American Cool. Peter N. Stearns

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СКАЧАТЬ the mother responds with the image of a butterfly emerging from a lifeless chrysalis. In other poems, again in school readers, the dominant theme was the reunion of loved ones after death in heaven.

      Oh. we pray to meet our darling

      For a long, long, sweet embrace.

      Where the little feet are waiting—

      And we meet her face to face.

      Tragic death scenes remained commonplace in stories for children, as they were asked to live through the sorrows of illness and passing while being assured that an outpouring of emotion was valid and ultimately healthy: “Elsie’s grief was deep and lasting. She sorrowed as she might have done for the loss of a very dear brother, … a half remorseful feeling which reason could not control or entirely relieve; and it was long ere she was quite her own bright, gladsome sunny self again.” Louisa May Alcott wrote of a sister’s “bitter cry of an unsubmissive sorrow,” of “sacred moments, when heart talked to heart in the silence of the night, turning affliction to a blessing, which chastened grief and strengthened love.”⁴⁹ Mother’s assurances, repeated references to protecting angels, and the increasing theme of familial reunion in heaven all linked the power of grief to hope and love; but the power was not evaded. Stories of death were now disengaged from fear and from moral admonitions about life’s transiency to become part of the characteristic Victorian emotional style, in which intense emotions served as a desirable part of life and, ultimately, an enhancement of human ties. The starkness of death disappeared under sentimental overlays in these portrayals, but the inescapability, even the benefit, of a period of deep grief was generally confirmed.

      The same themes pervaded popular parlor songs in the Victorian decades. The 1839 song “Near the Lake Where Droop’d the Willow” became an immense success in American concerts and inspired several decades of imitations. The song focused on a girl loved in youth, who had died long ago:

      Mingled were our hearts forever, long time ago;

      Can I now forget her? Never. No, lost one, no.

      To her grave these tears are given, ever to flow,

      She’s the star I missed from heaven, long time ago.⁵⁰

      In contrast to eighteenth-century songs about death, which were set in the artificial pastoral world of shepherds and written in the third person, Victorian grief songs were personal and immediate. Death and its aftermath became a field for emotional exploration. Minstrel shows dealt with the emotions of death, often without much reference to plot or character. Deathbed scenes, the emotional ties between dead and living, and the idea of ultimate reunion in heaven all figured prominently. Literally hundreds of songs about dying girls were published, particularly in the 1860s, when they obviously served as a combination of focus for and distraction from the terrors of the Civil War: “Wait for me at heaven’s gate, Sweet Belle Mahone”; “Though we may meet no more on earth, Thou shalt be mine above”; “Angels guard her with your wings. … Bid her dream love-dreams of me—Till I come, sleep, Eulalie.” But along with the sentimentalized heaven came real sorrow on earth, with frequent emotion-laden visits to the cemetery: “I’m kneeling by thy grave, Katy Darling; This world is all a bleak place to me”; “All night I sat upon her grave, And sorely I did cry.”⁵¹

      Oh, a huge great grief I’m bearing,

      Though I scarce can heave a sigh,

      And I’ll ever be dreaming, Katy Darling,

      Of. thy love ev’ry day till I die.⁵²

      The pervasive themes of grief and pathos formed an important part of Victorian culture, making the sorrow of bereavement seem natural, even desirable, though also to some degree consolable. Grief could soar, as love did. At the risk of trivializing grief (and certainly Christian doctrines concerning the afterlife), Victorian emotional culture embraced this sorrow openly, returning to it with almost endless fascination at least until the final decades of the nineteenth century.

       Victorian Intensity

      No single work, either expert or popular, conveniently summed up Victorian emotional culture. In examining the real though complex consistency of the amalgam that emerged after 1850, we are piecing together a wholeness that the Victorians themselves did not explicitly encounter. One result of the patchwork approach to popular presentations of Victorian emotional style was, inevitably, a host of inconsistencies. For example, men as well as women were urged to have intense emotions, and yet Victorian statements could imply that male superiority rested directly in the ability to control and suppress emotions. This inconsistency doubtless reflected some genuine ambiguity about how to defend gender goals in the emotional arena. Anachronistic standards also continued to intrude, including an occasional epitaph or story designed to discipline children through fear of untimely demise.

      Nevertheless, once the transition away from the simpler emotional view of the early Victorians was complete, advice literature, mainstream Protestant sermons, and moralistic popular fiction presented a fairly uniform picture about anger, fear, jealousy, grief, and love. There were no clear dissenting voices in the most widely read directives. An evangelical segment, to be sure, maintained a somewhat more traditional view of discipline through fear as part of their religious stance. Utopian communities also dissented, though less directly. In arguing for cooperativeness instead of competition, they did not adopt the mature Victorian idea of channeled anger. Nor did they countenance intense love as a means of joining a couple (and therefore emotionally isolating it from the community). On the other hand, they actually intensified the new view of jealousy in arguing against possessiveness, including sexual possessiveness.⁵³ These subcultures, both of which related to the mainstream middle class, must not be forgotten.

      Nor, of course, should the class base of the dominant Victorian emotional style be lost from sight. Popularizers intended their wares for all readers, but there is no question that their emphasis was class based. As we will see in the following chapter, evidence suggests that many Victorians translated their emotional culture into assumptions that lower classes and immigrants were incapable of the finer feelings it embodied. Victorian emotional style became part of a cultural arsenal that allowed middle-class publicists both to preach at the lower classes, confident of the superiority of their emotional standards, and also to condemn them for failing to live up to the necessary control or to express the ethereal qualities of true love. While the Victorian style did not address alternative norms, which testifies both to substantial middleclass agreement on goals and to the dominant cultural position of the middle class, there is no reason to assume that it displaced various working-class and ethnic alternatives or that the Victorians really expected it to do so. The history of ethnic and lower-class emotionologies, immensely desirable, has yet to be written, though some material on expressions of parental and romantic love warns us not to expect total differentiation.⁵⁴

      At any rate, a surprisingly coherent emotional culture was purveyed to the middle class during the second half or two-thirds of the nineteenth century. The culture had two main foci: the need for control, for directing emotional fervor to appropriate ends; but also the need for intensity, for the spark necessary to a full life and to the functions essential in modern society. Emotional excess was obviously condemned, but so was emotional flaccidity. The Victorians sought, as basic ingredients of good character, the capacity for deep feeling along with the capacity to direct that feeling to appropriate targets.

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