Genre, Gender, and Aesthetic Evaluation of Novels of Adultery: Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest and Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’s Unsühnbar Peter C. Pfeiffer Georgetown University Abstract: The article does a contrastive reading of two novels of adultery, Fontane’s Effi Briest and Ebner-Eschenbach’s Unsühnbar and asks how a gendered perspective challenges conventions in this very masculine genre. The two examples show how the ground rules are completely changed depending on the perspective taken. The essay argues that the aesthetic evaluation of the texts need to take those changes into account and not continue to reproduce the standard canon as exemplars of aesthetically valuable contributions. Keywords: Novel of adultery; genre; gender; aesthetic evaluation; Theodor Fontane; Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach The genre of the novel of adultery was one of the most productive, prominent, and admired forms in the nineteenth century. It had a remarkable influence on continental European literature, producing some of the most famous novels of the time and canonical works in a range of national literatures from Portugal to Russia. The best known are, of course, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856/ 57) and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877/ 78) in France and Russia, respectively. Many other canonical novels of adultery can be found in national literatures of continental Europe, though, for example, Benito Perez Galdos’ That Bringas Woman (1884) and Leopoldo Alas’ La Regenta (1884/ 85) in Spain, Eca de Queiros’ Cousin Bazilio (1878) in Portugal, and Jens Peter Jacobsen’s Fru Marie Grubbe (1876) in Denmark. 1 A confluence of social norms, cultural customs, and aesthetic practices facilitated the genre’s rise, such as the role of arranged marriages in bourgeois society (which claimed to support freedom and individuality), 2 the negotiation and assurance of legitimate inheritance lines, the absence of divorce laws, and reactions to increasingly restive attempts at attaining equal rights for women. 132 Peter C. Pfeiffer Marriage - which, after all, is the precondition of the novel of adultery - was the centrally important and stabilizing (i.e. norm-enforcing) institution of bourgeois society and the nation state. 3 Showing marriage under threat and displaying the consequences of such threats had a disciplining function. In broad terms, Peter Gay commented on this role of nineteenth century literature in his study The Tender Passion, observing that “[f]or all its flirting with illicit experiences, much nineteenth century fiction functioned as a prudent warning against the perils of precipitous infatuation, unsuitable alliances, marital irregularities” (151). More specifically, as Bill Overton makes clear, the novel of wifely adultery plays a role in chastening certain female behaviors and “should be considered not only as a literary genre but as part of the history of misogynism” (Fictions of Female Adultery 19). The genre kept its importance and influence in the “masculine literary establishment of continental Europe” (Novel of Female Adultery 224) until the end of the nineteenth century, only to fade in importance when social mores and legal contexts changed, for example, through the (re)introduction or expansion of civil divorce laws. In the following, I will explore different textual strategies in two novels of adultery, Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest, published in 1894—95, and Unsühnbar (1889), by Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach. More specifically, I want to investigate how those textual strategies interplay with (literary) genre expectations and gender, and how both of these impact the novels’ critical aesthetic evaluation. Effi Briest is by far the best known and most canonical of Fontane’s novels. Unsühnbar by Ebner-Eschenbach is less well known even though the Austrian or, more precisely, Habsburg female writer was among the most famous women authors in the German-speaking world around 1900. Unsühnbar offers an especially welcome example for the kind of comparative reading endeavored here because it is one of the rare examples of a novel of adultery written by a woman author. In my readings of the novels, I will focus on how the texts reference and utilize - or counter - genre expectations and how these textual and generic strategies point to an implied aesthetics of the texts that shapes the critical evaluation of these writers. While Fontane’s novel has long been studied in comparison with other examples of nineteenth-century European novels of adultery and is often named alongside Tolstoy’s and Flaubert’s texts, Ebner-Eschenbach has been largely neglected. 