Männlichkeit und Melodram: Arthur Schnitzlers erzählende Schriften by Imke Meyer (review)

The following experiment will tell readers more about the quality of Imke Meyer’s latest book on Schnitzler than anything this review can say: reread a favorite fictional or dramatic work by Schnitzler, read the extensive introductory chapter to this book, and then see if your insights into the primary work are not deepened and your focus intensified. Because Schnitzler is even today misunderstood as the naive, unreflecting chronicler of mores in Vienna, one constantly hears it said that there is nothing more to say about him. But careful scholarship and criticism over the past few decades, scrupulously reviewed and deftly requisitioned by Meyer, proves that Schnitzler’s achievement has still not been fully mapped. By focusing on men in Schnitzler’s fiction and showing how their individual psychological constitutions developed in accordance with social and literary conventions of melodrama, Meyer has illuminated dynamics of behavior with outstanding clarity in this strong contribution to Schnitzler studies.

As Meyer shows in her masterful review of history (30–42), the genre of melodrama arose among middle-class readers and audiences as a reaction to the tensions caused by the failure of the rational Enlightenment to fulfill its political and social promises. Persecution and moral corruption victimized women, who then reacted with excess emotion and built whole gender identities arising from hysteria, a male invention. But it has long since been established that male hysteria is just as prevalent, and Meyer shifts the emphasis of melodramatic conventions (overemotionalism, victim status, self-pity, helplessness) to the male. Schnitzler began writing at just the time when liberal politics in Austria-Hungary had failed, when the empire was clearly beginning to lose power and meaning; the response of the middle class was to exaggerate and rigidify further those aspects of gender identity that were meant to counter decline. Men were meant to be unemotional, tough, logical, and cool, no matter what they really felt, so they had to become complicit in society’s expectations if they were not to deteriorate into the dreaded other—the weakling, the homosexual, the Jew. Those pressures to uphold gender conventions in turn victimized men and drove them into the hysteria of having to repress anything that did not conform to the stereotype. And Meyer is especially astute in pointing out that the more obsessively men guarded the false facade of male identity, the weaker they became, thus helping accelerate the very decline their “manly” ways were meant to arrest: “Der Selbstmord männlicher Protagonisten, mit dem so viele von Schnitzlers Erzählungen enden, kann, wie so häufig in melodramatisch gefärbten Texten, verstanden werden als Verurteilung der Lebensweise, zu der die Moderne die Figuren verdammt” (40). A good summation and a good example of Meyer’s logical and elegant writing.

The best approach to this book is to read the “Schlussbetrachtung” (177–79), titled “Schnitzlers Melodramen der Männlichkeit und die Tragik des bürgerlichen Subjekts,” as a general summary of Meyer’s method and approach. Then read the lengthy introduction (11–44), which sets a fuller context by tracing the interwoven aspects of masculinity, melodrama, and social pressures on the Viennese middle class around 1900 through two other representative fictional works, Hofmannsthal’s “Das Märchen von der 672. Nacht” and Leopold von Andrian‘s Der Garten der Erkenntnis. Meyer persuasively shows the psychological and structural elements of melodrama both where we would not expect to find them and as applied to male figures, since melodrama was traditionally “weiblich geprägt” (36).

Over the next three chapters, Meyer purposely chooses works less often considered, not only because they fit the configuration of melodrama so well (after all, the whole body of Schnitzler’s fiction does) but also to advance the argument that her chosen pieces are of equal quality with better-known ones. The first chapter after the introduction is “Die ewigen Augen: Die Krise des männlichen Blicks in ‘Die Fremde’” (45–74), the second “Schwarze Gedanken: Das Melodram...