ABSTRACT
In 1909, Arnold Schoenberg composed his first completed work for the stage, the monodrama Erwartung, on a text by Marie Pappenheim, then a medical student at the University of Vienna. The erasure of female subjectivity in interpretations of Erwartung, either by ignoring the Woman or dismissing her as "hysterical," has everything to do with the ways in which modernism has been construed in virtual oppositon to women and their concerns. There is no small irony in such a construction, for the "Frauenfrage," or "woman question," was a leading social issue of early modernism's milieu, and numbers of "progressive" women, as fin-de-siecle feminists called themselves, were invested in modernism's artistic projects. The escape of Erwartung's Woman from the "traditional script of the heterosexual romance" and her critical reappraisal of her position reflect defining markers of modern feminist fiction from the late nineteenth century to the present, and enact the stated aims of Viennese feminist activists to "experience life".
