The attic
The Attic is a 1969 novel by the Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer . At the time of the constitution, Haushofer was already seriously ill. With her last novel, she provides a socio-psychological study of the existence of housewives and civil married life in the first post-war generation in Austria. The narrator's temporary deafness and her regular retreat into the attic symbolize the need for an escape from reality. Recurring motifs in Haushofer’s work, which can also be found in this novel, are loneliness in marriage and the inadequacy of communication between the sexes.
content
The novel depicts a largely everyday winter week from the perspective of a housewife and mother of two children. Her marriage to a lawyer has long become a routine; She has given up her job as a graphic designer and draws only as a hobby, preferably insects, fish, reptiles and birds. The place of this creative activity is the eponymous attic of the single-family house, into which the narrator withdraws every evening. One day an anonymous sender sends her her own diary from a traumatic epoch in her life.
Suddenly deafened by the sound of a fire brigade siren, the narrator was relocated to the former hunting lodge of her deceased father-in-law by her husband and mother. Her only social contacts at this time were the hunter who was entrusted with her care, whom she mistrusted from the start, and a stranger whom she met while walking. Because of her deafness, the stranger sees her as the ideal listener for his - according to his emotional turmoil when telling the story - apparently dark secrets and asks for further meetings in order to confide in her. At the last meeting, he wrote to suggest that she go away with him. When the narrator declines the proposal, he crushes a glass in a fit of anger. The narrator regains her hearing through the shock.
Back with her family, the narrator no longer wants to think about this experience. She therefore perceives the anonymous letters as threatening and burns them after reading them. When the last letter was burned, she achieved a creative breakthrough: after countless failed attempts to draw a bird that looked as if it wasn't the only bird in the world, she drew a dragon whose uniqueness she no longer considered a flaw feels.
shape
The narration takes place in the first person . The novel is divided into eight chapters, each dealing with the description of a weekday from one Sunday to the next. Chapters on Sundays consist of one part, and chapters on working days consist of three parts: the narrator's report on her daily routine, the print of the diary entries sent, and the narrator's report on the burning of the notes.
The quantitative largest part of the novel is devoted to the description of the narrator's weekly everyday life; the unpleasant memories should be suppressed through the focus on everyday activities. The burning of the letters every evening serves the same purpose - the narrator wants to resist remembering with all her might. Using the narrative trick of anonymous postal mailings, Haushofer succeeds in confronting the narrator with the repressed epoch and thus at the same time addressing both memory and resistance to memory.
Themes and motifs
Family and pseudo family
The narrator grows up as the only and unplanned child of parents suffering from tuberculosis. Out of hygienic caution, the parents avoid any physical contact. The narrator sees this as a rejection; she feels excluded from the intimate love affair of her parents.
In her mid-twenties, the narrator married the budding lawyer Hubert; they have two children together: son Ferdinand and daughter Ilse. But even in this family the narrator finds no security - the love for her husband has long since died, communication is limited to exchanging empty phrases, sex has become routine and does nothing to bring the spouses closer together. The narrator also reproduces the disturbed parent-child relationship. She cannot relate to her vital, self-confident daughter Ilse; Ilse's birth occurs at the time when the narrator sees her family only as a pseudo family. She has already recovered from her illness, but she cannot get over the exile by her husband and mother-in-law. After her return, she apparently resumes the role of wife and mother, but does so with the awareness that it is only a facade.
When the son was born - before illness and exile - authentic family life still seemed possible; the relationship with Ferdinand is therefore more intimate, but also strained by the unprocessed basic trauma of separation (from parents in childhood; from husband and child during their own illness). For the mother, the son serves as a substitute object with several functions, both as a male descendant and as an appreciative parent (for example when he praises her pastries). With this substitution, the narrator tries to camouflage her inability to relate. She is aware of the ethical questionability of this strategy; but this awareness only leads to feelings of guilt and mental self-censorship.
Disease and exclusion
A central theme of the novel is the strangeness between family members. This isolation within the family and the resulting feeling of helplessness is expressed by the narrator's temporary deafness. Added to this is the wife's feeling of living in her husband's house and not in her own home.
