When children were being discussed, emphasis on the bestiality of anger and its inappropriateness in family life took precedence over any effort to delineate gender traits. Anger was bad, and a good family would escape it. Correspondingly, though the connection was not elaborately explored, anger in a husband or wife was frequently blamed on a bad upbringing that left the individual “spoiled” or “capricious.”22
As with anger and fear, so jealousy came under new scrutiny when early Victorians applied the familial lens to emotional standards. Redefinitions of this emotion had been anticipated in the earlier reevaluation of family emotionality, but because jealousy was not seen as posing the same kind of threat to family harmony as anger or fear, it received less articulate attention. But the implicit shift was considerable even so.23
In the first place, when jealousy was mentioned it was now focused primarily on love relationships, particularly among courting couples and married adults. (Children’s jealousy came in for little comment at this point.) Earlier ideas about jealousy in defense of honor or jealousy as a spur to righteous action (this last a recollection of the emotion’s original etymological link to zeal) simply disappeared amid the new concentration on family emotionality.
In the second place, romantic jealousy, when discussed, was now uniformly condemned. Earlier Western tradition had been ambivalent on this point. Some authorities, like Shakespeare in Othello, had attacked jealousy’s tendency to possess a person and poison a couple’s relationship, while others had praised jealousy’s capacity to add spice to love and even to bring about greater commitment in love. Amid early Victorians, ambivalence officially withdrew: when jealousy was formally assessed, it was condemned. For jealousy contradicted the purity of love, adding a selfish and possessive quality that fouled this now-precious emotion. “There is no real love where there is no abandon and complete confidence.” Love, whose “truest, purest, highest form is that of strong, unselfish affection blended with desire,” “ennobles” the individual; it is “the beautifier, the glorifier, the redeemer.” Marriage itself was “complete union of amity and love, of life and fortune, of interests and sympathies, of comfort and support, of desires and inclinations, of usefulness and happiness, of joys and sorrows.” Small wonder, then, that popular commentary occasionally reminded middle-class readers of the dangers of jealousy. Godey’s Ladies Book ran a verse on “The Jealous Lover” in 1841, terming the emotion the “worst inmate of the breast; a fell tormentor thou, a double pest, wounding thy bosom by the self-same blow thy vengeance wreaks on the imputed foe.” An occasional story showed how baseless jealousy might ruin a romance while causing great personal agony. Young women’s jealousy of sisters or cousins who were being courted occasionally set the theme for a moralizing fictional comment. In one case, a woman is briefly assailed by the “old demon in her breast” but rises above it, rejoicing to God for “awakening her to a nobler life and higher aims than that of mere self-gratification.” Because real love so obviously made jealousy unnecessary by the mutual devotion and selflessness it entailed, jealousy was seen as requiring far less attention than anger. But the evils of jealousy, which could spoil love and prevent proper self-control, were quite similar. “We may even blight and blacken our happiness by jealousy, which is really an admission of our own inferiority, of our own cowardice and conceit.”24
Finally, early Victorian emotionology began a process by which jealousy came to be viewed as a disproportionately female problem. To the extent that romantic jealousy had long been seen as a sign of weakness, this attribution had some precedent. Other traditional uses of jealousy, however, as in the pursuit of honor, had been disproportionately masculine. No more. Women’s family focus and their own sentimental, loving nature made them particularly susceptible. “As in matters of the heart in general, females are more susceptible to the passion than men.” By the same token, some popularizers argued that women should exercise particularly repressive vigilance: “Jealousy is, on several counts, more inexcusable in a woman than in a man.” Because women’s principal emotional contribution was selfless love, and because as a practical matter jealousy might drive a suitor or spouse away, women needed to keep their possessiveness under wraps. Other stories, while implicitly confirming jealousy as a female issue, suggested a bit more leniency. A housewife’s manual in 1858 described a woman’s growing jealousy of her husband’s preoccupation with work. She is ashamed of her feelings but grows increasingly distracted by them. Finally the husband becomes aware and includes her in his work (in appropriately simple terms). Jealousy in this case is not good, but it can be handled by a compassionate male response with the result that a marriage is recemented.25 When jealousy was considered female and therefore somewhat understandable, and when it might quietly enforce a couple’s unity, it was open to constructive adjustment. Here was another reason why, though officially reproved and considerably redefined, jealousy drew less concerted fire from Victorians, early and late, than did anger or fear. Again, the litmus was the impact on family ties, which in this case, in practice, proved modest.
Overall, the early Victorian emotional style was disarmingly simple, though potentially demanding. Building on the earlier focus on family ties, it also incorporated an initial reaction to the growing separation of work from home. However, although emotional life outside the family was evoked in references to life’s storms and the pressures on men as agents in this murky world, standards for nonfamilial emotions were not set. Real emotion meant family, and family meant solace and calm.26 Emotions that supported this, various forms of love being atop the list, were good and were praised without reservation. Emotions that threatened it were bad and were condemned. Adults were urged to restrain themselves and spare their children in this ominous second category.
The result could be oppressive. Women especially were urged into a single, exiguous emotional mold: they must love, but they had no other legitimate emotional outlet. Anger, in particular, was denied them, and even fear had to be tightly controlled. At the same time, they encountered some criticism for disproportionate emotionality, a vague claim that nonetheless served as an additional constraint. But men had severe emotional chores as well, even though their emotional nature was not so narrowly defined. For both genders, difficult emotions were degraded as bestial or animal-like, and loss of control harked back to demonic possession.
Whether this culture’s prescriptions were thoroughly repressive might be debated, for the early Victorian style certainly did not seek to limit all emotion, nor are we certain about readers’ actual acceptance of prescriptive advice. Yet, while the standards added up in principle to a tidy package, from childish innocence to marital and parental harmony, their very idealism invited dismay over sordid realities. These standards led to criticism of emotional reactions by other family members and, even more, to criticism of one’s own impulses, with repressive consequences. Quite apart from the obvious attack on “bad” emotions, the sanctity of harmony and the drumbeat emphasis on serenity offered emotional rewards of a sort, but also a deadening uniformity—and they put a serious damper on any emotional flare.
Important elements of the initial Victorian formula persisted into later nineteenth-century emotionology, including some of its gender implications and the real tensions between emotionality and a longed-for calm. But the early Victorian statement was not the final word. From the later 1840s onward, new ingredients were blended in. The mature Victorian emotional style, which would in most respects persist into the early twentieth century, inserted previous emotional standards into a much more complex amalgam. Family no longer ruled so completely, though its special domain was acknowledged, and the primacy of tranquillity yielded to a growing delight in appropriately targeted emotional intensity. The Victorians became increasingly, though selectively, passionate.
Mature Victorianism: The Uses of Dangerous Emotions
One general index
