American Cool. Peter N. Stearns

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СКАЧАТЬ target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">¹⁸ And in the body-machine, emotions were harder to pin down, the symptoms harder to convey. Of course physical symptoms could still be invoked, but now only metaphorically. And although women’s emotional makeup was tied to the body in medical literature through discussions of how uterine development weakened the nervous system (and the brain) and so enforced a domestic emotional role, in popularized advice women’s emotions, like men’s, were discussed largely as independent entities. Popular stories could refer to the impact of emotion in causing blushing or sudden paleness, and in some stories, dire illness could follow from emotional experiences like love or anger, but in the United States, accident rather than illness seems more commonly to have befallen certain kinds of emotional victims in fiction.

      Despite some evidence to the contrary, it is safe to say that a traditional and automatic connection between emotional experience and physical sensation was challenged by the new, mechanistic idea of the body. Cultural adjustments resulted. Emotions in a sense became more abstract, and we are only now coming to grips with the consequences of this basic change in outlook. Victorians were unaware of their involvement, but they reflected it. Their recurrent tendency to see certain emotions as animal-like reflected a desire to achieve distance from the physical. Certainly their delight in ethereal emotional encounters—such as true spiritual love or the moral courage that could face down fear—reflected a desire to find a new basis for emotional intensity outside the corporal shell. Changing ideas of the body did not clearly cause basic adjustments in emotionology, but they contributed to the desire for regulation and to the particular Victorian version of soulful (not bodily) intensity. This same adaptation helps explain why Victorians, bent on disciplining the body through demanding clothing, posture requirements, and sexual constraints, did not see the relationship between these structures and their fascination with emotional fervor. Emotions came now from the spirit; they need not be constrained just because the body was regulated. Similarly, twentieth-century observers tend not to perceive the Victorian distinction between emotion and the body because they are accustomed to a more complete relationship between the two (though not, one hastens to add, a traditional, humoral relationship).¹⁹

      Finally, and in relation to the spiritualizing of key emotions, Victorian emotional style depended heavily on rapid changes in religious culture and in turn contributed to these changes. Here we see most clearly the inadequacy of defining functional requirements only in terms of economic structure and urbanization. A richer mixture of factors prevailed.

      Religious change intertwined with the Victorian version of emotional culture in two ways. First, several changes in mainstream Protestantism supported Victorian optimism about the consequences of vigorous emotion and were in turn supported by this optimism. The concept of a benign God stood behind motherlove, helping to explain the common association between the maternal image and prayer. The idea that God is benign also affected presentations of anger, further reducing any claim that wrath could be used to enforce hierarchy though not, ultimately, undercutting the notion of righteous anger against evil. God’s benignity also reduced the credit given to fear, for a more rosy-hued religion no longer saw an association between this emotion and true piety. Terrorized children, indeed, would not be able to discern God’s sweet mercy. One of the key arguments in early-nineteenth-century Protestantism focused on precisely this point, with the partisans of religion as an emotionally positive experience triumphing clearly, even in such previous bastions of dour Calvinism as Presbyterian Pittsburgh.²⁰ Solace for intense grief related to the declining attention paid to hellfire and the unprecedented notion of heaven as a divinely organized reunion of loved ones.

      In general, as several historians of middle-class religion have pointed out, American Protestantism shifted increasingly toward providing a positive emotional experience as its commitment to rigorous theology declined. The resulting assumptions undergirded common beliefs about the viability of courage in the face of fear and the bittersweet experience of grief while also encouraging restraint on some traditional uses of emotion such as fear in childrearing, now regarded as dangerous. Variant religious strands dissented from the norm, particularly in the case of the Evangelicals, who maintained a more traditional approach to anger and fear, seeking a more anxious piety and generating unacknowledged anger.²¹ Mainstream Protestantism, however, shared the directions of emotional culture, supporting the combination of control and intensity.

      Emotional intensity derived also, however, from the very process of weaning from traditional Protestant doctrine. Many middle-class Americans questioned their own religious commitment, aware that the theology of their forebears was being watered down; some, no doubt, simply became less religiously active given the growing hold of science and the bustle of the urban, industrial world. Thus emotional intensity could be sought as an equivalent to a religious experience that many Americans realized was slipping away. Motherlove, as Jan Lewis has pointed out, took on Christlike overtones: it was consuming, it expressed itself in self-sacrifice, it served as a beacon through life even when mother herself had passed from the scene. Indeed, many popular stories about male redemption featured an errant son, rescued from wicked ways by the inspiration of his mother’s love, returning to find his mother dead and vowing to devote his recovered purity to her memory; only the crucifix was missing. Ideals of romantic love picked up the same theme: in intense, spiritualized passion, couples hoped to find some of the same balm to the soul that religion had once, as they dimly perceived, provided. A few worried that their love contradicted the primacy of faith in God, but more concluded that true love was itself a religious experience. Byron Caldwell Smith put it this way in letters to his Katherine in the mid-1870s: “I feel somehow that the Holy power which sustains and moves the ancient universe … reveals itself to me as love. … To love you … and to sink my life in the Divine life through you, seem to me the supreme end of my existence. … Love is a cult and our love shall be our religion. … To each other we shall reveal only the divine attributes of tenderness and patience.” Karen Lystra has plausibly suggested that many young men, apathetic toward conventional religion, imbibed the commitment to intense love as a direct surrogate during the second half of the nineteenth century. And the words they used in love letters, soaring beyond the more cautious romantic spirituality of the advice manuals, point precisely in this direction. But men were not alone in this regard, despite women’s greater religiosity. Angelina Grimke worried about love and religion in her letters to Theodore Weld: “Am I putting thee in the place of Jesus? I am alarmed and confounded by my feelings. … I feel at times as if I cannot live without thee. … Am I sinning or would the Lord our Father have it so?” She answered in the affirmative, arguing that “our Father has enjoined us together, he has given us to each other” as both she and Theodore convinced themselves that their love was effectively a religious duty. Angelina again: “True love … is the seeking of the spirit after spiritual communion, … the union of heart and mind and soul.” ²²

      Victorian emotional culture stemmed in part, then, from an unusual moment in middle-class religion, when effective doctrinal changes created an environment in which God could be seen as supporting positive emotions but also in which many individuals came to regard intense, earthly love as a spiritual experience in itself as they made a transition away from more conventional religious commitments. Other cultural currents, notably social Darwinism, also supported the dominant emotionology after it had been established, providing it some new vocabulary and a scientific aura; but the link with religious adjustments remained more crucial.

      The causes of Victorian emotional style were thus varied, which is no surprise. Despite the temptation to seek a single main ingredient in a functionalist interpretation of emotionological change, historical reality suggests that a larger emotional culture requires a number of overlapping factors for its genesis and dissemination. The Victorian style built clearly on prior cultural change, combining a host of specific factors, such as the new need for greater sexual abstinence in the interest of birth control, that impelled particular emotional formulations as part of the СКАЧАТЬ