In recent years, Peter N. Stearns has established himself as the
foremost historian of American emotional life. In books on anger,
jealousy, coolness, and body image, he has mapped out the basic terrain
of the American psyche.
Now Stearns crowns his work of the past decade with this powerful
volume, in which he reveals the fundamental dichotomy at the heart of
the national character: a self-indulgent hedonism and the famed American
informality on the one hand, and a deeply imbedded repressiveness on the
other.
Whether hunting and gathering tribe or complex industrial civilization,
every social group is governed by explicit and implicit guidelines on
how to behave. But these definitions vary widely. The Japanese worry
less about public drunkenness than Americans. Northern Europeans adhere
to stricter standards than Americans when it comes to littering. Today,
we swear more now and spit less, discuss sex more and death less.
With an emphasis on sex, culture, and discipline of the body, Stearns
traces how particular anxieties take root, and how they express inherent
tension in contemporary standards and a stubborn nostalgia for the
previous nineteenth century regime.
Battleground of Desire explodes common wisdom about Americans in the
twentieth century as normless and tolerant, emphasizing that most of us
follow a litany of rules, governing everything from adultery to bad
breath.
