RICHARD SENNETT
357
was necessary at home, the realms of work and home were not therefore
identical. In the home, changed appearances would threaten the partners'
trust in each other, threaten their sense that each knew who the other was. A
repressive, rigid routine became the means of certifying that the marriage it–
self was real-just as the child was thought to grow in a healthy way only if
he experienced others in terms he could trust. For the Victorians, trust
meant trust
to
remain the same.
Thus, the privatization the family experienced in the nineteenth
century was a consequence of its search for an order in which stable per–
sonality could flourish; and yet it involved a belief in immanent personality
which thrust the family back out into the vety anxieties about order and im–
manent meaning which ruled public life .
Both
the desire to retreat and the
reconstruction of the outer society are elements of privatization. The fust
would soon have exhausted itself as a desire had not the second so insistently
thrust family dynamics back into the public contradiction, so that the fam–
ily's mission of orderly retreat never seemed accomplished .
For families of the present generation, privatization on these terms has
ceased
to
exist. There is no longer a world alien
to
the self
to
which the self
refers. For example, to preserve a marriage as a social contract, people today
are not willing to observe proprieties of the rigid sort which characterized the
last century; if one is obliged to make great sacrifices of immediate feeling
and perception about the other partner in the marriage, then the marriage
itself soon seems sour. Because so many nineteenth-century people were im–
prisoned in respectable but loveless marriages, the breaking of rigid codes of
correct behavior may well seem all
to
the good . The problem is that this
change in the terms of privatization has not liberated individuals within the
family, but paradoxically, has made the family bond more important and
more destructive . The reason for this is that when family relations become
withdrawals from the world the person has no experiences outside the family
which can be used
to
judge experiences within it. The family comes
to
seem
the terrain on which all emotions are displayed: emotions which are not
familial have no reality because the world outside is only instrumental. The
movement from privacy to intimacy is a movement from the family as an un–
successful private institution to the family as a tyrannical, psychologically
pure universe.
What is the rationale for conceiving of the family as socially withdrawn
and emotionally complete?
It
is that of the narcissistic mirror. If the family is
not a work unit as in the
ancien regime,
if it is not an arrangement involving
an arbitrarily rigid set of roles, as in the nineteenth century, then what ap–
pears in this "free" psychic network has a reality and purity unsullied by
