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On the crowded rack at the local superstore, not far from the cover of a men's magazine showing an extraordinarily beautiful young woman with fetchingly unzipped jeans, and about three feet north of a colorful array of gay magazines, the headline for the cover story from the Nation (Nov. 24, 1997) caught the browser's eye: "THE NEW PURITANISM." (The story, by John Leonard, took off from the failure of the new movie version of Lolita to find an American distributor.) Yeah, those New Puritans are really on the warpath. Who knows where the iron hand of repression will strike next?
It is not news that we live in a show-all, tell-all culture, where one of the year's most talked-about books-an instant best-seller-is a woman's memoir of incest with her father, carried on into her adulthood and recounted in lascivious detail, and where jaded 14-year-olds with a library of videos and cds have already seen and heard everything. Yet even among those of us who are repelled and disheartened by such excesses, there are many who would be loath to return to the conventions of a century ago, if such a return were possible.
How did we get here? That is the subject of Rochelle Gurstein's important book, The Repeal of Reticence: A History of America's Cultural and Legal Struggles over Free Speech, Obscenity, Sexual Liberation, and Modern Art (Hill & Wang), which traces the triumph of the "party of exposure" from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s. For anyone who wants to understand the peculiar logic of our culture, and especially for those who share the conviction that the assault on privacy has had a disastrous impact on the public sphere, Gurstein's meticulously documented study is essential reading.
Michael Cromartie interviewed Gurstein in October 1997 in New York, where she teaches at Bard College's Graduate Center.
In your book you quote Hannah Arendt: "[T]he activity of taste decides how this world is to look and sound, what men will see and what they will hear in it." And then you conclude that "the public sphere has degenerated into a stage for sensational displays of matters people formerly would have considered unfit for public appearance." I liked the two phrases you use to explain how this loss of taste and judgment has occurred: the "party of reticence" and the "party of exposure." Can you define them for us?
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, new agencies of exposure suddenly appeared: invasive journalism, a new kind of fiction that prided itself on its unflinching realism, and a new kind of discussion about intimacy and sex through sex education. I call the people who championed the attitudes underlying these changes-and those who continue to champion such causes today-"the party of exposure." Their opponents are "the party of reticence." Today the latter are likely to be dismissed as "Victorians," the epitome of all that is prudish and backward-looking. What I found instead was that there was a whole rich language that they had developed over many years, and that these new threats to privacy sharpened their self-awareness of beliefs that they had simply taken for granted.
Did these three engines of exposure-invasive mass journalism, the realist novel, and social reformers who promoted sex education-appear at the same time, more or less independently of one another?
Invasive journalism had predecessors before the Civil War, but it took a new kind of journalism-mass-circulation journalism-to develop the institutionalized prying into the lives of the rich and famous that began to flourish in the latter part of the nineteenth century. So, yes, these developments occurred simultaneously, and, yes, they were largely independent of one another. When I was doing my research for this book, I came across them in separate contexts. For the most part, these were three distinct discourses. What was striking to me is that most of the participants in these debates didn't see the connections. And yet all three discourses centered on the question of what sort of things should appear in public.
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