Women in Modern Drama: Freud, Feminism, and European Theater at the Turn of the Century 9781501741890

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WOMEN

IN

MODERN DRAMA

1

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WOMEN

IN

MODERN DRAMA Freud, Feminism, and European Theater at the Turn of the Century

by

Gail Finney

Cornell University Press Ithaca and

London

©

Copyright

1989 by Cornell University

All rights reserved.

Except for brief quotations

in a review, this

book,

or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without

from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, 124 Roberts Place, Ithaca, New York 14850. permission

First

in writing

published 1989 by Cornell University Press.

International Standard

Book Number 0-8014-2284-1

Library of Congress Catalog Card

Number 88-47924

Printed in the United States of America

Librarians: Library of Congress cataloging information

appears on the

The paper

last

page of

in this book

is

the book.

acid-free

and

meets the guidelines for

permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

For

my

grandmother,

Mercedes Camheilh, and

sisters,

Carol Dougherty and

Jill

Lawson

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P- 3 ^sexuality, but focuses ‘’Peter Gay seeks to revise such conceptions of Victorian most part on the United States. As he himself points out, it is impossible for the

rule prove that the sexually uninhibited couples he portrays represent the Bourgeois rather than the exception; Gay, Education of the Senses, vol. I ot The Experience: Victoria to Freud (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984). ^Richard J. Evans, The Feminists: Women's Emancipation Movements in Europe, ^ America, and Australasia, 18^0—1020 (London: Groom Helm, 1977 )> P' 3 England (1845); »The phrase is found in Mrs. Sarah S. Ellis, The Daughters of (BloomVicinus Age, ed. Martha Victorian and Be Still: Women in the to

'

see Suffer

ington: Indiana Univ. Press,

i

972 )>

P-

Introduction 5

with literary criticism or psychological theory, as

will

I

explain

later.

Although the term “feminism” did not appear

in print until

1895, the roots of the feminist movement lie in the eighteenth century, where two main influences can be distinguished: the Enlightenment notion that everyone is equally endowed with

women

reason and that

should therefore have the same rights to education as men, and the emphasis of the bourgeois revolu-

on equality and on individual

tions

rights

and

liberties.-*

The

movement was

further fueled in the nineteenth century by the liberal Protestant belief that individuals are responsible for their

own

salvation, as well as by the rise of the

concomitantly, of an increasing

number of

middle

classes and,

professions that ex-

cluded women. While nineteenth-century feminism officially began in the United States with the first Women’s Rights Convention in earliest

Seneca

Falls,

and most

New

York,

in 1848,

some of the movement’s

influential advocates

were Europeans. Even the briefest treatment of the history of feminism is incomplete, for example, without mention of Mary Wollsionecraft’s star-

tlingly

modern

Vindication of the Rights of

women

attacks the socialization of

into

Woman

pleasing “toys” and

pleads for their right to a serious education;

^Mv

(1792), which

in the

same year

brief survey of old

feminism draws primarily 011 Evans, Feminists; Patricia Women and Fiction: Feminism and the Novel, iSSo-igio (1979: London; Methuen, 1981); Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings, ed. Miriam Sclmeir (New York: Vintage, 1972); and The Feminist Papers: From Adams to Beauvoir, ed. Stubbs,

Alice S. Rc^ssi

(New York: Bantam,

also Olive Banks, Faces of Feminism:

(Oxford: Robertson, 1981); Richard

On

facets of European feminism see Study of Feminism as a Social Movement Evans, The Feminust Movement in (Germany,

1973).

A J.

1894-ig^^ (London: Sage, 197b); Andrew Rosen, Rise Up, Women! The Militant (.ampaign of the Women’s Social and Political Union, igo^—igi^ (London: Routledge 8c Kegan Paul, 1974): Werner Thdnnessen, The Emancipation of Women The Rise and Recline of the Women’s Movement in Herman Social Democracy, iS6^— 19^3, trans. Joris de Bres (London: Pluto, 1973); Herrad Schenk, Die femiHeramforderung: iro Jahre Frauenhewegung in Deutschland, 2d ed. (Munich: Beck, 1981); Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals (1931; London: Virago, 1977); and Ray (Rachel Cl.) nistische

Strachey, 7 he (.ause:

A

Bath: Chivers, 1974).

Short Histoiy of the Women’s

Movement

in

Hreat Britain

( 1

c)28;

Introduction

6

comparable work in Germany, Verbesserung der Weiber (On Improving the Status

Theodor von Hippel published liber die burgerliche

of Women).

a

John Stuart

Similarly,

Mill’s

Subjection of

Women

condi(1869) deplores the fact that women have been socially tioned to live for others and deny themselves, to shut themselves off from productive occupations, and, worst of all, to assent in

own

their

subjection. Often called the “feminist bible,

was soon translated into many languages and served for feminist movements throughout the world.

the essay

as a catalyst

The advances achieved by the women’s movement in the 1960s and ’70s make it easy to forget that many of the goals women have been struggling to attain during the last twenty years had already been fought for during the nineteenth century: the improvement of women’s education at both the sec-

ondary and university

the other professions, the erty

and

to retain

it

women to medicine and right of married women to own prop-

levels, access for

after divorce or separation, equal pay for

equal work, and safe, reliable methods of birth control. Common to all these causes was the goal of equality with men. Al-

though some suffragists believed in innate sexual differences, arguing, for example, that women were uniquely suited to certain careers, their primary goal was nonetheless equal rights for both sexes. Even moral reforms such as the temperance campaign and the battle against prostitution were motivated by a by desire for equality, albeit with female standards as the norm the hope that men would rise to the moral behavior of women.

England and in a number of continental nations, women began in the middle decades of the century to enter established universities, to found Progress was

their

own

made

in

colleges,

many

of these areas. In

and, somewhat

later,

to attend

medical

on equality marks a significant difference between old feminism and certain branches of contemporary feminism, especially in France, where a number of prominent feminist writers emphasize the existence of specifically feminine styles of thinking and writing. See New French Feminisms: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (1980; New York: Schocken, 1981), and works listed in the bibliography under “French Women Writers and I’Ecnture feminine" in Showalter, New Feminist Criticism, pp. 390—392. '“Its stress

Introduction 7

schools; Married

Women’s Property

Acts were passed from the

1870s on. Political

suffrage

reforms came more slowly. the cause, as

it

was called

ed feminist movements worldwide.

It

—

was the issue

that mobilized

of

female

and

unit-

he drive for the vote took on militant and occasionally even violent dimensions. Probably the best-known incident occurred in the early 1900s in England, I

where women suffragists under the leadership of Emmeline Pankhurst were sent to prison because they disrupted political meetings, staged mass marches, and smashed shop windows,

imprisonment beginning a cycle of hunger strikes, forcefeeding, release, and reimprisonment. Inspired by the push for suffrage, European feminism achieved its greatest strength in their

the forty years around the turn of the century and lapsed into a period of hibernation after 1920, since by then the vote had

been granted

women

England and in most of those countries on the Continent where feminist activity had been greatest. The suffragist was not the only figure to whom women’s opto

in

pression in the nineteenth century gave birth.

A

second was the

female hysteric. Hysteria was of course not a new ailment was recognized even in the days of Hippocrates. \'et by all counts, the ically

number

of hysterical

during the Victorian

women

—

it

ac-

patients rose dramat-

d his increase can be seen as the culmination of the wave of female illness that occurred in the last

century, often

era.*

•

reaching alarming proportions.

Barbara

Ehrenreich and Deirdre English document the trend: “In the mid- and late nineteenth century a curious epidemic seemed to be sweeping through the middle- and upper-class female population both in the

United States and England [and, one might

add, other European countries as

well].

Diaries

and journals

—

—

"Charles Beriilieiiner, Introduction to hi Dora's (Mse: Freud Hysteria FemiBernheiiner aiul Claire Kaliane (New ^’ork: Columbia Univ. Press,

nism, eel.

Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Worneu, Madness, and iS^o-igdo (New \'ork: Pantheon, 1985), lor a fascinating discussion of the Victorian association of hysteria and itisanity with women in •9^5)’ P- 5 English Culture, -

})articular.

Introduction

8

from the time give us hundreds

of

examples of

women

slipping

one

into hopeless invalidism.”*'^ Sickness was, quite simply,

of

the few ways to avoid the reproductive and domestic duties so closely bound up with women’s sphere at the time. In the course

of the century doctors came increasingly to believe that women were inherently weak, dependent, and sickly natural patients.

come and go in symptoms ranging from

Hysteria, which tended to

manifest

itself in

and

fits

starts

and

to

shortness of breath,

chronic coughing or sneezing, loss of voice, and eating disorders to temporary paralysis or loss of sensation in various parts of the body, was a more complex issue, since, lacking an organic basis, it

did not respond to medical treatment. Where feminism is rebellious, emancipatory, and

—

in

its

po-

change the world outside— constructive, hysteria is compliant, imprisoning, and self-destructive. Toril Moi s claim with respect to Helene Cixous’s and Catherine Clement’s Jcwnc nee (The Newly Born Woman) is illuminating: “Hysteria is not, pace

tential to

Helene Cixous, the incarnation of the

revolt of

women

forced to

silence but rather a declaration of defeat, the realization that

there

is

no other way

out. Hysteria

perceives, a cry for help

woman

sees that she

is

when

as Catherine

defeat becomes real,

efficiently

feminine role.”*^

is,

Clement

when

gagged and chained

to

the

her

—

hysteria and femifemale oppression nism are successively embodied in Bertha Pappenheim. She is better known as Anna O., the name given to her by the prominent Viennese neurologist Josef Breuer in his case history of his

Both responses

to

—

treatment of her in the early i88os. A highly intelligent girl with an unusually lively imagination, she suffered a hysterical collapse while devoting herself full-time to nursing her tubercular

Years of the and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: i Experts’ Advice to Women (Garden City: Anchor, 1978), p.103. 3 Toril Moi, “Representation of Patriarchy: Sexuality and Epistemology in Freud’s Dora,” in In Dora’s Case, p. 192. As Maria Ramas notes (“Freud’s Dora,

'‘^Barbara Ehrenreich

'

79 ti)» recent feminist discussions of hyselement of compliance.

Dora’s Hysteria,” in In Dora’s Case, p. teria

tend to stress

its

i

Introduction

9

Anna’s hysterical symptoms, which included hallucinations, alternating periods of overexcitement and somnolence, and an inability to speak her native language, were alleviated by what she herself dubbed the “talking cure” or “chimney-sweepfather.

ing,” the process of telling

Brener about her fantasies under selfinduced hypnosis.*^ Breuer then eliminated her symptoms temporarily by hypnotizing her

occasions on which they had

and encouraging her first

to recall the

appeared. Bertha Pappenheirn

Vienna for Germany, where she became the country’s social worker and an active campaigner for women’s rights.

later left first

She sought

to further the feminist cause, for

example, by trans-

lating Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of

Woman

into

German and

by writing a play titled Womens Rights. Consideration of Bertha Pappenheirn as the inventor of the cathartic method of therapy brings us to psychoanalysis, one

male reaction to the hysteria brought on by women’s oppression, for although the founder of psychoanalysis never met Anna O. and learned about her only through his friend and patron Breuer, she was the hysteric

whom

Freud most often named and discussed, and her case was profoundly usef ul to him in his own treatment of hysterics in Vienna after his return from Paris, where he studied hysteria under Charcot in the mid-i88os. Indeed, it was Freud’s clinical experience with female hysterics that gave birth to psychoanalysis, since the cathartic techniques of hypnosis, suggestion, and free association led him to the discovery of the unconscious mind and thus of repression, the cornerstone of the new science.

‘josef Breuer, “Frauleiii Anna in Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria (Studien iiher Hysteue, 1H95), vol. II of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Straciiey et al. (Lon‘

don: Hogarth, 1955), p. 30. (This edition is hereafter cited as SE.) For a {)syclu)analytic feminist reading of Anna’s speech problems wliich discusses in greater depth her complicated relationship with Breuer, see Dianne Hunter, “Hysteria, Psychoanalysis, and Feminism:

The

C^ase of .Anna ().,” in The (M)other Tongue:

Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, ed. Shirley Nelson ('.arner,

Kahane, and Madelon Sprengnether (Ithaca: (lornell Univ. Press,

89—

1 1

5.

('.laire

11)85),

PP-

/

Introduction

o

is

Freud’s eventual belief that the nature of hysterical repression that hysteria is the expression of secret sexual psychosexual patriarchal conceptions of is closely bound up with his

—

desires

—

female sexuality. This connection is nowhere clearer than in his famous case study of “Dora,” whose hysterical symptoms he atHerr tributes to the repression of her desires for her father, for K. (whose wife, f rau K.,

and, at the deepest

is

having an affair with Dora

level, for

Frau K.

— when

s

in fact the

father),

primary

cause of Dora’s hysteria is her role as a pawn in their game, a role determined by her position as a woman in turn-of-the-cenThe debate that Freud sparked about femininity tury Europe. and female sexuality has been crucial to the history of psychoanalysis.^^ In his Thvec Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)’ hysteria instance, he attributes women’s greater susceptibility to to their sexuality:

“The

fact that

women change

their leading

erotogenic zone in this way [from clitoris to vagina], together with the wave of repression at puberty, which, as it were, puts aside their childish masculinity, are the chief determinants of the greater proneness of

women

to neurosis

and

especially to

1 hese determinants, therefore, are intimately related Freud makes an equally revealto the essence of femininity. ing statement about the relationship between femininity and hysteria.

psychoanalysis in his paper “Femininity” (1933)* “^^^e wish to get the longed-for penis eventually in spite of everything may

contribute to the motives that drive a mature woman to analysis, and what she may reasonably expect from analysis a capacity, may often for instance, to carry on an intellectual profession

— —

be recognized as a sublimated modification of

this

repressed

wish.”^^

ispreud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” (“Bruchstiick einer VII, 7-122. For a collection of interpretations of Hysterie- Analyse,” 1905), works listed in its bibliography. this controversial case, see In Dora’s Case and the and the ecole Jreudienne, trans. Jac*^C:f. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan

queline Rose, ed. Rose and Juliet Mitchell (1982;

New

York: Norton, 1985), pp.

27-28. *^Freud, Three Essays on the Theory ualtheone), SE, VII, 221.

oj Sexuality

(Dtei

Abhandlungen

‘«Freud, “Femininity” (“Die VVeiblichkeit”), SE, XXII, 125.

zui

Sex-

Introduction / /

Freud these

s

theories of female sexuality, which were elaborated in

and other

our purposes

essays, will be

at this point,

it

more is

fully

explored

in Part

I.

For

sufficient to stress the crucial

place of Freudian psychoanalysis in what Michel Foucault calls the hysterization of women. Reflecting his ongoing interest in

the relationship between knowledge and power, the

of

first

volume

his History of Sexuality

attempts to overturn received ideas about sexual repression by arguing that for the last two hundred years institutions of

power have not thwarted but rather have discourse of sexuality, though one fraught with

encouraged a taboos and prohibitions. According to Foucault, this “deployment of sexuality,” which intensified during the nineteenth century, was brought about by four strategies or mechanisms of knowledge and power centering on sex: the hysterization of the female body, the pedagogization of children’s sex, the socialization of procreative behavior, and the psychiatrization of perverse pleasure.*^

The

woman, Foucault

first

of these processes

observes, was the

first

is

key, since the idle

figure to be invested

with sexuality. His definition of hysterization makes clear that

import was

to tie

hysterization

women

its

to their reproductive function, for

is

a threefold process whereby the feminine body was analyzed— qualified and disqualified as being thoroughly saturated with

—

sexuality;

whereby

was integrated into the sphere of medical practices, by reason of a pathology intrinsic to it; whereby, finally, it was placed in organic communication with the social body (whose regulated fecundity it was supposed to ensure), the family space (of which it had to be a substantial and functional element), and the life of children (which it produced and had to guarantee, by virtue of a biologico-moral responsibility lasting through the it

entire period of the children’s education): the Mother, with her negative image of “nervous woman,” constituted the most visible

form of

this hysterization. 1104]

'^Michel toucauli, The History

of Sexuality, vol.

An

Introduction, trans.

Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), pp. 104-105. Subsequent page references appear in the text. See also “I'he History of Sexuality,” in Foucault, Power! Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 7972— 7977, trans. C'.olin (iordon et al.

(Sussex: Harvester, 1980), pp. 183-193.

I,

7

Introduction

2

the innot difficult to recognize Freudian psychoanalysis as a powerful instrustitutionalization of sexual confession It is

—

ment of

hysterization.

Lest such a statement

seem reductive,

should be noted that

to believe in the original psychological

Freud came increasingly bisexuality of both

it

men and women and

that psychoanalysis,

unhealthy sexual repression in both sexes, was potentially liberating. In the main, however, both his new science and his concomitant theories of female sexuality stressed sexual difference. This emphasis is epit-

when used

what he viewed

to deal with

as

on feminism per se, such as his remark in differentiating girls from boys as regards the passing of the Oedipus complex: “Here the feminist demand for equal rights

omized

in his attacks

distincfor the sexes does not take us far, for the morphological psychical detion is bound to find expression in differences of

velopment. ‘Anatomy leon’s.’’20 Similarly,

is

Destiny’, to vary a saying of

Napo-

referring to Mill’s Subjection of Women, which

Freud himself had translated into German in 1880, he criticizes the author for neglecting the inborn distinction between men and women, “the most significant one that exists.

That

this

emphasis on sexual difference

as a reaction against

feminism was not limited to psychoanalysis is evident in an observation, couched as a supposition, made by Virginia Woolf in

A Room

of One’s

Own

(1929):

ever have been as stridently sex-conscious as our own, those innumerable books by men about women in the British Museum are a proof of it. The Suffrage campaign was no doubt for to blame. It must have roused in men an extraordinary desire

No age can

must have made them lay an emphasis upon their sex and its characteristics which they would not have troubled to think about had they not been challenged. And when one is chal-

self-assertion;

2 »Freud,

it

“The Dissolution

of the

Oedipus Complex” (“Der Untergang des

Odipuskomplexes,” 1924), SE, XIX, 178. 2 'Quoted by Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, ed. and abr. 118. Lionel Trilling and Steven Marcus (New York: Basic Books, 1961), p.

Introduction

lenged, even by a few women in black bonnets, one retalia, one has never been challenged before, rather excessively

By contrast, male contemporaries such as Edward Carpenter and the German socialist August Rebel, in their attention to women’s need for autonomy, move, like their female counterparts in the feminist movement, in the direction of equality, of sameness. I

o return

conjunction, volving

of so

now

drama, we can see how the historical dramatic, of these major developments in-

to the

itself

women and

affecting

men

many memorable female

century stage.

helps to explain the presence

characters on the turn-of-the-

—

double spectrum of women’s responses to their oppression (feminism and hysteria) and of men’s reactions I

his

to these responses

(feminism and hysterization)

— produced

a

field of conflicting

currents of thought which inevitably left their mark on dramatists of the day. Caught up in these contrary forces, male dramatists were often deeply ambivalent toward

women, and

the versions of

womanhood

theater are correspondingly ambiguous.

ground of

this force field that

they created for the

It

is

against the back-

examine the portrayals of a variety of female characters created by male playwrights between 1880 and 1920, the period embracing both the culmination of the first feminist movement and the origins of Freud’s I

theories of female sexuality.

