Victorian Delights

Thanks to five books by historian Peter Gay, the Victorians don’t have many secrets left.

The retired Yale professor has just published the fifth and final volume of his series

“The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud,” a massive reclamation project that has shed new light on the old view of the Victorian middle class as repressed, closed-minded philistines.

Gay’s cultural history of 19th century middle-class mores began with two startling volumes--”Education of the Senses” (1984) and “The Tender Passion” (1986)--that opened the bedroom door on Victorian sexuality, proving that a good number of our ancestors, especially women, actually enjoyed sex. In Volume 3, “The Cultivation of Hatred” (1993), Gay assessed how well (or poorly) the Victorians harnessed aggression, and in Volume 4, “The Naked Heart” (1995), he uncovered the middle-class interest in self-examination through diaries and intimate letters.

Now, in Volume 5, “Pleasure Wars” (W.W. Norton), Gay again debunks stereotypes, this time revealing many of the bourgeoisie as surprisingly supportive of the avant-garde in the arts.

Gay, 74, who turned his attention to the 19th century in 1971, says he hopes he has “enlarged the canvas” in our thinking about the Victorians. “Simple, derisive generalizations about [the bourgeoisie’s] greed and hypocrisy and cant are part of a big propaganda campaign, which is partly true and partly not,” he says during an interview in the two-tiered library of his home in Hamden, Conn.

Gay’s work about the Victorians has been both praised for its revelations and sometimes challenged for its reliance on the theories of Sigmund Freud.

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Freud is a passion of Gay’s--among his many books is a well-received 1988 biography of the father of psychoanalysis, “Freud: A Life for Our Time” (Norton). During the 1970s, Gay undertook intensive training at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis, and his psychoanalytic background gave him a framework for the “Bourgeois Experience” series.

His Freudian approach to history is “some kind of crazy mixture that reviewers have a lot of trouble with,” he says. Propped next to him on the couch is a Sigmund Freud pillow--a gift from his publisher. “What I found admirable and usable in Freud was his view of the human animal, the emphasis on the drives,” Gay says.

In “Pleasure Wars,” the Freudian influence is fairly subtle. The book is a lively, straightforward account that uses case histories of middle-class patrons who supported the arts in the United States and Europe--and of those who were more ambiguous or hostile toward the new.

At the beginning of the 1970s, Gay had completed two volumes on the Enlightenment (the first of which won the National Book Award) and wanted to move from the 18th century to the 19th. Initially, he planned to write about the artists and writers who led Western culture into modernism.

But as he undertook his research, he discovered an unexpected subject--the neglected and misunderstood middle class. The project crystallized the day his wife, author Ruth Gay, then a Yale archivist, came home with a photocopy of the first page of Mabel Loomis Todd’s diary. Todd, whose lover was Austin Dickinson, Emily Dickinson’s brother, had written of the moment her husband, David Todd, impregnated her.

“It was electrifying, oh, God,” Peter Gay says of reading Todd’s words, which turned his ideas about Victorian sexuality on their head. He went on to discover erotic letters wives sent their soldier husbands during the Civil War, further proving that not all Victorians were prudes. Of course there was sexual dysfunction, among men and women, Gay says, and Victorian society clearly was a patriarchy. But, he muses, “I sometimes have the feeling that they had a better time sexually than we do. I think the excitement [today] has been minimalized by the very availability and casual treatment of [sex].”

Gay writes in the epilogue of “Pleasure Wars” that he finished his five-volume series with a mixture of “relief and regret.”

But the prolific professor has already completed another book, a memoir of his childhood called “My German Question: Growing Up in Hitler’s Berlin,” which Yale University Press will publish, probably in the spring of 1999.

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Gay, an only child, was born in Berlin in 1923, to Jewish parents who had renounced their religion. That made no difference to the Nazis. As Nazi repression of Jews became increasingly violent, Gay’s family made plans to flee Germany, and in 1939 they were allowed to leave, thanks to the efforts of Gay’s uncle, who lived in the United States with his American wife. Gay and his parents spent two years in Cuba and entered the United States in 1941.

Two of Gay’s aunts, his father’s sisters, died in concentration camps.

Asked if he considers himself to be Jewish, Gay says:

“That’s a very hard question. I would say yes if only because no would seem to be like some sort of denial. But I am really as non-Jewish as you can get.”

Once in the United States, Gay pursued an education, attending the University of Denver and getting his doctorate from Columbia, where he taught for two decades. He joined Yale in 1969 and retired in 1993 as Sterling Professor of History Emeritus.

The title of his memoir, “My German Question,” refers to Gay’s difficulties with Germans--”for example, my unwillingness to talk about it or to read German for years and how my attitude very gradually changed.”

Gay’s next literary project is a short life of Mozart, for a Viking Penguin biographical series. And last year he was named founding director of a $15-million humanities center at the New York Public Library. He spends about three days a week in the city.

At home in Hamden the rest of the time, “I’m supposed to do my own work, which I like to do, keep on writing.”