Open AccessREPRESENTATION OF FEMALE SUBJECTIVITY IN THE NOVELS OF MELA HARTWIG
Author(s) -
Olga A. Dronova
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
praktiki and interpretacii
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2415-8852
DOI - 10.18522/2415-8852-2021-1-117-127
Subject(s) - subjectivity , antithesis , representation (politics) , literature , character (mathematics) , nothing , german , context (archaeology) , identity (music) , art , history , psychoanalysis , sociology , aesthetics , philosophy , psychology , politics , law , epistemology , geometry , mathematics , archaeology , political science
The work of the Austrian writer of the 1920s – early 1930s, Mela Hartwig, was rediscovered by the reader in the early 2000s after a long period of oblivion. Interest in Hartwig’s prose is caused by the connection of the problems of her work with contemporary discussions about the nature of female subjectivity. The article analyzes the novels of Mela Hartwig “The Woman is nothing” and “Am I a redundant human being?”, reflecting the identity crisis of her heroines. The reverse pole of the erasing of the personality in these novels is the multiplicity of “Self”, various behavior models that have a character of play or imitation. Reproducing traditional stereotypes about male and female nature, Hartwig at the same time demonstrates their exhaustion. In the context of the German and Austrian culture of the 1920s – the time when the image of an independent “new woman” dominated the mass media, cinema, and literature – Hartwig’s work acted as the antithesis of both the traditional and the new view of women, because both the “new woman” and the “femme fatale” of the turn of the century appear in her novels as masks that do not reflect the true identity of her heroine.