The Feminine Character: The Allegory of Ibsen’s Women in Adorno’s Modernist Literary Theory

Abstract

It is perhaps not surprising that the idea of the “feminine character” proposed by Theodor Adorno in his early theory has been picked up foremost by feminist scholars. In the early 1990s, German feminists such as Eva Geulen and Regina Becker-Schmidt began a more extensive reexamination of Adorno. This led to an increase in Adornian feminist scholarship in English, most notably Maggie O’Neill’s Adorno, Culture and Feminism (1999) and Renée Heberle’s Feminist Interpretations of Adorno (2006). Such scholars were particularly drawn to the idea that the feminine character could be defined as a gendered example of the nonidentical, or that which negates the false, oppressive identities projected onto the object (in this example, women) by capitalist society.