Neuschreibungen historischer Frauengestalten in der Literatur von Frauen : Daphne Marlatts Ana historic und Christa Wolfs Kassandra
| dc.contributor.author | Satzinger, Beatrix | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2024-08-15T18:19:09Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2024-08-15T18:19:09Z | |
| dc.date.copyright | 1992 | en_US |
| dc.date.issued | 1992 | |
| dc.degree.department | Department of Germanic Studies | en_US |
| dc.degree.level | Master of Arts M.A. | en |
| dc.description.abstract | Although women have always participated in the creation of western culture, their lives and histories have not been recorded in patriarchal historiography. In literature women were allotted stereotype roles. perceived and written from a male perspective. This thesis examines (writing) women's desires to reconstruct and reinvent women's psychological rootedness in afemale history in their search for constituting a new subjectivity and identity. The desire to create female self in the present, even with a view towards the future, leads to focusing back into a female past that has lain hidden from us. More specifically, I look at the rewriting of female historical figures in two recent works of fiction: Ana Historic (1988) by the English-Canadian feminist writer Daphne Marlatt, and Kassandra (1983) by the East German writer Christa Wolf. The first chapter explores women's absence in recorded history and, as 'real' women, in men's literature. It looks at the new women's movement in North America and Europe and its psychological consequences for many women's awareness of themselves. With the birth of "difference" as a valid gender quality that reaches beyond the desire for equality with men, areas of male structures and achievements are being questioned, in particular in literary theory and aesthetics. The shift in women's awareness is reflected in women's writing which, in turn, influences women's awareness. The last part of Chapter I examines the issue of the (in)compatibility of historical facts and fictionalization in rewriting female history. In this context, I look at both women's historical fiction and the new women historians' approach. As a result of my studies, the social-cultural construction of gender seems to me not only a worthwhile but imperative component of examination for the exploration of women's subjectivity and constitution of identity. Chapter II is exclusively devoted to Marlatt's Ana Historic. After a more general introduction, it focuses on the distinction between male, official history based on historical references, and a female, inner story, whose interest does not lie in precise factuality. The last part 'of this chapter explores the roles of female gender and sexuality in Ana Historic. Since gender is constructed so must female subjectivity be. Therefore, for Marlatt, there does exist the possibility of change in women's subjectivity and thus identity. In her novel, Marlatt liberates two of her female characters (Ana and Annie) from pre-ordained gender roles and gender behaviours through a "leap of imagination", i.e. the fantasy of an un-gendered and original form of "femaleness": this is, in Ana Historic, achieved through the act of writing and living the female body in a non-prescribed female language and sexuality. Chapter ill focuses mainly on Christa Wolf's Kassandra and the Voraussetzungen. After an introduction of the Kassandra-Complex, both Ana Historic and Kassandra are assessed in the context of historiographic metafiction. Part 3 examines the ways in which the myth of Troy and the female figure of the mythic-historical seer Kassandra have been psychologized and historicized, and thus been made accessible to a subjective rewriting. This part of the chapter also links Ana Historic with Kassandra in so far as it looks at theĀ· most obvious features the two works have in common. Moreover, the question is raised as to whether the two rewritings of female history can be seen as attempts to write women into history or out of history. The last part of this chapter focuses on male versus female history as presented in Kassandra, and includes a brief exploration of the role of sexuality in Wolf's novel as compared to Marlatt's. | en |
| dc.format.extent | 136 pages | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1828/19576 | |
| dc.rights | Available to the World Wide Web | en_US |
| dc.subject | UN SDG 5: Gender Equality | en |
| dc.title | Neuschreibungen historischer Frauengestalten in der Literatur von Frauen : Daphne Marlatts Ana historic und Christa Wolfs Kassandra | en_US |
| dc.type | Thesis | en_US |
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