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PARTISAN REVIEW
Gay's defense is not a demonstration, as we might have expected, of
the public treatment of sexuality by the bourgeoisie. Instead, his ar–
gument rests upon what has often been taken as the outstanding
mark of bourgeois repression: its hypocrisy and prudery in sexual
matters. He takes this as evidence of the culture's intense desire to
create and maintain a secure
private
realm for sexuality, so that it
could be freed from the scrutiny of public judgment. The unwilling–
ness of parents to talk openly about sex served the same purpose,
although this left young adults unprepared for the erotic side of mar–
ried life . Even the family was too public an arena; talk about sex had
to be reserved for the intimate life of the couple alone. Bourgeois
evasiveness, cant, prudishness, and hypocrisy were not forms of re–
pression, but expressions of wise restraint in the service of eros .
The life of Mabel Loomis Todd illustrates Gay's thesis. A
member of the elite of Amherst, Massachusetts, according to her
diary, she led for years a highly active sexual life with her lover,
Austin Dickinson, the brother of Emily. This liaison with Dickinson,
treasurer of Amherst College and a pillar of Amherst society, was
well known to the genteel society of the town, yet their peers did not
ostracize either of them for this violation of the social code. In fact,
she was lionized both during her affair and after her lover's death.
Everybody knew, yet it was central to her social position for her hus–
band , her lover, and for herself to preserve appearances . They were
willing to keep their irregular sexuality private, though not
altogether secret, which allowed society to accept her.
Such an account of the meaning of Victorian prudishness ex–
presses Gay's own serious misgivings about the morality of the mod–
ern period . Gay thinks that humane sexuality can flourish in private
without a corresponding public exaltation of its virtues . In fact, he
believes more is lost than is gained by the demand that the public
imagination openly celebrate sexuality. Contemporary culture does
not adequately recognize the crudely pornographic and crudely moral
elements in itself and therefore does not seek adequate defenses
against them. As far as Gay is concerned, sexuality had a better
chance within the constraints of Victorian life than it did within the
"let-it-all-hang-out"modernity of Weimar Germany or the counter–
culture of the late sixties and seventies.
Gay's suspicions about counterculture sexuality may be right,
but his defense of the Victorian bourgeoisie is flawed.
If
it created
the public monster against which it had to defend itself by prudery,
cant, and evasiveness, then the conventional view of the nineteenth-
