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Schnitzler's Century: The Making of Middle-Class Culture, 1815-1914, by Peter Gay
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An audacious work, Schnitzler's Century reassesses nineteenth-century history and traces the dramatic rise of the middle class. We have always believed that corseted Queen Victoria defined the mores of the nineteenth century. Yet Peter Gay asserts in this provocative, seminal work that it is the sexually emboldened Viennese playwright, Arthur Schnitzler, who provides a better symbol for the age. Challenging many sacrosanct notions about middle-class prudery and hypocrisy, he shows that in important ways, the Victorians were not Victorians. Gay chronicles the rise of modernity in countries as diverse as Germany and Italy, England and the United States, and in doing so presents a century filled with science and superstition, revolutionaries and reactionaries, eros and anxiety—in short, an age of contradiction rendered remarkably clear by one of our most eloquent historians. Not since Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror has a century been brought alive as dramatically. Schnitzler's Century is nothing less than a tour de force, a work that tells us with remarkable lucidity how we came to be the way we are. 13 b/w illustrations.
- Sales Rank: #714757 in Books
- Published on: 2001-11
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.30" h x 6.64" w x 9.54" l, 1.50 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 366 pages
Amazon.com Review
Prolific author Peter Gay describes the rise of the middle class in the 19th century through an unexpected lens: the life of Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler. Yet Gay's themes are much larger than the somewhat obscure Schnitzler: "If we may call [my book] a biography at all, it is one of a class," he writes. Schnitzler's Century necessarily focuses on the Victorians--a term often applied only to the British, but here extended to all of Europe and the United States--and Gay seeks to portray them in their complexity and diversity. "There are many people who think they have grasped the Victorian mentality when they have smiled at gushy keepsakes, maudlin poems, shy euphemisms, silences about matters that matter," he writes. In fact, "they lived with their eyes open." Gay has written a history of habits, with close attention paid to sexual ones. It is the sort of provocative book that the stereotypical Victorian would want to see removed from the storefront window--but also would want to peek at when nobody else was looking. --John Miller
From Publishers Weekly
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 in the series' first book, Education of the Senses, he argues here that the Victorian middle classes were much less inhibited about sex than modern stereotypes suggest. As in the last, Pleasure Wars, he finds that bourgeois philistinism has been vastly overstated and that there were plenty of respectable patrons for avant-garde art and music. Indeed, as Gay admits, some of the actual examples here are drawn from his former work. So what's new? Interweaving incidents from the life of Austrian playwright and novelist Arthur Schnitzler, "sometimes briefly as an impetus to broader investigations, sometimes as a participant," Gay begins his main text with Schnitzler's father breaking into the 16-year-old's locked desk to find, and vehemently reproach Arthur for, a diary indiscreetly recording the boy's erotic exploits; he closes with the diary's August 5, 1914, entry about the "dreadful and monstrous news" of WWI's outbreak. In between, the incident with Schnitzler's diary turns up several more times: as a demonstration of conflicted bourgeois notions about privacy, as an illustration of more lenient treatment of children (Dr. Schnitzler lectured his son, but didn't beat him). 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. Illus.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
The author of The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, Freud: A Life for Our Time, and many other works, Gay takes a fresh look at the 19th century and challenges long-held assumptions about the Victorian age. In this sweeping and provocative survey, Gay uses Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler as his guide to exploring the erotic and unconventional currents of bourgeois life in Europe and the United States. He weaves together strands of philosophy, psychology, literature, science, religion, and domestic practices, and the narrative frequently spins off into unexpected territory. For example, Gay offers a delightful discourse on Victorian anxiety, its causes, and its cures. The book can be seen as a distillation of and companion to Gay's five-volume series, "The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud," but it clearly stands alone as a vital contribution to modern history. Recommended for academic libraries.
- Thomas A. Karel, Franklin & Marshall Coll. Lib, Lancaster, PA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Draining His Coffers Dry...
By Nowhere Man
"Schnitzler's Century" is an engagingly written guided tour of the mental worlds of the late-nineteenth century European classes. As traced out over five previous volumes by the historian Peter Gay (b. 1923), the book argues that us Moderns have completely misunderstood our Victorian predecessors: they were neither as repressed nor as religious nor, frankly, as dull as their historical reputations have led us to believe. "Schnitzler's Century," despite Gay's claims in his introduction, is essentially a synthesis and considerable condensation of his five-volume work and, while making slight adjustments for then-recent scholarship (the book came out in 2002), tells fundamentally the same story. Gay, who also wrote a masterly biography of Freud, is at his most animated when discussing how much more varied and open were Victorian sexual habits than previously thought - it even creeps into chapters that address such other subjects as violence and anxiety. Other chapters really describe facets of nineteenth-century life that have, by now, been well integrated into common historical understanding: we know a lot more about home life and middle-class patronage of the arts, for example, than was appreciated when Gay started his project on the European bourgeoisie in the 1970s.
