Wedekind’s Lulu Plays: Woman as Spectacle and Commodity

Scarcely anyone in the history of German literature has provoked such mixed and violent reactions as Frank Wedekind, self-styled bohemian and passionate nonconformist. In stark contrast to the respectable physician Schnitzler and even to Wilde, who though also an enfant terrible of the literary world never relinquished the trappings of high society, Wedekind punctuated his work in advertising and journalism with stints as an actor and cabaret singer, spent one of the happiest periods of his life in the company of Parisian circus performers, and served a six-month prison term for ‘libeling the crown’ in one of his political poems. Little wonder, then, that Brecht was moved to comment after Wedekind’s death in 1918 that ‘his greatest work was his personality.’ Looking back with the hindsight that Brecht could not have, we recognize the degree to which his observation obscures the enormous impact Wedekind was to have on Brecht himself and on the many other twentieth-century dramatists whose work would be very different without his example.

None of Wedekind’s dramas has been more influential than his so-called Lulu plays, which in their unusual mixture of satiric, grotesque, and tragic elements combine some of the most memorable features of naturalist and symbolist theater and also anticipate expressionism. Wedekind’s initial inspiration for the subject was twofold: the circus pantomime Lulu, Une Clownesse danseuse by Félicien Champsaur, which he saw at the Nouveau Cirque in Paris in the early 1890s, and the stories of Jack the Ripper, whose notorious sex murders in London a few years before had sent shock waves across half of Europe. The Lulu material occupied Wedekind longer than any of his other works, off and on from 1892 to 1913. Because the original drama of 1895 was unwieldy, he expanded it and broke it up into two plays, Earth-Spirit and Pandora’s Box. Although Earth-Spirit was produced in various German cities from 1898 on, attracting directors of such renown as Max Reinhardt, Pandora’s Box fell victim to the censor’s knife, and it was not publicly performed in Germany until after the abolition of censorship in 1918. Although Wedekind was admired by intellectuals, as Brecht’s tribute to him attests, throughout his life the general public and popular press tended to regard him as little more than a pornographer.

For writers in the German literary tradition from Goethe to Thomas Mann, perhaps no theme has been more central than the importance of education—Bildung—in human development. Wedekind is no exception. The prelude to one of his first plays, Die junge Welt,¹ satirically depicts the restrictive education received by girls at the turn of the century; the farce Fritz Schwigerling² and the novel fragment Mine-Haha oder Über die körperliche Erziehung der jungen Mädchen (1901) present detailed pedagogical programs, emphasizing especially the importance of physical fitness in the upbringing of children.

1 – Originally published as Kinder und Narren (1891).

2 – Later retitled Der Liebestrank (1899).

Having first encountered Lulu as a ragged twelve-year-old making her way by petty thievery and by selling flowers on the street, Schön has always assumed that Schigolch is her father, although the text never confirms this assumption. Whereas the education provided her by the bum, pimp, and murderer Schigolch is anything but middle-class, he is far from the primeval, asocial creature that some critics have seen him to be, for example, associating his name with Molch, the German word for ‘salamander.’ Considering his character, we can derive a more appropriate reading of his name from the nearly exact equivalence of its inverse with logisch, the German for ‘logical.’ For Schigolch is nothing if not a shrewd thinker, managing to survive without a job by living outside the law and teaching Lulu to do the same, as her attempt to steal Schön’s watch as a child demonstrates. As important to Schigolch as money is sex. Even in his old age he comes begging to Lulu for funds to support his mistresses, and in the midst of his and Lulu’s desperately impoverished circumstances in London at the end of Pandora’s Box he is preoccupied with trying to seduce the keeper of a nearby pub. A number of remarks Schigolch lets fall, such as his admission that he, like so many others, originally wanted to marry Lulu, suggest that the erotic relationship between them began when she was a child. And his powerful sexuality doubtless influenced her by its example, just as Herod’s does his stepdaughter Salomé in Wilde’s play.

