Shifting Voices: Feminist Thought and Women's Writing in Fin-de-Siècle Austria and Hungary 9780773560529

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Feminism, the Women’s Movement, and Women’s Writing in the Context of Fin-de-Siècle Austria and Hungary
1 A “First Wave“: The Emergence of a Feminist Discourse in Austria and Hungary
2 The Fight for Women’s Education, Suffrage, and a New Sexual Paradigm
3 Feminism, Misogyny, and Viriphobia and Their Dialogic Relationship
4 The New Woman’s Thorny Road to Independence
5 Sexuality, Desire, and the Female Subject
6 A Return to Tradition?
7 The City and its Metaphors
Conclusion
Appendix One: Authors’ Biographies
Appendix Two: Bibliography of Hungarian Fin-de-Siècle Women Writers
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
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Citation preview

shifting voices

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shiftingvoices voices shifting Feminist Thought and Women’s Writing in Fin-de-siècle Austria and Hungary

agatha schwartz

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston | London | Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2008 isbn 978-0-7735-3286-1 Legal deposit first quarter 2008 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp ) for our publishing activities.

library and archives canada cataloguing in publication Schwartz, Agatha, 1961– Shifting voices : feminist thought and women’s writing in fin-de-siècle Austria and Hungary / Agatha Schwartz. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7735-3286-1 1. Austrian literature – Women authors – History and criticism. 2. Hungarian literature – Women authors – History and criticism. 3. Feminist literature – Austria – History and criticism. 4. Feminist literature – Hungary – History and criticism. 5. Feminism and literature – Austria. 6. Feminism and literature – Hungary. 7. Feminism – Austria – History. 8. Feminism – Hungary – History. 9. Austrian literature – 19th century – History and criticism. 10. Hungarian literature – 19th century – History and criticism. 11. Austrian literature – 20th century –History and criticism. 12. Hungarian literature – 20th century – History and criticism. i. Title. pt3826.w65s36 2008 830.9’9436082 c2007-905752-7

Set in 10.2/13 Minion Pro with ff Scala Sans Book design & typesetting by Garet Markvoort, zijn digital

Contents

Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Feminism, the Women’s Movement, and Women’s Writing in the Context of Fin-de-Siècle Austria and Hungary 3 –– A “First Wave”: The Emergence of a Feminist Discourse in Austria and Hungary 20 –2– The Fight for Women’s Education, Suffrage, and a New Sexual Paradigm 35 –3– Feminism, Misogyny, and Viriphobia and Their Dialogic Relationship 74

vi contents

–4– The New Woman’s Thorny Road to Independence 97 –5– Sexuality, Desire, and the Female Subject 2 –6– A Return to Tradition? 67 –7– The City and its Metaphors 83 Conclusion 95 Appendix One Authors’ Biographies 20 Appendix Two Bibliography of Hungarian Fin-de-Siècle Women Writers 22 Notes 243 Bibliography 255 Index 27

Illustrations

Rózsa (Roskia) Bédy-Schwimmer Metropolitan Ervin Szabó Library Budapest, Budapest Collection

36 Auguste Fickert Monument at the Türkenschanzpark, Vienna

5 Szikra (Countess Sándorné Teleki) Metropolitan Ervin Szabó Library Budapest, Budapest Collection

58 Grete Meisel-Hess

Austrian National Library Vienna, Picture Archive, sign. nb 533.20-b

63

Rosa Mayreder

Austrian National Library Vienna, Picture Archive, sign. nb 54.427-b

68

Margit Kaffka Museum of Literature Petőfi, Budapest

99

viii illustrations

Anna Szederkényi Metropolitan Ervin Szabó Library Budapest, Budapest Collection

03 Terka Lux Museum of Literature Petőfi, Budapest

4 Emma Ritoók Metropolitan Ervin Szabó Library Budapest, Budapest Collection

7 Maria Janitschek

Austrian National Library Vienna, Picture Archive, sign. Pg 2.32:I ()

23

Renée Erdős Metropolitan Ervin Szabó Library Budapest, Budapest Collection

74

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its generous support of my research, which made the writing of this book possible. I also wish to thank the University of Ottawa for its generous funding that allowed me to conduct my initial research. Prof. Dr Sigrid Schmid-Bortenschlager, University of Salzburg, helped me immensely with my on-site research in Salzburg and her expertise regarding Austrian fin-de-siècle women writers was invaluable. I also wish to thank Prof. Dr Éva Kissné Novák, University of Szeged, Hungary, for her guidance during the first steps of my research on Hungarian women writers. Judit Acsády, feminist scholar and activist from Budapest, generously shared with me her research results on Hungarian feminism from the turn of the century. Prof. Dr Anna Fábri, elte University, Budapest, offered precious hints regarding some lesser-known material. Dr Judit Szapor, York University, offered valuable insight into the Hungarian fin-de-siècle women’s movement. A special thank you to Dr Kyla Madden from McGillQueen’s University Press for her patient encouragement. I am also grateful to my research assistants, who worked with me throughout the various stages of this project: Anna Borgos, Mitchell Caplan, Mélanie Grégoire, Michèle Healy, Nausikaa Muresan, and Brigitta Oeding. And last but not least, I thank Paul for his listening, support, and easing of the waves of frustration in seeing the manuscript through to completion.

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shifting voices

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introduction

Feminism, the Women’s Movement, and Women’s Writing in the Context of Fin-de-Siècle Austria and Hungary

The end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century was without doubt one of the most fascinating cultural and literary periods in the history of Central Europe. Recent scholarship has confirmed that “it was Austria, particularly Vienna, which played a preeminent role in generating and propagating fin-de-siècle sentiments and modern twentieth century Western culture” (Hanák 993, 29), an assessment advanced as early as 983 by Norman Stone, with his claim that “it was in Vienna that most of the twentieth-century intellectual world was invented” (Stone 999, 407). Names such as Sigmund Freud, Ernst Mach, Arthur Schnitzler, Gustav Klimt, Arnold Schönberg, and many others shaped the cultural landscape of the Habsburg Monarchy in the last decades of its existence. The famous term coined by Hermann Broch, “joyous apocalypse” (fröhliche Apokalypse), expresses the contradictions that this multicultural empire spanned with its astonishing plurality of ideas and discourses. Budapest, the capital of the Hungarian part of the Dual Monarchy (established in 867) made its own contributions to the fin de siècle, with world-famous names in music such as Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, in painting with a unique modernist expression in the works of Lajos Gulácsy and Tivadar Kosztka Csontváry, and in literature with important modernist writers and poets who renewed literary Hungarian, such as Sándor Bródy and Endre Ady. One major aspect of fin-de-siècle modernity in both constitutional parts of the Monarchy was the presence of a strong and organized women’s movement, as well as of a whole new generation of women writers, many of whom were recognized and well-established in their time.¹ Some of

4 shifting voices

these writers, such as Irma von Troll-Borostyáni and Grete Meisel-Hess in Austria and Szikra (Countess Sándorné Teleky) in Hungary, were both active in the women’s movement and authors of essayistic and fictional texts. Many women writers of fiction (such as Grete Meisel-Hess, Maria Janitschek, and Elsa Asenijeff in Austria and Margit Kaffka, Renée Erdős, Emma Ritoók, and Szikra in Hungary) enjoyed considerable fame and respect, not only from readers but also from critics and fellow writers, both female and male. But while their work was mentioned and often praised in literary history and criticism during the first half of the twentieth century, they became, with a few exceptions, forgotten after WW II . Michael S. Batts sees one possible reason for such omission of women writers from modernity and from literary history in general in “a basic tendency in the writing of literary history away from a primarily historical attitude ... and towards a system based on supposedly absolute aesthetic criteria.” Batts adds that this tendency became even stronger because “the writing of literary history remained firmly in the hands of the masculine bourgeoisie” (Batts 999, 228). Feminist research of the past few decades has corrected this unjust neglect somewhat, yet much remains to be done. Scholars have done more “recovery” work on Austrian feminism and Austrian writers of this period than on the Hungarians. Hungary has seen a renewed interest in women writers and feminist research in general since the end of the Communist era. To date no comparative study between the Austrian and Hungarian fin-de-siècle women’s movements and women writers has been undertaken, a gap that this book aims to fill. The selection of writers in this study will, necessarily, leave some lacunae, as not all relevant authors could be included. It is thus, to borrow Helen Chambers’s words, “representative rather than exhaustive” (Chambers 2000, 389–90). Some major socio-economic factors triggered middle-class women’s organization in the second half of the nineteenth century. By the end of that century, there was not only a larger than average surplus of women but also many women did not marry. The social changes brought about by industrialization and urbanization “forced many single women to provide for themselves” (Harriman 993, 3). The economic crisis brought on by the Black Friday on 9 May 873 only reinforced this change. Although the economy did recover, this temporary collapse shocked many families of the middle and upper bourgeoisie and had a lasting impact, given that the financial stability offered by family and marriage could no longer be taken for granted (Mittnik 990, 7; Heindl 997, 22–3). Harriman quotes statistics from 900 according to which 44 per cent of all Austrian women were employed. The figure quoted for Hungary is lower, 27.6 per cent, but

Introduction

5

it covers only full-time employment, whereas the one for Austria includes both full-time and part-time employees. Given the discriminatory situation of female employees, particularly in regard to compensation for their work, women decided to take charge of their material concerns and started to form professional associations as early as the 860s, followed by political associations a couple of decades later. The dramatic changes that many women experienced were but a reflection of a deep-rooted upheaval in Austria-Hungary. The rosy surface of a world of stability, security, and progress for the bourgeoisie, as depicted by Stefan Zweig in Die Welt von gestern (The World of Yesterday, 942), started to crumble with the aspirations for cultural and national independence of the non-German and non-Magyar ethnicities. The political landscape, which Steven Beller describes as a “self-contradictory jumble of tributaries” (Beller 200, 5) with various combinations of ideologies, such as liberalism, anti-liberalism, nationalism, and anti-Semitism, added a further element to a general feeling of insecurity. Given this socio-political background, it comes as no surprise that, both in Austria and in Hungary, Nietzsche’s ideas were embraced, particularly by many intellectuals, including feminists and women writers, for his criticism of the current “decadent” state of culture and his quasiprophetic proclamations about the need for the dawn of a new humanity. For Austrian (and German) women writers in particular, Nietzsche’s writings “seemed to offer a platform from which to criticize existing bourgeois moral and social norms and to advance women’s right to full selfdevelopment as individuals” (Weedon 2000, 4). Freud’s discoveries about the power of the subconscious and sexuality also had a powerful impact on male and female writers alike, although some women writers, such as Grete Meisel-Hess, also criticized and modified some of his concepts. In Hungary, Freud’s ideas were just as popular, mainly because of his Hungarian student Sándor Ferenczi, who belonged to the modernist Nyugat circle. In Austria, Ernst Mach’s philosophical statement that “the Ego must be given up” (das Ich ist unrettbar), added more fuel to a general feeling of an identity crisis, particularly among male writers. Narcissistic withdrawal into explorations of the psyche was one of the ways in which some male writers responded to this atmosphere of uncertainty. Thus, Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Hermann Bahr did not explicitly deal with the political issues of the day – which is why Carl Schorske criticized them for their “retreat from history” (Beller 200, 3). However, this “aestheticist modernism” paradigm as the dominant attribute of Viennese intellectual life has recently been challenged by scholars such as Allan Janik, who

6 shifting voices

see in fin-de-siècle Vienna an equal presence of a “critical modernism,” in writers such as Karl Kraus and Robert Musil and among feminists such as Rosa Mayreder (Janik 200, 4). In Hungary, the French philosopher Henri Bergson had a comparable influence. Bergson fascinated writers with his challenge of a rationally measurable time and his concept of duration (durée), which could only be accessed through intuition. He influenced many Hungarian poets and writers, among them Mihály Babits, Attila József, and Valéria Dienes. Following 867, the year of the Compromise (Ausgleich in German or kiegyezés in Hungarian) with Hungary, the Empire became the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. “Hungary received its long-coveted autonomy, and shared only foreign affairs, defence, and common customs and revenue policies with the Austrian half of the Habsburg state” (Dreisziger 200, 27). Budapest quickly grew into the capital city of independent Hungary. It was the fastest growing city in the Monarchy: between 867 and 90, its population increased from 270,685 to 863,735 (Sármány-Parsons 993, 85). Given its recently acquired political autonomy, Hungary needed to validate a capital different from long-established Habsburg Vienna. Budapest thus became a feverish building site. Many new buildings were erected, including the magnificent Parliament building. Started in 896, on the occasion of the millennium celebration of Hungary’s existence, and finished in 902, it was the largest Parliament building in the world at the time (Lukacs 988, 49). New boulevards crossed the centre of the city, and the underground, also built in 896, was the first of its kind in Europe (Johnston 974, 344). This new metropolis attracted a very different kind of bourgeoisie from that of Vienna. The Budapester bourgeoisie was more parvenu, younger, and less established than the old Bildungsbürgertum and Besitzbürgertum of Vienna (Hanák 993, 57) and started to be formed only after the Ausgleich (Pynsent 989, 23). It was mainly composed of German and Jewish ethnicities, as well as some lesser Magyar nobility. The same was true for the intellectuals who formed the modernist groups: they came from the impoverished lesser nobility, middle-class Jews, and assimilated Germans, and were, almost without exception, attracted to Budapest from the provinces. None of them was born in the capital, whereas many of the Viennese modernist writers belonged to the upper-middle class and were Viennese born. All this gave Budapest and its intellectual life an atmosphere very different from that of Vienna. This seemingly “semibarbaric country and place,” looked down on by many a Viennese intellectual, including Freud, was, however, “breaking away from the nineteenth-century habits of thought, vision, manners and even speech” much faster and in different ways from old imperial Vienna (Lukacs 988, 27–8).²

Introduction

7

Hungarian modernity was in some ways similar to, but in others very different from its Austrian counterpart, regarding both its form and content. Unlike in Vienna, where modernity developed in the 890s and started fading after 90 (although some major works by modernist writers were published after that time), modernity arrived in two waves in Budapest (Sármány-Parsons 993, 90). The first wave started in the 880s and ended roughly in the mid-890s. Naturalism, which never had a strong following in Austria, was particularly present during this phase in Hungarian literature, with topics such as the misery of the big city, hunger for money, and prostitution. However, other styles, present in Viennese modernity, were also adopted, such as impressionism and art nouveau (Jugendstil). The second wave, in which we can find even more similarities to Viennese modernity, followed around 900, in particular around the poet Endre Ady and the periodical Nyugat (West), founded in 908 and published until 94. Focal points of the poets and writers of the Nyugat generation were the crisis of identity, loneliness and alienation, death, sexuality and eroticism, and antifeminism – all topics that had been explored for about a decade in Vienna. One important point on which the Hungarian moderns significantly differed from their Austrian counterparts was the question of national identity, the survival and redefinition of the nation and its political path – a very pressing question for Hungarian intellectuals, given the very recently acquired autonomy of the country after centuries of Habsburg dominance: “Unlike Viennese creative intellectuals who had but a fading and weak Austrian national identity and patriotism, most of their Hungarian counterparts never had the faintest doubt or uncertainty about their national loyalty” (Hanák 993, 53). This was given expression in the arts as well. In the music of Bartók and Kodály as in the literature of the Nyugat generation, national values were given expression in a modern form, thus fusing Hungarian and European culture into something new (Kelecsényi 200, 79). One should distinguish, however, between a modernist renewal of national culture and conservative Hungarian nationalism. It is symptomatic that the great poet Endre Ady, who actually redefined the notion of the Hungarian nation and reformed and rejuvenated literary Hungarian, was attacked by the conservative Hungarian nobility for his alleged lack of patriotism. His case shows the split between conservatives and moderns regarding their respective definitions of the survival of the nation. Some conservative women intellectuals and feminists were also active in this debate about the survival of the Hungarian nation, particularly following the disastrous loss of about two-thirds of Hungary’s territories in the Treaty of Trianon (June 920). Thus Sarolta Geöcze and Emma Ritoók, prominent names from the fin-de-siècle women’s movement and literature

8 shifting voices

respectively, published a treatise in 920 entitled The Problem of Hungary: Magyar Women to the Women of the Civilized World. Geöcze and Ritoók not only bemoan the loss of the territories but also adopt a conservative anti-Semitic and anti-communist tone and proclaim the supremacy of the Magyars over other ethnicities in the Carpathian Basin. Viennese intellectuals and feminists had no such discussions of national identity and fears about the survival of an Austrian nation. The presence of a women’s movement and the emergence of a rich women’s literature were majors aspects of fin-de-siècle modernity in both constitutional parts of the Dual Monarchy. As in many other Western countries, women were now abandoning the role of “bearers of meaning” for that of “makers of meaning” on a more massive scale (Bauer 988, 3), which meant that they not only fought for their social and political rights by organizing over several decades but also actively participated, through their essayistic and fictional texts, in the creation of a discourse of their own. I agree with Ernestine Zottleder, who, in her 932 dissertation on novels by Germanspeaking women writers, regards women’s fiction not as a “mouthpiece” (“Sprachrohr”) of the women’s movement, but rather considers both, the movement and the writing, as “parallel manifestations of the same cultural phenomenon, namely, women’s awakening” (Zottleder 932, 9).³ Anna Hauer argues along similar lines when she states that “women’s literature of the turn of the century should not be primarily understood as an illustration of the programmatic demands of the historical women’s movement” (Hauer 984, 49). Some of the authors I consider in this study were members of the organized women’s movement as well as writers of fiction (such as Rosa Mayreder, Irma von Troll-Borostyáni, and Grete MeiselHess in Austria and Szikra in Hungary), whereas others, while expressing feminist ideas in their texts, did not formally belong to any organizations that fought for women’s rights (such as Else Jerusalem-Kotányi, Maria Janitschek, and Elsa Asenijeff in Austria and Margit Kaffka, Emma Ritoók, and Anna Szederkényi in Hungary). How can we define feminism in the context of fin-de-siècle Austria and Hungary? In Hungary, “feminist” (feminista) was established at the time as a term to designate members of the organized women’s movement. The name of one of the most important progressive women’s organizations, the Feminist Association (Feministák Egyesülete, FE ), reflects this. The same is not true, however, for the Germanic context. According to Harriet Anderson, the word Feminist was used for male supporters of the women’s movement. The feminine form, Feministin, became more widely used only around 94. The feminists, in other words, women who were involved in

Introduction

9

the women’s movement, described themselves as “progressive women” (Anderson 992b, 9–0). In this study, I use “feminist” both as a noun, to designate authors and activists who fought for the advancement of women, and as an adjective, to express the goals of the women’s movement, i.e., the furthering of women’s social and economic status, and in opposition to the terms “conservative” or “traditional,” meaning the maintenance of established patterns of femininity. The borders between the two terms are, however, often fluid, and need to be drawn carefully, for the bourgeois women’s movement did use some traditional attributes of femininity to further women’s cause.⁴ In most texts, both fiction and non-fiction, we can discern the presence of both feminist and traditional voices in an interplay that is at times obvious and discordant and at other times more subtle. To present the intertwining of these different voices, the application of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories seemed particularly appropriate. Although Bakhtin himself was oblivious to categories such as gender in his system, feminist scholars have successfully applied his notions to feminist analysis. Bakhtin connects referentiality to a text, meaning that everything said is composed of (external) ideologies, i.e., a particular way of viewing the world that has been absorbed by the speaker. Therefore, a literary text cannot be read without its connection to the extra-textual world and it is important to know the ideologies, i.e., the historical and social context and discourses, within which it was created: “The importance of struggling with another’s discourse, its influence in the history of an individual’s coming to ideological consciousness, is enormous. One’s own discourse, and one’s own voice, although born of another or dynamically stimulated by another, will sooner or later begin to liberate themselves from the authority of the other’s discourse” (Bakhtin 98, 348). This “dialogic orientation of discourse” (Bakhtin 98, 279) is particularly prominent within the texts of the women’s movement and in women’s fiction as they reflect the struggle women had to face to gain some rights and to achieve some recognition. I will make particular use of Bakhtin’s notions of authoritative discourse vs internally persuasive discourse as well as double-voiced discourse, hybrid, and heteroglossia to demonstrate the dynamic presence of various ideologies in the voices of a particular text. Bakhtin defines authoritative discourse as “the word of the fathers” (Bakhtin 98, 342), as a type of discourse that does not apply itself to change, modification, or growth: “it remains sharply demarcated, compact and inert ... a compact and indivisible mass; one must either totally affirm it, or totally reject it” (Bakhtin 98, 343). Whereas authoritative discourse can also become internally persuasive, the latter allows room for play and creativity: “such

10

shifting voices

a word awakens new and independent words ... it organizes masses of our words from within, and does not remain in an isolated and static condition. It is not so much interpreted by us as it is further, that is, freely, developed, applied to new material, new conditions” (Bakhtin 98, 345). Unlike authoritative discourse, internally persuasive discourse allows for a hybrid construction, which is a mixture of “two utterances, two speech manners, two styles, two ‘languages,’ two semantic and axiological belief systems” (Bakhtin 98, 304), usually all within a single sentence. A hybrid is a subtle way of masking the author’s real intention or opinion. We will see it used by feminists as a tool to achieve their goals and make themselves heard by an often anti-feminist audience. Heteroglossia and double-voiced discourse, on the other hand, are something we encounter frequently in women’s fiction from this period. Heteroglossia is the presence of several voices within a text, which enter into a dialogic relationship: “Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia [raznorečie] can enter the novel” (Bakhtin 98, 263). In a heteroglot text, the characters use different languages, sometimes a jargon or dialect, and represent a particular viewpoint of the world. Double-voiced discourse reflects the presence of heteroglossia “and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the character who is speaking, and the refracted intention of the author” (Bakhtin 98, 324) thus resulting in the presence of two conflicting voices in a text. Sigrid Weigel’s term double focus will be introduced as part of the analysis as well, as it complements Bakhtin’s double-voiced discourse. Double focus⁵ also relates to a conflict between voices, but voices that are represented within one single character. For Weigel, such double focus usually occurs as a conflict between the traditional discourses of femininity and those of an anticipated new femininity – something Weigel has found to be of particular pertinence for women of the first women’s movement generation: “They will only be able to correct this sideways look when the woman theme is redundant – when living and writing woman has overcome her double life of living by the pattern set by the dominant images and in the anticipation of the emancipated woman” (Weigel 985, 7, emphasis in the original). Finally, for the analysis of several texts, I will also be incorporating contemporary theoretical concepts from psychoanalysis, mainly that of intersubjectivity, a term coined by Jessica Benjamin, in an effort to promote women’s status as subjects (as opposed to objects of male desire).

Introduction

11

Intersubjectivity implies a relationship between the sexes built on equality rather than on domination versus subordination. Whereas, according to Benjamin, “the intrapsychic mode operates at the level of subject-object experience,” in “the intersubjective mode ... both woman and man can be subject” (Benjamin 986, 93) and contribute to each other’s growth rather than suppressing it in the other. The focus of this study is not on the history and development of the Austrian and Hungarian women’s movements as such, this having been done by other scholars.⁶ Therefore, I only give a general introduction regarding the major organizations and goals of the two women’s movements. I am more interested in a discussion of the essays produced by the most outstanding feminists in Austria and Hungary and, particularly, of women writers’ fiction. Mainly through an analysis of these feminist essays I attempt to provide an outline of the major goals and ideas of the two women’s movements; then I proceed to analyse the fictional texts. The authors selected not only came from a middle-class or aristocratic background but also generally thematized issues pertaining to women and men from their milieu; as Weedon has rightly observed, “working-class writing was rare” (Weedon 2000, 3). Thus, for the most part, the authors can be considered representative of what has been termed “bourgeois feminism,” rather than Social Democratic feminism. The Social Democratic women’s movement and the few writers who spoke about proletarian women’s experiences⁷ are beyond the scope of the present study. However, socialism as an ideology was present across class boundaries, and we will notice the importance of a socialist voice in several texts, particularly in the essays. As for the fiction and aesthetics to which the writers of novels and short prose adhere, we will see that they establish a different kind of literary modernism from that usually referred to based on canonical texts only. Harriet Anderson regards the 866 foundation of the Viennese Women’s Employment Association (Wiener Frauen-Erwerbsverein) as the beginning of the “era of the organized woman” in Austria (Anderson 992b, 25). Changes in the demographic situation during the same decade may explain why middle-class women became obliged to seek independent employment. The Black Friday of 873 exacerbated this situation (Heindl 997, 22). The major organization of the Austrian bourgeois women’s movement, however, did not occur until 893, with the foundation of the General Austrian Women’s Association (Allgemeiner Österreichischer Frauenverein, AÖF). Its membership was composed mainly of teachers and other white-collar workers, as well as “the wives of some of the progressive intelligentsia” (Anderson 992b, 4). According to §2 of the AÖF ’s statute of

12 shifting voices

893, its goal was “the organization of Austrian women with the purpose of promoting their economic interests and their intellectual development as well as the raising of their social status” (“Allgemeiner” 899, 20). In its third annual report, the aöf further specified these goals, which did not include “the granting of rights but rather the raising of our intellectual and moral level, the development of our personalities. We want to become richer within ourselves, and while we share this richness with our loved ones also become happier” (quoted in Mittnik 990, 4). Although Auguste Fickert, one of the founding members, had originally wished to include a paragraph to define the aöf as a women’s political association, she had to withdraw it because of a request from the authorities (Anderson 992b, 4). This is also why the aöf parted ways with Social Democratic women such as Minna Kautsky, who initially belonged to the association. Fickert rejected any formal link between the aöf and any political party. Rosa Mayreder, another founding member, also rejected the Social Democrats for their dogmatism, whereas the Social Democrats considered the aöf “reformist, not revolutionary” (Anderson 992b, 89). The goals of the aöf can be considered as following the lines of Austrian liberalism: reformist, progressive, and evolutionary. They organized discussion evenings and lecture series and provided courses for women’s professional development, as well as counselling (Wagner 982, 87). The aöf ’s activities also included promoting women’s education (including sex education), maternity insurance, and a reform of marriage laws (i.e., recognition of illegitimate children), as well as fighting prostitution, improving conditions for low-income women, promoting co-operative households, and, later, fighting for suffrage, as well as pacifist activism during WW I . The aöf thus evolved from a moderate organization to an outright radical one. This shift is noticeable in Auguste Fickert’s 906 article, “Goals and Tasks of the Women’s Movement” (“Ziele und Aufgaben der Frauenbewegung”), which was based on the program of the women’s movement adopted at the 23rd General Meeting of the General German Women’s Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein). Fickert had launched Neues Frauenleben, the journal that, in 902, became the “official organ of the General Austrian Women’s Association” (Anderson 992b, 49). In the article, the general goal of the women’s movement is defined as “to bring woman’s cultural influence to a full inner development and a free social impact” (Fickert 906, ). This implies a reorganization of the educational system, of professional life, of marriage and family, and of public life in general. Women’s demand for the vote is also included, an element that originally did not figure on the aöf ’s list of priorities.

Introduction

13

Unlike the League of Austrian Women’s Associations (Bund Österreichischer Frauenvereine, founded in 902), the umbrella organization of the Austrian women’s movement, the aöf remained open toward internationalism and peace during the years of pre-war and war propaganda. The League, headed by Marianne Hainisch, became a member of the International Council of Women (ICW) in 903. “While the General Austrian Women’s Association was a direct response to women’s lack of political rights, the League emerged as part of the feminist network, more as a public relations body of the Austrian women’s movement than as a vehicle of campaign” (Anderson 992b, 90). Regarding questions of morality, the League took a more conservative stance, strongly anchored in family values. Whereas the aöf campaigned for the recognition of illegitimate children, the League was more interested in improving the position of women within the family and marriage. However, the League did establish a home for unmarried pregnant women and an information centre for mothers. It pleaded for paid maternity leave and the introduction of breast-feeding breaks for female workers in factories, though without success. It also supported women’s professional education. By 90 it achieved the opening of all state vocational schools to women; it also helped in the opening of a career advice bureau for girls and of numerous schools for domestic training. In 90, in an article in Dokumente der Frauen, Malvine Fuchs described the general attitude regarding the woman question in Hungary as one of denial: “We don’t have a woman question” (Fuchs 90, 45). Although a few years earlier, in 897, the National Association of Women Office Workers (Nőtisztviselők Országos Egyesülete, NOE ) had been established and several other associations demanding women’s employment and education had been in existence since the 870s, the attitude in Hungarian society regarding women’s place in public life was still very much that of mulier taceat in ecclesia. Although in theory Hungarian women had some rights that most other European countries did not grant their female citizens (such as owning and administering their own property), their actual recourse to these rights remained infrequent. Szikra, a leading Hungarian feminist, blamed women’s poor education for their failure to claim these rights (Szikra 90, 45). Much of the resistance to feminism in Hungary came from the prejudice that feminism was foreign to the Hungarian tradition, an argument easily proven wrong given that texts demanding rights for Hungarian women went as far back as the eighteenth century (Schwimmer 905b, 9). In Hungary, women’s role was defined by their idealized image not only as keepers of the hearth but also as guardians of the nation

14

shifting voices

and its values. A strong national identity and patriotism were key differentiating factors between fin-de-siècle Hungarian and Austrian intellectuals. This nationalist and patriotic voice is also present in several Hungarian feminists’ texts. However, Hungarian women, in spite of lacking an organized movement, did make several attempts during the nineteenth century to force their way into public life. During the 848 revolution, a group of young women, students of a girls’ school from Pest led by Countess Blanka Teleki, demanded equal rights for their sex. Their demands fell on deaf ears, as even men of the left wing of the revolution distanced themselves from any real political equality for women. Subsequently, women’s political activism died for the following five decades and women’s associations were focused on charitable activities (Zimmermann 999, 9–2). There were also some important initiatives to raise Hungarian women’s educational status and to make middle-class women employable. Emília Kánya, in her weekly Családi kör, established in 860, spoke out against women’s oppression and their lack of education. Without challenging women’s role of wife and mother, she demanded the opportunity for unmarried or widowed women to make an income. Furthermore, the National Association for Women’s Education (Országos Nőkepző-Egyesület), founded in 868 by Pálné Veres and supported by Emília Kánya, became the leading organization in promoting women’s secondary education. The 870s saw the founding of a National Women’s Employment Association (Országos Nőiparegylet), which became instrumental in demanding women’s employment as well as in opening a school where women could learn various trades. The Maria Dorothea Association (Mária Dorothea Egyesület) was founded in 885, mainly representing the cause of female teachers and becoming involved in reforms of women’s education. These, along with the NOE , the National Association of Women Office Workers founded in 897, can be considered the forerunners of women’s political organizations. In 904 the Feminist Association (Feministák Egyesülete, FE ) was founded. Soon it became, along with the Social Democratic movement, the leading “progressive” or “radical” association in Hungary, whereas the Federation of Hungarian Women’s Associations (Magyarországi Nőegyesületek Szövetsége, MNS z), the umbrella organization of the Hungarian women’s movement, also founded in 904, represented, along with the Catholic women’s movement, the “moderate” wing (Zimmermann 999, 23–8). Much like the AÖF, the FE did not adhere to any particular political party. However, unlike the AÖF, the FE considered itself an organization that united all Hungarian women in their fight for equality and

Introduction

15

continued in the footsteps of early, eighteenth-century Hungarian feminist efforts (Acsády 997, 9). This was also reflected in the membership, which was composed of religious and atheist women, Social Democrats and nationalists, and women from different class backgrounds, blue-collar along with white-collar. The FE published the journal A nő és a társadalom (Woman and Society), renamed A nő (The Woman) in 94. The editor, Rózsa (Rosika) Schwimmer, wrote in the first issue of the journal on the importance of the women’s movement: “The women’s movement is a huge factor in welding society together” (Bédy-Schwimmer 907b, ). She stresses the importance of a uniquely Hungarian feminist journal in fostering the feminist cause in Hungary. In what can be read as a mission statement of Hungarian feminism, she declares: “Not only for woman’s sake but for the benefit of the social body, which we always see as one unit, we want to destroy the horrible lie which calls knowledge for one half of humankind shame and sin, the most dangerous ignorance innocence, spiritual darkness feminine charm, the tortured and unnaturally deformed body beautiful, the sacrifice of human solidarity for the selfish interest of the family virtue, and the interest in social work a modern whim” (Bédy-Schwimmer 907b, 2). In addition to decrying women’s oppression, Schwimmer, much like Fickert in Austria, regards women’s emancipation as a cultural mission. The goal of the movement is, above all, women’s individual, social, and legal liberation, which is in the interest of society as much as it is in their own interest. Only as evolved beings will women become capable of furthering social harmony. Society as a whole can be reconstructed only if every member receives the same treatment and respect. The FE was actively connected to the international women’s movement and joined the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance in 905, as part of their fight for women’s suffrage in Hungary. Like their Austrian counterparts, Hungarian feminists conducted their activism not on the streets but through their publications and speeches, as well as their counselling services for women. These services ranged from legal assistance to advice regarding employment choices and help in finding childcare facilities (Zimmermann 999, 53). After 94 the FE became openly pacifist and, in that regard, again close to the profile of the AÖF. Like the AÖF, the FE remained pacifist throughout the war, as documented in the respective journals of the two organizations, Dokumente der Frauen and A nő és a társadalom. However, no formal links existed between the Austrian and the Hungarian “radical” wings of the women’s movement. Despite some similarities, they were completely autonomous movements. Despite their

16 shifting voices

similar goals and their geographic closeness, the Hungarian feminists looked more to Germany and other Western countries than to Vienna. One form of mutual recognition was occasional reports on each other’s activities and publications in their respective journals. The fight for higher education and women’s economic independence was the theme of much women writers’ fiction as well, but the topic that women explored by far the most in their fiction was the moral double standard and the need for the establishment of happier relations between the sexes, as well as, in some texts, of a new sexual paradigm altogether. Thus a reform of sexual mores implied a reflection on the necessity of new gender norms. These issues were discussed in many essayistic writings as well, but received a much stronger and wider representation in fiction. The present study is divided into seven chapters. Chapter one combines both theoretical and fictional texts as it presents ideas from what has been called a “first wave” within the Austrian fin-de-siècle women’s movement; ideas that would be fully developed and put into practice a decade or two later. In this early period of the burgeoning women’s movement, Austrian feminists Marianne Hainisch and Irma von Troll-Borostyáni, both of whom would later become leading members of the Austrian women’s movement, already raised the question of the necessity of women’s higher education in non-fiction work. Troll-Borostyáni, moreover, addressed all the other major questions that the organized women’s movement would put on its agenda: women’s legal and political rights, the moral double standard, and what she considered its outcome, prostitution. During this period, some of these questions started to be discussed in fiction as well, particularly in three Austrian novels: Julie Thenen’s Fräulein Doktor im Irrenhause: Eine Begebenheit aus unserer Zeit (Miss Doctor in the Madhouse: An Event From Our Time); Franziska von Kapff-Essenther’s Frauenehre: Roman aus dem modernen socialen Leben (A Woman’s Honour: A Novel From Modern Social Life); and Helene by Minna Kautsky. In Hungary, radical feminist texts such as those authored by TrollBorostyáni were still non-existent, but we can nevertheless see some signs of an emerging feminist consciousness. One interesting publication from the pen of Antonina De Gerando, a treatise entitled A női élet (A Woman’s Life), states that women’s education is essential for the nation’s survival. This nationalist-patriotic tone, absent among the Austrian feminists, is characteristic of some Hungarian fin-de-siècle feminism. Aranyfüst (Golden Smoke), a sentimental novel by Stefánia Wohl, features a subtle criticism of women’s position and of the social options available to them at the time. Wohl herself was an interesting new literary phenomenon in the

Introduction

17

Hungarian cultural context of the period, for both she and her sister Janka succeeded in establishing an independent life as single women through their writing. Chapter two gives a brief history and overview of the principal developments within the bourgeois women’s movement and outlines its major goals. This chapter is devoted entirely to essays written by women actively involved in the movement, some of them more prominent than others, such as Rosa Mayreder, Irma von Troll-Borostyáni, Marianne Hainisch, Grete Meisel-Hess, and Auguste Fickert in Austria, and Rózsa Schwimmer, Szikra, Sarolta Geöcze, and Szidónia Wilhelm in Hungary. The gradual change in women’s social status, which was achieved largely, though not exclusively, through women’s organized efforts over several decades and which society was not ready to accept, carried multiple societal, moral, and psychological consequences. We can, therefore, see a co-existence of various voices in the texts discussed. Many feminists had necessarily internalized traditional views, which were reflected in some of their essentialist arguments. However, traditional views were also used to the advantage of the movement, so as to further the improvement of women’s social condition. These texts offer a challenge to develop progressive ideas on changes in women’s educational status and professional lives as well as to redefine male-female relationships and claim women’s right to sexual happiness, while re-evaluating marriage, motherhood, and women’s cultural role. How big a challenge the women’s movement posed in two very patriarchal societies such as turn-of-the-century Austria and Hungary, where the general political instability fuelled conservative forces and attitudes, can also be seen from the re-emergence of a particularly strong and influential misogynistic discourse. Chapter three examines the interaction between feminism, with its sub-category viriphobia, and misogyny, which engendered a major debate of the period. Although the debate involving misogyny, feminism, and viriphobia occurred mainly in essays and treatises, we can follow its course in other genres as well, such as letters and even fiction. The major misogynistic authors in the debate were the Austrian “philosopher” Otto Weininger and the German psychiatrist Paul Julius Möbius; the major feminist ones were Meisel-Hess, Mayreder, and Troll-Borostyáni in Austria and Pálné Veres and Margit Kaffka in Hungary. Explicitly viriphobic authors were Helene von Druskowitz and Elsa Asenijeff in Austria and, to a certain degree, Renée Erdős in Hungary. Their interaction helps us to better situate feminist discourse within the intellectual life of the period and as a voice within this debate, as well as to understand the concepts that shaped it.

18 shifting voices

Chapters four to seven are devoted to fictional texts only. Chapter four deals with one of the themes Austrian and Hungarian women writers of the period explored in their fiction: access to higher education and the implications of the newly acquired access or the lack thereof on their female characters’ lives. In some of the selected narratives, the female characters take advantage of the new possibilities to achieve financial and professional independence and an identity previously denied to them. In others, the consequences of the long-standing lack of educational rights for women at the crossroad of two centuries are discussed, as well as the generational gap between the “old” and “new” woman, along with the ensuing conflicts within individual women characters themselves. The careers most frequently represented in these narratives are those of doctor, teacher, and artist. In Austria, Troll-Borostyáni and Meisel-Hess cast female characters whose life paths evolve in a fuller and happier way than those of the Hungarian heroines in Kaffka’s, Szederkényi’s, Lux’s, and Ritoók’s novels. The reasons behind such different developments are discussed. Chapter five uses psychoanalytic concepts from Freud, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger to examine aspects of desire and subject formation and the consequences of the moral double standard on female sexuality, which include hysteria and marital rape (as explored in narratives by Janitschek, Meisel-Hess, Szederkényi, and Asenijeff). Furthermore, I explore how desire and the female subject who reads and writes is formed through language and literary conventions, including the discourse of romantic love, in the female heroines of Ritoók and Kaffka. Lesbian love is given special attention, for although largely ignored by the women’s movement, it is still present in fiction, such as in several narratives by Janitschek, in Meisel-Hess’s novella “Neid” (“Envy”), and in Kaffka’s novel Hangyaboly (Anthill). In several of the narratives analysed in this chapter we can see a challenging of the classical narrative form and of the concept of a unified subject (both predominant in the narratives studied in earlier chapters), but three Austrian texts, all written as first-person narratives and using the form of the diary, Vera’s Eine für viele: Aus dem Tagebuche eines Mädchens (One for Many: From a Girl’s Diary), Kotányi’s “Venus am Kreuz” (“Venus on the Cross”), and Asenijeff’s Tagebuchblätter einer Emancipierten (Pages from the Diary of an Emancipated Woman), offer good examples of the crisis of the female self. The crisis of the self has been considered a major feature of fin-de-siècle Austrian modernity and we can see elements of it in Hungarian literature as well. But whereas literary history has focused on this phenomenon from the point of view of a male self, it is studied in these narratives from the

Introduction

19

point of view of the female. Although we can discern some commonalities with canonical modernist texts, these narratives offer a new perspective. Moreover, Lichtenberg Ettinger’s concept of the Matrix as a new paradigm for the inclusion of the repressed and excluded feminine into the symbolic is elaborated through a narrative by Meisel-Hess, Die Stimme: Roman in Blättern (The Voice: A Novel in Leaves). Chapter six explores a critical-ironic yet ambivalent attitude to the women’s movement and women’s emancipation in Janitschek’s novel Die Amazonenschlacht (The Battle of the Amazons ) and her novella “Das neue Weib” (“The New Woman”). In one Hungarian narrative, Szikra’s novel Ugody Lila (Lila Ugody), not only is the female character’s desire for emancipation suffocated by the requirements of her class and gender but even her personal happiness is sacrificed for her family. Another Hungarian text, Erdős’s novel A nagy sikoly (The Big Scream), is one of the most controversial narratives in early twentieth-century Hungarian literature. Although it falls somewhat beyond the fin-de-siècle period (it was published in 922), I have included it here for its complex heteroglossia regarding women’s place in Hungarian society and its exposure of the mechanisms of control over women’s sexuality and personal choices. Amidst the apparent triumph of the voices of tradition and patriarchy, Erdős inserts other voices that question and undermine these, thereby destabilizing and subverting the seemingly unwavering social order and stability. Chapter seven offers an analysis of the representation of the city in four novels, three from Hungary (Szederkényi’s Lángok, tüzek [Fire and Flames], Lux’s Budapest, and Szikra’s A bevándorlók [The Parvenus]) and two from Austria (Janitschek’s Die Amazonenschlacht [The Battle of the Amazons] and Meisel-Hess’s Die Intellektuellen [The Intellectuals]). Given that the city was a major topos of modernity, it is quite revealing to look at how female writers treat it in their narratives, how they integrate the character of the female flaneur, and how they formulate their position between fascination with and contempt for the city’s various facets. The cities referred to in these narratives are not only Budapest and Vienna, the respective capitals, but also Berlin, the European metropolis in the making. A conclusion is followed by the biographies of the writers (appendix one). I have included only those writers that are discussed in detail and, from among the others, those on whom biographical information was available. This was the case with all Austrian authors represented, but, unfortunately, I have not been able to find any biographical data on two Hungarian feminists: Szidónia Wilhelm and Perczelné Flóra Kozma.

111 A “First Wave”: The Emergence of a Feminist Discourse in Austria and Hungary1

The women’s movement was in full swing around 900, in both Vienna and Budapest, when feminists in both cities were forming their organizations such as the AÖF in Vienna and the FE in Budapest. Literature, both fiction and non-fiction, written by women and dealing with women’s emancipation, flourished around this time in both parts of the Habsburg Empire. The path to this development, however, had already been paved during the previous decades. In the Austrian context, Harriet Anderson distinguishes a “first wave” in fin-de-siècle feminism, during which several professional women’s organizations were founded (such as the Viennese Women’s Employment Association [Wiener Frauen-Erwerbsverein, founded in 866], the Association of Women Teachers and Governesses [Verein der Lehrerinnen und Erzieherinnen, founded in 870], and the Association of Women Postal Officials [Postbeamtinnenverein, founded in 876]). Initiatives for the improvement of women’s education were also undertaken during this period, for instance through the activities of the Association for Extended Women’s Education (Verein für erweiterte Frauenbildung, founded in 888) that lobbied for the opening of girls’ grammar schools. In Hungarian feminist history, we can also notice efforts on women’s part to organize prior to the establishment of women’s political organizations such as the Feminist Association (FE ). In the second half of the nineteenth century, several women’s organizations were established whose goal it was to promote women’s professional and educational status, such as the National Women’s Employment Association (Országos Nőiparegylet, founded in the 870s), the National Association for Women’s Education (Országos Nőkepző-Egyesület, founded in 868), and the Maria Dorothea

Emergence of a Feminist Discourse in Austria and Hungary

21

Association (Mária Dorothea Egyesület, founded in 885), representing mainly the cause of female teachers and becoming involved in reforms of women’s education. These, although they did not mobilize women on a larger scale, can nevertheless be considered the forerunners of women’s political organizations. During this period, both in Austria and in Hungary, a feminist discourse was appearing on the scene with non-fictional as well as fictional texts, reflecting on the concerns that the women’s movement would discuss and fight for a few decades later. The authors of this “first wave” were, for the most part, at least in Hungary, a generation older than the later feminists; the Hungarian feminists of the younger generation were born, with a few exceptions, in the 870s and 880s, as opposed to the feminists of the previous generation who were born in the 840s. On the other hand, the Austrian feminists of the “first” and “second” wave varied in age, and often cannot be distinguished by that quality only. “first-wave” feminism in austria Part of this first wave were two Austrian feminists who would later become prominent members of the women’s movement; they published some of their most important writings during the 870s. Marianne Hainisch, later the founder of the League of Austrian Women’s Associations (Bund Österreichischer Frauenvereine), amply advocated on behalf of women’s higher education, which was still unavailable. As early as 875, in her essay Die Brodfrage der Frau (The Question of Woman’s Paid Work), she declared that “the woman question isn’t only a human and a legal question but also notably an economic one” (Hainisch 875, 7). She cites statistics from different countries as proof of women’s participation in the paid workforce and defends the need for it based on the high number of single middle-class women who could not rely on a man to support them. Indeed, the economic crisis of the time affected mostly middle-class women. This change in the economic situation made it necessary for middle-class women to seek an independent income. Hainisch also points out the economic disparity between working men and working women and attributes it to women’s lack of access to better-paid jobs. She also points out the discrepancy between the common acceptance of women’s suitability for hard physical labour in factories and the persistent denial of women’s right of access to the institutions of higher education. To defend her argument, Hainisch constructs a hybrid: she declares that she is “convinced that man’s average spiritual and physical strength

22 shifting voices

is allegedly much higher than woman’s, although the same norms cannot be used for the spiritual and physical domain as well” (Hainisch 875, 3, emphasis added). According to Bakhtin, a hybrid construction formally belongs to a single speaker, but actually mixes “two utterances, two speech manners, two styles, two ‘languages,’ two semantic and axiological belief systems” (Bakhtin 98, 304). In Hainisch’s text, the use of the verb “convinced” along with the subjunctive form (in the German original) of the verb sein (to be), sei, best translated as “is allegedly” (to indicate the distance of the speaker), shows an overlapping of two opinions. Hainisch uses a generally accepted belief regarding men’s higher intelligence and better suitability for higher education, but with her hybrid construction, she subtly masks the fact that she does not really adhere to it herself. Further in the text, she indirectly refutes this belief by demanding that the gap in knowledge between the sexes be reduced through equal access to the educational system. She considers the “half-education” (Halbbildung) that girls’ schools offer very harmful for the family and society as a whole and contends that “nothing may be a stronger support to cultural progress than mothers who think rightly and without prejudice” (Hainisch 875, 9). Here Hainisch incorporates a more traditional internally persuasive discourse (one that we will find in some later Hungarian feminists as well, such as Sarolta Geöcze and Rozina Mársits), as she considers women’s highest cultural mission to be enlightened motherhood. The argument that women’s education should be improved so as to make them better mothers had been used repeatedly since the eighteenth century.² Hainisch thus re-activates an internally persuasive discourse regarding a pre-existing and accepted definition of women’s role in society and uses it as an argument in favour of women’s access to higher education. Hainisch also develops some progressive ideas regarding the compatibility of motherhood and women’s paid work, ideas she shares with other contemporaneous Austrian feminists. Not only does she not condemn working mothers for neglecting their children but also she argues that stay-at-home mothers do not perform any better in their motherly duties, since their time is used up in chores and they do not spend much more quality time with their children. She also observes that there is an underlying economic interest in the opposition to women’s paid work. She notes that debates regarding the compatibility of motherhood and paid work only arise when it comes to women’s entry into professions that carry more prestige and material wealth, an argument we will also find in Troll-Borostyáni’s writings. Many of these ideas were new for their time; nevertheless, Hainisch does not challenge traditional gender roles and her suggested improvements in women’s education would not lead to any transformation thereof.

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Several arguments in her writings further this maintenance of the status quo. Hainisch defends the image of the “eternal feminine.” She considers all the elements of the traditional bourgeois feminine ideal, such as affection, modesty, and devotion as conferred by nature and she assures her readers that they would not disappear with women’s greater participation in the workforce. The “masculine woman” (Mann-Weib) is a horror that she firmly rejects (Hainisch 875, 24). Hainisch supports women’s entry into the medical profession as a logical social necessity, but does so based on similar essentialist arguments regarding women’s more nurturing and self-sacrificing “nature.” One may, of course, argue that the essentialist arguments that she uses to defend women’s fuller representation in the workforce are merely utilized to convince a more conservative audience that educated women would not represent a threat to society’s power relations. Yet such an argument is weakened when we read of women not having to work as a utopian ideal that might be fulfilled in some distant future, an ideal that is, however, far from being shared by all members of society, since men do not partake in it: “the day when woman would be forever relieved of all the burden of earning a living and thus allowed to live only for the perfection of her own and her family, I would stop fighting for paid work and paid work yet again. That day would bring about the Golden Age for women and I would know only one regret: that man is excluded from it!” (23). Thus women’s fuller participation in paid work is only a temporary evil, and their “proper” place remains in the family. The yearning for a work-free Golden Age for women leaves traditional gender roles and relations unchallenged and, ultimately, puts women back into a dependent economic position. Troll-Borostyáni was already called during her lifetime “the first champion of women’s emancipation in Austria” (Troll-Borostyáni 994, 42). In her groundbreaking feminist essay from 878, Die Mission unseres Jahrhunderts (The Mission of Our Century) she addressed all the major questions that the organized women’s movement would put on its agenda about two decades later: women’s education, their legal and political rights, the moral double standard and what she considers its outcome, prostitution. This early text in many respects helped pave the way for what would evolve as the organized women’s movement. Rosa Mayreder, one of the founding members of the AÖF, the General Austrian Women’s Association, wrote in a letter to Troll-Borostyáni several decades later, in 905: “many years ago when I thought to be as alone with my ideas as Robinson on an island – it was you who gave me the first confirmation, the first liberating certainty that outside in the world which I could not access a new, promising future for the female sex was dawning” (quoted in Troll-Borostyáni 994, 44).

24 shifting voices

Not all reaction to Troll-Borostyáni’s groundbreaking text was as positive. Following its publication, the author was branded “an amazon” by an anonymous critic who saw “genuine man-hatred” in her book, and wondered how any male person would print those nasty pages that attacked his sex (Troll-Borostyáni 994, 22). What Troll-Borostyáni calls for is simply “equality of both sexes” (Troll-Borostyáni 878, 4). Yet she does it, unlike Hainisch, without any compromising or soothing tone, with no reference whatsoever to women’s traditionally accepted roles. She is straightforward, anti-clerical, and often ironic, a combination that understandably did not earn her too many friends among her contemporaries. Troll-Borostyáni recognizes the woman question as one of the most important questions of the time and states that “we are yet only at the beginning of the movement” (Troll-Borostyáni 878, 4). She sees two groups of adversaries to women’s cause: the first group, the “idealistic” one, which opposes women’s entry into public life based on a traditional image of femininity, is the least of evils; according to the author, it can be persuaded to change. The second group, however, cannot be converted. Troll-Borostyáni includes in this group men who profit from their power and privileges over women and would not want to give them up. She thus identifies two main sources of women’s oppression under patriarchy: myths of femininity and the unequal distribution of power. The main cause of women’s oppression is, in her mind, women’s education, or, as she calls it in an untranslatable play with words, “Verziehungsmethode” – a method of distortion (Troll-Borostyáni 878, 5). Troll-Borostyáni blames the education of young girls, and not their nature, for women’s lack of real contribution to culture. Unlike Hainisch, she strongly condemns the “virtues” that, in the name of an ideal womanhood, are inculcated in the female sex: “softness, devotion, yielding” (Troll-Borostyáni 878, 4). Not only does she not consider these “virtues” inborn but she goes one step deeper in her analysis: she asserts that this image of femininity is necessary for the maintenance of women’s subjugation and of the moral double standard. The result of such educational distortion is “mediocrity, puttering, ignorance” (Troll-Borostyáni 878, 9), and its manifestation in women’s behaviour “vanity, superficiality, a lack of right thinking and a desire for amusement” (Troll-Borostyáni 878, 23). This education not only does not give women any professional or academic credibility but also does not even prepare them properly for what society considers to be women’s goal in life, i.e., marriage: “The person who is standing here at the altar is not a woman who is aware of and prepared for her beautiful yet difficult tasks; it is a grown-up child for whom her

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first child won’t be anything but a pretty doll; she is not a partner for her husband, his equal in the strength of her will, in the maturity of her judgement, in her knowledge of life, but a schoolgirl who as of now is glad to be addressed with ‘madame’ rather than ‘miss’” (Troll-Borostyáni 878, 20). Unlike most of her contemporaries, Troll-Borostyáni does not consider motherhood and being a housewife women’s mission in life. She acknowledges that many women may be happy with the life of a mother and wife, but asserts that many other women may have different ambitions, which are suffocated through the educational “distortion.” However, society has opened to women only those professions that men do not want to fill. Troll-Borostyáni therefore demands a thorough reform of the educational system. Progress in education, for her, furthers the progress of society as a whole. She considers free competition on the job market between both sexes healthy, a situation that would not threaten men’s present positions, but rather bring out the best talents in both sexes. Her model is often the United States, but also European countries that she considers more progressive than Austria, such as the UK , and she supports her arguments with numerous statistics showing the extent of women’s participation in the workforce worldwide. Troll-Borostyáni summarizes her demands in three points: first, to open all types of schools that are open to boys to girls as well; second, to make all professions in all areas accessible to women; and, third, to modify the existing discriminatory laws so that both sexes have equal rights and duties.³ She categorically equates the present situation of women with slavery and calls upon men in the government to end the centuries-old situation in which men reign and women serve (55). The author does not put the whole blame on the male sex, though – a visionary approach considering some non-victim positions in present-day feminism. She blames the female sex as well for their passivity and invites women to fight for their rights: “Who wants freedom has to fight for that freedom; who isn’t capable of fighting for it isn’t worth it” (Troll-Borostyáni 878, 56). Women should not sit around and wait until someone else changes their lives, but rather take the initiative themselves. She invites women to form their own associations, to found their own journals (here Troll-Borostyáni recognizes the power of the media to influence public opinion), to organize schools for girls, to establish scholarships for female students, and to claim the right to vote. Troll-Borostyáni leaves this last goal as the final one toward which women’s efforts should be directed. She believes that women must be educated and acquire a certain knowledge of politics before they can enter the political arena – a debatable opinion. In

26 shifting voices

general, though, Troll-Borostyáni introduces a genuinely progressive feminist voice into this first wave of Austrian feminism. In Austrian fiction of this period, several narratives thematized women’s emancipation. In the novel Fräulein Doktor im Irrenhause: Eine Begebenheit aus unserer Zeit (Miss Doctor in the Madhouse: An Event From Our Time), published in 88, Julie Thenen chooses the setting of the madhouse for her discussion of various aspects of the emerging women’s movement. The madhouse is a topos that was frequently used in literature around 800 (Dopplinger-Loebenstein 987, 63). It provides the author with a safe space where she can, through her characters, discuss numerous ideas that are “in the air,” while she lets them maintain the freedom of the fool: “In our institution, everybody may speak freely to their heart’s content” (Thenen 88, 74). Thenen separates the men from the women, which may well reflect the actual gender segregation in mental institutions but also, in a broader sense, the separate spheres of male and female influence in society (Dopplinger-Loebenstein 987, 67). The reader visits the institution by following Zerline, an actress who assumes a false identity as a doctor to practice for her next role in the theatre. Within the women’s ward, the reader witnesses a meeting of three factions of the “women’s movement”: the conservatives, the emancipated faction, and the Social Democrats. The conservatives attack the emancipated women for their alleged heartlessness: their journal Der Feuerbrand (Fire and Blaze) contains pictures of a doctor dissecting the heart of an emancipated woman and diagnosing her with a “shrinking heart.” It is not difficult to see, in this little episode, a dialogic relationship, and a satirical one, toward misogynistic medical texts of the period, which were debating women’s lower intelligence based on their smaller brain mass.⁴ The conservative camp brings up other accusations against the emancipated women, branding them “amazons” who get mired in alcoholism, free love, and other morally deficient behaviour – attributes that were all part of a widely accepted derogatory image projected on women who challenged their traditional place in society. The emancipated women respond to such attacks by arguing that women and men are created equal and that, therefore, women should be granted the same rights as men. These ideas echo Theodor von Hippel’s Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Weiber (On the Civil Advancement of Women, 792), an important text of the German Enlightenment regarding women’s rights. Hippel expressed a desire to see the same civil rights men were claiming to themselves extended to women as well (Frevert 986, 5). The faction of the emancipated women is supported by the Social Democrats who also attack the conservatives and their defence of a traditional image of femi-

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ninity. Through this confrontation of the three women’s groups, Thenen anticipates the conflicts and differences in ideologies within the emerging women’s movement, thus creating a dialogic relationship between them. According to Bakhtin, a dialogic relationship implies tension and struggle. An important element of a dialogic relationship is that it is influenced by opposing values, interests, and desires (Hirschkop and Shepherd 989, ). Thus, although all three factions of the women’s movement, whose voices are represented here, may have fought for one goal, namely the betterment of women’s position in society, Thenen demonstrates their opposing ideologies and conflicts of interest. It is mostly this part of the narrative, rather than its overall plot, form, or style, that makes it worthwhile reading for anybody interested in the first Austrian women’s movement. Another Austrian writer, Franziska von Kapff-Essenther, published the novel Frauenehre: Roman aus dem modernen socialen Leben (A Woman’s Honour: A Novel From Modern Social Life) in 873. Divided into three books and respecting the form of a Bildungsroman, it follows the life of Emilie von Waldheim, who, thanks to her father’s ideal of “a truly educated, practical and independent woman” (Kapff-Essenther 873, : ) receives an education similar to her twin brother Emil. At the time, this rare privilege was only available to women from the upper classes, and even then limited to individual cases, given that education was still divided along very strict gender lines.⁵ Emilie is portrayed as a girl with considerably more talent and intelligence than her brother: she is not only interested in all the “manly” subjects (such as Greek and Latin) but also completely uninterested in activities considered typically feminine, such as playing the piano or needlework. The young woman’s attitude necessarily provokes a shocked reaction in society and even leads to the loss of a serious suitor. Emilie’s life becomes even more complicated because of her ardent desire to study medicine, something Austrian women were not allowed to do at Austrian universities until 900. Even though she is admitted to the final grammar school examination (Matura) as an external student, not even her doctor uncle’s connections are able to open the doors of the halls of knowledge to her in her native country. Here Kapff-Essenther resorts to the topos of cross-dressing. By taking up Emil’s clothes, Emilie is able to take his place as a student in the faculty of medicine. Despite a series of challenging situations for Emilie, after a few people discover her true identity, she nevertheless manages to successfully finish her studies. By setting an example, she contributes to the opening of universities for women. After she returns to her hometown as a graduate in medicine, she continues to inspire both men and women. Her earlier suitor Konrad Linden, whom she had rejected because of his conservative political views and his

28

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negative attitude regarding women’s education, manages to win her heart after he “converts” to her point of view, whereupon they get married, have a child, and both become socially involved. Another of Emilie’s multiple “triumphs” is a woman friend, Clementine, who, under Emilie’s influence, divorces an unloved husband and becomes active in the women’s movement. In this novel, the notion of woman’s honour merges two different voices. On the one hand, it clearly points in the direction of women’s emancipation: “ real, higher woman’s honour has to consist in a woman gaining selfrealization freely and independently of a man as an autonomous human being in society and to do so through her actions [“Thatkraft”], her knowledge and her abilities” (Kapff-Essenther 873, : 56). On the other hand, Emilie’s successes can be attributed to the fact that she keeps her “honour,” i.e., her virginity, despite the advances of numerous suitors. Thus, the concept of woman’s honour implies another, more conservative voice, which carries the bourgeois ideal of femininity and which splits norms and morality along clearly demarcated gender lines. As it suits this ideal, Emilie represents “goodness, the readiness to sacrifice, modesty, all qualities worthy of a ‘virtuous woman,’ and this is completed by her ‘impeccable’ figure, her beautiful looks” (Dopplinger-Loebenstein 987, 45). Emilie is contrasted with Linda, who stands for the “wrong” kind of emancipation: she smokes, drinks, asks men to dance, and does not care about her “honour.” The way Linda is portrayed is clearly negative; the voice of the narrator does not recommend emancipation of this kind for women. And yet, through Linda’s character speaks another voice, that of a more radical feminism, a voice that would soon speak more loudly in the Austrian women’s movement. One of the characteristics of this voice is the calling for not only educational equality for women and men but also equal moral standards: “I don’t see why for women there should be stricter mores, more narrow social boundaries and a more rigid morality than for men. I want to enjoy spiritual and social life just like a man does” (KapffEssenther 878, 2: 0). Unlike Emilie, who advocates emancipation as long as it does not shake up the very foundations of bourgeois gender roles, Linda, against her negative portrayal, speaks with a voice that demands deeper changes; the narrative is thus double-voiced as it expresses “the different intentions” between the character and the narrator (Bakhtin 98, 324). Yet it is Emilie’s version of emancipation that triumphs. She finds partnership with her husband, who accepts her professional ambitions but only within the frame of accepted sexual and moral norms: “the author’s ideal is that both sexes work together all the while preserving their specific qualities” (Dopplinger-Loebenstein 987, 45), qualities that are considered

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given rather than acquired – an ideal of emancipation also represented by Marianne Hainisch. Minna Kautsky, who saw her literary works as an outlet for her commitment to the Social-Democratic movement (Gürtler and SchmidBortenschlager 998, 63), published the novel Helene in 894, around the time when the major associations of the women’s movement were forming. I consider it therefore as the last example of the “first wave” women’s literature in Austria. Kautsky, like Hainisch or Kapff-Essenther, criticizes the lack of education available to middle-class girls. She also deals with another problematic issue, one that the literature of the next generation would treat abundantly: the moral double standard, which implied different behavioural values for young men and women. Whereas young men’s pre-marital sexual experiences were tolerated and considered normal, the opposite was true for young women who were to remain “untouched” until marriage. Regarding its structure, Helene could also be called a Bildungsroman. It tells the story of Helene Röder, a girl from a good family, who, given that she is “only a girl,” even if an intelligent one, must leave school early and instead prepare for her expected future as a mother and wife. But there is no true preparation for this task: her mother leaves her in complete darkness regarding sexuality. We see here a good example of Troll-Borostyáni’s criticism of young girls’ “distortion.” The fact that Helene’s father is a Social Democrat does not make any difference in regard to her education and upbringing. Thus, when Helene receives a marriage proposal from a lawyer, the parents are delighted: Dr Erich Hartmann seems to be a “good catch” (“eine gute Partie”) for their sixteen-year-old daughter. Kautsky uses irony to deconstruct such socially sanctioned marriage practices: not only does the young woman barely know her husband-to-be, but he takes a liking to her after seeing her photograph in a photographer’s shop-window, thus creating for himself an image based on an image. The woman thus becomes a double object of fantasy for the man’s desire. This objectification takes on concrete forms after the wedding as the gentleman husband decides to educate his naive little wife to his own taste. He is most unpleasantly surprised to see to what degree she is ignorant. Their wedding night, during which the marriage is not consummated, demonstrates the clash of different moral standards for the man and the woman: whereas he already has acquired, as men of his class were expected and allowed to, considerable sexual experience, Helene is not only sexually untouched, but she is not even familiar with the basics of human procreation. Kautsky’s description of the wedding night is very discreet, not nearly as open and direct as it will be in narratives by writers of the next

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generation: “She closes her eyes but feels his hot breath above her face and the tight pressure of his arms that embrace her” (Kautsky 894, 74). At this point, there is an interruption in the text and the narrative continues with what happens the next morning, one described as “fresh and clear” (Kautsky 894, 74). The reader is left with the impression that the wedding night has been consummated and only finds out otherwise later. That said, the way Kautsky describes Helene’s sudden evolution from a sexually ignorant and frightened little girl into a woman who ruefully opens up sexually to her husband is somewhat banal and not very convincing. But, as I said earlier, sexuality and its impact on young women’s lives will only be explored in more depth in narratives of the next generation. Helene’s naivety does not turn her husband away. To the contrary, it is the main attraction for him, as a weakness through which he intends to manipulate and control her, given that she has no education, no wealth, and no experience. However, through Helene’s genuine resistance to manipulation and corruption of any kind, Kautsky’s criticism of a young woman’s position in a middle-class marriage and of her total dependency on a husband becomes apparent. After Helene, pregnant, finds out about her husband’s politically motivated affair with the wife of a minister, the baby is stillborn and the relationship between the spouses deteriorates. After the death of the child, Helene becomes more and more self-confident and refuses to play the socially expected role of the beautiful and flirtatious young wife to help advance her husband’s career. For Helene, the final breakup becomes unavoidable, despite her dependent status, but she manages to find her own path by becoming a nurse in Bulgaria during the Balkan Wars. Books two and three describe Helene’s evolution into a Social Democrat and her discovery of a meaning in life through political involvement. She marries her childhood sweetheart, a Social Democrat himself. But Kautsky does not portray the position of a woman within social democracy as any different regarding gender roles: during the Social Democrats’ congress, Helene’s role is reduced to cooking and shopping. Thus, even the alternative ideology of social democracy is shown as not offering a genuine change regarding the very foundations of patriarchy.⁶ a “first wave” in hungarian feminism In Hungary, outspoken feminist voices such as Troll-Borostyáni’s in Austria were still non-existent at this time. Yet some voices of emancipation were raised in favour of improvements in women’s situation, such as the

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initiatives to improve women’s education by Emilia Kánya and Pálné Veres. In 892 Antonina De Gerando published a treatise entitled A női élet (A Woman’s Life) in which she discusses, on a theoretical level, questions similar to those Kapff-Essenther brings up in her novel. At the time of the book’s publication, De Gerando was principal of a girls’ secondary school in Kolozsvár (now in Rumania), and her text provoked strong reactions. She was accused of lacking religious and patriotic feelings, as well as of being influenced by socialist and other “foreign” ideologies, by which her attackers probably meant her references to Goethe, Schopenhauer, Rousseau, Locke, Montaigne, and other great European thinkers. One critic even recommended that she be dismissed from her post as principal (Fábri 996, 53). A close reading of the text leaves us, today’s readers, surprised at such harsh criticism. De Gerando does speak in favour of women’s education, but her tone is in no way demanding or radical: “A little knowledge makes a woman pedantic, a know-it-all, ridiculous, and boring. More knowledge gives back her modesty, spiritual freshness, and feminine charm. Semidarkness can also be cured by complete, pure light” (De Gerando 892, 39–40). Women’s education is not defined as a goal in itself, but as serving a function in the maintenance of their traditional role: “The more educated a woman is ... the more will she live for her duties” (De Gerando 892, 92). The author lists among those duties running a household, supporting a husband, maintaining cleanliness, and being thrifty – all qualities that were welcome in a “true” Hungarian woman and that very much correspond to the bourgeois ideal of femininity in the wider European context. De Gerando certainly does not call for a radical change in gender roles; in fact, she does quite the contrary by asserting women’s subordinate role to others: “A young girl always has to be natural. Her nature should be refined and disciplined from childhood on. She has to be able to exercise selfdiscipline; never should she behave capriciously, be in a bad mood or sulk – this doesn’t suit her ... never should she think of herself but always of others” (De Gerando 892, 64). The author considers a woman to be a creature in need of support, best found in marriage, which she regards, like Kapff-Essenther, as a relationship of equals, but of an equality that maintains separate spheres. She does acknowledge, though, the possibility of single life for a woman, but, again, based on women’s role to serve others: single women should turn to other ways of living a meaningful life through work or in the service of the nation and the homeland. In addition to this defence of traditional bourgeois feminine virtues, De Gerando also pleads for the maintenance of strong family ties as a basis

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for a nation’s, particularly the Hungarian nation’s, health, “so that we may achieve moral superiority in the nations’ tremendous rivalry” (De Gerando 892, 79–80). This nationalist-patriotic voice, typical of Hungarian intellectuals in the period of dualism, was ignored or, rather, taken for granted by De Gerando’s critics. In De Gerando, we find a mixture of voices comparable to that in KapffEssenther’s novel Frauenehre. While De Gerando’s Hungarian critics were most likely annoyed by her references to a bourgeois ideal of femininity inspired mainly by authors of the German and French Enlightenment that may have appeared as not Hungarian enough, this ideal of femininity, like the one represented by Kapff-Essenther, is laden with traditional values. Even though the text also contains a feminist voice, calling for women’s equality in marriage and their better education, which may have appeared radical in the Hungarian context at the time, this voice is by far not as strong as the voice of tradition. Another Hungarian text from the same period demonstrates the predominance of tradition even more. Aranyfüst (Golden Smoke), a novel by Stefánia Wohl, was published in 887. Stefánia Wohl and her sister Janka were famous not only for their salon in Pest, which was frequented by artists and diplomats alike and even by such international celebrities as Franz Liszt, but also for the fact that they managed to establish an independent life as single women purely through their writing, which, although not new in a broader European context, was a new phenomenon in Hungarian literary life. Aranyfüst is written in the tradition of the sentimental novel. Following its first edition, it received harsh criticism, so harsh that the author was discouraged from further writing until shortly before her death. Only publication in Germany and the ensuing positive reception managed to somewhat heal those wounds (Fábri 996, 47). In Aranyfüst, we are introduced to the character of Countess Mária, who is portrayed as an emancipated woman. Mária is raised alongside her older brother and, as a consequence, becomes somewhat of a tomboy: she rides a horse better than a man does, reads books that are normally proscribed to women of her class, and even finishes six classes of grammar school instead of convent school. Following the death of her brother, she becomes the sole heir, a practice that existed in Hungary as a legal possibility for a woman.⁷ However, even in Mária’s life the true goal is marriage, which is presented as a woman’s real calling. Although her husband, Count Szelényi, finds it somewhat challenging to marry an emancipated woman, Mária becomes a perfect wife whose sole focus from then on becomes to support her husband and his political career. The narrator, however, leaves a certain ambi-

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guity, which implies a criticism regarding such a turn in an intelligent and educated woman’s life: “Szelényi smiled. In his wife’s reasoning there was a certain smart lucidity that he wasn’t able to compromise, not even with his most dazzling paradoxes. What a dangerous oppositional MP could she have become had God not created her as a sweet little wife!” (Wohl 887, : 287). The rest of the novel becomes watered down in sentimental intrigues: Mária’s husband falls in love with another woman whom he eventually marries, and, as is to be expected, this marriage ends unhappily. Mária, on the other hand, receives her due recompense for the suffering she has had to endure and ends up marrying her first love, her former Latin teacher. A Madonna-whore dichotomy is present in the contrasting images of Mária and Liza, Szelényi’s second wife. Mária’s name already indicates her Madonna-like qualities and her predestination for suffering, whereas Liza represents the femme fatale who lacks all moral depth and only thinks of her pleasure and interests, and even sacrifices her child for a moment of enjoyment. What is more interesting, however, is the depiction of the political atmosphere in Hungary at the time of the Dual Monarchy, the modernization of the country, and the many debates and discourses emerging from these topics. In the portrayal of women, the voice of emancipation is fairly weak and is quickly drowned out by the much stronger voice of tradition: an emancipated woman can only be so as long as she uses her acquired education and intelligence to further her husband’s career. Yet at the same time, as the above quote demonstrates, a subtle criticism is woven into this picture of the position of women and the social options that were open to them at the time. In the above texts from the “first wave” of fin-de-siècle feminism in Austria and Hungary, we can see the various facets of the representation of women’s emancipation. In most Austrian and Hungarian texts, both fictional and non-fictional, with the exception of those of Troll-Borostyáni, emancipation may bring a woman professional fulfillment as long as it does not violate traditional gender roles. As Kapff-Essenther’s novel Frauenehre demonstrates, career and family may be compatible for a woman, as long as she accepts the normative rules regarding sexuality. A traditional morality triumphs in all texts, with the exception of Kautsky’s Helene, where the moral double standard is subject to criticism. Yet even though Kautsky posits a new political ideology as an alternative, this new ideology, social democracy, is shown as failing to challenge the hierarchy of gender-typical behavioural standards set by patriarchy. In the two Hungarian texts, by

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De Gerando and Wohl, sexual standards are not discussed; emancipation refers only to a better education for women and is justified as a means for a woman to further an interest above her own, be it via supporting her husband and family or her homeland. Unlike in the Austrian texts, professional gratification combined with family life does not seem to be an option for Hungarian women at this early stage in feminism. Early Hungarian feminism seems supportive of women’s professional advancement only in the case of unmarried women, a viewpoint that we will find reiterated by some later feminists as well.

