to realize that the same industrial world that required the family as emotional haven also required new emotional motivations for competitive work. (The lag behind actual economic change was interesting, as it meshed with other delayed reactions, for example, in schooling styles;10 but it was not acute.) The resultant response explains why Victorianism introduced its most distinctive emotional emphases in arguing for channeled anger and courageous encounters with fear. Military interests played a role, but the vision of emotions necessary to succeed in new entrepreneurial and professional roles was preeminent. Family values were preserved—and the virtual sanctification of motherlove preserved this goal even as other purposes were embraced—but the emotional range expanded as understanding of functional necessity broadened. Victorian emotional standards were meant to enshrine family while also providing the spur to achievement in public life.
Early industrialization and growing cities generated other functional concerns as well, which further shaped the Victorian style. Boundaries of social class became more vivid, even if American democratic values muted some of the conflicts that developed in the European version of industrialization. A recent article has shown how increased concern for cleanliness—a form of bodily discipline potentially related to emotional constraints—was in part a response to the need to formalize class divisions. Just as the middle class separated itself through the use of soap, so it prided itself on emotional restraints and subtleties whose absence marked other social groups as inferior.11 Channeled anger thus differed from the emotional propensity to brawl and certainly from real or imagined lower-class anger released within the family. Comments on fear routinely distinguished between what middle-class folks could aspire to and the baser emotions of the hoi polloi. Thus Dick, in an Oliver Optic story, spews out class pride when he contrasts his sort of courage with the actions of a host of deserters:
I can pity without blaming them, for it was a fearful ordeal for men such as you describe. As I heard my father say … , it requires a moral force behind the physical to enable a soldier to stand up before the enemy, facing death and mangling wounds, without flinching. We have always found that the most ignorant and ruffianly men make the most unreliable soldiers. As father said, it is the soul, rather than the body that makes the true soldier.12
Similarly, intense, properly spiritual love could serve as a differentiator. When late-nineteenth-century divorce law came to enshrine this quality through the concept of mental cruelty, provable through the absence of appropriate affection as well as blatant nastiness, the middle class was correspondingly privileged. Divorcing working-class couples could not point to absence of love as an excuse, for their natures precluded the finer sentiments in the first place. Mental cruelty grounds of this sort were denied them until after 1900.13
Emotional culture had begun to take on qualities of class identification even earlier, at least in the minds of middle- and upper-class proponents, as in late-eighteenth-century Virginia.14 It became part of a larger dispute over respectability throughout much of the nineteenth century. And while respectability claims focused in part on workers’ and immigrants’ lack of civilized restraints, they also highlighted some subtle intensities that were open only to people of refinement.
Class boundaries aside, urban and commercial life required rules that would assist in the identification of strangers. As familiar community monitoring proved increasingly inadequate, Victorian culture responded to the need to provide cues that would help people distinguish the trustworthy from the unreliable.15 Identification of correct responses was a result of this need.
Finally, and even more obviously, Victorian culture served gender purposes, and new functional demands also impacted this arena. Emotional arguments helped justify confinement of women to the home, which was seen by men and many women as a functional necessity given changes in the location of work. Beliefs about motherlove as well as female lack of motivating anger did not cause gender division, but they certainly helped support it. Men welcomed special emotional badges, like their aptitude for channeled anger and courage, not only because they put women in their place but also because they bolstered male qualities at a time when certain aspects of industrialization created masculine insecurities. With property ownership and traditional skills now threatened, with family role complicated by new work demands, it was comforting, perhaps truly functional, to have an explicit, if demanding, emotional identity.16 Emotional masculinity in this sense complemented increasing reliance on men’s role as economic provider, which replaced a more traditional and less anxious gender definition. Here, too, function was served.
Growing industrialization, in sum, created new needs for family enhancement, for personal motivation, for justifications for class boundaries, and for gender roles. The Victorian emotional style responded faithfully, particularly in its fuller version after the 1840s.
Yet the functionalist approach should not be pressed too far, for the emotional adjustments to industrialization were based on cultural preparation. For example, the value of intense family ties had to be established before they could be further emphasized. Functional logic, here at least, was prepared by beliefs, which is one reason why Victorianism did not fully break away from emotional patterns set up the century before.
Furthermore, three kinds of cultural shifts during the nineteenth century itself added to the imperatives of industrial work and urban social stratification in promoting the full-blown Victorian emotional style. The first involves implications from emotionological change itself: until interrupted by other factors, shifts in emotional culture tend to cause additional modifications in the same direction. Thus an emphasis on motherlove contributed directly to the heightened intensity attributed to romantic love. Hypertrophied maternal love increased the need for strong adult passion to aid products of emotionally intense upbringing in freeing themselves from maternal ties; love of a new sort must counter the love into which both boys and girls had, at least according to Victorian standards, been socialized. This aid in emotional weaning, particularly important for girls, was functional in a broad sense, helping to form the emotional underpinnings for new families, but it would have been far less necessary with a cooler familial background. Not surprisingly, Victorian fiction picked up elements of this motif in stressing the emotional anguish that young women might encounter in breaking, through ardent courtship, the bonds that had tied them to parents and to siblings.17
New emotional rules that urged more intense love, along with those that proscribed anger and fear in the discipline of children, obviously expanded the realm of guilt. While the culture urged socialization toward guilt as part of childrearing, adults readily expanded the connection—which heightened their own emotional response to guilt and further legitimated efforts to instill guilt in their offspring. By the later nineteenth century many parents reported guilt when they inadvertently shouted at or frightened their children. The sense of being morally monitored against spontaneous impulse both contributed to and complicated the task of living up to some of the Victorian norms.
A second strand of cultural causation stemmed from a source outside emotionology: changing conceptions of the body made emotions far more separate from somatic function than they had been in traditional conceptions or would be again in the twentieth century. Prior to the nineteenth century, dominant beliefs, medical and popular alike, attached anger, joy, and sadness to bodily functions. Hearts, for example, could shake, tremble, expand, grow cold. Because emotions were embodied, they had clear somatic qualities: people were gripped by rage (which could, it was held, stop menstruation), hot blood was the essence of anger, fear had cold sweats. Emotions, in other words, had physical stuff. But during the eighteenth century, historians increasingly realize, the humoral conception of the body, in which fluids and emotions
