Am I Normal?: The 200-Year Search for Normal People (and Why They Don't Exist) by Sarah Chaney

Author:Sarah Chaney [Chaney, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2022-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE STIFF UPPER LIP

‘Are you a “normal person”?’ American psychologist (and co-creator of Wonder Woman) William Moulton Marston asked the readers of his book Emotions of Normal People in 1928. Most people, Marston concluded, thought they were normal if they did not show frequent extremes of emotion. By the 1920s this view was widespread in psychology and popular thought. While eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century judges wept openly in court, and men and women publicly expressed rage or scorn without being seen as unhinged, this had changed by the beginning of the Victorian era.16 The teaching of emotional restraint was widespread by 1850, nowhere more so than in British public schools, where a punishing regime was adopted as a way of training boys’ bodies and minds to greater endurance.17 Self-control and self-discipline became the bywords for civilised masculinity, to be inculcated at an early age.

Since emotions emerged in children ‘long before the intellect is sufficiently developed or enlightened to direct or control them’, Scottish physician Andrew Combe’s parental guide, first published in 1840, warned, ‘it is obvious that if their proper regulation by the parent be unduly delayed by waiting for the dawn of reason, the character and happiness of the child must remain meanwhile very much at the mercy of accident’.18 In other words, if parents didn’t control children’s emotions for them, the child would suffer for it later. American authors had similar advice. Children would quickly exhaust themselves by exhibiting unchecked tears and rages, Henry Clay Trumbull told parents in 1891. Again, the parent had to nip tears and tantrums in the bud, enabling self-control to flourish. Once the child was old enough to understand, he should be ‘taught and trained to control his impulse to cry and writhe’ and ultimately ‘moderate his exhibit of disturbed feeling’.19

By the turn of the twentieth century, emotional control had become cast as an ability to put on a brave face to hide one’s true feelings, Thomas Dixon explains.20 First World War propaganda promoted this new ideal to British troops (and nurses), and the British ‘stiff upper lip’ soon became world-famous. In the 1930s and 1940s it was promoted in the movie theatre through the clipped received pronunciation and no-nonsense manner of film stars like Trevor Howard, Laurence Olivier and James Mason. Of course, their films still made moviegoers cry, even if they tried to hide it. ‘I am a very emotional person,’ middle-aged housewife Mrs H. told Mass Observation in 1950 when listing the many movies she had cried at. Despite claiming that she was not ashamed of her emotions, Mrs H. ‘endeavour[ed] to conceal all traces of emotion in public, except laughter. To cry in public would be like taking off my clothes.’21 Normal emotion was now private and hidden.

While the Brits tried hard to hide their tears, Americans were busy covering up their anger. In the late nineteenth century, advice manuals and psychological texts emphasised the need for American people to control this emotion in particular. When Marston described the emotions of ‘normal people’ in 1928, his words were especially damning.

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