Lucilla McCorkle, a southern minister’s wife, urged the following duties on herself in her private journal: “Self-denial—in food & clothing & keeping the tongue, early [sic] rising—industry—economy system—cheerfulness & sobriety—keeping down & quelling the spirit of malevolence, fault finding—covetousness or rather jealousy,” adding that she feared she suffered from “that disease.” Many women recalled specific attempts to keep anger under control when they were girls: “As I grew up I learned to keep intact a second self … who walked in tranquil beauty … [who] maintained her place unruffled when the other self was annoyed, dismayed.” Elizabeth Parsons Channing noted in a diary entry in 1874: “Irritable. Ashamed of myself when I am so alive to the desirableness of a sweet temper.” Or Lydia Sigourney, anxious about feeling unpleasant the day before: “I’ll try to carry a sunbeam in my heart today.” Many women claimed in private diaries to feel no anger against their spouses, though some would single out a particular issue—such as policies toward slaves—that allowed some indignation to be expressed. Many reported both the goal of repressing anger and the real difficulties encountered en route, including the complication of guilt when anger was discerned, even privately. As Charlotte Gilman put it: “The task of self-government was not easy. To repress a harsh answer, to confess a fault, and to stop (right or wrong) in the midst of self-defence, in gentle submission, sometimes requires a struggle like life and death.” Many women reported, in sum, a temperament hardly as magically anger free as some advice writers ascribed to femininity, but a very definite effort in that direction. A few even reported gleeful triumphs in which errant husbands were cast down through their own unjustified rage while the wife stood calmly by. As Mrs. Abigail Bailey put it in her memoirs, “I felt obligated to bear my faithful testimony to him against his wickedness; which I repeatedly did.” Here of course was the suggestion of very real anger, but carefully manipulated both to fit the Victorian norms and to use those very norms to confound the offending spouse.41
Women continued to work toward appropriate anger control throughout the nineteenth century. Winifred Babcock, admitting fury when her boyfriend dumped her, quickly returned to the party line in her memoirs: “But rage! What has it ever done to heal even the slightest hurt or wound. Oh I could tramp up and down … and wring my hands … but alas! would that bring me any comfort?” Adults, particularly men, increasingly applied teasing to anger in young girls, who registered the idea that they were being laughed at. While this suggests a slight loosening of the strictest rules concerning girls and anger consistent with a generally more permissive approach in end-of-the-century childrearing, girls nonetheless learned that grownup dignity and displays of temper were incompatible. A middle-class Pittsburgh girl’s memoir notes admiration at an oath by a peer—“Oh, the dickens”—while quickly adding that “since even the mildest oaths were discouraged at home, I never dared to use such a vigorous expletive.” And there were mothers who managed to provide role models of apparently complete mastery over temper. Whatever the realities of the case, their daughters could discern no chink in mother’s emotional perfection, and under her tutelage they also learned not to quarrel with any frequency or bitterness. Mother was simply never angry.42
Whether blessed with sunny dispositions or not, Victorian women showed other signs of contact with the goals of controlling the dangerous emotions. Vocal concern about dealings with servants was a staple of nineteenth-century domestic life. Among other things, these concerns expressed a very real anxiety that it was impossible in practice to preserve the calm demeanor that the emotional culture required. Many servants were simply too trying, too willing to resort to anger in confrontations with their mistresses. The domestic side of Victorian emotionology urged “equable and cheerful temper and tones in the housekeeper” as part of the larger atmosphere that should inform family life. Servants were vital to this atmosphere but were often criticized for improper emotional signals to the children in their charge. In fact, many housewives found it difficult to “refrain from angry tones” in dealing with servants, and their resultant guilt often worsened the atmosphere still further. Inability to live up to stated goals contributed to the tension in the mistress-servant relationship throughout the century, and to the decline of live-in service toward the century’s end.43
Finally, girls imbibed the messages about restraint of anger well into the early twentieth century. Even if they displayed a temper later as adults, they concealed it in childhood, in contrast to boys, whose adult personality was in this regard much easier to discern.44
On the repressive side, in sum, many women were deeply affected by the Victorian norms, fighting for control when the standards proved difficult, often conveying considerable success, sometimes suffering psychosomatic ailments because of the strain involved.
In actuality as in culture, however, repression was not the whole story. Men and women alike expressed deep commitment to the ideals of intensity in love and grief. They spoke about their fervor, wrote of it in letters, and gave it a prominent place in many diaries.
Expressions of love could start early. A child’s letter from 1899:
My dearest Mother,
Words cannot express how I miss you.
[then some chitchat]
(I love you with all my heart with all my soul and all my body.)
[more chitchat]
Your most devoted daughter,
Sweetest Mother,
And from a recollection years later: “We all loved Mother with all our hearts, with all our souls and with all our bodies, and when she went away we missed her more than tongue could tell. In later years, she said that she was afraid she had let us love her too much, that she sometimes thought we had put her in place of God. If we did, we might easily have had a less worthy idea of God.”45
Mothers could respond in kind. Although women’s magazines late in the nineteenth century began trumpeting a crisis between mothers and daughters, in which the former could no longer approve of the lifestyle changes of youth and/or the latter had lost the affectionate respect due their elders, actual middle-class mothers and daughters shared a deep emotional bond, with apparently few exceptions. When their daughters left for work or college, their mothers wrote them with ardent support, visited often, and in some instances actually stayed with them for a time. Disputes occurred, to be sure, but they were usually surrounded with reassuring love. As one wrote, “Your life must not be stunted by us [the parents]. … Our love can make any leaps of time and distance.”46 Reciprocating, even the “new” young women who were building careers referred to their mothers as “the anchor” of their lives. Both the depth of this feeling and the willingness to express it in ardent terms reflected real correspondence with the emotional culture of child- and motherlove, even at a time when middle-class women’s lives were changing noticeably.
The love theme pervaded courtship, again leading to expressions, from men as well as women, fully in keeping with the most soaring versions of Victorian culture. Byron Caldwell Smith, pressing Katherine Stephens in letters between 1874 and 1876, urged, “Oh write, write I am perishing to see on paper the words—I love you.” Describing the “great passion that fills me,” his “great life-passion,” he distinguished his love from mere romance, assuring her of “true” love and constancy. “It [true love] is to love with all one’s soul what is pure, what is high, what is eternal.” “A tender true heart that loves unselfishly, and seeks and understands a love which is not the mere surprise of the senses … but why should I go on to describe what I love to her I love.” And of course the religious connection