In their attention to the eroticism in the relationships of Salomé and Lulu with their father figures, Wilde and Wedekind dare to explore terrain from which Freud shied away. Freud initially postulated that the hysteria of many of his female patients was the result of sexual advances made by their fathers, but he later rejected this ‘seduction theory’ in favor of the view that his patients’ revelations were simply sexual fantasies. In recent years much debate has centered on the question of whether Freud abandoned the seduction theory because of contrary evidence or simply because he was reluctant to expose such shocking facts to the world and feared the professional opposition that his disclosure would arouse. Whichever the case, his thoughts on the subject were later incorporated into his writings on infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex, and he never gave up his belief that ‘the number of women who remain till a late age tenderly dependent on a paternal object, or indeed on their real father, is very great.’

In contrast to the children in Spring Awakening, the young Lulu suffers not from a lack but from an excess of sexual knowledge. Her most significant lesson at the hands of her sexual educator Schigolch is her entrance into the world of prostitution, an initiation he reveals to us with his comment, in the last act of Pandora’s Box, that it was as difficult for her to take to the streets twenty years before as it is now. (The corruption of Lulu is satirically echoed in the second act of Pandora’s Box in the fate of the twelve-year-old Kadidja, whose mother introduces her to wealthy older gentlemen who lust for her and, after the Jungfrau [‘virgin’] shares that support them have become worthless, decides to take her out of school and let her try out for the variety theater. In introducing Lulu to prostitution, Schigolch lays the foundation in her youth for the role that she is increasingly to play in her adult life—the role of commodity, or object of exchange.

This, then, is the product ‘snatched from the clutches of the police’ by Schön, Lulu’s second father figure: a girl familiar at the age of twelve with street theft, child molestation, and prostitution. Numerous statements call attention to his function as a shaping figure for Lulu, such as his own repeated reminders to her of the sacrifices he has made for her education; other characters also credit him with the responsibility for her development. The effects of this phase of her education are evident, for instance, in the repulsion she feels for her lesbian admirer Geschwitz, insofar as heterosexuality is the result of instinct conditioning. The period she spent with Schigolch, by contrast, had been for her one of undifferentiated sexuality, reflected in the name Lulu, used solely by him. Lulu not only is a name given to both sexes in Germany but also is akin to the bisyllabic consonant-vowel words first learned by children and associated with their earliest needs: ‘mama,’ ‘papa,’ ‘kaka,’ ‘pipi.’ When Schigolch visits Lulu at the home of her second husband, Schwarz, after not seeing her for several years, she tells him that no one has called her Lulu for ages and that the name now sounds to her ‘completely out of date’, a characterization that indicates the progress she has made under the tutelage of Schön.

For the most part, however, Schön’s education of Lulu affects her only superficially. As a newspaperman, a controller of public opinion, an advertiser and marketer whose very name (meaning ‘beautiful’) announces his aesthetic sense, he is well qualified to mold her into a beautiful object of desire. That there is indeed little substance beneath this attractive surface is perhaps most evident in the parodied catechism put to her by Schwarz: Can you speak the truth? Lulu: I don’t know. Do you believe in a creator? I don’t know. Is there anything you can swear by? I don’t know. Leave me alone! You’re mad. What do you believe in, then? I don’t know. Have you no soul, then? I don’t know. Have you ever been in love? I don’t know. She doesn’t know! I don’t know.

In his depiction of Lulu as a virtual nonentity, devoid of beliefs and opinions, Wedekind takes part in the time-honored tradition that defines the feminine in terms of an absence or lack of the masculine norm. This tradition, which as we have seen finds a foremost exponent in Freud, has received one of its fullest critiques in the writings of the French psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray. A good deal of her work responds either implicitly or explicitly to the neo-Freudian school of which she was originally a member, in particular to those papers of Lacan in which he expounds his theory that woman has been excluded from participation as a subject in the order of language, that she is in effect linguistically castrated. Much of Irigaray’s Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), as well as several of the essays in This Sex Which Is Not One (1977), criticizes the Freudian model that denies subjectivity to woman and instead views her as man’s specularized other or negative reflection.

Irigaray describes the basis of Freud’s model as an economy of representation whose meaning is regulated by paradigms and units of value that are in turn determined by male subjects. Therefore, the feminine must be deciphered as interdict: within the signs or between them, between the realized meanings, between the lines and as a function of the (re)productive necessities of an intentionally phallic currency, which, for lack of the collaboration of a (potentially female) other, can immediately be assumed to need its other, a sort of inverted or negative alter ego—’black’ too, like a photographic negative. Irigaray goes on to elaborate on woman’s function in sustaining the male ego: ‘Now, if this ego is to be valuable, some ‘mirror’ is needed to reassure it and re-insure it of its value. Woman will be the foundation for this specular duplication, giving man back ‘his’ image and repeating it as the ‘same’.’

Lulu serves precisely this kind of mirroring function for her male admirers: as a veritable tabula rasa, she is perfectly suited to reflect back to them their particular perceptions of and projections onto her. Her function as mirror is underlined by the series of names they give her: ignorant of her ‘primal name,’ Lulu, Schön romanticizes her origins by calling her Mignon, the name of the mysterious girl in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister whose elderly companion, the harper, is considerably more appealing than Schigolch; the first man to whom Schön marries Lulu off, the wealthy but senile Dr. Goll, calls her Nelli, perhaps a patronizing recollection of Dickens’s Little Nell; the painter Schwarz, to whom Lulu is, in her own words, ‘his wife, his wife, and nothing but his wife’, renames her Eve. Like all the others, her next suitor, the colonial explorer Prince Escerny, projects onto her his own fantasies of what he would like her to be: ‘Yours is a generous nature, unselfish. You cannot bear to see anyone suffer. You are the embodiment of mortal happiness. As a wife you would make a man supremely happy. Your being is all candour, you would make a poor actress’.

Lulu’s chameleon-like character—a beautiful surface without substance—is highlighted by her love of costumes. The ability to change clothes quickly, which Alwa says she learned as a child, is in Goll’s words her ‘own sphere’. Her first response after a disaster is to change her clothes, as if thereby to rid herself of any unpleasant effects, and her various outfits allow her to slip with ease from one role to another: from middle-class wife to Pierrot to flower girl to cancan dancer to ballerina to Queen of the Night to Ariel to East Indian sailor to jockey. It is surely no accident that the stage directions of both plays devote considerably more attention to descriptions of clothing, in particular Lulu’s clothing, than to details of physiognomy. In her talent as a role-player Lulu is perhaps intended—in anticipation of Mann’s Felix Krull—to represent a type of the artist, her theatrical skills constituting a creative power otherwise denied to the sterile femme fatale. In any case, it is clear that she is to be seen not as the incorporation of a natural principle, as has so often been claimed, but as the embodiment of artifice, carefully oiling, powdering, and dressing herself in an almost dandified manner (in an early version of the play she is even suspected of dyeing and artificially curling the hair in her armpits).

It is not insignificant that both Lola Montès and Lulu are first glimpsed on display, immobile, in a circus. For like Ophüls’s film, Wedekind’s Lulu plays combine the strategies of overvaluation and devaluation of the female in portraying the rise and fall of a femme fatale, and Lulu’s rise, like Lola’s, is marked by her function as fetishized spectacle. This function is most apparent in three scenes in Earth-Spirit which might be called embedded spectacles (within the overall spectacle of the drama itself): the prologue in front of the circus tent, Lulu’s appearance first in and then posing for her portrait, and her performance as a dancer. All three of these scenes, focusing on her as a sensually alluring figure, are analogous to those scenes in narrative cinema which, in Mulvey’s words, ‘freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation of a beautiful female star’.

Our next glimpse of Lulu is not of the living character but of her portrait as Pierrot, which Goll has commissioned Schwarz to paint. Gazing at this spectacle alongside the picture of his fiancée on which Schwarz is also working, Schön gives us an early indication of Lulu’s role as attractive surface without core, commenting that she is ‘a diabolic beauty,’ whereas his fiancée’s portrait shows ‘more substance’. But perhaps the most striking instance in the entire drama of Lulu’s role as silent spectacle occurs in the next scene, in which she stands on a raised platform posing for Schwarz in her Pierrot costume while Goll and Schön sit watching. Since this is the only one of the three embedded spectacles in the play which allows us to observe Lulu’s spectators observing her, the voyeuristic pleasure that underlies the fascination of drama is particularly great here, insofar as the theatergoer identifies with Goll and Schön in a kind of doubling effect.

