Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  This “new woman … thoughtful and active” will inspire a new painting, where she will be studied and depicted not by lovers but by equals.49

  One reason to regard Mauclair’s essay as significant is that it was not merely an expression of personal sentiment, but an account of a historical change in the way modern women projected their being, especially evident since the mid century. Without claiming that the differences between women’s and men’s social roles could ever be wholly effaced, Mauclair pointed to an already palpable shift in their public and private relations, and to the future of greater equality and mutual recognition it promised.

  10 Bourgeois morals: from Victorianism to modern sexuality

  Few features of classic bourgeois life have been more remarked on and bewailed than its morality, often derided as rigid, puritanical, and hypocritical, especially in regard to sex. Nineteenth-century moralists made large demands on speech and behavior in the name of decency and decorum, often in strikingly inconsistent ways. Men were allowed satisfactions considered unthinkable for women; representations of unclothed bodies were taken for granted so long as they could be assigned to some distant or mythical realm, but moralistic viewers were shocked by Manet’s ironic and playful contemporary nudes (in contrast to Mauclair’s celebration of them), and even by the suggestion of a falling gown-strap on the bare shoulder of an elegant woman in a portrait by John Singer Sargent. We can defend bourgeois morality on the grounds that many human societies have imposed narrow and inflexible standards of propriety on dress, demeanor, and public expression, especially for women, and that hypocrisy has reared its head wherever ordinary flesh-and-blood humans have sought to exhibit strict moral and religious principles in their daily lives. Bourgeois themselves were the first to call attention to hypocrisy in their midst, condemning it in the name of transparency and truth. In addition, Peter Gay’s detailed and colorful studies have shown that many nineteenth-century middle-class women and men lived far more open and varied moral lives than has commonly been supposed, often regarding sensual and erotic satisfactions as a highly desirable part of respectable existence. Even his account leaves many features of the traditional picture intact, however, and with them the need to make sense of the perplexing contours of modern bourgeois moral belief and behavior.1

  I will attempt to meet this need here by showing some of the ways bourgeois morality evolved in parallel to the developing pattern of gender relations set out in the previous chapter. Just as a longstanding and well-established system of separate spheres acquired new dimensions and justifications from late in the eighteenth century, but through social and intellectual developments that challenged its stability and whose further unfolding would render divisions between the sexes more permeable, so in morality a regime often taken to be peculiar to the nineteenth century is much better understood as a tighter and more rigid assertion of long-established distinctions between permitted and forbidden things. This moral stiffening was based on premises and practices often advanced and supported in the name of liberation and autonomy, resulting in an unstable compound whose demanding and rigid claims on individuals bore the seeds of a breakdown that would foster radical departures from traditional standards and expectations. This trajectory in morals, like the one we traced out for gender relations, owed much to the deepening importance of distant ties and relations in every sphere of life, and in particular to its impact on families.

  Classic moralism and its transformations

  The peculiar mix of continuities and contrasts between traditional attitudes and those that gave a new tone to moral thinking and practice during the nineteenth century has been most clearly set out by Michael Mason. Focusing on Britain, Mason shows that moderns inherited what he calls a “classic moralism,” grounded in religious and secular ideas that legitimated sexual activity only for the sake of reproduction and inside the family, consigning premarital sex or pleasure sought for itself to the dark realm of vice, alongside concubinage, adultery, prostitution, and divorce. By contrast with what emerged around 1800, however, this classic moralism was often far from puritanical. Bathed in an aura of unquestioned universal acceptance, it radiated a kind of common-sense worldly wisdom, recognizing the weakness that flesh is heir to, and thus the unavoidable gap between what morality might demand and the conduct most people could be expected to achieve. The indulgence classic moralists sometimes showed to human foibles and weaknesses went along with an often earthy and ribald style of speech about bodily and sexual matters. The more rigid moral system that came to be called “Victorian” did not wholly displace the older one; people could still read periodicals that took pleasure in lewd puns and that did not hesitate to satirize the extremes of prudish reformers (one article proposed to ban rolling pins and pokers because of their phallic shapes). Such instances recall the spicy and racy language of Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Rabelais, in a way classic moralists themselves. It was characteristic of such traditional moralism that it sought to regulate and restrict prostitution but not to stamp it out, in contrast to some self-consciously modern nineteenth-century reformers who believed the oldest profession could and should be eradicated.2

