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Young Generation's Response to Victorian Culture
Contributing teacher:
Daniel Kotzin
Time period: 1880–1910
Point
Casey Blake attempts to explain why the generation of educated Americans that came of age during the 1880s and 1890s rejected the Victorian culture of their parents. He says that the Victorian culture in which this generation grew up focused on maintaining rigid control and creating an order to life. Perhaps the most obvious sign of this was the established separate spheres for men and women. Blake argues, however, that the transformation of American society during this period, particularly the rapid rate of industrialization and urbanization, left many young educated Americans feeling there was a large discrepancy between Victorian thinking and reality. According to Blake, young Americans who were uneasy and anxious about the future both of America and of their own personal lives sought to break free of restrictive Victorian categories.
Counterpoint
While Blake uses literature and architecture to describe the desire among middle- and upper-class young people to break free of Victorian culture, Lewis Erenberg focuses on changes in entertainment in his book Steppin' Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Erenberg argues that the new public nightlife emerging during the late 1890s began the process of replacing Victorian culture with one focused on vitality, mutuality, and consumption. The cabaret, Erenberg shows, provided a place where young people could experiment as they recreated and redefined themselves.
On the other hand, George Cotkin in Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture, 1880–1900 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992) does not regard the break from Victorian culture as having been as dramatic as Blake and Erenberg see it. According to Cotkin, intellectuals at the end of the nineteenth century did not completely reject Victorian values; instead, they sought to reconcile those values with the modern world. In this respect, they helped to ease the transition to modernity by seeking a "middle ground." For example, Cotkin maintains that late-nineteenth-century American intellectuals, while recognizing they were in a new world of uncertainty and change, tried to hold on to their traditional Victorian moralism to help them to adapt. Cotkin also sees efforts by intellectuals to establish order during a chaotic time as another sign of their continuing hold on traditional Victorian values.
James Livingston takes a different view. In Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), Livingston offers a bold new thesis, arguing that the emerging corporate consumer culture played a leading role in constructing new identities and freedoms during this period. He claims that as corporate capitalism grew and altered categories of work, it also created, more clearly than ever before, time free of work and thus expanded leisure opportunities for many people. Therefore, while Blake sees young people reacting against Victorian regimentation in a time of change, Livingston sees corporate capitalism as the primary catalyst for the changes Blake describes. Both agree, however, that Americans were reconstructing their identities and experiencing new freedoms at the end of the nineteenth century.
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