Catharina von Georgien. Untersuchung des Trauerspiels von Andreas Gryphius (German Edition)

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In one sense, he was right, at least as far as publicity for his own new theater was concerned: If so, he miscalculated. The Tragedy of a Queen: Marie and her character Maria, as writer and queen respectively, share a directive calling. We might identify this as hubris on the part of the young playwright: This drives the men around her to both action and distraction. Darnley is tortured by a sense of inferiority, as is her second husband Bothwell later; and her brother Murray will not rest till Mary is cast from the throne and he himself has charge of the male heir later James VI and I.

Early on, Darnley is encouraged by the Scottish lords to establish mastery over Maria: Maria herself insists on the conjunction, when she complains to the men who are holding her captive after the murder of Rizzio: So wie ein Mann das Weib, das er begehrt. Maria pleads for mercy on the grounds that she is a weak woman, while Bothwell chooses to present her as a powerful queen: It is worth noting that the only other woman in the play, Lady Argyll, defines Maria differently: The available stock of images in language and cultural tradition tends to work against women, not for them, and must be turned around if they are to function rhetorically against men.

The rabidly gynophobic speech in which Bothwell finally vents his insecurity perfectly illustrates how a stock of misogynist images feeds neurosis and paranoia. When Mary kneels in her despair to ask for death at his hand, Bothwell explodes: So it is odd that this long speech is so poetic and impassioned. In fact, the speech is practically pre-written for Ebner in the German literary idiom: Bothwell characterizes Maria not only as a siren, but as Frau Welt, the popular medieval figure whose enticing exterior conceals foulness and decay.

The associations with this figure are serious and dreadful: The linguistic battles in the play interact interestingly with actual or threatened physical violence.

Early on in the play, when Douglas seeks to engage linguistically with the Queen, Murray suggests that this Gordian knot must be cut with violence: Nicht ich, bei Gott! Nur der Gewalt erliegt Maria Stuart. Judgments pronounced in court are, generally speaking, particularly effective linguistic acts they have concrete results — but Bothwell specializes in resisting the power of the speech act. His characterization in the play as a peculiarly masculine man depends as much on his relationship to speech as it does on his willingness to use physical violence.

We can see this if we focus on speech acts in the text. Commands or imperatives are an easily identifiable type of illocutionary speech act. Bothwell, by contrast, makes his first impression on the Queen by resisting an imperative issued by her. Maria commands that he be reconciled with Murray, but Bothwell, rather than simply refusing to obey the command, goes so far as to deny her ability to issue it to him: Bothwell has denied her linguistic and corporeal authority, and thereby asserted his masculinity: In asserting his love for the Queen, he both identifies and dismisses the danger inherent in that linguistic act: The Tragedy of a Revolutionary: From the first scene of the first act of Marie Roland, it is clear that the central protagonist is linguistically and corporeally in control.

A fellow Girondin disapprovingly observes her relationship with her husband, Roland: Importantly, they accord to her the authority to speak effectively: Vergniaud turns to Marie Roland for a decision with the words, Entscheide Du, [. She is not in thrall to powerful male speech in the way that her dramatic predecessor, Maria Stuart, was: Despite her control of language, Marie Roland cannot avoid being defined by it.

Like Maria Stuart, she is caught in the web of misogynist metaphor. Marie Roland is crucially unlike Maria Stuart, however, when she moves into negative self-definition. This, it seems, is the price of the gender-bending authority she has enjoyed. Gender norms dictate that women must assume an abject, not a dominant linguistic position. Sie ist mein Kind, hat einen starken Willen, Schon regt sich ihre junge Eitelkeit.

Marie Roland, we infer, has recognized the necessity of enforcing passive gentleness in women, even though she herself lived life as an active revolutionary. The dramatist who, as a woman playwright, is offending against gender norms forces abjection on her character who, as a historical leader of men, has offended against gender norms , who in turn forces abjection on her daughter who is to be prevented from the start from offending against gender norms. In both plays, Ebner returns us to an all-too-familiar order in which linguistically dominant women are disempowered and silenced.

As a form, historical tragedy traditionally brings the dramatist, too, a certain weight — the events portrayed lend the writer the authority of historical necessity. Brecht later turned this around, turning necessity into necessity-for-change; and Ferrel Rose has, from a modern reading perspective, identified a need-to-change in Maria Stuart: This is not in itself a dramatic weakness — it might even be read as a strength, since a return to order is understood to provide satisfying closure.

