Regional and Gender Variants
Agreement on the goal of controlled intensity allowed major features of the Victorian emotional style to transcend, though not to obliterate, two key cultural divisions within the nineteenth-century middle class: region and gender. It is not yet possible to offer definitive statements about these segmenting factors, particularly where region is concerned; but it is possible to suggest how emotionology relates to the larger cultural debates involved.
Recent work on gender and family has revived the question of the distinctiveness of southern culture, particularly around the middle of the nineteenth century. Regionalists appropriately insist that too many “American” studies, even when carefully confined to the middle class, have relied disproportionately on materials from the Northeast. It is unquestionably true that most of the advice literature and popular magazines privileged authors from New England, the Midwest, and the Middle Atlantic states. But several important studies on middle-class values in the South have argued that families in this group read much of this material and shared many similar goals.55 The principal features of Victorian emotional culture also suggest that there were more shared standards, stemming in part from shared reading, than images of hotblooded Rhett Butlers and calculating New England moneychangers might suggest. While further research explicitly focused on the South is essential, it is clear that regional factors affected but did not hopelessly entangle the Victorian style.
Southern distinctiveness did shine through in emotional criteria that related to honor. While Americans generally could still resonate to jealous intensity in defense of honor (at least when the intensity involved men disputing the sexual activities of “their” women), southern standards were more single-minded than was true in the rest of the nation. Thus southerners preserved habits of dueling or at least fighting in order to vent their jealous reactions against the claims or slights of others. Men sought to redress wives’ infidelity through private, emotionally charged action, as southern law castigated any “degrading” behavior on women’s part. Courtship rivalries were common. The law in southern states articulated the idea that jealousy could legitimately excuse violence, well past the point at which northern states began to rein in this particular emotional approach to justifiable homicide and crimes of passion.56
Some historians have argued that southern culture supported passionateness in general, not just passion related to gender and honor. Michael Barton, for example, in an impressive analysis of letters by Civil War soldiers, concludes that the upper class in the South displayed an emotional articulateness and vivacity that markedly contrast with the careful, almost disembodied control that ran through letters by Union soldiers from virtually all social groups. He concludes, not surprisingly, that emotional style constituted one additional arena in which, whether they knew it or not, southerners and northerners disagreed.57 Again, the existing state of research does not permit decisive dismissal of Barton’s approach,58 though most available evidence points in the other direction. Southern Victorians wanted control along with their passion—this was one of the changes in upper-class culture in Virginia by the early nineteenth century, as Rhys Isaacs has shown. And, as I have insisted, northerners wanted passion along with their control. It is probable, in fact, that differences in emotional culture were greater in the colonial period than in the nineteenth century, precisely because many southerners came to accept the idea of targeting emotionality more carefully while northerners rediscovered the usefulness of channeled anger and insisted on the delights of soaring love.59
Southern families, in the middle and upper classes, certainly shared with their northern counterparts an interest in respect and obedience from children, which logically led to some emotional constraint. But they did not seek abject docility, and fathers seem generally to have aimed at a rapport in which sons could discern the legitimacy of appropriate emotion, including affection. Dickson Bruce, while emphasizing some distinctive southern features, notes an ambivalence toward passion in the South—a desire to promote strong emotional attachment to family and a belief in the legitimacy of a passionate nature combined with a real concern lest emotion overwhelm reason. The same ambivalence, defined as an attempt to juggle control and intensity, effectively describes the emotional style of the Victorian North. Middle-class families in both regions generated a related ambivalence toward male violence. After the greater pacifism of early Victorianism, northern childrearing manuals (often read in southern cities as well) stressed the necessity of encouraging the emotional impulses that would lead boys to fight when the goals were just. Southern culture similarly taught its boys that, while sheer hot-headedness represented a fatal loss of control, violence was often inescapable.60
It is wrong to assume either a southern nonchalance about restraint or a northern emotional turgidity, or both. Northerners were a bit more wary of jealousy than southerners seem to have been, though there was some inconsistency even in the North. Both regions valued targeted anger, though northerners might speak more about its uses in competition than in defense of honor. Both regions claimed adherence to ideals of love, and both showed some acceptance of its concomitant, intense grief. Soldiers from both regions displayed intense and unembarrassed family affection. While northern Civil War soldiers tended to conceal emotions experienced in battle from their wives and mothers, they wrote more freely of their fear and their efforts at courage to their fathers, so that even here the idea of uniform emotional control is off the mark. Thus Charles Francis Adams, in the best boys’ story fashion, wrote proudly of his first response to combat, when he displayed “a vigor and power which, under the circumstances, I had never hoped [I] possessed.”61 Such articulations of the concept of facing and mastering fear were also common in southerners’ accounts.
The Victorian emotional style crossed regional boundaries in the nineteenth century. Later developments, in which southern culture proved more durably wed to Victorian standards than was true in the North, reopened gaps between the regions for a time, and these later differences help explain contemporary scholarly confusion about regional differences in the nineteenth century itself.
If Victorian popularizers dwelt little on regional factors, they were profuse in identifying emotional differences between the genders—again, particularly after the somewhat androgynous early Victorian interlude. No summary of emotional style can ignore the profound contrast between the standards assigned to men and those applied to women. In fact, Victorian emotional standards depended explicitly on gender differences. Women were supposed to supply an emotional charge that men lacked while accepting men’s greater rational sense as a constraint; and at the same time men needed women to help them achieve certain kinds of control that they might naturally lack. Only through the very different contributions of both genders could the twin goals of passion and restraint be met. Yet despite these contrasts, the underlying goal of emotional intensity under control did apply to men and women alike.
Unquestionably, the passion/control dualism in the mature Victorian emotional style applied most literally to men. While women were clearly regarded as “more emotional,” both in popularized literature and in scientific renderings such as those of psychologist G. Stanley Hall, actual discussions of emotional force concentrated on men. Anger was regarded as unfeminine in women, but men were supposed to be able to use anger. Children’s stories, such as the Uncle Wiggily books popular during the early decades of the twentieth century, routinely assumed the sweetness of little girls (whether in human or in personified animal form) while often noting temper problems of boys. The result was a clear image of girls as emotionally preferable; but, translated to adulthood, the same imagery held that men had far more drive. Correspondingly, the boy or man lacking the emotional spur was shockingly feminine, a sissy. Similarly, within marriage, while popular literature occasionally cited the justified wrath of a much-abused
