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levitybooks's review against another edition
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Featured in my Jan 2021 Wrap Up
These plays (from 1911) are unappealing and ignored because they are too vulgar for an audience wide enough to fund the shows. But I think they are of monumental historical importance, and that people have overlooked this because of their vulgarity. Here are the main observations I've made:
1. In The Lulu Plays (Earthbound and Pandora's Box), Lulu might be the first ever femme fatale. Many men die for a woman in plays (and vice-versa), but this is the first time it seems very explicitly related to Lulu rather than general misfortune.
2. In Pandora's Box, we might have the first ever character that explicitly identifies as 'queer', and the first explicit f/f relationship on stage.
3. In Death & The Devil (another play in this edition), we have the first description of a class war in feminism that oppresses sex workers. Very explicitly, this play has one man tell a women's rights advocate that feminists oppress other women by shaming sex work, which is in the interest of the bourgeois to lower the demand (and therefore the price) of sex work which disempowers women from using one of their biological advantages over men (allure) to help them in an already patriarchal capitalist society. Needless to say, this extremely short play fails to be appealing in being so explicit, controversial, and detailed on Marxist feminist theory with basically no action or character development. But it's somewhat visionary that in 1911 a male playwright could predict the intrafeminist wars of third wave feminism surrounding sex work, long before the second wave feminism grew in France during the war?
These plays (from 1911) are unappealing and ignored because they are too vulgar for an audience wide enough to fund the shows. But I think they are of monumental historical importance, and that people have overlooked this because of their vulgarity. Here are the main observations I've made:
1. In The Lulu Plays (Earthbound and Pandora's Box), Lulu might be the first ever femme fatale. Many men die for a woman in plays (and vice-versa), but this is the first time it seems very explicitly related to Lulu rather than general misfortune.
2. In Pandora's Box, we might have the first ever character that explicitly identifies as 'queer', and the first explicit f/f relationship on stage.
3. In Death & The Devil (another play in this edition), we have the first description of a class war in feminism that oppresses sex workers. Very explicitly, this play has one man tell a women's rights advocate that feminists oppress other women by shaming sex work, which is in the interest of the bourgeois to lower the demand (and therefore the price) of sex work which disempowers women from using one of their biological advantages over men (allure) to help them in an already patriarchal capitalist society. Needless to say, this extremely short play fails to be appealing in being so explicit, controversial, and detailed on Marxist feminist theory with basically no action or character development. But it's somewhat visionary that in 1911 a male playwright could predict the intrafeminist wars of third wave feminism surrounding sex work, long before the second wave feminism grew in France during the war?
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