Only Connect: Family Values in the Age of Sentiment: Introduction

Anyone who has taught history to undergraduates knows that regardless of the time or place covered by the course, a handful of students will always begin their examination essays with the phrase: “It was a time of change.” As a result of exposure to dozens of such openers, I have become leery of ever leading off an essay by pointing to a Great Watershed. Let us just say, then, that to historians interested in family life (and images of the family) in Early Modern Europe some long-term transformations become inescapably apparent by the eighteenth century. A first wave of historians of the family, writing in the 1970s, unabashedly celebrated the eighteenth-century family as the prototype of modern domesticity. For Lawrence Stone, author of the most widely-read synthesis on the pre-modern family, the eighteenth century saw the end of whippings and cringing deference and the rise of the “companionate,” “egalitarian” family (albeit only among the well-to-do). Edward Shorter, in another widely-read synthesis, viewed the family through the prism of the sexual revolution of the 1960s: for Shorter, the history of the family was that of a journey from sexual repression to erotic self-expression. Around the same time, Christopher Lasch gave us a phrase which has been used ever since in discussions of separate spheres and of the family under nascent capitalism: “haven in a heartless world.” ¹

It took the rise of feminist scholarship in the 1980s to challenge the complacency underlying such arguments: from a woman’s point of view the modern family is and was all too rarely a haven, still less an erotic playground, “companionate” or “egalitarian” for wife and children only at the pleasure of the male bread-winner. The more guarded outlook which has replaced Stone’s whiggish optimism has made it possible to move away from value judgments and evaluate this long and slow shift in the culture of family life in a different way. Over the course of many decades, between 1600 and 1850, “horizontal” definitions of the family replaced vertical ones; family lineage gave way to family life. Among the well-to-do, at least, ideals once represented by the genealogical tree, its sap replenished by regular infusions of money and status, gave way to the fantasy captured in the Greuzian or Diderotian tableau : old and young beatifically clutching one another, frozen in a moment of all-encompassing emotion. The synchronic family of love had displaced the diachronic family of bloodlines.

Social historians have advanced convincing demographic reasons for this long-term change. By the early decades of the eighteenth century in many parts of Europe, morbidity and mortality had begun to recede significantly. In the new affective economy of the eighteenth century, one could invest large amounts of emotion in a parent, a sibling, or an infant with less fear of waste—especially if one had money for decent food and other amenities. ² But the mere fact that the odds were better that a beloved family member would survive does not explain why one should want to allot vast amounts of emotional capital to the nuclear family in the first place. Why is the loving family so vivid, overblown, and ubiquitous in the culture of the West in the eighteenth century?

For decades scholars in history, art history, and literature have gotten away with a buzz-word: bourgeois. Conveniently ignoring the fact that historians of England, France, the United States, and elsewhere hardly know who the bourgeoisie or middle class really are, still less when exactly they appeared, and the fact that the sentimentalization of family life flourished just as vigorously in the aristocracy as elsewhere, many scholars continue to invoke a concept that is both teleological and essentialist. “You know what I mean,” the word bourgeois telegraphs: nuclear, sentimental, God-fearing, hypocritical, mercantile, child-centered, gender-segregated—what our own families became, and we so love to hate.

Thankfully, the best recent literature on gender, sexuality, sentimentalism, the law, and politics, as represented by the essays in this volume, suggests ways of getting away from reified...