Pleasure Wars: The Bourgeois Experience Victoria to Freud

The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud #5

by Peter Gay

In uncovering the roots of modernism, a master historian shows us a hidden side of the Victorian era, the role of the bourgeois as reactionaries, revolutionaries, and middle-of-the-roaders in the passage of high culture toward modernism."In the Victorian decades, the name bourgeois was at once a term of reproach and a source of self-respect". So Peter Gay opens his newest and perhaps most surprising work. For the Victorians we meet in this volume are not the stodgy, complacent characters of drawing-room comedy. They are instead a varied crowd, from the capitalists in the top tier of the bourgeoisie eager to be recognized as gentlemen or, better yet, dubbed as nobility to those at the bottom of the pile, the clerks and craftsmen mortally afraid of sinking into the mass of the proletariat. What they share is an anxiety, driven by their concern to advance up the social pyramid or at least to maintain the status they have achieved.

Some of the individuals in this richly peopled narrative turn on their own class, none more bitterly than Gustave Flaubert; others celebrate their success, whether in Manchester or in Munich, by sponsoring symphony orchestras or establishing museums; still others become cultural hunters and gatherers, turning their newly acquired fortunes to the private accumulation of art, ranging from the "safe" works of the old masters to the daring innovations of the Impressionists.

The stage is thus set for the explosion of modernism accompanied by an inevitable reaction against the subversive avant-garde of artists, composers, and writers as varied as Cezanne, Picasso, Stravinsky, Shaw, Ibsen, and Zola. No one reading this concluding volume of Peter Gay's magnificentrevaluation of the nineteenth century will ever again use the term Victorian as a synonym for dull.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

324 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

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

[Frederick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Obviously, I made a mistake by entering into a series of books at a point other than at the beginning. This is a very informative book about the relationship of the Victorian Bourgeoisie with art, literature, and music. It is difficult to get through but if you are willing to take the time it does provide context, background for understanding nineteenth century Europe's psychology. Gay's devotion to Freud, though, is maddening. He gives far too much importance to Freud's work, not just in a cultural context, but in an absolute scientific context and that is where Gay's arguments break down. No, I do not believe that Freud's philosophies contain, "a theory of politics, a theory of art, and, even more daunting, a theory of culture,'' at least not on the level that Gay imagines. (235)

[Lori Widmer Bean · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh god, this was dry. I got four pages in, and only because I forced it. I'll pick it up some other day - when I'm incredibly bored.

[Cat · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is book five of the five volume series. Yes, I have read them all. If I had to recommend two I would recommend the first volume(sex) and the third volume(agression). I feel that I should be awarded some sort of prize for completing this task.

I struggled with this volume, even though it is the shortest (240 pp.) by far of the five. Perhaps that's because the theme: bourgeois taste in art, was so dreadfully boring. There's not a single chapter I really enjoyed until the (last) chapter on the emergence of moderning. Or maybe that was because I was so close to the end.

So now I know plenty about the Victorian bourgeois. What can you say about them? That they defy easy categorization. But really, can't you say that about many subjects? Gay's focus on the journals of every day bourgeois as source material was fine, but over five volumes, I could have used some more "great men" and current events.