Defining Victorianism as repression is a considerable oversimplification. In some respects, the twentieth-century fascination with labeling and condemning Victorianism owes more to the needs of this century than to the characteristics of the previous one. Blasting Victorian shibboleths is a convenient means of trying to persuade contemporary Americans that they are truly free—and in the process concealing the many constraints that in fact have been introduced in our own time. Victorianism was to some extent invented after the fact, to simplify the twentieth century’s own self-satisfaction; with such a repressive past, progress became easy to claim.
The imagery is not all wrong. The Victorian emotional style contained strong repressive elements. So do all emotional styles, but even so, Victorian repressiveness in some respects went unusually far. Children were routinely enjoined to obedience, a recommendation that could cover a host of parental efforts to keep their offspring in line. Many Victorian childrearing manuals seem amazingly undetailed by current standards, largely because the injunction to obedience could cover such a multitude of sins. Sibling spats, for example, were almost never mentioned, and a leading reason for this was that the larger dictate, to obey parents’ commands, reduced the need for attention to such petty emotional or behavioral details.2 Correspondingly, when attention to sibling quarrels began to increase, by 1920, one reason was that the blanket insistence on obedience was now dismissed as outdated and repressive, requiring a new, more nuanced attention to specific problem areas.
In addition to the routine insistence on obedience, Victorian popularizers showed their repressive side in many other ways. Women in particular were to be kept in emotional check, and this standard contributed to many of the symptoms of distress disproportionately present in the nineteenth-century middle class, including the kind of hysterical paralysis suffered by repressed figures like Alice James. Victorian men and women alike frowned on spontaneity; uncontrolled impulse was a mark of poor breeding and a real social and personal threat. To this extent the civilization-of-manners schema fits Victorian goals fairly well. Emotions required monitoring, and children were taught this lesson early on. Generalized injunctions to obedience were combined with serious warnings about the dangers of displaying anger within the family, particularly toward parents. The margin of tolerance was narrow. Even as Victorians moved away from physical punishment—which was a constriction of parental spontaneity widely preached from the early nineteenth century onward—other disciplinary systems, including isolation of children, maintained a severe pattern of will breaking.3 Finally, Victorian popularizers talked a great deal about the importance of rationality and calculation, which fits a century devoted increasingly to business planning, growing organizational sophistication, and heightened faith in formal education. One of the real differences postulated between men and women involved men’s natural superiority in matters of the head and women’s corresponding inferiority because of weak-minded sentimentality—and the resultant imagery, along with its gender impact, constrained both men and women to distrust emotional tugs.
There is no convenient reversal for the Victorianism/repression oversimplification. Victorians cannot be seen as emotionally tolerant, certainly not as freewheeling. Accurately characterizing their emotional style requires subtlety and must acknowledge a strong repressive element. Aspects of Victorianism have been invented to bolster twentiethcentury self-confidence, but the characterizations are by no means entirely off the mark.
Revisionist views of the Victorian style have already been applied to sexuality, and the close relationship between this area and emotion warrants a brief comparison. Traditional scholarship on Victorian sexuality played the repression chords resoundingly; Victorians, or at least Victorian women, were turned into virtual museum pieces of unimagined repression. Victorian popularizers, like Lord Acton in Britain or some of the American faddists like Kellogg, were trotted out to show how Victorian women were told that all sexual impulse was wrong and, in women, unnatural, dangerous to propriety and physical health alike. For a time, the scholarship on Victorian sexuality could be summed up in the image of the respectable woman told to endure the indignity of the sex act by lying back in a darkened room and “thinking of England.” This standard was supplemented, for males and females alike, by instructions not to damage health by contemplating sex more than once a week, to shun sex before age twenty-three, and to avoid masturbation like the plague it was—this last injunction being enforced by bizarre physical constraints on male adolescents and even institutionalization for insanity.4 Surely Victorianism and repression were identical where sex was concerned. Actual Victorians might evade the repressive standards—male users of the double standard and consumers of prostitution and pornography were most commonly cited—but even they were indirectly constrained, condemned to furtiveness and to the separation of “respectable” male-female contacts from healthy sexuality.
Yet it turns out that this image, amusing or appalling as it might be to twentieth-century eyes, was simply not accurate. Victorian prescriptions did include some extremists, but they were atypical. Popular advice varied, and it generally recognized that a moderate sexual appetite was legitimate. Women were considered less sexual than men, to be sure, but even for women, physical and mental health required some regular sexual expression; occasional procreation was not the only goal. Writers on marriage, though hardly in the Masters and Johnson league, assumed that sexual satisfaction was an important ingredient in marital love. A few revisionist historians have gone so far as to assert a quiet Victorian sexual delight, citing married women who acknowledged not only their reliance on sexuality and their dismay when sex relations had to be curtailed for reasons of birth control but also their frequency of orgasm—a frequency that, if taken literally, actually surpasses contemporary twentieth-century self-reports. Yet extreme revisionism can go too far.5 Victorian attacks on child and adolescent sexuality were quite real, and they had some impact even in married adulthood, when a less repressive regime was widely advocated. Victorians did respect the validity and importance of sex, but they distrusted overemphasis on it and sought other primary bases for heterosexual relationships. A fully accurate formula for the subtleties of Victorian sexuality has yet to be worked out, but while it would include due notice of some special repressive features (and the needs that underlay them, such as birth control and social and gender hierarchy), it would not simply end with the repressive theme. Just as a twentieth-century flight from sexual repression is a simplistically misleading conception, so the Victorian acknowledgment of sexuality’s validity must be included in any characterization.
Students of Victorian emotionality have launched a reevaluation similar to that applied to sexuality. Although some recent work plays up the repressive theme alone, the idea of Victorian emotional repressiveness has been substantially modified. The various modifications need to be drawn together and then integrated into a more accurate vision of the nineteenth-century baseline. Yet the analogy with sexuality must be made with caution. Victorian sexual repressiveness was by no means complete, but it was more pervasive than was repressiveness in the emotional arena. In fact, Victorians hoped to use emotional opportunities to deflect certain kinds of unwanted sexuality, particularly in courtship.