He presents them with sympathy, insight and an enviable pathos. Gay shows himself splendidly resourceful in conjuring up the intimate worlds of these individuals, and Stories of a handful of bourgeois marriages, as revealed in journals, autobiographies and letters of 19th-century husbands and wives. Instead he relies on a series of case studies, the To expect Gay to defend this portrait with statistical evidence would be unreasonable, since his qualitative judgments won't admit of statistical confirmation even in an age of scientific polling. Bourgeois marriages were more successful than they are generally given credit for farįrom being plagued by turmoil, oppression or boredom, they afforded husbands and wives a substantial measure of physical gratification and psychic stability.

He insists that bourgeois marriages were grounded in mutual attraction and personal affinity -the union, as Freud was to put it, of 'two currents,' the 'tender and the sensual.'Ĭonsiderations of wealth and class were not ignored, but they served mainly to temper what remained at bottom a physical and emotional relationship. Gay wants us to think well of love in the 19th century.

His general portrait is not entirely clear. To be sure, his book contains an argument of sorts, and many telling insights, but it is often overwhelmed by biographical detail, textual commentary and psychoanalytic speculation whose significance for His exploration of 19th-century love (the 'tender passion' of the title of this volume) yields no such Despite their exaggerated fears of masturbationĪnd their insistence on confining sex to marriage, the Victorians, he argued, appreciated sexual pleasure and pursued it avidly. In 'The Education of the Senses,' (1984), the first volume of 'The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud,' Gay took issue with received wisdom about Victorian sexuality. He second volume of Peter Gay's projected five-volume survey of middle-class culture in the 19th century is a less tidy affair than its predecessor. Love, Love, Hooray for Love By PAUL ROBINSON

Freud by Peter Gay