Review by Choice Review
Only Peter Gay (emer., history, Yale) could have written this sparkling study of the bourgeoisie of 19th-century Europe. Gay calls it "the biography of a class," which it is, although given the influence of Sigmund Freud, there are moments when it reads as if it were the psychoanalysis of the bourgeoisie. Consider the beginning of the book: it opens with a moment in the adolescence of Arthur Schnitzler, when Schnitzler's father reads his son's diary and learns about--and severely censures--Schnitzler's early sexual adventures. Gay goes on to develop a general essay on love and privacy, to say nothing of aggression and sublimation, in the Victorian era. There are many magnificent passages, including those in which Gay considers the patronage the middle class gave to the arts (and the support many offered to artists who were implacably hostile to bourgeois values), or the remarkable indifference of most members of the middle class to those who had the misfortune to be, say, workers or indigenous peoples in remote colonies. All in all, this is a brilliant synthesis of Gay's work over his long and productive career, one that general readers and scholars alike will treasure for many decades to come. S. Bailey Knox College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
For four decades, National Book Award-winning historian Gay has been astounding the historical community with his enlightening works. Now he turns the tide on the Victorian era and demonstrates it to be the virtual opposite of that century's reputation. Gay would basically relegate Queen Victoria to the historical back burner and replace her with the sexually audacious Viennese playwright, Arthur Schnitzler, whom Gay feels more perfectly represents a century sowing the many changes that would sprout fully grown in the more obvious age of the masses, the twentieth century. Gay's depiction of Schnitzler--who collected women like trophies and actually kept a lifetime notebook annotating the number of his orgasms with each lover--symbolizes a middle-class populace in countries all over the Western world that was beginning to experiment and give full rein to their sexuality, in opposition to the repression that the term Victorian conjures up. Gay also demonstrates how, in many other areas--child rearing, scientific exploration, and the explosion of modernist art--the Victorian age was somewhat removed from conventionality. This is sure to be an attention-grabber and a candidate for the year's book awards. --Allen Weakland
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Nov. 12) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
For Gay, celebrated historian of the 19th century, it is not Queen Victoria but Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler who truly sums up the era. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
From distinguished social historian Gay (Pleasure Wars, 1998, etc.), an unusually vivid account of the development of bourgeois mores during the 19th century, filtered somewhat eccentrically through the life and experiences of Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler. If any Americans know Schnitzler, it's as the author of La Ronde, the serial copulation play that (in its English-language incarnation, The Blue Room) propelled Nicole Kidman's buttocks to the heights of Broadway fame. It's not the worst introduction, either, for the author makes it clear that Schnitzler was obsessed with sex in both his life and his art. The son of an eminent Jewish physician, he grew up enjoying all the benefits of religious emancipation and was thoroughly integrated into the mainstream of Viennese intellectual life. Although he trained and eventually practiced as a physician himself, Schnitzler was bored with medicine from the start and devoted most of his energies to the theater and to women. He was a precocious success at both. Gay sees the playwright as an archetype of the era-secular, rational, simultaneously self-confident and self-conscious-and he tries to connect incidents in Schnitzler's life to the broader movements in Victorian society at large. Thus, the young playwright's humiliation at having his diary (with its scrupulous accounting of his sexual conquests) discovered by his father stands as a metaphor of the newfound sexual ambivalence of the era: The 19th-century bourgeoisie, having lost a religious conception of sexuality, was unsure how to approach the subject. Although Gay's sketch of the broad movements of the period (science vs. religion, capital vs. labor, etc.) is quite familiar by now, he manages to shade the portrait wonderfully, and his use of Schnitzler as an exemplar of his times humanizes the history marvelously. A splendid, if idiosyncratic, portrait.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
