Haushofen’s & Polser’s The Wall: parable or dystopia

Moment of hope for narrator (Martina Gedeck)

The despairing end as she ceases to write her report any more

Dear friends and readers,

Marlen Haushofen may not seem a daughter of Jane Austen, but she is certainly a sister to Anne Radcliffe and the visionary women novelists emerging at the time. If we see two types of women’s fiction emerge at the close of the 18th century, the realistic domestic fiction (often conservative) school of Austen, and the gothic-fantasy critique school identified first with Radcliffe and then Mary Shelley. The Wall is an extraordinary distopian/utopian story about which Doris Lessing was right to say it seems that it could only be written by a woman. Polser’s film Here is the core plot-design:

The novel’s main character is a forty-something woman whose name the reader never learns. She tries to survive a cataclysmic event: while vacationing in a hunting lodge in the Austrian mountains, a transparent wall has been placed that closes her off from the outside world; all life outside the wall appears to have died, possibly in a nuclear event. With a dog, a cow, and a cat as her sole companions, she struggles to survive and to come to terms with the situation. Facing fear and loneliness, she writes an account of her isolation, without knowing whether anyone will ever read it

Her friends driving off

When she first discovers she is cut off

She realizes or surmizes all the people in the world have died suddenly and mysteriously when she comes upon two elderly people frozen in mid-gesture. The scene is of course fantasy as a corpse would rot:

She cannot reach them as they are on the other side of the glass wall which seems to surround her. It is possible that she could get beyond it, but she would have to climb and walk hundreds of miles into a forest of mountains, and she knows instinctively she is safer in the house with all the things her friends (unknowingly) left her to provide herself with: wood, implements, seeds, pototoes. She worries about her lack of matches. She has a strong will to survive. Early on she says she is no longer young enough to want to kill herself.

The story occurs over a succession of seasons: it begins in summer and we watch the narrator live through two winters, and two summers, where she goes to live in a meadow and thinks she is in a paradise but there she mets the savage male who murders her dog

A Robinson Crusoe story? it doesn’t feel like it; it shows us the stoic comfortable survival of Crusoe with his loyal man Friday is a myth: Friday would have murdered the master. I sped half-way through Haushofen’s book and (because I just couldn’t resist) since the disk arrived yesterday from Netflix in the later afternoon just as I had had enough, I watched it later at night.

I found the Julian Polser’s film adaptation (the transposition or apparently faithful sort) a masterpiece equivalent of the masterpiece book; I was just gripped as our heroine (who seems to be another of these nameless women called just Frau) slowly realized that she was cut off from all other humanity and slowly evolved a family of animals.

Her dog Lynx

Cats, kitten is called Pearl

An important analogical text (even if improbably a source) is Randall Jarrell’s Animal Family: there is the same slow buildup of an animal community as family and friends/children. We see slowly evolve a family of animals and a fish (a mermaid for a mother) as they build a world and life for themselves. It too quietly critiques much in our society. It has lovely illustrations by Sendak. Unlike Jarrell though the ending of The Wall is devastating — let me say this much: from not far from the outset our narrator begins to talk of when Lynx , the dog who becomes her beloved, is dead, or after Lynx died and that makes for suspense, yet since there is no inkling of how this happens when it does, it is a shock.

On the other hand, in the film she twice turns on a radio in a car and hears a song about freedom. Paradoxically she is free — at liberty to live the way she wants. Only we see this liberty is illusory because it takes her such effort to stay alive and she has nothing to exercise her liberty on but the papers and writing implements she (conveniently) finds and writes on.

While the book and film may be called dystopian fantasy and is compelling that way, it is also a woman’s story too: while she has no one to obey, she is all alone and sad, and in natural response it seems she begins to develop a small family, a dog (who early on the book is referred to as having died at some later date — so immediately we worry), and stays alive (she feels) out of her responsibility to the dog, the cats (the mother cat kittens), a cow (and eventually bull and calf). She is delighted each time she comes upon another animal and brings home all but those she is forced to kill (with a shotgun she naturally knows how to use) and eat. She dislikes hunting but does it.

The novel and film are also critiques or mirrors of the world’s way of treating women and how women behave. We see our heroine enact the behavior this leads to: one scene shows us all the food she has grown, managed to cook and put in bowls. We see her eating amidst her animals who she provides for:

Since at the climax of the story, its tragic close, a man suddenly appears out of nowhere, ragingly violent with an ae who proceeds to murder apparently wantonly the bull and the dog, this confirmed my sense this is a woman’s story — men are the killers of our world. Haushofen also builds no world of people (like Charlotte Perkins’s Herland), but rather mirrors inner experiences of isolation, terror, the desire to escape, to find some peaceful place free of competition (mentioned early on as awful, the worst manifestation of the human spirit). Yes depression too: a story that images or captures a mood of deep depression. When our heroine partly in an effort to save her dog runs back to her cottage to get a gun and comes back and kills the man (but alas too late for the dog), she confirms the sense I have from the book one of its assumptions is we are better off without people. People are the worst, and the narrator thinks again and again how she is an alien in nature (unlike her animals) — but this seems wrong and unfair. She is as much as part of the natural world as they and they depend on her. The novel is a parable — the film emphasizes her de-sexed appearance and behavior — she is the hunter shooting deer.  It is of course unrealistic — for enough food does appear; the deer, all that she needs as a minimum to survive.

