Etiquette and Equality

...One of these works, probably dating from the 15th century, warns: "Before you sit down, make sure your seat has not been fouled...

...AND EQUALITY BY ROGER DRAPER Ruies OF DEPORTMENT govem much of our daily lives, and we tend to accept them even though we understand that some are at least partly arbitrary...

...Itis impolite to greet someone who is urinating or defecating," he urges in a typical vein, for personal conduct was still pretty wild...

...to put into practice the national theory of equality...

...Individual plates, glasses and utensils were introduced and then required, each with suitable conventions...

...We must mix together, andittherefore behooves us, for our own comfort, to make the mixture as smooth and agreeable as possible...

...High prices and dress codes excluded many former customers...

...They soon spread to the provincial aristocracy, and by the Revolution were probably observed throughout France by the rich in general...

...Self-restraint is different, since less impulsive people are less violent...

...The most important branch of the courtly precepts governed the eating of food...

...Compared with Europe, our conduct was backward, if only because the observance of etiquette required far more equipment—tables, chairs, plates, cutlery, serving dishes—than most Americans owned...

...Not until then could they be taken for granted, even in exalted circles...

...For they have made us happier, certainly healthier, and even, in the long run, more equal than we would be in a world where manners were not for sale in practically every bookstore...

...Those that didn't left "vague just who these superiors were," as Kasson says...

...Indeed, a characteristically American argument for etiquette, with no acknowledgment of anyone's social standing, emerges from the manuals...

...Rudeness & Civility is a fascinating introduction to the transformation of American mores in the last century...

...Artistic reformers who likened music and theater to religion undertook to recast those arts...

...Procedures that made it easier and cleaner for the high nobility to eat at table could—and ultimately did—have the same effect upon everybody...

...Etiquette came within reach of a significantly larger market...

...You may be among the relatively small number who ignore or reject them...

...Aristocrats, it apparently was recognized, were surely as qualified to develop the protocols of polite behavior as anyone else...

...The 19th-century American etiquette manuals that John F. Kasson investigates in his new book, Rudeness & Civility (Hill and Wang, 305 pp., $22.95), belong to this genre and reflect its ideals: privacy, emotional self-restraint and hygiene...

...the courtly graces descended through the social systems...

...He makes no attempt to suggest that the changes in this area were motivated solely by the class agenda of the well-todo...

...Versailles was the dominant court as the rules of deportment neared their final form around 1750...

...One advised: "Always be polite to your inferiors, and it naturally follows that you will be politeness itself with your equals...

...Kasson admits, too, that the gains from the revised order "were enormous and incontestable...

...Over the centuries, these works transformed the most intimate body functions into purely private acts...

...In certain cases, of course, the actual standard we adopt does have intrinsic importance...

...On the contrary, he shows that some of them—for instance, the novel practice of dimming the house lights—were devised by middle-class reformers to make rich boxholders less conspicuous...

...Rather, it was the "delicacy" of an elite intent on distinguishing itself from the run of mere nobility that inspired the new rules, not any modern ideal...

...We may be uncomfortable about polite manners serving to define class, but we should not forget—as Kasson often does—that in this country as elsewhere they became independent of the elite's pretensions...

...relieve oneself without shame or reserve in front of ladies...

...The oldest parts of the canon are 13th- and 14th-century poems and ditties representing the manners of the courts of southern France and northern Italy...

...Shakespeare was the most popular playwright on early American stages, but his works, presented as mass entertainment, were liable to be interrupted by novelty acts and succeeded by farces...

...By the mid-19th century, however, the output of the domestic industries that produced those goods had swelled at every price level...

...If we all place them on one side or the other, we may well make it easier for a group of people to eat at the same table, but either side would do...

...At the outset, Kasson tells us that he values "highly the virtues of civility" and regards them "as an important, indeed indispensable, prerequisite to a democratic society...

...Hygiene is different, too: Cleaner habits are healthier...

...In New York and Chicago, as in Paris and London, the people most deeply interested in the placement of forks and so forth, especially early on, considered themselves the social elite...

