Austrian Literature Archives - Page 2 of 3

Musil’s Three Women – Grigia, The Lady from Portugal, and Tonka

There are some books which, when I take my notes from page to screen, seem more interesting and more enjoyable than they had been as I was reading them. Robert Musil’s Three Women is such a book. Three Women is interesting – I got awfully excited by the thought of all the essays I’ll be able to write next year on it – but it’s not exactly fun to read. Musil takes three different relationships and uses them to weave an intricate network of ideas and associations which provide an intellectual feast for anyone who hungers for one, built on workable plots.

This is, of course, progress for Musil, whose two stories Unions were also in my edition. These were written earlier, and as Frank Kermode writes of Three Women in the preface to my edition, “the difference from the earlier work could be expressed as a new willingness to find a place in his stories for straight narrative”, which is about as open as any serious literary critic could be about the fact that those two stories make no bloody sense whatsoever, however interesting they might be for someone who has got lost on the way to the philosophy section of the library.

Anyway, as I said at the top, now that I’ve extracted my notes, I can start to “appreciate” the stories. What follows is a teasing out of some of the various meanings I found.

A photo of Robert Musil — Robert Musil, author of *Three Women.* His most famous work is the unfinished *Man without Qualities*. However, it’s rather long and I’m not sure I like his writing enough to attempt it just yet.

Three Women and Robert Musil

There are three stories in Three Women, each of them centring on a different woman – “Grigia”, “The Lady from Portugal”, and “Tonka”. The last of these, “Tonka”, as about twice as long as the others, and is also broken up into chapters to make it easier to read. Robert Musil, their author, was an Austrian-German who had seem the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapse, but as Kermode makes clear, this is not the only collapse he witnessed. There is also the sense of “metaphysical collapse”, a sense that modern man (and everyone else) is losing his spiritual anchoring without replacing it with anything. In all of these stories the notion of “will” is of great importance, as is the feeling that looking at the world from only one angle, whether scientific or martial, can lead to our doom. Pretty typical Modernist stuff, to be fair, but Musil does it well.

Grigia

“Grigia” is the first story in Three Women and it takes its name from a peasant woman from Venetia. Homo, the main character, is left home alone by his wife and ailing son as they seek out treatment, so he decides to take up an offer from an old friend to go and attempt to reopen some gold mines in Venetia. Mines are a particularly German setting, taking us back at once to the Romantics. Novalis had studied mining, and Ludwig Tieck’s “The Rune Mountain” and E. T. A. Hofmann’s story “The Mines at Falun” both present classic renditions of the dangers of what lies buried beneath the ground. Of these three, I found “The Mines at Falun” to be the most relevant while I thought about “Grigia”.

In Musil’s story Homo, in an alien mountainous world, begins going “native”. As usual, we have to ask whether that nature has always been there. Homo has an “impression that behind the outward appearance of this district… there was hidden something that he yearningly awaited”; meanwhile, crystals from the mountain are compared to flowers. “Yearningly” and the connection with flowers (also present in Hofmann’s tale) speak to a kind of sexual desire that is hidden, not-fully-acknowledged, within Homo. When the gold starts to flow, Homo finds the attraction of power and wealth too, blotting out memories of his old life. Stars become like “thalers”, and in the villages “they poured out money among the people and held sway like gods”. Homo and his companions, the other mining directors, stop talking as time passes, instead adopting “an animal language”. Power takes away their civility and leaves them beasts.

The first page of Musil's Grigia, the first story in Three Women — The first edition of “Grigia”, the first story in *Three Women*. I quite liked “Grigia” but I wish Musil had focused more on straight narrative.

This power is a temporary state, of course, contingent upon the gold’s flow. “Grigia”, as do all the stories of Three Women, has at its core questions about identity. This is where Musil’s use of sex and eroticism comes in. The peasant women’s husbands all go to America in search of fortune there, and one day Homo hears a story about one who comes back. He goes to one woman, spends time with her until he runs out of money, and then he leaves to the next one. He has been in America and knows the husbands, letting him imitate them. The women do not object, perhaps do not even notice. They are simply glad of his return. Eventually the trickster is caught, but the story speaks to the idea that one can change one’s role at will. For Homo, far from home, the idea is an attractive one.

