the cultivation of hatred the bourgeois experience victoria to freud

The “three-decker novel” was a favored literary form of the 19th Century, a sprawling and loosely joined fiction crossed by innumerable subplots and a host of disparate characters Gay has written something like a three-decker history in this and his previous books. The book concludes with another large essay on the morality of aggression and a short, brilliant epilogue about how this culture of aggression and hatred helped lead to World War I. He then writes about the way the 19th Century expressed aggression through cruel jokes and wit. In a chapter on how the ideal of aggressive manliness related to fears of women, Gay ties the themes of this book to his two early studies. Next he recounts the expression of hatred in politics and its relation to a new kind of leader: a leader who hates others well. Then he explores pathological forms of aggression, from the harsh prison disciplines of the 19th Century to the practice of caning children in schools. In five large chapters, almost books in themselves, Gay looks first at the alibis for aggression contrived in the 19th Century, the stories of survival of the fittest or personal manliness people told to legitimate their aggressions. This picture of boys scarring one another with swords, their wounds purposely roughly sutured so that throughout their lives the scars will show as badges of honor, tells us at once that the word hatred in the book’s title covers a wide range of aggressive and violent experiences, not just the desire to kill an enemy. The book opens with a short portrait of what Gay sees as an emblem for 19th-Century experiences of violent aggression: the dueling club. Gay’s history ranges from the development of dueling clubs in Germany to aggressive political rhetoric in the Dreyfus Affair, from the compulsive ferocity of President Theodore Roosevelt to the crafty brutality of the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, from the distortion of Darwin’s notion of the survival of the fittest to the construction of dangerous “Others”-Jews, homosexuals, Indians-in order to justify Victorian desires to hate.

This new book concerns the opposite side of the coin: hatred. Gay has done so in three volumes which began, in 1984, with a study of Victorian sensuality two years later Gay published a book on the ways of love in the 19th Century. While we may have envisioned them as living in the soft-focus gentility of a Merchant-Ivory film, the Yale historian has shown them to have been far more open to erotic and violent experience.

During the last decade Peter Gay has given us an entirely new picture of our great-grandparents.

The cultivation of hatred the bourgeois experience victoria to freud