Sissi's World: The Empress Elisabeth in Memory and Myth by Maura E. Hametz Heidi Schlipphacke
2019; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 114; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/mlr.2019.0063
ISSN2222-4319
Autores Resumo Reviews nature of male/female friendships, forms of Christianity, literary genres and style, print culture and a widening reader base, and gendered medical discourses. e range of authors is also broad, including both the well-known and less well-known (for example, David Hume, Suzanne Necker, Louise d’Épinay). In conclusion, e Labor of the Mind is a lucid contribution to feminist critique of Enlightenment culture in France and Britain. e multifaceted analysis of the gendering of the mind in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it offers will be of interest to scholars and students working on gender from various perspectives, including social history, literary criticism, the medical humanities, and the history of emotions. C U J M Sissi’s World: e Empress Elisabeth in Memory and Myth. Ed. by M E. H and H S. London: Bloomsbury. . xiv+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. One in a line of lovely but doomed royal women—Mary Stuart and Diana Spencer spring to mind—Kaiser Franz Joseph’s alienated consort has long been a popular subject for biographies, most notably Brigitte Hamann’s Elisabeth: Kaiserin wider Willen (Vienna and Munich: Amalthea, ), translated as e Reluctant Empress: A Biography of Empress Elisabeth of Austria (New York: Knopf, ). Yet, as the editors of Sissi’s World point out, ‘little scholarly work has been dedicated to exploring the ways in which the Habsburg Empress is remembered and imagined, embodied and disembodied, recalled, revered and constructed’ (p. ). e fourteen contributions here, mostly by women, aim to rectify that omission. A secondary aim is to explore why this iconic figure has gained little traction in the USA despite Americans’ fascination with royalty and Mark Twain’s claim that ‘her assassination will still be talked of and described and painted a thousand years from now’ (p. ). In contrast, although she presumably counts as a class enemy, Fei-Hsie and Wang and Ke-chin Hsia reveal Elisabeth’s ongoing popularity in post-Maoist China, inspired by the three immensely popular Sissi films of the s starring Romy Schneider. ese are further examined in Heidi Schlipphacke’s ‘Melancholy Empress: Queering Empire in Ernst Marischka’s Sissi Films’. Unfortunately, their title, replicated in this collection, perpetuates a popular misspelling of Elisabeth’s pet name as Sissi rather than Sisi. Following Schlipphacke’s account, Susanne Hochreiter offers ‘Sisi: A Double reflection on a “Queer Icon”’. Princess Diana, similarly a gay icon and ‘reluctant, tragic, anorectic princess’ (p. ), looms large in Kate omas’s ‘Fat, in, Sad: Victoria, Sissi, Diana and the Fate of Wax Queens’. Elisabeth hunted at Althorp, Diana’s home, and figured in two books by her prolix step-grandmother Barbara Cartland. Effigies of both Elisabeth and Diana were displayed at Madame Tussauds in London. omas’s essay touches additionally on the possible impact Elisabeth had on omas Hardy’s fiction. Her unconcealed fictional depiction is discussed in Anita McChesney’s ‘Imagining Austria: Myths of MLR, ., “Sisi” and National Identity in Lilian Faschinger’s Wiener Passion’ (), translated as Vienna Passion (). Elisabeth Black examines ‘Cocteau’s Queen: Sissi between Legend, Spectacle and History in L’Aigle à deux têtes’, his play of and subsequent film of , which ‘attempt to retheatricalize the theater of the s [. . .] and to theatricalize the cinema lacking in actors truly worthy of the title “star”’ (p. ). Elisabeth’s physical allure is analysed in Olivia Gruber Florek’s discussion of Franz Xaver Winterhalter’s celebrated portrait of and Christiane Hertel’s examination of Ulrike Truger’s sculpture Elisabeth (/). As Carolin Maikler shows, the Elisabeth myth has even impacted upon the work of fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld. Contributions by Judith Szapor and András Lénárt on the Elisabeth cult in post-Communist Hungary and Maura E. Hametz and Borut Klabjan on the contested memorial statue in Trieste reveal the extent of Elisabeth’s lasting political significance in ‘Mitteleuropa’. With essays by Beth Ann Muellner on the Sisi museum in the Vienna Hourg, and Susanne Kelley on the problematic memorialization of Sisi in recent exhibitions in Austria and the USA, this volume ranges widely. Most obviously missing is any extended discussion of Elisabeth (), the most successful home-grown musical in the German-speaking world. ere...
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