SOURCE: Christensen, Peter G. “Farewell to the Femme Fatale: Angela Carter's Rewriting of Frank Wedekind's Lulu Plays.” Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy Tale Studies 12, no. 1 (1998): 319-36.

[In the following essay, Christensen examines Carter's “demythologizing” of the Lulu character in her revisions of the Lulu plays.]

In her book The Sexual Circus: Wedekind's Theatre of Subversion (32-35, 60-65), Elizabeth Boa notes the importance of fairy-tale motifs in Wedekind's major plays, Spring Awakening (Frühlingserwachen, 1891), and the Lulu plays, Earth Spirit (Erdgeist, 1895) and Pandora's Box (Die Büchse der Pandora, 1904). She writes that “in fairy tales—Rumpelstilzchen is the best known example—naming gives power over demons” (60). The eponymous heroine of the Lulu plays is the “demonic” character whom men try to control by naming. Given Angela Carter's work as a collector, translator, and adapter of fairy tales, it does not come as a complete surprise that one of the most vital of the new pieces made available in the posthumous collection, The Curious Room: Plays, Film Scripts and an Opera (1996), is Lulu, an adaptation of Frank Wedekind's Lulu plays written in 1987 at the request of Richard Eyre, Director of the National Theatre. The play was not staged at the time because of differences in conception between Carter and Eyre and between Carter and the prospective director Howard Davies. According to Mark Bell's “Production Notes” appended to Carter's version, Eyre stated, “I wanted Wedekind with the colour and graphic edge of Angela, which may have been an impossible combination” (qtd. in Bell 510). Eventually, Carter's play was performed—at Leeds in the mid-1990s. Although Carter's Lulu has not made it into the contemporary repertoire, it is a fine play that needs to be recognized as a significant part of her collected works. Here she rewrites the Lulu plays so that Lulu is not a femme fatale. She continues her project of demythologizing the mythic versions of women announced in her essay The Sadeian Woman. To do so, she must enter the “bloody chamber”—the London tenement where Lulu is the victim of a sex crime.

In “The Bloody Chamber” Carter had updated the fairy tale of Bluebeard found in Perrault and the Grimm Brothers collections, setting it in decadent turn-of-the-century France. In “Fairy Tale as Sexual Allegory: Intertextuality in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber,” Mary Kaiser points out that in this story Bluebeard's murders mirror those of Jack the Ripper, who was also obsessed with the womb” (33), for Jack in the 1880s mutilated women sexually. Since “Büchse,” as in Pandora's Box, can be a crude German slang term for women's genitals, it would not be wrong to see Carter's adaptation of Wedekind as an extension of her project of reworking fairy tales in a feminist manner. Wedekind's Lulu plays end with the murder of Lulu by a Jack the Ripper-type murderer. However, for Carter, Lulu's death is not to be seen as the deserved end of the femme fatale figure but rather the undeserved slaying of a woman driven to prostitution in a male world indifferent to her plight.

The Lulu plays, as Boa shows, are dependent upon the fairy-tale figure of the nymph or mermaid, such as Undine and Melusine, well known in German Romanticism through authors such as Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich Baron de la Motte Fouqué, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Franz Grillparzer, and composers such as E. T. A. Hoffmann and Albert Lortzing (64). Fouqué's “Undine” influenced Hans Christian Andersen's “The Little Mermaid,” perhaps the most famous literary fairy tale on this theme. At the core of this fairy-tale motif, we have the following configuration, according to Boa: The nymph/undine story is centered on the “idea of the naturally good but soulless spirit of nature who bridges the Christian and pastoral traditions. Such spirits, who are generally female, come to save men from the corruption of power through their feminine gentleness, but must themselves gain through men the human attributes of a soul and knowledge of good and evil. The tension between eros and nature on the one hand and morality and society on the other sometimes finds a Utopian resolution, sometimes only a tragic end” (64). Lulu's descent into prostitution and her murder by Jack the Ripper define the most tragic of ends for Melusine. Lulu is unable to save men from the corruption of money and power, and in the process she is corrupted as well.

Through the character of Lulu, Wedekind conflates Melusine with figures who are mythical: Pandora, Lilith, and Eve. These other figures emerge from the folklore of Greek and Hebrew culture rather than from the literary fairy tales of Germany and Denmark. Boa notes that Wedekind's use of Melusine already appears in the form of a conscious parody of the fairy tales of earlier authors:

In Act II of Earth Spirit, Melusine, who retreats every Saturday to her bath and resumes her fishy tail, is recalled twice: first when Lulu says she has come from the water (her bath and natural fluid element) [see Wedekind, Dramen 258; Eliot 146; not in Carter, Lulu 409] and secondly in Schigolch's sardonic remark that nymphs like the beautiful Melusine remain fascinating as long as they are young, but when they grow old they become animals for whom there is not even a place in the zoo [see Wedekind, Dramen 264; Eliot 154; not in Carter, Lulu 413].

(Boa 65)

The water element of Melusine is conflated with the flood in the Pandora story told by Hesiod: “Lulu hears her name as ‘vorsintflutlich’[Wedekind, Dramen 263; Eliot 152; not in Carter, Lulu 412]—from before the flood, probably not Jehovah's but the flood sent by Zeus after Pandora opened the box. Pandora was an earth spirit, too, fashioned from clay by Hephaestus” (Boa 61). Thus Pandora is present in the titles of both plays. Schigolch, Lulu's first protector, and possibly her father, is the one who first called her Lulu. Boa suggests that Lulu as a name recalls Lilu, another form of Lilith, the demon who preceded Eve as Adam's wife (61). And through the snake imagery of the prologue to Earth Spirit, Lulu is represented as Eve as well.

