Oh, a huge great grief I’m bearing,
Though I scarce can heave a sigh,
And I’ll ever be dreaming, Katy Darling,
Of. thy love ev’ry day till I die.52
The pervasive themes of grief and pathos formed an important part of Victorian culture, making the sorrow of bereavement seem natural, even desirable, though also to some degree consolable. Grief could soar, as love did. At the risk of trivializing grief (and certainly Christian doctrines concerning the afterlife), Victorian emotional culture embraced this sorrow openly, returning to it with almost endless fascination at least until the final decades of the nineteenth century.
Victorian Intensity
No single work, either expert or popular, conveniently summed up Victorian emotional culture. In examining the real though complex consistency of the amalgam that emerged after 1850, we are piecing together a wholeness that the Victorians themselves did not explicitly encounter. One result of the patchwork approach to popular presentations of Victorian emotional style was, inevitably, a host of inconsistencies. For example, men as well as women were urged to have intense emotions, and yet Victorian statements could imply that male superiority rested directly in the ability to control and suppress emotions. This inconsistency doubtless reflected some genuine ambiguity about how to defend gender goals in the emotional arena. Anachronistic standards also continued to intrude, including an occasional epitaph or story designed to discipline children through fear of untimely demise.
Nevertheless, once the transition away from the simpler emotional view of the early Victorians was complete, advice literature, mainstream Protestant sermons, and moralistic popular fiction presented a fairly uniform picture about anger, fear, jealousy, grief, and love. There were no clear dissenting voices in the most widely read directives. An evangelical segment, to be sure, maintained a somewhat more traditional view of discipline through fear as part of their religious stance. Utopian communities also dissented, though less directly. In arguing for cooperativeness instead of competition, they did not adopt the mature Victorian idea of channeled anger. Nor did they countenance intense love as a means of joining a couple (and therefore emotionally isolating it from the community). On the other hand, they actually intensified the new view of jealousy in arguing against possessiveness, including sexual possessiveness.53 These subcultures, both of which related to the mainstream middle class, must not be forgotten.
Nor, of course, should the class base of the dominant Victorian emotional style be lost from sight. Popularizers intended their wares for all readers, but there is no question that their emphasis was class based. As we will see in the following chapter, evidence suggests that many Victorians translated their emotional culture into assumptions that lower classes and immigrants were incapable of the finer feelings it embodied. Victorian emotional style became part of a cultural arsenal that allowed middle-class publicists both to preach at the lower classes, confident of the superiority of their emotional standards, and also to condemn them for failing to live up to the necessary control or to express the ethereal qualities of true love. While the Victorian style did not address alternative norms, which testifies both to substantial middleclass agreement on goals and to the dominant cultural position of the middle class, there is no reason to assume that it displaced various working-class and ethnic alternatives or that the Victorians really expected it to do so. The history of ethnic and lower-class emotionologies, immensely desirable, has yet to be written, though some material on expressions of parental and romantic love warns us not to expect total differentiation.54
At any rate, a surprisingly coherent emotional culture was purveyed to the middle class during the second half or two-thirds of the nineteenth century. The culture had two main foci: the need for control, for directing emotional fervor to appropriate ends; but also the need for intensity, for the spark necessary to a full life and to the functions essential in modern society. Emotional excess was obviously condemned, but so was emotional flaccidity. The Victorians sought, as basic ingredients of good character, the capacity for deep feeling along with the capacity to direct that feeling to appropriate targets.
Regional and Gender Variants
Agreement on the goal of controlled intensity allowed major features of the Victorian emotional style to transcend, though not to obliterate, two key cultural divisions within the nineteenth-century middle class: region and gender. It is not yet possible to offer definitive statements about these segmenting factors, particularly where region is concerned; but it is possible to suggest how emotionology relates to the larger cultural debates involved.
Recent work on gender and family has revived the question of the distinctiveness of southern culture, particularly around the middle of the nineteenth century. Regionalists appropriately insist that too many “American” studies, even when carefully confined to the middle class, have relied disproportionately on materials from the Northeast. It is unquestionably true that most of the advice literature and popular magazines privileged authors from New England, the Midwest, and the Middle Atlantic states. But several important studies on middle-class values in the South have argued that families in this group read much of this material and shared many similar goals.55 The principal features of Victorian emotional culture also suggest that there were more shared standards, stemming in part from shared reading, than images of hotblooded Rhett Butlers and calculating New England moneychangers might suggest. While further research explicitly focused on the South is essential, it is clear that regional factors affected but did not hopelessly entangle the Victorian style.
Southern distinctiveness did shine through in emotional criteria that related to honor. While Americans generally could still resonate to jealous intensity in defense of honor (at least when the intensity involved men disputing the sexual activities of “their” women), southern standards were more single-minded than was true in the rest of the nation. Thus southerners preserved habits of dueling or at least fighting in order to vent their jealous reactions against the claims or slights of others. Men sought to redress wives’ infidelity through private, emotionally charged action, as southern law castigated any “degrading” behavior on women’s part. Courtship rivalries were common. The law in southern states articulated the idea that jealousy could legitimately excuse violence, well past the point at which northern states began to rein in this particular emotional approach to justifiable homicide and crimes of passion.56
Some historians have argued that southern culture supported passionateness in general, not just passion related to gender and honor. Michael Barton, for example, in an impressive analysis of letters by Civil War soldiers, concludes that the upper class in the South displayed an emotional articulateness and vivacity that markedly contrast with the careful, almost disembodied control that ran through letters by Union soldiers from virtually all social groups. He concludes, not surprisingly, that emotional style constituted one additional arena in which, whether they knew it or not, southerners and northerners disagreed.57 Again, the existing state of research does not permit decisive dismissal of Barton’s approach,58 though most available evidence points in the other direction. Southern Victorians wanted control along with their passion—this was one of the changes in upper-class culture in Virginia by the early nineteenth century, as Rhys Isaacs has shown. And, as I have insisted, northerners wanted passion along with their control. It is probable, in fact, that differences in emotional culture were greater in the colonial period than in the nineteenth century, precisely because many southerners came to accept the idea of