The Bourgeois Experience, From Victoria to Freud - Education of the Senses

A WORRYING though often barely visible ingredient in the experience of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie was anxiety over its very definition: its internal rank orders, its status in society, its relation to other classes, its political future, its moral character. Whereas Education of the Senses focused on the sexual attitudes and practices of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, The Tender Passion concentrates on their notions of love. No less revisionist than he was in his first volume, Gay argues here that the Victorians were able not only to enjoy their sexuality but to know love in its most exalted sense. The realities of love for the Victorians, he shows, came much closer to their ideals than many have thought. Gay delves into a huge body of material, from philosophical treatises to medical texts, from letters and diaries to works of fiction. The book is replete with fascinating insights into the lives and works of individual Victorians, Dickens, Stendhal, Wagner, Oscar Wilde, Beatrice Potter and Sydney Webb, among them, and his discussions range from the "discovery" of homosexuality to the ways love was diverted or disguised in music and religion. In this first volume, the author "re-examines the sexual behavior and attitudes of this era and its much-maligned middle classes, [including] such areas as contraceptives and abortion, pornography, the nude in works of art, fears about pregnancy and infant mortality, marriage-night anxiety, masturbation, attitudes toward women, and the ideal of privacy."--Jacket Contents: v. 1. Education of the senses v. 2. The tender passion v. 3. The cultivation of hatred v. 4. The naked heart v. 5. Pleasure wars.