Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth Century Urban America. - book reviews

National Review, July 9, 1990 by Judith Martin

Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth Century Urban America

IT IS A pleasure to welcome yet another scholar to the swelling ranks of those who believe themselves alone in rediscovering etiquette as a subject fit for serious study. There must be enough of us now to hold a convention, where we can battle unreservedly over definitions of terms.

With his Rudeness and Civility, John F. Kasson, a historian from the University of North Carolina, has made a fine contribution to the history of etiquette, based on his research on the relation of the development of etiquette to the urbanization of nineteenth-century America. Particularly valuable are his capsule accounts of the evolution of dining etiquette and of audience etiquette, which trace the emotion-laden processes by which Americans were weaned from putting their knives in their mouths, and taught to believe it a crime to cough in a culture center.

As he points out, such changes restrained formerly open expressions of bodily needs and emotions. It became rude to shovel in food as efficiently as possible, and to shout at, or over, the performances of factors and musicians. In the rapidly growing cities of the nineteenth century, more and more detailed restraints were urged, as etiquette increasingly dealt with the problems of strangers living in constant proximity. Familiars back home knew all about one another's appetites and feelings, but the frank display of these to outsiders became an instrusion. In the countryside, everyone knew everyone else's identity and reputation, but in the city, people had to depend on reading the symbolism of behavior and dress to guess with whom they were dealing.

Mr. Kasson seems troubled by these increased requirements because the etiquette of nonintrusiveness prohibits absolute freedom of natural, individual, expression. Regulative systems, such as law, always do, in the interest of maintaining communal harmony where desires conflict. People cannot be free to smoke wherever they please if others are to be granted freedom from encountering smoke.

He appears to experience, and to pass on to his readers, the distress many people have felt when they realized that symbolic cues may be hypocritically manipulated by villains seeking to counterfeit good character. Symbols can always be misappropriated, as when a swindler postures pictously, or someone who doesn't recycle his trash wears an Earth Day T-shirt. It takes some sophistication to accept the gap between appearances and impulses cheerfully and put it to good service, as Benjamin Franklin did.

In recent decades, alternatives to traditional regulative and symbolic etiquette have been attempted. Free expression has been reclaimed as a virtue, to the point not only of displaying personal feelings and habits to straners, but of giving them unsolicited opinions about their own appearance or behavior. Symbols have become frankly separated from what they are intended to symbolize, as when poor children who know one another's circumstances nevertheless compete in wearing designer labels.

Yet Mr. Kasson challenges the belief that manners have declined. He also seeks to demonstrate that "established codes of behavior have often served in unacknowledged ways as checks against a fully democratic order and in support of special interests, institutions of privilege, and structures of domination."

In support of the first thesis, he uses a technique to which I will refer, in the interests of avoiding hypocritical gentility, as the "Eeeeeew, gross" approach. This consists of citing antique etiquette rules--"Before you sit down, make sure your seat has not been fouled"; "Smell not of thy meat nor put it to thy nose"--to show how far we've come. (Etiquette, like law, only proscribes actions that people are likely to do.) Rules made after the invention of indoor toilets and refrigeration invariably seem pleasanter than those that preceded them, and thus the past appears to be crude in comparison to the fastidous present.

It should follow that anyone who deplores current standards must be deluded by nostalgia for an ill-remenbered or imaginary society. However, the modern decline, Mr. Kasson fails to perceive, is not that people blow their noses more or less charmingly than they used to. It comes rather from a widespread abandonment and rejection of the underlying beliefs from which such surface etiquette rules spring. In the 1960s, objections to etiquette were no longer being made only by the selfish, who, unwilling to restrain their own behavior, were newly bolstered by calling this self-assertiveness. The objections were also made by idealists who regarded the restrictions imposed by etiquette as a stultifying repression of the human spirit. It is this two-pronged attack that led to a generally recognized deterioration of the standard of civility in American society and, more recently, a popular demand for the return of manners.

The technique for showing that etiquette further victimizes the down-trodden may be called, "Why don't those killjoys let us do what we feel like?" This age-old lament suggests how much better life would be if not for behavioral restrictions imposed by such meanies as (choose one) the older generation, women, etiquette arbiters, the rich, or the middle class.