The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns.

In this erudite and idiosyncratic work, Stephen Kern explores what he calls "one of life's deepest mysteries and most powerful emotions." Using literature, art and philosophy (his sources accounting for the word "culture" in the title), he analyzes "love" as it was portrayed between 1847 and 1934, and offers us both an "interpretation of change" and a heartfelt ethical judgment. Social historians will likely find Kern's philosophically-grounded treatise fascinating and frustrating in equal measure.

Kern uses phenomenology--most particularly as developed by Heidegger in Being and Time--as a framework for his historical analysis of love. He employs Heidegger's concept of authenticity to compare "Victorian" and "modern" love, concluding that, "compared with the Victorians, the moderns reflected more about the meaning of their experience of each of the elements [of love], and therefore experienced them more authentically, more as their very own." This statement, encapsulating Kern's argument, also exhibits his "compromise" with Heidegger's system, the compromise of history and philosophy. Heidegger saw human existence as always poised between the authentic and the inauthentic; Kern sees changes in historical conditions that make authenticity more possible in human existence.

The Culture of Love consists of eighteen chapters on "fundamental elements" of love, some of them fairly concrete (kissing, wedding, meeting, sex), others more abstract (encounter, embodiment, disclosure). Each chapter is, in many ways, a self-contained essay, and most begin with a brief overview of the philosophical underpinnings of the subject at hand. For example, the chapter "Embodiment" begins with the "mind-body problem"; the chapter titled "Others" moves from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty to Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra to Heidegger's concept of "the 'they'" in the space of its first page.

The joy of this book is in the precision of its author's mind, in his careful typologies and complex formulations. He is an insightful reader of texts, and though not everyone will agree with his interpretations and juxtapositions, they are unfailingly thought-provoking. His chapter on language is especially wonderful.

For all its intelligence, however, The Culture of Love presents some major difficulties for the social historian. Kern deals with his basic premises---questions of sources and interpretation--in a short introduction. Though one might read it as disarmingly frank, in the context of the larger work the introduction seems disingenuous at best. He has virtually ignored two decades of both social history and literary theory, and makes leaps practically guaranteed to drive social historians--as well as many cultural historians-to distraction.

On his decision to rely on the standard literary canon for his sources, he writes: "Classics survive the oblivion that buries popular novels precisely because they capture the actual sights and sounds of an age. Their descriptions enable us to see lovers in years past, and their dialogues enable us to hear them. Their plots and characters may be made up, but that creativity allows perceptive authors to come closer to the truth, not stray from it."

"I treat the novels which are my sources," he writes, "primarily as reflection of what was happening at the time when they were being written...." 3Thus, instead of using the texts he examines--so well--as representations of love, as sources for understanding new ways of conceptualizing love, he jumps straight from Leopold and Molly, Heathcliff and Cathy, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, Maggie and Amerigo, Connie and Mellors to "Victorians" and "moderns," to "men" and "women." And, more disturbing yet, we have no idea who these "men" and "women" are meant to be, for Kern uses Victorian and modern only to designate time periods, not to describe systems of belief or specific social groups. We have no national boundaries here, no distinctions of class or ethnicity or region or race.

Kern also Fails to reckon with ways that people in different times or cultures might have read their actions--or these texts--differently than he does. As Karen Haltunen has shown in her excellent cultural history, Confidence Men and Painted Women, the middling-class urban people who made up much of America's Victorian society were obsessed with questions of sincerity and authenticity, with the meanings of their actions. Their notions of authenticity might not square with Heidegger's or with Kern's, but it seems he needs to take Haltunen's argument into account.

Professor Kern says that he chose to rely on Heidegger's philosophical system as a unifying and structuring device largely because his sources became too rich. He felt the need for order, for a way to unify "the elements and their changing modes" and so "make this history comprehensible." His focus on authenticity does give order, providing a clear thread for the reader to follow through complicated explorations of the varied elements of love. But it also compromises his work. Instead of treating the development of phenomenology and the concomitant "shift in values from the moral and religious toward the existential" as a part of a cultural brew, a system of meaning, a way of seeing, that helped to construct the emotion we call love, he treats "authenticity" instead as a universal and a historical standard against which all must be measured.

Kern seems concerned about the way his philosophical concerns have propelled him to ethical judgments, and concludes the book with a moving and sensitive justification for them. He pays less attention to what will be, for many readers, the more fundamental problem with his book. History and philosophy, as Kern knows full well, exist in tension. That tension, here, proved fruitful in many ways. But in the end, I think, this book is a struggle between history and philosophy. It seems to me that philosophy won, and that is to the detriment of history.

Beth Bailey Barnard College