Toward a Twentieth-Century Frame of Mind

The scientists Ernst Mach, Henri Poincare and Hans Vaihinger urged that scientists consider their theories hypothetical constructs of the physical world. Scientists like Wilhelm Roentgen, Henri Becquerel, J.J. Thompson, Marie Curie, and Ernest Rutherford established the important properties and uses of radioactive materials. Albert Einstein researched relativity, and Werner Heisenberg published his uncertainty principle.

In literature, realism and naturalism became dominant themes. Flaubert used realism to portray life without adornment in his Madame Bovary and Zola set forth realism as a movement. Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw brought realism into the depiction of domestic life and romantic ideals.

• From the 1870’s onward, a new movement of modernism was captured in works by artists trying to break away from traditional forms. Igor Stravinsky did this in his Rite of Spring. Pablo Picasso accomplished this in his cubist forms, and members of the Bloomsbury Group accomplished this in literature. Virginia Woolf challenged the structure of traditional literature and the assumptions of Victorian culture.

• Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, and T.S. Eliot were just a few of the important literary modernists of this era.

Modern Art – Impressionism and Post- Impressionism

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) introduced psychoanalysis to the modern period. He became interested in the idea that dreams expressed the repressed desires of everyday life, and he developed a theory of infantile sexuality. Freud’s former student, Carl Jung, advanced his own ideas of collective memories constituting human souls and relied on Romanticism in his own work.

The influential German sociologist Max Weber advanced his belief in non-economic factors that might account for major developments in history and his faith in the role of the individual in society. Weber differed from many of his peers, who considered collected behavior more of a factor in society. These scientists included Emile Durkheim, Georges Sorel, Gustave LeBon, Vilfredo Pareto, and Graham Wallas.

Racial thinking in the century supported the ideas of superior and inferior races (in Europe and beyond) and led to racist ideology. An outgrowth of this ideology was anti-Semitism.

• The biological role of women as mothers became more entrenched in social views of women during this century. Misogyny was not uncommon in the fiction and art of this period.

• Women were excluded from the scientific community, as their alleged “inferiority” made them ineligible for participation. Freud’s views helped perpetuate these ideas, and he was later debunked by distinguished psychoanalysts like Melanie Klein and Karen Horney.

• Feminists of this era supported wider sexual freedom for women, and advocated contraception. Some women became active in Socialist groups; others sought to carve out careers for themselves in professions that had previously been unavailable to them.