The motif of family isolation can already be found in the narrator's family of origin. All the mother's love and care is concentrated on her husband, who is suffering from tuberculosis - the love even goes so far that the mother eventually becomes infected. The healthy child should, however, be protected from infection, is therefore kept at a distance and feels excluded from the sick parents. This pattern is later repeated with the opposite sign due to the narrator's psychosomatic illness. Now it is the sick who are kept away from the healthy, although their disease, unlike the tuberculosis of their parents, is not at all contagious. While her father received special attention from his mother due to his illness, the narrator feels abandoned by her family in her suffering. The exile in the deserted forest is portrayed by the husband and mother-in-law as a therapeutic measure, but in fact the environment does not seem to be conducive to recovery - the narrator receives no medical care there; your only contact person is a somewhat empathetic hunter who goes shopping for you and otherwise is rather hostile towards you. The narrator sees him as a guard, the time in the hunting lodge as a prison sentence. As in childhood, she refrained from complaining, accepted the plans of the relatives and did not criticize their behavior after her recovery. The pattern of dispute and conflict aversion continues.
Apparent death and life
The narrator divides her life story into phases of real life and periods of purely biological existence. In retrospect, of the forty-seven years of her life, she only sees twelve as real life - seven happy years with grandfather after the death of her parents, five happy years with Hubert before she fell ill. She sees the billeting in the hunting lodge as a metaphorical death, but the sudden recovery only as a pseudo-resurrection that does not awaken to new life, but only to a dull form of pseudo vitality.
This pseudo liveliness manifests itself in a marriage that only consists of a sequence of scenes that have been rehearsed for many years, and it also characterizes all other social contacts of the narrator, which she only maintains without much inner concern in order to fulfill the duties of her housewife and mother role. Accordingly, all social contacts fall into the female role ideal - the narrator regularly visits her former landlady and thus demonstrates respect for her age and continues to maintain contact with another mother who was also on maternity leave with her. By maintaining these pseudo-contacts, it hides its actual isolation. It is never about emotional connection or interest in the other person - the purpose of the exercise, in addition to maintaining the bourgeois facade, is mainly to distract from one's own obsessive thoughts.
Repression of the past
In addition to the role of the housewife in the 1960s, Die Mansarde also deals with the war and post-war issues and the issue of coming to terms with the past. The novel can be interpreted as a staging of collective amnesia and cultural memory.
Each working day chapter ends with the burning of the diary entries sent on that day. The time in the loneliness of the forest described therein represents a traumatic episode in the narrator's life - but she is not ready to come to terms with this trauma. The repression of private trauma is reflected on a collective level in the confrontation with the Second World War . Insecurity and excessive demands lead the narrator to see repression as the only option. Instead of coming to terms with the past and thus coming to terms with it, it uses all its might to restore the status quo. The elevation of silence and repressing as a behavior maxim prevents any hope of behavior change.
The attic as a retreat
The mansard from which it is named serves as a room for creativity and a room for exclusion. This is where the narrator withdraws voluntarily in order to develop her individuality away from the role of housewife and to carry out those activities that could disrupt the regular flow of family life. In the background there is a desire not to disturb and not to be disturbed, but also the unspoken fear of being pushed back into the wasteland if the person falls out of role again. The symbol of the attic thus refers both to the bourgeois, idyllic tradition of the artist's room close to the sky and the tradition of the madwoman in the attic ( The Madwoman in the Attic , a well-known example can be found in Jane Eyre ), in which femininity is perceived as radical locked away. The narrator's greatly reduced escape movement does not lead to freedom, but only to the attic, which is a substitute for actual free space and thus supports rather than breaks the conventional civil and family order.
The search for a place of retreat can be found in almost all of Haushofer's books. On the one hand, these places of retreat stand for the freedom necessary to survive, but on the other hand they serve to lock away the life that takes place there without endangering the traditional order. Creativity is domesticated in the attic. The compulsive focus on the monotonous chores of daily housework becomes an expulsion ritual.
Salvation through art
The final result of the creative activity taking place there can also be interpreted as ambivalent as the attic itself. The drawings reflect the ego metamorphoses triggered by the anonymous mailings. After burning the last diary entry, the bird motif is replaced by a kite. This new vision does not arise in the attic, but in the basement and thus symbolizes the risky descent into the sphere of the subconscious.
The burning of the diaries shows an unwillingness to identify with the past; this process can not only be understood as purely destructive, but also as dynamic. The new vision of the dragon finally rises from the ashes of the diaries. The interplay of artistic productivity and self-development is made clear by the cyclical alternation of destruction and reconstitution.
