Henry James Archives - Mostly About Stories

Edith Wharton – The Age of Innocence

So much of Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel The Age of Innocence is perfectly done that to write about it in a blog post becomes very difficult – it truly provides an embarrassment of novelistic riches. Such books are a blessing to a reader but a beast for the blogger. There is too much for me to say, even after a single (re)reading. Each word is a thread that can be followed, rather than merely plucked. Everything from flowers, to place (New York City), time (1870s), society, location, and language, works meaningfully to make this a supremely rewarding work for the analytical reader. And Wharton does all this with a prose that is clear and a story whose mysteries linger long after we finish it.

If I try to summarise it overmuch, the story might collapse into a mixture of predictability and familiarity. It is a question of the obligations owed to love in a restrictive society. Newland Archer, a marriageable young man of elevated social standing, gets engaged to May Welland, a pretty young lady from a good family who is ready for her husband to tell her what to do and who to be. Before the wedding, however, Countess Ellen Olenska, May’s cousin and an old friend of Newland, returns to New York from the Old World without her husband. Older, wiser, ignorant of the finer rules of New York society, Newland finds himself falling quickly in love with Olenska. But New York is a powerful force within the novel, and Newland is “at heart a dilettante”. We wonder whether he has the strength to choose, or whether that choice will be made entirely for him.

With so many themes and ideas to select from, the one that strikes me as the best way into the novel is that of perspective. “Age” is in the title of The Age of Innocence, and while this might refer to either Newland or May at their stage of life, it also refers to their time as a whole. Furthermore, it can only refer to their time when we have the wisdom to look back from a time when that innocence is no longer present. It implies a multiple perspective. This multiplicity concerns the whole novel, which we can read differently, depending on how closely we wish to stick to Newland’s perspective. If we decide to step back, as I think the novel would like us to, then it moves beyond being a simple work of frustrated love and weak men and allows for a far more nuanced view.

Viewing

The narrator follows Newland throughout The Age of Innocence, with only occasional moments when they step back to give a kind of “society view” through reference to things like “the daily press” on the novel’s first page, or to the welter of names we as readers have to get used to. Indeed, one reason The Age of Innocence feels like a society novel is because there are so many people milling about that I began to suspect that Wharton’s intention was that I struggled to keep track of them all. Indeed, I soon began treating them abstractly in my head as “important” or “unimportant”, just as those same characters would judge those around them. Newland, our hero, is just another member of this mass when the book begins, and it is only as it progresses that he begins to find himself being able to view it from his own perspective.

This sense of massed perspective is established in the first scene, where we are present at an opera performance. To one on the stage there is only a mass of eyes staring down, undifferentiated, and Newland is up there among them. The opera is not so important, because it is Newland’s gaze we are interested in, emphasised by the repeated looking words like “contemplated,” “scanned”, and so on. Indeed, because he spends much time staring at May across the hall, we might notice and smile at the thought that her presence in her box is every bit a work of performance as is that of the person on the stage, something that becomes clearer and clearer as we learn about the New York of the 1870s over the course of the book. Newland does not actually do anything here, really, except look. This preference for observation over action proves one of the most distinctive elements of his character.

This early scene also introduces us to one side of the dynamic between May and Ellen, a comparison that exists in Newland’s perspective and develops as he observes both women. There’s a striking paragraph here which sets out his view on May and explains quite clearly why Ellen may prove alluring:

“He did not in the least wish the future Mrs. Newland Archer to be a simpleton. He meant her (thanks to his enlightening companionship) to develop a social tact and readiness of wit enabling her to hold her own with the most popular married women of the “younger set,” in which it was the recognized custom to attract masculine homage while playfully discouraging it.”

