The Cultivation of Hatred: The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud
-
- $25.99
-
- $25.99
Publisher Description
With the same sweep, authority, and originality that marked his best-selling Freud: A Life for Our Time, Peter Gay here takes us on a remarkable journey through middle-class Victorian culture.
Gay's search through middle-class Victorian culture, illuminated by lively portraits of such daunting figures as Bismarck, Darwin and his acolytes, George Eliot, and the great satirists Daumier and Wilhelm Busch, covers a vast terrain: the relations between men and women, wit, demagoguery, and much more. We discover the multiple ways in which the nineteenth century at once restrained aggressive behavior and licensed it.
Aggression split the social universe into insiders and outsiders. "By gathering up communities of insiders," Professor Gay writes, the Victorians "discovered--only too often invented--a world of strangers beyond the pale, of individuals and classes, races and nations it was perfectly proper to debate, patronize, ridicule, bully, exploit, or exterminate." The aggressions so channeled or bottled could not be contained forever. Ultimately, they exploded in the First World War.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the Victorian age, bourgeois husbands beat their wives even during pregnancy, and raped or sodomized them, maintains Yale historian Gay. People in the 19th century, he argues, were virtually unanimous in viewing the human animal as innately aggressive, greedy, combative and wicked. The third volume in Gay's study ``The Bourgeois Experience'' (following The Education of the Senses and The Tender Passion ), this engaging, hugely rewarding survey uses Freudian insights to illuminate the dark, irrational side of 19th-century culture, which in Gay's view underpinned the modern breakdown of civilized constraints on aggression. He shows how Victorian ``alibis'' for aggression, formulated as religious, political or scientific beliefs, were used to legitimate the activities of colonialists, eugenicists, racists and extreme nationalists. He explores humor as a vehicle for aggression in the writings of Lewis Carroll, Heine, Flaubert and Freud, and he analyzes ``the interplay of aggression and libido'' as demagogues won mass followings and the middle class asserted its democratic rights. Laced with sharp profiles of George Sand, Bismarck, Sade, Zola, Nietzsche and many others, this study is rich in observations on the struggle for women's rights, the roots of suicide, sports, capital punishment, prison conditions and much else. Photos.