...Still, they outlived the objectionable circumstances of their birth...

...Until the Renaissance, Europeans ate with their hands...

...All classes were well-represented...

...Hence the central paradox of manners: Formulated precisely to exclude, in the long run they had the result of including...

...Food, drink, and implements—at first, only knives and spoons, later forks —were shared promiscuously, as were plates and glasses...

...Similar counsels, too elementary and embarrassing to be mentioned today, were explicit in the literature of deportment up to the mid-18 th century...

...Privacy is a positive value, but I don't think anyone could show it is objectively correct...

...The standard of cleanliness is captured by a verse attributed to the 13th-century poet Tannhäuser: "A man who clears his throat when he eats and one who blows his nose on the tablecloth are both ill-bred...

...You may deny that any such rules have an "objective" foundation...

...they have a historic basis...

...They were prohibited from returning to their plates anything they had already put in their mouths and from offering other people food that they had chewed themselves...

...By the few who had them, that is...

...Nonetheless, these are not simply matters of personal taste...

...The concerns of the societies that initially produced this literature now seem strange...

...Rules that suppressed the old participatory style cowed the remainder...

...At least 90 per cent of the total were written by Americans, Kasson reports, and upward of half of all the authors were women...

...A succession of related writings, dating back at least 700 years, has shaped a Western tradition of manners that is no less real than our religious and political traditions and is intimately associated with them...

...Etiquette requires us, for example, to put our forks to the left of the plate...

...It surely does...

...Next came more ambitious manuals, the most important of them, On Civility in Children (1530), by Erasmus...

...Yet as Kasson himself concedes, "if the fine points of manners could operate as another means of exclusion at the upper ranks of society, for much of urban and middle-class life the cultivation of bourgeois manners served as an instrument of inclusion...

...Shakespeare was presented in a serious new manner...

...Demanding discipline and restraint from both performers and audience made new standards of artistic excellence possible...

...The manuals are not the last word in egalitarianism, but they offer less practical support to a would-be aristocracy than their European predecessors...

...Diners were required to start every meal by washing their hands...

...As Lydia White wrote in 1889, "We [Americans] are all forced...

...During the 1830s, no fewer than 28 new treatises on its various aspects appeared here, followed by 36 in the 1840s, 38 in the 1850s, and an average of five or six a year from 1870 to 1914...

...I do wish that Kasson had resisted the temptation to attribute these developments to "an emergent industrial capitalist society": Actually, the etiquette manuals tapped into a tradition that was far older than capitalism...

...Court regulations from 1570 proclaim, "One should not...

...Besides, many of the American handbooks rejected the very idea of social superiority and inferiority...

...IN what would become the United States, most of the small number of books published on these subjects before and just after colonial times were written in England and France, says Kasson, who teaches American history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill...

...After 1776, manners changed decisively in only one sphere: theaters and concert halls...

...Kasson is fair-minded in the case of the theatrical revolution...

...This category includes pronouncements like, "Do not enter a private room without knocking...

...European societies, whose people of all classes had been prone to extremes of laughter, anger, weeping, rage, and violence, also evolved into communities where individual behavior was minutely regulated...

...Everyone, high and low, freely carried on with the performers, who tended to excel at this kind of repartee...

...The bulk of the courtly standard had emerged before this country became a sovereign state...

...They did not change significantly thereafter when new classes and nations took them up...

...A gentleman has no superior...

...Then he dwells excessively upon the fact that "established codes of behavior have often served in unacknowledged ways as checks against a fully democratic order and in support of special interests, institutions of privilege, and structures of domination...

...I also regret Kasson's willingness to convict social conventions of guilt by association with their original promoters, and his consequent unease about the conventions themselves...

...A majority of the patrons were men, and the women among them were mostly prostitutes...

...The rules of the table reformed and finally abolished the old habits of communal eating...

...Traditional theaters, here and in Europe, had recruited their audiences from the neighborhoods that surrounded them...

...Interestingly, too, hygienic as the reformation of table manners may have been, hygiene wasn't suggested as a reason for it until quite recently...