4 Even if one had not read either Fontane’s or Ebner- Eschenbach’s novel, one would have a general idea of the narrative arc of their stories, simply by characterizing them as novels of adultery or, to use Overton’s more precise terminology from his second study, Fictions of Female Adultery (2002), “novel[s] of wifely adultery” (vii), because the focus of this genre is on the female protagonist who commits punishable adultery. Genre, Gender, and Aesthetic Evaluation of Novels of Adultery 133 The basic outline of the plot goes like this: Two mismatched people get married - usually the husband is much older than the beautiful young wife. The wife is dissatisfied in her married life, meets an attractive suitor, commits adultery and receives some sort of punishment (often death), which is seen as poetic justice for her transgressions. Given that we are dealing with the nineteenth century, there might also be some sort of duel between the cuckold husband and the lover based on contemporaneous notions of honor. There are slight variations of this general plotline, but the overall narrative arc is more or less standard. This is in fact exactly the plot of Effi Briest in a nutshell, so the book fulfills all expectations the reader has of the general structure of a novel of adultery. Yet, by the time Fontane wrote Effi Briest, this genre was on the cusp of becoming “defunct” (Overton, Fictions of Female Adultery 218). So it is puzzling that Fontane should utilize this spent form of the novel for an aesthetically ambitious book. Why did he do that? To try to answer this question, we need to look at the contexts in which Fontane wrote Effi Briest. For one thing, Fontane is unusual among the canonical authors of novels of adultery because of his unorthodox treatment of adultery in two of his novels he wrote prior to Effi Briest� In L’Adultera (1880/ 82), the adulterous relationship ultimately ends happily rather than with some sort of destitution or death� In Unwiederbringlich (1892), published ten years after L’Adultera, the adulterous person is the husband. And yet, even in this configuration, it is the betrayed wife who commits suicide in the end, thereby highlighting the destructive forces of the husband’s personal failures but also “fulfilling” in some sense the gendered genre expectation that, in a novel of adultery, the female character has to die in the end. In contrast to these two atypical variations of the novel of adultery, Effi Briest follows the conventional storyline to a tee. This becomes especially evident when comparing Fontane’s inspiration - the ‘real’ story of Elisabeth von Ardenne, née von Plotho - with that of Ardenne’s fictional counterpart, Effi von Innstetten, née von Briest. It is striking that Fontane simplified Ardenne’s story, making it follow more closely the trivial narrative I outlined at the beginning. The real Ardennes were close in age, for example. Also, Elisabeth did not suffer the consequences of long and harsh social isolation. It seems almost like an ironic reference to the real-life personage of the Ardenne affair when Effi characterizes her inability to reach out when she is isolated in her Berlin apartment. She states to her maid and emotional anchor, Roswitha: Nun siehst du, du weißt es besser als ich. Und in solchen Verein [where young women learn housekeeping or in sewing schools], wo man sich nützlich machen kann, da 134 Peter C. Pfeiffer möchte ich eintreten. Aber daran ist gar nicht zu denken; die Damen nehmen mich nicht an und können es auch nicht. (GBA I/ 15: 315) This is exactly the opposite of what happened to Effi’s real-life model Elisabeth von Ardenne. As the supplemental materials of the Große Brandenburger Ausgabe document, Ardenne, once divorced, dedicated herself to helping needy and ill people and seems to have led a long, fulfilling life. While she did not see her two children for many years, they did eventually reunite. Ardenne died at the ripe old age of ninety-eight in 1952 (see GBA I/ 15: 353—58). 5 Why then did Fontane depict the story of Effi in so much starker terms of social isolation and emotional deprivation than the real-life story? Why did he make the story more clichéd than it was in reality? In a much-quoted letter of February 21, 1896 to Friedrich Spielhagen (who wrote a literary version of the Ardenne affair himself), Fontane points to an answer to this question. He writes that the Ardenne affair was an “Ehebruchsgeschichte wie hundert andre mehr” and the only reason his interest was piqued was “die Szene bzw. die Worte ‘Effi komm.’” 6 It is clear then that the story itself was of only marginal interest to Fontane. In fact, he narrates a story that is a dime a dozen. But within that clichéd story, he explores other dimensions of literary representation that play themselves out at the level of words or sentences. The words “Effi komm” haunt Innstetten and are picked up by Effi’s father when he finally sends a telegram to call her back home. Along a similar line of argument, Fontane in a letter of November 19, 1895, to Joseph Viktor Widmann, singled out the Chinese servant as “ein Drehpunkt für die ganze Geschichte” (HA IV/ 4: 506). So it is these haunting and ghostly presences that are essential to Fontane’s interest in writing this text. Ghostliness, as Christian Begemann and others have shown, is the “theoretische Reflexionsfigur” (“Spiegelscherben” 412) in particular for mimetic texts where they consider their status as texts and their status vis-à-vis “reality.” Elisabeth Strohwick expands on this theme. Like Begemann, she draws on ideas Jacque Derrida articulated in his Specters of Marx (1993). 