Social Power in The Artificial Silk Girl by Irmgard Keun

Examples of Social Power in The Artificial Silk Girl

Throughout The Artificial Silk Girl, one can see examples of how social power is exercised and responded too. The Artificial Silk Girl takes place during the last leg of the Weimar Republic. The Weimar Republic was a time era when women were trying to emancipate themselves. This involved them trying to prove that women can be more than just either a mother/Madonna or a street walker/prostitute. They were able to blur these lines by taking up jobs, participating in sexual encounters that did not tarnish their reputation and doing other acts that were previously only viewed as acceptable for men to do. The protagonist of The Artificial Silk Girl, Doris, views herself as a modern urban woman and in doing so challenges the previously construed views of women prior to the Weimar Republic. By doing so she believes that has attained an amount or social power.

The flaneur is a man who strolls through the streets with a nonchalant ease and appears to observe the city and its inhabitants. These men can walk through the streets and not be worried that they will be faced with someone who has ill intent aimed towards them. When a woman walks with the gait of a flaneur she has to be careful that she is not perceived as a streetwalker instead for it is only by her gait that a woman can be distinguished from a streetwalker and a woman merely walking the streets. Once Doris becomes the surrogate wife of Ernst she is able to become a flaneuse or a female flaneur. She exercises this social power by walking through the streets without Ernst in order to get groceries. Doris was once thought to be a streetwalker where she was accosted but she was able to defer the unwanted attention by informing t...

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...herself and turn the male gaze upon herself (Keun 84, 3).

When Keun uses the male gaze she is taking away any power that Doris may have accrued and giving it to her male counterparts. This is because Doris does not have the ability to describe herself. Instead, while looking in a mirror she uses a desexualized view to describe a sexually confident woman. In effect she doesn’t know who she is, she only knows herself by way of how she believes others (males) see her. The way Doris carries herself though it is almost as if she doesn’t even know that this is happening. She still believes herself to be the one in power even though she is continually proven otherwise. This might be due to the fact that during the Weimar Republic, even though women were gaining power, it was the men who held all of the social power and women only thought that they held most of the power.