This is funny, albeit in a terrible way. Look at the verbs – “wish”, “meant”, “develop”, “enabling” – each and every one of them looks to the future and presumes May has nothing to value now except her beautiful emptiness, her state as a blank canvas. Indeed, “Mrs Newland Archer” annihilates the name of his wife and thereby makes it clear how substitutable Newland must view this person as being. This is Newland’s view of May, and really, it does not change much as the novel progresses. He comes to contrast it mentally with Ellen, who has a history through her failed marriage. Unlike with May, whom Newland believes he must form, (hence requiring effort, something mildly distasteful to the dilettante, however pleasurable the reward), the temptation of Countess Olenska comes from the opportunity to discover a fully-formed personality. Since she thinks for herself, she is unknowable in the way that Newland believes May never could be.

Flowers

The constant presence of flowers within the novel both expands this comparison while also deepening it. Newland sends May lilies-of-the-valley every day, an action whose regularity (though it is not done by standing order) seems to predict the very predictability and conventionality of their married life. After reconnecting with Ellen, Newland finds himself in a flower shop, where his eyes land upon some yellow roses. “Too rich, too strong, in their fiery beauty” – rather than send them to his betrothed, Newland sends them to Ellen. Ellen receives flowers from many admirers, and her display of them – scattered here and there in her house, rather than kept orderly – is taken by society as yet another mark against her personality, a reminder of the disorderliness of the woman who has failed her husband by separating from him. The orderliness of May’s flowers contrasts with the personality of Ellen’s to evidence the seeming accuracy of Newland’s judgements of the two women.

Yet the flowers are not just a prop of this sort. Nor even does their importance cease at the obvious symbolic readings we can find in them – wastefulness, fragile youth, and so on. It is with flowers that we see, perhaps most obviously, some of the limitations of Newland’s perspective. Newland purchases the yellow roses he sends to Ellen “almost without knowing what he did.” Indeed, that Newland continues sending flowers to her at further points of the story is only brought to our attention after the fact some hundred pages later. It is as if the prose is conspiring to hide from Newland and the reader the fact that is increasingly obvious to anyone but him – the extent to which he loves Ellen. Newland might be discovering a life beyond society’s rules, but the yellow roses provide a potent symbol of the fact that in both cases he is carried by forces beyond his control – society in the first case, his subconscious in the second.

New York

New York dominates the novel – it is mentioned on near-enough every page. It is a totality, or at least seems to be. Yet this, too, is only a perspective that the novel seeks to shake. When May’s family go for a holiday to Florida, her father insists on trying to remake a little section of New York in their lodgings there. This is patently ridiculous – it makes New York look silly, shows how silly it is when removed from the environment that protects it. At the same time, it shows how important that environment was – how protective, to its inhabitants. When Ellen and Archer meet privately, it almost requires them to be somewhere else – a carriage or country estate, for example. In terms of the novel’s perspectives, one thing we might take from this is that New York’s restrictiveness actually works successfully to control everyone, so long as they are there. To me, the climax of the novel is when Newland tries to say goodbye to Ellen before she heads back to Europe, only to find that New York, in the figure of May, has already arranged for her to travel in a friend’s carriage.

Limitations

We see through Newland’s eyes. We see the frustration of his life in New York, once he wants what it cannot give him. But just as we saw with the flowers, he is limited. Even the most powerful image of the book reveals that limitation: “He shivered a little, remembering some of the new ideas in his scientific books, and the much-cited instance of the Kentucky cave-fish, which had ceased to develop eyes because they had no use for them. What if, when he had bidden May Welland to open hers, they could only look out blankly at blankness?” Striking, but even when he thinks outside the system of his city, Newland is still taking the image from another, not quite thinking for himself.

We think May is like this, because Newland repeatedly considers her so – a mere “type”, absent of agency. But the novel’s penultimate chapter, where May sends off her rival without ever openly acknowledging it, is startling because it is here where, after noticing the importance of perspective as we read, Wharton makes it clear that we’ve only seen a fragment of the whole. May, her eyes “wet with victory” in the undeclared battle, has indeed acted independently to surprise Newland with the personality he hadn’t supposed she had. Even though that personality’s distinguishing characteristic is to ally itself with the existing powers of New York, it is still much more a something than the nothing he assumed. Hence his failure to achieve the conclusion with Ellen that he had hoped for.

