Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America - Softcover

Rudeness and Civility
CHAPTER ONEManners before the Nineteenth CenturyManners are generally a subject for anecdote, rarely for analysis. But a half century ago, in The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias placed the study of manners on an entirely new footing with his treatment of the phenomenal changes in standards of deportment and expression since the Middle Ages. Norms of polite conduct, he insisted, could not be understood in isolation. Rather, they were intimately tied to the structures of feeling, human relations, and the larger society of which they were a part. Taking the extensive European literature on manners from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century as pivotal to his analysis, Elias noted how strange, even shocking, many admonitions in the earlier works appear to a modern reader. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century guides for refined nobles at court earnestly addressed concerns that now appear both too gross and utterly superfluous to mention at all:Before you sit down, make sure your seat has not been fouled. 
Do not touch yourself under your clothes with your bare hands. 
Do not blow your nose with the same hand that you use to hold the meat. 
A man who clears his throat when he eats and one who blows his nose in the tablecloth are both ill-bred, I assure you. 
Do not spit on the table.In attempting to suppress a fart, no less an authority than iErasmus advised:If it is possible to withdraw, it should be done alone. But if not, in accordance with the ancient proverb, let a cough hide the sound.Similarly, the Wernigerode court regulations of 1570 cautioned:One should not, like rustics who have not been to court or lived among refined and honorable people, relieve oneself without shame or reserve in front of ladies, or before the doors or windows of court chambers or other rooms.A 1609 edition of Della Casa's Galateo warned:One should not sit with one's back or posterior turned toward another, nor raise a thigh so high that the members of the human body, which should properly be covered with clothing at all times, might be exposed to view ... . It is true that a great lord might do so before one of his servants or in the presence of a friend of lower rank; for in this he would not show him arrogance but rather a particular affection and friendship.With regard to sleeping, even as late as 1729, one reads:If you are forced by unavoidable necessity to share a bed with another person of the same sex on a journey, it is not proper to lie so near him that you disturb or even touch him; and it is still less decent to put your legs between those of the other.1Instead of condemning such instances as evidence of "barbaric" or "uncivilized" behavior, Elias put aside value judgments in order to focus on what the process of "civilization" entailed. He assigned key importance to the changing requirements of daily life from the decentralized, rank-structured, hierarchical social relationships of the Middle Ages to the rise of the modern state: "As more and more people must attune their conduct to that of others, the web of action must be organized more and more strictly and accurately,if each individual action is to fulfil its social function. The individual is compelled to regulate his conduct in an increasingly differentiated, more even and more stable manner." All societies, he acknowledged, demand that individuals exercise some controls over the gratification of their feelings. Yet in comparison to more recent times, Elias argued, people in the late Middle Ages expressed their emotions--joy, rage, piety, fear, even the pleasure of torturing and killing enemies--with astonishing directness and intensity. As the state gradually assumed a monopoly over physical power and violence, individuals were expected to cultivate reserve and mutual consideration in their dealings. Once normal, even refined practices came to be regarded as offensive. First in social settings among their superiors, then increasingly among equals and inferiors and at all times, adults were expected and eventually children taught to discipline their desires and bodily gratifications. Particularly intimate bodily activities--eating, coughing, spitting, nose blowing, scratching, farting, urinating, defecating, undressing, sleeping, copulating, inflicting pain on animals or other human beings--became governed by especially exacting standards and were assigned their special precincts, for the most part behind closed doors. Innovations in polite behavior--epitomized in the rise of the such "implements of civilization" as the fork, the special nightdress for sleeping (replacing day clothes or nakedness), the handkerchief, the chamber pot and later the water closet--expressed this growing delicacy of feeling, a rising threshold of embarrassment, and correspondingly greater stress upon individual self-control. As a result, human affect and behavior were divided into aspects that might appropriately be displayed in public and others, especially sexuality, that had to be kept private and "secret." This split, as Elias emphasized, has enormous implications for the formation of modern personality, with its internalization of prohibitions and its exquisite sensitivity to embarrassment, shame, and guilt.2Elias's account is open to a number of criticisms.3 His insistence upon the crucial role of the rise of the modern state in the "civilizing process" was far too sweeping and undeveloped to be entirely satisfactory. Arguably, too, the role of the court was ultimately of less importance than that of the bourgeoisie in carrying forth the rising standards of refinement. His starting point in the late Middle Ages conveniently overlooked classical antiquity. Nor did he account sufficiently for the lessening of standards of reserve and growinginformality in the twentieth century. Granting when he wrote in the 1930s that "a certain relaxation is setting in," Elias contended it was "merely a very slight recession," and "only possible because ... the individual capacity to restrain one's urges and behavior in correspondence with the more advanced feelings for what is offensive, has been on the whole secured."4 In the half century since Elias wrote these words, we have traveled sufficiently far to feel a double sense of distance, not only from the relative lack of refinement of earlier times, but also from what many would regard as the overrefinement of the Victorian era. For each generation takes its own norms of behavior and feeling as objective.Nonetheless, Elias opened the door to a new kind of cultural history, keenly attuned to changing standards of emotional expression, bodily control, and personal interaction, and seeking to correlate these with larger changes in social structure. Belatedly discovered by scholars with its republication and translation decades later, including a two-volume English translation in 1978 and 1982, The Civilizing Process encouraged fresh explorations of historical terrain, including the transformation of American life from the colonial period through the nineteenth century.The "Civilizing Process" and Colonial AmericaEven though the "civilizing process" Elias described had substantially advanced by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the American colonies as well as in northern Europe, an unmistakable divide separates this period from the nineteenth. Almost all books on manners in colonial America were reprinted from English and French sources. Not only do they contain an emphasis on "superiors" and "inferiors" that would dramatically lessen in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but they also preserve striking remnants of the sort of advice Elias identified, which later generations would regard as shockingly crude. The most widely circulated of these colonial works was Eleazar Moody's School of Good Manners, based on a French courtesy book of 1564. It was first printed in New London, Connecticut, in 1715and ran through at least thirty-three editions before the mid-nineteenth century.5 Intended for children, this short work contained a mixture of instructionon worldly deportment and Christian doctrine that would soon go out of fashion. The 1786 edition admonishes the reader:Grease not thy fingers or napkin more than necessity requires.Bite not thy bread, but break it; but not with slov[en]ly fingers, nor with the same wherewith thou takest up thy meat.Smell not of thy meat nor put it to thy nose.Foul not the table cloth. Put not thy hand in the presence of others to any part of thy body not ordinarily discovered.Spit not in the room but in the corner, or rather go out and do it abroad.6Similarly, the fifteen-year-old George Washington, working from a French Jesuit Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour of 1595 that was widely circulated in various languages and first translated into English in 1640, dutifully copied such maxims as:Put not off your Cloths in the presence of Others, nor go out of your Chamber half DrestSpit not in the Fire, nor Stoop low before it ... .... bedew no mans face with Spittle by appr(oaching too nea)r him (when) you SpeakKill no Vermin as Fleas, lice ticks &c in the Sight of Others, if you See any filth or thick Spittle put your foot Dexteriously upon it[;] if it be upon the Cloths of your Companions, Put it off privately, and if it be upon your own Cloths return Thanks to him who puts it offBeing set at meat Scratch not neither Spit Cough or blow your Nose except there's a Necessity for itCleanse not your teeth with the Table Cloth Napkin Fork or Knife but if Others do it let it be done w/t a Pick Tooth7Other sources confi...