Summary

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Summary Summary (Masterplots, Fourth Edition)

Erika Kohut is a pianist who lives with her mother and teaches at a music conservatory. Erikas consciousness is filled with an angry, absurdist, flow of impressions, evoking strong memories and emotions. The thirty-eight-year-old Erika is still a very compliant daughter to her overbearing mother, a controlling bully who manages every aspect of her daughters life. Erikas mother had anticipated that her daughters talent would enable her to realize her own ambitions for greater wealth and social status. Because Erikas father is absent, taken away long ago in an agitated state to a mental institution, Erikas mother places all her hopes on her daughter, imagining her as a famous musician, envied and idolized by everyone. Despite all her mothers scheming and dreaming, however, Erika has not become a brilliant pianist. Years ago, for her debut, she chose to play a piece so esoteric that she alienated the judges, leading her away from performing and into teaching instead. While doing everything possible to encourage Erikas musical accomplishments, Erikas mother warns her against boyfriends, whom she thinks would destroy all of Erikas achievements. To discourage her daughters interest in men, her mother forbids her from wearing makeup and buying pretty things for herself, and she even threatens to harm Erika if she has anything to do with a man. Erika defies her mothers control and her thrifty domestic regime by splurging on frivolous dresses that she has no intention of wearing. This leads to one of their bitterest quarrels. Erika then smothers her mother with apologetic kisses, but a suggestion of aggression and animosity remains against the woman she considers her jailer and tormentor. Despite their disagreements, however, Erika is in many ways her mothers daughteras she makes her way home through the crowded streets of Vienna, she comports herself as a haughty queen subject to plebeian inconveniences. She is also competitive and envious; in high school she had reported to the authorities a girl whose activities as a prostitute enabled her to buy the pretty clothes denied Erika. At the same time, there are many signs of Erikas own true dissent. Buying the frilly dresses is one sign, but her rebelliousness takes a twisted and dangerous form when she begins to secretly visit the peep shows in the red-light district of the city. While Erikas visits to these shows and to sadomasochistic pornographic movies suggest that in one way she is assuming the power of the male voyeur, this underworld is nevertheless devoted to male sexuality and masculine preferences that encourage Erika to take them as guidelines for the construction of a submissive female sexual identity. Additionally, these sex shows and porn films provide nothing for Erika in the way of erotic pleasureshe so lacks an emotional or sensual life that at one point she cuts her genitalia to feel some sort of sensation. Although in one part of her life she seeks some kind of libidinous life in the red-light district, Erikas work persona is, like her home life, bereft of the erotic. One day, she finds that she is attracted to a young music student, Walter Klemmer. So obsessed is she that at one point she punishes a young woman flutist who is flirting with him by slipping a smashed glass into the womans pocket.

Summary

Erikas first sexual experience with Klemmer is in a lavatory of the conservatory; the second is in the cleaning staffs closet. Both episodes are joyless and unromanticthe second time, Erika is so repelled that she vomits into a pail afterward. Klemmer, on the other hand, is aggressive and forces her submission. She responds to her encounters with him by composing a list of demands. Erika has gained the upper hand by dictating to him how he may abuse her. At the same time, Erika, on one level, hopes he will take the initiative and abjure violence and reject her demands; she desperately hopes he will initiate a gentle and loving relationship. Even as Erika seems to be entering into a submissive relationship with Klemmer, she also criticizes his musical abilities to the director of the school, preventing him from performing as a soloist in the upcoming recital. Enraged by her control over him as a teacher and repelled by her list of demands, Klemmer barges into her apartment, shuts her shaken and frightened mother away, and brutally rapes Erika. Having felt he has taught her a lesson, Klemmer regains his serenity. Later, Erika procures a knife from her kitchen and puts on one of her old-fashioned pretty dresses. She then leaves to find Klemmer. When she confronts him, she does not exercise vengeance by attacking him as expected; instead, she requires him to bear witness as she stabs herself in the shoulder. Having finished with the brutal Klemmer on terms that suggest both sadistic power and masochistic submission, she returns home to the very mother who is responsible for the pathologies of her love life. Source: Masterplots, Fourth Edition, 2010 Salem Press, Inc.. All Rights Reserved. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, Web distribution or information storage retrieval systems without the written permission of the publisher. For complete copyright information, please see the online version of this work.

Summary (Masterplots, Fourth Edition)