"Männlich im Sinne des Butt" or "Am Ende angekommen?": Images of Men in Contemporary German-Language Literature by Women

"Männlich im Sinne des Butt" or "Am Ende angekommen?" Images of Men in Contemporary German-Language Literature by Women* REGULA VENSKE Und es ist an der Zeit, sich um die Männerfrage zu kümmern, historisch, politisch, sittlich und so weiter -vom stehenden Heer über Maschinerie und Männlichkeit bis zum Vaterschaftskult . (And it is time to concern ourselves with the man question, historically, politically, morally and so on -all the way from the standing army through machinery and masculinity on up to the cult of fatherhood.) The study of images of women in (male-authored) literature has become an established part of the current repertoire of feminist literary criticism. The prejudice against topics such as "women in _____," defined in 1979 by Wolfgang Paulsen as one of those which have always "enabled the less far-reaching intellects to complete their journeyman's service in Germanistik," has meanwhile been thoroughly refuted, both by the published studies available and their diverse methodological procedures — ideological, socio-psychological and psychoanalytical critical approaches as well as those grounded in social history and the history of myth. Yet even while feminist research was extending the traditional field of inquiry, it has for the most part limited itself to the issue of the image of women. A possible paradigm shift has only recently been suggested in the thematization of masculinity also. The decoding of images of women necessarily involves arduous work on male projections and male discourse about "femininity" before the "hidden woman" behind the images can be discovered. Studying images 79 of men created by women could, on the other hand, signify one further offensive step out of the narrow framework of images mirrored by men, out of the circle of women's narcissistic quests for identity, and out of the experiences of suffering and victimization of a sex that is still evolving. Coming to grips with the man question would necessitate a new way of thematizing the relationship of the sexes, the prescribed polarity of sexual characteristics , and the deficiency of reality. However, caution is advisable here: It most emphatically cannot be the task of a feminist-oriented literary criticism to scrutinize "images of men" thematically through literary history, by analogy to "images of women." Nor should we attempt, with methodological naivete, to draw conclusions as to the reality of the "menfolk" behind the images. Stating the problem this way — perhaps in contrast to depictions of men in "male literature" -will lead only to banalities, for the "menfolk" are by no means hidden in literature. Their place, unlike women's, is definitely locatable, occupied and well protected. Nor can our concern be that proposed in the almost quaint monograph Der Typus des Mannes in der Dichtung der Frau by Else Hoppe: to redefine the theme of "the figure, image and ideal of woman in the writing of this or that man" by replacing the subject with the object, i.e., "the bearer of the consequences with the object toward which his activity is directed." This simple reversal of the theme, in an act of primal will, leaps over the real exclusion of women from literature and patriarchal society as a whole. Woman writing about man writes as object about the subject, as un-real sex about the "real" one, as "other" about the male as human being. Thus, the issue is precisely how her view of men is related to her view of herself; the extent to which she reproduces, for example, her own dependence and the male's superiority; how she can develop her identity against/with/without the male. We must ask how woman comes to grips with her own sex and even with her own "masculinity" as well as how woman can imagine herself and the male beyond patriarchal principles. The point of departure and the goal of these questions is not only, or not so much, the reality of the "menfolk," but women's reality and fantasy, with bias in favor of women's development in the sense of a "real" sex that is identical with itself as well as of the development of a "real" literature by women. 80 The goal of decoding images of women is to...