The Final Chapter

In its final chapter, The Age of Innocence leaves us with a kind of mystery to ponder. I first read the novel over ten years ago now, and all I remembered in the years since was that the ending had left me feeling that there was something strange going on. That may well have been my total inexperience of romance, which meant I had no way of understanding Newland’s actions. Taking place nearly thirty years after the main events of the novel, this epilogue shows the consequences of Newland’s choice – if choice it quite was – of May over Ellen. He has achieved the worldly success that sticking in his place in society promised him, including professional recognition and beautiful children. He has also, in a way, come to terms with his life. “It did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of a duty.”

After May’s passing Newland’s son takes him to Paris. It is here that Ellen now lives. She sends a note to the Archers’ hotel when she learns of their arrival, inviting them both to her, but on the street the father hesitates, in the end only his son goes upstairs to her rooms. “It’s more real to me here than if I went up”, is how he puts it to himself. And then he goes back to his hotel.

Young Angus could not understand him. Older Angus, perhaps, can take a slightly more appreciative view. But still, it’s another moment where the novel seems to be doing something with perspective that’s not at all clear. We’ve gone through the whole of The Age of Innocence watching Newland and Ellen restraining themselves, making sacrifices for the good of a society that neither quite likes nor believes in. That society has done nothing to commend itself to us. Now, both of them are free to be together, free of that society, but even now, Newland still chooses to remain with a memory, rather than a reality.

It is perhaps some comment on human desires. The way that we want until the moment we have. Perhaps Newland, whose first recorded thoughts about May in the book use the distinctive word “possessorship”, has decided that having something real is no longer worth the trouble. Better to enjoy the dream, undiminished. The next generation are much freer than he and Ellen had been – his son is an architect, a profession that would not have been acceptable in Newland’s youth for a man of his background. By choosing not to see Ellen, I suppose we can say that Newland is choosing to protect the idea of his life, even with its bad parts, as having been the right choice. Perhaps this sense of justification is fragile enough that meeting the countess might throw him off course.

Perhaps the restrictions of the past – the absence of the telephone or relatively rapid transatlantic crossings – meant a heightened receptivity to what ultimately was perceived. The glance felt across the room back then was more keenly felt than the softest press of lip on lip is today. I don’t know; the novel does not know either. Newland’s justification seems rooted in fear. The novel’s portrayal of his world is too negative to redeem at the last moment. May may surprise Newland, and indeed us readers, when she steps up to ensure she gets her marriage and the life she wants, but her perspective is not enough to save the society. I came out of the book marvelling at its technical proficiency, which truly is worth studying; yet after writing this blog post, I’m marvelling also at this mystery, which still remains so to me, of what exactly it seems to want to say.

I suppose I’ll keep pondering these questions until the next time I return to it.

The Life of a Sculpture: Roderick Hudson by Henry James

Henry James is one of those authors who it is far more enjoyable to think about reading than actually to read. His reputation precedes him. He is perhaps the greatest sentence writer in the history of the English language. His novels are subtle explorations of the differences between the Old World and the New, and filled with moral murkiness. Who is not attracted by such a description? For anyone interested in writing, how can you justify not studying the sentences of a master?

When you actually read Henry James, though, it’s another story entirely. His sentences are long, and they are certainly complex. In a way, they are terribly beautiful too. But I cannot get pleasure out of reading them. In the same way, his stories, with their endless subtleties, often seem to be missing a soul to be subtle about. There are few writers who so successfully send my gaze away from the page and out towards the window.

A sculpture of a man looking at the ground — The Dying Gaul, one of the many sculptures that Roderick encounters during his time in Rome. Capitoline Museums / CC BY

Roderick Hudson is the story of a talented, perhaps even genius, American sculptor, the eponymous Hudson, who is taken to Europe by a wealthy patron, Rowland Mallet, to learn from the masters of that continent and their legacies. But Europe, specifically Rome, teaches young Roderick far more than simply how to sculpt brilliantly. In Europe Roderick encounters Christina Light, a young woman of great vitality and changeability, who makes a vivid contrast to the dreary Puritans of Roderick’s New England homeland. Roderick has left in America a fiancée, Mary Garland. Can there really be a danger in his acquaintance with Miss Light?