222 The Fight for Women’s Education, Suffrage, and a New Sexual Paradigm

women’s secondary, professional, and higher education Developments in Hungary

Women in Austria and Hungary were granted some rights in the eighteenth century, under Emperor Joseph II : they could take up employment without their husband’s permission, inherit property,¹ and own and administer their own property. However, as fin-de-siècle feminists noted, social mores and family and societal expectations usually made reality quite different from what the law envisioned. Most women of the middle and upper classes were not even aware of those few rights that they did possess. It would take the initiative of courageous women and the clout of organized women’s groups at the end of the nineteenth century to claim those existing rights and to push for the realization of others. Rózsa (Rosika) Schwimmer (Bédy-Schwimmer) was a leading member of the fin-de-siècle Hungarian feminist movement, which she also represented abroad, through both her intellectual involvement and her activism. When she published an article on the state of women’s education in Hungary in 902, she lamented the lack of an organized women’s movement in her country, a movement that could push for faster changes (Schwimmer 902, 95). At the time, Hungarian middle-class women had been organizing, but they were not yet working together towards one common goal. The Feminist Association, of which Rosika Schwimmer would become a founding member, was not established until 904. A few years earlier, in

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Rózsa (Rosika) Bédy-Schwimmer

897, Schwimmer had joined the then established National Association of Women Office Workers (Nőtisztviselők Országos Egyesülete, NOE ) and acted as its president from 900–908 (Zimmermann 999, 97). The NOE produced the future leaders of the FE and the two organizations “developed a collaboration where the association’s mainly economic demands and activities were put into the feminists’ political perspective” (Szapor 2004, 95). The first efforts to improve Hungarian women’s education had been made, however, much earlier, and many of these efforts form part of the “first wave” of the women’s movement discussed in chapter one. Women’s secondary and higher education was a badly neglected issue in Hungary up until the second half of the nineteenth century, although some initiatives to improve women’s educational status had been undertaken before the nineteenth century. One, proudly cited by today’s Hungarian feminists as preceding even Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (first published in 792), dates back to 790, when Péter Bárány wrote a letter to the National Assembly on behalf of Hungarian mothers. The Hungarian mothers requested that, during the Assem-

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bly’s meetings, they be allowed to observe from the gallery. The letter also included another, though less explicit, demand to foster women’s education. The women argued that they would become better educators of their children if they themselves received a scientific education: “If the flame of arduous fondness for the sciences were to be ignited in us, one of the consequences would be that through our love for the sciences we could incite our offspring more eagerly to study them” (quoted in Kornis 927, 484). Despite this, and a few similar initiatives as well as a fairly lively discussion of women’s education throughout the nineteenth century, nothing happened until the second half of the nineteenth century. Resistance to improvements in women’s education remained too strong. The National Association for Women’s Education (Országos Nőképző Egyesület) would be established only in 868 at the initiative of Pálné Veres.² Veres and her association lobbied for the establishment of secondary schools for girls in Hungary, and collected a petition signed by 9,000 women, which was presented to Parliament, but rejected. Faced with such resistance, the association itself opened, in 869, its first class, with twelve female students, in the rooms of an apartment in downtown Budapest. Despite its initially small scope and limited space, the school became a great success. During the following decade, the institution flourished, and moved into a larger building to accommodate several hundred students.³ The school set an example, and, during the tenure of minister Dr Wlassics, the Ministry of Education started to organize state-funded secondary schools for girls (Fábri 996, 39). The curriculum of these schools differed considerably from that of the grammar schools which, at the time, were open only to boys. Only by passing the final exam at a grammar school was registration at a university possible. The secondary schools for girls lasted only six years, two years less than grammar schools. They offered a general education with emphasis on Hungarian language and literature, history, German, and French. Graduates could advance to the final year of a teachers’ school. Although the final exam they wrote did not enable them to study at a university, graduates were, by passing an additional examination, able to enter university. A ministerial decree was issued in December 895 whereby the universities were opened to women in Hungary in the fall of 896, a year earlier than in Austria. Initially only the faculties of arts and sciences and medicine (which included pharmacy) were opened. The faculties of law and engineering would not accept women until after WW I . Following the opening of universities to women, the first girls’ grammar school opened in 896, but the first state-financed grammar school

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for girls would only open in 906. Although, for the most part, the subjects covered were comparable to those in the boys’ schools, education in Greek and Latin started later, subjects with “aesthetic elements” (Schwimmer 902, 99), such as painting and music, received greater emphasis, and girls also had to take obligatory classes in needlework. Although the first steps to eliminate the educational segregation between the sexes had been made, the generally accepted view of gender differences prevailed and was reflected in the subjects taught. Women’s higher education and participation in professional careers were still far from being widely accepted, and several attempts were made in the decades that followed to withdraw or limit women’s acquired educational rights.⁴ Contemporaneous Hungarian feminists, some of whom were active members of the FE , discussed at length the importance of furthering women’s education and opening new and better-paid professions to women. We hear a variety of voices in the texts written by Sarolta Geöcze, Sándorné Stricker Laura Pollacsek, Rozina Mársits, Szidónia Wilhelm, Szikra, Rózsa Bédy-Schwimmer, and Erzsébet Neményi. All of them agree on one point: that women’s education is above all an economic question and necessity. Other arguments in their texts, as to how society would benefit from educated women, reflect varying degrees of traditionalism and openness to new ideas. Some writings reinforce women’s traditionally nurturing role in society, yet all authors argue in favour of women’s greater intellectual and professional independence. We encounter various authoritative and internally persuasive discourses as well as hybrids in their texts. Sarolta Geöcze published the article “A nő a modern társadalomban” (“Woman in Modern Society”) in the periodical Nemzeti Nőnevelés (Women’s National Education) in 899. According to Zimmermann, Geöcze was “one of the principal figures in the fight for Hungarian girls’ education and upbringing and the leading female representative of a ‘Christian socialism’” (Zimmermann 999, 33). In her article, Geöcze welcomes the recent triumphs regarding the opening of universities and grammar schools to women and mentions the resistance female physicians were facing from their male colleagues in achieving acceptance by their professional associations. She strongly argues in favour of women’s higher education and uses the examples of other European countries, such as England, Switzerland, and Germany.⁵ Geöcze stresses, though, that the women’s movement is not about “women abandoning their natural qualities but rather the perfect unfolding of their natural gifts and particularly their moral uplifting” (Geöcze 899, 6). Women ought to remain, according to Geöcze, faithful to their “true” feminine nature; emancipation should not put them into pants

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or “masculinize” them in any other way. The ultimate mission in a woman’s life is still to follow her traditional path by becoming a good wife and an educator for her children, in particular her sons (Geöcze 899, 2). For Geöcze, the function of women’s education is basically to help them better fulfill their conventional roles and maintain patriarchy. She does acknowledge the option of single life for a woman, based on the example of England, where middle-class women outnumbered men and, therefore, many did not marry, a phenomenon found in many European countries in the second half of the nineteenth century. The author believes that, for unmarried women, life’s purpose lies in activities in the service of others, such as work through charities and hospitals. Thus, women’s traditional role of nurturer, even if they live an independent life, remains unquestioned. Geöcze demonstrates an essentialist point of view that regards gender roles and attributes as something inborn rather than as a product of society. The ideas outlined in her essay best fit into the framework of an internally persuasive discourse. In an internally persuasive discourse, the words of others are adopted by the speaker (or writer) and applied to a new situation. Geöcze, much like her predecessors in the 790 letter to the National Assembly or “first-wave” feminists such as De Gerando, had internalized traditional views on women’s roles, the socially established and dominant ideas as to what constitutes “true” femininity, and she does not question them. Rather, she confirms these concepts within the new context of women’s emancipation, justifying the need for improvements in women’s education by their desired outcome, namely strengthening what society for the most part still perceived as women’s mission. Sándorné Stricker Laura Pollacsek, a member of the FE , wrote Néhány szó a nőről s nőnevelésről (A Few Words on Woman and on Women’s Education) in 905. She develops arguments in favour of women’s education in more detail than Geöcze does, on multiple levels. Pollacsek, like Geöcze, develops an internally persuasive discourse: she defends women’s traditional roles by claiming that better-educated women would also make better wives and mothers. However, Pollacsek’s text integrates another internally persuasive discourse, namely, that of socialism. The author bases her analysis on women’s social situation, particularly on economic and class factors. She uses middle-class women’s dependent economic status to justify the need for their education. She sees women excluded from economics, an area monopolized by men: “We see that a deep spiritual separation exists between today’s working man, who is fighting economic battles and living scientific discoveries, and the woman, who is not only liberated from productive work but nearly cut off from it entirely” (Pollacsek 905, 5). To

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bridge this gap between the sexes, Pollacsek pleads for an equal education for boys and girls; moreover, she insists that a curriculum for girls include science as well as physical education and, most importantly, that it prepare them for a profession that would end their economic dependence. Pollacsek stresses the importance of women’s equal inclusion in the workforce: education should not serve to enable them to become better housewives, but rather, to become equal partners in the competitive labour market. Even though she sees marriage and motherhood as a very important part of a woman’s life, she adds an element that is lacking in Geöcze: she puts a woman’s happiness and personal fulfillment before everything else (Pollacsek 905, 6). Thus Pollacsek’s ideas regarding women’s role in society are less based on traditional and essentialist views, and her conclusions, therefore, go beyond what Geöcze has to offer. Rozina Mársits, in her 90 essay A huszadik század asszonya (The Woman of the Twentieth Century), also explains the need for women’s education by citing economic necessity, namely the increasing number of women who do not marry and, therefore, have to financially support themselves (Mársits 90, 72). Mársits uses arguments reminiscent of Geöcze, reiterating traditional views on womanhood: the educated and working woman would perfect her role as a mother and, thus, better fulfill her mission as educator of the nation (Mársits 90, 5). We can hear here the patriotic voice mentioned earlier, so present in fin-de-siècle Hungarian intellectual life. However, Mársits injects an element that deconstructs these arguments and their persuasiveness, allowing us to speak of a hybrid. When Mársits speaks of the ways in which women would improve and contribute to society by getting a better education, she uses arguments that are contradictory: “She [the educated woman] will not only be interested in the narrowness of her home but will be able to sympathize with the interests of society and act in and for it. And because she can think and feel clearly, she will become truer and more courageous; good with self-confidence because she will be wiser; and because she is wiser, she will be more gentle and more humble” (Mársits 90, 24, emphasis added). To today’s reader, the characteristics of an educated woman listed in the last sentence of the above quote must seem rather incongruous. Why would the gain in a person’s self-confidence due to her better education lead to an increased level of gentleness and humbleness, and, moreover, as Mársits continues, to her decreased talkativeness (Mársits 90, 25)? Mársits has obviously developed feminist ideas; this is reflected in her defence of women’s education and of the expansion of their field of influence in society. However, when she brings in old-fashioned views as to what constitutes the

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ideal woman (gentleness, humbleness, and keeping silent – all consistent with the ancient rule mulier taceat in ecclesia), she reiterates a traditional voice that she herself has rejected. She uses those views to meet the exigencies of an image of femininity that was still generally accepted so as to make the image of the emancipated woman less threatening to her readers. Mársits plays with the authority of these words, without absorbing them as her own. Therefore they remain a hybrid construction, a mixture of two speeches. Szidónia Wilhelm and Szikra, both important activists of the FE , in their respective essays Szerelem, házasság feminista tükörben (Love and Marriage in a Feminist Mirror, 908) and A feminizmusról (On Feminism, 9), regard women’s professional education as an economic necessity. Both authors note women’s economic dependence in marriage; Szikra equates such dependence with a relationship between master (man) and servant (woman): “A society in which half of the population has taken upon itself the responsibility to support the other half, yet under the condition of this other half’s total submission under its will ... in such a society the breadwinner and the dependant must constantly face each other like enemies” (Szikra 9, 7). To reassure opponents of women’s rights, Szikra, in a later article, stresses that the fight for women’s rights is about “equality” with men, not “similarity,” thereby casting off the spectre of the “masculine” woman (Szikra 92b, 85). This is a very interesting argument as it combines what has developed as two traditions of thinking in international feminism: the equality paradigm, rooted in ideas of the Enlightenment, and the difference paradigm, which evolved into cultural and radical feminism. We will see how the two positions often merge in texts of the first women’s movement in Hungary and in Austria. Szikra supports her argument in favour of women’s economic independence with economic and social facts: women’s work is undervalued and left out of history books, and women do not enjoy the same rights of citizenship as men do. Achieving women’s economic independence is the only way to put an end to this historical injustice and the gender war that results from it. Unlike Wilhelm, who in society’s resistance to women’s economic independence detects a struggle for economic power and men’s fear of losing their position of economic superiority, Szikra cites economics in men’s defence: she contends that society needs women’s participation in the workforce because men are less and less capable of supporting a family on their own (Szikra 9, 2). Despite the economic truth in this argument, it is hard not to recognize an underlying “feminine” tone when Szikra goes on to speak about the “gentlemen making the laws” who need to be “asked

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politely” to grant women the rights they are demanding. Knowing that Szikra presented her speech On Feminism to a mixed audience at the Lloyd Society in Budapest, the reader will understand that she uses a traditional image of femininity, of the kind, humble woman, to win those Hungarian gentlemen present over to her side. Yet, to the reader, this tone of humbleness in the midst of a text that emphasizes the fight for women’s rights results, as with Mársits, in a hybrid construction. Wilhelm defines the goals feminism should be fighting for very concretely and, thereby, along with Schwimmer, presents the most outspoken contribution to the Hungarian feminist discussion on women’s education and paid work. Above all, Wilhelm demands a thorough reform and modernization of women’s education, which includes their equal access to all levels of education and, moreover, co-educational schools. The latter was a fundamental goal of the FE . Wilhelm sees it as an essential condition to overcome the gap that separates the sexes in later life. The curriculum itself should also include sexual education, which she regards as a necessary part of a scientifically evolved era: “It [feminism] demands a reform of the entire school system in a sense that it must walk hand in hand with evolution. The programs shouldn’t waste time glorifying some facts from the past century, but rather prepare individuals to identify the times they live in and take their place in society” (Wilhelm 908, 55). In demanding the modernization of schools, Wilhelm is in line with Austrian feminists such as Auguste Fickert and Rosa Mayreder: it is not enough to open secondary schools for girls – the schools must offer an upto-date curriculum and not dwell on images from the past, so as to prepare young women and men for the future. According to the author, school reforms must go hand in hand with the reform of labour laws. Wilhelm clearly states that there is only one woman question, regardless of class, a position also taken by Schwimmer (Bédy-Schwimmer 9, 40) and the FE to which they both belonged. Pollacsek, although also a member of the FE , maintains that there is no single woman question, but several, which are class-bound. The debate around these two positions in feminism has remained open ever since. Wilhelm’s text raises other important issues as well. For the author, women’s paid work transcends class. In line with the demands of the FE , she demands paid maternity leave as part of a general health insurance policy for all female workers, something only implemented in Hungary to a satisfactory degree beginning in 967, and even more so in the 980s.⁶ Wilhelm also believes that women workers should be organized in trade unions, which would offer them additional security. To allow working

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mothers to better manage the double burden, she proposes the organization of cooperative households.⁷ Thus, Wilhelm develops her feminist arguments around a socialist internally persuasive discourse. The absence of essentialism of any kind regarding women’s “nature” and “natural” roles is also noteworthy in this text, making it unique among the Hungarian feminist texts heretofore discussed. Wilhelm’s only point of partial convergence with the other Hungarian feminists is in defending women’s mission in society; however, she does this by presenting women not as mothers, but as men’s partners who have the power to re-educate them toward acceptance of women’s liberation, and, from there, toward “humanity’s most complete happiness” (Wilhelm 908, 6), a position we will also see in Austrian feminism. Rózsa Bédy-Schwimmer also wrote on women’s education and paid work. Like her Austrian colleague Troll-Borostyáni a few decades earlier, she targets girls’ education as the main cause for women’s economically unequal status. Girls’ education only prepares them for “dependence, powerless attachment and a need to seek support in others” (Bédy-Schwimmer 907a, 9). However, education is not only a right; it comes with responsibilities as well, those of an economically and intellectually evolved human being. Schwimmer offers valuable socio-psychological insight into the way education changes women’s lives. She sees a generational gap between women of her generation and those of the previous one, who were not able to take advantage of an education that prepared them for an economically independent life, and warns that such women may have become too “stunted ... to carry this wonderful load” (Bédy-Schwimmer 907a, 9). Schwimmer agrees with other Hungarian feminists that women’s paid work has become an economic necessity, one that transcends class, because marriage is not a sufficient source of income for women any longer. She believes that patriarchy and capitalism are the chief enemies of all women, regardless of class. Like Wilhelm, Schwimmer also sees only one women’s movement: the working-class woman and the middle-class woman both suffer from the same social and legal restrictions inherent to patriarchy and capitalism, which reflects the position of the FE as an organization for all women. Both the working-class woman’s and the middle-class woman’s work is devalued through lower pay and limited access to employment, which usually results in work that is of a lower status but not necessarily easier to perform (Bédy-Schwimmer 9, 40). In 93, when the first changes in women’s education had already slowly taken place but were still repeatedly threatened by various initiatives to limit women’s access to higher learning, Schwimmer writes that the wom-

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en’s movement must push for substantial changes. She regards a thorough general as well as professional education as a necessity for all women, regardless of class, a point she and the FE share with Austrian feminists. Girls’ education is to their own benefit, stresses Schwimmer, as well as to that of the race. Feminists should act as champions for other women; they have the responsibility to defend women’s higher education and to stop any measures that may thwart it, in the interest of “women who have been damned to social inferiority and intellectual hunger” (Bédy-Schwimmer 93, 64). Schwimmer’s feminism is thus devoid of traces of traditionalism when it comes to women’s role in society. One internally persuasive discourse that is subtly present, when she speaks of women’s education and paid work furthering the race, is that of eugenics. The discourse of eugenics was very popular among fin-de-siècle feminists, both in Austria and in Hungary, as part of their seeking social and cultural renewal. In Hungary, Schwimmer in particular was involved in popularizing ideas to have state regulation implemented to prevent individuals with illnesses considered genetic from human reproduction (Zimmermann 999, 26). The last Hungarian author I wish to discuss here is Erzsébet Neményi, for she offers a thorough reflection on women’s professional education in her essay Die Berufsarbeit der Frau (Women’s Professional Work, 907). Even more so than Pollacsek, Mársits, and Schwimmer, or Hainisch in Austria, she regards the woman question as an economic one: “The woman question, and this cannot be repeated often enough, is a question of making a living; and this question will not be solved before woman is in total harmony with today’s developments. As we all know, these developments lead toward technical perfection” (Neményi 907, 9). Unlike Pollacsek and Wilhelm, who both criticize men’s opposition to women’s education and their fear of economic competition, Neményi opposes women entering “male” professions that require a university education. She justifies this surprising attitude based on economic factors: she observes the formation of an “intellectual proletariat” (Neményi 907, 9) among women who have a university diploma yet cannot find adequate work. Rather than delving deeper into the analysis of possible causes for this phenomenon (such as fear of competition from male colleagues or society’s rejection of women in new professions), Neményi suggests alternative work such as interior decorating, photography, gardening, and child care, all of which she deems suitable for women, as they require only a technical school rather than a university education and can be quite lucrative. She explains women’s suitability for such “feminine” professions with an argument that can be read as somewhat essentialist. According to Neményi, women are by their nature

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more inclined to do work that requires an aesthetic sensibility or sense of caring; however, she sees these feminine qualities as something women have developed through history because of their position in the family as caregivers and homemakers, rather than inborn. Neményi betrays a latent patriarchal attitude to the woman question. Basing herself on an internally persuasive discourse subtly rooted in essentialist views regarding women’s “nature,” she develops seemingly progressive arguments in favour of women’s professional independence. This independence, however, is only justified if it is not in competition with men. Women would remain, if we follow Neményi, in a less powerful position, economically and socially, occupying less prestigious professions and leaving those with the highest power and prestige, once again, to men. The division of economic and social power thus remains unchallenged and skewed to women’s disadvantage. Developments in Austria

In Austria, the situation concerning women’s education was similar in many ways to that of Hungary, with certain unique features. Until the second half of the nineteenth century, when feminist voices started speaking out in favour of women’s educational rights, the only schools that offered professional education for women beyond the obligatory “people’s schools” (Volksschule) were the schools for female teachers and governesses, the first of which had opened under Joseph II in 786 (Hainisch 902, 69). Additionally, the Viennese Women’s Employment Association was founded in 866. It began to organize courses in sewing, drawing, sales, and other occupations. Women’s professional education had become an economic necessity: in 890, of the nine million women in Austria over the age of ten, 6.5 million were making an independent living (“Vorwort” 899, 2). Already in 870 Marianne Hainisch, one of the most outspoken feminists in the Austrian women’s movement since its “first wave,” called for the opening of a grammar school for girls in Vienna, but her plea was rejected as too radical (Laube 930,2). In her own words, “this demand seemed to most men and women in my hometown a crazy requirement” (Hainisch 899, 243). Thus, secondary education that prepared students for entry to university remained, for more than two decades, an exclusive privilege of boys. The so-called “daughters’ schools” (Töchterschulen) prepared girls from the middle and upper classes to fulfill their role in society of educated wife and mother, yet did not offer them any professional skills. Subjects taught included history, literature, drawing, music, modern lan-

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guages, and needlework. Classical languages, mathematics, and sciences were not represented. The next step toward grammar schools for girls was the development of another type of secondary school, called the Lyzeum. Its main difference from the Töchterschulen was that it offered education in mathematics and physics. The first Lyzeum opened in 886 in Graz, and others followed in the 890s in Vienna and other towns. The Lyzeum offered six years of secondary education. It represented a major step toward women’s university education in that its graduates were accepted as part-time students at Austrian universities. A ministerial decree in 902 permitted graduates of a girls’ Lyzeum to be admitted to the teacher’s examination and thereby, for the first time, become teachers at a Lyzeum themselves – a privilege previously only available to young men. This also was an important step toward women’s higher professional education. As for academic prerequisites for universities, the Lyzeum did not grant enough credits. Although some scientific subjects had been introduced, their extent was not comparable to what boys studied in grammar schools. Neither Latin nor Greek were taught. As a result, many Lyzeums introduced additional courses to cover the subjects required for passing the final examination at a grammar school (Matura). Other types of secondary schools also offered additional courses geared toward immediate use in some white-collar professions rather than toward higher education. In 888 the Association for Women’s Extended Education (Verein für erweiterte Frauenbildung) came into being in Vienna. It lobbied for the opening of grammar schools for girls. Only in 892 did it succeed in opening a private grammar school class, “the first of its kind in the Germanspeaking world” (Anderson 992b, 30). However, the Ministry of Education remained unsupportive. In 906 the school was allowed to call itself an “upper grammar school for girls” (Mädchenobergymnasium), yet it could only continue functioning thanks to a generous donation from writer Marie von Najmájer (Anderson 992b, 3). The vast majority of girls seeking higher education were admitted to the Matura at certain existing (boys’) grammar schools (Hainisch 902, 74). In 908, however, a new type of grammar school came into being, open to both sexes, the so-called Reformrealgymnasium. Its curriculum, although different from the traditional grammar school, prepared students for university. The Reformrealgymnasium would gradually replace the Lyzeum for girls. A ministerial decree admitted women to Austrian universities as fulltime students for the first time in 897, with the opening of the faculties of humanities. Austria thereby became, along with Prussia, one of the last

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two countries in Europe to admit women to universities, although, as of 896, Austrian women who had acquired their diploma of medicine abroad had been allowed to repeat all relevant exams at home universities and to be admitted as doctors of medicine (Heindl 997, 24). It was only in 900 that another ministerial decree finally allowed Austrian women to study medicine in their own country, although the need for female doctors had existed for about a decade, especially among the Muslim population in the occupied territories in Bosnia. Similarly, the faculties of pharmacy also opened their doors. In 99 the faculties of law, technology, and agriculture followed (List-Ganser 930, 94). Marianne Hainisch, despite the initial lack of response to her efforts to introduce improvements in women’s education, continued lobbying for women’s professional and higher education. In her report to the International Women’s Congress in London, published in Dokumente der Frauen in 899, she acknowledges that some success had been achieved in these areas in the previous decades, but that much still remains to be done. She demands that “to women, all schools and professions to which they aspire and for which they demonstrate an ability should be open,” particularly the medical profession (Hainisch 899, 245), a point she had already made two and a half decades earlier. Hainisch lists three main goals in women’s education: the development of thinking abilities, “so as to make possible woman’s harmonious moral and intellectual unfolding” (Hainisch 899, 244); economic independence; and a strengthening of the ideal of the family. Concerning the latter, she supports schools that would prepare young girls for the profession of housewife, with exams they would have to pass before getting married. Hainisch builds an internally persuasive discourse that supports the traditional structure of the family: she considers the duties of running a household and raising children exclusively the domain of women, since she does not require men to pass any mandatory exams to enable them to be better husbands and fathers. What is new in her arguments, however, is the requirement for co-education of both sexes from early childhood on. In this, her position corresponds to that of Hungarian feminists such as Wilhelm, but disagrees with others such as Schwimmer. In a later essay, Hainisch criticizes developments on the industrial labour market for having pushed women into jobs with less prestige and pay (Hainisch 9, 6–7). She welcomes the opening of all vocational schools for women as of 90 as a step in the right direction and calls for the opening of even more schools and professions for them. Hainisch deems the work of a housewife a profession, a point that is not mentioned in contemporaneous Hungarian texts. She therefore demands that housewives be given

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equal access to their husband’s income as a justified compensation for their work (Hainisch 9, 25). She also identifies the double burden of work and homemaking as unique to women, and not something to be held as an ideal; the norm that “she never rests” must change.⁸ In a further essay entitled Die Mutter (The Mother, 93), Hainisch offers more concrete ideas on how to help working mothers alleviate the double burden. She considers that the state shares responsibility for the upbringing of young children and therefore has the duty to maintain kindergartens and grade schools, as well as holiday resorts for young children of working mothers (Hainisch 93, 9). The costs of such institutions should be divided between the state and those parents who are able to afford it. Hainisch shares this point of view with fellow Austrian feminist TrollBorostyáni, who also supported the idea, inspired by August Bebel, that children be brought up in institutions financed by the state and by parents whose budget allows for such expenses, for the benefit of those who cannot afford it (Troll-Borostyáni 93, 20–8). Although these ideas, developed around a socialist internally persuasive discourse, are directed toward bringing about improvements in working women’s lives, they also show Hainisch’s attachment to a traditional ideal of femininity, epitomized by motherhood and marriage as women’s main social duty and cultural mission. This ideal, along with the traditional structure of the family, remains uncontested by Hainisch, much as it had been earlier. In Katechismus der Frauenbewegung (Catechism of the Women’s Movement, 903) Troll-Borostyáni discusses, as before, the goals of the women’s movement. She repeats her demand from twenty-five years earlier that women be equal to men in all aspects of social, economic, and political life and observes that this equality is still only present in criminal law. She gives numerous examples of women’s situation in non-European countries in particular, her favourite examples being some American states and also New Zealand, places that she considers the most progressive in the treatment of women’s rights. One of her focal points is women’s professional work. Troll-Borostyáni demands the opening of all professions to women, regardless of whether they are deemed suitable for women or not. She sees a class-based difference in the goals of the women’s movement. Whereas middle-class women fight for entry into the professions that carry the most material wealth and social prestige, working-class women have to fight for better pay for their work. The female worker is in a worse position than the male worker: she suffers under the burdens of capitalism and patriarchy at the same time. Troll-Borostyáni looks deeper into possible reasons for this situation

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beyond the external socio-political ones, and pinpoints the internalization of patriarchal values in women: women are conditioned to be less assertive and do not stand up for their rights as much as men do, a visionary point that has been discussed at length in present-day feminism. Women’s access to university education was still very restricted at the time; even in those faculties (arts, medicine, and pharmacy) where women were allowed to register, they were still facing discrimination. The legal profession remained closed to Austrian women for almost another two decades. Through women’s entry into all intellectual professions, TrollBorostyáni sees a possibility for an evolution of society as a whole. Free intellectual competition involving the whole population would foster the best resources from both sexes, not just the male. For Troll-Borostyáni, women’s entry into all professions thus fulfills a cultural mission. The social benefit that Hainisch and other more conservative feminists see in enlightened motherhood, Troll-Borostyáni, in line with the AÖF, sees in women’s equal participation in all areas of social and cultural life, i.e., an opportunity to bring forward society as a whole: “the subordinated position of woman where she is deprived of her rights is a source of material and spiritual suffering not only for herself but also an obstacle to a higher cultural progress of humankind” (Troll-Borostyáni 903, 54). In 94, in Betrachtungen zur Frauenfrage (Observations on the Woman Question), Grete Meisel-Hess (who belonged to the younger generation of Austrian feminists and thus had the opportunity to enjoy some of the educational privileges that had been barred to Troll-Borostyáni, Hainisch, and Mayreder) discusses women’s increasing presence in professional life. Like Troll-Borostyáni, she addresses the problem of internalized patriarchal values in women who seek professional advancement. She observes women’s insecurity in the new professions and explains it by historical conditioning, noting that, historically, men have had the opportunity to acquire greater professional confidence, whereas women have not: “The generation of women who are standing today in professional life had to fight a bloody fight for this right and it’s no wonder that, where man starts off calmly and cold-bloodedly, many women arrive with their strength already exhausted, with a wounded and sensitive conscience” (Meisel-Hess 94, 6). The acuteness of this statement has still not lost its validity, even for contemporary women. Like Schwimmer in Hungary, Meisel-Hess sees a gap between the women of the younger generation, like herself, who have been given the chance to study for an economically independent life, and women of the previous generation, who are often victims of their situation when, be it through

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divorce or widowhood, they are suddenly faced with an independence for which they are completely unprepared. As does Hungarian Neményi, Meisel-Hess supports new professions for women that do not necessarily require an academic education, but simply creativity, originality, and courage. Yet, unlike Neményi, she does not use any essentialist internally persuasive discourse; she does not recommend new professions for women based on their “womanly” qualities, but rather on economic necessity and personal talent. Meisel-Hess, like Troll-Borostyáni, presents the United States as a positive model when it comes to innovations in women’s professional choices. She supports professions that require higher qualifications because they also bring in a better income. Here, she bases her reflections on a socialist internally persuasive discourse. It is the system as a whole that needs to be abolished for real change to happen: the physically demanding work that women (and men) of the lower classes had and have to perform is a result of the capitalist system. This situation will only disappear “when economic values become enfranchised from the dominion of capitalism” (Meisel-Hess 97b, 24). Thus, Meisel-Hess’s reflections on women’s education and paid work include ideas both about ways to improve the situation and about the necessity for global change. However, in a later essay, she defends marriage as the ultimate safe haven for women: she deems a good marriage a much better way to economic safety than a ten-hour drudgery in an office (Meisel-Hess, 97a, 58). This argument, rather than just an expression of the voice of traditionalism (Melander 992, 708), can also be read as a criticism of the capitalist economic reality and a rejection of paid work under circumstances of blatant exploitation of female labour. In her analysis of the reasons for women’s fight for their educational and professional rights, Meisel-Hess quotes not only economic reasons but also “spiritual hunger” and the “desire for independence” (Meisel-Hess 94, 06–7). She thus adds, inspired by John Stuart Mill, the right to personal happiness as a crucial element in women’s emancipation. Like Schwimmer, she stresses the importance of the responsibilities along with the rights that this process brings for women. Meisel-Hess demands the right of education for all women based on talent and personal choice, as opposed to class or family pressure. Education, as she defines it, should not only provide professional fulfillment but also truly free women from all patriarchal dependency, be it dependency on the family or on a man. Meisel-Hess’s vision is of an educated woman who is not only independent financially but also a complete human being who can stand on her own in every respect so as “not to become enslaved, not even in matters of the heart, in the sense that she doesn’t feel so unconditionally exposed to anyone for life or death”

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Auguste Fickert

(Meisel-Hess 94, 0). In her vision of a truly and inwardly emancipated woman, the author comes close to Auguste Fickert. In 906 Fickert, one of the leaders of the AÖF, wrote a commentary on the goals of the women’s movement. She demands, like Meisel-Hess in Austria and Schwimmer in Hungary, that women’s education transcend the limitations of class and be open to all women with talent (Fickert 906, 4). As a possible outcome of such an educational system, she sees a much more productive and creative competition between women and men. Like Meisel-Hess, she openly affirms the abolition of capitalism as one of the goals of the women’s movement, thereby building an internally persuasive discourse by using elements of a socialist discourse. Fickert vehemently opposes the bourgeois way of thinking in the women’s movement: the movement’s true mission should be to overthrow the bourgeois social structure, the main cause of women’s oppression. Her objective is not the betterment of women’s condition through reforms, which was Hainisch’s position, but rather women’s growth and awareness as individuals – and here again her position comes close to Schwimmer and Meisel-Hess. To

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free themselves from the oppression of patriarchy and capitalism, women ought to “overcome the slave mentality which still holds them captive in the present order of things” (quoted in Anderson 992b, ). Women’s education, thus, should work not toward a strengthening of their “natural” femininity or motherly role but toward increasing their self-esteem and consciousness. As a result of such an inner change, women would contribute to a radical transformation in society, for “woman’s elevation meant ‘an era of blossom, of growth, of happiness’ for humanity as a whole” (Anderson 992b, 3). Women’s still unused intellectual power would also enable them to overthrow the existing educational system, which Fickert and Mayreder, her colleague from the AÖF, both considered old-fashioned and badly in need of reform. Mayreder wrote to Fickert in 895: “We cannot expect anything from the Byzantine institutions of the grammar schools and the university in which the male sex is brought up into state cripples” (quoted in Heindl 997, 26). Women have the power to bring about radical changes in society, including a reform of the school system. Even though Mayreder contends that women’s entry into the professions “in which man with his more robust nature has already been reduced to a soulless machine” (Mayreder 923, 3) may carry the danger of doing the same damage to women, she still attributes a crucial role to women in a cultural restructuring of society. In this process, she considers “women’s entry into all male professions” of utmost importance, “even against the danger that in the first instance they would be carried away by the whirlpool of the male way of living” (Mayreder 923, 34). The opening of the first secondary schools and the beginning of the opening of universities and grammar schools for women, largely (but not only) as a result of women’s devoted and persistent efforts and activism, raised many new issues, which became part of a lively debate among Hungarian and Austrian feminists alike. The change in women’s social status, with all its societal, moral, and psychological implications, was not something society was willing to readily accept. It is, therefore, no surprise to see that various discourses have shaped the texts discussed here. Many feminists had necessarily internalized traditional views, which is reflected in some of their essentialist arguments. On the other hand, aspects of a traditional feminine role were also reworked into a new image of femininity so as to rethink women’s cultural function and their place in society, often using arguments from a socialist discourse and, sometimes, eugenics. These texts demonstrate in different ways the challenge of developing progressive ideas on changes in women’s education and professional lives

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in a system that resisted transitions that could redefine gender roles. However, we should also stress the incredible visionary potential that some of the feminist ideas carry, many of which have not lost their validity in the twenty-first century. acquiring the right to vote Austria

In Austria, demanding political rights was even more difficult than asking for improvements in women’s educational and professional opportunities. The political repression following the revolution of 848 and the general conservatism regarding gender roles were magnified by the power of the Catholic Church (Bader-Zaar 996b, 6). In 867 the so-called Law of Assembly (Vereinsgesetz) banned women from joining or forming political associations; it would only be withdrawn in 9. Under this law, women were put in the same category as children and foreigners. However, the law was not applied in Hungary; thus, by 908 Hungary had eighty-one registered women’s organizations (Zsuppán 989, 64). Yet, in 908 an article in the feminist periodical A nő és a társadalom criticized Hungarian feminists for lagging behind their sisters in both the West and the East. The anonymous author declares this situation all the more shameful as Hungarian women had enjoyed some rights earlier than other nations’ female populations. Despite the right to organize politically, which existed in Hungary for several decades before it did in Austria, no political party in Hungary at the time had female parliamentary representatives (“A magyar nő,” 94–6). In Austria, taxpaying and property-owning women had the right to vote, mainly by a male proxy, as of 849 on a community level and as of 86 on the provincial level. However, in Lower Austria, taxpaying women had their right to vote for the provincial diet withdrawn in 888; this was the beginning of political agitation for female suffrage (Bader-Zaar 996b, 62). The first wave of agitation began in 889, and by the early 900s women’s suffrage became a widely discussed topic. The AÖF, though a bourgeois women’s organization, stressed that it demanded suffrage for all women, regardless of class or level of wealth (Anderson 992b, 83). In 906 suffrage was granted to men only. The Committee for Women’s Suffrage (Frauenstimmrechtskomitee) was established in the same year. Marianne Hainisch was one of its founding members. Although in her early feminist years Hainisch was rather cautious regarding the right to vote, and considered reforms in the educational system the first priority,

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she came to the realization, as years went by, that “suffrage means power and that those who don’t have it are at a disadvantage and their fight for a living is made more difficult” (quoted in Bader-Zaar 996a, 63). The Committee for Women’s Suffrage launched the magazine Zeitschrift für Frauenstimmrecht in 9. Many well-known feminists, among them Mayreder, were active in the suffrage campaign. The reasoning behind the feminists’ claims for suffrage was that by gaining the vote, women would help bring about a cultural renewal. Some, such as Hainisch, believed that this would happen through women’s womanly and motherly virtues; others, such as Fickert and Mayreder, believed that “women’s suffrage and their entry into public life were in harmony with the spirit of the times and that such changes would lead humanity onwards and upwards” (Anderson 992b, 7). In any case, because suffrage would liberate women from their centuries-old silence, it was regarded by most feminists as an important step toward the beginning of a new era for humanity as a whole. According to Meisel-Hess, the right to vote also had a very practical significance: it meant equal participation in making the laws, and, thus, a direct impact on the community. Within the suffrage movement, there was considerable contempt toward male politics, particularly during WW I , for being “the politics of power and interest” (Bader-Zaar 996b, 64). Women, consequently, regarded themselves as the carriers of the values necessary to bring about peace, progress, and a better society. Contempt toward male politics was, however, one of the reasons why the suffragists did not achieve their goal. It would take WW I and, ironically, women’s role in the war effort to bring about female suffrage. In the events of 94–8 previous agitation for women’s vote was forgotten. In November 98 Austrian women were granted the right to vote for the National Assembly and the provincial assemblies, as well as the right to stand for office. On 6 February 99, for the first time in Austrian history, women voted for a parliament for which women candidates presented themselves (Weinzierl 975, 42). One group of women, however, remained excluded from the right to vote until 923 – prostitutes. Hungary

In Hungary, the situation regarding women’s suffrage after 848 developed much as it did in Austria. Suffrage became an exclusively male privilege. Zimmermann observes that this “explicit exclusion of women from the sphere of politics was not a Hungarian but a European phenomenon” (Zimmermann 999, 325). Szikra, in her essay A feminizmusról, quotes a

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passage from an 897 legislation, whereby women hold the same status before the law as a criminal, a person who has declared bankruptcy, or a person who is under guardianship. Her comment is quite strong: “we are put in the same place where evil-doers hide and the idiots’ sad troop howls, stutters and emits animal sounds, but is unable to talk in any articulate way” (Szikra 9, ). This attitude to women in legal matters extended to politics as well. In 905 the first of many reforms of voting practices came into debate; a proposal regarding general suffrage was to include the male population older than twenty-four who could read and write. This proposal reflects the general attitude toward suffrage in Hungary before WW I , notwithstanding some men’s support for the cause and the later foundation of a Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage (Férfiliga a nők választójogáért, 9). Even the League for Universal Suffrage, founded in 905, remained silent regarding women’s right to vote. The question of women’s suffrage would only be put on the table officially in 97, by the united opposition. Their proposal included women, yet on a very restrictive basis regarding age, education, and social involvement: it applied only to women over the age of twentyfour who possessed a minimum of four years of higher education and who had been members of a scientific or artistic association for a minimum of two years or were widows of war with children (Zimmermann 999, 33). Women’s organizations, such as the FE and the NOE , had been active in the fight for women’s suffrage since 905; they were later joined, although much more cautiously and to a lesser degree, by the Federation of Hungarian Women’s Associations (Magyarországi Nőegyesületek Szövetsége) and the Catholic women’s movement. Both the FE and the NOE demanded the inclusion of women in the above-mentioned planned reform of voting practices. However, the FE was more involved in concrete activism and political agitation. By designing and putting out posters, postcards, special stamps, and articles in newspapers, they drew public attention to the issue. They also held numerous public meetings where women’s suffrage was discussed. The viewpoint of the FE in particular was “equal political rights for both sexes” (Zimmermann 999, 336); suffrage for both men and women was only one expression of this political equality. A major result of the FE ’s activism was the organization of the 7th Congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (of which the FE had been a member since 905) in Budapest in 93. Several prominent members of the FE , among them Szikra and Schwimmer, were part of the organizing committee. Among the invited speakers and participants at the congress were the Alliance’s president, Carrie Chapman Catt, distinguished German feminist Minna

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Cauer, and great American writer and feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The FE ’s journal, A nő és a társadalom, reported extensively on this important event. Despite the FE ’s lobbying activities, no parliamentary party officially supported women’s suffrage. In 98 the last Hungarian Parliament in the Austro-Hungarian Empire decided to exclude women from the proposed suffrage reform. After the breakup of the Empire, the democratic Károlyi government introduced universal suffrage for men over the age of twentyone and women over the age of twenty-four (Pető and Szapor 2004). These efforts became thwarted because of the political takeover by the communist Kun government. Hungarian women were finally given the right to vote in 920 as a result of pressure by the Allied powers (Szapor 2004, 204). However, with Miklós Horthy’s conservative government, this right was repeatedly restricted, first in 92 and then in 924, to women over the age of thirty who had to fulfill certain economic and educational conditions. Radical feminism in Hungary had died by this point; despite the emergence of a conservative women’s movement, women’s rights did not become part of the political agenda until after 945. sexuality, love, and marriage Sexuality was much debated in Europe from about the mid-nineteenth century until around WW I (Jušek 997, 2).⁹ Feminists fervently criticized sexual practices based on the moral double standard and the marriage of convenience. However, in feminist discourse love and sexuality were mainly defined in heterosexual terms. Lesbian love and homosexuality are not addressed by the bourgeois women’s movement. “Most members of the women’s movement either spoke out against homosexuality or were silent about the issue” (Thorson 996, 94, emphasis in the original).¹⁰ This may not be surprising if one bears in mind that lesbians were represented in medical literature of the time as mentally ill and that feminists themselves were often equated with lesbians (Thorson 996, 9).¹¹ The women’s movement also tended to ignore lesbian women within its ranks and, moreover, the “emerging sexual science discourse on homosexuality” (Leidinger 2004, 48). Even in women’s fiction, lesbian love is only rarely addressed.¹² As we have seen through the feminist criticism of the educational system, the lack of appropriate instruction that would enable women to become truly adult human beings and the absence of sexual education for both women and men were considered the major culprits for the existing (im)moral standards. Although the question of sexuality was seen as

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closely connected with educational and political rights, feminists realized that the situation would not be remedied by merely implementing new legislation but only by changing, at a deeper level, a whole set of norms and moral attitudes. This is where, understandably, feminists would face the heaviest resistance and the most vicious attacks, for the maintenance of sexual inequality is the fundamental value that fosters the survival of patriarchy. Discussion of the topic in Hungarian feminist texts

According to Judit Acsády, Hungarian feminists had an additional reason for caution when it came to attacking attitudes with respect to sexuality and marriage, namely “fear that sexual radicalism would undermine the success of the suffrage campaign” (Acsády 995, 4). Nevertheless, leading feminists, such as Szikra and Schwimmer, did speak out against existing marriage practices, whereas Wilhelm wrote more openly about sexuality. In A feminizmusról, Szikra equates marriage in its existing form with bartering. She expands on the question of women’s financial dependency in marriage and the issues resulting from it in an article from 90, “Az asszony és a pénze” (“Woman and Her Money”). Even though Hungarian law allowed women, in theory, to dispose of their property in marriage – an argument often quoted by anti-feminists – Szikra notes the discrepancy between theory and practice. Again, she relates this practice to the power of gender-biased traditions, according to which “boys get education, girls upbringing, but none of them gets refinement” (Szikra 90, 46). She challenges the existing gender roles whereby boys have to take on the role of the patriarch and girls that of the beautiful doll. What Szikra wishes for both sexes instead is “to send both boys and girls out into life as each other’s understanding and helping partners” (Szikra 90, 46). She regards women’s right to vote as a step in that direction, because it would raise women’s self-esteem and, ideally, men would then also hold such women in higher esteem. What we see here, in a nutshell, is an anticipation of the theory of intersubjectivity, developed some eighty years later by Jessica Benjamin. Intersubjectivity implies a relationship between the sexes built on equality rather than on domination versus subordination. Whereas, according to Benjamin, “the intrapsychic mode operates at the level of subject-object experience,” in “the intersubjective mode ... both woman and man can be subject” (Benjamin 986, 93). Austrian feminist Mayreder developed more extensive thoughts on intersubjectivity in her theoretical writings, which I discuss later in this chapter.

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Szikra

In the same year Gyulané Huzella expressed very similar ideas in her article “A szerelem válsága” (“Love’s Crisis”). She considers women’s economic equality the first step toward happier relations between the sexes. With women’s intellectual development, a new form of femininity would come about that would bring women out of an existence solely defined by erotics. Huzella uses a metaphor to explain women’s lack of cultural contributions due to their neglected intellectual abilities: she compares the woman who is only defined by erotics to an instrument with only one chord. Huzella also believes, like Szikra, that a new relationship would become possible between women and men, for “men would get used to regarding them firstly as human beings and only secondly as women” (Huzella 90, 279). The crisis of marriage and criticism of the existing marriage practices were often addressed in both Hungarian and Austrian feminist writings. Marriage as an institution, however, was not challenged by either women’s movement, which can be interpreted as the presence of a very strong bourgeois ideal of gender relations. However, one also must keep in mind that

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the success of the movement would have been seriously undermined had the feminists openly professed a destruction of what was, still unquestionably, considered the foundation of family and society. Thus the reproach of conservatism that has been made against the bourgeois women’s movement does not really stand, as this has been stated by several scholars (e.g., Stoehr 983; Meyer-Renschhausen 985 and 984). Schwimmer focuses on what she defines as the crisis of marriage: “In front of our eyes, we can increasingly discern a sickly deconstruction of human marriages” (Schwimmer 905a, 5). She criticizes the institution of marriage for what she openly calls the “marriage market,” for its foundation in economic interest, not love, and the ensuing “fishing” methods young women must apply to attract a good candidate. Schwimmer defends those women who are attacked for refusing to enter such relationships. The light in which such women are presented, namely, as man-haters, is entirely wrong and misleading, because these women “value marriage and men infinitely more ... only they both have to respond to our highest ideals and our highest requirements” (Schwimmer 905a, 7). Parallel to her elevation of marriage standards, Schwimmer defends marriage as a highly recommended, indeed, ideal relationship between a woman and a man. In this respect, she comes close to Austrian feminists, particularly Troll-Borostyáni and Mayreder, who both express similar ideas rooted in a romantic ideal of love. The foundation of marriage in economic interests rather than love was also attacked by Wilhelm. She even equates such marriages with prostitution (Wilhelm 908, 9–20), as young women are reduced to a commodity for sale. Although she, like her fellow feminists, defends marriage as a desirable form of relationship between women and men, she adds another element, which we also find in the writings of Austrian feminists: the importance of mutual attraction and free choice. She includes other factors that would contribute to a liberalization of the institution of marriage, namely, women’s full economic independence and easy access to divorce. She sees in such changes to the existing marriage practices an important step toward the abolition of prostitution. The eradication of the latter was a point on which Hungarian and Austrian feminists also agree. Yet what makes Wilhelm’s essay the most radical among comparable fin-de-siècle Hungarian feminist texts is her focus on sexuality. As mentioned earlier, Wilhelm demanded sexual education as part of a reformed school curriculum, which was a position of the FE . She believed that sexual education would promote women’s liberation, as it would enlighten girls regarding unwanted pregnancies and contraception – and

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she suggests teaching the Malthusian birth control methods. Yet what Wilhelm attacks most is the double standard regarding sexuality: “What counts as sin for the woman is considered a virtue for the man, although we are faced with an act that one party cannot commit without the other” (Wilhelm 908, 22). When reflecting on the consequences of such a double standard, particularly young women’s restrained and repressed sexuality, Wilhelm shows familiarity with psychoanalysis. She suggests that this repression may be the cause of the lack of great intellectual and cultural contributions by women throughout history. By releasing this energy potential, “conscious desire for productive activity which represents independent, practical and general values” (Wilhelm 908, 26) would awaken in women. This connection between a free and happy sexuality and intellectual and artistic productivity was also made by the Austrian Meisel-Hess. It is remarkable that, in a period dominated by Freud’s often misogynistic ideas on sexuality, female authors constructed their own theories, which incorporated some aspects of his theories yet challenged others.¹³ The right to premarital sex for both sexes is an important step to achieve happy and healthy sexual relations and also to fight prostitution, which Wilhelm sees as a direct outcome of the moral double standard. She also demands full legal recognition of illegitimate children. Wilhelm’s text condenses the most important ideas on sexuality represented by the more radical wing of the FE . Discussion of the topic in Austrian feminist texts

The abolition of prostitution and a reform of marriage were key points in both the Hungarian and Austrian women’s movements. However, there are some nuanced differences in Hungarian and Austrian feminism on these points. In Die Verbrechen der Liebe (Love’s Crimes, 896), Troll-Borostyáni sharply attacks the existing marriage standards. Like Wilhelm, she considers bourgeois marriage a form of prostitution and marriage without love and free choice a “violation,” but she adds another dimension, namely, that it is also a major cause of “physical and psychological degeneration” (Troll-Borostyáni 896, 26). Such views speak of an internally persuasive discourse based on eugenics, an aspect missing in Wilhelm. On the other hand, Troll-Borostyáni shares Wilhelm’s views regarding illegitimate children and prostitution when she demands sharing of responsibility for illegitimate children on the part of the father. As for prostitution, she rejects it altogether, also on eugenic grounds.

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Troll-Borostyáni considers equality between the sexes a first and major step toward a thorough reform of sexual relationships in society. The other important points she stresses are free and easy access to divorce, as well as a complete reform of the educational system. Troll-Borostyáni’s ultimate goal was to achieve a regulation of sexuality as the foundation of a healthy culture; she even suggests concrete measures as to how to moderate one’s sex drive through changes in diet and sports (Troll-Borostyáni 896, 7). Thus, long before Freud developed his theory about the sublimation of drives as the basis of cultural development and progress, Troll-Borostyáni expressed similar ideas, although with different conclusions regarding women’s place. Rather than looking at women and sexuality as a hindrance to the development of civilization, she believed that the bourgeois morality and its double standards must change. Whereas Troll-Borostyáni suggests a remodelling of the existing moral norms via legal and lifestyle changes, the way to a new morality, according to Else Jerusalem-Kotányi, lay in a reclaiming of women’s power over their daughters’ upbringing. The author is known mostly for her fictional work, particularly her novel about the world of Viennese prostitution, Der heilige Skarabäus (The Sacred Scarab, 905). She is considerably less known as the author of a feminist essay from 902 with the title Gebt uns die Wahrheit! Ein Beitrag zu unsrer Erziehung zur Ehe (Give Us the Truth! A Contribution to Our Preparation for Marriage). Like many of her contemporaries, Jerusalem-Kotányi pinpoints women’s lack of education in sexual matters. She observes the contradiction that the opening of institutions of higher education has changed precious little in this area and contends that sexual mores have remained the same, with women’ bodies suffering the consequences. The topic of the body plays a very important role in this essay as well as in her fiction, distinguishing her from her contemporaries. Jerusalem-Kotányi attacks the hypocritical attitudes taken by families, society, and sanctioned reading materials in the upbringing of young women. She quotes the formulations of the moral double standard that are passed down from generation to generation like commandments, thus becoming an authoritative discourse; formulations such as “It isn’t appropriate” or “Because people will see it” (Jerusalem-Kotányi 902, 25). She offers a thorough analysis of the mechanisms of the moral double standard and the way its discourse is instilled in young women from early childhood on. The ultimate consequence for young women is a no-win situation: “If she stands upright, she finds no appraisal, is she sways, she finds no support, if she falls, she finds no mercy” (Jerusalem-Kotányi 902, 42). But

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young women’s lives not only suffer in terms of moral judgments regarding their behaviour or misbehaviour; the entire domain of the erotic becomes distorted because of the taboos of their upbringing. Jerusalem-Kotányi cites the upbringing of daughters by their mothers as one of the main mechanisms in the maintenance of the rules of morality. By affirming women’s participation and agency within patriarchy and in the perpetuation of its moral hypocrisy, she takes a non-victim position. She criticizes women for their lack of genuine support for each other, claiming that whatever support they offer each other, it gets distorted into pity, which only reconfirms the system’s values. Jerusalem-Kotányi cries out for a new morality that would create happy women from one generation to the next; one that would break with the marriage of convenience and, instead, base marriage on a free choice of partners founded in true attraction and enlightened sexuality, with happiness as the ultimate goal in women’s lives. Women’s happiness and sexual satisfaction were particularly emphasized by Meisel-Hess. The focus of her scrutiny is sexuality rather than love (although she talks about love as well); this is apparent from the title of her 909 book, Die sexuelle Krise (English translation as The Sexual Crisis, 97), but she examines these topics in other works as well, such as Die Bedeutung der Monogamie (The Meaning of Monogamy, 97). Meisel-Hess not only considers women’s sexual independence to be as important as their economic independence but also goes as far as to suggest that the fight for economic independence is only a stepping stone to what she considers the true goal of the women’s movement: liberated sexuality. Unlike some of her contemporaries, such as Mayreder or Troll-Borostyáni, who were strongly influenced by a romantic discourse on love, Meisel-Hess looks at sexuality and marriage in rather practical terms. The primary target of her criticism is the moral double standard. She offers an informed analysis of its origins, indicating her excellent education (she studied philosophy at the University of Vienna). This is apparent, for instance, when she examines Kant’s system of morality based on individual conscience and concludes that it is not sufficient for society to function. She regards both practical morality and religious commandments as necessary, and sees as their common element the demand for “the welfare of mankind, of future generations, of the race; and in the promotion of this welfare the most important factors are individual and racial hygiene” (Meisel-Hess 97b, 80). The requirements of “the duplex sexual morality” imposed on women, she contends, are a contradiction, for they do not apply to men as well: “If the question of hygiene, the question of venereal

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Grete Meisel-Hess

infection, were the dominant determinant in establishing the morality of our sexual life, the demand for preconjugal chastity would be far stronger as regards the husband than as regards the wife” (Meisel-Hess 97b, 8). Moreover, she considers the moral double standard inappropriate in times of women’s emancipation; since women have acquired economic independence, it is time for them to claim their right to sexual freedom as part of “their sexual human rights” and to fight against the “unnatural, cruel and ridiculous” social mores (Meisel-Hess 97a, xx). Meisel-Hess’s criticism of the moral double standard and of its sexual and social consequences does not stop there. She goes on to establish what she considers the worst outcome of a long tradition of this standard, namely, degenerate sexuality in men: “Sexual cripples are to-day in the majority” (Meisel-Hess 97b, 55). Women, on the other hand, because of their lesser exposure to sexual escapades and their confinement to the hearth, have, for the most part, maintained not only a healthier sexuality but also a more integrated personality. Meisel-Hess sees this as a great source of regeneration potential for men’s “crippled” state of being, as well as for society as a whole.

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Although the power of love is part of this potential, Meisel-Hess advises young women not to become too absorbed by love or to take it as their destiny but to be more flexible and strong, so as to be prepared to face the challenges a relationship may bring. One of the reasons behind this recommendation is that “degenerate” men, a category in which she includes most of her male contemporaries, are incapable of loving women, especially the “new women,” the intelligent and independent ones who are capable of enjoying life to the fullest: “But the seducer, the wooing seducer to joy, the man who makes it easy for a woman to give herself; one who, using the true art of love, can bring hours wherein life, love-intoxicated, becomes a festival of joy – such a man is not of our day” (Meisel-Hess 97b, 302). “Degenerate” men are no mates for such women and “new men” are still few and far between. Meisel-Hess therefore encourages women to re-direct their tenderness and emotional richness “into the channels of friendship, philanthropy, and even love of pets” (Meisel-Hess 97b, 292). All this does not mean that she recommends single life for women, quite the contrary; however, she warns them not to become involved in a relationship to the point of losing their independence and self-reliance. Although she defends marriage as the ultimate union between a woman and a man, Meisel-Hess sharply criticizes contemporaneous marriage practices and norms, such as older men marrying much younger women, as well as the general acceptance of polygamy. She borrows Freud’s concept of repression to support her critique of polygamy, which she believes implies constant lying and hiding on the man’s part, and which has a devastating effect on a person’s psyche and on one’s sexual relationship with one’s permanent partner (Meisel-Hess 97a, xv). She also finds polygamy biologically unjustified, whereas female polyandry is biologically much more defensible (Meisel-Hess 909, 2). Meisel-Hess sees monogamy as the condition for a “lively, happy, and aesthetic relationship” (Meisel-Hess 97a, x). Erotic happiness is not possible without monogamy. But, as does Jerusalem-Kotányi, she sees it based on a free choice of partners, something she also supports as a way to regenerate humanity (Meisel-Hess 909, 279). The discourse of eugenics, inspired mainly by Ernst Haeckel (Melander 992), is echoed here.¹⁴ MeiselHess constructs an internally persuasive discourse from the discourses of eugenics and socialism in her defence of the abolition of the (capitalistic) principle of inheriting property and the means of production to prevent biologically “inferior” individuals from triumphing over biologically superior ones merely because the latter may be born into economically less

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advantageous situations. Since eugenicists were, for the most part, against socialism and the implementation of social policies, but rather proclaimed a “natural” selection among human individuals, this use of the two ideologies together may seem puzzling at first. However, if we consider MeiselHess’s active involvement in the League for the Protection of Mothers (Bund für Mutterschutz)¹⁵ in Berlin, her position becomes clearer. The League supported the maintenance of the health of the race through a fight against existing sexual practices, particularly the moral double standard, along with the protection of unwed mothers. Thus we can see eugenics and socialist ideas merged. Meisel-Hess also modernizes the concept of the bourgeois ideal of marriage. She believes in marriage as a legal alliance that both women and men enter as mature individuals without considering it to be forever: “A union easily dissolved, but one entered into under official sanctions, would seem to be the form best adopted to satisfy the mental requirements of our own and ensuing generations” (Meisel-Hess 97b, 44). Although she does not oppose “illegitimate” forms of cohabitation, she does not recommend them, because she believes that they do not offer legal protection to women and children (for future practice, however, she suggests that this be changed). Moreover, at the present stage of human socio-psychological development, she does not see the necessary maturity in men or women for a “free” form of relationship. Therefore, she defends marriage as the ideal form of harmonious life for men, women, and children, but the option of separation should exist. The major reason for this, according to Meisel-Hess, is, again, a eugenic one: if a couple is not capable of producing healthy offspring together, both individuals should be given the chance to do so with other partners. Ideally, couples should enter a “trial marriage” (Probeehe) to test their compatibility before uniting in marriage. Children born during such a trial period should be considered legitimate. Regarding divorce, Meisel-Hess later expressed more conservative and contradictory views. While not recommending sublimation of one’s sexual instincts or the maintenance of a marriage that is not salvageable, she ultimately puts the burden of the marriage on women’s shoulders and defends the age-old idea of female suffering and forgiveness: “Remain in the situation, endure – hold out – no matter how difficult it may become” (MeiselHess 97a, 60). This opinion regarding marriage and divorce becomes more understandable when one looks at the divorce practices of the time and how they affected divorced women’s lives: “The divorced middle-class woman was excluded from society. This was exacerbated by her precarious

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financial situation which – unless she possessed some property – threatened her livelihood, especially if she was at fault for the divorce and the man had no obligation to pay her support payments” (Heindl 98, 68). Meisel-Hess considers a sexually satisfying relationship with a man of prime importance, particularly for women’s mental and emotional health; on this point, she refers to Freud (Meisel-Hess 909, 379). She contents that, whereas the moral double standard allows men to find alternative ways to satisfy their sexual needs before marriage, young women are condemned to sexual hunger and frustration due to the social stigma and vulnerability that extramarital sex carries for women. Because many women cannot find an adequate marriage partner, they either lead a completely asexual life or have occasional sexual adventures, which makes them fall into the category of what she calls the “rare woman” (die seltene Frau), whom she considers particularly prone to neurotic disturbances and hysteria. A good Freudian disciple, Meisel-Hess considers a happy sex life and erotic fulfillment essential not only for women’s mental and emotional health but – and here she goes beyond Freud – also for the development of their intellectual energies and the attainment of their social and economic equality. She explores these ideas in her fictional work as well, particularly in her novel Fanny Roth.¹⁶ For Meisel-Hess, the ultimate goal of the women’s movement is sexual liberation. She sees it as linked to women’s liberation from assuming the burden of motherhood in a relationship they have entered based on economics, not sexual attraction. Motherhood should be redefined according to the principle “that a woman should not be compelled to bear children to one upon whom she remains economically dependent” (Meisel-Hess 97b, 245). She sees motherhood as the right, desire, and biological necessity of every woman, particularly healthy and intelligent women. She invokes essentialist arguments, talking about the need for motherhood that every woman must satisfy if she is to maintain her happiness and sanity. According to Meisel-Hess, the women’s movement will have reached its goal once it recognizes the womb as the “centre of rights and order” (Meisel-Hess 909, 279), once the womb becomes both liberated and protected. These comments about the womb reflect Meisel-Hess’s active involvement in Helene Stöcker’s League for the Protection of Mothers (Bund für Mutterschutz). On the other hand, I also see here an attempt to posit a non-phallic paradigm of sexuality in an era dominated by Freud’s phallocentric model. Irmgard Roebling has already recognized in Meisel-Hess’s ideas on sexuality “a start, which, although perhaps in need of corrections and further development, explained female sexuality mainly based

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on its social making and strove toward a concept of female sexuality that would be independent of male thinking” (Roebling 989, 205). Although Meisel-Hess was influenced by Freud, she also criticized some of his concepts, such as the Oedipus complex, and his interpretation of dreams as an expression of repressed desires; she regarded the latter rather as an expression of repressed fears and an anticipation of future events, particularly menacing ones (Omran 999, 29). Interestingly, she does not explicitly criticize Freud’s biased opinions regarding female sexuality. Nevertheless, in her arguments about the womb “as the centre of rights and order” I see an implicit challenge to the Freudian phallocentric paradigm of sexuality and an attempt to establish a new sexual paradigm from a woman-centred perspective. Another important contribution to the feminist discourse on sexuality came from the pen of Rosa Mayreder. In 905 she published a first volume of her essays under the title Zur Kritik der Weiblichkeit (English translation as A Survey of the Woman Problem, 93); a sequel followed only in 923 as Geschlecht und Kultur (Sex and Culture). In these collections, Mayreder develops a theory of gender by subjecting prevailing ideals of femininity and masculinity to a highly informed and structured critique. She comments on the leading sexual-psychological writings of the day, by both male and female authors, and then goes on to develop, as part of her psychology of sexuality, her own typology of women. She distinguishes between two main types according to the degree to which they have developed, respectively, their sexuality or their intellect. The lowest level for her is the type of woman dominated by her drives. She divides this type into two groups. One group willingly submits to a superior will. Mayreder sees this group producing “weak, patient, gentle and tender wives” (Mayreder 93, 58). The other group comprises the egoistically frigid women who exhibit a greater independence by not being erotically dependent on a man. On the path towards this free feminine type, Mayreder sees the possibility of a combined type that pairs the desire for independence with the need for sexual subjugation, the result being a “dyscrasy of the feminine being” (Mayreder 93, 65). Mayreder sees this type represented among those contemporaries whose drives have not developed in step with their emancipatory strivings; she cites three examples of famous women in whom this dyscrasy has manifested itself: Mary Wollstonecraft; painter Marie Bashkirtzev; and mathematician Sonja Kovalevska. The highly developed, progressive category comprises women who are able to harmonize their erotic energy with personal freedom and who strive for their independence at any cost. While Mayreder asserts that it is idle to debate “which type of femi-

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Rosa Mayreder

ninity may be the real and genuine” (Mayreder 93, 7), her preference is quite clearly stated in the following: “But that woman who out of her own fulness of power desires to retain command of herself as a sexual being, and, true to an inner need, looks upon this personal right as the highest law of her life, that woman who, rather than be dependent, is content to toil – who would rather give up love than her right to choose for herself, must be regarded as a type of differentiated womanhood, regardless of the social position she may occupy” (Mayreder 93, 70). Mayreder’s typology of women could be accused of essentialism, for she defines her various types on the basis of either their physiology or their sexuality, or in terms of their capacity to harmonize their sexuality with their intellectual aspirations. However, in her introduction to A Survey of the Woman Problem, she makes it clear that she is aware of the dangers of a reductionist definition of the sexes: “While we are trying to explain masculinity and femininity in their contemporary aspects by means of original and primitive organic conditions, we are liable to overlook the fact that in many essential respects they are products of civilisation, and in

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no sense permanent, conclusive, or generally significant” (Mayreder 93, 6). These considerations show that Mayreder was, in some respects, ahead of the sexual psychology of her day and that she anticipated views on the social construction of sexual differences that only more recent feminist theory has elaborated on: “Social construction theory in the field of sexuality proposed an extremely outrageous idea. It suggested that one of the last remaining outposts in the ‘natural’ in our thinking was fluid and changeable, the product of human action and history rather than the invariant result of the body, biology or an innate sex drive” (Vance 989, 3). The constructionist side of Mayreder’s theories is even more apparent in her reflections on the philosophy of culture, where she analyses the gendered division of labour from the perspective of cultural history. At other points, however, she lapses into essentialist explanations. Much as she does with female types, Mayreder distinguishes between two basic types of masculinity: the primitive versus the differentiated. The primitive, warrior-like masculinity diminishes as civilization develops; Mayreder sees it as the vestige of a masculinity that originally resulted from the division of labour between the sexes. She notes the paradox that “through civilisation – which is almost entirely the work of masculine intelligence – man himself labours to bring about the destruction of his masculinity” (Mayreder 93, 94), an argument that supports Meisel-Hess’s theory of degenerate manhood, although the two authors differ in the way they view the roots of that degeneration. The struggle of many of her male contemporaries to retain atavistic forms of masculine behaviour is referred to with the catch-phrase “the mighty fist” (die starke Faust) and Mayreder considers it as being rendered obsolete by the emancipation of both women and modern youth. In the resulting reduction of the ethical and social superiority of the traditional pater familias, she sees room for a more extensive elaboration of a differentiated masculinity that, much like its higher female counterpart, entails a balance between sexuality and the intellectual sphere. In this sense, Mayreder sees no basic difference between women and men, since both are subject to social conditioning. Only a clinging to obsolete forms of masculine expressions, such as the cultivation of aggressive sexual impulses, continues to favour the social inequality of the sexes: “If men in general are reluctant to admit that under modern conditions of life they no longer differ from women fundamentally, but only in externals, and if they defend their callings obstinately against the incursion of women, it must be confessed, willingly or unwillingly, that the factor in them which resists this incursion is really that desire for distance which arises in the consciousness of sexual power” (Mayreder 93, 5).¹⁷

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From this, Mayreder derives her criticism of the moral double standard, which, while approving the expression of aggressive and dominating sexual impulses in the man, still demands that young unmarried women suppress their sexuality. However, she sees the centuries-long tradition of women’s moral upbringing giving them an advantage over their male contemporaries. Mayreder links the crisis of civilization, and its increasing onesidedness and over-emphasis on specialized productivity and knowledge (Pöder and Poppeler 986, 234) not, like Freud, to a “discontent” resulting from unsuccessful or incomplete sublimation, nor to the threat that women’s emancipation poses for masculinity (as was the opinion of misogynists), but rather to the lack of women’s involvement in public life: “Perhaps the appearance of woman as a social fellow-worker may create a change in that field where the one-sided masculine civilisation has failed” (Mayreder 93, 23). Mayreder’s criticism of gender divisions thus becomes one of culture and civilization at large, one that reaches into the mechanisms of how institutionalized knowledge is constructed and maintained through the exclusion of women and of what has been associated with the feminine. On the other hand, she may seem to restore women once again to their traditional bourgeois status as “schoolmaster of the male sex” (Mayreder 923, 82). Yet this process is no longer to be restricted to the confines of the traditional home; Mayreder envisions it unfolding instead among individuals interacting on an equal footing in public life, without one sex dominating the other. Women’s presence and impact on culture may then, ultimately, help bring about a shift in men as well, a shift that men, however, ought to perform themselves: “The man of intellect, however, will not develop into a harmonious and powerful being until his refinement shall extend to the sexual side of his nature. To be reborn in a new masculinity, he must do away with all the prejudices and weaknesses which belong to the primitive manhood, retaining only those elements which are inseparable from his nature as a man” (Mayreder 923, 23). Rather than falling back into the stereotypical bourgeois role of “schoolmasters of the male sex,” women would thus act more like role models to men. Much like Meisel-Hess, who thinks that, through their traditional cultural roles and sexual limitations, women of modernity, the “new women,” have maintained a more integrated sense of self and, therefore, possess an unspoilt vitality, Mayreder considers that the same traditional feminine virtues “have resulted in the refining and ennobling of sexual consciousness among women” (Mayreder 923, 22). This “self-mastery” not only gives them sexual superiority over men, but “places them above the newer form of manhood” altogether (Mayreder

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923, 23), which makes the urgency of an improvement in women’s social position all the more pertinent for global change. A variety of internally persuasive discourses are present in Mayreder’s ideas on love and relationships. Although she, unlike Troll-Borostyáni, opposes any interference by the state when it comes to sexuality, marriage, and parenting, she nevertheless defends the concept of a sublimation of the sexual drive in the name of love’s durability and relies on a person’s will to withstand any sexual temptations from others than the beloved. Although her arguments in defence of this thesis do not include any explicit rejection of divorce, they do imply a bourgeois ideal of marriage and, given her reference to human nature, are essentialist: “This can be explained partly by the fact that erotic attraction also happens between people who aren’t compatible and partly by human nature’s inconsistency and unreliability” (Mayreder 927, 45, emphasis added). Her critique of the crisis of marriage, on the other hand, is rooted in the concept of medieval “high love” as well as in a romantic androgynous ideal of a “melting of one’s being into an inseparable unity with the beloved” (Mayreder 927, 30). To attain such extraordinary standards in love, she believes that a high level of psychosocial development is required. As with the gradation of women and men in her psycho-sexual typology, only people who are at the highest degree of their personal development are capable of building such a love relationship; therefore, she strongly objects to using the word “love” when it refers to purely sexual feelings. A relationship between two people of opposite sexes is one based on equality; the “idea of perfection and completion in the person who loves is not brought about by the superiority of the beloved but rather by the condition of love” (Mayreder 927, 24). Thus, in love, the distinction of gender and the roles attached to it disappear, along with any objectification of the other; it is an experience of an “expansion of the male being over the female and of the female over the male” (Mayreder 929, 42), the result being a “transgression of the boundaries of the self” (Mayreder 927, 6). With these reflections, Mayreder anticipates elements of Jessica Benjamin’s concept of intersubjectivity: “The intersubjective mode ... assumes the paradox that in being with the other, I may experience the most profound sense of self” (Benjamin 986, 92). Intersubjectivity as a new paradigm for a relationship between individuals, especially between women and men, tries to overcome the timehonoured division of masculine and feminine spheres that has been superimposed on the polarized extremes of subject-object, active-passive, public-private, dominant-nurturing: “The intersubjective dimension ...

