Southern families, in the middle and upper classes, certainly shared with their northern counterparts an interest in respect and obedience from children, which logically led to some emotional constraint. But they did not seek abject docility, and fathers seem generally to have aimed at a rapport in which sons could discern the legitimacy of appropriate emotion, including affection. Dickson Bruce, while emphasizing some distinctive southern features, notes an ambivalence toward passion in the South—a desire to promote strong emotional attachment to family and a belief in the legitimacy of a passionate nature combined with a real concern lest emotion overwhelm reason. The same ambivalence, defined as an attempt to juggle control and intensity, effectively describes the emotional style of the Victorian North. Middle-class families in both regions generated a related ambivalence toward male violence. After the greater pacifism of early Victorianism, northern childrearing manuals (often read in southern cities as well) stressed the necessity of encouraging the emotional impulses that would lead boys to fight when the goals were just. Southern culture similarly taught its boys that, while sheer hot-headedness represented a fatal loss of control, violence was often inescapable.60
It is wrong to assume either a southern nonchalance about restraint or a northern emotional turgidity, or both. Northerners were a bit more wary of jealousy than southerners seem to have been, though there was some inconsistency even in the North. Both regions valued targeted anger, though northerners might speak more about its uses in competition than in defense of honor. Both regions claimed adherence to ideals of love, and both showed some acceptance of its concomitant, intense grief. Soldiers from both regions displayed intense and unembarrassed family affection. While northern Civil War soldiers tended to conceal emotions experienced in battle from their wives and mothers, they wrote more freely of their fear and their efforts at courage to their fathers, so that even here the idea of uniform emotional control is off the mark. Thus Charles Francis Adams, in the best boys’ story fashion, wrote proudly of his first response to combat, when he displayed “a vigor and power which, under the circumstances, I had never hoped [I] possessed.”61 Such articulations of the concept of facing and mastering fear were also common in southerners’ accounts.
The Victorian emotional style crossed regional boundaries in the nineteenth century. Later developments, in which southern culture proved more durably wed to Victorian standards than was true in the North, reopened gaps between the regions for a time, and these later differences help explain contemporary scholarly confusion about regional differences in the nineteenth century itself.
If Victorian popularizers dwelt little on regional factors, they were profuse in identifying emotional differences between the genders—again, particularly after the somewhat androgynous early Victorian interlude. No summary of emotional style can ignore the profound contrast between the standards assigned to men and those applied to women. In fact, Victorian emotional standards depended explicitly on gender differences. Women were supposed to supply an emotional charge that men lacked while accepting men’s greater rational sense as a constraint; and at the same time men needed women to help them achieve certain kinds of control that they might naturally lack. Only through the very different contributions of both genders could the twin goals of passion and restraint be met. Yet despite these contrasts, the underlying goal of emotional intensity under control did apply to men and women alike.
Unquestionably, the passion/control dualism in the mature Victorian emotional style applied most literally to men. While women were clearly regarded as “more emotional,” both in popularized literature and in scientific renderings such as those of psychologist G. Stanley Hall, actual discussions of emotional force concentrated on men. Anger was regarded as unfeminine in women, but men were supposed to be able to use anger. Children’s stories, such as the Uncle Wiggily books popular during the early decades of the twentieth century, routinely assumed the sweetness of little girls (whether in human or in personified animal form) while often noting temper problems of boys. The result was a clear image of girls as emotionally preferable; but, translated to adulthood, the same imagery held that men had far more drive. Correspondingly, the boy or man lacking the emotional spur was shockingly feminine, a sissy. Similarly, within marriage, while popular literature occasionally cited the justified wrath of a much-abused wife and certainly commended patient husbands, the dominant tone urged particular care on the female side. Within the sacred confines of family, men were supposed to keep their temper, but it was acknowledged that their nature and their cares at work might expose some rough edges. Women were much better suited to the kind of self-control necessary to keep the home a tranquil place. “If there isn’t one person in the house who simply shoulders more than his share and goes on quietly saying nothing about it, there are going to be friction and unhappiness”—and that one person was characteristically the wife, particularly in depictions after 1850. More simply put, “the average American girl believes that womanly, domestic methods are most effective.” And more directly still, from an early Victorian address to young ladies, “An enraged woman [is] one of the most disgusting sights in nature”—a theme that etiquette books repeated through the century.62 Whether this devotion to calm followed from women’s real lack of anger or simply from their greater effort at self-control was not always clear, but the message came through regardless: women had no legitimate need for anger. All the devices developed to ritualize channeling that were urged on middle-class families, particularly aggressive sports like boxing, were concentrated on boys; girls remained confined to the anger-free models developed early in the Victorian period.
The passionate encounter with fear was another male preserve. Nineteenth-century popularizations did not mention courage as a female attribute; this was true even in the early scouting movements, extended past 1900. Boys were routinely told to face fear and conquer it. Girls were simply not discussed, or at most were advised not to be more fearful than necessary. Advice to mothers, to hide fears from children, assumed that women could manage some control but had not undergone the transforming emotional experience that would really make them brave. Thus T. S. Arthur, urging adult women to conceal fear, clearly implied that they would suffer from it. In his twin manuals directed respectively to girls and to boys, only his boys’ book includes the characteristically long section on moral courage; the girls’ pamphlet is mute on this subject.63 Boys’ stories, like the Rollo series, liked to show girls paralyzed by fear while their brothers dealt with danger. Courage was nice, but courage in front of trembling females was even nicer. Again, the word “sissy” clearly showed the distinctions between gender standards where the encounter with fear was concerned.64
The basis for the gender-specific rules on handling the dangerous emotions lay, obviously, in assigned roles. Women, being domestic creatures, did not need and, regarding anger, could not afford the emotional range men required because of their work in the world. Public-private emotional divisions were crucial to Victorian culture, and these provided gender markers as well. The home was a haven in which disruptive emotions had no place. Women should therefore be emotionally gentle. The burden on men was in some ways greater, as they had to develop two emotional faces, one domestic and the other economic and political. But this same dualism gave them a far greater range for emotional intensity.
The distinction is interestingly revealed in the recurrent popular comments on jealousy. Men and women were held to differ here as well, as jealousy became feminized. With regard to female jealousy, a certain ambiguity developed that was not granted to men in Victorian culture: a bit of jealousy might be expected from dependent, emotional women, and a loving man might respond by changing behaviors even though the emotion was petty and potentially disruptive. Men were more constrained with respect to low-level jealousy; there was no acceptance of a jealous male in routine commentary. But when jealousy rose to heights of passion, motivating vengeance, men alone held the keys. Women could not, in law, use the claim of jealous rage to excuse attacks on their spouses’ lovers. The few who attempted this defense were uniformly convicted. Even where