Roderick Hudson, Genius?

The character of Roderick Hudson is presented through the eyes of his friend Rowland. Though Roderick Hudson uses a narrator, he hangs behind Rowland’s eyes for the course of the novel. Where he comes in is to warn us of events to come, something which happens with some regularity. From early in the book we have a sense of coming tragedy, but what exactly will happen is left only as vague hints about future tears.

Roderick is a young man when we meet him. He is training to work in the legal profession, something one character wittily describes as “reading law, at the rate of a page a day”. The work is not for him. Rowland, who is not old himself and has plenty of money, decides, after seeing an example of Roderick’s work, to take him under his wing and go to Europe. His mother and cousin (soon, fiancée) are at first sceptical, but Rowland assures them that Roderick has real talent, and eventually they relent.

He does have real talent, and we are repeatedly told he is “genius”. But unfortunately, being a genius is not quite enough to be a great sculptor. What one also needs is discipline and hard work. Roderick, perhaps, is capable of these things. But Roderick Hudson is the record of his drifting away from them as other pleasures and other desires occlude his passion for work. For Roderick is a young man from a boring, Puritanical, New England world. It is a far cry from Rome, from unrestraint and luxury and excitement. Rowland worries, as he takes Roderick away, that perhaps he is making a mistake. The world they leave behind is one of “kindness, comfort, safety, the warning voice of duty, the perfect hush of temptation”. The one they enter turns out to be anything but.

Rowland and his Responsibility

Rowland is not a particularly forceful character. He has more money than he has ideas, and no talent whatsoever, which forces him to look to Roderick for anything like success or achievement in this world. Instead of trying to get a job, he goes to a place – Europe – where it does not matter whether he has a job or not. He falls in love with Roderick’s fiancée but spends the novel trying to prevent Roderick and Mary from breaking their engagement. He takes care of Roderick, but more financially than morally. Rowland seems to have an instinctive fear of involvement, of danger, of conflict. So he watches Roderick’s decline without stopping it. It is hard not to dislike him for this, for his unwillingness to get either his own life in order, or that of Roderick. I certainly was ambivalent towards him.

Unless you are Emily Dickinson, it is hard to be a great artist without some degree of experience, of mobility. Rowland is right to take Roderick away, to give him a chance. But he is wrong to think that Europe can only offer positive developments. At the end of the first chapter in Europe, Roderick declares he wants to go off on his own, and Rowland, who bankrolls everything, lets him. The next time we meet our hero, he’s already gravely in debt. “Experience” turns out to be women and gambling. “I possess an almost unlimited susceptibility to the influence of a beautiful woman,” Roderick declares. Rowland, who forgives his protégé everything, does not admit to himself the danger of the words. Instead, he thinks that Roderick’s engagement to his cousin, Mary Garland, is a sufficient guarantee of good behaviour. How wrong he is.

The Coloseum painted. — The Colosseum, and Rome in general, form the backdrop of *Roderick Hudson*. Europe is dangerous, but also alluring to young Roderick. Unfortunately he is unable to resist its charms.

Christina Light

Christina Light is the woman who provides the danger at the heart of Roderick Hudson. She is an American, but has lived her twenty years of life on the Continent. Compared to the Puritans that Roderick leaves behind, Christina is a breath of fresh air. But even Roderick perceives, at least vaguely, that she might prove a problem. If “Beauty is immoral”, he says upon first seeing her, echoing the views of his family back home, then Christina is “the incarnation of evil”. He does not seem to realise that in the words of the New Englanders there may be more than just a grain of truth.

