Women as Lovers

Women as Lovers is a novel that, with the distance of time, is no less exciting in its sharpness than it was in the 1970s when it was written. In her earlier writing phase, Austrian Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek approaches feminism with rough, precise language, with a lot of irony. She writes

    Women as Lovers as a commentary, an unstoppable series of comments. Jelinek sets up an observation about two women and their lives in patriarchy. She twists and distorts these lives with her commentary like caricatures, exposing the mechanisms of the language of patriarchy and the violence of language. Women as Lovers are, for director Bojana Lazić and myself, not only the brides Brigitte and Paula, but also all the other women around them – their mothers and aunts, sisters and friends, colleagues… Women in marriage, and in any other relationship with a man governed by some form of contract, are the lovers of patriarchy. They are unfree – confined within rules and consensuses that regulate their freedoms. The structure of the production emerged directly from the structure of the novel. Just as Jelinek tells the stories of Brigitte and Paula through parallel narrative strands, alternating between their chapters and eventually bringing them together at a single point, during a wedding celebration, we decided to turn the production into that very event. Two parallel weddings, both equally grinding down the heroines through the mechanism of what is conventionally assumed to be the happiest day in a woman’s life – the ritual in which a woman passes from being her father’s responsibility to becoming her husband’s concern. However, in our approach to, and ways of confronting, the position of women within the problematic phallocentric and phallogocentric structures of culture and narrative, we decided to rescue the ending – or, one might say, the fate – of these two women and of future generations from the inevitable bleak future that we ourselves have already come to experience in the time since Women as Lovers was written, and whose darkness we can still sense looming ahead. Jack Halberstam advocates failure as a rejection of the expected norm: “A woman’s success has always been measured according to male standards. Gender failure most often means being freed from the pressure to conform to the ideals of patriarchy; failing to fulfil the role of a woman can lead to unexpected pleasure.” And it was precisely that pleasure that interested Bojana Lazić and myself as we were reading Elfriede Jelinek.

Dimitrije Kokanov