Author: Aylin Bademsoy, German Department , University of California at Davis

Summary: »Bloddy head of a rapist lying in the center of a little town in Turkey made headlines in Turkish media in 2013. This was not the first and certainly not the last time a woman sought to restore justice on her own after the institutional apparatus of the patriarchal state had failed her. Clara S.: Eine musikalische Tragödie (1981; Clara S. [A Musical Tragedy], 2001), a play written by Elfriede Jelinek, concludes with a similar scenario: the long-neglected artist Clara S., an explicit reference to the pianist Clara Schumann, ends up talking to the head of her freshly strangled husband, Robert Schumann. In Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina (1971), the female narrator, instead of fighting back, disappears into the wall that previously marked the border of her entrapment. Bachmann's and Jelinek's respective works establish a relationship to social history that can be read as reflections of the (diverging) modes of oppression of the "feminine," on the one hand, and as testimonies of ideological transformations within the capitalist patriarchal order, on the other. Utopic scenarios- for example, in Bachmann's Malina-end up demonstrating the inevitability of immanence as attempts to entirely transcend the trajectories of history necessarily fail.
Whereas the "modern" gender dichotomy and the entrapment of the "female" in the private sphere is central to Bachmann's novel, in Jelinek's work women's inclusion in the sphere of production poses a new challenge to emancipation: labor, which was expected to be a step toward liberation, is unveiled as yet another mutation of capitalist patriarchy. In this essay, I argue that differences in the literary responses to patriarchal violence can be theorized in line with transformations within capitalist production in the twentieth century, from Fordist production to post-Fordism and from modernity to postmodernity, as scholars in the humanities have argued. Whether the latter transition took place is doubtful; the works examined here reflect an increase of cynicism or cultural pessimism, an accusation frequently leveled at Theodor W. Adorno.« (Source: Cambridge Core)

Wikipedia: History of Europe: History of Austria | Literature: Austrian literature / Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina (novel), Elfriede Jelinek, Clara S, musikalische Tragödie | Sex and the law: Sexual violence