The simplest basic explanation of overall Victorian culture would focus on combining an understanding of emotionological trends that had been part of the transformation of mentalities throughout Western society from the late seventeenth century onward with attention to the impact of industrialization and urbanization in the nineteenth-century United States. According to such a reading, the Victorian emotional style was not a fundamental departure from eighteenth-century trends, themselves rather new. We have already seen that in highlighting explicit concern about anger, in attacking traditional disciplinary uses of fear, and in emphasizing various kinds of love, Victorianism amplified currents already present in American culture a century before. Victorianism thus built upon the reorientation of family functions toward greater emotionality and the attempt to introduce greater restraint in manners; it had no need to create. But while not fundamentally innovative, it did introduce its own flavor—the idea of motherlove, for example, while an outgrowth of the familial emphasis, was a distinctive Victorian product7—and this is where the new functional demands imposed by the growth of industry and the city made their mark.
The origins of the preindustrial cultural transformation are themselves not entirely clear. Several historians have cited the role of growing commercialization in prompting new concern about family emotional rewards as public life, in many communities, became increasingly competitive. Protestantism, as it transmuted into a wider belief system in the seventeenth century, unquestionably encouraged greater focus on family ties, emotional ties included. English writers pushed this theme hard and had obvious impact on attitudes across the Atlantic as well. Sources for the increasingly rigorous definition of civilized manners are not as easily pinned down. European upper classes grew increasingly suspicious of popular crudeness under the impact of Renaissance styles, which provided them a clear alternative to the prevailing version of mass culture. Growing prosperity brought a taste for refinement of habits. Capitalism also exacerbated divisions between propertied and unpropertied classes, which in turn generated an interest in habits of emotional restraint that would allow the former to distinguish themselves while conveniently blaming the latter for their own miseries. None of this bore fruit as quickly in the American colonies as in Europe, but, with the added effect of European cultural imitation, it began to have an impact by the later eighteenth century.8 Thus, well in advance of Victorianism per se, American emotional norms had been shifting, and these changes prepared the response to the challenges of a new economy.
By the 1830s the impact of an increasingly commercial economy was becoming clear. Victorian emotionology reacted, as we have seen, by seeking to enhance the special emotional role of the family; here was part of the functional charge behind the redefinition of motherlove. In the slightly longer term, the increasing absence of husbands and fathers, as work separated from the home, added fuel to the fire, and emotional standards had to be intensified simply to protect the established value of family life. Concern about the taints of commerce, present even among people who embraced commercial opportunities,9 provided yet another function for family-enhancing intensity and an emotional style that would clearly separate private from public activity.
But this was only an initial functional reaction in emotional culture. By the late 1840s, people began to realize that the same industrial world that required the family as emotional haven also required new emotional motivations for competitive work. (The lag behind actual economic change was interesting, as it meshed with other delayed reactions, for example, in schooling styles;10 but it was not acute.) The resultant response explains why Victorianism introduced its most distinctive emotional emphases in arguing for channeled anger and courageous encounters with fear. Military interests played a role, but the vision of emotions necessary to succeed in new entrepreneurial and professional roles was preeminent. Family values were preserved—and the virtual sanctification of motherlove preserved this goal even as other purposes were embraced—but the emotional range expanded as understanding of functional necessity broadened. Victorian emotional standards were meant to enshrine family while also providing the spur to achievement in public life.
Early industrialization and growing cities generated other functional concerns as well, which further shaped the Victorian style. Boundaries of social class became more vivid, even if American democratic values muted some of the conflicts that developed in the European version of industrialization. A recent article has shown how increased concern for cleanliness—a form of bodily discipline potentially related to emotional constraints—was in part a response to the need to formalize class divisions. Just as the middle class separated itself through the use of soap, so it prided itself on emotional restraints and subtleties whose absence marked other social groups as inferior.11 Channeled anger thus differed from the emotional propensity to brawl and certainly from real or imagined lower-class anger released within the family. Comments on fear routinely distinguished between what middle-class folks could aspire to and the baser emotions of the hoi polloi. Thus Dick, in an Oliver Optic story, spews out class pride when he contrasts his sort of courage with the actions of a host of deserters:
I can pity without blaming them, for it was a fearful ordeal for men such as you describe. As I heard my father say … , it requires a moral force behind the physical to enable a soldier to stand up before the enemy, facing death and mangling wounds, without flinching. We have always found that the most ignorant and ruffianly men make the most unreliable soldiers. As father said, it is the soul, rather than the body that makes the true soldier.12
Similarly, intense, properly spiritual love could serve as a differentiator. When late-nineteenth-century divorce law came to enshrine this quality through the concept of mental cruelty, provable through the absence of appropriate affection as well as blatant nastiness, the middle class was correspondingly privileged. Divorcing working-class couples could not point to absence of love as an excuse, for their natures precluded the finer sentiments in the first place. Mental cruelty grounds of this sort were denied them until after 1900.13
Emotional culture had begun to take on qualities of class identification even earlier, at least in the minds of middle- and upper-class proponents, as in late-eighteenth-century Virginia.14 It became part of a larger dispute over respectability throughout much of the nineteenth century. And while respectability claims focused in part on workers’ and immigrants’ lack of civilized restraints, they also highlighted some subtle intensities that were open only to people of refinement.
Class boundaries aside, urban and commercial life required rules that would assist in the identification of strangers. As familiar community monitoring proved increasingly inadequate, Victorian culture responded to the need to provide cues that would help people distinguish the trustworthy from the unreliable.15 Identification of correct responses was a result of this need.
Finally, and even more obviously, Victorian culture served gender purposes, and new functional demands also impacted this arena. Emotional arguments helped justify confinement of women to the home, which was seen by men and many women as a functional necessity given changes in the location of work. Beliefs about motherlove as well as female lack of motivating anger did not cause gender division, but they certainly helped support it. Men welcomed special emotional badges, like their aptitude for channeled anger and courage, not only because they put women in their place but also because they bolstered male qualities at a time when certain aspects of industrialization created masculine insecurities. With property ownership and traditional skills now threatened, with family role complicated by new work demands, it was comforting, perhaps truly functional, to have an explicit, if demanding, emotional identity.16