Jack Zipes argues, adapting ideas of Mircea Eliade, that in our century fairy tales based on folk materials can double for initiation myths (3). Eve and Pandora belong to this tradition, and their stories tell of man's initiation into a world of suffering. According to John A. Phillips, the stories of Pandora and Eve blended together in Western Europe. He writes, “It is clear that the Church fathers did not dismiss the story of Pandora in favor of Scripture; instead they preserved it as a completion of, and commentary on, the story of Eve” (22). He cites the statement of Erwin and Dora Panofsky that the Church Fathers “in an attempt to corroborate the doctrine of original sin by a classical parallel, yet to oppose Christian truth to pagan fable, likened Pandora to Eve, a step the full effect of which was not felt until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (qtd. in Phillips 23).

But what about Eve/Pandora's own suffering? Bell points out that Carter had definite ideas on how Wedekind should be adapted, for she had stated in a New Society article from 1978 that she felt that Wedekind's portrayal of Lulu was misogynistic. She reveals her anger through observations directed at Georg Wilhelm Pabst's 1928 film Pandora's Box. She says that the film remains one of the “great expositions of the cultural myth of the femme fatale.” For Carter, “It is a peculiarly pernicious, if flattering, myth which Pabst and his star Louise Brooks, conspired to both demonstrate irresistibly in action, while, at the same time, offering evidence of its manifest absurdity …” (qtd. in Bell 509).

For Carter, the original fault lay with Wedekind not Pabst. Carter claims that Wedekind condemns Lulu and fails to see what is good in her:

And indeed, Lulu is transparent as sunshine; which is why her presence shows up all the spiritual muck in the corners. So she gets blamed for the muck, poor girl. …

Lulu keeps repeating cheerfully that she has never been in love. This is the main thing that is wrong with her, according to Wedekind. No heart, see. A lovely flower that, alas, lacks perfume. Her loyalty to her old friends; her fidelity to her first seducer, the repulsive Schoen; her willingness to support her adoptive father and effete stepson by the prostitution she loathes—Wedekind records all this but cannot see it as any evidence of human feeling at all. She is the passive instrument of vice, he says. That's all.

(qtd. in Bell 510)

Carter's view is reminiscent of that of Martin Esslin, who wrote in 1971, “Lulu thus is anything but a femme fatale, or the eternal prostitute: she is the most innocent character in the play, a human being who simply acts with total sincerity in following her own nature” (vi). However, the fact that Lulu is sincere does not necessarily mean that she is innocent. Both Carter and Esslin discuss her as if she were morally innocent throughout, despite her involvement in the deaths of several people.

Breaking through the myth of the femme fatale can be helpful to men almost as much as it is to women. The femme fatale is the woman who destroys the weak man. These men would continue to live their uneventful lives of “quiet desperation” unless they were knocked out of their complacency by the temptress. Perhaps the clearest example of the continuation of the femme fatale tradition is in the film noir. In The Killers, for example, the weak Swede (Burt Lancaster) is destroyed by the heartless “Kitty” Collins (Ava Gardner). The moral dissolution of the none-too-scrupulous lawyer protagonist (William Hurt) smitten by a predatory husband-murderer (Kathleen Turner) in Body Heat provides an even more lurid, sexual example. Neither of these women is capable of love. They just use and dominate these stereotypically pathetic men.

Is the femme fatale Lulu capable of love? Carter's indignance in her comments on Wedekind is striking because one of its basic premises is wrong. Lulu does not claim that she has never been in love. Although Lulu does say early in Earth Spirit that she is not sure if she has ever loved (Wedekind, Dramen 256-57; Eliot 143; Carter, Lulu 407), she subsequently twice states very dramatically after she has killed Dr. Schön that he is the only man that she has ever loved (Wedekind, Dramen 314-15; Eliot 215-16). Elizabeth Boa, contrary to Carter, claims that Lulu really does love Schön and actively fights to keep him near her (58). He has, after all, once he is married to her, no proof of her adulteries, just the jealousy aroused by seeing her hangers-on around his home. In her adaptation, Carter tones down the first of the two statements and eliminates the second altogether (452), as if they run counter to the main current of the play.

Lorna Sage writes that in The Bloody Chamber, Carter succeeded because her assault on myth was done “caressingly and seductively” (39); however, in dealing with the “monstrous” Lulu, a woman as motherless as many fairy-tale heroines, Carter did not have the freedom to use the same strategy and still claim to have done an adaptation of Wedekind, a celebrated founder of modern theater. She had to stick to the main plot scenario of Lulu's life.

Carter believed that although Wedekind did not realize it, Lulu is capable of loving. For Carter, a rewriting of Lulu's character should move her out of the realm of the femme fatale. Furthermore, an adaptation should make sure that it does not becloud the transparency of her motivations, and it should create some admiration in the audience for Lulu's loyalty to her friends. Each of these ideas deserves further discussion. One could argue that Wedekind's Lulu is set up as a femme fatale from the start of the action because of the prologue in which she is brought in before the animal tamer. If so, then Carter needs not only to interpret Lulu but to rewrite her as well. Not surprisingly, Carter omits this prologue, for it sets up the archetype that helps explain Lulu's behavior. Presumably, for Carter, this prologue only serves to mythologize Lulu and conceal her actual motivations in the relatively realistic drama that follows.