7 She uses the term “Augengespenster” (1), which Goethe coined to capture certain visual perceptions of reality, to develop her notion of literary realism where “Realität ist Wahrnehmungseffekt, Effekt des ‘Eigenlebens’ der Sinne, die den grundsätzlichen Simulakrum-Charakter des Wirklichen artikulieren” (4). It is precisely in this context that haunting words and ghostly appearances, that “Effi komm,” the Chinese servant, and other ghostly features such as Frau Kruse’s “schwarzes Huhn” (GBA I/ 15: 55) or the “Schloon” (GBA I/ 15: 186) are of interest to Fontane; they are iterations of textual loci that allow him on a micro-level to delve into the modernist aesthetic exploration of literary representation and the changing cognition of reality. Genre, Gender, and Aesthetic Evaluation of Novels of Adultery 135 Fontane’s comments suggest a degree of embedded textual self-reflexivity that allows statements by characters to be understood as signaling aspects of the textual - rather than mimetic - status of the novel itself. This is exemplified by young Effi early on when she articulates an awareness of narrative conventions that follow social practices. After many false starts, Effi tells her girlfriends the story of her mother’s love for the young Baron von Innstetten, and how he ultimately lost out against the much older and more established Briest, who was to become Effi’s father. Nun, es kam, wie’s kommen musste, wie’s immer kommt. Er war ja noch viel zu jung, und als Papa sich einfand […], da war kein langes Besinnen mehr, und sie nahm ihn und wurde Frau von Briest … Und das andere, was sonst noch kam, nun, das wisst Ihr … das andere bin ich. (GBA I/ 15: 11—12) The story of Effi’s parents almost does not need to be told, because it is clear what the outcome must be. Transferred to the novel Effi Briest, Fontane indicates with this small anecdote his awareness of the triviality of the storyline of Effi Briest, where things also happen as they always happen. However, here they happen with a twist, as this trivial story also produces its “other” - which is Effi herself (and, I should add, also Fontane’s novel with the same title). 8 On one level, the form of the novel of adultery itself, as suggested above, is an expression of male dominance and female domestication and suppression. Yet it also shows an inherent potential for critique of the social repression of women’s roles in society, depending on the reader’s perspective. It can also, as Effi Briest does explicitly, create its Other. You can side with Innstetten (and male-ness) or you can side with Effi - or with neither or both, as the old Briest seems to suggest when, a month after his only daughter’s death, he has nothing more to offer than the suggestions that things are complicated and too difficult to evaluate, that they are “ein zu weites Feld” (GBA I/ 15: 333). One can find this ending indecisive and morally abhorrent - Wolfgang Matz did as much in his Die Kunst des Ehebruchs: Emma, Anna, Effi und ihre Männer (195). And yet, Fontane’s utilization of a literary form that - at that point in its development - tended towards the trivial and predictable may point in the direction explored already above, i.e. that the adulterous plot was not that important to him. As L’Adultera and Unwiederbringlich certainly show, Fontane knew of the possible complexities of literary treatment of adultery and the potential for exploring subtle social and political developments within that genre. In typical Fontane fashion, Effi Briest also contains artful considerations of political and social developments, for example, through Innstetten’s connections with Bismarck (a name never spelled out in the entire book) or Roswitha’s Catholicism. Yet, the overall structure of 136 Peter C. Pfeiffer the novel of adultery Fontane employs in Effi Briest is a puzzlingly standard edition compared to Fontane’s two previous novels in that genre. 