American Cool. Peter N. Stearns
had repercussions in public arrangements designed to express intensity as well as regulate its targets. Law and leisure, not to mention burial arrangements or penology, were significantly altered as a result of emotional values, as jurists, school authorities, and other officials faithfully acted under the guidelines of Victorian emotionology. Public expression of the new emotional culture peaked between about 1870 and 1910, suggesting a not surprising lag between the first expression of the culture and its capacity a generation later to affect major institutions.
Private Beliefs and Emotional Experience
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