  Although this venerable ethic survived into the nineteenth century, it never lost certain marks of its pre-modern origins. Its mix of moral stringency and indulgence accorded well with a widely shared view of the world that gave everything within it an assigned place in a hierarchical order stretching from pure divinity at the top to sheer materiality at the bottom; human nature, positioned in the middle, was at once and naturally drawn upward toward higher things and downward toward base ones. Lowly as the body might be, it had an allotted place in this architecture, and thus an inescapable role in the drama of preordained ends that gave meaning to the whole. The wide disparities in social position and well-being between ranks were justified on the ground that those at the top were both physically and mentally distinct from those below them. Because social divisions rooted in nature were passed between generations by procreation (and “blood”), bodily functions could assume a social and moral significance they would lose as they came to be seen as merely “private” matters. Thus it made sense for people of high degree to make a show of the activities that sustained their corporeal existence, going to bed, getting up, eating, and even sometimes voiding in public. Alain Corbin points out that pre-modern ideas about bodies depicted them as caught up in the physical order that governed the lives of plants and animals, responding to the phases of the moon and subject to astrological and magical influences. These views were reflected in taboos concerning such things as placentas, nail cuttings, and lost teeth, and in the widespread belief that it was wrong and dangerous to allow anything to “impede natural bodily functions; accordingly people were quite tolerant of belching, farting, sneezing, sweating, and physical manifestations of desire.” The unbuttoned nature of classic moralist speech noted by Mason belongs to this same cultural universe, one quite distant from the Christian image of humans as needing to look above all to the welfare of their souls. But in a world where people were exposed to both ways of thinking some mixing of them was bound to take place, and it seems sensible to regard the simultaneously rigid and loose ethic and language of “classic moralism” as one example.3

  It may not be possible even to list, much less to treat adequately, all the sources from which flowed the elements of a less forgiving moral orientation, but two important ones will structure the discussion that follows. The first may be called restrictive, and had to do with the relevance of behavioral restraint to well-being within particular social groups, and in particular the historical developments that led middle-class people to impose greater discipline on themselves and others. It was here that the role of family membership so important in structuring male–female relations made itself felt in morality. The second can be labeled enabling, and found expression in more positive views about human nature and its potentials, fostered first by the Enlightenment and then by the French Revolution. The expanding role
of distant connections in everyday life was important to both.

  The different degrees to which moral restraint was demanded within particular sections of society, and the ways these changed, had much to do with the ends served by family membership within each. As noted in the previous chapter, family was crucial to individuals at many social levels; save for those whose resources were too meager to sustain stable unions (to be sure, they were many), families served as vehicles for passing assets and status between generations and as points from which social alliances and connections were made. This was true no less of many early modern peasants and artisans than of aristocrats and bourgeois, but it is the latter pair that chiefly concerns us here.4 In one regard it was nobles who attached the greatest value to family, because they had the most to inherit and the greatest reason to preserve the purity of their blood lines; in every country great nobles prided themselves on the eminence and honor attached to their lineages. All the same, a longstanding and broadly diffused view regarded bourgeois as the people most devoted to family life, in the sense that they invested larger quantities of both affect and energy in domestic relations. Portraits of bourgeois couples, in sixteenth-century German or Netherlands towns, and later in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, give off an air of mutual involvement and intimacy palpably different from the self-conscious display of eminence that characterizes images of aristocrats. In eighteenth-century Paris, novels and plays often presented domesticity as a specifically bourgeois trait. Even those with far-flung commercial connections were described as caught up in everyday domestic relations and preoccupied by their problems and concerns, in contrast to nobles whose lives took on a freer and more exalted air through their ties to court and king.5

  The moral implications of this bourgeois domesticity were often noted. Husbands and wives were described as living a kind of obligatory common life, and as sentimentally devoted to marital fidelity, traits parodied and scorned by some aristocrats. Daniel Roche finds evidence for an “intensification of affective space” in the way bourgeois household interiors were arranged and inhabited. Moral seriousness was an aspect of the sturdy, unpretentious existence attributed to German Bürger by eighteenth-century writers, in contrast to the galanterie of French aristocrats and their local imitators. If Lawrence Stone is correct, such a family style was less confined to middle-class people in England, since country gentry and even some nobles all provide evidence for the spread of “companionate marriage” there during the eighteenth century, involving terms of endearment and expressions of affection between spouses, both in person and in letters. Patriarchy still reigned, but it was of a less insistent kind, capable of greater attention to the needs and rights of wives, and even of an expanded recognition about the place of sexual pleasure in marriages. That such attitudes and behavior were less class-specific in England than elsewhere accords with what we have seen in other connections.6

  Where the differences were marked various reasons have been offered for them, and there may be some truth in the often-repeated idea that bourgeois acted differently from nobles because they were less confident of their position and more fearful of disapproval. But a broader and more illuminating perspective arises from a contrast delineated by Göran Therborn in his wide-ranging world history of family life. The difference to which he points does not rigidly distinguish bourgeois families from aristocratic ones, but it places practically all of the former on one side of a line that runs through the world of the second; it rests on whether or not families were organized to support some form of productive life. Producing goods for their own survival or for the market, conducting some kind of business, or supporting the professional work of a household head (almost always male, to be sure) was an important part of what many families did; their survival and in some cases advancement depended on it. Rural activities were little different from urban ones in this regard, and Therborn stresses this continuity by employing the general term “estate management” to describe the practices that aimed to preserve family resources for the sake of supporting some occupation or employment. Where overseeing such assets was important to family survival, it was incumbent on members not to squander them, and individuals’ involvements with each other was reinforced by the understanding that each one’s fate was tied up with that of the household enterprise, however sharply differentiated the roles assigned (especially to men and women) within it. Although such a “family economy” contrasts with the later “male-breadwinner – female homemaker model” often associated with the nineteenth-century idealization of domestic relations, the earlier form already made whatever work sustained the family the focus of its members’ mutual reliance and dependence. Indeed, many early professional families (and some commercial ones) conformed to the later model, since in them too the role of the wife was largely limited to managing a household that both relied on and supported the husband’s work. To be sure, this interplay of domestic and practical concerns was not always productive of affection and harmony, nor did it constitute any guarantee of behaving morally, since complaints and fears about adultery, concubinage, resort to prostitutes, and children who schemed to fulfill their amorous desires against the will of their parents were present in every social sphere. “Classic moralists” would not have been surprised by such anomalies.7

