Though distinguished historian Gay declares in the preface that his new work is not "merely a Reader's Digest
condensation of the bulky texts that preceded it," readers of his five-volume study, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, will find most of the material decidedly familiar. As in the series' first book, Education of the Senses,
he argues here that the Victorian middle classes were much less inhibited about sex than modern stereotypes suggest. As in the last, Pleasure Wars,
he finds that bourgeois philistinism has been vastly overstated and that there were plenty of respectable patrons for avant-garde art and music. Indeed, as Gay admits, some of the actual examples here are drawn from his former work. So what's new? Interweaving incidents from the life of Austrian playwright and novelist Arthur Schnitzler, "sometimes briefly as an impetus to broader investigations, sometimes as a participant," Gay begins his main text with Schnitzler's father breaking into the 16-year-old's locked desk to find, and vehemently reproach Arthur for, a diary indiscreetly recording the boy's erotic exploits; he closes with the diary's August 5, 1914, entry about the "dreadful and monstrous news" of WWI's outbreak. In between, the incident with Schnitzler's diary turns up several more times: as a demonstration of conflicted bourgeois notions about privacy, as an illustration of more lenient treatment of children (Dr. Schnitzler lectured his son, but didn't beat him). As is always the case with Gay, the prose is graceful, the insights solid, the specific examples vivid and illuminating. Fellow historians and longtime readers will feel (correctly) that the author really isn't saying anything he hasn't said before; for those who lack the stamina for The Bourgeois Experience, this is an agreeable one-volume summary with some additional nuance. Illus. (Nov. 12)