It is attractive because it absolves him of responsibility. For one going “native” the only possible danger, so long as one stays where one is, is the possibility of guilt. Thinking about everything as acting is much easier. When Homo starts having sex with the peasant women, the language reflects his feeling that everything is in a way unreal, even though in fact it’s a further indication of his moral decline. Of one, he thinks “her passion was so brilliantly and passionately acted”, with a “theatrical quality of it”. And from this a kind of solipsism emerges, the necessary continuation of his growing sense of power. He thinks the women are there for him, and comes to find everything on the mountains as an “enchanted world ordained for him alone”. When he gets close to the peasant woman Grigia, he thinks it will bring him spiritually closer to his wife.

Perhaps it does, but reality intervenes. A vengeful husband traps Homo and Grigia in a cave, but only Grigia has the willpower to escape. Homo, already having had his pleasure, stays where he is. At that moment the mining stops, a failure. To me the story ultimately suggests the dangers of delusions, the need to have a firm grip on things. The need for a kind of spiritual centre. And since Homo’s name isn’t a far cry from Homo Sapiens, perhaps Musil’s message may be meant for us all.

The Lady from Portugal

The second story of Three Women is “The Lady from Portugal”. Unlike the other two stories in Three Women this one is set in the past, in the Alps on the border with Italy during the time of the earlier Holy Roman Empire. Its central characters are the Herr von Ketten (Man of the Chains), a nobleman, and his wife, a Portuguese lady. As with the other stories, the focus here is on identity. The Herr von Ketten is part of a long lineage of warriors, and his entire identity is based on war. For one year of their lives his people court their wives in faraway lands, and for the rest they fight. The Herr von Ketten’s sworn enemies are the forces of the Bishop of Trent. However, the real tension here is between von Ketten and his wife. Can they ever know each other or get close?

The Lady from Portugal imagines, when she reaches the castle, that the Alpine landscape reflects her husband’s character. She hears a story about how no-one has ever seen beyond the mountains, because every time someone sees past one row of peaks, another lies in wait. It is the same with identity – we may think that we know a person, but there is always another layer to be discovered. The castle itself is not to her taste – she finds it hideous, rotting, but she decides to try to make it her own. Meanwhile, her husband has already abandoned her to go to war. Thus begins their period of separation.

They meet, of course, but rarely. When he returns, he leaves “more hastily than was necessary”, and they both end up laughing awkwardly. She tends to his wounds, performing her duty as wife, but for both of them it becomes a comic action. For von Ketten, she is something outside of war, and thus alien. He has no power over her – she is as if from “some other realm.” War, by contrast, is much easier. Instead of the woman’s complexity, “To command is a thing of clarity”. “The thrust of a spear under an iron collar that has slipped is as simple as pointing one’s finger at something and being able to say: This is. This.” The spear and his finger are connected – for von Ketten there’s scarcely a difference.

He enjoys war because it doesn’t require “that other thing” – women. In fighting, his entire life can be focused on one thing. And indeed, it almost seemed to me that the war von Ketten fights is a war against multiplicity, against women. It is key that the Bishop of Trent is described as wearing “womanish robes” – if von Ketten can destroy him, it’s like he can destroy the presence of women in his life. For the Lady there are also challenges. Her children, which have not seen the sea, do not seem like her children to her. When the two meet she’s almost thankful for the brevity of these meetings – “If he had remained longer, he would have had to be truly as he was.” Things are easier because they are acted, rather than felt.

