Socialist Patriarchy and the Limits of Reform: A Reading of Irmtraud Morgner's Life and Adventures of Troubadora Beatriz as Chronicled by her Minstrel Laura

Irmtraud Morgner's Life and Adventures of Troubador Beatriz is one of several important anti-patriarchal texts to come out of the GDR over the past ten years. It is a complex and ambitious attempt to elaborate the meaning of women's emancipation in a socialist society, an attempt which is structurally and thematically marked by a struggle between oppositional and orthodox approaches to questions of sexuality, knowledge and power. This particular reading of the text emphasizes the limitatons which traditional Marxist analysis and representational practices impose upon a textual field which necessarily introduces conflict and difference into the repressive stability of GDR socialism and its conventional narrative representation. Having made women's radically different desires, experiences and relationships with one another a legitimate subject, the text opens up knowledges which threaten to violate traditional political, social and sexual orders, and conventional narrative consistencies. I have attempted to read the text's transgressions and radical oppositions against the pressure of its insistently conclusive Marxism and to suggest the need for a critical re-thinking of the relations between sexuality, representation and power. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol5/iss1/5 SOCIALIST PATRIARCHY AND THE LIMITS OF REFORM: A READING OF IRMTRAUD MORGNER'S LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF TROUBADORA BEATRIZ AS CHRONICLED BY HER MINSTREL LAURA BIDDY MARTIN University of Wisconsin Throughout the relatively short history of the German Democratic Republic, officials there have exploited the now wellknown Marxist maxim that progress in a society can be measured by the status of women. Indeed, the government's claims to have achieved political, legal and economic equality for women have figured significantly as legitimation strategies for the GDR. This official and paternalistic «equal rights» approach to emancipation has perpetuated the belief that advances can be made on the economic and legal levels, while leaving the supposedly derivative and in fact more threatening micro-structural bases of power and oppression intact. However, despite the official protests against the necessity of possibility of a «feminist» movement or literature in the GDR. a number of texts appeared in the seventies which opened an important critical discussion of patriarchal structures; texts which begin implicitly, if not explicitly to expose and challenge the limits of an essentially reformist approach to sexuality and emancipation among GDR ideologues and within Marxist theory generally. It is not surprising that such texts should have appeared in the years following the Eighth Party Congress of the SED in 1971.' The economic stability that the GDR had achieved by the early seventies and the generosity that this stability initially allowed have made a more critical literature possible. And it is certainly not insignificant that more critical analyses of political, social and psychosexual structures of domination began to appear concurrent59 1 Martin: Socialist Patriarchy and the Limits of Reform: A Reading of Irmtr Published by New Prairie Press 60 STCL, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Fall 1980) ly with the re-emergence of the Women's Movement as a critical force in the West. Writers like Christa Wolf, Gerti Tetzner, Brigitte Reimann, Irmtraud Morgner and Maxie Wander have begun to articulate the visible and damaging effects within the GDR of the historical oppression of women and the discursive repression of a «feminine» difference. In the process, they have succeeded in reconceptualizing what was once defined and made structurally harmless as the «woman question.» Christa Wolf has received the most attention among Western readers for having gone beyond the false project of legitimizing GDR socialism with illustrations of women's emancipation; in fact, her texts have exposed a very problematic relationship between socialism in that form and the emancipation of women or men. Like other GDR writers, Christa Wolf has elaborated the micro-structural bases of domination in ways that challenge the self-evidence of various GDR institutions and the «truths» on which they rest. Certainly, such anti-patriarchal literature in the GDR signals the kind of «insurrection of subjugated knowledges» against a regime of apparently self-evident and absolute certainties which, according to Michel Foucault, characterizes critical epistemological developments in the West during the past ten years.' The points of convergence between feminist and post-structuralist thought make Foucault's characterizations of such developments useful in our attempts to elaborate the significance for us of this anti-patriarchal literature in the GDR. What continues to fascinate us about this GDR literature are not only, and indeed, perhaps not primarily the explicit descriptions, validations and critiques for conditions of women in the GDR; these texts have an immediate informative value, but we read and re-read them not so much for what they say about women, but for what they do discursively, for what they contribute to the theoretical, political and literary projects in which we as Western scholars and feminists are engaged. Irmtraud Morgner's very long and complex montage-novel, Life and Adventures of Troubadora Beatriz as Chronicled by her Minstrel Laura (1974)i can be read as a textual field of struggle between oppositional knowledge and the theoretical and unitary discourse of traditional Marxism. Western critics have read the text as a compromising affirmation of the status quo and the GDR's «evolution» toward sexual equality on the one hand, and as a radical critique of that society, its patriarchal structures, and 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 5, Iss. 1 [1980], Art. 5 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol5/iss1/5 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1096