Basic cultural frameworks normally have considerable staying power, and when gradual changes do occur, they remain within the existing framework. As we will see, this was the case with Victorian variants on the trends established before the industrial revolution. A genuine framework change, however, did occur in the twentieth century, and several scholars have already theorized about its nature.
Some have described the change as a transformation in basic American character taking shape around the middle of the twentieth century or a bit later. David Riesman has argued that there was a general shift from inner-directedness, strongly oriented toward achievement and attuned to internal motivations and promptings, toward other-directedness, emphasizing attunement to signals from peers and media as the source of appropriate goals and standards. Christopher Lasch played a variant on this theme in his briefly celebrated lament on the decline of American character.20 For Lasch, the inroads of meddling experts and other changes in American society—including the weakening of the family resulting from women’s new work roles—produced a decline in strong individual motivation and an increase in shallow self-indulgence and concern with peer approval. Neither Riesman nor Lasch heavily emphasized the emotional corollaries of their claims, but clearly such corollaries would exist. While the present study does not propose anything quite so sweeping as a modal personality change, and while it certainly eschews Lasch’s empirically dubious claims about a shift in psychoanalytic dynamic, it does acknowledge a definite shift in emotional norms from an implicit emphasis on individual drive toward a greater concern with group conformity and attunement to peer reactions. In fleshing out this argument and explaining the causation and results of change, we tread at the edges of a trail blazed by earlier analysis.
Emotions theorists have recently cleared a trail of their own, venturing several overlapping arguments about a twentieth-century emotional style markedly different from its Victorian predecessor. For a time, American sociologists assumed a high level of repression in American emotional culture prior to the twentieth century, which gave way during this century (there was little concern for precisely when) to a radically different emphasis on self-expression and self-actualization. Modernization, in this sense, meant jettisoning “traditional” limits on venting emotion and delighting in a new individual freedom to let everything hang out. This formulation was not entirely wrong, but it was unquestionably oversimple, beginning with its faulty identification of Victorianism with traditionalism and undiluted repression. Interestingly, more recent sociological work on emotion has tended to eschew broader formulas in favor of attention to specific emotions or to a much more modest set of shifts and cycles within the twentieth century itself.21
Several Dutch and German sociologists, however, have picked up the theoretical gauntlet with a vengeance, working on the twentieth century within the broader historical perspective provided by Norbert Elias and his model of an earlier transformation toward impulse control. For example, Jürgen Gerhards argues for a “postmodern” emotional culture that escapes the bounds of Elias’s framework, though not simply in a release from repression. Cas Wouters develops the idea of “informalization” as the key description of the new emotional culture, in which strict codes of behavior diminish in favor of a more complex, mutually negotiated series of emotional self-restraints. Wouters even posits a correlation between the shift in emotional standards and the dominant mode of emotional analysis: “Just as Freud’s ‘discovery’ of ‘animalic’ emotions and motives occurred at the peak of their repression and denial, by analogy, the ‘sociology of emotions’ began to spread when rejection of repression and denial of emotions seemed to reach their height.” Abram de Swaan, even before Wouters, referred to growing informality and ad hoc negotiations about emotional display as part of an increasing democracy in social relationships. He, too, distinguished a decline in rigid rules against spontaneity, and like Wouters he argued that more spontaneity could be tolerated because of lessened insistence on hierarchy and growing confidence that most people knew without prodding how to avoid undesirable excess.22
This, then, is the recipe for twentieth-century emotional change that has already been prepared. It is plausible and correct in many respects. Why not simply reheat it; why review the ingredients directly? Why, in sum, a whole new cookbook? For the following reasons, all explored in the subsequent chapters:
1. The idea of a twentieth-century movement away from impulse control incorrectly reads Victorian emotions as repressive and nothing more. This is not the case, at least as applied to the nineteenth-century American middle class. It is essential to correct this baseline in order to arrive at a true verdict on the twentieth century.
2. Many of the generalizations emanating from Dutch researchers, and echoed by Jürgen Gerhards in Germany, rest on fairly slender empirical evidence. Important studies are cited, particularly a Dutch attitudinal survey in the 1960s. But generalizations have outraced data, sometimes producing sweeping claims based on remarks by the American novelist Tom Wolfe.23 Further, important studies demonstrating new forms of twentieth-century repression have not been incorporated in the dominant model. Finally, the “informalization” model assumes a transatlantic equivalence in emotional trends, with scattered American and European evidence used interchangeably. A fuller examination of specific cultures, like that of the American middle class, is imperative.
3. Evaluations of the timing of change are suspect, at least for the United States. The Dutch work focuses on the 1960s as the transition point. American Cool will argue that in the United States the more decisive break began to emerge four decades earlier.24 Only by properly identifying timing can we address causes and consequences.
4. The informalization model, while more right than wrong, simply does not capture the full substance of the emotional culture that emerged from the decline of Victorianism in the United States. Despite its attractive caution and complexity, it overdoes the liberating elements and, still more important, downplays the vital corollary of growing informality itself: the growing aversion to emotional intensity that such informality requires. It is the very un-Victorian suspicion of intense emotional experience, far more than a simple renunciation of Victorian repression, that forms the essence of the transition in American emotional culture. This is what must be explained. Emotional restraint must be seen as itself a causal force that has reshaped various relationships in contemporary social life. Even more than the informalization proponents have realized, fundamental features of the emotional culture that emerged from the ashes of Victorianism are counterintuitive, involving actual emotional constraints of which many middle-class Americans have remained unaware.
Source materials for this book cluster primarily, though not exclusively, in what is generally known as prescriptive literature. Victorian popularizers, and their readers, felt a need for guidance in various aspects of emotional socialization, and the popularity of the numerous manuals directed at parents and youth has been well documented. Then, in the 1920s, a new set of popularizing authorities entered the marketplace The audience their work achieved forms one index of middle-class Americans’ quest for some real innovation in emotional guidelines.
For the Victorian period the manuals referred to above form a vital starting point. Most of them addressed various kinds of