The Naked Heart: The Bourgeois Experience from Victoria to Freud.

The Naked Heart is the fourth volume of a continuing series by Peter Gay named The Bourgeois Experience from Victoria to Freud. Both titles are misleading. The Naked Heart is about cultural trends and personalities far more than experience, let alone experience specifically or typically bourgeois. Its time frame extends back half a century before Victoria mounted the throne. Even adjectivally Victoria evokes Britain, less Germany, and still less France; Gay deals with the three equally, however, and almost exclusively though his series title rings universal. His phrase "the naked heart" (adapted from Baudelaire) announces a candid disclosure of feelings such as Victorianism in fact disallowed. Finally, "to Freud" signals not the cutoff it suggests, but only the author's sense of Western culture as a buildup to Freud.

The contents of The Naked Heart overflow whatever its title can be stretched to mean. On Gay's own introductory say-so, its purview encompasses self-consciousness, the self's concern with other selves, "the way the self perceives, and responds to, the world" (p. 8), indeed virtually anything to do with the self or particular selves. Usually Gay states his subject for short as "inwardness," a bent for soul-searching that supposedly originated not among Christian mystics or such, but with the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. Yet in practice Gay passes from topic to topic in the history of scholarship and especially the arts with no steadier focus on inwardness than on self-disclosure, romantic love, the biographer's market, or lots else. Even after a huge section on the progressive objectification of historical writing he cites "the great voyage to the interior that is the theme of this volume" (p. 222n) - which at least allows the need for a theme.

Lacking a subject, Gay creates a pseudosubject far from that "great voyage" by an incessant loose use of the terms "bourgeois" and "middle class." For Gay, a nineteenth-century painter's public was his bourgeois public, no questions asked. By the same token, a nineteenth-century contest between objective and value-laden historical writing automatically "speaks to deep divisions within the middle classes" (p. 151). Byron fancying himself "being avoided at parties, hissed in the House of Lords, abused in the press, insulted in the streets," proves to Gay that "romantics overstated their estrangement from the bourgeoisie" (p. 93). Gay's warrant for such indiscriminate usage appears to be that the nineteenth century was "the bourgeois century" (p. 157) - a Marxist myth about a period when landowners dominated most of Europe economically, aristocrats socially, and both together politically. Certainly no class, whether as producers or consumers, monopolized the culture that Gay discusses. His running assumption that the bourgeoisie did goes unexamined from cover to cover just like his notions of what was and wasn't bourgeois. Before discussing some letters and diaries he declares them "relatively representative of bourgeois sentiments" (p. 311). He cannot mean of sentiments peculiarly bourgeois, which he makes no effort to delineate. The few actual sentiments he then quotes are to all appearances classless, in particular those drawn from his prize exhibit, Julie Manet's published journal. He treats letter-writing as preeminently a bourgeois doing, but was that preeminence, if real, a function of class, or was it just that the more lettered wrote more letters? Diarizing "became a recognizable ingredient in the bourgeois experience" (p. 333) - meaning that literate bourgeois diarized more than other literates? Fiction was "ever more acceptable to the bourgeoisie" (p. 222) - and less increasingly acceptable to book-buyers among the gentry? The stuff of Victorian pulp tales about a forester's daughter marrying a squire or an abused orphan marrying a professor was "middle-class dreams" (p. 234) - and not foresters' daughters' or abused orphans' dreams? But enough: such pesky questions offend against Gay's casual manner.

One real subject does fill a good third of The Tender Heart even though it mostly predated Victoria's reign: romanticism. Gay's romantics are the familiar idle dreamers of postromantic confection, their "single . . . message" no message at all but "an obsession with the deeper reaches of the feelings" entailing a pursuit of "the self . . . to its most secret hiding places" (p. 42) - as if there were no more to the romantic self than its feelings. Gay's romantics mostly preached and practiced amatory license even as they taught the bourgoisie, for all its stuffy propriety, about "the melting inwardness of love" (p. 97). In fact amorism was fully as rampant in the profligate old regime as in the romantic era. So was love a "melting inwardness" for medievals already: Thomas of Britain's Tristran alone should suffice to keep Gay from hearing romanticism in the "pathetic cry of a frustrated lover" (p. 314). Gay's romantics were "drowned in self-regarding passions" even in politics, being less concerned with events as such than with "how they felt - felt rather than thought - about them" (p. 55). Given their penchant for futility, they fast disavowed their early "dreams of changing the world through action" (p. 56); if they ever engaged in public affairs earnestly, he quips, then only "to experience themselves as earnestly involved in public affairs" (p. 57). In this same vein, his E.T.A. Hoffmann and Stendhal (of all people) promote a "legend" of "a war to the death between a revolutionary avant-garde and the hopeless [sic] proper bourgeoisie" (p. 88). All these are Gay's, not the romantics', vagaries. They turn the record topsy-turvy. In no other period in Europe was political consciousness more acute or political commitment more fervent in artists and the arts - Gay's prime concern - while social scientists and novelists alike in the romantic era took to studying shifting relations of power and status in society. Gay duly ignores the probing political and social analyses that a Stendhal novelized or a Buchner dramatized. He mentions a Constant's opinions or a Mazzini's exile only to overlook their political activism. And for him a Lamartine leading the French revolution of 1848 merely "moved into conspicuous though rather pathetic public service" (p. 60): such writing is more nearly a writing off.

