Schnitzler's Century
by Peter Gay
W. W. Norton

"Schnitzler's Century" should be subtitled "Peter Gay's Greatest Hits." One of the country's foremost historians, Gay has spent the last 20 years deconstructing the dominant narratives of the Victorian Era, and "Schnitzler's Century" is his synthesis of the research on 19th-century work, sex, art and religion from his previous four books. But like a compilation album that only gives you reprints of old songs, leaving out B-sides or live tracks, "Schnitzler's Century" fails to turn up anything new.

Gay, a professor emeritus at Yale and the director of the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, made his name in the 1960s as a Young Turk cultural historian, overturning traditional methods by looking at the past from the bottom up — examining things like diaries, letters and court records. His 1968 "Weimar Culture" is still the definitive text on interwar German culture, and his "Freud: A Life for Our Time" is required reading in any course on the father of psychoanalysis. What set Gay apart from other cultural historians was his unique understanding of psychoanalysis as a tool for historical study, tweezing out the subconscious of an era from between the lines of love notes and journal entries.

Gay's argument throughout the course of his work has been that the late 19th-century middle class, far from being the tight-girdled, over-weaned neo-puritans of popular conception, was actually a diverse crowd of lovers and fighters, philosophes and libertines, and that it has been unfairly stereotyped by left-wing radicals and artists looking to epater le bourgeois. In "Schnitzler's Century," Gay uses Arthur Schnitzler, a Vienna playwright and author, as a guide to navigate back through the important elements of his project. And he does more than revisit themes — much of the book is a re-presentation of what he considers his best "finds," the most enlightening journal entries, the most illicit letters (one he is particularly proud of has a wife tell her husband, away on a business trip, that she will "drain his coffers" on his return).

Schnitzler, born into an upper-middle-class family of Jewish doctors (and himself a doctor by training), stands out among late-19th-century denizens for his seemingly bottomless sexual appetite and a list of conquests to rival Don Giovanni's, all of which he recorded in exacting detail. Though Gay returns to Schnitzler throughout the book, he doesn't argue that the author was representative of the middle-class Victorians; rather, Gay says, if Schnitzler's bourgeois peers were even half as lascivious as he was, then the era was a libidinous time indeed.

Gay, however, is a victim of his own success. By constantly revisiting the same core argument, he is beating the dead horse he himself killed with books like "Education of the Senses" and "The Pleasure Wars." Gay attacks his subject with an Ahab-like intensity, a conviction that after 20 years people somehow still disagree with him. The truth, though, like the reality of the Victorian bourgeoisie, is more complex — the general reading public has accepted Gay's work whole hog, and will be turned off by the book's oldie-but-moldie tone, while historians of the era, who have largely moved on to more specific questions of gender and sexuality, will wonder why Gay is still concerned with such a general misconception. (Nor is Gay's use of Schnitzler a novel idea, either — Karl Schorske did the same in his essay "Politics and the Psyche.")

But "Schnitzler's Century" is more than just a frustrating summary of so many parts. It also exhibits many of the problems with cultural history — how can a sampling of letters or diary entries justify sweeping statements about an entire culture? How can anecodotal evidence be considered solid proof of social trends? Ironically, the only reason why this flaw is not more pronounced in "Schnitzler's Century" is that the evidence is fairly staid to begin with. Is it any surprise that some wives wrote somewhat naughty letters to their husbands? Or that some bourgeois, shaken by Darwin, should cast off conventional religion in search of new, more spiritual solutions? No, on both accounts, but neither these instances nor any other prove that Victorian Europe wasn't fraught with sexual and social repression. And because Gay never takes on the sources of bourgeois stereotypes, the tee-heeing journal entries seem like the exceptions that prove the rule; it's hard not to conclude that if this is the best Gay can come up with, maybe there's something to the stereotype, after all.

Which leaves Gay with a rather weak thesis: that a stereotype — in this case that Victorians were, well, Victorian — is wrong, and that historians need to reassess their narrative of the 19th century. Leaving aside the efforts of such scholars as Suzanne Fagence Cooper and John MacKenzie to do just that, the line between thesis and truism is a fine one in the case of "Schnitzler's Century." That a stereotype is false, particularly one that Gay destroyed years ago, seems hardly a point worth fussing about.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)