Just Beyond a Peak
Barbara Burns talks to Lea Felicitas Döding, whose volume Maria Janitschek: A Modern Woman: Stories and Poems is published today in the MHRA Jewelled Tortoise series.
BB. Your new book brings us the first ever English translations of stories and poems by the Austrian-born writer Maria Janitschek, an early exponent of modernist writing who defied the conventions of nineteenth-century gender codes, exploring themes of female sexuality and autonomy. In what ways was Janitschek’s work groundbreaking, and why do you think it is important to shed fresh light on her achievement today?
LFD. Maria Janitschek had a genuine curiosity for her fellow humans, and this extended into the part of her work that explored female sexuality. Where many of her male peers wrote one-dimensional seductresses and ailing Madonnas, she revealed the complex psychological mechanisms even behind her characters’ more questionable choices.
Her work feels very relevant now, not only because she was unjustly forgotten, but because the cultural conditions she analysed are remarkably similar to ours. In the Western world, we find ourselves just beyond a peak of immense comfort from where everything threatens to go downhill. A feeling of imminent collapse gives rise to a distorted nostalgia that also extends to gender roles. Stereotyping provides a sense of safety to those unsettled by a changing world, and algorithms reward this erasure of complexity. Janitschek defied this mindset in her own day, not least by creating nuanced, rather than didactic, stories. Individualism was at the heart of her work.
BB. Janitschek’s most successful works were her two prose collections: Of Woman: Character Sketches (1896), and The New Eve (1902), in which she engaged directly with the themes of female sexual desire, sexual education for girls, and homosexuality. Can you give us an insight into these novellas which established her reputation as one of the period’s most audacious feminist voices?
LFD. Each story is not only the portrait of a character, but of the sociocultural conditions that shaped, limit, and guide them. These figures all attempt to navigate their own cage-like set of beliefs and circumstances, and as so many people do, they occasionally romanticise it or even perish in it.
To name just two examples, Camilla in A Modern Marriage has become used to being treated like a spoilt pet, fed treats through the bars of her cage, but she pretends to not quite see the cage. Having been given many educational opportunities due to her beauty, she convinces herself that women who have to campaign for the right to study must simply be less deserving. When she ages and doors close before her, she has to go to great lengths to keep up her grandiose self-image.
Elline in The Deceived, on the other hand, sees her cage all too clearly. Impoverished, she knows she must inspire male desire to be married, but she also knows it will only be directed at her ‘Oriental beauty’. Since objectification seems a necessary evil, she decides she may as well capitalise on it. She role-plays as a masochistic man’s cruel, exotic fantasy in order to gain financial security for herself and her mother, at great cost to her mental wellbeing.
The settings may be of the past, but the problems feel incredibly current: internalised misogyny, the two-edged sword of capitalising on one’s own objectification.
BB. The first poem in your selection is ‘A Modern Woman’, published in 1889, in which a woman challenges her abuser to a duel, taking lethal retribution into her own hands. In what respects was this poem a landmark piece in terms of questioning the era’s patriarchal power dynamics?
LFD. The duel is not decided by strength, or skill, but purely by whose mind is better able to think outside the stereotypes. Though he is challenged, the man lazily lectures the woman about her place in society, instead of taking up the pistol she offers. And so, when she shoots him down, it is not because he is the lesser marksman. She wins because she rejects the limits of convention, while he thinks her incapable of acting in a way that does not conform to his idea of femininity: passive and obedient, devoid of a will to revenge, and made to quietly bear the pain he dealt her.
The poem is a striking example of the Nietzschean courage that Janitschek was often praised for. Its theme recurs throughout her writing: the conventions one has been brought up with must be recognised, questioned, and possibly discarded in favour of self-chosen values. This inner emancipation may be a painful process at times, but it’s the precondition to living fully, rather than denying oneself to fit in with the masses.
BB. Can you tell us a bit about the reception of Janitschek’s work, which was hailed by some critics for its courage and psychological insights but also faced moral outrage and censorship from the imperial authorities?
