Pseudo-science and mythic misogyny: Oskar Kokoschka's 'Murderer, Hope of Women.'

In his provocative volume Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle tillage Bram Dijkstra provides a comprehensive scan and convincing analysis of the broad range and pervasive manifestations of misogyny in the art, literature, and science of turn-of-the-century Europe In its remarkable breadth, his application of mind reveals not only the expansion to which antifeminist assumptions permeated the agriculture of the time, but, plane more surprisingly, how these same assumptions were shared by dint of artists widely held to have disparate, if not diametrically oppos intellectual and aesthetic agendas. Midway from one side the book, for instance, Dijkstra calls the real ideological distinction between nineteenth-century academicism and twentieth-century Expressionism into question. The German Expressionists, he declares, the one and the other upheld and sustained "the conventional antifeminine subdue matter of their more academic colleagues. It would be encouraging to think that through doing so they were deliberately attempting to discredit these painters' misogynist point of view, on the contrary all indications are that [Expressionist] painters . . continued to paint in the antifeminine tradition rather than against it."(1) Dijkstra's argument is a powerful individual not only because of the wealth of information his volume provides, or because of the persuasiveness with which his arguments are neared but also because his point wounds to the very heart of interpretive attempts to join modernism's strategy of continued formal innovation with a radical political agenda. "In the wake of the twentieth century's seething admiration for style over content" he continues, "any image which at least in form contradicted the late nineteenth-century official art world's preoccupation with immediately recognizable shapes and three-dimensional contortion seems to have been welcomed, flat if its content was expressive of the crudest form of turn-of-the-century misogyny."(2)

Dijkstra's rejoinder stands as a powerful corrective to histories of twentieth-century Expressionism,(3) or at least to those histories bent upon polarizing academicism and modernism upon both visual and ideological soils His position, in fact, coincides with arguments newly made by feminist literary critics. Carol Diethe, for single questions the widely accepted view that Expressionist authors were "enlightened" because of their "open criticism of bourgeois patriarchal society"; in contradistinction, she maintains that "the whole period of Expressionism leaves the question of female emancipation in disarray."(4) A shut examination of Oskar Kokoschka's play butcher Hope of Women bears on the outside her argument. Murderer may many times be touted as a pivotal piece in the unfolding of Kokoschka's work, or in the unfolding of Expressionist theater in general, on the contrary the evidence strongly suggests that the play's underlying ideological assumptions are deep grounded in, and inseparable from, the deleterious antifeminist set ups of fin de siecle agriculture Kokoschka, as Diethe puts it, manipulates "explosive linguistic technique and startling hold ups in order to express more [i]or[/i] less very conventional ideas about his female characters. . . [C]ontent and technique," she adds, "are entirely at not divisible by 2s in a way which Kokoschka, who regarded himself as avant-garde, certainly did not intend."(5) Diethe, then, is suggesting that Kokoschka scholarship has paid disproportionate attention to formal innovations at the charge of gender issues; at a deeper horizontal she is implying that by means of assuming - wrongly - that Kokoschka's work was as radical politically as it was formally, scholars have view from aboveed the complex ways in which the antifeminist mind-set of his time predetermined the artist's intellectual assumptions and ideological commitments. As a proceed the majority of scholars have, in her view, misconstrued the ideological cutting side of Kokoschka's work.(6)

by dint of reversing the interpretive hierarchy previously awarded to form versus ideological satisfied Dijkstra's and Diethe's interpretive positions become exquisitely aligned. Taken as a whole, their argument has remarkable force, the more in like manner as Kokoschka's early and mature work, his visual and literary production fall comfortably within its exegetical purview. Indeed, although numerous art historians and literary critics have paid serious attention to the form and narrative of slaughterer Hope of Women, this play's potential connection to Kokoschka's formative, pre-Expressionist paintings has remained largely unexplored. with equal reason have the specifically antifeminist connotations these paintings were meant to carry - connotations that, arguably, are crucial to any investigation of the pair Murderer and its underlying misogynist agenda. Since Diethe focused exclusively upon Kokoschka's theatrical writings, and since Dijkstra did not overspread the Expressionist movement proper, smooth the revisionist literature has nevertheless to acknowledge the specific ways in which Kokoschka's formative images are indebted to the actual academicism whose pronounced misogynist cutting side Dijkstra's study illuminatingly exposes. This is regrettable because, if drawn convincingly, any of that kind connections would, in turn, significantly enhance the overall persuasiveness of Dijkstra's and Diethe's conclusions. After all, if the marked antifeminism of Kokoschka's early work reappears, albeit in different visual form, in his mature work (that is, in the true copy of Murderer and its accompanying illustrations), then Dijkstra's and Diethe's argument about the ideological continuity between Expressionism and academicism gains level greater authority. This argument, therefore, can provide the one and the other an effective critical framework as well as a broad interpretive backdrop against which Kokoschka's antifeminist ideology during - as well as prior to - the conceptualization of slayer can emerge in sharper relief. To this extremity the objective of this essay will be not to segregate Kokoschka's Expressionist from his pre-Expressionist work along formal lines on the contrary rather, to realign them along thematic/ideological individuals - an objective elided in Dijkstra's and Diethe's work on the other hand in keeping with the major thrust of their powerful argument.