ABSTRACT
Men will necessarily grow milder, and life will be embellished by the quieter feelings, purified and enlarged, while the rougher, turbulent emotions will die away. The need to control the topic extends from the use of recurrent key emotion words and central metaphors to explicit rules recommended to keep the ‘storms of passion’ and their effects at bay. The attempt at balancing both the claims results in the manifold tensions and contradictions of the Victorian discourses on emotions. Emotional expression was considered essential for individual health, as long as it was kept in strict bounds. Yet indirectly, it would work its positive way into society from the ‘fountainhead downwards: through the influence of mothers, the epitome of the most favourite Victorian emotion: affection. Fiction and non-fiction converge in the discourses on emotions; because literary quotations allowed non-fiction authors to express what exceeded their rigid ‘scientific’ classification or physiological description.