An illuminating analogy is again provided by narrative cinema, much of whose appeal is also based on voyeurism: the visual dynamics of this scene in Earth-Spirit are similar to those of Alfred Hitchcock’s film Marnie (1964). Raymond Bellour, noting that in American English ‘one says, when describing a woman: ‘her looks’; as though her ‘looks’ were nothing but that image constituted through the looks given her by men,’ points out that Hitchcock has inserted himself into the chain of male looks that constitute Marnie: after a segment in which Marnie’s employer and a client of his elaborate on her ‘looks’ to the police following her theft and disappearance, Hitchcock himself appears in the hall of the hotel where she has gone, first watching her walk down the hall and then turning toward the spectator, ‘staring at the camera which he is, whose inscription he duplicates. The spectator in turn (re)duplicates this inscription through his identification with both Hitchcock and the camera’.

The ‘looks’ given to Lulu in this scene of Wedekind’s play render her art-like: Schön tells her she is a ‘picture before which Art must despair’ and instructs Schwarz to ‘treat her as a still-life’. Schön’s fantasy is clear: if this woman he helped create would only behave like a work of art—silent, framed, and immobile—all his troubles would be over.

If this fantasy is not realized, the actual work of art Schwarz produces—the painting of Lulu in her Pierrot costume—does remain. Displaying her at the peak of her beauty, the painting continues throughout both plays to be crucial to her identity as a desirable female, to what might be called her ego ideal. For her status as an attractive woman, as a pretty package, is more than merely pleasurable for Lulu; she regards it as her salvation. This is especially evident at the end of Earth-Spirit, where she attempts to use her appearance to persuade Alwa not to turn her over to the police for murdering his father: ‘Don’t let me fall into the hands of the law. It would be such a pity! I’m still so young. I’ll be true to you all my life. Look at me, Alwa, look at me, man! Look at me!’ (emphasis mine). Lulu’s need to see her portrait as soon as she gets out of prison is evidence of the same phenomenon, as is the fact that, when she is later so down-and-out that her looks have faded, she cannot bear to see the beautiful portrait with which she can no longer identify.

Lulu’s reliance on her portrait as mirror reflection is bound up with her narcissism, a condition not incongruous with her education into beautiful surface without substance. Like Schnitzler’s actress, she is constantly parading her awareness of her attractiveness, claiming to Goll while posing for Schwarz that she looks ‘equally well from all sides’ and to Alwa that when she saw herself in the mirror in her Parisian evening gown, she ‘wished [she] were a man, [her] own husband’. Escerny observes that ‘when she dances her solo she is intoxicated with her own beauty—seems to be idolatrously in love with it’. And, as Freud was to do a few years later, Wedekind presents the narcissistic woman as all the more fascinating for her self-contentment. Again and again Lulu is placed before mirroring surfaces. The mirrors in her dressing room give way to a gleaming dustpan when she is in prison, and in the opinion of the white-slave dealer Casti-Piani, the picture of her as Eve before the looking-glass is her grandest. Her self-involvement is epitomized in the early scene where she is left alone with Schwarz; when he commands her to look him in the eyes, she responds, ‘I can see myself as a Pierrot in them’. The melancholy introspection conventionally associated with the Pierrot figure in nineteenth-century literature and painting is replaced here by narcissistic self-absorption. But Lulu’s narcissism is essential to her sociocultural construction as a paradigmatic female. In the words of Judith Kegan Gardiner, ‘In film, as in literature and life, women are accustomed to seeing themselves being seen, to valuing themselves according to others’ evaluations of their appearance.’

The commodity—guardian parallel holds true for Lulu’s relationships not only with her father figures but with other men as well. Moreover, the consumer society within which she functions as a commodity, first as a child with Schigolch and then as an adult, leaves its mark on the language of both plays. Married to Schwarz, Lulu complains that he is ‘wasting’ her, and Alwa later uses the same word in warning her as a dancer not to ‘waste’ her strength before her final appearance. More graphically, lamenting the literary trends that have led to a decline in the popularity of the circus, the animal tamer tells his audience at the beginning of the prologue to Earth-Spirit, ‘My pensioners are short of fodder / So at the moment they devour each other’; within the same realm of imagery, Alwa compares the atmosphere in the theater where Lulu is dancing to the frenzy of a menagerie at feeding time. The degree to which Lulu has internalized her role as object of consumption is evident in the reason she gives Schigolch for oiling and powdering herself so carefully each day: ‘I want to be good enough to eat’. The process of consumption is not one-sided, however, as Casti-Piani’s comment about Lulu’s ‘heavy consumption’ of men makes clear.