Of non-historical tragedies by women, Susanne Kord has made this important observation, which is worth citing at length: Allen nicht geschichtlichen Trauerspielen von Frauen sind zwei Aspekte gemeinsam: In Trauerspielen von Frauen [. We can apply this to the historical tragedies Maria Stuart and Marie Roland.

Ebner does provide closure, but it is not of a type that can be read as satisfying for a female self or subject. The earlier play ends with the absolute triumph of men: An Experiment in Comedy: Comedy, at least as much as tragedy, relies on a set of social codes. It will inevitably overstep the established mark — that is an important part of what makes comedy funny — but every transgression makes sense only in the context of knowledge of the code or boundary that is being overstepped.

The overstepping of boundaries necessitates a particularly clear return to order at the end of the play if satisfying closure is to be achieved. It is less easy than it might appear to shake off such traditional shackles: One clear attraction posed by comedy for women writers is its status.

There is no doubt that comedy is regarded as a less grand mode than historical drama or tragedy. In October , it was intimated to her that Laube now 30 at the Stadttheater intended to stage both dramas, but only the comedy was performed. The two plays, as emerges from the diaries, were written in overlap T I, 28 June Even though one is a historical tragedy and the other a contemporary comedy, they show thought-provoking similarities in their content and structure.

In both plays we have a central female protagonist who is fiercely and self-consciously righteous: This righteousness — which is a quality of humane virtuousness rather than self-righteousness — is expressed in both cases on two levels, one of which could be described as stereotypically masculine, the other as stereotypically feminine. Both women show by their actions that they are braver than most of the men around them, and put 31 the unmasculine male to shame. Both are straightforward, straighttalking, impatient of personal adornment, resolute and fearless, with a strong sense of personal honor.

As well as ideal masculine traits, however, both heroines also display a sexual continence that is traditionally idealized in women. Marie Roland chooses her duty to and friendship for her much older husband over her passionate love for Buzet. Both characters are shown to be crucially different from those around them. Historically, views are divided on Marie Roland: Ebner depicts her as a passionate political revolutionary, whose power to lead stems from a remarkable belief in herself, which is also a belief initially at least that she is unlike those she condemns.

Danton, and the deposed and executed queen MarieAntoinette. It is important that those similarities are not only apparent to the audience, but are recognized by the protagonist: Neither heroine, then, preserves her status as other than those she has condemned. Both give up their masculine roles as central performer: We can see the comedy as an attempt to create something more accessible and popular, from which Ebner may have promised herself the appreciation from a theater audience she so badly wanted.

In each case the triangle includes a worthy older man and a younger, more passionate beloved, and in each case the older men are prepared to sacrifice themselves for the women they love. Roland offers to dissolve his marriage to Marie so she can marry Buzot — he even insists he will do so gladly, for the sake of her happiness, although he would be giving up his own.

Later in the play he commits suicide when he hears of her death, something he has always sworn he will do. Ebner is turning dramatic conventions on their heads: And that is not the end of it. Remarkably, in these relationships it is the women who take on a role that in the Rousseau-influenced nineteenth century is peculiarly masculine: Buzot explains that his love for Marie Roland derives in great measure from the political education he received at her hands But Ebner turns the tables on him — by the end of the play, we find Count Paul expressing gratitude to Sarah for all that she has been able to teach him: These women protagonists speak their minds, are forceful and uncompromising in their opinions, and, most importantly this distinguishes them from the earlier heroine, Maria Stuart , their speech is effective: Marie Roland risks and suffers, in tragic mode real death, where Sarah Hochburg risks but avoids, in comic mode social death.

Sarah and Marie Roland are not the only women who are taking risks. The closest she comes to stating her position around the time of writing these plays is in a note written to herself in December These two women set out to achieve what Nature, in giving them the qualities of intelligence and dynamism, appears to have made possible. For Ebner this constitutes good sense rather than radicalism, and in her plays the men who matter agree. This is not to make the claim that Ebner was ignorant of the force of gendered convention; on the contrary, she shows herself keenly aware of it.

As a playwright she is clearly also aware that only a return to gendered norms, in some form, can provide satisfying closure, in comedy or tragedy: Marie Roland goes to her death retaining her belief in the social and political cause, but also embracing, for the first time, the values of femininity. Sarah acquiesces because she is in love, and therefore — as convention has it — tamed.

