3 - Julie Kühne, Laura Marholm, Clara Viebig: Performing Subjects

Summary

IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER we saw dramatic characters performing both the norm of female gender and, to a greater or lesser extent, alternatives to that norm. The alternatives — independent creative activity, hand-in-hand with self-ownership or control over one's own body — take the female subject outside the structure of the patriarchal family, because they are apparently not possible within it.

In this chapter I analyze three plays that advertise their concern with a female subject in their titles and subtitles: Julie Kühne's Elfriede Laub oder Weib und Mensch (1873), Laura Marholm's Karla Bühring: Ein Frauendrama (1895), and Clara Viebig's Barbara Holzer (1897). These are not historically attested or notable figures like Ebner's Maria Stuart or Marie Roland: in each case, and particularly in Elfriede Laub and Barbara Holzer, the dramatist portrays an ordinary woman, whose life does not differ in its external circumstances from that of numerous other women. What makes these women remarkable is that they believe (initially at least) that they can assert an autonomous self, even in a society where femininity or femaleness is understood to be a subordinate reflection of dominant masculinity or maleness. When this belief leads them into conflict with convention and their environment, two of the three women finish up dead, and therefore outside of the social structure in a drastic sense; one finds her way back into society in a learning process that renders the play practically a Lehrstück.

Performing Gender

The character who survives is Elfriede, the central figure in Kühne's play, which has the full title Elfriede Laub oder Weib und Mensch. There is no evidence to suggest that this play was ever performed; given the subject matter, it is unlikely that a theater would have accepted it.

While the play does have a distinctly dramatic narrative, it recalls at times the Reformation dialogues of the sixteenth century rather than the theater of the nineteenth — verbal interchanges often occur with the clear intention of presenting a discourse versus a counter-discourse, and (as in the Reformation dialogues) we are left in no doubt as to whose side we ought to be on.