Yet the drama is probably more expressionistic than realistic, for Lulu's career is not a typical one, even for a femme fatale. In Earth Spirit her first husband, an old man with a penchant for teenaged girls, Dr. Goll, dies of a heart attack when he considers her to be in a compromising situation with Schwarz, whom he has commissioned to paint her picture (act 1). Schwarz kills himself when he finds out her disreputable past from Schön, the newspaper editor, in whose home Lulu had grown up as combination adopted child and adulterous love (act 2). Lulu rejects Escerny, an imperialist aristocrat who looks for sexual masochism to brighten up his off-duty hours in Africa, and she gets the widower Schön to break off his engagement with his longtime fiancée (act 3). Finally, Schön's jealous fantasies over Lulu get the better of him, and he tries to force her to shoot herself. However, she kills him instead and turns to his son, Alwa, her childhood playmate, now a budding writer, as her new protector (act 4).

Although we leave Earth Spirit with Lulu as the “destroyer” of three men, it can be argued that she killed Schön in a panic and/or in self-defense. In Pandora's Box, Lulu returns to Alwa from prison, after allowing the lesbian Countess Geschwitz to exchange places with her in a life-threatening escape plot (act 1). They all go to Paris, where Lulu becomes the lover of the “white-slave trader” Casti-Piani, who wants to sell her to a Cairo brothel. In making her getaway, Lulu gets her oldest defender, Schigolch, to murder the gross acrobat Rodrigo Quast (act 2). When she arrives in London, she is forced to become a prostitute and is murdered by her fourth client, Jack the Ripper, in the same tenement apartment where Schigolch abandons her to her fate. Geschwitz and Alwa are also killed. Geschwitz by Jack and Alwa by the second client, Kungu Poti.

Carter does not remind us that actresses who have played Lulu have conceived the role very differently, from Tilly Newes's sympathetic portrayal on the one end of the spectrum to Gertrude Eysoldt's turn-of-the-century trend-setting negative one, on the other (Bentley 28-29). Carter, who uses more elaborate stage directions than Wedekind, tries to limit the range of interpretations available and to stay on the sympathetic side. Perhaps this strategy led to some of the problems in the National Theatre's aborted production. Any sympathetic portrayal of Lulu would also have to confront Lulu's actions toward the woman who loves her untiringly, Countess Geschwitz. It is evident that in using Geschwitz as a pawn in escaping from Rodrigo Quast, Lulu treats her without any loyalty. In fact, Elisabeth Bond-Pablé calls Geschwitz “the Countess from whom she takes everything and to whom she gives nothing” (xxv). Wedekind himself in his foreword to Pandora's Box asks us to be sympathetic to the “tragic” Geschwitz, although he skirts the issue of Lulu's bad treatment of her (Wedekind, Foreword 214).

In her comments Carter is unfair to Wedekind when she claims that he casts his antiheroine in completely negative terms, and she overestimates Lulu's goodness. Yet insofar as we see her text as an adaptation rather than a translation, it would be wrong to claim that her play itself is unfair to Wedekind. She alters the text to make Lulu less of a femme fatale primarily through rewriting the dialogue so as to make the men around her grosser or more hypocritical. Those who have not read Wedekind's plays recently may wonder what alterations she has made, since Carter actually does not change the major line of the action, and she takes over the basic act and scene structure and holds it in place.

Carter's approach to adapting the Lulu plays cannot be understood without some reference to their complicated stage history and to the question of Wedekind's original intentions about his Lulu plays, for his original version of the play did not have a circus prologue with Lulu specified as an archetypal temptress figure, although references to Lulu as Eve and Pandora in other scenes are there. Wedekind's ambivalence toward Lulu is infected by fin-de-siècle misogyny. Sally Robinson notes that “Carter is no idealist, not one to take a utopian leap beyond normative representations of Woman to some uncontaminated representation of women; rather her text inscribes, in order to subvert, representations that produce women as Woman” (117).

Wedekind's Lulu plays forced their readers and audiences to examine without sentimentality the relationship of Woman to women. Not surprisingly, they were the subject of at least three court cases related to public morals. Earth Spirit was first performed in 1898 at the Leipzig Crystal Palace with Wedekind in the role of Dr. Schön. Pandora's Box premiered in Vienna in May 1905, and this time Wedekind played the role of Jack the Ripper. Wedekind had been forced to cut up his original long five-act version because the last two acts, set in Paris and London, respectively, did not pass censorship (Bond-Pablé xxvii). Wedekind continued as late as 1913 to keep all of the material in one play, but it continually forced him to compromise his intentions, according to such critics as Edward Bond (64) and Eric Bentley (28). Carter has not divided her play into two parts. Instead, it is a long evening's entertainment of at least five hours in seven acts without the metatheatrical prologue that precedes each play. (The second prologue is in a bookshop and does not touch directly on Lulu's personality.)

While Carter was trying to improve on Wedekind, in Germany Hartmut Vinçon was reassembling from various archives the original version of the 1892-94 Lulu (see Wedekind, Die Büchse der Pandora). This version, called The First Lulu by Eric Bentley, preceded the drafting of the third act of Earth Spirit (Theatrical Dressing Room, the scene in which Lulu gets Dr. Schoen to write a letter breaking off his engagement) and the first act of Pandora's Box (German Renaissance Hall, the scene in which Lulu reappears after her prison escape). This first version was clearly much truer to Wedekind's intent and, even more importantly, more sympathetic to Lulu. As Wedekind's daughter Kadidja told Eric Bentley (26-29), her father had grown more misogynistic after his troubled love affair with Frieda Strindberg later in the 1890s. This original five-act version was published in two 1988 issues of Theater Heute and reprinted by Vinçon with notes in 1990 as Die Büchse der Pandora: Eine Monstretragödie (Pandora's Box: A Monster Tragedy). The book publication of Vinçon's edition came shortly after Peter Zadek directed the world premiere in Hamburg (1989) with a production set in the 1950s. Zadek and Johannes Grützke collaborated on an illustrated text based on some of the ideas for this production, called Lulu: Eine deutsche Frau—Frei nach Wedekind.

