“I am coming!” Returning to the Womb in Elfriede Jelinek’s Die Klavierspielerin and Michael Haneke’s Film La Pianiste

Abstract

Elfriede Jelinek‟s Die Klavierspielerin (1983), 1 a novel about a piano teacher (Erika Kohut) at the Vienna conservatory in her late thirties who still lives with her mother in a small flat, deconstructs and anatomises myths of maternity very radically and successfully, perhaps better than any other German-language literary text. Erika‟s short moments of escape from her possessive mother are made up of little secrets, such as going to peep shows and porn cinemas or hurting herself in the bathroom as well as playing sadistic mind games with her students. But Erika‟s sadism in relation to her students and her sexual masochism are in fact addressed to her mother, who is simultaneously her penetrator, her object of hate and desire, and her accomplice. In this article, I will explore this complex sexual drive between mother and daughter.