Sudden appearance of a murderous savage man

Her attempt to kill the man and/or save Lynx

Her grief for Lynx

I identified with her aloneness. The last 3 days and now this one I’m alone all day — except for my girl cat who is continually with me. She was sitting in my lap as I watched the movie and seemed to me a version of Lynx. The woman narrator adopts a stray cat who then has a long haired white kitten (who also dies as a natural victim) but the cats are not presented as companions. Well mine is and I do think to myself how I have an obligation to them to stay alive. It wasn’t cathartic for me nor therapeutic but rather an intense reliving of what I am experiencing just now.

Women are so isolated in our society by various structures: when your children are babies or young, the society structures itself to make you the constant caretaker and the renewed ferocious insistence on breast-feeding is a nailing down of the woman.  Why is widowhood so bad? becuase you have been put into a partnership dependent on a man often — not necessarily financially any more but he is often the leader.

Here is Fran’s explication from Women Writers Across the Ages:

One of the most obvious is the novel as a feminist critique of gender roles and especially the position of women in Austrian society as Haushofer had experienced it up to her writing of the novel between 1960 and 1962. The Austria of that time was still a very much male-dominated, highly conservative, catholic society, where women were often marginalized and expected to adhere to their traditional roles oriented around the (in) famous three Ks, Kinder, Küche, Kirche – children, kitchen and church – and rapidly ran against walls of inacceptance that were difficult to overcome if they tried to break out and expand into other non-traditional spheres of activity. 
 
Haushofer experienced this as oppressively claustrophobic, stultifying and frustrating, both as a child and as an adult. As a child, when her highly religious mother forced her to attend a convent boarding school, the cloistered restrictions of which came as a complete shock to one used to playing in the freedom of Austria’s beautiful countryside (her unromantic love of which is everywhere evidenced in the novel); as an adult in her role as a stay-at-home provincial wife and mother, whose household chores made finding the time to write and realize her artistic ambitions very difficult indeed. In both instances she reacted with serious depression and physical illness. The confining or excluding wall can be seen as a projection of such feelings and experiences as mentioned yesterday.
 
On the other hand, as Haushofer herself said, the wall seems to be not only negative in effect. Being cut off from the rest of society means that the significantly unnamed narrator, whose rmemories of her old life beyond the wall indicate an unfulfilled, already alienated existence, is thrown back on her own resources to survive and is able to rise to the occasion and carve out an autonomous, if precarious, existence and new life and identity for herself as a guardian and preserver of her corner of nature and the animals that she has found there. 
 
This goes hand in hand with a critique of the kind of education she’d received as a woman on the other side of the wall that had ill-equipped her for such a task.
 
The novel can then also be seen as one of painful female self-discovery and self-realisation, with the narrator going through various stages of numbing shock, denial, realisation, confrontation and transformation to acceptance of her new role and situation, if one sometimes clouded by the kind of suicidal thoughts that she experienced at the beginning.
 
You mention the violent incursion of the male survivor who irrationally kills the narrator’s animals which both would actually need to survive and who is in turn killed by her, though she’d previously been reluctant to kill anything even to survive. Haushofer seems to be building up a gender oppostion here: the female in the classic role of caretaker and protector of life who lives with nature and the male as the aggressor who kills and wants to dominate nature and others and has to be stopped from doing it. The incursion of the male infects her with his violence, too.
 
The wall takes on a double quality here as well, at once marginalizing and excluding, but also normally protecting from potential predators and aggressors.
 
Male war machinery is also presumed responsable for the catastrophe that created the wall and petrified the people and animals on the other side in the first place. In this respect the novel can  very much be seen as an anti-war novel and topical critique of the kind of patriarchal society that leads to such.
 
At the time of writing, the Berlin Wall was built (1961), arbitrarily and randomly cutting off people from their families and neighbours, the Iron Curtain was  firmly in place, the Cold War at its height and the Bay of Pigs incident had raised fears of an imminent war and nuclear or biological catastrophe.
 
Haushofer’s reaction was to produce a novel that was both a kind of Robinsonade and warning end- of-days scenario, criticizing so-called civilisation and what it had already done and threatened to do to people, nature and the ecology.
 