Thus we can see that had Carter's adaptation been produced it would have been on the boards just shortly before the Hamburg premiere of the earlier version. Whether Vinçon's reconstruction will replace the two-play version still remains to be seen. Despite the increasing desire for greater fidelity to Wedekind, we should remember that when Jack the Ripper kills Lulu in the original version, he cuts out her uterus (die Büchse) for eventual sale. Even in large cities, such a play is unlikely to have a long run.

English translations followed immediately. In 1991 the Jean Cocteau Repertory Company in Manhattan in conjunction with Applause Theatre Books commissioned Eric Bentley to provide a translation of Die Büchse der Pandora: Eine Monstretragödie for a production directed by Richard Hupp. The text of the production appeared in 1994 as The First Lulu. Meanwhile in 1992 Edward Bond and his wife Elizabeth Bond-Pablé had written a translation for the first London production (Cambridge Theatre Company, directed by Nick Philippou) of the recently restored work, and it was published by Methuen in 1993 as “Lulu: A Monster Tragedy” as part of Wedekind's Plays: One. Bond-Pablé calls the standard two-play version a sad mutilation of a great masterpiece in which the only good thing added amid the omissions and changes is the letter-writing scene (xxvi).

Carter herself was not the first to have worked on an English adaptation of the Lulu plays. Peter Barnes (with Charlotte Beck) published a version of Lulu and Pandora's Box for the 1970 Nottingham Playhouse and Royal Court Theatre productions, which he directed with Stuart Burge. He shortened it by half so that it could fit into one evening, as did Steve Gooch in 1990 for the Red Shift Theatre at the Edinburgh Festival. Samuel A. Eliot, Jr. (1914), Stephen Spender (Spender and Fawcett; 1952), and Carl Richard Mueller (1967) had already translated the plays before these adaptations were made, and Spender's translations had been reprinted under a different title in 1972. In 1979 Lulu was again in the news with the first performance on 24 May at the Paris Opera of all three acts of Alban Berg's unfinished opera Lulu, based on the seven acts of Earth Spirit and Pandora's Box. Friedrich Cerha finished the last act from drafts by Berg, who had died in 1935. Pierre Boulez conducted Patrice Chéreau's production.

Probably more people know the character of Lulu from Berg's opera than from any other source. Berg's opera, which retained the prologue to Earth Spirit, reinforced the view that Lulu is an archetype of the femme fatale. In The Sadeian Woman, published the same year as the opera premiere, Carter wrote in the “Polemical Preface” against archetypal presentation of women. She stated: “If women allow themselves to be consoled for their culturally determined lack of access to the modes of intellectual debate by the invocation of hypothetical great goddesses, they are simply flattering themselves into submission (a technique often used on them by men). All the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciling mother, are consolatory nonsenses; and consolatory nonsense seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway” (5). Carter sees herself as a demythologizer, a socialist who brings a historical understanding to false claims that the order of things has always been organized along natural, generally oppressive, lines. Because Carter made such an impression with her reworked fairy tales in the 1979 collection, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, she was sometimes seen to be a champion of myths rather than a critic of them, but she clarified her position in an interview with Anna Katsavos (12-13), pointing out that after her fascination with Godard's Alphaville waned, she “became uninterested in these sorts of semisacralized ways of looking at the world” (13).

Carter continues in The Sadeian Woman: “Myth deals in false universals, to dull the pain of particular circumstances. In no area is this more true than in that of relations between the sexes. … The nature of the individual is not resolved into but is ignored by these archetypes, since the function of the archetype is to diminish the unique ‘I’ in favour of a collective, sexed being which cannot, by reason of its very nature, exist as such because an archetype is only an image that has got too big for its boots and bears, at best, a fantasy relation to reality” (6). When Carter adds that archetypes confuse the fact that women historically have been dependent on men, she is approaching a topic that reappears in her comments on Wedekind, when she maintains, correctly, that Lulu does not wish to be a prostitute (Bell 510).

Not surprisingly, Carter (ten years after she had published The Passion of New Eve) totally eliminates the prologue of Earth Spirit. Here a stagehand with a big paunch carries out Lulu in her Pierrot costume on the command of the animal trainer to bring in the snake. The trainer tickles Lulu's chin as he regales the audience with a description of her perversity:

Sie ward geschaffen, Unheil anzustiften,
Zu locken, zu verführen, zu vergiften—
Zu morden, ohne daß es einer spürt.

(Wedekind, Dramen 237)

She was created to incite to sin,
To lure, seduce, corrupt, drop poison in,—
To murder, without being once suspected.

(Eliot 118)

Obviously, Lulu is being assimilated into the Eve archetype through the trainer's reference to her as a serpent who seduces men and lures them on to sin. He exhorts her to act like an unaffected beast and not to conceal her womanly essence. The snake image is repeated before the stagehand carries her off again. The tamer calls out:

Es ist jetzt nichts Besondres dran zu sehen,
Doch warten Sie, was später wird geschehen:
Mit starkem Druck umringt sie den Tiger;
Er heult und stöhnt!—Wer bleibt am Ende Sieger?!—
Hopp, Aujust! Marsch! Trag sie an ihren Platz—

(Wedekind, Dramen 237)

There's nothing special now to see in her,
But wait and watch what later will occur!
She coils about the Tiger stricter—stricter—
He roars and groans!—Who'll be the final victor?—
Hop, Charlie, march! Carry her to her cage. …

(Eliot 118)

Replacing the audience's introduction to the pythonlike Lulu in the prologue is the elaborate stage direction for Lulu in the first act of Carter's adaptation.

