Battleground of Desire: The Struggle for Self -Control in Modern America

SIX: New Combinations

| 133 || S I X| New Combinations The factors that led to the revision of the Victorian style of self-control solidified in the turn-of-the-century decades. Signs of transition, including both relaxations and new targets for constraint, emerged at the same time, although the fuller shift in standards awaited the 1920s and ensuing decades. This was the point, for example, at which the new popularized expertise generated a flood of advice literature on child rearing, marriage, and etiquette—symptoms, as we have seen, of both novel sources of behavioral advice and audience demand for clarifications amid change. This chapter deals with some of the trade-offs since the 1920s and describes themes that will be extended to body presentation and sexuality . Earlier transitions were amplified in the 1920s, and the process of redefining a system of self-control continued thereafter, with the 1950s and the 1970s particularly important to setting additional adjustments in motion. Standards were loosened in some areas, tightened in others, while new technologies called for additional caution. The underlying framework was a process of regulation and deregulation bent on creating a more relaxed but still disciplined personal style, suitable for the demands of a service economy and a consumer society. Subtle controls guided the emergence of the casual. Although the need for demonstrations of restraint remained, the specific requirements shifted. This pattern of trade-offs was a mixture of Victorianism, modernist attack, and, above all, a tendency toward increasingly detailed standards. Some of these standards were relaxed, and others were demanding, as opposed to the more general injunctions with which the nineteenthcentury middle class had been content. The framework of trade-offs, New Combinations| 134 | then, was not a tidy, reasoned process of change but, rather, a welter of specific adjustments. That is, Victorian restraints were transformed but not undone as a variety of forces pushed toward a new set of tensions between control and indulgence. The basic factors that required change, beginning with the new consumerism and work needs and including the continuing insistence on the capacity to demonstrate self-discipline, rebalanced rather than simply moved toward the greater freedom that some popularizers thought they were advocating. Each surge—for example , in the recreational culture—generated not just traditionalist concerns but also specific countermeasures to limit excess and compensate for pleasure. Victorianism was gradually redefined, but its spirit continued to inform many of the resulting adjustments and often radically new functions that self-control was now supposed to fulfill. Understanding this trade-off process is essential to recognizing how nineteenth-century values survived, even at the end of the twentieth century and even in settings that Victorians themselves would have deemed unacceptable. At a commercially organized speakers’ panel in 1997, for example, offering famous people commenting on the ingredients for success, the focus was on recommendations that a Victorian would have readily recognized: study, work hard, accept personal responsibility , treat people fairly, and trust in (a nondenominational) God. Retired General Colin Powell, for example, accounted for his extraordinary career in terms of character: it’s ‘‘a story of values, it’s a story of families.’’ Indeed, the whole idea of a lecture series on the moral underpinnings of success, as well as the virtues stressed, bespeaks the persistence of cherished Victorian beliefs and habits in a society that defined specific personal goals, habits, and problems very differently. A reader writing to Ann Landers attacked the idea that avoiding divorce demonstrated ‘‘old-fashioned virtue’’ and ‘‘character.’’ Having been stuck with an unfaithful, abusive, drunken husband, ‘‘it took all the virtue, character and courage I could muster’’ to end her marriage and raise her three children on her own. Not only she but also the children greatly bene- fited from the decision. This ability to defend modern behaviors in terms of older character values shows the range of combinations possible in a culture that has shifted its standards without jettisoning essential traditional qualities and vocabulary. The same continuity can be seen in today’s self-help business manu- New Combinations| 135 | als, a quintessential nineteenth-century legacy. In the 1920s, when as we have seen, a spate of new manuals sought to prepare their readers for the corporate world, and again in the 1980s and 1990s, such books insisted that by taking the pertinent actions, individuals could control their economic fate and organizational...