Women's roles in Lessing's dramas
Starting with contemporary films, we now went back to one of the most influential German playwrights, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. The project group that developed this case study was also particularly interested in gender issues. If Lessing was so influential in advancing the drama of his time, i.e. the end of the 18th century, can we also recognise a more progressive representation of female characters in his dramas? Well, a purely quantitative analysis does not reveal any clear trends here. There is indeed a drama by Lessing, Miss Sara Sampson, which at 45:55 has an almost balanced ratio of female and male characters. Misogyny (43:57) and Damon or True Friendship (40:60) are also close. On the other hand, there are also dramas in the sample in which only male characters appear. The midfield is also interesting: most dramas show a gender gap of between 80:20 and 70:30.
Themes of fin-de-siècle women writers depicted in their novellas
In terms of both the subject matter and the research interest, we now come to an unusual project in the context of this conference simulation. The project group has compiled a catalogue of topics based on Sach Sorg (2018), which contains topics that have been identified as significant for novellas in fin-de-siècle literature. This categorisation system includes the themes
- Death
- Decadence
- Eroticism
- Melancholy
- Downfall
The project group was particularly interested in how these themes are represented in novellas by women writers. The corpus of 20 novellas includes texts by Lou Andreas-Salomé, Ricarda Huch, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach and Isolde Kurz, among others. In a close-reading approach, all 20 novellas were manually annotated, i.e. each novella was read very carefully and annotated. This revealed that the theme of "death" appears in almost all (19 out of 20) novellas. Nevertheless, it is not the dominant theme in many of the novellas. The theme of death is therefore more of a permanent presence, while the themes of "melancholy" and "eroticism" appear in fewer novellas, but are more dominant. The themes of decadence and downfall play a rather subordinate role in this corpus. Around the turn of the century 1899/1900, female writing in the form of novellas accordingly focussed a great deal on the themes of "death", "melancholy" and "eroticism". Is this due to the historical context in which women often took on caring duties? According to one of the project group's conclusions, an even broader database is needed in order to gain deeper insights here.