Von Ketten cannot hide from his wife forever. When the Bishop of Trent dies naturally both sides make peace, leaving von Ketten without the cornerstone of his identity. On the way home he is stung by a fly and almost dies. He suffers fevers and a surgeon. This latter is already a challenge to his old world view – “How strange it was to let pain be inflicted on one and not defend oneself”, he thinks. He drifts between death and life but eventually decides to live, but he doesn’t fully recover. His head has shrunk and his cap no longer fits. He has literally lost a part of himself without war.

At home the Lady from Portugal has a guest – a friend from her homeland. For von Ketten what is unbearable is seeing what real closeness can actually look like. “Their souls seemed to be in harmony with each other”, and when he spies them in the garden “among the leaves the shadows all blurred into one”. He starts to second-guess the past, finding evidence for betrayal everywhere. But he is sick, and a soothsayer tells him he will be cured only when he’s “accomplish[ed] a task” – what task, she doesn’t say. Now, just as once she couldn’t understand him, he cannot understand her. “When he gazed into his wife’s eyes, they were like new-cut glass, and although what the surface showed him was his own reflection, he could not penetrate further” – once again, an image of layers.

One day a kitten appears. At first beloved by all, it later gets ill. All three nobles try to take care of it. Ultimately, they fail and send it away, but it comes back well. When it falls ill again they have it killed. Ketten now decides it is time to get rid of the Portuguese guest. But “he could not make the final decision that he had all his life found it so easy to make”. Something has changed, and killing is no longer in his nature. All the same, one night he climbs onto the castle’s rocks to try to catch his wife and guest together. As he does so, his strength returns. But the man has already vanished. His wife explains: “If God could become man, then He can also become a kitten”.

Through this experience of jealousy and care von Ketten moves on from war to a kind of love.

Tonka

“Tonka” is the last story of Three Women, and the longest. It tells the story of a relationship between a young man from the middle classes and a peasant girl, Tonka. As ever, we are made to think about notions of identity. Tonka is a girl who is like “a snowflake falling all alone in the midst of a summer’s day” – she is always out of place. Moreover, she is hard to pin down, always associated with liminality. For instance, her full name is the German “Antonie” but the shortened form comes from the Czech “Toninka”; in addition, her family is made of an aunt “who was actually her much older cousin” and a grandmother who is actually the grandmother’s sister.

The young man brings her into his household as a nurse for his own ailing grandmother. Tonka is not intelligent – she mostly just says “yes” or “no”. Her mind has an “opacity” to it because she cannot express herself. By contrast, the young man’s relatives are all talkers. They know that speech is “not a medium of thought, but a sort of capital, something they wore like jewellery to impress others”, even if their speech is empty. When the grandmother dies, Tonka doesn’t cry – she doesn’t understand the need to fake emotions. His mother berates the young man for being “out of place” when he tries to help Tonka – his relationship doesn’t conform to the strictures of his class. But at the same time, the young man is part of his class – he gets annoyed when something reminds him of Tonka’s earlier life, when she worked in a shop.

Eventually, Tonka and the young man go to Berlin. They were unable to stay with the family. The young man doesn’t want to become like his mother, forced to carry on a relationship in secret. He and Tonka are now in love, though it is a strange love: “He loved Tonka because he did not love her, because she did not stir his soul, but rinsed it clean and smooth, like fresh water. He loved her more than he himself believed.” Tonka is simple, but she is not stupid. Even to the young man she reveals hidden depths, such as when she tells him about chemistry she has remembered, “like pretty stones whose names one does not know, kept in a box!” For a time, all is well. After some difficulty, “suspended between emotion and theory”, they have sex. And then she gets pregnant.

A painting of a seated woman — Egon Schiele, “Edith Schiele in gestreiftem Kleid sitzend”. In “Tonka” there is a great tension between who Tonka says she is and what reason dictates she must be. For the rational, scientific young man who is her partner, the gulf between the two is too great to overcome.

