Ritualization of middle-class family life in nineteenth century britain

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Everyone has two families: one to live with and another to live by. There are also two family histories: one written in terms of observ? able behavior, the other constructed from family myths, memories, and symbols. Over the past two decades we have learned a great deal about the former. In cooperation with historical demographers, historians now have a clear picture about how the size and composi? tion of family has changed and how family structures and functions have altered. But the symbolic family remains obscure. Historians have either consigned it to the history of ideas or conceded it to the psychologist and the novelist, acknowledging its existence but warning us not to confuse it with the real.3 However, the symbolic family is no less real than that which is constructed by behaviorally oriented historians from the so-called facts of the parish register and census schedule. And, if their highly abstracted, reified accounts of family life have not yet challenged the novel and the soaps for a share of their vast audiences, the fault lies with the neglect of the symbolic dimension. A family history that focuses on behavior without dealing with meaning simply does not correspond to the actual experience of family as simultaneous image and reality, symbol and action, a way of life and a way of thinking about life. What distinguishes family life today from family life 200 years ago is the way family has become a principal symbolic resource for making sense of ourselves and the world. As Virginia Tufte and Barbara My erhoff have pointed out, we not only think about but we think with the family, "using it as an object in our cultural work of self-definition."4 For evidence of this we need refer not only to contemporary novels, television, and the speeches of presidential candidates, but to the history of family life itself. Here we find evidence of an enormous proliferation of familial language, sym? bols, and rituals, the history of which has until recently been seen as trivial or merely reflective, but which, in fact, is of immense significance, not just for the family but for society in general. For while our public and private lives are now radically separated, the symbolic family serves to mediate this chasm, to mask its contradic