9 So again: Why did Fontane use such a predictable plot? I want to suggest that he used it in order to reduce the complexity at the macro-level of the storyline while opening up a greater space for experimentation and aesthetic exploration at the micro-level. Early in his career, Fontane had insisted that the realist author seeks to reveal the truth about reality; however, his later novels increasingly questioned the possibility of finding and extracting “das Wahre” from “[das] Wirkliche” (HA III/ 1: 242, 241; italics in original). Such an operation would have to rely on the possibility of stable semiotic relations. However, in his techniques of narration, Fontane increasingly explored the semiotic crisis that undergirded German literary realism in the nineteenth century: the utopian quest for a stable relationship between the “world” and its true representation became suspect, and the precarious status of the literary vis-à-vis “reality” became progressively more obvious. Christiane Arndt in her aptly titled book, Abschied von der Wirklichkeit (2009), shows this development for a range of nineteenth-century German realist authors. Katharina Adeline Engler-Coldren recently summarized the consensus of Fontane scholarship in this regard, stating that his narratives increasingly present “polyvalence and uncertainty as modern conditions” (135). When Innstetten intradiegetically characterizes Kessin to his newly married wife Effi by stating “[h]ier ist alles unsicher” (GBA I/ 15: 50), he also makes a point about the status of semiosis in the text of the novel itself. Using the staid and stable literary form of the novel of adultery where everything proceeds along - as Crampas is said to know - “den natürlichen Entwicklungsgang” (GBA I/ 15: 169) allowed Fontane to delve into his modernist sensibilities, therefore questioning the possibility of stable semiotic relationships and highlighting the mediated nature and perspectival character of knowledge (see Strowick 227—304). Some thirty years after Fontane’s death, Alfred Döblin would experiment with collage techniques that undermined grand narratives in his famous Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) and at about the same time, Robert Musil, in his magnum opus Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930/ 1932), disrupts the narrative text with essayistic interjections. Fontane does not go that far, but in a sense he had his cake of grand narrative (a trivial and predictable novel of adultery) while also eating away at the certainties of successful realist representation and narration at the micro-level. Let me give two examples for this. First, there are constant disruptions of side-stories that characters promise to tell, but either fail to complete or do not tell at all. Effi’s often disrupted telling of the background story of Innstetten and her mother that I quoted above is an early example of this technique. “Aber ich Genre, Gender, and Aesthetic Evaluation of Novels of Adultery 137 komme vom Hundertsten aufs Tausendste und vergesse die Geschichte.” (GBA I/ 15: 10) Fontane uses this technique throughout the novel to great effect. Innstetten never tells the story of the Chinese servant, as Effi reminds him (54). One of the few delightful conversations between Innstetten and Effi must “[m]itten im Gespräch […] abbrechen” (GBA I/ 15: 242). Valerie D. Greenberg noted this characteristic feature of Effi Briest and how the constant disruptions and halftold or untold tales put into question the very possibility of capturing the world through a linear narrative. 10 In my second example, the narrative is disrupted due to destabilization of cognition and semiosis. This occurs at the word level, through the inflationary use of the word “etwas,” or rather its derivatives such as “was,” “sowas,” including the “was” as relative pronoun and as interrogative. The meanings of these words are often difficult to capture, because the regular translation as “something” or “what” does not capture the element of je ne sais quoi that they evoke in the original German. Frequently, but not exclusively, these words are used when the ghost of the Chinese servant that might or might not haunt Effi’s new abode is mentioned or when issues are addressed that might seem beyond the commonsensical. In addition, these words are also used when actions and conversations test the limits of proper etiquette and touch sexuality or lust. From a socio-linguistic discourse analytical perspective, Rebecca Gault called these aspects the “ghost of discourse” that haunts Effi Briest. She shows persuasively that this ghostly presence is not merely felt when the talk turns to the Chinese man but typifies the characters’ discourses more generally. 11 Let me give a few concrete examples: ‘Ja,’ sagte Hulda, ‘der erzählte immer so was. Aber so ’was vergisst man doch wieder.’ ‘Ich nicht. Ich behalte so ’was.’ (GBA I/ 15: 14) ‘Für dich bin ich …’ ‘Nun was? ’ ‘Ach lass. Ich werde mich hüten, es zu sagen.’ (GBA I/ 15: 58) ‘Es muß so ’was gewesen sein … aber es war doch auch noch ’was anderes.’ (GBA I/ 15: 87) ‘Also ist es doch ’was damit. Eine Geschichte. Du sagtest schon heute früh so ’was. Und es wird am Ende das beste sein, ich höre, was es ist.’ (GBA I/ 15: 97) ‘Höre Marie, das ist ’was.’ Und er hat auch recht gehabt, es ist auch ’was damit.’ (GBA I/ 15: 109) ‘Erst ist es ’was, und dann ist es wieder nichts.’ (GBA I/ 15: 153) ‘Ihre Frau will mir bloß noch ’was erzählen; aber es ist gleich aus […] .’ (GBA I/ 15: 205) ‘Du bist ja noch eine schmucke Person und hast so ’was.’ (GBA I/ 15: 207-208) 138 Peter C. Pfeiffer I have decontextualized these quotes to show how context-dependent they are, because much of what is being said here is “empty” talk, dependent on the conversational context to make it somewhat readable. In a way, these quotes are the exact opposite of what we normally select as quotes, i.e. words or sentences pregnant with meaning that can then be explicated in a careful reading. And yet, even in context, these words tend to move towards a level of multi-valences that calls into question the ability of words to function successfully as a medium of clear communication or mimetic representation. This is also highlighted by the fact that in the first printing of the text, many of these “was” have an apostrophe at the beginning, indicating the absence of the “et” of “etwas.” They all carry an absence with them. 12 The apostrophes haunt the meaning of the “was.” No wonder then, that Innstetten knows that “alle Zeichen trügen” (GBA I/ 15: 215), a blanket indictment of stable semiosis. More comprehensively still, he connects the three elements of the was (in this case without the apostrophe), the “Zeichen,” and the “Geschichten,” the last of which seems to depend on precisely the instability of semiosis: “Es ist merkwürdig was alles zum Zeichen wird und Geschichten ausplaudert, als wäre jeder mit dabei gewesen” (GBA I/ 15: 288). In effect, anything can become a sign and generate stories in an attempt to create realistic presence and meaning in a discourse space marked by the subjunctive. The instability of the “Zeichen” and the absences indicated by the apostrophes demand to be narrated into a story. But social reality - and literary genre - also generate stories, among them stories of female adultery. These are not haunted by the absence of the “et” in the “etwas” but instead have an unrelenting presence of the “Etwas” that forces consequences onto a particular path. When Innstetten unequivocally states in his famous dialogue with Wüllersdorf (see Renz 19—46) that he has no choice but to bring the affair to its predetermined conclusion by challenging Crampas to a duel - “Ich muß.” - , he evokes “ein Etwas” that forces him toward that action only to concretize it moments later as a “tyrannisierendes Gesellschafts-Etwas” (GBA I/ 15: 278). That tyrannical social force is in itself somewhat abstract, ill-defined - it remains an “Etwas; ” yet the impact of this “Etwas” lacks all malleability in meaning and the potential open-endedness of the readability and effects of the “was.” After questioning the necessity of the duel, Wüllersdorf ultimately agrees that there is no other way. “Ich finde es furchtbar, daß Sie recht haben, aber Sie haben recht” (GBA I/ 15: 280; italics in original). Even Effi ultimately echoes this sentiment: “[M]ir [ist] klar geworden, daß er in allem recht gehandelt” (GBA I/ 15: 348). Examples such as these support the evaluation of Fontane - as well as other (male) realist authors - as aesthetically advanced and “modern.” For literary critics, these modern elements become tokens of aesthetic quality; the more Genre, Gender, and Aesthetic Evaluation of Novels of Adultery 139 “modern” aspects, the higher the aesthetic quality. In a recent example of this line of argument, Elisabeth Strowick, in her Gespenster des Realismus (2019), emphasizes the modern dimensions of realist texts as they explore the fundamental constructedness of all knowledge, namely, that all reality is a simulacrum in the Baudrillardian sense (4, 304). Strowick includes only a small number of writers in her study of realist texts and their connection to modernity. All of them are white male authors of the canon. This focus on white male authors for establishing the criteria for literary quality is typical in the field. All authors studied in Christiane Arndt’s book of 2009, or the ones that are the focus of Christian Begemann’s studies are male, to name just two of the most prominent critics. Of Fontane’s books, Strowick especially celebrates Die Poggenpuhls, the novel the writer penned right after completing Effi Briest, because that text is where he becomes “radikal modern” (280). Setting aside the surprisingly teleological undertone of this statement, it is typical for much of academic literary criticism as it celebrates modernist textual strategies as indicators of aesthetic quality. To sum up what has been explored up to this point: Fontane uses the standard model form of the novel of adultery - unimpeded by its troubling participation in the history of misogyny - to reduce the complexities of the text at the plot level in order to gain more freedom to critique notions of a stable realist semiosis and indulge his modernist sensibilities by exploring the status of cognition of reality. This imbues the novel with modernist elements which are referenced in secondary literature in the (positive) evaluation of the text precisely for its modernist qualities. It is important to remember that the criteria for these evaluations are developed