The Piano Teacher

Jelinek is a downright pessimist. Many people consider her a feminist. If a feminist, her feminism does not appear to have the positive meaning of “women's liberation” or equality for women. Rather, her portrayal of women’s status quo is bleak and hopeless.

New York Times said that her writings focused on “sexual politics.” Sexual Politics is an interesting angle to comprehend the Piano Teacher. Politics is about relationship. It consists of social relations involving authority or power. Hegel said that human relations always lead to master-slave relationships. Jelinek once quoted Hegel and said that the relationship between man and woman was a Hegelian relationship between master and slave. In the Piano Teacher, the estrangement in sexual relations takes many different forms. Every possible logic is shattered in the anguish of feminine irremediable fate.

Absence of men – There is no men in Erika and her mother’s life. Her father’s death and her mother’s suffocating control play a large part in her life. Erika has no idea of what the proper female sex is and is incapable of settling for heterosexual normality. Without the other side of the relation - the master, the women are no longer salves. So the two women have engaged in internal strife, bulling, screaming, and slapping at each other. Mothers have been so fully shaped by patriarchal hierarchy that they usually are among its most willing perpetuators.

Dominant Slave – Klemmer falls in love with his piano teacher, Erika. During their first amorous encounter, Erika is the one who gives out direction. She later writes him a letter which spells out her masochistic yearnings and details instruction on what he has to do at their next encounter to meet her demands. The change of power game leaves the young student completely nonplussed, he must recognize his need to subjugate the object.

Men in power – There is a very clear idea in Klemmer’s mind about the proper composition of a relationship and what sexual intercourse is, Erika’s scenarios are received as disturbing because they challenge the innate value of Klemmer’s world. Torn between the outrage of humiliation, and the urge to save Erika from her misconceptions about sex, Klemmer bursts into Erika’s apartment, beats and rapes her. Violence and repression are Jelinek’s interpretation of male control.

The consequences of female autonomy – Erika is a loner who is incapable to enjoy life, sex, and passion. At the end, Erika stabs herself in the shoulder with a large kitchen Knife. She has adopted both violently opposed gender roles in a lose-lose configuration and promptly lost herself.

At the time of the Nobel Prize, Jelinek was asked whether she thought feminism had made any significant gains over the years. “Nothing,” she said, “would lead one to suppose that it had.” In the Presentation Speech, Professor Engdahl of the Swedish Academy said that “the difficulty to read Elfriede Jelinek is that there is no sympathetic writers voice that the reader can rest in and identify with. It is an awakening from reading the narcissism.”

* Chinese version