If The Naked Heart as a whole has no clear subject, neither has it a coherent argument. Freudianisms aside, its one attempt at historical explanation that I spotted is this one for Victorian prudery: that "the revolutionary age bursting by 1848 upon Europe . . . alerted the devout and powerful to the dangers of unconventionality" (p. 157), as if Europe's guardians of order had not been on high alert for over half a century by the time of that bursting. For the rest, Gay's perspective is just spottily Freudian. With Freudian smartness he calls a regicide a "parricide" (p. 69), points out an "oedipal revolt" here (p. 143), "oedipal themes" there (p. 371), an "oedipal crime" and "oedipal battles" elsewhere (p. 236), and lengthily grounds Dickens's appeal in an exploitation of that stock Freudian complex. John Stuart Mill's mother having been a mere "drudge," Mill's overpraise of his later wife "reads like the mournful [sic] tribute of a man in search of a woman he could unconditionally adore as he could never adore his real mother" (p. 141). Yet for all his Freudian persuasion, Gay's Freud is shaky. Hans Christian Andersen's childhood memory of having mollified a bailiff about to whip him "reads like a screen memory" (p. 121)? No, like a false memory. Edmund Gosse sounds "positively Freudian" in calling his mother's denial of her talent for storytelling "the repression of an instinct" (p. 133)? No, on Freud's terms storytelling is no "instinct" and its denial no "repression." It "playfully hints at . . . a consuming gluttony of the mind" for Ranke to have written that he was longing to "gain admittance" to a "still wholly virgin" archive and "to make her my declaration of love" (p. 203)? No, neither gluttony nor of the mind. Oddly, Gay has Freud offering a "diagnosis of repressed middle-class culture" (p. 173), thereby restricting the great man's scope even with "middle-class" a synonym for "nineteenth-century."

Psychohistory could have stood Gay in better stead than his beginners' Freud. Thus he quotes Sainte-Beuve at length on Chateaubriand's mean-spirited, vindictive, self-serving memoirs (pp. 138-39) without suspecting Sainte-Beuve's own mean-spirited, vindictive, self-serving animus against that preferred rival for Madame Recamier's favor (not Recamier, incidentally, nor her favors: she was never Chateaubriand's "mistress") (p. 96). Or again: "In his attachments, as in other matters, Goethe the adult owed much to Goethe the child. 'The first love, one says with justice,' he observes, anticipating Freud by a century, 'is the only one'" (p. 119). Gay scores this Freudian point for (not that adage but) a Goethe writing about "his tense, long-lasting love for Charlotte von Stein in Weimar" - and Freudianly fails to see that Goethe affirming his childhood love behind Charlotte von Stein was thereby denying his grownup love behind her: Charlotte Buff, alias young Werther's Lotte.

While no coherent subject, sustained argument, or overall analytic scheme holds this book together, what does keep it all of a piece is the conspicuous authorial presence on every page. For its subject proper is Peter Gay's latest readings and ruminations, complete with ready self-referencing in the notes. Such unmitigated Gay is no total loss. Gay is nothing if not learned. More, he writes with uncommon clarity at the sentence level, always striving for the felicitous touch. This he does not always achieve, to be sure, what with the likes of "subjectivity raised to metaphysical dimensions" (p. 77) and "flexible as steel" (p. 206n), or cliches the size of "incorrigible individualists" for the French (p. 60). Nor is his grip all that firm on the French and German titles he parades: he pluralizes La confession d'un enfant du siecle, known worldwide in all its singularity, and thrice pairs Bocklin with a misfiddling death ("mit dem fiedelden" instead of "fiedelnden Tod") in the artist's celebrated self-portrait. For all that, readers who fancy Gay's rummagings through cultural history more than that history itself are in for a treat.

Rudolph Binion Brandeis University