American Cool. Peter N. Stearns
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.
Impacts: The Public Sphere
Describing an emotional culture offers the challenge of identifying common elements in discussions of particular emotions and in varied kinds of popular media. Explaining how this culture arose and what needs it seems to have filled forms the next step in analysis, challenging in its own right. These first two steps are meaningless, however, unless a third can be completed as well: indicating that the emotional culture had genuine resonance, affecting the way people believed and behaved.
Victorian emotionology had impact. This is certain despite the impossibility of ever demonstrating with full precision exactly how many people merely mouthed certain beliefs or exactly how they carried belief into action. More middle-class parents continued deliberately to use fear in childrearing than Victorian standards recommended, but a growing number accepted these standards at least in part, either changing disciplinary behavior or regretting anachronistic impulses or both; but how many fell into which camp cannot be determined. We do not know how many young, middle-class men actually experienced the transcendence of Victorian love or how many sustained the passion after marriage (when even the prescriptive literature suggested some lapse from perfection).23 Yet without claiming exactitude, it is possible to demonstrate impact. Victorian emotional culture, distinctive in itself, helped shape a distinctive emotional reality.
The best means of sorting through the impact of an emotional culture is to proceed through three layers, the first of which is, frankly, the easiest. If an emotional culture does not affect public arrangements, then it is scarcely worth talking about. People responsible for translating emotional standards into laws and organized activities inevitably reflect the values preached around them, whether they internalize these values in their own emotional lives or not. The fact that this first impact is obvious—public culture and organizational behavior inevitably coincide to a degree—should not obscure its importance. Victorian experience was shaped in significant ways by changes that responded to or reflected the new emotional values. Even if no private echoes of these values could be found—which is not the case—the salience of Victorian emotionology for “real life” would be amply demonstrated—along with, admittedly, a strong dose of hypocrisy. As will be shown, the first layer of cultural impact, at the level of institutional response, displays clearly the Victorian impulse not simply toward repression of undesirable emotional impulses but also toward the promotion of essential intensity.
In 1904 Andrew Carnegie set up a trust for the Carnegie Hero Fund to provide moneys for people who had been injured performing heroic acts, or for survivors of people killed in such acts:
We live in a heroic age. Not seldom are we thrilled by deeds of heroism where men or women are injured or lose their lives in attempting to preserve or rescue their fellows; such the heroes of civilization. The heroes of barbarism maimed or killed theirs.24
Carnegie’s fund followed on a common newspaper genre that had developed by the 1890s, featuring stories of ordinary people who, as one journalist put it, “were suddenly confronted with the question of whether or not they would risk death to save the lives of others” and describing “the manner in which they met, without preparation or forethought, that supreme moment.” Feature stories and the special fund for heroes obviously institutionalized Victorian concepts of facing and conquering fear. They institutionalized the stuff of boys’ stories, emphasizing the ability to experience intense emotion and channel it toward socially useful ends. They highlighted the importance of spontaneity and impulse against any Victorian temptation to stodgy caution. The purity of the emotional experience was primary.25
The Carnegie Fund was not a transformative organization in America, though thanks to the wonders of capitalist investment it survives to this day. But along with the public expressions of belief in courageous mastery of fear written into boy scout literature, newspaper stories, and other genres, the fund did concretely express the extent to which Victorian emotional values could be translated into action. Some Victorians, clearly, were willing to put money where their emotional commitments lay.
Victorian emotionology translated abundantly into sports. There are all sorts of reasons for the rise of sports in the nineteenth-century United States, but among them, and particularly important in the distinctively American enthusiasm for introducing