Divorce,Bureaucracy,and Emotional Frontiers

Tracking Emotional Practices

How, then, do we go about studying the emotions of people seeking separation or divorce more than a century ago? The burgeoning field of emotions history is characterized less by a unified theoretical and methodological venture than by a multiplicity of approaches. ²³ There does, however, seem to be a consensus among most cultural theorists of emotion that we need to deconstruct and historicize dichotomies such as reason/emotion, body/mind, individual/society, biology/culture, and interior/exterior that tend to structure modern Western thinking about our emotional life. ²⁴ Rather than evaluating the genuineness of specific emotional expressions, which is in any case a dubious endeavor, historians of emotion more often seek to examine the emergence of and changes in emotional formations or cultures or they study the historicity of specific emotions. ²⁵

The approach in this article similarly represents a departure from the dichotomies described above as well as from a discussion of the extent to which emotional displays give an accurate idea of how the historical actors really felt. Going over the separation and divorce cases, I analyze what people said and did and seek to reconstruct the patterns and changes in their emotional practices.

Paying analytical attention to people’s actions, I suggest, is an advantageous way of studying emotions historically, and in doing this, Monique Scheer’s Bourdieu-inspired notion of emotions as practice is useful. Rather than being the cause or effect of actions, Scheer argues, emotions should be seen as a form of practice emerging from a culturally formed and socially structured body, “The habitus specifies what is ‘feelable’ in a specific setting, it orients the mind/body in a certain direction without making the outcome fully predictable. Emotions can thus be viewed as acts executed by a mindful body, as cultural practices.” ²⁶ While this definition arguably leaves it up to the individual analyst to define precisely what distinguishes emotions from other types of cultural practices that involve the “mindful body,” it also offers a possibility to transcend distinctions such as those between the interior and the exterior, biology and culture, or the individual and the collective. It approaches emotions as an active, embodied engagement with other people and the material world, which can be more or less conscious or strategic, but which is invariably contingent upon the sociocultural structures that have always already shaped the body.

Clearly, emotions are often practiced, mobilized, affected, and interpreted through bodily acts and expressions that are difficult for the historian to retrieve: tone of voice, facial expressions, gestures, tears, laughter, and other forms of more or less ambiguous nonverbal language. Although some such actions are occasionally recorded in the cases examined here (e.g., an official might note that an applicant appeared “distressed” with reference to body language), more often they are not. In a study such as this, one has to rely on what was deemed sufficiently important to be noted down and, hence, to accept that the picture one can draw is at best a partial one.

Skillful Emotional Navigation

A large number of cases each year were initiated by couples that apparently agreed to dissolve their marriage, and who underlined in the application their incompatibility of tempers. While this argument was centered on an emotional category (temper, or in Danish, Gemyt), the incompatibility was usually described in a calm matter-of-fact manner. This strategy was designed to appeal to an emotional–legal logic, which set about specific procedures and types of paperwork in the administrative body at the office of public administration and generally dictated a prompt grant of separation.

A characteristic example of this category can be found in the case of actress at the Royal Theatre, Agnes Flemmine Nyrop (1841–1903), and her husband, former opera singer at the Royal Theatre, Jens Larsen Nyrop (1831–1904). The couple had prepared well before they made their request. They had coauthored their application stating: “little by little [efterhånden] we have reached the persuasion that matrimonial cohabitation between us is an impossibility because of the incompatibility of our tempers and therefore apply for separation with regards to table and bed.” ²⁷ No intimate details of conflicts or of emotional indifference or agony were given. Instead, the couple used the standard expression of incompatibility of tempers, which, As noted earlier, constituted a legitimate foundation for divorce already at this time in Denmark. “Separation with regards to table and bed” was likewise a standard legal phrase indicating the very material implications of marital dissolution. It seems beyond doubt that the Nyrops had sought the assistance of a lawyer who had helped them translate their emotions and desires into a language that would be both appropriate and effective at the office of public administration.