In her theoretical reflections on the comic, Susan Purdie has distinguished between two types of fool: The abject fool we laugh at — he or she is the butt of our jokes — but the masterful fool we laugh with, because she or far more likely he is running the show. Conventionally, women are expected to be the butt of comedy, not its master — even with the recent ascent of women in stand-up, there are more jokes about women than by them. Woman as Abject Fool: Druskowitz disappeared almost completely from 42 literary critical discussion at the end of the nineteenth century; therefore, some basic biographical details are not out of place.

She was born in Vienna in , and died in in Mauer-Oehling near Salzburg, having spent the last 27 years of her life in psychiatric care. In addition to literary critical and philosophical works — including some attacks on Nietzsche, for which she became notorious — she wrote a number of 43 dramas, some of which were published but none performed. Unlike Ebner, Druskowitz shows us a woman not as a masterful fool, but as an abject one. This is her interpellation into the world of the play, and her first stage appearance confirms or reiterates it: The intellectual pseudonym she bears, Aspasia, invites ridicule because it reflects her semi-educated status: Aspasia, the second wife of Pericles, was indeed an intellectual, but Alwine presumably does not know that her namesake was also mocked in Athenian comedy for being his concubine.

Aspasia did not have citizenship in Athens and her marriage was not fully recognized. One odd feature of this character is that she is beautiful: What Druskowitz seems to be signaling in her portrayal of a beautiful fool is that Alwine Dissen is redeemable. Her son Percy reminds her: Where Amalie and Emily are largely ignored or avoided, high-status men such as university professors are prepared to engage with Alwine.

An exchange between Alwine Dissen and Professor Werent illustrates the dynamics well: Werent — although he is himself a ridiculous character — here clearly plays the role of the masterful fool. Alwine, however, is not only ludicrous, but also dangerous. Comedy is often linked to a sense of threat or danger; in laughter, that tension is released and the threat dispelled, because the superiority of the audience over the comic object is established.

One is the type embodied by Alwine, the type that is simultaneously risible and dangerous. Alwine poses a dual threat: On the other, her singlemindedness in the pursuit of her academic studies translates into danger for her children: Alwine risks the future happiness of her daughter, Zelia, not only by trying to force her into academia — Zelia is a gifted artist, but a miserable scholar — but also by arranging her marriage to a worthless, posturing academic, whom Alwine is too foolish to see through.

The consequences for Percy are even more extreme: That her intellectual ambition adversely affects her children, we infer, is proof that it is unnatural. The name is not subtle, and a connection between this ideal character and Druskowitz herself might be deduced, as Hinrike Gronewold has observed, from the reversed initial letters of their 47 names. Unlike Alwine, Dora is focused: Dora, too, has distinct and well articulated views on the Frauenfrage, which tempt us to read her as a mouthpiece for her creator: Das Talent allein kann Beweise schaffen.

The improbability of this rosy scenario is of less interest than the implicit message it sends. If they only would behave like Dora, everything would go swimmingly. The focus of responsibility for the social re-positioning of women as full human beings is shifted off men and on to women themselves. But those fates also depend entirely on the approval of men, which means that women, even women like Dora, have at best eternally deferred subject status.

Melvil Decimal System: 832.5

The notion that male approval is not capricious and partisan, but wise, authoritative, and good, permeates this play. Mock is made, it is true, of the two professors, Werent and Teichert, but they are primarily associated with Alwine, and their function is to expose her foolishness and the shallowness of her academic learning, which manifests itself in her inability to recognize intellectual fraud. At those moments in the play when Alwine comes closest to wreaking real havoc, men step in to save the day. Moro saves Zelia from being forced down the academic path that terrifies her, and Moro exposes Werent as the intellectual charlatan he is, thereby rescuing Zelia from a disastrous arranged marriage.

Zelia, then, is safe under the protection of this authoritative, gently instructive father-figure. By the middle of act 5, she has engineered a situation which can only be described as desperate: Percy is fighting a duel for her honor that endangers his own life, and the reception rooms are filled with her creditors, demanding repayment of monies owed for a failed publishing project.

GRYPHIUS - Definition and synonyms of Gryphius in the German dictionary

At this moment her husband, Emil, who has significantly been absent in the USA all this time, arrives at the house in Zurich. The moment smacks of a vision or revelation: It provokes her into immediate self-accusation and confession: Emil functions here not only as the deus ex machina who will resolve the dramatic situation, but as a divine patriarch who will judge, forgive, and remedy. The function of the dramatic family as a microcosmic analogy, identified by Kord, is very clear here: In dieser Analogie symbolisiert der Vater den Staat bzw.