  The case was very different, however, with families whose position rested not on some form of “estate management” but on attempts to obtain personal favor and material advantage through participation in courtly life. To the end of the eighteenth century, and later in some places, royal or princely patronage offered access to very large resources, in the form of offices, gifts, and favors, some of which could be used to cement connections with equals or with clients further down the social scale. Such opportunities were especially attractive to nobles who considered ordinary work beneath them or whose other resources had somehow become diminished, and rulers were happy to provide them in exchange for loyalty and support. Preserving familial position was an important condition for pursuing such benefits, but everyday cooperation between family members had little to do with it; far more important were certain personal qualities – attractiveness, charm, good manners, speaking well – rather than the moral discipline that aided in directing resources toward collective survival and advance. These courtly qualities could be conceived as civilizing and even moral, as Baldessare Castiglione’s famous treatise The Courtier and its many imitators showed, and court life sometimes sought to follow these models; indeed Norbert Elias regarded it as a major source of the internalization of discipline and self-control he famously labeled “the civilizing process,” rooted in forms of politeness and restraint adopted in order to show respect for superiors, and to dramatize each person’s place inside the hierarchy topped by a prince or king. But the personal qualities that made for success in courts could also pass over into self-promotion, seductiveness, wiliness, and intrigue. Where they did, Therborn observes, aristocratic society “let go of many family norms in favor of general sexual libertinism.”8

  The phenomenon was particularly marked in France, where it received literary representation in Choderlos de Laclos’s famous Dangerous Liaisons of 1782, a story of sexual exploitation, intricate machinations, and cold-hearted personal revenge; its portrayal of scheming and self-indulgent aristocrats resembled those in the many now-forgotten but then highly popular libelles that portrayed the frivolity and decadence of courtly life, and whose role in draining away the Old Regime’s aura of legitimacy has been highlighted by Robert Darnton. Most German courts had a more reserved style, but aristocrats were the object of moral critique there too, as in England, where people whose position depended on patronage sometimes exhibited moral attitudes close to their French counterparts, a phenomenon well illustrated by Samuel Pepys in his famous diary. Aristocratic libertinism may also have been encouraged by the close connection between nobles and military life, and Roy Porter and Leslie Hall point to the increased militarization of the British aristocracy at the
time of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars as feeding an upsurge in upper-class profligacy in England in the years around 1800. The increase in state budgets at the same time also meant more opportunities for people (not only aristocrats) to enrich themselves through state contracts; in England this meant a heightened awareness about the power of the kings to use their control of patronage to influence Parliament, an important aspect of the “old corruption” much decried at the time, feeding the movement that issued in the Parliamentary Reform Bill of 1832.9

  The contrast between the lax and even libertine tenor of courtly and military morality and the more restrained and serious tone of bourgeois existence deepened during the eighteenth century. Enlightenment culture’s attack on corruption and on unjustified claims to authority and domination in public and private fostered a heightened emphasis on moral responsibility in society as a whole, but Margaret Hunt, in a study of eighteenth-century middle-class business and family life, has identified some special reasons why “middling” people were becoming especially concerned about the link between self-discipline and family enterprise. These reasons remind us that the other side of what was regarded as the particular attachment of bourgeois to family life was the same people’s participation in markets and other activities tied to relations at a distance. Hunt sees the evolving connections between family, commerce, and behavior as underlying the pervasive concern to foster moral responsibility evident in such periodicals a Addison and Steele’s Spectator (to which we can add the German “moral weeklies” inspired by them, of which the Hamburg paper Der Patriot was the first). In places such as London (as well as Hamburg and Bordeaux), commerce involved relations with distant markets and suppliers, but business was conducted by family firms for whom relatives provided the chief sources of partners, collaborators, and capital (regularly assembled through marriage connections). Conditions in the far-away places where the funds were employed were difficult to monitor and could change unexpectedly, bringing danger of failure and imposing sudden needs for additional credit. In later periods businesspeople in such a situation would turn to a bank or other impersonal lender, on whom some of the loss would fall should things go badly. Given the rarity of such institutions through much of the eighteenth-century (and even later in many places), merchants and traders turned to family and friends to meet these needs, and if things went wrong a whole cluster of relatives and associates felt the impact. Blame would then be laid on those most directly involved. As Hunt puts it: