Dr. Goldfine: Bree, how does this reconciliation have a chance if the two of you can’t be honest about the innermost parts of your lives?
Bree: We’re, um, wasps, Dr. Goldfine. Not acknowledging the elephant in the room is what we do best.
Bree Van De Kamp is the most quietly desperate of the Desperate Housewives. As played by the exquisitely uptight Marcia Cross, Bree spent the first season silently navigating marital problems with husband Rex. She has since survived Rex’s sudden death — after which her only public sign of grief was a series of stunning black outfits — and accepted a dubious marriage proposal because she felt it would have been rude to decline. (“Obviously there is a downside to having good manners,” as she later explains to Dr. Goldfine.) The buttoned-up Bree may not be as conventionally sexy as her barely dressed neighbour Gabrielle, but she exudes a certain steely eroticism. Check out any fan forum and you’ll find fired-up admirers waiting for that preternaturally neat red hair to be mussed.
Meanwhile, over at the Las Vegas crime lab, Gil Grissom is hot. Despite being middle-aged and a bit pudgy, despite geeky hobbies such as entomology, despite a set of emotional inhibitions that would bring an ox to its knees, the head of the csi graveyard shift (as played by William Petersen) is way, way hot. At csi-forensics.com, one of the many websites that encourage fans to post their fictional expansions of the show’s characters, Gil is at least as big a draw as hipster Greg, and much bigger than all-American frat-boy Nick, or tall, cool Warrick. Of particular interest to the fan-fic crowd is the unexpressed relationship between Gil and Sara Sidle, which has been confined mostly to significant glances over blood-spatter patterns and — on one memorably romantic occasion — some deeply submerged flirting while the two tracked the insect infestation of a dead pig.
So why are these characters, who at one time might have been dismissed as charmless, turning out to be this season’s sex symbols? Could prime-time TV — of all things — be helping to re-brand reticence?
The values of privacy, modesty, discretion, and restraint have taken a hit in the last forty years. This distrust of emotional reserve is partly a hold-over from the 1960s, when failure to voice even stray feelings and thoughts was considered hypocritical and phony. An ideological divide hardened into rigid stereotypes about who is expected to wear their hearts on their sleeves and who is expected to tuck them tidily into breast pockets. Conservatives supposedly support a collective stiff upper lip, while liberals believe in free-to-be-you-and-me emotionalism. Men are evidently from Mars, a planet where communication consists of Gary Cooperesque “yups” and “nopes,” while women are caring and sharing Venusians. wasps are expected to stare mutely into their drinks, while the sons and daughters of the Mediterranean engage in the loud, wildly gestural fights so beloved by the Italian neo-realists. All rich people are stuffy and stiff, while all poor people are given to exuberant, spontaneous outbursts of dancing, like the steerage passengers on James Cameron’s Titanic. Young people routinely embark on romantic affairs by saying, “Let’s promise to always tell each other everything,” while their more cautious elders have retreated to the fallback “don’t ask, don’t tell” position.
These either/or categories put progressive repressives like me in a bind. If we admit that over-emotionalism leaves us feeling faint and exhausted, we risk being aligned with a whole set of values that we might not actually embrace (if we were given to embracing at all, which, generally speaking, we are not). Fortunately, recent blips on the pop-culture radar seem to be offering a way to rehabilitate reserve without coming off as completely pompous. Where the control of passion was once viewed as hopelessly square, it can now be seen as sexy, smart, and self-aware. Done right, emotional repression could be the new cool.
Emotional coolness has a history. The Stoics believed that while we cannot control external events, we can control our emotional responses to them through the exercise of reason. (Stoicism saw a brief millennial revival with the release of Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full, in which the writings of Epictetus inspire a stoic televangelistic crusade, and Gladiator, in which the aging Marcus Aurelius praises the virtues of forbearance and fortitude while a stripped-to-the-waist Russell Crowe acts on them. In the end, though, contemporary North American culture had a hard time sustaining a philosophy that declares that “wealth is the greatest of human sorrows.”) In his discourses on the virtues of the Renaissance courtier, Baldassare Castiglione advocated modesty, gentleness, grace, good sense, and discretion (along with the abilities to run, jump, swim, ride, throw darts,cast stones, vault, wrestle, play tennis, speak the classical languages, and compose poetry). In keeping with his belief that extreme positions contain their opposites, Castiglione argued for both emotion and reason, which he felt could be reconciled through the virtue of temperance.
Later, the Victorians became the image of emotional propriety; their very name is now synonymous with prudery and primness, though the layered realities of Victorian life actually illustrate how complex the balance between emotion and expression can be. While middle-class Victorians believed that some feelings should not enter into polite conversation, they could also — in modern terms — turn into sentimental mush balls, weeping publicly over the death of Dickens’ Little Nell or writing letters replete with flowery declarations of friendship. Queen Victoria herself took her protracted private mourning for Prince Albert to almost necrophiliac extremes.
Over the centuries, artists and thinkers have characterized this tension in various ways: reason vs. passion, mind vs. body, super-ego vs. id. The current skirmish involves neuroscientists who are searching for the hard-wired emotions that enable the human species to survive vs. those postmodernists who view emotions as social constructions. Apparently, in whatever way the human heart has been mapped out, the control of feeling has never been as neat or complete as the Stoics would have wished.
