Variety theatre and theatre of variations Performance, Female Body and Music in Émile Zola’s Nana (1880), Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) and Arthur Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else (1924)

This article aims to analyse the spectacle of the female body in musical performance through a psychoanalytical lens. The protagonists of the novels above will be approached as actresses who use the stage to re-enact the passivity of their social condition in order to transgress it. Reading Freud’s notion of compulsion repetition, it is argued that such performances create possibilities of ‘variation’ and ‘variety’ both on, and most importantly, off stage.