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Abstract
In this dissertation, I analyze Ingeborg Bachmann's attempt to articulate a non-totalitarian aesthetics beyond hierarchical gender binary, by (playfully) blurring traditional notions of (female) gender identity and desire in her late short story collection Simultan (1971).
My reading is informed by gender studies, psychoanalysis and postmodern modes of inquiry, which question these traditional binaries and hence dissolve other opposites usually associated with them (such as object-subject, connection-separation, simulation-truth). Instead, Bachmann portrays feminine desire as a range, encompassing bond and bondage, as well as (narcissistic) assertiveness. Her female characters are torn between contradictory desires, which are expressed in the body as the site of unconscious desires, often in so-called typically female/feminine pathologies, such as hysteria, narcissism and melancholia/depression, as well as specific specific areas associated with the feminine, such as Romantic love, masquerade and melodrama.
In order to go beyond the paradigm of female victim and male victimizer, I employ the tropes of androgyny and hermaphroditism, which signify closure and disruption respectively--on the level of desire, epistemology, and writing. In the first chapter, I examine Bachmann's nontotalitarian aesthetic in the light of these two tropes, and situate it in the gender debate from the 1960s to the present. In the second chapter, I explore her concept of a two-edged utopia of absolute, ecstatic love (androgyny) on the one hand, and an ambivalent utopia of rupture, which Bachmann develops mostly on the level of writing (hermaphroditism) on the other. In the following chapters, I analyze this two-fold utopia in the individual Simultan stories.
