The New Victorians

Reader ScurvyOaks draws out attention to the New York Observer's trendspotting piece on -- wait for it -- the New Victorians. Sounds semi-crunchy to me, to wit:

Then she opened her mouth, and it was if one had been transported back—oh, 150 years or so. “We had been talking about getting married since we got together,” Ms.—or perhaps we should write Miss—Miller said, describing how her friend Noelle had, early on, asked her beloved his “intentions”; how he had proposed last autumn, presenting the diamond ring that now glittered in the cloud-light on her left hand. “Ever since I met him, I felt like we’re a strong unit that would be a great foundation for a family,” she said demurely. “We’re very settled in and cozy; we’re like Hobbits in our little place.”

There was a time, not too long ago, when the young and the aimless hightailed it to New York City in pursuit of an altogether different urban experience than the domestic bliss enjoyed by Miss Miller and many of her bosom companions. High on a cocktail of recklessness and abandon, they came here to find their id, lose their superego, shake up the world, or simply shake their thang. Then they promptly chronicled these exploits in confessional sex columns.

But recent years have seen a breed of ambitious, twentysomething nesters settling in the city, embracing the comforts of hearth and home with all the fervor of characters in Middlemarch. This prudish pack—call them the New Victorians—appears to have little interest in the prolonged puberty of earlier generations. While their forbears flitted away their 20’s in a haze of booze, Bolivian marching powder, and bed-hopping, New Vics throw dinner parties, tend to pedigreed pets, practice earnest monogamy, and affect an air of complacent careerism. Indeed, at the tender age of 28, 26, even 24, the New Vics have developed such fierce commitments, be they romantic or professional, that angst-ridden cultural productions like the 1994 movie Reality Bites, or Benjamin Kunkel’s 2005 novel Indecision, simply wouldn’t make sense to them.

As one soon-to-be-married, female 26-year-old online editor who lives in Williamsburg put it: “It’s no longer cool to be a slacker and be living in your basement.”

And:

In the business for over two decades, Mr. Bart has also sensed a change in the fashion industry’s party landscape. “It’s about home and hearth and eating, versus dancing all night,” he said. “A lot of people like to go out to a mid-evening dinner and then the evening’s over at 11 or 12 and then they’re home.”

Back among more mortal New Vics, life may be less glamorous, but it is no less charmed or precious. To clock the type, one need only visit the aisles of the now ubiquitous cookery store Williams-Sonoma. At the Time Warner Center branch on a recent evening, the male half of one young couple examined a stainless steel asparagus steamer only to declare that he preferred his asparagus prepared “the old-fashioned way.”

The current obsession with food preparation—I absolutely must have that Le Creuset casserole!—is totally New Victorian. So, too, the current rage for blousy, maternity-style tops, mutual funds and bathroom renovation. “One of the biggest things I talk about with my friends is home improvements, how best to invest your money, and family planning,” said Jerilyn Dressler, a 28-year-old native New Yorker and account manager for Ernst and Young who recently moved to Philadelphia—how much more New Vic can you get?—with her husband of two years, a professor at Villanova, where they acquired a two-story rowhouse. “We’ve saved some, so we’re thinking of home renovation,” she said.

And then there is gardening—or, at least, joining a community-supported agriculture collective; in New York City, the first indelible step, perhaps, toward becoming landed gentry. “I was at brunch with another couple the other day where all we talked about was farm shares,” said the Williamsburg editor.

This kind of thing is easy to make fun of, and there are quotes in the piece that make it sound like these people are living this way as This Year's Fad. OK, fine, but isn't this a much better fad to follow, all things considered, than the Way of the Boomers (or Gen Xers)? Without question there were many things to fault the (Old) Victorians for, but they were also praiseworthy. As historian Gertrude Himmelfarb has written:

This is not to say that the Victorians would have spurned any of the classical virtues. On the contrary, they would have approved of them. If they did not assign to some of them (courage, perhaps, or such lesser virtues as munificence or magnanimity) a high priority, it was because they would not have thought them the most essential virtues for most people in their own times. They may even have thought them more appropriate to a heroic, aristocratic age than to a bourgeois, democratic one.

Nor were the Victorian virtues the Christian ones--faith, hope, and charity (the latter in its original meaning of the love of God)--although, again, the Victorians would not have belittled these virtues. The Victorian virtues were more domesticated than the classical ones and more secular than the Christian ones. (Not entirely secular, however, as witness the familiar terms used to describe them: the "Puritan" or "Judaic-Christian" ethic.) But whatever their lineage, those virtues were deemed essential, not only for the good life of individuals but for the well-being of society.

Now, I find it difficult to believe that the young couples profiled as New Victorians would cop to esteeming virtue in the Victorian sense. But it does seem to me, at least superficially, that they intuit that there's nothing wrong, and in fact a lot right, with living lives of responsible bourgeois domesticity. The NV quoted at the top of the story spoke of being a happy hobbit. That's not such a bad thing to be. The hobbits' fault as a people was their inability to see beyond a life of domestic comforts. But that's not a bad fault to have. You could do a lot worse than idealize a life of a stable home and family life, built around a postmodern revitalization of "Kinder, Kuche, Kirche."

The New Yorkers the piece identifies as NVs sound like upper-middles. Yet I can think of three couples I know who are NVs who got married early (like, early 20s), and who are living pretty NV lives, in defiance of the stereotype. They're pretty crunchy, though -- can't imagine any of these guys making recreational trips to Williams-Sonoma, though at least two of the couples are into cooking. Religion is a lot more important to their lives than it seems to be in the lives of the NYC NVs. And they don't have nearly as much money. Still, there are parallels there.

This phenomenon reminds me of the food chapter in "Crunchy Cons," in which I talked about how Julie and I got into cooking at home in part because it was a real adventure for us to learn about food, and what we could do with it. In fact, domesticity itself can be a drudge, but we've never stopped seeing it as an adventure. When we were expecting our first child, my sister, who had two by then, told me, "You're not going to believe me now, but just wait: in a few months, you'll be spending your Saturday nights at home doing nothing but cooking and playing with the baby, and you'll wonder if life could possibly get any better." She was right.

I was ready to get married and settle down and live, um, respectably long before it happened. You get to the point where you just are bored out of your mind with going out. Making dinner at home, having friends over, nesting, cocooning -- it becomes a lot more interesting. You know?