American Cool. Peter N. Stearns
see a corpse. It is desirable to dwell on the joys of the righteous in the presence of their heavenly Father, freed from every pain and sorrow, rather than on the state and burial of the body, a subject, very likely, painful to affect the imagination.” Happiness was the key: death was to be presented as a joyous release and an opportunity to achieve the greatest possible serenity. Thus a child might be told, on the death of a playmate: “she would like to live but she was ready to go … she had a happy life in this world but felt sure that a still happier one awaited her in the next.”16 Epitaphs, similarly, were altered to displace fear with religious cheer:
Go peaceful Spirit rest
Secure from earth’s alarms
Resting on the Saviour’s breast
Encircled by his arms.17
The overall message concerning fear was unambiguous: it must not disrupt the positive emotional bonds between parent and child. Fear was an “infirmity” that was “most enslaving to the mind, and destructive of its strength and capability of enjoyment. … How cruel, then, purposely to excite false terrors in those under our care.”18
Anger was the second emotion to be excised from family life.19 At least as much as fear, anger could corrode the affection essential to the family. Fiction in the popular women’s magazines around midcentury, and advice literature even earlier, crystallized this belief in an endless series of accounts of the horrors of first quarrels. “Cultivate a spirit of mutual and generous forbearance, carefully abiding anything like angry contention or contradiction. Beware of the first dispute, and deprecate its occurrence.” “Quarrels of every sort are exceedingly destructive of human happiness; but no quarrels, save those among brethren in the church, are so bitter as family quarrels; and … should be so sedulously avoided.” Women particularly received advice about their role in promoting domestic serenity, for it was noted that, unlike their husbands, they were cushioned from the frustrations of business life. Wives’ good temper was vital because men needed solace from their harsh workday realities. But men were held to the same domestic standards. William Alcott, in an advice book for husbands, intoned: “The reign of gentleness. … is very much needed in this jarring, clashing, warring world.” Phrenologist Orson Fowler noted wives’ sensitivity, such that a single “tart remark” might make her wretched. Anger, quite simply, was too dangerous to play with, for even a little dispute might so contradict the loving tranquillity of the home, the “soul blending” that a real marriage involved, that irreparable damage might ensue. “Let [the First Quarrel] be avoided, and that hateful demon, discord, will never find a place at the domestic hearth. Let it have its existence, no matter … how brief its duration, the demon will feel himself invited and will take his place, an odious, but an abiding guest, at the fireside.”20
First-quarrel stories drove the point home by describing ensuing disaster. An angry wife makes a husband so ill that he almost dies, though in this case reform saves the marriage. A man’s anger leads to his wife’s death and also to the ruin of most of his children. A wife, repenting her stubborn anger too late, sees her husband go off to India, where he dies. Another wifely outburst causes a man to seek solace in the woods, where he is almost killed by a falling tree. Another angry wife almost dies herself: her face reddens with rage, every vein swells and stands out, every nerve quivers, foam covers her lips, and finally she falls as blood gushes from her nose and mouth. The theme of possession by rage, and accompanying references to demons, recalls an earlier set of beliefs about the causes and consequences of emotional excess, but the principal focus at this point was family misery. The result was an extremely rigorous standard, in which true love and harmony forbade a single harsh remark between husband and wife, and avoidance, rather than conciliatory strategies, held center stage. Here was Victorian emotional repression at a peak. For not only was anger to be shunned, but the early Victorian formula also held that one party was always to blame in any lapse: anger identified the bad person, which left the good, calm party free from responsibility. Anger showed bad character, pure and simple. And while occasional remarks suggested that men might not be as gentle as women because of men’s work responsibilities outside the home, there was no particular emphasis on a wife’s obligation to suffer anger in silence. The gender difference with regard to anger lay in the notion that men had to work to live up to standard while truly feminine women had an inherent gentleness that excluded even the need to exercise self-control. Correspondingly, though this was rarely explicitly stated, an angry woman was worse than an angry man.21
Anger between parents and children was condemned as thoroughly as that between spouses. Indeed, proper childrearing would so exclude anger as to create the personalities (presumably, particularly in women) that would later allow the marital standards to hold sway. Given growing assumptions about childish innocence, it was thought that if parents controlled their own anger, children would not learn anger themselves. “I say to any father or mother, are you irritable, petulant? If so, begin this moment the work of subjugating your temper.” “Fretfulness and Ill temper in the parents are provocations.” Fortunately, self-control and, above all, maternal love, calm, and cheer could save the day; few manuals between 1830 and 1860 dwelled on childhood anger as a particular problem. In the event that parental models might fail, prescriptive writers offered uplifting children’s stories featuring George Washington’s efforts to control his temper and good boys who avoided responding angrily to taunts. But mother was key. “A mother must have great control over her own feelings, a calmness and composure of spirit not easily disturbed.” “And can a mother expect to govern her child, when she cannot govern herself?” T. S. Arthur, that ubiquitous advice giver of midcentury, put it more simply still: “As mother is, so will be children.” And the goals of avoiding or subjugating anger applied to boys as well as girls. When children were being discussed, emphasis on the bestiality of anger and its inappropriateness in family life took precedence over any effort to delineate gender traits. Anger was bad, and a good family would escape it. Correspondingly, though the connection was not elaborately explored, anger in a husband or wife was frequently blamed on a bad upbringing that left the individual “spoiled” or “capricious.”22
As with anger and fear, so jealousy came under new scrutiny when early Victorians applied the familial lens to emotional standards. Redefinitions of this emotion had been anticipated in the earlier reevaluation of family emotionality, but because jealousy was not seen as posing the same kind of threat to family harmony as anger or fear, it received less articulate attention. But the implicit shift was considerable even so.23
In the first place, when jealousy was mentioned it was now focused primarily on love relationships, particularly among courting couples and married adults. (Children’s jealousy came in for little comment at this point.) Earlier ideas about jealousy in defense of honor or jealousy as a spur to righteous action (this last a recollection of the emotion’s original etymological link to zeal) simply disappeared amid the new concentration on family emotionality.
In the second place, romantic jealousy, when discussed, was now uniformly condemned. Earlier Western tradition had been ambivalent on this point. Some authorities, like Shakespeare in Othello, had attacked jealousy’s tendency to possess a person and poison a couple’s relationship, while others had praised jealousy’s capacity to add spice to love and even to bring about greater commitment in love. Amid early Victorians, ambivalence officially withdrew: when jealousy was formally assessed, it was condemned. For jealousy contradicted the purity of love, adding a selfish and possessive quality that fouled this now-precious emotion. “There is no real love where there is no abandon and complete confidence.” Love, whose “truest, purest, highest form is that of strong, unselfish affection blended with desire,” “ennobles” the individual; it is “the beautifier, the glorifier, the redeemer.” Marriage itself was “complete union of amity and love, of life and fortune, of interests and