Rudeness and Civility

...Kasson, was hopeless and self-punishing...

...In the former, fashionably dressed men and women in an ornate room are brought their dinner by a servant...

...Kasson reproduces two 1873 line-drawings originally intended to illustrate the difference between good table manners and bad...

...It certainly did not accomplish the "radical sort of leveling" Kasson idealizes...

...54 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1990...

...The commercialization of manners is not a yuppie innovation...

...The middle class has more to gain, of course...

...But, as the observant know, the manner in which a wife greets her husband or in which a householder may hand alms to a beggar on the Sabbath is fraught with spiritual significance in every detail...

...But Kasson is not much interested in individual prerogative...

...As John Kasson reports, the guides to good behavior that proliferated during the nineteenth century were self-help books for the new upward mobility, premised on "the conviction that proper manners and social respectability could be purchased and learned...

...But, according to Louis Auchincloss, later denizens of Wharton's milieu shunned Jay Gould's grandchildren for their patriarch's notorious success...

...During this procedure the man's most expressive features—his eyes, mouth, and hands—required precise governance...

...All the while, he regulated his chewing and his chatter in order to forestall any physical or emotional intimacy with his partners...

...Did the obsolete courtesies of vanished ladies and gentlemen also have morally didactic value...

...it would be a presumptuous host who took it as the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1990 53 model dinner party...

...The strictures in the Talmud that govern everyday gestures are, like century-old customs of polite usage, routinely dismissed as irrelevant to modern life...

...It is a pity that Kasson, who evokes the richness of formality so well in that case, is generally insensitive to the complexities and nuances in his subject...

...By observing the new rules, they "acceded to their own marginalization...

...The intended message was that luxury was the reward of gentility, not vice versa, but that incentive, according to Francis X. Rocca is a writer living in New Haven, Connecticut...

...He aimed to make all his gestures consistent, fluid, intelligible, and easily read without being eccentrically conspicuous...

...But urban anonymity and fluctuations of fortune in capitalism demanded tougher standards of "bodily management" and "emotional control" by which to tell the genteel from the grubby...

...Similarly, the postbellum practice of silence in theaters and concert halls (which today seems like nothing but common, albeit increasingly rare, courtesy), amounted to the abrogation of "the prerogatives of the audience," particularly of the working class, to interact with the actors or musicians—more generally, to carouse...

...He is only an individual in a culture of academicians increasingly preoccupied with current theory and sadly remote from the original sources of their knowledge...

...Kasson recognizes no ultimate difference between probity and profitability...

...By the Gilded Age, each guest was served his meal in a strict progression of courses (suggestive of social hierarchy), kept away from the common vessels, and ate from his own elaborate place setting (identified with private property...

...in the latter, people in work clothes lunge for food at an uncovered table, and there are cracks in the plaster of the wall behind them...

...When manners become a matter of habit, Kasson says, they appear to be natural behavior: It becomes easy for the socially privileged to regard their class position and prestige as the product of their natural attributes, including their superior "taste" and "breeding," rather than the cause, and for those lower on the social scale to accept their domination, and to see the rich (in Scott Fitzgerald's famous phrase) as "different from you and me," set apart from nature rather than class and culture...

...He honored each as a woman without making his expression of honor in public specific to her as an individual...

...1880...

...To disqualify Victorian propriety as a tribute to human dignity as such, Kasson performs a reductio ad absurdum: a Last Supper conducted by standards of etiquette circa A.D...

...Attention to minutiae becomes a form of continuous prayerful reflection...

...The obvious objection to this is to assert the prerogatives of the individual spectator, of whatever class, to see and hear the program he bought a ticket for...

...Erasmus counseled sixteenth-century gentlemen merely to "let a cough hide the sound" when they broke wind at the dinner table...

...rri his "segmentation" is Kasson's biggest theme, and he finds it epitomized in the transformation of the formal dinner party...

...For him authoritarian injunctions against foot-tapping and whistling during a concert or play led to "commodification": the packaging of a performance as a standardized, salable entity independent of a particular audience, which turned every listener into a passive consumer, isolated from his neighbors...

