It forms the second part of his pairing of Lulu plays, the first being Earth Spirit (German: Erdgeist, first printed in 1895), both of which depict a society "driven by the demands of lust and greed".
Wedekind is known to have taken his inspiration from at least two sources: the pantomime Lulu by Félicien Champsaur, which he saw in Paris in the early 1890s, and the sex murders of Jack the Ripper in London in 1888.
[2] The premiere of Pandora's Box, a restricted performance due to difficulties with the censor, took place in Nuremberg on 1 February 1904.
Rodrigo Quast, the acrobat, plans to take Lulu away with him as a circus performer but when she arrives, emaciated from the prison regime, he declares her unfit for his purposes.
Two characters attempt to blackmail her, since she is still wanted by the German police: Rodrigo the acrobat and Casti-Piani, a white slave-trader who offers to set her up in a brothel in Cairo.
The play has attracted a wide range of interpretations, from those who see it as misogynist to those who claim Wedekind as a harbinger of women's liberation.
And each man "lets her down because he is flawed by a blind disregard for her true self, an indifference that stems from that blend of self-centredness and self-interest which Wedekind ... saw as typically male".
[4] Whether Lulu is victim or femme fatale, the centre of gravity in this second play shifts in the direction of Geschwitz, whom Wedekind describes, in his preface to the 1906 edition, as the "tragic central figure of the play", and holds up as an example of both "superhuman self-sacrifice" and spiritual strength in the face of the "terrible destiny of abnormality with which she is burdened".