Knowing that getting separation by administrative decree required prior clerical mediation, the couple had also visited vicar Schepelern ²⁸ who at the end of the application letter had testified to the futility of the mediation process in terse prose: “The spouses have been before me to the obliged clerical mediation, with no result achieved.” ²⁹ Finally, the couple had included a document stating their intended division of common property and debt as well as their desired custody arrangements with regard to their three children. Their daughters, Ida and Margrethe, who were then fifteen and eleven, respectively, were to live with their father, while their son Michael, who was sixteen, was to stay with his mother. ³⁰

The letter of application was dated January 14, 1885, and the vicar’s note had been added a week later. The couple only met at the office of public administration once in relation to their separation case. The meeting was presumably short and undramatic; there are no records of any kind of interrogation or signs of inappropriate behavior, and their case was decided immediately. ³¹ The separation grant, a standard form filled in with the couple’s details, stated that the couple was no longer able to live together, due to incompatibility of tempers and upheld the division of common property, debt, and children suggested by the couple, adding only that none of the spouses would be asked to pay spousal support. ³²

Those couples who knew how to interact with the bureaucracy, engaging in the proper emotional and communicative practices—or who could afford to get help to do so—could effectively appeal to the systematized procedures in place, and thereby rather easily achieve the desired separation by administrative decree. This type of unsentimental process was particularly customary for middle-class couples. The case files usually reveal the husband’s occupation (and in a few cases, the wife’s as well), showing that while a few blue-collar laborers, and even a couple of unskilled laborers, managed to navigate the bureaucracy in this manner, nearly all couples from the higher classes of society did. In this group of separation cases, one finds artists, musicians, architects, military officers, and different white-collar workers. ³³ There are hardly any applicants with that type of background in the cases in my sample marked by passionate and ongoing conflicts. ³⁴

Although we cannot know how Agnes and Jens Nyrop comported themselves physically in the administrative office or what kinds of emotions their facial expressions indicated or stimulated, any disagreements or fights that may have taken place at home or elsewhere most likely remained undisclosed during their meeting with the officials. Their emotional agency at the office of public administration appears to have been what the officials would have considered appropriate and polite, distinguished by discretion, dignity, and control. ³⁵

As Auguste Mussén noted in an etiquette manual published in Danish in 1884, morality and politeness were indistinguishable, since the moral person was inevitably polite and polite emotional behavior implied a high morality. “Politeness,” he further explained, “curbs agitation, yes even hatred…makes us amiable and casts a cloak of gentleness over our customs and practices.” ³⁶

Writing at a time when divorce was after all quite unusual, Mussén did not give specific advice to separating couples, but he did emphasize the importance of polite behavior in one’s interaction with the authorities in general and at the offices of public administration in particular. For Mussén, as for other contemporaries, politeness was to function as a kind of overarching tool of control enabling individuals to handle emotions in a way that would be agreeable and “beautiful” to their surroundings while also inducing others to be less brutal toward them. “Politeness is a splendid means to hide the unpleasant feelings we have for others, and the greater mastery a person has over himself the better he will be able by polite form to dismiss unpleasantness without hurting others.” ³⁷

Fifty-five years before the publication of Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process (1969, German original Über den Prozeβ der Zivilisation, 1939) which famously argued that the process of civilization entailed an increased regulation of the passions, ³⁸ Mussén likewise linked the ability to control one’s emotional life to civilization. Not only could a nation’s civilizational stage be estimated on the basis of the people’s politeness; an individual also revealed his true level of refinement by his/her ability to restrain inappropriate passions. ³⁹ This, of course, was in no way particular to the Danish context. As Ute Frevert has noted,

From the early modern period, and culminating in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European society took a growing interest in affect regulation. As much as it was deemed necessary for a person to have and show feelings, those should be moderated and appear in a well-tempered form. Letting rage take possession of one’s mind and actions was considered inappropriate, irrational and uncivilised. ⁴⁰

Encountering an Emotional Frontier

Unlike the Nyrops, the largest group of applicants for separation engaged in emotional practices that breached norms of politeness and restrained emotional conduct, instead vividly demonstrating intimacies turned ugly. These mostly working-class applicants found themselves at an emotional frontier, unaccustomed as they seemingly were to the emotional–legal culture at the offices of public administration.

