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Abstract
This dissertation explores representations of female masochism in selected German-language literary works from the late-eighteenth and post-war twentieth centuries. An analysis of the historical genesis of masochism reveals that the concept is only considered to be “perverse” when applied to male subjects. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Sigmund Freud and his student Helene Deutsch align themselves with a series of physicists and philosophers who have defined the feminine role in childbirth as “passive,” asserting that masochism is a “natural” trait of women, while sadism is a characteristic endemic to masculinity. In contrast, modern feminist psychoanalysts such as Paula J. Caplan and Jessica Benjamin expose the oppressive and socially-constructed nature of female masochism.
The literary texts dealt with in this work reflect both spectrums of the debate on female masochism. Lessing's Emilia Galoffi (1772), generally treated as a paradigmatic representation of “bourgeois literature,” presents both the symptoms and the corresponding contradictions inherent to a “natural” female masochism. The heroine, Emilia, is killed by her father, yet a close reading of the text reveals that the daughter herself desires and, ultimately, choreographs her own death. Emilia's masochism is symptomatic of the situation in which the female subject finds herself in the bourgeois epoch. Female masochism is both imposed upon literary female bourgeois subjects by sociological conditions and expectations and embraced by these figures as a mode through which they can act and desire. Sophie von La Roche's Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Stemheim (1771) reproduces this paradigm while simultaneously honing it into a model to be emulated by women readers. The post-war literary texts dealt with in this work can be aligned with the critical stances of Paula Caplan and Jessica Benjamin. Bachmann's Der Fall Franza (ca. 1961) explicitly criticizes a restrictive model for female subjectivity and reproduces moments of female masochism as a mode of critique. The heroine of Elfriede Jelinek's Die Klavierspielefin (1983) simultaneously exposes and perpetuates her own oppression through meaningless acts of masochism. In this sense, female masochism signals both a radical limitation upon manifestations of female subjectivity and a mode by which these limitations themselves might be exposed.
