Centrifugal Fires. Consuming Desires and the Performative Female Subject in Karin Michaelis’s The Dangerous Age

Abstract

Despite the ‘sensational’ status of Karin Michaelis’s The Dangerous Age at the time of its original publication in 1910, English‐language criticism of the novel is still problematically scarce, and the radicalism of Michaelis’s psychological vision remains unexplored. This essay will create a dialogue between The Dangerous Age, Freudian and post‐Freudian psychoanalysis, and Judith Butler’s seminal work, Bodies That Matter, arguing through this dialogue that Michaelis self‐consciously negotiates constructivist and essentialist concepts of gender. The essay will examine the narratological, psychological and physical modalities of performance, concluding with an analysis of desire, creativity and sublimation. The image of widow sacrifice recurs throughout the novel as the social and psychological symbol of women’s gendered subordination; however, by refiguring the theme of ‘sacrifice’ through Jeanne, Michaelis simultaneously uses the idea of sacrifice to reassert the potency of female desire and speech. The Dangerous Age plays with the possibilities of subjective dissolution by presenting us with a heroine and narrator at the brink of a bodily crisis: the menopause. Looked at through a patriarchal lens, the menopause is the point at which the female body stops performing its ‘proper’ reproductive function. Exploiting this view, Michaelis uses the ‘crisis’ of the menopause to reflect upon patriarchy as a whole.

A Bibliometric Overview of Orbis Litterarum from 1983 to 2020

“…It started with a psychological interpretation of Joyce's Exiles (van Stralen, 2007), a discussion about the other in Joyce's 'A Painful Case' and 'The Dead'(Boysen, 2007), Joyce's engagement with the theme of exile in relation to Ibsen(Mack, 2008), and Elias Canetti's theory of power under the influence of Joyce(Juan, 2008). Then McCulloch (2012) studied a piece of poetic prose and argued that modernism and theory need to be understood in conjunction with each other Wood (2013). analyzed the narratological, psychological and physical modalities of performance, concluding with an analysis of desire, creativity and sublimation in Karin Michaelis's…”