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refers to experience between and within individuals, rather than just within. It refers to the sense of self and other that evolves through the consciousness that separate minds can share the same feelings and intentions, through mutual recognition. Its viewpoint encompasses not simply what we take in from the outside but also what we bring to and develop through the interaction with others – our innate capacities for activity and receptivity toward the world” (Benjamin 988, 25, emphasis in the original). Benjamin sees in both sexes capacities for passivity and activity alike, which are lost in the course of childhood as a result of the way boys and girls identify with their parents, a process that unfolds according to the gender patterns that the parents continue to follow in the family and in society. For Benjamin, just as for Mayreder, change would have to take place on micro and macro levels alike. She sees the achievement of the intersubjective dimension as still more the exception than the rule in civilization’s current state of development, despite the increasing presence of women in public life. While Mayreder had initially hoped that a massive influx of women into the public sphere might bring about a fundamental change in society, Benjamin notes that the changes brought by the twentieth century have had little impact in that area: “It remains, in its practices and principles, ‘a man’s world’” (Benjamin 988, 87). In a prescient statement from 928, Mayreder also seems to have become somewhat disillusioned regarding the actual change in women’s place in society. She notes how little real progress had been achieved in the effort to reformulate gender roles in the context of real, practical life: “With the fulfillment of its practical demands, the women’s movement has lost its strongest weapon, and now its ideological demands find no resonance. Only when women will have come to see that social equality has done nothing to further even their material – let alone their ideological – interests, only then can a new women’s movement come into being” (Mayreder 928, 4). Benjamin published The Bonds of Love in 988, after the women’s movement had moved the battle lines forward, and she came to the conclusion that little had changed regarding the prevailing role models and the power relationships in the public and private spheres of the sexes. The Mayreder quotation of sixty years earlier, despite the change in contexts and some progress achieved, has lost little of its relevance.¹⁸ The implications of the above reflections by Austrian and Hungarian feminists regarding gender roles and sexual mores were multiple, from a re-definition of male-female relationships, particularly marriage, along with women’s right to sexual happiness, to re-evaluating motherhood and the cultural roles of women and men. The discourses that are shown as the most influential in shaping the texts discussed are socialist ideas, the

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bourgeois ideal of femininity, eugenics, psychoanalysis, and a romantic discourse, which define fin-de-siècle feminism as an intellectual product of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of the three major goals that the women’s movement fought for – education, suffrage, sexual reforms – the question of women’s education and professional independence and the criticism of the moral double standard and its implications found ample expression in women writers’ fiction, in both Austria and Hungary. The feminists and the women writers of the turn of the century seized the opportunity for communicative action toward women’s liberation. However, their raised voices were not unquestioned or wholeheartedly accepted, as the prevalence of misogynistic and antifeminist ideas during that period testifies.

333 Feminism, Misogyny, and Viriphobia and Their Dialogic Relationship

To better situate the position of the feminist discourse in fin-de-siècle intellectual life, an examination of the interaction between misogyny and feminism, with its sub-category, viriphobia, is of particular interest. Femininity and masculinity were among the most debated topics in finde-siècle literature and culture and, as such, were linked to a more general discussion relating to a cultural crisis. Doctors, theologists, philosophers, ethnologists, writers, and feminists all participated in the debate. Traditionally, women had been used as “projection surfaces” (Fischer 997, 2) for the male imagination in literature and art. The turn of the century was no exception in this regard; what was new, however, was that now, with the organized women’s movement, women actively and openly took part on a larger scale in the debate surrounding concepts of femininity and masculinity, and projected their own ideas and desires onto men, while reflecting on the female condition. They did so in both their essays and their fiction. This effort by female authors to reject the dominant definitions of gender and to formulate their own was, understandably, a challenge to the prevalent attitude of many a male intellectual. It resulted in a lively controversy around male and female roles within the context of cultural renewal, with clashing visions of the attribution of power to one sex or the other. A dialogic relationship, which implies conflicting values and interests, can therefore be established between the three main voices – misogyny, feminism, and viriphobia, the hatred of men – that participated in this debate. The gender roles and norms of the turn of the century can be traced back to the Enlightenment, when a dualistic model of gender, manifesting in the separate spheres theory and the attribution of qualities such as active and

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rational to men versus passive and emotional to women, was postulated. Regarding sexuality, this model resulted in a perception of male sexuality as stronger and more aggressive, yet controllable, and of female sexuality as more animal and infantile, labelled “uncivilized” and, at times, “frigid” (Bruns 997, 222–3). This model implies a contradictory attitude to female sexuality that reached its apogee around the turn of the century: one group, represented by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Cesare Lombroso, and Paul Julius Möbius, among others, “held the female to be naturally frigid”; the other “maintained that the carnal desire of the female is much greater than that of the male” (Angerer 996, 90). Otto Weininger can certainly be considered the major representative of the latter. Both views imply a misogynistic attitude to women. According to Philip Rieff, two misogynistic positions surfaced in the nineteenth century: one idealized women as quasi asexual beings, thereby basically positing their sexual deficiency; the other misogynistic attitude “is based on the intellectual deficiency of women: the childbearing female represents the natural heritage of humanity, while the male carries on in spite of her enticements the burden of government and rational thought” (Rieff 973, 82–3, quoted in Jušek 996, 36; emphasis in the original). I argue not only that the two often intersect, as we will see in Möbius, but also that the first position led to theories in defence of the moral double standard, such as in Bachofen, Morgan, and Engels. According to these theories, women, unlike men, have throughout history “naturally” demonstrated a tendency against promiscuity and, consequently, towards higher moral standards – an argument used to defend men’s “natural” polygamous drive versus women’s monogamy. Fin-de-siècle feminists use some elements of these theories in their criticism of the moral double standard and in their defence against misogynistic attacks. Although misogyny, “an unreasonable fear or hatred of women” (Gilmore 200, 9), has a far-reaching tradition in Western philosophy and thought (going as far back as Plato and Aristotle and echoing all the way into the nineteenth century, with the most famous examples being Schopenhauer and Nietzsche),¹ misogynistic discourse saw an upsurge around the turn of the century.² Jacques le Rider goes so far as to compare this period to the time of the witch hunts and the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum, that evil “textbook” of the Inquisition, and he calls the two most blatant misogynists, Otto Weininger (an author difficult to classify) and German psychiatrist Paul Möbius, the “most notorious great inquisitors of modernity” (Le Rider 985, 78). Possible explanations for this phenomenon may lie in the advent of a strong, organized, and vocal women’s movement. Fin-de-siècle feminism,

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as both a movement and a discourse, achieved, as we have seen, improvements in the areas of women’s education, paid work, and political rights, while providing important insights into the cultural constitution of gender and the inequality between the sexes. These insights, whether acknowledged or not by misogynistic authors such as Weininger and Möbius, nevertheless elicited a dialogic response from those same authors. As Dale Bauer, summarizing some of Bakhtin’s ideas from Discourse in the Novel, states: “No voice can resist the other voices which influence it; no voice can be purely ‘monologic’” (Bauer 988, 66). From Austria, I use the writings of Mayreder, Troll-Borostyáni, and Meisel-Hess as examples for the feminist voice in this “battle among voices,” which came about as a result of women abandoning the role of “bearers of meaning” for that of “makers of meaning,” thus “threatening ... the disciplinary culture” (Bauer 988, 3). In Hungary, the authors participating in the misogynistic-feminist dialogic debate are (other than Weininger, whose writings were also known in Hungary) Imre Madách and Zoltán Szász, on the one hand, and Veres, Margit Kaffka, Renée Erdős, and Percelné Flóra Kozma, on the other. The third voice in the gender debate, in addition to those of misogyny and feminism, is that of viriphobia (a neologism introduced by Gilmore). Viriphobia is the hatred of men; it regards “the human male as constitutionally evil” (Gilmore 200, 2).³ Whereas misogyny had a long tradition on which to build, viriphobia was a new phenomenon that emerged in finde-siècle Austria and to a certain degree in Hungary, and was developed in the writings of Helene von Druskowitz, particularly in Pessimistische Kardinalsätze (Pessimistic Axioms), first published in 905. The title of one of its chapters, “Der Mann als logische und sittliche Unmöglichkeit und als Fluch der Welt” (“Man as a Logical and Moral Impossibility and a Curse to the World”) clearly indicates its viriphobic tone. The texts of Elsa Asenijeff, in particular Aufruhr der Weiber und das dritte Geschlecht (Women’s Riot and the Third Sex, 898) and Tagebuchblätter einer Emancipierten (Pages from the Diary of an Emancipated Woman, 902), disclose similar ideas. In Hungary, some viriphobic ideas can be found in Renée Erdős’s novel A nagy sikoly (The Big Scream, 922). Viriphobia has been largely ignored in the intellectual landscape of the fin de siècle. Even though, at the time of their publication, feminist and viriphobic texts may have enjoyed a fairly positive reception, there is no doubt that misogynistic texts have exerted the most influence and power and have occupied a prominent place in literary history: “Since 903, there have been fifty editions of this book [Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter], the latest published in 980. Mayreder’s Kritik der Weiblichkeit, on the other hand, has had three editions, the last of which appeared in 922” (Reiss 984, 23).⁴

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According to Bakhtin, heteroglossia necessarily exists between different socio-ideological groups (Bakhtin 98, 29). Given their different interests and intentions, the voices may often compete with each other, forming a dialogic relationship that implies tension and struggle. An important element of a dialogic relationship is that it is influenced by opposing values, interests, and desires (Hirschkop and Shepherd 989, ). Adding a gender dimension to Bakhtin’s theories, Bauer has pointed out that the dialogic process in which women’s voices have been marginalized or simply ignored cannot be considered gender-neutral. Yet she stresses that despite this silencing, women’s voices “still interanimate the male voices which remain as the socially dominant ones” (Bauer 988, 66). Feminism, and particularly viriphobia, can therefore be considered to be “socially unequal” and to engage in a “dialogic interaction in which the prestige languages try to extend their control and subordinated languages try to avoid, negotiate, or subvert that control” (White 994, quoted in Vice 997, 9). By reintegrating the neglected feminist and viriphobic voices into the fin-de-siècle discussion about gender, I will establish a gender heteroglossia, an intertwining of misogyny, feminism, and viriphobia.⁵ I will also demonstrate a dialogic relationship between the different voices in the selected texts. In some cases this relationship results from a direct response to another text. In others no direct response is evident, but rather merely arguments representative of the ideology⁶ from which the voices spring. The latter instances, however, may also be read dialogically, as every utterance can be considered as interacting with others, “a process in which they oppose or dialogically interanimate each other” (Bauer 988, 354). The starting point from which the three voices depart is a reaction to the cultural crisis, which they tackle differently and for which they offer various solutions, with the argument of biology versus the social formation of gender dominating the debate. The misogynists focus on the danger of culture’s “feminization,” the feminists express the desire to integrate the feminine and ultimately unite it with the masculine, and the viriphobic authors seek female self-determination and, ultimately, separation. The attempt to maintain control over the emerging feminist discourse is clearly present both in Möbius’s Über den physiologischen Schwachsinn des Weibes (On Woman’s Physiological Insanity, 907) and in Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character, 903). Both Möbius and Weininger⁷ use strong anti-feminist arguments to support the maintenance of social inequality between the sexes and traditional gender roles, while relying on essentialist arguments regarding woman’s allegedly natural subordination to man. The use of the generic “woman” (das Weib) to designate all womankind already suggests an essentialist confirmation of a

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patriarchal ideology. Möbius underscores his statements by quoting scientific “evidence,” that is, by attributing relevance only to those sources that are derogatory of the female sex and ridiculing those that might undermine his arguments, thereby giving greater weight to the misogynistic voice. He ascribes woman’s “natural” lower status to the physiology of the female brain: some contemporaneous research had shown not only that a woman’s brain was smaller than a man’s but also that it was, supposedly, less developed in those parts most important for mental activity.⁸ Möbius concludes that all “natural” characteristics of woman – being driven by instincts; a propensity for lying, stealing, and gossiping; and an inability to realize great spiritual or artistic accomplishments – justify male superiority in every type of activity, even those traditionally performed by women, such as cooking and weaving. Möbius not only denies women’s achievements throughout history but also claims that a woman’s intellectual activity has an adverse effect on her biological function of childbearing. For all these reasons, and as a remedy against cultural decadence and racial degradation, Möbius concludes that woman should be allowed but one function in social life, to be a mother and an educator of her children: “Nature wants motherly love and faithfulness from a woman ... That’s why woman is childish, jovial, patient and simple-spirited” (Möbius 907, 24). The allpervasive quality of the misogynistic ideology in Möbius’s text reaches absurdity when the author claims to be a friend of the female sex, whom he wants to save from the “unnatural” efforts of the feminists. Möbius inserts a direct reference to feminism, so as to ridicule feminist arguments and prove his point about women’s intellectual inferiority. According to him, feminists claim “that women have only lacked practice, that they have been, like the African blacks, made slaves by muscular men and in this slavery their brain has atrophied” (Möbius 907, 2). This is not the only reference to feminism. Later on, Möbius formulates a direct attack against the feminists’ goal of promoting women’s higher education and their professional equality by suggesting tearing down all secondary schools for girls (Möbius 907, 4). To give more weight to his anti-feminist reasoning, Möbius even includes a critique of several feminist texts by contemporaneous writers, such as the now feminist classic Women and Economics by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Stetson), only to fall back, again and again, into his misogynistic reasoning. This dialogic response supports those views that see in the emergence of the women’s movement one possible explanation for the existence of a strong misogynistic discourse at the turn of the century. As Chandak Sengoopta has convincingly demonstrated, “both the crisis of masculine identity and the feminist movement

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simultaneously affected the consciousness of male intellectuals” at the turn of the century (Sengoopta 996, 02, emphasis in the original).⁹ The interaction between misogyny and feminism and the consequent clash of ideologies is furthered in Mayreder’s response to Möbius in Zur Kritik der Weiblichkeit (A Survey of the Woman Problem). Mayreder’s essay, which includes a discussion of both Möbius and Weininger, constitutes an important part of the feminist voice in fin-de-siècle gender heteroglossia. Her response to Möbius is directed in particular against his essentialism, which places woman in a subordinate position in society: “He conceives of woman as a mere elemental creature, and sees her only in the perspective of her maternal calling. But it is impossible in any highly developed state of society to regard man and woman as mere elemental beings unless we also regard all civilization as futile or as a process of degeneration” (Mayreder 93, 48). Opposing Möbius’s essentialism, Mayreder supports her arguments with ideas about the cultural construction of gender. She sees civilization rather than women’s nature as the main hindrance to cultural development: “Civilization, being almost entirely a product of man, shows in such results as these that it is based chiefly upon his own needs and requirements” (Mayreder 93, 5). It is the level of cultural development, or rather the lack of it, that prevents both women and men from realizing their full potential. A highly evolved civilization would not only be contingent on women’s equal participation in work outside of their traditionally defined sphere but also require women’s full involvement in cultural work. Mayreder’s position reflects the ideas of the bourgeois women’s movement in the broader German cultural context. They targeted the generally accepted image of the German woman as passive, compliant, and focused only on the well-being of her husband and children.¹⁰ In both Germany and Austria, feminists such as Mayreder sought to mobilize women’s potential, which they saw repressed in a patriarchal-industrial culture, and to foster a new ideal of femininity. Unlike Möbius, for whom all progress comes from men and the exclusion of women from the public sphere is the condition for a healthy society, feminists attribute to women the power to regenerate society by stepping out of their traditional roles, while maintaining their differences. Mayreder, unlike Möbius, does not see motherhood as women’s sole raison d’être; she considers motherhood and professional fulfillment as mutually compatible categories, something Weininger denies even more strongly than does Möbius. Weininger, just like Möbius, completely ignores or repudiates the existence of women’s historical and cultural oppression. Moreover, he repeatedly falls into the trap of errors of logic in his contentions (Brude-Firnau

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979). Other critics have also noted the confusion in language and terminology (such as Freud’s Hungarian student Ferenczi, quoted in Kerekes 2005, 7). In the introduction to Geschlecht und Charakter, Weininger states that while his only aim is to establish a sexual typology of W versus M, these types should not be equated with either the female or the male sex: “we may suppose the existence of an ideal man, M, and of an ideal woman, W, as sexual types, although these types do not actually exist” (Weininger 975, 7). But, particularly in the second part of his book, Weininger does precisely what he pretends not to do: he makes extensive use of essentialist arguments and gender stereotypes to support his misogynistic ideology. In his essentialism, he, like Möbius, also overlooks the impact of social factors on the formation of character and aspects of behaviour; thus, he ascribes women writers’ use of male pseudonyms to their desire to be male, rather than examining the position of writing women in society. In his hatred of the female sex, Weininger is even more radical than Möbius. For him, woman is to be considered not as physiologically insane, but as a complete non-entity. He goes as far as to justify physical abuse by woman’s desire for it: “If he is going to treat her as she wishes, he must have intercourse with her, for she desires it; he must beat her, for she likes to be hurt; he must hypnotise her, since she wishes to be hypnotised; he must prove to her by his attentions how little he thinks of himself, for she likes compliments, and has no desire to be respected for herself” (Weininger 975, 337). Throughout the text woman becomes the carrier of the purely sexually defined W and of total negativity in every respect, be it moral, philosophical, or metaphysical: woman has no character, no logic, no genius, no soul, not even physical beauty. This definition of woman by negativity is nothing new per se; as Rosi Braidotti has pointed out, “misogyny ... is a logical step in the process of constructing male identity in opposition to – that is to say, rejection of – Woman” (Braidotti 994, 235). Yet, as Jessica Benjamin has suggested, “exclusion is an illusion” (Benjamin 998, 02), as the abject other remains present in the dialogic dimension. In Weininger’s system, the equation of woman with mere sexuality or, rather, reproductive functions results in the centuries-old binary opposition of the mother (Madonna) and the prostitute. For him, all intellectually and artistically inclined women belong to the latter category. This opposition becomes the grounds on which he dismisses the women’s movement and its claims, which he interprets – wrongly – as “merely a desire to be ‘free,’ to shake off the trammels of motherhood; as a whole the practical results show that it is revolt from motherhood towards prostitution” (Weininger

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975, 332). This statement proves Weininger’s familiarity with feminist texts and thus the dialogic nature of his treatise. However, it also shows his complete misreading of the goals of the women’s movement, which not only valued motherhood highly, but, also, as part of a platform for cultural renewal, fought against prostitution and other social evils such as alcoholism and, later, war. This misinterpretation of the meaning of emancipation is also evident in Weininger’s statement that emancipation “is not the wish for an outward equality with men,” but rather woman’s desire to become like man and to acquire his character (Weininger 975, 65). Austrian (and Hungarian) feminists, on the other hand, repeatedly stressed the opposite, namely, that they were seeking equality, while maintaining their differences as a basis from which to regenerate culture and society, thus merging equality and difference in their definition of feminism. In his conclusion, Weininger seems to want to supersede “woman” by saying that both woman and man should give way to a third, bisexual entity. However, this conclusion does not hold. First, how could a being whose humanity the author questions by asking “is she then human, or an animal, or a plant” (290) suddenly turn into something beyond herself; second, why would anything as “perfect” as man stop existing only for the sake of serving as woman’s redeemer? Mayreder was among the first to observe these incongruities in Weininger’s text. After a due recognition of Weininger’s initial hypothesis regarding an innate bisexuality in both sexes, she presents the clash in logic between the first and second parts of Geschlecht und Charakter. She not only criticizes the equation of the “mere abstraction of woman” (Mayreder 93, 23) with women in general but also deconstructs Weininger’s strict separation of the sexes according to preconceived binary oppositions. She extends her criticism of Weininger to one of essentialism in general by concluding that “the problem of sexual psychology remains insoluble so long as the sexual antithesis is regarded as an essential separation and a radical difference, permeating the whole constitution as well as the psychic personality” (Mayreder 93, 24). Like Le Rider some eighty years later, Mayreder draws a parallel between Weininger and the Malleus Malleficarum and mentions “a specific psycho-sexual condition as their common source of origin, unchanged by the passage of the centuries” (Mayreder 93, 29). In Geschlecht und Kultur (Sex and Culture), Mayreder expands this reflection on possible sources for such a deep hatred for the female sex. She identifies a gap that had opened in the Western world since early Christianity and had continued to influence modern misogynists such as Schopenhauer and

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Weininger: the gap between the intellect and sexuality. This gap results, especially in Weininger’s case, in an abhorrence of sexuality and of women, whom he saw as the incarnation of sexuality (Mayreder 923, 40–2). Weininger’s book elicited a much more extensive reaction on the part of Meisel-Hess. Her book-length study Weiberhaß und Weiberverachtung (Hatred and Despisal of Women, 904) was a direct response to Geschlecht und Charakter. The dialogic aspect of this text, published one year after Weininger’s suicide in 903, is underlined by the author herself in the introduction: “This polemic is not directed against the dead man – but against the book, which is alive” (Meisel-Hess 904, 4). Ellinor Melander has pointed out that, although the two authors were of the same age and both studied philosophy at the University of Vienna, it is “questionable whether they personally knew each other” (Melander 992, 697). As to whether Weininger was familiar with Meisel-Hess’s writings, Melander refers to Weininger’s biographer Emil Lucka who claims this to be the case. Helga Thorson confirms Melander’s findings when she states that, according to Lucka, “Otto Weininger was familiar with much contemporary literature by women, including the work of Meisel-Hess” (Thorson 2000, 76). Weininger could have been familiar with Meisel-Hess’s novel Fanny Roth (902) and two smaller essays published in 900 and 90 respectively, Generationen und ihre Bildner (Generations and Their Formation) and In der modernen Weltanschauung (In the Modern Weltanschauung), but her major theoretical texts were published after Weininger’s suicide. Like Mayreder, Meisel-Hess also speaks out against the logical inconsistencies in Weininger’s text. She also finds them “filled with an almost wild hatred against everything natural and sexual” (Meisel-Hess 904, 46). Her arguments in defence of women’s emancipation stand in contrast to what the misogynists feared, namely that women strived to become like men. To the contrary, says Meisel-Hess, the woman question is a social one, inspired by economic necessity. Women’s desire to marry, which Weininger relates to their lower, sexually defined “nature,” is for Meisel-Hess the outcome of an upbringing that segregates the sexes from early childhood under the influence of the double moral and economic standard. Therefore, socialization, not nature, is the main cause for the different roles women and men take on in later life: “What in man was fostered as his self-evident duty, to achieve a position and importance in the world, did not even come up as a reflection in female education of the past centuries” (Meisel-Hess 904, 2). Meisel-Hess sees the lack of an equal education, not the lack of an innate talent, as the major cause for women’s achievements lagging behind those of men. Here she also takes a dialogic stand against Möbius, who strongly

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argues against women’s access to better education. Meisel-Hess considers women as, at least, men’s equals in professional and intellectual life. Her examples to support this claim include women of antiquity and of the Middle Ages. Her statement that women are more contemplative by nature and, therefore, more suitable for philosophy is essentialist in itself, yet it is an essentialism used to affirm women’s value and abilities, not to suppress them and, as such, stands in a dialogic relation to the essentialism found in the misogynistic discourse. Meisel-Hess’s arguments in favour of improvements in women’s education and work opportunities as one of the principal sources of social change and cultural renewal reflect a major goal of the women’s movement and can, therefore, be found, though with a slightly different focus, in Mayreder’s and Troll-Borostyáni’s texts as well. Both Mayreder and Troll-Borostyáni offer a lucid analysis of the cultural constitution of femininity, which subverts the misogynists’ essentialist arguments about female “nature” and their attribution of “appropriate” social roles in which the patriarchal power structures remain intact. TrollBorostyáni aptly calls the education of middle-class girls a “distortion,” for keeping them in a position of economic dependency and perpetual immaturity, i.e., where misogynists believe women “naturally” belong. However, she does not plead for just any kind of economic independence for women. She does not see liberation from this kind of captivity in the socially accepted female occupations of teacher or governess, which offered young women a rather dull existence. Women should be allowed to attend universities and develop their intellectual abilities on an equal basis with men. Troll-Borostyáni detects an underlying economic motivation in defenders of women’s suitability for certain traditional professions, such as that of nurse, as opposed to more prestigious ones, such as that of doctor with its alleged physical challenges for women: “Were it possible to make the profession of nurse a better paid one, the opponents of female doctors wouldn’t hesitate in the least to revert their opinions to the contrary” (Troll-Borostyáni 994, 0). Although Troll-Borostyáni originally published her book Die Mission unseres Jahrhunderts in 878 (probably as a reaction to one of Möbius’s inspirational sources, Theodor L.W. Bischoff’s Das Studium und die Ausübung der Medizin durch Frauen [Women’s University Education and the Practice of Medicine, 872]), its relevance and dialogic potential had not faded more than two decades later, as it brings up the issue of sharing economic power through a dialogic tension between the different interests inherent in the misogynistic and feminist voices. Möbius clearly states that women’s entry into the public workforce would

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make them less interested in marriage (Möbius 907, 40) and Weininger wants women to “be kept from having a share in anything which concerns the public welfare, as it is much to be feared that the mere effect of female influence would be harmful” (Weininger 975, 339). The misogynistic voice thus camouflages an underlying interest in keeping women in an economically dependent position, which is challenged by the feminists. What both voices are ultimately concerned with is a regeneration of culture and society; however, the roads to that renewal are designed in keeping with opposing interests. Misogynists believe that confining women to their traditional roles and banning them from the public sphere is the way to cure all social evils. Feminists see the root of cultural degeneration in this segregation into private versus public social roles; they formulate the need for women’s broader inclusion into the public domain if culture and society are to be saved from decline. According to Mayreder, women’s entry into the male professions would allow them to balance out what she calls “the male character in modern civilization” (Mayreder 923, 27). She traces all the negative aspects of technological development to the suppression in the public domain of the values that have been culturally inculcated in the female sex as a historically acquired condition. Here, again, she opposes the essentialism of Weininger and Möbius, who both advocated the exclusion of women from the public sphere as a necessary condition for progress. According to Mayreder, women’s different attributes should be appropriately acknowledged and applied to solving the crisis of contemporary culture. She predicates her vision of a new culture on a suggestion for altering gender-specific power structures. By allowing women to enter the public sphere, not by further excluding them, as the misogynists wish to do, culture could be redeemed from its degeneracy. As a result of the very qualities deemed inferior by the misogynists, women have the power not only to become men’s teachers and spiritual leaders but also to make modern life more receptive to their own needs. Only when women will have regained in public life their position as keepers of culture will the lost balance of productivity and receptivity be restored. Although not in as much detail as Mayreder, Meisel-Hess expresses similar ideas in Die sexuelle Krise (The Sexual Crisis). The author’s ideas on love seem, at first, surprisingly traditional and rather incongruous with her emancipatory strivings. She contends that the only area where women can unfold their full potential, their genius, is love, and she adds: “In women it is only this genius of the heart which is comparable to the genius of the intellect in the male, in the degrees in which the latter in certain types

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attains to its loftiest altitudes” (Meisel-Hess 97b, 5). This statement may be read in a dialogic relationship to Weininger’s contention about genius, which he saw as a unique property of men and completely lacking in women (Weininger 975, 24). Meisel-Hess acknowledges that women also have genius even though she does not locate it at the same level as in men. Her argument reiterates the binary opposition between man as the carrier of intellect and woman as the carrier of emotions, thus ultimately confirming a bourgeois-patriarchal definition of gender. Her argument may also be read as echoing the bourgeois ideal of femininity, of women’s confinement to the hearth. While Meisel-Hess, unlike Weininger, does acknowledge the importance of women’s contributions to art and science, she regards these as springing from the emotions, not from the intellect. If, however, we look deeper at her justification of these ideas, we see a proximity to Mayreder and even Druskowitz (as shall be later elaborated), when she talks about women’s “priesthood.” Women, according to these authors, have maintained, unlike men, a more complete quality of humanity and vitality precisely because of their oppression under patriarchy; they have remained unspoilt by sexual escapades (which have been the “privilege” of the male sex) and by the existential fight to which men have been exposed throughout history. Therefore, women have a mission to redeem men (not the other way around as Weininger states), and, ultimately, culture as a whole. The ultimate goal is the creation of a new morality and a new economic reality in which women would participate on an equal basis by maximizing their qualities acquired through the centuries. Weininger’s work soon became translated and well-known in Hungary as well.¹¹ However, before considering the Hungarian responses to Weininger, I would like to discuss an earlier example of a Hungarian dialogic clash between a misogynist and a feminist, namely, the one between Imre Madách and Pálné Veres. Madách, a distinguished Hungarian playwright, wrote one of the most famous Hungarian misogynistic attacks back in 864. Because of its typically Hungarian tone of misogyny, I would like to briefly discuss it here, even though it falls into the period of the first wave of Hungarian feminism. In his inaugural address to the Hungarian Academy of Science, “A nőről, különösen esztétikai szempontból” (“On Woman, Particularly From an Aesthetic Point of View”), Madách takes a misogynistic position that denigrates women’s intellectual abilities. Moreover, through his idealization of women in their traditional roles, Madách is a good example of “how it is possible to completely put down the female sex by extolling it” (Acsády 996, 460). Madách also supports his opinion about women’s lower intel-

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lectual abilities with arguments, similar to those in Bischoff’s Hirnbeweis (upon which Möbius had based his views), originated by a Hungarian physician, István Almási Balogh, to the effect that “women, due to their biological condition, aren’t capable of rising to the higher spheres of reason” (Acsády 996, 459). Madách adds some essentialist thoughts regarding women’s physical constitution to conclude that woman “thinks with her heart,” lacks a real genius, and “never made an important contribution to art or science” (Madách 999, 307). Because of her lower intellectual abilities, woman is an infantile creature in need of protection. But given that she is “love’s incarnation,” woman is the centre of family life. Using very poetic language, Madách idealizes women’s role as mothers and keepers of the hearth and its importance in preventing their moral degradation, which would inevitably occur if “she wanted to analyse, through reasoning, things that she merely ought to feel” (Madách 999, 308). He acknowledges that some exceptional women may be capable of transcending their own sex and reaching unusual spiritual heights. However, they must pay a high price and renounce all “advantages” of their sex. This idea and, ultimately, the fear of the “masculine woman” foreshadow later misogynistic thought found in Weininger. On the basis of his formulation of such fundamental differences between the sexes, Madách strongly opposes women’s emancipation and their equality with men in society. As a typical representative of a literary tradition with a dualistic representation of “woman,” he projects upon this abstract and imagined feminine entity both extremes of the angel (Madonna) and of the devil (whore): “Only woman is supposed to be capable of fraternizing with the devil who perhaps came down from heaven as an angel” (Madách 999, 308). One of the few women in the audience who heard Madách’s speech was Pálné Veres. She was so offended and hurt by his derogatory statements about her sex that she devoted her entire life to women’s education to prove that, to the contrary, “women’s backward intellectual condition is a result of their education, not their lower capacities” (Acsády 996, 460). As seen earlier, the most important result of this reaction was that Veres became one of the champions of Hungarian girls’ secondary education and fought for the opening of the first grammar school for girls in Budapest. A more immediate response to Madách and his misogyny were two unfinished letters, which she never sent to him but which testify to a textual and dialogic relationship between the two authors. Veres was a friend of Madách’s, which made his insulting remarks even more painful for her, as can be seen from the first sentence of her first letter:

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“I have no opportunity to express to you in live words my pain over the fact that you have used your scientific education and your humour against the oppressed part of humanity” (quoted in Bisztray 2000). She equates women’s destiny with that of American slaves¹² and opposes Madách’s biological determinism regarding the female sex. In her second letter, Veres becomes more analytical and looks at women’s and men’s position in society. Rather than their nature, it is women’s insufficient education that makes them inferior to men. The typical opposition in the misogynistfeminist debate, namely the argument of biology versus the social forming of gender, thus appears here as well. One point upon which Madách and Veres agree, however, even though they approach it from different angles and with very different justifications, is on the importance of women’s motherly role in society (Bisztray 2000). But whereas Madách defends this role for women because of his reductionist view of the female sex, in other words, women’s unsuitability for anything else, Veres observes that women sacrifice their talents for the sake of the family. Misogyny did not die with this debate in Hungary, but was alive and well way into the twentieth century. The translation of Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter gave additional fuel to Hungarian misogyny, but it was by far not the only misogynistic text that circulated in turn-of-the-century Budapest, as we will see in the following feminist responses to Weininger and other, Hungarian, misogynistic authors. In 93 Margit Kaffka gave a lecture in response to the publication of Geschlecht und Charakter in Hungarian, which an unsigned critic reviewed in the daily Világ. It is difficult to locate Kaffka’s own ideas in this article and to differentiate them from those of the unnamed critic. After briefly presenting Weininger’s major misogynistic points, the author of the article cites Weininger’s influences as being Plato, Kant, and Christianity. The author notes with irony the double standard in Weininger’s presentation of women versus that of men: “Weininger always thinks of prostitutes, maids, washerwomen or social butterflies when he thinks of women – but never of a waiter, janitor, policeman or bank clerk when he mentions men; it is Kant or Jesus” (“Nem és jellem” 93, ). The author of the article defends women’s fight for equal rights as a social and historical necessity that Weininger overlooks, and, like the Austrian feminists and in opposition to Weininger, designates women as the redeemers of humanity. Yet unlike most Austrian feminists, the Hungarian author does not see this latter contribution happening through women’s greater presence in the public sphere, but rather through their motherly role, a position, as seen earlier, fairly prevalent among Hungarian feminists.

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In the same year Kaffka herself wrote a review for the periodical Nyugat about a Hungarian author, Zoltán Szász, and his book A szerelem (Love). In her review, Kaffka comments on Szász’s ideas on women, all the while comparing them to Weininger. While ridiculing several of Szász’s arguments and statements about women, Kaffka also criticizes Weininger. She thus enters into a dialogic relationship with two misogynistic authors simultaneously. Although she does acknowledge the overall quality of Szász as a writer, Kaffka brilliantly exposes his latent misogyny, a misogyny very similar to Madách’s, which apparently extolls women while actually denigrating them. Not only does she show the invalidity of such statements by exposing their over-generalization of certain aspects of women’s “nature” (such as women’s “inborn” capacity to contain their jealousy and tolerate their husband’s sexual escapades or the irrelevance of a man’s physical beauty for a woman’s affection) but also she deconstructs his arguments in two ways. On the one hand, she demonstrates that his views are biased because he “regards woman from the perspective of a male existence” (Kaffka 93 quoted in Kerekes 2005, 55) and counters them with her own arguments from a female perspective. On the other hand, Kaffka masterfully inserts Weininger’s ideas, which are often the exact opposite regarding what Szász claims to be women’s “nature.” She cites Szász’s contention that women are more prone to loving and idealizing, given their less developed ability to make judgments, in direct contrast to Weininger, who holds that only man is capable of true love and idealization. By putting up the two authors’ ideas face to face, Kaffka shows the absurdity of such statements and thereby invalidates both. She admits, however, that Weininger openly hated women, while Szász does not, and comes to the following ironic conclusion: “No, no, Zoltán Szász still loves us more than the young Austrian philosopher who came to such a tragic end, poor man!” (Kaffka 2005, 57). Another Hungarian response to Weininger came somewhat later from best-selling author Renée Erdős in her novel A nagy sikoly (The Big Scream, 922). As I discuss this novel in more detail in chapter six, I focus here only on the elements relevant to the current context. In one of the scenes of the novel, a young woman, Dóra, whose marital life is not very satisfying, seeks comfort and reassurance by confessing to the bishop, a relative of hers. In his lecture to Dóra, the bishop mentions Weininger as the most despicable misogynist, calling him a “pervert” and a “monster” whose only good deed was to commit suicide and thereby liberate the world from his presence (Erdős 989, 269). It is, of course, ironic that Erdős puts this antiWeininger statement into the mouth of a bishop, given the centuries-old misogynistic tradition within the Catholic Church itself. If, however, one

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reads the whole speech the bishop delivers to Dóra, it becomes clear that his outwardly anti-misogynistic stand is only a facade for his own misogynistic ideas. Under this seemingly woman-friendly surface, Erdős weaves in a criticism of a morality that is founded in a deep-seated woman-hatred, a morality that relies on the same arguments that Weininger himself used so as to keep women’s sexuality under male control. To account for the lack of sexual pleasure Dóra experiences in her marriage, the bishop uses the same essentialist argument as does Weininger in Geschlecht und Charakter, namely, that female sexual desire is a bottomless abyss and can never be satisfied: “When it comes to pleasure, women’s nature is entirely uncontrollable and insatiable” (Erdős 989, 265). The bishop’s antidote to this curse put upon women is but one: find solace in motherhood, thus affirming women’s traditional role under patriarchal domination. In regard to women’s calling in life, he thus comes to the same conclusion as does Möbius, though via a different misogynistic path, more reminiscent of Weininger’s. In the bishop’s speech, Erdős thus exposes a misogynistic attitude that combines arguments from both Weininger and Möbius. One last example for the dialogism of misogyny and feminism in Hungary is an article published in the feminist periodical A nő és a társadalom in 908 by Perczelné Flóra Kozma. Perczelné wrote the article as a reaction to an unnamed misogynistic writer’s article, in which he had made denigrating statements about women, calling them “creatures of a lower order” (Perczelné 908, 72). Perczelné uses constructionist arguments throughout. She does not contest the statement that a large number of women’s lives may be filled with vanity and useless activities, but she claims that at least an equal number of men are just as vain, spending their time partying and playing cards. The author goes one step further by looking into the socio-historical factors that have led to women’s vain behaviour and their exclusion from any important decision-making processes. Like TrollBorostyáni in Austria, she holds a male-dominated society responsible for such traditions and mores, which are perpetuated through women’s lack of education and their upbringing as “an empty doll” (Perczelné 908, 73). She also names economic and moral factors. She points out the logical discrepancy between the said social and educational conditions and the burden women have had to carry throughout history as the bearers of a higher morality. She does defend the maintenance of this cultural role for women, though; women could serve as an example for all humans on how to evolve into a being “who is self-reliant, able to generate self-control, guided by an instinct which comes from a higher source” (Perczelné 908, 74). The idea of cultural renewal through women’s greater involvement in

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social life, much present among the Austrian feminists, is thus implied in this text as well. The necessity of cultural renewal, which was a quintessential topic of modernity, is present in the misogynistic, the feminist, and the viriphobic voices alike. The paths to this renewal as outlined in the texts, however, are quite different and are, in the cases of both the feminist and viriphobic voices versus the misogynistic voice, diametrically opposed, revealing their dialogic character. The misogynists see either women’s emancipatory strivings or their thralldom to their baser sexual instincts, or both, as major hindrances to the revitalization of culture and progress; the feminists and the representatives of the viriphobic voice attribute to women the mission of cultural purifier and redeemer, while demanding changes in women’s education and social status. Helene von Druskowitz, just like Mayreder and Troll-Borostyáni, recognizes the subordinate position of women in society and, like Mayreder, bestows upon them the power of cultural renewal. Druskowitz¹³ was the first Austrian woman philosopher and the second woman to earn the title of Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Zurich, in 878, with a dissertation on Byron’s Don Juan.¹⁴ When Druskowitz published Pessimistische Kardinalsätze: Ein Vademecum für die freiesten Geister (Pessimistic Axioms: A Handbook for the Freest Spirits) in 905,¹⁵ she had been confined to a psychiatric hospital for fourteen years, where she would remain until her death in 98. It remains unclear whether she was really mentally ill.¹⁶ Although Druskowitz was not directly involved in any turn-of-thecentury Austrian women’s associations, in her writings she expresses ideas that challenge the restrictions the misogynists wanted to see maintained. Like Troll-Borostyáni, she demands women’s political representation and their unrestricted access to education. In her comedy Die Emanzipationsschwärmerin (A Fanatic of Women’s Emancipation, 890), she defends women’s right to study by contrasting two female characters, one who merely flirts with ideas of women’s emancipation and one who takes seriously the newly available opportunities for women by becoming a graduate in medicine. Her criticism of the institution of marriage is another point in which she echoes the feminist voice. As early as 885, in her essay Drei englische Dichterinnen (Three English Woman Poets), Druskowitz criticizes marriage for restricting women, for hindering the expression of their talent: “Nearly all outstanding women artists, poets and writers were either unmarried or they only created something relevant after the bonds of marriage had dissolved” (Druskowitz 885, 32). However, with her demands for the abolition of marriage, demands that can be related

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to her viriphobia, she goes beyond the feminists who valued marriage and motherhood both within and outside marriage highly, and, as the case of Meisel-Hess showed, fought for the recognition and protection of single mothers. However, motherhood does not even emerge in Druskowitz’s thoughts as an option for women. As for marriage, she sees it as one of the major causes of women’s subordination and oppression, and glorifies single life as a necessary condition for female creativity: “You should know that single life out of conscious reasons and reasons of general validity is the most noble sign of female genius; indeed, it stands for woman’s genius as such” (Druskowitz 988, 74). The dialogic relationship to Weininger can be seen from Druskowitz’s subverting the attribution of the quality of genius (which, in Weininger’s mind, was a privilege of the male sex only) and allocating it to women.¹⁷ Druskowitz’s ideas can also be read dialogically to Meisel-Hess’s reflections on women’s genius. But whereas MeiselHess defines female genius, the genius of the heart, as complementary to the male genius, the genius of the intellect, Druskowitz excludes men from her definition altogether. We can see here already a fundamental difference between the feminist and the viriphobic voice. Whereas feminism does maintain differences between and assigns different roles to men and women, its ultimate goal is to include both women and men in its vision of a new culture and society. Viriphobia, on the other hand, attempts to completely separate the sexes for the benefit of women. The fate of another Austrian author who wrote in viriphobic tones, Elsa Asenijeff, bears a disturbing resemblance to that of Druskowitz. Asenijeff also spent the last twenty years of her life under enforced psychiatric hospitalization for which, as with Druskowitz, no clear medical reason existed. This prolific and multi-talented writer was declared “querulous” (Querulantin), which led to her interdiction and eventual hospitalization, because of her insistence that she be supported financially by the sculptor Max Klinger, the father of her only daughter, after their separation. A battle with the courts ensued which she, as a single woman not supported by anyone, ultimately lost. Her case, perhaps even more than Druskowitz’s, demonstrates how fragile a woman with neither financial nor family support was in those days if she decided to openly challenge the power structures of patriarchy. Asenijeff also wrote on the topic of marriage. Her ideas demonstrate a mixture of a feminist and a more traditional voice where essentialist arguments abound. On the one hand, she deems it a woman’s responsibility to make her husband happy and glorifies motherhood to the point of wanting to forbid women with no children the right to be an author; on the other

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hand, she discourages women (and men) who have a goal in life (obviously other than motherhood in the case of the former) from marriage. She also claims that women make their husbands happy, but not vice versa, because of their greater ability to read human souls (Asenijeff 898, 92). In other words, a woman’s spiritual self is thwarted in marriage despite the joys of motherhood the author tries to defend. Both Asenijeff and Druskowitz go beyond the scope of the feminists’ demands, with their formulation of women’s need for “a room of their own.” In Tagebuchblätter einer Emancipierten (Pages from the Diary of an Emancipated Woman, 902), Asenijeff expresses this need through her character’s demand for space, separate from the company of a man, to be able to think and focus her energy on her own intellectual work. Druskowitz, in Pessimistische Kardinalsätze, demands an exclusive, segregated feminine sphere on a much larger scale: she wants cities to be divided by sex. Only by living in their own, man-free space could women be truly liberated from all harmful male influence, a necessary condition for complete female self-realization as well as for professional and legal equality: “only if you live and dwell separately will you possess all the rights and practice all appropriate professions with ease; whereas in places where the direct fight still rages and the whole crowd is tied together, male jealousy and the provocative and hypnotizing ways of the thief and killer called ‘man’ try to wrest the laurels from womankind again and again” (Druskowitz 988, 75). Druskowitz’s demands are radical: she prefers complete isolation for women, to put an end to their oppression and to create conditions under which they could build a new culture through female self-determination. The ultimate goal for Druskowitz is the achievement of women’s “priesthood”; women should appear as “guides into death” (Druskowitz 988, 60). Death can be interpreted here as the death of the current culture, criticized by Mayreder and Meisel-Hess as well, in which men dominate women and exploit them and mother Earth. Druskowitz wants this situation of patriarchal rule with all its negative manifestations abolished so that a new, woman-friendly social order can emerge.¹⁸ The tone Druskowitz uses in this text introduces a new voice into the gender heteroglossia. The title of one of its chapters, “Der Mann als logische und sittliche Unmöglichkeit und als Fluch der Welt” (“Man as a Logical and Moral Impossibility and a Curse to the World”) already unveils its viriphobic message. Even though Druskowitz, much in line with the feminist voice, favours a change in women’s role in society and sees women’s cultural mission in a “priesthood,” her argument does not stop there. She attributes all negative aspects of nature and culture to the male sex, and

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thus, without any direct reference to Möbius or Weininger yet in a dialogic relation to their ideas, turns their “evidence” about woman’s lower evolutionary level upside down. She depicts man as the one who is physically, intellectually, and morally deficient: “He doesn’t fit in the least into the frame of the rational world; for he is too brutal and a liar, his thinking too defective and diffuse, his external ugliness too obvious to be able to reign over life in a tactful manner” (Druskowitz 988, 33). Man, according to Druskowitz and in exact opposition to Weininger, not only is uglier in physical appearance than woman but also terrorizes her with his constant sexual urges. He is immoderate in eating and drinking and in his treatment of the environment. He is greedy, gossipy (two characteristics of the female sex according to Möbius), responsible for wars and for the lack of real progress in science. What she condemns most in men – and here she critically refers to Nietzsche – is “the blind will for power,” which she considers to be “the basic trait in man” (Druskowitz 988, 55), responsible not only for destruction but also for a weakening in the intellectual abilities of human offspring. Women, on the other hand, are higher beings: “Women are not only worthier and kinder beings; they are also of a more perfect and noble descent, which is indicated in mythologies by numerous connections between women and the sea” (Druskowitz 988, 37). Druskowitz uses essentialist arguments both to debase men and to extol women. Another contradiction in her text is that, despite recognizing male authorship in the writing of history, she overlooks the fact that myths of femininity form part of that very same male-authored history. Asenijeff’s statements about the lower value of the male sex complement the viriphobic voice found in Druskowitz, even though they are rarely as direct and strong (Spreitzer 997, 45). Only in a few instances does she use such labels for man as “castrated in his soul” (Asenijeff 898, 38) or refer to his strength as based on “beating, robbery, murder, the wild power of his body” (Asenijeff 898, 35). Sometimes she adds a touch of humour, for instance when she parodies Goethe’s famous line from Faust about the “eternal feminine”: “The eternal-masculine draws us down” (Asenijeff 898, 68). Women should, therefore, by no means want to become like men, a form of false emancipation, according to Asenijeff. Instead, women need to find their own true selves. In a manner similar to Druskowitz and her essentialist arguments about woman’s “nature,” and to a certain degree also to Meisel-Hess, Asenijeff asserts that womanhood in itself guarantees the rise to a higher level of human existence: “Being a woman is something sacred” (Asenijeff 898, 6). It is to women’s merit that, through their “inner strength of the soul” (Asenijeff 898, 35), they helped humankind evolve

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beyond their beastly nature: “Humans separated from animals in a toilsome way; and this was women’s achievement” (Asenijeff 898, 48). Asenijeff’s definition of femininity can thus be read dialogically to Weininger’s theses about men’s exclusive use of spiritual values and women’s degradation to pure sexuality. Like Druskowitz, she inverts the spiritualphysical ratio to women’s advantage. What misogyny ascribes to men and not women, viriphobia ascribes to women at the expense of men. One rare example of viriphobia in Hungarian literature of the period can be found in Erdős’s novel A nagy sikoly. The main character Dóra, after her first disappointment with marriage, has a significant conversation with Ida Bondieu, an actress. Dóra turns to Ida in a quasi-confession very different from that she would share later with the bishop. In front of this woman, Dóra can bare her true feelings without fear of being judged or put into her “proper” place, unlike with her family and social circle. Ida blames men for women’s unhappiness in love and sexual relations. She calls them simply “animals” incapable of loving a woman, animals who, moreover, impose their degenerate sexuality on women and turn every woman into a “prostitute” mired in brief, lifeless and loveless sexual acts. Although Ida’s words hold a criticism of the moral double standard, she does not hold patriarchal society as a whole responsible for perpetuating such a standard, but rather men themselves: “The whole female sex is condemned to prostitution forever. It is man’s love that turns them into prostitutes, the man who is set on woman already at age sixteen and who prepares, from age sixteen – and through what creatures – to turn us into what we become! What a shame, what a horror!” (Erdős 989, 20). Men’s love is presented as a prison in which men keep women enslaved, in that women’s sexual enjoyment is a curse that men’s love brings over women so as to maintain their power over them and to feed their vanity. It is “what makes them feel like gods!” (Erdős 989, 4). The only way for a woman to remain free of such slavery and remain empowered is to remain sexually “frigid.” The recipe for female happiness Erdős recommends through Ida’s character is thus diametrically opposed to Weininger’s ideas on sexuality, in that it is male sexuality that corrupts women’s original purity and drags them down into a morass of erotic dependency. These ideas echo Druskowitz and Asenijeff. Although Erdős limits her arguments to the sexual sphere, without further discussion of men’s negative impact on women’s creative and intellectual abilities, she clearly portrays men in a negative light and their influence on women as harmful, thus implying that a separation of the sexes is beneficial for women’s happiness.

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According to Rosi Braidotti, misogyny is a necessary outgrowth of a system of thinking that posits difference as negativity in order to affirm normativity, i.e., the masculine (Braidotti 994, 8). We may place viriphobia in the same line of discourse as misogyny: they are both built on a model of thinking based on binary oppositions in which one sex, defined as the Other, is allocated a lower value. As necessary and understandable a cultural phenomenon as viriphobia may be, it is based, just like misogyny, on the great discourses of the universal subject where difference is defined by negativity and (the illusion of) exclusion; therefore, it only reverses the abject gender while maintaining the opposition and widening the gap between the sexes. Viriphobia, in relation to misogyny, thus cannot be regarded as subversive, as it does not challenge the very basis from which the latter derives, the thinking in mutually exclusive binary oppositions. However, it does reverse misogynistic arguments by projecting “man” as the new scapegoat for all social evils. When read dialogically to misogyny, viriphobia thus neutralizes the validity of the misogynistic arguments. Viriphobia, through its proclamation of the superiority of the female sex, also outlines the concept of a segregated world order for women, thereby foreshadowing certain subsequent developments in radical feminism.¹⁹ It is therefore a valuable and wrongly neglected voice in fin-de-siècle gender heteroglossia. The feminists’ call for women’s entry into the public sphere and into more prestigious positions that require higher education is the issue through which the struggle between the different voices in the fin-de-siècle gender heteroglossia becomes most apparent and is, moreover, one of the major reasons for the misogynistic backlash against feminism and the female sex in general. Thus, the issue of sharing economic and social power seems to be what inspires fin-de-siècle gender heteroglossia. Misogyny argues from a position of dominance; its ideology reveals an interest in the maintenance of the status quo of patriarchal rule. It supports seemingly positivistic viewpoints with quasi-scientific evidence, such as when its speakers defend woman’s inferiority based on her allegedly lower nature. Misogyny remains within the confines of a thinking grounded in essentialism and binary oppositions of male-female, intellect-emotions, public-private. Viriphobia, as demonstrated, also uses essentialist arguments and reasons along binary lines. Feminism, for the most part, defines gender through social construction, but is not completely void of essentialist arguments or of a dualistic thinking. However, it diversifies the dualistic model by maintaining some of the traditional feminine qualities for women while

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adding to them others traditionally viewed as masculine, and replaces the separation paradigm of both misogyny and viriphobia with one based on complementarity. The misogynistic voice attempts to define what “woman” apparently is, thereby confining her to an easily controllable sphere. This attempt to define woman is present in the feminist and viriphobic texts as well. “Each continues to represent prescriptions of what woman should be, and although they extend the prescriptions of the status quo they still do not break down the gender barrier” (Anderson 992b, 20). What differentiates the feminist and viriphobic voices from the misogynistic one, however, is that they both emphasize women’s suppressed potential. Their use of essentialist arguments about women can be seen as a way of constructing an internally persuasive discourse on gender. According to Bakhtin, an internally persuasive discourse “is half-ours and half-someone else’s ... The semantic structure of an internally persuasive discourse is not finite, it is open; in each of the new contexts that dialogize it, this discourse is able to reveal ever newer ways to mean” (Bakhtin 98, 345–6, emphasis in the original). The essentialist arguments that have been internalized, to various degrees, by all the participants in this gender heteroglossia are thus given a new meaning through the feminist and viriphobic voices. These voices, through their criticism of women’s present condition, encourage a liberation of women’s suppressed creative potential and empower them with a vision of culture’s “feminization” (much dreaded by the misogynists), which includes concrete measures upon which to build a new, womanfriendly, inclusive society and a new feminine identity. Their interaction with misogyny can therefore broaden our understanding of the many faces of modernity.

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As the previous chapters suggest, of the three major goals of the women’s movement – suffrage, educational and professional rights, and a reform of moral and sexual standards – fin-de-siècle women’s fiction mainly focused on women’s educational and sexual rights, and the consequences of women laying claim to these. The fictional texts should not be read as a mere reflection of the historical and social context in which these narratives were born, but rather, as a parallel phenomenon to the women’s movement. In these narratives, varied voices speak through the characters and/or the narrator. Through these voices we can reflect on the social history of the period and its dominant discourses and gain a more diversified insight: “What literature is capable of achieving in the context of social history ... is to present punctual actualizations and individual illustrations of facts that we know from other sources” (Schmid-Bortenschlager, “Stand”). Women writers, both in Austria and in Hungary, thematized women’s newly acquired educational rights or the lack thereof, and the implications of these on their female characters’ lives. In some narratives, the female characters take advantage of the new possibilities to achieve financial and professional independence, and an identity previously denied to them. In others, the consequences of the long-standing lack of educational rights for women at the crossroad of two centuries are discussed, as well as the generational gap between the women of the older generation and the “new women,” along with the ensuing conflicts within individual women characters themselves. According to Schmid-Bortenschlager, two professions are predominant in Austrian literature of the period: the teacher and the doctor (“Stand”).

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I would add another one, that of the artist.¹ The prevalence of teacher and doctor characters can be explained by the historical fact that the faculties of law and engineering only opened much later for women (in Austria in 99, in Hungary in 98); therefore, no women lawyers or engineers existed as possible models for literary characters. When reflecting on the social and historical relevance of those two professions that were available for women around 900, one might conclude that they corroborated women’s traditional nurturing roles. However, the roles of healer and teacher, which had existed for women earlier in history, were barred to them during the Renaissance with the opening of universities, from which they were largely excluded (Schmid-Bortenschlager, “Stand”). In this context, I argue that by becoming teachers and, particularly, doctors (since the former did not require a university degree), women did not fall back into a traditional feminine role, but rather took back a position of power that they had lost for centuries. In the following, I illustrate this process of acquiring and reacquiring power and its pitfalls, based on narratives by the Hungarian writers Margit Kaffka, Anna Szederkényi, Emma Ritoók, and Terka Lux, and the Austrian writers Grete Meisel-Hess and Irma von Troll-Borostyáni. two hungarian narratives by margit kaffka and anna szederkényi Margit Kaffka has been called Hungary’s most prominent woman writer to date (Bodnár 963, 297). Moreover, as Tötösy notes, she is a “canonized woman author” (Tötösy 996, 77, emphasis in the original), probably the only one among those discussed here, although certainly not the only Hungarian woman writer of the fin de siècle to have introduced in her fiction the struggles of the “new woman.” Her novel Színek és évek (Colours and Years) was originally published as a series in the periodical Vasárnapi Újság in 9, and subsequently as a volume in 92. With this narrative, Kaffka introduced a new literary form in Hungarian fin-de-siècle literature, namely, the Proustian “reflective” novel (Fülöp 988, quoted in Tötösy 996, 87). The importance of Színek és évek for Hungarian literature lies, thus, in both its themes and its form. From the perspective of a first-person narrator, the novel tells the story of Magda Pórtelky. Fifty-year-old Magda, widowed twice and now living alone, reflects on her life. But the novel is more than just an account of Magda’s life. It is also a reflection on a historical period and the downfall of Magda’s social class, the gentry. What makes the novel particularly interesting is a profound analysis of the condition of Hungarian women of

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the upper classes living in the turbulent times of the turn of the century, through three generations: those of Magda’s mother, Magda herself, and Magda’s daughters. Young Magda’s life follows in the footsteps of her mother’s and grandmother’s. She notes the complete lack of any generational conflict in her youth: “At that time we – mother, grandmother and child – were still able to understand each other so naturally, steadfastly and trustfully” (Kaffka 999, 33).² Yet against young Magda’s superficial compliance with the rules and the prescribed gender and class roles laid out for her, aging Magda introduces a feminist voice that, in retrospect, rebels against them. Not only does she call the pressure young women of her generation were subjected to, the pressure to perform at balls so as to attract an eligible suitor, a “half-witted prancing, this twitching night-stint” (Kaffka 999, 53) but also she bitterly recognizes that in her (first) marriage, all her energy was used up in household chores, which she performed with an extraordinary passion and devotion. With the distance of time, Magda is now capable of asking herself “whether this wild desire for action, this crazy ambition

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that I spent in beating the carpets might not have been good for something else, something more important” (Kaffka 999, 69). She acknowledges the talents that she put into decorating her home and wonders whether she might not have been able to invest them better somewhere else – the potential career of interior decorator being implied here. Yet, at the same time, she remains within the confines of her upbringing and its internalized discourses when she comments that such thoughts suit her daughters, who belong to a different world, but not herself, who comes from the “old world order.” Thus, the voice of emancipation remains without consequences for her own life; it will become, however, an internally persuasive discourse regarding the choices she makes about her daughters’ upbringing. For a woman like Magda, the old world order meant that her entire life had been defined by someone else: first her family, then her husband. It is worth noting that despite the absence of a male as head of the household (Magda’s mother being widowed), the power of patriarchy over women’s lives is untouched, and reproduced through the acting head of the household, the grandmother. The only choices Magda had to make were between various suitors, and even there her mother and grandmother pressured her to make up her mind quickly before her popularity starts to fade. The internalization of the discourses of her upbringing, which equated marriage with finding a “good catch,” is only shattered once, by her brief infatuation with a suitor who never proposes to her. Being the perfect obedient girl, she does not take her romantic feelings too seriously, has a cry over the fact that she has to let him go, and follows her mother’s advice to marry Jenő Vodicska, a lawyer from a middle-class family. Kaffka’s omission of any description of physical passion between the spouses reflects that Magda marries out of financial necessity. It is a rational decision, not a matter of heart, just as her second marriage will be. The relationship with her first husband is depicted as fairly harmonious, at least on the surface. However, from the jealousy scene, when Jenő hits Magda, it becomes clear that her kind and loving husband is only that way as long as she remains within the confines of her role: that of the supportive wife who has no right to a romantic past or to respond to other men’s advances in any way. Jenő falls back into the role of the loving and kind husband after he finds out that Magda is pregnant. Thus, marital harmony is “restored” through the abuse, on the one hand, and, on the other, through Magda’s fulfilling of another role, that of mother. In her marriage, after that point, Magda gives up any individual aspirations and assumes a fairly active role as the supportive wife. Her husband respects her opinions about various matters, which he discusses with her openly. Thus, in Magda’s character

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Kaffka incorporates some elements of the historical ideal of the Hungarian nagyasszony, the grand lady who traditionally had a fair amount of power in the family and stood by her husband’s side as his equal³ – an ideal that in the minds of other Hungarian writers and feminists such as Szikra was far from the reality of most Hungarian women’s lives. But Kaffka corroborates Szikra’s opinion and uses the nagyasszony model in an ironic way, for Magda is far from happy and fulfilled in her marriage, let alone powerful. She understands that the way to realizing her social ambitions is through her husband, given that, for her generation, the option to achieve those ambitions independently was still unavailable: “I felt that all my dreams and ambitions would be fulfilled, and after that there was nothing more I could wish for. I should have liked to hurry this man, push him and stimulate him; his calling was to fulfill and accomplish in this world what my own ambitions desired. Yes, yes, I thought, with a man everything can be achieved; through them you can achieve everything, you only have to encourage, desire, pester, doggedly and cunningly, that’s a woman’s job” (Kaffka 999, 0). Magda reiterates here, like a parrot, the formulas of an authoritative discourse that she has absorbed from her mother, as part of the “recipe” for female happiness. But, paradoxically, these formulas do not bring happiness either to her mother or to herself. Her mother, also a widow, remarries a man who squanders the remainder of her fortune, whereas Magda’s husband, after a financial and political defeat, shoots himself. Thus, the verbal expressions of an authoritative discourse become deconstructed, on the one hand, by the plot itself, and, on the other, by the episode of the gala dinner Magda organizes at their home for their family and friends. This dinner, rather than just a gentry show-off (as Magda’s middle-class inlaws interpret it), is a manifestation of her desire to express, for once, her own ambitions through herself, not her husband (Földes 987, 8, quoted in Tötösy 996, 83). It is her attempt, albeit faint and thwarted, to cast off the chains that have kept her in the role of the object of desire of others and to become the subject of her own desire – i.e., to take on an agency that will only be available to the women of the next generation, the “new women.” The dilemma of Magda’s life becomes clear following her husband’s suicide. Her inability to actively solve her life’s problems without her family to back her up or a husband at her side becomes apparent in the scene when she enters the room where her husband lies dead. Through Magda’s reaction (she faints), Kaffka recreates a well-known literary scenario, from both “high” and “low” literature, namely that of the fainting heroine who, in a critical moment, collapses. This corroborates the social

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expectation of female weakness and inability to cope with life’s challenges. Indeed, Magda’s words following the fateful event are: “At that moment ... everything, everything came to an end” (Kaffka 999, 35). But unlike in previous situations, where everything was always resolved through the intervention of one or several family members, this time, Magda, despite some limited support, must look after herself and fully become the subject of her own actions. However, the hypocrisy of her upbringing and lifestyle is deconstructed, as she finds herself incapable of responding to the new demands of her life; she had not received any formal education and the professions open to women were still rather limited for that generation. After she realizes, with bitter irony, that she has two options – either to become a resigned and bored employee at a post office or to marry again – she chooses what appears the lesser of the two evils, gives in to social pressure from her family and environment, and marries Dénes Horváth, a long-time friend. Whereas, in her first marriage, Magda was willy-nilly playing the role of supporting wife, in her second marriage, although she still fulfills her duties as a housewife and bears three daughters, she does not maintain a facade anymore and asserts herself by verbal disapproval of her husband’s alcoholism and other shortcomings. Her marriage is but a series of arguments with her husband, who eventually dies. Using the stereotype of the nagging wife Kaffka criticizes the lack of a creative outlet for a woman’s talents in marriage. During her second marriage, Magda feels her physical beauty vanishing through frequent childbearing and holds no more social ambitions for herself, let alone for her husband. The only meaning of her life lies in bringing up her three daughters. Kaffka captures the historical moment that brought about fundamental changes in the lives of Hungarian women; higher education was opening for the generation of Magda’s daughters and Magda embraces the discourse about women’s new place in society by investing all her remaining fortune and energy in her daughters’ education: “My dear little girls, darlings! You just study! Whatever the cost, whatever happens! Don’t do anything around the house; I’ll do the cooking, sweeping and cleaning; my hands are worked to the bone and my body’s neglected and gone to pieces anyway, so it doesn’t matter. All you’ve got to do is to prepare yourselves for a better, triumphant and independent life, to be your own mistress, not to humble yourselves before any man, and not to be a washerwoman at anyone’s mercy, or a dog to be kicked around by anyone! Just study everything, even if I have to give my last pillow for that cause!” (Kaffka 999, 24).

