Celebrate Else Steinhardt. People should not be defined by their victim-hood. Fraulein Else is the name of the novella Arthur Schnitzler wrote in 1924. It was a forerunner of Joyce's stream of consciousness writing and it incorporated some of the psychosexual ideas from Freud's theories. It's about a young girl of 19 who lives in Vienna and is cornered into stripping for an old voyeur by her own mother. The father is having financial problems and the man will help the father if the girl obliges. There are some parallels with our Else. She was roughly the same age as the character in the novella when it was written, and she probably moved in the same circles as Schnitzler, as a young opera singer. Moreover, Else was, if not classically beautiful, highly flirtations and attractive. In the pictures of her she is often arch: she licks ice creams, sits on laps and embraces naked statues. In other pictures she is dressed in loose, flowing clothing, matching the ope...
Left wing commentary from the heart and the head