The Feminine Beast: Anti-moral Morality in Early 20th-Century Literature

Authors

  • Dorothee Ostmeier

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5399/uo/konturen.7.0.3529

Abstract

Texts of the early Twentieth Century link animalism, gender struggles, and issues of identity in their stark critique of bourgeois gender ideology. This essay places selected texts by Bertolt Brecht and Frank Wedekind in the center of this debate as they elaborate on Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of the Western nature/culture divide and his animal imagery. For Brecht, corruption of bourgeois value systems, including gender concepts, undermines any possibility for an authentic lifestyle, whereas Wedekind ¬– a generation earlier – explores the corruptibility of authenticity itself.

Author Biography

Dorothee Ostmeier

Dorothee Ostmeier is Professor of German and Folklore, and Participating Faculty of Comparative Literature and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Oregon. Her research and teaching focuses on the border areas between German literatures, culture and philosophies of the 18th to the 21st centuries. She has published two books. One discusses Nobel Price laureate Nelly Sachs’ cryptic dramatic writings, which she composed after escaping Nazi persecution in 1941. Ostmeier situates Sachs’ oeuvre within the ongoing debate on obsessive memory in the face of the universal disappearance of idealist utopias. The other book analyzes gender tensions in poetic dialogues between lovers in the early Twentieth Century demonstrating how these texts radically anticipate gender discourses of the late twentieth century. Her interest in fantasy and the uncanny tackle the moves from utopian to anti-utopian tales and have inspired essays, focusing on the Brothers’ Grimm, ETA Hoffmann’s, Michael Ende’s and Cornelia Funke’s fantasy texts, and the film “Ever After.” These essays interrogate the borders between reality and fiction and expose the psychological and social risks of crossing such borders. Ostmeier views the fascination with such risks as a desire for an ethics that evades the violence of authoritative structures.

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Published

2014-09-16

How to Cite

Ostmeier, D. (2014). The Feminine Beast: Anti-moral Morality in Early 20th-Century Literature. Konturen, 6, 151–178. https://doi.org/10.5399/uo/konturen.7.0.3529

Issue

Vol. 6 (2014): Defining the Human and the Animal

Section

Articles