The Cultivation of Hatred: The Bourgeois Experience, vol. 3, Victoria to Freud.

The Cultivation of Hatred: The Bourgeois Experience Vol. 3: Victoria to Freud, by Peter Gay (Norton, 685 pp., $30)

TO THE educated middle class in the nineteenth century, it was a commonplace that virtue must be taught and learned--that "natural" man, contrary to the Rousseauean myth, was a savage and not a noble one. So assuming, vast numbers of writers, preachers, philosophers, and scientists devised theories and rules of conduct and social conventions that would tame the beast in man. In The Cultivation of Hatred, the third of a projected seven volumes on bourgeois culture in the Victorian era, Peter Gay attempts to describe one broad aspect of the undertaking, that aimed at controlling man's presumed natural inclination toward violence. Mr. Gay unnecessarily compounds the difficulties of his task by using words in a somewhat muddled fashion. The word "hatred" in his title, for instance, is too strong. He means, rather, aggressiveness; and at midpoint in the work, he calmly declares that "the aggressive drive, we know, is not synonymous with hostihty." Again, he writes of "alibis" for aggression, only to soften the tone by using the word interchangeably with "rationales" and "justifications."

Nevertheless, Mr. Gay's thesis comes through clearly enough. The principal devices employed by Victorians to curb and channel pugnacity, he writes, were "the case for competition," adapted from a biological theory to cover economic and social activities; "the construction of the convenient Other," a mixture of pseudoscientific "discoveries" with traditional prejudices; and the promotion of the "cult of manliness," an adaptation of "the aristocratic ideal of prowess." These rationales "cultivated hatred, in both senses of the term," fostering as well as restraining it by providing "respectable pleas for its candid exercise" and "compelling it to flow within carefully staked out channels of approval." All that is set forth early in the book. The remainder rings the changes in lengthy chapters on pathologies, politics, relations between the sexes, humor, and the drive for mastery (especially over nature). In support of his thesis, Mr. Gay masses a huge array of details, anecdotes, quotations, and contemporary commentaries.

The data that constitute the heart of the book are often instructive and occasionally entertaining, but they are marred by problems. One is that, even though Mr. Gay repeatedly warns of the perils of glib overgeneralization about the Victorians, he sometimes glibly overgeneralizes. On one page he writes of "the vituperativeness that the nineteenth century relished," and on the next he declares that the age was "desperate to control the passions." Elsewhere, he not only puts thoughts in people's heads, he injects struggles into their unconscious. (As P.G. Wodehouse might have said, Joe McGinniss could take his correspondence course.) Mr. Gay also indulges in what I call chained-dogisms, after a historian who once wrote, bizarrely, that "there is nothing like seeing a chained dog to bring out the sadist in all of us." For example, "the hostile joke stands in for the desire, nearly always blunted or frustrated, to wound or kill one's enemies"; or, the statement that children have no sense of humor. Too, Freudianisms abound: nineteenth-century Caesarism was "an incongruous but viable amalgam of aggressions with erotic undertones"; "warfare between striking out and holding in... is, of course, everyone's lot"; prizefight fans "obtained psychological rewards--we would call them narcissistic supplies--from attending these 'blackguard and brutal' battles." (I would not be caught dead calling anything narcissistic supplies.)

The inanities merely irritate. More disturbing is the question of the reliability of Mr. Gay's data. Many of his sources and subjects lie outside the areas in which I can profess special competence, but in those areas in which I can claim expertise, errors are rife. In a brief sketch of Theodore Roosevelt, Mr. Gay does not notice that when Teddy and his "roughriders'' went to Cuba they arrived without horses, misses the political calculations that inspired Roosevelt to have Booker T. Washington as a dinner guest at the White House, fails to understand the essentially bogus Northern Securities Case, does not realize that Roosevelt's "legislative program" was the work of others, overlooks the fact that instead of controlling "abuses" in the steel industry Roosevelt agreed to the creation of a steel monopoly, and tells us that Roosevelt "was the first to inject the Federal Government into a labor dispute"--though Presidents had been interfering in such disputes for more than thirty years. He mistimes the slogan "manifest destiny" by four decades. He garbles his account of the Alien and Sedition Acts, apparently being unaware that the Sedition Act broadened freedom of the press by making truth a defense in federal cases of seditious-libel (which it was not under the laws of the several states, where Jeffersonians gleefully brought seditious-libel prosecutions against their Federalist enemies). He tells us the decennial United States census was inaugurated in 1800 (the first census was in 1790). And so on.

Similarly suspect is Mr. Gay's interpretation of fictional works, on which he relies heavily as a source for social attitudes. The point can be made by referring to a long and awesomely tedious chapter called "The Powerful, Weaker Sex." Mr. Gay depicts two prevailing stereotypes designed to keep women in the home and thereby protect the male's fragile self-confidence: the "man-eating creature concealed beneath a facade of ladylike submissiveness" ("the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world") and "the masterful perception of woman as too pure and vulnerable to function in the world." Now, never mind that in dealing with the urban bourgeoisie he ignores the rural majority, the reality that most families still worked together on farms. Never mind that in societies where the "cult of manliness" genuinely prevailed, such as in Spain and the American South, wives ran the business affairs, sordid concern with commerce being beneath the masculine dignity. Never mind that though Mr. Gay mentions abolitionism only in passing, the abolitionist movement was, at least in the United States, propelled by women, and its propaganda was directed at the crimes committed upon black females by white masters. Never mind that Queen Victoria is not mentioned at all in an eighty-page chapter on women in the Victorian age. What concerns us here is Mr. Gay's use of literary evidence.

Let us comment on two novelists, Thackeray and Dickens, to whom Mr. Gay devotes considerable space. We are told that "when Thackeray did have a hero, like Henry Esmond, his heroic qualities manifested themselves in his overcoming sexual temptations, and 'holding fast to honor, duty, virtue.'" True enough of Esmond, but what would Gay do with Esmond's twin grandsons, George and Henry Warrington, protagonists of The Virginians, who jointly shatter the stereotype cult of manliness, and their mother, who by no means fits Gay's molds for women? As for Dickens, there are some women who conform to the molds, but a great number of Dickens's memorable females--Edith Dombey, the dolls' dressmaker, Madame Defarge--are far more complex and fascinating than Mr. Gay's model allows. (Predictably, he regards Dickens's masterly portrayal of Mrs. Jellyby as a "cheap caricature of feminism," apparently not noticing that Dickens was equally devastating in exposing male frauds.)

Space limitations prevent extended comment upon another subject that Mr. Gay treats, namely the much-condemned hypocrisy of the Victorians. Hypocrisy has had a bum rap. To be a hypocrite is to pretend to be something that one is not. Given that we are fallen creatures, sinners all, and not only in our hatreds and our aggressions, to the extent that we successfully pretend otherwise, we become moral, decent, virtuous--civilized--human beings. As Kurt Vonnegut put it, we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend.

These observations have perhaps been too negative. Many things about the book deserve applause. For example, Mr. Gay numbers his pages consecutively, which is a genuine convenience. (That was meant to be a funny remark. It does not mean that I wish Peter Gay were dead.

Mr. McDonald's new book, The American Presidency: An Intellectual History, is forthcoming from the University Press of Kansas.