American Cool. Peter N. Stearns
most devoted daughter,
Sweetest Mother,
And from a recollection years later: “We all loved Mother with all our hearts, with all our souls and with all our bodies, and when she went away we missed her more than tongue could tell. In later years, she said that she was afraid she had let us love her too much, that she sometimes thought we had put her in place of God. If we did, we might easily have had a less worthy idea of God.”45
Mothers could respond in kind. Although women’s magazines late in the nineteenth century began trumpeting a crisis between mothers and daughters, in which the former could no longer approve of the lifestyle changes of youth and/or the latter had lost the affectionate respect due their elders, actual middle-class mothers and daughters shared a deep emotional bond, with apparently few exceptions. When their daughters left for work or college, their mothers wrote them with ardent support, visited often, and in some instances actually stayed with them for a time. Disputes occurred, to be sure, but they were usually surrounded with reassuring love. As one wrote, “Your life must not be stunted by us [the parents]. … Our love can make any leaps of time and distance.”46 Reciprocating, even the “new” young women who were building careers referred to their mothers as “the anchor” of their lives. Both the depth of this feeling and the willingness to express it in ardent terms reflected real correspondence with the emotional culture of child- and motherlove, even at a time when middle-class women’s lives were changing noticeably.
The love theme pervaded courtship, again leading to expressions, from men as well as women, fully in keeping with the most soaring versions of Victorian culture. Byron Caldwell Smith, pressing Katherine Stephens in letters between 1874 and 1876, urged, “Oh write, write I am perishing to see on paper the words—I love you.” Describing the “great passion that fills me,” his “great life-passion,” he distinguished his love from mere romance, assuring her of “true” love and constancy. “It [true love] is to love with all one’s soul what is pure, what is high, what is eternal.” “A tender true heart that loves unselfishly, and seeks and understands a love which is not the mere surprise of the senses … but why should I go on to describe what I love to her I love.” And of course the religious connection was ever present: “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.” Women could respond in kind, as Angelina Grimke did to Theodore Weld: “Yes my heart continuously cleaves to you, deep of my nature is moved to meet the reaching agonies of your soul after me.” “Why does not the love of my own dear sister … satisfy. … Why do I feel in my inmost soul that you, you only, can fill up the deep void that is there?” And Theodore answered flight with flight: “How many times have I felt my heart… reaching out in every agony after you and cleaving to you, feeling that we are no more twain but one flesh.”47
From at least the 1830s until 1900 thousands of middle-class couples, during their courtship years and sometimes afterward when separation necessitated letter writing, tried to describe the deep, spiritual love that filled them. The themes were almost commonplace. Granting of course that the letters still available today may not be fully representative of courtship sentiments, studies of middle-class youth reveal a virtually unquestioned assumption that intense, spiritual love would be the basis for engagement and marriage. Autobiographies and other commentaries echo these sentiments, while the Mosher survey, addressing upper-middle-class women at the end of the century, reveals similar, if somewhat less ethereal, beliefs in the centrality of abiding love in marriage.48 A central tenet of Victorian emotional culture, in sum, corresponded to the real emotional aspirations of much of the middle class and to the felt experience of a sizeable number within it. Childhood experience (including deep love for siblings as well as for mothers), encounters with the standards of love through fiction and advice books, and the promptings of religious feeling and sexual deferment all combined to create this relationship between belief and reality.
Furthermore, the quest for deep emotional fulfillment in love also spilled over into friendship and many lifelong relations among sisters. The searing language used in letters between women friends has been frequently noted as a Victorian characteristic; it obviously transferred into friendship much of the intensity with which the culture surrounded love in general. “Dear darling Sarah! How I love you and how happy I have been! You are the joy of my life. … I cannot tell you how much happiness you gave me, nor how constantly it is all in my thoughts. … My darling how I long for the time when I shall see you.” Marriage did not necessarily interrupt these outpourings, in some cases, no doubt, because the emotional expectations brought to wedlock were not fulfilled. References to kissing, eternal love, and devotion pepper the letters of women to each other. “I wanted so to put my arms round my girl of all the girls in the world and tell her … I love her as wives do love their husbands, as friends who have taken each other for life—and I believe in her as I believe in my God.” Religiouslike qualities helped women identify their emotions, as Mary Grew wrote: “Love is spiritual, only passion is sexual.”49
Young men developed similar passions in the period of life during their early twenties when they had separated from parents but were not yet positioned to launch courtship. In letters and journals they described themselves as “fervent lovers” and wrote of their “deep and burning affection.” Like the women, they commented on their physical contacts with each other and dreamed of a life of mutual intimacy. When the time came to separate, usually when one friend married, the emotionality of friendship came to the surface again: “[0]ur hearts were full of that true friendship which could not find utterance by words, we laid our heads upon each other’s bosom and wept, it may be unmanly to weep, but I care not, the spirit was touched.”50
Male intimacy almost always ended with marriage, and most men, even in their passionate youth, knew that this would be so. Women, in contrast, might preserve the passion or might use it to generate intense resentment against the marital threat. Thus in a letter of congratulation to a newly wed couple, one friend addressed the husband: “Do you know sir, that until you came along I believe that she loved me almost as girls love their lovers. I know I loved her so. Don’t you wonder that I can stand the sight of you?” Here, real experience not only gave substance to the fervent love preached by Victorian culture but also to the common theme of separation emotions that sustained so many short stories dealing with sisters or friends adjusting to the marriage of one of their number.51
As with love in its principal forms, so, logically enough, with grief: the Victorians who expressed themselves in letters, diaries, and often in ritual commonly expected, articulated, and felt the sharpness that grief was supposed to generate.52 The intensity resulted above all from the attachments of love, but it was heightened by emotionological approval of grief itself, such that its presence was expected, its absence a potential occasion for guilt. Grief applied most poignantly to death but also to departures and other separations. Nellie Wetherbee recorded in her diary as she left her family to head west, “I only cried as the steamer sailed away—bitter, bitter tears.” The death of children produced almost overwhelming emotion, as an 1897 diary reported: “Jacob is dead. Tears blind my eyes as I write … now he is at rest, my little darling Jacob. Hope to meet you in heaven. God help me to bear my sorrow.” Here, clearly, not only the pain of grief but also the conscious handling of grief with references to reunion and divine support reflect the currency of the larger Victorian culture. Men as well as women expressed their sorrow. A Civil War soldier leaves his family in 1863, crying for days before the final departure, then musing in his diary both on his great love and on the “cruelty” of the separation. A minister, coincidentally in the same year, asks Jesus to “support me under this crushing blow”—his brother’s death.