Christina is extremely beautiful, but capricious. Her mother tries to control her, with partial success, and Christina makes use of scandal and flirtation as her one source of freedom. Roderick appeals to her, and they begin a long will-they-or-won’t-they that runs the length of Roderick Hudson. Roderick thinks of the young woman as his Muse, but it doesn’t take long for his feelings of jealousy and frustration to turn his Muse into the opposite, and for his inspiration’s flow to run dry. Christina’s mother is obsessed with finding a rich prince for her daughter, and Roderick is neither of noble blood nor in possession of a positive balance at the bank. But he is unable to see the impossibility of the situation, or that in some way Christina might be using him for her own ends. Alas, his love leaves him blind to the truth.

A Backdrop of Stability: the Artists and Puritans of Roderick Hudson

Roderick and Christina have stormy emotions but also a great deal of vitality. Roderick Hudson, however, by its end seems to pronounce judgement on their style of living, and that judgement is not a positive one. In our search for positive characters we must look at the Puritans of the novel, and the artists of Rowland’s circle. Mary Garland, Roderick’s fiancée, is the main representative of the former group. She is intelligent, which we see by her constant reading and questioning, and she is also natural and unaffected in style. This is in contrast to Christina, who is always described as playing a role or being “dramatic”. Mary is honest too, which leaves her less vulnerable to her imagination. She faces the world, instead of trying to flee it like her fiancé.

Of the artists, a group made of Rowland’s friends in Rome, Sam Singleton stands out as a heroic figure. He is a painter of small talent, but of hard work. We know that he does not produce masterpieces, but whenever we see him, he is training, learning, and active. Instead of waiting idly for inspiration to come as does Roderick, Singleton goes out to hone his skills to be ready for it when it does. Roderick describes him as “a watch that never runs down. If one listens hard one hears you always – tic-tic, tic-tic.” We know that if Roderick had even an ounce of Singleton’s work ethic, he would be a far better sculptor, but it is also true that he would be a better person.

Singleton is happy, calm, at peace, where Roderick is prey to the full force of his emotions. A great artist is the one who can master their emotions and set them upon the page or marble, not simply experience them. Singleton’s weakness is a lack of torrential emotions, but it is an artistic weakness, not a human one. By the end of Roderick Hudson it was clear which of the two artists I would prefer to be, however boring my choice is.

A photo of Henry James, author of Roderick Hudson — It is somewhat hard to believe that Henry James was in his early thirties when he wrote *Roderick Hudson*. Like everything he wrote it seems to be written by a serious old man, and is just as exciting.

Conclusion

I confess that by about the half-way point I was rather keen to get Roderick Hudson over and done with. That’s not to say that I didn’t like the book – it was thoroughly okay – but there are many other books, waiting on my shelf, which I’m quite certain I will enjoy more. By the end, reading Roderick Hudson felt like a kind of penance, a sign of deference to the Master, but certainly not an act of love or pleasure. There are various reasons for this, and in his preface James notes several of them for us.

For one, the story is rather too determined by “developments”, events that seem rather forced. The novel’s final section, in Switzerland, is particularly weak in this regard – suddenly all the characters from Rome meet again, and James simply expects us to take this on faith. When James has his characters exclaim “it’s like something in a novel” this is no excuse. In fact, this spoils the impression still further. Rather than drawing our attention to the artificiality of the structure, the structure itself ought to have been altered.

I’m also not a great fan of the characters. Perhaps the women of the late 19^th century were all as flighty as Christina Light or as sombre and serious as Mary Garland, but I struggle to believe that people were that simple. Being changeable does not make for a great or believable character. And beauty is not a character trait – it is laziness. The men come off only slightly better, but overall, I found myself disliking most of the characters, which made it hard to care about any of them or their fates. Rowland is ineffectual; Roderick is just an idiot.

Roderick Hudson was James’s first serious novel. Though he revised it later, it still bears the marks of his youth. Whatever technical genius he already displays here – and there are some awe-inspiring sentences – his feeling for people still has a way to go. I had planned to read all of James’s novels one-after-another as a kind of project. Unfortunately, for now I feel like I’d rather just think about reading them all instead.

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?