Gender and Identity in Franz Grillparzer’s Classical Dramas by Alicia E. Ellis

Abstract

Reviewed by: Gender and Identity in Franz Grillparzer’s Classical Dramas by Alicia E. Ellis Pamela S. Saur Alicia E. Ellis, Gender and Identity in Franz Grillparzer’s Classical Dramas. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021. 175 pp. The new study of Grillparzer by Alicia E. Ellis discusses the female protagonists in three of his classical dramas. The study emphasizes gender, identity, and related issues such as women’s social standing and constraints in ancient Greek culture. The three are Grillparzer’s versions of familiar figures from classical texts (myths and dramas), analyzed here with the benefit of applicable contemporary feminist views, particularly the theories of Judith Butler and Sara Ahmed. Ellis states in her introduction, “I do not explicitly argue [End Page 124] that Grillparzer was a feminist [ . . . ] but rather that his work can be read as a feminist intervention where gender and difference become the site of the constitution of his subjects” (3). She emphasizes the significance of “female speech,” which in these dramas “resists the negating power of containment, regulation and punishment” (1). All three women are willful and rebellious, all are treated unjustly by authorities and circumstances, and all “eventually leave the lives that have alienated them” (9). Ellis identifies the women as Sappho “the alienated poetess,” Medea “the rejected witch,” and Hero “the isolated priestess” (23). The chapter on the 1818 play Sappho is “organized around the categories of inclusion and exclusion” (31). The play opens with Sappho returning home from Olympia triumphant after winning the highest laurels for her poetry. As Ellis states, “She appears to have considerable autonomy,” but she must face a hard choice. “She must be either artist or woman; one precludes the other” (37). Sappho must choose between “a commonplace and domestic life with her lover Phaon” (55) and her role in the male-dominated and socially exalted world of poetry. She decides to choose love over her art. Ellis asserts, “Sappho’s decision to retreat from the lofty heights of poesy is the dream of integration, [ . . . ] the exchange of the laurel wreath of fame (the public sphere) for the myrtle (the domestic sphere)” (35). Tragically for her, Phaon falls in love with Melitta, a slave, and Sappho is left with emptiness. As Ellis concludes, “The final three acts [ . . . ] depict rapid unraveling of Sappho’s world, embodied in rejection by Melitta and Phaon and loss of belief in her identity as both poetess and woman” (52). Sappho commits suicide. Medea, in the 1821 play named for her, is an outsider for several reasons. As Ellis notes, “Even as a princess of Colchis, Medea existed on the periphery as a barbarian witch disobedient to the sovereignty of her father, the king” (70). She longs for social belonging but instead is marginalized as a foreigner and a witch with strange magical powers. Willful and outspoken, she condemns her father for defying the ideal of hospitality by putting a foreigner to death, rebelling against the man who “as both sovereign and patriarch is invested with a dual power which should restrict Medea in all ways—domestic, civic, and psychological” (77). She speaks up boldly, rejecting the silence expected of her. As in the familiar story, Medea is betrayed by her husband Jason and destroys his new family, murdering his new beloved and Medea’s own estranged sons. Yet, as Ellis states, “Grillparzer creates a sympathetic character in his interpretation of Medea” (80). According to Ellis, “Grillparzer takes [End Page 125] the muthos and reimagines Medea as both victim and victimizer. She has been repeatedly wounded by the men in her life [ . . . ] she has absorbed the knowledge of her own apartness and uses her alterity to demonstrate that she also wields a power than can expel, curse, and lay waste” (96). Grillparzer’s drama Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen (1831), subject of Ellis’s third chapter, is based on the Greek myth about the pair of lovers, Hero and Leander, known for their nocturnal swims to meet each other, guided by lamps. Eventually a storm puts out the light and Leander drowns. When Hero sees his body, she commits suicide by throwing herself from a tower. Of the three heroines...