American Cool. Peter N. Stearns
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.
Causation
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