Gender and the City: Schnitzler’s Vienna around 1900

Abstract

At first glance, Arthur Schnitzler’s narratives Die Toten schweigen and Lieutenant Gustl seem to be rather different from each other, both with regard to their respective sujets and with regard to form. Die Toten schweigen relates the horrific end of an illicit affair between a married bourgeois woman and a young man from her social circles. Lieutenant Gustl opens a window onto the emotional turmoil that engulfs a young lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian army who fears that an insult he experienced has taken away his honor. The story of Die Toten schweigen is related to us by a third-person figural narrator who at various points utilizes both of the text’s main characters, Franz and Emma, as reflector figures.1 Lieutenant Gustl, by contrast, does away with the agency of a narrator and introduces to German-language literature the radically new concept of the Monolognovelle, a narrative presented in interior monologue, and entirely from the perspective of its central character.2 And yet, for all their differences, the two texts also share certain characteristics. They were published in fairly close chronological proximity to each other—in 1897 (Die Toten schweigen) and 1900 (Lieutenant Gustl), respectively. Moreover, both texts represent characters who move through the cityscape of Vienna while they live through personal crises. Thus, as Schnitzler allows his readers to access the inner lives of the characters at the centers of his stories, his narratives capture images of Vienna as a conflicted imperial city suspended between its past and the threshold of modernity.3 Most strikingly, though, the mapping of the topography of figural consciousness onto the chronotopography of Vienna4 makes plain that Schnitzler’s texts render the experience of urban spaces as distinctly marked by gender. On the following pages, then, I want to elucidate what I believe to be a particular kinship between Die Toten schweigen and Lieutenant Gustl, namely the representation of a gendered experience of the imperial city that was Vienna as the 19th century drew to a close.