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Anna Szederkényi

Magda speaks here with a feminist voice, a voice that was more audible at the time of the novel’s publication and, although by far not undisputed, was also becoming more socially acceptable and relevant. She, the once good and obedient daughter, now can afford and allow herself to step beyond the boundaries of the discourses of her upbringing. And her efforts are not in vain. All three daughters finish school and become professionally independent in Budapest, one a teacher in a girls’ grammar school, one a pharmacist, and the third a pianist – the three professions (teaching, medicine, the arts) in which the generation of the “new woman” was becoming increasingly present. Here, with the aging Magda’s reflections, the narrative comes full circle with an open ending, as the reader does not find out anything further about Magda’s life or that of her daughters. The novel leaves the struggles that the daughters, the “new women,” would have to fight, to the reader’s imagination. The struggles of a “new woman” are depicted by Kaffka’s contemporary, Anna Szederkényi. Along with Kaffka, Szederkényi was called, “the

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writer who depicted most persistently the interior crises and the struggle for liberation and equality of the modern woman in Hungarian literature” (Bánhegyi 938, 33). Yet again, like most of her female contemporaries, today she is a forgotten author. Szederkényi was not only a recognized writer in her time but also the first professional Hungarian woman journalist. Her literary style has been called “naturalist” (Várkonyi 942, 32) for its frank description of sexuality and the importance of desire in a couple’s life, particularly in her novel Amíg egy asszony eljut odáig (Until a Woman Goes That Far), published in 95. What makes this novel relevant is not only its plot – the story of Judit Koszorús, an educated young woman from a middle-class background, a teacher by training, her trials and tribulations in her marriage and the struggle it takes her to eventually leave it – but also its mixture of voices. Against the social expectations for most young women of her background, the heroine of the novel, Judit, marries a young man of her own choice, without the consent of her parents. Her beloved, Zalárd Borongós, is a self-styled poet who seduces Judit with his colourful words and romantic promises. The novel starts as a parody of romance novels, the dominant genre in young women’s reading materials of the period. The “poet’s” last name, which in Hungarian means “the melancholic one,” announces Szederkényi’s intention to parody the romantic pitfalls to which the lack of education in sexual and emotional matters made young women particularly vulnerable. Zalárd’s whole posture and way of talking is based on a discourse taken from romance novels and turned into parody: Zalárd [sat down] two steps below her. He posed his head on Judit’s knee. They looked up to the sky. “This will be our life” said Zalárd. “A triumphant road to eternity. Together with you I will conquer the world. No man has ever sung about love the way I will be singing. For nobody has ever loved this way. Our love hasn’t sprung from the soil. It doesn’t have its roots in dust. Our love has grown out of a crystal, it is dazzling like a sparkling diamond. Our love is the union of two souls. This is the divine drink that enraptures the gods. Put your hand on my forehead, Judit. Your fingers on my artery, on my temple. Do you feel, tell me, how my living life is flooding towards you? ... Oh, every atom is alive in me, they are all active. Each and every part of me is alive separately, they are all thinking on their own. A thousand ideas have lit up in me at the same time. If I stopped on the top of a mountain, I would be shining like a divine beam! You saint, white woman! ... You grace, you miracle that got lost on Earth from Heaven.” Judit listened, listened to his words like to a revelation. (Szederkényi 95, 7–8)

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The last sentence of the above paragraph indicates to what degree Judit is prone to absorbing his words, words that will make her leave her parent’s home and follow Zalárd into an existence of want and insecurity. Criticism is a crucial element of parody (Rečnik 986, 528), an element that soon becomes apparent in the novel when Judit runs away with Zalárd with only a small bag of her belongings, relying on his lofty promises. As it turns out, her husband-to-be is completely incapable of supporting himself, let alone his young wife. Whereas Szederkényi’s criticism is mostly directed against the man’s selfish, careless, and increasingly rude treatment of the woman, she is no less critical of the woman’s naivety and the internally persuasive discourse of romantic love that blinds her to reality and leads her into creating constructs that are purely a product of fantasy. The first lesson on Judit’s journey with Zalárd will be taught to her by a character who plays somewhat the role of the fool; he has been a psychiatric patient on multiple occasions and thus enjoys a certain freedom of the fool. An earlier acquaintance of Zalárd’s, in whose house the couple finds shelter on their first night away from home, he shines the first light of suspicion into Judit’s blinded eyes: “[Judit] ‘I want to be only with him. It’s his soul that I love. His thoughts. Harmony.’ ‘With this man?’ he interrupted her, screeching like a crow. ‘You don’t even know this man. You created yourself an ideal, gave it a form from your fantasy and pulled it over this man. Don’t forget to put a label on it from the outside, in red letters: Fragile! Handle with care!’ Judit didn’t respond. She was thinking” (Szederkényi 95, 72). Judit’s disillusionment will only grow from that point on, as the cloud of fantasy she has constructed clashes with the daily reality that she resists and refuses to acknowledge. At one point, the author has her character resort to a traditionally feminine literary genre, the letter, bringing in a subjective element into the narrative, but one in which “spontaneity and reflection do not exclude each other” (Weigel 985, 66). Through a letter addressed but never sent to her mother, Judit talks frankly about the process of awakening she has gone through and blames poetry and novels for filling young women’s heads and hearts with lies and false expectations: “Poetry, novels, what does all this have to do with marriage! ... In their novels, the writers never talk about what the hero had to eat, where he found the money to pay the rent and the washerwoman ... And the women writers! They also lie all over the place! ... If one of them sat down once at her desk like in the confessional and started writing about things the way a woman thinks about them ... Not the way she says them, but thinks about them ... Then we would have something to read ... Then man and woman

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would come closer to each other and the big lie would come to an end” (Szederkényi 95, 29). Szederkényi offers such a narrative from a woman’s pen. Its novelty is not only the frankness with which she writes about sexuality (a topic the next chapter explores in more detail) but also an element that brings her close to some of Kaffka’s heroines, the gap between the romantic discourse, with its unrealistic expectations, and the difficulty of creating new discourses. One such discourse represented in the novel is that of women’s emancipation. Curiously enough, it is voiced through a male character, the judge who claims to be an advocate of women’s emancipation, of the “woman who is a self-assured being, who looks into the world with clear eyes, who is aware of her own values, who has shaken off the handcuffs of centuries” (Szederkényi 95, 6). He also criticizes marriage as a form of “legal slavery” for the woman (Szederkényi 95, 7). But Szederkényi does not adopt the discourse of emancipation uncritically. She shows the possibility of its abuse as an empty manner of speech, in this case, as a cover for the judge’s morally hypocritical behaviour, as all he is interested in is to try to have an extra-marital affair with Judit. On the other hand, the author confirms emancipation in her portrayal of Judit as a “new woman” who is stronger than any man who makes advances toward her. This strength manifests itself particularly throughout Judit’s relationship with Zalárd. Unlike Kaffka’s Magda Pórtelky, Judit is not economically dependent on her husband (thanks to her training as a teacher) and, for a while, even becomes the family breadwinner. Although she eventually leaves her husband, her internal struggle that leads up to that decision is profound: the voice of the romantic illusion, still strong almost to the point of an authoritative discourse and hard to shake off, is reinforced by the equally strong voice of the traditional “suffer and endure” marriage ideology for the woman, which tells her to remain at the side of the man, no matter what. Only after a series of deep hurts and insults from her husband is her illusion of love entirely shattered and she realizes that they are complete strangers to each other (they always address each other formally), incapable of living together. Judit claims her remaining power for herself, refuses the judge’s advances, and takes the train to return “to her mother.” The need to reconnect to and embrace feminine power is also reflected in the last scene of the novel. Just before embarking on the train, a little old lady touches Judit’s arm saying: “Hurry up, please, hurry up, because they will occupy the compartments for women” (Szederkényi 95, 35). In a metaphorical sense this sentence is a call to women to claim their own space both in their relationships with men and in society in general. Although

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at the end of the novel Judit is disillusioned and has tears in her eyes as she departs, the symbolism of the train going to another location does leave the possibility of a better future. fanny roth by grete meisel-hess In 902 Austrian writer Meisel-Hess published the novel Fanny Roth: Eine Jung-Frauengeschichte (Fanny Roth: A Young Woman’s Story),⁴ and it became a best-seller. By 93 it had reached thirty editions (Fraisl et al. 2004, 275). Scholars have attributed to this short novel the same importance in the turn-of-the-century women’s movement and literature that Verena Stefan’s Häutungen (Shedding) would have in the 970s (Roebling 989). The novel was criticized by many contemporaries for its frank description of sexuality, but also received a positive reception, mainly from women critics. It was even acknowledged abroad (Melander 992, 697). Meisel-Hess was also praised for her literary talent and her “artistic drive to explore the depths of life and her time” (Geißler 93, 360). I have chosen to discuss Fanny Roth after Szederkényi’s novel because Meisel-Hess’s heroine goes through a process that is, in some aspects, similar to that of Szederkényi’s Judit: she marries a man of her own choice with whom she is not compatible, and ends up choosing her independence and leaving her husband. Before her marriage, twenty-year-old Fanny is already an accomplished musician, a violinist and composer, much to the pride of her mother who, against the father’s will, succeeded in her fight for Fanny’s education. The big change in the life of “emancipated” Fanny (the word the mother uses for her) comes about when she meets a handsome and well-established man from a good family who is fully acceptable to her family as “a great catch” (Meisel-Hess 902, 38). Fanny is so carried away by her erotic longings that she disregards all signs of a possible incompatibility with Josef Fellner and, despite the shocked comment of a friend (“but you won’t throw yourself into the arms of a stranger,” Meisel-Hess 902, 36), gets engaged after having known Fellner for barely a few days and marries him some months later. Meisel-Hess’s criticism of the middle-class marriage market and of the moral double standard, outlined in her previously mentioned essays, manifests itself through Fanny’s story. Fanny experiences an awakening from romantic illusions reminiscent of Szederkényi’s Judit. During her wedding night, which Meisel-Hess describes in terms more appropriate for a rape, Fanny cries out inside: “So have they all lied, the poets, who spoke of the joys of this night? Has none of them, not one been honest?” (Meisel-Hess

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902, 56). Yet whereas Judit experiences a disturbing sense of strangeness between her husband and herself, which grows deeper with every day of her marriage, Fanny lives through a short period of erotic fulfillment after the initial shock of the wedding night subsides. Nevertheless, she becomes increasingly aware of her husband’s oppressive and selfish behaviour, which starts to suffocate her creative energies. Initially, she had consented to his selfish demands to abandon her career as a musician and become totally dependent on him, something both Josef and her father expected of her in line with the dominant ideal of femininity. Symbolically, it was her mother who gave her some money before Fanny left on her honeymoon, whereas her father’s words for the road were “be good” (Meisel-Hess 902, 46). The father thus confirms her subordination to a male (now her husband), whereas the mother continues to support her independence. We see here the female bonding also present in Kaffka’s and Szederkényi’s novels, a bonding that is formulated as an alternative to patriarchal oppression. Once her sexual curiosity and thirst have been quenched, Fanny’s independent personality seeks to break out of the intellectual and creative confines her husband imposes on her. Fanny’s strength and will eventually lead to her decision to leave her husband, with whom she attempts in vain to build a deeper connection beyond the purely physical, a relationship of equals based on intersubjectivity, as Jessica Benjamin defines it: “the intersubjective mode acknowledges that the other person really exists in the here and now, not merely in the symbolic dimension” (Benjamin 988, 93). It is a relationship between two subjects who mutually acknowledge and recognize each other. For Fanny’s husband, his wife only represents a projected image, an object of his desires, a generic woman who is there to meet his needs, while he is unable to grow toward a deeper understanding of her needs and her personality. When he gives her an ultimatum to choose between her marriage and her career, Fanny, after going through a short crisis and illness, is strong enough to pack her suitcases, take her violin, and leave. She thereby assumes the power of a subject status traditionally denied to women, which her husband is unable to recognize and for which he, ironically, accuses her of being an egoist. The ending of the novel leaves matters open. MeiselHess allows Fanny the possibility of choosing her life’s path with or without the company of a man: “A thousand possibilities lay dormant in her: the unborn child in her womb that would come into this world once she found the right partner – or when she would be strong enough to create her own destiny. And a thousand joys of the soul and a thousand happy forces that were sleeping in her violin” (Meisel-Hess 902, 33).

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As a subject of her own desires and creative potential, Fanny is capable not only of being separate and independent but also of maintaining her ability to be connected to another. Although Fanny does take the first steps on her newly chosen path alone, she does so with an awareness of her desires and her full potential to be whole, autonomous as well as connected. As Nancy Chodorow puts it, “where false, reactive self was, there shall true, agentic self be, with its relationally based capacity both to be alone and to participate in the transitional space between self and other self that creates play, intimacy, and culture” (Chodorow 989, 203). The open ending of this feminist Bildungsroman, while eschewing a simplistic happy ending, offers new possibilities for constructing the female subject and feminine identity and leaves the hope that an independent woman may find a fulfilling relationship with a man, a hope that is not explicitly present in Szederkényi’s novel. the female doctor in two austrian and two hungarian narratives In the following four narratives, the authors have created female characters who venture into a profession that was just opening for women and required a university degree, that of doctor. Two of the narratives are by Troll-Borostyáni: the novellas “Stützen der Moral” (“The Pillars of Morality,” 900) and “Höhenluft” (“Mountain Air,” 907). In Hungary, Ritoók published the novel Egyenes úton – egyedül (On a Straight Path – Alone) in 905 and Lux the novel Leányok (Girls) in 906. Troll-Borostyáni, whose groundbreaking feminist essays have already been discussed, also wrote a fair number of fictional texts, whose literary value remains disputable. I somewhat agree with Alexandra Enzenhofer’s view that they can be mainly considered a mouthpiece for Troll-Borostyáni’s theoretical views: “I consider Troll-Borostyáni primarily a theoretician who tries to spread her new ideas with the help of the ‘mass media’ literature” (Enzenhofer 992, 2). Troll-Borostyáni’s fiction was similarly evaluated by her contemporaries. Thus Geißler calls her fiction “tendentious,” although he acknowledges her talent in constructing the plot (Geißler 93, 659). A programmatic approach to fiction is visible in both “Stützen der Moral” and “Höhenluft.” In “Stützen der Moral,” Klothilde Fels is a young graduate in medicine from the University of Zurich. The date of publication of the narrative, 900, explains why Klothilde had to go to Switzerland to obtain her degree. The faculties of medicine only opened to women in Austria that very same

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year, meaning that there were no female doctors with Austrian diplomas yet. Klothilde, whose last name is chosen as a metaphor for her firmness and determination⁵ (Spreitzer 999, 07), has an audience with the minister of culture and education in her Austrian hometown, where she would like to have her diploma recognized and to offer her medical services. The night before this important event, Klothilde, an adopted child, finds her biological mother on her deathbed. The mother reveals to Klothilde that the minister – unbeknownst to him – happens to be her biological father. He, now in a position of power to decide over the future of his daughter’s career, had once pushed her young mother into a life of misery after impregnating and abandoning her. In the conversation between father and daughter, Troll-Borostyáni brings about a clash between anti-feminism, voiced through the minister, and emancipation, voiced through Klothilde. The hypocrisy of the minister’s apparently respectful treatment of the young woman is unmasked by his entire attitude, which makes it obvious that he does not take those “American ideas” from a “youthful, pretty curly head” (Troll-Borostyáni 900, 67) very seriously. Yet neither the minister’s patronizing comments nor his anti-feminist reasoning intimidate the “rock” Klothilde, not even the (ironic) argument that he uses to ultimately dismiss her claim, namely the alleged offence a woman in a doctor’s coat poses to morality. Klothilde ultimately triumphs in this verbal duel with the man in power when she, through a cleverly disguised introduction, reveals to him the truth about her mother’s life and death in misery and thus her own identity. She uses this story to illustrate the hypocrisy of the morality the minister so ardently defends, a morality that keeps middle-class women in an economically dependent position, thus entirely vulnerable and at men’s mercy. Klothilde’s argument with the minister echoes Troll-Borostyáni’s emancipatory ideas from her theoretical writings. The firmness in Klothilde’s character is matched by her physical appearance: “Klothilde’s slim and tall figure had too little soft roundness and fullness to be called pretty and feminine; and her dark brown hair that surrounded her broad forehead with short curls, matched the almost male expression of her face” (Troll-Borostyáni 900, 45). A double-voicedness becomes discernible in the narrative regarding women’s emancipation and gender identity. Whereas Troll-Borostyáni constructs Klothilde’s character so as to morally triumph over the minister’s hypocrisy and anti-feminism, at the same time she constructs the independent woman’s gender identity along traditional binary oppositions of masculinity and femininity, which ultimately reiterate the misogynistic arguments regarding the alleged loss

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of femininity in emancipated women. The “masculinization” in Klothilde’s character is accompanied by a renunciation of sexuality and sensuality in general; not only does her abode “emanate an aura of strict asceticism” (Spreitzer 999, 07) but also she prefers to keep the minister’s son, initially a friend with romantic intentions, at the distance of camaraderie, even before finding out that he is her half-brother. Klothilde’s life seems to be devoted to her profession, therefore she takes up an offer to work in a hospital in London and leaves her country. In this development we can also see a reflection of Troll-Borostyáni’s ideas from her theoretical texts, as she repeatedly pointed out the backwardness of Austria and Germany regarding women’s advancement in comparison with the Anglo-Saxon world. In Troll-Borostyáni’s later novella, “Höhenluft,” the doctor character is already a practising physician in Austria and, this time, her professional and sexual happiness are constructed so as to make them compatible. Dora, a young doctor, meets a young man, Viktor, on a holiday trip in the mountains, and a mutual attraction quickly develops between them. Viktor is attracted to Dora because of her vitality and friendly down-to-earth manners, which are much in contrast to his own sullenness combined with a touch of misanthropy. Whereas Viktor goes around criticizing everything and everybody, Dora is forgiving and understanding toward people. She also believes that everything can be achieved, including happiness: “Of course, you shouldn’t think that it simply falls into your lap like a ripe fruit. You have to attain it and fight for it” (Troll-Borostyáni 907, 27). This statement reflects Troll-Borostyáni’s opinion regarding women’s emancipation, which she outlined in her theoretical texts, in particular Die Mission unseres Jahrhunderts, where she invited women to fight for their rights: “Fight for your rights, for your future with all weapons of the spirit and with a practical support of your goals” (Troll-Borostyáni 994, 23). Dora is portrayed as both gentle and strong, a mixture of “feminine” and “masculine” attributes. Viktor’s initial impression of Dora (who is portrayed in such a way as to embody the traditional image of the allunderstanding and all-forgiving woman) feeds his expectation that if she truly loved him she would, of course, as it befits a “real” woman, renounce all professional aspirations and choose the matters of heart over “that knowledge stuff which is so superfluous for the female soul” (TrollBorostyáni 907, 33). However, Viktor, despite his anti-feminist attitudes, seems to be suitable for re-education, a process that takes place during his conversation with Dora’s sister Ida. Ida, who had abandoned her medical studies and married her professor instead, nevertheless challenges Viktor’s rigid and inconsistent arguments when it comes to a woman practising

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medicine. In Viktor’s rejection of a woman in the role of doctor as opposed to nurse, Troll-Borostyáni weaves her arguments from Die Mission unseres Jahrhunderts, in which she observed the underlying economic interest in arguments used by the opponents of the women’s movement to keep women in an economically less favourable and dependent position. Thus, in Viktor’s conversation with Ida, the clash between an anti-feminist and a feminist voice is heard. The turning point in the process of Viktor’s “re-education” is when Ida accuses him of belonging to the “slaves of convention” (Troll-Borostyáni 907, 4). In the following days, Viktor experiences a deep change. Following what Troll-Borostyáni describes as a “process of shedding,” Viktor eventually reaches the point of understanding Dora’s devotion to her profession and accepts that she would not be a happy person or a happy wife if she had to give it up. Viktor’s successful transformation leads to a happy end, thus confirming Troll-Borostyáni’s optimism and trust that female professionals, although a thorn in the eye of many, may be acceptable once the barriers of convention are broken through. This belief in the individual’s perfectibility and ability to step beyond the limitations imposed by social conventions, which “seemed to echo the bourgeois ideologies of the eighteenth century” (Mittnik 990, xxii), speaks to the presence of an internally persuasive discourse dating from the Enlightenment. What Mittnik has found to be true of Mayreder’s writings, namely a re-actualization of the previously repressed ideas of the Enlightenment in nineteenth-century Austria and an overcoming of the dominant “therapeutic nihilism” (Johnston 974) found in the writings of most canonical writers of the period, can be also applied to TrollBorostyáni’s novella. The inclusion of a traditional image of femininity, undoubtedly present in Dora’s character, can also be explained on the same grounds. Isolde Schackmann has characterized Troll-Borostyáni’s emancipated female character, using a play of words inspired by Virginia Woolf, as “the angel out of the house” (Schackmann 992, 97), thereby reproaching the text for its lack of real innovation regarding women’s traditional roles. One can, certainly, recognize elements of the bourgeois ideal of femininity in Dora’s lack of selfishness and her willingness to serve – if not a man, then the community at large. However, I see here the voice of the bourgeois “eternal womanhood” merged with a feminist voice. The process of emancipation at the turn of the century, as reflected in this text, assimilates a more traditional view of women’s place and role in society – not only to be the nurturer and healer but also to embody the “eternal womanhood” women had symbolized particularly since the Enlightenment; a

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strategy the bourgeois women’s movement had adopted so as to improve women’s place in society. As Mayreder indicated in her theoretical texts, these culturally induced differences in women were to find an appropriate acknowledgement and application in the crisis of contemporary culture. By allowing women to enter the public sphere culture could be redeemed from its doom. By using their historically acquired differences in the process of emancipation, women had the power not only to become men’s teachers and spiritual leaders toward a new masculinity, but also to help build a new culture altogether and make modern life and its conditions more receptive to their own needs. This seems to be the message that Troll-Borostyáni’s novella also conveys. Two Hungarian novels from the same period, Lux’s Leányok (Girls) and Ritoók’s Egyenes úton – egyedül (On a Straight Path – Alone) also cast female doctors as their main characters, but they strike a much less optimistic chord than Troll-Borostyáni’s two novellas. The heroines of these two novels share many similarities: they both study medicine, they both come from modest family backgrounds and thus have to struggle to obtain their degrees and their desired independence, and they are both orphans. Moreover, in both of these Hungarian narratives, the heroine ends up living without a partner, dedicating herself to her profession and family members (unlike in Troll-Borostyáni’s “Höhenluft” with its happy ending). In addition, these two novels are both built around the stories of three young women: the central character (the young doctor) and two others, whose lives run parallel to hers. I consider the secondary characters to be the heroine’s alter egos, given that they pursue other life paths that remain either closed to or rejected by the heroine, but nevertheless reflect the heroine’s inner conflicts and thus function as a complement to her. Lux was praised by her contemporaries, particularly for her critical portrayal of the capital city, Budapest, and its social life (Bánhegyi 938, 70). In Leányok, three young women meet in Budapest in a rented room: Juli, who is finishing grammar school with the goal of studying medicine; Janka, a girl from an impoverished gentry family who wants to become a pianist and believes that the main goal in a woman’s life is marriage and that Juli is wasting her most beautiful years; and Baba, who wants to become an actress. Lux uses the description of their physical appearance to make the differences in their aspirations and their characters evident. Baba is introduced as a fifteen- to sixteen-year-old girl “of a delicate shape, slender, with white skin, happy-go-lucky, with a sensual look in her eyes, pretty and blond”; Juli is described as “stocky, short, not even remotely as pretty as the other, but of a strong and well-shaped physique, and her grey eyes

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Terka Lux

with a Japanese contour shone with intelligence, firmness and courage” (Lux 906, 6–7); and Janka enters the scene with the arrogance of her class even in poverty, “like a pretender to the throne” (Lux 906, 80). These portrayals are consistent with the voices that the three characters represent. In the contrast between Juli and Baba, we can see, as in Troll-Borostyáni’s “Stützen der Moral” (although not to the same degree), stereotypical links between physical beauty and intelligence, the underlying message being that a truly beautiful and feminine woman (whatever that may be) cannot also be an intelligent woman and vice versa. Juli, the one predestined for perseverance and struggle, speaks with the voice of the “new woman.” She has the most difficulties to make ends meet and has to support herself by giving private lessons. She is also oriented toward the present, the one “who is radicalism depending on its own human strength and knowledge” (Lux 906, 209). In contrast, Janka represents the voice of her class speaking nostalgically of a glorious and lost past and despising work as an option in life. Janka’s conservatism does not stop at her disdain for women who study and work. True to her class,

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she equally rejects non-Magyars, particularly Jews. The narrative renders this anti-Semitism absurd at two levels: first, through the character of Mr Grünspan, an old Jewish gentleman who is most helpful toward the girls (including Janka); and eventually, through Janka’s courtship by a young doctor. Once she finds out about his Jewish background, the voice of her class drowns out the voice of her heart and she breaks off the relationship. Her life after that becomes very unhappy, and she ends up marrying a colonel whom she does not love, a development that implies the author’s criticism of racial prejudice. Baba, whose name (which means “doll”) suits her initial description, is drawn toward sensual love, an option for which she eventually has to pay a very high price – her life. After her fiancé leaves her pregnant, she begs her former roommate Juli, already a practising physician, to perform an abortion on her. Juli refuses and tries to talk Baba into keeping the baby. In her despair, Baba undergoes an abortion performed by a quack and dies as a result; Juli arrives too late to try to save her life. Several voices blend in Juli’s refusal to perform the abortion: the voice of her professional ethics, the voice of conservative morals imbued by a Catholic rhetoric about sin and penance (the conversation between the two young women even takes place in a Catholic church, adding a more austere dimension to Juli’s lecture to Baba about the “fallen” woman and the consequences she has to carry), and the voice of an alternative lifestyle based on female bonding in which Baba, her mother, and Juli would be raising Baba’s child together. Remarkably, the narrative does not explicitly question the moral double standard and does not even raise the issue of the man’s responsibility for Baba’s ill-fortune. Baba’s death, however, becomes an implicit criticism of such a standard as well as of the moral hypocrisy that Juli does not herself challenge. Another consequence of the conservative voice on Juli’s attitudes in sexual and moral matters is that her life remains unfulfilled outside of her professional success. Her life does not unfold much more happily than Janka’s or Baba’s. She rejects both options her friends, her two alter-egos, represent: conventional marriage and surrender to sensual love. Lux presents these two paths as possible yet undesirable for a “new woman” by colouring them both in unhappy and even tragic hues. Juli focuses on professional fulfillment as a highly respected physician in a children’s hospital who lives for her work. A few years after the tragic episode with Baba, Juli decides to leave her job and move back to her hometown, to be able to help her local people and support her siblings. The novel ends on a rather pessimistic note. While neither of the options represented by Janka or Baba

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seems to be viable for Juli, the “new woman,” she still ends up looking into her future with tears in her eyes, hopeless over her lonely life, no matter how devoted she may be to her mission. Her books are her only “trousseau” (Lux 906, 270). To the comment of Baba’s mother, “you don’t only have a brain like these men, but also a heart, the angelic, good heart of a woman, which needs to be loved and to love, to have children,” Juli responds “let’s not talk about that” (Lux 906, 270–). We can see from this scene that Juli still nurses an underlying desire to find an adequate marriage partner and establish a conventional family, but that she does not see a way of reconciling this desire with her lifestyle. Although the narrative does not recommend alternative forms of relationships or single motherhood as a desirable or acceptable option for a happy life, professional success by itself is presented as a lonely path for the “new woman.” Lux includes a feminist statement toward the end of the novel: “In feminism it’s not the feminist ideal that will win, it’s not the ideal that strengthens a woman’s situation, it’s a woman’s character” (Lux 906, 268–9). This character, manifested in Juli, seems to suggest an ascetic lifestyle, similar to that of Troll-Borostyáni’s Klothilde Fels in “Stützen der Moral.” But whereas Klothilde’s renunciation of a romantic relationship is built on a well-founded criticism of the moral double standard and, given the novella’s “tendentiousness,” Klothilde is not unhappy over the lack of a romantic dimension in her life, Lux paints a less optimistic picture of the life of a “new woman” devoted to her profession. This novel’s heteroglossia, with the conflicting voices resonating in Juli, suggests a possible reason for this, namely, that the “new woman” is caught between several internalized discourses that shape the choices she makes. This makes it impossible for the narrative to resort to a well-established happy-ending pattern. Ritoók’s award-winning novel Egyenes úton – egyedül is built on a similar scenario. The author was a “new woman” herself. She was one of the rare Hungarian women of her generation to have received a rich education; she studied at several European universities (Budapest, Leipzig, Berlin, Paris) and obtained a doctorate in philosophy. Literary critics of her time recognized her work for its treatment of the modern woman’s struggle for independence and the inner crises it engenders (Boross 935, 3), as well as for her portrayal of characters representing an ultramodern and cosmopolitan way of thinking in Budapest (Pintér 928, 28). Egyenes úton – egyedül has the structure of an essayistic novel. From the beginning, it abounds in lengthy reflections on the question of malefemale roles and women’s emancipation. The terms “new woman” and “bluestocking” (blaustrumpf ) are both mentioned several times. The voice

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Emma Ritoók

of women’s emancipation is represented not only by the main protagonist, Ágnes, but also by several others. Ágnes, herself a young orphan and future doctor who, following the death of her elder brother has to look after her two younger sisters, succinctly formulates the struggles the “new woman” faces: “I believe that in this quiet feminine revolution of ours the transition is the most difficult phase. Not only do people not understand us, but we don’t quite understand ourselves either. The woman of the future, of a happy future, will already be born with a clear understanding of those aspirations that are still so faint before our eyes ... Don’t you see how we are bound by the thousand threads of the past? By family life’s traditions of thousands of years? They took us out of the walker, we are free, but they couldn’t take away our heredity and upbringing; and when one of us walks down the street to go into an editorial office or a dissection room, she can feel in her soul those invisible ties that pull us back into the past” (Ritoók 905, 28). Through Ágnes, Ritoók thus expresses the power of old discourses over the “new woman” and also ascribes to this first generation of emancipated women what Sigrid Weigel has termed the “double focus,” a

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conflict between the desire for emancipation and the burden of traditional roles and norms (Weigel 985). Ágnes’s path is parallelled by that of another young woman, Eliz Oroszi, who lives an independent life as an artist and fights her way to success despite the discrimination she initially experiences because of her sex. Ágnes’s sisters, on the other hand, both choose lives that Ágnes rejects. Zsuzsa becomes a housewife and a mother, though this option is subjected to her own harsh criticism: “I’m a machine that bears children, cooks and washes!” (Ritoók 905, 2). Here is an echo of Magda Pórtelky’s generation, who had no alternative but to become this machine. Zsuzsa’s circumstances are also important: she lives in a small apartment in the city, where the drudgery of her housewifely existence is even more apparent. Ritoók contrasts her life with that of another woman whose marriage is much happier, as she is the lady of a large household on a large farm. Thus Ritoók does not reject the option of marriage as such, but the drudgery suffered by many urban housewives. And Zsuzsa passionately demands of feminists like her sister that they educate young women about what awaits them in such a marriage. Ágnes’s younger sister, Magda, speaks with the voice of free love. She falls in love with the same man that Ágnes is in love with, Sándor, Ágnes’s colleague, and her love is requited. But Sándor does not want to go against his family’s principles and marry before he has established himself professionally. The male character is constructed as the weaker one, just as in Lux and Szederkényi, thus confirming Pynsent’s definition of modern man as “weak” (Pynsent 989, 8). Magda is the stronger one, who disregards social conventions and decides to live with Sándor. Ágnes reacts to this decision with a petty bourgeois moralizing tirade where she talks about “honour,” “sin,” and “shame” (Ritoók 905, 82–5). Her friend Eliz cuttingly analyses the double focus in Ágnes’s reaction with the following words: “your soul, Ágnes, is only half ways the soul of the new woman; the other half belongs to the old-fashioned Hungarian housewife, full of tenderness and prejudice” (Ritoók 905, 86), a judgment that could also be applied to Lux’s Juli. The tragic ending to Magda’s life adds an additional double voicedness. The voice of free love that Magda represents is contrasted with a moralizing voice that echoes through the tragic resolution of the plot. When, at the impending visit of his family, Sándor sends Magda away for fear of introducing her as his common-law wife, the reader is misled into believing that she has committed suicide, for she disappears without a trace.

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However, several years later Magda’s corpse is brought to the morgue of the hospital where both her sister and Sándor work. We learn that it is only now, after all these years, that Magda has indeed thrown herself into the Danube. The reader is left in the dark as to the motives for her action, for she obviously had been capable of looking after her little daughter and herself, without Sándor. Such tragic consequences of Magda’s divergence from the “straight” path carry a moralizing message: by victimizing the young woman, the narrator ultimately condemns the “sinful” lifestyle that she had chosen, thereby rejecting love without the sanction of marriage and defending the “straight path” that Ágnes walks on. The novel ends with Ágnes talking to her niece, now her adoptive daughter. Although, like Troll-Borostyáni’s Klothilde and Lux’s Juli, Ágnes remains single, she finds solace in her newly acquired mothering role and looks into the future with hope – but only for the next, her niece’s, generation: “The future, in which you women will be strong and happy, – the future which is yours and which will give you a space” (54). Among all the narratives discussed in this chapter, this novel best explicates the main struggles and conflicts of the “new woman” as epitomized by Ágnes and summarized by Weigel: “She must learn to voice the contradictions, to see them, to comprehend them, to live in and with them, and also learn to gain strength from the rebellion against yesterday and from the anticipation of tomorrow” (Weigel 985, 73). Among the voices within the novel’s heteroglossia, the voice of a conservative morality seems to remain intact in its basic principles, given that the character who mostly challenges it, Magda, dies. Single motherhood seems to be an acceptable option, but only in the form of adoption, for the woman who remains on the “straight” path. Below this surface, however, through Ágnes’s interaction with her alter egos, Magda and Eliz, the narrative offers a criticism of the conservative voice that resonates within Ágnes, for both Magda and Eliz challenge, oppose, and subvert it, each in her own way. Moreover, Magda’s death can be read along the lines of Dale Bauer’s definition of literary suicide: “Literary suicide and sacrifice are metaphors for a refusal to be conscripted” (Bauer 988, 4). The ending of this novel also deconstructs a happy ending, like Lux’s Leányok. There is an ambiguity regarding the ideology of the heterosexual romance, which is, to borrow Rita Felski’s definition, “characterized by female passivity, dependence and subordination” (Felski 989, 29, quoted in Wittmannn, 992, 54). Whereas Troll-Borostyáni’s “Höhenluft” and, to a certain degree, Meisel-Hess’s Fanny Roth revise the position of the “new

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woman” in a heterosexual romance and envision its compatibility with female independence and equality, Troll-Borostyáni’s “Stützen der Moral,” Kaffka’s Színek és évek, Szederkényi’s Amíg egy asszony eljut odáig, Lux’s Leányok, and Ritoók’s Egyenes úton – egyedül question this, each in its own way and to various degrees. Lux and Ritoók in particular demonstrate, through the conflicting voices in their narratives, the inner struggles faced by the “new women,” who are caught in a double focus.

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between sexual drive and romantic love The exploration of sexuality in fin-de-siècle women’s literature reflected one of the major goals of the women’s movement, namely, the fight against the moral double standard and its consequences on women’s (and men’s) lives and society as a whole. On the other hand, it also reflected this period’s interest in female sexuality (and sexuality in general). Female sexuality was a major focus of late nineteenth-century medical and psychological research – particularly feminine hysteria and women’s so-called sexual frigidity. Neurologist Moritz Benedikt, whom Breuer and Freud cite in their publication on hysteria, stated as early as 860: “The shocks to the female nervous system come partly from stresses and stimuli originating in their special organs, and also from the lack of sexual satisfaction, which is so frequent in females, and becomes the main source for the convulsion of the sensitive nervous system” (Benedikt 906, quoted in Angerer 996, 89). Freud does not delve any deeper than Benedikt into the possible causes for women’s “frigidity.” In Das Tabu der Virginität (The Taboo of Virginity), from 98, Freud states that women play out an “archaic” virginal reaction with their first sexual partner, through their “frigidity.” Although he admits that men’s desire to control women’s sexuality is why they wish their brides to remain virgins until the wedding night, he stops at that and does not go any further in acknowledging either the deeply seated unequal power relations between the sexes¹ or the reasons that may lead to women’s deficient sexual responsiveness, namely, their lack of sexual experience and education (Borgos 2003). The latter, again, is a result of the moral double

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standard, thus nothing inborn or “archaic,” but rather socially induced. A recognition of this would have challenged Freud’s deeply seated biological determinism and essentialism, which dominated his approach to female sexuality and desire throughout, including his (in)famous theory of women’s “penis envy”: “Behind this penis envy appears the hostile exasperation of the woman against the man, which is always latently present in the relations between the sexes and which shows its most obvious manifestation in the efforts and literary productions of the ‘emancipated’ women” (Freud 98, 30, quoted in Severit 998, 2). Ten years before the publication of Das Tabu der Virginität Freud’s Hungarian student and colleague Sándor Ferenczi had already expressed more progressive views than Freud’s. In his study “A korai magömlés jelentőségéről” (“On the Significance of Ejaculatio Praecox,” 908), Ferenczi talks about women’s right to sexual pleasure and satisfaction. He expresses ideas that feminists such as Meisel-Hess will later explore, stating that women’s priority ought to be fighting for their sexual rights and choices (Borgos 2003). However, a fact that Ferenczi underplays but feminists acknowledge is that women’s sexual liberation cannot be separated from a global change in their social and political position. Ferenczi, though, does recognize the impact of upbringing and social conditioning on women’s sexuality. While he espouses women’s right to sexual pleasure, he also points out that women internalize the belief that sexual enjoyment is something only for “fallen” women. He thereby touches on the importance of women’s upbringing and the power of discourses that form a crucial part of that upbringing. In their fiction, fin-de-siècle women writers in both Austria and Hungary explore sexuality in connection with existing sexual and social mores, and the impact of the discourses surrounding these mores on women’s sexual and emotional happiness. In some narratives, such investigation is more explicit and central; in others, it is intertwined with other themes. Maria Janitschek’s novella “In der Knospe” (“In the Bud,” 896) implies a criticism not only of the moral double standard but also of the sexual and intellectual ignorance in which young women are brought up. To portray this ignorance, she constructs her character Sidonie in rather unflattering terms, as a pretty yet somewhat stupid and empty doll who has no particular interests. Although she is already sixteen and engaged to an older, established man, she continues playing with the dolls that her fiancé brings her. Foreshadowing Freud’s ideas from Das Tabu der Virginität, Janitschek shows the man’s need to control the woman’s sexuality in his desire to maintain her doll-like ignorance, so as to preserve the virginity of

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his son’s future mother until the wedding night. In keeping with the moral double standard, he, on the other hand, has already enjoyed life, and many women. Through the ironic description of the aging future husband, who tries to maintain a youthful appearance so as to match his much younger fiancée, Janitschek deconstructs such double standards. Sidonie’s doll-like character, her ignorance, and her lack of any genuine interests are another focus of Janitschek’s irony, which is aimed at subverting conventional images and plot resolutions (Schmid-Bortenschlager 2000, 25). Sidonie’s actions are motivated purely by drives; she is not capable of any judgment or anticipation of the consequences of her actions. Her attraction to her cousin Hans, a moody and spoiled young man who appears in the role of the typical seducer with his lofty promises, is based on anything but love. All she feels for him is “a burning curiosity” (Janitschek 896, ), which still compels her more than the feeling of the obedient daughter she has for her fiancé. Through the story’s ending – the fiancé appears just at the last moment before Sidonie steps out of the house to run into Hans’s arms, thereby saving her “honour” – Janitschek demonstrates

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the triumph of sexual oppression and control. However, she is also critical of the apparent sexual liberation that Sidonie may have experienced with Hans. This can be seen from the description of Sidonie’s preparation for her unrealized date: “She dawdled upstairs without dreaming that she may have been grooming herself for her doom, that perhaps within a few hours, the impetuosity of a boy would have pulled her young and pure life into disgrace and shame” (Janitschek 896, 4). Although critical of the lack of sexual satisfaction that a typical marriage of convenience meant for young women, Janitschek is, at the same time, lucid enough not to recommend a premarital adventure as a way of liberation, because of its social consequences for the woman. Her character Sidonie is aware, though on an unconscious level, of her no-win situation, as manifested in the bath scene. Just before going into the bathtub, Sidonie takes a brief look at her naked body in the mirror, and cries. “This was one of the rare times that she cried. She didn’t know why. She stepped into the water quickly and tried to forget what she had seen” (Janitschek 896, 0). Sidonie has a premonition that her young body does not really belong to her, for no matter what she does, it will have to satisfy a man’s desire, either that of an unloved and boring husband who only wants her for her reproductive abilities or that of an attractive yet irresponsible young man who has just as little interest in her desire as her husband-to-be and only wants to satisfy his own sexual hunger and fantasies. The depth of Janitschek’s social criticism lies precisely in this presentation of the sexual options available to a young woman: “Under the existing social conditions and the power of the dominant images of femininity, the possibility of a positive sexual experience for women is not given” (Lettner 992, 72). Another novella by Janitschek, published in the same volume as “In der Knospe,” is entitled “Die Lehrerin” (“The Teacher”). It also thematizes the impossibility of sexual happiness for women, but from the perspective of a professionally independent woman. However, Janitschek’s main character is anything but a “new woman”; at best, we can call her a parody of the “new woman,” though a parody with a sad undertone. The life of a teacher, which allows Elise to lead only a very modest existence, does not bring her any professional, let alone emotional, fulfillment. On her thirty-fifth birthday, she decides to break out of her dull existence. As she kisses the picture of her late mother, she tries to break free from the authoritative discourse of a morality represented by her mother, which still resonates in her ears with its catchwords such as “honour” and “decency.” She goes out for a late walk by herself, trying to display her feminine charms with an “unusual, provocative, new feature around her mouth” (Janitschek 989, 8). But

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this new determination, which attracts a suitor (who, ironically, initially mistakes her for a prostitute), proves to be a mask that she is not able to wear for very long. The authoritative discourse of the good girl, mingled with her emotional neediness, loneliness, and repressed sexuality, shines through and the young man, Friedrich, soon begins to find this repulsive. Elise’s small apartment, which he calls “the typical old-maid’s little room” (Janitschek 989, 2), reflects the level to which she is caught in a system of values that she desperately tries to escape. Elise’s repressed sexuality threatens to betray the veneer of her good-girl demeanour, eventually bursting out in a hysterical crying attack in reaction to Friedrich’s lack of sexual responsiveness. It is only when she falls on her knees in a grotesque pose, “her hat slipped sideways on her neck, with one glove on and the other lying on the floor,” (Janitschek 989, 29) that his sexual instincts win over. Following this single sexual encounter, which Janitschek does not describe, Friedrich puts a stop to any further contact, whereas Elise is completely changed: she seems more settled and happier in her everyday life. Her fantasy remains focused around “the happiness of this single hour,” and is fuelled with ever richer images. The metaphor used to describe her state, “pregnant sensuality” (Janitschek 989, 29), indicates that Elise’s fantasies become mired in a pathological delusion that supersedes the reality of her life. Because of the “indecent” smile that becomes stuck to her face, she faces the possible loss of her job, but she is already so carried away by her delusion that she does not care, and keeps on smiling. Janitschek’s story thus ends with an incipient state of madness as the ultimate result of the confusion between sexual needs and desire, on the one hand, and bourgeois morality, on the other. While Janitschek demonstrates, in both narratives, the importance of the sexual drive and the consequences of its repression, she does this in a matter-of-fact way without offering any further reflection or explanation, be it from the point of view of the narrator or of the characters. As Helen Chambers has observed, she achieves this by creating “an ironic distance between herself and her characters as she treats them almost as the objects of laboratory experiments” (Chambers 2000, 398). As with most of her narratives, the result is an equivocal position regarding women’s emancipation and sexuality (Klugsberger and Bortenschlager 999, 82), which makes it impossible to classify Janitschek as either a feminist or an antifeminist author. This is probably one of the reasons that contemporaneous writers gave her a mixed reception. Ricarda Huch, for instance, found the direct way in which she portrayed sexuality “indelicate and unacceptable” (Chambers 2000, 399). Some critics objected that her writings were

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“decadent” and lacked unity (Geißler 93, 248), whereas others found fault with her “distorted” and “exaggerated” portrayal of reality, without the look of an “affectionate observer” (Brausewetter 897, 200). Only presentday scholars have acknowledged Janitschek for her clever “manipulation of narrative perspective and conventional narrative models” (Chambers 2000, 398). Meisel-Hess, on the other hand, in her novel Fanny Roth, not only presents a young woman’s successful search for a fulfilling life but also discusses the awakening of female sexuality and the mechanisms through which it becomes either violated or satisfied in marriage. Meisel-Hess’s theories about the importance of sexuality and the consequences of its repression are reflected in Fanny’s story. Like Freud, Meisel-Hess considered that sexual activity was vital for healthy development and that refraining from it may lead to hysteria.² Fanny does show mild hysterical symptoms prior to her marriage, such as inability to sleep and nervousness. Although these symptoms disappear during her marriage, Fanny has to bear the consequences of the moral double standard and the unnatural restrictions imposed on her burgeoning sexuality through the choice of a husband with whom, as shown before, she cannot develop any deeper relationship beyond the sexual one. However, unlike Janitschek, who in “In der Knospe” constructs Sidonie’s story as a no-win situation in terms of sexual and emotional happiness, Meisel-Hess endows Fanny with both of these qualities. At the beginning of the narrative, Fanny is described as very pleased with the view of her young body in the mirror (unlike Sidonie in the bath scene), a detail that foreshadows Fanny’s sexual fulfillment in her marriage. She looks at herself in detail, starting with her face, and then her body, which Meisel-Hess constructs according to the art nouveau ideal of the thin, serpentine female body.³ Although Fanny has to break through her initial shyness over her nudity, she enjoys the awakening of her sexual feelings and her subsequent dreaming about Josef Fellner. Fanny’s erotic drunkenness pushes her to give in to Fellner’s insistence to marry quickly, the consequences of which we have seen before. The scene of the wedding night merits particular attention, for it introduces a popular topic in fin-de-siècle Austrian and Hungarian women’s literature, namely, sexual violence – in this case, marital rape. The thematization of rape is very important here, for “it confronts the silence around sexual violence within both the medical field and the field of literature” (Thorson 996, 29). As Thorson observes, Freud, like others in his field, tended to focus on women’s “frigidity,” yet he was silent when it came to

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male sexual aggression. Meisel-Hess breaks this silence: “And it was a wild, horrible fight: the desperate effort of a childlike little body against a brazen male force. Her screams suffocated in bloody kisses, an iron strength subdued her wrestling limbs, a pitiless will forged her blazing resistance ... She didn’t give in, she sank – rattling and helplessly – into this force. In her last moments of consciousness she heard only his gushing begging for forgiveness, and she felt as if a monster that had just torn her apart were now gently licking her hand” (Meisel-Hess 902, 57). Meisel-Hess’s accusation of the moral double standard is strongest in this scene. Such a standard allows the sexually experienced man to brutally claim physical possession of his still childlike wife, whose sexual inexperience he very much values as a basis for domination and control. Thorson has rightly diagnosed Fanny’s husband as belonging to the category of degenerate men (a category Meisel-Hess will introduce a few years later in Die sexuelle Krise), for his brutality and inability to respond to his wife and women in general in any but a purely sexual way; the woman represents a mere object of his pleasure and needs (Thorson 996, 223–4). Against all expectations, despite the traumatic experience of the wedding night, Fanny does not become a “frigid” woman; instead, she feels relief the following morning. MeiselHess lets Fanny’s sexual desire unfold and eventually manifest itself very strongly and satisfactorily in her marriage. This is a unique development in the literature of the period, in both Austria and Hungary; it is not found in other narratives that thematize sexual violence, such as Szederkényi’s novel Amíg egy asszony eljut odáig and Asenijeff’s short story “Daseinselend.” As previously shown, Meisel-Hess’s Fanny Roth and Szederkényi’s Judit have several things in common: they are both educated, they both marry the man of their own choice but later discover that they are not compatible with him, and they both leave their husbands to choose an independent life. Another commonality in the two narratives is the open discussion of sexuality and of sexual brutality experienced by the heroines, although the two authors approach this topic differently. For Meisel-Hess, sexuality, sexual attraction, and pleasure do not necessarily go hand in hand with love. Fanny marries Josef Fellner out of sexual urgency, not love, thereby confirming the importance that Meisel-Hess attributed to human drives (Morrien 2000, 52). And, although love does not develop between the spouses, Fanny still comes to enjoy sex with her husband, even though she later realizes that such a relationship does not satisfy her completely. For Szederkényi’s Judit, on the other hand, sexuality is inseparable from love. During her flight with her future husband, Zalárd, Judit experiences sexual desire for him, but this desire crumbles at

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the first signs of his lack of genuine interest in her personality: “The daze vanished. Judit became disenchanted and started to think ... The moment was gone. The moment when the woman gives herself freely, like a divinity” (Szederkényi 95, 74). Subsequently, she does not enjoy Zalárd’s kisses, which he pours over her with ardent passion; instead, she feels frightened. Sexual coldness and the feeling of strangeness toward Zalárd remain with Judit throughout her marriage. Although Szederkényi, unlike MeiselHess, does not offer a detailed description of the wedding night, later information indicates that Judit did suffer brutality, much like Fanny. When, during one of their fights, Zalárd reproaches Judit for her sexual coldness since their wedding night, Judit cries out: “Don’t even mention that night to me. You killed my soul then” (Szederkényi 95, 283). Whereas in Fanny Roth the narrator informs the reader of Fanny’s sexual violation and subsequent developments in her marital life, here the character herself expresses her reflections directly, in dialogues with various other characters and, more extensively, in the letter that she writes, but never sends, to her mother. In this letter, Judit analyses possible causes of the sexual incompatibility that she experiences in her marriage: In the evening, after sunset, my husband approaches me like night itself. No matter what may have happened during the day, when night comes, he changes. He begins to besiege me, and I feel that it is not even me whom he wants to conquer, but rather the unknown power that separates us from one another ... What is it? I have even thought – oh I know now many things that as a young girl I didn’t even have an idea about – that perhaps those women are between us who had come before me, from whom he had filched pleasures and who had understood the art of loving better than I do ... Perhaps he thinks of them, perhaps in a way that he himself doesn’t know ... I have started to believe that what I have banalized so far, what I considered a complete side issue and what I sneered at, what I claimed to be proudly above without being touched by it, that this is the foundation of marital life and that everything comes down to it ... How curious that still nobody talks about it, not even husband and wife. (Szederkényi 95, 27–8)

Judit’s analysis touches on some important and much discussed issues within the women’s movement, such as the moral double standard, young women’s sexual ignorance before marriage, and the lack of open communication about sexuality between spouses, all of which have contributed to Judit’s “frigidity.” Judit’s musings go further as she confronts the gap between romantic love, which she compares to a “high tower” that she had built (Szederkényi 95, 30), and sexuality, with its basic instincts.

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The unsent letter to her mother is not the only instance in which Judit seeks a female network, albeit imaginary, from which to draw emotional support. She does the same in an imaginary dialogue that she addresses to her absent little sister. In this dialogue-monologue, Judit posits a duality between women and men: men become the carriers of a corrupted sexuality based solely on instincts, while women are imbued with purity and innocence. Female sexuality is presented as more subtle and complex, requiring an intersubjective relationship for its development. This duality is confirmed in Szederkényi’s portrayal of the other male characters as well, all of whom have but one thing on their mind, no matter how nicely they may wrap it up. In Meisel-Hess’s terms, Szederkényi’s male characters all fall into the category of sexually degenerate males. Unlike Janitschek or Meisel-Hess, whose female characters are as much driven by sexual instincts as the males, Szederkényi represents women as the objects and victims of a permanent male sexual appetite: “Woman’s destiny is terrible ... No matter where she turns, she encounters an enemy that she cannot fight ... This painful, miserable female body that brings along eternal suffering” (Szederkényi 95, 249). Confirming psychoanalytic theories, the absence of pleasure brings about physical illness and hysterical symptoms in women, as in Judit’s friend Ella. Yet this apparent victim-voice carries another level of reflection, which addresses the unequal power relations between the sexes that make an intersubjective relationship impossible to develop. Ella quotes a Hungarian popular song: “I need a woman who will get up even when she is sick” (248). This traditional song reflects a deeply entrenched discourse about women’s role in Hungarian culture and, as such, speaks to their subordinate status. In contrast to such gender relations, Judit presents the utopia of male and female camaraderie, a concept based on intersubjective acknowledgment of each other that she finds impossible to develop in her marriage. Ella, on the other hand, chooses adultery with a man toward whom she develops passionate feelings absent in her marriage, but Judit disapproves of this solution. Judit’s difficulty in leaving her husband after she comes to the conclusion that her love for him has died is based on an authoritative discourse, namely sexual dependency on the “first man.” The power of patriarchy’s mystification of a woman’s virginity and the concept of honour attached to it proves difficult to confront, but in the end the discourse of emancipation triumphs in Judit’s internalized discourses and she leaves, relying solely on feminine power, just like Fanny Roth. Yet, unlike in Fanny Roth, in this narrative the possibility of a harmonious male-female relationship remains foreclosed.

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Asenijeff’s short story from the thematically intertwined series “Daseinselend: Episoden aus dem Weibesleben” (“Existential Misery: Episodes from Women’s Lives”), which appeared in the 896 volume Ist das die Liebe? (Is This Love?) sums up, in only a few pages, what Janitschek, MeiselHess, and Szederkényi each address in their narratives: women’s sexual ignorance before marriage, the false expectations of romantic love fuelled by the internalized discourses of their upbringing, and the shock of the wedding night. The brevity of the story and the use of irony throughout make Asenijeff’s criticism of these phenomena the sharpest among the texts discussed. Asenijeff’s Mary Bender combines the qualities of the previous female characters: she is just as ignorant as Janitschek’s Sidonie, full of romantic dreams about love like Szederkényi’s Judit, and she, like Fanny Roth, experiences brutality on her wedding night. The description of the wedding night, which takes up nearly half of this short narrative, is its most important element. Regarding the level of brutality, it goes beyond MeiselHess’s representation, partly because of the contrast between the spouses’ sexuality. Whereas Mary’s sexuality still lies dormant, thanks to her pampered upbringing, the previously more romantic than aggressive fiancé, Heinrich, becomes completely transformed at the prospect of the consummation of his spousal rights. Asenijeff describes him as a wild animal who falls over his innocent and ignorant prey: his face turns pale, then all red, his voice becomes “rough and hoarse,” his eyes bloody, and his breathing audibly faster (Asenijeff 896, 72), while Mary experiences intense fear and even hatred for him. Asenijeff repeatedly uses the words “fear” and “frightened” to describe the horror of this experience for the young woman; she also stresses Mary’s physical pain. The description of marital rape is given in gruesome detail, even more so than in Fanny Roth: She trembles and shakes and writhes in powerless pain under his body, while he, with his greedy lips, burrows in her flesh. His hands press her budding, virginal breasts so that she screams in pain. She presses, trembling, her head against the pillow and closes her frightened eyes, while he whispers infamous, shameless words into her ear. Her whole trembling body is flushed with fear and glowing with fever, her heart beats in terror, in her head it whistles, she sees nothing from fear and tries to escape, but the brutal fist of the man holds her down. And now his hands go from the breasts downward, to a spot that her chaste thoughts never once dared to touch. He pulls on her legs – he groans wildly, his whole body pulls together in a convulsion – she screams piercingly. (Asenijeff 896, 73–4)

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For Asenijeff, the wedding night represents an irretrievable loss of innocence for the woman, a loss that, unlike in Fanny Roth, is not followed by a surge of creative energy. The shock of sexual brutality remains a permanent wound for the woman that can never heal but that she can never openly admit to either, convention requiring that she keep silent about it behind a smiling face. Despite the somewhat grotesque, animal-like representation of male sexuality, Asenijeff, unlike in some of her later texts with viriphobic elements, does not criticize the man for his brutal behaviour. She regards men as basically innocent, just like women, for they manifest one part of a duality of socially induced and sanctioned behaviour: whereas women are brought up in “gushing dreaming,” men “stand at the opposite pole of most vulgar brutality” (Asenijeff 896, 74). The narratives by Meisel-Hess, Szederkényi, and Asenijeff formulate implicitly what more recent theories of violence have elaborated on, namely, that male violence is grounded in a social structure based on domination and control (Kaufman 987, 6) and that the existing social structure determines the degree to which violence is legitimized (Schaeffer-Hegel and Wartmann 984). These narratives not only place marital sexual violence in its socio-historical context and break the silence on this topic but also add a subtle meta-textual dimension regarding the mechanisms through which such violence is tolerated and never spoken of. language, desire, and the constitution of the subject Freud saw the concept of the Oedipus complex as central to identity formation. Jacques Lacan has applied Freud’s theory to the acquisition of language. According to Lacan, the subject comes into existence through language. In the pre-Oedipal stage, which Lacan terms the imaginary, the subject is not yet formed. According to Freud, this unformed self must be repressed for a healthy individuation process to occur. This sublimation allows for the access to the territory of the symbolic. Women, according to Freud, do not go through this process without keeping “residues” of the pre-Oedipal, which is why “this territory represents not only the feminine, but also the anxiety linked to the feminine” (Lichtenberg Ettinger 992, 85). For Lacan, women cannot become part of the symbolic, given these pre-Oedipal remnants, and, therefore, are excluded from subject formation. For Lacan, the symbolic is phallic, which is why important parts of the female body and sexuality are excluded from symbolization. Thus, women and the feminine have no place in the symbolic order, in language and culture, as these are phallically connoted: “The masculine-paternal,

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in this instance, is the only agent of culture, and the feminine is the price that must be paid in order to belong to culture” (Lichtenberg Ettinger 992, 90). The realm of the feminine is excluded from language to the point that Lacan is able to conclude: “Il n’y a pas La femme” – Woman is not (Lacan 975, 66; emphasis in the original). The exclusion of the feminine from the symbolic has far-reaching consequences for women: “woman” is either equated with the realm of the Real, which is everything that has been left out of the process of symbolization, or put in the position of that which is not, the “deficient,” the Other, and, ultimately, the object. Female difference and the expression of female desire cannot fit within the constraints of phallic language; hence Lacan’s assumption that women’s desire must be located “au delà du phallus” – beyond the phallus (Lacan 975, 67), which leaves them, if they want to be part of the symbolic at all, only one choice: “Woman can only enter the world of the symbolic when she internalizes male desire (the phallic libido). The speaking and writing subject is therefore a ‘male’ one, the silent object ‘female’” (Brinker-Gabler 988, 25). Women are thus silenced, shut out of language; hysteria is their acknowledged form of expression, for Freud as for Lacan. In addition to the discourse of the hysteric, Lacan recognizes the discourse of the mystic as another feminine discourse. Both involve a pleasure beyond self-centred phallic pleasure. The mystic is an authentic feminine discourse, mystical love being the form of love that transcends phallocentric pleasure and self-love (Lindhoff 995, 85–6), yet at the same time causes the subject to disintegrate. While being able to reach out to the other, women, according to the phallocentric model, remain outside of the constitution of a subjectivity of their own: they place their desire into God or Man. Reflecting on the consequences of phallocentrism for women’s sexuality, Luce Irigaray concludes that a woman, to become part of the Law of the Father, remains trapped in a continuous “seduction of the father”; she unceasingly seeks to awaken a man’s desire for her, to which he cannot give in, since this would mean breaking his own law and acknowledging woman, the Other (Irigaray 974, 4–2). Irigaray attributes the alleged lack of women’s desire within the phallocentric model to the dominant systems of representation that do not allow women to express their desire, “which does not mean that they have none” (Irigaray 990, 90). Benjamin, through her concept of intersubjectivity, has proposed a different paradigm of desire, namely one that breaks with the duality implied in phallocentrism and acknowledges women’s desire and subject status. She describes intersubjectivity as a mode that “may point to a locus for women’s independent desire, a relationship to desire that is not represented by the phallus”

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(Benjamin 986, 9). Intersubjectivity thus challenges the dominant norms of traditional role distribution and identity formation in which subjectivity is phallically connoted. I will analyse how, in several narratives, these modes of expression and formation of desire interact in forming or destroying the female subject. In Ritóok’s novel Egyenes úton – egyedül, the story centres around the lives of two sisters: Ágnes, who becomes a doctor, and her youngest sister Magda, who ends her life by drowning herself in the Danube. Ágnes is very well aware of how male and female identity and desire are constructed. When a female friend, talking about her younger brother’s bossy behaviour, remarks that “they come into this world with the thought that they are the ones who rule, it is born with them,” Ágnes replies: “Just as the thought of subordination is born with us” (Ritoók 905, 58). Ágnes thereby formulates the traditional gender division into male subjects and female objects. As a representative of the “new woman,” she must painstakingly find her way out of the double focus, and she does so by becoming a doctor. In her personal life, the only way for her to avoid the double focus, in which, according to Weigel, the “new woman” inevitably becomes caught, is to remain single. For Ágnes, love is not desire for a man’s desire, nor is it a subject-disintegrating mystical love; rather, she wants to preserve her individuality in a relationship and wants to be recognized as a subject – something she does not see possible for women of her generation. The opposite is true for her sister Magda, who focuses her life solely around her relationship with Sándor, only to be met with his rejection and his inability to embrace a relationship beyond traditional norms. Magda, in her attempt to be subject of her desire, loses herself in her love for Sándor. The description of Magda’s experience of desire gives it a “mystical” quality, to use Lacan’s terms: “she doesn’t understand what is happening to her ... she felt a tense restlessness in her soul ... an insecurity filled with anticipation” (Ritoók 905, 30–). There is no precise description of Magda’s desire, not because she does not have one, but because she cannot express it within the framework of the Law of the Father, represented through Sándor and his dependency on social conventions. She remains longing to be recognized as a subject by the man, Sándor, and is ultimately incapable of being one without him. She thus stands as Ágnes’s alter ego, and her vanishing as a subject mirrors Ágnes’s struggle to construct herself as a subject without a man. In another novel, A szellem kalandorai (Spiritual Adventurers), which was not published until 922, Ritoók presents an intellectual woman’s struggle, both with her peers and within herself, to gain recognition as

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a writing subject, an author. The novel is fascinating reading for anyone interested in the intellectual history of the fin de siècle. It is not only a true document of the author’s broad education and knowledge in matters of philosophy – Plato, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bergson are mentioned, among several other philosophers and thinkers – but also a real chronicle of the turn of the century’s intellectual and social currents.⁴ Virtually no topic is left untouched in Ritoók’s characters’ numerous discussions, which range from social and political issues (revolution and anti-Semitism) to Taoism, theosophy, the Bhagavad Gita, music (Wagner, Gustav Mahler), and literature. This makes this text still worth reading today, despite its apparent formal and compositional weaknesses, for which the novel has been repeatedly criticized. For its critical portrayal of the turn of the century’s ideological content and intellectual and moral crisis, Ritoók’s novel can be called a Hungarian Zeitroman. Her principal male character, Ervin Donáth, has a lot in common with Musil’s Ulrich from Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities): he wants to become a “great man” in the domain of philosophy and uses the love (and money) of several women to help him reach this goal. However, Ritoók’s novel differs from Musil’s or other Zeitromans of the same period in that it is told mainly from a woman’s perspective, through Héva Bártoldy, the principal female character. It not only implies a criticism of the male character’s selfish and self-centred behaviour and lifestyle but also offers insight into the “new woman’s” struggles to find her way toward an expression of her creativity and her sexuality. This aspect of A szellem kalandorai makes it unique in its genre. From its very beginning, the novel testifies to Ritoók’s familiarity with contemporaneous intellectual issues, such as Freud’s theories. Ervin’s character reveals a narcissistic disorder that makes him a selfish dreamer who is unable to love another human being and whose only way of relating to others is by seeking their undivided attention and exploiting their affection. Héva Bártoldy’s name is mentioned for the first time during one of those soirées where the young men are absorbed in philosophical discussions and the women present “occasionally ... threw in a comment into the debate” (Ritoók 922, : 79), a situation that clearly speaks of the power relations in intellectual circles. Héva, already a published writer, seems to be the only woman whom the young philosophers respect for her intellectual abilities. Still, while recognizing Héva’s creative potential, Ervin expresses his generation’s essentialist views about women: “‘But it must be a woman who would write about the aesthetics of tragedy,’ continued

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Ervin, ‘with that purest receptivity for thoughts which can only be the quality of a woman who is endowed with the creative gift of understanding everything’” (Ritoók 922, : 78). The image of woman as the receptacle and unconditional listener for everything a man’s mind might conceptualize shines through. Although Héva offers her unconditional ear to Ervin, she also lives an independent life and is an accomplished writer: “She lived off her small fortune, travelled and studied; she knew her intellectual values, she was capable of working and her faith in her independent creative abilities was strong and sure” (Ritoók 922, : 27). The reader’s impression of Héva is one of a woman who has succeeded in establishing herself in the symbolic order, despite her sex and the exclusion from the symbolic attached to it. However, some passages speak of her inner doubts regarding her creative abilities. Ritoók puts these interiorized doubts and the double standard about women’s authorship into Héva’s words after Héva has completed the text of her drama: “Often I believe that a woman cannot be a writer; music, colour, drawing is much more suited for her. Perhaps a man also feels how shameless the uttering of thoughts and feelings through words is in front of indifferent, unknown, foreign people. In a woman it conflicts with her womanly essence ... every writing is poetry and woman’s poetry, the music of her body and soul can only belong to one man” (Ritoók 922, : 220). Here Ritoók formulates the public aspect of writing and how it goes against the traditional space assigned to women, how it challenges their dependency on recognition by a male subject, suggesting the deeply ingrained phallic construction of authorship. Weigel sees the fear of the intellectual woman as deeply rooted in Western culture. She speaks of the difficulty of linking womanhood and authorship and builds on one of Walter Benjamin’s Denkbilder, which applies the metaphor of birthing to the genesis of a literary text and art in general, as the creation of art implies the myth of creation connoted to a male, omnipotent God-Father. This idea, Weigel argues, explains how throughout history, artistic production has necessarily led to the exclusion of women as authors, since the concept of the authoress “would jeopardize or thwart the whole concept of men’s self-creation as a transcending of their own origins, which is but an expression of the fear of female omnipotence and the desire for its containment, respectively” (Weigel 990, 238). On the other hand, women authors of the period (and of earlier periods) had themselves interiorized this “anxiety of authorship” as described by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (Gilbert and Gubar 979). Since, traditionally, women had not been considered the creators of culture and literature but had been excluded from the symbolic,

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taking up the (male-defined) pen meant that fin-de-siècle women writers not only had to cope with society’s prejudice against the intellectual woman as something unfeminine, not to say monstrous, but also to overcome those barriers against their own writing within themselves, as Héva’s case illustrates. Ervin is attracted to Héva’s personality and they become very close friends. Ervin is taken not only by Héva’s ability to listen but also by her intellectual responsiveness to his ideas, something he has not encountered in any other woman. However, when he wants their friendship to become an intimate relationship, Héva steps back. Ervin’s masculinity and narcissism are hurt by this rejection, which he cannot comprehend. All he knows is that he wants the woman in Héva to confirm his male desire: “Not that he hasn’t known until then that average-male feeling to possess the woman in her, but now he wanted that she want it too. He wanted to receive from the woman that fearful, expecting, perhaps unconscious invitation which cannot be expressed in words and which, all at once, gives the man complete security” (Ritoók 922, : 62). Yet he is completely incapable of recognizing Héva’s sensibilities. Héva senses Ervin’s selfishness and does not get the feeling of oneness when he kisses her. She attributes his insistence on making their love physical to their racial difference – Héva being the offspring of an old Hungarian family – thereby voicing another internalized discourse, very much alive as part of the growing anti-Semitism of the turn of the century, regarding Jews’ greater sensuality.⁵ On the other hand, Héva is also ambivalent regarding sexuality, split between the internalized moral double standard and the wish to be a “new woman” who freely acts on her sexual desires, regardless of whether they are expressed within marriage or not. However, Héva’s lack of responsiveness to Ervin’s sexual advances has yet another cause. She feels in him the same forceful sexual desire that estranged her from her husband on her wedding night: “But when she saw Ervin’s face, which had completely changed from desire and forceful self-control, that pale forehead and those burning eyes with that male look waiting and wanting – she knew that it wasn’t possible; as if she had already seen this expression which was unbearably foreign, forceful and self-assured” (Ritoók 922, : 228). Héva, despite the love and friendship she feels for Ervin, is repulsed by the raw, animal, object-oriented desire in the man who wants to possess the female while disregarding her desire and needs, that very same degenerate male sexuality criticized by other women writers. Héva yearns for a different kind of sexuality based on intersubjectivity. She feels that a “heightened awareness of both self and other, the reciprocal recognition that intensifies the self’s freedom of

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expression” (Benjamin 986, 93) would not be realized in an erotic encounter with Ervin, who is interested in the conquest of the female in her, and thus, her reduction to an object, adding yet another chapter to his philosophy of Eros. Although, following the breakup with Erwin, Héva does go through a deep personal crisis and even attempts suicide, she does not give in to the deconstruction of her self but finds her way back to her writing, thereby asserting herself as a subject within the symbolic. Her path thus echoes that of Ágnes from Egyenes úton – egyedül. Kaffka’s novel Mária évei (Mária’s Years, 93) focuses on the writing rather than the reading subject and the construction of desire through internalized discourses of literary scenarios of romantic love. Kaffka demonstrates the extent of the power of internalized discourses over the life of a young woman, Mária, a girls’ grammar-school teacher. Although, to all appearances, Mária has every reason to be happy – a respected career and a fiancé who loves her – she ends her life by jumping from a bridge into the Danube. Kaffka shows how the seed of that tragic ending is already sown during Mária’s college years. Mária’s friends from teacher’s college call love a “cultural neurosis, a compulsive-imaginary whim that the Middle Ages left for humanity” (Kaffka 994, 9). They list the sources from which they themselves have acquired all that “muddled food for the journey” (Kaffka 994, ): Rousseau, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Goethe, and, above all, the medieval love story of Tristan and Isolde – all famous examples of tragic heroines, of women who were created as objects of the fantasy of a male literary subject. The young women, although unaware of the gender aspect of the cultural burden they carry, acknowledge that they will have difficulties adapting to the real world, given that, in their sheltered lives, their desires have been shaped by literary models, not real-life experiences: “We squeezed into ourselves the most varied, foreign loves seriously, thoroughly and almost studiously, although we haven’t been kissed on the lips by anyone in the whole wide world” (4). Mária will be the one most incapable of resolving this conflict in her own life. The first manifestation of this split between romantic projections and reality is her long correspondence-based love affair with the famous writer, Seregély. Her letters to him, along with her diary from a trip where she recreates the path he had followed on an earlier journey, take up a substantial part of the first half of the novel. These first-person narratives, the letter and the diary, are Mária’s attempts to become a writing subject herself and thus express her desire, something she is not able to do in her everyday

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life. But unlike some of her contemporaneous literary heroines, such as Szederkényi’s Judit, who resort to similar forms of “subjective literature” (Weigel) to critically explore the conflict between their desire and their internalized discourses, Mária does not achieve clarity through writing, but rather reiterates the romantic discourse (Wittmann 994, 4) and invents herself as a literary figure. She has internalized the discourse of romantic love as an authoritative discourse to the point of complete identification, such that her own writing, rather than liberating her from the acquired discourse, leaves her trapped in the realm of fantasy, as a suffering and tragic heroine who keeps real-life young men at a distance. Mária is contrasted with her former friend from college, Vica, who becomes a successful writer. Vica succeeds where Mária fails, namely, on the one hand, in recognizing the male authorship in discourses that have shaped culture and, consequently, distorted female imagination, and on the other, in extricating herself from the object-trap by becoming a subject. Mária’s shying away from physical contact with men is already clear in the dance scene: “She pulled back her delicate, tall figure in a distinctive yet somewhat stiff and peculiar posture, fearing the pressure of a hand out of control. Nobody dared to start a deeper, meaningful conversation with her beyond the few mandatory compliments” (Kaffka 994, 32). Mária’s love-at-a-distance with the writer offers her the perfect opportunity to avoid the physical aspects of sexuality. The fact that the man of her fantasy is an author helps feed her imagination during their only encounter, when she pays him a brief visit at his apartment in Budapest. This meeting is a perfect example not only of how the male subject of literary discourse creates the female as an object of his discourse but also of the power that these discourses exert on the female reader. As in a Freudian talk-cure, where the analyst, the master of the symbolic, provides the discourse for his hysteric female patients “caught” in the imaginary, thereby creating their story for them, the writer manipulates Mária’s projection of literature onto reality, not only through their previous correspondence but also by staging the “perfect” moment her romantic fantasy has been longing for: “Their thoughts became heated, and at moments they could almost hear the other breathe ... One move now, the girl thought, would break the magic; dangerously, perhaps confusing everything or liberating. No, no motion! Let everything remain like this. This is sacred!” (Kaffka 994, 73). Though they are both aware that this moment has the potential to liberate Mária from her prison of words, she is not capable of taking the necessary step and he is unwilling to push her to do so: “the man delights in the effect of the male created discursivity of which Mária is a prisoner” (Wittmann 994, 407).

