Some facets of grief varied, to be sure. Different personalities responded differently to death. Death could still call up diary entries dwelling on the transience of life and the uncertainties of God’s judgment. Some diaries report that intense grief followed death for a month or so, then tapered off; others record a fresh renewal of grief well over a year after a death or separation. In the main, however, the obligation to record grief and the felt intensity of grief as a direct reaction to love rather than to fears of death reflected real-life experiences of the culture’s emotional standards. Deep loss, hopes for reunion in the afterlife, bittersweet recollections of the ongoing love—all were commonplace in the private reportage.
Of course grief intensities also varied with the level of acquaintance and the kind of death. Deaths that were lingering, providing the chance to prepare, sometimes caused less grief than sudden departures; the concept of a “good death” may have cushioned grief in the former instances. Where sheer pain dominated, as in the unexpected death of a child, the bittersweet theme might be absent entirely. But efforts to see beauty in death, to emphasize the sharing of grief by friends as well as the consolation of a better life in heaven, expressed some of the qualities urged in the more general commentary on this emotion. Christian resignation entered into the formula, along with frequent references to the “happier world” beyond and the beauty of the dead body (a clearly Victorian theme expressed for example in death kits for children’s dolls), but so did hopes for reunion—a child “spends this Sunday in Heaven with all her departed relatives,” wrote a Schenectady Protestant—and a sense of propriety in the love shared, through grief, in the family circle and beyond.54
Prescriptions against unacceptable expressions of dangerous emotions, particularly by women, were thus matched by even more open references to fervent love and grief. The final ingredient of the Victorian amalgam, successful channeling of fear and anger, received less frequent comment, but here too there was real experience.
Courage and controlled anger showed most openly in what Anthony Rotundo has called Victorian middle-class boy culture. Groups of boys, fiercely independent of their mothers, developed a host of games to test aggressiveness and courage. They teamed up to throw stones at each other. They developed hazing rituals to test their ability to withstand fear—a habit that was institutionalized by the 1830s in male fraternities and lodges, where hazing challenges were extended into young adulthood.55 These activities and the emotional values that underlay them contrasted magnificently with the maternally dominated domestic sphere, which was precisely their purpose. Yet they also corresponded, in tenor if not in cruel specifics, to the advice being offered about male ability to use and channel dangerous emotions. A game of “soak-about” involved boys hitting one of their number in a vulnerable spot with a hard ball—a test of the ability to endure fear and pain. “Dares” were endemic—“the deeper the water, the thinner the ice, the longer the run, the hotter the blaze, the more certain [was] the challenge.” Again, Victorian courage found a daily puerile expression. The taunts of “crybaby” and “sissy” awaited any who could not pass the tests. Anger was tested as well, as boys preferred to settle “a personal grievance at once, even if the explanation is made with fists.” And while cultural pundits clucked about boys’ wildness, they, too, approved of hearty play that would assure, as “Mrs. Manners” put it, that no male child turned into a “girl-boy.”56 This boy culture began to be curtailed somewhat by the 1880s, as length of schooling extended and new, adult-run institutions like scouting introduced more supervision and regulation into boys’ lives. But even these institutions, as we have seen, maintained an emotionology that valued and tested courage in the face of fear and the ability to summon up channeled anger. The culture had real impact on the ways Victorian boys lived.
Adult men manifested their adherence to the dominant emotionology as well. Men may have been fearful in the face of business innovations and intense competition, as one author has recently argued, but the commitment to express courageous joy in facing down the odds was high. This was one reason why many businessmen and professional people were open to the doctrines of social Darwinism, which provided a scientific basis for the values of male conquest of fear or of anger-fueled rivalry. Middle-class soldiers in the Civil War, like Oliver Wendell Holmes, delighted, as we have seen, in writing about their reactions to battle in terms of heroic boys’ stories, expressing wonder at their coolness under fire. Adherence to the ideal of channeled anger showed in at least two settings. Male politicians and reformers routinely used angry invective and anger-inspired moral fervor in debate, with no sense of inappropriateness or need for subsequent apology. They, like the larger culture, shared the view that anger in a just cause was useful; calm, rational presentations would not alone suffice. Businessmen showed their anger too. A foreman angrily replied to complaining workers in Chicago, “Quit if you want to. You are welcome to quit.” Worker protest brought anger into the open, with employers frequently “raging like tigers,” as one employee put it around 1900.57
Documentation of male commitment to utilizing the dangerous emotions is hardly voluminous, and of course, quite apart from the question of individuals’ adherence to cultural standards, personalities varied. References to fear and justifiable anger were frequent, however, suggesting genuine correspondence between the dominant emotionology and the ways in which many men perceived their own emotional responses. Not surprisingly, the same atmosphere produced frequent real-life conflicts between emotional standards at work and those desired at home. Many a man, like the harassed coal company manager described in a Pittsburgh memoir, came home irritable, repairing to his library (and its bottles) in silence—not living up fully to the domestic ideals so much as carving out a certain solitude in their midst. Precisely because the dangerous emotions were tried at work, the cultural tension applied to manhood in principle could prove difficult in the daily experience.58
Emotional reality is a complex entity, and its historical documentation is maddeningly elusive. In contrast to the institutional expressions of emotional culture, personal experience admits of tentative generalizations at best. Available diaries and letters provide strong evidence that the standards for intense love and grief were internalized, but obviously most people’s emotions, even within the middle class, went unrecorded. Whether the experience of love, guilt, or grief (or, for men, anger or courage) differed from experiences in the past cannot be decisively determined. Individuals’ descriptions of experience did change, but emotions are more than verbal reports. They also involve behaviors and physiological changes, and the latter, in particular, do not permit historical measurement.59 Furthermore, individual variation around norms is impossible to track. We know, in contemporary society, that some individuals are more anger prone than others, and experiments show that anger-prone people respond differently to the same stimuli. Such personality variation surely occurred in the past as well. Nevertheless, cultural norms may affect the available range of personality types, as well as the way individuals present their personalities. Norms clearly affect the verbal presentation and self-evaluation aspects of emotional experience, even if other reaches remain unclear.
Thus, Victorian emotional culture did shape real emotional life, though it did not describe it perfectly or completely. The way people loved or grieved or encountered fear was defined in part by what they were taught; and to an extent, both emotional experience and emotionology were shaped by the same functional and broader cultural factors. Exactly how much the distinctiveness of the culture is reflected in a similar experiential distinctiveness is not clear. Basic physiology, personality variations, or even the time lag between the generation of new standards and widespread assimilation may have limited the cultural hold on emotional reality. A tension between lived emotional experience