Linda Kraus  Worley 

The Wild Man and Woman: Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’s Constructions of Sexuality 
	Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830-1916), clearly  the most popular and honored Austrian woman writer around 1900, is often (dis)regarded as a tarnished icon of the Habsburg era, a “poetic” realist writing about the travails of village and manor life (c.f., for example, her Dorf- und Schlossgeschichten).  Much is missing in this view of Ebner and her work.  One missing element is Ebner’s fascination with the “wild” man (and woman), sexuality and infidelity, a fascination that can be traced from the beginnings of her career as a fiction writer through various short stories and her often revised novel of female adultery Unsühnbar.   I propose to concentrate on the fairy tale “Die Prinzessin von Banalien” (1872), which she wrote at the beginning of her career as well as on Unsühnbar, whose final edition was published in 1908.  Ebner wrote her fairy tale at a time when the wild man and woman were neither anthropological entities as they had been in the 17th and 18th centuries, nor were they living myths, as had been the case in ancient Rome and Greece.  The anxieties and longings associated with these figures had, however, not dissipated
and were soon to be resurrected in the new mythology of Freudian thought.  As dealt with by Ebner in her fairy tale, these anxieties and wishes include obsessive longing for the sexually wild, female masochism and aggression as well as other complicated sexual longings and negotiations permeating the tale.  The tensions between “civilized” and “natural”/ ‘wild”/ ‘sexual”often  reappear in Ebner’s work, but, after a harsh rebuke from the editor Julius Rodenberg concerning the “disgusting” sexuality he discerned in the manuscript of a story she had sent him for possible publication in Die deutsche Rundschau, she learned to push these tensions into niches hidden with muted tones.  Thus, if a reader knows about Ebner’s themes and writing strategies, it becomes plausible to read a story about the loyalty of a dog also in terms of female submission and Hörigkeit.  Unsühnbar seems at first glance an eerily non-sexual novel of female adultery, yet Ebner’s anxieties and longings are as omnipresent as the heroine’s unrecognized, illegitimate brother “Wolfi” as he stalks the outskirts of his sister’s world.  
	I propose that a nuanced, complete understanding of the Austrian cultural environment with respect to sexuality around 1900 must include the popular and thus influential Ebner.