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Other literary heroines, such as Szederkényi’s Judit and Asenijeff’s Mary, are unable to respond to physical contact with a man as a result both of the internalized discourse of romantic love and of sexual violence, that is, marital rape, but Mária has no negative sexual experience. Her teacher colleague, later friend and ultimately fiancé, Sándor Apostol,⁶ is anything but a brutal male. He is very understanding, gentle, and patient with Mária – an exceptional male character in women’s literature of the period. The paradox in this narrative is that it is the man who both wishes and is able to build a relationship with the woman in an intersubjective space, but the woman is not. Apostol accepts Mária as his equal both intellectually and sexually. Apostol, although far from being perfect, is a “new man,” not only in his awareness of his wrongdoings and his shortcomings but also in his ability to acknowledge the general power imbalance between the sexes in society and his attempt to build a relationship of equals with Mária. However, Mária’s internalization of the discourse of romantic love and her resulting inability to be a truly independent “new woman” shows in the scene where Apostol does not consider it necessary that he accompany Mária to a function, whereas she feels inwardly indignant, expecting chivalrous behaviour from the man. Mária’s fear of sexuality and marriage does not originate only in her romantic escapism, which does not allow her to enjoy any physical advances by a man – her reaction to a kiss an earlier suitor tries to give her is disgust and, later, she “endures” her fiancé’s kisses – but also in the reality of marriage as presented to her by her older sister, with the double standard of a cheating husband and a humiliated wife. The lie to Apostol about her nonexistent sexual past, through which she hopes to avoid his proposal, also stems from that fear. But through the lie she creates another level of fear, namely, that she would make herself ridiculous if he found out the truth. She becomes so trapped by her lie that the only way out she sees is to seek a sexual affair with another man, this time a politician. Her fantasies are fuelled by this imaginary affair, just as they used to be by the writer, to the point that she is ready to become the politician’s mistress – but this never happens because he misses their date.⁷ In her two fantasy affairs Maria is searching for the desire of men of accomplishment, who are firmly established within the phallocentric power structures. By seeking their desire, she is trying to connect to a place of importance that they embody, to a subject status that women of her generation were just beginning to acquire but that she does not see herself capable of claiming for herself: “I am not independent enough, not strong enough, not human enough to place my life’s focus on myself” (Kaffka 994, 42).

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Mária echoes here ideas that Kaffka formulated about the “new woman” more extensively in an article from 93: “She should be able to leave, transcend and stand tall, direct her focus and appreciation towards herself, not only into pleasing a man” (Kaffka 93). Mária’s work as a teacher does not offer her enough sense of importance. During a class, she daydreams of “leaving a trace somehow in the life of others, at least squeezing something out, not remaining so neutral and unimportant” (Kaffka 994, 22). Her self-inflicted death is the consequence of the impossibility of her inscribing herself in the symbolic as a woman of deed. Since, unlike her author-friend Vica, she cannot break out of the constructions of a phallocentric subject or replace them with new ones, Mária becomes a tragic inversion of the “new woman” and dies like a tragic heroine, an invention of male desire and fantasy from a man-made literary scenario. lesbian love Lesbian love was not widely represented in fin-de-siècle women’s literature, although Hanna Hacker has demonstrated that, nevertheless, a lesbian subculture did exist in fin-de-siècle Austria (Hacker 983), and even more so in the 920s and 930s (among other places in the Semmering near Vienna) (Hacker 987, 208).⁸ At the turn of the century, there were still very few examples of fictional texts where female sexuality was openly addressed.⁹ In Austria, these include Janitschek’s novels Mimikry (903) and Im Finstern (In the Dark, 90) and her novella “Neue Erziehung und alte Moral” (“New Upbringing and Old Morality,” 902), as well as MeiselHess’s novella “Neid” (“Envy,” 92). In these narratives, lesbian love is treated merely as an episode in the lives of the protagonists. Women’s attraction to each other is not presented as a desirable alternative to heterosexual normativity. In Hungary, examples of fictional representation of female homosexuality are even rarer, such as in Kaffka’s novel Hangyaboly (Anthill, 97); no Hungarian groundbreaking study has yet appeared on this topic. Therefore, as part of the various representations of female sexuality and desire, it is all the more necessary to look at those few examples of fiction where lesbian love is either mentioned in passing or made a central part of the narrative. In Janitschek’s novel Mimikry (903), female and male homosexuality appear only briefly in a dialogue between Lillith, a young emancipated woman, and her friend Emil. As they talk about relationships and marriage, Lillith explains to Emil why she finds it impossible to marry. She contends that the two sexes have lost their ability to complement each

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other, that women have become like men because men have become like women, which is why women seek women’s company and men the company of men. The only option Lillith sees in a heterosexual relationship is, therefore, camaraderie. Through Lillith, Janitschek presents a criticism of a shift in gender identities, which she regards as a consequence of men’s “effeminization.” Women’s attraction to each other is, thus, viewed negatively, a result of a cultural degeneration and of a loss of strictly separated gender identities rather than a sexual option to be embraced. In another of Janitschek’s novels, Im Finstern (In the Dark, 90a), lesbian love is a passing episode in the life of a young woman, Isa. Repulsed by the advances of an older man, Isa meets Clara, who wants to protect her from the unwanted suitor and, for this reason, travels with her to Italy. The evening before they leave, Clara offers Isa champagne, to drink “to the new woman and her new love.” Isa notices that Clara’s hands shake just the same as her male suitor’s hands used to, thus betraying her sexual attraction to Isa; but Isa also notices that “the words sound different” (Janitschek 90a, 64). She is attracted by the promise of this different desire and follows Clara. There are no further descriptions of their relationship, except for a brief hint at its sexual nature by Isa’s former suitor who, in a conversation with Isa’s mother, makes the following cynical comment: “They [Isa and Clara] are probably somewhere, in a distant place, celebrating their honeymoon” (Janitschek 90b, 72). Clara’s infatuation with Isa, however, ultimately remains unrequited and Isa accepts an invitation from her mother to return home. The farewell scene between the two young women discloses the unequal emotional involvement in the relationship, an inequality that pushes Isa to the point of denial of her attraction to Clara. To Clara’s plea to Isa to say at least one good word to her before they separate, Isa replies: “Why should I lie? After all these experiences that have shown that there isn’t the slightest unanimity in our ways of looking at life, in our inclinations or our aversions. I wish I were air to you just like you are to me” (Janitschek 90b, 75). Clara tries to respond to Isa’s hurtful words with spite by inviting herself to Isa’s wedding sometime in the future, one which would turn Isa into “the serf of some handsome gentleman” (Janitschek 90b, 76), thus implying a woman’s subordinate status in a heterosexual relationship and positing female homosexuality as an alternative relationship between two equals. In her concluding sentence in this verbal duel Isa compares Clara to a man-hater and unsuccessful man-imitator. Lesbian love is thus ultimately defined as the result of a woman’s resentment toward the male sex, a denial of her “true” sexual identity and, in the end, an aberration from the desirable

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path of heterosexuality. It becomes a brief interlude in both Isa’s and Clara’s lives. Clara eventually marries, thus embracing (or resigning herself to) heterosexuality, whereas Isa chooses to remain single and to study. With this ending, Janitschek seems to defend heterosexuality against homosexuality; however, Isa’s choice of an independent life over marriage casts a shadow of ambiguity over such an unequivocal conclusion. Janitschek resolves the plot with an apparent triumph of heterosexuality, but, with Isa’s choice of independence, she leaves a trace of doubt about the benefits that a heterosexual relationship and marriage may bring to women. Janitschek’s novella “Neue Erziehung und alte Moral” (“New Upbringing and Old Morality,” 902) offers another view on lesbian love and sexuality. Like the much better-known text from German literature, Frank Wedekind’s tragedy Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening, 89), the novella thematizes the awakening of sexuality in teenagers. The central figure of the narrative is Seffi, an orphan brought up with seven stepbrothers in an adoptive family. Because of the stepmother’s modern methods of upbringing, she treats Seffi as her sons’ equal in every respect until she turns seventeen and starts showing her feminine form. Then suddenly the stepmother’s modern methods yield to the authority of the moral double standard and she places limits on the young girl’s burgeoning sexuality, on the one hand, by physically separating her into a bedroom of her own and, on the other, by frightening her with the dreadful consequences of a possible faux pas, namely, unwanted pregnancy. Although Seffi, unlike most young women of her age, does not remain ignorant in matters of sexuality and procreation (her brothers shared sexually related literature with her and her mother forced her to witness animals giving birth at the farm), she is not allowed to experience these things directly. Whereas the brothers find an outlet for their sexual desire with other women and even brag to Seffi about these conquests, she has to suffer the unappeased waves of her passion that the brothers are only allowed to tease. The horrors the mother paints before her eyes are just too overwhelming, to the point that “Seffi swore to keep her virginity, although the blood in her full veins was screaming for fulfillment” (Janitschek 982, 3). Things change for Seffi after a young cousin, Agathe, comes to visit for the summer. She is the exact opposite of Seffi, the embodiment of a girl from a good family, namely, completely ignorant in sexual matters. Soon, however, the two young women start exchanging gestures of tenderness, which become an outlet for Seffi’s frustrated sexuality. Unlike the heterosexual approaches of the boys, these physical contacts between the

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two girls are described discreetly: “She [Agathe] caressed her [Seffi] and took her two hands that were holding on to each other like in a cramp” (Janitschek 982, 4). As Julia Neissl has correctly observed, in this novella heterosexuality is dominant in the representation of sexuality. Although, in general, Janitschek does not describe sexuality in very explicit terms, heterosexual passion is more evident and is given more importance in the narrative (Neissl 200, 56–7). It is also the heterosexual jealousy of one of the brothers that draws the mother’s attention to the two girls’ increasing infatuation, who reacts by wanting to separate them. But despite this apparent dominance of heterosexuality, we have to take into account Janitschek’s use of the euphemism “the girlfriend” (die Freundin) when she refers to the relationship between Agathe and Seffi. Hacker has noted the use of “girlfriend” and “friendship” (Freundschaft) as a “way lesbian ladies used to refer to themselves and their love relationships” (Hacker 983, 266). By adopting this term, Janitschek signals to an informed reader the deeper meaning behind it and thus reveals the sexual nature of the relationship between Agathe and Seffi. Altogether, lesbian love is presented by Janitschek as a temporary solution and as a result of the moral double standard, which leaves a young woman’s sexual desire unsatisfied in heterosexual contacts. Lesbian love thus becomes a reaction to sexual frustration rather than a choice in itself. “Like Freud, Janitschek shows that lesbianism is ‘caused’ by a faulty environment which encourages the homosexual side of an individual’s natural bisexuality to become dominant” (Faderman and Eriksson 990, 6). Despite Seffi’s plea to her mother not to separate her from Agathe, lesbian love is not presented as a viable and positive alternative to heterosexuality, but rather as a necessary evil that needs to be temporarily tolerated. And yet, the final sentence, “but it was you who threw me into the arms of the girlfriend, leave her to me now” (Janitschek 982, 5) ends the narrative on an ambiguous note by leaving the fate of Seffi and Agathe’s relationship open. In Meisel-Hess’s novella “Neid” (“Envy,” 92), lesbian love plays a central role. The love affair happens between two women of unequal classes: one, Sascha, is a poor Russian actress, thus a marginal character in Vienna in more than one way; the other, Anitta, is a spoiled girl from a good Viennese family. Anitta falls in love with Sascha and initiates their affair. The class difference between them determines the outcome of the relationship. Anitta treats Sascha in the same way that young men of her class would treat a young woman from the lower classes, namely, like a süßes Mädl.¹⁰ She rents a nice little room for her where she visits her; she gives her money,

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brings her flowers, and has her learn bookkeeping so that she can earn a living – all this with the financial support of her parents. Despite the many inequalities between the two women, their relationship is described in happy terms: “Those were beautiful days – the happiest in her [Sascha’s] life. Full of love and tenderness and gushing feelings” (Meisel-Hess 92, 75). But, at the same time, the narrator also takes an ironic distance when she refers to Anitta and the way she treats Sascha just like another whim. The sexual aspect of the relationship remains obscured behind a few innuendos, which include the use of the terms “the girlfriend” and “friendship.” This contrasts with the very explicit description of heterosexuality in other narratives by Meisel-Hess, such as in Fanny Roth. Thus, just as in Janitschek, lesbian love receives a less favourable narrative treatment. And, again as in Janitschek, it is only a temporary situation. Anitta, under the pressure of her parents, who want this “tender friendship” (MeiselHess 92, 74) to end, eventually marries from her class. Sascha is forced to return to her marginal existence and is sent back to her Russian homeland. But the narrative does not stop here with a heterosexual happy end for Anitta and the successful expulsion of Sascha back to the social periphery. When, about a year later, she returns to Vienna in search of work again, and sees her one-time friend not only happily married and pregnant but also a successful aspiring writer (an ambition Sascha was not able to realize due to her poor mastery of the German language), she shoots herself. Although the narrative offers an explicit explanation for Sascha’s suicide by stating that she was “not a great human being” and that it is her “envy” toward Anitta that killed her (Meisel-Hess 92, 8–2), the suicide as such leaves a wider space for interpretation. According to Bauer’s definition of literary suicide, “suicide forces the internal dialogue into the open, raising questions about sexual difference rather than closing them” (Bauer 988, 4). It is also the only remaining expression of Sascha’s rebellion against the restrictions imposed upon her and her sexuality and of her refusal to accept her social marginalization and to concur with Anitta that marriage and motherhood are the norm, “the natural” and that, therefore, their lesbian past is the deviant, “the unnatural” (Meisel-Hess 92, 79). Underneath the explicit favouring of heterosexuality in the above narratives and the ultimate rejection of female homosexuality as a sexual alternative, we can see layers of encoded meaning that make the apparently unfavourable treatment of lesbian love questionable and offer the possibility of a critical reading of the triumph of heterosexuality as a norm. If we bear in mind that homosexuality was not only viewed as a deviation but often as a case of mental illness,¹¹ it becomes understandable why contem-

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poraneous women writers, even if they were heterosexual, would not have wished to be labelled lesbian or even a lesbian sympathizer and instead would have chosen a less explicit narrative treatment of female homosexuality. On the other hand, we could also interpret this apparent reluctance to give more explicit expression to a taboo topic as the writers’ inability to formulate a socially sanctioned form of female desire, a desire that challenges phallically connoted heterosexuality. The representation of lesbian sexuality is even more discreet in Kaffka’s novel Hangyaboly (Anthill, 97), where the setting of the narrative is a convent. The subtly expressed passionate feelings, however, become all the more dramatic because of the several levels of strict normativity – religious, social, and (hetero)sexual – against which the nuns have to struggle. Unlike in Janitschek’s and Meisel-Hess’s texts, lesbian love in Hangyaboly remains unconsummated, partly because it occurs within an unrequited quasi-love triangle among three nuns, with Kunigunda attracted to Virginia and Virginia attracted to Magdolna. Kunigunda’s passion for Virginia is expressed through her gestures and body language much more than her words. Whereas she makes only a few passing remarks about her feelings, such as “my heart is still able to feel” (Kaffka 97, 27), her body becomes the carrier of unspoken messages. When, following a heated debate between the young Virginia and the older Kunigunda regarding reforms in the convent, Virginia gets up and leaves angrily, Kunigunda “reaches out with her two fat arms imploring the one who was leaving” (Kaffka 97, 34). And she starts yelling at the students, while she “shrieked, scolded, shaking her head and stamping and trampling with her feet, like the carried away fury of hysterical anger” (Kaffka 97, 35). The Word of the (Christian) Father, by which Kunigunda has lived all her life, fails when it comes to verbalizing her passion, which has no place whatsoever in the phallocentric world of the Father. The language of the hysteric thus takes her, for a moment, beyond the limitations and rules that she, as a good Catholic, has abided by all her life, thus disrupting an identity formed on the ideology of the Church: “The hysteric unties familiar bonds, introduces disorder into the well-regulated unfolding of everyday life” (Cixous and Clément 987, 5). Virginia’s love for another young nun, Magdolna, is also rejected. In her adoration of Magdolna, Virginia, without seeking the other’s consent, nominates her for the position of the new mother superior. She thus confuses her passion for Magdolna with political interest (Wittmann 992, 62). When Virginia first declares her love to Magdolna, her confession is verbal: “Never, never have I loved a human being this much; it isn’t possible to love

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more!” (Kaffka 97, 9). But soon, following Magdolna’s dismayed rejection, it takes on a hysterical expression: “she [Virginia] crawled and wriggled on the floor for a few moments, in mindless passion ... Her nervous mouth and every facial muscle twitched and trembled; her lips were so dry that she could barely pronounce any words” (Kaffka 97, 9). Magdolna’s response to this outburst of repressed feelings is to push it back within the parameters of “proper” behaviour, thus acting on behalf of the voice of convention from which Virginia for a moment broke free. The words that Magdolna uses to place Virginia’s passion within the realm of what is considered normal and acceptable – “nervousness,” “illness,” and “strange condition” – could have been borrowed from the medical literature of the time, which regarded lesbianism and homosexuality as an illness and degeneration often associated with hysteria (Felski 995, 3; Thorson 996, 9). Indeed, Virginia soon returns to the conventional norm, belittling her passion and respecting the commandments of the Church. The phallocentric order triumphs over the brief disruption caused by the hysteric; the Law of the Father remains firmly established. In the narratives analysed here, lesbian love is not represented as a desirable or viable alternative to a heterosexual relationship. It is an unacceptable and occasionally tolerated necessity or temporary aberration, as in the case of Janitschek’s Seffi; it leads to an unhappy ending (for MeiselHess’s Sascha); or else it is something to be “corrected,” through marriage, for Janitschek’s Anitta and Clara, and through acceptance of a Catholic morality, for Kaffka’s heroines. However, despite such apparent triumph of patriarchy’s norms, the expressions of lesbian love do put a crack into this seemingly stable surface. Although these narratives seem to echo the official condemnation of female homosexuality, they are important because they break the taboo against a topic considered unacceptable by the dominant social and sexual norms, a topic that the women’s movement itself preferred to ignore. modernity and a crisis of the female self The exploration of sexuality and subject formation in women’s literature at the turn of the century went hand in hand with a general feeling of a crisis of the self in literature. Inspired in particular by Nietzsche (the loss of transcendence), Freud (the splitting of the ego into its conscious and subconscious parts), and Ernst Mach (with his statement that “The Ego must be given up,” das Ich ist unrettbar), the “joyous apocalypse” of the Habsburg Empire was reflected in its literature as the loss of a unified self, on the one

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hand, and the longing for wholeness on the other. Gotthart Wunberg has pointed out the following characteristics of Austrian fin-de-siècle modernity in literature: a consciousness of the lack of unity and disparity in the world, determined by historical discontinuity; a dissociation of the personality; a “relativity of values”; and a “lack of qualities” (Wunberg 986, 04). He cites Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Robert Musil, and Hermann Broch as the principal authors whose works embody these characteristics. One could certainly add Arthur Schnitzler to that list, in particular his novella Lieutenant Gustl (first published in 900), often cited as the first narrative in the German literary context to use the stream of consciousness technique. In Hungarian literature of this period, we can find some similarities, particularly in the texts of the poets and writers of the Nyugat generation (who were inspired mostly by French sources), such as crisis of identity, loneliness and alienation, coupled with death, sexuality, and eroticism. Whereas much has been written about the crisis of the self in relation to the above-mentioned authors and other male writers recognized by the literary canon, thus defining this crisis as male-centred, the numerous turnof-the-century women writers have been ignored by the writers of literary history and only recently rediscovered by feminist scholars. One reason for this omission, cited by Wittmann, may be that many fictional texts written by women of this period do not use any new literary techniques, but rather “seem to fit into the mould of ‘classic realism’ with its illusion of language as medium of communication between narrator and reader, with its hierarchy of discourses, and with its necessary closure” (Wittmann 992, 49). Such narratives construct a unified subject, a position adopted by authors such as Troll-Borostyáni and Meisel-Hess in Austria and Lux and Ritoók in Hungary in works previously analysed. In texts such as “Höhenluft,” “Stützen der Moral,” Fanny Roth, Leányok, Egyenes úton – egyedül, and A szellem kalandorai, we can certainly recognize a position that parallels the first women’s movement with its “attempt to gain entry into the dominant discourses, be it in law, higher education, professional work, sexual autonomy, artistic achievement” (Wittmann 992, 52) – all areas where women had been either excluded or, at best, marginalized for centuries. However, in several narratives we can also observe a deconstruction of the concept of the unified subject, a position already demonstrated in Kaffka’s novel Mária évei, and elements of which are also present in Ritoók’s Egyenes úton – egyedül and in Lux’s Leányok. Such a position corresponds to the modernity paradigm of the crisis of the self. In Mária’s case this crisis is the result of her being caught in a romantic discourse and of her idle longing for a subject position within the symbolic. In Ritoók and Lux the position

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of the unified subject is destabilized through the construction of parallel female characters as the heroine’s alter egos without, however, taking away the heroine’s sense of agency. But in the following three narratives – Eine für viele: Aus dem Tagebuche eines Mädchens by Vera, “Venus am Kreuz” by Else Kotányi, and Elsa Asenijeff’s Tagebuchblätter einer Emancipierten – the splitting of the self is experienced by a first-person narrator and is the result of patriarchal constrictions imposed on female creativity and sexuality and of sexual violence. The crisis of the self is thus formulated in terms that are significantly different from contemporaneous canonical texts. The male protagonists, such as Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos in “Ein Brief,” Schnitzler’s Gustl, and (somewhat later) Musil’s Ulrich in Der Mann ohne Eigenshaften experience a loss of unity as the consequence of their alienation from values and concepts that, for them, have lost their validity; it is thus, within the social limits that surround them, still a personal choice. The female protagonists in the three following narratives have no such choice. The process of their gradual fragmentation is, rather, a direct result of patriarchal constrictions imposed on female creativity and sexuality and/or of male sexual violence. The ultimate alternative the female characters face is self-destruction. In Eine für Viele: Aus dem Tagebuche eines Mädchens (One for Many: From a Girl’s Diary, 902) Vera (Betty Kris) analyses both the mechanisms that lead to women’s repressed sexuality and creativity and the ways in which these mechanisms bring about a crisis of the self. Although later literary critiques dismissed its literary value (Geißler 93, 666), this little book became an instant success. There were twelve editions within a year of its first publication alone. Moreover, it provoked a lively debate in Viennese literary life, referred to as the “Vera-scandal”: no less than twelve books were written as a fictional response to Vera, and numerous letters were published in papers, by both female and male readers, discussing the moral double standard, the problematic marriage laws, and related issues (Schmid-Bortenschlager 988). The text features Vera’s diary from 8 September to 3 December. The diary is preceded by Vera’s farewell letter to her fiancé, Georg, in which she briefly explains to him her reasons for choosing self-inflicted death over marriage. She sees herself as a “victim of our society” (Vera 902, 3). Vera’s desperate act is the only way she sees out of the morass in which her life seems to have become mired. Although she recognizes the hypocrisy in the upbringing of upper and middle-class girls, she is, at the same time, unable to break free of its restrictions: “I rattle with my chains without the strength to break them” (Vera 902, 40).

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Vera struggles with several internalized discourses. She defies the existing norms on which the moral double standard is built, namely, that women should practice sexual abstinence before marriage. She also challenges certain prevalent discourses of the period about women’s lower sex drive spread by authors such as the sexologist Krafft-Ebing or the psychiatrist Möbius. Unlike Janitschek’s female characters, who are driven by their impulses without understanding the implications of their actions, Vera is conscious of the conflict between her sexual desire and the prevailing moral hypocrisy, and she verbalizes it: “The eruptions of my passion are brusque, sudden, and abrupt, like my whole being. I suffer from this erotic longing ... I am sick of the atavistic remnants of my environment’s norms. The ounce of gold forged into the wedding ring is supposed to grant me the right to give away my body whereas my love is denied that same right? ... And in the meantime I am supposed to put my senses to sleep, kill my impulses and lock myself into a cage of convenience?” (Vera 902, 39–40). Seeing herself as part of the decadently idle lifestyle of women of her class, which kills “the energies of the soul” (Vera 902, 7), Vera echoes the discourses of eugenics and of cultural crisis. She wishes for a life filled with useful work that could cure her pessimism, and does not think that women who live her lifestyle are able to produce a “strong species” (Vera 902, 2). On the other hand, she does not trust the women’s movement either. Women who fight for emancipation are doing little more than “knocking out small pieces from the wall”; she herself believes in the necessity of a complete overthrow of the social system (Vera 902, 3). However, she limits herself to articulating this belief while taking no steps whatsoever toward effecting change, thus proving her previously stated point that she has been brought up so as to become incapable of any meaningful action and implicitly criticizing women’s upbringing and education. Vera is torn particularly by her musings over the bourgeois ideal of marriage. Even though she challenges the double standard, requiring sexual purity from the woman only, by suggesting that men be held to a similar standard, she in no way questions the ideal of pre-marital sexual purity as such. This ideal has the weight of an authoritative discourse for her. She cannot accept Georg’s imperfection in this regard, and his “soulless” premarital relationships, which she sees as an “incompleteness” (Vera 902, 84). Unable to understand that he is, just like herself, a product of social conditioning, she cannot let go of her ideal and her attempts to forgive him are in vain. Her resignation becomes even deeper with her realization of the impossibility of building a relationship with Georg based on intersubjectivity:

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“His passion is strong and deep, but doesn’t reach far. He wants to melt my personality in this ardour and pour my being into the form of his own being. This effort of levelling out love makes me doubt its power. If two souls don’t join each other as whole, free and independent beings, if they don’t understand, hold and complete each other, if they don’t touch each other with the full extent of their diversity, then no attraction is capable of bringing about the ultimate happiness of a concentrated unity” (Vera 902, ). Vera strongly opposes object-love and the prospect of becoming an instrument for the fulfillment of Georg’s desire and needs at the expense of her own. While she realizes that Georg cannot live up to the requirements of an intersubjective relationship, she, unlike Troll-Borostyáni’s female characters, does not feel in any way motivated or able to play the role of a man’s teacher. Trapped in a conflict of her desires, her internalized discourses, and the reality of her social environment, the wholeness of her self starts to shatter and she feels her soul “torn apart” (Vera 902, 82). For a moment, she tries to stop this process by re-embracing acquired discourses about a traditionally “feminine” way of loving, giving up her self and accepting the role prescribed for women, that of the sufferer. But these discourses do not have sufficient power over her anymore and only deepen her crisis of self, to the point that she feels “as if [her] consciousness started to split into two halves” (Vera 902, 96). Her ensuing act of self-destruction becomes a response to a general feeling of hopelessness for which she does not find a creative outlet, either in her unsatisfactory relationship with Georg or in any form of meaningful work. The popularity of this small book reveals how symptomatic a problem Vera addresses. On the one hand, she criticizes middle-class women’s lack of professional independence (despite the opening of more professional options) and, on the other, the hypocrisy of young women’s sexual upbringing, with its old-fashioned discourses. The lively debate this book generated confirms what Dale Bauer stated about literary suicide: “suicide forces the internal dialogue into the open, raising questions about sexual difference rather than closing them” (Bauer 988, 4). Suicide is thus to be viewed not so much as a tragedy but as a literary technique that engenders further discussion around the issues it raises. Here it is also the ultimate form of agency that is left against the restrictions imposed upon the female subject. In the novella “Venus am Kreuz” (“Venus on the Cross,” 899) Else Kotányi addresses sexual morality and its impact on the female self from the aspect of sexual violence. The novella is written using the technique of the interior monologue, similar to Schnitzler’s Lieutenant Gustl published

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only a year later (Gürtler and Schmid-Bortenschlager 998, 229–33). This alone makes this largely neglected text an interesting and valuable discovery in fin-de-siècle Austrian literature. “Venus am Kreuz” is told from the perspective of Garda, who writes her life’s story in scattered notes (Blätter). The scattering applies not only to the notes but also to the timeline of the narrative, which is broken, so as to reflect the chasm that widens more and more within the narrator’s psyche; the narrative thus jumps from Garda’s past to her present to her fantasies. Unlike in contemporaneous canonical texts, this fracturing is the result not of a loss of transcendence, a “relativity of values,” or a “lack of qualities,” but of male violence. Garda’s life appears to be determined by violence from the moment of her conception, as she is the product of the rape of her mother. Throughout the text, the importance of this heredity is repeatedly stressed, thus giving the novella a naturalistic quality: “Oh what, I am worth nothing, both from my maternal and paternal side ... Sin, desire, blood – this is all my inheritance – overlayed with virginity and purity – those white mists above abysses that flee when one tramples them down” (Kotányi 899, 33). In several ways, Garda’s life becomes a repetition of her mother’s life; for instance, she will also be raped, by her piano teacher, as a young adult, an event that determines the course of her life; the circle of victimization continues. Garda displays some behavioural patterns typical of a victim of sexual violence, such as retreating into silence and refusing to speak of the events in question, even to herself in her notes: “Don’t want to talk about it” (Kotányi 899, ). Sharon Lamb has pointed out certain behavioural patterns that female victims of sexual abuse demonstrate, such as addictions and dissociative identity disorder (Lamb 999, ). Lamb has also stressed that female victims of sexual abuse are constructed and silenced for the sake of the accepted and acceptable image that society wants to maintain of them, namely, that of the weak and suffering victim whose agency and ability to heal are doubted and taken away from her (Lamb 999, 3). Several of these symptoms apply to Garda. Not only does she choose silence regarding the dreadful event but also she becomes a drug addict, taking increasingly high doses of chloral, a sleeping drug with high toxicity. However, unlike her mother, Garda also demonstrates an active and rebellious side. She revolts against her victimization and her mother’s legacy: rejection, lack of love, and the authoritative command “learn to suffer” (Kotányi 899, 9). Following her first episode of sexual victimization, Garda rejects this command by challenging the gender norm of

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woman being man’s suffering object and refusing to subordinate her passion to a man’s will like her mother had done. She will use her passionate nature in a subversive way to take revenge on men. Thus Garda engages in a real Strindbergian battle of the sexes. She will not only take on the role of a femme fatale “with scorching, mad eyes and a laughter that went into men’s heads and made their blood boil” (5) and use men’s passion so as to make them dependent on herself but also take full pleasure in her sexual adventures. She thereby subverts the dominant gender bias that only men are entitled to full sexual enjoyment whereas women ought to remain passive and “endure it.” The other form of subversion of the victim role and of female passivity is her taking up the pen, i.e., the act of writing itself. However, despite these acts of rebellion, Garda has internalized the moral double standard with its dual images of woman as “Madonna” and “whore” (Kotányi 899, 35). She is painfully reminded of this double standard by a man whom she meets at an undefined point in the narrative and to whom she subsequently refers as to her beloved. He evokes for her the purity of her soul, which she feels has remained untainted by her “sinful” lifestyle (Kotányi 899, 26). The split imposed through the discourse of the double standard gains more and more power over her, despite her attempt to dethrone the concept of the soul as a literary construct. The title, “Venus am Kreuz,” already demonstrates the internalization of this split by Garda. Although she repeatedly tries to affirm her passionate lust for life by stating that she is Venus and not Mary Magdalene, she acknowledges that this Venus is carrying the cross and that she is ill (Kotányi 899, 42). In several instances, Garda describes this “illness” that is increasingly gaining power over her as madness. She is lucid enough, though, to pinpoint the source of her “illness” when she accuses men and the violence she has had to endure of being “cruel and unjust” (Kotányi 899, 52). One form of this violence is sexual, the other is more subtle and she experiences it even more painfully, for it comes from her beloved. His judgment, “oh Garda, how deeply have you sunk, oh Garda, you have lost the best of yourself” (Kotányi 899, 46) cuts deeper wounds in Garda’s self than the sexual violence had done earlier, for it stigmatizes her for the sexual freedom that she had taken for herself and ultimately results in physical rejection by him. This either-or categorization of Garda as a “whore” leading a lifestyle of sexual libertinage and therefore not allowed into polite circles anymore, and as a (now lapsed) “Madonna,” is a consequence of the dualistic paradigm implied in the moral double standard. The consequences of the moral double standard and of women’s upbringing on the repression of female sexuality are reminiscent of Vera’s

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Eine für viele: “You aren’t allowed, you aren’t allowed, you ought to keep yourself white as snow and chastise your flesh, enslave your blood and suffocate the voice of nature” (Kotányi 899, 48–9). But whereas initially Vera mainly laments the lack of permission to live out her sexual passion toward her fiancé before their wedding night, Kotányi relies on irony when, through Garda, she describes women’s long-awaited reward for their patient waiting – a man: “My God! Look at this splendour! Tired, bored, lazy, cranky, full of worries and experience – a little handsome, a little good, a little smart and a little – man” (Kotányi 899, 49). What Garda finds astonishing is that such a creature can still nurture the illusion that he is desirable to a young woman. And this is where Kotányi looks deeper into the origins and mechanisms of the double standard. Garda asks herself whether women are made of other material than men (an argument particularly dear to misogynists), a reflection that she subsequently dismisses. She understands that men’s higher level of confidence stems from a long history and a well-established moral tradition and practice: “They are able to forget because the morality of thousands of years has secured them against self-accusation, because thousands of years have killed in them what has grown over our bodies. They don’t sin because they are given the laws of the world from the beginning – and sanctioned sin kills the conscience. Nobody trembles for their given rights. But as for us, everything has been put into our bodies as a lie” (Kotányi 899, 48). Garda thus not only pinpoints the exclusion of women from the symbolic but also demonstrates in her writing elements of what French feminist theory has called “writing the body.” From and through this body, which carries not only the burden of her own past but also the historical burden that women’s bodies were assigned to carry through their representative function, the process of disintegration of Garda’s self begins. Kotányi posits the utopia of a new morality as an alternative to the existing situation, proposing ideas that she elaborated on in her later essay (discussed in chapter two), Gebt uns die Wahrheit! Ein Beitrag zu unsrer Erziehung zur Ehe (Give Us the Truth! A Contribution to Our Preparation For Marriage, 902), which she presented as a lecture in reaction to the Vera-scandal. In the essay, Kotányi offers the vision of a liberated female sexuality with joy as the ultimate goal in women’s lives. She considers women’s happiness – first their own and then of those around them – their only duty. This implies the creation of a new morality. Nietzsche’s influence on this idea is made more explicit in “Venus am Kreuz” not only through direct references such as “I’ll teach you the overman” (Kotányi 899, 32) but also through the implications of the new morality for men: “And I want

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to invent a man, powerful and strong, with bliss in his eyes and love in his warm hands – not sick, not ready for the grave, who doesn’t kill the flesh and doesn’t say sin” (Kotányi 899, 36). By liberating the power of the erotic in both sexes, the new morality is aimed at abolishing the split that women were made to carry in their bodies. However, Kotányi recognizes that something as strong as the old morality, centuries-old and anchored in the Law of the Father, cannot be easily subverted, and that it may take centuries before a new morality takes its place. And Garda, who compares herself to a creature dying of hunger, realizes: “in the meantime, I go under” (Kotányi 899, 50). The process of disintegration that had already begun much earlier is irreversible and her fight futile. Her consumption of chloral, which she started taking to dull her pain, only exacerbates this process. In the increasingly incoherent notes, she intersperses remarks about hallucinatory sensations, such as hearing music or experiencing two planes of consciousness simultaneously. The text, which initially had elements of a traditional first-person narrative, thus follows the fragmentation of Garda’s self. She reaches the point where thoughts about dying surface in addition to the re-emerging ones about falling into madness. As her sense of self-worth reaches a low point, her body loses its ability to feel; she feels dead and incapable of pleasure. She has headaches, feels cold and tired, and demonstrates somewhat manicdepressive symptoms, ranging from laughter to tears, which she tries to alleviate with increasingly higher doses of chloral. She also sees and hears “little demons” around her bed (Kotányi 899, 70). As her physical and mental health deteriorate, she falls back into the position of the victim: she is afraid of and disgusted by one of her suitors and his brutal physical force. The last ten pages of Garda’s notes reveal a state of delirium before her death, in which the internalized discourses resurface. She fantasizes about her beloved approaching her in a minister’s cloak to restore her “purity”; she is wearing a white wedding gown and myrtles in her hair. Finally, she mistakes the doctor at her bedside for the official from the marriage license bureau. Garda thus dies in the mental delusion of a recipe for happiness that patriarchy creates for women, namely, the illusion of acquiring an identity by becoming defined by a man, an object of male desire. Such illusion implies the opposite of an intersubjective relationship, namely, what Benjamin calls the “intrapsychic mode,” which “operates at the level of subject-object experience” (Benjamin 986, 92). As in Eine für viele, the splintering of the female self ends in the death of the female protagonist, again, with suicide as the last remaining form of agency for the woman. One could argue that this process fits the modernity

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paradigm of the crisis of the self but here, significantly, it is coupled with madness. Wittmann has argued that madness occurs as a result of women’s exclusion from the symbolic and their subsequent attempt to inscribe themselves into man-made literary norms that rupture the symbolic, a process in which they would be more prone to “lose hold on reality” than men, who set the norms (Wittmann 992, 5). Garda’s “madness” thus can be read both as a text (the story of violence and its effects on the female self) and a metatext of modernity (the construction of a new literary paradigm from women’s point of view). Moreover, Garda’s death stands as an accusation against the appropriation and functionalization (“Funktionalisierung”) of the feminine caught in the duality of representation (Spreitzer 997, 50). I believe it also stands as a refusal to embody a female self according to male standards, a refusal to be reduced to one or another signifier of male desire: “Venus, how you gave yourself laughingly ... It is good that you died, they would have turned you into a penitent as well! – Mary Magdalene!” (Kotányi 899, 60). Rather than being tamed, the subversive force of the erotic, as outlined in the concept of a new morality, also goes under with the female protagonist. Elsa Asenijeff, in Tagebuchblätter einer Emancipierten (Pages from the Diary of an Emancipated Woman, 902), also uses the form of the journal to illustrate the crisis of the female self. The narrative was published in the same year and by the same publisher as Fanny Roth and Eine für viele. The narrator is Irene; her notes form a frame narrative to the few pages of Hella’s notes that Irene finds following Hella’s suicide. To Irene, Hella is a narrative alter ego whose life embodies, in the extreme, the consequences of the criticism on which Irene elaborates, a criticism of malefemale relationships and of women’s attitude to their own sexuality and creative potential. Irene begins by noting her proximity to the “moderns,” whom she defines as “without a backbone” (Asenijeff 902, ). However, she immediately clarifies that she, as a woman, unlike men, still carries “a healthy strength and willfulness” (Asenijeff 902, 2). Thus the text carries a Nietzschean overtone right from the beginning. Direct references to Nietzsche appear as well, as in Kotányi, such as “Nietzsche created the overman” (Asenijeff 902, ). Women are represented as more capable of living up to a Nietzschean ideal of humanity: they are stronger and purer than men and therefore need to define their own self unspoilt by male influence. Although some of the narrator’s arguments are strongly essentialist and, as we have seen earlier in Asenijeff, even viriphobic, here women’s traditional social role in relation to men determines the lack of their self-definition:

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“Either we remain the same – nothing but an excitement for man’s sake – who give him pleasure and pain, or we put all that away and search for what lies in the depths of our own nature” (Asenijeff 902, 25). Asenijeff puts forward a fundamental feminist demand that women free themselves of the male perspective, that they break with what Weigel has called “putting on the male glasses” (Weigel 988, 93), which have distorted their selfimage throughout history: “We are so crippled by male thinking that we have become used to see everything from a male point of view” (Asenijeff 902, 69). The thought that women are superior to men pervades Irene’s notes. Female sexuality is represented as more complex than the debased male desire for superficial pleasures. Although no direct connection is made between male sexual violence and female sexuality (unlike in Asenijeff’s short story from “Daseinselend” analysed above), Irene briefly alludes to “brutalities” that she has experienced and that as a young girl she was unable to anticipate (Asenijeff 902, 3). The reader also finds out that Irene’s love life has not been very fulfilling, that she divorced an unloved husband because she was never happy and joyful with him. JerusalemKotányi’s opinion that women’s happiness is the ultimate (and unfulfilled) goal in marriage is echoed here. What Irene yearns for after her divorce is to be able to devote time to herself, conserve her energies, and have a “room of her own” undisturbed by any male influence. Happiness for her means “quietude” (2) and a chance to be alone. She feels compassionate toward young women whose lives revolve around the goal of catching a husband and is glad that her life has moved beyond that phase and that she is now able to search for her true femininity, which she considers thwarted in a patriarchal culture. Thus, although no direct connection is made between male sexual violence and repression of the female self, the crisis of this self is still shown as being connected to a society and culture dominated by an aggressive male energy that hinders the expression of women’s creative potential: “Male civilization has corrupted us. It kills us, it makes us into a resource for man’s needs, into one of his little distractions” (Asenijeff 902, 26). Through Irene, Asenijeff formulates a cultural feminism. Like Mayreder, she sees civilization and its by-product, science, as a creation of men and their aggressive and mechanical way of thinking. Whereas Irene’s way of coping with such a reality is to turn away from men altogether and find her own creative space, her alter ego Hella, another femme fatale, immerses herself fully in the world of men with uncompromising passion. Like Kotányi, Asenijeff constructs the femme fatale as a positive literary figure. Significantly, the figure of the femme fatale is used

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here by female authors, whereas traditionally it is a creation of male literary and artistic fantasy. Hans-Joachim Schickedanz in his classic Femme fatale completely ignores the existence of femme fatale characters in the works of female authors and artists (Schickedanz 983). According to Carola Hilmes, the image of the femme fatale at the fin de siècle springs from a romantic tradition that relies on the “mortification of the feminine” (Hilmes 990, 28). As a projection of the male imagination, Hilmes regards the sensual woman as an expression of both male desire and male fears. The femme fatale thus becomes the other of the male self and an expression of the crisis of this self (Hilmes 990, 236). In the texts of the literary canon, the femme fatale is put into the background while the male (anti)heroes take the foreground, even though her actions of destruction are central to the narrative (Hilmes 990, 225). In Kotányi’s and Asenijeff’s narratives, on the other hand, the femme fatale is the firstperson narrator, which brings her perspective into the foreground and lets the story unfold from her point of view, thereby allowing her to speak up against the mechanisms of constraint that bind the feminine. Thus Kotányi and Asenijeff not only construct the femme fatale as a literary figure that stands for feminine power and subverts male domination but also let her step out of the realm of silence and tell her story. In both cases, however, the femme fatale realizes the limits that are set for women’s power in patriarchy and, therefore, chooses self-inflicted death, thereby following the general pattern of the death scenario for the femme fatale as defined by Hilmes (Hilmes 990, 224). Although outwardly Irene is outraged at Hella’s manners, she secretly rejoices that “one of these tormenters, just another man, finally gets mistreated himself” (Asenijeff 902, 32). This confirms Hella’s function as Irene’s alter ego, who acts out what Irene is not capable of herself. Unlike Irene, who uses her writing to verbalize her dissatisfaction with the relations between the sexes and with the place that the feminine occupies in the world, Hella embodies the pain Irene only talks about. She thus carries in her body, similar to Kotányi’s Garda, the dualism of Venus and Magdalene, and, just like Garda, her suicide is an expression of her refusal to be reduced to one or the other. Hella’s notes disclose a love story with an artist whose work she greatly admires. She sees him in Nietzschean terms as a great man, a hero (Asenijeff 902, 8). To Hella’s way of loving we can apply Lacan’s theory about feminine desire as “beyond the phallus,” as transgressing the limits of phallic self-enjoyment, falling into the domain of the mystical, and therefore beyond words within the confines of the symbolic, of the language of

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subject-object relations. Thus, Hella declares: “My lips are silent, but my soul speaks to him” (Asenijeff 902, 90). In mystical love the subject-object duality vanishes and the subject dissolves. We can follow this dissolution in Hella particularly in the last pages of her notes. She feels both tired and drunk from her love, and starts speaking about herself in the third person, as if she were already of the past. Her notes end in what we can read as a mystical ecstatic outcry: “Kneeling God! Fleeing hero! — you! you!! – no!!” (Asenijeff 902, 92). We can interpret the dissolution of Hella’s self and her ensuing suicide, like Garda’s, as a refusal to become a part of the symbolic order, whose limits and standards do not include the feminine. For Irene, as for Hella, love also suggests a mystical experience. She remembers such experience from her past: “The beloved stood behind me – only our souls had confessed the deep and the mystical for which there are no words! ... It was as if there were no I and Thou, but one and all” (Asenijeff 902, 4–5). Physical contact with a man, however, is mostly repugnant to her; when she senses love come in the “form of the lascivious and unpoetic male animal” (Asenijeff 902, 7), she feels disgust. Feminine desire for Asenijeff involves both body and soul, unlike masculine desire, which is goal- and object-oriented (Spreitzer 997, 44). To the external world, this distinct quality of feminine desire being “beyond the phallus” appears as “frigidity” and causes the woman to shy away from mere physical contact which fails to bring two human beings together: “We exult in love’s fury before our body has found solace in another one, we consume in premature thoughts our souls in kisses dreamt by our lust, so that we arrive poor and exhausted on the day when the warmth of another life touches ours” (Asenijeff 902, 28–9). Benjamin’s concept of intersubjectivity goes beyond a subject-object relationship; it also “may point to a locus for women’s independent desire, a relationship to desire that is not represented by the phallus” (Benjamin 986, 9). Unlike in Lacan’s concept of feminine desire as mystical self-loss, in an intersubjective encounter between two individuals self-growth is implied: “The intersubjective mode ... assumes the paradox that in being with the other, I may experience the most profound sense of self” (Benjamin 986, 92). Intersubjectivity thus goes beyond both phallocentric object-love and mystical self-extinguishing love, opening up a space where two subjects can not only recognize each other as subjects but also contribute to their mutual growth. However, as Benjamin pointed out later, for that to happen, the other must be recognized as a subject and be allowed to remain such, with all its differences and contradictions (Benjamin 998, 00). Objectlove does not tolerate difference but wants to override and dominate it.

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Understanding the consequences of gender relations with a lack of intersubjective space makes us better comprehend the crisis of the female self and the ultimate extinction of the female protagonists in Eine für viele and “Venus am Kreuz.” Whereas Asenijeff’s Hella, Irene’s alter ego, follows a path that leads to this type of crisis, Irene herself discovers her limitless possibilities, alone: “I separate myself from everything human and male and come closer to things the depth of which no words can express. Everything sexual has died off in me” (Asenijeff 902, 94). Irene’s search for her identity becomes based on separation from and transcendence of her sexuality. In contrast with Vera and Garda, who, staying connected to men, opted for physical self-destruction as the only remaining act of agency available to them, Irene is aware of her deviation from male standards. Her belief that men are unable to have an intersubjective relationship leads her to separate from their world altogether, with no desire for a connection to it. The crisis of male identity in Viennese modernity was based on the earlier premise of the wholeness of the self and a unified subject. However, this wholeness implied the domination and repression of the feminine – thus the challenge felt by the threat of the “feminization” of culture and the subsequent misogynistic backlash. In contrast, the crisis of female identity, as thematized in women’s narratives, sheds a different light on the topic. Whereas elements in several of the above narratives, such as hypersensitivity, cultural pessimism, and a desire for death, can be linked, as part of the crisis of the self, to the mainstream style of fin-de-siècle, in particular Viennese, modernity,¹² the dissociation of the female self stands as a criticism of the impossibility for women of inscribing themselves in the symbolic without suffering serious damage. The ultimate consequence for the survival of the feminine thus becomes a total distancing from the masculine. One possible outcome of this position is the claiming of women’s separate space, a “room of one’s own” where they can develop their abilities undisturbed by the negative influence of patriarchal rules. The other possible outcome takes this to its extreme, in the form of man-hating or viriphobia. Yet we can also read these narratives as an attempt to establish an altogether different paradigm for the construction of the female subject. a new paradigm for the female subject One alternative to the exclusionary model of phallic subjectivity can be found in French theories of women’s writing. Julia Kristeva introduces the concept of the chora, which refers to a “feminine” sphere prior to the

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symbolic. The chora is expressed in poetic language as well as in psychotic discourse, since both disrupt the phallocentrism of the symbolic (Kristeva 974). However, Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger rightly comments that “this is in accordance with the classical psychoanalytic position which dissociates the ‘feminine’ from the symbolic” (Lichtenberg Ettinger 992, 98). Lichtenberg Ettinger proposes a new paradigm for the feminine. Unlike Lacan, who basically confirms women’s position as a “muted group” (Showalter 980, 29), and unlike Kristeva, who posits the chora outside of the symbolic, Lichtenberg Ettinger proposes the Matrix, not in opposition to the phallic and hence not excluded from the symbolic either: “I will not replace the Phallus by the Matrix, neither will I propose it as its opposite. Matrix is a slight shift from the Phallus, a supplementary symbolic perspective” (Lichtenberg Ettinger 992, 94). She defines the Matrix, whose original meaning is “womb/uterus,” not as an organ but as a symbol, like the Phallus – in this case, a symbol of the feminine. The Matrix relates to a prenatal state where no differentiation between the I and the not-I(s) has yet occurred; therefore no objectification of the not-I and/or no rejection thereof is possible. The “other,” the not-I, thus, can be recognized in its difference and its “unknown-ness,” it can be acknowledged instead of being assimilated or marginalized: “These are processes of change without domination. I and not-I(s) may relate to one another or simply turn their backs on one another, but they neither swallow nor kill one another” (Lichtenberg Ettinger 992, 200, emphasis in the original). To use Benjamin’s term, intersubjectivity becomes possible. The symbolic opens up to include both Phallus and Matrix, and the Lacanian equation of the Phallus with the symbolic no longer holds. Whereas phallic subjectivity implies oneness and sameness – thereby refusing to recognize anything different – the Matrix is “more-than-one but not everything, less-than-one but not nothing” (Lichtenberg Ettinger 992, 20). The subjectivity the Matrix symbolizes is fragmented, multiple; it hinges on borderlines and derives, for both women and men, from the repressed prenatal state and the repressed womb. It therefore challenges the cultural supremacy of the Phallus and of a subjectivity defined through the repression of the pre-Oedipal. The paradigm of the Matrix states that there are ways to pass from the Real to the Symbolic other than the Phallus and that a separation between the preOedipal and the Oedipal is not necessary to avoid the disintegration of the subject into a psychotic state.¹³ If the phallic symbolic relates to linguistic expression, what would be the area of expression for the matrixial symbolic? Lichtenberg Ettinger places it in the holes of discourse, “which represent the not-yet-known,

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the repressions, and the denials of our culture” (Lichtenberg Ettinger 992, 204). These are perpetually recreated and ever-changing, and their expression in the symbolic can be either phallic or matrixial. If we look at Eine für viele, “Venus am Kreuz,” and Tagebuchblätter einer Emancipierten in this context, we can better situate the relevance of these narratives in fin-desiècle literature. The fragmentation of their form, along with the fragmentation of the female self as a consequence of patriarchal limitations and male violence, falls into the “holes of discourse” posited by Lichtenberg Ettinger. In Tagebuchblätter einer Emancipierten, the parallel construction of two female characters, Hella and Irene, one of whom undergoes the process of disintegration while the other remains in the process of redefinition, allows us to speak of a matrixial paradigm that offers a position for the subject outside the phallic symbolic, a position that escapes a fixed and linear identity. We could see elements of this paradigm previously in the construction of other alter-ego characters: in Ritoók’s novel Egyenes úton – egyedül and in Lux’s Leányok. This paradigm is even more evident in the following narrative by Meisel-Hess. Meisel-Hess published Die Stimme: Roman in Blättern (The Voice: A Novel in Leaves) in 907. This first-person narrative is told by Maja, whose name is mentioned for the first time only on page 5, thus making her an elusive figure from the beginning. The novel is preceded by two short prefaces by the author herself. In the second, which she wrote for the 99 edition, Meisel-Hess defines the “voice” as “the innermost power of a person’s soul struggling for expression and to find its melody” (Meisel-Hess 99, 7– 8). The novel, like other first-person narratives studied here, is thus both a means for a personal quest and the product of a creative act (Spreitzer 999, 82). The reader follows Maja’s endeavours to find the appropriate expression for her voice and her struggles throughout this process.¹⁴ She begins her “notes” as a retroactive narrative going back to her younger years. The first form of expression she finds for her voice is by singing in the theatre. She is successful in her career at the side of a young husband who is also her manager. The expression Maja uses, “my husband who was managing me” (Meisel-Hess 907, 27), indicates a level of inequality in the marriage. This inequality manifests itself not only in the professional relationship of the spouses but even more in their intimate sphere. When, after their honeymoon voyage, Maja concludes that her wedding night had not happened yet, it is meant in a metaphorical sense, namely, that she as a woman has not given herself yet to this man whom she considers “degenerate.” Rudi Neudorfer, the husband, shares this quality of degenerate manhood in the Meisel-Hessian sense with Fanny Roth’s hus-

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band and also with other male characters, such as Szederkényi’s Zalárd. This degeneracy was noted by Meisel-Hess in Die sexuelle Krise, where she points out the inability of her male contemporaries to respond to a “new woman” and her strong and complex personality. One manifestation of a degenerate sexuality is the attraction to extremes, such as sexual excess, perversion, or misogyny (Meisel-Hess 97b, 30). The degeneracy of Maja’s husband consists in his numerous short-lived sexual adventures, none of which are the result of a deep passion. Rudi’s sexual pathology is exacerbated by his dishonesty, which ultimately leads to his wife’s disdain and the breakup of their marriage. Following the separation from Rudi, Maja finds herself facing an existential crisis, namely how to survive on her own. She longs to be able to sing and be free, to link creative expression to the freedom that a materially secure existence brings. What is attainable for Fanny Roth, namely the development of her artistic career after she leaves an unhappy marriage, is more difficult for Maja. Her journey to her creative liberation is longer and more fraught with obstacles, for she faces more difficulties in overcoming her dependency on men. She is involved in two other relationships, both with men who are oppressive in their own ways. During these relationships Maja gradually loses her voice. Meisel-Hess depicts this process in more detail than in Fanny Roth and also offers a more in-depth reflection regarding the mechanisms that allow it to happen. The engagement gift, a pearl necklace, from the next man, Yussuff Hilmi Pascha, is perceived by Maja as a means to place her in captivity. She refers to their first conversation as a “loop” that he threw over her; the same image is used again to describe the long pearl necklace which he twists around her neck three times. The word for necklace in German, “Kette” (chain), reinforces the image of confinement into which Maja feels she is falling. She feels completely passive and incapable of resisting Yussuff’s oppressive energy. If it were not for its effect on Maja, the representation of Yussuff could be regarded as a parody of courteousness. This is particularly obvious in the scene of the duel, which Yussuff fights to restore the “honour” of his fiancée. As Maja comments: “They shot three times in the air and l’honneur de madame Nödorffère was restored” (Meisel-Hess 907, 60). Whereas Maja becomes gradually suffocated, Yussuff’s infatuation with her is growing, based on an ideal image of femininity that he projects on her to the point of complete objectification. He incessantly bombards her with imperatives that she, as his ideal, must fulfill; he even prohibits her from continuing her career as a singer. Maja’s voice thus becomes silenced not only in the relationship, in which she is not allowed to express any

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opinion that would contradict Yussuff’s, but also in its creative expression. She finds her situation increasingly unbearable and starts to resist by refusing to play the role that he has envisaged for her. However, it still takes the physical and geographical distance of a trip away for Maja to regain her power and reflect. During this separation Maja listens to her voice again and sees her relationship in a clearer light. She understands her need for intersubjectivity in a relationship, a need that Yussuff is not capable of filling. She decides to let her voice flow freely and sing in a concert again, an act of “disobedience” soon followed by her separation from her oppressor and the symbolic return of the chain of the pearl necklace. Her next relationship, with Dimitri, ends in marriage, but, again, not a happy one. Dimitri, like Yussuff, regards a woman as his possession; moreover, he needs her to “fill” him and serve as an outlet for his aggressive energy. Maja thus incorporates the abject feminine for him. Again, she “falls” into this relationship. Yet this time she not only starts to lose her voice, but she begins to feel the psychotic symptoms of a split personality: “I feel as if I were doing something in my own absence, almost behind my own back” (Meisel-Hess 907, 87). The process of the disintegration of her self is, as in the above narratives, a result of oppression and violence, even though psychological, not physical, violence. During her marriage with Dimitri, the only situation in which Maja feels her voice somewhat awaken is through their literary conversations. Maja succeeds in proving to Dimitri the inconsistencies in Weininger’s work. However, Dimitri remains firm in his misogynistic attitude toward women writers, whom he rejects based on what he sees as the lack of depth in their writing. Maja’s approval of his views can be interpreted as the reaction of a typical reader accustomed to the canon in which women writers are usually relegated to the trivial and immature. She herself describes women writers as “wild children” who “let their emotions explode” (Meisel-Hess 907, 02). We can thus see in Maja the presence of an internally persuasive discourse of a gender-biased literary aesthetic. Yet, at the same time, she goes beyond such an aesthetic in that she allows the space for women’s writing to unfold and declares, “What a pity that I am not a writer!” (Meisel-Hess 907, 02). Following this regretful exclamation, she states that only Dimitri’s word counts, indicating how her opinion on women writers has been shaped and controlled by the phallic paradigm he represents. Maja’s difficulty in resisting oppression in a relationship can be understood if we look at her statements about her expectations in relationships. These statements speak to the authoritative discourse that she has inter-

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nalized regarding rules of femininity and masculinity, such as a woman’s alleged need to be protected. Even though this need is not met in her second marriage, she still cannot tear herself away from her husband. She not only loses her voice but also begins to lose her body and mind, like Kotányi’s Garda. At this point she finally leaves him, but only after he tells her to save herself from him, thus confirming her dependency on male authority and approval. She leaves not only him, but also Vienna, to move to a “tougher climate” (Meisel-Hess 907, 28), presumably Berlin, where she feels she can develop.¹⁵ In the next stage of her life Maja begins to write her notes. Interspersed among them are some addressed to a “you” whom she knows only through limited contact, but who is nevertheless significant to her. She identifies this “you,” whom she addresses as “Herr Professor,” as a friend and the addressee of her notes and the brief letters that she occasionally sends him. Thus her process of writing seems to require the inspirational force of a man. However, there is a suggestion of doubt as to whether this friend, later named Johannes, really exists in her life or is only a literary alter ego, an inspirational force for her writing, with the function of bringing her voice back to her, with a shape and tone, and of giving her writing a form. Following her breakup with Dimitri and Johannes’s entry into her life on a more permanent basis, Maja writes feverishly and is very productive. Her notes become less coherent, as she stops documenting the chronology of her life and instead delves deeper into the exploration of her self and her writing. Unlike the first-person narratives previously explored, Maja’s notes include a metatextual dimension, as she reflects on the act of writing and on what constitutes a “real writer” (Meisel-Hess 907, 46). She still struggles with the acquired notions of what makes good literature and does not consider that her subjective literature qualifies: “If I were a writer, one could speak of a ‘productive phase’” (Meisel-Hess 907, 49). For Maja, the act of writing is combined with an additional artistic dimension in that she sews her notebooks herself. She thus brings together the traditionally male-dominated activity of writing with the traditionally female activity of sewing. She becomes capable of defining genius, by quoting the poet Lenau, as both male and female, thus liberating herself from the misogynistic attitude that Dimitri carried toward writing women. A Nietzschean influence is also noticeable here, when Maja mentions her will, which has helped her to face all the challenges and to find herself. The voice can only sing and speak from strength. Drawing on Nietzsche, she posits the view that not only the creative act but also the act of loving require a strong personality, the only type capable of an intersubjective and joyful relationship: “Because love means giving oneself. But only the person who has a clear,

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conscious self is capable of giving it” (Meisel-Hess 907, 66). She criticizes her degenerate contemporaries, particularly the male ones, who lack that strength and whose weakness pushes them to commit acts of cruelty. Meisel-Hess’s Nietzsche reception in her fiction thus confirms her ideas from Die sexuelle Krise, namely, that women have the potential for growth men have lost. Thus the Nietzschean “overman,” the person who grows beyond his present limits, is presented as an “overwoman,” a concept that befits women, but to whose requirements men do not rise. Maja continuously reiterates her doubts about her writing abilities while, at the same time, affirming the possibilities of women’s creativity. Through a poem, she conducts a dialogue with none other than the great Goethe about the source of artistic inspiration and creation, and she raises the suggestion that “an answer for Goethe / could be found by a – woman?” (Meisel-Hess 907, 229). She finds her language through the writing of the notes and through Johannes. Johannes sometimes “dictates” to her. Again, I read this in the light of Johannes’s role as her male alter ego and inspirational force, which she needs to accept herself as a writing woman. For this reason, I disagree with Spreitzer, who interprets the character of Johannes as a “male figure of redemption” (Spreitzer 999, 84) and as a falling back into patriarchal role models. I see here the expression of a struggle symptomatic of a female author of (not only) Meisel-Hess’s generation, the struggle to define herself, independent of a patriarchal way of thinking in which the act of writing is male-connoted (hence the male inspirational force) and phallically inscribed. With Maja’s attempts to fill in the gaps left by the dominant discourses, which also resonate in Maja and necessarily shape her attitude toward writing and the creative process, this text is a good example of the struggle to divert the creative act of writing from its phallic mode of expression towards a redefinition of the (writing) subject according to a matrixial paradigm. Maja’s act of “sacrifice” goes beyond the simple traditional “feminine” act that Spreitzer sees. I read it as a matrixial way of salvaging that “unsalvageable” (“unrettbar”) self of modernity as defined by Mach. In this case, it is done through the act of writing itself, in which the female subject enters a cycle of perpetual recreation. In an intersubjective process, where othering is replaced by a recognition of difference, Maja calls on Johannes to bring her voice back again, the voice that she has burnt into these notes, so as to make another creative act possible. The voice thus keeps on being lost and found again, by Maja and Johannes, along with its possible products, which can only be matrixial, multiple, and without closure. The narratives analysed in this chapter challenge the narrative form, with its traditional closure and unified subject. Those narratives that reflect

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the position of the women’s movement and the fight for women to enter into the realm of the symbolic, such as Kaffka’s, Ritoók’s, and Lux’s novels, show signs of a disintegration of the unified subject, as a reflection of the dissatisfaction with and criticism of the concept of the phallically connoted subject for women and the expression of the impossibility for women to be fully part of the phallic symbolic. The attempt to form a matrixial paradigm offers a position where the feminine can acquire subject status and enter the symbolic without becoming annihilated in this very process. It allows for the feminine to engage itself in an act of permanent redefinition and recreation, existing next to the phallic but neither overriden by it nor excluded from the symbolic. Moreover, the paradigm of the Matrix allows us to think inclusively when thinking about literature. It permits us to “fill in the blanks” of literary history, the blanks left by the omission of women writers. Rather than creating a separate “feminine aesthetic,” a concept many feminist critics rightly see as problematic for its reinforcement of the spaces left empty in the dominant literary discourse, we need an interplay of both modes, the phallic as well as the matrixial. This process would make possible a “re-reading, re-discovering [of] what the canon’s priestly mantle would conceal: the entanglements of all literature with the power dynamics of culture” (Aiken 986, quoted in Pollock 999, 6).