In Wedekind's original, Lulu is not granted a description when she first enters (242). However, Carter gives an elaborate one after she has first introduced Dr. Schoen (her spelling) and the painter Schwartz (her spelling) as fetishists attracted to Lulu's Pierrot costume:

Schwartz returns, carrying the pierrot costume tenderly, as if it were a bride he was carrying across the threshold.

The music we heard earlier … fairground quality … a puppet dance … mechanical, ghostly. …

Schwartz holds the costume up and shakes it; for a moment the costume lives a brief, dancing life of its own. Schoen sighs. There is a powerful sense of fetishism about the men's reactions to the pierrot costume.

(392)

The two men are described as “almost breathless when they think of Lulu, half-naked, clambering into this garment” (392). They get the costume to dance between them as music accelerates. In Wedekind's original, Schwarz and Schön (named Schöning in the 1892-94 version) are more struck by the difficulty that Lulu must have in getting into the one-piece costume. Some readers may find hints of fetishism here, but Carter does away with hints and makes her interpretation clear.

In Carter's description of Lulu, we find the real young woman rather than the fetish:

Lulu, a tiny, plump, fluffy, big-eyed blonde, sports lavish furs, very high heels and a chic little hat, all of which she wears with a delightful wit, as if she saw the funny side of her own attractiveness. Her manner is exuberant; at first sight she seems the perfect, frivolous, high-spirited society beauty, her exuberance given pathos by a certain child-like vulnerability. That is her special quality for these sophisticated gentlemen: the piquant charm of a child play-acting the seductress. She is seventeen years old. Like all those who make a living out of pleasing others, she is well aware of her precarious position in the world. She knows her role, the charming child (who, when she is naughty, can be punished ‘for her own good’). She plays it, charmingly. Underneath, she is tragic, driven, doomed.

(393)

The description of Lulu stresses her vulnerability, but in doing so it shows that Carter is not making Lulu a transparent character, as she conceived her to be in her comments a decade earlier. The tragedy and doom surrounding Lulu stem from her having to play a role for which she is not cut out.

As for the leering men who were first associated with fetishism, once Lulu is actually on stage they move into a voyeuristic mode. Lulu's husband, Dr. Goll, “pats her bum” and then “slaps her bum” before he and Schoen “behave increasingly like uninhibited voyeurs” (395). The stage directions make it unclear as to the approximate year in which all this is happening. Carter's set design for act 1 is rather sparse, and there is no Smyrna rug and Spanish screen, as in Wedekind's original, to give the setting a certain dignity. Thus when Lulu says “(Monroe-esque.) I'd like to leave it [my bra] off altogether. It's terribly constricting” (395), there is nothing at this point in the play (although in the end she will be killed by Jack the Ripper) to make the Marilyn Monroe reference openly anachronistic. The mention of Monroe underlines the fact that Lulu is caught in a commodified role that she cannot escape.

To create further sympathy for Lulu, Carter has Schwartz attempt to rape her after Lulu damages the portrait of Dr. Schoen's fiancée, in this case by clearly breaking it over his head (401). Wedekind has her less specifically throw the easel at him (Dramen 251-52; Eliot 137). Although in performance it may not be totally clear that Carter's Schwartz attempts to rape her rather than corner her, this is indeed Carter's stage direction:

He emits a high-pitched scream. He lunges at her; he intends to rape her. Lulu flings herself dramatically on to the sofa, instantly prone. Schwartz halts, at sea. Then, a moment of decision—he goes and bolts the studio door.

(401)

Carter not only increases the potential for disaster here, but she also extends the audience's emotions by going farther in the direction of farce as well. Lulu gets Schwartz to calm down some, and then he tells her that he will call her Eve (402; Wedekind, Dramen 252). Soon afterward Dr. Goll returns, only to have a heart attack from shock at what he sees.

At this point Carter goes very far in stressing the childlikeness she finds in Lulu, creating a whole set of humorous stage directions without parallel in the original. Carter writes:

(Music—a slow, weird, eerie parody of the earlier “chase.” She starts to walk round the stage, making a huge detour in order to avoid the corpse, heading for the discarded pierrot costume. She gives the corpse a sideways glance.)

Watching my feet, are you? How'm I doing? Want to hit my legs, Daddy?

(She walks with exaggerated care now, a dancer's walk, arching her insteps, keeping one eye on the corpse all the time, just in case.)

He's scrutinising every step.

(She is now virtually dancing. She makes a little arabesque in order to lean over him and pluck up the pierrot costume. She peers down at him. She retreats on tiptoe. Returns for another look. Then she shimmies for him; then she twirls; then she performs a high kick. Nothing doing.)

Oh, come on. Wakey wakey.

(404)

For Lulu, Goll's death is just a scene in a bad play, and she is escaping from it with her costume. She is released from the man to whom Dr. Schoen gave her. Carter has her say, “He's dead all right, this time. Bring down the curtain, the show's over. He'd dropped me right in it. Gawd, whatever will I do?” (405).

In Wedekind's original, Lulu is much more frightened and anxious. Wedekind has her say that “Der Tanz is aus” (Dramen 254), or, the dance is over, and this line is Carter's cue for the elaborate stage directions that she gives. Lulu's words, “Es ist ihm Ernst” (254) (“It's serious with him” [Eliot 141]) show more hysteria at a potential scandal than does Carter's humorous injunction, “Wakey wakey” (404).

Carter's use of slang also diminishes Schwartz's character at the very end of the act as he is exhorting the obviously dead Goll to get up. In Wedekind's original, these words are anguished, whereas for Carter they are grossly pathetic. Carter writes:

Tell you what, let's trade places. You can have her back again, I'm not strong enough. I haven't sufficient faith, and I've lived off servility too long. I'm terrified of being happy. Isn't it a scream. (He screams.) I never touched her. Honest. Wake up!

