THE PORTRAIT OF A MODERN WOMAN IN THE POETRY OF WANDA MELCER

The article tackles the topie of womanhood as a typical motif in Wanda Melcer' s poetry, a topie which in historical-literary studies has so far been insufficiently discussed. Through the analysis of selected poems from her two published volumes as well as from other scattered poems, the portrait of a modern woman as presented in that poetry has been sketched out. This woman is a person who takes part in civilisational, social and manner-related changes. Her relations to culture, art and literature, her vitality and being active in life, all attest to her abandonment of roles imposed by the patriarchal system. It has been shown that the "new woman" breaks taboos and is educated. Above all she is independent and selfreliant, desires success and thirsts for new experiences, as demonstrated by how she frequently changes her surroundings and appropriates new spaces. She moulds her identity in confrontation with the outside world, she is open to otherness and changeability. At the same time she maintains personal consistency. Her creative identity is related to acting upon the principle of choice, and not obligation. Due to the multitude of biographical references present, the portrait of the female heroine contained in Wanda Melcer's poetry can be seen as a self-portrait of the author herself.

From a "Child of Light" to a "Woman of Genius": Sarah Grand's The Beth Book as the New Woman Bildungsroman

The New Woman fiction, popular in the last decade of the 19th century, contested the traditional notions of gender roles and participated in the public debates on women’s rights. The protagonists of the New Woman novels refused to conform to the submissive and self-abnegating Victorian ideal of femininity. The article discusses the ways in which Sarah Grand, a prominent New Woman novelist and social activist, uses and transforms both the elements of her own life and the Bildungsroman conventions in her 1897 novel The Beth Book to create a heroine whose growth and development result in her personal independence and her active public engagement in women’s issues. Cast in a variety of social roles, Beth Maclure reclaims her agency and becomes an embodiment of the New Woman.

RINGL + PIT: (UN)FIGURING THE NEW WOMAN

The photography of Ellen Auerbach and Grete Stern of the studio ringl + pit consistently shirks established formulae of advertising. The emphases on traditional gender roles and an exaggerated femininity in conventional Weimar advertisements reaffirm heterosexual male desire, and attempt to combat the development of the modern female ‘type’ into the independent and androgynous männliche Frau, or masculine woman. The disparity between media-constructed Weimar-era femininity and the actual ways in which Germans at this time understood their own selves as women and individuals is evidenced by Auerbach and Stern’s advertisements, which challenge such objectifying and sexualizing imagery by suggestive figures in the absence of real bodies, formed from the very goods being sold.This article examines how ringl + pit’s advertisements for artificial silk and other new commercially-available goods use substitution techniques to suggest a desire to create one’s own self, while acknowledging the power of the commodity in identity formation. Stern and Auerbach’s photographs work as a reflection of their own understanding of the power of the commodity whose uncanny beauty is revealed through intense focus and surprising reconfigurations. Their intense focus on materiality and their revisioning of such materials suggest connotations beyond the material being photographed. Ringl + pit’s advertisements become semi-blank receptacles that allow numerous modern women, and even non-binary and queer individuals, to see themselves represented as possible consumers for such products, and thus be in control their own identities and images.

The Republic’s Righteous Woman at the Opéra-Comique

The 1901 premiere of Massenet’s Grisélidis was sandwiched between two of the most high-profile premieres that had hitherto been staged at the Opéra-Comique. In the early days of his career, Massenet built his reputation on his penchant for creating intriguing and “dangerous” female characters that personified and even validated the fear shared equally by the Republic and the Church: that women who behaved badly could cause the downfall of even the most righteous man and, in the process, endanger the strength and health of the nation itself. Grisélidis (and its eponymous heroine), however, marked a striking departure from these otherwise “troublesome” women. As a model bourgeoisie whose Catholic faith shaped her every action, Grisélidis appeared as an exemplar of female behavior to Republicans and Catholics alike. While the dangerous and demoralizing threats of the “new” woman loomed large over Paris, the patient, righteous, and ever-faithful Grisélidis represented the paragon of womanhood that could appease both the Church and the State. On the one hand, she symbolizes Eve herself, or perhaps Eve’s redemption. On the other, Grisélidis functions as the ideal French Catholic. The system of traditional moral values epitomized in Grisélidis ultimately and successfully crossed party lines: Grisélidis was everything that both the Church and the Republic thought a French woman should be.