The commodification of Lulu is most apparent in Pandora’s Box. Whereas her function as fetishized spectacle predominates during her rise as a femme fatale, her role as commodity prevails during her fall, which begins with her murder of Schön at the end of Earth-Spirit. In the terms that Mulvey sets out and Silverman takes up in discussing the fortunes of Lola Montès, it is at this point that overvaluation gives way to devaluation, that star becomes criminal. Pandora’s Box presents us with one male character after another trying to ‘cash in on’ Lulu: the variety acrobat Rodrigo, guided by his conviction that ‘it’s not half as much of an effort for a woman to support her husband as the other way about’, plans to train her as a trapeze artist after their marriage and then live on her income; Casti-Piani intends to make a large sum by selling her into prostitution in Egypt; and after her escape from prison both threaten to turn her back over to the police if she refuses to comply with their wishes. Even Alwa has profited from her, by taking her life as the subject of his play. In the tradition of her mythological ancestor Pan-dora, Lulu not only is ‘all-gifted’ but becomes a ‘gift for all’.

…and dissecting Lulu and speculates about how much money the London Medical Club will pay for this ‘prodigy’—the part of Lulu denoted, in vulgar parlance, by the ‘box’ of the play’s title.

But what about Wedekind’s attitude toward Lulu’s grisly fate? Are we to view it as a wish-fulfillment fantasy of male revenge for the snares of female sexuality or as a condemnation of woman’s utmost victimization? The drama has been read both ways, and indeed, the Lulu plays offer one of the most profound examples in turn-of-the-century literature of the ambiguity characteristic of male portrayals of women. On the one hand the character Lulu is, as we have seen, clearly a product of her socialization; her roles as spectacle and commodity grow out of a patriarchal capitalist system in which men control both women and money. The implication of this view—that women are not inherently inferior or evil and that the only way to improve their lot is to abolish capitalism—places Wedekind on the side of socialist thinkers such as Engels and Bebel, who supported the feminist struggle for equal rights while doubting its effectiveness as long as the current economic structure remained intact. Certainly Wedekind’s drama Der Marquis von Keith (1900), a harsh portrayal of the emotional and spiritual bankruptcy of human beings in a capitalist society, would support this kind of categorization.

On the other hand, to identify Wedekind with the feminist cause is misleading, since in the Lulu plays as well as in other works he seems to take pleasure in making fun of the turn-of-the-century women’s movement. At the end of Pandora’s Box Geschwitz, following her ludicrous failed attempt to hang herself in despair at Lulu’s indifference to her, resolves to return to Germany to study law and fight for women’s rights. Similarly, in the prelude to Die junge Welt, mentioned earlier in the context of Wedekind’s concern with education, several girls form a women’s rights group and vow not to marry until the sexual inequalities characterizing the education of women have been completely removed, yet in the course of the play one after the other forgets her pledge and enters a traditional marriage.

And in Death and Devil (1905) Casti-Piani reappears to convince a prudish member of the International Society for the Suppression of White Slave Traffic that the ability to sell their bodies is women’s only advantage over men and that sensual pleasure is the one joy in a world deadened by the hypocrisy of bourgeois society. But his belief that prostitution is the result of female sexual desire is unmasked as an illusion through the confession of one of the girls in his bordello, who reveals that her work there has failed to satisfy her raging masochistic lust. Her stance echoes Lulu’s description to Alwa of her recurrent (and prophetic) dream of being attacked by a sex murderer, which she immediately follows with a request for a kiss. Wedekind’s attribution of masochism to women, paralleling Freud’s views, as well as other evidence of his belief in the existence of polar differences between the sexes, places him on the side of notorious ‘hysterizers’ such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and even Weininger.

Evidently Wedekind is not to be pinned down. In their open-endedness the Lulu plays encourage critics, directors, and even audiences to project their own preconceived notions of femininity onto Lulu, thus imitating the male characters in the dramas themselves. Created by a man to represent ‘woman’—in her ‘primal form’—Lulu is of necessity marked by ambivalence. For ambivalence has typified depictions of the female ever since Hesiod told the story of Pandora, who is remembered for bringing into the world not only evil but also hope.