Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Leder, Daniela

Titel

Wenn mädchen überleben: Inventur im gewalthaushalt bei J.M.R. Lenz und Frank Wedekind

Ort / Verlag

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses

Erscheinungsjahr

2011

Quelle

ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Representations of female adolescent figures in German literature from around 1750 to 1900 regularly play out in a similar way: the adolescent girl encroaches upon and transgresses sexual norms. In the vast majority of these scenarios, the girl consequently dies, often after giving birth or in the course of a pregnancy, thereby reaffirming the patriarchal norms of sexual abstinence and passivity prescribed for the young girl, which she initially put into question through her unorthodox actions. In this manner, the female adolescent is both a threat to and victim of the patriarchal system governing the text, and to the violence it entails. Not only her gender but, as this dissertation tries to argue, specifically her young age plays a significant role in this constellation. Only a few of these figures survive and continue to play a central role in the text. It is these exceptional female figures - girls who survive - that this dissertation explores, for their actions open up questions regarding the usual role prescribed to the figure of the young girl in German literature. The introduction seeks to consider the scholarship surrounding female death and representation, (notably the female as other, one who both stands in for and is supposed to ward off death) as well as to add to existing research by focusing on the factor of age and its relation to societal violence. The dissertation then examines plays by J.M.R. Lenz and Frank Wedekind's work, specifically the fragment Mine-Haha, where alternative scenarios, in which female adolescents survive, are developed. In Lenz's case the girl's survival depends on her limitation to the home, Wedekind's figures stand in for the principle of survival itself. The interplay between gender and age here becomes central to the questioning of the patriarchal order in these texts, and especially its economy of violence. One main question this dissertation investigates is whether the structural and interpersonal violence of the prevailing social system is minimized, or simply reorganized, if its usual victim – the young girl – is not as radically subjected to it.