Zweig: Marie Antoinette
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While it seems that the group as a whole is focusing on Zweig's fiction works, when I searched my local library for Zweig, I found more nonfiction than fiction. As it turns out, in addition to everything else that Zweig does so brilliantly, he also wrote several biographies, including one about Marie Antoinette called Marie Antoinette: the portrait of an average woman. It isn't a biography in the Antonia Fraser sense of the word (although I did like her bio of Marie Antoinette as well). It is more of a psychological study of Marie Antoinette, Louis, and the rest of the aristocracy, and particularly of the events and character flaws and other reasons that led to the downfall of the French monarchy.
A couple thoughts:
1) Zweig writes beautifully. Even nonfiction. It's great.
2) Zweig is quite the little Freudian (which makes sense, given his time period and friendship w/ Freud). He puts a not insignificant amount of blame for the Revolution on poor Louis XVI's "little problem" which resulted in a 7 year unconsummated marriage. Which is, of course, problematic if your main job is to produce an heir. You see, if Louis could get it up and be a man and impregnate his wife, then he'd be more decisive, and not such a spendthrift, and Marie Antoinette wouldn't have been so silly and wasteful and wouldn't have made the people hate them, and also he would have kept his brothers in line, so that he and MA and the kids would have been rescued, etc etc. I'm not sure I agree with that - the Revolution was going to happen, and no amount of sex was going to stop that.
3) Zweig had unrealistic expectations of 14 year old girls. I fully admit that times were different then, but any young, spoiled girl from any time period is going to act like a 14 year old girl. Of course she isn't going to spend all her time studying and learning to rule effective. Only exceptional people behave that way (like Maria Theresa, for example), and Marie Antoinette was an average, albeit fantastically wealthy and privileged, girl of her time (as Zweig says in the title).
A couple thoughts:
1) Zweig writes beautifully. Even nonfiction. It's great.
2) Zweig is quite the little Freudian (which makes sense, given his time period and friendship w/ Freud). He puts a not insignificant amount of blame for the Revolution on poor Louis XVI's "little problem" which resulted in a 7 year unconsummated marriage. Which is, of course, problematic if your main job is to produce an heir. You see, if Louis could get it up and be a man and impregnate his wife, then he'd be more decisive, and not such a spendthrift, and Marie Antoinette wouldn't have been so silly and wasteful and wouldn't have made the people hate them, and also he would have kept his brothers in line, so that he and MA and the kids would have been rescued, etc etc. I'm not sure I agree with that - the Revolution was going to happen, and no amount of sex was going to stop that.
3) Zweig had unrealistic expectations of 14 year old girls. I fully admit that times were different then, but any young, spoiled girl from any time period is going to act like a 14 year old girl. Of course she isn't going to spend all her time studying and learning to rule effective. Only exceptional people behave that way (like Maria Theresa, for example), and Marie Antoinette was an average, albeit fantastically wealthy and privileged, girl of her time (as Zweig says in the title).
