The Cultivation of Hatred

In the Victorian age, bourgeois husbands beat their wives even during pregnancy, and raped or sodomized them, maintains Yale historian Gay. People in the 19th century, he argues, were virtually unanimous in viewing the human animal as innately aggressive, greedy, combative and wicked. The third volume in Gay's study ``The Bourgeois Experience'' (following The Education of the Senses and The Tender Passion ), this engaging, hugely rewarding survey uses Freudian insights to illuminate the dark, irrational side of 19th-century culture, which in Gay's view underpinned the modern breakdown of civilized constraints on aggression. He shows how Victorian ``alibis'' for aggression, formulated as religious, political or scientific beliefs, were used to legitimate the activities of colonialists, eugenicists, racists and extreme nationalists. He explores humor as a vehicle for aggression in the writings of Lewis Carroll, Heine, Flaubert and Freud, and he analyzes ``the interplay of aggression and libido'' as demagogues won mass followings and the middle class asserted its democratic rights. Laced with sharp profiles of George Sand, Bismarck, Sade, Zola, Nietzsche and many others, this study is rich in observations on the struggle for women's rights, the roots of suicide, sports, capital punishment, prison conditions and much else. Photos. (Sept.)