Abstract

Jackie Kennedy, although widely remembered as an American cultural icon who wore a pink Chanel suit, left behind little to no autobiographical material, allowing her narrative and identity to be defined and interpreted by others. The purpose of this study is to analyze Austrian playwright, Elfriede Jelinek’s 2004 play, Jackie, as a radical feminist deconstruction of J’s mythologized legacy we know today. Erving Goffman’s performative self theory and Sonja K. Foss’s strategies of disruption served as my dual-approach methodology. These combined perspectives offered analytical lenses—such as the frontstage, backstage, juxtaposing incongruities, cultivating incongruities, and generating new perspectives—to investigate how Jelinek’s monologue challenges master narratives that have a history of dictating how women’s lives are written and remembered. Major findings indicated that Jelinek leverages J’s “backstage” realities—experiences with reproductive trauma, disease, and the assassination—to clash with the performative “frontstage” public persona. This study also reveals how Jelinek’s linguistic style of the play is a critique that ultimately replaces traditional, sanitized biographies with a fragmented identity shaped by public consumption.

Advisor

Muellner, Beth

Second Advisor

Bostdorff, Denise

Department

Communication Studies; German Studies

Disciplines

Communication | German Language and Literature

Keywords

Feminist, Kennedy, Jelinek, Goffman, Foss, narrative, myth

Publication Date

2026

Degree Granted

Bachelor of Arts

Document Type

Senior Independent Study Thesis

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