Feminism, Disability, and a Dragon: Transcending Classification in Marlen Haushofer’s Die Mansarde

Abstract

This article analyzes Marlen Haushofer’s final novel, Die Mansarde (1969), through the critical lenses of disability studies and ecocriticism. Using these combined methods of analysis, the article uncovers a critique of species-specific bodily norms. Additionally, the article follows the protagonist’s evolution from outsider to resilient woman as she increasingly questions and eventually rejects these norms in favour of self-love and an appreciation for her own embodiment. Channelling centuries of woman-reptilian relationships, Die Mansarde sees its protagonist awaken her imaginative powers and extricate herself from the oppressive valuations tied to species-centered norms through the creation and recognition of a dragon figure; one of the protagonist’s final acts is to envision and sketch a dragon. For the protagonist, the dragon embodies defiance and resilience as a valuable, deviant, and monstrous being. She recognizes herself in this dragon as an outsider not easily classified or fit into normative categories. As the protagonist learns to accept her differences, she begins to understand herself as imperfect but valuable nonetheless, and she finally recognizes the limitations of a traditional, ableist, monological science. This article argues that in contrast to Die Wand, a cornerstone text for German ecocriticism that offers an abrupt utopic/dystopic destruction of humanity and a reconstruction of human relationships with Nature and animals, Die Mansarde offers a much subtler and slow-growing solution: that of self-love rooted in a critical understanding of species-based norms and their inherent oppression of deviant bodyminds.

KEYWORDS:

• Marlen Haushofer
• Die Wand
• Die Mansarde
• Disability
• Feminism
• Ecocriticism
• Ecofeminism
• Bodily norms
• Domesticity and Frauenliteratur
• Dragon figure
• History of disability and environment
• Val Plumwood
• Scientific classification
• Situated knowledges
• Women and nature
• Masculinity
• Critique of Reason
• Rationality
• Human/nature dualism
• Species norms
• Donna Haraway
• Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
• Genevieve Lloyd

Notes

1 Julian Pölsler, Die Wand, Drama, Fantasy, Mystery (Coop99 Filmproduktion, Starhaus Filmproduktion, Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), 2012).

2 See Dagmar C. G. Lorenz, ‘Marlen Haushofer — eine Feministin aus Österreich’, Modern Austrian Literature, 12.3/4 (1979), 171–91; Sabine Frost, ‘Looking Behind Walls: Literary and Filmic Imaginations of Nature, Humanity, and the Anthropocene in Die Wand’, ed. by Christine Lubkoll et al., Germanistik Online (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010); Richards, ‘The Friendship of Our Distant Relations’; Littler offers a posthumanist reading of ‘reason’ (‘Vernunft’ and ‘Verstand’) in Die Wand that draws connections between the animal characters and their ability to reason and the protagonist’s increasing ‘dispersal’ into the world about her. See Margaret Littler, ‘The Posthuman and Marlen Haushofer’s Die Wand on Page and Screen’, in Marlen Haushofer: Texte und Kontexte (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2022), pp. 41–58.

3 Sarah Neelsen compares Die Wand and Die Mansarde and argues that the transformation of the protagonist in Die Mansarde goes further than that of the protagonist in Die Wand, but ultimately, she claims that Die Mansarde ends with an ‘ähnlich zwiespältigen Schlussfolgerung über Emanzipation’. See Sarah Neelsen, ‘Marlen Haushofer Als SF-Autorin?’, in Marlen Haushofer: Texte und Kontexte, pp. 59–75.

4 Marjorie L. Hoover, review of Eine Handvoll Leben, by Marlen Haushofer, Books Abroad, 31.1 (1957), 59. doi:10.2307/40096548.

5 Marianne Bonwit, review of Die Tapetentür, by Marlen Haushofer, Books Abroad, 32.3 (1958), 294. doi:10.2307/40098408.

6 Lorenz writes a clear analysis of the limitations of women writers within contemporaneous society in Austria, linking societal expectations of good writing with masculine expectations for broad topics within the public sphere like war, sports, or politics. See Lorenz, ‘Marlen Haushofer’.

7 The term Frauenliteratur was and remains controversial. See Sigrid Weigel and Luke Springman, ‘“Woman Begins Relating to Herself”: Contemporary German Women’s Literature (Part One)’, New German Critique, 31 (1984), 53–94. doi:10.2307/487889.