Emil and Alwine agree that the current disastrous situation is the natural and inevitable result of her intellectual ambitions. Between them, Fate and Emil have restored order, and Alwine Dissen has been pulled back into line. She has undergone comic punishment, and will now be received back into the domestic fold under the watchful eye of her father-husband, to resume her duties as wife and mother, as she promises: The answer is simple enough: Dora is not married.

There is a subtler problem in the reception of much writing by women than simple gender prejudice: Male dramatists, she argues, established a convention of using suffering and passive women in their sign-systems, and therefore: Dies konnte nicht im simplen Verkehren der Rollenmuster, dem Ersetzen 52 der passiven durch aktive Heldinnen, gelingen. This, Giesing seems to be suggesting, would threaten the subject status of the woman writer, and interfere with the process of active creation. Not only the structure of theater as institution is a problem for women, but the discourse of the dramas which are played in it.

German drama is in its origins a didactic genre; and the notion of woman as pedagogue to grown men turns the world of nineteenth-century, Rousseauinfluenced German gender theory on its head. It is no coincidence that the plays she finally took refuge in and the ones with which she was successful in gaining entry as a playwright to the Burgtheater are short comic pieces, designed to be played as complement to the main dramatic event. They therefore come closest to obeying the gender imperative. Significant here is that both women were writing to please; neither could afford, for whatever reason, to use her comedy to voice radical ideas that might offend.

Yet Ebner did offend, at least the critics, and Druskowitz, for all her efforts, never managed to get her play accepted for production. Neither the tragic nor the comic form seem to have provided a solution for these writers. Externally to the dramas, the situation regarding performance and reception is just as difficult.

The men characters play important roles, but they are important primarily in their relation to the two central protagonists, Alwine Dissen and Dora Hellmuth. This reverses the pattern familiar from traditional masculinist drama, in which women characters even central characters! To the male-dominated institution of theater, plays about women are not plays that matter. That will become a leitmotif of this study. Allgemeine Illustrirte Zeitung , Heinz, , German Women Writers in the 18th and 19th Centuries, ed. Lang, , — Niemeyer, , I, 7 February Ein Bonner Symposion zu ihrem Lang, , 97— See Karlheinz Rossbacher, Literatur und Liberalismus: Zur Kultur der Ringstrassenzeit in Wien Vienna: Belvedere, , Laube clearly did not feel under pressure to remove the play from the program immediately.

Poetischer Vortrab , ed. Mayer, , All further references are to this edition of the text. Yale UP, , 1—7. I would argue that both, political activity in the public sphere and personal rigidity, are immediately recognizable in late nineteenth-century eyes as unfeminine, and that Marie is therefore damned for both.

See Kord, Ein Blick hinter die Kulissen: Francke, , —60 Perspectives on Women and Comedy New York: Cited in Gladt, Pandora, , Schiller, too, uses this pattern, in his Maria Stuart. The Mastery of Discourse New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, , 59— Ebner and Druskowitz met in Suhrkamp, , 96— Druskowitz, her mother Madeline von Biba. She occasionally claimed to be the illegitimate daughter of a Bulgarian prince called Tedesco Ventravin.

As a writer, Druskowitz also used the pseudonyms Adalbert Brunn, H. Gronewold and Hensch also list five unpublished and now lost dramas written after Druskowitz was admitted into psychiatric care.

Synonyms and antonyms of Gryphius in the German dictionary of synonyms

Gender and Orient on the German Stage — Oxford: Clarendon, , — Schulbuchhandlung, , Camden House, , Schreibende Frauen vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Metzler, , —59 Freiburger Echo, , 11— In all the plays considered, rebellious women protagonists are tamed — whether by fate or by society — and neither dramatist was able to find a mode comic or serious of presenting such characters that might guarantee their popular appeal. But by the mid s, the conventions associated with Naturalism — domestic settings, the working- or middle-class milieu, prose dialogue, often in dialect — had begun to make themselves felt.

