THE BLOODY HEAD OF A RAPIST lying in the center of alittle town in Turkey made headlines in Turkishmedia in 2013. This was not the first and certainlynot the last time a woman sought to restore justiceon her own after the institutional apparatus of thepatriarchal state had failed her. Clara S.: Eine musikalischeTragödie (1981; Clara S. [A Musical Tragedy], 2001), aplay written by Elfriede Jelinek, concludes with asimilar scenario: the long-neglected artist ClaraS., an explicit reference to the pianist ClaraSchumann, ends up talking to the head of her freshlystrangled husband, Robert Schumann. In IngeborgBachmann's Malina(1971), the female narrator, instead of fightingback, disappears into the wall that previouslymarked the border of her entrapment. Bachmann's andJelinek's respective works establish a relationshipto social history that can be read as reflections ofthe (diverging) modes of oppression of the“feminine,” on the one hand, and as testimonies ofideological transformations within the capitalistpatriarchal order, on the other. Utopic scenarios—for example, in Bachmann's Malina—end up demonstrating theinevitability of immanence as attempts to entirelytranscend the trajectories of history necessarilyfail.

Whereas the “modern” gender dichotomy and theentrapment of the “female” in the private sphere iscentral to Bachmann's novel, in Jelinek's workwomen's inclusion in the sphere of production posesa new challenge to emancipation: labor, which wasexpected to be a step toward liberation, is unveiledas yet another mutation of capitalist patriarchy. Inthis essay, I argue that differences in the literaryresponses to patriarchal violence can be theorizedin line with transformations within capitalistproduction in the twentieth century, from Fordistproduction to post-Fordism and from modernity topostmodernity, as scholars in the humanities haveargued. Whether the latter transition took place isdoubtful; the works examined here reflect anincrease of cynicism or cultural pessimism, anaccusation frequently leveled at Theodor W.Adorno.