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Pseudo-science and mythic misogyny: Oskar Kokoschka's 'Murderer, Hope of Women.'
Art Bulletin, The, March, 1999 by Claude Cernuschi
In his provocative book Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture, Bram Dijkstra provides a comprehensive survey and convincing analysis of the broad range and pervasive manifestations of misogyny in the art, literature, and science of turn-of-the-century Europe. In its remarkable breadth, his study reveals not only the extent to which antifeminist assumptions permeated the culture of the time, but, even more surprisingly, how these same assumptions were shared by artists widely held to have disparate, if not diametrically opposed, intellectual and aesthetic agendas. Midway through the book, for instance, Dijkstra calls the very ideological distinction between nineteenth-century academicism and twentieth-century Expressionism into question. The German Expressionists, he declares, both upheld and sustained "the conventional antifeminine subject matter of their more academic colleagues. It would be encouraging to think that by doing so they were deliberately attempting to discredit these painters' misogynist point of view, but all indications are that [Expressionist] painters . . . continued to paint in the antifeminine tradition rather than against it."(1) Dijkstra's argument is a powerful one, not only because of the wealth of information his book provides, or because of the persuasiveness with which his arguments are presented, but also because his point cuts to the very heart of interpretive attempts to connect modernism's strategy of continued formal innovation with a radical political agenda. "In the wake of the twentieth century's fervent admiration for style over content," he continues, "any image which at least in form contradicted the late nineteenth-century official art world's preoccupation with immediately recognizable shapes and three-dimensional volume seems to have been welcomed, even if its content was expressive of the crudest form of turn-of-the-century misogyny."(2)
Dijkstra's rejoinder stands as a potent corrective to histories of twentieth-century Expressionism,(3) or at least to those histories bent on polarizing academicism and modernism on both visual and ideological grounds. His position, in fact, coincides with arguments recently made by feminist literary critics. Carol Diethe, for one, questions the widely accepted view that Expressionist authors were "enlightened" because of their "open criticism of bourgeois patriarchal society"; in contradistinction, she maintains that "the whole period of Expressionism leaves the question of female emancipation in disarray."(4) A close examination of Oskar Kokoschka's play Murderer, Hope of Women bears out her argument. Murderer may frequently be touted as a pivotal piece in the development of Kokoschka's work, or in the development of Expressionist theater in general, but the evidence strongly suggests that the play's underlying ideological assumptions are deeply grounded in, and inseparable from, the deleterious antifeminist constructs of fin de siecle culture. Kokoschka, as Diethe puts it, manipulates "explosive linguistic technique and startling props in order to express some very conventional ideas about his female characters. . . . [C]ontent and technique," she adds, "are entirely at odds in a way which Kokoschka, who regarded himself as avant-garde, certainly did not intend."(5) Diethe, then, is suggesting that Kokoschka scholarship has paid disproportionate attention to formal innovations at the expense of gender issues; at a deeper level, she is implying that by assuming - wrongly - that Kokoschka's work was as radical politically as it was formally, scholars have overlooked the complex ways in which the antifeminist mind-set of his time predetermined the artist's intellectual assumptions and ideological commitments. As a result, the majority of scholars have, in her view, misconstrued the ideological edge of Kokoschka's work.(6)
By reversing the interpretive hierarchy previously awarded to form versus ideological content, Dijkstra's and Diethe's interpretive positions become perfectly aligned. Taken as a whole, their argument has remarkable force, the more so as Kokoschka's early and mature work, his visual and literary production fall comfortably within its exegetical purview. Indeed, although numerous art historians and literary critics have paid serious attention to the form and narrative of Murderer, Hope of Women, this play's potential connection to Kokoschka's formative, pre-Expressionist paintings has remained largely unexplored. So have the specifically antifeminist connotations these paintings were meant to convey - connotations that, arguably, are crucial to any investigation of both Murderer and its underlying misogynist agenda. Since Diethe focused exclusively on Kokoschka's theatrical writings, and since Dijkstra did not cover the Expressionist movement proper, even the revisionist literature has yet to acknowledge the specific ways in which Kokoschka's formative images are indebted to the very academicism whose pronounced misogynist edge Dijkstra's study illuminatingly exposes. This is regrettable because, if drawn convincingly, any such connections would, in turn, significantly enhance the overall persuasiveness of Dijkstra's and Diethe's conclusions. After all, if the marked antifeminism of Kokoschka's early work reappears, albeit in different visual form, in his mature work (that is, in the text of Murderer and its accompanying illustrations), then Dijkstra's and Diethe's argument about the ideological continuity between Expressionism and academicism gains even greater authority. This argument, therefore, can provide both an effective critical framework as well as a broad interpretive backdrop against which Kokoschka's antifeminist ideology during - as well as prior to - the conceptualization of Murderer can emerge in sharper relief. To this end, the objective of this essay will be not to segregate Kokoschka's Expressionist from his pre-Expressionist work along formal lines but, rather, to realign them along thematic/ideological ones - an objective elided in Dijkstra's and Diethe's work but in keeping with the major thrust of their powerful argument.
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