American Cool. Peter N. Stearns

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       3 Evaluating the Victorian Emotional Style: Causes and Consequences

      Major features of Victorian emotional culture have been well described in recent years. Despite persistent and erroneous oversimplifications about blanket repressiveness and hostility to spontaneity, in fact the picture painted in the previous chapter blends a host of familiar portraits.¹ Victorian interest in emotional intensity combined with greater strictures concerning sexuality and bodily control, with emotion actually offering some relief from the more rigorous standards applied to other areas.

      The causes of the Victorian style are, however, less well known, partly because the emotional culture has not previously been addressed in its entirety. Furthermore, although we will see that some of the specific consequences have been traced, analysis of effects can be improved by looking at the impact of the whole culture rather than individual parts such as love or gender norms.

      Cause-effect evaluation of the Victorian style is essential, for without it, the purely descriptive summary provided in the previous chapter may prove deceptive. Despite widespread and substantial concordance in the cultural prescriptions to the middle class, emotional standards must be considered mere window dressing if they did not respond to real needs in Victorian society; pinpointing causation is vital. Even more obviously, if the emotional norms had no demonstrable consequences aside from filling up advice literature and moralistic fiction, they could well be dismissed as meaningless. In fact, however, despite incomplete evidence on private beliefs and behaviors, it is possible to trace a number of results that issued from the widely preached culture and to conclude that, like the culture itself, these results were persistent. Finally, cause-effect evaluation is essential in preparing for analysis of subsequent change; for change could occur only as causation shifted, and the impact of causal shifts had to be formulated in contest with previous cultural impacts.

       Causation

      Basic causes of emotional standards have been discussed less often than the standards themselves, both in historical work and to a substantial extent in sociology. Anthropologists, who deal extensively with emotional culture, pay even less attention to causation since, with rare exceptions, they pick up well-established patterns (or assume that they do) and do not emphasize change. For them, prior culture causes present culture, with other causes stretching back in the mists of time. Yet causal analysis is vital in dealing with emotions as social or cultural constructs, for we need to know what factors prompted particular patterns to emerge. Constructionist theory has emphasized the importance of changing social functions in reshaping emotional life, an approach that invites exactly the kind of causation assessment historians seek; but practicing constructionists have spent more time discussing their propositions in the abstract than providing concrete case studies.² Their approach has been brought to bear on twentieth-century change, and I will turn to it in due course, but middle-level generalizations, based on more than recent developments, are hard to come by. As a result, important debate among constructionists, about what kind of functionalism underlies emotional standards, has remained largely implicit. Constructionists would generally agree that emotions serve particularly to maintain the moral order and the social status quo, but this may beg the more precise question of which particular moral and social factors are involved. James Averill defines these factors as social and cultural, but practicing constructionists like Arlie Hochschild construe functionalism more narrowly, emphasizing primarily economic and organizational factors.³ Yet the anthropologists who have contributed to constructionist theory emphasize cultural functions as well. There are important issues here, which I will address in applying functionalist explanations both to Victorianism and to subsequent twentieth-century change; but there are no precise models to guide our inquiry.

      Causation is a tricky concept in historical discussion, particularly in dealing with an already-slippery descriptive category like emotional culture. Explaining Victorian culture is a far more challenging task than assigning causes for the War of Jenkin’s Ear. Historians have no laboratory basis for testing replicability. They cannot present causation findings in the same manner as scientists, who do have this capacity. Yet, granting the imprecision and openness to further debate, historical change can be identified and it can be subjected to probabilistic evaluation, yielding a fair sense of the major factors involved.

      One further issue requires some preliminary comment: the relationship between the causes of standards applied to individual СКАЧАТЬ