Emotional Interactions
A third area in which reality and perception intertwined also reflected Victorian emotionology. In addition to its impact on public institutions and individual experience, emotional culture also colored the way middle-class people reacted to the emotions of others. This final realm is just being opened up in sociology and social psychology, as researchers turn from a preoccupation with the emotional impulses of individuals to an inquiry into broader emotional functions. In this new view, emotions are primarily designed to affect relationships, and thus they must be tested not only in terms of the signals an individual sends or wishes to send but also in terms of the likely responses. Grief, for example, though perhaps initially designed as a way of restoring the lost loved one, ultimately serves the function of encouraging emotional support from others to ease the griever through the loss; it builds compensatory relationships. Yet this purpose is served only if the relevant others accept the grief signal. For Victorian emotionology this raises a question: Were people ready to accept the intensities of others, even as they wrote certain intensities into sports programs or sought to describe their own emotional lives in culturally appropriate terms?
Here, too, the answer is affirmative, though a host of research opportunities remain. Victorians clearly expected to deal with intense emotional expressions from other people so long as the settings were appropriate—just as they expected suitable restraint, as part of proper etiquette, in other settings. Public reactions to the crime-of-passion trials, for example, suggested a widespread belief by both genders that extreme jealousy was a valid emotional response in certain equally extreme instances, even when accompanied by violence. The defendants who won their pleas received considerable outpourings of popular support at the close of trials and in subsequent letters. On a more ordinary basis, despite cultural disapproval of jealousy, many Victorians seem to have accepted jealous responses from a suitor or partner and to have been willing to adjust behavior accordingly. Thus husbands were urged not, in their wives’ presence, to “enthusiastically praise the sterling qualities of other women,” while wives should not “invidiously eulogize the seemingly incomparable character of other men.” Men often concealed behavior that might cause jealousy—which was an indirect recognition of its potential intensity—while wives were urged to do the same. Love letters, while sometimes attempting to assure that possessiveness did not taint the spiritual qualities desired, sometimes also admitted jealousy at least circuitously. “Do not think I assume the right to control your actions; but I love you too fondly to share our smiles with another.”60 And the appropriate reaction from a lover was adjustment, with promises not to give reason for jealousy in the future. Response here was complex, for jealousy was not to be accorded too much status. Yet there was little attempt in practice to deny the emotion’s validity (except by some of the experimenters in utopian communities). While jealousy could be acknowledged, this was not an emotion to be flaunted.
Responses to emotion changed demonstrably in certain instances. During the eighteenth century upper-class southern men had professed considerable indifference to women’s anxieties about childbirth. After 1800, however, they changed their tune, admitting real validity to women’s fears, sharing some of their anxieties, and even cooperating in reducing conceptions in order to limit the risks. There were many reasons for this behavior, including of course the increasing belief in female frailty, which made admission of fear and weakness seem more appropriate. But enhanced emotional attachment and even anticipated grief joined in as men empathized more fully with women in this area in part because of their own awareness of potential emotional loss. Emotional reaction to expressions of concern thus changed far more than did the women’s fears that evoked it.61
Expectations toward guilt also changed. As we have seen, the standard use of guilt in childrearing involved isolating the offender from the family network until guilt had done its work and could be suitably expressed in sincere apology. Then the incident could be officially forgotten and relationships restored. Parents taught, then, that indications of guilt were vital cues in preserving or recovering social contacts, and these lessons were carried into later life. Functional guilt surely operated in the eighteenth century as well, but a greater reliance on shame produced different expectations, as community disapproval might be meted out in any event. Again, responses to intense expression shifted.62
Intense expressions of love were obviously regarded as acceptable by many of their recipients. This process may well have begun in childhood as boys and girls learned the normalcy of fervent maternal affection. Certainly love letters suggest scant hesitation to express soulful depths. The only apparent concerns about expression of love were the fears that passion might not be reciprocated or that it might somehow complicate appropriate religious duties. No evidence suggests that lovers attempted to defuse the intensities of their partners, and even rejections of affection treated the emotion itself, if not its particular target, as appropriately fervent.
Nor did most same-sex friends hesitate to receive expressions of passion from their partners. Most exchanges seem to have involved mutual expressions of deep emotion with no warnings against excess. Expressions of friendly love were naturally more muted when there was uncertainty about whether the love was reciprocated, or in the rare case when parties worried that their fervor might be misconstrued as sexual. A breakup of a friendship might also occasion disparities between the continued passion of one friend and the new indifference of the other, as on the occasion of a marriage. But even in these cases the appropriateness of passion itself was not questioned; it was simply less welcome due to altered circumstances. Because most male friendships dissolved on marriage, men rarely questioned expressions of intensity: these were fine while the friendship thrived, and they stopped when it was over. Only in the case of some women friends, particularly when one partner married, was there any significant implication that the suitability of emotional fervor was at all in doubt. Thus, Mary Hallock Foote wrote her friend: “Imagine yourself kissed a dozen times my darling. Perhaps it is well for you that we are far apart. You might find my thanks so expressed rather overpowering.” And later: “You know dear Helena, I really was in love with you. It was a passion such as I had never known until I saw you. I don’t think it was the noblest way to love you.”63 Some of these hesitations may have related to sexual desires or manifestations, complications that cropped up in expressions of heterosexual love as well; but some may have captured an otherwise unusual doubt about intensity itself, as it would be perceived by the other or might be judged by outsiders.
Many other settings, besides those involving love, showed acceptance of deep emotion. Boys obviously expected channeled anger from others and expected to see others react to, and conquer, fear. Their derision was reserved for those who shunned intensity, not for those who revealed it.
Grief was also accepted. Its function of building supporting relationships to cushion loss seem normally to have worked. Many adults drew close on the death of a child as they accepted each other’s grief and the terms in which it could be consoled. Grieving diarists commented on the “sympathy of friends” and the importance of shared ritual. Etiquette books emphasized appropriate rituals for expressing grief and channeling reactions to it, but they too acknowledged the validity of the emotion and the need of supportive friends and relatives to respond to it. Writers on manners deplored any disruptive potential in conversation, to be sure. A few, in this vein, urged that signs of mourning be ignored in dealings with mere acquaintances. This advice, particularly common in the first half of the century, recognized emotional intensity—“any allusion to the subject of his grief [is] very painful to him”—but recommended an aloof reaction. More common was the recommendation that good manners obliged people of good breeding