8 Evelyn Torton Beck and Biddy Martin, ‘Westdeutsche Frauenliteratur der siebziger Jahre’, in Deutsche Literatur in der Bundesrepublik seit 1965, ed. by Paul Michael Lützeler and Egon Schwarz (Königstein: Athenäum, 1980), p. 137.

9 Vansant marks Haushofer’s first novel, Eine Handvoll Leben, as a turning point for feminist literature in the postwar years for its focus on women in the private sphere as well as on women’s desires. Littler, too, highlights Eine Handvoll Leben for its focus on the surprisingly forward depiction for nonheteronormative love and desire. See Vansant, Against the Horizon, p. 134; Margaret Littler, ‘The Cost of Loving: Love, Desire, and Subjectivity in the Work of Marlen Haushofer’, in ‘Other’ Austrians: Post-1945 Austrian Women’s Writing, ed. by Allyson Fiddler (Berne: Peter Lang, 1998), p. 211.

10 Whereas animal life expires outside the wall, plant life explodes. The wild growth of plant life stands in contrast to the protagonist’s cultivation of potato and bean plants inside of the wall. This contrast calls for future exploration.

11 Marlen Haushofer, Die Wand (Berlin: Ullstein, 2004).

12 Ibid, pp. 10, 37, 176.

13 See Anna Richards, ‘“The Friendship of Our Distant Relations”: Feminism and Animal Families in Marlen Haushofer’s Die Wand (1963)’, Feminist German Studies, 36.2 (2020), 75–100. doi:10.5250/femigermstud.36.2.0075.

14 See Littler, ‘The Cost of Loving’, p. 212; Lorraine Markotic, ‘Melancholy and Lost Desire in the Work of Marlen Haushofer’, Modern Austrian Literature, 41.1 (2008), 72.

15 It is important to note that deploying deafness as a stand-in for anything else — even something positive like liberation — falls into the trap of deploying disability as a metaphor. For more about this see Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Picador, 2001); Additionally, the protagonist recovering from her deafness can be read as deploying disability as a form of narrative prosthesis. For more about narrative prosthesis, see David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001).

16 Haushofer, Die Mansarde, p. 193.

17 For a reading of Haushofer’s critique of enlightenment rationality, see Regula Venske, ‘“Vielleicht, daß ein sehr entferntes Auge eine geheime Schrift aus diesem Splitterwerk enträtseln könnte … ”: Zur Kritik der Rezeption Marlen Haushofers’, in Oder war da manchmal noch etwas anderes?: Texte zu Marlen Haushofer (Frankfurt a.M.: Verlag Neue Kritik), pp. 43–66.

18 Michael Oliver, Bob Sapey, and Pam Thomas, Social Work with Disabled People, 4th edn (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. xi.

19 Michael Oliver, The Politics of Disablement (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990), p. 45.

20 See ‘Introduction to the ADA’, <https://www.ada.gov/ada_intro.htm> [accessed 8 July 2021].

21 See Mairian Corker, Deaf and Disabled, or Deafness Disabled? (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1998); Jenny Morris, Pride Against Prejudice: A Personal Politics of Disability (London: Women’s Press, 1991).

22 Morris, A Personal Politics of Disability, p. 10.

23 Citing feminist scholarship’s history of asserting the importance of the personal in order to counter so-called objective, heteronormative theorizing, Carol Thomas in her article ‘Feminism and Disability’, convincingly argues that social modelists like Mike Oliver and Vic Finkelstein ignore the individual experiences of disability out of scholarly tradition of the distinct separation of the public and private or personal sphere and claims that a more complex social or bio-social model of impairment is necessary. Carol Thomas, ‘Disability and Gender: Reflections on Theory and Research’, Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research, 8.2–3 (2006), 177–85. doi:10.1080/15017410600731368.

24 Extraordinary Bodies, published in 1997, was the first text to offer a (feminist) disability studies reading of cultural and literary representations.

25 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, 1st edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 24.

26 Haushofer, Die Mansarde, pp. 5–6.

27 Ibid, p. 5.

28 Ibid, p. 6.

29 Ibid, p. 7.

30 Ibid, p. 7.

31 Ibid, p. 7.

32 Haushofer, Die Mansarde, p. 6.

33 Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies, 14.3 (1988), 575–99. doi:10.2307/3178066.

34 Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 2.

35 Ibid, p. 4.

36 Ibid, p. 5.

37 Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 16–17.

