Introduction

Summary

THE FREQUENT ASSOCIATION OF WOMEN with death in Western culture has received a great deal of critical attention. But the cultural representations under scrutiny have typically been representations produced by men, and critics have primarily been interested in the masculinist, sometimes misogynistic, assumptions that motivate them. It has been argued, for example, that the alignment of women with death can be attributed to the “unknowable” quality of each for the male sex. Elisabeth Bronfen explains that representing the death of a woman, or death as a woman, allows male writers and artists at once to express the threatening and fascinating quality of this mystery and to contain it. Helen Fronius and Anna Linton suggest that the link between women and death, so frequent in male-authored works, may be the “shadow-side of their connection with birth.”

German culture offers many examples of women who die and women who kill: these include women represented in the motif of death and the maiden in early modern German art, the numerous reworkings of biblical stories about figures such as Judith and Salome, the ethereal heroines of German Romanticism, Amazon warriors such as those portrayed in Heinrich von Kleist’s drama Penthesilea (1808), nineteenth-century Heldenmädchen (heroic maidens), and femmes fatales such as Frank Wedekind’s Lulu, to name but some. Volumes 1 and 2 of the Women and Death series, the product of a three-year research project funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council, investigate German traditions such as these with a particular focus on how women are represented as victims and killers (volume 1) and on the woman warrior (volume 2), in art, literature, and media produced for the main part by men. As well as demonstrating how fertile the topic of women and death has proved to be for the (male) cultural imagination — its power to trouble and to fascinate — both volumes reveal the historical, changing nature of the topic’s portrayal.

But what of the relationship of women artists to death? This is the issue that the current, third volume in the Women and Death series seeks to address. The threat of death is universal; for women, too, then, the portrayal of death must fulfill an important function if, following Bronfen, it is through representing death that we work through and contain our fears of it.