Central Europe Yearbook

From Self-Fashioning to State Symbol: Empress Elisabeth's Aesthetic Agency, Posthumous Cult, and National Appropriation in Austria

Sylvia Rutherford

Abstract

This thesis interrogates the life and posthumous transformation of Empress Elisabeth of Austria (1837-1898), challenging prevailing historiographical constructions that cast her as a passive consort constrained by the rigid formalities of the Habsburg court. Through an analysis of visual culture, gendered self-representation, and the processes of cultural mythologisation that followed her death, Elisabeth emerges as a figure who strategically cultivated a public persona that exercised aesthetic and performative agency in subversion of the symbolic constraints of her imperial role. After her assassination, however, this carefully constructed image was appropriated and reconfigured within Austrian cultural memory, as her acts of self-fashioning were systematically effaced and supplanted by a romanticised iconography that functioned as an ideological projection screen for the reconstruction of national identity in twentieth century Austria.