American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style.

By Peter N. Stearns (New York: New York University Press, 1994. ix plus 368pp.).

In this boldly innovative book, Peter Stearns brings together his work for the past decade on the history of emotions to propose a major new synthesis of American culture in the twentieth century. In connecting family, work, leisure activities, health concerns, and innumerable lesser aspects of life in the twentieth century through an underlying emotional matrix, Stearns's book raises as many questions as it answers, but it makes for compelling and essential reading.

Stearns begins by examing normative values attached to the expression of several "basic" emotions--jealousy, love, grief, anger and guilt--in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He summarizes the contrast in the approved expression of each as defining two differing (though not completely opposed) emotional styles: the nineteenth-century Victorian style based on deep feeling or passion and that of the twentieth century, which he shrewdly calls "cool," that downplays excessive expression or intensity and emphasizes informality. In so doing, he vigorously challenges the once common, but increasingly old-fashioned, historiography which believed twentieth century emotions and personal styles to be liberations from Victorian repression. Steams is surely correct in insisting that all cultures mold emotional expression, that none is free from repression, and that no progressive liberalization has taken place. Far from being emotionally freewheeling, the twentieth century, apart from an ostentatious sexuality, emphasizes niceness over passion, and is embarassed by deeply felt or intensely expressed emotion. Steams argues that this style first appeared in the 1920s (and helps to account for the acute sense of change of that period), and came to a full fruition in the 1960s, both in the United States, and, after a later and slower inception, in Europe. The value of Steams's sharp appraisal of the nature of twentieth-century style, of the requisite cool, low key form, can be confirmed by any parent of a school age youngster and more generally to anyone who watches Woody Allen movies.

In discussing the contrast between Victorian and modem emotionology, Steams provides the reader with countless important insights into the way emotional norms are created as well as how they were related to each other and the expressed forms they took. I especially like his discussion of the devaluation of motherlove, how the changes in valuation of emotional intensity decreased gendered differentiations, and how the new emotional norms led to the perceived need for increased supervision of young children.

But American Cool goes way beyond defining the shift in emotional norms that has taken place and detailing its various manifestations. Steams also attempts to explain these changes and examines their cultural consequences. In this Steams is, by sums, breathtakingly ambitious, dazzlingly insightful, and invites rebuff. His large agenda amounts to a major reinterpretation of the American cultural and social landscape. Steams seeks to connect what started as basic economic and family change in the nineteenth century and their varied twentieth-century social consequences through a largely (though not exclusively) functionalist framework so that most of the emotional norms can be "understood" in terms of their social functionality and the many cultural expressions of the experienced emotions are either directly functional or functionally compensatory. Steams is aware that this explanatory framework is vulnerable, but also that it may well be the only one that can manage such an enormous task (because it is less an explanation than a method of analysis?). The results, in terms of bringing into a coherent framework a mass of disparate twentieth-century phenomena like sports fanatacism, management styles, language, and psycho-therapeutics, is exhilirating, but it does leave the reader antsy (or anxious depending on your personal emotional style) to come up with counterexamples, or alternative explanations. Steams anticipates some of this and is fully aware, for example, that his discussion is overwhelmingly middle-class in its base (not to mention ethnically whitebread), and leans heavily on prescriptive norms. Indeed, his last two chapters suggest some of the limitations of his large tableau as well as future angles for research. But this cannot get him off the hook entirely, for to undertake such a coherent and centered analysis in today's multicultural climate makes Steams's assertions about the homogenizing tendency of white, native, middle-class norms, very gutsy, indeed. One is also forced to ask whether Stearns's ambition to provide a functionalist and uniform lens made him misrepresent some very large cultural phenomena (or avoid dealing with them). The counter culture of the 1960s, when Americans were urged to "let it all hang out," and "say it like it is" comes to mind. Indeed, adolescent peer culture generally, which encourages outrageousness in behavior and extremes in expression is largely ignored in this book, although it is certainly a twentieth-century cultural phenomenon.

Given my own present obsessions (an emotional no-no in twentieth-century emotionology), I am left wondering whether most of what Stearns here attributes to complex long term structural changes in the economy and family and the resulting profound alterations in approved and experienced emotions could not more efficiently be attributed to the style made necessary by the twentieth century media. Unlike the theatre or opera where emotion is to be indulged and displayed, the movies (after the silents), photographs, radio, and television require cool projections, and the laid back self-representations of a Johnny Carson or Jimmy Stewart--cool, nice and even tempered, or the sexual power simmering beneath a cool surface displayed by a Marlon Brando or Eva Gardner. If this is so, then the independent role of culture and of technology, becomes much more fundamental then Steams assumes, although Steams has already anticipated this alternative and rejected it (p. 272). The questions of how styles are generated, let alone large questions of causation, as Steams is fully aware, are very tricky.

Beyond the question of the overreach of the explanatory framework is the fragility of its anchor. Stearns seeks not to attach himself to any particular and therefore historically limited theoretical psychology and adopts, instead, a constructivist perspective. The result at once denies any particularity to the emotions while making them fundamental to an enormous social and cultural superstructure. But we are told (and perhaps know) far too little about what these emotions are, where they come from or how fundamental they really are. Steams begins to address these issues toward the end of his book, but not really sufficiently to stanch a queezy feeling that emotions are both more and less than a constructivist framework allows.

In the end, however, Steams has tried something really new here. He has proposed to see society and culture through the lens of emotions, without stooping to the inanities of many psychological explanations. And he has done this with verve and insight. Not only is this worth doing, but it helps us to see things in a fresh way and to make unusual and important historical connections. It is a tribute to the importance of the book and to the intelligence of its analysis that American Cool challenges the reader to propose alternative frameworks, and to argue with particulars. I must add here that it is profoundly embarrassing (and not cool) to like this book as much as I do and to give it such a positive review in this particular place.