Elfriede Jelinek's Nora Project: Or What Happens When Nora Meets the Capitalists

Elfriede Jelinek's Nora Project: Or What Happens When Nora Meets the Capitalists CHRISTINE KIEBUZINSKA The distinguishing feature of the creative output of the contemporary Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek is the unmasking of the illusion perpetuated by misreadings of canonical texts. In her play Was geschah, nachdem Nora ihren Mann verlassen hatte oder Stutzen der Gesellschaften. written in 1979 as a reflection upon the centennial of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's HOllse, Jelinek superimposes a strong materialist feminist reading on a range of contemporary issues: the demythification of canonical texts that adhere to the fictions of everyday life, the continuity of patriarchal structures in capitaJist market economies , and the limitations of utopian individualism in feminist myths. l Jelinek recognizes that a critique of the appropriation of Ibsen's classic simultaneously necessitates a demystification of the modes of representation most successful in the dissemination of ideologies. In her deconstruction of Ibsen's A 00/1's HOllse, Jelinek transposes the action of the play to reveal "what happened after Nora left her husband and met the pillars of societies.'" Ibsen's A Do/l's HOllse is continually present in Nora, particularly in Jelinek's deconsrruction of its idealistic implications, the heroic strength of the heroine and the utopian hopes for the equality in the partnership of the married couple; however, in Jelinek's version the psychological depth of the characters has disappeared and utopian dreams of gender equality are undermined by her use of the cliches that continue to surround the reception of Ibsen's play. Throughout Ibsen's play, we see Torvald carefully creating the tenus and appropriate postures of his fictive world out of the moral maxims on debt, responsibility, the telling of lies, the aesthetic differences between knitting and embroidery,_and even on eating macaroons. Nora in turn has become an accomplished actress in sustaining her fiction of youthfulness and irresponsibility by acting out the prettifying, self-deluding fiction of innocence for the eight years of their marriage. When the "wonderful" does not happen, Nora's and Torvald's fictions collapse and they are left, as in theatre, only with the Modern Drama, 41 (1998) 134 Jelinek's Nora Project 135 appearance of a marriage.J Nora discards her dancing-girl costume and assumes the adult costume essential to her new recreation of self as an uncompromising and strong-minded heroine capable of taking on all society. It is in this somewhat frayed adult "costume" from the last scene of A Doll's HOl/se that Nora wanders into Jelinek's script looking for a self-fulfilling job in a factory in order to test her quest for self-realization. In Jelinek's play, Nora's "redefinition" occurs in the.time space of the Germany of the 1920S, as it is undergoing economic collapse following the economic crash and hyperinflation leading to the rise of Hitler's National Socialism. Simultaneously, Jelinek also projects the action into the time space of the late 1970S, a time space that represents the accelerated economic development in West Germany as well as the emergence of Germany's feminist movement. Jelinek sets the play within these time spaces in order to demonstrate the ideological continuities between National Socialism and the contemporary German Wirtschaftswunder. or economic miracle, brought about through market deregulations and highly sophisticated take-over maneuvers, behind which the unseen power of the multinational corporations conspires to overcome political and legal constraints. In her play Jelinek reveals the mechanism of "the linguistic cover-up of what a capitalist knows and thinks, but doesn't express publicly:" and this was the reason that Jelinek wrote her Nora "as a kind of Wircschaflskrimi (business crime novel).'" Since the very title of Jelinek's play refers to both Ibsen's A Doll's House and The Pillars of Society, it might be fruitful to examine how Ibsen's texts function as pretexts to Nora. A Doll's House provides the entire ensemble of characters with the exception of Dr. Rank; from The Pillars ofSociety Jelinek borrows the motive of land speculation, for the source of Konsul Weygang's characterization in Nora as aspeculator, capitalist and profiteeris not difficult to recognize in the figure...