In pointing

up the ambiguities

in these characters

I

proceed

in

terms of analogy rather than influence, with Freudian theories of femininity and female sexuality offering a paradigmatic analogue for the dramatic depiction of female difference, often resisted by a character’s

own impulse toward emancipation and

My

purpose here is to present Freud not as a culprit but simply as one of the most emphatic voices of turn-of-theequality.

century patriarchal society. (Indeed, the role of turn-of-the-cen-

‘‘^‘^V^irginia

•957). P-

Woolf, A Room of One's

•v/>^ Introduction

>

'Cj

C

V

^

/i

*

VA

'

t

V

' ,.

'

540-545: 9 4 Review, no. 152 (1984); Clare Coss, Sondra Segal, and Roberta Sklar, “Separation (*

and

Survival: Mothers, Daughters, Sisters

ater,” in Future of Difference, pp.

— The

Women’s Experimental

193-233; Staging Gender, special issue

oi'

I

he-

Theatre

Jane Moss, “Le Corps spectaculaire: Le Theatre au feminin,” Modem Language Studies, 16 (Fall 198(1), 34-Go; and Sue-Ellen Case, Feminusm and Iheatre (New York: Methuen, 1988). For twentieth-century plays by women, see,

Journal, 37 (1985);

and about Women, ed. Victoria Sullivan and James Hatch (New 5 ’ork: 1973): Was geschah, nachdem Nora ihren Mann verlassen hatte? 8 Hbrspiele von Elfriede jelinek et ai, ed. Helga (ieyer-Ryan (Munich: Deut.scher laschenbuch, 1982); and Flays by Women, ed. Michelene Wandor and Marv Remnant (London: Methuen, 1982-8G). e.g.. Flays by

Random House,

Wolfgang from Runyan to

The Implied Reader: Fatterm of Communication in Frose Fiction Reckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Lniv. Press, 197.1), P- ^'i- t)n the “implied author” see Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Pre.ss, 19G1), esp. p. 138. Iser,

Introduction

20

expectations brought to the the culturally determined cluster of moment in history. text by a hypothetical reader at a particular horizons of expectaIn suggesting the possibility “of different in any one society, tion co-existing among different publics

Susan Suleiman intimates the of

these principles of

possibility of a feminist

adaptation

an

reader-oriented literary criticism

gender and approach that would consider the ways in which men and gender-typing can influence the reading patterns of phewomen. Jonathan Culler has taken a systematic look at the nomenon of “reading as a woman,” defining the process as “to defenses and avoid reading as a man, to identify the specific feminist correctives distortions of male readings and provide ,

criticism,

he writes, “employs the hypothesis of a

woman

reader

male critical provide leverage for displacing the dominant reading often invision and revealing its misprisions.”^'^ Such not meant to be volves reading the text against itself, as it was this read— resisting it. One of the most extensive examples of

to

Judith Fetterley’s Resisting Reader: A Feminist American Fiction, which seeks to counteract the con-

type of work

Approach

to

is

m

or the way ventional “immasculation” of feminine readers, with a which “women are taught to think as men, to identify legitimate a male point of view, and to accept as normal and Putting into practice Adrienne Rich s male system of values. with of re-vision “‘the act of looking back, of seeing

—

concept

fresh eyes, of entering an old text (xxii)

from

a

new

critical

Fetterley reexamines canonical texts of

American

toward ture to disclose the designs on and thinking plicit in

direction litera-

women

im-

them.

Literary Theory, in Robert lauss, “Literary History as a (Challenge to Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis; Univ. )auss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 3 45 rVarieties of Audience-Oriented Crit;^«Susan R. Suleiman, “Introduction; Audience and Interpretation, ed. Suleiman icism,” in The Reader in the Text: Essays on and Inge (Tosman (Princeton; Princeton Univ. I ress, 1980), p. 37 37 |onathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism 35 Hans

-

•

1

*

(Ithaca; (Cornell Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 54, 57 Feminist Approach to American Fiction :^«Iudith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A -

,

(Bloomington; Indiana Univ. Press,

i

978 )>

P-

Introduction

In the chapters that follow

I

attempt a similar reexamination

of turn-of-the-century

European drama. I endeavor to shed new light on a selected group of canonical male-authored texts by viewing them through a feminist lens, one that reveals the attitudes and ideologies shaping their depiction of female characters.

Ideally,

lumined.

these works

will

emerge both

familiar

and

il-

Female Sexuality and Schnitzler’s La Ronde

1

will

make

a confession which for

my

sake 1 must ask you to keep to yourself and share with neither friends nor strangers. 1 have tormented myself with the question why in all these years 1 have never attempted to make your acquaintance and 1

have a talk with you. The answer contains the confession which strikes me as too intimate. 1 think 1 have avoided you from a kind of reluctance to meet my double [aus einer Art von Doppelgangerscheu]. to

.

.

.

This often cited confession forms the center of Freud’s third

Arthur Schnitzler, written in 1922 to congratulate the author on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. By this time letter to

^

Schnitzler’s

renown

dramas and prose works had won him international

as the

sharp-eyed

critic

of fin-de-siecle Viennese society;

more famous than Freud. Freud’s “reluctance” to meet Schnitzler stemmed from his conception of the double, which he had adopted from Otto Rank and described in his paper “I'he Uncanny” in 1919. During the indeed, until the late 1930s he was

stage of primary narcissism which dominates the

dren and primitive adults, Freud ^Letters of

(New York:

minds of

writes, the idea of the

chil-

double

Siginund Freud, ed. Ernst L. Freud, trans. Tania and James Stern Basic Books, i960), p. 339. Schnitzler had begun tlieir correspon-

dence on the occasion of Freud’s

birthday in 1906. For the original versions of Freud’s letters to Schnitzler, see Sigmund Freud, “Briefe an Arthur Schnitzler,” ed. Heinrich Schnitzler, Neue RumLschau, 66 (1955), 95-106. Schnitzler’s letters to

fiftieth

Freud have been

lost.

2

Freud’s Double?

6

operates as an insurance against tlie destruction of the ego; once character this stage has passed, however, the double reverses its and becomes the uncanny harbinger of death, and confronta-

double causes identity confusion/^ But Freud overcame his reservations about Schnitzler. The birthday letter of May 1922 prompted Schnitzler to suggest that they meet at last, and Freud responded with a dinner invitation. The following August, Schnitzler visited Freud in Berchtesgaden, where he was vacationing. Yet although they continued tion with one’s

exchange their publications, between 1922 and Schnitzler s death in 1931 they saw each other only five more times: three times by accident and on two occasions when Schnitzler visited Freud in a sanatorium located down the street from Schnitzler s

to

house.

Freud had good reason to see himself mirrored in Schnitzler. The parallels between the two men begin on the biographical were level: Freud was only six years older than Schnitzler; both products of the same milieu, Vienna at the height of the Hapsburg monarchy; both were educated, upper-middle-class, nonpracticing Jews; they traveled in the same circles and Freud was well acquainted with Schnitzler’s brother Julius, a surgeon. Perhaps most important, both Freud and Schnitzler were doctors with an interest in psychiatry, although Schnitzler eventually chose to specialize in laryngology, the same field in which

had distinguished himself. Schnitzler’s first exposure to Freud dates from 1886, when he attended and reported on a meeting at which Freud spoke on male hysteria. That same year Schnitzler worked under the neurologist Theodor Meynert, just as Freud had done a few years before. In Meynert’s psychiatric clinic Schnitzler learned hypnohis father

with which he carried out sensational experiments in his father’s polyclinic. Schnitzler’s most extensive medical treatise

sis,

was a discussion of the treatment of hysterical voicelessness through hypnosis and suggestion, and in the late 1880s and '^Freud,

“

Fhe Uncanny” (“Das Unheimliche”), SE, XVII, 234-235.

Schnitzler’s

La Ronde

27

early 1890s he reviewed several of Freud’s translations of psychi-

works by Charcot and Bernheiin. Hypnosis appears in two of his dramas, where it is used to express characteristically atric

Schnitzlerian ideas. In tol

one

of the one-act plays included in Ana-

(1893; dates following plays refer to year of publication),

which launched Schnitzler’s career

as a playwright, the

title

acter hypnotizes his lover in order to learn whether she

him but

faithful to

is

is

chartruly

then afraid to ask her the question, prefer-

ring his illusions to certainty. Paracelsus (1898), in which the

noted Renaissance doctor discovers a married woman’s secret sexual fantasies through hypnosis, astonished Freud with its knowledge about “these things”^ the conscious and uncon-

—

scious desires that complicate married

life.

Schnitzler’s writing increasingly took precedence over his activities as

a physician, especially after the death of his father,

who had from his

the beginning been the motivating force behind

medical career. Throughout, Schnitzler’s works reflect

fascination with the dynamics of the

accident that he was the

first

writer in

his

human psyche; it is no the German language to

use the technique of the autonomous interior monologue (in the novella Leutuant Gustl, 1901). He makes frequent use of dreams

prose writings, notably in Traurnnovelle (1928) {Rhapsody: A Dream Novel). And many of his works, such as the novella in his

Frdulein Else (1924), are akin to case studies in their minute

exploration of psychologically troubled characters. In light of Schnitzler’s preoccupations,

it

is little

wonder

that

the renaissance in Schnitzler scholarship in recent decades has in

measure consisted of ef forts to detail the affinities between the Viennese writer and the founder of psychoanalysis. 'Fhus we large

find attempts to demonstrate that Schnitzler anticipated Freud’s

most important ideas and categorizations of the psychoses ^Quoted

in

Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Si^nund Freud, ed. and abr. Lionel 'Lrilling and Steven Marcus (New York: Basic Books, 1961), p. 225. Freud also refers to Paracelsus, with reference to resistance, in a footnote to his case in

study of Dora; see “Fragment of an Analysis of a (^ase of Hysteria” (“Bruchstiick einer Hysterie-Analyse,” 1905), SE, V'll, 4411.

Freud’s Double?

28

such attempts hold that there arguing about whether Freud or Schnitzler was

Schnitzler’s oeuvre. is little

point in

*

But

critics of

or that discovery,^ particularly since Freud himself repeatedly observed that many of the insights he gained through analysis and experimentation were not original with

the

first to

make

this

Moreover, “Freudian” interpretations of Schnitzler’s works, of which there have been a considerable number, overlook or underestimate Schitzler’s ex-

him but were known

to creative writers.

pressed reservations about psychoanalysis. Although Schnitzler

claimed in an interview, “In some respects I am the double of he could never overcome his sense that there Professor Freud, was something monomaniacal about Freud’s way of thinking

and

that psychoanalysis,

overinterpret.

It

dominated by “fixed

seems plausible

to

ideas,

tended

to

conclude that the differences

Beharriell, “Schnitzler’s Anticipation of Freud’s Dream Theory,” Monatshefte, 45 (1953), 81-89, and “Freud’s ‘Double’: Arthur Schnitz(these ler,” youma/ of the American Psychological Association, 10 (1962), 722—730 ^E.g., Frederick J.

essays are revised

and combined

in

Beharriell,

Schnitzler.

Freud

s

Doppel-

546 - 555 ); Robert O.

Weiss, “The Psychoganger, ” Literatur und Kritik, 19 [1967], ses in the Works of Arthur Schnitzler,” German Quarterly, 41 (1968), 377-400. ^See, e.g., Hartmut Scheible, Arthur Schnitzler und die Aufkldrung (Munich: Fink, 1977), pp. 47-48. In “Arthur Schnitzler und Sigmund Freud: Aus den Anfangen des Doppelgangers,” Germanisch-Romantsche Monatsschrift, 24 (1974), 193-223, Bernd Urban, in describing Schnitzler’s medical knowledge and experience in the early days of research on hysteria in order to demystify what Freud saw as Schnitzler’s “intuition” of his ideas, also invokes Freud’s disavowal of his originality.

^(ieorge

S.

Viereck,

“The World of Arthur

Schnitzler,” in Viereck, Glimpses of

Great (London: Duckworth, 1930), p. 333. ^Commenting on a study of his works up to Anatol by Freud’s student

the

Reik,

one of the

writes that

it is

first to

draw

parallels

Theodor

between Schnitzler and Freud, Schnitzler

“not uninteresting” but that

it

“lapses into the fixed psychoanalytic

Arthur Schnitzler, diary entry of 27 June 1912, Tagebuch, /909-/9/2, ed. Werner Welzig et al. (Vienna: Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1981), p. 339. (Unless I have noted otherwise, all translations are my own.) Ernest Jones, with whom Schnitzler also argued about these mat-

ideas toward the end”;

mentions that he had particular difficulty accepting Freud’s ideas of incest and infantile sexuality (Jones, Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, p. 435). Michael Worbs follows a survey of Freudian configurations in Schnitzler’s works with a discussion of Schnitzler’s criticisms of psychoanalysis; see Worbs, Neruenkunst: Literatur und Psychoanalyse im Wien der J ahrhmidertwende (Frankfurt: Europaische ters,

Verlagsanstalt, 1983), pp. 225—258.

Schnitzler’s

La Ronde

between the two men were

29 as responsible as the similarities for

the infrequency of their personal contact. Schnitzler’s ambivalence is perfectly captured in a diary entry made on the day he arrived Berchtesgaden to visit Freud in 1922: “His entire being atti acted me again, and 1 feel a certain desire to talk with

m

him about the various chasms I

in

my works

(and

in

my

life)

but

think I’d prefer not to.”^ Schnitzler’s ambivalent attitude toward Freud’s thinking

probably nowhere clearer than

in the writer’s

is

views on female

Both sex and women play such a prominent role in his oeuvre that the importance of this issue for Schnitzler can sexuality.

scarcely be overestimated.^

One

of the works most useful in exploring his conception of female sexuality is Reigeii (i90‘^)

Round Dance), probably best known outside Austria and Germany through Max Ophuls’s romanticized film version of 1950, La Ronde (Since the appearance of Ophiils’s film, the {The

.

^This^quotation of 16 August 1922 from the unpublished diaries is cited in Urban, “Arthur Schnitzler und Sigmund Freud,” p. 223. In addition to Urban

and Scheible, scholars who have warned against a facile identification of Freud and Schnitzler include Henri F. Ellenberger, who in The Duscovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution Dynamic Psychiatry of (New \'ork; Basic Books,

1970) writes that Schnitzler, in contrast to Freud, emphasized the importance of role-playing in hypnosis and hysteria, the unreliability of memory, the thematic rather than the symbolic element in dreams, and the self-deceptive rather than the aggressive component in the origin of war (pp. 471- 474); and Wolfgang Nehring, “Schnitzler, Freud’s Alter Ego?” Modern Austrian Literature, 10, nos. 3 and 4 (1977). 179-194. 'vho observes that Schnitzler focuses on individuals in a particular society, whereas Freud’s findings are universal; that unlike Freudian analysis, Schnitzler’s diagnoses do not lead to self-awareness; and that whereas

Freud

strives to detect the genesis

phenomena

of neuroses, Schnitzler analyzes psychological only as they appear in the present.

^In “Schnitzler’s Frauen

517, Renate

und Madchen,” Diskussion DeuLsch, 13 (1982), 507Mbhrmann points out the abundance and variety of female figures

in Schnitzler’s

works, a feature particularly striking in his dramas, since the unusually high proportion of female characters has caused difficulties in pro-

ducing

his plays (507).

mOn

the films transformations of the play see, e.g., Anna Kuhn, mantization of Arthur Schnitzler: Max Ophuls’ Adaptations of Reigen, Brecht.

“Fhe RoLiehelei and

in

Prohleme der

Modeme:

Studien zur deutschen Literatur von Nietzsche his Festschrift fiir Walter Sokel, ed. Benjamin Bennett et al. (Tubingen:

Niemeyer, 1983), pp. 83-99.

Freud’s Double?

30

French

and

I

title

will

translations, has taken precedence, even in English

use that

title

here.) Schnitzler’s

drama

quite literally

ten dialogues frame an act of the text and, dashes sexual intercourse, conveyed hy a row of and raising of the curtain on in early productions, hy a lowering appeared in the each case one of the partners has

revolves around sex: nine of

its

m

stage; in

the following scene— previous scene and the other appears in reappearance in the last A-B, B-C, C-D, and so on. Character A’s the impression that the scene completes the “round” and creates play’s innovative structure, cycle will be repeated endlessly. The the drama of the unique not only in Schnitzler’s oeuvre but in message— so daring in its time, is the perfect vehicle for its relentless day— about the universality of sexual desire. In its a summation of many portrayal of sexuality La Ronde stands as

marriage and adulof the themes that preoccupied Schnitzler: men and women play with tery, the roles and linguistic games and illusion and, coneach other, the tension between reality both self-deception comitantly, between honesty and deception,

and deception of

others.

The production its

history of

La Ronde reveals just how shocking

thus the salutation subject matter was. “Dear Pornographer”: letter

of a tongue-in-cheek

from Hofmannsthal and Richard

him, in the face of Fischto take care in his selection of a er’s refusal to publish the play, and to demand a publisher for his “piece of dirt” {Schrnutzwerk) the book would surely be confislot of money in advance, since was realized in 1904, cated by the censors. 11 Their prediction unauthorized the play’s publication. Although

Beer-Hofmann

to Schnitzler advising

the year after

performed outside Ausversions of La Ronde were occasionally first decades of the century, the tria and Germany during the first full

production

in

Berlin. Within a year

did not take place until 1920, in cast and director were tried for obscen-

German

its

in

Hugo

" Hof mannsthal and Beer-Hofmann to Schnitzler, 15 February 1903 Therese Nickl and von Hofmannsthal /Arthur Schnitzler, Bnefwechsel, ed. 167—168. Heinrich Schnitzler (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1964), pp.

Schnitzler’s

ity,

La Ronde

31

but acquitted. In every

performed,

riots

German

which the play was and demonstrations erupted, many of them city in

came armed with

anti-Semitic; theater patrons

rotten eggs

and

bombs. But nowhere was the scandal greater than in Vienna, the setting of the drama and thus the “scene of the crime.” Here the controversy even led to fights in parliament, suggest-

stink

made about Vienna

ing that a statement Schnitzler

in 1981, fifty years after

death, was true at the turn of the century as well: “Hardly any other city is as unhesitatingly tolerant of sexual

freedom

s

as

Vienna

— as long as one condition

is

met: that

it

is

never talked about. ”*2 In 1922 Schnitzler, thoroughly fed up with the whole affair, forbade any further productions of his

much-maligned drama. son Heinrich

tempted

to

it

however,

his

ban, and since then directors have atfor the play’s long period of dormancy.

lifted the

make up

The scandalous fact that

Fifty years after his death,

quality of

La Ronde

spares no social

paradigmatic types, spanning

class. all

I

lay at least in part in the

he

play’s use

levels of society

of nameless,

from

prostitute

to count, has often

been noted. Yet these characters represent not only social types but also gender types— “the parlourmaid,” “the young gentleman,” “the actress,” and so forth. A close look at the play in

which

its

terms of Freudian categories reveals the degree to

characters strain against the confines of these gender

stereotypes.'*^

As we

shall see, Schnitzler often sets

tional masculine-feminine dichotomies only in

lematize and undermine them.

I

up conven-

order

am

not

on Schnitzler

or,

should emphasize that

interested in determining PYeud’s influence

to prob1

'^Ernest Borneniaiin, Protil no. 18, 1981, quoiecl in Renale Wagner, Arthur Schnitzler: Erne Btographie (Vienna: Molden, 1981), p. 338. For a full account of' the play’s scandal-ridden production history see Wagner, pp. 325-338, and

Ludwig Marcuse,

Obscene: The History of an Indignation, trans.