38 Haushofer, Die Mansarde, pp. 5–6.

39 Ibid, p. 6.

40 The protagonist’s lack of a name may additionally be read as a reference to the invisibility or erasure of women characters in literature, or it could be interpreted based on the many name-centered traditions in fairy tales; Marlen Mairhofer reads the protagonist’s lack of a name as an extension of her ‘private language’ as opposed to the ‘genealogical order’ that Hubert (like his father and son) is a part of. She also offers a close reading of Hubert’s and the protagonist’s argument about the tree, claiming that Hubert’s insistence on the name of the tree in his own language (inherited from his father) is another example of his access to the genealogical order. See Marlen Mairhofer, ‘“Es ist natürlich eine Agazie.” Signifikante Genealogien in Marlen Haushofers Die Mansarde’, in Marlen Haushofer: Texte und Kontexte, ed. by Andrea Capovilla (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2022), pp. 77–86.

41 Val Plumwood, ‘Androcentrism and Anthropocentrism: Parallels and Politics’, in Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature, ed. by Karen J. Warren and Nisvan Erkal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 333.

42 Baukje Prins, ‘The Ethics of Hybrid Subjects: Feminist Constructivism According to Donna Haraway’, Science, Technology, & Human Values, 20.3 (1995), 354.

43 Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 53.

44 Plumwood, ‘Androcentrism and Anthrocentrism’, p. 343.

45 Haushofer, Die Mansarde, p. 7.

46 Val Plumwood, ‘Ecological Ethics from Rights to Recognition: Multiple Spheres of Justice for Humans, Animals, and Nature’, in Global Ethics and Environment, ed. by Nicholas Low (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 190.

47 Haushofer, Die Mansarde, p. 7.

48 Plumwood, ‘Ecological Ethics’, p. 190.

49 The protagonist must convince Hubert to go on walks in the afternoon for his health. She is aware of the need to take care of her bodily health. He, however, does not pay attention to it; See Haushofer, Die Mansarde, p. 7.

50 Ibid, pp. 179–80, 214.

51 Haushofer, Die Mansarde, p. 8.

52 Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, eds., Material Ecocriticism, Illustrated edn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), p. 1.

53 Iovino and Oppermann, Material Ecocriticism, pp. 79–80.

54 Haushofer, Die Mansarde, p. 8.

55 Ibid, p. 7.

56 Ibid, p. 8.

57 Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, eds., Material Feminisms, Illustrated edn (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), p. 1.

58 Iovino and Oppermann, Material Ecocriticism, p. 3.

59 Haushofer, Die Mansarde, p. 9.

60 Ibid, p. 8.

61 Haushofer, Die Mansarde, p. 85.

62 See Lorenz, ‘Marlen Haushofer’, p. 184.

63 Haushofer, Die Mansarde, p. 20.

64 Ibid, pp. 19–22, 151–52.

65 By ‘species-downward method of drawing’, I mean that the protagonist begins her process of drawing by thinking of a species and then attempting to imagine a generic body that fits norms.

66 See Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1996).

67 Other scholars have written about the protagonist’s small dragon but in different contexts. See Anne Duden, ‘In Ruhe Und Ordnung: unheilbar verwundert. Zu Marlen Haushofers Roman Die Mansarde’, in Oder war da manchmal noch etwas anderes?: Texte zu Marlen Haushofer (Frankfurt a.M.: Verlag Neue Kritik, 1995), pp. 108–16; Littler, ‘The Cost of Loving’, pp. 221–22; see Anne Duden, Der wurde Punkt im Alphabet (Hamburg: Rotbuch, 1995), p. 79; Kathryn Bond Stockton, God Between Their Lips: Desire Between Women in Irigaray, Brontë, and Eliot (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 50; Irmgard Roebling, ‘Drachenkampf aus der Isolation oder das fortschreiben geschichtlicher Selbsterfahrung in Marlen Haushofers Romanwerk’, in Frauen-Figuren in der deutschsprachigen Literatur seit 1945, ed. by Mona Knapp and Gerd Labroisse (Amsterdam: Rodopi,1989), pp. 275–322.

