Refractions of the Feminine: The Monstrous Transformations of Lulu

Abstract

Refractions of the Feminine: The Monstrous Transformations of Lulu Karin Littau The Lulu-figure, from Frank Wedekind's Earth Spirit and Pandora's Box, has been the object of numerous transformations. First written in 1894, Wedekind continually rewrote the play in the face of censorship until 1913. 1 Whilst the play's first version was reconstructed in the 1980s by Hartmut Vinçon from the scattered original manuscripts, and finally published in 1988, there have been a variety of other versions of Lulu, such as Alban Berg's 1934 Lulu opera, G.W. Pabst's famous screen version of Pandora's Box with Louise Brooks, Kathy Acker's postmodern pastiche, as well as Angela Carter's feminist rewrite of Lulu. 2 Thus, the play's adaptations, including its stage adaptations and the many translations, as early as 1923 and as recent as 1993 and again in 1994 3 have meant that the character of Lulu has not only been incarnated in different media, but has also been subject to monstrously different characterizations. Lulu acts as a paradigm from which to recast questions of rewriting and gender, precisely because—whilst she is a screen onto which the male protagonists in the play project supplements of themselves, and the screen onto which her rewriters, censors, translators, adapters, dramaturgs and critics project their Lulus—she nevertheless disrupts the order of re-presentation with every attempt to capture her anew. The rewritings of Wedekind's plays constitute what André Lefevere would also call "refractions" or "spin-offs", amongst which he includes "plot summaries in literary histories or reference works, reviews in newspapers, magazines or journals, some critical articles, [End Page 888] performances on stage or screen, and, last but not least, translations." 4 What refractions such as the above share is not only, to use Paul de Man's words, that "these activities resemble each other in that they do not resemble that from which they derive," 5 but also that all these activities necessarily manipulate the source texts they work with. As texts which draw on other texts, refractions clearly have "the intention of adapting them to a certain ideology or a certain poetics," 6 a point we may rephrase to suggest that Lulu, as the Urgestalt des Weibes, 7 comes to be rewritten or adapted to "a certain ideology"—here patriarchy. If rewriting, as Lefevere has it, "turns out to be a very important strategy which guardians of literature use to adapt what is 'foreign' (in time and/or geographical location)," 8 rewriting, in our treatment, exposes the strategies used to adapt what is foreign to man, in other words, that which is other to man: woman. Consequently, we must not only trace Lulu's representations in the play and her re-presentations in its various versions, but also the stakes involved in the masculine dream of her translatability, the dream, and as we shall see the phallacy, of attempting to decipher the feminine, of translating das Urweib. The question of woman and representation, which is also the question of woman and her re-presentations, will not, however, be approached via the metaphors they share. This is to say, the metaphorics implicit in the question of gender and engendering, of woman and rewriting, or more specifically, woman and translation, which Lori Chamberlain brings to light in her fine essay "Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation," 9 will not be our starting point. Rather than posing translation in terms of the second text, and woman in terms of the second sex, and subsequently exposing the violence implicit in the hierarchization which is at work in binary oppositions, be it in the privileging of the term primary over secondary, the privileging of model over copy, original over translation, man over woman, I shall begin by tracing some of the threads which entwine gender and engendering, which entwine woman and her re(-)presentations in their shared matrix. In short, I will trace the creations and creation myths of Lulu as Pandora, as Eve and as Lilith. The Urgestalt des Weiblichen which Wedekind creates through Lulu therefore finds her beginnings in the Urweib Pandora, first woman of the Greek creation myths. But this is not the...

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