Divorce, Bureaucracy, and Emotional Frontiers

Abstract

Through a reading of administrative separation and divorce cases from late nineteenth-century Denmark, this article examines the emotional practices of separating couples interacting with the state bureaucracy. The argument is that, unlike in other European countries where achieving divorce depended on faultfinding, the Danish law, the bureaucratic procedures, and the state officials, who administered them, promoted polite emotional practices of divorce. While some couples easily met these standards, others encountered an emotional frontier and struggled to align their affective behavior with the emotional–legal logic of the law. The analysis shows a delicate dialectic between emotional practices and social class.