Karen (iershon (London: MacCiibbon Sc Kee, 1965), pp. 165-2 iq. '^See Barbara Own, Emanzipation hei Arthur Schnitzler {VtcvYur. Spiess, 1978), for a survey of female types in Schnitzler’s works in general. For the most part ('.utt focuses on describing and illustrating these types rather than on the attempts of the women characters to break out of them. On character types in Schnitzler’s dramas see also Jiirg Scheuzger, Das Spiel nut Typen und TypenkonstellaUonen in den Dramen Arthur Schnitzlers (Zunch: Juris, 1975)-

— Freud’s Double.''

52 since Freud’s writings

on femininity postdate La Ronde,

in

dem-

onstrating the degree to which Schnitzler anticipated Freud. Rather, my intention is to use Freud’s thinking as a lens through

treatment of the kinds of roles and stereotypes assigned to women in turn-of-the-century Vienna. Because of the range of' types encompassed by La Ronde, close study of this work should also prove illuminating for the dramas

which

to

examine the

play’s

discussed in subsequent parts of this book. As I mentioned in the Introduction, the issue of female sex-

been crucial to the history of psychoanalysis, though Marcus calls the discusits fate has been a turbulent one. Steven sion of female sexuality since Freud a “tragicomedy”; in Kate or a Millett’s words, the question has been a “scientific football swamp of superstitious misinformation.”^^ No one was more

uality has

perplexed about the subject than Freud. of his uncertainty from his

from

his

first

writings

statement in Three Essays on

that the erotic

life

of

women

the

“is still

One

on the

finds expressions topic to his last

Theory of Sexuality (1905)

veiled in an impenetrable

obscurity” to his characterization of the nature of femininity as a

most frequently quoted utterances is that in which he described to Marie Bonaparte “the great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years “riddle” in “Femininity” (1933)^5 Surely

one of

his

of research into the feminine soul”: “What does a woman want?” (“Was will das Weib?”).‘6 And yet he did construct a theory of ’‘Steven Marcus, introduction to Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, xxxviii; Kate trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York; Basic Books, 1975), p. For psychoanalytic Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Ballantine, 1969), p. 164.

Female Sexuality: New Psychoanalytic omen and AnalyViews, ed.Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel (London: Virago, 1981); ed. Jean Strouse (New York, sis: Dialogues on Psychoanalytic Views of Femininity, Female Psychology: ContemporaTy Psychoanalytic (irossman, 1974); Harold P. Views (New York: International Universities Press, 1977); and Zenia O. Fliegel, views of female sexuality since Freud see,

e.g..

W

“Haifa Century Later; Current Status of Freud’s Controversial Views on Women,” Psychoanalytic Review, 69 (1982), 7—28. ’^Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality {Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheone), SE, tory Lectures

VH,

151,

and “Femininity” (“Die

on Psycho-Analysis, SE,

“’Quoted by Jones,

Life

XXH,

1

VVeiblichkeit”), in

13.

and Work of Sigmund Freud,

p.

377.

New

Introduc-

Schnitzler’s

La Ronde

33

female sexuality, and one whose ramifications were far-reaching. An understanding of this theory necessitates a brief rehearsal of his

conception ol the early development of sexuality.

In his essays on infantile sexuality (notably the Three Essays and “The Infantile Genital Organization,” 1923) f'reud postulates the concept of sexual monism: child sexuality for both sexes

masculine, since both

is

and boys recognize only the persist throughout in viewing

girls

male genital organ. (He was to libido as masculine, as he indicates 131.)

From I

for example, “Femininity,”

the child’s point of view the clitoris

stitute for the penis; “the little girl

118).

in,

hus Freud

is

a

little

is

man”

simply a sub(“Femininity,”

phase following the oral and anal both sexes. In both sexes the girl’s

labels the

phases the phallic phase

in

lack of a penis leads to a castration complex, since children believe that the girl had a penis and lost it. But the castration

complex manifests

itself differently in

the two sexes,

and these

bound up with differences in the Oedipus complex in boys and girls, outlined in “ I he Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex” (1924) and elsewhere, f or Freud the Oedipus complex, which has been described as “a shibboleth on distinctions

are

closely

which psychoanalysis stood or fell,”*^ was the central phenomenon of the sexual period in early childhood. After the boy discovers that the

what he has, freud hypothesizes, he comes to dread the possibility of castration, perhaps as a punishment for masturbation brought on by his oedipal desires for his mother. His castration complex leads him to repress these desires

and

girl lacks

to begin internalizing his father’s authority, thus

ing the kernel of his superego, which

will

form-

maintain the prohibi-

tion against incest.

d'he situation

is

different with

girls.

Whereas

in

boys the

Oedipus complex is terminated by the castration complex, the girl’s Oedipus complex is produced by the castration complex. Accepting her castration as having already occurred, she comes

'‘^Juliet

Mitchell,

arid Analysts, p. 33.

“On Freud and

the Distinction between the Sexes,” in

Women

— Freud’s Double.'"

34 is envy the boy his penis: “She has seen it and knows that she replaces her witliout it and wants to have it.”‘” Yet she gradually in wish for a penis by her wish for a child, and with this purpose mind she rejects her mother, the primary object of her preoedipal affection, and takes her father as a love object. At this

to

culminating stage of her Oedipus complex, the ship with her mother is colored by jealousy: “The

girl s relation-

girl

has turned

Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes,” 256). Freud emphasizes to possess a penis and to bear a child that these two desires its are crucial in helping to prepare the woman’s nature for

into a

little

woman” (“Some

Psychical

—

subsequent sex

role. Significantly,

because her castration has

already taken place, the girl has less reason to move beyond the Oedipus complex than the boy. The two results are that women may remain until a late age strongly dependent on a paternal

on

object or

become thus

their actual father,

and

that their

men, than men and are more

as well developed, as “inexorable,

women show

less

sense of justice

superego does not as

it

does

in

judgments by feelings of affection, envy, or significance hostility. In “Female Sexuality” Freud sums up the of this difference in the development of child sexuality as follows: “We should probably not be wrong in saying that it is this difference in the reciprocal relation between the Oedipus and

influenced

in their

stamp to the charPerhaps most important, acter of females as social beings.” according to this theory that takes the male as the norm and defines the female in terms of a lack, the castration complex the castration complex which gives

leads both sexes to disparage

To

repeat, this

woman,

summary of

development of sexuality

is

its

special

the castrated being.

Freud’s conception of the early

not intended as an indictment but

rather, interpreted metaphorically, as representative of the

atti-

Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes” (“Einige psychische Folgen des anatomischen Geschlechtsunterschieds,” 19^5), SE, XIX, 252. ‘^Freud, “Female Sexuality” (“fiber die weibliche Sexualitat,” 1931), SE, XXI, '«Freucl,

230.

“Some

Psychical

Schnitzler’s

La Ronde

35

tudes of his social order. to

precisely the

stance?

We may

same

What about this

question by interweaving

specific considerations of Freud’s writings

in

his belief,

tendency girls

than

into a close

Freud’s definition of libido as masculine

pronounced sex drive

attribution of a less

gave up

on women

more

La Ronde.

analysis of the text of

Inherent

who belonged

order? Did he take a different

social

answer

best

Schiiitzler,

to

is

his

women. He never

expressed as early as Three Essays, that “the

to sexual repression

and

in boys]” (2 19),

seems in

general to be greater

in

“The Taboo

[in

of Virginity” (1918)

he writes of the “general female tendency to take a defensive line [toward sex].”^^^ He simply does not regard female sexuality as an

active,

independent

important to

women

drive.

than sex

What seems is

love; as

he

to

Freud

states in

Instinctual Life” (i933)> the fear of castration

replaced in the female sex by a fear of tant with these views

is

his often

loss

to

be more

“Anxiety and

found

of love.

in

men

is

Concomi-

repeated association of mas-

culine sexuality with activity and feminine sexuality with pas-

Indeed, he notes that the contrast between masculinity and femininity must frequently be replaced in psychoanalysis by that between activity and passivity {Three Essays, 160). Although

sivity.

he occasionally qualifies

many of

essential validity, since

based on

this equation,‘^‘'^

his

he clearly believes

in

its

most important claims are definition of libido as mas-

dichotomy (such as his culine), and in one of the last works to be published during his lifetime he refers to the male’s “struggle against his passive or feminine attitude. this

Turning now to Schiiitzler, we find that such dichotomies do not hold up under scrutiny, although at first glance they may seem to. In two scenes those between the young gentleman

—

20Freud, “The Taboo of Virginity” (“Das Tabu der V^irginitat”), SE, XI, 201. ^T'leud, “Anxiety and Instinctual Life” (“Angst und Lriebleben”), in Xeio Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, SE, XXII, 87. ^i^E.g., in “Instincts and their V'icissitudes” (“Lriebe und Triebsciiicksale.”

15-1 ib. 1915), SE, XIV', 134, and “Femininity,” 23Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (“Die endliche 1

endliche Analyse,”

19:^7),

SE,

XXI 11,

250.

und

die un-

Freud’s Double?

^

or and the young wife and between the sweet girl {sufics Mddel) men rip women’s clothes in their haste to grisette and the poet are often in a get on with things. Similarly, the male characters act is hurry to get away from their partners once the sexual over— thus the soldier with both the prostitute and the parlourthe husmaid, the young gentleman with the parlourmaid, and

—

whose observation that he is different By contrast, after their intimacies’^'* sums up this phenomenon. of the sweet the reaction of the parlourmaid with the soldier and

band with the sweet

girl,

partwith the husband following intercourse is to ask their gender ners whether they care for them. These conventional

girl

roles are not maintained,

however;

in the scenes

between the

girl young gentleman and the young wife and between the sweet womand the poet it is the men who express concern about the who are in a hurry en’s love for them afterward and the women count seems to to get home, and in the play’s final scene even the other wish he meant something more to the prostitute than the

men

she has been with.

And

several of the female characters are

anything but passive in their sexual relations. The prostitute approaches the soldier even though she claims not to want any money from him, hence falling out of her social role; the parlourmaid’s interest in the young gentleman is evident in the way the she primps before taking him the glass of water he requests,

her rendezvous with the young gentleman in most obviously, the full awareness of what awaits her; and, actress initiates sex with both the poet and the count. A similar pattern emerges in La Ronde in connection with a

young wife goes

characteristic

to

Freud often

associates with

women, shame.

In

Three Essays he observes that the development of the inhibitions of sexuality, such as shame, takes place in little girls “earlier and in the face

of

less resistance

than

quently cited passage in “Femininity he writes:

2 \Schnitzler,

La Ronde,

Penguin, 1982), scene

vi,

are identified in the text

and in a freShame, which is

in boys” (219),

Sue Davies and John Barton (Harmondsworth: quotations are from this edition and p. 37. Subsequent by scene and page number. trans.

La Ronde

Schnitzler’s

37

considered to be a feminine characteristic /;«r excelleyice but is far more a matter of convention than might be supposed, has as its purpose, we believe, concealment of genital deficiency” (132). He then goes on to describe women’s invention of plaiting and

weaving

— one

of their few contributions to civilization, he as an unconscious imitation of the interwoven hair that

notes

conceals their genitals. In

commenting on this passage Sarah Kofman points out the ambiguous nature of F'reud’s conception of feminine shame as “both a conventiojial virtue (more or less linked to cultural repression) and a natural one, since, in her invention of weaving,

woman

Moreover, Kofman adds, serves to excite trick

was only

‘imitating’ nature.

“natural /conventional artifice”

this

and charm men: “Feminine modesty

of nature that allows the

human

is

thus a

species to perpetuate

it-

self” (49).

Kofman

observations are illuminating apropos of Lrt Ronde, which unmasks the contradictions of traditional conceptions of s

shame such

as those

expounded by Freud and shows

supposedly natural but

it

to

be a

convention that serves to parlourmaid’s embarrassment as the

in fact artificial

enhance seduction. The young gentleman opens her blouse and kisses her breasts in broad daylight, heightened when she learns that he has seen her undressed

in

her room

intensifies the desire

comes

at night,

does not deter him but rather

of both. Similarly, the

fact that the

young

young gentleman’s fiat “heavily veiled” (iv, 12) and her insistence that if she becomes conscious of what she is doing she will “sink into the earth with shame” (iv, 16) are simply wife

to the

game of seduction, just as her feeble protestations in drawing room that “it is so light here” (iv, 17) only move the

part of her

the

young gentleman

her into the bedroom. Indeed, the implicit comparison of the young wife to a popular contempoto lead

rary actress suggests that she

Kofman, The Enigma

is

merely playing a role expected of

of Woman: Woman in Freud's Writings, trans. (latherine Porter (Ithaca: ('.ornell Univ. Press, 19H5), p. 49. Subse977). P- 77'.^Helen (irace Zagona, The Legend of Salome and the Rrincifde of Art for Art's Sake ((ieneva: Droz, i960), p. 22.

55

Deniythologizing the F'emme Fatale

5^

who had

celebrated the dancer/^

ing and literature

The Salome

come together

one

in

traditions in paint-

of the

most memorable

depictions of the theme, Huysmans’s A rebours (1884) {Against effects Nature), where Des Esseintes describes the transporting him of two of Gustave Moreau’s paintings, The Apparition and

on

Salome Dancing before Herod.

To

the

mind of Des

Esseintes, Sa-

lome has become in Moreau “the symbolic incarnation of undying Lust, the Goddess of immortal Hysteria, the accursed Beauty exalted above hardens her flesh and

all

other beauties by the catalepsy that

steels

her muscles, the monstrous Beast,

Helen indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning, like the everything of ancient myth, everything that approaches her, that sees her, everything that she touches.”^

Huysmans’s treatment of Salome was one of the primary influences on Wilde’s one-act play Salome (published in French in as the culmi1893, in English in 1894), which may be regarded nation of the turn-of-the-century preoccupation with the myth. Written in French (and corrected by friends of Wilde), in Paris,

and

in a lyrical, symbolist

mode

that contrasts sharply with the

tone of his social comedies of upper-class English life, this drama seems much more a part of the French literary tradition than the English. In fact Wilde was thoroughly familiar with French literature and saw it as his task in the late 1880s and early 1890s to

reading public and plead its cause, and he became one of the major theoreticians of French decadence. In a letter to Edmond de Goncourt written in 1891, just as he was completing Salome, Wilde proclaimed, “French by sympathy, have condemned me to speak I am Irish by race, and the English

introduce

it

to the British

the language of Shakespeare.”^

Wilde’s allegiance to France was strengthened by the produc-

^Michel Decaudin, “Un Mythe Tin de

siecle’:

Studies, 4 (1967), 109.

^Joris-Karl

Huysmans, Against Nature,

worth: Penguin, 1959),

trans.

Salome,” Comparative Literature

Robert Baldick (Harmonds-

p- 66.

^Wilde to Goncourt, 17 December 1891, in Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979), p. 100.

Wilde’s Salome

57

tion history of Salome,

which he originally intended

on at the Palace Theatre in London, in French, with Sarah Bernhardt in the title lole. His enthusiasm was high, since he considered Bernhardt “undoubtedly the greatest artist on any stage,” with “the most beautiful voice in the world”; he was later recorded as “ saying, I he three women I have most admired are Queen Victoria, Sarah Bei nhardt, and Lillie Langtry. I would have married any one of them with pleasure.’’^’ Rehearsals oi Salome had already begun at the Palace in 1892 when the Examiner of Plays for the Lord Chamberlain, a Mr. Pigott, refused to grant the

work

a license because

it

contained

to put

biblical material, thus in-

fringing on a law established at the time of the Protestant Reformation to prohibit Catholic mystery plays. Wilde’s rage at Pigott,

whom Shaw

described as a “walking

sular prejudice,

compendium of

was so intense that he threatened

vulgar

to

in-

renounce

and leave for France, where he felt his art could be appreciated. Although he did not carry out the threat— his British citizenship

—

unfortunately for him, as things turned out he increasingly viewed France as his spiritual home and spent the last years of his life there. Appropriately, the first public performance of Salome took place in Paris, at Lugne-Poe’s Lheatre de I’Oeuvre in 1896. Wilde, in Reading Gaol

at

the time, was deeply grateful,

and attributed the subsequent improvement

in his

treatment as

a prisoner to this event.

Reactions to Salome in Europe and the United States were mixed. They are perhaps best summed up by the American

Edgar Saltus’s characterization of the play as a thing that “could have been conceived only by genius wedded to insanity.”^ writer

The drama was ter the

debut

particularly popular in Ciermany, especially af-

in

Dresden

Montgomery Hyde, Oscar (iiroux, 1975), 7 ‘

p{).

.

P-

5

^Quoted Barnes

&

Wilde:

1905 of Richard Strauss’s opera

A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus

I'i:

140, 40.

(*eorge Bernard Shaw,

930

in

vol.

I

of Oj/r Theatres in the Nineties

(New

\'ork: Wise.

‘-

in

Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage, ed. Karl E. Beckson

Noble, 1970),

p.

132.

(New

^’ork:

5

Deniythologizing the

^

Femme

Fatale

Salome, the libretto of which was an abridged translation of Wilde’s text. The musical qualities of the play had been foreseen

by both Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, who translated it into English. In our own time the opera, which according to a music Metrocritic present at its first performance at the New York politan “left the listeners staring at each other with starting eyepopballs and wrecked nerves,”'* has largely eclipsed the play in ularity.

understanding of Wilde’s interpretation of the femme fanecessitates a look at his variations on the Salome myth, for most striking innovation is in the presentation of Salome

An tale

his

Hhodias Salome is merely the passive instrument of tierodias’s revenge on John the Bapto her former tist, who has condemned Flerodias’s marriage husband’s half brother Herod as incestuous; indeed in the Gosherself. In the Bible

and

in Flaubert’s

Matthew and Mark, Salome is not even referred to by name. Although the motive of Salome/ Herodias’s lust for John the Baptist has been present in versions of the myth since the fourth century, nowhere else is Salome’s passion evoked as fully

pels of

and graphically

as in Wilde’s

drama. Heine

s

Atta Troll, for ex-

ample, treats Herodias’s love satirically, as is evident in the narrator’s rhetorical question “Would a woman demand the head of a man she didn’t love?” (Caput XIX), and Laforgue’s Salojne is similarly ironic.

In Wilde’s Salome, by contrast, the

Jokanaan, as he feelings are

trancelike

is

first

called here,

is

title

at the

heroine’s attraction to

center of the play.

Her

conveyed through the use of incantatory,

repetitions in

the

manner

of

Maeterlinck,

whom

Wilde greatly admired: variations on the sentence “I desire to speak with him”‘^* after she is drawn to Jokanaan’s voice rising

up from the cistern where he is being held prisoner, repetitions of “You will do this thing for me” (556ff) as she attempts to

Alan Bird, The Plays of Oscar Wilde (London; Vision, 1977), p. 77. ^'^Salome, in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (London; Collier, 1966), p. 556; subsequent page references appear in the text.

^Quoted

in

Wilde’s Salome

59

persuade the Syrian captain to bring Jokanaan to her, and, most striking, her often reiterated “I will kiss thy mouth” (559ff.) as she

is

seized with desire for Jokanaan. lo be sure,

have been put off by

this repetitive style,

viewing

many it

critics

as a bur-

lesque of Maeterlinck or even as comparable to exercises in language instruction,*^ but seen from the perspective of contemporary

drama

the technique appears quite

modern, anticipating

the theater of Pinter, Beckett,

and others. In her obsession with Jokanaan, Salome becomes oblivious of everything else. When he urges her to seek out the Son of Man, for instance, she asks, “Is he (55^)'

The

render her

is

beautiful as thou art, Jokanaan?”

similes she uses to describe aspects of his person lust virtually cannibalistic:

she compares his voice to

wine, his hair to clusters of grapes, and his

mouth

to a

pome-

granate, which she wants to bite “as one bites a ripe fruit” (573). The contrast between the passionate Salome and the ascetic

Jokanaan is underlined by their attitudes toward the act of looking. Whereas she cannot resist the desire to look at him more closely, he refuses to look at her at all and is repeatedly associated with the unseen in his role as precursor of first

soldier remarks,

“The Jews worship

Cdirist; as the

a Ciod that

you cannot

see” (553).

