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The distinguishing feature of the creative output of the contemporary Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek is the unmasking of the illusion perpetuated by misreadings of canonical texts. In her play Was geschah, nachdem Nora ihren Mann verlassen hatte oder Stitzen der Gesellschaften, written in I979 as a reflection upon the centennial of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, Jelinek superimposes a strong materialist feminist reading on a range of contemporary issues: the demythification of canonical texts that adhere to the fictions of everyday life, the continuity of patriarchal structures in capitalist market economies, and the limitations of utopian individualism in feminist myths.' Jelinek recognizes that a critique of the appropriation of Ibsen's classic simultaneously necessitates a demystification of the modes of representation most successful in the dissemination of ideologies. In her deconstruction of Ibsen's A Doll's House, Jelinek transposes the action of the play to reveal "what happened after Nora left her husband and met the pillars of societies."2
Ibsen's A Doll's House is continually present in Nora, particularly in Jelinek's deconstruction of its idealistic implications, the heroic strength of the heroine and the utopian hopes for the equality in the partnership of the married couple; however, in Jelinek's version the psychological depth of the characters has disappeared and utopian dreams of gender equality are undermined by her use of the cliches that continue to surround the reception of Ibsen's play. Throughout Ibsen's play, we see Torvald carefully creating the terms and appropriate postures of his fictive world out of the moral maxims on debt, responsibility, the telling of lies, the aesthetic differences between knitting and embroidery, and even on eating macaroons. Nora in turn has become an accomplished actress in sustaining her fiction of youthfulness and irresponsibility by acting out the prettifying, self-deluding fiction of innocence for the eight years of their marriage. When the "wonderful" does not happen, Nora's and Torvald's fictions collapse and they are left, as in theatre, only with the appearance of a marriage.3 Nora discards her dancing-girl costume and assumes the adult costume essential to her new recreation of self as an uncompromising and strong-minded heroine capable of taking on all society. It is in this somewhat frayed adult "costume" from the last scene of A Doll's House that Nora wanders...