Status Updates From The Lulu Plays and Other Se...

I've been fascinated by "Lulu" and the many kaleidoscopic representations of Lulu since I first saw Pabst's Pandora Box with Louise Brooks in 1973 at a University of Michigan film cooperative. However, I never dug back into Frank Wedekind's background. I'm reading an inexpensive paperback now of this little collection edited for the Tulane Drama Review in the 1960s. I appreciate all the context in this little volume.

"Nature has endowed woman with her advantage of being able to do business with her love, and therefore bourgeois society, dominated as it is by men, nautrally regards it as the most disgraceful of all crimes."

Fascinating. In Death & The Devil (1904?) Wedekind predicts the Marxist criticism of 3rd wave vs. 2nd wave feminism on the sex industry well over half a century before it happened? ...Shame this play sucks!

"Geschwitz: It's amazing how hunger deprives men of the strength to withstand misfortune. But when they've gorged themselves they turn the world into a torture-chamber, and throw lives away to satisfy a whim. [...] I'm not a human being, my body has nothing in common with human bodies. And yet I have a human soul."

Oddly prescient for 1904, ok, finally, some insight. (G is Lulu's female lover).

"Kingu Poti: My father Emperor of Uahubee. I got six wife here: two Spanish, two English, two French. But --- I don't like these wife. I always got to take bath... bath, bath, bath..."

Six wives hard life.
Makes 0 sense he'd want a mistress to help him with this? I don't think this is slapstick, if it is then it's the only joke I've noticed this far into Pandora's Box!

"Lulu: She's waiting. What shall I tell her?
Rodrigo: my best regards and that I'm queer."

A play in 1904 understands queer as a sexuality. And yet, even today I feel like the average person might not. Honestly I'm surprised to see this word in a play that's over 115 years old?

"Lulu (imploringly): Oh, yes, please. You must, you must take care of him. Then you can do whatever you want with me"

This book needs an internet filter. Seriously considering whether this play is the literary origin of pornography scripts.

"...When I was fifteen [...] I doubted I'd ever be happy. I bought a revolver; and at night ran across the bridge to shoot myself in the snow. Then I had the good fortune of lying in the hospital for three months without ever seeing a man."

Not only is this both psychologically inconsistent and physiologically implausible for this particular character, this plot point is disgustingly insensitive. This play fails.

"For twenty years literature has produced nothing but half-men: men unable to beget children and women unable to bear them. It's what's called the "Modern Dilemma"."

People in plays always seem to hide behind portieres. Does anyone actually own one? Has anyone ever hidden behind them to avoid a scandal in real life?

This is the first time I've been the only GoodReads user reading the True First edition of a book. I feel pompously responsible for describing this book as best I can for the sake of internet history. The problem is, is that it's not very good.