Artist for Art's Sake or Artist for Sale: Lulu's and Else's Failed Attempts at Aesthetic Self-Fashioning

Abstract

Frank Wedekind's Lulu, of his plays Earth-Spirit (1895) and Pandora's Box (1904), and Arthur Schnitzler's Else, from the novella Fräulein Else (1924), are both examples of female performance artists given their construction of stylized and aestheticized selves. By comparing Lulu and Else, this essay reveals how women's performativity can either constitute a form of empowerment and self-affirmation or serve as a path toward commodification and consumability. Despite Lulu's and Else's initial attempts to achieve agency by fashioning themselves as artists or aesthetes, socioeconomic forces and the men who control them turn both women into aesthetic objects and salable commodities. (KC)