Tales of the Vienna streets
Jane Ridley
SCHNITZLER'S CENTURY: THE MAKING OF MIDDLE-CLASS CULTURE, 1815-1914 by Peter Gay Allen Lane, £20, pp. 334, ISBN 0713994487 n 18 March 1879 a 16-year-old Viennese schoolboy made an entry in his journal: 'A diary is found, of course the most recent one (about Emilie). Big scenes with my father.' The boy was Arthur Schnitzler, later to become Vienna's most celebrated playwright, and his diary contained a detailed record of his precocious sexual adventures, The father, an eminent throat specialist and university professor, summoned the boy to his study and gave him a furious dressing-down, frightening him with repellent medical illustrations of syphilis. The son was outraged. He never forgave his father for ransacking his desk and unlocking his secret drawer. In his diaries, he continued to chronicle a sex life as predatory and callous as it was promiscuous. Meanwhile, he made a half-hearted attempt to join his father as a doctor. Only after his father's death did he rebel and abandon medicine, quickly becoming famous for his plays.
In Schnitzler's Century, Peter Gay uses Schnitzler's story to map the mind of the Victorian middle class, ranging widely over topics which move from sex (plenty of that) to anxiety, taste, work and privacy. The lee ture Schnitzler received from his father points up the late Victorian panic about syphilis, itself the symptom of a wider Victorian anxiety and nervousness, which Freud diagnosed as a consequence of sexual repression. The boy Schnitzler was infuriated because his father had burgled his desk, invading the privacy which was a fetish of bourgeois life.
The Schnitzlers were a family of well-todo Viennese bourgeois, and they fit neatly into the paradigm which Freud described and analysed. Old man Schnitzler is an archetypal authority figure and the mother is conspicuous by her absence from the son's record — evidence, according to Gay, of the classic Oedipal triangle. The young Schniztler kept obsessive tallies of his sexual conquests. According to Freudian interpretation, Schnitzler's heroic sexual athleticism masked homoerotic impulses, which he felt a need to deny. Though himself urgently promiscuous, Schnitzler wanted all his women to be virgins. The cult of (female) virginity, explains Gay, was an integral part of the Victorian sexual double standard. Yet in spite of his contempt for women, Schnitzler savagely satirised the double standard in his plays.
Peter Gay is the Grand Old Man of Victorian cultural history. The massive fivevolume survey of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud which he published in 1984-98 was a brilliant, ambitious piece of cultural revisionism. Gay is an authority on Freud (amongst many other things, including Marx, the Enlightenment and the Weimar Republic), and his breakthrough was to use Freud to explore the family dynamics and sexuality of the Victorians. He realised that the key to understanding the bourgeoisie was the 19th-centurycult of domesticity and the family — the domestic paradigm which was the vital background to Freud's ideas. Citing the erotic diaries of women such as the sexually rapacious and insatiable Mavis Loomis Todd, Gay exploded once and for all the myth that all Victorian wives were frigid doormats who gritted their teeth as they closed their eyes and thought of England.
In Schnitzler's Century, Gay revisits the territory he charted in The Bourgeois Experience, taking Schnitzler as his guide and synthesising the original five volumes into a manageable singleton. In place of the repressed, straight-laced and joyless Victorians of legend, Gay shows a class of fulfilled and civilised human beings. And what is truly impressive is that Gay is able to write a cross-national history of an entire class, stretching from Austria to the United States.
Schniztler's Century is the work of an emeritus. It's stylish and elegant but less closely engaged and densely written than the earlier books. If there are few surprises here, that's because so much of Peter Gay's pioneering work has become the basis of a new orthodoxy. He really has changed the way we think about the Victorians.
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