SOURCE: "Kafka's Egoless Woman: Otto Weininger's Sex and Character," in Reading Kafka: Prague, Politics, and the Fin de Siècle, edited by Mark Anderson, Schocken Books, 1989, pp. 149-69.

In the following essay, Stach examines Kafka's characterization of women in his fiction and the extent to which it was influenced by Weininger.

With the idea of myth, the Feminine gained entry into the realm of theory—but only as another myth. The familiar images of woman as natural being, primal mother, vampire, sphinx, or the promise of happiness, were not disavowed but rather conceptualized into theory. However, the very continuity of these cultural projections allows us to decode prevalent sexual myths in their theoretical, largely affirmative reformulations. Besides psychoanalysis, the most influential attempt to develop a theory of sexuality was Otto Weininger's dissertation, which was published under the title Sex and Character in 1903.¹ The extent to which the struggle...