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The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud #4
The Naked Heart
A renowned historian explores the inner life of the Victorian middle class, discussing the influence of artists and writers such as Delacroix and Gustave Flaubert on the attitudes of the bourgeois toward the self. By the author of Freud.
463 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1995
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183 people want to read
About the author
Peter Gay
150 books153 followersPeter Joachim Gay was a German-American historian, educator, and author. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and former director of the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers (1997–2003). He received the American Historical Association's (AHA) Award for Scholarly Distinction in 2004. He authored over 25 books, including The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, a two-volume award winner; Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968); and the widely translated Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988).
Gay was born in Berlin in 1923, left Germany in 1939 and emigrated, via Cuba, to the United States in 1941. From 1948 to 1955 he was a political science professor at Columbia University, and then a history professor from 1955 to 1969. He left Columbia in 1969 to join Yale University's History Department as Professor of Comparative and Intellectual European History and was named Sterling Professor of History in 1984.
Gay was the interim editor of The American Scholar after the death of Hiram Haydn in 1973 and served on that magazine's editorial board for many years. Sander L. Gilman, a literary historian at Emory University, called Gay "one of the major American historians of European thought, period".
Gay was born in Berlin in 1923, left Germany in 1939 and emigrated, via Cuba, to the United States in 1941. From 1948 to 1955 he was a political science professor at Columbia University, and then a history professor from 1955 to 1969. He left Columbia in 1969 to join Yale University's History Department as Professor of Comparative and Intellectual European History and was named Sterling Professor of History in 1984.
Gay was the interim editor of The American Scholar after the death of Hiram Haydn in 1973 and served on that magazine's editorial board for many years. Sander L. Gilman, a literary historian at Emory University, called Gay "one of the major American historians of European thought, period".
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 5, 2010
To borrow a term used by Friedrich Nietzsche, Peter Gay's "Naked Heart" is a book "for all and none." The scope of Gay's multivolume exploration into Victorian bourgeois culture is so expansive that even a person with little interest in the period could find something in it to pique their interest. However, at the same time because of its immense scope, parts of "Naked Heart" are bound to bore any reader excepting those with an intense devotion to the Victorian period.
In my case, "The Naked Heart" started off promisingly with a chapter on "The Reenchantment of the World". This chapter was a brief history of the German Romantic movement and gave brief intellectual biographies of some of its most interesting, and sometimes scandelous figures, like the brothers Schlegel, Madame de Stael, and Novalis. Gay then explored the influences different Romantic movements had on one another. I found this section, along with the introduction detailing the history of music listening etiquette, to be fascinating.
However, my passion for "The Naked Heart" began to wane as Gay began jumping from music, to visual art, to fiction writing, and eventually advances in the postal system and diary writing. These themes were loosely connected with one another and even the sections themselves were further atomized by short biographies or portraits of particularly notable songs, paintings, or novels. A more focused thesis and more detail regarding certain themes of interest (at the expense of other sections, especially the drudgery of the last section on diary writing) would have held my interest better and made for a more enjoyable reading experience.
One final point is the odd omission of Freud in "The Naked Heart". Psychotherapy, the culmination of much of the bourgeois soul searching outlined in the book, fails to make an appearance. Perhaps it would have added another layer of complexity to an already sprawling project, but to this reader it seemed like the logical conclusion to an era of reflection.
In my case, "The Naked Heart" started off promisingly with a chapter on "The Reenchantment of the World". This chapter was a brief history of the German Romantic movement and gave brief intellectual biographies of some of its most interesting, and sometimes scandelous figures, like the brothers Schlegel, Madame de Stael, and Novalis. Gay then explored the influences different Romantic movements had on one another. I found this section, along with the introduction detailing the history of music listening etiquette, to be fascinating.
However, my passion for "The Naked Heart" began to wane as Gay began jumping from music, to visual art, to fiction writing, and eventually advances in the postal system and diary writing. These themes were loosely connected with one another and even the sections themselves were further atomized by short biographies or portraits of particularly notable songs, paintings, or novels. A more focused thesis and more detail regarding certain themes of interest (at the expense of other sections, especially the drudgery of the last section on diary writing) would have held my interest better and made for a more enjoyable reading experience.
One final point is the odd omission of Freud in "The Naked Heart". Psychotherapy, the culmination of much of the bourgeois soul searching outlined in the book, fails to make an appearance. Perhaps it would have added another layer of complexity to an already sprawling project, but to this reader it seemed like the logical conclusion to an era of reflection.
February 25, 2019
Useful in insight, not so much in anecdote because there are so many. These are dense books, not popularizations.
May 17, 2017
In this volume Gay examines the Victorian middle classes'obsession with introspection and subjective experience, as well as the ways that this inclination was mediated by the limitations of language, consciousness, and social performance. Gay covers a broad cultural field from music, philosophy, politics, religion, history, fiction, art, correspondence, and diaries. The focus is primarily European, though American is referenced and considered in some sections, and Gay often has a Freudian slant to his attentions. I may be somewhat at a disadvantage having only read the fourth book in Gay's series, but the oscillations between broad compass and detailed observations was rather dizzying, and often stultifying by nature of its overwhelming swath, that lead to me as a reader feeling that the text dragged in sections and jumped to much in others. Still, Gay's breadth of scholarship is impressive, and frequently insightful.
May 2, 2021
Um dos grandes livros sobre o século XIX, leitura aprofundada, emocionalmente rica, da vida mental da burguesia vitoriana... seus hábitos, anseios e medos.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews