Electra after Freud, death, hysteria and mourning

grantor: University of TorontoThis study considers the importance of the Electra myth for the twentieth century, and in so doing resurrects a theme which has been curiously neglected despite the proliferation of modern adaptations. The myth and its heroine are located at the intersections of history and the feminine, eros and thanatos, hysteria and melancholia. At the point of departure is Hugo yon Hofmannsthal's influential 'Elektra' (1903), which introduces two important twentieth-century innovations to the Electra myth, the heroine's death and hysteria. Walter Benjamin's reading of allegory in 'Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels' serves as a theoretical framework for a discussion of the significance of Electra's allegorical "Dance of Death" in Eugene O'Neill's 'Mourning Becomes Electra', Sartre's ' Les Mouche's and Heiner Miller's 'Hamletmaschine'. This is followed by a consideration of the uncanny similarities between Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud's case study of the hysterical "Anna O." and Hofmannsthal's Elektra, where it is demonstrated that the mythological heroine indeed subverts her hysterical diagnosis by playing analyst to her own author. A further chapter shows the complexity of the interrelations of language, music and dance in Strauss's operatic adaptation of Hofmannsthal's ' fin de siècle' play, and demonstrates that Elektra manipulates the Viennese waltz into an ironic reminder of naive frivolity, decadent decay, and omnipresent paternity. Ezra Pound's unconventional translation of Sophocles' ' Electra' in turn transforms the heroine from a grief-stricken hysteric into an angry defender of civic responsibility, whereby the mourning daughter's predicament parallels the poet's own incarceration. Finally, the poetic enactment of Electra's story is treated as the testimony of personal trauma in H.D.'s "A Dead Priestess Speaks" and Sylvia Plath's ' Ariel Poems', in which these manifestations of melancholia arguably constitute a "poetics of survival." Overcoming hysteria and mourning in an ecstatic 'Totentanz', this century's Electra ultimately triumphs through courage, strength and her fierce determination to act.Ph.D