| Popis: |
The injunction to learn to be “moderate”—to avoid extremes, to contain passions and resentments—is a key discourse and practice in nineteenth-century instructional books. This term prefigures some of the contemporary unease about activists, and about those who seem to be going too far left or right on the political scale. As in today’s discourse, where the notion of what counts as the middle keeps shifting, so in the nineteenth century the notion of what would be moderate was a highly gendered, raced, and classed performance. Moderation was seen as a frame for civic discussion, a hedge against aristocratic license, and a practice linked to the temperance movement. It was a self-monitoring practice that disciplined the emotions, that contained anger or grief, and that crafted “appropriate” responses. |
