Peter Gay

Schnitzler's Century

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.