One final point, which no introduction should be without: So what? What is the point of attending to emotional culture at all? Emotional culture is hard to study, yet the game is worth the candle, and not only because the quest is intrinsically challenging. In the first place, the study of emotional culture makes an essential contribution to other kinds of emotions research, aiding scholars who seek to understand what emotions are and what roles they play. Emotions study is on the upswing of late. Cognitive psychologists, even researchers on artificial intelligence, probe links between emotional reactions and other forms of thought; though typically interested in formulas yielding high generalization, and thus often partisans of the idea of inherent, basic emotions, they are not immune to an interest in cultural change as a variable. Social psychologists, dealing with emotions in a collective context, have contributed directly to historical study and have examined various categories of emotional standards and behaviors that may or may not be open to historical change. A growing group of sociologists, and some anthropologists, includes the most articulate advocates of the idea of social or cultural construction, in which emotional standards and even internal behaviors respond at least in part to evolving functional needs. Yet it remains true that reasonably general, reasonably precise, and reasonably analytical tests of the idea of basic emotional change are not numerous. The present study contributes additional substance to the constructionist venture and links with other kinds of inquiries into the relationship between emotion and variations (including changes) in social context.
Emotions research also adds new and important dimensions to historians’ examination of several familiar developments, and it helps connect these developments. Here, an example quite relevant to this study will serve better than a general formulation. The concept of consumerism is a staple in American social and cultural history. We all know that new passions for acquisition had flamed by the 1920s; though it can be argued that basic changes occurred somewhat earlier, important discussions of precise timing need not obscure the basic point that growing numbers of Americans, headed by the middle class, developed a new relationship to goods and the process of obtaining them. We know also, if in fairly general terms, that the rise of consumerism, as distinct from earlier, more subsistence-based forms of acquisition, promoted or reflected broader changes in outlook.29 But we are far from knowing the full effects of growing commitment to consumerist behavior. A study that explores the emotional corollaries of this trend, which is what this book is in part, thus adds considerably to our grasp of the human meaning of a familiar new social pattern. It is hardly surprising that increased interest in acquiring nonessential goods had emotional consequences, so that other kinds of emotional contacts changed as people put more emotional energy into consumption. But these ramifications have rarely been examined. Catching the connection as it took shape—that is, treating the connection historically—is an essential step in improving understanding. Further, growing consumerism was connected to other developments, familiar in themselves and coincident in time, such as changing religious values. By looking at the larger framework for measurable shifts in emotions culture—by looking beyond a single major factor such as consumerism—emotions history can reveal how concomitant changes were brought home to real people in that substantial segment of their lives pervaded by emotional reactions and evaluations.
Emotions history does not, however, simply measure the results of other changes in human terms. It also adds to the explanation of change. Emotions research, particularly in the constructionist school, tends to downplay this vital facet of emotion, looking mainly at the context for emotional standards and at the ways standards shape individual lives. Emotions are treated either as isolated phenomena or as dependent variables; their own impacts are not assessed. From the historical side, much social history has focused on emphasizing the rationality of various groupings. One of the first claims in social history, for example, was that lower-class rioters were not impelled by blind passion, that they chose targets carefully according to well-defined goals. These goals certainly differed from modern, middle-class goals; there was no disputing the importance of cultural context. But within this context cool rationality prevailed. Only recently have social historians developed any real interest in going beyond rationalism to look at other kinds of reactions and relationships. But their probes remain tentative and characteristically confined to family patterns and other private behaviors. The potential for examining the wider consequences of emotional change—for taking emotions seriously as a source of social behaviors, within families to be sure but also in a variety of other, more public settings—has not been tapped. This kind of emotions history is not, it must quickly be noted, in conflict with rationalist social history. Emotions are not irrational; they relate to the cognitive process in that they involve thinking about one’s own impulses and evaluating them as an intrinsic part of the emotional experience itself.30 When changing emotional standards thus affect social protest, as I will argue occurs in the twentieth century as a consequence of the emotional transition this book explores, the result is not that protest becomes more or less rational. Emotions form part of the motivational package that includes culturally logical goals and careful choice of targets. They do, however, have a causal force of their own, and in this respect, as in numerous other areas, we short-change our power to explain if we leave out the impact of emotional culture. When this culture changes, as it did in the second quarter of this century, other results follow. We will see elaborate results in law, protest, leisure, and other areas—some of which add fundamentally to general understanding of the behaviors involved and the needs that underlay them.
Finally, because emotional standards play a significant role in translating other changes into human routine and in contributing to change, a study that seizes on a recent basic transition inevitably contributes to an understanding of emotional patterns, and some wider behaviors, in the United States today. The transition that began to take definite shape in the 1920s still reverberates in ways that have been partially delineated elsewhere.31 Without claiming to explore the connection fully where emotions are concerned—this is a study of the transition and not of contemporary emotional patterns—I intend to suggest some probable implications. In the transition that formed a new emotional culture, we find a mirror in which we can see and understand some of our own features and compare them with the emotional faces of our Victorian forebears.
2 The Victorian Style
The image of repression has long haunted Victorian culture. Most