(408)

There is no such theatrical screaming in Wedekind. One can imagine Schwarz sobbing. Since Wedekind did not have him explicitly try to rape Lulu, there is more justification in his saying that he did not touch her than in Carter's version.

Ich möchte tauschen mit dir, du Toter! Ich gebe sie dir zurück. Ich gebe dir meine Jugend dazu. Mir fehlt der Mut und der Glaube. Ich habe mich zu lange gedulden müssen. Es ist zu spät für mich. Ich bin dem Glück nicht gewachsen. Ich habe eine höllische Angst davor. Wach auf! Ich habe sie nicht angerührt.

(Dramen 257)

Would I could change with you, you dead man! I give her back to you. I give my youth to you, too. I lack the courage and the faith. I've had to wait patiently too long. It's too late for me. I haven't grown up big enough for happiness. I have a hellish fear of it. Wake up! I didn't touch her.

(Eliot 144)

Lulu's freedom of spirit shows through in strong contrast with the type of emotional bondage exhibited by Schwarz. There is no reason for her to love him, her new husband.

Lulu's indifference to Schwarz is also reworked by Carter in act 2 when she leaves off the last two pages of the act at the point where the doorbell rings and Escherich, a reporter, is about to enter to investigate Schwarz's suicide. To make Lulu less crude, Carter omits the bloodwiping scene, which is translated by Samuel A. Eliot, Jr., as follows:

ALVA:
There they are———(Schön starts to the door. Lulu jumps up.)
LULU:
Wait, you've got blood———
SCHöN:
Where?
LULU:
Wait, I'll wipe it. (Sprinkles her handkerchief with heliotrope and wipes the blood from Schön's hand.)
SCHöN:
It's your husband's blood.
LULU:
It leaves no trace.
SCHöN:
Monster!
LULU:
You will marry me, all the same.

(172)

LULU:
(aufspringend) Warten Sie, Sie haben Blut.
SCHöN:
Wo … ?
LULU:
Warten Sie, ich wische es weg. (Besprengt ihr Taschentuch mit Heliotrop und wischt Schön das Blut von der Hand.)
SCHöN:
Es ist deines Gatten Blut.
LULU:
Es läßt keine Flecken.
SCHöN:
Ungeheuer!
LULU:
Sie heiraten mich ja doch.

(Dramen 278-79)

Again we see here what Carter discounts, a strong desire on Lulu's part to be with the one man whom she loves as his wife not as a mistress.

In act 3 Lulu gets Schoen to write to his fiancée to break off their long engagement. Her words to him in Carter's version stress her victimization rather than her dynamism. After Lulu asks Schoen why he always places the blame on her, she continues, “You told me to marry Goll. You told me to marry that painter” (437). However, in Wedekind's original there are additional lines which indicate her own part in these marriages: “Sie haben mir befohlen, Dr. Goll zu heiraten. Ich habe Dr. Goll gezwungen, mich zu heiraten. Sie haben mir befohlen, den Maler zu heiraten. Ich habe gut Miene zum bösen Spiel gemacht” (Dramen 294). In the more literal translation by Eliot, these lines are rendered thus: “You ordered me to marry Dr. Goll: I forced Dr. Goll to marry me. You ordered me to marry the painter: I made the best of a bad bargain” (191). Although it could be argued that an actress may speak these lines either defiantly or submissively, Wedekind at least gives Lulu the chance to be more defiant, whereas here as elsewhere Carter tries harder to control the audience's response to Lulu through her additions and deletions.

Another key line from Lulu's big speech is altered in Carter's version after Schoen taunts her with the possibility of his marriage. Carter stresses Schoen's attempt to degrade Lulu when she has Lulu say, “It makes me proud to see the depths you'll sink to, and you want to pull me down with you, pull me down as low as a man can pull a woman, because you think that then you won't possibly be able to love the thing you've made of me” (437). In Wedekind's words there is less stress on Lulu's humiliation: “Wie stolz ich darauf bin, daß Sie mich mit allen Mitteln demütigen! Sie erniedrigen mich so tief—so tief, wie man ein Weib erniedrigen kann, weil Sie hoffen, Sie könnten sich dann eher über mich hinwegsetzen” (Dramen 295). Eliot's translation captures in contrast to Carter's adaptation the importance of Schön's attempt to forget Lulu and his past relationship with her, the very things he taunted Schwarz with, leading to the latter's suicide. In his words, Lulu says: “How proud I am that you take every means to humble me! You push me down as low—as low as a woman can be debased to, for then, you hope, you can sooner get over me” (191-92).

When Wedekind has Schön continue, he resorts to the archetypal imagery that Carter has usually been leaving out of the play. Carter has no equivalent for these lines of his: “Ich weiß, wo der Engel bei dir zu Ende ist und der Teufel beginnt. Wenn ich die Welt nehme, wie sie geschaffen ist, so trägt der Schöpfer die Verantwortung, nicht ich!” (Dramen 295; “I know where the angel in you leaves off and the devil begins. If I take the world as it's made, the Creator must bear the responsibility, not I!” [Eliot 192]). Before this interchange closes, Wedekind again begs her to be true to the angel that is part of her nature.

