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- Title
VISIONS OF SADISTIC WOMEN: SADE, SACHER-MASOCH, KAFKA.
- Authors
Katharina Schaffner, Anna
- Abstract
Invested with both fear and longing, the figure of the sadistic woman is always double. At once castrating executor of the death-wish and object of desire, perverter of the 'natural' order and a necessary agent in the male sexual imagination, she embodies the ambiguous attitudes towards female sexuality that precipitated the crisis in modern conceptions of gender. This essay explores three paradigmatic literary representations of sadistic women in order to shed light not only on specifically modern sexual fantasies and anxieties, but also on more general cultural assumptions about what was deemed appropriate and what was understood as pathological feminine behaviour in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The sadistic woman violates both latent and overt gender stereotypes in the most radical manner, and thus presents an ideal case study for exploring the nature and function of these stereotypes. After briefly addressing theories of female sadism in nineteenth-century sexological and twentieth-century psychoanalytical discourse, I discuss Juliette (1797) by the Marquis de Sade, Venus im Pelz (1869) by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and a selection of Franz Kafka's cruel women figures, in particular in Der Verschollene (written in 1912-13, first published in 1927), which not only reveals the influence of his literary predecessors but also presents a characteristically tragicomic modernist vision of the female sadist.
- Subjects
SADISM in literature; SADE, marquis de, 1740-1814; VON Sacher-Masoch, Leopold; KAFKA, Franz, 1883-1924; DER Verschollene (Book); VENUS im Pelz (Book); JULIETTE (Book)
- Publication
German Life & Letters, 2012, Vol 65, Issue 2, p181
- ISSN
0016-8777
- Publication type
Essay
- DOI
10.1111/j.1468-0483.2011.01566.x