Lou Andreas-Salomé and Mayreder: Femininity and Masculinity

Abstract

Lou Andreas-Salome and Rosa Mayreder were contemporaries whose lives, for all their differences in background and education, led them to geographical and, more important, intellectual proximity. While Mayreder is known to have been acquainted with Andreas-Salome and welcomed her to the salons that she held in her native Vienna home (Kreide 3), critics have yet to consider a point of literary contact that links these two important figures in the women's movement and women's writing at the turn of this last century. Mayreder's essay Frauen und Frauentypen (Women and a Typology of Women) – published in the 1905 collection Zur Kritik der Weiblichkeit (A Survey of the Woman Problem) – entails a response to Andreas-Salome's essays on femininity that provides a point of departure for comparing texts by the two with respect to how they defined femininity, masculinity, and women's social role, and for revealing in their ideas early traces of a theory of intersubjectivity (Jessica Benjamin). That discussion provides the background for a reading of Andreas-Salome's Fenitschka (1898) as a paradigmatic turn-of-the-century text that elucidates the theoretical reflections of the two writers in narrative form. The two authors were virtually coevals. With Louise von Salome born in 1861, Rosa Obermayer in 1858, and the two dying in 1937 and 1938, respectively, they both lived through epoch-making intellectual and social developments such as the beginnings of psychoanalysis and the women's movement – developments in which the two, each in her own way, shared an intense intellectual involvement. Andreas-Salome ranked among the most influential women writers of her day, possessed of a controversial personality and personal history that, with its friendships with Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud, inspired numerous biographies. Her early essays elicited mixed responses from the outset, with many radical representatives of the German women's movement