In her comments from 1979, Carter made it clear that she did not like Dr. Schoen, and for this reason she tones down Lulu's stated love for him. After Lulu fires five shots into his back as a rather belated response to his attempt to get her to shoot herself, Carter cuts out lines that might be taken as sympathetic to Schoen. When Lulu justifies herself, she says, “If you bring me your old age in sacrifice, you have had my whole youth in return. You understand ten times better than I do which is the more valuable” (Eliot 214; “Wenn du mir deinen Lebensabend zum Opfer bringst, so hast du meine ganze Jugend dafür gehabt. Du verstehst dich zehnmal besser als ich darauf, was höher im Wert steht” [Dramen 313]). The second of these lines indicates that she can address him intimately as someone she really loves.

In Wedekind's version, Schön calls Lulu a murderess three times when he demands that she get down on her knees (Dramen 312-13). Carter has him tell her to pray “for strength” (452), although Wedekind makes it explicit that she should pray to God for this strength (313). Considering the fact that Lulu could have fled from her house rather than kill her husband, the omission of Schoen's name-calling probably creates more sympathy for Lulu. A few lines later, as Alwa goes to get water, Lulu says Schön is “Der einzige, den ich geliebt!” (314), literally, “the only one I've ever loved,” a line which Carter adapts as the less committal “I love you. I've always loved you” (452).

In Lulu's big speech just before the close of act 3, Wedekind shows how nontransparent Lulu is by having her repeat her claim that she only loved Schön and combining it with her now apparent willingness to take up with Alwa, with whom she had a brother-sister relationship as a child. Carter considerably shortens Lulu's words, thus partially obscuring both of these points:

LULU:
(To Alva; calm at first, but with increasing hysteria.) Don't turn me over to the police. I'll do anything you want. Alva, only don't turn me over to the police. I'm still young. I'll always be good to you, Alva. Don't turn me over to the police. Alva! Look at me!

(453)

In Wedekind's Erdgeist, the use of the world “treu” connotes more than the idea of “good.” It is an adjective used to show fidelity in love not just generous behavior.

LULU:
(sich vor Alwa niederwerfend) Du kannst mich nicht dem Gericht ausliefern. Es ist mein Kopf, den man mir abschlägt. Ich habe ihn erschossen, weil er mich erschießen wollte. Ich habe keinen Menschen auf der Welt geliebt als ihn. Alwa, verlang, was du willst. Laß mich nicht der Gerechtigkeit in die Hände fallen. Es ist schade um mich! Ich bin noch jung. Ich will dir treu sein mein Leben lang. Ich will nur dir allein gehören. Sieh mich an, Alwa—Mensch, sieh mich an! Sieh mich an!

(Dramen 315)

LULU:
(Throwing herself before Alva.) You can't give me up to the law! It is my head that is struck off. I shot him because he was about to shoot me. I have loved nobody in the world but him! Alva, demand what you will, only don't let me fall into the hands of justice. Take pity on me. I am still young. I will be true to you as long as I live. I will be wholly yours, yours only. Look at me, Alva. Man, look at me! Look at me!

(Eliot 216)

The decline that Lulu undergoes in Pandora's Box can be seen not only as her inability to triumph over men's desire to have her body for money, but also as a type of emotional disequilibrium after the death of her husband. The weak Alva is totally incapable of giving her the support that she needs. She cannot accept Geschwitz's unselfish but emotionally masochistic love, and almost everyone else around her seems to be primarily interested in using her.

In Carter's act 5 (the first act of Pandora's Box), Carter exculpates some of Lulu's actions toward Geschwitz by leaving out the exposition of the circumstances of the escape from prison. All Lulu says is that Geschwitz spent hours practicing looking like her so that they could exchange clothes (460). However, in Wedekind's play, Geschwitz risked her life and learned a new profession. Even though cholera was raging in Hamburg during the summer, Geschwitz became proficient at nursing and went to Lulu's prison to help care for the cholera patients. Then, at the first opportunity she put on the underclothes of a recently deceased cholera victim so that she could be placed in Lulu's cell and then exchange clothes (Wedekind, Dramen 339; Eliot 241-42). This speech is probably the most callous one that Lulu ever delivers. It shows that her innocence is lost and that she still has the power of a tyrant over Geschwitz.

In the penultimate act, Carter already has Lulu set up as the potential victim of Jack the Ripper by her transformation of Lulu's words about her recurrent dream. She makes it seem as if she is being stalked by someone—a sinister implication, given the fact that Jack the Ripper stalked his prostitute victims. She tells Casti-Piani how her dream came to her after her suicide attempt at age fifteen: “That's when he started coming to see me. My man. As soon as I closed my eyes, there he was, night after night, walking through my dreams, stalking me, looking for me. Only me. The man for me. Ever since then, even at night, even in the pitch dark, I can tell from a hundred yards if he is the one” (465). In Wedekind's original, the indication of what man Lulu is looking for in the dark is less specific. There is no mention that a man is searching for her.

In meinen Träumen sah ich Nacht für Nacht den Mann, für den ich geschaffen bin und der für mich geschaffen ist. Und als ich dann wieder auf die Männer losgelassen wurde, da war ich keine dumme Gans mehr. Seither sehe ich es jedem bei stockfinsterer Nacht auf hundert Schritt Entfernung an, ob wir für einander bestimmt sind.

(Dramen 349)

Night after night in my dreams I saw the man for whom I was created and who was created for me, so that when I was let out on the men again I was a silly goose no longer. Since then I can see on a man, in a pitch-dark night and a hundred feet away, whether we're meant for each other. …

(Eliot 253-54)

Lulu's statement is intended to back up her fierce contention that she does not want to be sold as a prostitute. She is stressing the idea that she can always tell a man whom she desires even on a dark night at a distance. She is not implying that there is a particular man out there who is going to destroy her.