Emotional practices emerge from a socially structured body, in which codes of proper emotional conduct have been embedded over time; while they may be either calculated or spontaneous, they necessarily depend on existing embodied knowledge and affective repertoires. The concept of an emotional frontier, as Kristine Alexander, Stephanie Olsen and I define it, signals that codes of appropriate emotional behavior vary subtly or radically across communities and social spaces. ⁴¹ People meet the emotional imperatives of a particular context in different ways depending on their background, experience, and social position (or in other words, depending on the social structuration of their body) as well as according to the specific power dynamics of the situation. Emotional frontiers can thus occur in any given context, depending on its social composition and the level of mobility that characterizes it. An emotional frontier entails the affective experience of getting the emotional codes wrong: laughing when you are not meant to, failing to be affected by an event that your social surroundings find tragic, showing your appreciation too enthusiastically or too composedly, and so on. Encountering an emotional frontier can be both profoundly disconcerting and uncomfortable, laying bare a form of social dislocation. ⁴²

In their interactions with the state bureaucracy, many working-class couples at least initially revealed the inability—or reluctance—to accord with supposedly more the civilized notions of proper emotional conduct that prevailed at the office of public administration. Contrary to the consensual separations described earlier, in these cases often only one spouse—in most cases the wife—applied for separation, while the other spouse, at least initially, frequently declined to cooperate in the process. These cases often reveal protracted processes marked by conflict, involving police, witnesses, (alleged) lovers, family members, neighbors and friends, and officials at the Ministry of Justice. Aside from clerical mediation records and application letters, they implicated police interrogation reports, certificates of good conduct, and systematized communications between different administrative authorities. They also often required that the applicants visit the offices of public administration several times, and this allowed them the time to adjust and adapt their behavior to the unfamiliar emotional regime. ⁴³

The administrative response to couples openly enacting their conflicts, detailing their suffering, and shaming one another, was less clear-cut—and apparently more dependent on the individual couple and on the flexibility of the particular administrative officer—than to those in the category distinguished by the more tempered incompatibilities. Spouses here presented evidence of violence, alcoholism, and abuse both of marital partners and of children. ⁴⁴ Somewhat paradoxically, such processes occasionally resulted in denial of a separation grant, usually because the partners could not reach an agreement—either on separation itself or on the specific terms of separation. ⁴⁵ Nevertheless, the great majority of such cases also eventually resulted in separation by administrative decree, and in contrast to most other countries at the time, female divorce applicants were just as likely to be successful as were male applicants. ⁴⁶ If only one spouse desired separation, the local office of public administration invariably consulted with the Ministry of Justice before issuing the grant as they were required to by law; however, I have not found a single instance in which the latter diverged from the recommendations of the former.

An example of such a case was that of Josefine Hansen (born Nielsen) and her husband, shoemaker assistant Jens Peter Hansen. In January 1885, Josefine sent in her letter of application in which she explained how her husband, whom she had married two years earlier, had begun to act “horrendously” toward her. The day before she authored the application, her husband had moved out of the house, placed their one-year-old son in the care of a friend, and sold all of their furniture (this furniture, it seems, had not been picked up by the buyer, because Josefine asserted that she had locked it up in the house). In case these offenses did not suffice as grounds for separation, she continued to detail the suffering to which Jens Peter had subjected her in their marital life. Recently, after she had started working outside the home, presumably out of necessity, her husband had quit working and when she returned home with her earnings he would abuse and beat her until she gave him the money. “Since I can no longer bear the horrendous cohabitation and since my husband, as noted, has now completely abandoned me, I hereby respectfully venture to apply to the honored Prefect [the highest public official] for separation, although [I ask that] that my husband will be ordered to pay alimony to the child and me.” ⁴⁷

Considering her financial situation, it seems unlikely that Josefine had consulted a lawyer prior to sending her application. While she enlisted various offenses that she must have expected to justify separation, her emotional practices did not directly appeal to the dominant logic encoded in the legal term, the incompatibility of tempers.