Interestingly, too, it’s also a novel about writing. As a housewife Haushofer seldom had a lot of time to write and didn’t have a room of her own to do it in, normally writing at the dining or kitchen room table. The narrator in the novel, who develops increasingly androgynous features in the course of the novel, has oodles of time, plenty of room of her own, but probably no audience other than mice to write for and at the end no more paper to write on either. It’s like a very macabre riff on Virginia Woolf, but I’m not sure if that was intentional or not.
 
Almost endless possibilities of interpretation and speculation

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As we first see her in the film, the first shot: she is with her friends in a fine car apparently off for a holiday in a rural retreat

In the middle of the movie somewhere: she is washing her face after hard work

After I finished the novel, I watched the movie twice and was really gripped: the novel differs from the movie in ways one might expect. The movie opens as a flashback with the heroine at her book writing and then we move backwards to how the situation first happened: we are told slightly more about Hugh and Luise in the movie. The book moves forward with lots of tiny flashbacks interwoven throughout. There are more animals in the book, and consequently more losses: the movie leaves out the birth of Tiger, the tom-cat, the developed relationship and how he disappears one day. She works very hard in both novel and book to survive: each stroke of a instrument, each killing of a deer, each harvesting, cooking is a tremendous effort and she show it physically. She becomes one with nature, but not de-gendered.

The movie succeeds in bringing out the deep individuality of the animals: each is individually filmed and as all but the cow and mother cat die, we grieve for them as valuable lives. This is a film that brings home to the viewer how animals have lives like humans through showing us the companionship of the animals and the central heroine.

The book weaves in thoughts she has of her life before: as a young woman, young mother, the sense of loss she had when her children started going to school and she was not able to help them, her dependence on her husband, and various less concrete thoughts — all really depressive and melancholy. They provide analogies and pointers to how to take the book as a parable which are not voiced in the movie. Most of all the horrifying  closing scene is much more prepared for with hints and memories, and the growing constant references to Lynx now dead, not being there any more, and then it is or feels much shorter.

We are also led to feel maybe she could have been smarter and not told the dog not to attack the man and maybe the man would not have been able to kill the dog. But that is her thought.  So the movie uses it more melodramatically, singly without qualification, and all at once with a big blow and then the ending is swift. I felt at the end of the movie what could be suggested is suicide, while at the end of the book it seemed to me obvious she carried on and on and on.

What the movie can do is provide alternations between silence and sound, the voice of the narrator thinking and her silent face looking on and remembering the scenes she’s lived through as she writes them down. The camera during moments of intense horror and sadness slows down the movement and the actress appears to float in air, to be part of a dream fragment. The music can be deeply melancholy with oboes and violins. often discordant and disjunctive, and again crash down with percussive hits to grate on us.

Carrying Lynx tenderly to bury him

Ceasing to write her reports

My gut feeling is the story whether conveyed through novel or film is deeply humanizing. That might sound paradoxical — for after all she is living without human beings and the only one to show up is savagely murderous – maybe his response to finding himself alone. But she grows and we do with a sense of pity and identification with the animals as presences every bit as valuable and varied as the human being at the center.  I don’t think it is a distopia or a utopia — at any rate it’s not a newly built world somewhere else but is the natural world we know only she’s walled in and has no people about; it’s fantasy because she just happens on just these animals she needs and can love and love her. I felt a strong sense of bonding — when she loses all the animals but the cow and the old cat I remembered how I have lost my husband, mother, father and am left with a daughter living with me, one further off and two cats. I have to survive and get along and I wasn’t doing very well in November; I am doing better with my new regime of sleeping and eating regularly.

There are two marvelous critique/explication/evaluations of the book and movie on-line: Laura Kapelari’s Feminist Utopia and Dystopia: Marlen Haushofen’s The Wall: Kapelari argues for the relevance of Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex and Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun; she tells of Haushofen’s life; she relates the fiction to events in WW2 and Austria. Lorraine Markotic in “Melancholy and Lost Desire in the works of Marlen Haushofen where Markotic explicates the sources and nature of depression for women in Haushofen’s novels. Markotic defines depression as the very loss of desire: by that mark I’d say our heroine does not seem a depressive, for no one ever worked harder to provide beautiful meals for herself and her animals; to keep the room tidy and neat, to adhere to a schedule of normal day and night time, to write, to wait (it seems) in hope for some change, someone to come.

Julian Polser has also discussed on line what he thinks the most significant incidents, the universality of the film and difficulties in filming it. He finds the woman’s developing reaction isolation to be central to what happens to her, and seems to find her unhinged by its end.

She carries on alone for a while before finally stopping and saying she will join the white crow

Ellen