LFD. On the one hand, Janitschek was praised as an individualist, someone who dared to tackle matters that others did not. In fin-de-siècle Germany, these traits were read as Nietzschean: strong, fearless, modern. After all, to be a non-conformist was to embody traits of the Übermensch who has surpassed the need for approval.
But with regard to the more sexual themes of her prose, aspects of these same qualities were increasingly criticised. Her understanding of sexuality far exceeded what was morally palatable in a woman. Some critics diagnosed her with hysteria; others considered her anti-feminist for portraying, and not condemning, women who did not act in progressive or ideal ways. Her choice to portray female characters who are complex and flawed positioned her in the crossfire of criticism from both sides of a moral divide: those who found her far too emancipated, and those who claimed she opposed women’s emancipation.
BB. Was Janitschek politically involved in the women’s movement, or did her early feminist work have a role in inspiring other emancipatory writers of her time?
LFD. She was not officially involved in the movement, as far as we know. In fact, she even depicted characters that cast it in a negative light, having joined for selfish reasons that have nothing to do with the cause. Dishonesty with oneself was something Janitschek tended to satirise.
However, she herself was something of the model woman she never portrayed. She was considered the first of a fearless new brand of writers. Sexuality soon became a significant topic among German women writers, often imbued with Nietzschean individualism. For instance, the Nietzschean poem ‘Teufelsträume’ (Dreams of the Devil, 1894) by Marie Eugenie Delle Grazie, in which the narrator is haunted by her own repressed sensuality and mates with her inner Satan to liberate it, quotes from a poem by Janitschek.
BB. What prompted you to produce this volume?
LFD. Two things came together: I am an art historian specialising in jewellery of the Belle Époque, and am particularly interested in the morality that policed women’s adornment. I also love the ornate, jewel-like prose of Decadence.
One day at work I came across an antique cameo that depicted a woman inhaling the scent of lilies, and suddenly remembered a line from Janitschek’s story ‘In Beauty’ which I had read long previously: ‘Are you quite trying to kill us with your lily scent?’ I sought out more of her stories. The instant I finished ‘Hysteria’, I knew I wanted to translate it. It was so extraordinary, so different from how a Gourmont or Przybyszewski would have written a woman in search of carnal ecstasy. I began to collect first editions of Janitschek’s works, and those of other decadent works by German women writers that I plan to anthologise.
BB. Your volume appears in the MHRA’s Jewelled Tortoise series, which is dedicated to aesthetic and decadent literature of the British and European fin de siècle. As an antique jewellery specialist, you are familiar with the concept of the jewelled tortoise, both as a literary symbol and a historical reality. Can you tell us more?
LFD. The bejewelled pet tortoise of the eccentric Robert de Montesquiou inspired a key scene in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ 1884 novel À rebours: its protagonist has a tortoise’s shell encrusted with rare stones to serve as a living ornament. In the novel, the fatal collapse of the animal beneath its precious burden is a striking symbol of art triumphant over nature, an iconic moment of Decadent literature.
While combing through old jewellery periodicals, I came upon evidence that during the winter of 1897–98, Parisian demi-mondaines wore tiny, living Indian star tortoises equipped with gem-set harnesses as jewellery, inspired by Huysmans’ novel. They were met with outrage and insulted as mentally ill, not because of cruelty to animals, but because jewellery assumed a distinct moral dimension during the 1890s. Among rising cultural anxieties around female sexuality, animal ornaments were thought to be commentaries on the wearer’s character. And to wear an animal symbolic of decadence – all the more so a living animal that eats, excretes, follows its instincts – suggested a laxness of morals that made it impossible for women of ‘proper society’ to wear this ornament.
The whole story has some more twists and turns, and I invite readers to learn more here if they like. But I think with this example of women’s bodies as a site of culture wars, we may have arrived back at Janitschek, who I am very grateful to see included in the Jewelled Tortoise series.
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