The administrative officials presumably responded by demanding documentation of clerical mediation because in February the partners had met with vicar Schepelern (the same minister as in the Nyrop couple’s case) who testified to the ineffectuality of his attempt to reconcile the partners. In contrast to his record of the meeting with the Nyrop couple, the vicar here noted additional details of the couple’s conflicts: at the meeting, Jens Peter had accused Josefine of adultery. Josefine reportedly vehemently denied the charge. ⁴⁸ Rather than stimulating a more conciliatory set of emotional practices, which was its formal purpose, the bureaucratic requirement of a clerical mediation report thus seems to have helped escalate the conflict between the spouses.

Thus far, like other separation applicants in this category, both Josefine and Jens Peter, in their communications (direct and indirect through the vicar) with the office of public administration, both engaged in what might be seen as a strategy of shaming their spouse based on the claimed violations of gendered obligations within the patriarchal family order. Josefine emphasized Jens Peter’s excessively violent temper, but at least as importantly, his failure to live up to his duty as breadwinner. Jens Peter, for his part, pointed to Josefine’s supposed sexual misconduct. ⁴⁹ While these allegations may or may not have been true, they fit almost archetypal modes of gendered misconduct, indicating what the Hansens expected to be the sort of transgressions most likely to convince the public officials, drawing them to sympathize with their situation. There certainly was nothing polite about their behavior toward one another.

When the couple met at the office of public administration a week later, Josefine repeated her wish for separation while Jens Peter continued to refuse. Even though one might think that the administrative officials would interpret their mutual accusations and the disagreement, to which they testified during their meeting, as signs of the incompatibility of their tempers, this was not the case. No-fault separation could be granted only insofar as consensus could be reached. The couple’s emotional practices marked by conflict, mutual accusations, shaming, and outing of intimate details—as well as, perhaps, their working-class background—helped generate a different bureaucratic procedure: a police report was procured in order to establish whether there was sufficient ground for fault divorce. ⁵⁰

The police report exposed to the administrative staff even more intimate details of the spouses’ different versions of their relationship and its dissolution. The police had interviewed both spouses and a former neighbor of the couple, Christiane Larsen, whom Josefine had asked to act as a witness, and cooper assistant Christiansen, with whom Jens Peter accused his wife of committing adultery.

Josefine stated that while in the first year of their marriage, they had been “very happy,” lately her husband had become dull and indifferent toward the home. She also repeated the accusations from her application letter of Jens Peter’s crudeness and brutality, adding that one morning when she lay undressed in the bed, with his straps, he had “administered several blows to her naked body, something which had caused several black and blue stripes to appear, and after that he had grabbed her hair and pulled her out of the bed.’ ⁵¹ Even though she did not describe the terror she might have felt in this situation or others like it, detailing her husband’s violence was no doubt meant to portray Jens Peter as a rascal as well as to appeal to the sympathy of the administrators.

Josefine might have asked herself why she had brought in Christiane Larsen as a witness, because the neighbor neither confirmed nor contested her account. Christiane Larsen who from her kitchen windows had been able to look straight into their apartment, “and as such had splendid opportunity to observe their behavior,” said that she had often heard the couple fight. She had also seen Josefine with a black eye, but she did not know from where it came and she had never seen Jens Peter beat his wife. ⁵² Whether Jens Peter acknowledged or denied his violent behavior is unclear; curiously, given that brutality could be the basis of separation, the police officer does not seem to have questioned him about this.

