When Respect Grew for Manners

Erasmus of Rotterdam ~ The Father of Children's Etiquette Instructors … The bronze statue of Erasmus, in Rotterdam. Created by Hendrick de Keyser in 1622, it replaced a stone statue from 1557.

New Respectability For Manners; Scholars Tackle a Topic Long Thought Too Trivial for All but Fussbudgets

The subject of manners once seemed worthy of serious attention. The authors of the Talmud took up such topics as burping, yawning and bad breath. Erasmus wrote the 16th-century equivalent of a best seller on civility and Edmund Burke considered manners more important than laws.

But somewhere between the Renaissance and the late 20th century, the topic got a bad name. Manners came to be viewed as trivial, hypocritical and superficial. Heavy thinkers abandoned manners to the authors of etiquette books, with their fussing about finger bowls and the evils of blowing on soup.

Now an interest in the subject, which once preoccupied the middle classes, is back in vogue, and not just among politicians like Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who earlier this week went so far as to invoke Plato in his continuing quest to make New York City a more orderly, civil and, well, mannerly place.

Judith Rodin, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, has convened a 48-member national commission, made up heavily of academics, that is in the midst of a three-to-five-year study of what some believe is an explosion of incivility degrading the quality of public life.

At Johns Hopkins University, P. M. Forni, a professor of Italian literature and culture, has organized a wide-ranging project that includes a course on civility, manners and politeness. It also includes research on civility in schools and in health care, and efforts to encourage scholarly work in the field.

Last fall, the university offered the course not only to its own undergraduates but also to inmates of a maximum-security prison in Jessup, Md. Having spent the semester studying texts like Erving Goffman's, “Interaction Ritual,” both groups came together at the end to discuss what they had learned.

And next month, Johns Hopkins plans to hold a three-day, international symposium titled “Reassessing Civility: Forms and Values at the End of the Century,” with speakers ranging from historians who have written on manners to Judith Martin, the author of the Miss Manners columns and books.

“Manners were expelled from respectable scholarly thinking: ‘Who would be interested in a stupid thing like that?’” Ms. Martin said in a recent interview. “Never mind that the answers are Burke, Mill, Emerson, Aristotle, Cicero, Castiglione, Erasmus, Locke.”

There is indeed a long tradition of serious writing on manners, not the least of which were three centuries of “courtesy books” originally written to instruct young princes but later directed to the sons of the upper classes.

One of the best known of the genre was Erasmus’, “De Civilitate Morum Puerilium” (“On Civility in Boys”), first published in 1526, which went into more than 130 editions and covered everything from dental hygiene and the importance of clean fingernails at the dinner table to when and how to spit.

A wide-eyed look suggests stupidity, Erasmus advised. If mucus falls on the ground while blowing one’s nose with two fingers, step on it, fast. When offered a communal tankard, wipe your mouth first. If food sticks to your teeth, remove it (with a quill or a toothpick, not a knife).

“The whole idea of manners was linked to civilization,” said Richard L. Bushman, a Columbia University historian and the author of “The Refinement of America” (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). “It would be listed right along with the growth of art, science and law as a sign that we were civilized.”

But that view changed, at least among scholars. Michael Curtin, a historian in Oakland, Calif., has traced the shift to the late-18th and early-19th centuries, when he believes the long association between manners and morals was irrevocably broken.

In an article published in the Journal of Modern History in September 1985, Mr. Curtin in particular blamed Lord Chesterfield's courtesy book, “Letters to His Son,” published in 1774, which Mr. Curtin said “appeared to represent manners at their most cynical, expedient and immoral light.” In the book, manners seemed to be entirely in the service of self-interest and self-aggrandizement rather than of any broader civic good.

At the same time, Mr. Curtin suggested, Romanticism helped doom the courtesy book. Cosmopolitan standards of civility became suspect. As he put it, the Romantic quest for deep and authentic feeling, uninhibited by propriety and social convention, was destructive of manners.

Others, including Mr. Bushman, trace the decline of serious attention to the subject to the rejection of the formality and triviality of late-Victorian manners. “We had to reduce it in scholarly importance, so we just cast it aside,” he said. “They were seen as something curious and quaint.”