...In his gloss on instructions for "the lost art of hat-tipping," Kasson himself shows that it was so...

...Crucifixion, betrayal, body, and blood would be jnappropriate table talk, of course, and for the host to wash his guests' feet would be most unseemly: . . . it is ludicrous to imagine Jesus and his apostles donning formal dress and participating in the ceremonies of private ownership and display . . . In addition, the Victorian emphasis on prescribed social forms and procedures would have amounted to pharisaism, a strict insistence upon the letter of social ritual in such a way as to kill the spirit...

...During the Colonial era, a banquet table was set before hand with the entire repast, the host himself did the carving, and guests served themselves from the dishes...

...Potentially, dining might usher in a new kind of fellowship: a melting of individual reserve and a breakdown of social norms into a changed collectivity...

...Now, the circumstances of this meal were, to say the least, extraordinary by the standards of any age...

...If that was self-interest, it was self-interest so enlightened and so stubbornly pursued as to be positively transcendent...

...Parents pay $550 a week to send their children to etiquette camp at the Breakers in Palm Beach because, as one father explained to Insight magazine: "I want my son to know the social graces and be able to play polo or feel at home on the tennis court...

...The question of whether or not a life of poverty is the truest way to imitate Christ and the apostles is the subject of longstanding theological dispute, far out of Kasson's ken...

...It is not captious to cite an American history professor for such an oversight, but it would be impolite to single out Kasson...

...The finger bowls, oyster forks, and other sacramentals in the ritual of formal dining were prohibitively expensive for a working-class family, "and such luxuries were often unpalatable and their trappings and procedures clumsy to this family compared to eating a sandwich with two hands and drinking beer from a mug or a bottle...

...Throughout, he testified to his own self-control and ritual competence...

...But in the remark's original context, it is clear that Fitzgerald means that the rich are different because of upbringing, and largely by virtue of the conceit of their superiority...

...Furthermore, if Orthodox observance consecrates the casual, did Victorian manners estheticize it...

...Kasson's reference to rabbinical Judaism ("pharisaism") suggests an inspiring, if profane, analogy...

...I well remember the horror excited by any irregularity in affairs," recalled Edith Wharton, "and the relentless social ostracism inflicted on the families of those who lapsed from professional and business integrity...

...the literal condescension of foot-washing, the commanding way in which Jesus conducted the event, and the very exclusivity in gathering the most important disciples, are affirmations of a hierarchy...

...A casual error gives a clue to the fundamental flaw in his approach...

...Elsewhere, his antipathy to capitalism leads him to cynical misinterpretation...

...22.95 Francis X. Rocca WTI here are upper-class manners, I and there are middle-class manners," my grandmother used to say, "and middle-class manners are much better...

...Kasson has apparently not read the story: the quote—a fragment of the single best known line by one of this country's greatest writers—is footnoted to a 1984 book by a French critic...

...These precautions had momentous political implications: Advocates of civility and refinement may well have sensed that the act of sharing a meal might subvert that segmentation, in favor, not of barbarism, but of some radical sort of leveling...

...Prior to the industrial order, rank had not been characterized by huge distinctions in refinement...

...Incidentally, it seems likely that pious Jews, however poor, would have donned the best clothes they had for Seder, though if Kasson takes "formal dress" to mean white tie, we must grant him the point...

...Kasson concludes: "While the bourgeois code of manners might mediate in some respects the fluctuations of the marketplace, ultimately it was tied to them...

...In fact, the words occur in a story about a rich young man who flouts the rules of etiquette...

...He paid attentive deference without subjecting her to pointed scrutiny...

...To do whatever's necessary to achieve success...

...For the professor, Wharton's integrity is a "principle of fidelity-to-contract, fundamental to business transactions...

...He exerted this ceremonious control on behalf of all women of his acquaintance (if they acknowledged him), no matter whether they were social antagonists, at one extreme, or intimate relatives, at the other...

...Here, Kasson is mildly paranoid...

...Etiquette in this case—as in much of the circumspection, especially between the genders, that Kasson documents—is merely respect for the classical liberal right to privacy (in its commonsensical construction, not the penumbral version of Justice Douglas...