2 - Elsa Bernstein-Porges, Mathilde Paar, Gertrud Prellwitz, Anna Croissant-Rust: The Gender of Creativity

Summary

THE PESSIMISTIC CONCLUSION to the previous chapter was that neither the serious nor comic mode seemed to offer an emancipatory solution for the dramatic work of Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach or Helene Druskowitz. 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 1880s, 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 1929: “seit dem Naturalismus [haben sich] Typus der Frau und Struktur des Dramas […] nunmehr genähert.”

While it is true that, in the 1880s and 1890s, a number of German language women playwrights began to acquire prominence, the continuing perception of drama as a space properly owned by men is nonetheless testified to in critical reactions to women's visible dramatic activity: reactions that range from interested astonishment to outright disapproval. 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: to redefine her as a “masculine” woman. The method is much used: Devrient remarks on Ebner-Eschenbach's “männlichen Geist”; in 1898, Otto Krack congratulates Emilie Mataja (1855–1938; alias Emil Marriot) for displaying “etwas Männliches, Entschiedenes, Selbstständiges” in her writing; and Theodor Lessing finds Elsa Bernstein-Porges (1866–1949; alias Ernst Rosmer) “beinah männlich.” In all cases, the description is intended as a compliment, and in the two latter cases at least, the male pseudonyms, Emil and Ernst, used by the authors for their dramatic work can be read as a form of acknowledgment that they ought properly to be men.