Returning to The Wall
On Marlen Haushofer’s ecofeminist classic.
The following essay was originally supposed to be published in a magazine three years ago, but it fell through in the way that sometimes these things do, especially in the world of smaller journals. What can I say? I’m generally good at chasing down editors, but at the time I was working on this, I was going through some big life changes—I had just left a job at The Paris Review, where I had worked for a few years; I was doing some traveling before I started graduate school and didn’t always have the best internet access; there were some upheavals occurring in my personal life—and so it didn’t end up happening. But now that New Directions has recently published a new translation of another Marlen Haushofer novel, Killing Stella, I thought it might be fun to unearth this unpublished review of her novel The Wall from the depths of my computer. If any of the bits about the German language are wrong, forgive me—I studied the language pretty intensively for some years, but it’s been ages since I used it and whatever skills I once had have fallen by the wayside.
There are two words in German that can be used for the English noun “wall”: Mauer and Wand. The former is familiar to anyone who has visited Germany’s capital city and spent an afternoon wandering through the remnants of die Berliner Mauer; the latter, to my non-native and rudimentary knowledge of the language, is applied mostly to the walls of a room. In Mauer, there is a sense of heft, an implication of stone or brick—something sturdy—something that can stand freely, and that cleaves as much as it encloses. Wand, by comparison, is more domestic—you can hang a picture an der Wand, whereas a Mauer can be monument or metaphor. The Great Wall of China, visible from space, is a Mauer; a sitting room wall is a Wand—you view it from the inside.
It is the second of these words that the Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer chose to title her 1963 novel Die Wand, translated into English by Shaun Whiteside as The Wall in 1990 and newly reissued this year by New Directions. Since its initial publication, The Wall has become something of an ecofeminist classic, the titular wall one that takes the form of an invisible barrier that descends, without warning, during a nameless woman’s mountain holiday, cutting her off from the outside world and the woman she used to be. It is a strange book, uneasy in its practical approach to despair: “I was no longer young enough to think seriously about suicide,” is a characteristic line. The Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek has cited it as an influence, naming one of her Princess Plays after it (the play in question features the writers Ingeborg Bachmann and Sylvia Plath as characters, and opens with them mauling a deer). In 2012, a film adaptation by Julian Pölsler updated the story to the present day without ceding much emotional resonance. And as a blurb from Doris Lessing, featured on the front of an out-of-print copy of mine from 2013 published by Cleis Press, promises, “It is not often you can say only a woman could have written this book … It is as absorbing as Robinson Crusoe.”
The first time I read it was in the spring of 2020, when it very much did feel like die Wände were closing in. Thanks to the pandemic, I was spending all of my time indoors, alternating between staring at screens and staring at walls, blank white walls—neither my then-roommates nor I had any interest in interior decorating. Our attention was instead mostly directed to the screens, filled as they were with news, and as time went by the metaphors that the news trafficked in became more fervent: the virus was an “enemy,” the public was “at war,” and so too were the healthcare providers who “battled” the disease, the realities of death trussed up in the heroic terminology of combat. Magazines published pandemic diaries, mostly from intellectuals, and though they quickly became the subject of online ire—ho hum, another sourdough starter!—I sort of liked them, and the unflattering intimacies therein. Reading Haushofer amidst all of this, it felt refreshing to encounter a different kind of metaphor, one that felt more apt, more passive, than the dynamic terms of battle—when I stood at my apartment’s windows, staring at the empty streets below, it did indeed feel like a wall descending.
This is the context in which I first encountered The Wall, and one that is hard to shake. Two years later, I approached rereading it with some concern, worried that it would no longer have the same impact—“I’m no longer the person I was two years ago,” the book’s narrator observes early on, the book itself ostensibly a diary of the two years she endures behind the wall. Unsurprisingly, neither am I. But though its science fiction premise might be the initial draw, applicable to any number of dystopian scenarios ranging from nuclear fallout to, yes, a global pandemic, what remains most interesting about The Wall is what it has to say about femininity, masculinity, and the uneasy relationship between the two. In its scenes featuring an almost-prelapsarian portrayal of animal husbandry and food cultivation, Haushofer is sharp regarding the gendered divisions of labor. She hints at the origins of an altogether different kind of dystopia, one that needs no invisible wall to establish itself: that of patriarchy.
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“If I think today of the woman I once was, the woman with the little double chin, who tried very hard to look younger than her age, I feel little sympathy for her. But I shouldn’t like to judge her too harshly. After all, she never had the chance of consciously shaping her life.” In The Wall, the woman who writes these lines is middle-class, middle-aged, a wife and mother to two grown children, a biography not unlike that of Haushofer, herself a “reticent midcentury Austrian housewife,” as Claire-Louise Bennett writes in her afterward to the new reissue. Born in 1920 in Frauenstein, in upper Austria, Haushofer would go on to complete seven books before her early death in 1970 from bone cancer. Hers was a double life lived in the spaces between mother and writer. As Nicholas Spicer wrote in the London Review of Books in 2014, she divided her time between urban Vienna and suburban Steyr, where she lived with her husband, a dentist, and their two sons: “In Vienna, she moved in fashionable literary circles, discussed books and ideas, had affairs; in Steyr, she played the biddable housewife.” She and her husband would go on secretly divorce before remarrying again.