666 A Return to Tradition?

The previous two chapters presented fictional texts that, either through an explicit message to the reader or through a deconstruction of the classical form of plot or character formation, thematized women’s fight for their educational and professional rights and sexual liberation. In the narratives analysed, the female characters find a way – be it constructive or destructive – to go beyond the limits imposed on their sex. Yet the fin de siècle also offers narratives in which women’s attempts to step out of the frame and challenge the control of socially prescribed roles are thwarted. Some narratives, such as Janitschek’s novella “Das neue Weib” (“The New Woman,” 90b) and her novel Die Amazonenschlacht (The Battle of the Amazons, 897), have an ironic perspective on women’s emancipation and present it as an aberration in a woman’s life, whereas others, such as Szikra’s novel Ugody Lila (Lila Ugody, 900) and Erdős’s A nagy sikoly (The Big Scream, 922), critically examine the reasons and mechanisms that govern women’s decisions to remain within the confines of their traditional roles. Janitschek has been recognized as an author who resists categorization as either a feminist or an anti-feminist. Her position in her writings often fluctuates, and as much as she criticizes the repression of female sexuality in the previously analysed novellas “In der Knospe,” “Die Lehrerin,” and “Neue Erziehung und alte Moral,” she ridicules women’s emancipatory efforts and even the women’s movement as such in other narratives. Janitschek makes abundant use of irony in “Das neue Weib,” making it impossible to classify the position of the narrator. The targets of her irony are both the female characters, particularly the main one, Selma, and the only male character, Selma’s husband, whom the reader knows only through

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the ridiculous nickname his wife gave him, Bibibi. Janitschek shoots ample ironic barbs at Bibibi. He is presented as a sly womanizer who exploits his present wife (as well as his two previous ones) sexually, emotionally, and financially. One comical peak in the narrative is when the physician who comes to examine the husband for having lately exhibited rather strange behaviour, prescribes some pills for the wife instead.¹ Yet Selma herself is just as much the target of ironical treatment for her unconditional support of and emotional dependency on a man such as Bibibi. The shifting perspective of the narrator is particularly obvious in the scene where Selma, for the first time, eavesdrops on her husband committing an infidelity, through the wall of a hotel room where Bibibi is “interviewing” a young woman, a potential author for his newspaper (which he owns thanks to Selma’s money). Unfortunately, large parts of this scene were confiscated by the censor, thus depriving the reader of the complete literary experience Janitschek would have offered. But even in the parts that escaped the censor’s scissors, we can hear voices that come from various sources: “She [Selma] found out all sorts of things. About the ways women writers often achieved fame and how others were turned down because they flew out, haughtily, at certain expectations. How belles-lettres had become an area dominated almost exclusively by women. How a certain literary taste was imposed on the public, which solely depended on the respective variations in the chief editor’s appetite. How the critique’s guillotine worked without a brain and reason. How serious men wanted to fight less and less on literature’s field of work” (Janitschek 90b, 205–6). In the second sentence, within an observation on Selma’s part, the narrator inserts “haughtily,” an epithet which most likely derives from Bibibi, as does the following sentence (“how belles-lettres ...”) as well as the last one (“How serious men ...”). On the other hand, the two sentences in between (“how the reading public ...” and “how the critique’s guillotine ...”) express the opinion of the young and anonymous writer who is being “interviewed,” and can be read as an opinion representative of other aspiring writers. The narrator thus takes a distance from all the expressed opinions. Selma’s revenge for Bibibi’s infidelity takes the form of a book that is a combination of a treatise on women’s condition in patriarchy and a personal attack against her husband. Again, the narrator’s position is ambivalent in recounting parts of Selma’s book. She describes the process of Selma’s authoring the book as follows: “And Selma, filled to the brim with anger and bitterness, forgot her pride, put herself on the same level with other female poultry and wrote a book” (Janitschek 90b, 207). A derogatory tone regarding women writers is clearly present. We could also interpret

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this as a form of critical self-evaluation, a romantic irony on Janitschek’s part toward her profession as a female (and bestselling) author. On the other hand, amidst all the irony lies a serious tone, namely, a criticism of women’s place in society. Selma describes women’s lives as a series of victimizations, from their birth as members of a second-class sex, through the use and abuse of their bodies that get thrown onto the marriage market, to the shock of the wedding night, continuous childbearing, and, eventually, their husband’s infidelities. Yet this seriousness is soon dampened through the ironic description of the book’s reception: “All the women, the enslaved, sacrificed, and abused ones, circled around their brave sister, the new woman, the first one who dared to set her tyrant in the pillory” (Janitschek 90b, 2). This irony becomes even stronger through the last pages of the narrative, in which Selma fails to respond to the expectations of her readers to put into action her “noble and revolutionary ideas,” namely, to leave her husband and live alone, devoted to her work in proud “martyrdom” (Janitschek 90b, 22). What Janitschek demonstrates and ridicules through the almost grotesque final scene, in which Selma not only does not leave her husband but even begs him on her knees for forgiveness, is the emotional dependency of the “new woman” that Selma aspires to be. Janitschek shows this dependency as coming from two possible sources. On the one hand, Selma is intimidated by her husband’s physical force. Thus, there is an implied criticism of domestic violence and of the possibility of physical abuse, even though, as usual, Janitschek does not delve deeper into its underlying mechanisms. On the other hand, Janitschek brings out the “old Eve” (Janitschek 90b, 26) in Selma, “the old Eve that can never be expelled, not even from the ‘newest’ woman” (Janitschek 90b, 26). Through Selma’s decision to remain by her husband’s side, Janitschek, in her matter-of-fact way, shows the clinging to a passive role that was traditionally inscribed as feminine and mocks pseudoemancipatory attempts that remain stuck halfway to their goal. However, despite an implied criticism, she does not offer a deeper analysis, nor does she attempt to find possible explanations as to why a woman would choose to remain in an abusive situation; instead, she reduces this behaviour to an essentialist “old Eve” pattern. Janitschek’s novel Die Amazonenschlacht tells a somewhat similar story, although the husband in this case is not the object of irony; he is portrayed as an average, somewhat plain, and taciturn man whom his wife begins to find boring and thus decides to leave. The wife, Hildegard Wallner, arrives in the big city, Berlin, from her small provincial town with lofty expecta-

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tions and the attitude of a spoiled and pampered young woman who has never had to look after herself. With a mocking description of Hildegard’s troubles in Berlin (from Hildegard’s finding fault with almost everything in her modest lodging to her embarrassment at finding herself eating alone in a restaurant), Janitschek criticizes the lack of autonomy in a young woman of a middle-class background and her inability to adapt to new circumstances and lead an independent lifestyle. This position is even more obvious when it comes to showing Hildegard as living on her husband’s purse. Hildegard or, as Janitschek often calls her as a reminder of her dependency, Mrs Wallner, is portrayed as being entirely impractical, choosy, and particular about what kind of work she would like to do, namely, to be a secretary. Consequently, she rejects all alternative suggestions coming from other women and is greatly disappointed when members of the bourgeois women’s movement do not give her a secretarial position. The Janitschekian narrator’s position is ambivalent yet again. Following a series of disparaging remarks about Hildegard’s personality comes a possible explanation and justification for it, namely, her typical middle-class upbringing and the lack of a thorough education that would have taught her how to think and act independently. But there is no follow-up to this explication. Although education is acknowledged as a factor in forming (or rather deforming) young women’s minds and personalities, allegations of gender-based discrimination in higher education are downplayed as an excuse for frustrated semi-talented feminists, and women’s unequal standing is explained by men’s superiority and women’s lack of true talent. This ambivalent position runs through the whole novel. Women’s intellectual judgment, or rather the lack of it, is seen as based, on the one hand, on female inferiority, and, on the other, on women’s typically received education and their lack of knowledge about life’s practical aspects. Janitschek’s depiction of the women’s movement is even more ironic than that of Mrs Wallner. She not only makes fun of its goals as being the result of a man-hating attitude and, often, women’s boredom with married life but also characterizes its members as not doing much beyond throwing around empty and useless slogans that have little impact on reality. Janitschek denies any practical or visionary aspects to the women’s movement. She belittles it by showing the split between its bourgeois and Social Democratic wings and by explaining the motivations behind the movement as rooted in private interests. Janitschek’s apparent place in the finde-siècle misogynistic chorus becomes more explicit in her ironic treatment of a project financed by the women’s movement. The project, which would have involved collecting data on famous and important women in history,

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remains uncompleted, for the lady in charge cannot find any evidence of significant female inventors, scientists, philosophers, or generals. It is quite revealing that Janitschek views the lack of a recorded history of women through “male glasses,” to recall Weigel’s term. Yet again, an ambivalence creeps in, through a critical tone regarding the presentation of feminists in newspapers through “male glasses,” by focusing on their physical appearance without even mentioning the content of their speeches. The reader can notice the shifting position toward the women’s movement in this scene through Hildegard taking offence at how women are represented. Yet ultimately, Hildegard gradually finds her way back into the safe haven from which she so wanted to escape. The ironic downplaying of feminism means that the discourses of her upbringing remain dominant. Thus the initial “amazon” returns home to her ailing husband after having undergone a process that one could describe as a “taming of the shrew.” She concludes that the ultimate freedom for women resides in “love and sacrifice” (Janitschek 897, 97). She loses “all hardness and obstinacy” (Janitschek 897, 04) and is ready to raise the white flag to the male sex. Thus, despite an ambivalent treatment of the topic of female independence and a certain level of criticism regarding women’s upbringing and the representation of feminists, Janitschek’s position shifts toward confirming the then dominant condition of middle-class women rather than challenging it and suggesting ways of improving it. The tone of Szikra’s novel Ugody Lila is quite different. As a fiction writer, Szikra actualizes some of the ideas developed in her essays as she depicts the conflict between society and women who try to break out of the roles traditionally assigned to them and move toward a new femininity. Even though her literary writing is largely forgotten today, it was acknowledged and positively received by many a contemporaneous literary historian. Jenő Pintér praises her convincingly realistic, as well as satirical, portrayal of the aristocracy’s haughty demeanour (Pintér 928, 27–8). István Boross also mentions her satire and sharp observation, and notes her novels’ refined and polished narrative structure (Boross 935, 5–6). Jób Bánhegyi stresses her talent for acute observation as well, in addition to her well-drawn psychological portraits: “A subtle malice is often mixed into her depictions; she chastises human weaknesses and social life’s absurdities and ill-judgments with a biting mockery” (Bánhegyi 938, 69). Nándor Várkonyi praises Szikra’s talent to render not only fine details but also more complex situations. He also notes her interesting storylines (Várkonyi 942, 322). Anna Fábri, one of the exceptional present-day scholars to pay tribute to Szikra’s literary work, connects the critical tone found

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in Szikra’s feminist essays and speeches to that present in her literary texts: “She qualifies, judges, summarizes, stresses – which means that she remains a publicist in her fictional writings as well” (Fábri 996, 72). While these scholars recognize the social criticism in Szikra’s work, none of them mentions her critical portrayal of gender relations. As for Fábri’s notion that she “remains a publicist,” one should acknowledge that Szikra imports feminist ideas from her non-fictional texts into her fiction, much like TrollBorostyáni or Meisel-Hess in Austria. Yet unlike Troll-Borostyáni, who in her fiction often paints a rather rosy picture regarding the compatibility of women’s emancipation with heterosexual romance, in Ugody Lila Szikra goes against such scenario. In this novel, published in 900, Szikra, herself of aristocratic descent, dissects the mores of high society, in particular with regard to young upper-class women’s upbringing. Through Lila, the offspring of an old Hungarian family and a young woman full of creative energy and unfulfilled ambitions, the author reproves the idle lifestyle of young upper-class women, which prevents the expression of their talents. Lila vents her bitterness in a conversation with the gardener’s musician son: “There, beyond the locust trees, is the fence, a tall stone wall. Nobody may look in through it and we cannot look out through it either. You see, Pali, this is my world. Beyond the fence is the country road which binds us all together. All those who, through their actions, words, art or science, fight for a place in the hearts, souls and minds of their fellow human beings set out on this road. But it is closed off for me by the tall stone fence of traditions. I’m a girl from a good family, the descendant of old and proud Hungarian nobles. What an honour! ... My world therefore cannot go beyond this closed, segregated, neat, well-pruned garden ... And even there it is limited to the large paths. God keep me from walking on new paths” (Szikra 900, 57). Despite her intelligence and artistic talents, Lila’s life, as becomes young women of her class, is limited to husband hunting. Her only resistance against the norms and expectations of her social milieu is her refusal to accept the suitors her family tries to impose on her. Szikra’s satirical portrayal of “love” and the marriage market in Lila’s milieu indicates the chasm between the shiny surface of the contrived social scenarios with their fancy clothes, polite ambiance, and arranged situations and the ideal of intersubjectivity and partnership that she defends in her essays. Szikra attacks another aspect of the marriage market, namely, the stigma of the “old maid,” by pointing out the absurdity of forcing young women into marriage before they are even of legal age: “So we have to marry, and the sooner the better. Because in our society a girl is looked upon with a

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certain pity: oh yes, she is already twenty-one! But contrary to this, according to our laws, a girl is of age only at twenty-four, and even then only on paper. For does she have any more freedom after that? Any more right to self-determination? She doesn’t, correct? After that, we only deserve one title which is bestowed on us with lavish generosity: old maid” (Szikra 900, 8). Through Lila’s intelligent and rebellious analysis of her class’s customs, Szikra tears apart the illusion of marriage as the ultimate goal and happiness in a young woman’s life and illustrates her own involvement in the women’s movement regarding women’s legal position in marriage. The novel takes a turn toward a heterosexual romance when Lila falls in love and her love is requited. Her beloved, Dénes, fits the description of a “good catch” to satisfy Lila’s family, for he is a man from a good family with a promising political career. However, the stigma of the “old maid” shows not only in the refusal of Dénes’s mother to accept twenty-eight-year-old Lila, but also in Lila’s own postponement of her decision on marriage because she considers herself too old to marry. Szikra masterfully portrays Lila as torn between internalized discourses and her rebellion against them. The author does not stop there. As in her essay A feminizmusról, in which she quotes the example of Western countries where women had already been granted suffrage, she attacks her country’s backwardness in social mores by comparing it to the West: “What do you think, how many girls, who aren’t a little bit younger than you are, marry in the educated West?” “I know,” replied Lila smiling involuntarily, “but they are further away from Asia than we are.” “You see,” laughed Dénes, “I hope that you don’t regard me completely as a Kirghiz either”² (Szikra 900, 9). Interestingly, as in Kaffka’s Mária évei, the man is portrayed as being more progressive and having more courage to go against tradition and prejudice; he decides to marry Lila despite his mother’s disapproval. But Szikra turns the story away from a happy ending as the voice of tradition takes precedence over Lila’s pursuit of personal happiness. After Lila’s sister-in-law dies in childbirth, Lila falls into the role of the stereotypical “old-maid” aunt.³ She accepts it as her duty to bring up her brother’s four orphaned children, and turns down Dénes’s marriage proposal. Thus the voice of tradition wins in the end, and Lila becomes a double victim, not only of the customs of her class that prevent her from realizing any artistic ambitions but also of her family’s needs, to which her personal happiness is sacrificed. Unlike Szikra, Renée Erdős was not involved in the women’s movement. But, like Szikra, she was a prolific author; moreover, she made a living exclusively from her writing. Her writing style was unique in the Hungarian literature of her time. She has been called the femme fatale of

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Renée Erdo˝s

fin-de-siècle Hungarian literary life (Fábri 996, 69) and the “most erotic Hungarian woman writer” (Bánhegyi 938, 8) for the open expression of female desire, in both her poetry and her prose. At the time, Hungarian literature was not at all ready for such erotic frankness, which was considered completely unsuitable coming from a woman’s pen. Critics vehemently attacked Erdős, even warning young ladies not to read her.⁴ Despite, or maybe because of, such scandal-provoking writing, she was, according to Bánhegyi, probably the writer most talked about in Hungary for decades, and her books had tremendous success with the public (Bánhegyi 938, 90). Yet only the first novel of her tetralogy Ősök és ivadékok (Ancestors and Descendants), published in 95 under the title Az új sarj (The New Offspring), gained some literary recognition. Her other novels were merely deemed suitable for “certain layers of the female literary audience; literary history cannot keep them on its records” (Várkonyi 942, 3). Thus, Erdős’s writings, despite their immense popularity during the first half of the twentieth century, followed the fate of most writing by women of her generation: they were simply left out of literary history, only to be rediscovered and re-appreciated to some degree in the 990s.⁵

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The novel that earned her the most infamy, however, was separate from the tetralogy. A nagy sikoly (The Big Scream, 922) focuses on an exploration of sexuality, and, as the title suggests, female sexual pleasure. The novel was branded sheer “pornography” by the Catholic press. At the other end of the spectrum, leftist papers found it to be “too Catholic and too conservative” (Kádár 997, 24). In a reassessment of the novel, Judit Kádár gives it a “unique place in Hungarian literature” (Kádár 997, 24) because, as a woman, Erdős wrote openly about female – and, I would add, male – sexuality. Although Erdős focuses on sexuality in this novel, she was by no means the only woman writer in fin-de-siècle Hungarian literature to have challenged certain taboos around this topic. As we have seen, so did authors such as Szederkényi and Kaffka. Erdős adds another dimension, however. She not only openly describes desire, but also, through her character formation and the various discourses around sexuality, exposes dominant attitudes and destabilizes the power structures that govern sexual behaviour. One could argue that it was not just that she wrote about sexuality that made her (in)famous, but how she wrote about it, baring the repressive and misogynistic mechanisms and discourses of patriarchy. The novel tells the story of Dóra and Sándor’s marriage, which, despite its beautiful, albeit somewhat pompous, initial chords, brings no happiness to either spouse. Following a deep crisis in which Dóra considers leaving her husband, she eventually opts for her duty, accepts her marriage for what it is and returns to Sándor in order to embrace motherhood. This novel is a prime example of a heteroglot narrative in which the heteroglossia also manifests in a double focus within several of the characters regarding, in particular, sexual morals, which is precisely what critics found so disturbing and confusing. Bánhegyi pointed out that, although the “right” moral principles prevail (Bánhegyi 938, 02), the story itself does not support the ideal professed in the last lines of the novel, in which Dóra seems to have found her direction: “the road of the future, the road of duty, of woman’s calling, the road from which, at a distance, she saw the coming Beauty wave at her in a glow, the greatest of all Duties, Renewal, the most noble Promise: the CHILD ” (Erdős 989, 330). Bánhegyi claims that the author deceives herself and misleads her readers by ending the novel with those words, when the novel represents a series of events in which Erdős glorifies free love and immoral behaviour (Bánhegyi 938, 03). The first act that would have been deemed immoral by Erdős’s critics happens in the scene between mother and daughter just before the newlyweds are about to leave for their honeymoon. Dóra’s mother, in an attempt to give her daughter some advice on her new path as a married woman, gives her a little parcel from the doctor with the instruction not to open

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it in front of her husband, who must not know of it. To the reader, despite the mother’s innuendos, which the daughter may or may not understand, it is obvious that the mother is giving Dóra some contraceptive device. The mother goes against the doctrine of the Catholic Church by doing so (which explains the label of “immorality” on the part of critics) and she justifies this subversive behaviour by her desire to let her daughter be completely happy in this initial period of her marriage, to simply enjoy herself with her husband. An act of female bonding, one could say, and an emancipated attitude on the part of the mother. Yet if we look at the rest of the mother’s talk to Dóra, a double focus becomes obvious. She invites her daughter to be reserved with her husband and to never let the “virgin” completely die in herself, not even in the most passionate moments: “And show reserve, Dóra, even after the opposite may perhaps not be difficult to do anymore. There are moments when the man carries the woman away into shameless acts, but he never forgets those moments” (Erdős 989, ). Contrary to the advice she gives to Dóra to use contraceptives in order to experience unburdened pleasure, the mother, at the same time, professes a double standard regarding sexual behaviour. While it is acceptable for the man to let himself go completely and enjoy, the woman must not forget to apply the brakes of “decency,” even in the bedroom. Thus we can hear, through the mother, two voices; the voice of sexual emancipation, however, remains suffocated under the much stronger voice of an internalized control over female sexuality. Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi recognized the impact of upbringing and social conditioning on women’s sexuality. He formulated ideas regarding the suffocation and control of female sexuality. Ferenczi espoused women’s right to sexual pleasure and satisfaction and criticized the lack thereof in marriage. Yet he also pointed out another important element in the creation of the sexual double standard, namely, that women internalized the belief that sexual enjoyment was something only for “fallen” women. He thereby touches on the importance and the power of discourses that form a crucial part of women’s upbringing. The scene between Dóra and her mother is a prime example of such internalization of a patriarchal model of sexuality, one that gets handed down from mother to daughter. This internalized double standard regarding the male or female right to sexual pleasure echoes the dominant views about sexuality at the turn of the century. Dóra’s mother represents one end of that spectrum, namely, the view that women, the “decent” ones at least, are, by nature, less sexual beings (a view present in Möbius’s ideas on women). The development of

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Dóra and Sándor’s marital relations certainly seems to point in that direction: Dóra grows increasingly less interested in sexual relations with her husband and, consequently, becomes what would be labelled a “frigid” woman. However, this is by no means a result of Dóra’s naturally asexual personality. During their wedding night, she responds to her husband’s kisses with great passion at first, a passion that bursts out from deep within, from underneath those layers of acquired discourses that repress female sexuality. To Sándor’s question “Do you love me?” Dóra responds “I adore you,” and she says it in a voice “which sounded like the voice of a woman she didn’t know” (Erdős 989, 8). Yet everything changes following the sexual act which Erdős does not describe. Thus, despite her frank approach to sexuality, even Erdős, like other Hungarian women writers of the period (and unlike Austrian writers), avoids direct description of the brutality of the wedding night. The reader only witnesses the conversation between the spouses “later.” In it, the husband tries to comfort Dóra, who is in tears, an expression of both her physical pain and her emotional disappointment: “‘And what about the celebration? My celebration?’ asked the silent, suffering eyes of the woman, her lips shut tight, her repressed tears” (Erdős 989, 2). In her confusion, Dóra wonders whether something may have been wrong with her expectations and whether everything is just the way it is supposed to be. Several scholars have pointed out that Sándor’s selfish and increasingly brutal sexual behaviour is the major cause for Dóra’s sexual frigidity (Kádár 997, 2; Kemenes and Jastrzębska 998, 2). The husband treats his wife like a sexual object, a toy for his pleasure, regardless of how she may be feeling. During their honeymoon, he impatiently demands her unconditional submission to his desire and his needs: “Now I am here, your husband,⁶ and you have to be the way I want you to be” (Erdős 989, 33). Dóra finds herself caught between two wills and two discourses that command her: one stems from her upbringing which commands her to be a “decent” woman, and the other from her husband whose understanding of a “real” woman and wife is radically different. Thus, her family and her husband represent two forces with seemingly opposite interests, splitting the woman into the dualistic image of the Madonna and the whore. What they actually have in common is that they both lead to Dóra’s submission. Together, they turn her into a confused and disoriented puppet, a victim with no power to leave the abusive situation. Dóra suffers repeated sexual abuse, which takes on sadistic nuances as Sándor’s pleasure becomes increasingly fuelled by his wife’s growing disgust: “I don’t care what you think and what you feel, the more you find me repulsive, the more I love you ... Sometimes I even

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believe that it is not you I desire but this suffering, this torment with which you give yourself to me” (Erdős 989, 35). And, as in any situation of abuse, the abuser blames his victim: “What have you done with me, I who was good and tender? You see, what you have done with me” (Erdős 989, 35). Erdős’s portrayal of Sándor’s sexuality exemplifies what Meisel-Hess terms “degenerate sexuality,” degenerate masculinity. Sándor thereby joins the company of similar male characters in which women’s literature of the time abounds (one only has to think of Meisel-Hess’s novels, Asenijeff’s short story “Daseinselend,” or Szederkényi’s novel Amíg egy asszony eljut odáig). Sándor’s sexually “degenerate” behaviour is seen not only in his sadistic attitude and his inability to please and seduce his wife but also his numerous pre-marital affairs. His sexually deviant behaviour continues during their marriage as well. After Dóra repeatedly fails to respond to Sándor’s attempts to produce the much-awaited “big scream” (which he wants to satisfy his male vanity, not really to satisfy his wife), he, still on their honeymoon, breaks his marriage vows by sleeping with another woman. This moves Dóra to step away from her role as the passive and enduring victim and to break off sexual relations with her husband. Although Dóra claims her power to dictate the conditions of their marriage, she is not capable of going all the way and doing what deep within she would like to do, namely, divorce her husband. She does not feel strong enough to defy the immense power of the discourses that resonate within her: the social stigma of the divorcée and the crushing power of the Catholic Church. In the moments before she confronts her unfaithful husband, she remembers the sermon of the bishop, a relative of hers, at her wedding, in which he called marriage a “heavy chain that you take upon yourselves for a whole life” (Erdős 989, 74–5). Thus Dóra remains at Sándor’s side and shares the same household, but not the same bedroom. However, Dóra’s strength and determination in confronting her husband brings about a shift in the power structure of their relationship. For the first time, Sándor takes her seriously, not just as a beautiful little girl, as he had done until then, and agrees to her conditions, only to keep her at his side while secretly hoping that, with time, she would change her mind. Erdős does not limit her criticism of degenerate male sexuality to Sándor but extends it to most of the male sex, as seen in the conversation between Dóra and the actress Ida Bondieu. Ida presents the lack of orgasmic pleasure in Dóra’s marital life as a blessing and “frigidity” as the only way to remain free of the detrimental influence men’s love carries for women. Ida’s opinion on women who are capable of reaching orgasm and thus producing the “big scream” much appreciated by their male partners reflects the dual-

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istic model regarding female sexuality: “decent” women, like Dóra, who, according to Ida, are in the majority, are not made for the big scream, while the other group, who indulge in sexual pleasure, are by far a minority. Ida, despite her acknowledgment that the big scream is indicative of fantastic pleasures, presents it as an “illness,” a “curse from God” that makes those women who are capable of it lose their refinement (Erdős 989, 6); what is worst is that it leads to a desire that can never be satisfied. Erdős has built in two voices into Ida’s words. On the one hand, female sexuality is presented in misogynistic terms, reflecting Otto Weininger’s theory about the “sexual-only female” whose desire can never be fully satisfied; but on the other, Erdős reverses misogynistic definitions of female sexuality by countering them with a viriphobic argument. It is men’s fault, after all, that women who indulge in the big scream become its captives. It is men’s degenerate sexuality that teaches women to be similar in sexual behaviour, not – as Weininger claims – women who drag down the male, who is made for “higher” affairs, into a morass of lust. Ironically, the bishop offers the same opinion about male sexuality during Dóra’s confession. He lists several well-known misogynists – Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Möebius, and Weininger – whom he holds responsible for the spread of ideas among young men that devalue women. It is ironic because the bishop himself expresses misogynistic ideas when he professes that women’s sexual thirst is unquenchable unless it is sated by a higher calling, namely, motherhood (Erdős 989, 265). But, unlike Ida, the bishop does not recommend independence for Dóra, a state that she has begun to rather enjoy and appreciate and that has given her a sense of relief and a new power over her husband. Quite the opposite – the bishop talks Dóra back into subordinating herself, reminding her of her duties as a wife and future mother. According to the doctrines of the Catholic Church, motherhood is women’s true calling, the bishop contends, not pleasure seeking, which is men’s domain and of a lower order. The traditional role of woman as keeper of the family and morality through the sacrifice of her individual happiness is thus Dóra’s lot. Dóra herself listens to the voice of tradition and follows the advice of the Church at a crossroad which could have also led her into a very different life. Through a friendship with the composer Ózdy, she experiences a hint of a different kind of love, based on intersubjectivity, a love that goes beyond mere sexual attraction and seeks a deeper connection between woman and man. Ida, in their earlier conversation, already mentions the yearning for that kind of love, a love that acknowledges a woman as an individual and does not reduce her to a sexual object in a relationship of master and slave:

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“Then man would also adjust to woman and not think of himself that he can settle, once and for all, a woman’s every problem with one embrace” (Erdős 989, 23). Unlike Ida, Dóra does experience a love of this kind with Ózdy, for a brief period, in a moment of musical ecstasy, when he plays a piece for her on the piano, inspired by their encounter. Moreover, Dóra has a non-sexual orgasmic experience: And she felt how rapture, the great rapture that she had never known, came towards her through the music of the eyes and the tones. She felt how it took command of her heart, her brain, her whole body! How some purple fog fell on her eyes, how her body slowly became numb from the choking pleasure that was approaching her, how her arms trembled ready to open up for a big embrace! How her lips opened as if his lips were approaching hers! How the never-felt, the first pleasure flashed through her body, how it took her into its power, how it swept her away! And then she suddenly lifted both her hands and pressed them against her lips so as not to scream! Not to scream into the music, with the scream of the first delight which created her womanhood, which was there, right there, it had found her, without her body, through the wings of the music and under those burning and enchanting eyes. (Erdős 989, 244)

But the voice of duty, commanded by the Church, overpowers this surge of true passion and intimacy and Dóra renounces this opportunity to explore sexual and emotional happiness with a man who stands outside of the category of the “degenerates.” What László Kemenes Géfin says about this novel is somewhat true, namely, that Erdős’s message is “that modern patriarchal society’s smooth functioning ... is secured not only through regulation but, moreover, through destruction of female sexuality” (Kemenes and Jastrzębska 998, 0). The novel’s ending, a reconciliation between the spouses and Dóra’s renunciation of personal happiness for the sake of the roles expected of her, certainly confirms such a view. However, Erdős would not be the controversial writer she was if she had not created other female characters who are Dóra’s opposites and who choose to break with tradition, even at the expense of their lives. Erna, Dóra’s younger sister is one of them. That she is Dóra’s exact opposite is made obvious at the beginning of the narrative. As she embraces Dóra and kisses her goodbye before Dóra leaves for her honeymoon, she smells the flowers in Dóra’s hair and comments: “‘These orange flowers make me feel so queasy ... Not you?’ ‘Not me’ said Dóra with a slightly impatient voice” (Erdős 989, 3). We can see here, on a symbolic level, Erna’s refusal of the

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traditional roles of wife and mother. Oranges are a symbol of fertility, which Dóra, but not Erna, eventually accepts as her duty. Erna is not only artistically inclined and studies painting, thus leading a life outside the bourgeois norm, but moreover she engages in several sexual affairs with no interest whatsoever in marrying any of her lovers. She refuses to take upon herself any “shackles,” as she calls marriage. But, as if to appease the conservative reader, Erdős has Erna suffer from a lung disease that will eventually take her young life. The other female character whose life ends tragically is Dóra’s widowed aunt, Tonia, once Sándor’s lover. Tonia, who lost a beloved young spouse, also leads an independent life, partly looking after her late husband’s aging father and, during her travels, having the odd love affair, which she keeps secret from the family. To those around her, Tonia is the embodiment of love of life and beauty, but inside she is also crushed under the power of oppressive discourses, although in a different way from Dóra. Tonia decides to end her life at the age of thirty-six out of fear of aging and losing the charms that attract new suitors. If one looks at the dictatorship of the ideals of beauty and youth over women’s lives, then and now, Tonia’s fear becomes quite understandable. Her suicide, however, is more than just a tragedy. It is, like other suicides of female characters in contemporaneous literature, a criticism of the society in which she lives, which does not allow women the same freedoms that it allows men, and forces them to commit various acts of self-sacrifice. Once again, suicide is seen, for a woman of Tonia’s generation who decides to go against social norms, as the only authentic expression of self, as it stands for the refusal to comply with the prescribed behaviour. The challenging of traditional images of femininity through Erna and Tonia is complemented by Dóra herself. Dóra’s brief happiness in her encounter with Ózdy, with its hint of an intersubjective relationship between woman and man, and her thoughts just before she returns to her husband in self-renunciation, thoughts expressing hope in the possibility of a new humanity, give voice to a feminist discourse. Although Erdős would not have called herself a feminist, the following quote is certainly a feminist statement, though projected onto the next generation, as in Ritoók’s novel Egyenes úton – egyedül: “The liberation of the female soul, won’t it shake the very foundations of man’s separate morality, this blatant lie which formulates laws for women, laws that he himself escapes! Although a law can only be good and just if it is equally binding for both men and women” (Erdős 989, 32). This resonates with a major goal of the first women’s movement, namely, to create equality between women and

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men not only in the economic realm but also in the area of social mores and personal relationships. Thus, the apparent triumph of the voice of tradition and patriarchy conveyed through the novel’s ending is undermined by other voices in the novel’s heteroglossia. The narratives discussed in this chapter do not introduce any new topics. They revolve, like the texts presented earlier, around women’s desire to explore new intellectual horizons and their need for independence and sexual gratification. What is particular about them, in comparison with the previous texts discussed, is their approach to these topics and their narrative structure. All four offer a closed ending, an ending that reverses any preceding efforts of the female protagonist to step out of a system of control and its discourses, be they of marriage, the family, or the Church. Where the narratives differ is in their treatment of this apparent triumph of tradition (particularly when compared to the literary texts discussed in chapter one where the voice of tradition was still much stronger than here, a generation later) and the degrees to which it is justified or undermined. While Janitschek uses irony as her main tool to destabilize a firm narrative position, Erdős constructs a complex heteroglossia, reinforced by a double focus in several of her characters, thus seriously bringing into question the novel’s “proper” ending. Szikra, on the other hand, despite her critical tone, does not quite reach the level of satire that she reached in her first novel A bevándorlók (The Parvenus, 898), in which she not only offers a biting satire of the marriage market but also names Budapest “Snobopolis,” tout court. The topic of the big city as a place of many seductions and of multiple challenges, which was also explored in several women’s narratives around 900, is the focus of the next chapter.

777 The City and its Metaphors

In many European cities the end of the nineteenth century brought about dramatic changes in growth, population size, and structure. Between 880 and 90 the population of Vienna tripled from 700,000 to around two million;¹ in Budapest, between 870 and 90, the population also tripled in size, from 270,685 to 863,735, a rate of growth nine times faster than that of the country as a whole. After 870 Budapest quickly developed into one of the most modern cities of Europe and became Hungary’s true economic and cultural centre. Its public transportation system was ahead of many other European cities: Budapest had an electrical tramway as early as 889 and, in 896, Swiss engineers built the first underground railway in Europe (Johnston 974, 344). These developments were coupled with a burgeoning of “high” as well as “low” cultural life: literature and the arts, coffee houses, restaurants with gypsy music, and theatres with operettas flourished. Thus, for the upper classes, the city certainly presented a happy picture, a “dream world” (Frigyesi 998, 4), as depicted by John Lukacs. However, the other reality of the city was much less rosy, reflecting the huge gap in Hungarian society between its wealthiest and its poorest segments: “In 90, 36 percent of the population of Budapest lived in what was considered at the time ‘worrisome bad conditions,’ that is, six or more persons per room” (Frigyesi 998, 45), many in humid basement apartments. As many as one in three inhabitants were sublessees, renters of, at best, a crowded room or, worse, a bed or even a mattress for the night (Lukacs 988, 98). About 65 per cent of the population lived in poverty. Although by 900 illiteracy rates had declined to about 0 per cent in Budapest itself (Lukacs 988, 00), in the rest of the country, illiteracy affected as much as

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50 per cent of the population. With these large contrasts, the description of Budapest as “a city between east and west, between feudalism and modernity” (Johnston 974, 346) is justified. Vienna, the old capital city of the Habsburgs, was also full of conflicts and contradictions at the time. The main difference between Vienna and Budapest was that the former was ceasing to be the capital of a huge multiethnic empire, whereas the latter was redefining itself as the capital of a nation that had finally acquired independence. With its predominantly seventeenth- and eighteenth-century style architecture, Vienna “seemed like a grandiose attempt to stop the clock” (Timms 989, 2). In many ways, it seemed anachronistic in comparison with other European capitals, particularly London and Paris. It comes as no surprise that Vienna’s young architects Adolf Loos and Otto Wagner rebelled against the old-fashioned building style of their city and wanted to make it more modern and functional. The conflict between tradition and modernity in Vienna around 900 reflected the social realities of the city. While the structure of society remained anchored in a medieval-feudal model, industrialization brought about urban slums along with a new capitalist bourgeoisie: “The city held far too many blue-collar, service-industry, and manual laborers who were underpaid, underfed, and underhoused” (Arens 2003, 244). In both Vienna and Budapest the process of industrialization, with all its negative social consequences, took place, unlike in England, within a few decades, resulting, in Karl Kraus’s words, in a “‘techno-romantic’ civilization” (quoted in Timms 989, 3). Both cities offered ample material for the artistic imagination. In literature and art the city is frequently seen as a “centre of negative meanings for subjective passions: for vice, the body, for power and property; the city as whore, the jungle, the slaughterhouse” (Scherpe 988, 30). On the other hand, the city also serves as a source of fascination. Numerous fin-de-siècle writers thematized the city in their fiction, offering different forms of social criticism. Given that naturalism was absent in mainstream Viennese modernity, the portrayal of Vienna by writers such as Schnitzler or Musil is characterized by a “disregard for social realism” (Timms 989, 6). In Hungarian literature of the same period, however, social realism is present in the writings of several canonical authors. One needs only to mention Tamás Kóbor, whose novel Budapest (90) was one of the first to present “the conflict of the modern city” (Frigyesi 998, 43). As in the work of his contemporary, Sándor Bródy, who published Erzsébet dajka (Nanny Erzsébet) around the same time, Kóbor’s protagonists are women whose lives are broken in their struggle for a better life in the city. Contempora-

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neous women writers, both in Hungary and in Austria, depicted the city – mainly Budapest and Vienna, but also Berlin – in several narratives. These narratives are much less known, if not virtually ignored today, although they add a new dimension to the image of the city at the turn of the century. In Die Amazonenschlacht, introduced in chapter six, Janitschek portrays the big city, Berlin, as a place that never sleeps. Hildegard, who arrives in Berlin from the Austrian hinterland, finds it difficult to sleep peacefully with the constant background noise and the permanent glare of street lights in her room. Both the noise and the lights are contrasted with the dark quietude of her small Austrian town. Hildegard also finds the size of the city, with its two million inhabitants, nerve-racking and disorienting. The apartment building where she lives is depicted in a similarly negative way, from its small and dark back alley to its mouldy air. Through Hildegard’s Berlin adventure, Janitschek contrasts, in her ironic way, the provinces and the city, without taking sides in favour of one against the other. In this novel, Janitschek anticipates a topos connected to the city, which only the literature (and film) of the 920s will fully explore: that of the flaneur.² Traditionally, flanerie was a male privilege and the flaneur, on his rambles, turned the city and its women into the object of his voyeuristic pleasure (Weigel 988, 79). Janitschek constructs Hildegard as something of a female flaneur, who often walks the streets of Berlin with no particular goal in mind, other than to escape the confinement of her little room. But rather than enjoying her flanerie and appropriating the big city, Hildegard gets lost in it and feels exhausted and discouraged by its challenges. We have seen in chapter six that Janitschek constructs Hildegard as an example of a failed attempt to become a new woman; her shortcomings become a target of irony. Even Hildegard’s difficulty in eating in a restaurant alone without embarrassment does not elicit any sympathy; instead, the narrator ascribes it to her spoiled and pampered character. This contrasts with Anke Gleber’s perspective on the situation of the female flaneur. She refers to Jules Michelet and his analysis of women’s increasing presence in public spaces at the end of the turn of the century: “How many irritations for the single woman! She can hardly ever go out in the evening; she would be taken for a prostitute. There are a thousand places where only men are to be seen and if she needs to go there on business, the men are amazed, and laugh like fools. For example, should she find herself delayed at the other end of Paris and hungry, she will not dare to enter into a restaurant. She would constitute an event; she would be a spectacle: All eyes would be constantly fixed on her, and she would overhear uncomplimentary and

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bold conjectures” (Pollock 988, 69, quoted in Gleber 997, 7). Even after public spaces started opening up for the single woman toward the end of the nineteenth century, the perception of her presence in those spaces was changing very slowly. Janitschek eschews this important aspect of the representation of the city and of the woman in the city in her construction of Hildegard as a flaneur. But although she ridicules Hildegard’s unsuccessful effort to build an independent life in the city and brings her character back to her little Austrian hometown and her husband, she offers us material for a more differentiated reflection on the position of the fin-de-siècle woman in the city. Three Hungarian women’s novels in particular focus on the representation of the Hungarian capital, Budapest: Lángok, tüzek (Fire and Flames, 97) by Szederkényi; A bevándorlók (The Parvenus, 898) by Szikra; and Budapest (908) by Lux. They portray the city through the life paths of three female characters: Szikra chooses hers from the upper class; Szederkényi from the middle class; and Lux from the working class. I will discuss Lángok, tüzek first because it offers some parallels to Janitschek. Szederkényi’s image of Budapest is not very flattering. The dichotomy between the province and the city is drawn very clearly; unlike Janitschek, Szederkényi takes sides. She gives her heroine the same name as that of the heroine of her earlier novel, Amíg egy asszony eljut odáig: Judit Koszorús. But unlike the earlier Judit, who is a teacher and ends up leaving a bad marriage to find her path to an independent life, the Judit of Lángok, tüzek is initially a twenty-year-old middle-class woman who, in her thirst for knowledge, leaves her little hometown for Budapest to study philosophy. She soon becomes a member of the Modern Women’s Association (Modern Nők Egyesülete). Like Janitschek’s Hildegard, she believes in the principles and ideas of women’s emancipation and women’s responsibility for their own actions, as she expresses it in a conversation with her soon-to-be lover Demeter: “I don’t owe any explanations to anybody regarding my actions, for I am my own master” (Szederkényi 97, 39). However, it soon becomes clear that the narrator is far from supportive of the free lifestyle Budapest offers a young woman like Judit. The first target of Szederkényi’s criticism is the morality of the city, the ideology of “free love” that makes Budapest so attractive to young people; Szederkényi labels it “love from Pest, artificial love.” It is a “contagious fever” which “in those days crept into young girls’ pure souls and swept them away” (Szederkényi 97, 39). The narrator, disapprovingly, calls it a matter of fashion, similar to easy-to-open dresses or women’s short hair.

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The “love from Pest,” which sweeps Judit away in her affair with the painter Demeter, is represented as pure physical passion that ultimately leaves the lovers strangers to each other and does not result in any deeper connection between them. This distance between Judit and Demeter is also shown in their addressing of each other with the formal form of “you,” maga. Moreover, particularly in phrases such as “The holy fire didn’t warm them” or “Not the holy madness in the name of which one has to forgive even the hand of the murderer dripping with blood” (Szederkényi 97, 39), a Christian moralizing voice speaks through the narrator. The image of Budapest as a place of moral decay and degeneration becomes sharper as the novel continues, and is contrasted with the purity of the Hungarian hinterland, Judit’s home. During a visit to her village after several months of exposure to “love from Pest,” her appearance causes general disapproval because of the dress she is wearing (a white dress with a 5 cm slit showing her ankle as she walks). Judit herself becomes caught in an inner struggle between the discourses of her upbringing and those of the city that she thinks she has adopted. In a conversation with Mihály, who will eventually become her husband, she defends Budapest and her decision to live there, citing the freshness of the life it offers her, the “new woman,” the “female human being” (Szederkényi 97, 74) that she has become, versus the provincial dullness and the “silent dying” (Szederkényi 97, 73) that she has fled. Unlike with Demeter, Judit and Mihály address each other with the informal te, which shows their proximity. Mihály speaks up patriotically in defence of country people. He says that the people of Budapest travel on fast trains, yet in their confusion fail to see the whole picture around them. Country people, on the other hand, have more stamina and steadfastness and are therefore able to “stand guard” (Szederkényi 97, 75) for Hungary, as opposed to the “moderns” of Budapest who are not capable of producing any lasting truth. Although Judit continues to defend life in the city for giving her a chance to be herself, her tone becomes less persuasive, her silences longer, and her speech more lethargic. Szederkényi gradually pushes her to the recognition that she belongs to the village and that Budapest and its values have been a mere aberration. The initial ideal of the strong, independent woman gives way to the desire to be led by Mihály’s strong arm. Thus, the criticism of the city and of modernity not only has a nationalist tone attached to it, with the idealization of rural Hungary, but also is accompanied by a re-embrace of the traditional ideal of femininity. The voice of a traditional lifestyle and traditional femininity triumphs in Judit’s double focus.

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This is further stressed by the satirical portrayal of the leader of the Modern Women’s Association, who wants Judit’s support for their general meeting concerning trafficking in women.³ Szederkényi portrays the leader of the association with all the stereotypical attributes that antifeminists have used to ridicule feminists: she is physically unattractive, an “old maid,” and has absolutely no style in fashion or behaviour. All the other women who work in the association are represented in the same manner. Moreover, as in Janitschek’s Die Amazonenschlacht, the whole feminist cause is ridiculed as a pastime of wealthy women who only throw around empty slogans but have no real platform for action and do not help women in need.⁴ Judit’s last visit to the Modern Women’s Association only strengthens her already half-formed decision to leave the city and move back to the country where “firm” values await her and where she will be safe from various temptations. The conversation with her father upon her arrival concludes the return of the errant daughter: “‘So you are back, my dear daughter?’ ‘I am, father.’ ‘Have you had enough of studying?’ ‘Enough, father.’ ‘I had the blue room prepared for you. Márika will help you unpack. I knew it would end like this. A girl needs a bonnet,⁵ not scholarship’” (Szederkényi 97, 57). The one element of emancipation that Judit will keep is to be allowed to speak occasionally in an erudite way as a proof of her studies of philosophy. Yet overall, the voice of traditional, rural family life and heterosexual romance triumphs, with Judit marrying Mihály and giving birth to their child. This superiority of rural Hungary and of traditional values and lifestyles is also apparent in the act of Mihály “forgiving” Judit her pre-marital affair with Demeter. Moreover, rural Hungary’s vitality is emphasized in the symbolic slaying of the city and its decadence when Demeter, the “modern” and “neurotic” one, jumps under the train conducted by Mihály, the “traditional” and “stable” one. Thus, Szederkényi adopts a discourse of nationalism that was rising in Hungary around 900, a new nationalism that regarded Budapest as “corrupt, antinational, destructive, decadent” (Lukacs 988, 86) and was anchored in a nostalgic view of a semi-feudal Hungary in which an ineradicable gap separated the capital (with its high percentage of a non-Magyar population) from the rest of the country. In A bevándorlók (The Parvenus, 898), Szikra also offers a criticism of Budapest, directed in particular at the upper classes and their lifestyle. Through the story of Mrs Szob, whose very name invites ridicule by Budapest’s high society (she is nicknamed Mrs Sznob), and her daughter Ilona, the reader witnesses the life and value system of the Hungarian gentry and nobility. Although Szikra also addresses the schism between Budapest and

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rural Hungary, she, unlike Szederkényi, does it through satire of the social mores and eschews a black-and-white portrayal. The widowed Mrs Szob is the descendant of an old Hungarian gentry family. Her highest aspiration is to belong to the nobility by marrying off her daughter Ilona to a Hungarian nobleman. To carry out her plan, she is willing to squander her modest means and visits Budapest with Ilona for the season of the balls, that major site of husband-hunting. Although in this novel Szikra’s main focus is not to criticize the marriage market and the double standard that it poses for young women and men, this topic at least fleetingly becomes the object of her mockery. In Budapest Mrs Szob does all in her power to maintain the appearance of wealth. She often encounters an arrogant and cool reception among the members of Budapest high society, bordering on disdain. Although, in some situations, she almost becomes a tragicomical character, she fails to elicit the reader’s sympathy, not only because of her prejudice against people who lack a title or who are of a different religious background but also because of the way she tries to maintain appearances, which sometimes hurts people of the lower classes. One example is the scene where she takes a fiacre with her daughter to visit a rich relative and cheats the driver of the appropriate payment: “Mrs Szob turned a five-forint bill eightfold and, with a movement suitable for an aristocrat, slipped it into the driver’s palm. Then she walked up the stairs with hurried steps ... By the time the driver could realize what amount she had given him, Mrs Szob had disappeared” (Szikra 898, 77). Szikra’s satire of both the nobility and the gentry is all the more convincing as she herself was an aristocrat. She aptly describes their decadent lifestyle, their anti-Semitism, their engagement in gossip, their use of theatre as a social institution rather than an art, and, mostly, their alienation from the people and their problems. As Frigyesi points out, the “two nations” of feudal Hungary, the huge schism between the upper and lower classes, was still very much a reality at the turn of the century (Frigyesi 998, 45). It is no wonder that Ilona becomes everybody’s favourite dancer, as, coming from rural Hungary, she is the only one who really knows how to dance the csárdás. But when it comes to considering her as a potential wife, the aristocratic suitors quickly withdraw, for, although Ilona is beautiful and comes from an old family, she has no title and she cannot count on a large dowry. Imre, who despite his lack of a title and against Mrs Szob’s disapproval, persists in his love for Ilona, describes Budapest as “Snobopolis,” because of “the people who live there, its architecture, its customs” (Szikra 898,

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230). He goes on to equate the architecture of the city with its inhabitants and their desire to appear bigger than they really are. Through Imre’s criticism of the city, Szikra portrays the provincial complex of Budapest, the nation’s quickly developing capital: “the only desire and aspiration of the majority of those living in the houses is to appear as more than what they are entitled to in reality. So it’s natural that the snobs have turned the country’s heart into Snobopolis. Although, he added in a very serious tone, dear God, how little would it take to make Budapest the world’s most beautiful city!” (Szikra 898, 23). Through Imre’s words, Szikra points out a discrepancy in Budapest’s rapid march toward modernization and confirms what Lukacs says about the architecture of fin-de-siècle Budapest, namely, that it had a particular inclination for the neo-baroque style and lagged behind in modernism. Whereas in many European cities, including Vienna, a breaking away from traditional architectural styles had begun by 900, in Budapest only a few modern buildings were built between 903 and 906: “It was not until 90– that the first impressively modern buildings appeared in some of the Budapest side streets” (Lukacs 988, 49). The novel ends in a heterosexual romance, with Ilona marrying Imre, which confirms its overall lack of pretentiousness on the formal level. Nevertheless, A bevándorlók, with its acute portrayal of class conflict, of Budapest’s high society, and of some of the city’s parvenu aspects, remains an important literary document of its time. Terka Lux’s novel Budapest (908) takes the same mostly negative view of the city. This novel is interesting for today’s readers for several reasons. Lux not only attempts “to take upon herself the birth of the myth about the Hungarian capital which had grown into a metropolis” (Fábri 996, 83) but also represents Budapest as an organic creature living according to its own rules; moreover, this creature is female. Such “allegorization” of the city as “female,” “as a quasi-organic body” (Weigel 988, 77) is a quintessential part of city literature. But whereas the feminine city usually becomes an object of male desire, of the (male) flaneur’s voyeuristic pleasure, in Lux’s Budapest the city is equated with the protagonist, Fáni Schneider, as described in the introductory “Chat with the Reader”: “That beautiful, lovely, elegant, intelligent, cunning Budapest of light morals that has made a fantastic career. Her mother is a Slovak day-worker, her father a Swabian foreman-builder and she, the barefooted little Fáni Schneider with tousled, flying hair plays at first in the dusty streets of Rácváros and later in the former Saint Peter suburbs. She sings for drunken horse-dealers and fishmongers, then at the present Gizella square and at the German theatre, to finally become a Hungarian courtesan and grind innumerable legions of people with her beautiful teeth” (Lux 908, 7).

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Budapest and Fáni are thus one, the “stone-woman” who destroys the lives of thousands by “sucking out their blood and their brains,” “breaking their bones,” and “squandering their fortunes” (Lux 908, 8). All the negative characteristics associated with the city as listed by Scherpe and quoted earlier are thus present. Moreover, Budapest-Fáni is clearly defined as a femme fatale. The femme fatale was a popular figure in American, English, French, and Austrian fin-de-siècle literature and arts (Sármány 994), yet virtually absent in Hungary, which makes this neglected novel all the more interesting and valuable a literary text of the Hungarian fin de siècle. The definition of the city as a femme fatale connotes decadence and decay, as in Szederkényi’s Lángok, tüzek. But, unlike in Szederkényi’s novel, where Budapest is unequivocally defined in negative terms, here the narrator conducts a love-hate relationship with the city, thereby taking a position of ambivalence: “They say that he who criticizes, doesn’t love. Maybe. But I love Budapest. It hasn’t done me any good, but I love it” (Lux 908, 0). The narrative is divided into several units; the first three follow the life path of Fáni on the streets of Budapest: “the street in the morning,” “the street at midday,” and “the street at night.” All three are allegories of Fáni’s development. In the morning, when the air of the city is still “virginally clean” and the city itself “strong, fresh, good and honest” (Lux 908, 8), Fáni is a young, innocent yet very attractive fifteen-year-old from a modest family background who is easily seduced by a “gentleman,”⁶ a sculptor, and soon becomes his mistress. While her brother Szepi reads Marx and becomes increasingly interested in the class struggle, Fáni becomes a “fallen woman” who reads novels of dubious morality given to her by the sculptor. As Szepi blames capitalism and the imbalance in class power in the city for his sister’s seduction, Fáni’s life moves away from her family and her class. Following her rejection by the sculptor, she becomes the mistress of an old count, who invests in Fáni’s education. Within the short span of a few years, she grows into a refined and very beautiful young woman. This is the “midday” of her life, the most fulfilling part. But class interferes again: at her suggestion that he marry her, the count shows his true face, that of the nobleman from a 700-year-old family who can give only his money, never his name, to a woman below his rank. This class double standard hurts Fáni very deeply and she bitterly accuses the city of having pushed her into a debased existence: “This city has lost me, has robbed me, now I will rob it myself!” (Lux 908, 64). Her revenge is thorough, as she turns into Budapest’s most famous, desired yet feared, femme fatale. The femme fatale is usually associated with destruction as she steps out of the traditional roles set for women: “She has lost her capacity to love, and with it her role as wife and mother. She is now a mistress, beautiful but pro-

192 shifting voices

foundly unnatural” (Ridge 96, quoted in Pynsent 989, 80). It comes as no surprise that in this third part of her development, the “evening,” Fáni becomes one with the city’s nightlife and its unleashed ruinous passions. She is the object of everybody’s fantasies and the main topic of conversation at every soirée, to the point of absurdity. But as such, Fáni objectifies men and manipulates their desire. By constructing Fáni as a femme fatale, Lux brings in a feminist perspective. As in Kotányi’s and Asenijeff’s portrayals of the femme fatale, Fáni’s destructive actions are central to the narrative and the story is told from her perspective. She is like Kotányi’s Garda and Asenijeff’s Hella, a literary figure that embodies feminine power and tries to subvert male supremacy. Through Fáni’s seductive games with men, Lux also unmasks the projection of male desires and fears upon women. She exposes the male fantasies that project upon woman the dualistic images of Madonna and whore, images that Lux associates with Christian mythology and its morals. Thus Fáni’s angelic face masks devilish qualities. This dualistic aspect in Fáni stands as a metaphor for the city itself, for both the fascination and the horror it inspires. Only one of her suitors, a journalist, realizes that Fáni has not become evil by herself, but that men and their desire have turned her into this vengeful creature. Her devilishness inspires fascination mixed with horror as she stands in front of him; Lux underlines Fáni’s devilishness through her physical appearance: “Like a tall, slim torch, her red silk dress with a long train was burning on her in flames, her black hair throwing sparks and her face white as marble or a lily put in the middle of a pool of blood, was casting a cold glow” (Lux 908, 30). However, Fáni helps the city’s poor, her class of origin, with the money she earns through her morally dubious lifestyle, showing a complexity of character that defies a black-and-white assessment. Fáni’s actions, however, are far from being motivated by remorse, which leads the narrative away from a moralizing denouement. The only true motivating force in Fáni’s life becomes her desire for power, which she hopes to share with her brother Szepi, who, in the meantime, has become a socialist MP. In her striving to achieve power, Fáni moves away from the scenario of self-destruction for the femme fatale seen in other narratives. Yet these aspirations are short-lived, as Szepi is shot dead by the brother of a young woman whom he has seduced – thus mirroring his sister’s story. This repetition of the same scenario shows Lux’s critical attitude toward socialism as an alternative which, when it comes to individual moral decisions, does not produce better people than capitalism. Lux does not portray the people of the lower classes as morally superior to the upper classes; she, unlike Szederkényi and even Szikra, does not take sides or idealize any segment of society.

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Fáni becomes a bored, lonely woman whose only pastime is spending large sums of money and occasionally visiting “her dead” at the cemetery – her heart, as suits a traditional femme fatale, is empty: “and her coach carried Fáni through the dark, early winter morning, alone, toward an unknown future. On her head, she wore a red wig, her lips were coloured red and her heart was dead” (Lux 908, 2). Although Fáni does not physically die, like the femmes fatales Garda and Hella, her inner devastation represents, on the one hand, the “mortification of the feminine” that Hilmes (Hilmes 990, 28) has defined as a dominant trait of the femme fatale at the fin de siècle; on the other hand, it also represents the effect that the city and its destructive forces exert on the – here female – individual. With this ending, Fáni’s life continues to mirror the city, its ambiguous identity and morality, as well as its undefinable future. However, whereas at the beginning of the novel the city’s portrayal was not wholly negative but, rather, contained elements of a love-hate relationship, the ending offers a purely negative vision for the future, with death as the dominant image. Such a vision of the city is reminiscent of German expressionism, which often represented the city in very negative, even hateful tones, as a phenomenon with “cannibalistic manifestations” (Hermann 988, 6). On the other hand, Meisel-Hess offers a positive image of the city in Die Intellektuellen (The Intellectuals, 9). The novel provides a panorama of the intellectual currents of the turn of the century in two major intellectual centres, Vienna and Berlin. At the same time, through one of the novel’s protagonists, Olga, Meisel-Hess contrasts the two cities’ different modi vivendi. Vienna is presented as a place defined by traditional values, which suffocate a young person like Olga in the process of defining herself and her life’s purpose. In Vienna, “charming” and “cozy” on the surface, Olga feels “oppressed by the care of the family, confined by the patterns of convention, limited and observed” (Meisel-Hess 9, 33). In Berlin, on the other hand, she feels freer because of her lack of roots in the city. Berlin is described as “an asylum for ‘the homeless’” (Meisel-Hess 9, 33), for people who, like Olga, are about to shake off the burdens of tradition. Berlin is thus the ultimate city of modernity. This feeling of freedom and discovery accompanies Olga on her flaneries through Berlin. Unlike Janitschek’s Hildegard, who is only a halfhearted flaneur and does not enjoy the city at all, Olga savours what Berlin has to offer: the cafeteria of a large department store, the air that feels “transparent and fresh” to her (Meisel-Hess 9, 38), the parks, and the wide streets, even though they tire her. She rejoices in the sight of the electrical lights illuminating the streets and the tramway. Olga perceives the Berlin lifestyle as radically different from the Viennese, leaving more room for loneliness

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and individuality. Yet despite the feelings of loneliness and strangeness, Berlin also breathes an aura of safety. Compared to Berlin and its pace, Vienna seems almost provincial, a town where one has to belong to a group and where gossip flourishes. Die Intellektuellen offers a positive image of the city as a place that not only leaves plenty of room for a young person’s quest for freedom but also offers pleasure and relaxation amid the fast-paced lifestyle. This image of Berlin is opposed to Janitschek’s image of the city and even more so to that of Budapest. In all three Hungarian narratives analysed we can see a critical portrayal of the city. It is represented as a place of decadence, which exercises a destructive force on those wanting to belong to it, usually by such means as trying to transcend class, social, and gender boundaries, as well as on those who are outsiders either through their provincial roots or their belonging to a lower class. Whereas Szikra focuses her criticism on the capital’s haughty demeanours and its provincial complex, in Szederkényi’s novel the provinces are sharply contrasted to the city and triumph over it because of what are considered more stable values that withstand all new fashions and their “temptations.” Lux, on the other hand, offers a feminist and an almost expressionist picture of the city, with no happy ending. As such, the novel Budapest shows a closer affinity to literary modernity than do the other two Hungarian narratives. The two Austrian writers, Janitschek and Meisel-Hess, focus more on what they view as the metropolis, Berlin, and are rather disdainful of Austria and Vienna. For many Viennese intellectuals, male and female alike, Berlin was a point of attraction and the hub of German language culture, whereas Vienna was often perceived as lagging behind not only technologically but also culturally. The Hungarian authors, on the other hand, thematize their own capital as a place of both aversion and fascination, painting it often in a negative light and as a source of numerous conflicts, struggles, and shifting identities.

Conclusion

This study has presented some of the major theoretical texts of the fin-desiècle bourgeois women’s movement in Austria and Hungary along with women writers’ fiction from the same period. Texts, both essayistic and fictional, by about thirty authors from the two constituent parts of the Habsburg Monarchy have been considered in detail, with an attempt to place the feminist discourse in its contemporaneous context and to evaluate its position between tradition and modernity and its relationship with prevalent discourses of the period. Theoretical texts of the Austrian and Hungarian women’s movements have been presented alongside fictional texts and put in a comparative perspective. Whereas the essays directly reflect the positions of their authors, ranging from more conservative to more progressive forms of feminism and often balancing between a cultural and a radical position, the fictional texts were found to be more complex. Since most of these texts are largely unknown today even in their respective countries of origin, let alone to an English-speaking readership, a summary of content or plot was considered necessary for each analysis. The texts, both theoretical and fictional, have been examined with respect to the three major goals of the women’s movement: the fight for women’s higher education, the fight for political rights, and the fight for a change in sexual standards and norms. Through these goals, the women’s movement envisaged a transformation of gender roles, in particular regarding women’s cultural role, a re-designing of standards of femininity and masculinity, and a shift in power relations between the sexes. This study has shown that various discourses other than feminism (such as a traditional-

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bourgeois definition of gender roles based on the moral double standard, psychoanalysis, eugenics, or socialism) influenced the production of the texts in question, resulting in internally persuasive or authoritative discourses and, sometimes, hybrids. The hybrids in the theoretical texts are a good example of how some fin-de-siècle feminists, such as Hainisch in Austria or Mársits in Hungary, chose to use this merging of two speeches, of two belief systems, as a strategy to subtly demonstrate their disapproval of dominant opinions and to bring forward their own views without appearing to be too direct or to be challenging the system – a well-known strategy employed by writing women at earlier times as well. Other feminists, such as Troll-Borostyáni or Meisel-Hess, did not resort to such strategies but wrote openly against the current. The various discourses manifest themselves as a conflict between, and often an overlapping of, different voices, thus bringing about heteroglossia, a battle of voices that, in fiction, are represented by various characters and/or by the narrator, but sometimes also by one character; we could thus see the presence of a double-voicedness in several narratives and, often, a double focus in female characters who aspire to the ideal of the “new woman” yet still remain caught in the web of traditional discourses. Through the essayistic texts of the women’s movement I introduced the major topics of discussion that the fictional texts expand on. The chapters have been divided thematically so as to follow the development of the same theme in various narratives. Therefore, while one title may appear in several chapters each time the analytical focus is different. The fictional texts shed a more differentiated light than the essays, in particular on gender relations, examining critically both male and female sexuality, its standards and its mechanisms of conditioning, as well as the power structures and hidden agendas behind misogyny and anti-feminism. Moreover, the fictional texts elaborate on topics that the theoretical texts do not address, such as sexual violence, marital rape, lesbian love, or the city, from a female perspective. They thus contribute to a deeper analysis of and offer a more diversified insight into the social and intellectual history of the period, its values, and the construction of its dominant images, such as that of the femme fatale. The Austrian and Hungarian writers differ in their treatment of some topics. The Austrian writers speak more openly and directly about sexual violence, not shying away from its straightforward description, whereas the Hungarians address it only indirectly. This may be explained by the different expectations of a woman writer and the different degrees of tolerance toward what they wrote, for, to quote Lansen, a woman writer “risks

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the reader’s resistance if the acts of telling, the story she tells, or the self she constructs through telling it transgresses the limits of the acceptably feminine” (Lansen 992, 9). One should not conclude from this, however, that fin-de-siècle Austrian society was much more progressive and tolerant toward sexual frankness from a female author. Austrian women writers who challenged public mores, such as Janitschek, Kotányi, Meisel-Hess, and Asenijeff, published their works through German publishers. Viennese intellectuals believed that their city limited the expression of personal freedom, whereas Berlin, the “real” metropolis, allowed an unfolding of one’s abilities and was, therefore, more receptive toward an open discourse about sexuality. Significantly, the female characters who most embody the attributes of the “new woman,” who fights to achieve her independence through entering a profession previously denied to her (in most cases, that of doctor), are depicted in rather asexual terms. This is true for the doctor characters in Troll-Borostyáni’s “Stützen der Moral,” Ritoók’s Egyenes úton – egyedül, and Lux’s Leányok. They either consciously choose to remain single and renounce a romantic relationship – as in the cases of Troll’s Klothilde and Lux’s Juli – or else, as in the case of Ágnes, single life becomes a consequence of the impossibility of their building an intersubjective relationship with an adequate partner. In these narratives, the necessity for the “new woman” to remain single is elaborated on two levels. One is through the construction of characters that I have called the heroines’ alter egos, whose lives mirror the options the heroine may consider but ultimately rejects – a rejection that, despite the subversive dimension the alter egos represent, becomes justified through the resolution of the plot. The second is through the characterization of the “new woman” heroines as rather “unfeminine,” both in their physical appearance and in their lack of romantic interest. One could argue that such an approach to standards of “femininity” and their incompatibility with what ought to define the “new woman” reiterates a misogynistic discourse and its statements regarding the alleged loss of femininity in intellectual women. But it also demonstrates the challenge that a redefinition of standards of femininity and masculinity posed for these writers living and writing among still very strict gender divisions, even though these divisions had begun to be questioned. Thus I am not surprised that the construction of the “new woman,” who was stepping into professional territory traditionally regarded as masculine, often meant the loss of traits that were traditionally regarded as feminine. A stable gender identity and a stable identity in general have proved to be the exception rather than the rule in the narratives analysed. The con-

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struction of a stable subject as part of the formal requirements of the realistic novel and the construction of the plot along the lines of a heterosexual romance are respected in only a minority of these fictional texts. KapffEssenther’s novel Frauenehre and Troll-Borostyáni’s novella “Höhenluft” are the best examples of a respect for these literary conventions. This is not surprising, given that they embody, in the most transparent way, the ideals of the women’s movement in its fight for women’s higher education and thus for a position of power previously denied to women. MeiselHess’s Fanny Roth, although still respecting the construction of the unified subject, resorts to the deconstruction of the heterosexual romance, thus showing its incompatibility (at least in the short term) with the “new woman’s” strivings. The unified subject is further destabilized in novels such as Kaffka’s Mária évei, Ritoók’s Egyenes úton – egyedül, and Lux’s Leányok, and reaches a definitive crisis in the narratives by Vera (Eine für viele), Asenijeff (Tagebuchblätter einer Emancipierten), and Kotányi (“Venus am Kreuz”). The works by Vera, Asenijeff, and Kotányi very much correspond to literary works from mainstream Austrian modernity, looking at issues such as the crisis of identity, alienation, cultural pessimism, the desire for death, and the dissociation of the personality. Except in Kaffka’s works, these themes were not present in Hungarian women’s fiction to the same degree. Although formally these Austrian narratives written by female authors (mostly unrecognized today) share many commonalities with texts written by their (canonized) male counterparts, their crucial difference is the particular cause for the crisis of the female self, which is rooted in male sexual violence or other forms of inhibition imposed on the free expression of female sexuality and creativity. Self-inflicted death as the ultimate expression of the destruction done to the female self is one of the outcomes; other possible outcomes represented in the above narratives explore the ways in which the female self could be salvaged rather than being sacrificed on the altars of patriarchy. One solution presented is the creation of an alternative female space, a complete separation from patriarchal and masculine values, which in its ultimate form implies a radical response to misogyny, namely, viriphobia. The other is the construction of an alternative paradigm for the formation of the female subject that would overcome the paradox of the female subject’s exclusion from the normative frame of a phallically connoted symbolic. Such an alternative was found in the paradigm of the Matrix, which implies a subject formation that eschews a stable and fixed identity and embraces being fragmented and multiple as a parallel form of being a subject, not excluded from, but, instead, an alternative to the phallic

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symbolic. An example of matrixial subject formation was noted in MeiselHess’s novel Die Stimme. Behind questions pertaining to a general feeling of crisis, including the crisis of identity, fin-de-siècle women’s literature, both theoretical and fictional, was deeply concerned with the need to redefine the subject as both male and female and to establish intersubjectivity, not only as a new way of defining female desire but also as a new framework for gender relations. The attempt to define and construct intersubjectivity as a timely alternative to the existing patriarchal subject-object relations runs like a leitmotif through both the theoretical and fictional texts, in Austria and in Hungary. In texts by outspoken feminists such as Szikra and Mayreder and in fiction, by writers such as Meisel-Hess, Ritoók, and Erdős in particular, it is presented as a prerequisite for a global social change that would ultimately result in happier women as well as men. We can thus talk about a utopian dimension in fin-de-siècle feminism and women’s fiction, a utopia rooted in the realm of the possible rather than the unreal and fantastic. Utopia here implies a transformation of the existing reality; it therefore has a revolutionary potential. Moreover, this potential to effect cultural and social change is bestowed upon women with their unrecognized and unused talents and abilities, whereas, for the most part, it is considered lost in men. As seen by the majority of the authors, the most crucial hindrance to the realization of intersubjectivity lies in the prevailing patriarchal gender norms and roles and the double standard that they imply. Their ultimate result is a cultural crisis that manifests itself especially in men’s sexual and emotional degeneracy. Such degeneracy is formulated on a theoretical level most explicitly by Meisel-Hess in Die sexuelle Krise, although we can also see a criticism of a society and a civilization that functions as “man’s world” in Mayreder’s writings and in the viriphobic texts authored by Asenijeff and Druskowitz. Meisel-Hess also applies her theory of sexual degeneracy in the construction of male characters in her fiction. But she is by far not the only author of fiction to present sexually degenerate male characters as the most prevalent specimens of their sex. Other Austrian writers, especially Asenijeff, did likewise. Interestingly, although there was no theoretical debate among Hungarian feminists about sexual degeneracy, other than a criticism of prostitution as a social illness, there is ample thematization of sexually degenerate men in their fiction, as seen in narratives by Szederkényi, Ritoók, and Erdős. On the other hand, unlike in Austrian narratives, in Hungarian fiction we find several examples of “new men,” who do not fit into the category of sexual degeneracy, but are capable of growing beyond the limits imposed on their sex, and who embrace

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intersubjectivity when their female partners are not capable of doing the same. In Hungary, the fin-de-siècle gender debate seems to have taken place in less polarized tones than in Austria, which can also be seen in the virtual absence of viriphobic texts. This feature, along with the patrioticnationalist voice detected in several feminist texts (which, again, was absent in Austria), is the major difference found between Austrian and Hungarian fin-de-siècle feminisms and women’s fiction. However, as well as the utopian dimension present in many texts, in several narratives we have seen a return to traditional patterns of femininity and a triumph of conservative values. This triumph is either openly criticized, as in Szikra’s Ugody Lila, or openly justified and even defended, as in Szederkényi’s Lángok, tüzek. In other narratives, such as Janitschek’s Die Amazonenschlacht and, even more so, in Erdős’s A nagy sikoly, this triumph is undermined, either by the ironic position of the narrator or by the complexity of the heteroglossia built into the novel. However, all of these narratives bear witness to the persistent dominance of a patriarchal social structure and its values, despite some advances. Thus, the hope for a world in which women would fully enjoy the same rights and pleasures as men is dampened by the perseverance of centuries-old patterns of thinking and living. Mayreder’s statement from 928 best expresses the realization of how far women still had (and have) to go: “With the fulfillment of its practical demands, the women’s movement has lost its strongest weapon, and now its ideological demands find no resonance. Only when women will have come to see that social equality has done nothing to further even their material – let alone their ideological – interests, only then can a new women’s movement come into being” (Mayreder 928, 4). This piece of feminist wisdom still resounds nearly a century later and carries a powerful message for contemporary feminist activists and scholars.

appendix one

Authors’ Biographies

Asenijeff, Elsa , born Elsa Maria Packeny in 867 in Vienna. She was educated

as a teacher. Her first husband was a Bulgarian, Ivan Johannis Nestoroff. She lived with him in Bulgaria until her divorce six years later. The same year brought about the publication of her first book, a collection of short stories Ist das die Liebe? (Is This Love?). She published all her works under the literary pseudonym Asenijeff. She moved to Leipzig where she studied philosophy and wrote. She was influenced by Nietzsche and the philosopher Ludwig Klages. Her next partner was the artist Max Klinger with whom she had a daughter. Her most productive period was around 900 when she published a book (poetry and short stories) almost every year, besides writing for various prestigious literary papers and delivering lectures. She also became involved in anti-war groups and experimented with texts for the cinema. Following the breakup of her relationship with Klinger (who then married a much younger model), she entered a long legal battle with him, interrupted by the war, for financial support. In 92 she was declared mentally unstable and deprived of her rights. Three years later, neglected and malnourished, she was forcibly hospitalized in the psychiatric clinic of the University of Leipzig. She was subsequently put into different institutions, always under her vehement protest. She died in 94 in Bräunsdorf near Freiberg.

