THE BOURGEOIS EXPERIENCE
Victoria to Freud Volume I
- The Education of the Senses
Peter Gay
New York University Press, 1984
534 pp., $25.00
THE BOURGEOIS EXPERIENCE
Victoria to Freud Volume II
- The Tender Passion
Peter Gay
New York Oxford University Press, 1986
490 pp., $24.95
FREUD FOR HISTORIANS
Peter Gay
New York, Oxford University Press, 1985
252 pp., $17.95
The dusty family portrait of the nineteenth-century bourgeois stored in most of our intellectual attics is the collaborative effort of nearly a hundred years of angry masters. Goethe, Byron, Shelley, and the other romantics sketched its outlines; Austen, Stendhal, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and the other nineteenth-century novelists filled in its details; Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud reshaped its composition with bold strokes; Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Mann, Proust, and their modernist contemporaries added the final touches. And since their time it has remained in place, largely undisturbed, its accuracy seldom questioned. Peter Gay has had the audacity not only to pull the portrait out, dust it off, and view it anew, but to suggest that it's really a caricature.
The bourgeois of the inherited portrait are certainly a sorry lot: morally hypocritical, sexually repressed, socially rigid, economically parasitic, artistically philistine. To challenge the accuracy of this familiar view, to attempt to rehabilitate their reputation - even a little - is ambitious. To do so in a study that is also meant as a full-scale demonstration of a controversial historical method is even more ambitious. But to succeed in this without falling into the trap of a simple revisionism in which all that seemed black is now revealed to have been white is to make a major contribution both to our understanding of nineteenth-century culture and to historical method.
In the first two of the six projected volumes of his The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud - The Education of the Senses and The Tender Passion - Peter Gay has, in fact, largely succeeded. Magisterial in its conception, impressive in its execution, The Bourgeois Experience promises to be a landmark in our age's historical study, comparable in its own way to Fernand Braudel's Civilization and Capitalism 15th - 18th Century and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Les Paysans de Languedoc. It will also be, I suspect, the consummate work of one of America's most distinguished intellectual historians.
Developing a Perspective
In the preface to Freud for Historians, published between The Education of the Senses and The Tender Passion and meant as an exposition and defense of the approach taken in these works, Peter Gay outlines
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