Tonka gets pregnant while the young man is away on a journey. There are two possibilities – either an immaculate conception, or infidelity. The young man is a man of science, but Tonka, “impervious to his reasoning”, is a force of her own. She is from “a world that does not know the concept “truth””. She grows ill, her skin peels away, “letting the peasant skeleton peer through the skin.” By contrast, the young man’s “well-bred face” better survives hardship. Illness seems to reveal who they really are. Money grows tight, and the young man’s forced to turn to his mother. But he has broken the unwritten codes – the family alludes to “amorous acts” that Tonka uses to control him. There are none. They simply cannot understand Tonka’s simplicity.

The young man becomes superstitious just as he becomes suspicious, but at the same time his personality splits. Part of him, the superstitious and suspicious part, is Tonka’s lover – the other is a scientist. And as the relationship worsens, the science improves. He stops shaving because he thinks it helps the relationship, only wears a certain ring. When he tries to confront Tonka with the scientific and medical irrefutability of her infidelity, “all she could do was to vouch for the truth of her words with the truth of her whole being.” There is more than one type of truth in the world. But for the scientist it is a torment to have no certainty. Even though he’s sure she’s betrayed him, this feeling is like a “dream” – they are real only while we experience them. Later we see their flimsy construction.

He starts dreaming. His dreams come as warnings that his work is not his true life. He has a repeated memory of disbelieving in religion as a boy and trying to button up his coat during a frost only to find the cold has numbed his fingers. Tonka ends up in the hospital. The young man is unable to tell her “I believe you” – he cannot face the consequences of those words for his worldview. Eventually she dies, without hearing those words. Only then does the young man appreciate that deep inside her “there is a part of her that remains untouched by all this” – where infidelity is irrelevant because it is not a part of her truth. But it is too late. Unlike Herr von Ketten, the young man is unable to save his love. His need for rational certainty has cost him everything.

Conclusion

I have written too much. All the same, I hope this piece gives an idea of why Musil is an interesting writer and Three Women is an interesting collection. At least when you’re looking to write an essay. Musil’s Modernist concerns in Three Women – the shifting nature of identity and the dangers of a worldview that is too focused on one thing – remain pertinent in our own time, as does the importance he sets upon having an appreciation for the possibility of spirituality and irrationality as an antidote to looking at the world in only one way. Unfortunately, I’m still not sure I actually enjoyed reading Three Women. Even though I found parts of it touching, especially the descriptions of an unusual love in “Tonka”, most of Three Women was just too intellectual for my tastes, like Musil’s Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, which I looked at here.

But still, it’s probably worth checking out Three Women. These stories are much shorter than The Man Without Qualities and may help you decide whether that book’s for you. If you enjoyed the piece or have read Three Women and think I seriously have misinterpreted the stories (I probably did), do leave a comment.

Robert Musil’s Posthumous Papers of a Living Author

Robert Musil’s novel, The Man Without Qualities, is the perhaps the foremost German-language contribution to the exceedingly long and perhaps overly cerebral modernist genre, otherwise the domain of Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time. Why the German-speakers and their works have never been as popular as those of the English and French is a complicated and thorny subject. Musil’s magnum opus, at least, is hurt by the fact that its author departed this life before he had completed it – though he managed over a thousand pages, so perhaps we shouldn’t complain. The Man Without Qualities is, according to critical wisdom, the best thing Musil wrote. However, lacking unlimited time, I decided to try a few of Musil’s other works, to get a feel for him. My first attempt is Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, a collection of creative non-fiction and short stories. Below are my thoughts.

An old photo of Robert Musil, author of Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, looking dapper. — Robert Musil, author of *Posthumous Papers of a Living Author,* is most famous for his *The Man Without Qualities.* He was born in Austria Hungary in 1880 and died in Switzerland in 1942, his work almost forgotten. Only recently has he found much popularity in the English-speaking world, thanks to new translations.

Of Flies and Worms

The first thing I noticed about Posthumous Papers of a Living Author is that it is a book populated with animals. I don’t know if Musil was a vegetarian, but I had the impression as I read that he had great sympathy for animals, regardless of whether he ate them. I think in them he saw a reflection of our own human selves in the modern era. Fears about mechanised slaughter and technology-driven control, and about the destruction of individuals under the treads of science and social pressures, he expresses through his non-fiction, in particular the pieces “Flypaper” and “Fishermen on the Baltic”.

