American Cool. Peter N. Stearns
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