Grillparzers Welttheater: Modernität und Tradition by Brigitte Prutti (review)

Prutti’s study of Grillparzer’s dramatic work is an ambitious project that plays down its ambition. The introduction denies any intention to provide a new global assessment of Grillparzer or his body of work; instead, Prutti claims simply to conduct new readings of the works using up-to-date approaches and concepts. Yet, she has a certain Grillparzer in mind. She announces “die programmatische Intention, den aufregenden und vielseitigen Weltdramatiker an die Stelle des langweiligen und ideologie-konformen Nationaldramatikers zu setzen” (31). This project yields multifaceted readings of his work. In addition to discussing the body of secondary literature exceptionally thoroughly, Prutti analyzes the poetic and theatrical components of Grillparzer’s work; contextualizes it within the literary and dramatic traditions; attends to reception history; and considers its position with respect to the politics of the restoration Habsburg Empire. The result is a compendium that provides an extensive overview of Grillparzer’s work and does, in fact, present a very different picture of Grillparzer than that familiar from many other studies.

Not only does the study seek to establish Grillparzer as a world dramatist, rather than a Habsburg apologist, but its theoretical commitments and interpretive concerns are more unified than the introduction suggests. The first five chapters each examine a major dramatic work (Die Ahnfrau, Sappho, Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen, Ein treuer Diener seines Herrn, Weh dem, der lügt!), the sixth two (König Ottokars Glück und Ende, Die Jüdin von Toledo), and the epilogue a collection of letters and poems in which Grillparzer stages his own romantic relationships. While Prutti does apply other approaches at times (e.g., celebrity studies in the chapter on Sappho and post-colonial studies in that on Weh dem, der lügt!), most of her readings are grounded in a gender studies approach with strong commitments to psychoanalysis and semiotics. She does not forward a central claim, but a clear pattern emerges from the body of individual analyses.

Nearly all of the chapters contain variations on a theme: Grillparzer’s female figures serve the construction and stabilization of male identity and status. While many of Grillparzer’s dramatic women initially appear as strong and dynamic figures, in the end, their roles and staging shore up male subjectivity, authorship, political power, and dynasty. Prutti makes this argument explicitly about König Ottokars Glück und Ende and Die Jüdin von Toledo, but the same could be said for her readings of Ein treuer Diener seines Herrn, in which the rebellious Queen Gertrude and the imperious lady Erny become bodies in the restorative tableau of the conclusion, and Weh dem, der lügt!, in which the spirited and resourceful Edrita becomes a fetish of a benevolent, paternalistic, enlightened universalism meant to be associated with Habsburg Austria. As these examples have already suggested, stabilizing the male position often requires sacrificing the female figure. Sappho’s subjectivity and hysterical body must be sacrificed, Prutti contends, to affirm the purity of a divine (but secular) art separated from the dirty business of life. Erny must die because she represents a sign that cannot be fixed; closure can be achieved only after her death, when “Man(n) ist endlich ganz unter sich” (236).

To be sure, not all of the chapters deal with this theme. The discussion of Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen presents the play as exploring the psychology of modern romantic love and as deconstructing the myth of the romantic Liebestod. Prutti’s discussion of the death scene is illustrative of the scope of her analyses. True to her interest in establishing Grillparzer as a skilled dramatist, she devotes significant attention to his prowess in stagecraft: in the careful choice of props and costume, in the staging of spectacle, and in the creation of highly symbolic and affecting tableaus. In discussing this play, she contends that Grillparzer’s choice to narrate the kiss, rather than to stage it, aims to foreclose...