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MOTHERS AND LOVERS IN SOME NOVELS BY KAFKA AND BROD
Author(s) -
Robertson Ritchie
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
german life and letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 12
eISSN - 1468-0483
pISSN - 0016-8777
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-0483.1997.tb01706.x
Subject(s) - masculinity , happiness , human sexuality , psychology , gender studies , psychoanalysis , social psychology , sociology
Gender studies using literary materials have as yet said little about the part played by separation from the mother in shaping masculinity. Its importance is illustrated from three novels by Kafka and Brod. In Der Verschollene , mother‐figures are threatening or untrustworthy, and sexually active women arouse fear. Brod's Das große Wagnis expresses frankly the nostalgia of adult men for nonsexual maternal love, and assigns women a quasi‐religious redemptive function. In Das Schloß , a response to Brod's novel, Kafka suggests a theology centring on the Fall into adult sexuality; his characters, male and female, are romantically enthralled by a patriarchal masculinity that cannot provide lasting happiness; a playful, feminised state preceding separation from the mother can only be glimpsed nostalgically, and the protagonist poignantly fails to recreate it in an adult relationship.