American Cool. Peter N. Stearns

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СКАЧАТЬ causes that generate a larger emotional style involves overlap but not complete identity. For example, the Victorian emphasis on parental love for children built on cultural trends that had been taking shape for some time, but there were also more specific reasons for it. The American middle class was busily cutting its birth rate from the late eighteenth century onward. Smaller family size often encourages a more intense relationship between parents and children and also, when it is first developing, a rather anxious concern to justify novel demographic behavior. Arguing in terms of great love and extensive maternal obligations helped Victorian parents ease their minds about having fewer children, on average, than their own parents had expected. While emphasis on love for children also fit, of course, in the larger Victorian style and indeed played a major role in some of its other ramifications, its specific origins must be acknowledged. It is also important to recognize that events may carry impact on some emotional standards without particularly altering others. For example, the Civil War obviously helped heighten earlier emphasis on channeled anger and courageous encounters with fear,⁴ but it had little impact on standards of love. Again, particular factors can be identified without contradicting the larger causal analysis, but they do add complexity. Explaining the Victorian style itself constitutes the most important analytical task, but it does not exhaust the process of evaluating factors relevant to more specific ingredients.

      Two other illustrations highlight specific contexts applicable to individual emotions. Victorian grief, which served a central position in the larger culture, stemmed in part from the continuing high child mortality rates (all the more keenly felt with the birth rate steadily declining) in a culture that now saw children as more precious, child mortality as less inevitable. This specific formula for intense grief bore little relationship to channeled anger or several of the other Victorian staples.

      Finally, Victorian romantic love ideals stemmed in part—possibly in large part—from the tension-filled combination middle-class couples attempted between extensive emotional exchange and pronounced restrictions on premarital sexuality. Courting couples were given considerable freedom for mutual contact in the United States—far more than outdated Victorian imagery had suggested. They were encouraged to think about love, and of course their culture had already prepared them, well before courtship, to expect some decisive emotional charge. Young men, for example, thought about women and love long before their economic circumstances permitted them to go courting.⁵ But they were not supposed to have sexual intercourse even as they built an intense relationship, and while a few couples crossed this barrier, most did not. It is hardly fanciful to see the emphasis on overwhelming but ethereal passion as in part a compensation for sexual limitations and an aid in enforcing restraint among couples who firmly believed that premature sex would sully their true love. Sexual constraint may indeed have informed other facets of the Victorian emotional style, providing a physical basis for the need to find channels for emotional intensity, but it applied most directly to the love connection. It is obvious that larger emotional cultures like the Victorian style result in part from the accumulation of smaller changes that relate to more specific parts of the emotional spectrum.

      Accumulation, however, is not the only explanatory approach. Just as individual factors involved in particular emotional reactions informed the Victorian style as a whole, so the style had roots of its own that helped shape particular emotional reactions. Interestingly, despite the recent flurry of attention to Victorian emotionality, we have only incomplete glimpses of the larger causation. Just as the style itself has not previously been synthesized, so the causes of the style have not been directly addressed.

      Victorian emotional culture contrasted with eighteenth-century styles in several key respects, particularly in the decades of maturity after the 1840s. Indulgence of grief was novel, for while individuals grieved in the eighteenth century, the public interest in this emotion was limited.⁶ The mature Victorian definition of romantic love, while it built on prior trends, went well beyond eighteenth-century precedents. The idea of channeled anger meshed neither with traditional indulgence in certain kinds of anger—in defense of hierarchy or religious orthodoxy, for example—nor with growing eighteenth-century concern about keeping anger in bounds. Attacks on disciplinary uses of fear emerged specifically in the early nineteenth century, and in this case were quite consciously directed against prior standards. The same holds true for some of the new uses of guilt. The Victorian emotional style was not, then, simply a carryover from prior standards or even from some of the newer cultural trends, though it involved the latter. Thus it is necessary to isolate the causes of the Victorian emotional style, for such analysis will in turn facilitate exploration of the reasons for yet another, more profound, post-Victorian set of shifts.

      The simplest basic explanation of overall Victorian culture would focus on combining an understanding of emotionological trends that had been part of the transformation of mentalities throughout Western society from the late seventeenth century onward with attention to the impact of industrialization and urbanization in the nineteenth-century United States. According to such a reading, the Victorian emotional style was not a fundamental departure from eighteenth-century trends, themselves rather new. We have already seen that in highlighting explicit concern about anger, in attacking traditional disciplinary uses of fear, and in emphasizing various kinds of love, Victorianism amplified currents already present in American culture a century before. Victorianism thus built upon the reorientation of family functions toward greater emotionality and the attempt to introduce greater restraint in manners; it had no need to create. But while not fundamentally innovative, it did introduce its own flavor—the idea of motherlove, for example, while an outgrowth of the familial emphasis, was a distinctive Victorian product⁷—and this is where the new functional demands imposed by the growth of industry and the city made their mark.

      The origins of the preindustrial cultural transformation are themselves not entirely clear. Several historians have cited the role of growing commercialization in prompting new concern about family emotional rewards as public life, in many communities, became increasingly competitive. Protestantism, as it transmuted into a wider belief system in the seventeenth century, unquestionably encouraged greater focus on family ties, emotional ties included. English writers pushed this theme hard and had obvious impact on attitudes across the Atlantic as well. Sources for the increasingly rigorous definition of civilized manners are not as easily pinned down. European upper classes grew increasingly suspicious of popular crudeness under the impact of Renaissance styles, which provided them a clear alternative to the prevailing version of mass culture. Growing prosperity brought a taste for refinement of habits. Capitalism also exacerbated divisions between propertied and unpropertied classes, which in turn generated an interest in habits of emotional restraint that would allow the former to distinguish themselves while conveniently blaming the latter for their own miseries. None of this bore fruit as quickly in the American colonies as in Europe, but, with the added effect of European cultural imitation, it began to have an impact by the later eighteenth century.⁸ Thus, well in advance of Victorianism per se, American emotional norms had been shifting, and these changes prepared the response to the challenges of a new economy.

      By the 1830s the impact of an increasingly commercial economy was becoming clear. Victorian emotionology reacted, as we have seen, by seeking to enhance the special emotional role of the family; here was part of the functional charge behind the redefinition of motherlove. In the slightly longer term, the increasing absence of husbands and fathers, as work separated from the home, added fuel to the fire, and emotional standards had to be intensified simply to protect the established value of family life. Concern about the taints of commerce, present even among people who embraced commercial opportunities,⁹ provided yet another function for family-enhancing intensity and an emotional style that would clearly separate private from public activity.

      But this was only an initial functional reaction in emotional culture. By the late СКАЧАТЬ