Gender and Identity in Franz Grillparzer's Classical Dramas

Alicia E. Ellis is associate professor of German at Colby College.

Introduction Chapter 1: Sappho: The Gender of Belonging Chapter 2: Medea: The Construction of the Other Chapter 3: Hero: The Challenge of Virtue Conclusion

In her beautifully crafted book Figuring the Female: Gender and Identity in Franz Grillparzer's Classical Dramas, Alicia E. Ellis, enacts a compelling and stunning feminist textual analysis of the classical female figures, Sappho, Medea, and Hero. Rather than leave them stranded as it were as projections of particular historical moments, she reads them as fluid figures of speech that provide models of transgressive and multivalent forms of resistance significant for exposing gender injustice and oppression. Thus, Ellis invites us to open up new pathways for rereading classic female figures as subversive even as the surface text relegates them to objects of tragedy, male longing, and deceit. -- Karen Remmler, Mount Holyoke College In a series of nuanced close readings, Alicia E. Ellis fruitfully applies concepts from recent gender theory and feminist studies to an analysis of key dramas by Austria's leading 19th-century playwright, Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872). Her sophisticated study focuses on Grillparzer's portrayals of three tragic female figures from classical antiquity - Sappho, the celebrated poetess; Medea, the filicidal sorceress; and Hero, the virginal priestess. In the process, Ellis deftly uncovers an abundance of intriguing perspectives on how this male author's modern reworkings of ancient tragedies that center on "willful" women may contribute to an increased understanding of the intractable complexities and gendered contradictions that condition the formation of female subjecthood in a male-dominated (patriarchal and androcentric) world. -- Christian Rogowski, Amherst College