This emphasis on looking points

to the nature of Salome’s

obsession with Jokanaan: scopophilia, or a delight in seeing, has been characterized as a central element of fetishism.*- Writing

on the turn

of the century,

Hans

Hofstiitter observes:

Fetishism plays an important role in symbolist art and literature because it replaces the actual fullilhnent of a wish by a symbol. This symbol is bound up with the olject of longing: it is concretized as a detail of the whole, but a detail in which the whole is

both compressed and contained

representative fashion. Such fetishes are the hair, the eyes, the mouth of the beloved, which

''Beckson, Oscar Wilde,

in

p. 133.

N. Smirnof f “La Transaction fetichique,” Objets du fetichisme, special issue ot Nouvelle Revue de Psychaualyse, 2 (1970), 46. ‘‘^Victor

,

1

Demythologizing the

6o

Femme

tatale

are posited as absolute symbolic signs, all the more so since they also appear as sexual signs in dream symbolism.'-^

Aspects of Freud’s theories on fetishism are illuminating for the for spirit if not the letter of Salome’s devotion to Jokanaan.

body part or article of clothing which serves maas a substitute for the normal sexual object, represents the ternal penis whose absence the (male) fetishizer perceived as a child; the fetish, which is usually associated with the last thing Freud the

fetish, a

the boy saw before his disturbing discovery of his mother’s genitoken of tritalia (feet, shoes, underclothing, etc.), remains a

over the threat of castration and a protection against it.^^ Although Salome’s fixation on Jokanaan’s body, hair, and

umph

mouth belongs

to the

more general category of

fetishism as an

obsessive devotion rather than to the perversion Freud postulates, her passion shares with Freud’s definition two main characteristics, ambivalence and the perception of a lack.

irrational,

stems from the mother’s lack of a penis, but the structure of the fetish is ambivalent since the child both recognizes this lack and disavows his recognition by creating a

For Freud the

fetish

and thus relieving his castration anxiety; his simultaneous acknowledgment and disavowal lead to both affection and hosfetish

tility

toward the

fetish. Similarly,

Salome’s fetishization of parts

of Jokanaan’s anatomy results from the fact that he is forbidden to her, or lacking, and his condemnation of her causes her to Hans H. Hofstatter, Symbolismm und die Kunst dev J ahrhundertwende (Cologne: Du Mont Schauberg, 1965), p. 201. ‘^See especially Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality {Drei >

3

Fetishism ( FetischisVdl, i 53 ~^ 55 Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, 1905), mus,” 1927), SE, XXI, 149-157; An Outline of Psycho-Analysis {Abriss der Psycho202-204; and “Splitting of the Ego in the Process of analyse, 1940), SE, XXI 1 Defence” (“Die Ichspaltung im Abwehrvorgang,” 1940), SE, XXIII, 273-278. In ’

,

Freud’s definition fetishism is obviously confined to men. Although recent femiSarah Kofnist criticism has postulated the existence of female fetishism (e.g., Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings, trans. Catherine Porter man, The Enigma of [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985],

and Naomi Schor, “Female Fetishism: The

Case of George Sand,” 1985; rpt. in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Susan R. Suleiman [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986], pp. 363-372),

it

is

not

my

intention to

do so here,

as will

become

clear.

Wilde’s Salome

6i

what she has previously praised: “ d hy body is hideous. 1 hy hair is horrible” (559). Only his mouth escapes her ambivalence, and she literally kills for it. But what about the source of Salome’s treatment of Jokanaan? Close analysis of the play as a whole reveals that her behavior is revile

clearly learned: this daughter’s education in a veritable school of

where the principle of immediate gratification reigns, undei mines the conventional notion of the femme fatale lust,

as a kind

of natural force of virtually mythic proportions. In her tion of jokanaan she is simply following the

around

her,

who

fetishiza-

example of those him. fhe opening

her the way she treats lines of the drama, repeated several times, demonstrate the Syrian captain

Salome

s

fascination with her:

The

to-night!”

ways looking fashion

treat

at

her

(553ff.),

“How

beautiful

is

page’s admonition to him,

the Princess

“You are

al-

dangerous to look at people in such points up another parallel between the captain It is

and Salome. And just as her longing to kiss Jokanaan’s mouth compels her to have him decapitated, the captain’s unrequited

love for

Salome drives him to suicide. Salomes foremost model, however,

stepfather, Herod.

The

first

is

observation

surely her uncle

made about him

and

in the

“He is looking at something,” which the second soldier amends to “He is looking at some one” (553); the “some one” is of course Salome, at whom, as his wife Herodias tells him with play

is

iiritation,

he

“always looking” (561). Herod’s lust for his stepdaughter is so overpowering that here, in contrast to other versions of the myth in, for example, the Bible and is

—

Flaubert’s

where Salome’s dance precedes Herod’s offer he coerces her to dance by promising her anything she desires, Just as Salome uses her power over the Syrian captain to force him to bring Jokanaan to her. Salome and Herod are also linked by the insistent repetition of their monomaniacal desires, her “I will kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan” and his “Dance for me, Salome” (567ff.). Having learned her lesson well, Salome is simply Herodias,

the

fullest

embodiment

decadence surrounding her, which is not only exemplified by the contrast between the pagan pracof the

Demytliologizing the

62

tices at

Fatale

Herod’s court and the incipient Christianity represented

Jokanaan but also quite obviously reflected wrought style.

l)y

The

Femme

individualized nature of Salome’s sin

mined by her

in the play’s over-

is

further under-

identification with Herodias; although the

daugh-

not merely her mother’s agent, as in other versions of the myth, there are numerous parallels between them. On the most

ter

is

obvious

level, attention

is

called to their shared physical charac-

such as golden eyes and gilded eyelids, which lead Herodias to think Jokanaan is cursing her when in fact he is condemning Salome. Similarly, just as Salome now shocks Herod s teristics,

entourage with her carnal interest in the holy man, so had Herodias scandalized the populace years before by giving herself to the men of Chaldea, Assyria, and Egypt and by divorcing her husband to marry his half brother. Not surprisingly, Herodias applauds Salome’s demand for the head of Jokanaan. Herod’s resigned response to this demand sums up the similarities between the two women: “Of a truth she is her mother’s child!” In effect Salome is for Herod little more than a younger (573).

version of Herodias, of

whom

he has grown

In the end, then, Wilde seems to be

femme

ular

whole society

less

tired.

condemning

a partic-

than commenting on the decadence of a perhaps a mask for his own. But there is another

fatale

—

mask in the play, one that serves further to demythologize Salome as a fatal woman: on a disguised, symbolic level she is not a woman at all, but a man. As the one who looks at and admires, as spectator, Salome assumes vis-a-vis Jokanaan a traditionally borne out by the language she uses in praising him, by her part-by-part celebration of his anatomy.

male

role.^^

This role

is

kind of anatomical “scattering,” introduced by Petrarch, became the standard means by which male poets after him por-

For

this

'^See john Berger, Ways of Seeuig (Harmonclsworth: Penguin, 1972), who observes with regard to painting that “the ‘ideal’ spectator is always assumed to be male” (64). As we will see in chap. 3, feminist film criticism has paid a good deal of attention to the dichotomy between the female as spectacle and the male as spectator.

Wilde’s Salome

63

trayed female beauty. Nancy Vickers points out that we never see in Petrarch s Rime sparse (Scattered rhymes) a complete picture of Laura; she

woman.

“It

always presented as a part or parts of a would surely seem,” Vickers writes, “that to Petrarch is

Laura’s whole body was at times

less

than some of

its

parts;

and

that to his imitators the strategy of describing her through the isolation of those parts presented an attractive basis for imitation, extension,

woman

not as a

and, ultimately, distortion.

By depicting

the

but as a series of dissociated parts, the male poet could overcome any threat her femaleness might pose to him. This obsessive insistence on particular body parts in turn totality

produced during the Renaissance the genre of the blasoyi or blazon, which praised individual fragments of the female body in a highly ornamental fashion; the new genre even provided an occasion for contests of rhetorical

which, for example,

skill in

one poet

pitted his description of a breast against another’s celebration of an eyebrow. As Vickers notes, the blazon functioned as a

power

strategy, since “to describe

control, to possess,

and

is,

in

some

ultimately, to use to one’s

senses ... to

own

ends.’’^^

Reexamining Wilde’s play in the light of these observations, we find that Salome’s paean to Jokanaan shares much with the traditional male celebration of female anatomy. Her successive tributes to his winelike voice, white body, black hair,

and red mouth, a series of mini-blazons reminiscent of the Song of Songs, can be read as an attempt to attain power over him by taking him apart,” as it were. Roland Barthes’s comments on the blazon are illuminating in this context: The

spitefulness of language:

once reassembled,

order to utter itself, the total body must revert to the dust of words, to the listing of details, to a monotonous inventory of parts, to crumbling: language undoes the body, returns it to the fetish, riiis return is coded under the term blazon. [Like the blazon] the sentence .

“^Nancy

J.

Rhyme,” 1981;

Vickers, rpt. in

.

in

.

“Diana Described: Scattered

Wntmg and Sexual Difference,

Woman

and Scattered

ed. Elizabeth Abel (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), p. 97. '^Nancy J. Vickers, Ehis Heraldry in Lucrece’ Pace,’” in Female Body in Western Culture,

}).

2

1

9.

,

Demythologizing the

64

Femme

Fatale

meanings can be listed, not admixed, the total, the sum are lor language the promised lands, glimpsed enumeration has been at the end ol enumeration, but once this completed, no feature can reassemble it or, if this featuie is

can never constitute a

produced,

The

it

total;

too can only be added to the others.*®

and Barthes with the heightened in Salome s ad-

dissociation linked by both Vickers

literary celebration of

body parts

is

dress to Jokanaan by her use of incongruous imagery, which is women s particularly evident in her treatment of his hair. Fiair

hair— was often fetishized at the turn of the century by male describes artists and writers.*^ Adopting the male role, Salome Jokanaan’s hair

in

extravagant similes:

of thy hair that I am enamoured, Jokanaan. Thy hair is like from clusters of grapes, like the clusters of black grapes that hang the vine-trees of Edom in the land of the Edomites. Thy hair is Lebanon that like the cedars of Lebanon, like the great cedars of give their shade to the lions and to the robbers who would hide themselves by day. The long black nights, when the moon hides her face, when the stars are afraid, are not so black, d he silence that dwells in the forest is not so black. There is nothing in the Let me touch thy hair. [559] world so black as thy hair. It is

.

Simple logic ters

of grapes

straight

tells

—

.

.

us that one thing cannot resemble both clus-

soft

and tall— at

—

and round and the cedars of Lebanon the same time. In the manner of a Renais-

in sance blasonneur, Salome’s impulse toward rhetorical display this case, decadent rhetorical display— triumphs over her inter-

coherence and consistency, and her aesthetic fascination with color supplants her concern with substance. In expressing her desire to touch the admired object, however, Salome over-

est in

power but weakness; Jokanaan’s rebuke— “Back, daughter of Sodom!

steps the

bounds of the virtuoso poet and

reveals not

i»Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York; Hill pp. 113-114. Wilder Garten

ist

Dein Leib: Die Frau urn

(Vhenna: Forum, 1968), pp. 122—123.

& Wang,

die J ahrhundertwende ed.

1974),

Otto Basil

Wilde’s Salome

Touch me

65

Profane not the temple of the Lord (iod” (559)— therefore provokes her to reverse the tenor of her blazon: “ 'Lhy

hair

not.

horrible.

covered with mire and dust. It is like a crown of thorns which they have placed on thy forehead. It is like a knot of black serpents writhing round thy neck. I love not is

It

is

thy hair” (559). She then

mouth, nal

moves on

to celebrate the

terms whose implication

in

French

text:

is

redness of his

revealed only by the origi-

remembering her disguised male

status,

we

find

that the culminating phrase “Laisse-moi baiser ta bouche” (“Let

me

mouth”) takes on added significance when we consider the colloquial meaning of baiser (“to have sexual interkiss thy

course with”). Salome’s fetishization of Jokanaan

on

a literal level he

is

thus doubly forbidden:

forbidden to her because he is a representative of God, pure and untouchable; on a symbolic level he is forbidden to her (in her male guise) by the taboo on homosexuality.

al

With

his

is

prophecies of Christ,

of the angel of death, and

his

Herod, and Salome, Jokanaan

is

warnings about the arrivcondemnations of Herodias, his

well suited to

evoke the

guilt

associated with prohibited objects of desire. Imprisoned in the

same

where Salome

cistern

before, he

s

father had been locked

up years

the patriarch par excellence, the quintessential externalization of the paternal superego. Hence Salome’s passion

him

is

on oedipal overtones as well. Seen in this way, Wilde’s SV/Zo/wc emerges less as a misogynistic denunciation of the femme fatale than as a masked depiction of one man’s prohibited longing for another. Such a strategy should not seem surprising in a writer who declared, “Man is for

takes

least himself

when he

talks in his

own

person. Ciive him a mask,

and he will tell you the truth. fhis masking structure is lar to one that has been recognized in women’s writing. In

now

classic

I

he

Madwoman

(>ritic as Artist,” in

of

Oscar Wilde,

p.

of Wilde’s disguised subversions of conventional sexual behavior

Donan Gray

— see

Ed Cohen, “Writing (ione Wilde:

Closet of Representation,”

FMLA,

their

Sandra (hlbert and Susan

in the Attic,

Complete Works

simi-

—

On

anotlier

The Future of llonioerotic Desire in the

102 (1987), 801-813.

Femme

Deiiiythologizing the

66 Ciiihar use the

literally, a

model of the palimpsest

reinscribed after an earlier text has been erased

—

Fatale

parchment

to describe the

of nineteenth-century women writers, “works whose sur(and less face designs conceal or obscure deeper, less accessible thus intended socially acceptable) levels of meaning’ and are fiction

dem“both to express and to camounage.”^^ Gilbert and Gubar subveronstrate the ways in which these women writers create or melodramatic doubles in their fiction to act duout the anger and rebellion that their lives deny them, but guilt at harboring tifully kill these characters off to assuage their has such feelings. Echoing Gilbert and Gubar, Elaine Showalter suggested that “women’s fiction can be read as a double-voiced

sive, passionate,

discourse, containing a ‘dominant

and

a

muted

story.

Salome— homosexual man in the

Analogously, Wilde’s “double-voiced” treatment of as a

woman

“dominant

in the

—

story, a

ambivalent attitude: although his is has the only literary version of the Salome myth in which fierod her killed, Wilde’s depiction of her plight at the end of the play

“muted” story

reflects his

contains an undeniable element of sympathy. I here is something inherently tragic in the fact that the satisfaction of her desire can be achieved only through the death of the beloved

object— a

situation that anticipates the

famous

insight of

“The

Ballad of Reading Gaol”: “Each man kills the thing he loves.” Indeed, Salome’s ultimate desire remains frustrated, as her

Jokanaan’s severed head on the charger reveal: “I am athirst for thy beauty; 1 am hungry for thy body; and neither wine nor fruits can appease my desire ( 574 )- Shortly after the French version of the play was published in 1893, Wilde re-

words

to

ferred to Salome in a letter as “that tragic daughter of pasAnd yet through her death, symbolically forecast from sion.

‘^'Sandra M. Gilbert W'riter

and

the Nineteenth-Century Literary

Press, 1979), pp- 73, Hi. ‘‘^

in the Attic:

m

Showalter, “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” 1981; rpt. Showalter Feminist Cntictsm: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed.

2 Elaine

New

The Woman Imagination (New Haven: Yale Univ.

and Susan (iubar, The Madwoman

York: Pantheon, 1985), 2 ^Quoted in

p. 266.

Hyde, Oscar Wilde,

p. 150.

The

(New

Wilde’s Salome

67

the beginning of the

he expresses

play/*^^

awareness that neither unbridled female sexuality nor homosexuality could go his

unpunished in Victorian society. For a number of reasons it is appropriate both that Wilde used a female character as a mask for a male homosexual and that a model derived from women’s writing be employed to illuminate the structure of his play. P'or

it

might be said that

in his

day the

—

male homosexual possessed woman s status or worse, since the so-called Labouchere Amendment of the 1885 Criminal Law ”

Amendment Britain.

made

Act had

all

male homosexual

acts illegal in

In a traditional, patriarchal society such as this one,

both male homosexuals and

women

are marginalized.

The En-

and homosexual writer Edward Carpenter often drew parallels between the repression of female sexuality and the psychological damage done to homosexuals by his glish feminist, socialist,

society in the last decades of the century.

Wilde had feminist sympathies as well. His admiration for Sarah Bernhardt, one of the least conventional and most selfconsciously masculine of female entertainers and an adamant advocate of women’s rights, is telling. More concretely, his twoyeai tenure as editor of

from

"I

he W’omaii^s World, which he converted

a fashion sheet to a

“organ of

women

of

that

endeavored

intellect,”^ reflects his special

ing of and respect for equality, the

magazine

women. Infused

magazine contained

their position in politics

of his

on women’s work and ahead of their time and

articles

which were

tive in

‘“^^See

comedies expose

his society,

my

(lentury,”

posing

far

On

a lighter note,

facets of the in

“Tlieater of Impotence:

Modern Drama, 28

understand-

with a spirit of sexual

with which Wilde was entirely in agreement. all

to be the

double standard operavarious ways the question Jack

Fhe One- Act T ragedy

at

the T urn of the

(i()85),

.458—^59. ^^Por a detailed description of conditions for homosexuals in Britain at the time see Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London: Quartet Books, 1977). ‘^•'Quoted in Robert Keith Miller, Oscar Wilde

(New York: Ungar, 1982), p. 19. ^^Arthur k'ish, “Memories of Oscar Wilde,” in vol. I of TAvcrtr Wilde: Intei'inews and Recollectunus, ed. L. H. Mikhail (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1979), pp. 152-

Demythologizing the F'emme Fatale

68

Prism near the end of The Importance of Being Earnest when he thinks he has discovered in her his longlost mother: “Why should there be one law for men, and another

Worthing puts

for

women?”

to Miss

L.ady Windermere's

Fan and A Woman

of

No

Impor-

on the theme of the fallen woman versus the unscathed man, and An Ideal Husband demonstrates the unequal balance of power in marriage (all four plays premiered between 1892 and 1895). And for Salome the consequences of the double

tance hinge

standard are fatale plot,

precise reversal of the typical

fatal: in a

whereas Herod

is

allowed his

cause of hers. Wilde’s stance toward

lust,

women

she

is

femme

killed be-

thus accords with

Eve Sedgwick’s recent argument against the association of homosexuality with misogyny. Wilde’s sympathy for sexual equality takes on broader significance in the light of recent work on the decadent or dandy and the turn-of-the-century New Woman, which has shown that both character types represented a threat to established culture, Both the especially as far as sex and gender were concerned.

dandy and the New Woman opposed the rigid Victorian division between the sexes and moved in the direction of androgyny, or the combination in one person of both masculine and feminine traits, in that the dandy inclined toward male effeminacy and toward female mannishness. An 1895 issue of the British humor magazine Punch satirized this trend in a the

New Woman

poem: a

new

Tomorrow

my bosom

vexes;

there

may be no

sexes!

end

Unless, as

Each one

fear

to

in fact

all

pother.

becomes the other.

Kosotsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985), pp. ig— 20. ^^See, for example, Linda Dowling, “The Decadent and the New Woman in the 1890’s,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 33 (1979), 434 — 453 3^ n androgyny see, e.g., Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (1964; New York: Norton, 1982); June Singer, Androgyny: Toward a New .

0

Anchor/ Doubleday, 1976); and Ellen Androgyny (New York: Pergamon, 1985).

Theory of Sexuality (Garden City: Psychological

Piel

Cook,

Wilde’s Salome

69 E’en then perhaps they’ll start amain A-trying to change back again!

Woman was woman, man was man, When Adam delved and Eve span. Now he can’t dig and she won’t spin. Unless

’tis

Once again we may tuin

tales all

slang and

sin!‘^*

to 1 he Importance oj Bet?i^ Karnest for a

pithy commentary. In her conversation with Cecily in Act III Gwendolen observes, “The home seems to me to be the proper

sphere for the man. And certainly once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully effeminate, does he

And

not?

While rectly

play

in

I

don

t

like that.

It

makes men

Salome the blurring of the sexes

than in

this passage, as

we have seen

it

so very attractive.” is

expressed

lies just

less di-

beneath the

surface, lending a timely, socially specific significance to the “timeless myth” of the femme fatale, and making her s

as

much man

as

woman.

Aubrey Beardsley’s

‘^2

illustrations to Salome,

which accompanied

the English version published in i8p^, reveal his awareness of the ambiguities that Wilde was unwilling to express openly.

Few

of the drawings actually

from the play; they serve rather as a kind of visual commentary, unmasking disguised themes and associations. Prominent among them is the theme of androgyny implicit in Wilde’s double-voiced treatment illustrate scenes

Issue of 27 April 1895, p. 203: (juoted in Dowling, “ I he Decadent and the New Woman,” pp. 444-445. In “Salome: Ehe Jewish Princess Was a New Woman,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 78 ( 974), 95- 1 1 3. jane Marcus argues that both Salome and Jokanaan are androgynous types of the suffering artist and that Salome, like the New Woman, is discontented with her stereotypical role as a sex object. Yet Marcus’s attempt to present Salome as spiritualized 1

and

saintly overlooks Salome’s objectification of

jokanaan. a reading somewhat similar to mine, Kate Millett also views Salome as the product of Wilde’s homosexual desire and guilt, although her interpretation identifies Salome specifically with Wilde rather than with the male homosexual in general and sees the play as “remarkably contingent in the very midst of the sexual revolution, somehow oblicpie and aside from the point” (215), rather than as a (disguised) part of this revolution itself; see Millett, Sexual Politics \’ork: Ballantine, 1989), pp. 214—221.

(New

Deniythologizing the

70

Femme

Fatale

Salome, to which Beardsley adds the element of physical hermaphroditism, or the possession of both male and female sexual organs, d'he original versions of several of the illustra-

of

obscene and replaced for the published edition, contain a number of hermaphrodites, such as the horned figure with breasts and a penis on the left side of the

tions,

which were suppressed

as

page (Figure i) and the serving girl/boy in the The original version of The Toilette of Salome (Figure 2). Similarly, Woman in the Moon (Figure 3), originally titled The Man in the suppressed

title

androgynous implications that can be interpreted in predominant motifs in at least two ways. The moon is one of the define the play, serving as a means by which the characters

Moonf^'^ has

themselves and their obsessions. Yet in nearly every case the moon is associated with Salome: in the Syrian captain’s comparison of the moon to a “little princess” (552), in the page’s simile likening tion of the

it

moon

to a

“dead

woman

as a “virgin” (555),

Salome s descripHerod’s comparison

(552), in

and

in

Thus Beardsley’s depiction of Wilde’s face in the moon in The Woman in the Moon, one of four caricatures of the author among the illustrations, associates Wilde with Salome and, more generally, with femaleness. From a different perspective, three of the illustrations link Salome with maleness— specifically with Jokanaan— by portray-

of

it

to a

“mad woman”

(561).

ing a likeness between their facial features: John and Salome, The The Climax, in Dancer’s Reward, and The Climax (Figures which Beardsley has supplied John’s severed head with snaky.

Medusa-like hair (thus recalling Salome’s comparison of his hair to

a “knot of black serpents”),

is

particularly striking.

The

theme among romantic and decadent writers, but she is typically depicted in confrontations with male characters, since the mythological Medusa had no power over women. Beardsley’s portrayal of Salome holding up and gazing

Medusa was

a popular

longingly at Jokanaan’s Medusa-head thus underlines her male-

33Haldane Mactall, Aubrey 1928), p. 52.

Beardsley: The

Man

and His Work (London: Lane,

figure

I.

Salome: Suppressed Title Page

71

Figure

72

2.

Salome: Original of

The

Toilette of

Salome

Figure

5.

The Woman

in the

Moon

Figure

74

4. Sa/om^’;

John and Salome

Figure

5.

I'he Dancer’s

Reward

75

Figure

6.

The Climax

Wilde’s Salome

77 ness in the play’s

muted

On

story.

story, Freud’s association of the

the level of the dominant

Medusa’s head

decapitation generally with castration

Jokanaan’s decapitation

at

is

specifically

not irrelevant.

and For

the hands of Herod’s executioner

represents Salome’s

disempowerment not only of Jokanaan but of Herod as well: just as Jokanaan is feminized in his status as object, the man whose presumed power was so great that he thought himself able to forbid Messias from raising the dead finds himself (565) subjugated to a woman’s will. But Salome’s power over Herod is only temporary, since she is empowered meiely as a

fetish, as a beautiful

woman becomes Medusa, she

monstrous,

female body; once the beautiful

herself' imitating the fate

of the

destroyed. Neil Hertz’s discussion of the emblematization of certain kinds of revolutionary violence in the eighis

teenth and nineteenth centuries in the “hideous and fierce but not exactly sexless ting here .35 For

Medusa figure— as

woman”— is

a

illumina-

precisely Salome’s masculine qualities, in particular her aggressive sexuality, that make her terrifying as a it

is

woman and

thus intolerable. In Beardsley’s drawing jokanaan’s Medusa-head functions as a secret mirror of Salome’s own

blurred and monstrous sexuality.

Not surprisingly, Wilde was dissatisfied with Beardsley’s drawings and vented his displeasure in the criticism that the illustrations were “Japanese” whereas his play was “Byzantine. Except for those that were obscene, however, he ultimately allowed the drawings to be published with his text, probably because he

'^^See Preucl,

“Medusa’s Head” (“Das Medusenliaupt,” H).p)/ 1922), SE,

273-274.

W

ill

Hertz, “Medusa’s Head: Male Hysteria under Political Pressure,” in Hertz, 'Ihe End of the Line: Essays on PsychoanalysLs and the Sublime (New \’ork: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985), p. .'iSNeil

'^‘'Katharine

Worth, Oscar Wdde (New

\'ork: ('.rove, 1983), p. 64.

The impor-

tance of Wilde’s displeasure is downplayed by Elliot L. (iiibert, who in arguing against the conventional view that Beardsley’s illustrations misrepiesent Salome reaches some of the same conclusions I do. Cf. (ulhert, rumult of Images’Wilde, Beardsley, and Salome," Victonan Studies, 26 (1983), ’

’

Demythologizing the

78

Femme

Fatale

at the was aware of the publicity value of Beardsley’s notoriety he saw as a time. Wilde’s defense of Salome in the face of what conclusion negative treatment by Beardsley may serve as an apt our discussion of the pl^iy- His heroine, he insisted, was a

to

“mystic,” a kind of “St. Theresa”

moon

instead of the cross.

who would have adored

As so

often, he retreats here into

aesthetics to avoid confronting ethics

and

a religion

the

— the

ethics of a society

whose laws were most uncongenial

to him.

“L’Equivoque de 1970, quoted in Jacqueline Bellas, du symbolisme au Salome dans la litterature et I’art Tin de siecle,’” Poesie et peinture de Varsovie, 5 (1973)’ d®surrealisme en France et en Pologne, special issue of Cahiers ^'^Les

Muses, no. 35, 20

May

3

Woman

as Spectacle

and Commodity: Wedekind’s Lulu Plays

Scarcely anyone in the history of

German

literature has pro-

voked such mixed and violent reactions as Frank Wedekind, self-styled bohemian and passionate nonconformist. In stark contrast to the respectable physician Schnitzler

Wilde,

who though

also

an enfant

and even

terrible of the literary

to

world

never relinquished the trappings of high society, Wedekind punctuated his work in advertising and journalism with stints as an actor and cabaret singer, spent one of the happiest periods of his life in the

company of Parisian

a six-month prison

poems.

term for

circtis

performers, and served

“libeling the

crown”

in

one of

his

wonder, then, that Brecht was moved to comment after Wedekind’s death in 1918 that “his greatest work was his personality.” Looking back with the hindsight that political

Little

•

Brecht could not have, we recognize the degree to which his observation obscures the enormous impact Wedekind was to

have on Brecht himself and on the many other twentieth-century dramatists whose work would be very different without his example.

None his

Wedekind’s dramas has been more influential than so-called Lulu plays, which in their unusual mixture of satirof

Der vermummte Heir: lirieje Frank Wedekinds am den Jaliren iSSi — 79/7, ed. VVoKdietrich Rasch (Munich: Deutsclier raschenhuch, 1967), p. 2.41. '

Quoted

ill

79

Demythologizing the

8o

Femme

Fatale

grotesque, and tragic elements combine some of the most memorable features of naturalist and symbolist theater and also

ic,

anticipate expressionism.

Wedekind’s

initial

inspiration for the

pantomime Lulu, Une Clownesse danseuse by Felicien Champsaur, which he saw at the Nouveau Cirque in Paris in the early 1890s, and the stories of Jack the Ripper, whose notorious sex murders in London a few years subject was twofold: the circus

before had sent shock waves across half of Europe. The Lulu material occupied Wedekind longer than any of his other works, off and on from 1892 to 1913. Because the original drama of

1895 was unwieldy, he expanded

it

cities

many

Reinhardt, Pandora’s Box, like so this

it

into

and Die Biichse Although Earth-Spirit was produced in various German from 1898 on, attracting directors of such renown as Max

plays, Erdgeist (Earth-Spirit)

Box:^

up

two der Pandora (Pandoras

and broke

book,

fell

of the plays discussed in

victim to the censor’s knife,

and

it

was not publicly

performed in Germany until after the abolition of censorship in 1918. Although Wedekind was admired by intellectuals, as Brecht’s above-mentioned tribute to him attests, throughout his life the general public and popular press tended to regard him as little more than a pornographer. The main cause of the scandal surrounding the Lulu plays was the figure of the heroine herself Responsible for the deaths not only of three husbands but of several admirers and possibly of .

the wife of her third spouse, Schon, as well. Lulu appears to be a virtual caricature of the femme fatale. Like Wilde’s Salome, she is

a fin-de-siecle incarnation of an ancient myth; like the biblical

Salome, the mythological Pandora, created to punish mankind for Prometheus’ theft of fire from the gods, is both beautiful

and

a source of evil, reflecting the

fundamental and persisting

the various versions see the standard biography by Artur Kutsclier, Wedekind: Leben und Werk, newly edited by Karl Ude (Munich: List, 1964), pp. 109-136; and David Midgley, “Wedekind’s Lulu: From ‘Schauer2()n the differences

tragodie’ to Social

among

Comedy,” German

Life

and

Letters,

38 (1985), 205—232.

Wedekind’s Lulu Plays

8i

ambivalence of men toward the female sex.'^ As the titles of both Lulu dramas suggest and as the animal tamer who introduces her in the prologue to Earth-Spirit expressly states, Lulu is intended to represent “the primal form of woman.”* Perhaps it was the work’s evocation of this mythic, primal realm, the source

many

of so

operas, that inspired Alban Berg in the ip^os to follow Strauss’s example with Salome and compose his Lulu, a

combined version of the two plays which has become a mainstay of opera repertory. Whatever the case, whether Lulu is seen as the manifestation of an “unconditional moral imperative” or as “consisting of nothing but flesh and vulva,”^ she has traditionally been equated with nature, instinct, animality. Silvia

natural

Bovenschen has shown how

phenomenon

is

conception of Lulu as a paradigmatic example of male myths this

of the feminine.*’ Yet this perspective does not fully take into account the extent to which Wedekind depicts the character Lulu as both a product of her society and a quintessential incorporation of its values. For Earth-Spirit and Pandoras

Box offer

30 n the Pandora .nytli see H. R. Hays, The Dangerous Sex: The Myth Li;;/ (New York: Putnam’s, 1964). pp. 79-87, and Dora and

of

Feminine

Erwin Panotsky,

Fandoras Box: The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol, 2d ed. (New ^’orkPantheon, 1962). Expressing his disappointment with Reinhardt’s 1902 production of Earth-Spiiy m Berlin, Wedekind criticized (’.ertrud Eysoldt’s performance as Salome-hke” and therefore misrepresentative of his heroine’s childlike, unself-conscious nature; Frank Wedekind, “Was ich mir dabei dachte,” vol. IX of Gesammelte Werke (Munich: Muller, 1924), p. 440. As we shall see, hovJever, are

m

fact

numerous

there

between Salome and Lulu. ’Wedekind, I he Lulu Plays and Other Sex Tragedies, trans. Stephen Spender (London: (.alder, 1977), p. 11. Subsequent parenthetical references to this ediparallels

tion of Earth-Spirit, abbreviated as ES, include act, scene, and references to Pandora's Box {PB) consist of act and jiage number

page number;

onlv, as each act

is

confined to one setting.

^The

first

characterization

Wilhelm Emrich’s, “Frank Wedekind: Die Lulum his Protest und Verheipung: Studien zur klassischen und modernen lyditung (frankfurt: Athenaum, i960), p. 206, the second is Peter Michelsen’s, Frank Wedekind, \u Deutsche Dichter der Modeme: I hr Leben undWerk ed Benno von Wiese, 2d ed. (Berlin: Schmidt, 1969), I

is

ragbdie,”

p. 55.

’’Silvia

Boveiuschen, Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit: ExempUuische

kulturgeschichtlichen

Suhrkamp,

und

literarischen

1979), pp. 43_-9.

V ntersuchungen

zu

Prdsentatiomformen des Weiblichen (Frankf urt

— Deniythologizing the

82

one of the

Femme

Fatale

dramatic literature of the cultural into spectacle and commodity, two

fullest portrayals in

construction of a

woman

roles conventionally played by

women

in

consumer economies.

her society Par from being removed from the workings of revoluVVilhelmine Germany undergoing a belated industrial of tion— Lulu reveals the ways in which its dominant ideologies mechanisms of patriarchy and capitalism reinforce each other as toward Jokaobjectification. Just as Salome’s wanton behavior

of her,

naan is conditioned by her stepfather’s lustful treatment particular Lulu is not simply born but made, shaped by her upbringing and education. Goethe to For writers in the German literary tradition from

Thomas Mann, perhaps no theme the

importance of education

has been

Bildung

—

in

more

central than

human

develop-

one of his first ment. Wedekind is no exception. The prelude to originally published as* plays. Die junge Welt (The young world; satirically depicts Kinder undNarren[iSgi] [Children and fools]), education received by girls at the turn of the centhe restrictive

retitled tury; the farce Fritz Scfiwigerling (later

Der Liebestrank

the novel fragment Mine-Haha [1899] [The love potion]) and jungen Madchen (1901) Oder Uber die kdrperliclie Erziehung der pre(Mine-Haha, or on the physical education of young girls)

emphasizing especially the sent detailed pedagogical programs, But importance of physical fitness in the upbringing of children. in Wedekind’s oeuvre the most enduring treatment of education Erwachen (1891) (Spring Awakening). is the early drcxnvei Fruhlmgs

Children” (1907), Anticipating Freud’s “Sexual Enlightenmentof Wedekind’s play graphically demonstrates the detrimental re-

be of the f ailure to provide children with what would today ef fects of a botched called “sex education”: one girl dies from the sults

abortion, having

become pregnant

after her

embarrassed moth-

reproduction, er was unable to explain to her the mechanics of and her pubescent lover is sent to a reformatory because the

of sexual intercourse with which he enbreaklightened a schoolmate is blamed for the schoolmate’s

illustrated description

Wedekind’s Lulu Plays

down and moted

)_bodies(?)— possible atid desirable,

more

who

is

no

describable than god, sotil, or the Other; the part of yoti that puts space between yourself and pushes

woman Found

It

you to inscribe

s style in

apiii.

votii

language. Voice; milk that could go „„ forever

The

lost

seems reasonable

mother/bitter-lost. Etei uitvi'is voice

mixed

to suspect that a

female perspective is and realistic conception of the mother arclietype. Indeed, one line in Candida intimates that Shaw was dimly necessary for a

full

aware of this possibility himself. Conversing with Morell’s curate about Candida, Proserpine comments, “I’m very fond of her and can appreciate her real qualities far better than any man can (I, 206). Although Prossy is by no means one of the powerful and subversive old maid f'lgures that Nina Atterbach has

Fstella Uuiter, “Visual

Archetypes

in

Femnm!

Thought, ed. Lauter

and

Images

In VVoineii: .A Test

Case lor the Theorv of

Archelyfol TImoy: C.arol

.S.

Re-Vuwm

Rnpprechl (Knoxville:

Uiiiv.

Press, 1985), pp. 56, 58.

"Helene Cixons and Catherine Clement, The Newly Hon, Wing (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, i98(h.

p. 9^.

of

of reimessee

nans

lielsv

Motherhood, Power, and Powerlessness

2o6

discovered in Victorian literature, serves credence,

and

it

her remark nevertheless de-

suggests the degree to which the male

Candida are biased by their subjective, sexually colored perceptions. However, Just as theater audiences had to wait until Elizabeth Robins’s Votes for Women (1907) for a Shaw and his contemrealistic portrayal of the New Woman,

characters’ images of

poraries would have to wait until the twentieth century for women to enter the arts in numbers large enough to offer a corrective revision

of age-old female archetypes.

Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 109—149. *‘*See Catherine Wiley, “The Matter with Manners: The New Woman and the Problem Play,” in Women in Theatre, ed. James M. Redmond (Cambridge: Cam^*^Nina

bridge Univ. Press, 1989).

9

The

Devil in the House?: Strindberg’s The Father

Erie Bentley finds the

than that of

/I

ending of “much more savage” Doll Home. “Only Strindberg could have written a

sequel to [Candidal

m

the present

The cruelty of the heroine— merely implicit play— would have to come to the surface in any

continuation of the story. Candida has chosen to discover his shame: she, as well as he, will

let

have

her husband to take the

consequences. Let the stage matiager hold razors and strait jackets 111 readiness!"i In the last sentence Bentley is referring to the final images of August Strindberg’s Julie (1888) and The /•Vtf/tcr (1887), respectively. Miss Julie, having demeaned herself by sleeping with her father’s valet, is persuaded by the valet to walk offstage at the play’s end with the razor in her hand, leaving the viewer to assume her suicide. The Father, sounding the first note of the obsession with uncertain paternity

Mm

which was

echo

in

such later works as

A Madman's

Defense (1888)

to

and The

Ghost SoHflto (1907), closes with the Captain paralyzed by a stroke and trussed a straitjacket, his sanity luiving been worn awtiy by doubts fanned by his wife’s carefully chosen words and his own paranoia.

m

We ing

at

can d«ermine the validity of Bentley’s assertion by lookShaws drama and Strindberg’s side by side. Of the two

'Foreword to Plays by George Bernard Shaw, ed. Eric Bentley (N e\v American Library, i960), p. xxiv.

