered fear was defined in part by what they were taught; and to an extent, both emotional experience and emotionology were shaped by the same functional and broader cultural factors. Exactly how much the distinctiveness of the culture is reflected in a similar experiential distinctiveness is not clear. Basic physiology, personality variations, or even the time lag between the generation of new standards and widespread assimilation may have limited the cultural hold on emotional reality. A tension between lived emotional experience and beliefs is a common aspect of emotional life, which means that the beliefs are important but not always determinant; and this was surely as true in relation to the demanding standards of the Victorian decades as it is in a rather different emotional culture today. Nevertheless, from illnesses encouraged by emotional constraints to expectations formed in search of love, the Victorian encounter with intensity expanded beyond the covers of the advice books and popular romances. Many people lived the culture in substantial measure.