The Wall, Haushofer’s fourth novel, initially proved difficult to write, going through multiple handwritten drafts before it was finished. The conceit is straightforward: The nameless narrator lives in the city, and is on vacation with friends, a married couple, in their remote cabin in the mountains. Few other specifics of her life are given—she has a husband and grown children, we learn; she seems to be well-educated; at one point she mentions “the war”—but the majority of the book is devoted to what happens after the wall descends. In that, too, Haushofer is straightforward: one morning, the woman wakes up to discover that she is alone save for a few animals, her friends still unreturned from an earlier walk into town. When she, too, tries to walk down to the local village to find out what might be going on, she finds that she cannot, her path blocked by “something smooth and cool: a smooth, cool resistance where there could be nothing but air.”
The repetition in this sentence is interesting. It’s also present in the original German, in which Haushofer writes that the wall is “etwas Glattes und Kühles: einen glatten, kühlen Widerstand.” This is not a wall placed in a garden or erected at a nation’s border, exposed to the elements and consequently rough to the touch. No, Haushofer is careful to emphasize this wall’s smoothness, one that brings to mind another type of wall, that which creates a room. It seems impossible not to think of this wall as one akin to those that trap a woman—be she a modern-day housewife or servant, mistress of the house or merely a visitor—indoors, regulating her to the domestic sphere. There is something paradoxical, then, to the external freedoms that Haushofer will assign to her character, unhindered as she is by the regulatory eyes of men and polite society. For the next two years, she will learn how to farm, how to tend to her animals, and how to attempt to survive alone.
“It wasn’t until I was forty that I discovered I had hands,” the woman remarks, bitter, before detailing the many struggles that attend her need to live. Elsewhere, she notes, “For two and a half years I have suffered from the fact that this woman was so ill armed for real life.” In the world beyond the wall, her class and her gender have conspired to render her useless, infantilizing her through the comforts of postwar consumerism and the limitations of wifedom, but real life, suffused as it is with the random cruelties of nature, cannot help but intrude. “I realized that the composure with which I had adapted to my situation from the first day had only been a kind of anesthetic,” the woman writes. “Now the anesthetic was wearing off.” Death becomes intimate, familiar in the way that anyone who has ever lived on a farm understands. A cat beloved by the narrator bears three litters of kittens over the course of the book, beautiful and mewling; all die young or are stillborn. A cow named Bella fares better for a short while, until it becomes clear that she, too, is pregnant, and must give birth. What follows is, frankly, harrowing: tight, tense pages springing back between life and death and life again, the calf stuck in its mother, the woman’s source of both milk and companionship potentially about to perish. To save Bella, the woman must stick her arm into her, pulling the calf out.
There are moments in The Wall in which it feels as though time has collapsed in on itself, as though the reader were watching a reenactment of the birth of agriculture, the transition from the oral to the written, and the invention of human civilization itself. The woman must learn how to prepare for winter—even behind the wall, the seasons haven’t stopped—but as she learns how to physically care for herself, so too does she awaken to a more existential understanding of herself, and what separates the animal from the human. “The only creature in the forest that can really do right or wrong is me,” she observes. “And I alone can show mercy.” Her two years behind the wall put her in conversation with the essential human concerns, which haven’t changed much. “The wall forced me to make an entirely new life,” she writes, “but the things that really move me are still the same as before: birth, death, the seasons, growth and decay.” In the same way that weeds curl around abandoned ruins, that grass eventually covers abandoned railroad tracks and roads, the muscle memory of what matters most to humans lies dormant in our bodies, eventually taking over the woman. Call it instinct, call it biology—the mysteries of life, death, birth, what does or does not lie beyond—but it cannot be pruned. Eventually, the vines will twine over.
This is the great irony undergirding The Wall: though she may be physically enclosed within the wall’s boundaries, the longer Haushofer’s heroine is trapped within them, the freer she becomes. Disentangled from the restrictions imposed upon her by motherhood—“an intimidating amount of duties and worries,” is how she characterizes the experience, one that turned her into “a tormented, overtaxed woman of medium intelligence, in a world…that was hostile to women and which women found strange and unsettling”—Haushofer’s heroine quickly abandons the pretenses and poses of femininity. She cuts her hair short, ages visibly, and removes all gendered adornments such as makeup and jewelry (“Who would decorate their tools with gold rings?”). In doing so, she is no longer a woman, but instead transforms herself into something more akin to birth, decay, death, all those forces that drive animal and human life forward: “a very old, sexless creature…more like a tree than a person, a tough brown branch that needs its whole strength to survive.”
These are very old binaries at play here: man versus woman, civilization versus the natural world. Rather than asserting any kind of biological essentialism concerning the role of the body, though, Haushofer reveals both sides of the wall to be a trap. Inside or outside of it, her narrator is still restricted, still vulnerable to outside forces; a moment of unexpected, brutal violence, abrupt in the same senseless way of the violence that governs the animal kingdom, occurs. A man, dressed in expensive clothes and holding a hatchet—the first male character to be described in detail by Haushofer—appears at the narrator’s cottage, killing first Bella’s calf, now a fully grown bull, and then eventually, the narrator’s dog, too. Eventually, she shoots and kills the man, but his presence is never explained, and the mystery remains unsolved. It is shocking, frightening—is this what it felt like, when the first murder occurred, or when private property was invented?
“Perhaps he had been a game-tenant,” the woman writes after the fact, “or one of the lawyers, directors, and industrialists” that her friends from the beginning had once invited to their cabin. “Whatever he might have been, now he was just dead.” With an air of grim resignation, she notes that Bella is again pregnant, and this will be her last diary entry, having run out of paper. A beginning, an end. She is, once again, alone. Inside versus outside, man versus woman, none of it is important. In the strange world of the wall, only one binary matters: life versus death.