The wallpaper door

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The wallpaper door is a 1957 novel by the Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer . The failing relationship between the introverted, sensitive protagonist and her professionally successful, extroverted, unfaithful husband is depicted. The novel offers an early example of Haushofer's preoccupation with the motives of loneliness and alienation of the individual and the longing to break out of social conventions.

content

Annette, a young widowed librarian after a short marriage, lives alone and values ​​her privacy. Previous sexual relationships with men have hardly left any emotional marks. It is therefore only with relief that she sees her current boyfriend's departure to Paris for six months. Annette's father left the family when she was a child and has not sought contact with her since. When he dies, Annette meets the lawyer Gregor Xanther at the opening of the will, who both attracts and disturbs her with his completely opposite nature. Despite dark premonitions and a lack of trust in his ability to be faithful, she gets involved in a relationship, becomes pregnant by him and accepts his marriage proposal. This first deeper love experience pulls her out of her previous lethargy on the one hand and gives her a feeling of security for the first time, but on the other hand forces her to permanent disguise, since the superficial Gregor shows little interest in her inner life and Annette concludes that she gives him the expression of negative Cannot fully accept emotions such as fear or anger. At Gregor's request, Annette gives up her job in order to concentrate fully on her new role as a housewife and mother. During Gregor's pregnancy, the - supposedly professional - evening appointments increase. Annette suspects an affair and begins to suffer from insomnia. Your health is getting worse every day. There are complications in childbirth. Annette loses the child and has a nervous breakdown. She doesn't want to be a burden for Gregor and lets him go.

shape

The notation is linguistically conventional and simple; In contrast to many other authors of the 1950s and 1960s, Haushofer dispensed with linguistic experiments. Sections from the third person's narrative perspective alternate with the protagonist's diary notes, in which she critically engages with the zeitgeist and expresses her skepticism about progress and consumerism. The diary notes reflect feminist and existentialist ideas. The protagonist ultimately proves to be an unreliable narrator - a narrative strategy that Haushofer uses to undermine gender-specific role expectations.

Themes and motifs

Invisible walls

Invisible walls are a recurring leitmotif in Haushofer's work. They symbolize different forms of demarcation - between men and women, the individual and the world, childhood and adulthood. Their emotional connotation is always ambivalent - the wall stands for isolation, but also for a space, both for exclusion and for protection.

The wall with the eponymous wallpaper door is only perceived as such by the protagonist. She feels an insurmountable barrier between herself and her fellow human beings. The relationship with the future husband does not change that either - the protagonist sees her doomed to failure from the start. However, realizing their situation does not lead to any action or change.

Read

The main character, Annette, is a smart and educated young woman. As a librarian, she has made reading her profession. Her reading - preferably Kant and Schopenhauer - is also regularly reflected in her reflections, for example when she thinks about the terror of National Socialism or the legitimacy of having children. Above all, Schopenhauer proves to be formative for Annette's pessimistic worldview, according to which security can only be found in death. Annette shares all these considerations with her diary, but never with her husband, who is not interested in an intellectual exchange and is hardly suitable for it. Gregory uses his mind only for pragmatic purposes; his conversations with Annette are banal and superficial.

Gender roles

Annette finds it difficult to fit into the traditional distribution of gender roles, but she accepts this as natural. The woman is loving and self-sacrificing, the man is cold-hearted and self-centered, nothing can be changed about that. When Gregor soon began to lie to her, she saw no choice but to come to terms with it. Accepting gender stereotypes allows her to justify the husband's transgressions and to maintain love for him.

The dynamic of the befriended couple Goldener is mirrored with reversed gender roles. Here an intelligent, patient man sacrifices himself for a superficial, malicious woman. Annette sees Mr. Goldener's love for his wife as his only vice, cannot understand it and thus cannot make the analogy to his own situation. Otherwise she could no longer excuse Gregor's behavior and would have to admit that all of his mistakes are due to his person and not to his nature as a man.

