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The Representation of Female Power in Ethel Smyth's Der Wald (1902)
Author(s) -
Lebiez Judith
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
the german quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.11
H-Index - 10
eISSN - 1756-1183
pISSN - 0016-8831
DOI - 10.1111/gequ.12084
Subject(s) - subversion , opera , context (archaeology) , representation (politics) , femininity , power (physics) , literature , art , character (mathematics) , suffrage , reading (process) , humanities , sociology , history , philosophy , gender studies , law , linguistics , politics , political science , physics , geometry , mathematics , archaeology , quantum mechanics
Born 1858 in England, Ethel Smyth studied in Leipzig, composed six operas, took an active part in the women's suffrage movement and wrote ten books. The lead character of her second opera, Der Wald (1902), is a strong and sexually free woman portrayed as maleficent, which casts a negative light on female power. This article first introduces the context in which the opera was composed, before proposing a closer reading of the libretto with a view to assessing the respective weight of convention and subversion in Smyth's representation of femininity.