Modern intersections of Utopian imagination and gender discourse with special reference to texts by Hauptmann and Wedekind

Abstract

Gerhart Hauptmann's novel Die Insel der grossen Mutter oder das Wunder von lie des Dames together with its paralipomena, and Frank Wedekind's incomplete and fragmentary Die grosse Liebe together with the published novella Mine-Haha oder über die körperliche Erziebung der jungen Mädchen and the related text Eden constitute the textual focus of this thesis. Two culturally and socially significant and, at this period of modernity, problematic discourses intersect in this text corpus : sex/gender and utopian imagination. Counterfactual social orders are imaginatively constructed in the texts under discussion : specifically, pedagogical province, primitivist theocracy, arcadian matriarchy, Spartan male colony and matrimonial Robinsonade. These constructs are examined here with reference to three central criteria of utopian writing : alternativity, collective focus, and critical dimension (directed both inwards at the world of the text and outwards at the extra-textual world).