A "More Smiling" Atmosphere: Women, Face Ache, and the Climate of Genteel Culture

Matthew Salway, University of California, Los Angeles, "A 'More Smiling' Atmosphere: Women, Face Ache, and the Climate of Genteel Culture." Models of feminine behavior saturated late nineteenth-century genteel culture,... [ view full abstract ]

Matthew Salway, University of California, Los Angeles, "A 'More Smiling' Atmosphere: Women, Face Ache, and the Climate of Genteel Culture."

Models of feminine behavior saturated late nineteenth-century genteel culture, compelling wealthy American women to wear facial expressions that conveyed enthusiasm and interest, and to repress what William James called the “unuttered inner atmosphere” of their interior lives. This paper brings fiction and criticism by Hawthorne and Howells into conversation with short stories featured in Harper’s Weekly and the Century to show how pervasive literary ideals of American femininity—as both vacant and responsive to masculine ambition—created the kind of social “climate” that led to the misperception of a naturally thinner, headier atmosphere, and which prompted Howells to insist that American writers should reflect on “our more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American.” The burden of sustaining this man-made climate, which exclusively benefited men by protecting their egos and building their confidence, was on women and their faces.

          Engaging with the concept of “climate” as an affective instrument for controlling genteel female behavior means rethinking the relationship between gender and mental health in the late nineteenth century. The perception that women were inherently predisposed to madness obscures the systemic manipulation of emotion and physiology experienced by generations of American women. A more representative theory of these effects can be drawn from James’s claim that “the imitation of bad models,” rather than the supposedly exceptional American climate, produced an “absence of repose” and an “agony of expression” in women who embodied a quality of “bottled lightning”—and who, I argue, were most likely to be struck by it.