THE BOURGEOIS EXPERIENCE: Victoria to Freud, VoL II: The Tender Passion

by Peter Gay ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1986

In this second volume of his promised five-volume enterprise of redefining the life of the bourgeois in the age of Victoria, Gay (history, Yale) examines the Victorian middle-class experience of love. As in his previous volume, Education of the Senses (1983), Gay argues here that the Victorian bourgeois knew, practiced and enjoyed sexuality and love, and actually, he says, even discussed them more frankly than we have been led to believe. The difficulty here, however, is that love is not always dearly distinguishable from sexuality, and Gay too leisurely unfolds his impressive learning without giving it a clear structure. But this is not thesis-history, rather, an undoing of the formulas to which middle-class ways of loving have been reduced--and Gay does gather an astonishing amount of material that traces love in diaries, memoirs, novels and under such disguises of sensuality as music, nature, religion and the machine. Because the Victorians were uncomfortable voicing their emotions, Gay cautions the historian to do the ""kind of deep archeological reading psychoanalysis Freud specializes in."" Gay points out that ironically the shift from reticence to candor many times increased public censure instead of winning approbation, and that such rigid pronouncements, as that of the House of Lords, for example, that ""the crime here alleged (lesbianism) has no existence"" in a paradoxical way made the 19th century surprisingly permissable. (Since the crime did not exist, there were no criminals.) Gay sees Victorian defensiveness as a ""tribute to passion,"" religion as refuge and excuse for sensuality, and he argues that Freud's thesis that nervousness was the characteristic malaise of the bourgeois is very questionable. The cases Freud treated were not typically bourgeois, and Freud, in his pessimistic way, underestimated the ability of the bourgeois to confront and fulfill their erotic needs. In fact, Gay believes that, as Eliza Wilson wrote to her fiance, Walter Bagehot, ""happy marriages were not uncommon."" Turning which way--from Flaubert to Zola to Wagner--Gay's encyclopedic mind dazzles. On to Volume III.

Pub Date: March 1, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Oxford Univ. Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1986

Categories: NONFICTION