of initiatives or displaying the kinds of confidence desirable in middle-class life. Most obviously, if fear became an emotional link between parent and child, long-term affection would be excluded even if short-term discipline was served. Fear, quite simply, became an emotional abuse of parental authority, a theme that continued through the twentieth century in virtually all the prescriptive literature.14
A key facet of the new campaign against fear in childrearing involved the presentation of death. American Calvinists had long emphasized death images as a means of inculcating religious obedience in children. Elements of this theme persisted into the nineteenth century, with authors like James Janeway writing that unrepentant children were “not too little to die,” “not too little to go to hell.”15 But middle-class opinion was shifting rapidly, and the idea of sinful children who deserved to be frightened by terrifying images of death became increasingly distasteful. By the 1820s, clergymen who refused to accept the growing, romantic belief in childish innocence were frequently confronted with rebellious congregations, so that many changed their tune or at least sought refuge in silence. Lyman Beecher and others helped steer Protestantism away from emphasis on original sin and its corollaries infant damnation and legitimate fear of death. Avoidance of fear again related to the larger emotional package being developed by the early Victorians. In 1847 Horace Bushnell ventured a synthesis: “A proper nurture could counteract mere ‘tendencies’ to depravity if nurture began while wickedness was weakest—that is, in infancy. … Kindness, love and tender care by a mother who exemplified all the virtues would adequately prepare the child for salvation and a life of moral responsibility.” Lydia Child anticipated the sentiment in her Mother’s Book in 1831: “They [infants] come to us from heaven, with their little souls full of innocence and peace; and, as far as possible, a mother’s influence should not interfere with the influence of angels.” The lessons obviously applied to the presentation of death. “Great care is required that children do not imbibe terrific and gloomy ideas of death; nor should they incautiously be taken to funerals, or allowed to see a corpse. It is desirable to dwell on the joys of the righteous in the presence of their heavenly Father, freed from every pain and sorrow, rather than on the state and burial of the body, a subject, very likely, painful to affect the imagination.” Happiness was the key: death was to be presented as a joyous release and an opportunity to achieve the greatest possible serenity. Thus a child might be told, on the death of a playmate: “she would like to live but she was ready to go … she had a happy life in this world but felt sure that a still happier one awaited her in the next.”16 Epitaphs, similarly, were altered to displace fear with religious cheer:
Go peaceful Spirit rest
Secure from earth’s alarms
Resting on the Saviour’s breast
Encircled by his arms.17
The overall message concerning fear was unambiguous: it must not disrupt the positive emotional bonds between parent and child. Fear was an “infirmity” that was “most enslaving to the mind, and destructive of its strength and capability of enjoyment. … How cruel, then, purposely to excite false terrors in those under our care.”18
Anger was the second emotion to be excised from family life.19 At least as much as fear, anger could corrode the affection essential to the family. Fiction in the popular women’s magazines around midcentury, and advice literature even earlier, crystallized this belief in an endless series of accounts of the horrors of first quarrels. “Cultivate a spirit of mutual and generous forbearance, carefully abiding anything like angry contention or contradiction. Beware of the first dispute, and deprecate its occurrence.” “Quarrels of every sort are exceedingly destructive of human happiness; but no quarrels, save those among brethren in the church, are so bitter as family quarrels; and … should be so sedulously avoided.” Women particularly received advice about their role in promoting domestic serenity, for it was noted that, unlike their husbands, they were cushioned from the frustrations of business life. Wives’ good temper was vital because men needed solace from their harsh workday realities. But men were held to the same domestic standards. William Alcott, in an advice book for husbands, intoned: “The reign of gentleness. … is very much needed in this jarring, clashing, warring world.” Phrenologist Orson Fowler noted wives’ sensitivity, such that a single “tart remark” might make her wretched. Anger, quite simply, was too dangerous to play with, for even a little dispute might so contradict the loving tranquillity of the home, the “soul blending” that a real marriage involved, that irreparable damage might ensue. “Let [the First Quarrel] be avoided, and that hateful demon, discord, will never find a place at the domestic hearth. Let it have its existence, no matter … how brief its duration, the demon will feel himself invited and will take his place, an odious, but an abiding guest, at the fireside.”20
First-quarrel stories drove the point home by describing ensuing disaster. An angry wife makes a husband so ill that he almost dies, though in this case reform saves the marriage. A man’s anger leads to his wife’s death and also to the ruin of most of his children. A wife, repenting her stubborn anger too late, sees her husband go off to India, where he dies. Another wifely outburst causes a man to seek solace in the woods, where he is almost killed by a falling tree. Another angry wife almost dies herself: her face reddens with rage, every vein swells and stands out, every nerve quivers, foam covers her lips, and finally she falls as blood gushes from her nose and mouth. The theme of possession by rage, and accompanying references to demons, recalls an earlier set of beliefs about the causes and consequences of emotional excess, but the principal focus at this point was family misery. The result was an extremely rigorous standard, in which true love and harmony forbade a single harsh remark between husband and wife, and avoidance, rather than conciliatory strategies, held center stage. Here was Victorian emotional repression at a peak. For not only was anger to be shunned, but the early Victorian formula also held that one party was always to blame in any lapse: anger identified the bad person, which left the good, calm party free from responsibility. Anger showed bad character, pure and simple. And while occasional remarks suggested that men might not be as gentle as women because of men’s work responsibilities outside the home, there was no particular emphasis on a wife’s obligation to suffer anger in silence. The gender difference with regard to anger lay in the notion that men had to work to live up to standard while truly feminine women had an inherent gentleness that excluded even the need to exercise self-control. Correspondingly, though this was rarely explicitly stated, an angry woman was worse than an angry man.21
Anger between parents and children was condemned as thoroughly as that between spouses. Indeed, proper childrearing would so exclude anger as to create the personalities (presumably, particularly in women) that would later allow the marital standards to hold sway. Given growing assumptions about childish innocence, it was thought that if parents controlled their own anger, children would not learn anger themselves. “I say to any father or mother, are you irritable, petulant? If so, begin this moment the work of subjugating your temper.” “Fretfulness and Ill temper in the parents are provocations.” Fortunately, self-control and, above all, maternal love, calm, and cheer could save the day; few manuals between 1830 and 1860 dwelled on childhood anger as a particular problem. In the event that parental models might fail, prescriptive writers offered uplifting children’s stories featuring George Washington’s efforts to control his temper and good boys who avoided responding angrily to taunts. But mother was key. “A mother must have great control over her own feelings, a calmness and composure of spirit not easily disturbed.” “And can a mother expect to govern her child, when she cannot govern herself?” T. S. Arthur, that ubiquitous advice giver of midcentury, put it more simply still: “As mother is, so
