Transgressions of the Feminine: Tragedy, Enlightenment and the Figure of Woman in Classical German Drama. By CATHERINE E. RIGBY. Heidelberg: Winter. 1996. vii + 270 pp. DM 42.
This study is based on a much extended doctoral dissertation. Extra years taken to mull over and extend that limited compass have in this case undoubtedly led to a fuller, more comprehensive study. But at the same time theoretical accretions and new perspectives attained over the intervening years have made for an approach that at times is confusing, as theory of tragedy, critical social theory, literary analysis, women's history, and feminist theory all jostle for position.
The book falls into two main sections, the first theoretical, the second a close analysis of four major dramas from the German 'classical' canon: Goethe's Iphigenie, Kleist's Penthesilea, Grillparzer's Das goldene Vliess, and Hebbel's Gyges und sein Ring. The works selected most obviously share mythical or legendary subject-matter, and cultural and male-female conflicts. An unusual feature is to preface these analyses, several of which are of high quality, with an equally detailed account of Racine's Phedre. The reasons for this do not seem conclusive: it breaks the historical integrity of the German tradition established between 1780 and 1850 without adding much that is new about the form of tragedy.
The first section covers the various theoretical positions the author deems valuable for her study. She aims to suggest a different way of conceptualizing the relationship between tragedy and 'Enlightenment', the difference in question being supplied by feminist theory. 'Enlightenment', defined according to the strictures of Adorno's and Horckheimer's Die Dialektik der Auflkarung, is a key term; tragedy, modernity, and the place of women are then defined and discussed within this framework. Not all readers these days will accept so readily the Marxist concept of Enlightenment as a 'disembodied and instrumental kind of rationality', an alienation from nature that is seen to pervade thinking in both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, nor agree that the 'discourse on enlightenment' is necessarily pessimistic. They may also find the view that 'Enlightenment' is a 'critique of patriarchy' somewhat reductive. Tragedy and 'Enlightenment' are shown to relate in different ways to one another and the elastic term 'Enlightenment' itself is extended backwards to ancient times: for the author Sophocles's Antigone, for example, reveals the limitations of institutional rationality, and provides a 'corrective' to Enlightenment; whereas other classical tragedies, for example Aeschylus's Eumenides, demonstrate a post-tragic position in which a new system of 'Enlightenment' replaces the old. On this basis the author constructs a model of the 'dialectic of Enlightenment', which she will apply to the dramas studied, judging them within the extreme points of a frame represented at one end by 'The Enlightenment of Tragedy' and at the other by the 'Tragedy of Enlightenment'. Iphigenie represents the first category, Gyges und sein Ring the second; the other two dramas occupy intermediate positions. All this may strike the reader as a shade contrived.
If these theories of 'Enlightenment' are not entirely unfamiliar to us, they are reinforced by those of other Marxist 'heavies', notably Georg Lukacs and Ernst Bloch. The latter's concept of the coexistence of the non-contemporaneous ('die Gleichzeitkigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen') is applied to what the author terms the 'non-synchronous' development of German social, political, and intellectual life, which in turn, it is suggested, gives rise to a drama strung 'between the Ancients and Moderns', where myth is preferred to history (it is perhaps significant that Schiller plays no part in the scheme).
What, then, is the connection with tragedy? Here the perspectives of Lukacs are invoked, for whom tragedy was paradigmatic of dramatic form. The climax of this form in Hebbel's mid-nineteenth-century works and its subsequent 'decline' prompts theories and explanations ranging from Hegel's 'dialectical inevitability' to Nietzsche's and (eventually) George Steiner's cultural pessimism. The author's own contribution is to show the 'emancipatory possibilities and the tragic costs of the processes of enlightenment and modernisation but in a classicizing form that is in turn rendered problematic by these same processes'. 'Tragedy', then, according to this definition, is stripped of all metaphysical meaning and reduced to the status of a broad cultural and sociological phenomenon; it is the outcome of imposing rationalist ideologies on unreceptive, protesting victims, mainly women who, as is demonstrated in three of the chosen examples, Penthesilea, Medea, and Rhodophe, retaliate with various forms and degrees of violence.
Of these four analyses that of Iphigenie is possibly the most convincing, but much of the interpretation does not benefit especially from the application of the theoretical criteria outlined. Goethe's drama certainly strains against the canon of later works analysed but that fact is not explained by pasting onto it the rubric 'Enlightenment of Tragedy'. The pivotal role of the eponymous heroine as the vehicle for change and her ability to convince even recalcitrant barbarians to adopt her own humane values is not enhanced either by this or by the term 'bourgeois' to describe such values as honesty and sweet reasonableness. The difficulty, even artificiality of the exercise of bringing Iphigenie under the same roof as the others is reflected in the author's implied criticism of it for not giving full expression to the uncontrolled irrationality and sexuality displayed by characters in the later works.
Penthesilea, which is categorized as the 'Return of the Repressed', and a 'rebarbarisation of antiquity', is clearly a better fit. The Amazon state is construed as an 'instrument of rationality', authoritarian but not primitive, and (correctly) patriarchal not matriarchal. More speculative is the view of barbarism displayed by Penthesilea's frenzy as a 'correlative of the potential barbarism of modern civilization itself ' and the author's attempt to draw parallels with contemporary political events and to propose a reading of the drama as a vision of a violent future and a 'revolutionary rupture' with the past does not wholly convince. Furthermore, although the theoretical frame works for some of the drama, much of its substance is omitted and many subtleties ignored.
Of the other two dramas analysed, Das goldene Vliess introduces the 'tragedy of exile' in which the 'primitive' woman is excluded from the civilized community and wreaks her revenge. Differences with Penthesilea are perhaps overstated when the denouement of Kleist's tragedy is read as unreconciled and destructive whereas in Grillparzer's the author believes she sees more hopeful glimmers and a 'possible new synthesis' despite Medea's own continued 'displacement' as a more primitive being, and a marginalized woman involved in outmoded cults and values.
Gyges und sein Ring is viewed as the complete antipode to Iphigenie, a drama in which the female character's sanctity and antiquated values have been violated by two 'progressive' males, the young Greek Gyges and her husband Kandaules. 'Enlightenment' here is associated with these progressive forces and with the 'reification' of woman. The terrible backlash of Rhodope can surely be seen as a feminist statement, but the author adjudges it to be a 'flawed feminism' because it is backward-looking and based on unemancipated ideas of female domestication. Given Hebbel's even-handed treatment of the opposing principles of female conservatism and male progressiveness and his alignment of these attitudes to particular historico-cultural conflicts such a reading may seem forced. The drama is proclaimed to be the fullest embodiment of the principle of 'Tragedy of Enlightenment'. How it relates to Penthesilea and Das goldene Vliess in this respect could perhaps be made clearer.
The book concludes with a glimpse of later developments in German drama in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since, on the author's own admission, Hebbel's tragedy 'represents an end rather than a beginning', that seems strange. However, continuity with modern forms is detected not in the 'closed' classical form, nor in the mythological tragedy that were so important in the earlier discussion. Now feminist concerns provide the continuity, as these are taken up by Ibsen and others. We are told that the preferable 'alternative' way of understanding 'Enlightenment' is as a critique directed against the 'historical oppression of women'. Having earlier in the study been invited to adopt a pluralistic standpoint, it is disappointing to find the focus narrowing like this.
The text is too often marred by misprints, omissions of words, and faulty alignment of punctuation. The bibliography is highly selective, especially in the case of the works of the four authors whose dramas are examined in detail. This reinforces one's impression of one-sidedness in the interpretation.
HILDA M. BROWN ST HILDA'S COLLEGE, OXFORD