Peter Gay: Education of the Senses, Volume I of the Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud; Oxford University Press; New York

 When Brantôme in the 16th century wrote a rather spicy Life of Great Ladies, or Samuel Pepys, in the 17th century, wrote his diary, neither intended these works as a history of culture, which is a modern erudite/academic genre. Nor was this the aim of Mark Twain, Flauber, and many others who, outside their public art, devoted little volumes for the tastes of delighted amateurs, and later, for the under-the-counter trade. The mores, of course, have changed. Yale’s Peter Gay, hitherto a respectable historian of ideas and culture—of the En­lightenment, of the Weimar Republic­—has brought out the first volume of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, a hefty tome that reads like a combination of sexologists Krafft-Ebing and John Masters, and better-class girlie magazines. The author’s intention must have been to acquaint us, in mostly tiresome chapters, with the underside of bourgeois existence. The most telling thing about the book is that it, in our dreary fin de sifcle, passes as “cultural history.” Perhaps unwittingly, Gay illustrates not so much the Victorian morals-illustrates it, that is, from below-but our decayed civilization, one that permits a reputable professor and a reputable publisher to collaborate in bringing forth so much obscenity.

It is presented as “history”: meticulous documentation; a huge, closely printed bibliographical essay (45 pages); solid erudition; a wide sampling of German, American, French, English societies during the bourgeois century. What bores from the outset is the early realiza­tion that on the subsequent hundreds of pages there will be talk of nothing but sex. Granted, sex is natural to humans. Moreover, we have been told and told and told that there is nothing to be ashamed of, that we should get rid of our Manichaeism, that sex is good for pre­schoolers and pensioners alike, and that by year 2000 mankind shall enter paradise under the guidance of ERA and NAMBLA. (Sade had predicted that much for I789; we are late.) Neverthe­less, when faced with the endless annals of sex between obscure New England ladies, their husbands, lovers and other women’s husbands and lovers, and when the same unoriginal plot is recounted between Ruskin and Effie, Lester Ward and Mrs., the Goncourt brothers and their mistresses, then again back to the same between American housewives, husbands, and lovers—one is hardly comforted by the reassurance that the documents tell the truth that hides under the stiff upperlipped simulacra of a hypocritical century. Quite literally, Who cares?

 Gay, of course, wants us to care. After all, many years’ research has been invested in this and the promised sister volume or volumes. What is Gay’s enterprise? He says that it is to explore the libidinal drive of the bourgeois, its loving, erotic, and perverse expressions. Sade, at least, wrote no preface, and did not introduce the social class-system as an explanatory factor. But there is more to discourage Gay’s reader: he is told, and told again throughout the volume, that the author’s great, unique mentor is Sigmund Freud. Now, whatever we may think of the Viennese guru, his transcen­dent prestige has with the years eroded. Not only was he posthumously psycho­analyzed and found inaccurate, fraudu­lent in the description of his most celebrated case-histories (hating his father, etc.) his regularly evoked name has become a bad-smelling label, not unlike that of brother Marx. If every social phenomenon is explained by Marxism, and every other by Freudism (until Marcuse achieved a “synthesis”), then, of course, nothing is explained. But Gay is tenacious: “the theories of Freud have been indispensable to me;” “My principal intellectual obligation is obviously to Sigmund Freud.” The announcement reeks of upside-down Victorianism.

Early in the body of the book, Gay quotes Freud’s letter to Fliess in which he says he had seen his mother naked during a train trip when he was two-and­ a-half-years-old . This is the central theme; Gay discovers similar threads in the sex lives of all bourgeois men, from William Gladstone to David Todd. The book itself is an exasperating string of “true confessions.” The author quotes letters, diaries, conversations, medical documents, travelogues, poems, museum catalogues—the whole ap­paratus of a scholar—only monoto­nously to insist on bourgeois guilt feeling, the heartrending ignorance of young ladies trapped by their husbands’ similar ignorance and consequent impo­tence or brutality. This is the world seen from the level of a chamber pot. It is then not surprising that this culture­ historical study is studded with declara­tions like: “Mabel Todd’s erotic experi­ence throws light on nineteenth-century bourgeois culture.” Such a sentence would be laughable if found in a student’s term paper, but it is sad when similar ones feed 500 professorial pages. Gay makes the reader privy to so many examples of sexual relationships that the reader becomes a voyeur. 

 However, such details result in high sales figures, which proves the author’s business acumen. Today we are im­mersed in a pornographic flood. There is no film without the obligatory bed scene, no play without obscene words, no school without sex education, no feminist movement without the inalienable right to copulate, no modern lifestyle without wife-swapping. From advertisements to TV panels, sex crowds the culture-market. Thus, a “scholarly” examination of the “cultural history” of sex has a ready market. The public is panting to read such a book, a treasure trove of quotations at cocktail parties. At a certain level, if not of culture, then of academic degree, one may wish to mix one’s conversation with more than four­ letter words, called for the purpose “erotica.” Peter Gay supplies them in bulk. In other matters, too, he takes the fashionable side, as when he informs males that opposition to women’s rights comes from men’s fear of castration by females. Which Congressman would now dare vote down ERA? He also supplies arguments to advocates of sex education for children—didn’t baby Sigmund enjoy seeing his naked mother? For good measure, he describes the devastating effects of ignorance on the wedding night. He allows us to draw our own conclusion about tabooed homo­sexuality, which was also Freud’s con­clusion: everything that ends in ejaculation is healthy.

My chief objection to the book (does it stem from my castration complex?) is that it is boring. A serious writer should choose his subject in such a way that it becomes at once obvious to the reader that he means to give a view of the eternally human. Now, you might ask, are love and its erotic aspects not eminently human? Let me then further qualify that humanness ought to be seen above the level of bed and bidet, above Mabel Todd’s weekly bath in prepara­tion for lovemaking, above the orgasmic grunts of Edmond Goncourt’s mistress. The mere fact that things happen and are universal, does not turn them into items of cultural history. A world history of defecation, to pick an appropriate example, may not be an adequate topic through which to learn about man. Nor is the topic of Education of the Senses.

 Education of the senses. An admir­ably chosen title, alas debased and trivialized on every page of this book. The senses are educated by the objects that surround us, at home, on the streets, in travels; by the sights of monuments and landscapes, the color of gardens, the smells of the marketplace; by contact with people, the touch of animals, the noise of cities, the secrets of the night. Sex itself does not educate the senses, nor does eating refine the palate. Our primary instincts bring us pleasure; it is not their function to educate us. Educa­tion is the product of higher satisfactions in which pleasure, reflection, memory, beliefscuriosity, time, place, and myriad other vibrations mix. For Peter Gay, education seems to mean the acceptance of instinctual behavior as a social norm—value-free of course. He celebrates sexual pleasure. 

The author whom reviewers will celebrate for his nonconformism and path-breaking boldness, does not at­ tempt to break out of today’s cliches. His work merely reinforces society’s domi­nant hedonist streak and launches a new branch of scholarship, sexual history, with no other apparent purpose than to cause a certain kind of enjoyment and justify contemporary practices by showing how they overcame past and prudish limits. There is another “first”: blatant sex via the university press. Since the book will achieve success and fame, perhaps another university press will go farther: include an invitation to Plato’s Retreat, The New York Copulation Club, or a membership card to NAMBLA.