“Flypaper”

“Flypaper”, the first of these little pieces, describes the killing of flies. We begin with a basic scientific and factual description of the paper in question – “Tangle-foot flypaper is approximately fourteen inches long and eight inches wide; it is coated with a yellow poison paste and comes from Canada”. But this beginning is deceptive, for Musil starts to work in his argument immediately after it. The structure of the piece is simple, describing in only two or three pages the process by which flies are killed by flypaper: they land, they try to fly, and then at last they lose their strength and die. Such a description would hardly affect us if Musil had left it like that. But instead, he uses language to draw us into the fly’s struggle, and make us aware of its brutal nature. And in this verbal magic, not even the form can remain neutral.

Part of this comes through metaphors and similes. Although “Flypaper” is short, it is packed with images. And these images are invariably, consciously, human. Entangled flies are like “the mountain climber”, like “the man lost in the snow”, like “the hunted man” – all this within a single, long, sentence. Musil’s use of multiple images within a single sentence makes the particularly human nature of his images hard to avoid noticing. Then there is his use of “we”, not often but just often enough for us to know that the fly’s struggle is much like our own. Musil’s language is also startlingly colloquial at times, like when the flies “take a breather and try again”. Where technical, scientific language would push us away from the fly, Musil’s particularly casual style does the opposite.

A photo of a fly — As annoying as houseflies are, it still pays, so argues Musil in “Flypaper”, to have an awareness of what they go through when we kill them. It might teach us something about ourselves.

And so the fly dies, and by this point we are almost on its side. We have been made aware of its human qualities. And the attention that Musil gives to it, showing in detail how it tries to escape only to lose its strength and collapse, also alters our view of the fly’s death. By breaking down “flies land and die” into its component parts, by defamiliarizing the process of death, Musil turns the flypaper into something abhorrent, and the fly’s struggle into tragedy. When we learn, in the final sentences, that though the fly stops moving, nevertheless there is “some tiny wiggling organ that still lives a long time”, that “it opens and closes, you can’t describe it without a magnifying glass, it looks like a miniscule human eye that ceaselessly opens and shuts” – when we learn all this it’s hard not to feel horror and shock.

“Fishermen on the Baltic”

What “Flypaper” does for flies, the third piece in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, “Fishermen on the Baltic”, does for worms. But here Musil alters the approach. In “Fishermen on the Baltic” we focus on fishermen preparing worms for fishing. At first they are “an obscure, mouldy, enticing ugliness in the clean white sand”, but then the men take them, cut them into pieces, and put them in their equipment chests. It is “a very tidy operation”, one where Musil uses the passive voice to further distance the fishermen from their slaughter.

But, as Musil himself hints at the end of the piece, “you have to pay close attention”. (It’s hard not to read this as a command for the reader concerning the text, even as it’s ostensibly about the worm-preparation). Take the placing of worms on hooks by the men, “as carefully as nurses to make sure that each hook gets a worm”. Nurses do not aim to kill people. The image, while fitting on one level – nurses and fishermen need steady hands – is repulsive once you go beneath the surface.

“Fishermen on the Baltic” is even shorter than “Flypaper”, but there is still a lot going on here. We should admire the skill of the fishermen’s craft, but Musil wants us to think also about its cost. The worms are killed mechanically while the fishermen banter. Perhaps there is something of an allegory for fascism here. Posthumous Papers of a Living Author was published in 1936, but I haven’t been able to work out when this particular piece was written. Nonetheless, we have a sense of the worms’ ugliness, a sense that they are only useful for us as objects for fishing and not as living beings in themselves. Perhaps it’s not too much of a stretch?

