American Cool. Peter N. Stearns
lead to “wars, rapine and misery.” “Anger is not lovely,” and children’s rages create such ugly physical symptoms that the person seems “a child no longer, but a creature under demoniacal possession.” Children must not be permitted to gain anything by showing anger, for they must learn to solve problems by other means. Motherlove was still invoked, but childrearing manuals began to pay more attention to practical advice on how to avoid irritations and insufficient sleep. Etiquette books, in contrast to family advice manuals, continued to stress the importance of temper control, particularly avoiding arguments and monitoring conversational style.29
The crucial revision, however, involved the notion of anger’s usefulness. Even the etiquette books distinguished between polite conversation (“general society”) and other social settings, such as earnest discussions with friends. Other literature, however, suggested the crucial norms more clearly. Horatio Alger’s books on work and mobility urged the importance of aggressive, competitive behavior, in which serenity had little place. Darwinians like G. Stanley Hall simultaneously condemned anger’s destructive potential, even its threat to physical health, while also urging that “a certain choleric vein gives zest and force to all acts.” In the same vein, early in the twentieth century the American Institute of Child Life warned against anger in a pamphlet directed toward the parental role in temper control, while simultaneously venturing that the emotion should be “a great and diffuse power in life, making it strenuous, giving zest to the struggle for power and rising to righteous indignation.” Boys’ stories and children’s advice literature pushed the same theme: “the strenuous soul must fight or grow stagnant or flabby”; “better even an occasional nose dented by a fist … than stagnation, general cynicism and censoriousness, bodily and psychic cowardice.” A child-study manual in 1903 took up a similar view toward anger and fighting; a boy with no tendency to fight would be unnatural, a “nonentity”: for, in the long run, “competition is a form of fighting that is very permanent all their life.” Pushing more toward social justice, the National Congress of Mothers urged girls to maintain good cheer and prepare a tranquil home but wanted mothers to school their sons in “righteous indignation”; for with such training, even a violent temper can be a “splendid force” providing “royal service.”30
The key was proper control and direction, which gained pride of place over the earlier blanket cautions. Parents were urged to react strictly to defiant childish anger but to avoid breaking their sons’ spirits. Stories showed boys angrily attacking bullies and other legitimate targets, while sports such as boxing were specifically recommended as an ideal means of preserving anger while channeling it into healthy activity. The goal was to teach controlled use, so that properly socialized adults would be masters of a fund of anger, with the experience to target it appropriately. In the mid-1890s G. Stanley Hall approvingly cited a teacher who argued for more anger in schools, in precisely this spirit: “There is a point where patience ceases to be a moral or pedagogical virtue but becomes mere flabbiness.” Into the 1920s childrearing manuals combined sincere condemnations of anger’s role in crime and violence, which should be prevented by proper discipline and large doses of maternal affection, with praise for anger’s role in motivating and energizing. Here, the emotion had value for individual and society alike: “If he is stirred, if he reacts powerfully, out of that very stirring may come achievements and performance of a high level.”31
Along with the reassessment of anger, fear was also reevaluated from the late 1840s onward. The early Victorian admonitions against using fear to discipline persisted, but they were now supplemented by active praise for the fearless child. In 1847 Horace Bushnell urged that children must not be taught to fear parent or God, but he added a new and explicit note on the “natural state of courage” that children could utilize in their familial and religious lives. Not merely absence of terror, but active courage now served as the goal, and while parental caution played a role in developing this more active emotional stance, it must be supplemented by children’s own encounter with, and triumph over, the power of fear. Family writers rarely expounded on this theme at great length. T. S. Arthur’s uplifting but curt appeal, “Train up your children to be virtuous and fearless. Moral courage is one of the surest safeguards of virtue,”32 was a characteristic sample. Yet the idea of active engagement with fear as a source and test of emotional bravery became an increasingly common staple.
The same theme resounded in popular boys’ fiction through the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century. Oliver Optic, one of the most widely sold writers in the boyhood genre, offered a representative story: a lad stops a plunging horse, shrieking lady atop, without considering his own danger. He has had neither time nor wish for deliberation, but he has emerged with a new kind of emotional confidence. “He was a boy who would not fight even in self-defense, but he had the courage to do a deed which might have made the stoutest heart tremble with terror.” Harry Castlemon’s boy in the pilot house exhibits similar bravery: “We have seen that he felt fear. Had it been otherwise he must have possessed nerves of steel, or have been utterly destitute of the power of reasoning; but that fear did not so completely overpower him as it had but a short time before. … On the contrary, it nerved him to make the greatest exertions.” Courage involved control over emotion amid great intensity. Fear became an essential experience in the inculcation and testing of bravery.33
In the aftermath of the Civil War, military settings routinely drove the message home in boys’ stories. An injured lad was urged to “keep up a good heart. … A little pluck does more for a wound than a good many bandages.” Invocations of mother and prayer provided the basis for courage in this and other cases. In another instance, a boy faces a mad dog, “cool and courageous in the moment of danger,” then in a later trembling reaction realizes that a kindly God had sustained him.34
Fear differed from anger, of course, in that its role in character development was more indirect. Whereas anger could be usefully channeled, fear had no direct utility. Its role was more subtle, providing the test that allowed males to learn their own moral and emotional courage. The links between fear and anger were nevertheless real. Both emotions provided moments of great intensity vital to effective living. Both could be used for motivation and moral development, if properly mastered. The spirited Victorian boy was one who did not avoid fear, but faced it and triumphed over it, while using anger as a spur to action.35
The connection between fear and anger showed clearly in the evolution of the word “sissy,” which by 1900 had clearly come to mean an effeminate boy who was too cowardly or unaggressive or both. The word had been coined in the 1840s as an affectionate term for “sister,” but in the 1880s it began to become a derisive term for spineless boys and men, almost exclusively in the United States.36
As the role of fear evolved in the Victorian emotional lexicon, it was seen as less problematic. While parents were still reminded not to frighten infants unnecessarily, no elaborate discussions were considered necessary. Most late Victorian prescriptive writers, like Felix Adler (the last popular childrearing manualist who wrote in an almost purely Victorian mold), assumed that older children could learn essential goals through literary example and appropriate parental advice. The goal was moral courage, an emotional resource that could overcome physical cowardice and so conquer the “paralyzing” effect of fear “by a powerful effort of the will.” Character training, derived from good reading and good teachers, would do the trick.37
The Victorian reversals on fear and anger were not matched by a revised outlook on jealousy. Because this emotion was more feminine and more fully attached to love, earlier warnings largely prevailed, tempered by some practical advice on the need to help a partner overcome jealousy by reassurance. Even with jealousy, however, the later Victorians evinced a strange, almost anachronistic fascination with emotional power that, without establishing a really