ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes and synthesizes themes explored through an investigation of the body in Viennese literature, centered on modern puppets and marionette theater. It explores the crisis of semantic language that pervades this literature, and suggests that corporeal gestures in paintings became effective and alternative modes of communication for Austrian artists and writers. This chapter not only discusses these important examples of theatrical hysterics, but also establishes their legacy in fin-de-siècle Viennese painting, which includes works by Gustav Klimt, Koloman Moser, and Egon Schiele. Contemporary critics and writers were additionally swift to examine the emergence of the grotesque and uncanny aspects of the Puppe as an inhuman doppelgänger. The chapter argues that the language of the uncanny puppet served as a metaphor for the human body in Schiele's various self-portraits, in Kokoschka's paintings of his "sex doll", and in literary works by Hofmannsthal, Gütersloh, Heinrich von Kleist, and Rainer Maria Rilke.