Cultural and Other Declines

Posthumous Papers of a Living Author is not only concerned with modernity’s crushing effect on the individual – it’s also a record of various sorts of decline that Musil saw taking place around him. Partially, this decline is linguistic. Musil is concerned with the way that language, through advertising and overuse, is losing its meaning. In a piece like “It’s Lovely Here”, Musil takes aim at the clichés of postcards. In “Monuments”, Musil connects the fate of monuments in Europe – ignored, or at best used for directions – with the broader cultural decline. If only they used the new tricks of advertising – “Goethe’s Faust is the best!” would be a great inscription for a statue to the German instead of something so boring as a name and date.

Often, language is simply unable to convey its idea. In “Boardinghouse Nevermore”, Musil notes that words like “harmony” are useless at showing what to the naked eye is obvious. This points to a deeper problem: that people assume, with the encroachment of scientific language into everyday speech, that everything can be explained and translated. Such a view ultimately takes the “magic” out of life. Musil, unlike most writers, had actually had a scientific and technical education – nonetheless he understood the dangers of adopting an overly-scientific worldview. In “Can a Horse Laugh?” this is treated with humour. At first an “acclaimed psychologist” is quoted – “…for animals don’t know how to laugh or smile”. Musil, however, spends the rest of the essay arguing against this through the example of a stable boy and his horse. Personal experience defies the scientist. But we shouldn’t blame the horse for proving him wrong.

Snobbery and State of Consciousness

Against this sense of linguistic decline there are a few attempts here to fight back. In addition to “Flypaper”, there are other stories that make us revaluate the world through taking us into different consciousnesses. “Maidens and Heroes” amusingly puts us inside the head of a canine, while “Clearhearing” shows us the world through the eyes and ears of a convalescent. “Binoculars” makes us think about the way we look at things by showing us, through careful descriptions, a zoomed-in version of the world. Musil’s inventiveness is at times really quite impressive.

However, while Musil’s linguistic ventures can be interesting, the cultural criticism is often less so. The advertising criticism of “Monuments” is just about okay, but in something like the “Paintspreader”, talking about talentless “genre painters”, Musil comes across as simply a snob. In “Surrounded by Poets and Thinkers” he asks the question of why writers don’t write long books anymore, and comes to the conclusion that it’s because the reading public are idiots. There is more to the essay than this – it ultimately is about our loss of belief in experts, and the way that as a result we know longer trust each other. In the end, Musil writes, someone whose views are completely awful will be able to gain popularity simply because everyone has an equally poor claim on respect. It’s a timely point, but one overshadowed by the condescending tone. Musil is no egalitarian champion himself.

A monument to Musil, showing a bust on a granite column. — A monument to Musil. While I’m going to read more of him, I can’t help but feel like overall *Posthumous Papers of a Living Author* was a mixed bag. At times it was fascinating – what I wrote about “Flypaper” and “Fishermen on the Baltic”, for example – but at others it was overly intellectual, snobbish, or dull. Photo by Albrecht Conz / CC BY-SA 3.0 DE

Conclusions

I only spoke about a few of the things from Posthumous Papers of a Living Author in this post in part because I ended up having more to say about them than I’d expected – indeed, I had to cut and compress whole themes from my plan. However, another reason I did not speak about many other of the pieces is because, quite frankly, they didn’t leave a great impression on me. Posthumous Papers of a Living Author was, in its author’s words, a “little stop-gap book”, and as a result the quality is very uneven. At times, Musil’s language is fantastic and inventive, while at others it falls victim to modernist overindulgence.

I also think that the ideas of Posthumous Papers of a Living Author are not all equally interesting either. Perhaps I am just jaded, having read more than my fair share of modernist literature, but a lot of Musil’s moaning about cultural and linguistic decline and related matters, however relevant his complaints remain in our own day, just strikes me as picking on easy targets. The fact remains that identifying problems is the first step towards solving them – not the only one. I got the impression that Musil can’t quite pick a side between being art-for-art’s-sake or being engaged with the world, and it hurts these pieces at times.

