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PARTISAN REVIEW
in Western culture, relatively recent, having its origins in the culture
of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and undergoing some rever–
sal because of the prudery, hypocrisy, emotional and sexual severity
of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture . And if humane and caring
relations within the family, along with the attempt to fuse together in
the marriage relation both sensual and ethical components, are
modern phenomena, then we, as moderns, occupy a privileged and
morally advanced position in the history of private life .
The common moral sentiments of the revisionist historians
should not blind us to their differences. Above all, they divide on the
bearing of patriarchy's public conceptions of women , of children,
and of sexuality on the actual practice, moral health, and happiness
of private lives . The liberation philosophies generally took the posi–
tion that there could not be a humane private life in a world where
public conceptions of that life were inhumane . Modernity, in general,
objects to the treatment of women in the imaginative and conceptual
life of patriarchy's public realm, in its journalism, fiction , films , and
popular science, just as much as it objects to the treatment of actual
women, in daily practice, in both the private and public spaces of
societies ruled by "the fathers ." The reason may be the conviction
that private conduct must necessarily , or generally , reflect public
ideas . Or it may be the belief that even if we live rightly in private,
we are much the poorer for having no public support and celebra–
tion , no public resonance, for our private ways.
One of the revisionists (Ozment) shares these ideas , but puts
them to the defense of patriarchy. Another (Rose) goes far in the op–
posite direction, espousing a postmodern fictionalism . Many of the
central figures of modernity , for example, Freud, thought that a
happiness founded on illusion was not worthy of our respect. We
achieve a greater dignity in enduring the pain of the truth. But
without regret, some of the revisionists affirm the primacy of fiction
over fact in the ordering of our private lives. What spouses believe
about their marriage and lovers about their romance is more impor–
tant than what is "really" going on, as determined by some objective,
and public , standard. This amounts to saying that for strong-minded
people, at least, the public realm is less of a danger than modernity
would have it be . What is real in intimate relations is largely a fic–
tion, best constructed, and enjoyed in private .
The most well known of the new revisionists is Peter Gay, whose
Education oj the Senses
(Oxford University Press, 1984; the first in a
projected series of volumes entitled
The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to
