The Naked Heart: The Bourgeois Experience Victoria to Freud, Vol. 4

A renowned historian explores the inner life of the Victorian middle class, discussing the influence of artists and writers such as Delacroix and Gustave Flaubert on the attitudes of the bourgeois toward the self. By the author of Freud.At the very time that industrialists, inventors, statesmen, and natural scientists were conquering new objective worlds, Gay writes, "the secret life of the self had grown into a favorite and wholly serious indoor sport."Following the middle class's preoccupation with inwardness through its varied cultural expressions (such as fiction, art, history, and autobiography), Gay turns also to the letters and confessional diaries of both obscure and prominent men and women. These revealing documents help to round out a sparkling portrait of an age. For decades after the romantic poets, novelists, artists, and philosophers who had celebrated the liberated spirit passed from the scene, their ideas and ideals, suitably tamed for middle-class consumption, continued to percolate through Victorian culture. At the very time that industrial and mercantile buccaneers, inventors, statesmen, and natural scientists conquered new worlds through their mastery of objective facts, much of the bourgeoisie looked inward. In The Naked Heart, Gay crosses seemingly impenetrable divides. He moves across gulfs separating business magnates from petty clerks, professional men from small merchants, academics from those without university education; he touches the lives of housewives and of women who acted boldly, beyond domesticity, by entering harshly competitive fields as professional authors and by making themselves into indefatigable gadflies of a male-dominated world. He follows the middle classes' preoccupation with inwardness through its varied cultural expressions: self-portraits and autobiographies, fiction both elevated and popular, and works of history - all more widespread in the nineteenth century than ever before - and through the intimate confessions so characteristic of middle-class men and women. The Naked Heart does not confine itself to the famous; it explores how the makers of international bestsellers approached - or evaded - the inner lives of their characters in works now little remembered. And in its broad sweep, it counterpoises a painter like Caspar David Friedrich, forgotten for decades, who wanted his landscapes to convey a profound religious experience, with Jean Francois Millet whose Angelus would become a household favorite, endlessly reproduced, with the original fought over by collectors until the Louvre finally bought it for more than 800,000 francs. In investigating the inner life of the whole Victorian bourgeoisie, that vast class, in Emile Zola's words, "reaching from the common people to the aristocracy," Gay turns also to the letters and confessional diaries of both obscure and prominent men and women. 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. 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. Peter Gay. Vols. 3-5 Have Imprint: New York : W.w. Norton. Includes Bibliographical References And Indexes. In The Naked Heart, Peter Gay explores the bourgeoisie's turn inward. At the very time that industrialists, inventors, statesmen, and natural scientists were conquering new objective worlds, Gay writes, "the secret life of the self had grown into a favorite and wholly serious indoor sport." Following the middle class's preoccupation with inwardness through its varied cultural expressions (such as fiction, art, history, and autobiography), Gay turns also to the letters and confessional diaries of both obscure and prominent men and women. These revealing documents help to round out a sparkling portrait of an age. The prophets, poets, and propagandists of the nineteenth-century quest for the naked heart were the romantics.