Jens Peter’s description of the early part of their marriage resembled Josefine’s. He stated that the two of them had “lived very happily together,” but that after the first year his wife gradually “became cold and indifferent toward him, in that she frequently omitted to give him food, just as she desisted from taking care of his cleanliness.” ⁵³ Jens Peter thus sought to justify his behavior and, like his wife, to win the sympathy of the public officials. In doing this, he played on gender specific notions of decency and indecency: Josefine had failed to care for his bodily needs in the way that one might reasonably expect from a wife. In addition, she had begun to stay out at night oftentimes leaving him alone with the child—evidently not something a respectable woman or good mother would do. His suspicion of her infidelity, he said, was confirmed when he had met a Madam Frause who had told him that Josefine had confided in her that she had once spent the night with cooper assistant Christiansen, her coworker.

Were these allegations driven by jealousy, humiliation, and heartache, or by a sense of grievance and defensiveness? Were they a strategy to persuade the authorities not to adjudge his alienated wife spousal support in case of separation? Perhaps a mixture of all of these? Regardless of his motivations, the allegations prompted further investigations. Had Josefine committed adultery, she might not be entitled to separation.

Cooper assistant Christiansen and Josefine, however, both categorically denied having had carnal knowledge with one another, although both admitted to having kissed and walked together on a few occasions. Josefine stated that she had considered this without importance, since such conduct “happened almost daily between female and male workers at wholesaler Lund’s, Nybrogade, and this happened more in fun [Plasér] than in seriousness.” ⁵⁴ In her rendering, the workplace was thus a space in which certain intimate types of affective interaction were not only standard but also completely socially acceptable. As her testimony underscores, separating couples navigated various sociomaterial spaces (the apartment, the street, and the workplace as well as the office of public administration) with different impulses, possibilities, expectations of, and constraints on behavior. Had Josefine kissed cooper assistant Christiansen in his or her own home, she herself might have found the action less tolerable.

The police officer did not volunteer his estimation of the truthfulness of these different accounts and accusations. However, regardless of what had actually passed, the couple had clearly demonstrated emotional behavior marked by a lack of politeness. They sought to humiliate one another based on reigning notions of proper gendered respectability and honor.

Adjusting Emotional Conduct

Nevertheless, the report conveyed the possibility in this case as in others like it of restyling the separation process into a more peaceful and consensual type: Jens Peter now agreed to separation because he had come to the realization that happy cohabitation between him and his wife would not be possible after what had passed. ⁵⁵ He would even be willing to pay child support for the son, though he still refused to pay alimony for his wife.

Embedded as they are in both bodily practices and verbal language, emotions invariably help define an individual as well as to mark out their place in a social hierarchy. ⁵⁶ Since, as noted earlier, emotional conduct characterized by politeness was a marker of status, the police officer and the administrative staff may well have taken the Hansen couple’s behavior as a sign that they lacked education and culture. It is also likely that the Hansens and working-class couples were less concerned about appearing polite and hence cultured or civilized according to middle-class sensibilities.

However, after his encounter with the authorities, and specifically after the police interrogation had intensified the conflict with his wife, Jens Peter had now moderated his emotional behavior. The police report signaled the possibility of reshaping the Hansen couple’s emotional struggles to fit the category of incompatibility of tempers, and the staff therefore called the couple in for another meeting. When they entered the office of public administration approximately two months after the case had been initiated, their general behavior had changed markedly. Not only had Jens Peter changed his mind about separation; through their interactions with the officials and the police, the couple had also learned and become disposed to handle their marital conflicts and emotional distress in a way that appealed effectively to the dominant logic of separation in the public bureaucracy.

Various factors may have stimulated this change, but it seems likely that the administrative procedures of the bureaucracy helped call forth an agreement between the spouses. In April 1885, Josefine thus received a separation grant giving her full custody of their son on condition that she would not place him in care with family and that she would allow Jens Peter to see him. ⁵⁷ Of their common debt, Jens Peter would be held responsible for two-thirds, and Josefine for the rest. In addition, Jens Peter would be required to pay child support.

