Rhetorical Strategies of Cooperation and Resistance in Lou Andreas-Salome’s Woman
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Abstract
The judgment of Lou Andreas-Salomé in her own time and even today is ambivalent. The theorists of the women's movement of the time did not accept her into their ranks, and she had debates with them about the concept of Woman. Some scholars today consider her a forerunner of modern feminism, while others see her as an anti-feminist. Salomé's ambivalent reception is partly due to the fact that she had to forge a new language. She integrated images of psychoanalysis with a subversive, above all, ironic rhetoric. The aim of this study is to analyze Salomé's linguistic images and explore the contradictions that characterize her writings. I shall argue that Salomé did not produce a unified theory about the relationship between men and women but made an attempt to articulate the female images she conceived in her literary figures. The judgment of Lou Andreas-Salomé is controversial, not least for the specificities of the literary register.