Overall, Posthumous Papers of a Living Author suffers from much the same problems that Alfred Döblin’s Murder of a Buttercup did – it’s sometimes intellectually satisfying, but it forgets to touch the heart. At its best, Musil seems a worthy precursor to Borges. But unfortunately that isn’t the case often enough. I can only hope that his other works will be more consistent.

Sex and Society in Arthur Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else

Fräulein Else is a surprising novella of sex and desire that retains its power to shock even now, almost a hundred years after it was published in 1924. Its Austrian-Jewish author, Arthur Schnitzler, was rather notorious in his day for his works’ frank depictions of sexuality, especially – in the case of Fräulein Else – of female sexuality. Taking us inside his characters’ heads, in a stream of consciousness style reminiscent of Molly Bloom’s in Ulysses, Schnitzler in Fräulein Else and elsewhere shows us what, under the respectable veneer of 19^th century literary realism, was lurking all along – real and violent passion.

A painting of a reclining woman. The cover of my edition of Fräulein Else. — William Edward Frost, “Life study of the female figure”, (c) Victoria & Albert Museum. *Fräulein Else* asks us, at least in part, to consider how far the socially conditioned idea of innocent and passive women is actually true by showing us what actually takes place within one such woman’s mind.

Fräulein Else is the story of a young girl whose life falls apart over the course of one evening. A playful and young nature comes against forces she is unable to withstand – forces of power, both masculine and monetary. Else’s story is that of an attempt to live against a world that is unwilling to let her do so, and the results are ultimately fatal.

Setting the Scene – the beginning of Fräulein Else

We are introduced in Fräulein Else to our protagonist in her natural state – at play. She has just finished a round of tennis with her cousin and his lover and she has decided to go back to her hotel. Else is in Italy, in the Trentino resort of San Martino di Castrozza. Whether the action takes place before or after the First World War is hard to make out – the hotel is full of international guests, just as in a Henry James novel – but we have a sense that for the likes of Else, the time doesn’t matter. She plays games, flirts endlessly in her head, imagines herself with many lovers, pictures a wonderful villa by the beach, and obsesses over her naked figure. All is well in the world.

But then a letter comes from home in Vienna. Her father, a lawyer, has fallen on hard times and there is no way for the family to keep itself afloat without Else’s help. Every friend has already lent him money, and there is now no choice but for Else to ask an acquaintance of her father’s at the hotel, Herr Dorsday, whether he would pay off the 30000 Guilder debt within the next two days. Otherwise the debtors’ prison awaits him. Else eventually asks Dorsday for her help, but he sets a condition – Else must show herself to him, naked, at midnight. After all her sexual imaginings, the idea repulses her, and she is sent spiralling into confusion. On the one hand, the demands of her father, of maintaining her social position; on the other, her desire for sexual autonomy.

One moment she seems to condemn her father to either shooting himself or being locked up; the next, she wants it to be herself who dies.

Else herself – a successful free spirit?

Coming from the 19^th century as I more or less do, Else’s clearly articulated sexuality is surprising, if not quite as shocking as it would once have been. Her pleasure in her young and naked body shows the pure desire to live that she embodies:

“Ah, how wonderful it is to walk naked up and down one’s room. Am I really as beautiful as the mirror makes me look? Ah, come a little closer, my young lady. I want to kiss your blood-red lips. I want to press your breasts to mine. What a shame it is, that glass, cold glass, separates the two of us. Oh how good we would be together. Isn’t it so? We need nobody else. Not a single other human being.”

But for all her sexual confidence, the text also reveals a kind of solipsism on Else’s part. Without any love for those in the world, she ultimately turns inward. She is free spirited, imagining herself with hundreds of lovers, but she has no respect for any of them. I liked her because of her wilfulness, not because she is in any way a good person. But this lack of love for others is also, it seems, the result of a lack of love from them too. After dismissing the French and piano lessons she concludes of her upbringing: “But what goes on in my heart and what digs at me and makes me afraid, has anyone ever cared about that?” We have a sense that, even disregarding the stream of consciousness, Else is not only unhappy, she is also terribly alone.

