American Cool. Peter N. Stearns

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СКАЧАТЬ on the female side. Within the sacred confines of family, men were supposed to keep their temper, but it was acknowledged that their nature and their cares at work might expose some rough edges. Women were much better suited to the kind of self-control necessary to keep the home a tranquil place. “If there isn’t one person in the house who simply shoulders more than his share and goes on quietly saying nothing about it, there are going to be friction and unhappiness”—and that one person was characteristically the wife, particularly in depictions after 1850. More simply put, “the average American girl believes that womanly, domestic methods are most effective.” And more directly still, from an early Victorian address to young ladies, “An enraged woman [is] one of the most disgusting sights in nature”—a theme that etiquette books repeated through the century.⁶² Whether this devotion to calm followed from women’s real lack of anger or simply from their greater effort at self-control was not always clear, but the message came through regardless: women had no legitimate need for anger. All the devices developed to ritualize channeling that were urged on middle-class families, particularly aggressive sports like boxing, were concentrated on boys; girls remained confined to the anger-free models developed early in the Victorian period.

      The passionate encounter with fear was another male preserve. Nineteenth-century popularizations did not mention courage as a female attribute; this was true even in the early scouting movements, extended past 1900. Boys were routinely told to face fear and conquer it. Girls were simply not discussed, or at most were advised not to be more fearful than necessary. Advice to mothers, to hide fears from children, assumed that women could manage some control but had not undergone the transforming emotional experience that would really make them brave. Thus T. S. Arthur, urging adult women to conceal fear, clearly implied that they would suffer from it. In his twin manuals directed respectively to girls and to boys, only his boys’ book includes the characteristically long section on moral courage; the girls’ pamphlet is mute on this subject.⁶³ Boys’ stories, like the Rollo series, liked to show girls paralyzed by fear while their brothers dealt with danger. Courage was nice, but courage in front of trembling females was even nicer. Again, the word “sissy” clearly showed the distinctions between gender standards where the encounter with fear was concerned.⁶⁴

      The basis for the gender-specific rules on handling the dangerous emotions lay, obviously, in assigned roles. Women, being domestic creatures, did not need and, regarding anger, could not afford the emotional range men required because of their work in the world. Public-private emotional divisions were crucial to Victorian culture, and these provided gender markers as well. The home was a haven in which disruptive emotions had no place. Women should therefore be emotionally gentle. The burden on men was in some ways greater, as they had to develop two emotional faces, one domestic and the other economic and political. But this same dualism gave them a far greater range for emotional intensity.

      The distinction is interestingly revealed in the recurrent popular comments on jealousy. Men and women were held to differ here as well, as jealousy became feminized. With regard to female jealousy, a certain ambiguity developed that was not granted to men in Victorian culture: a bit of jealousy might be expected from dependent, emotional women, and a loving man might respond by changing behaviors even though the emotion was petty and potentially disruptive. Men were more constrained with respect to low-level jealousy; there was no acceptance of a jealous male in routine commentary. But when jealousy rose to heights of passion, motivating vengeance, men alone held the keys. Women could not, in law, use the claim of jealous rage to excuse attacks on their spouses’ lovers. The few who attempted this defense were uniformly convicted. Even where defense of family was concerned, intensity, again, was male.⁶⁵

      Thus women were seen as emotional but not passionate. The intensity that would lead to dramatic, effective action was a masculine preserve. As part of the larger imagery of female passivity, women’s emotions were often seen as soft and desirably gentle. Men were not only more highly sexed but were also possessed of more driving emotions, which served both for economic competitiveness and as a foundation for broad social action. Women, as befit their domestic sphere, had no such range. Songs of grief persisted in using examples of women’s deaths, which served to emphasize a male role in grief but also reminded the audience of female frailty. Beliefs about female hysteria, though not commonly discussed in the popular prescriptive literature, may have added to the sense of women’s emotional boundaries.

      Even motherlove, that deep wellspring that women alone possessed by nature, was a sacrificing, subterranean emotion more than a driving force. As Jan Lewis has demonstrated, motherlove lived in the children, but it must not overwhelm them. Mothers “must beware of disclosing [their] feelings, or at least, let there not be an apparent attempt to exhibit them. … This would be most ruinous. Rather let [the child] feel that there exists in your bosom a well spring of feeling and anxiety, which others know nothing of, and which even he cannot fathom.” Women’s maternal intensity, in sum, must be self-effacing; it did not motivate powerful action. A woman endowed with “warm feelings” and “quick apprehension” must exercise “self-control” so that she might display only a “calm good sense.” Emotion was not an unqualified good, and to the extent that women were particularly emotional, they could complicate their own maternal tasks. As John Abbott insisted, in discussing “The Mother’s Difficulties,” “We must bring our own feelings and our own actions under a rigid system of discipline, or it will be in vain for us to hope to curb the passions and restrain the conduct of those who are looking to us for instruction and example.”⁶⁶

      Unquestionably, male and female emotions were held to differ, as were the functions of their emotions. The same rules that defined a combination of passion and control also clearly specified areas where women could not tread. Criticisms of women’s excessive, debilitating emotionality surfaced recurrently.

      Yet a full differentiation was not attempted, and even the male passion/female sentiment distinction should not be pressed too far. Men, too, could fail through emotional excess, as when they displayed ungovernable temper. They, like female hysterics, could be subject to medical controls. Women, for their part, though disbarred from channeled anger or the passions of courage, had intensities of their own. The fact that mothers must monitor their display did not automatically differentiate them from men, who were also required to be watchful. Though manipulated for the child’s good, deep emotional expression could be part of maternalism: “Another outlet for thy womanly heart: a mirror in which thy smiles and tears shall be reflected back; a fair page on which thou, God-commissioned, mayst write what thou wilt; a heart that will throb back to thine, love for love.”⁶⁷ Here was some female equivalence for the male joys of channeling anger toward a justified target or conquering the pangs of fear through courage triumphant.

      The point is that pronounced gender separation and a passion/control combination coalesced in Victorian emotional culture. Control for women was more severe, as it enforced domesticity and was constantly associated with the insistence on sweetness and calm. But a version of the characteristic tension applied to both genders.

      In romantic love, finally, men and women shared the field. Love was the intense emotion meant to unite two different characters, but in this case with equal fervor. While some Victorian advice suggested a slight concern that men might not love as well as women (because they were too reserved or distracted by other things and of course because their lusts might get the better of them), the injunction for men to love deeply was a standard fixture in the emotional culture. Women’s capacity to love was seldom doubted, though an interesting subgroup, in men’s advice literature after 1870, began to worry about women’s “other” interests, including incipient feminism, as a distraction from love: “Why do not women marry?” The idea of love, however, burned brightly still, for the same author who fretted about rising divorce СКАЧАТЬ