^’ork:

New

Motherhood, Power, and Powerlessness

2o8

Strindberg dramas to which Bentley alludes. The t cither is the more appropriately compared with Candida, since the mother

The

figure plays a key role in both.

between the Captain and

his wife,

fierceness of the battle

Laura, for control of their

daughter gives the drama a sensationalism that has left its mark on audiences throughout the play’s stage history. Describing one of the play’s teristic

first

performances

to Nietzsche (albeit with charac-

hyperbole), Strindberg writes that “an elderly lady

down dead

.

.

.

,

another

woman

gave birth, and

fell

at the sight of

the straitjacket three-fourths of the audience rose en masse to leave, yelling madly!”^

The shocking

quality of The Father has

no doubt had much

to

do with audience perceptions of the character of Laura. Much recent literature on the play corroborates the older conception of her as “demonic” or “monstrous,” a view that places her at the beginning of a line of monstrous mothers in Strindberg’s work.^

Madonna must be colored by New Woman, the perception of

Yet Just as reactions to Candida as the features she shares with the

Laura

we

as evil

must be qualified by

shall see, several ideas

a variety of factors. Indeed, as

expressed through Strindberg’s por-

Laura can now be said to have anticipated (if unintentionally) facets of contemporary feminist theory. Strindberg’s mixed depiction of Laura is best illuminated against the background of his ambivalent attitudes toward women and feminism in general. A letter of 1886 to Edvard Brandes

trayal of

reveals that Strindberg considered

woman’s place

to

be distinctly

from man’s: “Is it really necessary for the unmarried woman to enter the male labor market? After all, she has her own. The unmarried woman can become a maid, a wet nurse, a housekeeper, a teacher, a music teacher, an actress, a dancer, a

different

^Strindberg to Nietzsche (in French), 1 1 December 1888, in August Strindbergs brev, ed. Torsten Eklund, VII (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1961), 203. -’See, e.g., Gideon Ofrat, “The Structure of Ritual and Mythos in the Naturalistic

Plays of

August Strindberg,” Theatre Research

International, 4 (1979), 103,

106. In later plays by Strindberg, such as The Pelican (1907), the mother, conventionally associated with

ism.

nourishment,

is

instead linked with

its

opposite, vampir-

Strindberg’s The Father 2

singer, a lady in waiting, a queen, an empress, case— a whore. Which latter resource

or— in

og

the worst

denied to the male ” Strindbergs stance toward the Scandinavian women’s movement m the 1880S seems clear f rom the collection of short stories titled Mamed, which appeared in two volumes in 1884 and 1886 “A Doll House,” for example, takes a stab is

at

nowned Norwegian contemporary, telling the tain who nearly loses the love of his wife

'

Strindberg’s re-

story of a sea cap-

after an unmarried, emmist woman friend encourages her to read Ibsen’s Doll Home; the husband finally wins his wife back by

flirting so outrageously with her friend that the wife becomes jealous and throws her out, thus finding her way back

to

station,

ft

appeared

IS

m

worth noting the

first

that

one of the

her proper wifely

stories in

Mamed

issue of a

Viennese magazine called Der trauenjeind ( I he misogynist), founded “to counter the e.xaggerated passion for worshipping women .”5 Similarly, Strindberg’s play Comrades (1888), a rewritten version of Marauders, inverts Ibsens Doll House: two would-be bohemian artists, Bertha and Axel, switch gender roles after Bertha’s painting is accepted by the salon and Axel’s is refused; Strindberg carries the parody so ar as to provide a Spanish woman’s costume for Axel But whereas Shaw’s inversion of A Dolt House ends harmoniouslv, with Candida “choosing” her husband and sending the interfering young poet off into the night, Comrades closes with the breakup of Axel and Bertha and so reveals the ideal of unisexism to

precisely

that— an

be

ideal.

Other works that Strindberg wrote during these years demonstiate his attitude toward the women’s movement more specifi-

cally.

In his autobiographical novel

emancipated

women

^ ,

“fools”

A Madman's

and “half-women,

Defense he calls

and he uses the

Hrandes, 3 December 1886, in Augmt Strindberg.s passage was translated by Barr\ Jacolfs, to whom

indebted for numerous helpful references and suggestions for Michael Meyer, (New YorCLuUun

this

llous

hrev, I

am

clnntfM

" i.^')

p.'

‘’August Strindberg. A Madmiu.s Defeme, trans. based on Kllie Schleussner's version, revised and edited by Evert Sprmchorn (('.arden Citv. N.^' “ Do b e day/ Anchor, 19(17), pp. 251, 258. •

'

2

Motherhood, Power, and Powerlessness

10

latter

designation again in the preface to Miss Julie:

woman

a type that forces itself

is

on others,

“ I

he

half-

selling itself for

power, medals, recognition, diplomas, as formerly it sold itself for money. It represents degeneration.”'^ Such statements provide an appropriate backdrop for the play

waywardness

is

partially attributed to

itself, in

which

Julie’s

her upbringing as the

daughter of an emancipated woman. Undeniable contradictions, however, cloud our view of Strindberg’s opinions about

avowed sentiments on woman’s proper place, for example, all three of his wives had careers, one in journalism and two in acting. Although his life would doubtless have been simpler had he married a conventional domestic woman, the prospect evidently had little appeal for him. the

women’s movement. Despite

his

Strindberg’s feelings about the female sex per se are equally

ambivalent.

On

the one hand, in the preface to Miss Julie, in a

women

passage describing theater audiences, he notes that retain a primitive capacity for deceiving themselves

ting themselves be deceived, that

is,

for

and

succumbing

“still

for

let-

to illusions

and responding hypnotically to the suggestions of the author” (564), and similarly categorical denunciations of women abound in his works of the 1880s. At their extreme his expostulations resemble the views of Otto Weininger, the Viennese Jewish writer

who

killed

himself

at

the age of twenty-three after publishing

the rabidly misogynist Geschlecht und Charakter (1903) (Sex and

Weininger admired Strindberg’s works, especially The Father, and may have been influenced by them. There are in any case numerous parallels between the thinking of the two Character).

men, such as their view of women as nonmoral, lacking in soul and genius, and dominated by sexuality rather than rationality. Strindberg felt that Sex and Character had solved the woman problem, and a memorial to Weininger published in Die Fackel I he torch) provides him with an appropriate opportunity to (

’“Preface to

Bernard

F.

Mm Julie," in Dramatic Theory and Criticism: Greeks

Dukore (New York;

Holt, Rinehart

the only uncut version of the preface in

appear

in the text.

&

to

Grotowski,

eel.

Winston, 1974), p- 568 (this is English); subsequent page references

Strindberg’s The Father

summarize

his views

has created

21

on the

subject:

“The simple

fact that

of culture, spiritual as well as material, strates his position as the superior sex.”« all

I

man

demon-

On

the other hand, Strindberg often claimed that his misogyny was merely theoretical, since he could not do without the

company of women. Further,

in

an

article that

appeared

in

Die

backel a few years after the

Weininger memorial, Strindberg presents a dialogue between a hypothetical “author” and “interviewer” m which the author points out that he has attacked not woman’s attempt to liberate herself from cradle and kitchen but her attempt to liberate herself from bearing children, not woman but contemporary social conditions.^ This last remark reflects Strindbergs strong feelings about woman’s role as mother feelings similar to those we encountered in Hauptmann’s later work which inspire the author’s final exclamation in the inter-

“Woman

view:

does not need my defense! She is the mother, and therefore she is ruler of the world” (22). And yet, knowing

same writer who on other occasions attributed the decline of patriarchy in his time to man’s adulation of the mother, we should perhaps take his glorification of maternity that this

is

the

with a

grain of Idle

salt.

ambivalence evident

in Strindberg’s

polemical statements IS discernible as well in his portrayal of Laura. Although in some ways she is indeed the harridan she has so often been made out to be,

her behavior

at least partially

explained by her situation. Especially by contrast with the Captain, for instance, she appears relatively uneducated, professing a lack of knowledge about the is

matters that concern him. Laura’s ignorance could in fact be one of the examples to which the “author” alludes in the scientific

*^Strindberg, “Idolatrie, (iynolatrie: Eiii Nachruf von August Strindberg,” Die tackel, no. 144 (17 October 1. See also Hugh Salvesen, 1903), p.

pointed Idealist: August Strindberg

German

Studies,

9

(

1

98

1

),

1

in

“The DisapKarl Kraus’s Periodical Die Fackel," New

57- 7^ 1

^Strindberg, “Zur Frauenfrage,” Die Fackel, nos. 227-228 (10 june 1907), pp. 21—22; subsequent page references appear in the text. '•Tvert Sprinchorn, Strindberg av Dramatist (New Haven: \’ale Univ. Press 1982), p. 47.

Motherhood, Power, and Powerlessness

2/2

interview published in Die Fackel twenty years later claims, “I have

shown

under present

that

ture;

I

have, in other words

— write

social conditions

woman

cation has often (not always) turned it

when he

down,

edu-

into a stupid creasir

— attacked wom-

en’s education” (22).

As the product of an educational system that trains men for the world and women for the home, Laura is not only ignorant but socially powerless.

Her

when she

early in the play

lack of financial

power

is

evident

has to go to the Captain for household

must account for what she has spent. Her subsequent responses to him are revealing “If our financial position is bad, it’s not my fault” and “If our tenant doesn’t pay,

money and

it’s

not

my

is

told she

fault”^^

—

— the repeated phrase underlining her lack of

and thus of authority. Her exclusion from external avenues of power is manifest in her wish for her daughter, Bertha, to stay at home, countered by the Captain’s desire for the girl to study with a freethinker in town, to become an atheist, to be independent. As Richard Hornby points out, “if Laura were truly a feminist, she would want these very things for her responsibility

Strindberg’s awareness of the difficulties sexual in-

daughter.”

equality caused a

women

woman’s love

in his

day

reflected in his definition of

is

ardor and 50 percent hate tied to [her lover] and subordinate to him.”^^

as “50 percent

because she feels

.

Laura’s powerlessness and frustration are expressed gestural level as well.

him her accounts speaks for 31)

itself.

When

later,

.

.

on the

the Captain decides that she can give

the curtsy with which she “thanks”

him

Similarly, Bertha notes, “She cries so often!”

(I,

— and her tears of course are a manifestation of anything but

strength and control. Other characters also recognize her impo-

“Slrindberg, The Father, in Fre-Inferno Plays, trans. Walter Johnson (Seattle: Univ. of Wasfiington Press, 1970), Act I, p. 2 subsequent quotations are identified in the text by act and page number. ‘^Richard Hornby, “Man against Nature in Strindberg’s The Father," in vol. II 1

of All the World:

Drama

;

Past and Present, ed. Karelisa V. Hartigan (W'ashington:

Univ. Press of America, 1982), p. 34. '^Strindberg, “Idolatrie, Uynolatrie,”

p. 2.

Strindberg’s The Father

21^

conn n conftdentta I

varying degrees. ly

remarks

to her, “Yot.

know how one

Doctor

Tlie feels

one’s mnettnost being when one’s strongest wishes are frnstrated

when ones

will

it,

thw-arted” (II, 35), den,ot,strating his understand.ng of her situation. But it is the Nurse, the intti.er figure par excellence of the play, who puts her finger on the source of Laura s powerlessness-and of her power-when she tells the aptain, A father has things beside his child, but a mother has ts

question to the Captain in their emotional exchange at the end of .he second act: “What has this whole struggle fotlife or death been about but power?’’ (44). Lacking powet in society

le financial

as a

management

of her

mother.

and even

home, Laura can exercise

it

In his attention to the particular combination of maternal

powei and social powerlessness embodied in Laura, Strindberg although hardly a feminist himself, can be seen as a precursor l{ ^tch postwar feminist thinking from its beginnings to tf,e presen As early a commentator as Simone de Beauvoir points out ba the pleasure of feeling absolutely superioi

eel in

legard to

women-can

-which men

he enjoyetl hv w.,.

(Hillsrlale, N.,|.:

I’sychoaoaMc Vishm ed Anaivlic Press.

,>^

Jordan and Janet L. Surrey. “The sSelf-in-Relatioir Finirnhv and die Moiher-Danghler Relalinnship.in Psychology of Today's Koiaan. p 8rp

Motherhood, Power, and Powerlessness

218 Irigaray, for

example, writes

in

Le Corps-d-corps avec

la

rnhe of the

form a reciprocal relationship in order to work toward their mutual emancipation: “[I'his relationship] is indispensable for our emancipation from the authority of the fathers. Phe relation mother/daughter, daughter/mother constitutes an extremely explosive nucleus in our societies” (86). Yet Irigaray is aware too of the profound ambivaneed for daughters and mothers

lence of the

mother-daughter

to

relationship, an ambivalence no-

where more graphically expressed than

One

the

in

her

“And

lyrical piece

Doesn’t Stir without the Other.” Written in the daugh-

ter’s voice,

it is

pervaded with the imagery of ambivalence, con-

veying the daughter’s simultaneous feelings of suffocation by and love for the mother: “With your milk. Mother, I swallowed

And

ice.

more

here

I

am now, my

insides frozen.

than you do, and

difficulty

I

And

move even

I

walk with even

less.

You flowed

me, and that hot liquid became poison, paralyzing me. And I can no longer race toward what I love. And the more

into

love, the

.

more

immobilizes

I

become

.

.

I

captive, held back by a weightiness that

me.”‘‘^^

Strindberg also demonstrates considerable insight into moth-

er-daughter ambivalence, for Bertha’s protectiveness toward Laura is countered by feelings of resentment and entrapment. “How I’d like to get to town, away from here, anywhere at all!” (I, 31), she exclaims to her father, and goes on to complain that her mother “doesn’t Captain’s pressure

myself’

(III,

56)

on her

— points

against Laura as well.

ambivalence

is

me!”

listen to

to

(I,

conform

31).

Her response

to his will

—

to the motivation for

The

“I

to the

want

to

be

her rebellion

dramatization of mother-daughter

and mother

not limited to the relationship between Laura

Bertha, however, since Laura

is

presented not only as a

but as a daughter herself. Although Laura’s mother never ap-

“And the One Doesn’t

Other,” trails. Helene V. Wenzel, Sigtis, 7 ( 98 ), 60. See also Eleanor H. Kuykendall, “Toward an Ethic of Nurturance: Euce Irigaray on Mothering and Power,” in Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory, ed. Joyce Trebilcot (Towota, N.J.; Rownian Sc Allanheld, 1983), ‘“^^Irigaray,

1

p\).

263-27.4.

1

Stir

without

tlie

Strindberg’s The Father 2

pears on stage, she

ig

referred to often, and her presence seems to hover over the action like a dark cloud; indeed, for Harry Carlson she is the “secret heart of the play, is

hidden and

noiis,

a

niyste-

modern

incarnation of the rerrible Mother archetype.-^'’ Significantly, the one time she speaks is to ask Laura whether her tea is ready, and the dutiful daughter replies that she will “bring it very soon” (I, .4). Yet Laura is by no means a wholly subservient daughter. That she maintains some distance

between herself and her mother becomes evident when she tells the Nurse, “My mother imisn’t know anything about ail tins [her efforts to have the Captain committed]. Do you hear that?" (Ill, 49). Lama s attitude toward her own mother suggests that she is not terribly sanguine about the mother-daughter bond. And in general her treatment of Bertha suggests that she is not committed to motherhood for its own sake but rather because of the powei it alfoids her the only kind of power she can have. This aspect of The Father anticipates Strindberg’s one-act play The Bond U8g2), in which a divorcing couple claim that their child is the focus of their concerns but in fact use him as a tool to their

justify

own

respective selfish causes. An illuminating commentary on Laura as by Strindberg’s younger contemporary

mother

provided

is

Emma Goldman, the American anarchist and feminist. Viewing The Father as a portrayal of “motherhood, as it really is,’’ she argues that hood,

much

praised, poetized,

m

“motherand hailed as a wonderful thing,

reality very often the greatest deterrent influence in the life of the child. The average mother is like the hen with her IS

.

.

.

brood, forever fretting about her chicks if they venture a step away from the coop. Woman must grow to understand .

the father

is

.

.

that

as vital a factor in the life

of the child as is the mother. Such a realization would help very much to minimize the conflict between the

sexes.’’-^^

argument

that the father

^‘’Harry Carlson, Stnndherg mid the Poetn of Myth (Berkeley California Press, 1982), pp. 51, 53. '

‘^^Eniina (.oklman, The Social Significance of the *914). PP- 4 ^- 5 «-

’

liniv

'

of

Modern Drama (Host U)ston; Badger.

2

Motherhood, Power, and Fowerlessness

20

should play a greater role

in

parenting surfaces

the relationship between the Captain

and Bertha,

portrayed with moments of genuine poignancy. ther that Bertha runs screaming

mother wants

in

a relationship It is

to her fa-

thinks that her grand-

She burns the midnight oil to work at Christmas gift. And the image with which

home

she describes his arrival

and

when she

The Father

to hurt her.

sewing her father’s ness

in

is

a beautiful expression of happi-

always so heavy, so terrible in there as

relief: “It’s

if

it

were a winter night, but when you come. Dad, it’s as if we were taking out the double windows on a spring morning!” (I, 31). Just as the career

conform

to his

women

Strindberg himself married failed to

expressed ideal of womanhood, the Captain’s

explanation for his wish that Bertha become a teacher appears to contradict the playwright’s

an’s

proper sphere:

“I

avowed sexism

don’t want to be

my

in delimiting

daughter’s

pimp and

bring her up for marriage alone. If she doesn’t marry,

have a hard time”

(

1

19).

,

in the horticultural

uses to describe his sense of having lost her:

my

she’ll

His interest in Bertha’s education

nurturing influence, as we can see

arm, half

wom-

brain, half the

marrow

in

“I

grafted

my backbone

is

a

image he

my

right

to another,

grow into one and become a more perfect tree, and then someone came along with a knife and cut everything off just below the graft, and now I’m only half a tree” (III, 55); he tells the Nurse, “It isn’t enough for me to have given life to the child I want to give her my soul, too” (I, 28). Strindberg’s criticism of maternal omnipotence and his correbecause

I

believed they could

—

sponding suggestion that the father should have a role in raising children foreshadow the argument voiced in our own day by Dorothy Dinnerstein and Nancy Chodorow. Dinnerstein shows

how

female-dominated child care guarantees the perpetuation of the sexual double standard that generates so much discord between

men and women, how

it

furthers age-old antagonisms toward

woman, including “a deeply ingrained conviction that she is intellectually and spiritually defective; fear that she is untrustworthy and malevolent [and] a sense of primitive outrage at .

.

.

Strindberg’s The Father

meeting her

in

22

any position of

Chodorow-who,

unlike

1

woilcllv aiitlioi ity.”2» Similarly

Freud,

focuses on

the preoedipal phase of development— argues that wometi’s motheritig is responstble for crucial and problematic differences in the fetninme and the masculine persotiality: "From the retention

of preoedipal attachments to their mother, growing girls come to < efme and experience themselves as contititious with othersthetr experience of self cot, tains tnore flexible or permeable ego boundaries. Btiys come to define themselves as more separate and dtstmct, with a greater setise of rigid ego boundaries atid

differenttatton.

