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83 Chapter Four  Looking to Dominate: Power and Gender in Franz Kafka’s Amerika and Egon Schiele’s Seated Male Nude (Self-Portrait) Les signes ne sont pas des preuves, puisque n’importe qui peut en produire de faux ou d’ambigus. —Roland Barthes, Fragments d’un discours amoureux Franz Kafka’s novel Amerika: The Missing Person opens with the hero Karl Rossmann entering New York Harbor, where the Statue of Liberty is holding a sword instead of a torch. No longer a “Mother of Exiles”1 guiding and nurturing new immigrants, Kafka’s Liberty is a warrior type, a phallic woman posing a potential threat to those arriving on her watch. Referring to her with the feminine noun “Freiheitsgöttin” (V 9, “goddess of liberty”; translation and italics mine), as opposed to the commonly used Freiheitsstatue (Statue of Liberty), which can refer to figures of any gender, the text emphasizes the feminine gender in contrast to the phallic sword, thus highlighting the gender-inverse symbolism. The stunning image indicates that in Kafka’s “new world,” power is no longer wielded along traditional gender lines, and one cannot associate unquestioningly dominance with male figures and subordination with female figures. Juxtaposing Kafka’s novel with Egon Schiele’s 1910 painting Seated Male Nude (Self-Portrait), reveals painter and writer as actors of gender conflict who offer provocative views on the hierarchies organizing bourgeois society and especially on the idea of an essential male superiority. Focusing on the sexual and abused body as the nexus of a discourse of power, gender, and desire, Schiele and Kafka undermine the notion of a clear-cut distinction between male and female roles. As a result, gender emerges as an arbitrary instrument organizing the exercise of power as visual or physical access to 84 Chapter Four bodies, which, in turn, implicates the distribution of power as a major subtext of the contemporary gender debate. Both Schiele’s and Kafka’s works present the encounter with another body as unpredictable and disorienting in the absence of a discernible organizing structure such as gender. In his self-portrait, the painter rendered his own physique as a site of blurred gender distinctions. Carefully manipulating the viewer’s gaze, the work suspends those traditional gendered visual and sexual economies that reflect social hierarchies privileging the desiring male gaze on the female object. In Kafka’s novel, too, bourgeois social roles appear to be in flux and, consequently, gendered hierarchies are unstable. Ultimately, the fluidity of male and female roles, combined with the heightened corporeality and violence characterizing the novel’s relationships, contribute to Rossmann’s experience of disorientation and prevent him from developing a stable gender identity. Highlighting Kafka’s and Schiele’s acute awareness of the stakes involved in their period’s extensive changes in images of masculinity and femininity and sexual and body politics, this comparison offers a novel view on the painter and writer and their works. On the one hand, it debunks further the image, prevalent to this day, of Kafka as an isolated, reclusive fabulist and insurance employee.2 On the other, it opens a new perspective on Schiele’s works, which appear no longer solely as expressions or performances of an eccentric, angst-ridden artist or self-centered erotomaniac, but, like Kafka’s novel, as intriguing engagements with the time’s gender discourse. Staging the Body: Egon Schiele’s Seated Male Nude (Self-Portrait) In his life and art, Egon Schiele crossed the boundaries of what turn-of-thecentury Vienna deemed respectable and to be in good taste.Thus, for instance, he had his younger sister sit for many of his nudes, lived “in sin” for four years with his girlfriend Valerie “Wally” Neuziel, and would often ask children to model for him naked. This behavior raised eyebrows, and his works only contributed to widespread suspicions. Especially his often very sexually explicit nudes, many of them self-portraits, shocked most audiences. While a small circle of collectors was fascinated by these works, in part undoubtedly because of their erotic nature, many considered them pornographic or found them simply morally offensive and disgusting.3 In 1912, the artist’s defiance of social and aesthetic conventions received a major blow: he was jailed for displaying nude drawings in the presence of children, and the judge burned one of his pieces in the courtroom.4 As Frederic Schwartz has shown, in finde -siècle Vienna, court cases, especially those revolving around well-known figures and sexual or...

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