In the terms of gendered discourse, this brings drama closer to the women writer — both are now defined as natural and located tendentially in the domestic sphere, as Else Hoppe notes, with hindsight, in In all cases the woman playwright is seen as the exception to a rule, and specifically as a phenomenon that crosses the bounds of gender. She is therefore in need of explanation or rationalization by critics. The quickest and easiest way to explain away dramatic creativity in women is to cross-assign the writer to the proper, male, gender category: The method is much used: In the mainstream literary criticism and theory of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there is a clear, explicit insistence that drama is the realm of the male writer; it is gendered masculine.

An influential proponent of this notion is a woman: Ella Mensch, herself a prose 5 writer as well as a literary critic, who paid special attention to the problem of women playwrights in her monograph Die Frau in der modernen Lite6 ratur This is not just masculinity; it is hypermasculinity, the apex of the hierarchical patriarchal ideal. Mensch is developing a definition of drama and the dramatist that depends on utter separation from all that is associated with the feminine. Drama is architecture; it erects a monolith; and it is therefore an unnatural act for a woman to write a play.

Yet women dramatists at this time — themselves defined in critical discourse as creatures without creative or dramatic genius — show a distinct inclination to explore the potential of female and male creativity in their work. Women as Artists The drama of the female artist cannot — of course — escape the problems raised by the gendered discourse of creativity. The two major women characters in the drama, Helene the heroine and her friend, Melitta, are both practicing artists — at least when the play opens.

This is also, of course a risky situation — patriarchy is protectionist, and when a woman is not subordinate or protected she is vulnerable. Her friend, Melitta, is another character who takes risks, who lives without male protection: She is adamant that only self-ownership can enable self-expression: Melitta is so emancipated, so potentially threatening in her self-ownership and self-expression, that she might well need to be laughed at, for the sake of audience relief; but this is something her creator is keen to avoid.

Because Warbek no longer owns Helene as his wife, he is reduced to using sheer economic power to prevent her from appearing in public: It is as if Paar were appropriating and mimicking the discourse of gender, ownership, and power with the intention of exposing its dehumanizing, objectifying impetus. For a little while it really looks as if Helene might achieve the kind of personal and artistic freedom that Melitta enjoys, albeit like Melitta at the cost of her exclusion from the social support structure of the family.

There is an enormous effort involved in breaking free of this structure, as Helene explains: But Paar has no intention of letting her heroine escape. Und wir ziehen nicht nach Amerika? Bestimme Du, wo wir leben sollen. Ich habe keinen Willen mehr, als den Deinigen! In the context of the play, does Paar really expect her audience or reader to believe this? The scene is highly sentimental, and sentimentality almost invariably functions as a legitimating cover for brutality. Its sweetness disguises the distasteful violence that has been done, for the second time, to Helene. Other elements in the play are less easy to swallow.

Other, often tiny, details in the text offer an alternative reading alongside the conventional progress of the action.

Scholarly, Theatrical and Literary Receptions

But this reads like an ironic joke, for a transformation from Sappho to Gretchen would reflect all too bitterly on the domestication, and in some senses destruction, of Helene that is imminent at this point in the play. The words are of course prophetic: Like many women playwrights, Elsa Bernstein-Porges preceded her career as a dramatist with work as an actress.

She has attracted more critical attention than any other German-language woman playwright of her generation. Not only were her plays well received by her contemporaries despite frequent comments on 17 her femaleness and only slightly less frequent remarks on her Jewishness , but she is the only woman writer of that generation to have become the subject of a modern monograph dedicated specifically to her dramatic 18 work.

But she wrote at least twenty other plays between and ; of these, the best known are those which appeared in the s and early s, 21 which include Wir Drei. Sascha shows striking resemblances to Bernstein-Porges herself. Another point of contact between the character and her creator are the reviews Sascha receives of her work. In this way she lives wifehood and domesticity vicariously, through Agnes, while continuing her activity as an artist. She only becomes active after Richard has made a declaration of love to Sascha: Previously, Agnes has only ever been owned; now she becomes an owner.

Her power over a fetus that is potentially a child, another human being, somehow confers personhood on her. She leaves Richard only to find herself again under the control of Sascha, who decides first to take her in, and then secretly to allow Richard into the house. This enables him to hear the birth of the child, during which he celebrates his proprietorship of Agnes: But the baby escapes all three of its waiting would-be owners: Richard, too, will have to give up his pretensions to an artistic career.

