Elfriede Jelinek's Nora Project: Or What Happens When Nora Meets the Capitalists

The distinguishing feature of the creative output of the contemporary Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek is the unmasking of the illusion perpetuated by misreadings of canonical texts. In her play Was geschah, nachdem Nora ihren Mann verlassen hatte oder Stutzen der Gesellschaften. written in 1979 as a reflection upon the centennial of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll’s House, Jelinek superimposes a strong materialist feminist reading on a range of contemporary issues: the demythification of canonical texts that adhere to the fictions of everyday life, the continuity of patriarchal structures in capitalist market economies, and the limitations of utopian individualism in feminist myths. Jelinek recognizes that a critique of the appropriation of Ibsen's classic simultaneously necessitates a demystification of the modes of representation most successful in the dissemination of ideologies. In her deconstruction of Ibsen's A Doll’s House, Jelinek transposes the action of the play to reveal "what happened after Nora left her husband and met the pillars of societies."