EDMUND LEITES
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Freud)
vehemently attacks popular and scholarly views of nineteenth–
century bourgeois sexuality. Rebellious Edwardians and their suc–
cessors, such as Steven Marcus, saw Victorian culture as having "a
prudish and hypocritical surface" and an "illicit, often perverse
underground, the two forever split apart." Gay regards this as a
cliche, inconsistent with the characteristic ambitions and experience
of the Victorian bourgeoisie. Gay denies that the split between sex–
uality and emotions of commitment and love, so well described by
Freud in his 1912 essay "On the Universal Tendency to Debasement
in the Spheres of Love" (and which Freud himself believed was the
most common erotic disease of modern civilization), is a central fea–
ture of nineteenth-century bourgeois sexuality. "Freud was inclined
to underestimate the opportunities for erotic happiness" - that is, for
the fusion of care, affection and sexual excitement - "available in the
bourgeois world, for men and women alike." Extensive reading of
diaries, letters, and memoirs, Gay claims, demonstrates that the
nineteenth-century bourgeois typically, and often successfully,
sought a fusion of eros, conscience, love and steadfastness within
marnage .
Gay grants that the public attitudes of bourgeois culture ex–
pressed a deep ambivalence about sexuality and its expression. Mar–
cus may have been overstating in saying that Dr. Acton's belief that
women were naturally sexually anaesthetic "represented the official
view of sexuality held by Victorian society," but it was a position that
was widely if not universally upheld by writers on female sexuality.
The pornography of mid and late nineteenth-century England, also
a public treatment of sex, was equally inhumane.
It
assigned both
men and women gargantuan sexual appetites, but cut these desires
ofT from their more elevated feelings oflove, caring, and devotion, as
pornography typically does.
But "whatever they might claim," Gay says, the sexual purists
were not "authorized spokesmen for the middle class opinion of their
time." Nor did the pornographers and patrons of prostitutes speak
for the characteristic bourgeois attitude toward love and sexuality.
In between the expurgators and the pornographers, there remained
what Gay calls "the most characteristic bourgeois perspective, an
uncertain, far from consistent liberalism," which sought to find a
reasonable compromise between sexual license and the brutal re–
pression of normal and healthy sexual needs.
Gay's problem is to prove that the middle position did, in fact,
represent the heart of the bourgeois viewpoint. The key element of
