does more for a wound than a good many bandages.” Invocations of mother and prayer provided the basis for courage in this and other cases. In another instance, a boy faces a mad dog, “cool and courageous in the moment of danger,” then in a later trembling reaction realizes that a kindly God had sustained him.34
Fear differed from anger, of course, in that its role in character development was more indirect. Whereas anger could be usefully channeled, fear had no direct utility. Its role was more subtle, providing the test that allowed males to learn their own moral and emotional courage. The links between fear and anger were nevertheless real. Both emotions provided moments of great intensity vital to effective living. Both could be used for motivation and moral development, if properly mastered. The spirited Victorian boy was one who did not avoid fear, but faced it and triumphed over it, while using anger as a spur to action.35
The connection between fear and anger showed clearly in the evolution of the word “sissy,” which by 1900 had clearly come to mean an effeminate boy who was too cowardly or unaggressive or both. The word had been coined in the 1840s as an affectionate term for “sister,” but in the 1880s it began to become a derisive term for spineless boys and men, almost exclusively in the United States.36
As the role of fear evolved in the Victorian emotional lexicon, it was seen as less problematic. While parents were still reminded not to frighten infants unnecessarily, no elaborate discussions were considered necessary. Most late Victorian prescriptive writers, like Felix Adler (the last popular childrearing manualist who wrote in an almost purely Victorian mold), assumed that older children could learn essential goals through literary example and appropriate parental advice. The goal was moral courage, an emotional resource that could overcome physical cowardice and so conquer the “paralyzing” effect of fear “by a powerful effort of the will.” Character training, derived from good reading and good teachers, would do the trick.37
The Victorian reversals on fear and anger were not matched by a revised outlook on jealousy. Because this emotion was more feminine and more fully attached to love, earlier warnings largely prevailed, tempered by some practical advice on the need to help a partner overcome jealousy by reassurance. Even with jealousy, however, the later Victorians evinced a strange, almost anachronistic fascination with emotional power that, without establishing a really new emotionology, was linked to the larger preoccupation with intensity.
Typically, the setting was a murder trial in which a man had killed the lover of his wife or fiancée. The period between 1859 (the Daniel Sickles trial) and about 1900 saw a series of such courtroom dramas, widely publicized and greeted by general popular acclaim, in which well and expensively defended men argued that jealousy had overcome them to the extent that they could no longer control their actions. While the specific defense rested on loss of control and technical insanity, the larger argument suggested that here was another emotion whose power could lead to just and vigorous action. “For jealousy is the rage of a man; therefore he will not spare in the day of vengeance. … Those who dishonor husbands are here warned of their doom. … Jealousy, which defies and bears down all restraint, whether it be what we technically call insanity or not, is akin to it. It enslaves the injured husband, and vents itself in one result, which seems to be inevitable and unavoidable.” So argued the successful attorney for Daniel McFarland, whose acquittal in 1870 won warm approval from hundreds of well-wishers. Daniel Sickles’s lawyer, while duly noting how jealousy took possession of his client like a “consuming fire,” similarly pointed to the justness of jealousy: “He would have been false to the instincts of humanity if that rage of jealousy had not taken possession of him.” Here, too, the jury accepted the plea.38
The mature Victorian emotional style accepted and admired the power of passion, for this emotional arsenal underlay the strong wills and vigorous actions that identified good and successful male character and that yielded positive economic and political results. Untrammeled passion that mastered a person’s reason was not acceptable; in this regard the use of jealousy defenses, rare in any event, was genuinely exceptional—though this exception may be explained by the role of jealousy in protecting home and family. But where emotions brought fire to the person who controlled them, and where they entailed no disruption to a calm and loving family, they were positively courted. Management, not repression, was the key, so that dangerous emotions were kept in their proper place—largely away from the hearth—and used to achieve rationally chosen ends.
Love
Later Victorianism also built growing fervor into the vision of love, particularly romantic love. This was another area in which intensity won active support, here involving women equally with men. The early Victorian definition of romantic passion was not fully revised, as were those of anger and fear. But there was change, as calm sentimentality was supplemented by a transcendent emotional charge.
Continued emphasis on motherlove formed part of the framework for the growing attention to emotional goals between the sexes. Its potent impact on boys as well as girls established a link between motherlove and children’s ability to form deep affective ties. In fulfilling her varied special tasks—“it is the province of the mother, to cultivate the affections”—mother set standards for all her offspring. As Catharine Beecher put it, “the mother holds, as it were, the hearts of her children in her hand.” And while mothers offered a host of qualities, including serenity and morality, the central ingredient was “disinterested love, … ready to sacrifice everything at the altar of affection.” Not only family but also the community and the wider world would be transformed by this deep, redeeming passion. As Mother’s Magazine gushed, “Love—flowing from the hidden spring in a mother’s heart … [flows] deeper and wider as it goes, till neighborhood, friends, and country are refreshed by its living waters.” Instructing by example, the mother “teaches our hearts the first lesson of love … around [her] our affections twine and closely and surely, as the young vine clasps itself about the branch that supports it: our love for [her] becomes so thoroughly a part and portion of ourselves, that it bids defiance to time and decay.” Children of a loving mother would come to “revere her as the earthly type of perfect love … they cannot but desire to conform themselves to such models.”39
Motherlove was intense; it knew no bounds. It was “untiring,” “imperishable,” “unquenchable,” and “irrepressible.” Its very intensity imprinted the mother indelibly on her offspring: “Yes! You will live in your children.” “Working like nature … she … sends forth from [her] heart, in pure and temperate flow, the life-giving current … her warm affections and irrepressible sympathies.” The religiouslike qualities of this love were no accident; they were deliberately signaled by many advice writers, evangelical and secular alike.
As with other intense emotions, motherlove required self-control. While expressions of love itself could be fervent, a more generalized emotionality was not recommended; mothers must be calm, avoid anger, shun displays of fear. Here, too, at least in the domestic realm, motherlove showed its relationship to the broader Victorian emotional style: “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.” The resulting tension between praise for women’s natural, perfervid emotional endowment and suspicion of women’s potentially excessive emotionality was never fully resolved. Maternal self-control was essential in conveying the good qualities of motherlove to the child without the complications of idiosyncratic emotionality or disconcerting emotional expressions. Intensity should underlie, not dominate. Here, too, the relationship with the general Victorian style was apparent in the
