EDMUND LEITES
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century bourgeoisie as repressive is still correct. Earlier phases of
modern Western culture were far less hostile toward sexuality. The
religious reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were
in general steadfast in their exaltation of marital fidelity and the joys
of conjugal love. The Puritans, for example, were no prudes when it
came to discussion of sexual matters, and their discussion in the
seventeenth century of the problems and joys of domestic life are
considerably more at ease and happier with the carnal side of mar–
riage than the treatments of the same topic by nineteenth-century
dissenters. Why did the public treatment of sex become so oppressive
in the nineteenth century? Gay suggests that the rapidity of change
in the nineteenth century had something to do with anxiety in sexual
matters, but just how the expansion of railway and telegraph lines
encouraged pornography or the belief that good women were sex–
ually anaesthetic is not spelled out.
One wonders to what extent humane private sexuality can
flourish in a culture which offers little in the way of publicly shared
elaborations of its blessings, the difficulties to be faced in its attain–
ment, and the possible means by which a more civilized sexuality
may be achieved. Is the fusion of sexuality and affection so natural
to humane beings that they do not need the aid of their culture in
respect to both its imaginative products and its scientific or common
sense reflection? Gay builds his case for the humane happiness of
much Victorian private sexuality on very little evidence, and there is
plenty of evidence (some of which he supplies himself) to show that
public silence was a cause of private unhappiness . This is not to say
that the call for the public exaltation of eros, as expressed, for exam–
ple, in the student movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, has
served humane sexuality any better. The counterculture's public
celebration of sexuality typically has an ulterior motive - the weak–
ening of hierarchies and authority - and is not really in the service of
eros, affection, and ethical concern. But it is surely reasonable to
think that if there is to be a widespread union of these elements in
the private lives of men and women, the public imagination must
mightily come to its aid. This Victorian culture surely did not do.
Phyllis Rose's
Parallel Lives
(Knopf 1983), which describes the
marriages of five Victorian writers, is another revisionist account of
nineteenth-century private life, and one which argues that marriage
at best is the union of two compatible fictions. In unhappy mar–
riages, wife and husband hold to different versions of what is going
on. In good marriages, Rose argues, there is a single narrative con-
