occasional procreation was not the only goal. Writers on marriage, though hardly in the Masters and Johnson league, assumed that sexual satisfaction was an important ingredient in marital love. A few revisionist historians have gone so far as to assert a quiet Victorian sexual delight, citing married women who acknowledged not only their reliance on sexuality and their dismay when sex relations had to be curtailed for reasons of birth control but also their frequency of orgasm—a frequency that, if taken literally, actually surpasses contemporary twentieth-century self-reports. Yet extreme revisionism can go too far.5 Victorian attacks on child and adolescent sexuality were quite real, and they had some impact even in married adulthood, when a less repressive regime was widely advocated. Victorians did respect the validity and importance of sex, but they distrusted overemphasis on it and sought other primary bases for heterosexual relationships. A fully accurate formula for the subtleties of Victorian sexuality has yet to be worked out, but while it would include due notice of some special repressive features (and the needs that underlay them, such as birth control and social and gender hierarchy), it would not simply end with the repressive theme. Just as a twentieth-century flight from sexual repression is a simplistically misleading conception, so the Victorian acknowledgment of sexuality’s validity must be included in any characterization.
Students of Victorian emotionality have launched a reevaluation similar to that applied to sexuality. Although some recent work plays up the repressive theme alone, the idea of Victorian emotional repressiveness has been substantially modified. The various modifications need to be drawn together and then integrated into a more accurate vision of the nineteenth-century baseline. Yet the analogy with sexuality must be made with caution. Victorian sexual repressiveness was by no means complete, but it was more pervasive than was repressiveness in the emotional arena. In fact, Victorians hoped to use emotional opportunities to deflect certain kinds of unwanted sexuality, particularly in courtship.6 Thus the repressive model is farther off the mark where emotions were concerned than where sexuality was involved. This distinction is vital to an understanding not only of Victorianism but also of the changes that followed in the twentieth century.
For Victorian acceptance of emotion was in principle quite wholehearted. Natural emotions were basically good, though they must be controlled and properly targeted. Even less fortunate emotions, like anger or even fear, whether natural or not, could be put to good use. “No person should be afraid of his finer feelings,” wrote one Pittsburgh minister in 1880, capping a long evolution away from early nineteenthcentury sermons in which a more traditionally Calvinist gloom about this world and its works had prevailed. Victorianism was born, after all, in an atmosphere shaped by romanticism and its appreciation of emotion, or at least of sentimentality. To be sure, Victorianism was also shaped by the Enlightenment emphasis on the importance of reason. However, the driest kind of rationalism was modified at the level of practicing intellectuals, and it had never caught on widely among the reading public.7 In contrast to sexuality, then, emotion was not regarded with anxiety and suspicion. Management and appropriate use, not systematic limitation, were the guiding principles.
The Victorian emotional style began to take shape in the 1820s, building on many of the emotionological principles that had developed in the previous century, including a strong emphasis on family emotionality.8 For about two decades, a new genre of family advice literature, partially secular though heavily informed by Protestantism, suggested a sentimental tone that, beginning in childhood, could maintain family harmony. Prescriptive writers, like Catharine Sedgwick, writing from a Protestant perspective but generally without emphasis on religious goals, emphasized several emotional criteria for an appropriate family life, some of which they explicitly contrasted with more traditional standards.9 Loving relationships were essential.10 The 1830s saw the genesis of an unprecedented fascination with motherlove. The Reverend John Todd told the readers of Mother’s Magazine in 1839 that “God planted this deep, this unquenchable love for her offspring, in the mother’s heart.” From this love, in turn, would come the inculcation of appropriate affection in the children themselves, male and female alike. “It is the province of the mother, to cultivate the affections, to form and guard the moral habits of the child, for the first ten years of life, and to all intents and purposes the character of the man or woman is substantially laid as early as that period of life.”11 The equation of love and morality was virtually a commonplace in prescriptive literature from the 1830s onward, though in fact it was a substantial innovation in a culture that had traditionally doubted that human affection could be compatible with an appropriate focus on things divine.
The emphasis on love spilled over to other family relationships. Portrayals of siblings emphasized their deep affection. A staple of popular middle-class fiction involved sisters so deeply loving that the introduction of an outsider in their midst, in the form of a successful suitor for one of the sisters constituted a great crisis of emotion. Deep affection was also routinely portrayed in discussions of brother and sister, though here qualified by the different strengths each gender could bring to a relationship. The Rollo series for boys involves many an episode in which Rollo saves his sister from some disaster, demonstrating courage and affection simultaneously.12
Love between spouses also received high praise as one of the chief benefits of family life. “Men find so little sincere friendship abroad, so little true sympathy in the selfish world, that they gladly yield themselves to the influence of a gentle spirit at home.” Love and serenity were closely linked in this image, providing the essential emotional underpinning for a growing commitment to hearth and family. Emphasis on the special emotional qualities of women was linked to the other durable image being generated at this point—the idea that women had special domestic qualities, including appropriate emotional warmth as wives and mothers.13
The focus on loving families prompted other emotional standards as well. Most obviously, emotions that might jeopardize affectionate family life were now discredited, and a good-bad dichotomy based on family impact was developed. Here, too, trends in the prescriptive literature built on the earlier shift in emotional culture toward family centeredness and self-control, but with new fervor deriving from the heightened emphasis on family intensity.
Fear was reassessed. A standard argument from the 1830s onward held that children would have no reason to develop fear “unless it was put into their heads.” Fearful adults, or even worse, reprobate adults who used fear as part of discipline, were seen as disrupting children’s emotional tranquillity. The obvious solution was to urge adults, particularly mothers, to swallow their own fears lest they induce them in their children, “embittering the whole existence of her offspring.” And all adults must be prevented from deliberately scaring their children: “She who can tell a frightful story to her child or allow one to be told, ought to have a guardian appointed over herself.” No obedience was worth the poison of fear when affectionate, gentle guidance could win even better results without negative emotional side effects. Even safety was no excuse for inducing fear. A child made afraid of spider bites might get bitten just as easily as a child who had not been terrified, and bites are preferable to a “fear that troubles one all life long.” Servants who delighted in scaring children came in for particular criticism, as the middle class and popular culture began to diverge. “It is utterly impossible to calculate the evil” that imposing fears could wreak on sensitive souls. Instances of actual death resulting from children’s fears were cited in warnings about a host of traditional disciplinary measures that must be rejected as an “undefined species of horror.” Loving motherhood, not corroding terror, provided the emotional lodestar for parents. As the God-fearing qualities of religious virtue began to decline in mainstream American Protestantism, a fearful individual
