SOURCE: “Mothers and Lovers in Some Novels by Kafka and Brod,” in German Life and Letters, Vol. 50, No. 4, October, 1997, pp. 475-90.

In the following essay, Robertson examines Brod's and Kafka's approach to women in their novels.

The growth of women's studies has helped to open up the wider terrain of gender studies, including the study of masculinity. Instead of being considered a known quantity, the standard against which women's difference could be measured and explored, masculinity is itself a problematic concept, and the extent to which it is a socially constructed set of meanings, rather than a biological given, has by now received ample attention. Understandably, the focus has been on those forms of masculinity associated with domestic or political power. The stern father, the patriarchal husband, the soldier, and the dictator have all received sceptical study and been exposed as inwardly anxious beings whose embattled masculinity rests...