Thus women were seen as emotional but not passionate. The intensity that would lead to dramatic, effective action was a masculine preserve. As part of the larger imagery of female passivity, women’s emotions were often seen as soft and desirably gentle. Men were not only more highly sexed but were also possessed of more driving emotions, which served both for economic competitiveness and as a foundation for broad social action. Women, as befit their domestic sphere, had no such range. Songs of grief persisted in using examples of women’s deaths, which served to emphasize a male role in grief but also reminded the audience of female frailty. Beliefs about female hysteria, though not commonly discussed in the popular prescriptive literature, may have added to the sense of women’s emotional boundaries.
Even motherlove, that deep wellspring that women alone possessed by nature, was a sacrificing, subterranean emotion more than a driving force. As Jan Lewis has demonstrated, motherlove lived in the children, but it must not overwhelm them. Mothers “must beware of disclosing [their] feelings, or at least, let there not be an apparent attempt to exhibit them. … This would be most ruinous. Rather let [the child] feel that there exists in your bosom a well spring of feeling and anxiety, which others know nothing of, and which even he cannot fathom.” Women’s maternal intensity, in sum, must be self-effacing; it did not motivate powerful action. A woman endowed with “warm feelings” and “quick apprehension” must exercise “self-control” so that she might display only a “calm good sense.” Emotion was not an unqualified good, and to the extent that women were particularly emotional, they could complicate their own maternal tasks. As John Abbott insisted, in discussing “The Mother’s Difficulties,” “We must bring our own feelings and our own actions under a rigid system of discipline, or it will be in vain for us to hope to curb the passions and restrain the conduct of those who are looking to us for instruction and example.”66
Unquestionably, male and female emotions were held to differ, as were the functions of their emotions. The same rules that defined a combination of passion and control also clearly specified areas where women could not tread. Criticisms of women’s excessive, debilitating emotionality surfaced recurrently.
Yet a full differentiation was not attempted, and even the male passion/female sentiment distinction should not be pressed too far. Men, too, could fail through emotional excess, as when they displayed ungovernable temper. They, like female hysterics, could be subject to medical controls. Women, for their part, though disbarred from channeled anger or the passions of courage, had intensities of their own. The fact that mothers must monitor their display did not automatically differentiate them from men, who were also required to be watchful. Though manipulated for the child’s good, deep emotional expression could be part of maternalism: “Another outlet for thy womanly heart: a mirror in which thy smiles and tears shall be reflected back; a fair page on which thou, God-commissioned, mayst write what thou wilt; a heart that will throb back to thine, love for love.”67 Here was some female equivalence for the male joys of channeling anger toward a justified target or conquering the pangs of fear through courage triumphant.
The point is that pronounced gender separation and a passion/control combination coalesced in Victorian emotional culture. Control for women was more severe, as it enforced domesticity and was constantly associated with the insistence on sweetness and calm. But a version of the characteristic tension applied to both genders.
In romantic love, finally, men and women shared the field. Love was the intense emotion meant to unite two different characters, but in this case with equal fervor. While some Victorian advice suggested a slight concern that men might not love as well as women (because they were too reserved or distracted by other things and of course because their lusts might get the better of them), the injunction for men to love deeply was a standard fixture in the emotional culture. Women’s capacity to love was seldom doubted, though an interesting subgroup, in men’s advice literature after 1870, began to worry about women’s “other” interests, including incipient feminism, as a distraction from love: “Why do not women marry?” The idea of love, however, burned brightly still, for the same author who fretted about rising divorce and distracted women praised a pure love that was “unequaled by any other emotion.” No restraint was necessary. Men and women could and should love with equal, unbounded intensity. It was this very fervor, indeed, that could bridge the gaps between the genders and reconcile different emotional natures with the equal necessity of a tight marital bond. With the same intensity, in effect, men and women would love different things. As T. S. Arthur put it, a woman would fall deeply in love with the “moral wisdom of her husband,” while men would fall just as deeply in love with the affectionate nature of good women.68
The passion/control combinations ascribed to emotionally correct men and women differed greatly. They unquestionably privileged men in a host of ways. Yet the formulas suggested for each gender were nonetheless somewhat comparable. Each had needs and outlets for intensity, each must of course learn important management controls. And the whole package was assembled by the one kind of intensity that could be sincerely enjoined on men and women alike: the intensity of a deeply spiritual, faithful, consuming love.
Guilt
Victorian emotional culture capped its central themes by developing a growing reliance on guilt as the central enforcement mechanism for proper behavior, including suitable expressions of feeling. John Demos has outlined the process by which middle-class Americans shifted from primary reliance on shame to primary reliance on guilt between the mideighteenth and the midnineteenth centuries.69 While the change entailed a host of ramifications, reflecting declining reliance on community cohesion in the northern states and the need to provide more family-based and ultimately internalized emotional discipline, the relationship to the larger evolution of emotional style was vivid. Guilt may be seen as a reaction to the possible loss of cherished relationships, with expression of guilt helping to restore those relationships. The intensity of family emotional ties in Victorian culture created precisely the environment in which the intensity of guilt could itself receive new emphasis.
The enforcement of shame in colonial New England went beyond the fabled stocks, pillories, and badges that exposed offenders to public ridicule. Even whipping, though producing physical pain, was carefully scheduled in public to inflict scorn as well. Thus on one occasion a female offender who was spared the whip because of infirmity was ordered to stand at the whipping post “that she may in some measure bear the shame of her sin.”70 Concern about shame is revealed in many lawsuits designed to avenge wounded honor, for the culture urged one to measure up to external standards, and hence vigorously to redress false assertions that one had failed to do so. The orientation to shame began in childhood, as wrongdoers were abundantly exposed to the mockery of siblings and peers, and continued in the insults that pervaded neighborhood life.
This orientation shifted by 1850. Even a bit before this, Catharine Sedgwick had offered a paradigmatic tale of family punishment.71 A boy attacks a family pet with boiling water. The father sternly orders the boy to go to his room—by this time, a form of punishment greatly preferred over physical discipline. Aside from the act of removal, there is no attempt to encourage shame even within the family. Indeed, after initial horror over the scalded cat, the family expresses sympathy, “grief,” and support. The point is for the boy to look within himself, to punish himself, during a period (in this story, two full weeks) of removal from the family, and then to disclose his internal process by a sincere apology. Internal emotional turmoil, not externally applied scorn, becomes the central disciplinary theme.
The reform movements that proliferated during the nineteenth century hung heavy with the themes of guilt. Temperance literature emphasized personal degradation and material and moral damage to family. Realization of guilt was intended to motivate sincere commitment to change—“conscience-stricken” was a favorite