The Bourgeois Experience

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The fifth and final volume in his acclaimed series, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, revises our understanding of Victorian high culture and the birth of modernism. In Gay's analysis, "bourgeoisphobes" like Flaubert, Marx, William Morris and Balzac nurtured the myth of a uniformly materialistic Victorian middle classa colorless lot with no inkling of the inner life. A corollary of this partisan myth, asserts the author, is that avant-garde artists fought a dominant, conventional bourgeoisie. On the contrary, argues Gay, who keeps psychoanalytic theory to a minimum in this volume, Victorian middle-class taste, though generally cautious and conservative, often embraced the innovative and experimental; the bourgeois canons detested by artistic rebels were not immutablein fact, the avant-garde survived by changing the taste of the paying public. Gay focuses on the pivotal role of the bourgeois dealers, patrons, critics and collectors who, far from forswearing the unconventional, championed modernist taste. Urban angst, patronage and democratization of culture, he finds, made possible the explosion of modernist styles that led to Rimbaud, Kandinsky, Picasso and Debussy. Gay's magisterial survey challenges and enlightens.

Library Journal

The final installment of Gay's multivolume study of the 19th-century bourgeois experience (e.g., Naked Heart: The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud, LJ 10/1/95) is a welcome addition to the literature. Current historical stereotypes of the bourgeois are rather flat, regarding them as either extremely confident or extremely insecure, depending on which authority is consulted. Gay's work systematically attempts to determine which is correct through an examination of their attitudes toward art, literature, and the concept we know as modernity. Throughout, Gay maintains that to view the bourgeoisie as stiff-necked and incapable of genuine affection or the enjoyment of pleasure is dangerously simplistic. In fact, the bourgeois experience was multidimensional, as were the bourgeois themselves. They were a revolutionary force, notes the author, whether they engaged in reactionary or modern crusades, and their ideas shaped the 20th century. An insightful and challenging book; recommended for general and specialized libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/97.]Frederic Krome, Northern Kentucky Univ., Highland Heights

NY Times Book Review

The final volume concerning art and the avant-garde of an immense, imaginative, tireless study of the much-abused class that invented everything liberal intellectuals cherish about modern civilization.