Position in literary history

A lack of contact with people and the outside world is a common theme in contemporary Austrian novels, which can be found among others in Peter Handke , Ingeborg Bachmann , Thomas Bernhard , and Gerhard Roth . In the center of these novels there are often characters to whom the environment appears dangerous and who appear dangerous to the environment - the flight into inwardness thus appears to be the only way out. Loneliness and alienation are also characteristic of Marlen Haushofer's main characters. The main character in Die Tapetentür is a suffering, introverted woman who finds no understanding in others and who no longer looks for it.

Haushofer puts the inner workings of her main characters in the foreground of her portrayal - as the narrative perspective she chooses the inner perspective of the main characters; everything that happens in the outside world is filtered through this prism. The main problem of a typical Haushofer main character lies in this subjective view of the world: any attempt to communicate with other people fails because of the gap between the conventional, stereotypical reality of the community and the individual reality of the individual. The only way to assert yourself is to get out of the community.

The development of a typical Haushofer main character can be divided into three phases: It begins with childhood education, which aims to adapt to social norms. This attempt at adaptation also shapes adolescence and the first years of adulthood. A phase of detachment from these norms follows. In the end there is a freer, no longer corrupted existence, which however had to be bought at the price of loneliness. Ultimately, the main character sees loneliness as the only way to find and maintain their own identity.

reception

Male critics of the 50s and 60s were unimpressed by the novel. They saw Annette as an overly sensitive woman and Gregor as a weakly contoured man.

An examination of the early reception of the novel points to a moralizing-pathologizing tendency of the reviews, which can also be found in benevolent critics. The protagonist of the wallpaper door is read here as a neurasthenic incapable of living, her suffering in society is attributed to her hypersensitivity and thus portrayed as a purely private problem. The main character, often even the author herself, is psychologized; the socially critical element is ignored.

The work received a belated appreciation in the course of a feminist reception, which increasingly focuses on Haushofer's radical questioning of the patriarchal system and approaches critical of rationality.

proof

  1. ↑ a b Ingrid Ossberger: Invisible Walls: To the novels by Marlene Haushofer. In: Auckenthaler, Karlheinz F. (Ed.): The time and the writing . 1993, p. 279–287 ( u-szeged.hu [PDF]).
  2. ↑ Marlen Haushofer- The wallpaper door. Kultur Plus association, accessed on July 2, 2020 .
  3. ↑ Bärbel Westphal: Unreliable narration as a staging of deviations from the norm: A gender-oriented narrative text analysis using the example of Marlen Haushofer's "Die Tapetentür" (1957), Doris Dörries "Mitten ins Herz" (1987) and Karen Duves "In deep snow a quiet home" ( 1999). In: Elisabeth Wåghäll Nivre, Brigitte Kaute, Bo, Andersson, Barbro Landén, Dissislava Stoeva-Holm (eds.): Encounters . Stockholm University, Stockholm 2011, p. 561-573 .
  4. ↑ a b Marlen Haushofer: The wallpaper door. Novel. Review note on Neue Zürcher Zeitung. In: Pearl Divers. July 15, 2000, accessed July 2, 2020 .
  5. ↑ a b c d e Rolf Löchel: Vice love - Marlen Haushofer's perhaps still underestimated novel "Die Tapetentür": literaturkritik.de. In: literaturkritik.de. March 1, 2001, accessed on July 2, 2020 (German).
  6. ^ A b Palmer, Katarzyna: The problem of loneliness in the novels of Marlen Haushofer . Ed .: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM Źródło. No. 19 . Studia Germanica Posnaniensia, 1993, p. 15-22 .
  7. ↑ DCCLorenz: Marlen Haushofer - A feminist from Austria . In: Modern Austrian Literature . tape 12 , no. 3/4 , 1979, p. 171-191 .
  8. ↑ Regula Venske: "Perhaps that a very distant eye could unravel a secret script from this fragmented work ...". On the criticism of Marlen Haushofer’s reception. In: "Or was there something else sometimes?" Texts about Marlen Haushofer. Frankfurt aM 1986, p. 43-66 .
  9. ^ 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 .