De Gerando, Antonina , daughter of August de Gerando and Countess

Emma Teleki, born in 844 in Paris. She received an excellent education. The great historian, Michelet, was her teacher. In 86 she passed the first level of the teacher’s exam in Paris; then in 863, the second level. In 864 she received her teacher’s diploma. In 872 she moved to Hungary and started a private course for girls in Pest. In 880 she became principal of the higher boarding school for girls in Kolozsvár (now in Rumania) and remained in this position until 92. She pub-

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lished several books on women’s education, among them Nőtan vagy az asszonyi hivatás tudománya (A Study on Women or on Women’s Calling, 880). She was also important as a literary translator both from and into French. She died in 94 in Kolozsvár.

Druskowitz, Helene von , born Helena Maria Druschkovich in 856 in Hietzing near Vienna. She received the best possible education available to a young woman at the time. Her mother, widowed twice, supported her daughter’s education. Druskowitz studied music at the Viennese Conservatory and became a pianist. Between 874 and 878 she studied philosophy, classical philology, archeology, Orientalism, German literature, and modern languages at the University of Zurich. She was only twenty-two when she received her doctorate in philosophy with a dissertation on Byron’s Don Juan. She thus became the first Austrian woman to earn such a title. She wrote several plays, but unfortunately, the stage remained closed to her as to many other contemporaneous women writers. She then wrote several literary essays. She became acquainted with many famous people from Austrian and German culture at the time, such as Marie von EbnerEschenbach, Nietzsche, Rilke, Lou Andreas Salomé, and Meta von Salis. For her criticism of Nietzsche’s philosophy, mainly in her Moderne Versuche eines Religionsersatzes (Modern Attempts to Replace Religion, 886), she was chastised not only by Nietzsche but also by many of her friends. She published under various male pseudonyms. Following the death of her mother in 888 she moved to Dresden, where she apparently became involved in a love affair with the opera singer Therese Malten. On 2 February 89 she was hospitalized in the mental asylum in Dresden and later transferred to Austria, to the asylum Mauer-Oehling, where she died twenty-seven years later. Erdős, Renée , (Regina Ehrental), born in 879 in Érseklél, then Hungary, today part of Rumania, in an Orthodox Jewish family. She came to Budapest as a fifteenyear-old to study acting at the Theatre Academy. She started publishing her first poems soon afterwards. Her first volume of poetry, Leányálmok (Girls’ Dreams, 899), was received very warmly by the critics for its frankness. She subsequently published other poems and novellas with a strong erotic tone and, after 94, she began to write novels. Her long and scandalous love affair with the celebrated Hungarian writer Sándor Bródy (who was not only much older, but married with four children) profoundly influenced not only her early writings but also her career when Bródy, in revenge for their breakup, used all his influence and power to prevent Erdős from publishing her works. Her first long stay in Rome was probably also partly a result of this breakup. This stay had a profound spiritual impact on her and she converted to Catholicism. Subsequently, she lived in Budapest and Rome with her two daughters and her first and then second husband. Her most successful period as a novelist came after 98. Her numerous novels were best-

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sellers and she was Hungary’s most popular and successful writer. In 93 a thirtyvolume edition of her works was published to celebrate thirty years of her writing. She died in 956 in Budapest.

Fickert, Auguste , born in 855 in Vienna. She was a teacher by training and one of the initiators of the women’s suffrage campaign in Austria. She co-founded, with Rosa Mayreder and Marie Lang, the Allgemeiner Österreichischer Frauenverein (AÖF) in 893. She considered her involvement with the AÖF and her writings on social and political issues pertaining to women to be her life’s work. She was also one of the editors of the journal Dokumente der Frauen. She initiated the establishment of a legal counselling office for women with modest means and was active in organizing women as state employees. Her last big achievement was the establishment of a house with a communal kitchen for working women. She died in 90 in Vienna. Her native city erected a monument to her in the Türkenschanzpark, in the XVIII th district. Geöcze, Sarolta , born in Zemplén megye (now in Serbia) in 862. In 883 she came to Budapest, where she studied to become a teacher. In 886 she became a teacher in a higher elementary school (polgári) in Brassó and only two years later she became the school’s principal. In 892 she moved to Komárom, where she was director of another school for girls and in 898 she started teaching in Budapest at the State School for Teacher’s Training (Állami Tanítóképző). In 907 she became the school’s principal. She was interested in pedagogy, sociology, and women’s education. She was also involved in the Christian Socialist (Catholic) wing of the women’s movement, whose goal was to strengthen female workers’ economic position as well as their moral protection. She died in 928. Hainisch, Marianne , born in 839 in Baden near Vienna. She was one of the pioneers of the Austrian women’s movement. The focus of her activism was the improvement of girls’ education. She was a member of the Viennese Women’s Employment Association (Wiener Frauen-Erwerbsverein), founded in 866. As early as 870 she called for the establishment of girls’ secondary schools. In 899 she founded the League of Austrian Women’s Associations (Bund Österreichischer Frauenvereine). She wrote extensively on questions pertaining to the women’s movement and was involved as a pacifist activist. She was also vice-president of the International Council of Women. Mother’s Day in Austria was established thanks to her initiative. She died in 936 in her native Baden. Janitschek, Maria , born Maria Tölk in Mödling near Vienna in 860 as an

illegitimate child. She went to a school in a nunnery in Hungary and later lived with her mother in Graz, where she started publishing as a journalist. In Vienna she met her husband, Hubert Janitschek, a professor of archeology and art his-

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tory whose research on women in the Renaissance profoundly influenced her own image of women. The couple lived in Strasbourg and Leipzig. Following the death of her husband in 893, Janitschek went to Berlin. This was the most productive period in her literary career and she became one of the most successful and controversial authors of the turn of the century. In 902 she settled in Munich in the artistic community of Schwabing. She published collections of short stories and novellas, poetry, and novels. Just as her position regarding feminism is ambivalent, her writings vary in both aesthetics and content. Her novels belong to such diverse genres as Bildungsroman, historical novels, and light reading. What is common to all of them is her critical and analytical attitude to gender relations. She died in 927 in Munich.

Jerusalem-Kotányi, Else , born Else Kotányi in 877 in Vienna and died presumably in 942 in Buenos Aires, to which she emigrated with her second husband, embryologist Dr Viktor Widakowitsch, in 9. Her name is familiar today only to a small circle of specialists, primarily for her very successful novel about the world of Viennese prostitution, Der heilige Skarabäus (The Sacred Scarab, 905), which her friends speculated could have been nominated for the Nobel Prize. At the age of sixteen, she was one of the first women to be allowed to audit lectures in literature and philosophy at the University of Vienna. She published her volume of novellas Venus am Kreuz (Venus on the Cross) in 899 at the age of twenty-two, under her maiden name, Kotányi. All her subsequent works were published under her married name, Jerusalem. From her first marriage, she had a daughter and a son who remained with their father after she divorced him. She had another daughter from her second marriage. Jerusalem was apparently not very happy in Buenos Aires, which she found uncultivated. She travelled back to her native Austria at least twice, in 93 and 925. During those stays she renewed her literary contacts and gave lectures. The rise of anti-Semitism would eventually make publishing her works in Europe increasingly difficult. Her life in Buenos Aires thus turned into a real exile where she would eventually die forgotten. Kaffka, Margit, born in 880 in Nagykároly. She was a secondary-school teacher and taught in Miskolc. Many consider her one of the most important, some even the most important Hungarian woman writer. She began to write in 902, initially mainly poetry Her first volume of poetry appeared in 904 under the simple title Versek (Poems), followed by a volume of novellas in 90, Csendes válságok (Silent Crises), the title of which alone marks it as a major contribution to literary modernity. In 90, following her divorce from Brunó Fröhlich in 906, she went to Budapest where she married again. She became a regular member of the circle around the modernist magazine Nyugat. Between 90 and her tragic death from Spanish influenza (her young son also died from it) in 98 in Budapest, she was incredibly productive and published several novels and volumes of novellas, poems, and fairy tales.

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Kapff-Essenther, Franziska von , born Franziska Essenther in 849 in the castle of Waldstein near Leutomischel, then Bohemia. She received private education and passed, thanks to her endurance and diligence, the exam for teachers. She then became the principal of a private girls’ school in Hernals near Vienna. When only sixteen years old, she wrote an article about rhyme in poetry. Three years later, she started work on her novel Frauenehre (A Woman’s Honour) which was published in 873. Her first marriage ended in divorce. She then married a fellow writer, Paul Blumenreich, and became one of the major contributors to his journal Berliner Feuilleton. She was extremely productive and published during her lifetime numerous novels, novellas, and short stories. A few of her works were published posthumously. She died in 899 in Berlin. Kautsky, Minna , born Minna Jaich in 837 in Graz. Her family moved to

Prague in 845. For financial reasons, she received very little education, but became an avid autodidact. At sixteen Minna married the young painter Johann Kautsky. He supported his young wife’s ambitions to become an actress. By the age of twenty, Minna had borne four children and she suffered from a lung disease for the next ten years. After Johann was appointed as painter for the Burgtheater in Vienna, the couple’s financial situation improved considerably. Through her eldest son Karl, Minna Kautsky became acquainted with the ideas of Social Democracy and Darwin. She published her first story, Moderne Frauen (Modern Women) in 870 under the male pseudonym Eckert. She subsequently wrote dramas, poetry, numerous stories, novellas, novels, and articles, some of which appeared under the pseudonym Wilhelm Wiener. Her own path from petty bourgeoisie to socialism is often a theme in her fiction. Another autobiographical element is the casting of actresses as her heroines, as in the novel Herrschen und Dienen (To Reign and to Serve, 882). In other novels she offers a criticism of the conditions of the working class. Another target of her activism was the condition of women. She was one of the founding members of the Association of Female Writers and Artists in Vienna (Verein der Schriftstellerinnen und Künstlerinnen in Wien), which established a pension fund and a fund for helping female artists and writers. The novel Helene (894) and the story Ein Maifesttag (A Mayday Celebration, 907) are considered her best works. She died in 92 in Berlin-Friedenau.

Lux, Terka , whose real name was Oláh Dencsházi (or Dancsházy), was born in

Szilágysomló in 873. For no obvious reasons, she is missing from Margit Bozzay’s Magyar asszonyok lexikona (Lexicon of Hungarian Women, 93), which lists all major women writers and their biographies from the beginning of the twentieth century. Her father had been an active fighter in the war of liberation under colonel Bem. Her childhood does not seem to have been a very happy one. Her marriage was not successful either. After her divorce, she devoted herself to a literary career. Under the pen name Terka Lux, she published stories, novellas, and novels, including Marcsa gondolatai (Marcsa’s Thoughts, 903), Leányok (Girls, 906), Álom

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(Dream, 93), and Budapest (908). She was known as a feminist and published in the feminist journal A nő és a társadalom. She also had a regular feuilleton in Pesti Hírlap under the title “Hétköznapok” (Weekdays). She was recognized for her thematization of women’s lives and her accurate knowledge and portrayal of the city’s social atmosphere and characters. She died in Budapest in 938.

Mársits, Rozina , born in 856 in Csongrád; her year of death is unknown.

She was principal of a girls’ school in Arad (today in Rumania) and author of the feminist essay A huszadik század asszonya (The Woman of the 20th Century, 90), as well as of some didactic literature for young women.

Mayreder, Rosa , born Rosa Obermayer in 858 in Vienna. She rebelled at a young age against the restrictions imposed on her sex. She received the education considered appropriate for a young woman in a girls’ school and learned to play the piano and to paint. However, because of her extraordinary thirst for learning, her father allowed her to take part in her brothers’ private lessons in Greek and Latin. When she was eighteen years old, she refused to wear a corset, a scandalous act in her circle. She documented her life and her struggles in her diaries, as well as in her autobiography, Das Haus in der Landskrongasse (The House in the Landskrongasse), published in 948. In 88 she married the architect and professor Karl Mayreder, who supported her intellectual efforts. Rosa Mayreder had a salon in their apartment, which was a meeting place for intellectuals and artists. She held her own exhibition of watercolours in 89 in the Wiener Künstlerhaus. Her first volume of novellas, Übergänge (Transitions), was published in 897 and her first novel Idole (Idols) in 899. She also became one of the founding members of the AÖF and its vice-president in 894. She published numerous important essays on gender relations, the cultural construction of gender, and sexuality. She was also, for a short period, co-editor of the feminist journal Dokumente der Frauen. Her marital bliss faltered after 92 when her husband started to suffer from depression and not even Freud was capable of curing him. Both the husband and his therapist blamed Rosa and her intellectual superiority for Karl’s depression. In 928, for her seventieth birthday, Mayreder was made an honorary citizen of Vienna in recognition of her life’s work. She died ten years later in her native city. Meisel-Hess, Grete , born Margarethe Meisel into a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague in 879. Her family moved to Vienna, where she received an excellent education. She studied at the University of Vienna (philosophy, sociology, and biology) but did not earn a degree. In 900 she married the journalist Peter Hess but the marriage did not last very long. Meisel-Hess began to publish articles and reviews in periodicals at the age of twenty. Her first books, Generationen und ihre Bildung (Generations and their Formation, 900) and In der modernen Weltanschauung (In the Modern Weltanschauung, 90), were followed by the novel Fanny Roth: Eine Jung-Frauengeschichte (Fanny Roth: A Young Woman’s Story) in 902.

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Her book-length study Weiberhaß und Weiberverachtung (Hatred and Despisal of Women, 904) was a direct response to Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character). As she found life in Vienna more and more constraining, she moved to Berlin in 908 into a milieu that she found more stimulating. There she met and married the architect Oskar Gellert. In Berlin, Meisel-Hess wrote her important theoretical texts on sexual psychology, such as Die sexuelle Krise (909, English translation The Sexual Crisis, 97). She was also active in Helene Stöcker’s League for the Protection of Mothers (Bund für Mutterschutz), founded in 905 in Berlin. She gave lectures and participated in debates. She also contributed articles to the League’s journal, Mutterschutz. Her later works reveal more conservative ideas. WW I struck her in more than one way. Not only did she lose her husband in a Siberian POW camp but also she had to struggle with great financial difficulties. All this exacerbated her psychological condition. She died at the Charité hospital in Berlin in 922.

Neményi, Erzsébet, born in 882. She wrote on several questions pertaining

to the women’s movement, such as women’s paid work, the compatibility of motherhood and paid work, the creation of more “feminine” professions, and suffrage. She also wrote positively on Hungarian women writers, observing that Hungary had many very talented women writers, most notably Margit Kaffka. She died very young, at the age of twenty-six, in 908 in Budapest, leaving a husband and their little daughter behind.

Ritoók, Emma , born in 868 in Nagyvárad, now Rumania. She was one of the finest Hungarian intellectual women and a recognized writer of her time. She studied at several European universities (Budapest, Leipzig, Berlin, Paris) and obtained a doctorate in philosophy, which was exceptional for a woman of her generation. She was a close friend of many outstanding thinkers of the fin de siècle, among them Ernst Bloch. Ritoók was a prolific author; she wrote essays, short stories, and articles for Hungarian newspapers and magazines, as well as several novels. She also translated from French and Norwegian (e.g., Knut Hamsun), and worked as a chief librarian in Budapest. She was one of the founding members, along with György Lukács and Béla Balázs, of the philosophical society The Sunday Circle (Vasárnapi Kör), founded in 95. Her novel Egyenes úton – egyedül (On a Straight Path, Alone, 905) won the literary prize of the magazine Új idők. Even though her writings were given appropriate consideration by literary critics in the first half of the twentieth century, she has been virtually forgotten by post-war literary history – a fate she shares with many other women writers of her generation. Only in the past two decades can we see some evidence of a renewed interest in her work. In 993, in a series edited by György Bodnár, her novel A szellem kalandorai (Spiritual Adventurers), originally published in 92, was reprinted. She died in 945 in Budapest.

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Schwimmer, Rózsa (known abroad as Rosika, later Bédy-Schwimmer), the

most distinguished Hungarian feminist, was born in 877 in Budapest. She initially worked as a bookkeeper and helped establish the National Association of Women Office Workers (Nőtisztviselők Országos Egyesülete). She served as its president from 897 to 92. She was also one of the founders of the Feminist Association (Feministák Egyesülete) and, given her knowledge of nine languages, very active internationally as well, both as a speaker and a writer. She was editor of the periodical A nő és a társadalom and co-organized the 7th Congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) in Budapest. In 93 she was elected as corresponding secretary of the IWSA . The following year, Schwimmer moved to London to serve as the IWSA’s press secretary. With the outbreak of WW I , she remained in London and began organizing feminist and pacifist leaders. She went to the United States, where she met President Wilson and his Secretary of State Jennings and urged them to bring the war to an end. She also played a major role in organizing and conducting the 95 International Congress of Women in The Hague, where she represented Austria-Hungary. After the meeting, Schwimmer travelled to London, Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, Rome, Berne, and Paris, where she met with members of the various governments in an attempt to end the war. She became vice-president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Under the Károlyi government, she was appointed Hungary’s ambassador to Switzerland. In 99 Béla Kun’s Communist government ousted Károlyi, and in 920 Schwimmer fled to Vienna to escape the succeeding anti-Semitic Horthy regime. In 92 she emigrated to the United States. She was declared a dangerous radical, charged with being a German spy, a Bolshevik agent, and a member of a Jewish conspiracy. Her application for citizenship was denied. Although she remained in the United States until her death, she was formally stateless. She was put forward by several nations for the 948 Nobel Peace Prize, but she died in New York before the winner was chosen. No award was given that year.

Stricker Sándorné Pollacsek, Laura , born in 882 in Vienna. Her

mother, Cecile Wohl (not related to Stefánia and Janka Wohl) was well-known in Hungarian intellectual life as the hostess of a salon gathering representatives of the Hungarian avant-garde. The Pollacsek family became known under the name Polányi and made important contributions to the fin de siècle, most notably through Laura’s younger brothers Karl and Michael. Laura was one of the first Hungarian women to receive a doctorate in economic history at Budapest University in 908. As a member of the Feminist Association (FE ), she was the acknowledged expert on education among the feminists and gave numerous lectures. In 9 she opened an experimental co-educational kindergarten inspired by Freud’s and Ferenczi’s ideas. In 98, during the Károlyi government, she organized the women’s group of the Bourgeois Radical Party. In 938 she emigrated with her three children and her husband to the United States. At the end of her life she published important articles on Captain John Smiths, the founder of Virginia.

Authors’ Biographies

209

Szederkényi, Anna (Párniczkyné) , born in Mező-Nyárád in 882. She

finished teacher’s college, worked first as a teacher and then, at only twenty, began publishing in various periodicals. Later she moved to Budapest and became the first Hungarian woman member of the Budapest Association of Journalists (Budapesti Újságírók Egyesülete). She was also active in various charitable women’s organizations. Her drama, A kőfalon túl (Beyond the Stone Wall), first performed in 9, caused a lot of controversy because of its touchy topic of adolescent sexuality, the taboos attached to it, and its criticism of young girls’ religious upbringing behind the stone walls of a convent. A prolific writer, Szederkényi subsequently published numerous novels including: Amíg egy asszony eljut odáig (Until a Woman Goes That Far, 95); A nagy nő (The Great Woman, 94); Lángok, tüzek (Fire and Flames, 97); Hill Márta (Márta Hill, 99); Amiért egy asszony visszafordul (What a Woman Turns Back For, 929). She is the first Hungarian woman writer whose works became published in a series. As the titles indicate, in most of her narratives she thematizes women’s lives from different angles and with various messages, from feminist to more conservative. For her interest in women’s lives and the depiction of their struggles for emancipation, she was placed next to Margit Kaffka. She died in 948 in Budapest.

Szikra , Countess Sándorné Teleki, born Juliska Kende in Pest in 864. She received an excellent education, was fluent in nine languages, and wrote her first play at the age of eight. In 886 she married Count Sándor Teleki junior. She wrote and published, despite her husband’s and her family’s disapproval, under the pen name Szikra. A bevándorlók (The Parvenus, 898) was her first novel. For about a decade, she was Hungary’s most famous woman writer. She published eight volumes of novels and short stories. This exceptional success eventually led to her acceptance as a writer within her family as well. In her home in Pest, she organized a literary salon that was frequented by many intellectuals and some important contemporary women writers, among them Emma Ritoók, Minka Czóbel, and Cécile Tormay. In 924 she founded, together with writer Iván Vándor (Ilonka Várady), the Circle of Hungarian Women Writers (Magyar Irónők Köre). She was also involved in the first Hungarian women’s movement. As an active member of the Feminist Association (FE ), she published regularly in their journal A nő és a társadalom. Later, when the journal changed its name to A nő, she became a member of the editorial board. In 93 she was one of the leading members in the organizational committee of the 7th Congress of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance held in Budapest. She continued her active literary life until her death in Budapest in 937. Thenen, Julie , born in 835 in Lemberg. She married and began writing in

852. She published short stories, humorous sketches, and tales about Jewish customs in various journals. Today she is mainly known as the author of the novel Fräulein Doktor im Irrenhaus (Miss Doctor in the Madhouse, 88). She published another novel and a collection of novellas. She died in 99 in Vienna.

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Troll-Borostyáni, Irma von , born Marie von Troll in 849 in Salzburg. She had an excellent education. She studied music in Vienna and wanted to become a pianist but had to give up her plans. In Vienna she also began to publish sketches in various journals, under the pseudonym Leo Bergen. She went to Hungary, where she first lived as a music teacher with an aristocratic family. At that time she changed her name to Irma. After three years, she went to Budapest, where she met her husband, the Hungarian writer Nándor von Borostyáni, whom she married in 875. He fully supported her literary ambitions. A tragedy struck the couple when their three-year old daughter died from diphtheria. Irma went back to Salzburg in 882 to look after her dying mother and remained in her native town. She lived in a house with the Baumgartner sisters. Her husband continued to support her financially from Paris and left her with a small pension after his death in 902. Troll-Borostyáni published several key theoretical texts of the Austrian women’s movement, as well as fiction. She published a total of nineteen books during her lifetime, as well as numerous articles on women’s rights in papers and magazines. She was not only a radical thinker but also challenged social norms and conventions in her behaviour and dress code (she cut her hair short, wore men’s shirts and jackets, smoked cigars in public, and engaged passionately in various sports). She also actively fought in the women’s movement, particularly for suffrage and against prostitution. She died in Salzburg of a stroke in 92. Salzburg named a small street after her in 996. Vera (Betty Kris, also recorded as Alma de la Vera), born in 876 in Prague. There is practically no information available on her life. She is mainly known as the author of the best-seller Eine für viele: Aus dem Tagebuche eines Mädchens (One For Many: From a Girl’s Diary, 902) that provoked a scandal in Viennese circles. It reached twelve editions in the year of its publication alone and also inspired twelve literary responses in the form of other books, a fact that speaks for the pertinence of its topic: the sexual double moral standard. Vera also wrote a drama under the title Die Heldin (The Heroine). Veres, Pálné Hermin Beniczky, born in 85 in Lázi. She lost her parents at a young age and was brought up by her maternal grandparents. In 839 she married Pál Veres who later became the deputy-lieutenant of Nógrád county. She learnt Hungarian well only in the first years of her marriage. Following the birth of her daughter, she became interested in the question of women’s education. She had her daughter educated according to her principles. Following the polemic with Imre Madách, she felt compelled to become a fighter for women’s educational rights. She is credited with the establishment of the first secondary school for girls. She died in Váchartyán in 895. A monument to her stands in the heart of Budapest. Wohl, Stefánia , born in 848 in Pest. She and her sister Janka received a good education. She published her first book in 865 under the title Wohl Stefánia rege

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könyve (Stefánia Wohl’s Book of Legends). She wrote for English and French papers and also edited, with Janka, the Hungarian women’s journal Nők munkaköre. She travelled a lot, mainly in France and Spain. She and Janka had a salon in their apartment and many famous people of their time visited, among them Franz Liszt, who even performed there (Janka Wohl was an accomplished pianist herself). The Wohl salon was compared to salons in Paris. Stefánia wrote two novels, short stories, poems, and aphorisms. In her last years, Stefánia was very ill and frequently bedridden. She died in 889 in Budapest. Janka published another volume of her writings posthumously, in 89.

appendix two

Bibliography of Hungarian Fin-de-Siècle Women Writers

Frequently used Hungarian expressions: Regény: novel Mesék: fairy tales Elbeszélések, elb.: short stories Novellák: novellas Versek, költemények: poems Színjáték, színmű: play Fiatal leányok számára: for young girls Ifjúsági: for young people Gyerekeknek: for children Történeti, történelmi: historical Ács, Klára (date of birth and death not found), writer Álarcosbál. Színjáték. Place and date unknown Asszonyember. Regény. Budapest: Galantai Gyula 93 Asszonyok vallomásai. Hogy fogtam meg a férjemet. Budapest: Tolnai 927 Egy Don Juan kalandjai. Place and date unknown Az élet célja. Budapest: Hellas 928 Férfihűség. Budapest: Pesti nyomda 97 Furcsa valaki. Budapest: Hajnal 932 Füzes Ágnes szerelme. Budapest: Érdekes Újság 922 Gyermekszobám, tündérváram. Mesék. Budapest: Tolnai 935 Lilla ... Liliom. Budapest: Hellas 928 A másik szemüveg. Regény és novellák. Budapest: Tolnai 925 Milliók drámája. Budapest: Érdekes Újság 923

Bibliography of Hungarian Fin-de-Siècle Women Writers

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Alba, Nevis (Unger, Ilona) (Eresztevénypuszta, 886 – date of death not found), writer, poet Ádámok, Évák. Elbeszélések. Budapest: Légrády date unknown Bíbor. Regény. Versek. Budapest: Légrády 96 Bolti leányok. Elbeszélések. Budapest: Légrády 908 Egy szerelmes lány könyvéből. Új versei. Budapest: Athaeneum 9 Érzések, szenvedélyek. Novellák. Budapest: Mozgó Könyvtár Váll. 909 Harminc pompás mese. Budapest: Nova 925 A hét csuda. Versek. Budapest: Légrády 905 A jövő titka. Budapest: Literatura Regény t. 920 Konfetti. Novellák. Budapest: Légrády 98 Napországban. Ifjúsági színjáték. Budapest: Magyar Írók Társasága 98 Nász előtt. Versek. Budapest: Légrády 90 Összegyűjtött költeményei. Budapest: Légrády 920 Andorffy, Mária (896–99), writer, poet Szivárvány. Budapest: Légrády 98 Tavasz után. Budapest: Légrády 97 Arató, Erzsi (date of birth and death not found), writer Elkésett emberek. Regény. Budapest: Pantheon 920 Tavaszi requiem. Regény. Budapest: Athaeneum 920 Az árva Mariska napjai (author unknown) Budapest: Nyugat 9 Bártfay-Portell, Róza (Miskolc, 853 – date of death not found), writer Elbeszélések. Esztergom: Szabadság nyomda 902 Beniczkyné Bajza, Lenke (Pest, 840 – Budapest, 905), writer Ahol a czipő szorít. Elbeszélések. Nagy-Kanizsa: Fischel 888 Az anyajegy. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 894 Arany kígyó. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 895 Ár és apály. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 896 Átültetett virág. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 895 Delila. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 894 Divatos házasság. Színmű. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 89 Az első nyom. Budapest: Athaeneum 885 Edith. Színmű. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 888 Egy rossz lépés átka. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 904 Egy szegény leány története. Regény. – Merész szavak. Elbeszélés. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner date unknown Az élet könyve. Budapest: Lampel 905

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Az élet viharában. Budapest: Képes családi lapok date unknown Előitélet és fölvilágosultság. Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 902 Az erdei lak. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 896 Északról, délről. Beszélyek. Budapest: Révai 887 A fátyol titka. Budapest: Légrády 885 A fekete könyv. Elbeszélés. Nagy-Kanizsa: Fischel 888 Felhőbomlás. Losonc: Kármán nyomda 895 A gyöngy-sor. Regény. Budapest: Pallas 888 A házasság titka. Budapest: Szépirodalmi 890 Hanna. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 90 A hegység tündére. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 890 A helytartóné. Elbeszélés. Nagy-Kanizsa: Fischel 887 Hiúság. Regény. Budapest: Lampel 905 Hol a boldogság? Elbeszélés. Győr: Gross 892 Az ibolya-csokrok és egyéb elbeszélések. Budapest: Pallas nyomda date unknown Itt és a jövő életben. Budapest: Athaeneum 878 Kényszer alatt. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 904 Két Mária – A költő gyermekei. 2 elbeszélés. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 903 Késő bánat. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 900 Késő szerelem. Budapest: Franklin 906 Kiközösítve. Budapest: Athaeneum 897 Közvélemény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 897 Leányok tükre. Nagy magyar nők élete. Budapest: Lampel 904 Mártha. Budapest: Franklin 88l Megkésett fecske. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 895 Méta. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 903 Minden áron. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 90l Nem ismerem a múlt történetét. Budapest: Franklin 885 Nyomaveszett. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 894 Opál. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 895 Osztatlanul. Elbeszélés. Győr: Gross 892 Ő az! Regény. – Lydia. Elbeszélés. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 887 Örök törvény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 902 Öt órakor. Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 893 A porban született. Budapest: Révai 885 Rang és pénz. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 89 Régen volt. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 902 Rhea grófné. Színmű. Budapest: Pfeifer date unknown Rózsa-e vagy viola? Elbeszélés. Győr: Gross 893 Ruth. Budapest: Athaeneum 884 Saját kezébe. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 886 Sára története. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 899

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Szabály ellen. Budapest: Athaeneum 889 Szem és száj között. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 899 Szőke, mint a búza. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 895 Szükség és hajlam. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 899 Tárczák. Budapest: Szépirodalmi Könyvtár 892 Tavasz és szerelem. Budapest: Révai 892 Tévesztett utak. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 904 A titok. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 895 Tűzben. Budapest: Révai 890 Uri hajlamok. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 900 Végzetes tévedés. Budapest: Lampel 904 A vér. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 892 A vér hatalma. Budapest: Székely 886 Yelda és egyéb elbeszélések. Budapest: Pallas nyomda 905 Zajos múlt. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 904 Zárt ajtók mögött. Budapest: Pallas 886 Zöld gyepen. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 900 Zsebkendő és legyező. Budapest: Magyar háziasszonyok 887 Berde, Mária (Kackó, 889 – Kolozsvár, 949), writer, poet Bacsányiné Bamberg Gabriella élete és költészete. Kolozsvár: Stief nyomda 92 Egy kicsi szolgáló. Elb. Nagyvárad: Kálvin 937 Enyedi történetek. Nagyvárad, 926 Földindulás. Kolozsvár: Concordia nyomda 930 A hajnal emberei. Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 943 Haláltánc. Budapest: Athaeneum 924 Ha visszatérsz ... Regény. Budapest: Kp-i Kiadó 942 Keresztjáró szerelem. Regény, Budapest: Athaeneum 94 Az örök film. Budapest: Athaeneum 97 Rima kincse. Elb. Temesvár: Pán Könyvtár 923 Romuald és Adriána. Széphistória. Berlin: Veggenreter 927 Seherezáde himnusza. Budapest: Athaeneum 929 Szavazzunk, nőtestvéreim! Tíz válasz tíz kifogásra. Kolozsvár: Romániai Magyar Írószövetség date unknown Szentségvivők. Regény. Nagyvárad: Erdélyi Magyar Írói Rend 934 A szent szégyen. Regény. Marosvásárhely: Révész 925 Télutó. Novellák. Place unknown: Minerva 928 A tükör. Regény. – Szegény kicsi Jula. – Borzhistória. Elb. Marosvásárhely: Kosmos 920 Tüzes kemence. Regény. Budapest: Nyugat 936 Versek. Budapest: Athaeneum 93 Vizen hold. Elb. Kolozsvár: Haladás 924

216 appendix two

Berend Miklósné Kilényi, Júlia (887–956), writer, translator Akik kihullottak Isten tenyeréből. Budapest: Pantheon 939 Álomlovag. Budapest: Pantheon 943 A boszorkány. Budapest: Thália nyomda 92 Elátkozott tündérkert. Budapest: Körmendy 948 Hadiárvák. Budapest: Nova 938 Isis legyőzi Aphroditét. Budapest: Pantheon 942 Istenek és ösztönök. A lélek és a vár regénye. Budapest: Pantheon 929 Joachim Ibn ben Aluya. Egy orvos története. Budapest: Genius 923 A lüktető talaj. A tegnap és a ma regénye. Budapest: Pantheon 927 Ne ölj! Budapest: Körmendy 946 A Piombo-kép. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 938 Pogány versek. Budapest: Pallas nyomda 905 Századvégi emberek. Nyolc nap története. Budapest: Pantheon 94 Szent Bertalan-éjszaka. Budapest: Káldor 934 Vippári, a csavargó asszony. Egy komédiásnő regénye. Budapest: Nova 937 Visszahulló kő. Budapest: Körmendy 945 Bethlen, Margit (Budapest, 882 – Budapest, 970), writer A boldog sziget istene és egyéb elbeszélések. Budapest: Egyetemi nyomda 925 Egy élet. Regény. Budapest: Athaeneum 92 Egy vénlány története. Budapest: Athaeneum 935 Előszó Szendrey Júlia naplója, levelei, halálos ágyán tett vallomása közzétett kötetéhez. Budapest: Genius 930 Erdélyi történetek. Elb. Budapest: Stádium 94 Fehér lapon fekete képek. Elb. Budapest: Athaeneum 937 Fräulein Katinka erlebt das Wunder. Regény. Basel-Berlin-Leipzig: Zinner Verlag 934 Impressziók. Budapest: Athaeneum 930 Két asszony közt. Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 94 A kisasszony. Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 937 Kis és nagybetűk. Elb. Budapest: Athaeneum 933 Magyar történelem. Olvasókönyv. Budapest: Miéme 943 Majd. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 920 Mese a szomorú városról és egyéb történetek. Budapest: Athaeneum 96 Morzsák. Elb. Budapest: Athaeneum 938 Pitypang. Elb. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 930 Szomszédok. Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 942 A szürke ruha. Dráma. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 929 A város. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 920 Blaskó, Mária (Lugos, 89 – date of death not found), writer, poet Alkalmi versek. Budapest: A Szív 93

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Angyalszívek karácsonya. Karácsonyi színjáték. Budapest: Kispesti Tisztv. Mária Kongregációja 94 A bölcsek köve. Regény. Budapest: Az Apostol 928 Columbus tojása. Regény. Budapest: Az Apostol 928 Isten kardja. Békedarab. Budapest: Szent István Társulat 99 Mesekirály nevenapja. Budapest: Stephaneum nyomda 92 Szívgárdisták. Elbeszélés. Budapest: Apostol nyomda 920 Bokor, Malvin (Baja, 890 – Budapest, 940), writer, playwright Három színdarab fiatal leányok számára. Budapest: Szent István Társulat 90 Hét tél, hét nyár. Budapest: Légrády 99 Két világ. Budapest: Szent István Társulat 9 A legszebb ajándék. Karácsonyi játék. Budapest: Szent István Társulat 908 Mintha álom lett volna. Budapest: Légrády 9 Nyár. Elbeszélés. Budapest: Légrády 909 A Szirányi-család. Regény az ifjúság számára. Budapest: Szent István Társulat 908 Vihar. Regény. Budapest: Légrády 93 Virradat. Regény a 8. századból. Budapest: Szent István Társulat 93 Vörösmarty emlékezete. Jelenet. Baja: Szerző 902 Tél van megint. Novellák. Budapest: Légrády 95 Brucknerné Farkas, Gizella (888 – date of death not found), writer Boldog idők, háború és falu. Budapest: Grill-Benkő date unknown Büttner, Lina (846–97), writer Amit a csillagok látnak. Elb. az ifjúság számára. Budapest: Szent István Társulat 905 Egy rút kisleány története. Elb. fiatal leányok számára. Az én édesem. Rajz. Budapest: Franklin 879 Juliánka. Elb. serdülő leányok számára. Budapest: Szent István Társulat 899 Az ősi földért. Elb. az ifjúság számára. Budapest: Szent István Társulat 909 Öt évi találkozó. Elb. fiatal leányok számára. Budapest: Szent István Társulat 906 Szabadság földön, égen! Elb. az ifjúság számára. Budapest: Franklin 906 Testvérek vagyunk. Elb. serdülő leányok számára. Budapest: Szent István Társulat 897 Az Urmándyak kincse. Regény fiatal leányok számára. Budapest: Athaeneum 899 Czóbel, Minka (Anarcspuszta, 855 [or 854, or 859] – 943 or 947), poet, writer Donna Juana. Regényes költemény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 900 Az erdő hangja. Versek. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 94

218 appendix two

Fehér dalok. Versek. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 894 Hafia. Regény. Budapest: Grill 89 Kakukfüvek. Költemények. 890–900. Budapest: Athaeneum 90 Két arany hajszál. Regény. Budapest: M. Keres. Közlöny 908 A magyar nép nótáskönyve a bölcsőtől a sírig. Kisvárda: Felsőszabolcsi nyomda 943 Maya. Versek. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 893 La migration de l’âme. Poème dramatique. Transl. Melchior de Polignac. Paris: Ollendorff 897 Nyírfa lombok. Versek. Budapest: Révai 890 Opálok. Költemények. Budapest: Franklin 903 Pókhálók. Elb. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 906 Újabb költemények. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 892 A virradat dalai. Budapest: Franklin 896 Dánielné Lengyel, Laura (Újfehértó, 877 – Budapest, 954), writer Az adlersfeldi Szent Ágnes. Budapest: Pallas 92 Álmok. Tárczalevelek. Budapest: Athaeneum 899 Az árva leány. Történeti elbeszélés. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 92 Balázs Klára. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 899 Bánk Judit. Regény a török világ idejéből. Budapest: Lampel 93 Bethlen Gábor udvarában. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 93 A boldogság útja. Budapest: Budapesti Hírlap 904 Boróthy Lenke és egyéb történetek. Budapest: Lampel 903 A császár anyja – Tűzhalál. Drámák. Place unknown 900 A császár udvarában. Történelmi regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 933 Csokonai. Ifjúsági regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 934 Dénes Olga házassága. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 90 Edit. Place unknown 94 Egy kis diák levelei. Elbeszélés. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 903 Egy leány. Elb. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 907 Elbeszélések. Budapest: Budapesti Hírlap 904 Fehér keresztek. Budapest: Budapesti Hírlap 908 A fejedelemasszony. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 928 Hágár a pusztában. Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 940 A három galamb – Az árva leány. Történeti elb. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 92 Az idegen leány. Budapest: Dante 932 A kis Zsolnay László és más történetek. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 903 Klára regénye. Budapest: Budapesti Hírlap 90 Máb királyné. Elb. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 9 Magda története. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 904 Magyar hősök. Történeti elbeszélés. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 906

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A magyar levegő. Elbeszélés. Budapest: Lampel 908 Marica. Ifjúsági regény. Budapest: Révai 93 Medici Lőrincné a Hattyú utcában. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 924 A megváltás és más elbeszélések kiváló magyar írókról. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 908 Mikes menyasszonya. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 932 Piroska mesét olvas. Elb. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 907 A próba. Színmű. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 90 Rolandné. Regény a francia forradalom idejéből, az ifjúság számára. Budapest: Athaeneum 925 Rhédey Claudina. Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 939 A sorsjegy. Vígjáték. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 904 Tavaszi mese. Budapest: Lampel 903 Történetek, mesék. Budapest: Lampel 902 A túlsó parton. Budapest: Franklin 929 Tűzhalál. Drámai képek. Budapest: Budapesti Hírlap 923 Az új élet. Elbeszélés. Budapest: Lampel 90 Az utolsó Hunyadi. Történelmi regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 933 Vera naplója. Budapest: Athaeneum 906 Viki. Budapest: Franklin 937 A virradat napja. Elbeszélés. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 903 A zsibói vár ura. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 932 Dárday, Olga (Szende, Fülöpné) (date of birth and death not found), writer Crab apples (Vadalmák). Hungarian society sketches. London: Goschen 94 Forgácsok. Elbeszélések. Budapest: Athaeneum 903 Rost (Rozsda). Roman. Teschen – Wien – Leipzig: Prochaska 92 Rozsda. Regény. Budapest: Franklin 94 Vadalmák. Elbeszélések, jelenetek. Budapest: Budapesti Hírlap nyomda 909 Dienes, Valéria (Szekszárd, 879 – Budapest, 978), poet, philosopher, choreographer Hajnalvárás. Elmélkedések, versek. Budapest: Szent István Társulat 983 Henri Bergson filozófiájának alapgondolatai. Budapest 929 A mai lélektan főbb irányai. Budapest: Haladás 94 Miénk az idő. Emlékezések. Budapest: Szent István Társulat 983 A mozdulatról. Budapest: Magyar Iparművészeti Főiskola Tipografikai Tanszék 979 Az Orkesztikai Egyesület programja. Budapest: Révai 928 A Szent Imre misztérium mozdulatdráma szövegkönyve. Budapest: Madách 93 A szimbolika főbb problémái. Budapest: Dobosi 98 Világ Királynéja: Kilenc ének Szűz Mária tiszteletére. Rákospalota: Szalézi Művek 944 A zenei alkotás és hatás lélektanáról. Budapest: Deutsch 906

220 appendix two

Dobosiné Pécsi, Mária (Túrkeve, 885 – date of death not found), writer, translator Antoni Dániel. Regény. Date and place unknown Csodálatos bába. Regény. Date and place unknown Királyok és parasztok. Mesék. Budapest 98 Magyarok szimfóniája. Regény. Date and place unknown Második négyes. Regény. Date and place unknown Művész és király. Regény. Date and place unknown Persephone elrablása. Regény. Date and place unknown Virágok, pásztorok. Meséskötet. Date and place unknown Draskóczy, Ilma (Jörg, Endréné) (880 – date of death not found), poet Lélekrengés. Temesvár: Helikon 925 Melódiák. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 9 Versek. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 905 Eörsi, Júlia (Kápolnásnyék, 889–959), writer Lót. Fantasztikus mese. Budapest: Lampel 90 Erdős, Renée (Ehrental, Regina) (Érseklél, 879 – Budapest, 956), writer, poet, translator Alkotók. Színmű. Budapest: Fővárosi nyomda 92 Antinous. Budapest: Pantheon 920 Aranyveder. Regény. Versek. Budapest: Stephaneum 90 Árginus. Regény. Budapest: Athaeneum 937 Az assisibeli zsoldos. Színmű. Budapest: Dick 923 Az asszony, aki ölt. Regény. Budapest: Révai 936 Az asszony meg a párja. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 904 Ave Roma. Budapest: Révai 935 Báró Herzfeld Clarissz. Regény. Budapest: Athaeneum 926 Berekesztett utak. Regény. Budapest: Dick 923 Borsóhercegnő. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 924 Brüsszeli csipke. Regény. Budapest: Révai 930 Csodálatos mezőkön. Elb. Budapest: Pallas 905 A csöndes kikötő. Regény. Budapest: Révai 933 Egy leány. Place unknown 904 Az élet királynője. Budapest: Pallas 920 Erdős Renée – Sik Sándor – Harsányi Lajos. Legendák. Győr: Élet nyomda 96 A hárfás. Regény. Budapest: Révai 93 A herceg. Regény. Budapest: Dick 925 Az indiai vendég. Regény. Budapest: Révai 928 János tanítvány. Evangeliumi színjáték. Budapest: Eke 9

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Jöttem hozzátok. Versek. Budapest: Franklin 909 Lavinia Tarsin házassága. Budapest: Révai 927 Leányálmok. Versek. Budapest: Hunnia nyomda 899 A meztelen táncos. Regény. Budapest: Révai 93 A nagy sikoly. Regény. Budapest: Dick 923 Norina – Hattyuk. Regények. Budapest: Révai 98 Nyirfaerdő. Szanatóriumi jegyzetek. Budapest: Révai 927 Örök papok. Regény. Budapest: Révai 932 Ősök és ivadékok. Budapest: Pallas 920 Őszi kaland Firenzében. Kisregény. Budapest 93 Pándy György ifjúsága. Regény. Budapest: Révai 928 Réz Bálint. Lysias. Regény. Budapest: Palladis 943 Római levelek. Visszaemlékezések. Budapest: Pallas 922 Római napló. Budapest: Dick 925 Sibyllák könyve. Versek. Budapest: Athaeneum 98 Szemünk fénye. Regény. Budapest: Nova 939 Szentgyörgyvára. Regény. Budapest: Révai 934 Teano Amaryll egyszerű élete. Budapest: Révai 929 A Timothy-ház. Regény. Budapest: Révai 938 Új dalok. Kleopatra. Versek. Budapest: Pallas 906 Az új sarj. Budapest: Athaeneum 95 Versek. Budapest: Pallas 902 (Under the pen name Réz, Bálint): Abiság. Budapest: Palladis 935 A csukott kert. Versek. Budapest: Müller 945 Édes Rosamunda. Budapest: Központi könyvkiadó 94 Egy perccel alkonyat előtt. Versek. Budapest: Pallas 92 Emlékeim. Budapest: Révai 93 Ezüst bölcső. Regény. Budapest: Révai 93 Gránátvirág. Regény. Budapest: Müller 945 Hajnali hegedűszó. Regény. Budapest: Athaeneum 933 Sába királynője. Regény. Budapest: Palladis 98 Santerra bíboros. Regény. Budapest: Athaeneum 923 Evva, Sári (pen name Balásházy, Péter) (date of birth and death not found), writer Egy kislány gondolatai és egyebek. Elbeszélések. Budapest: Budapesti Hírlap nyomda 907 Fehér szárny. Imádságos könyv kisleányok számára. Budapest: Budapesti Hírlap nyomda 907 Felajánlás. Regény. Budapest: Szent István Társulat 929 A láthatatlan ellenség. Regény. Budapest: Élet 936 A nővérek – Glória. Kisregények. Budapest: Budapesti Hírlap nyomda 907

222 appendix two

Fanghné Gyújtó, Izabella (pen name Lépessy, Gábor) (Parajd, 840 – Kolozsvár, 94), writer Az életből. Elb. Budapest: Athaeneum 883–884 Emlékeim a szabadságharc idejéből 847–850. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 90 Legjobb otthon. Budapest: Athaeneum 887 A multak árnyai. Budapest: Révai 882 Őszi hangulat. Elb. Budapest: Mezei nyomda 892 Fáy, Ilona (pen name Czenk) (Budapest, 863 – date of death not found), writer Alkonyat. Regény Berzsenyi Dániel életéből. Budapest: Franklin 93 Bánky Tamás fiai. Regény. Budapest: Pallas 928 (Co-authored with Ujházy György): Csók a pusztán. Komédia. Budapest: Klein nyomda 94 Elbeszélések. Budapest: Stádium nyomda 934 Hivatás. Budapest: Franklin 92 Mentsd meg a lelkedet! Beszédsorozat missiók és lelkigyakorlatok alkalmára. Sopron: Szent Domonkos Konviktus 938 Fehér, Krisztina (date of birth and death not found), writer Akik megtalálták egymást. Budapest: Légrády 97 A boldogság ára. Budapest: Légrády 98 Ferenczi, Magda (Kolozsvár, 890 – Sztára, 93), writer Fehér árnyékok. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 94 Macza. Elb. Budapest: Franklin 96 dr. phil. Ferenczi, Sári (Kolozsvár, 887 – Budapest, 952), writer Ágneske elment. Novellák. Budapest: Athaeneum 920 Estétől hajnalig. Place unknown 922 Mary. Budapest: Franklin 93 Túl a hegyen. Place unknown 923 A vörös daru. Történelmi regény. Budapest: Athaeneum 95 F. Kernách, Ilona, (date of birth and death not found), writer Asszonyélet. Történetek. Budapest: Franklin 99 A fajtája. Parasztdráma. Place unknown 92 Flatt, Zsóka (date of birth and death not found), writer, poet Egy ódon balkonról. Budapest: Légrády 96 Küzdelmes élet. Regény. Budapest: Magyar Népműv. Társasága 94 Minden olyan ködbe borult. Budapest: Légrády 94

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Gajáry, Böske (date of birth and death not found), writer Mardocheus. Elbeszélések. Budapest: Lampel 95 Gárdos, Mariska (Nagyberény, 885–973), writer, journalist, translator, political activist Asszony a vártán. Regény. Budapest: Világosság nyomda 939 A bálkirálynő. Regény. Budapest: Világosság nyomda 939 Bebel Ágoston halálának 20. évfordulójára. Budapest: Esztergályos J. 933 A csodálatos sugár. Regény. Budapest: Világosság nyomda 939 Egy úttörő asszony. Regény a “munka lovagjainak” korszakából. Budapest: Világosság nyomda 936 Fénycsóva az éjszakában. Regény. Budapest: Világosság nyomda 939 Az igazság: az élet. Kolozsvár: Újhelyi 906 A jó Lujza. Történeti regény. Budapest: Világosság nyomda 936 Kilenc hónap. Novellák. Budapest: Biró 97 Kukoricán térdepelve. Visszaemlékezések. Budapest: Szépirodalmi 964 A nő a történelem sodrában. Budapest: Világosság nyomda 939–40 Szállj gondolat. Emlékiratok. Budapest: Szépirodalmi 902 Százarcú élet. Visszaemlékezések. Budapest: Szépirodalmi 975 A szegények őrangyala. Elbeszélés. Budapest: Világosság nyomda 938 Trier legszebb lánya. Place unknown 936 Gáspárné Dávid, Margit (Budapest, 889–964), writer, journalist, editor, translator Az árvizi hajós. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 938 Bözsike. Színdarab. Place and date unknown A csodadoktor. Regény. Budapest: Széchenyi 942 A divat története. Budapest: Pantheon 923–24 Huncut Böske és egyéb mesék. Budapest: Tolnay nyomda 906 A kis masamód. Regény. Budapest: Kultúra 98 Lélekvásár. Budapest: Dömjén 933 Liselotte. Budapest: Athaeneum 97 Maroknyi boldogság. Regény. Budapest: Stilus 943 Máglyahalál. Budapest: Grill 926 Mylord. Debrecen: Világirodalom 929 Öröklángok. Huncut kölyök Pesten. Regények. Budapest: Világirodalom 927 Pesti dámák. Budapest: Hertzka 99 Szerelmi házasság. Budapest: Literária 940 Szerelmek városa. Budapest: Nova 925 Topázgyűrű. Budapest: Lingua 935

224 appendix two

G. Büttner, Júlia (848–925), writer A méltóságos asszony emberei. Budapest: Szent István Társulat 904 Ösvény a révben. Budapest: Algner 885 Ugy a mint volt. Elb. Budapest: Szent István Társulat 90 Gellért, Mária (date of birth and death not found), writer Dávid. Regény. Budapest: Athaeneum 98 Don Juan leánya. Regény. Budapest: Pallas 922 A halálon innen és az életen túl. Regény. Budapest: Palladis 927 G. Miklósy, Ilona (Budapest, 876 [or 873] – Budapest, 958), writer, actress Három szőke asszony. Budapest 905 Illyésházi Kata házassága. Budapest: Budapesti Hírlap 94 Johanka, egy színészgyerek élete. Budapest 94 A nagy tűz. Budapest: Tolnai 927 A színész és leánya. Budapest: Légrády 924 Az utolsó felvonás. Színészek és komédiások. Budapest: Budapesti Hírlap 92 Viola. Budapest 906 Gyarmathy Zsigáné Hóry, Etelka (Magyargyerőmonostor, 843 – Kolozsvár, 90), writer Asszonyokról asszonyoknak. Elb. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 895 Bánék, Andrásék. Budapest: Érdekes könyvtár 904 Beszélyek és apróságok. Budapest: Hornyánszky nyomda 887 Erdélyország, tündérország. Mesék. Budapest: Athaeneum 900 Három leány regénye. Budapest: Athaeneum 898 A havasok alján. Elbeszélések a kalotaszegi népéletből. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 89 A házasság titka. Budapest: Szépirodalmi Könyvtár 890 A hegyek közül. Elb. Budapest: Algner 885 Az ifju pap. Budapest: Athaeneum 885 Mari néni mankója – A remete. 2 elb. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 899 Monostory Katinka. Budapest: Athaeneum 890 Önkéntes martirok. Elb. Budapest: Athaeneum 898 A regényes feleség. Budapest: Athaeneum 884 Régi urak, új parasztok. Elb. Budapest: Athaeneum 897 Az uj hajtások. Budapest: Franklin 902 Zudorék. Budapest: Franklin 897 Győri, Ilona (Orosháza, 868 – London, 926), writer, translator Angolok. Budapest: Élet 94 Csitri Erzsi és egyéb elbeszélések. Budapest: Tolnai 99 Egérke. Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 927

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(with Ginever, Arthur C.): Hungarian grammar. London: Kegan-TrenchTrübner 909 Hungarian Literature in Relation to the History of Magyars. London: Asher 903 A kézimunka mint kereseti forrás és hasznos szórakozás. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 92 A leányok testi nevelése. Place and date unknown Százötven rövid elbeszélés. Schmrd Kristóf és mások után átdolgozta Győri Ilona. Budapest: Sachs-Lauffer 906 Hadik, Hella, Countess (date of birth and death not found), writer A város veszedelme. Elbeszélés. Budapest: Stephaneum nyomda 99 Harmath, Luiza (Torda, 846 – Marosvásárhely, 90), writer, translator Az álom folytatása. Budapest: Országos Irodalmi Rt. 907 Az anya átka. Budapest: O.I. Rt. 909 Az én kis világomból. Elb. a székely népéletből. Kolozsvár: Erdélyi Hiradó 894–895 Fény és árny. Kolozsvár 865 Góbé Palkó meséi. Elb. Budapest: O.I. Rt. 905 A hős leány története. Rege Erdély múltjáról. Budapest: Méhner 895 Hullámok. Budapest: Athaeneum 900 Az ikrek. Budapest: O.I. Rt. 900 Mese az eltünt leányról és a szép Ikláról. Budapest: Méhner date unknown Egy muszka gróf meséje. Elbeszélés. Budapest: Méhner 897 Szentek és bolondok. Budapest: O.I. Rt. 902 A szép Rapsonné vára. Erdélyi néprege. Budapest: Méhner 895 A szépség és egészség ápolása. Budapest: Wodianer F. és fia 90 A szeretet erősebb mindennél. Rege Erdély multjából. Budapest: Méhner date unknown Hatvany, Lili, Baroness (Hatvan, 890 – date of death not found), writer, playwright Asszonyok egymás közt. Novellák. Place unknown 928 Az az ember. Regény. Place unknown 926 Bacarola. Színmű. Place unknown 924 A csodálatos nagymama. Színmű. Place unknown 927 Az első férfi. Színmű. Place unknown 927 Első szerelem. Színmű. Place unknown 922 (with Hunyady, Sándor): Kilencágú korona. Színmű. Place unknown 936 Lánc. Színmű. Place unknown 934 Ma este vagy soha. Dráma. Place unknown 930 Noé bárkája. Szatirikus színmű. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 98 Ők. Novellák. Budapest: Singer és Wofner 98

226 appendix two

Útközben. Regény. Place unknown 923 A varázsige. Színmű. Place unknown 932 Havas, Alice (date of birth and death not found), writer Szent Borbála képe. Regény. Budapest: Franklin 97 Katicabogár. Regény. Budapest: Franklin 923 Jámborné Székely, Lilla (date of birth and death not found), writer Az idegen istenek. Elb. Budapest: Hornyánszky nyomda 908 Az igaz hit. Elb. Budapest: Hornyánszky nyomda 898 Jellemek, történetek és képek. Elbeszélések. Békés: Drechsel nyomda 897 A nagymama történeteiből. Elbeszélések, legendák és jellemrajzok. Debrecen: Hegedűs és Sándor 92 Egy öngyilkosjelölt. Elb. Budapest: Hornyánszky nyomda 895 A talált gyermek. Elb. Budapest: Hornyánszky nyomda 894 Kaffka, Margit (Nagykároly, 880 – Budapest, 98), writer, poet Állomások. Budapest: Franklin 97 Csendes válságok. Novellák. Budapest: Nyugat 90 Csonka regény és novellák. Budapest: Athaeneum 9 Az élet útján. Versek. Budapest: Nyugat 98 A gondolkodók és egyéb elbeszélések. Budapest: Athaeneum 906 Hangyaboly. Budapest: Nyugat 97 Képzelet-királyfiak. Mese. Budapest: Lampel 909 Két nyár. Novellák. Budapest: Nyugat 96 Kis emberek, barátocskáim. Budapest: Pallas 98 Levelek a zárdából – Nyár. Elb. Budapest: Lampel 905 Mária évei. Budapest: Nyugat 93 A révnél. Elb. Budapest: Franklin 98 Süppedő talajon. Elb. Budapest: Lampel 92 Szent Ildelfonso bálja. Novellák. Békéscsaba: Tevan 94 Színek és évek. Budapest: Franklin 92 Tallózó évek. Versek. Budapest: Nyugat 9 Utólszor a lyrán. Versek. Budapest: Athaeneum 93 Versek. Budapest: Lampel 904 Keresztszeghy (Keresztszegi), Eta (Nyír-Gebe, date of birth and death not found), writer Egy asszony története. Budapest: Boruth 895 Olga grófnő. Budapest: Athaeneum 887 Zsibó esperes. Elbeszélés. Budapest: Angló nyomda 89

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Kernné Nyári, Mária (date of birth and death not found), writer A nő és a háború. Budapest: Rovó Aladár 96 Kóbor, Noémi (896–959), writer, playwright, translator Elmúlt világok. Elbeszélések. Budapest: Franklin 928 Ezerkilencszáztizenhat. Anti tanár úr. Budapest: Tolnai Világlapja 97 És tedd rá éltedet. Regény. Budapest: Magyar Szépirodalmat Pártolók Egyes 936 Goethe. Könyvdráma. Budapest: Franklin 920 Az ismeretlen barát. Regény. Budapest: Globus nyomda 939 Jeruzsálem pusztulása. Színmű. Budapest: Franklin 922 Koppány vezér. Történeti regény. Budapest: Franklin 924 Mi lett belőlem? Regény. Budapest: Franklin 934 Kovásznai, Erzsi (date of birth and death not found), writer, translator Asszony és feleség. Regény. Budapest: Lőrincz Ernő 932 Egyetlen egyszer ... Regény. Budapest: Szöllősy 944 Gáborka. Regény a magyar gyermekeknek. Budapest: Pfeifer 930 Hegedűszó. Ifjúsági regény. Budapest: Forrás 944 Leánydalok. Budapest: Szerző 95 Miss huszadik század. Regény. Budapest: Lőrincz Ernő 930 Pünkösdi király. Regény. Budapest: Légrády 98 A szerelem mindig meglepetés. Kisregény. Budapest: Áchim 943 Kövér, Ilma (Pest, 862 – Budapest, 928), writer, playwright, translator Angyal Zsuzsa testamentuma. Falusi történet. Budapest: Lampel 902 Bárányfelhők. Elb. Budapest: Athaeneum 898 A budapesti bál után. Vígjáték. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 907 Damár Margit. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 892 Vadrózsa kisasszony. Elb. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 894 A Jánoska koronája és más elbeszélések. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 900 Két világ közt. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 897 Kis lányok, nagy lányok. Elb. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 899 Margit férje. Regény és egyéb elbeszélések. Budapest: Athaeneum 902 Révész Magda. Budapest: Magyar Kereskedelmi Közlöny 90 Teremts ujat és egyéb elbeszélések. Budapest: Pallas nyomda 908 A vitorlás hajó. Elb. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 907 Zrinyi Ilona. Budapest: Magyar Keresk. Közlöny 905 Krüzselyi, Erzsébet (875–954), poet Brankovics Györggyel: Erzsébet királyné emléke. Budapest: Nagy J. date unknown Csendország dalai. Új versek. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 93

228 appendix two

Hangtalan lírán. Új versek. Sighetui-Marmatiei: Hermes nyomda 924 Örök csendben. Versek. Máramarossziget: ny. n. 907 Örök csenddel ködön át. Versek. Budapest: Pannónia nyomda 928 Versek. Máramarossziget: Mayer és Berger 897 Kvassayné-Kun, Melanie (Pest, 864 – Veresegyház, 884), writer Csak egy rózsa volt. Nem szerették egymást. 2 elb. Budapest: Athaeneum 900 A jégvirág háza. 2 elb. Budapest 900 A sors kegyencei. Budapest: Dobrowsky-Franke 884 Sötét pontok. Regény. Budapest: Khór és Weiss 883 Virányosiak. Elb. Budapest: Athaeneum 899 Lángné Lehoczky, Ida (date of birth and death not found), poet Hulló csillagok. Temesvár: Csanádegyházmegyei nyomda 94 Lányi, Sarolta (89–975), poet, writer, translator Ajándék. Budapest: Nyugat 92 A távozó. Gyoma: Kner 95 Napjaim. Budapest: Hajnal 922 Őszi kert. Budapest: Magvető 956 Próbatétel. Versek, novellák, napló. Szabadka: Munkásegyetem 982 Lesznai, Anna (885–966), poet, designer Édenkert. Gyoma: Kner 98 Eltévedt litániák. Bécs: Libelli-Verlag 922 Hazajáró versek. Budapest: Nyugat 909 Kezdetben volt a kert. Önéletrajzi regény. Budapest: Szépirodalmi 966 Lesznai képeskönyv. Irásai, képei és hímzései. Budapest: Corvina 978 Mese a bútorokról és a kisfiúról. Gyoma: Szerző 98 Lux, Terka (Dancsházi Oláh) (Szilágysomlyó, 873 – Budapest, 938) writer, journalist Álom. Novellák. Budapest: Érdekes újság 93 Amire születtünk. Budapest: Légrády 906 A una corda (Egy húron). Elb. Budapest: Légrády 909 Budapest. Budapest: Légrády 908 Budapesti fotográfiák. Budapest: Lampe 906 Életre, halálra. Kolumbus. Két regény. Budapest: Légrády 92 Emberek vagyunk. Regény. Budapest: Légrády 98 Halk szerenád. Regény. Place unknown, 93 Kelet és nyugat. Novellák. Budapest: Légrády 923 Küzdelem az élettel. Regény. Budapest: Légrády 94 A láthatatlan hajós. Regény. Budapest: Légrády 928

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Leányok. Budapest: Légrády 906 Lenci naplója. Elb. Budapest: Faragó 905 Marcsa gondolatai. Novellák. Budapest: Légrády 903 Mesék. Budapest: Lampel 903 Meseország. Elb. Budapest: Légrády 90 Nápoly és Buda. Történelmi regény. Budapest: Kókai Lajos 94 Tűz. Elb. Budapest: Légrády 97 Madarassy, Zsuzsa (90–957), writer, poet Akik megteszik ... Elbeszélések. Budapest: Színházi Élet 924 Amiről Isten megfeledkezett. Regény. Budapest: Biblioteka 934 Arany bárkán, ezüstös vizeken. Versek. Budapest: Pallas nyomda 98 Harag nélkül. Versek. Budapest: Színházi Élet 920 Panni és Patrick. Elbeszélések. Budapest: Almanach 940 Majthényi, Flóra (837–95), writer, poet, traveller Elégiák kis fiamhoz. Pest: Fanda nyomda 868 Flóra dalai. Pest: Emich nyomda 860 Flóra ötven költeménye. Pest: Emich nyomda 858 Flóra újabb költeményei. Budapest: Herz nyomda after 877 A jó gyermekek könyve. Gyermekversek. Pest: Emich 867 Spanyolországi képek. Elbeszélések. Budapest: Lampel 900 (Under the pen name Andor, Pál): A nők hibája. Place and date unknown Az uram nem szeret. Place and date unknown Miklós, Jutka (886–976), poet Élet őfelségéhez. Nagyvárad: Sonnenfeld nyomda 908 Költeményei. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 908 Nagyné Farkas, Mariska (date of birth and death not found), writer Rövid történetek. Elbeszélések, rajzok. Szombathely: Szerző kiadása 888 Nagyráti-Ádám, Erzsi (date of birth and death not found), writer Aranyhíd. Regény. Budapest: Pallas 920 Csodálatos csodák. Indiai regék. Budapest: Szerző 929 Szerelemvirágok. Apró történetek. Budapest: Szerző 929 Tüzek a Ganges partján és más elbeszélések. Budapest: Szerző 95 Osváth, Eszter (date of birth and death not found), writer, poet Isten eltévedt gyermekei. Regény. Budapest: Fővárosi nyomda 935 Versek. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 93

230 appendix two

Ozorainé Kálmán, Margit (date of birth and death not found), playwright Halálos összetartozás. Az újraélés színjátéka. Budapest: Katz 928 Skála. Komédia. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 93 Petheő, Irén (867 – date of death not found), poet, writer Aki nem tud látni és egyéb történetek. Budapest: Budapesti Hírlap nyomda 9 Egy asszony versei. Budapest: Budapesti Hírlap nyomda 909 Élet, ma szembenézek veled. Versek. Budapest: Széchenyi 943 Reichard, Piroska (Beregszász, 884 – Budapest, 943), writer, poet, translator Az életen kívül. Versek. Budapest: Athaeneum 9 Itt voltam. Drámakötet. Place unknown 935 Őszi üdvözlet. Versek. Budapest: Dick 922 A Szentírás Babits Mihály költeményeiben. Budapest: Franklin 943 Telamon históriája. Budapest: Franklin 909 A változó napokkal. Versek. Place unknown 936 Walt Whitman 89–892. Budapest: Franklin 94 Reschner, Ilona (Gaál, Gyuláné) (date of birth and death not found), writer Porszemek. Elb. Kolozsvár: Gombos nyomda 90 dr. Ritoók, Emma (Nagyvárad, 868 – Budapest, 945), writer, poet, philosopher, translator Arany János elmélete az eposzról. Budapest: Révai 906 Egyenes úton – egyedül. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 905 Ellenséges világ. Novellák. Budapest: Nyugat 93 Gyárfás Sándor hét élete. Budapest: Révai 934 Das Hässliche in der Kunst. Stuttgart 96 Mai idegek. Elb. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 896 A nagy véletlen. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 908 Négyen a tűz körül. Novellák. Budapest: Politzer 9 Pán megváltása. Misztériumjáték. Budapest: Élet 929 (with Geöcze, Sarolta): Le problème de la Hongrie. Budapest: Pfeifer 920 A rút a művészetben. Budapest: Szerző kiadása 96 Sötét hónapok. Versek. Budapest: Táltos 920 A szellem kalandorai. Budapest: Révai 922 A természettudományi irány a szépirodalomban. Értekezés. Place and date unknown Tévelygők. Regény. Budapest: Mojsza János 938 Tündérmesék. Budapest: Révai 930 Die Wertsphäre des Tragischen. Stuttgart: Enke 935 Zur Analyse der ästhetischen Wirkung auf Grund der Methode der Zeitvariation. Stuttgart: Enke 909

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Rózsahegyi, Kálmánné (date of birth and death not found), playwright Az ideál. Társadalmi színmű. Eggenberger 909 Rozsnyay Kálmánné Dapsy, Gizella (pen name Nil) (885 – date of death not found), writer, poet El nem küldött levelek. Versek. Szeghalom: Tevan nyomda 90 A fehér ruha. Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 925 Lélekstációk. Elbeszélések. Békéscsaba: Tevan 9 Lelkem virágos ablakából. Versek. Nagyvárad: Sonnenfeld 94 Nálunk. Versek. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 908 A szivem. Versek. Békéscsaba: Tevan 909 Testamentom. Versek 94–924. Budapest: Tóth-Mező nyomda 925 Vallomás. Párjelenet. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 906 Versek. Békéscsaba: Corvina nyomda 905 Zsúrvilág provincián. Kisvárosi élőképek és egyebek. Gyula: Dobay nyomda 904 Schreiber, Mária (date of birth and death not found), poet Minden csak álom. Budapest: Rényi 95 Serákné Hentaller, Elma (Jászberény, date of birth and death not found), writer Elbeszélések az ifjúság számára. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 892 Köd előttem, köd utánam. Rajzok és elb. Budapest: Szerző kiadása 885 Sikor, Margit (pen names Nihil, Nulla) (date of birth and death not found), writer Apró-cseprő históriák. Elb. Budapest: Algner 886 Babos uram szerencséje vagy a pálinka hatása. Budapest: Révai 898 Egy kis árva története. Elb. Győr: Gross 88 Hevesiné: az élet. Elbeszélések az életből. Győr: Polgár nyomda 89 Somfay, Margit (pen name Ikay, Pál) (Budapest, 892 – Budapest, 965), writer, journalist A bűnös. Színmű. Budapest: Biró nyomda 97 A félhold árnyékában. Ifjúsági regény. Budapest: Magyar Könyvbarátok 937 Fészekrakók. Budapest: Pallas nyomda 932 Mégis szép az élet. Leányifjúsági regény. Budapest: Szent István Társulat 943 Mindenki boldog akar lenni. Budapest: Szent István Társulat 937 Vénusz jegyében. Történelmi regény. Budapest: Stádium 928 Somló, Sári (886–970), poet, writer, sculptor Hallali vadásztörténetek. Budapest: Stephaneum nyomda 94 Költemények. Budapest: Franklin nyomda 908–909 A mélységből kiáltok. Versek. Budapest: Szeredai nyomda 920 Szent Miklós. Pécs: Wessely és Horváth 97

