SOURCE: "'Woman-Defender' and 'Woman-Offender', Peter Altenberg and Otto Weininger: Two Literary Stances vis-à-vis Bourgeois Culture in the Viennese 'Belle Epoque'," in Modern Austrian Literature, Vol. 20, No. 2, 1987, pp. 51-69.

In the following essay, Schoenberg discusses the social and psychic implications of the paradoxical images of women in late-nineteenth-century Viennese bourgeois culture and the contrasting viewpoints of Weininger and Peter Altenberg.

During the second half of the nineteenth century the "femme bourgeoise," a central figure in much of eighteenth-century drama, claims her place in narrative fiction as well. In order to illustrate the widespread manifestation of and interest in this type of woman one need only recall a few of the narrative masterpieces of latter nineteenth-century European fiction such as Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857), Tolstoi's Anna Karenina (1887), and Fontane's Effi Briest (1895). These works not only served to highlight the "femme bourgeoise" but, more importantly, enabled their authors to express some...