on the basis of a rather limited sample of literary texts and that they might need to be adjusted when that sampling is broadened to include other authors such as female writers. In a second move, I want to explore how the criteria for evaluating the quality of a text might be different when taking seriously the potentially different criteria called for in different texts. For that, I will look at a novel of adultery written by a woman and how her strategies differ from those employed by Fontane. By the time she published Unsühnbar (Beyond Atonement; literally translated: Inexpiable [1889]) a few years before Fontane’s Effi Briest, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach had established herself as one of the premier German-language authors. Critics clearly placed Unsühnbar in the tradition of the novel of adultery, literary scholar Rudolf Majut in the 1950’s actually called Ebner-Eschenbach’s novel the “österreichische Effi Briest” (Unsühnbar HK 293). In a sign of how famous Ebner-Eschenbach was at the time, the first American English translation came out only three years after its original publication. The publisher’s description of a new, 1997 translation by Vanessa Van Ornam describes the book thus: 140 Peter C. Pfeiffer Beyond Atonement (Unsühnbar, 1889), loosely based on an actual event in a high-class Austrian family, is a novel about adultery: Maria marries Hermann Dornach, though she is in love with Felix Tessin; two years later, she commits adultery with Tessin, conceiving a child whom she alone knows to be illegitimate; when her husband and their legitimate son die in an accident, she reveals her infidelity. Her unforgiving family and her own remorse set Maria apart from the protagonists of other nineteenth-century novels of adultery such as Goethe’s Elective Affinities and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina� 13 I cite this characterization on the one hand to provide a thumbnail sketch of the plot of the novel and on the other to show how determined critics are to focus on the act of adultery as the centrally important issue. (Arguably, Goethe’s Elective Affinities really is not a novel of adultery since no character physically commits adultery in it. Also, the family in Ebner’s book reacts harshly but is not as unrelentingly cruel as Innstetten or - at first - the parents in Effi Briest.) While Fontane was fascinated not by the adultery but by the possibilities of exploring the multivalences of literary representation and realist semiosis under the cover of a novel of adultery form, Ebner focuses on a moral struggle that has little to do with the act of adultery itself, but rather with the consequences forced onto a woman who wants to stay true to herself. In a letter of March 12, 1889, to her publisher Julius Rodenberg and reproduced in the historical-critical edition by Burkhard Bittrich, she wrote, “[M]ich beschäftigte der Gedanke seit Langem, den heroischen Entschluß einer edlen und allgemein verehrten Frau zu motiviren, die, um der Wahrheit die Ehre zu geben mit einigen Worten ihren makellosen Ruf vernichtete” (HK 235). In other words, Ebner-Eschenbach is interested in exploring the struggle for authenticity in a woman who has been exploited by a suitor and who cannot live with the fact that the resulting offspring is a constant reminder - and here comes the interesting twist - not primarily of the adulterous affair or the male violence she endured, but of the corrosive inauthenticity she is forced into. The fact that the book’s title is not the name of the female protagonist as it is in Anna Karenina, Effi Briest, or Madame Bovary, but instead an adjective that describes a moral proposition, indicates a fundamental shift. This sets Ebner’s novel apart from Tolstoy’s, Fontane’s, and Flaubert’s famous examples - and makes it somewhat similar to Fontane’s Unwiederbringlich. Ebner’s comments to Rodenberg make clear that it is authentic truthfulness that occupies the center of Ebner’s project in the sense that Shakespeare captured in the famous lines that Polonius speaks to Laertes in Hamlet and that Lionel Trilling in his probing lectures on Sincerity and Authenticity from 1969—70 uses as a starting point as he describes central aspects of moral life in modernity: “This above all, to thine own self be true / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then Genre, Gender, and Aesthetic Evaluation of Novels of Adultery 141 be false to any man” (Hamlet 1.3.564—66). 