When Jack appears in the last act, Carter reverses her usual procedure of telling more rather than less than Wedekind. She describes Jack as a “dishevelled man with red-rimmed eyes and—yes—the mark of Cain upon him” (493). Gone are the pale face, heavy brows, drooping moustache, fiery red hands, and chewed fingernails that Wedekind attributes to him (Dramen 386). Yet, as a whole, Carter's act 7 probably stays closer in spirit to Wedekind than does the rest of the play thus far. She does, however, underline that Alva, who once loved her, has fallen apart more than she has. Alva tells Schigolch: “When I look at that face, all our catastrophes seem inexorable. Now I know why I am ruined. There's danger oozing out of every pore of her. She's like a pirate ship; she's come to wreck the bourgeoisie with the terrible weapon of her sex” (487). Wedekind has Alwa less bitter here (Dramen 378; Eliot 290), commenting that no one who ever sees Lulu's eyes and body dare cast the first stone at him for throwing his life and career away on her. Carter writes these new lines for Alva because they ironically point out the fact that the terrible weapon of sex is used by Jack to mutilate and murder women and that Lulu's seductions are small potatoes, given men's history of violence against women.

Carter cannot alter the fate that awaits Lulu, as she can those of the heroines in The Bloody Chamber. Lulu ends her life in a bloody chamber that can neither be rinsed clean nor whisked out of history. Yet, Carter's Lulu is not a failure, given the high quality of the dramatic dialogue and the skillful handling of action. Truly, it is no surprise that the play did not get off the ground when planned. With more faithful translations, such as Eliot's, readily available, as well as Barnes's one-evening condensation, it would have been very risky to try out such a long evening's worth reworking of Wedekind before the imminent publication of the original version.

In From the Beast to the Blonde, Marina Warner writes, “The growing presence of humour in Carter's fiction signals her defiant hold on ‘heroic optimism,’ the mood she singled out as characteristic of fairy tales, the principle which sustained the idea of a happy ending, whatever the odds. But heroic optimism shades into gallows humour” (197). No one, not even Angela Carter, can find “heroic optimism” in the Lulu plays. There is only gallows humor. And it is there in the very last line, spoken by the dying Geschwitz, “O verflucht!—” (Wedekind, Dramen 389), which Carter translates as a simple “Oh, damn” (492).

Works Cited

Barnes, Peter, adapt. Lulu: A Sex Tragedy. By Frank Wedekind. Trans. Charlotte Beck. Introd. Martin Esslin. London: Heinemann, 1971.

Bell, Mark. “Production Notes.” The Curious Room: Plays, Film Scripts, and an Opera. By Angela Carter. Introd. Susannah Clapp. London: Chatto & Windus, 1996. 500-10.

Bentley, Eric. “The First ‘Lulu’: Nine Notes.” The First Lulu. By Frank Wedekind. New York: Applause, 1994. 1-29.

Boa, Elizabeth. The Sexual Circus: Wedekind's Theatre of Subversion. London: Blackwell, 1987.

Bond, Edward. “Using Lulu.” Wedekind, Plays: One 63-68.

Bond, Edward, and Elisabeth Bond-Pablé, trans. “Lulu: A Monster Tragedy.” Wedekind, Plays: One 73-209.

Bond-Pablé, Elisabeth. Introduction. Wedekind, Plays: One xi-xxviii.

Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. London: Gollancz, 1979.

———. Lulu. The Curious Room: Plays, Film Scripts, and an Opera. Ed. Mark Bell. Introd. Susannah Clapp. London: Chatto & Windus, 1996. 391-496.

———. The Passion of New Eve. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.

———. The Sadeian Woman. London: Virago P, 1979.

Eliot, Samuel A., Jr., trans. Tragedies of Sex. By Frank Wedekind. 1914. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923.

Esslin, Martin. Introduction. Barnes iii-vi.

Gooch, Steve, adapt. and trans. The Lulu Plays; The Marquis of Keith. By Frank Wedekind. Bath: Absolute, 1990.

Kaiser, Mary. “Fairy Tale as Sexual Allegory: Intertextuality in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 14.3 (1994): 30-36.

Katsavos, Anna. “An Interview with Angela Carter.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 14.3 (1994): 11-17.

Mueller, Carl Richard, trans. The Lulu Plays. By Frank Wedekind. New York: Fawcett, 1967.

Phillips, John A. Eve: The History of an Idea. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984.

Robinson, Sally. Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women's Fiction. Albany: State U of New York P, 1991.

Sage, Lorna. Angela Carter. Plymouth, Eng.: Northcote House/British Council, 1994.

Spender, Stephen, trans. The Lulu Plays & Other Sex Tragedies. By Frank Wedekind. 1972 London: Calder, 1977.

Spender, Stephen, and Frances Fawcett, trans. Five Tragedies of Sex. By Frank Wedekind. New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1952.

Warner, Marina. From the Beast to the Blond: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.

Wedekind, Frank. Die Büchse der Pandora: Eine Monstretragödie. Ed. Hartmut Vinçon. Darmstadt: Jürgen Häusser, 1990.

———. “Die Büchse der Pandora: Eine Monstretragödie.” Theater Heute 29.4 (April 1988): 42-57.

———. “Die Büchse der Pandora: Forsetzung und Schluß der Monstretragödie: Lulu in Paris und London.” Theater Heute 29.5 (May 1988): 36-50.

———. Dramen I. Ed. Manfred Hahn. Berlin: Aufbau, 1969.

———. Foreward to Pandora's Box. Spender and Fawcett 213-17.

———. Plays: One. Trans. Edward Bond and Elisabeth Bond-Pablé. London: Methuen, 1993.

Zadek, Peter, and Johannes Grützke. Lulu, eine deutsche Frau—Frei nach Wedekind. Frankfurt a.M.: Athenäum, 1988.

Zipes, Jack. Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1994.