By thus encouraging amicable, consensual separation processes, Danish law and bureaucracy differed from the situation in most other European countries where achieving separation or divorce was possible only insofar as one spouse might convince the court that the other spouse had committed a serious offense against the marriage. As Deborah Cohen has shown, this was the case in England, where the requirements of the divorce court established in 1857 meant that couples from all walks of life were compelled to expose their dirty, shameful secrets—the more vulgar or outrageous, the better. Some unhappy couples that agreed on seeking divorce even engaged in collusion, arranging in advance to disclose (or invent) an offense, which would result in a separation grant. ⁵⁸

The Danish state, by contrast, seems to have preferred marital dissolutions to happen quietly and discreetly. Exactly why this was the case is hard to tell. Perhaps there was a hope that this would be a stronger safeguard to the institution of marriage than exposing potentially contagious immoral behavior. Perhaps it was mostly a pragmatic solution to the challenge of dealing with already broken relationships; a policy of awarding “death certificates of marriages that ha[d] already ended.” ⁵⁹ Most likely, perhaps, it reflected the growing expectations of emotional intimacy in marriage and the more liberal attitudes toward marriage breakdown in Danish society. ⁶⁰

Conclusion: From Fluctuating Passions to Tempered Incompatibilities

As Emma Gad advised in 1918, emotional discordance in divorce could be handled in very different ways. Couples like the Nyrops enacted their conflicts at the offices of public administration with emotional repertoires that must be presumed to have been very different from and probably often in direct contradiction to what went on within, for example, the space of their home. Their communication with the bureaucracy was characterized by agreement, formality, and politeness. In the process of attaining separation, this was an efficient strategy resulting in the immediate grant of separation by administrative decree based on the incompatibility of tempers. The couple was able not only to achieve separation but also to dictate the terms on which it happened and as such remained in control of their own life situations.

For couples like the Hansens, the encounter with the bureaucracy, by contrast, seemingly entailed the experience of emotional frontier. Unable and, in some cases, unwilling, to engage in polite emotional behavior, these spouses instead worked to revoke and to some extent even reenact and enhance the conflicts and suffering which was linked to their marital life in general. Through the process of interacting with the administrative personnel, however, quite a few of them gradually translated their experience and adjusted their emotional agency so that it better fitted the notion of the legal–emotional notion of incompatibility of tempers.

Couples’ emotional practices in the offices of public administration depended, at least to some extent, on their familiarity with the law as well as the ruling codes of conduct in the offices of the state. While class background did not in itself dictate one’s emotional behavior, the sources explored here suggest that middle-class applicants were more likely than working-class applicants to act according to the ruling legal logic favoring unsentimental and polite behavior. Conversely, one’s conduct in the offices of public administration presumably helped determine one’s class status in the eyes of the officials.

This is a reminder that emotional frontiers often are likely to expose and enhance the vulnerability of subalterns—whether in terms of gender, race, age or as here, class—who fail to meet the systematized emotional expectations of a specific context. On such an emotional frontier, there are political choices and impositions to negotiate. The emotional imperatives may be more or less rigid, and those knowing the codes may be obliging or condemning toward those who violate them.

The cases discussed here illustrate that the separation processes, governed by Danish law as well as the sensibilities of caseworkers, sometimes contributed to an intensification of emotional conflict among already feuding couples, yet eventually often led to a tactful and discreet, if not necessarily amicable, emotional practice of divorce. Not only were applicants frequently poised to adjust their emotional behavior to attain separation; the state bureaucracy was willing to help them do so. In that manner, the law and the way it was practiced locally helped structure the emotional comportment of separating couples in important ways.

How these dynamics might have affected prevailing perceptions of divorce in society is hard to say. However, the possibility of a separation process that did not require the exposure of degrading details and emotional agony may well have made divorce seem less terrifying even to middle-class couples desiring a split. It might, in other words, have helped along the gradual transformation of divorce from a shameful last resort into a more broadly socially acceptable life choice.