at alienation of affections.30 Such a suit could be directed against an individual who purposefully alienated the affections of another’s spouse. The suits obviously expressed proprietary attitudes toward marriage (male and female alike), but they also emphasized the mental anguish caused by loss of a spouse’s or a fiancé’s love. There was no particular reference to material inconvenience, unlike earlier suits against enticement; the focus was on love and the pain of its disappearance. (Interestingly, this kind of action, common in American courts until the 1930s, did not develop in England despite the many similarities in other legal precedents.) Breach-of-promise actions, though less distinctively American, also increased in the later nineteenth century, based again on the enormity of love, even in courtship, and the bitter loss entailed in its disruption.
Divorce law recognized love through the back door of mental cruelty provisions.31 Allowances for divorce in cases of physical cruelty developed only haltingly in various American states in the early nineteenth century; even proof of substantial bodily harm did not always suffice. Further, several courts ordered juries to ignore the question of whether a marriage had “that tenderness and affection which should characterize the matrimonial relation.”32 But the increasing emphasis on positive emotional bonds in marriage, along with beliefs in women’s frailty such that even words could sting, gradually widened the mental cruelty concept from a landmark Pennsylvania decision in 1849 onward. Insults could cause as much suffering as bodily pain, for, as the Massachusetts Supreme Court put it in 1867, a “deeply wounded sensibility and wretchedness of mind can hardly fail to affect the health.”33 Even the need to claim damage to physical health gradually loosened, so that wounding the “mental feelings” of the other spouse might suffice, as in a path-breaking Kansas Supreme Court decision of 1883. This court connected this trend clearly to the new emotional ideals, noting that “the tendency of modern thought is to elevate the marriage relation and place it upon a higher plane, and to consider it as a mental and spiritual relation, as well as a physical relation.”34 A California court repeated this sentiment in 1890, adding that marriage must now be seen “as a union affecting the mental and spiritual life of the parties to it,” exhibiting “mutual sentiments of love and respect.”35 Once launched, of course, the mental cruelty clause outstripped all competitors as grounds for divorce in states that allowed it, but its popularity testifies to its vagueness rather than to mass adhesion to Victorian love ideals. The point is the thinking that underlay the nineteenth-century court decisions: a good marriage now carried such positive emotional valence that cruelty could be found in mere withholding of affection.
Love of other sorts found institutional expressions that reveal what middle-class people actually thought, not just what public agencies decreed. The monetary value of children soared at the end of the nineteenth century, as expressed in the cost of insurance policies and adoption alike. Just as their economic utility was disappearing, belief in the emotional significance of children inflated their market worth.
Psychohistorians pointed out a decade ago that one obvious expression of Victorian emphasis on intense love, and delight in appropriate manifestations of deep feeling, was the introduction of the honeymoon as a ritual following middle-class marriage. The honeymoon was designed to allow a couple to explore mutual feelings as well as sexual interests, and ideally helped translate the emotional intensity of courtship into more permanent bonds. Here was a significant change in the de facto institution of marriage, fully in keeping with, and presumably supportive of, the Victorian valuation of love.36
Grief, finally, had its outlets as well. Death had rituals, inherited from the past, involving family and community participation in the act of dying whenever possible. Rituals after death more clearly changed in the nineteenth century to accommodate heightened emotion. Victorian funeral procedures, unlike those before or since, were intended both to remove the fear of death and to allow open expression of grief through ritual. Increasing use of cosmetics on corpses, and ultimately the rise of professional undertakers and embalmers who took over the handling of death from bereaved families, expressed mainly the desire to allay fear and to direct emotions away from decaying flesh to the bittersweet grief at a loved one’s loss. The practice of wearing mourning clothing spread. Funerals became more elaborate, cemeteries and tombstones more ornate and evocative. Scholars have legitimately argued over whether the paraphernalia of middle-class Victorian funerals expressed simply growing wealth and status rivalry, or real grief, and the sensible conclusion has been that both were involved.37 Families really did need rituals that would allow them to show their grief. Where child death was involved, funeral monuments of unprecedented size combined with haunting epitaphs to convey the sorrow and love that sent the child to heaven. Gravestone euphemisms about death as sleep, or as going home, expressed the grief-induced need to see death as something less than final.38
Love, anger, grief, fear, jealousy, and, somewhat ambivalently, guilt—all had repercussions in public arrangements designed to express intensity as well as regulate its targets. Law and leisure, not to mention burial arrangements or penology, were significantly altered as a result of emotional values, as jurists, school authorities, and other officials faithfully acted under the guidelines of Victorian emotionology. Public expression of the new emotional culture peaked between about 1870 and 1910, suggesting a not surprising lag between the first expression of the culture and its capacity a generation later to affect major institutions.
Private Beliefs and Emotional Experience
That Victorian leaders liked to claim adherence to new emotional standards is no surprise. The new policies that resulted were significant, but they beg basic questions about the extent of real belief. Did Victorians internalize the new standards—not uniformly or completely, to be sure, but sufficiently to make a difference in their own emotional lives?
The answer is yes, though again there can be no claim of precise measurement. Many Victorians clearly enjoyed the possibility of analyzing their emotional state, though there is evidence as well that the demanding rules of the culture made this process more than a bit bewildering. Henry Adams described a woman’s process in his 1880 novel, Democracy:
Madeleine dissected her own feelings and was always wondering whether they were real or not; she had a habit of taking off her mental clothing, as she might take off a dress, and looking at it as though it belonged to someone else, and as though sensations were manufactured like clothes.39
While women were most vocal about their emotional inventories, men too, as we will see, frequently offered comments, particularly in the throes of love or highly charged friendship. The evaluation process reflected the importance of the emotional culture in many private lives.
Several historians have already developed a convincing case concerning the internalization of restrictions on anger on the part of some middle-class women. Barred from expressing their real emotions, or even admitting unladylike sentiments to themselves, some women converted anger into psychosomatic illness, with such manifestations as hysterical paralysis. Intense familial love could have its pathological side as well. Smothered by parental affection that they could neither deny nor fail to reciprocate, some girls began to develop anorexia nervosa as a means out of the emotional trap. Here, Victorian standards showed their repressive edge and their reality, however distorted, in the experience of a minority of middle-class women.40
Certainly
