Nietzsche on Gender: Beyond Man and Woman (review)

Oppel's lively and informative work makes important contributions to conversations concerning the images of 'woman' in Friedrich Nietzsche's texts. In addition to providing helpful accounts of sources that inform Nietzsche's characterization of the feminine, Oppel offers a literary approach to reading Nietzsche's writing that supports her compelling thesis: "Nietzsche's texts eliminate 'man' and 'woman' altogether" (ix). Analyzing Nietzsche's use of gendered symbols and metaphors, Oppel traces how he undercuts any sense of "woman as such."

In chapter 1, Oppel argues that Nietzsche's texts represent 'woman' as "an ideal whose use-by date has expired" (15). Beginning with Nietzsche's claim in Twilight of the Idols (1888) that "Man created woman . . . out of a rib of his God, of his 'ideal'" (15), Oppel separates Nietzsche's references to women into negative and positive categories, and discusses two facets of Nietzsche's negative: the myth of the eternal feminine and the emancipated woman. In the process, Oppel explains why Nietzsche couples "feminism" with (Christian) "idealism" as two instances of dualistic thinking, and interprets Nietzsche's references to multiple ideals of woman as a strategy for exposing and undercutting the authority of any one of them.

In chapter 2, Oppel examines the sources that informed Nietzsche's sense of the "positive feminine," namely, accounts of ancient matriarchies and of the unconscious as detailed by two of Nietzsche's contemporaries, Johann Jacob Bachofen and Eduard von Hartmann, respectively. She also examines references to Greek women, prophets, and priestesses in Nietzsche's notebooks, 1869–1870 in particular. The positive feminine Oppel finds is complex and multivalent, linked metaphorically with nature, myth, tragedy, music, art, and mothers.

In chapter 3, Oppel draws from her analysis of these sources for a positive feminine to interpret the relative absence of Greek women from Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy (1872). She concludes that "rather than slighting the feminine, Nietzsche gives it mythic status," and he does so insofar as he "deliberately dismember[s] her, as Dionysus was dismembered by the Titans, and scatter[s] her pieces through the text, with the expressed hope that she may be reborn" (65). Oppel thus interprets the absence of female characters as evidence of Nietzsche's concern with redistributing feminine values "to all of humankind" (37).

In chapter 4, Oppel proceeds to an analysis of The Gay Science (1882, 1887), developing Nietzsche's critique of 'God' and 'woman' as two ideals "whose 'reality' men will defend against the precepts of their senses" (93). Discussing passages that readers have tended to interpret as representing Nietzsche's opinion, Oppel finds evidence in his literary strategies that he is speaking ironically, saying the opposite of what he appears to be saying. Rather than endorsing gender stereotypes, he is holding them up for interrogation. Oppel also identifies instances where Nietzsche redistributes masculine traits to women, thus "admitting the possibility of playing with gender performance" (95), and traces Nietzsche's early revaluation of 'woman' as a positive metaphor for Life, Wisdom, and eternal return.

In chapters 5 and 6, Oppel continues her analyses of woman as a metaphor for Life through the narrative of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885). In chapter 5, she offers fascinating reflections on the symbolism of Zarathustra's whip as demonstrating how crucial "the operation of sex-gender" is in understanding Zarathustra's "major prophecies, the Übermensch and the eternal return" (119). Setting the passage in the context of Nietzsche's relationship to Lou Salome (with whom he discussed the situation of women in society), Oppel likens the genre of the work to Menippean satire, "mimicking and calling attention to our cultural genealogy" (135). Demonstrating how Zarathustra's speech to the old woman repeats and parodies the misogyny of Christianity and Arthur Schopenhauer, Oppel interprets her comment about the whip as a symbol of Zarathustra's own resentment to women—a resentment he must overcome in order to affirm life (150). Oppel further demonstrates how women's positions as readers are "ironically privileged by...