She, who was rational, purposeful, and articulate when arranging her divorce, loses all will and is silenced by the death of her child. When her dead baby disqualifies her from the position of owner, Agnes returns to her old status, as merely owned. As before, Sascha decides what is to be done with her: Agnes is finally reintegrated into the family structure by the mystical word: Evincing the first sign of life she has shown in this scene, Agnes repeats the word: Remarkably, a rapprochement is thus made possible: Part of this order is the exclusion of Sascha from the family unit.

A particularly interesting dramatic investigation of the woman artist in relation to the family, and the last I shall consider here, is Der stand23 hafte Zinnsoldat by Anna Croissant-Rust — , a play that was published in , but never performed. The boy is finally stabbed to death by his foster father in retribution for the murder. Der standhafte Zinnsoldat, on the other hand, is — like Helene and Wir Drei — a middle-class drama that deals with the subject of creative endeavor, and specifically as in Wir Drei literary endeavor.

But instead of being angry with her — as she expects — for her secret authorship, Ernst is delighted and supportive. Johanna asserts her separateness from Ernst, her autonomy as artist, even within the relationship to him: Ernst is keenly aware of the limits this puts on her personal freedom: Du warst gekleidet wie ein Priester [. Once again the price of artistic activity is exclusion from the normal social support structures. Contemporary critical responses to the play were mixed. They were also limited: The essence of the recurring complaint is that this piece is not dramatic, but epic.

Precisely this tension drives the dramatic action of Der standhafte Zinnsoldat, although that dramatic tension seems, perhaps unsurprisingly, to be inaccessible to the male reviewers who have themselves never been confronted with that dilemma. Clearly their reception in a male-centered literary critical economy, by critics who have never learned to perceive their own subjective interests as anything other than definitive, is one problem for these women playwrights.

But another is the act of creating a play about female creativity in that same ideological environment. Helene almost achieves the artistic freedom that Melitta has; Sascha almost has Richard for her lover as well as literary success; and Johanna almost has a career as a writer alongside a functioning marriage. We have to ask why each of the dramatists takes this alternative away from her protagonist at the very moment it seems to beckon most persuasively. Another possible answer follows from the Chodorowian interpretation of the writer-protagonist relationship offered by Judith Kegan Gardiner, 30 when she maintains: Women Supporting Men We find more extreme forms of the repression of women protagonists in dramas where the male artist is dominant, and women play a supportive role.

In Johannes Herkner, no obvious attempt is made to find space for female subjectivity. The studio in which Albrecht seduces Mirjam, and in which she works as his nude model, is dominated by an enormous sculpture of Lucifer; Lucifer as counter-figure to the eponymous patriarch Johannes, who is ever-present even though he never appears on stage. Lucifer is cast from his pedestal. The figure of the patriarch Herkner is central to the piece, and Albrecht is central to the action. All the women revolve around and consciously depend on these two. Mirjam, for example, discourages Albrecht in sentimental tones from commitment to her, even though her own reputation and related quality of life are at stake they are sleeping together: The ideal she incorporates is rendered particularly insidious by the illusion of self-determination.

Not a hint of irony disturbs the text. Further difficulties arise when Elisabeth struggles to prove that her father, Johannes Herkner, was right rather than sexist in his preference for the absent son who ignored him over the dutiful daughter who was his unpaid secretary: Mutter — mich hat Vater lieb gehabt, aber Albrecht — den hat er geliebt. Was ist einem Mann eines Weibes Seele?

Meaning of "Gryphius" in the German dictionary

But the most trying melodrama is still to come: Bernstein-Porges came from a musical family, and her father Heinrich was a fanatical admirer of Wagner to confess that they have been sleeping together. Mirjam, who opposes this revelation, is sent offstage with Elisabeth to make space for the man-to-man confrontation.

When Siegmund asserts his brotherly rights of ownership, Albrecht responds with a characterization of the educated, musically gifted Mirjam that makes her sound like a Neanderthal: Aber du bist es nicht — du kannst es deiner ganzen Art nach nie werden! Die nehm ich auf mich. Bernstein-Porges directs audience attention not at Mirjam, but at the two men and their relationship: For Mirjam, illocutionary or perlocutionary speech acts — the kind that get results, which the men are constantly involved in — seem impossible.

She asks Albrecht to decide her fate for her, and he performs a classic illocutionary act when he hands her over to Siegmund: Elisabeth is sent away to change into white robes, to take on the identity required of her by the creative male: But it is difficult to find any indication that Bernstein-Porges is making her characters perform gender as masquerade with conscious or critical intent.