232 appendix two

Szabóné Nogall, Janka (pen name Szederinda) (Gyula, 86 – Budapest, 924) writer, translator, editor Biri. Elb. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 895 Boldog emberek. 7 elbeszélés. Budapest: Molnárok lapja nyomda 905 Bűnök. Elb. Budapest: Franklin 899 Derű. Novellák. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 894 Elbeszélések. Budapest: Athaeneum 895 Elvira kisasszony és más elbeszélések. fiatal leányok számára. Budapest: M. Keresk. Közlöny date unknown Az erdei ház és egyéb elbeszélések fiatal leányok részére. Budapest: Uránia 98 Die Flachsblume (A lenvirág). Wien: Winiker-Schikhardt 888 Flirt. 7 történet. Budapest: Légrády 9 Hetedik szentség. Place and date unknown Igaz történetek a serdülő ifjúság számára. Budapest: Légrády 89 A jó modor. Útmutató a modern társasélet kötelességeinek és az illem szabályainak helyes követésére. Budapest: Pallas 903 A jó modor. Utmutató. Budapest 92 A kis kocsi és más történetek. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 900 Leány-álmok. Elb. Budapest: Szépirodalmi könyvtár 893 Mara és egyéb történetek. Budapest: Lampel 900 A modern háziasszony. Utmutató. Budapest: Pallas 90 A nagyobbik leány. Regény és három elb. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 907 Pipiske. Regény fiatal leányok számára. Budapest: Athaeneum 895 Piros bóbitások. Place and date unknown Szerelmes asszonyok. 3 történet. Budapest: Pallas nyomda 905 Tizenkét hónap. Regényes rajzok a mindkét nembeli ifjúság számára. Budapest: Dolinay Gyula 888 Az uri konyha. Utmutató. Budapest: Pallas nyomda 92 Vezeklés. Regény. Budapest: Légrády 90 Zsófika naplója. Regény fiatal leányok számára. Budapest: Singer és Wofner 899 Szalay, Fruzina (864–926), poet, writer Bébi és Micóka. Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 906 Irodalomtörténeti értekezés. Kaposvár: Szabó nyomda 933 Egy marék virág. Versek. Budapest: Athaeneum 897 Versek. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 894 Szederkényi, Anna (Párniczkyné) (Keresztes-Nyárád [Mezőnyárád], 882 – Budapest, 948), writer, editor, translator, journalist Amiért egy asszony visszafordul. Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 929 Amíg egy asszony eljut odáig. Regény. Budapest: Athaeneum 95

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Az asszony meg a fészek. Könyv az asszonyról. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 928 A csodálatos sziget. Novellák. Budapest: Athaeneum 93 Döcög a szekér. Regény. Budapest: Grill 926 Felszabadultak. Regény. Budapest: Athaeneum 932 Hágár. Nihil. Place and date unknown A halott bekopogtat. Regény. Budapest: Általános nyomda 937 Hárman. Elb. Place and date unknown Hill Márta. Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wofner 99 Hol a boldogság. Regény. Budapest: Lapárusitó Rt. 940 Az ismeretlen fiatalember. Novellák. Budapest: Grill 926 A Jóska meg a Mariska. Ifj. elb. Budapest: Eisler Kowin nyomda 922 Jövő felé. Place unknown 906 Kaleb. 2 elb. Place unknown 904 A kőfalon túl. Kép az életből. Színjáték. Budapest: Politzer 90 Krasznahorka titka. Regény. Budapest: Általános nyomda 938 Lángok, tüzek. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 97 Laterna magica. Két fantasztikus jelenet. Budapest: Athaeneum 97 Lázadó szív. Regény. Brassó: Brassói Lapok 924 A legtisztább víz. Játék 3 felvonásban. Budapest: Wodianer 927 A Mária Annunziáta villában. Elbeszélés. Békéscsaba: Tevan 96 Márika. Regény fiatal lányoknak. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 925 Munkái. Gyűjteményes kiadás. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 929 A nagy nő. Regény. Budapest: Athaeneum 94 A padlás meg a halál. Novellák. Budapest: Sacelláry 92 Patyolat. Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 920 Sorsok ha találkoznak. Regény. Budapest: Magyar Irók Társasága 98 A spájzkulcs. Bohózat. Budapest: Athaeneum 94 A tengernek egy csöppje. Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 98 Vándortarisznya. Feljegyzések a küszködő ember sorsáról. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner, date unknown Van ilyen asszony. Elb. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 92 A végzet és egy rongybaba. Regény. Budapest: Athaeneum 920 Visszatér a múlt. Elb. Budapest: Kohn-Grünhut 90 A vöröshajú. Regény. Budapest: Általános nyomda 935 Szikra (Countess Teleki, kölcsei Kende, Juliska) (Pest, 864 – Budapest, 937), writer, editor, poet, feminist activist A betörők. Elbeszélés. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 902 A bevándorlók. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 898 Csak egy bokor muskátli. Elb. Budapest: Orsz. Irod. Szöv. 904 Die Einwanderer: Roman aus der ungarischen Gesellschaft. (A bevándorlók) Trans. Arthur J. Ebenthal. Wien-Leipzig 905

234 appendix two

Enyém? Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 906 Ez az! Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 95 Fejlődés. Budapest: Várnay nyomda 92 A feminizmusról. Budapest: Lloyd Társ. 9 A fölfelé züllők. Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 904 A hét szilvafa árnyékában. Novellák. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 909 Judith. Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 90 Káprázat. Vígjáték két felvonásban. Place and date unknown Kincsesláda. Versek. Budapest: Spády 94 Márta aki Máriának született. Regény. 2. edition. Budapest: Pallas 934 A nagy-nagy kerék. Regény. Budapest: Athaeneum 923 Nagy asszonyok élete. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 92 Öles Miska és más mesék. Budapest: Spády 93 Régen ... Elb. Budapest: Franklin 907 Tabu. Regény. Budapest: Athaeneum 99 Tépett láncok. Dramolett egy felvonásban. Place and date unknown A tóparti remete. Regény. Budapest: Franklin 926 Ugody Lila. Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 900 Vadászat és egyéb elbeszélések. Budapest: Lampel 903 Thirring Gusztávné Waisbecker, Irén (Kőszeg, 868–957), writer, ethnographer Hortyék rózsái. Elbeszélés Mátyás király idejéből. Budapest: Orsz. Irod. Rt. 903 Amit gyerekeimnek meséltem. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 94 Apró mesék. Vol. i . Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 903. Vol. II . Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 907 Aprómesék, példabeszédek. Place unknown 906 Dalok és mesék. Két rövid értekezéssel. Vers és próza. Budapest: Hornyánszky nyomda 922 Dr. Weisbecker Antal élete és a magyarországi Weisbecker család története. Sopron: Székely nyomda 935 Emlékek viharos időkből. Amikor a Széchenyiek megszerették Sopront. Sopron: Röttig-Romwalter nyomda 940 Az én hangszerem. Allegóriák, mesék, elbeszélések. Budapest: Szerző 98 Gondolatok a világháborúról és a világbékéről. Budapest: Hornyánszky nyomda 922 Gyermekvédelem. Budapest: Városi nyomda 907 Az igazság temetése és feltámadása. Budapest: Kellner nyomda 924 A nyugat-magyarországi németek és a nemzetiségi kérdések. Budapest: Pfeifer 920 Tallózás. Mesék, költemények, prózák az ifjúság számára. Budapest: Egyetemi nyomda 933

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Tormay, Cecile (Budapest, 876 – Mátraháza, 937), writer, editor, translator Álmok. Elbeszélés. Budapest: MOVE 920 Apród-szerelem. Novellák. Budapest: Athaeneum 894 Apró bűnök. Elb. Budapest: Franklin 905 Bujdosókönyv. Feljegyzések 98–9-ből. Budapest: Rózsavölgyi-Pallas 920–922 Emberek a kövek között. Budapest: Franklin 9 Görög mesék. Elb. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 939 Küzdelmek, emlékezések. Budapest: Genius 937 Megállt az óra. Elb. Budapest 924 Az ősi küldött. Regény. Budapest: Genius 934 Összes munkái. Budapest: Genius 937 A régi ház. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 94 Viaszfigurák. Elb. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 98 Virágok városa (Firenze), Szirének hazája (Szicília). Elb. Budapest: Genius 935 Tóth, Jolán (date of birth and death not found), poet Kuthy Lajos mint drámaíró. Budapest: Pátria nyomda 907 A láthatatlan pirámis. Versek. Budapest: Galántai 97 Lira ma. Költemények. Budapest: Pátria nyomda 907 Tóth, Wanda (Dombiratos, 888 – Budapest, 926), writer, translator A csodálatos köntös. Novellák. Budapest: Nyugat 929 Törökné Kovács, Hermin (Kaposvár, 882 – Budapest, 942), writer, translator Az aranykapu. Regény. Budapest: Stephaneum 99 A Baárd leányok. Regény. Budapest: Szent István Társulat 9 A breznóti takács. Elbeszélés. Budapest: Szent István Társulat 93 Az ezüst létra. Gyermekszínjáték. Budapest: Légrády 920 Fehér asszony. Regény. Budapest: Fáklya 924 Galambkisasszony. Budapest: Pallas 932 A harmadik. Regény. Budapest: Országos Irodalmi Rt. 92 A harang és egyéb elbeszélések. Győr: Élet nyomda 96 Kormos Biri. Ifjúsági regény. Budapest: Szent István Társulat 928 Margitvirágok. Elb. gyerekeknek. Budapest: Szent István Társulat 933 A régi falióra. Regény. Budapest: Palladis 939 A sárga kastély. Regény. Budapest: Palladis 938 A szilfai birtok. Budapest: Stádium nyomda 94 A szürke autó. Regény. Budapest: M. Népművelők Társ. 94 Timár-utca 7. Ifjúsági regény. Budapest: Szent István Társulat 939 A tüzes hajnal. Regény. Budapest: Stephaneum nyomda 96 Az üvegbatár. Regény. Budapest: Szent István Társulat 943

236 appendix two

Varjutanya. Regény. Budapest: Pantheon 928 A várkastély vendége. Regény. Budapest: Palladis 940 A zöld selyemruha. Regény. Budapest: Stádium 944 Tutsek, Anna (Kolozsvár, 865 – Budapest, 944), writer, editor Ágnes története. Regény fiatal lányok számára. Budapest: Dante 926 Apró történetek fiatal leányok számára. Budapest: Szent István Társulat 904 Aranyfátyol. Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 930 Az édes otthon. Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 904 Égig érő rózsa. Elb. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 940 Egy igazi anya szellemi hagyatéka. Budapest: Márkus nyomda 90 Egy kis ház története. Ifjúsági regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 934 Elbeszélések és rajzok. Kolozsvár: M. Polgár nyomda 887 Az élet iskolája. Regény fiatal leányok számára. Budapest: Athaeneum 904 Életképek. Elb. Budapest: Lampel 902 Az én utam. Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 936 Évike feljegyzései. Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 925 Évike vándorlása. Elb. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 90 A fenyvesek körül. Elb. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 893 A galambvölgyben. Elb. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 90 A hegyek között. Regény és elb. fiatal leányok számára. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 920 Hét mese. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 896 Iluska vándorlása. Ifjúsági regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 929 Az Ilva folyó partján. Elbeszélések. Place unknown 890 Izes falatok. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 930 Jázminvirág. Regény fiatal leányok számára. Budapest: Athaeneum 928 Jó mulatást, gyerekek! Meséskönyv. Budapest: Ifj. Kiadó 920 Judith. Regény fiatal leányok számára. Budapest: Ifj. Kiadó 920 Katóka szakácskönyve. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 93 Két leány élete. Regény fiatal leányok számára. Budapest: Dante date unknown Kis anyám. Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 926 Kis fiuk, kis lányok meséskönyve. Budapest: Ifj. Kiadó 920 Klárika szerencséje. Elb. Budapest: Stephaneum nyomda 924 Lottika és egyéb elbeszélések. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 90 Magunkról. Elb. Budapest: Ath. 898 Marietta. Ifjúsági regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 92 Mese két kislányról. Budapest: Pallas 926 Mikor a rózsák nyílnak. Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 933 Mindig lesznek Cilikék. Ifjúsági regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 934 Nagy meséskönyv. Budapest: Dante 926 Nagymama naplója. Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 928

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A negyedik parancsolat. Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 933 Örvény és egyéb elb. Budapest: Lampel 90 Régi emlékek. Regény fiatal leányok számára. Budapest: Ifj. Kiadó 920 Rózsák között. Ifjúsági elbeszélések. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 899 Szélvész kisasszony. Elbeszélés fiatal leányok számára. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 90 Szerencse gyermeke. Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 929 Tréfás mesék. Budapest: Dante 927 Tündérek szigete. Színjáték. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 92 Az utolsó Eörssy-lány. Regény fiatal leányok számára. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 934 Vetés és aratás. Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 932 Vidám Jankó kalandjai. Mesék. Budapest: Dante 927 Vidorka. Regény fiatal leányok számára. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 902 Viola története. Regény. Budapest 895 Üchtritz-Amade Emilné Bánhidy, Stefánia, Baroness (date of birth and death not found), writer Anta, egyiptomi hercegnő. Ó-egyiptomi regény. Budapest: Franklin 98 Elbeszélések és filmtémák. Budapest: Bethlen nyomda 944 A fehér asszony. Regény. Budapest: Légrády 925 Imák. 93. pünkösd. A Szentlélek dicsőségére. Budapest: Légrády 93 Isis papnője. Ó-egyiptomi regény. Budapest: Légrády 93 Vachottné Csapó, Mária (Pest, 830 – Tapolca, 896), writer, editor, translator Gyermekvilág. Place unknown 86 Legújabb ifjúsági iratai. Place unknown 886 Rajzok a múltból, emlékiratok. Budapest: Algner 887 Remény. Verses művek. Place unknown 858 Vállaji Sipos, Ida (869–940), poet, writer Ákáczok alatt. Versek. Kecskemét: Sziládi nyomda 908 Az aranyszobor. Elb. Mezőtúr: Török nyomda 938 A Bobróy vér. Regény. Budapest: Bethlen nyomda 927 Börtön és szabadság. Elb. Budapest: Hornyánszky nyomda 90 Édesanyánk. Elb. Budapest: Hornyánszky nyomda 97 Elbeszélések. Tahitótfalu: Sylvester nyomda 923 Az élet beszédiből. Elbeszélések. Budapest: Hornyánszky nyomda 95 Gyermekversek óvodások, iskolások számára. Budapest: Orsz. Ref. Szeretetszöv. 938 A jó tanuló. Színdarab – Az ajándék. Karácsonyi játék. Tahitótfalu: Sylvester 926

238 appendix two

A kisharang. Elbeszélés a török világból. Budapest: Orsz. Ref. Szeretetszöv. 938 Költemények. Kecskemét: Kecskeméti nyomda 940 Mesék és képek. Kecskemét: Fekete nyomda 905 Múlt és jelen. Kis színdarab. – Színésznő leszek. Monológ. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 97 Az örök nap. Regény a magyarországi reformáció első perceiből. Tahitótfalu: Sylvester 927 Porból az égig. Versek. Budapest: Bethlen nyomda 924 A tízparancsolat elbeszélésekben. Debrecen: Református Szeretetszöv 939 Virágos ablak. Elb. Mezőtúr: Török nyomda 938 Várady, Ilona (pen name Vándor, Iván) (Debrecen 886 – Budapest, 962), writer, translator Ács Éva és egyéb történetek. Regény. Debrecen: Városi nyomda 9 Ágnes. Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 929 Andrea arcát a nap felé fordítja. Regény. Budapest: Franklin date unknown Az aranymadár. Budapest: Athaeneum 97 Balassa Bálint szerelmei. Elb. Budapest: Athaeneum 97 Beethoven ifjúsága. Budapest: Palladis 943 Délibáb. Elb. Budapest: Nádor nyomda 942 Felhők között. Regény. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 930 Hajdanában. Regényes színjáték. Budapest: Légrády 92 Köd kisasszony és egyéb elb. Budapest: Budapesti Hírlap 908 A költő (Regény Kisfaludy Károlyról). Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 93 Lopott lelkek. Regény. Budapest: Pallas 932 Megváltó ismeretlen. Place unknown 925 Melitta hét apja. Regény. Budapest: M. Szépirodalmat Pártolók Egy 936 Petrőczy Kata Szidónia. Regény fiatal leányok számára. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 926 A sólyomház. (Andrea-sorozat). Regény. Budapest: Dick-Franklin 928–933 Várnai, Zseni (Nagyvázsony, 890–98), poet, writer Áldott asszonyok. Versek. Budapest: Magyar Téka 947 Anyaszív. Versek 95–97. Budapest: Népszava könyvkeresk 98 Borostyán. Versek. Budapest: Szépirodalmi 969 Ég és föld között. Regény. Budapest: Szerző 94 Egy asszony a milliók közül. Regényes önéletrajz. Budapest: Arany János nyomda 942 Egy harcos asszony írásai. Versek. Budapest: Egyetemi nyomda 973 Élők, vigyázzatok! Versek. Budapest: Szépirodalmi 962 Én mondom, és te add tovább. Új versek. Budapest: Hungária nyomda 937 Én nem mondok le soha a reményről. Versek az anyaszívről. Budapest: Arany János Nyomda 940

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A fájdalom könyve. Versek. Budapest: Világosság nyomda 92 Favágó Péter kincse. Mese. Budapest: Móra 973 Fekete bárány. Versek. Budapest: M. Szépirod.-t Pártolók Egyes 935 Feltámadás. Versek. Budapest: Szépirodalmi 959 Fényben, viharban. Regényes önéletrajz 2. Budapest: Szépirodalmi 958 Forradalmi versek. Budapest: Közokt. Népbizt. 99 Furulyaszó. Gyermekversek. Budapest: Népszava 923 Gracchusok anyja. Versek. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 96 Ime, itt az írás. Versek. Budapest: Szerző 927 Katonafiamnak! Versek. Budapest: Népszava 94 Kórus szopránban. Versek. Budapest: Népszava 930 Legyen meg a te akaratod. Versek. Budapest: Arany János nyomda 939 A mesélő erdő. Budapest: Népszava 92 Nem volt hiába. Regényes önéletrajz 3. Budapest: Szépirodalmi 962 (with Peterdi, Mária): Mint viharban a falevél. Regény. Budapest: Arany János nyomda 943 Nyugtalan madár. Versek. Budapest: Szépirodalmi 966 Örömök kertje. Mesék. Budapest: Népszava 99 Új versek. Budapest: Szépirodalmi 960 Üldözött versek. Budapest: Athaeneum 945 Versek az anyáról. Budapest: Szépirodalmi 968 A világ asszonyaihoz. Vers. Gyoma 959 Vörös tavasz. Versek. Budapest: Népszava 99 Vécseiné Jankovich, Lujza (date of birth and death not found), writer Egy asszony mesél. Elbeszélések. Jászóvár: Prem. növ. papság Remény önképzőköre 93 Felhős ég alatt. Elbeszélések. Budapest: Élet 92 Keressük a boldogságot. Regény. Budapest: Szent István Társulat 95 Klárika mindent eligazít. Gyermek színdarab. Székesfehérvár: Pannonia 93 Kurucok álma. Elb. Miskolcz: Klein-Ludvig 95 A legszebb ruha. Színmű fiatal leányoknak. Budapest: Magyar Irók Társ. 98 Török Klára házassága. Regény. Budapest: Athaeneum 905 Vay, Sándor (Vay, Sarolta) (859–98, Lugano), writer, journalist, translator Amikor még postakocsin jártak. Elb. Budapest: Orsz. Monográfia Társ. 909 D’Artagnan meséi. Elbeszélés. Budapest: Vass, Markovits 903 Elpusztult urak. Elb. Budapest: Orsz. Monográfia Társ. 90 Erzsébet királynéról és más krónikás följegyzések. Elb. Budapest: Orsz. Monográfia Társ. 90 A királyné poétája és más elbeszélések. Budapest: Orsz. Monográfia Társ. 909 Lavotta szerelmei és egyéb elb. Budapest: Orsz. Monográfia Társ. 909 Megfakult írások. Elb. Budapest: Orsz. Monográfia Társ. 909

240 appendix two

(under the pen name d’Artagnan): Régi magyar társasélet. Budapest: Athaeneum 900 Ősökről, unokáknak. Elb. Budapest: Orsz. Mon. Társ. 90 A palatinus-huszárok. Elb. Budapest: Orsz. Mon. Társ. 90 Pestvármegyei históriák. Elb. Budapest: Légrády 907 Régi nemesurak, úrasszonyok. Históriák, legendák, virtusos cselekedetek. Elb. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 900 A régi világból. Elb. Budapest: Orsz. Monográfia Társ. 909 Udvari dámák leveleiből és más elbeszélések. Budapest: Orsz. Mon. Társ. 909 Vészi, Margit (Budapest, 885 – Mallorca, 96), writer, journalist, war reporter, translator Az égő Európa. Budapest: Dick 95 Éjféli mese. Novellák. Budapest: Pantheon 923 Útközben. Visszaemlékezesék. Budapest: Singer és Wolfner 98 Wohl, Janka (Pest, 846 – Budapest, 90), writer, poet, translator Az én első albumom. Budapest: Athaeneum 892 Francois Liszt. Souvenirs d’une compatriote. Paris: Ollendorff 887 A kerékpárról. Budapest: Athaeneum date unknown Költeményei. Ed. Jókai Mór. Pest 86 Könyörüljünk. Budapest: Athaeneum 896 A modern asszony breviáriuma. Budapest: Athaeneum 895 A női szépség fenntartásának, ápolásának és növelésének titkai. Írta egy nagyvilági hölgy. Budapest: Athaeneum 885 Az otthon. Útmutató a ház czélszerű és ízléses berendezésére s vezetésére. Írta egy nagyvilági hölgy. Budapest: Athaeneum 882 Wohl, Stefánia (Pest, 848 – Budapest, 889), writer, translator Aranyfüst. Budapest: Méhner 887 Egy szerelem életrajza. Regény. Budapest: Révai 883 Éva. Elbeszélések, rajzok, aforizmák. Budapest: Méhner 888 Hátrahagyott iratai. Budapest: Athaeneum 89 Regék. 2. bővített kiadás. Budapest: Franklin 875 (With Wohl, Janka): Beszélyek és tárcák. Budapest: Athaeneum 877 Az illem. Útmutató a művelt társaséletben. Írta egy nagyvilági hölgy. Budapest: Athaeneum 880 Zempléni P., Gyuláné (Elek, Irma, pen name Irma néni) (date of birth and death unknown), writer, translator Gyermekek öröme. Tanulságos és mulattató gyermekmesék. Budapest-Bécs: Deubler 906

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Idegenben. Regény fiatal leányok számára. Budapest: Révai-Salamon 905 A két árva. Regény A. Clément után. Budapest: Afra 925 Mesegyöngyök. Tanulságnak-mulatságnak egybefűzte Irma néni. BudapestBécs: Deubler 906 Zemplényi, Klára (893–960), writer Egy elkésett ember évei. Regényvázlat. Budapest: Táltos 98 A jazz előtt. Regény. Budapest: Viktória 936 Kaland a tóparton. Elbeszélések. Budapest: Periszkóp 939 Két szoba, hall. Dramatizált regény. Budapest: Kosmos 934 Zemplényiné Stark, Ella (date of birth and death not found), playwright Álomország. Háborús ifjúsági színjáték. Budapest: Szerző 97

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Notes

introduction  Chris Weedon notes: “By the end of the nineteenth century the number of women writing and publishing in German was astonishing” (Weedon 2000, ). The same can be said for women writing in Hungarian. Sigrid Schmid-Bortenschlager and Hanna Schnedl-Bubeniček published a 209-page bibliography of Austrian women writers alone, for the years between 880 and 938 (Bortenschlager and Schnedl 982). I have tried to somewhat compensate for the lack of a similar publication in the Hungarian context by adding a much more modest “Bibliography of Hungarian Fin-de-Siècle Women Writers” at the end of this book (see appendix two). 2 As reported by Terri Switzer, Austria regarded Hungary in many ways “as a problematic Eastern inferior.” In the census reports of the Habsburg monarchy, Hungarians were qualified as “Asians,” which, at the time, was not a desirable ethnic labelling (Switzer 2003, 64). 3 All quotations from non-English sources have been translated, unless otherwise indicated, by the author. 4 On the question of the difficulty of labelling the bourgeois women’s movement “conservative,” see Elisabeth Meyer-Renschhausen’s works. 5 The English translation of the German der schielende Blick does not quite do justice to the original, as has been acknowledged by the translator, Harriet Anderson: “‘Der schielende Blick’ can mean ‘the cross-eyed gaze,’ ‘the surreptitious gaze out of the corner of the eye,’ or ‘the gaze directed in two divergent directions’” (Weigel 985, 59). 6 For the Austrian women’s movement, see in particular Anderson 992b; for the Hungarian women’s movement, see Zimmermann 999. 7 In Austria, Adelheid Popp came from a working-class milieu and wrote about her experiences, particularly in her autobiographical novel Die Jugendgeschichte

244 notes to pages 19 –26

einer Arbeiterin, von ihr selbst erzählt (The Story of a Young Worker’s Life, Told by Herself ) (Popp 909). In Hungary, Mariska Gárdos came to prominence with her collection of short stories Kilenc hónap (Nine Months) (Gárdos 97). One writer that I have included in this study is Minna Kautsky, who came from a petty bourgeois milieu but became a Social Democrat. chapter one  I am using “first wave” here in quotation marks for two reasons. One is that it is a term used by Harriet Anderson when she refers to the early stages of the first Austrian women’s movement. The other, main reason is to avoid historical confusion. The first women’s movement in the international context is generally referred to as the “first wave,” followed by the “second wave” of the 970s and, finally, the “third wave.” 2 In Hungary, several texts appeared in 790. One was a petition written on behalf of Hungarian mothers by a man, Péter Bárány. It was presented to the National Assembly of Hungarian Noblemen. It asked for women’s presence as spectators during the Assembly’s sessions. The petition used arguments similar to those Mary Wollstonecraft would use two years later in her classic A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, namely, if women were better instructed in politics, they would be better patriots and, therefore better educators of their sons – an argument that reappeared in the women’s movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ádám Pálóczi Horváth wrote a flyer, also in 790, entitled “A magyar asszonyok prókátora” (“A spokesman for Hungarian women”). Pálóczi also advocates women’s educational rights for the sake of better education of children. However, he goes one huge step further when he, using the example of great queens (Maria Theresa and Catherine the Great), recommends that women be allowed to hold public office (Kornis 927, 483–4). In the German cultural context, Theodor von Hippel published Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Weiber (On the Civil Advancement of Women) in 792. Hippel asks that the civil rights enlightened men claim for themselves be extended to women as well. He reiterates ideas that were typical for the Enlightenment (such as abolishing the oppression of an absolutist rule); but rather than applying them to the political situation, he uses them so as to argue against women’s oppression. 3 Troll-Borostyáni amply discusses the laws that gave men full privilege and right of disposal over their wife’s property, whereas a woman could not dispose of her own property, which she brought into marriage. 4 Psychiatrist Paul Julius Möbius, one of the famous misogynists of the fin de siècle, based his theories regarding women’s lower intellectual abilities on the same findings in his influential Über den physiologischen Schwachsinn des Weibes (On Woman’s Physiological Feeble-Mindedness), published in 900. Misogyny and its relationship with feminism is discussed in more detail in chapter three.

notes to pages 27–56 245

5 Rosa Mayreder is one example from real life. She was allowed to sit in on her brothers’ private tutorials and thus acquired a knowledge of subjects that were normally not taught to girls, such as classical languages. 6 This situation was still unchanged about a century later when the New Women’s Movement was born in Germany out of a disillusionment with the way women were treated by the men of the New Left. 7 The term in Hungarian is fiúsitás, which literally means “the making into a boy.” chapter two  This part of the law about inheritance did not apply to Hungary. 2 In Hungary, it is still a tradition today that some women, upon marriage, take up their husband’s name, and, henceforth are addressed not only by his last name (in this case Veres), but often his first name as well (here Pál), with the suffix -né, which stands for Mrs. 3 The street was later renamed after Veres and is now called Veres Pálné utca. 4 The most notorious case of limiting women’s rights to university education is discussed in Szegváry 988. 5 Germany was not the best of examples regarding the opening of universities to women. Whereas some German states had allowed women into the universities by the end of the nineteenth century, Prussia was the last state in Europe to do so. It was not until 904 that women were allowed to study at universities in Prussia. 6 On this topic, see Corrin 994, 8–50. 7 This initiative did come to fruition, at least temporarily, in a town in southern Hungary, Nagybecskerek, now Zrenjanin in Serbia (Neményi 90, 285–7). 8 Hainisch quotes the line “und ruhet nimmer” from Friedrich Schiller’s famous poem “Die Glocke.” This line is often quoted as the quintessential summary of the bourgeois ideal of femininity. 9 The implications and the extent of the debate over sexuality are discussed in more detail in chapter three. 0 One exception in this regard was the petition campaign against §75 of the German constitution, which made homosexuality a criminal activity. It was organized in Berlin by the Scientific and Humanitarian Committee (WissenschaftlichHumanitäres Komitee), founded in 897. The petition was signed by only a few women, but among those were members of the Austrian women’s movement, namely Rosa Mayreder and Grete Meisel-Hess. See Kokula 98, 9–20.  By the same token, feminists were often equated with hysterics. In particular, the suffragettes’ struggles were reduced “to the irrational outbursts of a group of deranged and dangerous women” (Felski 995, 3). 2 In Hungary, Margit Kaffka’s novel Hangyaboly (Anthill) is one rare example. In Austria, one example is Grete Meisel-Hess’s novella “Neid” (“Jealousy”); Maria Janitschek only hints at the topic of lesbianism in several of her narratives.

246 notes to pages 60 –73

3 I am thinking here in particular of Freud’s theory, developed later in Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilization and Its Discontents), about sublimation being an essential requirement of cultural production and women’s alleged inability to perform such sublimation. Fin-de-siècle feminists not only included women in the production of culture, but also stated the opposite of what Freud would formulate regarding the necessity of sublimation. 4 Ernst Haeckel was a zoology professor from Jena who popularized Darwin’s theories in Germany. Using Darwin’s theory about the evolution of the species, Haeckel developed his own theory about human social history, in which he distinguishes higher and lower human races. He based his system on what he calls monism, a theory that “creation evolved from a single principle, from the primitive cell to the social rise of the white race” (Janssen-Jurreit 979, 42). Haeckel’s major work from 899, Das Welträtsel (The Enigma of the World) became highly influential among several generations of German intellectuals and had sold 500,000 copies by the ascent of the Third Reich in 933. Other eugenicists, such as Herbert Spencer from England, fostered ideas that would exclude criminals, alcoholics, people who suffered from tuberculosis, and people with physical disabilities, mental illnesses, or venereal diseases from human reproduction, all in the name of an improvement in the biological quality of the race. 5 The Bund für Mutterschutz (later the name was expanded to Bund für Mutterschutz und Sexual-Reform) was founded in Berlin in 905, under the presidency of Helene Stöcker. Meisel-Hess joined it as soon as she moved to Berlin in 908. She became one of its most active and recognized members, giving public lectures and contributing articles to the League’s journal, Mutterschutz. Helene Stöcker considered her “one of the theoretical pillars of the League” (Melander 992, 705), even though some of her ideas were regarded as too radical. On the League, see also Janssen-Jurreit 982, 65–72. 6 As Harriet Anderson has pointed out, Meisel-Hess only uses those ideas of Freud that fit into her system and disregards others, such as those on “the necessity of repression for the existence of culture” (Anderson 992a, 74). I believe that the absence of the latter can be explained simply by the dates of Freud’s and MeiselHess’s publications. Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents was only published in the 930s. 7 I have slightly modified the existing English translation in the last part of the paragraph because it was incorrect. 8 Rosi Braidotti also confirms Mayreder’s findings: “We must be rid of the simplistic idea that we can remedy centuries of exclusion and disqualification of women by their sudden state-sponsored integration into the labor force and into symbolic institutions and systems of representation. Putting women in, allowing them a few odd seats in the previously segregated clubs is not enough. What is needed is for the newcomers to be able and to be entitled to redefine the rules of the game so as

notes to pages 73–7 247

to make a difference and make that difference felt concretely” (Braidotti 994, 242, emphasis in the original). chapter three  Beverley Clack includes in her list most “fathers” of Western thought: Plato, Aristotle, Tertullian, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Kramer and Sprenger, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Rousseau, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Weininger, Spengler, and J.R. Lucas. However, as David D. Gilmore has demonstrated, misogyny is by no means a phenomenon particular to Western culture, but can be found in many cultures worldwide. 2 In Germany, even an Association for the Fight Against Women’s Emancipation (Bund zur Bekämpfung der Fraunenemanzipation) was established in 92. In Austria or Hungary no similar organization existed (Evans 976, 75–205). 3 Gilmore uses the term “viriphobia” as opposed to “misandry,” which he finds “has little currency” as a term. Unlike misogyny, the concept of man-hating is not rooted in any organized form: “Women as a group do not appear to have a dogmatist ideology regarding men as a group” (Gilmore 200, 3). 4 This information is somewhat dated, given the date of publication of the article (984). Weininger’s book has since had not only new editions but also translations and Mayreder’s book has also appeared more recently, in a new edition by Harriet Anderson. 5 I have chosen the term heteroglossia rather than polyphony because it seems more appropriate given the background from which the different voices were speaking. Whereas polyphony means the co-existence of equal voices, heteroglossia is distinguished by differences in class, profession, or, I shall add, gender (Vice 997, 2–48). 6 Here I use ideology in Bakhtin’s terms, as a “particular way of viewing the world, one that strives for a social significance” (Bakhtin 98, 333). 7 I have selected these two authors rather than others from the given period whose writings have also been considered misogynistic by some, for the blatancy of their misogyny, their openly hateful tone regarding women, and the critical responses their writings elicited from the feminist writers. Beverley Clack also includes Nietzsche and Freud in her list of misogynists (Clack 999). However, she admits that when talking about misogyny, one has to distinguish between authors who developed wholly negative concepts of women (such as Weininger) and those who merely imply a hierarchy between women and men (man being the norm against which woman is measured). Freud would definitely fall into the second category. Not only were his statements regarding female sexuality ambivalent but also many of his theories concerning women were finalized later, in the 920s and 930s. Mayreder and Meisel-Hess criticized some of Freud’s ideas, such as the Oedipus complex (Springer-Kremser 999, 6), but not his anti-feminism. As we have seen

248

8 9

0  2 3

4

5 6

7

8

notes to pages 77–92

in chapter two, Meisel-Hess integrated several of Freud’s ideas into her own sexual psychology. Nietzsche’s somewhat open anti-feminism was ignored or went unnoticed by fin-de-siècle feminists, while other aspects of his oeuvre were received quite enthusiastically, such as his ideas about the new strong individual. One example is, again, Meisel-Hess, who was considerably influenced by Nietzsche, while remaining an ardent critic of Weininger, as shall be demonstrated in this chapter. The only woman writer among those mentioned here who expressed some criticism of Nietzsche (particularly on pages 45–59 of her 886 study Moderne Versuche eines Religionsersatzes: Ein philosophischer Essay) was Helene von Druskowitz. However, her criticism was directed against Nietzsche as a philosopher; she overlooks his anti-feminism. Here Möbius most likely refers to Theodor I.W. Bischoff and his “Hirnbeweis” (Heindl 997, 25). Sengoopta refutes Le Rider’s thesis developed in Modernity and Crises of Identity that the crisis of masculine identity constituted in itself the major cause for misogyny. See Stoehr 983, 22–48. Weininger 93. Bisztray finds an interesting historical parallel here given that the American civil war was taking place at the same time. She often published under male and female pseudonyms, a fairly widespread practice among women writers of the time. She used the pseudonyms Adalbert Brunn, H. Sakkorausch, H. Sakrosankt, Erna von Calagis, H. Foreign, and Frl. E. von René. The first woman Doctor of Philosophy to graduate from the University of Zurich was the Russian Stefania Wolicka. The very first woman with a doctorate in philosophy in the broader European context was the Italian Elena Cornaro, who obtained her degree from the University of Padua as far back as 678. According to Hanna Hacker, the publication date is not certain, it could also be 90 (Hacker 987, 66). Hinrike Gronewold and other scholars suspect that her “illness” mainly consisted in her lesbian inclinations and her somewhat rowdy behaviour – she was a heavy drinker and smoked a pipe – which was considered unacceptable for a woman of her social status (Gronewold 992; Hacker 987). I have not come across any written evidence that Druskowitz may have read either Möbius or Weininger; yet chronologically speaking, it is likely that she would have been familiar with their works (Möbius’s book was published in 90, Weininger’s in 903, and Druskowitz’s in 905 or later). Regarding the abolition of patriarchy, we can see here some parallels to Otto Gross, that controversial “sexual immoralist,” and his praise of a matriarchal revolution: “Today’s revolutionary, who, thanks to the psychology of the unconscious, can see relations between the sexes in the light of a free and happy future, struggles

notes to pages 92–126 249

against rape in its most elemental form against the father and against patriarchy. The coming revolution is a revolution of matriarchy. And its forms and methods are unimportant” (quoted in Le Rider 993, 35). However, Druskowitz, unlike Gross, speaks in favour of a total segregation of the sexes on top of the abolition of patriarchy. 9 I am thinking here in particular of Valerie Solanas (Solanas 97). She created SCUM as an abbreviation for Society for Cutting Up Men. Both the ideas she develops and her writing style closely resemble those of Druskowitz. chapter four  On the topic of the artist in German and Austrian women’s literature of the fin de siècle, see Dehning 2000. 2 All quotes are from the existing English translation. 3 The word for “wife” in Hungarian, feleség, literally means the “other half.” 4 The title can be translated as “the story of a young woman” or “the story of a virgin” – an ambiguity that was probably intended by the author. 5 “Fels” means “rock.” chapter five  Rosa Mayreder had expressed this sexual inequality already in 905: “The sexual relationship for the masterful man is bound up with the idea that woman is a lower order of being, essentially different from man but created for his purposes. The sexual relationship ministers to his sense of superiority – it gives him the sensation of power and possession. He cannot think of woman except as belonging to him and dependent upon him. He recognizes her only in so far as she is an expedient. As a separate individuality like himself, with aims of her own, she does not exist for him” (Mayreder 93, English translation, 94–5). 2 Although Meisel-Hess adopts here the discourse of hysteria, which ultimately over-medicalized female sexuality to keep it under control, it is much more significant that she developed a theory of hysteria as applied to the man. “Whereas doctors such as Freud constructed the threat of the ‘frigid’ hysterical women, Meisel-Hess concentrates on the ‘fragmented’ hysterical man” (Thorson 996, 238). Meisel-Hess defines hysteria in the following terms: “a patient is hysterical when the sense of the unitary personality has been lost, and when consciousness becomes dissociated into two or more conflicting elements” (Meisel-Hess 97b, 33). She shows such a split in Fanny’s husband and his “degeneracy,” rather than in Fanny herself. 3 I agree with Rita Morrien that Meisel-Hess infuses this description of the female body with clichés about femininity typical of the fin de siècle: “The new woman comes in old clothes, richly decorated with sultry erotic Jugendstil motives”

250

4

5 6

7

8

9

0



notes to pages 126 –44

(Morrien 2000, 49). Morrien interprets this as a lack of consistency, often found in turn-of-the-century women writers, which, however, should not divert from the overall criticism of the dominant images of femininity. On the novel’s references to historical characters, such as the intellectuals involved in “The Sunday Circle” (Vasárnapi Kör), particularly Ernst Bloch, see Karádi and Vezér 980, as well as Schwartz 2002, 297–306. See for instance Konrád 997, 8–92. Ritoók was known for her nationalist and anti-Semitic position. I am using the male character’s last name (Apostol) here rather than his first name (Sándor) to avoid confusion with the male character Sándor from Ritoók’s novel Egyenes úton – egyedül. Kaffka leaves some ambiguity regarding why the politician is not in his apartment when Mária arrives: it may be that he has not received her letter in time or that he has simply withdrawn. According to Hacker, in fiction, lesbian love became a more popular topic in the late 920s and 930s, for instance in Grete von Urbanitzky’s novels Der wilde Garten (The Wild Garden, 927) and Durch Himmel und Hölle (Through Heaven and Hell, 932). One fin-de-siècle author that she mentions and that I have not included here is Marie von Najmájer (844–904; Hacker 983). In Germany, Aimée Duc’s 90 novel Sind es Frauen? Roman über das dritte Geschlecht (Are They Women? A Novel About the Third Sex) stands out as one where lesbian love is celebrated with a happy ending. The rest of the lesbian fiction of the period was written largely by men and presented lesbians as sick or confused. This term is difficult to translate; literally, it means “sweet little girl.” It refers to a type of feminine figure found mainly in the work of Arthur Schnitzler and reflects a “young man’s ideal image that corresponds to his social and erotic expectations” (Janz and Laermann 977, 4, quoted in Severit 998, 5). The süße Mädl is from the lower classes, young and single, and she loves the young gentleman from the upper class unconditionally, only to be abandoned by him when he either moves on to the next süße Mädl or marries within his social class. The sexological literature of the time took two approaches to homosexuality: Richard von Krafft-Ebing maintained that homosexuals were “congenitally defective” (Faderman and Eriksson 990, xiv, emphasis in the original), whereas Freud held female homosexuality to be a sexual aberration but one that was acquired (Faderman and Eriksson 990, 6). Overall, however, female homosexuality figured much less in the medical and sexological literature: “there was the tendancy to treat female homosexuality ... as the simple reversal of male homosexuality” (Matysik 2004, 4). Thus Freud would not treat female homosexuality as a distinct libidinal phenomenon until 920 and, even then, he considered it less common than male homosexuality. The Berlin medical doctor Magnus Hirschfeld was an exception among his colleagues not only for his efforts to fight for the rights of homosexuals but also because he included female homosexuals in his theory of

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2

3

4

5

the “third sex,” “a category said to describe individuals whose sexual make-up falls somwhere in the middle of the spectrum of ‘male’ and ‘female’” (Matysik 2004, 4). In Germany, the legal situation of female homosexuals reflected the general ignorance about their existence. After 87, female homosexuality did not fall under Paragraph 75 of the criminal code (although in 909 there was an unsuccessful initiative to introduce a Paragraph 250 for female homosexuals as well). In Austria, on the other hand, lesbians and homosexuals were equally persecuted under Paragraph 29 (which dated back to the early nineteenth century and would only be abolished in 972). Brigitte Spreitzer recognizes these elements mainly in Asenijeff’s works and links her with the authors of Viennese modernity, in particular those of Jung-Wien (Spreitzer 999, 74–5). However, the very same elements are present in Kotányi and Vera. Lichtenberg Ettinger acknowledges her indebtedness in the development of her concept of the Matrix to object relations theory as developed by Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Guntrip as well as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and their rejection of the Oedipus. They have done research similar to Lichtenberg Ettinger’s on “intermediary psychic categories such as borderline cases” (Lichtenberg Ettinger 992, 205), which Lacan rejected. The term “voice” is used with a different meaning in this novel from that used in the rest of the present study. Whereas I use “voice” to designate the presence of various discourses in a narrative, here “voice” connotes the concept of “finding a voice” and gaining expression under a situation of oppression. Susan Sniader Lansen has called this concept of the term “voice” the “feminist” one, whereas the other concept would correspond somewhat to what she calls the “narratological” one (Lansen 992, 4). Although this aspect is not the focus of my analysis, this narrative has several autobiographical elements. Not only the passage from Vienna to Berlin but also Maja’s birthday correspond to facts from Meisel-Hess’s life. chapter six

 This literary scenario is reminiscent of a real-life case from the life of Rosa Mayreder. For several years, Mayreder’s husband was mentally ill and in therapy with Freud, who, at some point during the therapy, faulted Rosa and her intellectual superiority for her husband’s mental condition. 2 A strong tone of Eurocentrism is present in these lines, as in the whole East-West debate, which was so strong among Hungarian intellectuals of the turn of the century. In another essay from 92, Fejlődés (Evolution), written mainly as a pacifist outcry, Szikra pleads for the creation of a European federation, or a United States of Europe, as a means to prevent further wars. This proposal of a united Europe was visionary at the time; this idea would only be developed in the writings of the

252

3 4

5

6

notes to pages 173– 88

Austrian Count Richard N. von Coudenhove-Kalergi, who in 923 founded the Pan-European movement. Szikra’s Eurocentrism can also be read in this context. Another later Hungarian novel, Mari néni (Aunt Mari, 920), by Judit Beczássy, traces the destiny of the “old maid” aunt even better and in more detail. Judit Kádár mentions that the great poet Endre Ady, who would open up Hungarian poetry to a more frank expression of sexuality, was still at the beginning of his literary career and that this may have been an additional reason for the shocked reaction of critics not yet used to such openness about sexuality in poetry. Kádár does not exclude the possibility that Erdős may have influenced the later Ady, a hypothesis that she admits needs further research (Kádár 997, 8). The reception of Erdős’s writings among her contemporaries had an anti-Semitic aspect. Some critics claimed that it was her Jewish background that made her capable of pouring out such “confessions that knew no restraint nor decency” (Bánhegyi 938, 92). Erdős’s conversion to Catholicism was welcomed as a positive development in her quest for a remedy for her “wild Jewish temper,” but it was not enough. According to Bánhegyi, in her subsequent novels, such as Ave Roma (part four of her tetralogy based on her own experience of becoming a Catholic), erotic details still prevail and bring the motives for her conversion into question (Bánhegyi 938, 00–). In the Hungarian original, the word traditionally used for husband (úr) has a double meaning, also signifying “lord” and “master,” thereby invoking the patriarchal value system within marriage. chapter seven

 As Janet Stewart notes, this was also because in 89 “Vienna’s boundaries were extended to include the outer suburbs (Vororte), adding nine further districts (Bezirke) to the existing ten, and bringing the total population to ,365,70” (Stewart 2003, 27). 2 Reflecting on the usability of the term in its feminine form, flaneuse, Anke Gleber remarks that it carries “sexually suggestive, and discriminatory connotations.” On the other hand, “female flaneur,” although suggested by some scholars (Gleber mentions Meaghan Morris), has not gained sufficient ground in theories of flanerie: “The female flaneur has remained absent from debates over the status of the image and the perception of modernity” (Gleber 997, 69). Still, overall, “female flaneur” seems to be more acceptable a term and I adopt it here. 3 Trafficking in women was a major problem in Hungary at the time. In her speech A feminizmusról (read before the Lloyd society in 9), Szikra, an ardent fighter against trafficking, quoted some frightening statistics, namely, that Hungary was responsible for 50 per cent of the world trafficking in women. 4 As we know from the Feminist Association’s (FE ) activities, historical evidence proves exactly the contrary. Not only was its membership not limited to one particular class but also it offered professional courses for women, as well as counsel-

notes to pages 188 –91 253

ling and organized communal kitchen projects. Most Hungarian feminists from the FE and other associations (Szikra, Rózsa Schwimmer, and Sarolta Geöcze, to name but a few) were outstanding public workers and most were married. 5 “Bonnet” (főkötő) is used here as a metaphor for marriage, as traditionally a woman who was not married would be referred to as hajadon, meaning a woman who does not cover her hair. 6 The Hungarian word, úr, also implies a class division between working-class Fáni and the middle-class sculptor.

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Index

Acsády, Judit, 5, 57, 85, 86 Ady, Endre, 7, 252n4 (ch. 6) aestheticist modernism, 5 Aiken, Susan Hardy, 65 Anderson, Harriet, 9, , 2, 3, 20, 46, 52, 53, 54, 96, 243n6, 244n, 246n6 Angerer, Marie-Luise, 75, 2 A nő és a társadalom (A nő), 5, 56, 206, 209 anti-Semitism, 5, 34, 36, 89, 204, 250n5, 252n5 AÖF. See General Austrian Women’s Association Arens, Catherine, 84 Asenijeff, Elsa, 76, 30–, 55–9, 20; on marriage and motherhood, 9–2; her viriphobia, 93–4; Nietzsche’s influence on, 55, 57 Association for Female Writers and Artists in Vienna (Verein der Schriftstellerinnen und Künstlerinnen in Wien), 205 Association for Women’s Extended Education (Verein für erweiterte Frauenbildung), 46 Ausgleich, 6

authoritative discourse, 0, 24, 29, 38, 49, 5, 63; definition of, 9–0 Bader-Zaar, Birgitta, 53, 54 Bahr, Hermann, 5 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 9–0, 77, 96, 247n6 Balogh Almási, István, 86 Bánhegyi, Jób, 04, 3, 7, 74, 75, 252n5 Bárány, Péter, 36–7, 244n2 Bartók, Béla, 7 Batts, Michael S., 4 Bauer, Dale, 8, 76, 77, 9, 44, 50 Bebel, August, 48 Beczássy, Judith, 252n3 (ch. 6) Bédy-Schwimmer, Rózsa. See Schwimmer Beller, Steven, 5 Benedikt, Moritz, 2 Benjamin, Jessica, 0–, 57, 72, 80, 08, 32, 36–7, 54, 58 Bergson, Henri, 6 Berlin, 9, 70, 85, 93–4, 97 Bildungsroman, 29, 09 Bischoff, Theodor L.W., 83, 248n8 Bisztray, György, 87, 248n2

272 index

Black Friday 873, 4,  Bodnár, György, 98 Borgos, Anna, 2, 22 Boross, István, 6, 7 bourgeois women’s movement, 8–9, , 5, 7, 79, 2–3, 28, 70, 95; its goals, 2, 5, 73, 75–6, 47; and pacifism, 2, 5, 25n2; and homosexuality, 56, 46, 245n0 Bozzay, Margit, 205 Braidotti, Rosi, 80, 95, 246n8 Brausewetter, Ernst, 26 Brinker-Gabler, Gisela, 32 Broch, Hermann, 3, 47 Bródy, Sándor, 84, 202 Brude-Fimau, Gisela, 79 Bruns, Brigitte, 75 Budapest, 3, 6–7, 3, 82–4, 86–9, 94 Catholic Church, 53, 88, 5, 45, 46, 76, 78, 79 Chambers, Helen, 4, 25, 26 Chodorow, Nancy, 09 city, 9, 82–94 Cixous, Hélène, 45 Clack, Beverley, 247nn, 7 Clément, Catherine, 45 Committee for Women’s Suffrage (Frauenstimmrechtskomitee), 53–4 co-operative households, 2, 43, 245n7 Corrin, Chris, 245n6 crisis: of identity, 5, 7, 47, 59, 98, 99; of the self, 8–9, 46, 59; of the female self, 47–50, 54–5, 56, 58, 59, 63, 65, 98 critical modernism, 6 cultural crisis and renewal, 54, 70, 74, 84, 85, 90, 49, 99 Darwin’s theories, 246n4 De Gerando, Antonina, 6, 3–2, 20–2 Dehning, Sonja, 249n (ch. 4)

desire, 0, 04, 2, 22, 24, 27, 32–3, 36–9, 4–3, 45, 49, 50, 54–8, 74 dialogic relationship, 9, 0, 26, 27, 74, 76, 77–8, 80–3, 85–6, 88–9, 9, 93–5 Dokumente der Frauen, 5, 206 Dopplinger-Loebenstein, Andrea, 26, 28 double burden, 48, 245n8 double focus, 7–8, 20, 33, 75, 76, 82, 87; definition of, 0 double-voiced discourse, 28, 0; definition of, 0 Dreisziger, N.F., 6 Druskowitz, Helene von, 76, 90, 202; on women’s genius, 9; and women’s cultural mission, 92; her viriphobia, 92–3, 249n8; her essentialism, 93; on Nietzsche, 202, 248n7; her pseudonyms, 248n3, 249n9 Dual Monarchy, 3, 6, 33 Duc, Aimée, 250n9 emancipation, 5, 9, 20, 23, 26, 28–9, 30, 33–4, 38–9, 50, 63, 70, 8, 82, 86, 90, 93, 00, 06, 0, , 2–3, 6–8, 67, 86 Enzenhofer, Alexandra, 09 Erdős, Renée, 9, 76, 73–82, 202–3, 252n5; against Weininger and Möbius, 88–9; her viriphobia, 94, 79 Eriksson, Brigitte, 43, 250n essentialism, 7, 23, 39, 44–5, 52, 66, 69, 7, 77, 79, 80, 8, 83, 89, 9, 93, 95–6, 22, 34, 55, 69 “eternal feminine,” 23, 93, 2–3 eugenics, 44, 52, 60, 64–5, 73, 49, 96, 246n4 Evans, Richard, 247n2 expressionism, 93 Fábri, Anna, 3, 32, 37, 7–2, 74, 90 Faderman, Lillian, 43, 250n

index 273

FE . See Feminist Association

Federation of Hungarian Women’s Associations (Magyarországi Nőegyesületek Szövetsége), 4 Felski, Rita, 9, 46, 245n female sexuality, 66–7, 75, 2, 22, 24–3, 37, 38–9, 4–6, 49, 52–3, 56–7, 59, 75–80 female subject, 8, 09, 32, 33, 37, 38, 39, 47, 50, 59, 65–6 femininity, 9, 0, 24, 42, 48, 52, 58, 67–9, 74, 79, 83, 94, 0–, 2, 62, 64, 8, 87, 200, 249n3; bourgeois ideal of, 28, 3, 32, 73, 85, 245n8 feminism, 8–9, , 3, 5, 7, 26, 34, 4, 42, 44, 73, 75–6, 78, 79, 8, 84, 95–6, 6, 80, 8, 88, 200; cultural, 4, 56, 95; radical, 6, 28, 4, 56, 95, 95; non-victim position of, 25, 62; vs misogyny, 8–5, 87–90 Feminist Association (Feministák Egyesülete, FE ), 8, 4, 5, 55, 252n4 femme fatale, 33, 52, 56–7, 73, 9–3 Ferenczi, Sándor, 5, 80, 22, 76 Fickert, Auguste, 203; on the women’s movement, 2; on women’s education, 5–2; on suffrage, 54 Fischer, Lisa, 74 flaneur, 85–6, 90, 93, 252n2 Földes, Anna, 0 Fraisl, Bettina, 07 Freud, Sigmund, 5, 6, 46, 206, 25n; on female sexuality, 2–2, 26; on female homosexuality, 43, 250n; on sublimation, 6, 3, 246nn3, 6; on hysteria, 32, 38; his misogyny, 60, 247n7 Frevert, Ute, 26 Frigyesi, Judit, 83, 84, 89 Fuchs, Malvine, 3 Fülöp, László, 98

Gárdos, Mariska, 244n7 Geißler, Max, 07, 09, 26, 48 General Austrian Women’s Association (Allgemeiner Österreichischer Frauenverein, AÖF), –2, 5, 53, 203 genius, 80, 84–5, 86, 9, 64 Geöcze, Sarolta (Charlotte), 7–8, 38–9, 203 Gilbert, Sandra, 34 Gilman Perkins, Charlotte, 78 Gilmore, David D., 75, 76, 247nn, 3 Gleber, Anke, 85–6, 252n2 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 93, 65 Gronewold, Hinrike, 248n6 Gross, Otto, 248n8 Gubar, Susan, 34 Gürtler, Christa, 29, 5 Hacker, Hanna, 40, 43, 248nn5, 6, 250n8 Haeckel, Ernst, 64, 246n4 Hainisch, Marianne, 203; on women’s higher and professional education, 6, 45, 47–8; and paid work, 2–3; on women’s double burden, 48, 245n8; on suffrage, 53–4; her image of femininity, 23, 48 Hanák, Péter, 3, 6, 7 Harriman, Helga, 4 Hauer, Anna, 8 Heindl, Waltraud, 47, 248n8 Hermann, Jost, 93 heteroglossia, 9, 77, 6, 9, 75, 82, 96, 247n5; definition of, 0; gender, 77, 79, 95–6 heterosexual romance, 9–20, 72, 73, 88, 90, 98 Hilmes, Carola, 57, 93 Hippel, Theodor von, 26, 244n2 Hirschfeld, Magnus, 250n Hirschkop, Ken, 27, 77

274 index

Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 5, 47, 48 Huch, Ricarda, 25 Huzella, Gyuláné, 58 hybrid (hybrid construction), 2–2, 40–, 42, 96; definition of, 0, 22 hysteria, 26, 29, 32, 38, 45, 46, 249n2 internally persuasive discourse, 9–0, 39, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 50, 5, 60, 64–5, 7, 98, 00, 05, 2, 63; definition of, 9–0, 96 intersubjectivity, 57, 08, 29, 36–7, 49–50, 54, 58, 65, 79, 99; definition of, 0–, 7–2, 32–3 Irigaray, Luce, 32 irony, 24, 29, 87, 88, 0, 23, 25, 30, 34, 53, 67–7, 82, 85, 200 Janik, Allan, 5 Janitschek, Maria, 9, 22–6, 40–3, 67–7, 85–6, 203–4, 245n2; her irony, 23, 25, 67–7, 82, 85, 200 Janssen-Jurreit, Marielouise, 246nn4, 5 Janz, Rolf-Peter, 250n0 Jastrzębska, Jolanta, 77, 80 Jerusalem-Kotányi, Else, 6–2, 50–5, 204; Nietzsche’s influence on, 53–4 Johnston, William M., 6, 2, 83 Jušek, Karin, 56, 75 Kádár, Judit, 75, 77, 252n4 (ch. 6) Kaffka, Margit, 98–03, 37–40, 45–6; against Weininger and Szász, 87–8, 204, 245n2 Kánya, Emília, 4 Kapff-Essenther, Franziska von, 27–9, 205 Karádi, Éva, 250n4 Kaufman, Michael, 3 Kautsky, Minna, 2, 29–30, 205 Kelecsényi, László, 7

Kemenes Géfin, László, 77, 80 Kerekes, Amália, 80, 88 Klinger, Max, 20 Klugsberger, Theresia, 35 Kóbor, Tamás, 84 Kodály, Zoltán, 7 Kokula, Ilse, 245n0 Konrád, Miklós, 250n5 Kornis, Gyula, 37 Kotányi, Else. See Jerusalem-Kotányi, Else Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 75, 49; on homosexuality, 250n Kraus, Karl, 84 Kristeva, Julia, 59–60 Lacan, Jaques, 3–2, 25n3 Laermann, Klaus, 250n0 Lamb, Sharon, 5 Lansen, Susan Sniader, 96–7, 25n4 Laube, Grete, 45 League of Austrian Women’s Associations (Bund Österreichischer Frauenvereine), 3 League for the Protection of Mothers (Bund für Mutterschutz), 65, 66, 246n5 Leidinger, Christiane, 56 Le Rider, Jacques, 75, 248n9, 249n8 lesbianism, 8; and the women’s movement 56, 46, 245n0; in women’s fiction, 56, 40–6, 245n2, 250nn8, 9; its legal situation, 25n Lettner, Natalie, 24 Lichtenberg Ettinger, Bracha, 9, 3, 60–, 25n3 Lindhoff, Lena, 32 List-Ganser, Berta, 47 literary canon, 2, 47, 48, 66, 84; and women writers, 4, , 9, 98, 5, 63, 98; and the femme fatale, 57 Loos, Adolf, 84 Lucka, Emil, 82

index 275

Lukacs, John, 6, 83, 88, 90 Lux, Terka, 3–6, 90–3, 205–6 Mach, Ernst, 5, 46, 65 Madách, Imre, 85–6 Maria Dorothea Association (Mária Dorothea Egyesület), 4, 20– marriage: in theoretical texts of the women’s movement, 2, 24, 29, 3, 40, 4, 43, 48, 50, 56, 57–62, 64, 65–6, 7; in fiction, 00, 02, 05, 06, 07, 8, 24, 26, 28, 40–, 48, 49, 72–3, 78, 8; viriphobia and, 90–2; marital rape in fiction, 27, 28, 30; and lesbianism in fiction, 42, 44 Mársits, Rozina, 40–, 206 masculinity, 68–70, 74, 0, 3, 4, 64; “degenerate,” 63–4, 94, 27, 29, 36, 6–2, 65, 78, 79, 99, 249n2 Matrix, 9, 60–, 65–6, 98–9 Matysik, Tracie, 250n Mayreder, Rosa, 2, 23, 206, 245nn5 (ch. ), 0, 249n (ch. 5); on the educational system, 52; on suffrage, 54; on intersubjectivity, 57, 7, 72; on femininity, 67–9; on masculinity, 68–70; on the moral double standard, 70; her essentialism, 69, 7; against Möbius, 79; against Weininger, 8–2; her vision of a new culture, 70, 84, 3; and Freud 70, 247n7, 25n Meisel-Hess, Grete, 5, 70, 206–7, 245nn0, 2; on women’s professional work and education, 49–5; on suffrage, 54; on the moral double standard, 62–3, 07; on degenerate masculinity, 63–4, 27, 65, 249n2; on marriage, 64–5; her ideas in relation to Freud, 66–7, 26, 246n6, 247n7; on motherhood, 65; against Weininger, 82; her essentialism, 83; on genius, 84–5, 64; on women’s cultural mission, 85; on hysteria,

249n2; her fiction, 07–9, 26–7, 43–4, 6; Nietzsche’s influence on, 64–5, 248n7 Melander, Ellinor, 82, 07, 246n5 Meyer-Renschhausen, Elisabeth, 243n4 misogyny, 7, 75–8, 80, 83–4, 85–7, 88–9, 95–6, 62–3, 79, 96, 247nn, 7; vs feminism, 8–5, 87–90 Mittnik, Kay, 2, 2 Möbius, Paul Julius, 75, 77–8, 83–4, 244n4, 248n8 modernity, 3, 7, 8, 8, 9, 90, 96, 47, 54–5, 59, 65, 94, 98, 25n2; and the city, 84, 87, 93, 252n2 moral double standard, 6, 8, 23, 24, 29, 56, 60, 6–3, 66, 70, 75, 07, 5, 6, 2, 23, 26–7, 28, 43, 48, 49, 52–3, 76 Morrien, Rita, 27, 249n3 motherhood: in theoretical texts of the women’s movement, 22, 25, 40, 48, 49, 66, 72; and misogyny, 79, 80, 89; and viriphobia, 9, 92; in fiction, 6, 9, 44, 79 Musil, Robert, 34, 47, 48 mystical love, 32, 33, 57–8 National Association of Women Office Workers (Nőtisztviselők Országos Egyesülete, NOE ), 3, 4, 36, 55 National Association for Women’s Education (Országos Nőképző Egyesület), 4, 20– national identity, 7–8, 4 National Women’s Employment Association (Országos Nőiparegylet), 4, 20– nationalism, 7–8, 4, 6, 32, 87, 88, 200 naturalism, 7, 04, 84 Neissl, Julia, 43 Neményi, Erzsébet, 44–6, 207, 245n7 “new man,” 39, 80

276 index

new morality, 6–2, 85, 53–4, 55 “new woman,” 8, 64, 70, 97, 98, 0, 03, 06, 4–20, 24, 34, 36, 39, 40, 62, 87, 96, 97 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5, 46, 53–4, 55, 57, 202, 248n7 Nyugat, 7, 47, 204 Omran, Susanne, 67 Pálóczi Horváth, Ádám, 244n2 parody, 04–5 patriotism, 4, 6, 32, 40, 87, 20 Perczelné Kozma, Flóra, 89–90 Pető, Andrea, 56 Pintér, Jenő, 6, 7 Pöder, Elfriede, 70 Pollacsek, Stricker Sándorné Laura, 39–40, 208 Pollock, Griselda, 65, 86 polyphony, 247n5 Popp, Adelheid, 243n7 Poppeler, Hermine, 70 professional women’s organizations, 20– prostitution, 2, 6, 23, 59, 60, 8, 94, 209 Pynsent, Robert B., 6, 8, 92 Reiss, Mary-Ann, 76 Ridge, George, 92 Rieff, Philip, 75 Ritoók, Emma, 7–8, 3, 6–20, 33–7, 207 Roebling, Irmgard, 66–7, 07 romantic love, 7, 05, 28, 30, 37, 38, 39 Sármány (Sármány-Parsons), Ilona, 7, 9 satire, 72, 8, 82, 88, 89 Schackmann, Isolde, 2 Schaeffer-Hegel, Barbara, 3

Scherpe, Klaus, 84, 9 Schickedanz, Hans-Joachim, 57 Schmid (Schmid-Bortenschlager), Sigrid, 29, 97–8, 23, 48, 5, 243n Schnedl-Bubeniček, Hanna, 243n Schnitzler, Arthur, 5, 47, 48, 50 Schorske, Carl, 5 Schwartz, Agatha, 250n4 Schwimmer (Bédy-Schwimmer), Rózsa (Rosika), 3, 207; on the women’s movement, 5, 35–6; on women’s education and paid work, 43–4; on marriage, 59 Sengoopta, Chandak, 77–8, 248n9 7th Congress of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, 55–6, 209 Severit, Frauke, 22, 250n0 sexual violence, 26–7, 30–, 39, 48, 5, 56, 77–8, 96 Shepherd, David, 27, 77 Showalter, Elaine, 60 social democracy, 29–30 Social Democratic women’s movement, , 2, 6, 9 socialism, , 3, 38, 39, 43, 48, 50, 5, 52, 64–5, 72, 92, 96 Solanas, Valerie, 249n9 Spreitzer, Brigitte, 93, 0, , 58, 6, 65, 25n2 Springer-Kremser, Marianne, 247n7 Stefan, Verena, 07 Stewart, Janet, 252n Stöcker, Helene, 246n5 Stoehr, Irene, 59, 248n0 Stone, Norman, 3 Stricker Sándorné Pollacsek, Laura. See Pollacsek suicide, 9, 44, 48, 50, 54, 57, 58, 80 süßes Mädl, 43, 250n0 Switzer, Teri, 243n3 Szapor, Judit, 36, 56 Szász, Zoltán, 88, 252n3

index 277

Szederkényi, Anna, 03–7, 27–9, 86–8, 209 Szegváry, Katalin, 245n4 Szikra, 3, 209; on women’s economic independence, 4–2; on women’s legal status, 54–5; on marriage, 57; her fiction, 9, 7–3, 88–90; her satire, 8, 82, 89; her eurocentrism and pacifism, 25n2; on trafficking in women, 252n3 (ch. 7) Teleki, Blanka, 4 Thenen, Julie, 26–7, 209 Thorson, Helga Mae, 56, 82, 26, 27, 46, 249n2 Timms, Edward, 83, 84 Tötösy, Steven de Zepetnek, 98, 0 Troll-Borostyáni, Irma von, 6, 20, 244n3; on women’s education and upbringing, 23–6; on the moral double standard, 23–4; on women’s professional work, 48–9, 83; on marriage and sexuality, 60–; her fiction, 09–3, 6 Urbanitzky, Grete von, 250n8 utopia, 23, 99 Vance, Carole, 69 Várkonyi, Nándor, 04, 7, 74 Vasárnapi Kör, 207, 250n4 Vera, 48–50, 20 Veres, Pálné, 4, 37, 20; against Madách, 86–7 Vezér, Erzsébet, 250n4 Vice, Sue, 77 Vienna, 3, 6–7, 83–4, 93, 94, 252n Viennese Women’s Employment Association (Wiener FrauenErwerbsverein),  viriphobia, 7, 74, 76, 77, 9–6, 59, 79, 98, 247n3

Wagner, Nike, 2 Wagner, Otto, 84 Wartmann, Brigitte, 3 wedding night, 29–30, 07, 08, 2, 26–7, 28, 30–, 34, 6, 77 Wedekind, Frank, 42 Weedon, Chris, 5, , 243n Weigel, Sigrid, 0, 05, 8, 9, 35, 56, 85, 90 Weininger, Otto, 75, 77, 79–8, 84, 87, 79, 247n4 Weinzierl, Erika, 54 White, Allon, 77 Wilhelm, Szidónia, 4; on women’s paid work and education, 42–3; on marriage, 59; on sexual education, 59–60 Wittmann, Livia, 9, 38, 45, 47, 55 Wohl, Janka, 7, 20– Wohl, Stefánia, 6, 32–3, 20– Wollstonecraft, Mary, 36, 244n2 woman question, 2, 42, 44 women’s education and upbringing: criticism of, 24–5, 02, 49, 70 women’s paid work, 2–3, 4, 43, 48–9, 50 women’s professional, secondary, and higher education, 8, 2, 97–8; in Hungary, 36–8, 44; in Austria, 45–52 women’s suffrage: in Austria, 53–4; in Hungary, 54–6 Woolf, Virginia, 2 Wunberg, Gotthart, 47 Zeitroman, 34 Zimmermann, Susan, 4, 5, 36, 38, 44, 54, 55, 243n6 Zottleder, Ernestine, 8 Zsuppán, F.T., 53 Zweig, Stefan, 5