The Femininity Drama—Women Playwrights at the End of the 19th Century

Abstract

Heike Schmid’s dissertation on German-speaking women playwrights at the end of the 19th century tackles the dearth of research on these playwrights and their work, as “no other territory pursued by women has undergone such consequent exclusion from literature’s historiography and canonisation as the dramatical genus” (p. 35). At the end of the 19th century, as naturalism and modern writers evolved, many women writers dared introduce their work to the public sphere. Dramatical works in particular tend to “recur on societal conditions of their time” and contain a “contemporary, disturbing and thereby oftentimes destabilizing potential which spreads through the specifical way of—collective—reception of drama” (p. 13). However, it is important to bear in mind “that also the Moderne constitutes a patriachy, which evades social questions, especially the question of new lifedrafts of women” in view of “the consequent non-observance of contemporary femal dramatists” (p.14). Even today, the “tight yet opulent production of drama” continues to exclude women’s writing (Wilperts Sachwörterbuch der Literatur).