The madwoman on the stage: Goethe’s Aurelie and Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else as representations of the modern woman’s fractured self

Goethe’s Aurelie has long been overlooked as an important character in the novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-6), and dismissed as melancholic, unbalanced, or as a necessary feature of Wilhelm’s Bildung (development). This paper seeks to rehabilitate Aurelie’s importance as a literary forerunner of modernist narratives of the fractured female self, especially Arthur Schnitzler’s 1924 novella Fräulein Else. Both Aurelie and Else fall apart under pressure placed on them by male characters and both narratives feature a scene thematising their exposure, including nudity. Both texts digest male control and voyeurism and the trauma it can inflict on the female psyche. This article examines brings these aspects into dialogue with Freud’s writings on hysteria and sexuality, which have often been linked to Schnitzler, and which may themselves have been influenced by Freud’s extensive reading of Goethe. I argue that the defiant voices of Aurelie and Else achieve a form of agency in speaking directly to the reader, an agency which transcends the narrative traps in which they find themselves in their respective texts and allows us to understand them as exemplary modern female subjects.