But in 1978, a history of manners that was then 40 years old, “The Civilizing Process” (Blackwell) by Norbert Elias, was published in English for the first time. Many scholars say has since inspired new interest in manners and helped transform the way they are seen.

First published in German in the late 1930's, the book followed the evolution of manners in Western Europe since the Middle Ages. Mr. Elias, a sociologist and social historian, tracked what he described as a rising level of shame about bodily functions and restraint in public, and traced it to the development of the modern state.

The emergence of the state, with its monopoly on violence and the growing interdependence of its members, necessitated greater degrees of individual self-control, Mr. Elias suggested. People began to modify their approach to everything from eating and scratching to spitting and sex.

Tracing the Fork And the Spittoon

Mr. Elias tracked such things as the arrival of the fork at the end of the Middle Ages, which put distance between diner and dined upon; the increasing restrictions on the way knives were used, the introduction of the nightdress, the handkerchief, the chamber pot, the spittoon.

Since the book’s appearance in English, a number of scholars, many of them influenced by Mr. Elias, have published books that have tended to view manners as a source of power or political authority and as a reflection of larger tensions in developing societies.

“Elias opened the door to a new kind of cultural history,” John F. Kasson, a historian at the University of North Carolina, has written. That kind of history, he said, is “keenly attuned to changing standards of emotional expression, bodily control and personal interaction, and seeking to correlate these with larger changes in social structure.”

In his own book, “Rudeness and Civility” (The Noonday Press, 1990), an examination of manners in 19th-century urban America, Mr. Kasson challenges the idea that so-called improvements in manners necessarily represented an unalloyed good.

“I wish to stress how established codes of behavior have often served in unacknowledged ways as checks against a fully democratic order,” Mr. Kasson wrote, “and in support of special interests, institutions of privilege, and structures of domination.”

As an example, he cites the case of the Astor Place Opera House, built in New York City in the 1840’s to embody the latest standards of etiquette and refinement. The house was “aristocratized,” with open seating eliminated and red damask seats sold only by subscription.

To exclude women of dubious respectability, Mr. Kasson writes, women were admitted only in the company of men. Men were expected to comply with a strict dress code that included evening dress, a fresh vest and kid gloves — a calculated slap, Mr. Kasson says, at working- and lower-class men.

“To look at manners in the 19th century is to realize that so-called good manners were often at the expense of a lot of deference to a broadly speaking privileged middle class,” Mr. Kasson said in an interview. “If class is the dirty secret in American life, manners is a way we launder it.”

Mr. Kasson is hardly the only current scholar of manners who acknowledges a debt to Mr. Elias. Another is Nancy Bentley, an assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, who in 1995 published “The Ethnography of Manners” (Cambridge), an analysis of the fiction of Henry James and Edith Wharton.

“People like Elias say there is a doubleness about manners,” Ms. Bentley said recently. “They are really about how you get along in a group. At the same time, these acts of gentility are also codes that do reinscribe power in some ways, even if they make for more peaceful coexistence.”

Table manners, for example, thus become arbitrary codes. “Insiders know these codes,” Ms. Bentley said. “If you don't, you won't be recognized as an insider. It becomes a way that you can have a kind of identity and recognition and joining of power that outsiders aren't able to claim.”

Ms. Bentley's sister, Amy Bentley, a cultural historian and assistant professor in the department of nutrition and food studies at New York University, has studied table manners in some detail. In a recent interview, she said she shared the view that manners are about power.

“They're necessary, but the ways they’re devised and developed can be about distancing people from one another,” she said. “Who is at the head of the table, who is carving, who waits until they are spoken to — all those kinds of rules about gender, age and other things.

“So I'm not anti-manners,” she said. “Because manners are good. But the ways that they've been used or developed can show interesting things about what people were anxious about in the society and who they were anxious about.”

A correction was made on

March 5, 1998: An article in the Arts and Ideas pages on Saturday about recent scholarly interest in manners referred incorrectly to the role of P. M. Forni in starting the civility project at Johns Hopkins University. He was one organizer; he shared that role with Giulia Sissa, a classics professor. –By Janny Scott, NYT, 1998

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