Synopses & Reviews
A seminal and provocative work of history,
Schnitzler's Century reassesses nineteenth-century culture and traces the dramatic rise of the middle class.
We have always believed that Queen Victoria defined the mores of the nineteenth century. Yet Peter Gay, one of our most eminent cultural historians, asserts in this radical work that it is the sexually emboldened Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931), the most influential Austrian writer of his time, who provides a better symbol for the age.
Why Schnitzler? Although he was hardly the archetypal bourgeois citizen of his cultured society, Schnitzler was, as Gay comments in his preface, "endowed with qualities that make him a credible and resourceful witness to the middle-class world," whose emergence Gay so dramatically chronicles. Thus, Schnitzler becomes "a kind of master of ceremonies," an historical figure whose problematic parental relationship, sexual obsessions, much-catalogued romances, and troubling neuroses serve as the impetus to broader investigations of nineteenth-century history.
In a set of nine closely linked chapters, each focusing on major topics of bourgeois life, Gay synthesizes three decades of far-ranging research, presenting a lucid reinterpretation of the nineteenth-century middle class its passions, politics, religion, and anxieties that we only think we know well. Extending his examination back to 1815, at the close of the age of Napoleon, Gay chronicles a hundred-year period that witnessed not only the emergence of the middle class but also the birth of a culture that remains vital today. Throughout Schnitzler's Century, he does justice to the complexity of the era, showing that there was superstition as well as science, cruelty as well as humanity, anxiety as well as Eros. But digging deep into bourgeois life all the way from Philadelphia to Moscow, London to Rome, he has recognized a general Victorian style through the Western world, however colored each country was by characteristic local habits.
In denying that hypocrisy among men and frigidity among women were Victorian signatures, Gay argues persuasively that "we will have to rewrite the accepted history of Eros in the Victorian bourgeoisie to make it more lifelike, and in gratifying ways far less desolate than we have been led to believe." In addition to offering a fundamental reworking of our understanding of nineteenth-century sexuality, he finds the same need for revision to explain other significant expressions of the middle-class mind: its nervous preoccupation with masturbation, its surprising sympathy with Modernist art, its complicated approaches to religion and Darwin, its unprecedented obsession with privacy.
Schnitzler's Century is not revision for its own sake, but for the sake of the truth about the past. With the daring, Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler as his companion, Gay provides startling perspectives on once-familiar subjects. Written with remarkable elegance, Schnitzler's Century provides astonishing insights into an age that made us largely what we are today.
Review
"For four decades, National Book Award-winning historian Gay has been astounding the historical community with his enlightening works. Now he turns the tide on the Victorian era and demonstrates it to be the virtual opposite of that century's reputation....Gay's depiction of Schnitzler who collected women like trophies and actually kept a lifetime notebook annotating the number of his orgasms with each lover symbolizes a middle-class populace in countries all over the Western world that was beginning to experiment and give full rein to their sexuality, in opposition to the repression that the term Victorian conjures up. Gay also demonstrates how, in many other areas child rearing, scientific exploration, and the explosion of modernist art the Victorian age was somewhat removed from conventionality. This is sure to be an attention-grabber and a candidate for the year's book awards." Booklist (starred review)
Review
"Though distinguished historian Gay declares in the preface that his new work is not 'merely a Reader's Digest condensation of the bulky texts that preceded it,' readers of his five-volume study, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, will find most of the material decidedly familiar....As is always the case with Gay, the prose is graceful, the insights solid, the specific examples vivid and illuminating. Fellow historians and longtime readers will feel (correctly) that the author really isn't saying anything he hasn't said before; for those who lack the stamina for The Bourgeois Experience, this is an agreeable one-volume summary with some additional nuance." Publishers Weekly
Review
"I can't remember the last time I had such fun and learned so much from any work of history or nonfiction." David Nasaw, author of The Chief
About the Author
Peter Gay is Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and, since 1997, director of the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Among his many books are Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988), which has been translated into nine languages, and The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (1966-69), of which the first volume won the National Book Award. A prolific cultural historian, Gay lives in Hamden, Connecticut, and New York City.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations xi
Preface xix
Overture xxvii
Part I Fundamentals
1 Bourgeoisie(s) 3
2 Home, Bittersweet Home 35
Part II Drives and Defenses
3 Eros: Rapture and Symptom 63
4 Alibis for Aggression 97
5 Grounds for Anxiety 129
Part III The Victorian Mind
6 Obituaries and Revivals 157
7 The Problematic Gospel of Work 191
8 Matters of Taste 221
9 A Room of One's Own 253
Coda 281
Notes 291
Bibliography 315
Acknowledgments 317
Index 321