The dragon symbol combines the central motifs of the novel. As a mythical hybrid creature that unites all elements, the dragon can be read as a metaphor for overcoming gender differences and breaking out of a conventional order. The dragon vision results from the lifting of the barriers between the conscious and the subconscious - the artistic imagination is no longer censored by a rigid sense of reality.
reception
For Daniela Strigl , Die Mansarde is "a malicious, funny, confidently laconic marriage novel" which contains the sum total of Haushofer's oppressive art. Criticism also praised the careful composition of the novel, in which the different levels of time and consciousness are interwoven and topographically differentiated through mirror relationships and parallelism.
Compared to Haushofer's earlier novel Die Tapetentür , Die Mansarde represents a more successful, differentiated and more complex analysis of gender relations for many critics. The accusation of gender stereotypes "standard cast" often made against Haushofer does not apply here - figures such as the murderous baroness who former landlady of the narrator, show a deviation from the principle of gender dichotomization. Even the protagonist's over-fulfillment of femininity clichés can be interpreted as a consciously employed masquerade that allows the protagonist to create space for her non-bourgeois attic activities.
However, the narrator's perspective, which many contemporary reviewers perceived as unusual, also met with negative reactions. Above all, the extravagance and abnormality of Haushofer's psychological depictions and the pessimistic-fatalistic attitude expressed in the work were criticized. In a meeting by the Federal Association of Teachers at Vocational Schools in Austria, the novel was classified as unsuitable for young people. "The young person strives for the light and forwards, he does not want to be alone and crawls into the attic ...".
The accusation of a lack of positive messages and utopian moments is only partially shared by the feminist reception. The beginnings of a utopian thinking and development potential of the female main character are clearly recognizable - the dragon drawing in the last chapter can therefore be interpreted as the happy result of a continuous process of self-awareness by the narrator. The dragon as a self-portrait of the creative subject enables the design of a biologically and socially genderless creature. This conciliatory interpretation of the novel in the sense of a survival pathos of female art production is seen, however, in contradiction to the rest of Haushofer's work.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Daniela Strigl: Solution from provincial entanglements - derStandard.at. April 8, 2000, accessed July 22, 2020 (Austrian German).
- ↑ a b c d D.CCLorenz: Marlen Haushofer - A feminist from Austria . In: Modern Austrian Literature . tape 12 , no. 3/4 , 1979, p. 171-191 .
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k Sabine Seidel: Reduced life. Investigation into the narrative work of Marlen Haushofer. In: Dissertation . University of Passau 2006 ( kobv.de ).
- ↑ a b c d e Rita Morrien: Female request for text from Ingeborg Bachmann, Marlen Haushofer and Unica Zürn. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1996, ISBN 3-8260-1267-4 , p. 27 ff .
- ↑ Lundström, P .: "Every past needs to be liquidated": Memory problems and failing to come to terms with the past in Marlen Haushofer's novel Die Mansarde - a study of motives with reference to theories of collective memory (dissertation). Uppsala 2019 ( diva-portal.org [accessed July 30, 2020]).
- ↑ Marlene Krisper: The tidy life of the Marlen Haushofer. An essay . Ennsthaler Verlag, Steyr 2010.
- ↑ a b Irmgard Roebling: Femininity as a masquerade to appease demons. Unity and separation in Marlen Haushofer's novel Die Mansarde . In: Johannes Cremerius u. a. (Ed.): Freiburg literary psychological discussions . 13. Separations. Würzburg 1994, p. 163-185 .
- ↑ Regula Venske: "... the old lost and the new not won ...": Marlen Haushofer . In: Regula Venske, Inge Stephan, Sigrid Weigel (eds.): Women's literature without tradition? Nine portraits of women authors . Frankfurt a. M. 1987, p. 99-130 .
- ↑ Irmgard Roebling: Dragon fight from isolation or The continuation of historical self-awareness in Marlen Haushofer's novels. In: Mona Knapp, Gerd Labroisse (Hrsg.): Women's questions in German-language literature since 1945 . Amsterdam-Atlanta 1989, p. 275-321 .
- ↑ Elke Brüns: Outstanding, awkward, upside down, female: Psychosexual author positions with Marlen Haushofer, Marieluise Fleißer and Ingeborg Bachmann (results of women's studies) . JB Metzler, Stuttgart 1998.