A Woman’s Lot

Thoughts of suicide circle around Else like flies. She has several capsules of Veronal, a popular sleeping pill, and even before the letter arrives she considers taking them all. For all her spiritedness, what stands out about Else is just how unhappy she is. In spite of her attempts to maintain autonomy in this world, it’s clear that she’s trapped in it. Even though she pretends that all is well at the novel’s beginning, the very fact that she has the pills on hand suggests that this is not exactly the case.

She is not talented. She admits as much. “I’m not made for a bourgeois life. I possess no talent”. She speaks several languages and plays the piano, but in the end, there’s nothing she can do with her life except waft about hotels. Her choice is either a sensible marriage, or a “nurse or telephone operator”. For a woman at the time, there were few other choices. When she tries to assert herself, her only option is to be a “Luden” – a slut, as opposed to the whore Dorsday wants her to be, or a passive wife. But even this assertion is imperilled by her dependence on Dorsday’s money. In the end, she can barely assert herself at all.

Else hatches an insane plan involving going to Dorsday, who is listening to music, naked but for a coat and shoes. She is successful, but the intensity of the moment leads to her fainting and being carried back to her room by her cousin and her aunt while they wait for a doctor. Here again we have a sense of Else’s powerlessness as a woman. Her problems and mental state are immediately dismissed as hysteria and – what is more – her aunt thinks the best course of action is simply to lock Else away in an institution. Even among women, the pressure to conform is paralysing, and the punishments for non-conformity are terrifying. Else, who has shown her sexuality in public via her nakedness, now must be hidden away.

Decline and Fall: Money and Society

But the greatest pressures on Else are financial. One key tension of Fräulein Else lies between one’s place in society, and where one ought to be. As Else remarks, she’s not fit for the bourgeois life. Alongside her own thoughts of suicide, she mentions that her father’s brother killed himself when he was young too. Her father is desperately, and failingly, trying to maintain his position in society through money that he doesn’t have. Else herself can only enjoy the hotel because of the good graces of her aunt, who is paying for her stay. Wherever she looks, she is dependent on others because she has no money for herself. Dorsday can control her because he has money, and because he is an older man. Even if Else were to go against him Dorsday can dismiss her as being hysterical. She is doubly trapped.

Stream of Consciousness, Loss of Consciousness

In fact, the very form and style of Fräulein Else plays into its suggestions about female sexuality and suffocating society. Else is free – to flirt, to imagine a beautiful future – but only within her own mind. Whenever she comes into contact with external forces, whether they be a telegram from Vienna or a chance encounter with friends, she is unable to control herself – social and familial obligations suddenly take over. At the novella’s end, when Else lies dying after a sudden faint, the situation is particularly acute. She is conscious – she hears what others are saying all around her – but she is unable to get up to act or speak for herself. In dying, she has become even more fully the object, open to the control of others, than she ever was before. The sense of being locked in is only the culmination of an entire novella’s worth of powerlessness.

Conclusion

I liked Fräulein Else. Else herself, with her divided nature and conflicting loyalties, is described well – I really felt she was alive, and though I knew what was coming it was awful to watch it happening through her eyes. I really had a sense of how much she wanted to live, and yet how hard it was for her to do so in the society she lived in. But all the same, and as much as I liked the stream of consciousness style, I felt a sense of relief when I finished the story. A feeling of claustrophobia from the style suits the plot, but it’s not something I would want to see extended into a novel-length project. Fräulein Else is good because it doesn’t overstay its welcome. Any longer and we might lose our patience with our young and foolish protagonist, or the tragedy might be blunted.

Fräulein Else is the first thing I’ve read by Schnitzler and will probably not be the last – if for no other reason than my edition also contains his “Lieutenant Gustl”, and because the German was surprisingly easy to read. For more Austro-Hungarian tales of declines and falls, Hofmannsthal, Márai, and Zweig are your “friends”.

Have I completely misread Else? Why not leave a comment below?