Battleground of Desire: The Struggle for Self-Control in Modern America. - Review - book review

Journal of Social History, Summer, 2001 by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn

Battleground of Desire: The Struggle for Self-Control in Modern America By Peter N. Steams (New York: New York University, 1999. xiii plus 434 pp. $28.95).

With Battleground of Desire: The Struggle for Self-Control in Modern America, historian Peter Steams directly enters a number of long- and short-term conversations about the consequences of modernity for American life. Two of these conversations stand out as more important than the rest. The first involves the deeply-rooted, ongoing scholarly discussion of American national character. The second, related to the first but usually pursued more directly outside of the academy, involves contemporary worries about "moral decay" and the decline of civility. Bridging these concerns, Steams counters claims of declining self-control by painting a detailed portrait of American social life in the twentieth century. Rather than a licentious, impolite, "slatternly society" (in journalist George Will's phrase) (p. 8), Stearns finds contemporary America bounded by expectations for self-control surpassing even those of the Victorians.

Stearns, well known to readers as the founder and editor of these pages, is in the full bloom of a prolific writing career that is nothing short of awe-inspiring. Author and editor of scores of books and articles, Stearns has pioneered in numerous areas of inquiry, most prominently the history of the emotions. His studies are famous for combining a bold range--of time span, region, subject--with an eye for absorbing specifics that zeroes in on the significance of otherwise elusive subject matter, such as the history of anger, jealousy, or American "cool." His books on these matters join those of only a handful of other authors like sociologist David Riesman and Phillip Rieff [1] whose great insight has captured essential shifts in American character. Stearns's approach is as close as American historians usually come to the rich, provocative labors of the ambitious "mentalities" historians of Europe--particularly those inspired by the Annales school--who sought through intensive examination of a specific time and place or event or else through a broader look at the "longue duree," to get at the world view of a particular people and its roots in structural realities.

In an often breathtaking synthesis, Stearns calls on much of his earlier findings on the history of various emotions, [2] as well as new research, to address a fundamental paradox that has remained unexplored--and even unstated--in both contemporary debates about civility and scholarly explorations of American character. While the twentieth century has brought new freedoms, new openness to self-expression, and growing informality, it has also seen the rise of new restraints and even a regimentation and rationalization of instinct and emotion. Critics who think Americans are at risk of losing the manners and morals that traditionally acted as controls on their desires and impulses, in Stearns's view, rely on a simplistic and misleading differentiation between imagined Victorian propriety and current-day license. The real story, he says, involves the rise of new and different areas of self-control.

Stearns turns first to the Victorian era to show that, although middle-class notions of respectability stressed good character and self-mastery, the result was not an unmitigated success, nor were individuals entirely left to their own initiative. On the one hand, the age's well-known double standards and hypocrisy allowed for deviation from self-control--as in the case of men's visits to prostitutes--and particular outlets for profuse emotionalism--as in romantic love or mourning. On the other, a set of external, "environmental" supports aided individuals in their quest for control, including entertainments laced with a heavy dose of moral instruction. It is precisely the absence of these external supports that forced twentieth-century Americans to rely more on their own inner resources than ever before. Just as Michel Foucault described earlier in Discipline and Punish, [3] Stearns thinks that formal rules and structures of discipline gave way to the internalization of norms for control. The twentieth-centu ry movement toward what historian Cas Wouters calls "informalization," which arose in the wake of the breakdown of rigid social hierarchies, [4] actually fostered an increased level of anxiety over conduct and fascination with "our need for subtle internal adjustments" (p. 29) to social requirements.

Stearns goes through a literal and detailed accounting of those behaviors where discipline relaxed--such as obscene language--and those where new rules were enforced--like spitting. His point is that social behavior did not become universally free from restraint; rather, a whole new set of behaviors ironically needed to be brought under control according to the ascendant tenets of good health, pleasure, and informality.

While Stearns admits that certain long-term trends cited by others did occur, such as a general decline of judgmentalism or a rise of permissiveness in areas like sexuality and pornography, he is adamant that such trends did not constitute a wholesale rejection of morality itself. Conflating morality and moralism, he remarks that moralistic concerns continued in full-force, both in the warnings of incipient moral decline by critics, and in a set of "compensatory" areas of control, such as Americans' obsession with dieting. Such new strictures, Steams thinks, amounted to a kind of guilty response to the new areas in which indulgence was not only permitted, but encouraged. A chapter starkly entitled "Causation" traces the rise of this new, anxiety-laden mode, in which individuals continually had to balance the claims of leniency and repression, be on the guard for cues on how to behave in endlessly varying situations, and "know how to restrain oneself" (p. 22) in all the appropriate ways. Though intellectual cur rents such as the modernist attack on Victorianism and Darwin-inspired fears of man's unleashed animalistic nature undergirded the new stress on internalized control, the imperatives of new corporate bureaucracies combined with consumerism to give rise to the new tensions. On the one hand, the work environment of the new corporations and service industries demanded wholly new restraints on emotions, and on the other, consumerism preached the well-known gospel of "indulgence and pleasure-seeking" (p. 122).