Von Muettern und von Dirnen: Urspruenge und literarische Inszenierungsformen eines dualistischen Weiblichkeitskonzeptes von der Jahrhundertwende bis 1938 (Otto Weininger, Austria, German text)

Around the turn of the century, the debate on femininity unfolds as a central structuring feature of the intellectual debates of the time. Of course, this phenomenon does not occur for the first time at the end of the nineteenth century, but the experience of modernized society added a new sharpness to it. Attempts to theorize the feminine brought its subject from the domain of myth into that of abstract terminology. However, on the other hand the feminine was still assigned the role of a counter model and respite that nature could no longer fulfill at a time of rapid industrialization and urbanization. Images from both modes of presentation are going to be examined in this study. They are viewed as stereotypes which could be brought back and perpetuated through the literary text as containing cultural constructions without being dependent on an actual presence in a given society; stereotypes which set into play an irreducible ambivalence towards the feminine. Gender functions as interpretative category which shaped the contents of scientific knowledge and philosophical assumptions underlying the contemporaneous interpretations of nature as well as cultural and social experience. The primary texts examined in this study are viewed as exemplary in their appropriation of specific elements from a broader context of cultural philosophy concerned with the experience of modernity. The relationships between modernity and the feminine are shown to be diverse and multifaceted and the figure of woman pervades modern culture as a powerful symbol of both danger and promise. In order to outline the set of premises more clearly, the study includes a close reading of Otto Weininger's work Geschlecht und Charakter (1903). Weininger's wide-ranging impact on many of the most important writers of his time has been well established by the research of the past decade. Weininger sees the central problem of all ethics in the relationship between the sexes. He endeavours to locate the feminine in a space which combines the categories of the mother and the harlot as corporeal, morally deficient forms of existence. His attempt ends with a figurative negation of the sexual in order to restore the possibility of deliberative moral actions of an autonomous subject. Embracing the influence of Weininger's work this study sets out to uncover numerous 'Weiningerian' subtexts. Furthermore, it introduces subcategories to the literary equivalents of Weininger's categories in order to make it easier to systematize these literary equivalents.; Rather than stating a recurrence of identical phenomena, this study is concerned with the repetition of certain images within changing contexts of intellectual history.