The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns

by Stephen Kern

The Culture of Love interprets the sweeping change in loving that spanned a period when scientific discoveries reduced the terrors and dangers of sex, when new laws gave married women control over their earnings and their bodies, when bold novelists and artists shook off the prudishness and hypocrisy that so paralyzed the Victorians. As public opinion, family pressure, and religious conviction loosened, men and women took charge of their love. Stephen Kern argues that, in contrast to modern sex, Victorian sex was anatomically constricted, spatially confined, morally suspect, deadly serious, and abruptly over. Kern divides love into its elements and traces profound changes in from waiting for love to ending it. Most revealing are the daring ways moderns began to talk about their current lovemaking as well as past lovers. While Victorians viewed jealousy as a "foreign devil," moderns began to acknowledge responsibility for it. Desire lost its close tie with mortal sin and became the engine of artistic creation; women's response to the marriage proposal shifted from mere consent to active choice. There were even new possibilities of kissing, beyond the sudden, blind, disembodied, and censored Victorian meeting of lips. Kern's evidence is mainly literature and art, including classic novels by the Brontës, Flaubert, Hugo, Eliot, Hardy, Forster, Colette, Proust, Mann, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Musil as well as the paintings and sculptures of Millais, Courbet, Gérôme, Rodin, Munch, Klimt, Schiele, Valadon, Chagall, Kandinsky, Kokoschka, Picasso, Matisse, and Brancusi. The book's conceptual foundation comes from Heidegger's existential philosophy, in particular his authentic-inauthentic distinction, which Kern adapts to make his overall interpretation and concluding affirmation of the value of "The moderns may have lost some of the Victorians' delicacy and poignancy, perhaps even some of their heroism, but in exchange became more reflective of what it means to be a human being in love and hence better able to make that loving more their very own."

Genres: History, Nonfiction

464 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 1992

Reviews

[Nina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Took me awhile to read this one. I even read another book to take a break in the middle. Tough going when it contains sentences like, "In place of older philosophical interest in semantics and conceptual analysis, phenomenology was concerned with the way people actually speak to one another. Heidegger was particularly concerned with the sharing that is a co-understanding of existential possibilities." Overly erudite in style at times, but still very interesting comparison of Victorian and modern impressions of love based on literature and art from the times. The interpretation of art works was particularly interesting. I won't be so quick to look at a piece of art anymore just on its aesthetic merits!

[Kirk · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very useful analysis of how romantic means of expression changed between the Victorian and modern era. Kern divides the book into chapters that focus on different gestures of love and desire: my favorite chapter is on the kiss. As you might expect, James Joyce and DH Lawrence get a lot of play here, as do the Brontes and Hardy. But there are also a lot of more popular culture examples cited. This book hasn't proved as influential as THE CULTURE OF TIME AND SPACE, but that doesn't mean it's not as good.

[Derek · Rating 3 out of 5]

Original, but as good as his Culture of Time and Space book.

[Hirosasazaki Sasazaki · Rating 3 out of 5]

this book is a study of victorian culture.so this book helps me understand some of its background.i found i like novels the best while reading this book.
it's interesting book though.