FEMINISED HUMANITY DRAMAS

Abstract

Assigning feminine characteristics to the features of certain types of art is a risky exercise, as it may suggest feminine essentialism. If these characteristics do exist, they have been shaped by external conditions: we can point to general political- social-emotional reasons and several other specific circumstances (misogyny or only a patriarchal institutional organisation, more limited opportunities for self- representation). Moreover, this relationship is not a simple correspondence – meaning that there are more male and more female avant-garde genres –, often it is precisely male genres that women writers reverse, upturn or even use as masks – speak from a female position and imbue with female voices, or make them so ironic that they become parodies of themselves. In the present study, we examine a surprising pair of texts in which avant-garde women writers experiment with rewriting and subverting one of the most influential mythologies in world literature (and, within this history of tradition, one of the most important classical works): Faust.