Expressionism Archives - Mostly About Stories

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?

Georg Trakl and the Poetry of Spiritual Twilight (Translations)

I came to the Austrian German poet Trakl depressed and didn’t leave any happier. His short oeuvre, written in the final years before the first world war, is not for the faint of heart. There is very little joy to be found here, and what beauty there is in his poems is tainted by an overwhelming sense of decay. But what Trakl does offer, above and beyond his despair and endless talk of decline, is a unique view of the world, and a unique language of symbols for appreciating it. Each of his poems is a mysterious mood-piece, filled with images whose interpretations are never definite. Rilke’s view, that reading Trakl is like being “an outsider pressed against panes of glass”, looking into a space of experience which “like the space in a mirror, cannot be entered”, hits the mark.

Georg Trakl. Intensely sad, his poems reflect a sensibility that felt deeply the spiritual turbulence of his age. A turbulence that continues into our own and leaves his poetry mysterious and fresh even now.

Trakl is a strange poet, but he is also one whose work is tragically beautiful, and I hope to show that in these few translations below. His concerns seem perfect for our own age. The empty spiritual gulf left by religion’s decline, the feeling of foreboding as the world enters a new era without any ballast or sense that we are prepared for its challenges, and even the loss of a deep understanding of and connection to the natural world – all these are just as relevant now as they were as the First World War erupted. To face Trakl’s dark world is to be given a way of visualising the darkness of our own. So let’s begin.

The Poems

Trakl’s poems are made up of short and simple sentences, that are nonetheless often hard to understand. There’s a lot of ambiguity due to the syntax and punctuation, and whenever I’ve met something unclear, I’ve aimed to convey that same uncertainty in the English. After all, I’m trying to translate a mood and an atmosphere, not a technical document. If I have managed that, then I can be happy with how these have turned out. Following the poems is a bit about Trakl’s life and a conclusion.

Song of a Captive Blackbird (DE)
 
Dark breath in green twigs.
Blue blossoms float around the face
Of the lonely one, his golden step
Dying under the olive tree.
The night is filled with the fluttering of drunk wings.
So quietly bleeds out humility,
Dew, which slowly drips from the blossoming thorn.
The mercy of shining arms
Embraces a breaking heart.

A painting showing a night time landscape. Munch's early and middle work reflects a similar sensibility to that of Trakl. — This painting (Starry Night), by Edvard Munch, strikes me as a good representation of my feeling as I read the final two stanzas of “Spiritual Twilight.” Munch was working at about the same time as Trakl and I feel like both of them are often similar in tone and image.

 Spiritual Twilight (DE)

 Silence encounters at the forest’s hem
 Its dark quarry.
 On the hill the evening wind ends quietly,
  
 The blackbird’s cries are stilled,
 And the soft flutes of autumn
 Go silent in their pipes.
  
 On a black cloud
 You sail, drunk on the poppy,
 The ponds of the night,
  
 The stars in the heavens.
 The sister’s lunar voice is always calling
 Through the spirit’s night.

The Sun (DE)

Daily comes the yellow sun across the hill.
The forest, the dark beast, man – hunter or shepherd – 
All are beautiful.
  
Reddish rises the fish in the green pond.
Under the round heavens
The fisherman quietly rows in his blue boat.
  
Slowly ripens the grape, the grain.
When the day silently ends,
A good and an evil is prepared.
  
When the world becomes night,
The wanderer quietly lifts his heavy eyes;
The sun breaks out of a gloomy chasm.

The Sun, also by Munch, shows a sun. — The Sun, also by Munch. I wonder if, had Trakl lived to grow older, he too would have found way of looking at and representing the world that moved beyond fear and anxiety.

In Spring (DE)
Softly sank from dark steps the snow;
In the shadow of the tree
The lovers raise their rosy lids.
  
Star and night always follow
The dark calls of the mariners;
And the oars beat softly in time.
  
Soon on the ruined wall blooms
The violet;
The temples of the lonely one silently grow green.

Autumn Homecoming (DE)

Remembrance, a buried hope,
Preserves this brown wood frame,
Where dahlias hang above -
An ever stiller homecoming;
The ruined garden, the dark reflection
Of childhood years,
So that from blue lids the tears plunge
Unstoppably.
Now swim the glassy minutes
Of gloom
Over and into the night.

Who was Trakl? Biography and its Absence

Georg Trakl was born in 1887 and died towards the end of 1914, likely by his own hand. He was born in Salzburg to a family of not great financial means, but all the same this is where he was most happy. His relations with his sister Grete, herself a musical prodigy, may well have been incestuous. In his poems Trakl often writes about the “sister”, but it’s difficult to know what to make of that. What is more clear is that Trakl developed a drug addiction that he supported through becoming a pharmacist. Once war broke out Trakl joined the Austro-Hungarian army as a medical officer on the Eastern Front. By this point his mood was extremely unstable and the experience of the battle of Grodek, though it led to perhaps is most famous poem, also led to Trakl’s final breakdown and probable suicide of a cocaine overdose.

Yet all of this is almost irrelevant in the poems. As is clear above, Trakl hides himself from view. The experience of reading his work is rather like floating through a deep fog. There is nothing so solid as an “I”, even a lyrical “I”, to hold on to. The places of his life certainly make their appearances, including Grodek itself, but always more as symbols and maps of an internal world than as real settings, at least it seems that way to me.

The lovely German edition of Trakl’s work from Reclam which I’ve been reading also includes many of his letters. But these, too, are not of much use for understanding his poems. We can hear Trakl’s own voice, always in pain, and always suffering. It only caused me to feel a terrible and futile desire to help the poor man, but the poems remained – perhaps thankfully – impenetrable. “I was terribly sick for a few days, I think from a mourning that cannot be put into words”. Shortly before he dies he writes “I feel like I’ve already almost passed over into the beyond”. What I like about him so much is that his sensibility really does seem to belong to another world, no matter how much suffering seems to be involved.

Conclusion – Religion and the Poppy

Probably my favourite pieces here are the first two. The image of the blackbird, of the innocent forced to suffer its way through the world, lies at the heart of Trakl’s whole project, and the bird’s short and brutal poem strikes me as being particularly beautiful. But it also contains within it a rare hint at redemption. Trakl’s religious inclinations are, as with so much else about him, not entirely clear. But for me at least, this poem has a spiritual angle to it: the suggestion that for all our suffering there may lurk at the end of the tunnel a kind of salvation. It’s not unlike Dostoevsky, in its way.

As for “Spiritual Twilight”, I love its tone and sense of mystery. For me it really conveys that world of abstract rumination we fall into somewhere in the depths of our despair. It is a weightless poem, just as we, in our thoughts, are weightless too. But one day we must open our eyes. And that is where the challenge lies.

The last word on all this should go to Trakl himself. This is how he describes himself, towards the end of his life: “Too little love, too little justice and mercy, and always too little love; too much hardness, pride, and all sorts of transgressions – this is me. I am certain that I only refrain from evil out of cowardice and weakness and in doing so shame even that part of me.”

I hope, having read a few of his poems, you have a sense that for all the mercy and love he did not receive himself, he was more than willing to give plenty of it out to those who needed it in his work. The strange thing is, for all his despair, I find myself feeling less alone for reading in his company. And that’s why I think he’s a fantastic poet.

What did you think?