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Content warning: eating disorders
Final-year PhD student Rhoslyn Beckwith selected to deliver the annual Sylvia Naish lecture at King’s College London and online as part of the 70th National Postgraduate Colloquium in German Studies in June 2022.
The event is part of the Institute of Modern Languages Research programme of activities and the honour is awarded to one research student working in Germanic Studies at a UK university each year. Rhoslyn’s PhD research is on the cultural afterlives of Queen Luise of Prussia and Empress Elisabeth of Austria. Both women have been called the ‘Queen of Hearts’ and her lecture focused on postmodern literary commemorations of Elisabeth of Austria, known as Sisi.
Rhoslyn first encountered Sisi and the way that she has been used to promote idealised images of Austria and Vienna on a childhood visit to the country. Marketing which transforms Sisi’s life into a fairytale and depictions of her in 1950s films which call to mind Disney princesses like Cinderella deliberately gloss over the personal battles with coercion and an eating disorder which are seen in the meticulous records which the Empress kept. It is these disturbing and hidden aspects of her life which have inspired postmodern novels like Lilian Faschinger’s Wiener Passion (1999) and Linda Stift’s Stierhunger (2007).
Oil painting of Empress Elisabeth of Austria (Franz Xaver Winterhalter, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons)
When talking with Rhoslyn, it was impossible not to see parallels between Sisi and the way that young women are used in today’s celebrity culture, from the appropriation of their identities as symbols, to the Schadenfreude expressed when their lives turn out to be less than perfect.
Some of the most successful TV series of recent years have been more or less fictional reimaginings of history, from the dramatization of Elizabeth II’s reign in The Crown, via the medievalism of Game of Thrones, to the lockdown escapism of Bridgerton. Rhoslyn explained how Empress Elisabeth is being reinvented again in the TV and book series Sisi: Das Dunkle Versprechen which portray her as daring and eager to experience all that life has to offer.
In her research Rhoslyn draws on literature, film, history and theoretical approaches from memory studies to question how the lives of real women have been rewritten to sell a national image, to explore the trauma of eating disorders, and to entertain. We caught up with Rhoslyn and had the chance to ask her a bit more about her choice of Sisi for her research and to talk more about connections with modern celebrity culture and the presentations of historiographic metafiction in TV shows like The Crown, Game of Thrones and Bridgerton.
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