Shifting Voices: Feminist Thought and Women's Writing in Fin-de-Siècle Austria and Hungary (review)

Agatha Schwartz's comparative study of Austrian and Hungarian women writers of the fin de siècle fills a major gap in the scholarship on that era's literary and cultural discourse. By showing how the women authors and philosophers profiled in her study engaged with and raised their voices against the gender discourses of their times, the book provides a compelling reason to rethink entrenched ways of understanding the cultural life of Austria and Hungary around 1900.

After situating the recurrent issues addressed by the authors in her study within the context of fin-de-siècle Austria-Hungary, Schwartz devotes each chapter to a specific issue, among them women's education, suffrage, viriphobia, sexuality, independence, and examples of more traditional texts. While Schwartz draws from a wide range of feminist theory, she applies Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of double-voiced discourse, hybridity, and heteroglossia to reveal the frequent "presence of two conflicting voices" (10) in the philosophical and literary texts of the women writers in her study. Additionally, Schwartz is interested in how Jessica Benjamin's psychoanalytical theory of intersubjectivity, which "implies a relationship between the sexes built on equality rather than on domination versus subordination" (11), applies to the development of male-female relationships in the literary works represented in her study. As Schwartz explains, her goal is to provide a contour to the interests of the two different, primarily bourgeois feminist movements in Austria and Hungary rather than provide a historical overview of their developments. While emphasizing that the Hungarian women's movement was typically more socially and religiously conservative than the Austrian women's movement, Schwartz also de-monstrates a number of useful parallels between the two, reminding the reader of how important the interchange of ideas in Central Europe was to Austria-Hungary's cultural and intellectual identity.

One particularly valuable contribution of this volume is the way Schwartz embeds the texts of these feminist writers in ground that is for scholars of fin-de-siècle Austria-Hungary familiar territory. The result is a refreshing sense of defamiliarization. While Otto Weininger's Geschlecht und Charakter (1903) is requisite reading for the understanding of this period, the works of Helene von Druskowitz and Elsa Asenijeff, for example, cannot claim the same canonical status, but Schwartz demonstrates through several examples from these authors and others that the engagement with Weininger's work was more varied and interesting than current Weininger scholarship suggests. Schwartz does not claim that these voices were the primary voices or that they were heard above the general acceptance of Weininger's misogynistic tirade. Yet she does demonstrate convincingly that there was indeed a public discourse that not only criticized Weininger but even went so far as to suggest its opposite: viriphobia. Schwartz analyzes, for example, Druskowitz's Pessimistische Kardinalsätze: Ein Vademecum für die freiesten Geister (1905), which directly reverses the crux of Weininger's argument — that is, woman as nothing — as indicated by the title of one of her chapters: "Der Mann als logische und sittliche Unmöglichkeit und als Fluch der Welt" (92). Druskowitz and a few other women writers of this period called for a completely separate women's sphere and rejected any possibility of an equal exchange between men and women. Thus Schwartz offers a much deeper and more interesting picture of Weininger's reception and concludes: "What differ-entiates the feminist and viriphobic voices from the misogynistic one, however, is that both emphasize women's suppressed potential" (96). Schwartz understands both responses to misogyny as an attempt by women themselves to guide the discourse on gender. By underscoring the significance of these authors for their contributions to the cultural dialogue about gender and women's rights, her study both deepens and widens her readers' understanding of the fin de siècle.

Shifting Voices is in many ways...