The

basic feminine sense of self

is

connected

the world, the baste tnasculine sense of self is separate. Dtnnerstetn and Chodorow advocate that the father and participate equally in child-raisitig from the baby’s

life,

to

Both

mother

beginning of the since only this kind of double exposure will prevent

the child from reproducing conventional gender distinctions The not, -feminist Strindberg’s belief in and censure of

maternal

omntpotence tllummate the Its

characteristics of the tnyth as well as analysis by Suleiman, Dinnersteit,, Chodorow, and other

temporary feminist thinkers. I he C.aptam s wish to play a greater role

cot,-

in raising

Bertha, if implied criticism of maternal omnipotence, IS motivated also by two selfish considerations: his desire for a sense of immortality and his need to counteract the strong female influence the house. In pursuing the second of these concerns he goes too far in his demands: he asserts

forward-looking

in

its

m

that “chil-

dren are law

(I,

to

22),

be brought up

according to the and that a mother has no rights over her child at all

thereby inciting Laura to cent of Strindberg’s

m

in their father’s faith,

own

Lhe Captain’s stance is reminishe expressed it in two letters written

battle.

as

January and February 1887:

in the first

letter

he praises

^HDorothy Dinnerstein. The Mernnud and the Mnwtaur: Sexual Anan^ements and Human Malaise (New \ork: Harper X: Row, i()76), pp •'SNancy C:lKHlor«w, Th, Ke/,rosyd,oo„„ly,o. and the Soetology oj Gender (Berkeley; Uiiiv. of California Press, 1978 ), p. 169.

Motherhood, Power, and Powerlessness

22 2

Bismarck’s Germany, “where patriarchy and still

virile

member

are

revered”; in the second he instructs Edvard Braudes to

“have a penis of red sandstone erected on

my

Yet as

grave.

John Ward points out, by putting such autocratic and obviously unreasonable opinions in the Captain’s mouth, “Strindberg is able to criticise the man and to condemn those bourgeois notions of marriage for which he ing.”*^

felt

both contempt and intense long-

^

The

conventional view of Laura as

evil

mother

is

further un-

dermined by the play’s intimation that on a metaphoric level she is scarcely a mother at all, since she appears as hardly feminine. Like Shaw’s depiction of Candida, Strindberg’s portrayal of Laura flies in the face of the Yictorian ideal of the angel in the

house; she

is

hardly the

woman

envisioned by Patmore and de-

and Gubar as the “girl whose unselfish grace, gentleness, simplicity, and nobility reveal that she is not only a pattern Victorian lady but almost literally an angel on earth. Laura’s divergence from the typically feminine is suggested by her repeated expressions of anger, an emotion traditionally characterized as unwomanly. As Jean Baker Miller has written, “women generally have been led to believe that their identity, as women, is that of persons who should be almost totally without anger and without the need for anger. 1 herefore, anger feels like a threat to women’s central sense of identity, which has been called fejnininityr^'^ Marianne Hirsch observes of the mother’s stands in a paradoxical relation to anger specifically: “Anger the maternal as culture has defined it. In fact, the term ‘materscribed by Gilbert

.

.

.

^‘^Strindberg to Braudes, 19 January and 19 February 1887, in August Strindbergs brev, IV (1958), 145, 168; cited in Egil Tornqvist, Strindbergian Drama:

Themes and Structure (Stockholm: Almqvist & VViksell, 1982), p. 24311. 3 'John Ward, The Social and Religious Plays oj Strindberg (London: Athlone, 1980), p. 49. ^‘-^Sandra

Writer

and

M.

(iilbert

and Susan (kibar. The Madwoman

the Nineteenth-Century Literary

Imagination

in the Attic:

(New Haven:

The

Woman

\'ale

Univ.

Press, 1979), p. 22. 33jean

Baker

Miller,

1983), p. 3.

in Women and Men,” Work Developmental Services and Studies,

“The Construction of Anger

in Progress (Wellesley: Stone

Center for

Strindberg’s The Father

anger

nal

is

itself

225

sonietliing of an

oxymoron. ... A mother anger (is a mother; she must step out of a culturally circumscrtbeci role which commaiKis mothers to he caring and nurtunng to others, even at the expense cantiot articulate

of themselves.”:''

Laura’s anger

not the only indication of her tionfemininity. ter she has had the Captain locked away in an upstairs room, the Pastor indtrectly compares her is

to

May

I

look at your

hand?— Not

Lady Macbeth, asking

a spot of blood to give

away, not a trace of the treacherous poison!”

Lady Macbeth

rejects f'eminitie

weakness

you

(Ill, 51). Just as

her plea to the "spirme here,” Laura gains strength as she sheds fetninmity. The analogy between Laura and Lady Macbeth has not gone unnoticed by critics of the play, but guided by Janet Adelman’s observations on Macbeth, we can take its implications eveti further. Adelman argues that the source of Lady Macbeth’s power over Macbeth is her attack on his virility, atui that she acquires that power 111 part because she can make him imagine himself as an infant vulnerable to her: “As [Lady Macbeth] progresses from questioning Macbeth’s masculinity to imagining herself dashing out the brains of her infant son, she articulates a fantasy m which to be less thati a man is to its

in

to “utisex

ably a

woman

or a baby.”35 Proni

stems the play’s central fantasy ifested first

become ititerchangethis moment, Adelman argues of escape from woman, man-

Macbeth’s envisionitig his wife as the all-male mother of invulnerable infants (“Bring forth men-children only! / For thy undaunted mettle should compose / Nothing but males”) and then in the witches’ prophecy: “None of woman born / Shall harm Macbeth.” 111

In The Father, the equivalent of Latly Macbeth’s attack on her husbatid’s virility is Laura’s questioning of the Captain’s paternity, a process similarly bound up with the male’s fantasies of

Indiana Univ. Press). Forthconiinj^. anet Adelman, “ ‘Born of Woman’: Fantasies of Maternal Power in Macbeth " in MnyubaL,\\ Itches aad Divorce: Estranging the Renamance, ed. Marjorie ('.arlie’r (Baltimore. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 11)87), iiigton.

P*

a

Moliierhood, Power, and Powerlessness

224

being a child or a woman.

It

is

as a child that the

Captain begs

you see I’m as helpless as a child? Don’t you hear I’m asking for pity as from a mother?” (II, 45). Like Ckmdida, Laura slips into the maternal role vis-a-vis her husband: “Weep, my child; then you’ll have your mother with you l.aura for mercy: “Don’t

Do you remember

again.

came

into

your

life?

...

it

was

as

your second mother

loved you as

I

my

child. But,

every time your feelings changed nature and you

first

I

you know,

came

as

my

was ashamed, and your embrace was a Joy that was followed by pangs of conscience as if I had committed incest” (II, lover,

I

46). Particularly in

Nurse

that

“it’s

view of the Captain’s later remark to the

a delight to

fall

asleep on a

woman’s breast

—

mother’s or a mistress’, but most delightful one’s mother’s!”

(Ill,

her maternal

feel-

61),

it

seems that Laura’s

inability to reconcile

husband with his erotic desires for her represents a male projection of this problem onto her. Thus in contrast to Freud’s claim in “Femininity” (1933) that a wife’s assumption of a maternal posture toward her husband will strengthen their ings for her

marriage

— a belief anticipated by Shaw’s

women who

numerous

portrayals

—

husbands or lovers Strindberg’s drama acknowledges the conflict between men’s filial and sexual feelings toward women, a conflict Freud himself had de-

of

infantilize their

scribed in his earlier paper

basement

in the

“On

the Universal

Sphere of Love”

Tendency

to

De-

(1912).'^^

Whereas Shaw sustains his desexualized presentation of wife as mother and of husband as son throughout Candida, Strindberg contrasts the mother-son relationship idealized by both the C^aptain and Laura with the reality of male-female sexual relations, fraught with tension and hostility. Flere the Captain’s fantasy of his womanhood comes to the fore: the more masculine mother-son references in The Father 2iS on his mother; see Uppvall, August Strindberg: A Psychoanalytic Study with Special Reference to the Oedipus Complex (Boston: Badger, 1920). While Strindberg may indeed have been close to his mother, to reduce his treatment of the issue to a version of his own family constellation seems unnecessarily limiting and obscures the larger significance of '^‘’Axel

Johan Uppvall regards

all

of the

j)rool of Strindberg’s incestuous fixation

this conflict for

men

at

the time.

Strindberg’s The Father

225

Laura becomes, thus following in the footsteps of the “unsexed” Lady Macbeth, the more feminine he imagines himself to be. This gender reversal reflects Strindberg’s belief that “the

cipation of

men.

-^7

women

Laura

eman-

necessarily leads to the effeminization of symbolically expresses her appropriation

husband’s male power by having

of her

the bullets

removed from guns and bags, a gesture that calls to mind the actress’s requesting that the count unbuckle his saber in Schnitzler’s La Ronde. The Captain’s obsession with gender reversal pervades his language in the latter part of the play: “When women get old and have ceased to be women, they get beards on their chins. I wonder what men get when they become old and have ceased being men? (II, 47). And he envisions Laura as Omphale, the Lydian queen to whom Hercules was sent as a slave, who amused all

his

making him dress up as a woman and do woman’s Omphale!” the Captain exclaims. “Now you’re playing

herself by

work.

with the club while Hercules spins your wool!” (HI, 58). The Captain displays a similar sense of gender slippage in suggesting that the ruler over life is “the god of strife then! Or the goddess nowadays!” (HI, (3o). In contrast to the situation in Macbeth, however, The Father it is not the female but the male presence that is ultimately eliminated from the play. This outcome represents not a male wish-fulfillment fantasy but rather Strindberg’s horlific anxiety dream of a female assumption

m

of power. In Strindberg’s oeuvre the idea that each gender possesses aspects of the other is by no means limited to The Father. Lhe switching of gender roles in Comrades has been mentioned; the title

character ot Miss Julie

tells

her father’s

valet that in

growing

up she learned everything a boy learns and was dressed boy, and that on the estate of her emancipated mother,

like a

the

were given the women’s jobs and

men

vice versa. Similarly, in the

one-act play Creditors (1888) Adolf describes a sense of identity between himself and his wife, admitting that when she gave 371^3, ry Jacobs, “'Psychic

Murder and Characierization

rather,’” Scandinavica, 8 (1969), 26.

in Strindberir’s ^

'

I'lie

Motherhood, Power, and Powerlessness

226 birth to their child,

he too

felt

labor pains. Fhe preoccupation

with gender duality, with masculinity in

women and

femininity

men, appears in the post-Inferno Strindberg as well, as Stephen Mitchell points out in his analysis of Easter (1901).^^ In-

in

deed, Declan Kiberd

make androgyny

calls

Strindberg “the

the central issue in his

first

modern

writer to

accounts of sexual rela-

•ions.--

When we

recognize the importance of androgyny in Strind-

we are inevitably reminded of the equally large role it plays in Shaw’s; and when we compare their work we are led to a rather surprising conclusion. For Shaw, androgyny is an ideal, but for all his attempts to present men and women as equal and berg’s work,

alike, as in

Candida, he succeeds only in perpetuating sexual

stereotypes that underline the differences between the sexes.

Strindberg, by contrast, repeatedly emphasizes sexual difference, often scandalizing audiences by the vituperation of his

misogyny, yet his male and female characters are governed by

same passions and driven by the same rages; his men and women, in the last analysis, are very much alike. These paradoxes epitomize the complexities of the European drama crethe

ated by male writers at the turn of the century, a period in which conflicting currents of thought about

women

inevitably created

an atmosphere of confusion and yet excitement, perplexity and yet hope.

^^Stephen A. Mitchell, “The Path from Inferno to the Chamber Plays: Easter and Swedenborg,” Modern Drama, 29 (1986), 163. '’‘^Declan Kiberd, Men and Feminism in Modem Literature (London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 34.

Index

Abolitionism, 140 Acton, William, 3—4

Beardsley, Aubrey: Salome illustrations,

Aclelman, Janet, 223 Alberti, Conrad, 141 Allen, Grant, 195 Allen, Virginia M., 5211

Beauvoir, Simone de, 146, 202, 213,

216-17

Andreas-Salome, Lou, 158 Androgyny, 68-70, 77, 159, 163, 203,

223-26

“Angel in the house,” 191, 222 Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim), 8-q, 13611

Annunzio, Gabriele

D’,

Arabian Nights, 166 Archer, William, 187

Ascher, (iloria j., 16711 Atwood, Margaret: Handmaid's Tale, 183

Auerbach, Nina, 1711, 205-6 Augspurg, Anita, 140

Bachofen, J

^15 Baniber, Linda, 120-21 Banks, Olive, 511 Bansch, Dieter, 14111 Barrymore, Ethel, 123 Barthes, Roland, 63-(34 J-.

Baudelaire, (diaries, 52

Bebel, August, 13, 100 Beckett, Samuel,

59

Beer-Hofmaim, Richard, 30

Behan iell, Frederick

).,

2811

Belkin, Roslyn, 15011 Bellas, Jacqueline, 7811 Bellour, Raymond,

94

52

Apollinaire, (iuillaume, 55

“Baby M.,” 183

69-78

Beatles, 192

Bentley, Eric,

207-8

Berg, Alban: Lulu, 81 Berger, John, 6211 Bernhardt, Sarah, 17, 57, 67 Bernheim, Hippolyte, 27 Bernheimer, Charles, 711 Beutler, Margarete, 140-41 Beydoii, Therese, 106, 117 Bible, 58, 61,

192-93

Bird, Alan, 5811

Blazon, 63-64 Blum, Harold

P.,

3211

Bohni, Karl, 16711 Bonaparte, Marie,

32 Booth, Wayne, 19 Bortieniann, Ernest, 3111 Bourgeois tragedy, tradition

•30-31. 137

22

of, 125.

5

1

228

Index

Bovenscheii,

Dacre, Kathleen, 15611

Silvia, 8i

Bowlby, Rachel, 97?! Brandes, Edvard, 208, 222 Brecht, Bertolt,

Dandy, 68 Decaudin, Michel, 56n

79-80

Dickens, (diaries: Old Curiosity Shop,

Breuer, Horst, io8n Breuer, Josef, 8—9, 1360 Brooks, Louise, 92-93

Brown, Janet,

Dijkstra, Brain,

Dinnerstein, Dorothy, 147, 220-21 “Dora” (Ida Bauer), 10, 126, 161,

1811

Brownstein, Rachel, Burke, (Carolyn, i4n

52n

164 Douglas, Lord Alfred, 58 Dowie, Menie Muriel, 195

1711

Butler, Josephine, 140

(>aktnur, Belma, i67n

Dowling, Linda, 68n, 6911 Downs, Brian, i59n Dukore, Bernard F., 201

(lainphell, Mrs. Patrick, 17

Dumont, Louise,

(larlson, Harry,

Duse, Eleonora, 17

(^aird,

Mona, 195

219

17

(Carlson, .Susan L., 12 in

Larpenter, Andrew, 106 (Carpenter, Edward,

Michael

(larroll,

(>ase, Sue-Ellen,

C.auer,

2,

13,

Egerton, Ceorge, 195 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 7-8, 18011 Ellenberger, Henri F., 2911

67

190, 19111

P.,

i9n

Ellis,

Minna, 140

Ellis,

(dianiisso, Adelhert von: “Strange

Story of Peter Schleniihl,” 166

(diampsaur, Felicien: Lulu, Une Clownesse dariseuse, 80 (diarcot, Jean M., 9, 27 Chekhov, Anton, 15 (diodorow, Nancy, 146—47, 214,

220—2

Havelock, 1411 Sarah S., 40

Thomas, 930

Elsaesser,

Enirich, Wilhelm,

8in

Engels, Friedrich, 100, 215 English, Deirdre, 7-8, i8on

Erikson, Erik H., 12611 Evans, Richard J., 411, 511, 14011 Eve, 53 Eysoldt, Certrud, 8111

(dirist, (^arol, 191

Cixous, Helene,

8,

18, 15911, 162,

205 (dement, (’.atherine, 18011,

8,

159—62, 180,

20511

(a)hen, Ed, 6511 (a)llett, (>aniilla,

(Collins,

150

Michael,

(a)luni, Padraic,

1

1

18

(a)ok, Ellen Piel, 6811 (a>ss, Clare, 1911

(amch,

I.otte S., 4311

(a)wen, Roy C., 14411 Oaiiach, Lucas, 55 Crane, (iladys M., 19711

Jonathan, 20, 216 (Ainninghani, (iail, 19511 (diller,

Father-daughter relationship, 15; in Hedda Gahler, 156; in Lulu plays, 82—87; in Playboy of the Western World, 103, 106-14, 1123-26, 129—30; in Rose Bertid, 103, 123— 26, 129—31, 144; in SalomC 61—62, 82,

15

(amiedy, 193—94; and gender 112,1 20—2 1 (anitratto, Susan, 146, 214

Farr, Florence, 17

roles,

84-85

Fay, Frank,

1

Fay, William,

1

1

15 Fechter, Paul, 127 Felnian, Shoshana, 16

Female sexuality: Freud on, 10-14, 3^~35> 139* 19th-century myths

~ 3 4 post-Freud views on, 32 n; Schnitzler on, 29, 35—50; >

Wedekind on,

101

Feminism, contemporary, 146-47

611,

126,

Index

229 Feminism, old, 185; comedy and, 120-21; Freud and, 12; goals of, o~ 7 46-47* 173: Hauptmann -

• * “

b, 52,

Schnitzler and, 49;

Genital Organization,” 33; “Inand Fheir Vicissitudes,”

stincts

Diterpretation of Dreams, 9911;

“Medusa’s Head,” 77; Moses and Monothemn, 214-15; “On Narciss’

and, 202-3; Strindberg and, 20812, 220; Synge and, 106, 116-17,

Wedekind and, Wilde and, 67-68

Femme

fatale, 15;

^m, 46—47, 9f^; “On Tendency to Debasement

100;

Lulu and, 52-53,

“Femme

the Sexes,” 34; Question of Lay Analysis, 4911; “Sexual Enlightenment of Children,” 82; “Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence,”

Ferguson, Mary Anne, 204 Fetishism, 59-61, 64-65, 77, 92, 98

6011; Studies on Hysteria, 9,

Fetterley, Judith, 20 Fish,

“Taboo of 146-47

uality,

168—70

Flaubert, Gustave, 52, 55; Herodias, 58, 61 Fliegel,

Zenia O., 3211 Flitterman, Sandy, 9411 Fontane, Theodor, 123 forrey, C^arolyn, 195 Foucault, Michel, 11, 126 France, August, 1411

French, Marilyn, Freud, Sigmund:

Hauptmann

and,

101

Psycho-Analytic Work,” 1560; CiviIts

Discontents,

39—40;

“‘Civilized’

Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness,” 39; “Development of the Libido and the Sexual Organizations,” 107; “Dissolution of the

32-33, 35-36, 46,

6011,

25-26

Gallop, jane, 1411, 8811 Canz, Arthur, 120, 16311, 201 Gardiner, Judith Kegan, 95 Garner, Shirley Nelson, 10811

Joanne

E., 1711, 15811

Gautier, Theophile: Nuit de Cleopdtre, 51

works of: “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” 3511; “Anxiety and Instinctual Life,” 35; “Some Character-Types Met with in limtion a?id

’

(^authier, Xaviere, 18

11311, 12111

Wedekind and,

10,

16011; “LJiicanny,”

Cates,

^88-34; Hofmannsthal and, 171; Schnitzler and, 25-29, 31-32, 3^^50;

159-50;

Virginity,”

