Erika Kohut is in her late thirties. By day she confronts her unrealised ambition as a concert
pianist teaching at the Vienna Conservatory while at night she skulks through porn shows and
spies on couples in the park confronting her inadequate awareness of her own sexuality.
Kendall Petersen seeks to examine the notion of power including its manifestations and
consequences in social sexual and interpersonal relationships in The Piano Teacher by
Elfriede Jelinek based on an analysis of the three main relationships narrated in the text.
Not only does it become clear that social and interpersonal relationships cannot be divorced
from the dynamics of power which demonstrate themselves in acts of physical psychological and
sexual violence but more importantly that the text narrates a legacy of female
internalisation of patriarchal power which ironically results not in women who are
fundamentally independent and self-sufficient but rather in women who are and will always
remain victims disempowered desexualised and dehumanised.
