[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_30

Poetic Diary, Elizabeth of Austria, 1885 - 1889

Mainstream Western culture has built a cumbersome myth about Elizabeth of Austria; it's hard not to have heard of her since she is among the most popular female sovereigns in Europe, after Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria. There’s a considerable filmography about her, starting from the Austrian trilogy of the 1950s, which featured the young Romy Schneider, up to the most recent feminist versions.

After the Second World War, Elizabeth of Austria became the symbol of Vienna and Austria in general, so much so that you cannot cross the Austrian border without finding her portrait on postcards, magnets, and chocolates (along with that of Mozart). I underlined "Second Postwar" because before the 1950s, before her trilogy, Sissi – that was her nickname - was not loved at all. She had fallen into deep oblivion, as profound as the blame that had accompanied her in life.

When I was a child, I was in love with her character. Austrian cinematography presented her to me as beautiful, dreamy, and rebellious, but above all, as a winning character who had found happiness with her charming prince. The patriarchal narrative was not hidden at all, but Italian children of the 90s had never heard of patriarchy, so believing that personal fulfillment coincided with marital love was not strange.

Going to visit Schonbrunn, the Habsburg royal residence, and discovering that my heroine was a depressed, anorexic, asexual, betrayed, and derided person shocked me. I arrived in Vienna after seven hours by bus, accompanied by my grandfather and all his cheerful retired friends, just so that Sissi could see the traces of her luminous life as Empress. Instead, I found an ordinary woman, stuck and unhappy. No one around me shared or understood my frustration; there were just many older adults with audio guides in their ears, walking around disoriented, with their mouths open. I, too, like Sissi, felt alone and betrayed.

Why tell all those lies about her?

As I grew up, I understood that her life was too complex to be translated into mainstream language. It was too complex in the 19th century, and, in some ways, it still is today. And this is also the reason for her fortune, the reason why her real and mythological figure continues to intrigue and fascinate.

Reading her diary is a bit like spying on the affairs of the royal family through the keyhole, a voyeur action if you like. But it is also like catching the lightning that at night, for a moment, illuminates a landscape that would otherwise have remained invisible. In these pages, Sissi symbolizes a condemned world: "They don't realize," writes Elisabeth, "that all those crowned heads will soon fall." The Twentieth Century was yet to begin, but the twilight of an Era was already clear to Sissi in the suffocating hypocrisies of the Vienna court, in the growing independence revolts, in forming new national identities. Elizabeth of Austria was too refined and cultured; "She was without posterity," as Emil Cioran wrote about her: "As a human phenomenon, she was the most fascinating figure of decadence, of ruin."