"We Are All Hypocrites"

By Otto Friedrich

THE BOURGEOIS EXPERIENCE: VICTORIA TO FREUD: VOLUME I: EDUCATION OF THE SENSES by Peter Gay: Oxford 534 pages; $25

"Sweet communions," she called those first nights just after her marriage. "Oh joy! Oh! Bliss unutterable." Also, "a little Heaven just after dinner." And on the morning she got pregnant in May 1879, "a very happy few minutes of love in our room." This was bright-eyed Mabel Loomis Todd, 22, of Washington, who played the piano and painted water-colors and confided to her diary about her young husband David. When David Todd moved to Amherst to teach astronomy, Mabel began flirting with one of the students, Ned Dickinson. She then took up with his unhappily married father Austin, a grizzled 53, treasurer of the college, older brother of Emily Dickinson and pillar of respectability. "I love you, and I want you bitterly," Mabel wrote to Dickinson. Her husband seems to have been remarkably tolerant, and so was the genteel society of Amherst. When Dickinson died in 1895, nobody was surprised that Mabel kissed what she called "the dear body, every inch of which I know and love so utterly."

Peter Gay, Berlin-born professor of history at Yale and author of such highly regarded works as The Enlightenment and Weimar Culture, tells the rather steamy tale of Mabel Todd in considerable detail because she illustrates to perfection the basic thesis of his ambitious new book: that the middle classes of the Victorian century, widely thought to have suppressed sexuality in favor of piety and profit, were just as amorous as their great-grandchildren of today. Even Queen Victoria was not really Victorian, says Gay, for she "drew, and bought, male nudes and gave her adored husband Albert just such a drawing as a present."

This is the beginning, Gay announces, of a formidable project: a psychological history of at least five volumes on the European-American middle class from roughly 1820 to 1920. This middle class was not large--Gay estimates it at generally no more than 15% of the population--but the 19th century was the era in which it replaced the aristocracy as the ruling class of the Western world, the arbiter of style and morality. Should this ruling class now be reinterpreted not according to its economic or political influence but its sexual mores? Gay apparently believes so. The changes that brought the bourgeoisie to power, says the historian, made it suspicious of all change, anxious and insecure about itself; it cherished privacy and discretion. "In matters of sexuality," explained the great explainer of that time and class, Sigmund Freud, "we are, all of us, the healthy as much as the sick, hypocrites nowadays."

Sexual practices probably change far less over the years than do people's ways of talking about them--or not talking. Gay does, however, examine such oddities as Edith Wharton's asking her mother about her wedding night, "What will happen to me?" and Mama answering only that men and women are "made differently," and "Don't ask me any more silly questions." But in his wanderings through the high and low cultures of half a dozen nations, Gay finds far more evidence of bourgeois couples coupling. And procreating. And writing down all kinds of details in journals left for future historians. So he shows us Richard Wagner hurrying in to hush Cosima's moaning during the birth of Siegfried, and Prime Minister Gladstone assisting his wife's lactation by rubbing her nipples "& prayers as usual."

The 19th century bourgeoisie acquired its dismal reputation partly because of what Gay calls its "lust to conceal" and partly because historians have been too inclined to listen to its cultural leaders, its pedagogues, its doctors and divines, who imposed on their society what Gay calls "learned ignorance." Any aspect of sex that diverged from the biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply, they taught, was immoral and therefore must not happen.

This high-principled denial of reality inspired the lunatic crusade against masturbation, which various eminent doctors declared a cause of blindness, consumption, dyspepsia, vertigo, epilepsy, madness and early death. One doctor recommended warning the guilty: "In three months you will be a dead man." Others prescribed various girdles to be worn at night.

When that failed to reform a seven-year-old girl in Cleveland, she was subjected in 1894 to a clitoridectomy. Yet one expert declared the number of adolescent masturbators in Germany to be 100%.

Birth control was so rudimentary that pregnancies came annually. They were both painful (until chloroform appeared in 1847) and dangerous (childbed fever was not solved until the 1850s), but Charles Goodyear vulcanized rubber in 1839 and soon thereafter got his first patents on birth control devices. More than a century before the famous Pill, the sexual revolution inspired by contraception was under way. The cultural leaders preached against birth control, even prosecuted its advocates, but that only spread the news. Contraceptive devices sounded "perfectly revolting," as one California matron wrote to a friend, but "one must face anything rather than the inevitable results of Nature's methods."

Once the bourgeoisie had decided not to talk about what it did, it created a new symbolic language, both verbal and nonverbal, to convey information. Middle-class women no longer got pregnant, for example; they became enceinte, or were "in an interesting condition." Painters and sculptors thrilled staid merchants with luscious nudes fig-leafed with titles like Venus Now Wakes. Manet's Olympia shocked the salon of 1865 not because she was naked but because she looked back at the viewer with the defiant eyes of a thoroughly contemporary Parisian courtesan. On second thought, said Freud, who is one of Gay's principal heroes, perhaps "a certain measure of cultural hypocrisy is indispensable for the maintenance of civilization."

Nathaniel Hawthorne expressed a typical mixture of 19th century inhibitions when he wrote to his fiancee Sophia Peabody that he could never read one of her letters "without first washing my hands." No one would ever know the fullness of their love, he went on, "for we shall not feel inclined to make the public our confidant; but if it could be told, methinks it would be such as the angels would take delight to hear." Gay concludes: "The bourgeois experience was far richer than its expression, rich as that was; and it included a substantial measure of sensuality for both sexes, and of candor--in sheltered surroundings." There is little reason to dispute the thesis of The Bourgeois Experience. Indeed, can any century that included hedonists as varied as George Sand, Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde ever have been seriously considered a model of abstinence? On the contrary, the chief drawback to Gay's otherwise diverting book is that he keeps arguing each point as though it were a revelation of dazzling novelty, requiring document after document to prove its validity. Four more volumes of this will all too forcefully remind readers that the 19th century was the era of the 1,000-page novel, the overstuffed horsehair sofa and the Wagnerian opera.

--By Otto Friedrich