The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Volume 2: The Tender Passion

The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud #2

by Peter Gay

Education of the Senses , the first volume of Peter Gay's The Bourgeois Experience , was hailed as "a subtle, elegant, profound and prodigiously researched book" ( Washington Post Book World ), "the most learned, as well as the wittiest, survey of human sexuality ever to be published" ( The New
York Times ). In this, the second volume, Gay continues his eloquent, psychoanalytically informed exploration of the lives of the Victorian middle classes. Whereas Education of the Senses focused on Victorians' sexual behavior and attitudes, The Tender Passion concentrates on their notions of love.
Gay argues that, contrary to popular belief, Victorians were able to know love in its most exalted sense. "Freud was only summing up the current wisdom," he writes, "when he observed that 'a completely normal attitude in love' requires the uniting of 'two currents,' the 'tender and sensual.'"
Beginning with the stories of two young men, one English and one German, Gay proceeds to a wide-ranging inquiry into the ideal and real meaning of love for the Victorians. Based on a vast amount of material--including philosophical treatises, medical texts, letters, diaries, works of fiction,
and art--the book explores such topics as homosexual love, class differences in the perception of love, and the diversion of love in music and religion. There are also fascinating insights into the lives of eminent 19th-century figures, including Dickens, Stendhal, Balzac, Wagner, and Beatrice Webb.
A work of remarkable erudition and analytical sophistication, The Tender Passion is an impressive addition to "one of the major historical enterprises of the decade" ( The New York Review of Books ).

Genres: History, Nonfiction, European History, 19th Century, Victorian, Cultural Studies

512 pages, Paperback

First published March 13, 1986

About the author

Peter 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".

Reviews

[Lauren Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

So far, of the two books in the series, I can say that they cannot be easily summed up. Gay is painting a portrait, not telling a narrative history. His portrait is of diversity. An interesting question would be whether his evidence is skewed. Could someone go through the evidence (letters, diaries, etc.) and find a different picture? He writes that just because the bourgeois did not talk or write about these things (usually), does not mean they did not feel or do them. The examples he picks go against the grain of the usual image of the Victorians. But he is, after all, choosing the examples. Perhaps other people would find that the Victorians were, indeed, Victorian?

[Brenda Clough · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent as always, but very like the other volumes in the series.