So, the book's a bit old hat. To rework his favorite anecdote, his coffers are draining dry - the narrative flows alright but the book lacks a lot of interpretative juice. Even more, in my view, he shortchanges his eponymous subject, the Austrian writer, Arthur Schnitzler. He doesn't particularly delve into Schnitzler's life and, especially, his work in any great detail and, more annoyingly, tries to read an excessive amount of significance into a fairly minor event in his life. Indeed, one gets the uncomfortable feeling - especially from an historian of Gay's stature (with many masterpieces to his credit, one must add) - that the Schnitzler angle was incorporated to make the book marketable (there was a brief Schnitzler vogue at the beginning of the 2000s). As a way of introducing the broad array of middle-class attitudes, Schnitzler's life doesn't always fit his schema particularly well - except, of course, in the matter of sex, sex, sex. So one finishes not convinced that the nineteenth-century was "Schnitzler's Century"; if anything, Schnitzler's writings, I'd argue, pointed toward the twentieth. While the Victorians were certainly much more complicated than their historical reputation, Schnitzler and Freud were charting exciting and frightening new territories in the unconsciousness, not validating the prejudices of the older generations.
The book is certainly worthwhile if you have a passing interest in the European middle-classes at their moment of greatest cultural influence and his anecdotes are often revealing and witty. He does amass a large cast of interesting characters. But it's also the work of a historian with precious little left to prove and the experience of reading "Schnitzler's Century" is a lot like hearing your beloved great uncle regale you with stories of the olden days. It's an enjoyable collection of people and stories - a nice popular history - but you're not likely to remember much of it afterward.
21 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
Biography as History, History as Biography
By Doug Anderson
Peter Gay's choice of Arthur Schnitlzer is an interesting one. After all when we think of Victorian literary figures we usually think of the essayists Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold; poets Tennyson and Browning; and novelist Dickens. "Schnitlzer" is not a name that readily comes to mind to most readers when speaking of the Victorians. He wrote plays and stories and novels which are rarely read today but Gay is not really interested in taking a measure of Schnitzlers literary achievements. What interests Gay about the Viennese author is not his official output but his private output as Schnitlzer kept extensive diaries. For Gay these diaires offer a glimpse into the private life of the Victorian. Gay quotes liberally from Schnitzlers diaries because after all its the unofficial history of the Victorians that Gay is really interested in. We are all familiar with the public record of the time and the cliches about the Victorian mind set but Gay wants to peel back those cliches and have a look at the Victorian with his gaurd down -- he wants to tell us what the middle-class Victorians really thought and how they really behaved. The diary gives Gay access to the private mind and conscience behind the Victorian facade. One of Gay's points is that there is no typical "Victorian" really and that the much disparaged middle-class is really a much more diversified and conflicted group than many historians would lead you to believe. Schnitzler is not exactly a representative Victorian. In many ways he is a figure (roughly contemporary with Freud) who tells us more about the century to come than the one he was born into. Like Freud he is concerned less with the general goings-on within society than he is with the goings-on within his own and his characters minds -- their hidden motivations etc.....
Schnitzler's mind appeals to Gay because Gay himself is a Freudian and his history is an attempt to reveal the hidden motivations(anxieties , fears, aggressions, desires) driving the age. Gay is a consummate historian however and he never lets his Freudian interests lead him into speculative corners -- he supports every point with lively data and convincingly shows us that the Victorians are a largely misunderstood people. We assume they were overly shy about sex but Gay gathers plenty of evidence to counter this assumption. Schnitlzer himself seems to have thought of little else as he moved from one conquest to another. Whether we are to assume that Schnitzler is a typical Victorian or not seems to be beside the point because what Gay wants us to see is that any generalization that we make about the Victorians will quickly be undone by evidence to the contrary. This is not a "biography" of Schnitzler and it is not a typical "history" of the Victorians or middle-class. Rather this is an interdisciplinary work which blends biography and history. Schnitzler's Century uses one discipline to challenge the other and in so doing offers fresh insight into both.
In addition to "sex" two other topics are given extensive consideration: the "gospel" of work, and religion.
A rewarding work.
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
Victorians Unmasked
By lvkleydorff
The title is misleading: Schnitzler lived from 1861 to 1931; The book covers the period from 1815 to 1914. The author uses the life of Schnitzler as a hook on which to hang his tales of the Victorian bourgeoisie.
Mr. Gay discusses the moral atmosphere during the 19th century and shows us that the bourgeoisie was not as constipated as they are claimed to be. Next he discusses the Victorian family, their religious habits as well as their culture and work. Shaping the century is the fact that it was relatively free of wars and thus gave people a chance to better themselves in peaceful times. But probably the most important factor was the arrival of the industrial age. The railroads not only created riches for some bourgeois, but enabled the speedy transport of goods, just as the telegraph cut down on the transmittal time of news. Especially the second half of the 19th century was a time of upheaval, with people trying to find their place in a rapidly changing environment. This continued long into the 20thh century before it settled down to a more comfortable pace.
Mr. Gay had previously written a five-volume explanation of the bourgeois experience in the 19th century. I must assume that his research for such a massive undertaking served as the basis of the present book. Unfortunately, too many authors recycle their leftover research. That is definitely not the case here. The writing is fresh and of new interest.
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