68 Haushofer, Die Mansarde, pp. 182–83.

69 Michalko, The Difference that Disability Makes, p. 61.

70 See Haushofer, Die Mansarde, pp. 164–65.

71 Ibid, pp. 164–65.

72 Haushofer, Die Mansarde, p. 165.

73 Ibid, p. 191.

74 Haushofer, Die Mansarde, p. 191.

75 See Marlen Haushofer, Himmel, der nirgendwo endet (Berlin: Ullstein, 2018).

76 Haushofer, Die Mansarde, p. 166.

77 Ibid, p. 197.

78 Haushofer, Die Mansarde, p. 177.

79 Ibid, p. 177.

80 Ibid, p. 196.

81 Haushofer, Die Mansarde, p. 197.

82 For Lewis’s full definition of ableism, please see: Talila A. Lewis, ‘TL’s BLOG’, Working Definition of Ableism, 2022, <https://www.talilalewis.com/blog.html> [accessed 5 July 2022].

83 Haushofer, Die Mansarde, p. 197.

84 See Phil Senter, Uta Mattox, and Eid. E. Haddad, ‘Snake to Monster: Conrad Gessner’s Schlangenbuch and the Evolution of the Dragon in the Literature of Natural History’, Journal of Folklore Research, 53.1 (2016), 67. doi:10.2979/jfolkrese.53.1-4.67.

85 Senter, Mattox, and Haddad, ‘Snake to Monster’, p. 71.

86 Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans by Stephen A. Barney et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 255.

87 See Leo Ruickbie, The Impossible Zoo: An Encyclopedia of Fabulous Beasts and Mythical Monsters (London: Little, Brown Book Club, 2016), Kindle.ADD KINDLE POSITION OR PAGE NUMBER PLEASE.

88 See Conrad Gessner, Gesnerus De serpentibus oder Schlangen-Buch: d. ist, e. gründl. u. vollkommene Beschreibung aller Schlangen, so im Meer, süssen Wassern u. auff Erden ihre Wohnung haben (Frankfurt a.M.: Serlin, 1662), pp. 52–63.

89 See Gessner, ‘Snake to Monster’.

90 See ‘Perseus Beheads Medusa Essential T-Shirt by EyeMagined’, Redbubble, <https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/Perseus-Beheads-Medusa-by-EyeMagined/22918216.FB110> [accessed 15 March 2022]; ‘Personalized Trump Medusa Gifts’, <https://www.zazzle.com/s/trump±medusa> [accessed 15 March 2022], for T-Shirts of Hillary Clinton as Medusa being slain by Donald Trump as Perseus.

91 See Elizabeth Johnston, ‘Medusa, the Original “Nasty Woman”’, The Atlantic, 6 November 2016, <https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/11/the-original-nasty-woman-of-classical-myth/506591/>.

92 See Katie Scott-Marshall, ‘Eve: The Enduring Legacy of the Original Dangerous Woman’, Dangerous Women Project (blog), 9 October 2016, <http://dangerouswomenproject.org/2016/10/09/eve-dangerous-woman/>.

93 See Anne McCaffrey, ‘Weyr Search’, Analog, 80.2 (October 1967); Anne McCaffrey, ‘Dragonrider’, Analog, 80.4 (December 1967); Anne McCaffrey, ‘Dragonrider’, Analog, 80.5 (January 1968); Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea, Illustrated edn (New York: Clarion Books, 2012).

94 See Haushofer, Die Mansarde.

95 Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2011); Game of Thrones, Action, Adventure, Drama (Home Box Office (HBO), Television 360, Grok! Studio, 2011).

96 Haushofer, Die Mansarde, pp. 200–01.

97 Michael Organ, ‘The Austrian Frigate SMS Novara 1843–99’, 10 April 2007, <https://documents.uow.edu.au/~morgan/novara1.htm>.

98 See Karl Scherzer, ‘Reise der österreichischen Fregatte Novara um die Erde in den Jahren 1857–1859 unter den Befehlen des Commodore B. von Wüllerstorf-Urbair. (Physicalische und geognostische Erinnerungen von A. v. Humboldt)’, 3 vols. (Wien: Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1861).

99 Haushofer, Die Mansarde, pp. 200–01; This something of which she is reminded could be her own prior deafness, but it could also be a reference to the enclosing wall in Die Wand.

100 Haushofer, Die Mansarde, p. 201.

101 Ibid, pp. 7, 9, 27, 53–57, 88.

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Kassi Burnett

Kassi Burnett graduated with her Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures from the Ohio State University in December 2021. Since then, she has taught as a Lecturer at the Ohio State University and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Denison University. Her research is interdisciplinary and social justice-oriented, and her academic publications range in scope from literary criticism to social media analysis. Her interests include the environmental humanities, gender studies and disability studies. In addition to her academic interests, she has worked with Sierra Club and Buckeyes for Accessibility as an environmental and disability rights activist.