Fräulein Else
Fräulein Else or Miss Else is a news of the writer and Austrian doctor Arthur Schnitzler published in 1924. This work was the subject of a film adaptation of a style dramatic comedy where a named young girl Miss Else of the middle-class Viennese is forced with humiliation to save her father lawyer of the ruin. This work celebrates of Arthur Schnitzler presents the originality to be exclusively made up, except for some dialogs, of the continuation of the thoughts of Miss Else from one evening to another, while going until its last thoughts. This relatively new process for the time, the interior speech, was going then to be systematized by Joyce in Ulysses, but also in other works like Belle of the lord of Albert Cohen.
Summary
Else T., girl of a lawyer Viennese, is for a few days of holidays in an Italian thermal spa. There, it obtains a telegraph of her mother, in whom it asks him to urgently apply for a loan Dorsday, rich commercial of objets d'art. because his/her father lost with the play of the money pertaining to his pupils and will be stopped soon if it cannot refund. Else will see Dorsday and explains to him the difficult situation of its family.
Dorsday agree to lend the 30.000 guilders necessary, but n the other hand requires the authorization to be able to contemplate Else naked during fifteen minutes. Else reacts violently to that, but reflects during the evening on the dilemma of its situation. Divided between an absolute fidelity with her father and his strong desire of autonomy it does not manage to choose one of the two possible options: if it rejects l'" offre" of Dorsday, it gives up her father with his destiny; the proposal of Dorsday would be equivalent to a autoprostitution and thus not to have its own body more.
In this conflict situation, in which Else does not stop changing opinion, show through the exhibitionist desires and of died of Else, like its desire to be liked and its not acknowledged aspiration with émanciper. In the opposition between the public exhibitions that she sees herself making in her imagination, and its modest refusal to strip itself in front of Dorsday, one sees contradiction between the domination of the man on the woman, and the desire of the female emancipation. But it in the final analysis proves that Else is not able to be opposed to the requirements of his/her father and to impose its own will. At the same time, it becomes increasingly clear that the abandonment of oneself of Else will go hand in hand with a suicide - in its thoughts, the suicide is always regarded as a possible decision.
However, it becomes also clear for Else which it will not be able to only go to Dorsday and which it is not able to undergo this humiliation. Else goes in the refectory of the hotel only equipped with a black coat, and agrees to be naked, then disappears. She then manages to commit suicide by introducing sleeping pills discreetly, which seems to release it definitively.
With reading
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Fräulein Else , Editor Lgf