On a metaphorical level we can look for interesting touches: But if we view the drama more conventionally we see Albrecht, the sculptor, as a creator of bodies. For a while there is a level of subversion in his studio: But with the advent of Elisabeth, clad in white, and the toppling of Lucifer, Albrecht now as St. In her far less well-known piece Seine Welt of , Prellwitz finds an ironic and often entertaining perspective on the world that revolves around men.

Eine 34 Wotanslegende Seine Welt is dedicated to Heinrich von Kleist, whom Prellwitz admired. It is another drama of the male artist: The other central protagonist is Dr. Hadumoth Silcher, whose name exudes all the exoticism of the presumably Jewish female intellectual. Hadumoth is clearly an extraordinary character. It is worth quoting at length: Und dann erklang uns seine Antwort! Another teaching colleague remarks: Weibchen, und in denen verehrt man die heilige Natur.

But Hadumoth greatly admires Heinrich, and sees his efforts in the field of creative writing as proof that this field is beyond her: Prellwitz leaves it to the reader to draw her own conclusions, here and elsewhere in the play. No obvious criticism is made when Heinrich demands of Hadumoth that she function as speculum, allowing him to uncover her as a mirror of his poetic self: In exposing Hadumoth, what he expects and desires to see is not her, but a reflection of himself.

Heinrich is more obviously lampooned when he mixes his new love for Hadumoth with satisfaction in the notion that she will now do the donkey work of teaching for him: This ought to encourage us to read the following scene of the play critically. Und der Vater in seinem immer nehmenden Egoismus! Ich aber, ich bin ganz anders! Auch nicht die heiligste Pflicht! Yet in the same breath she condemns married slavery: Hadumoth, like a German Jane Eyre, instructs Heinrich that he will marry her, and purposefully stagemanages the ensuing interview with her father, but her choice of the pompous, self-indulgent, often ridiculous poet for a husband is not a satisfying one.

All the plays discussed in this chapter reiterate gender norms as well as performing an alternative. The status of the female body in these plays is worth considering. In this context, the female body is clearly an object for use as model or muse by the creative male. It also leaves them, in the end, outside of that organization; alone, isolated, without the security of the family.

Her deployment of real bodies, models and statues on stage in Johannes Herkner provides for a striking visual event. What the corporeality of drama also gives Bernstein-Porges, however, is the means of demonstrating the abjection of the female body. It is of course difficult, when writing within a discourse as powerful and all-embracing as the discourse of gender, at the same time to articulate an alternative to that discourse, or to rebel against it.

For a writer, there is a strong temptation to opt to provide audience satisfaction through sentimental reiteration of familiar norms. In Johannes Herkner, Bernstein-Porges succumbs to this temptation this is not true for all her plays — Maria Arndt , for example, is a different case. Grimm and Fran k Rainer Max eds. Ihr Leben und Werk, Berlin, A Linguistic History to , Oxford Peter Burke, The Renaissance, London Bernhard Lohse, Martin Luther. Richard Marius, Martin Luther: Basingstoke by C.

Alexander, Das deutsche Barockdrama, Stuttgart Karin Kelping, Frauenbilder im deutschen Barockdrama: Cornelia Plume, Heroinen in der Geschlechterordnung: Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart Reclam Alexander, Der deutsche Barockroman, Stuttgart Barbara Becker-Cantarino ed , Martin Opitz. Studien zu Leben und Werk, Daphnis 11 Studien zu seinen Auftraggedichten, Satiren und Klageliedern, Bonn, Five Studies in European Petrarchism, Cambridge Dieter Breuer, Grimmelshausen-Handbuch, Munich Eberhard Mannack, 'Grimmelshausen', in Deutsche Dichter des Ihr Leben und Werk, ed.

Epoche - Werk - Wirkung, Munich Eine Sammlung von Einzelinterpretationen, Stuttgart Eberhard Mannack, Andreas Gryphius, 2nd edn, Stuttgart Das Gedicht wurde zur Zeit des Barocks geschrieben und ist in zwei Quartette und zwei Terzette eingeteilt. Das seit dem fruhen Mittelalter verbreitete und Carolin Catharina Wolf, Barock, 23 Quellen im Literaturverzeichnis, Sprache: Keine Epoche der europaischen La vita et 1a lirica di Andrea Gryphius. Instituto Superiore Navale, 5.

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