"The Culture of Love" interprets the sweeping change in loving that
spanned a period when scientific discoveries reduced the terrors
and dangers of sex, when new laws gave married women control over
their earnings and their bodies, when bold novelists and artists
shook off the prudishness and hypocrisy that so paralyzed the
Victorians. As public opinion, family pressure, and religious
conviction loosened, men and women took charge of their love.
Stephen Kern argues that, in contrast to modern sex, Victorian sex
was anatomically constricted, spatially confined, morally suspect,
deadly serious, and abruptly over.
Kern divides love into its elements and traces profound changes
in each: from waiting for love to ending it. Most revealing are the
daring ways moderns began to talk about their current lovemaking as
well as past lovers. While Victorians viewed jealousy as a "foreign
devil," moderns began to acknowledge responsibility for it. Desire
lost its close tie with mortal sin and became the engine of
artistic creation; women's response to the marriage proposal
shifted from mere consent to active choice. There were even new
possibilities of kissing, beyond the sudden, blind, disembodied,
and censored Victorian meeting of lips.
Kern's evidence is mainly literature and art, including classic
novels by the Brontes, Flaubert, Hugo, Eliot, Hardy, Forster,
Colette, Proust, Mann, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Hemingway,
Fitzgerald, and Musil as well as the paintings and sculptures of
Millais, Courbet, Gerome, Rodin, Munch, Klimt, Schiele, Valadon,
Chagall, Kandinsky, Kokoschka, Picasso, Matisse, and Brancusi. The
book's conceptual foundation comes from Heidegger's existential
philosophy, inparticular his authentic-inauthentic distinction,
which Kern adapts to make his overall interpretation and concluding
affirmation of the value of authenticity: "The moderns may have
lost some of the Victorians' delicacy and poignancy, perhaps even
some of their heroism, but in exchange became more reflective of
what it means to be a human being in love and hence better able to
make that loving more their very own."
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