35, 41, 4849; Three Essays on the Theory of Sex-

Arthur, 6711

Fish, Stanley,

the

between

ms

fragile,” 5211

Firestone, Shulamith,

in

Outline of Psycho-Analysis, bon; Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction

and, 52—53,

*

Universal

Sphere of Love,” 41, 191, 224;

80, 90, 92, 98, 103; in 19th centniy, 51—^2; Salome

55 58, 61-62, 68-69,

j

Fragment

Shaw

126, 162-63;

7

224; “fetishism,” 6011; of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” 10, 2711; “Infantile

1

and, 126, 137, 139-43; vs. hysteria, 7-8, 13, 126, 162-63; Ibsen and, 149-50, 157-58, 162-63; naturalism and, 140-41; roots of, 5

*

8511, 188,

Oedipus Complex,” 12, 33; “Family Romances,” 215; “Female Sexuality,” 34; “Fenii-

Cay, Peter,

Gender

411

roles

and

types, 165, 180; in

Candida, 186, 189-202, 204, 206; in (»ernian classical humanism, 7 ^~ 7 ^> *ti Hedda Qabler, 155-59, 161, 163-64; in Lulu plays, 82, t

86-101;

in Playboy of the Western

World, 103, 112-14, 11 617, 119, 126, 137; in La Honde, 31—32, 35— 50; in Rose Bemd, 103, 125-26, 137: in SalomC 62-66, 69, 77, 91; in Shakespeare’s comedies, 1 21)21; in Strindberg, 186, 209, 211. 222, 225; in Woman without a Shadow, 171-72, 176, 180-81 Gilbert, Elliot L., 7711 Chibert, Sandra, 65-66,

153-54, ^^2

Index

2^0 (’.ilman, ('-harlotte Perkins: Herland,

Heller, Peter, 3911

143 (iilnian,

Sander

Hering, (ierhard, 13911 Herman, Judith, 85, 217

L., 4911

(iissing, (ieorge,

195 86n Albert, Horst ('•laser, (’•oebbels, Joseph, 144 (’•oethe,

Hermand,

Johann Wolfgang von,

82,

Wilhelm Meister, 89 (ioldnian, Emma, 219 (ioncourt,

Edmond

Heyniann, Lida Gustava, 140 Hibberd, J. L., 10 in Higonnet, Margaret, 16411 Hinterhauser, Hans, 52n

Theodor von: On Improving

the Status of

(irand, Sarah, 195 (ireene, David H.,

Women, 6

Hirsch, Marianne, 10711, 1

Hirschman,

1511

Lisa,

222-23

85

Hitchcock, Alfred: Mamie, 93-94

(ireg, William R., 3 (irene, Nicholas, 117

Hoberman, John, 16011 Hoffmann, E. T. A., “Fraulein von

Gernot, 16711 (iiibar, Susan, 65—66, 153—54, (iurewitsch, Matthew, i66n

('•ruber,

S.,

Hertz, Neil, 77

Hippel,

de, 56

(iraf, Erich, 17011

(iuthke, Karl

Jost, 14 in

Hermaphroditism, 70

171—72; “Fairy Tale,” 166; Faust, 138, 166, 180-82; Geheirnnisse, 170;

('•utt,

Helen of Troy, 51

12411, 12711,

Scuderi,” 96

Hofmannsthal,

133-34

Barbara, 3 in, 4911

—

Hugo

von, 30; and

Freud, 171 works of: Death and

the Fool, 176;

Death of Titian, 175; Emperor and Hackett,

Amy,

Witch, 180; Gestern, 175; Idyll, 176;

14011

Madonna

Haniann, Richard, 14111 Hanion, Augustin, 18611 Hanson, Katherine, 15011 Hardwick, Elizabeth, 156, 1580 Hardy, Thomas, 195 Harmon, Sandra D., 19511

Edward P., 9611 Hartmann, Eduard von, Haskin, Dayton, 193

and

Freud, 133-34

— works

of: Before

Dawn, 141; Hann-

134; Henry of Aue, 134; Island of the Great Mother, 142—43; Lonely

ele,

Lives, 134,

Mine

at

without a Shad-

Falun, 176; ow, 15, 50, 147—48, 166-85 Hofstatter, Hans, 59-60 Holledge, Julie, 1711, 18

211

(ierhart, 83, 211;

Dianora, 176;

Woman

Harris,

Hauptmann,

the

141-42; Mutterschaft,

142-43; Rose Bernd, 15, 50, 103, 123-44, 151, 156, 161, 216 Hays, H. R., 5211, 8111 Heath, Mary, 1711 ana MagHebbel, Friedrich, 125;

M

dalena, 131

Hederer, Edgar, 17011 Heger, Jeanette, 4511 Heilbrun, ('-arolyn, 112 Heine, Heinrich: Atta Troll, 55, 58

Holloway, Joseph, 115 Holroyd, Michael, 203 Homans, Margaret, 15411, 193-94 Homosexuality and SalomG 65—68 Hornby, Richard, 212 Hortenbach, Jenny C., i42n Houssaye, Arsene, 55

Huneker, Janies, 199 Hunter, Dianne, 9n, 13611, i6on Huston, Nancy, 158

Huysmans,

Joris-Karl: Against Nature,

56 Hyde, H. Montgomery, 5711, Hypnosis, 9, 26—27 Hysteria, 15, 52; and female

6611

illness,

7—8; vs. feminism, 7—8, 13, 126, 162—63; and Freud, 9—10, 84, 159—61, 163; in Hedda Gabler, 159—63; in Rose Bernd, 126, 133— 34, 161-63; symptoms of, 8

Index 2 Hysterization: defined, ii;

Freud, 11-12, 101; ler,

in

and Hedda Gab-

151, 161, 164, 178; vs.

feminism, 13;

male Rose Bemd, 126—

in

^7. 131. 133- 135. >51. 161; and Hedekind, 101; in Womati without a

Shadow,

1

78

Ibsen, Henrik, 123, 195; Doll House, 1, 141, 149, 151, 161-64, 201, 207, 209: Ghosts, 151; Hedda Gabler,

147-68, 174, 176, 178, 185; Rosmersholm, 15611; When We 1,

15, 50,

Dead A waken 153 n Infanticide drama, tradition

of,

125

213—14,

218 Irmei, Hans-Jochen, 9911 Iser,

Kuhn, Anna,

Wolfgang, 19

Jack the Ripper, 80, 99 Jacobs, Barry, 20911, 22511

Jacobus, Mary, 93 Jakobson, Roman, 8611

James, Henry, 151 Janitscliek, Maria, 141 Jardine, Alice, 8811

Hans Robert,

19 — 20

Jelavicli, Peter, 9611

John, Evan, 55 Johnson, Barbara, 154 Jones, Ernest,

1211, 2711, 2811, 3211

Jordan, Judith W, 21711 Jung, Carl G., 14611, 204

Lacan, Jacques, 17-18, 88 Lafargue, Paul, 215 Laforgue, Jules, 55; SalomG Laigle, Deirdre,

Laurens,

Kaplan, E. Ann, 9111 Keefer, L. B., 2411 1

Keyssar, Helene, 1811 Kiberd, Declan, 162, 20311, 226

James, 11511 Joseph, 18011 Kleist, Heinrich von, 171 Koerber, Heinrich, 12711 Klaits,

Kofnian, Sarah, 37, 47, 6011 Kohler, Wolfgang, 16611 Kovach, Thomas A., 17711 Krafft, Maurice,

55

1

1

58

in

(iilbert, 5511

Lauretis, Teresa de, 91 Leavitt,

Dinah

L., 1811

Leblanc, (ierard, 113-14 Lenau, Nikolaus, 166 Lessing, Gotthold E., Galotti, 131;

12^; Emilia Minjia von Barnhelrn,

30

Levi-Strauss, Claude, 97 Lewis, Helen B., 1411,

217 Lorenz, D. C. G., loon Lorichs, Sotija, 19711 Lorrain, Jean,

55 Lugne-Poe, Aurelien, 57

MacDonald, Susan

P.,

10711

Macfall, Haldane, 7011

McC.rath, William J., 8411 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 58-59

Makward, Christiane, Malcolm, Janet, 8411 Mallarme, Stephane,

Mann, Thomas, lix

Kain, Richard M., 115

Kilroy,

2911, 8711

Kutscher, Artur, 8011 Kuykendall, Eleanor H., 21811

1

Jauss,

1411

Lauter, Estella, 205

137 Iiigaray, Luce, 88, 97, 197,

Krafft-Ebing, Richard,

Kristeva, Julia, 146, 190 Kuckartz, Wilfried, 17011

1411

55

82; Confessions of Fe

Krull, ConfideTice

Man, 90

Marcus, Jane, 1711,6911 Marcus, Steven, 411, 32 Marcuse, Ludwig, 3111 Marhohii, Laura, 1411 Marowitz, (diaries, 156 Marschalk, Margarete, 142 Marx, Karl: Capital, 96-97 Masson, Jeffrey M., 8411 May, Keith M., 19611 Mayer, Hans, 13511 Medicus, I'liomas, 8611

Medusa, 70, 77 Meiedith, (»eorge, 120—21

Index

252

New Morality, 140 New Woman, 68, 195—202,

Meyer, Michael, 20911 Meyneri, Theodor, 26

208

Michelsen, Peter, 81 n Midgley, David, Hon, 9011, 9911

John: Subjection of Women, Miller, Jean Baker, 222 Miller, Nancy, 147-48, 172 Miller, Robert Keith, 670 Mill,

204, 206,

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 101, 208 6, 12

Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg): Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 166

Novy, Marianne,

12111

Millett, Kate, 1411, 32, 6911

Ofrat, (iideon, 2o8n

Milton, John: Paradise Regained, 193

Ophuls, Max: Lola Month, 92, 98; La Ronde, 29 Oppenheim, James: “Bread and

Misogyny, 68;

femme

fatale

and, 52-

53, 65; naturalism and, 141;

Strindberg and, 209-1 1, 226; Wedekind and, 99, 101 Mitchell, Juliet, i4n, 33n, 8811, 103 Mitchell, Stephen, 226 Modleski, Tania, 18211 Mdhrmann, Renate, 29n Moi, Toril, 8 Molnar, Joseph, 194-95 Moreau, Gustave, 55; Apparition, 56; Salome Dancing before Herod, 56 Moss, Jane, i9n Mother archetype ((ireat Mother),

145-46, 204-5

Motherhood,

15, 185,

1960;

Hauptmann and, 140—44,

211,

216; Hofmannsthal and, 147—48,

167-70, 172, 174, 176-83, 185; Ibsen and, 147—56, 158, 161—62, 164, 167, 176, 178, 185; postwar feminist thinkers on, 146-47, 176,

202, 204—5, 213—14, 216—18, 22023;

Shaw and,

185, 187-94, 197,

201-4, 208, 216, 224; Strindberg and, 185, 208, 211, 213—21, 224 Mother-son incest, fantasies of, 191, 224 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus: Magic Flute,

167

Muller, Klara, 140

Roses,” 188

Oppens, Kurt, i66n Ortner, Sherry

B., 19211

Osborne, John, 124-25 O’Shaughnessy, Arthur William G., 55 W.: Pandora’s Box, 92—93 Pandora, 53, 80, 8 in, 86n, 98, 101 Pankhurst, Emmeline, 7 Pankhurst, Sylvia, 511 Panofsky, Dora and Erwin, 81 n Pantle, Sherrill Hahn, i73n Pappenheim, Bertha, 8—9, 13611 Patmore, Coventry: “Angel in the House,” 191, 222 Pabst,

(i.

Paul, Fritz, 21511

Petrarch: Rime sparse, Pierrot, Jean,

62—63

52n

Pierrot figure, 93, 95 Pilz, (ieorg, 1250 Pinter, Harold,

59

Politzer, Heinz, 17 in, 174

Post, Klaus Dieter, 13711

Prandi, Julie D., 171—72 Praz, Mario, 51—52 Psychoanalysis, 9, 12, 28. See also

Freud, Sigmund Pygmalion, myth of, 96

Mulvey, Laura, 91-92, 98 Ranias, Maria, 8n,

440

Naef, Karl, 169

Rea, Hope, 106,

17

Nathan, Rhoda B., 201 Nauniann, Gustav, 1411 Nauniann, Walter, i66n Nehring, Wolfgang, 2911

Reading as a woman, 19—20, 168, 172-73, 177 Reik, 7 'heodor, 280, 4511 Reinhardt, Max, 80, 8111 Reinhardt, Nancy, 16

Neumann,

Erich, 145—46, 204

1

Index

^33 Rich, Adrienne, 20, 14711, 176 Ritzer, Waiter, 17011

Robins, Elizabeth, 17, 149, ,58; Votes for

Women, 206

Rogers, Katherine M., 15011 Rose, Jacqueline, 8811

Rosen, Andrew, 511 Rothe, Friedrich, 8311 Ruddick, Sara, 213 Ruskin, John: “Of Queens’

2

1

in

Savona, Jeannette L., Scanlon, Leone, 19511

1911

Schafer, Hans- Wilhelm, 13211 Scheible, Hartmut, 28n

Schenk, Herrad, 511, 14011 Scheuzger, Jurg, 3111 Schiller, Friedrich von, 125, 171; Love and Intrigue, 131, 138; “Song

of the Bell,” 38 Schmtzler, Arthur, 79, 134; and Freud, 25-29, 31-32,

35-50

—works

of: Anatol, 27, 2811, 44-45; Frdulern Else, 27; Jugend in Wieji, 4511, Leutnant Gustl, 27; Paracelsus,

27, 46; Rhapsody, 27:

L5

’

^ 9 ~ 3 ^>

35 ~ 5 ^^>

La Ronde, 1495' >91' 225

Schnitzler, Heinrich, 31 Schnitzler, Julius, 26

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 101 Schor, Naomi, 6011 Schreiner, Olive: Story of an African Farm, 195

Schrimpf, Hans Joachim, 124 Schroeder, Sabine, 14211 Schuler-Will, Jeannine, 9511 Schweickart, Patrocinio P., 168, 170, 1

72

Scott-Jones, Marilyn, 1411 Sebald, W. (k, 4511

Sedgwick, Eve, 68 Seduction theory, 84-85

21,

16,

118,

120-

223-25

Shaw, Bernard, 57, 105, ^24, 226; Candida, 1, 15, tjo, 185-209, 216, 222, 224, 226; Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, 201-2; Love among the Artists, 201; Major Barbara, 1, 88; Misalliance ',

Saddlemyer, Ann, 105-6, 10711, 116 Said, Edwarci, 153-54 Salome, figure of, 52, 55-56, 80, Sin. See nlso VV’ilde, Oscar Saltus, Edgar, 57

Hugh,

Shakespeare, William,

1

(hardens

3

Salvesen,

Segal, Solid ra, 1911

197; Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 188, 197; Fress Cuttings, 202; Pygmalion,

96; Qiiintes.sence of Ibsenism, 197 Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein,

96

Showalter, Elaine, 211, 711, 66 Silverman, Kaja, 92, 98 Singer, June, '68n Sklar, Roberta, 1911

Smirnoff, Victor N., 5911 Smith, J. Percy, 190 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 110

Sprinchorn, Evert, 21111 Steiner, Herbert, 170 Stendhal (Henri Beyle): De I'amour,

4^-43 Stephan, Naomi, 14211 Stephens, Edward M., Stocker, Helene, 140 Stopes, Marie, 1411 Storey, Robert F.,

1

15

9511

Strachey, Ray (Rachel C.), 511 Strauss, Richard: Salome, 57—58, 81;

Woman

'

without a Shadow, i(i6-()7

173 Strindberg, August: Bond, 219; Comlades, 209, 225; Creditors, 225— 26, Easter, 22(1; The Father, 1, 15, 50, 185-86,

207-26; Ghost Sonata, 207; Madman's Defense, 207, 209; Married, 209; Miss Julie, 1, 207,’ 210, 225; Motherlove, 217; Pelican

20811

Stroszek, Hauke, 8611 Stubbs, Patricia, 511

Suffrage for women, Suleiman, Susan, 20, Surrey, Janet

7,

195-96

154, 214, 221

L., 21711

Suzman, Janet, 155 Swales, Martin, 4211

Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 52

Index

^34 Synge, John M.: Deirdre of rows,

1

the Sor-

i6, 120; Playboy of the West-

ern World,

105-27, 162, 164-65;

15, 50, 103,

1,

Junge

Welt, 82, 100; Liehestrank, 82;

Marquis von Keith, 100; Mine-Haha, 82; Spring Awakening, 82—83, 85

Tennyson, Alfred, 191

Weeks, Jeffrey, 670 Weininger, Otto, loi, 211; Sex and Character, 14, 210 Weintraub, Rodelle, 198 Weiss, Robert O., 2811 Wells, H. (i.: Ann Veronica, 195

Terry, Ellen, 17, 189, 198 Thomalla, Ariane, 5211

Wilde, Oscar, 79, 105; “Ballad of Reading (iaol,” 66; Ideal Husband,

129-30, 137, Riders

to the

of the Glen, 1

15(1,

Sea, 1

1

16, 120;

Shadow

16; Tinker’s Wedding,

16

Thonnessen, Werner, 511 Tieck, Ludwig, William Lovell, 127

68; Importance of Being Earnest, 68— 69, 15311; Lady Windermere’s Fan,

Titian; Assumption of the Virgin, 189 Tornqvist, Egil, 22211

68; SalomC

15, 50,

1,

82, 84-85, 91, 121;

56-7^. 80,

Woman

of

No

Importance, 68

Turco, Alfred, 19911

Wiley, Catherine, 20611

Audrone

Uppvall, Axel Johan, 22411

Willeke,

Urban, Bernd,

Wilt, Judith,

2811, 2911, 17111

1

2

1

B., 10111

n

Wittniann, Livia Z., 1960

Valency, Maurice, 20on Veblen, Thorsteiii, 163

Wollstonecraft, Mary: Vindication of

Nancy J., 63—64 Viereck, George S., 2811 V^irgin Mary/Madonna figure, 189—

Wolzogen, Ernst, 140

the Rights of

Vickers,

95, 197—98, 200, 202, 204, 208 Voltaire, Francois, 17

Wagner, Heinrich

L.:

Kindermbrderin,

133. 138

Wagner, Renate, 3111 Wandor, Michelene, 1811 Ward, John, 222 Warner, Marina, 194 Watson, Barbara Bellow, 196 Weber, Evelyn, 14211

Wedekind, Frank, vil,

V

101; Death and De-

Women:

36,

5,

9

exclusion of, from theater,

16-18;

and

Woman,

in

19-century Europe, 1-4;

silence,

17-18, 88, 93, 135-

216

Women’s Women’s

18—19 writing, 6n, 65-67, 153— 54. 193-94.205 Woolf, Virginia: Room of One’s Own, 12-13 Worbs, Michael, 280, 17111 Worth, Katherine, 7711 Wyss, Hugo, 1700 theater,

Yeats, William B., 115

100; Earth-Spirit! Pandora’s Box, 15.

79-ioL

135- 156:

Zagona, Helen Grace,

5511

Library of Confess Cataloging-in-Publication Data Finney, (;ail.

Women

in

modern drama.

Includes index. 1.

Women

in

literalure. 2. Psychoanalysis and Feminism and literature. 4. European drama- 19th century-History and criticism. drama— 2 (Hh century— History and criticism: 5. European 1.

literature. 3.

Title.

ISBN 0-8014-2284-1

(alk.

'935^04 paper)

‘-i

H«--47 q 24

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\

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4

4

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4l!»

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