|
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 can 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 Victoria 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 makes us largely what we are today.
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.
|