14 While acknowledging that Polonius’ maxims generally “compete with one another in prudence and dullness” and are a sign “of a spirit that is not only senile but small” (3), Trilling sees in these three verses a different quality that shows that Polonius has conceived of sincerity “as an essential condition of virtue” (3). Ebner-Eschenbach’s insistence on sincerity as described in her letter quoted above seems to turn the premise of narratives of adultery - deception - on its head. This observation is supported by the way that Unsühnbar undermines some generic moves, as the main female character Maria does not follow Effi’s lead (or that of Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina, for that matter) by actively encouraging or pursuing the adulterous affair. Maria, instead, is explicitly an unwilling participant. Where the generic expectations would call for the passionate consummation of mutual adulterous desire, Ebner narrates a form of rape that is enabled by a genealogy of adulterous affairs of Maria’s father that make this rape possible. The “Affärenreigen” (Polt-Heinzl 23) of Maria’s father humiliated her mother so deeply that it drove her to hysterical madness and death. One of these affairs resulted in an illegitimate son, who empowers and encourages Maria’s suitor, Tessin, who lies in wait for her in a small pavilion that serves as Maria’s special space for pursuing her artistic and musical interests. This is a space very much like Virginia Woolf’s famous “room of one’s own” necessary for creative women and of the utmost personal importance for Maria. Tessin’s very presence violates Maria on an intimate level, because he occupies such a special and cherished space connected with her artistic aspirations. Maria is surprised and taken aback when she sees Tessin in that room. In a moment of sincere openness, she admits that she was attracted to him in the past. But Tessin abuses this moment and forces himself on her. ”Er zog sie in seine Arme und erstickte mit seinen Küssen den Schrei, den sie ausstieß. / / Sie wollte sich ihm entziehen - sie wollte sich retten - und lag an seiner Brust, unwiderstehlich hingerissen, wie von einer Naturgewalt” (64). This is neither a seduction nor an act of intended wifely adultery. Some readers - like Ebner’s sister Julie and the poet Paul Heyse - were so enwrapped in the pruderies of the time that they were scandalized by Ebner’s choice of genre, which shows just how daring Ebner was in writing this novel. 15 One of the first critics of the book, the eminent literature professor Erich Schmidt, complained that the adulterous moment was “viel mehr ein Gewaltakt als eine Hingebung” (quoted in Tanzer 131). Many years later, Werner Kohlschmidt, in his Literaturgeschichte, was equally taken aback by the scene, as it was, for him, a “Vergewaltigungsversuch” (688) rather than a seduction. Readers also criticized that the psychological motivation for Maria’s adultery was unconvincing - which indeed it is, because it is not an adulterous moment. If read with the 142 Peter C. Pfeiffer genre-expectations of a novel of adultery, Ebner’s text disappoints - and has been criticized as inadequate as a novel of adultery, i.e., an aesthetic failure. 16 However, there were also more perceptive reactions. Among the materials included in the historical-critical edition of Unsühnbar is a letter by Louise von François, another famous woman writer. On December 9, 1889, she wrote to Ebner: Ich habe Unsühnbar heute zu Ende gelesen. Ein, so viel wie mir bekannt, dichterisch noch niemals behandeltes Problem: nicht etwa das der Reue über eine heimliche Schuld, sondern das des intensiven Schmachgefühls über eine unberechtigt behauptete Liebe u. Verehrung, die, wenn unverscherzt, zu höchstem Lebensglück berechtigt hätte. (242) Von François zeros in on the issue that Ebner deals with: how patriarchy’s constant and multi-faceted emotional and physical violence undermines even the potential for a relationship between a man and a woman to be guided by “Wahrheit und Wärme” (Unsühnbar 20), the utopian vision briefly alluded to between Maria and her husband and not fully realized by her at the time. Maria is forced to live a lie by Tessin’s actions (and in a certain way by the genre conventions of the novel of adultery) and thereby undermines what could have been: a utopian relationship of equality between man and woman. It is not necessary to explore Ebner-Eschenbach’s novel in detail to show how the difference in perspectives between Fontane and Ebner leads to a difference in the approach to the form of the novel of adultery. As I indicated above, Fontane uses the form as a scaffold-like framework for exploring his modernist sensibilities and modernist ways of cognition. Ebner, on the other hand, struggles with the inherently misogynistic genre itself, exploring another aspect of modernity, authenticity. 17 The intensity with which Maria pursues this quality, what Woodford calls “female integrity” (166), through elaborate practices of atonement and detailed modelling of all possible consequences of her actions lead to an “eigentümliche[n] Sophistik” (72), laying bare the contortions that a woman has to put herself through and the insurmountable barriers for a woman to reach that goal of being an authentic self. As Charlotte Woodford has shown, “Ebner subverts the agenda of the male-authored realist novel of female adultery,” yet she does not seem to be able to envisage “an alternative path for her sentimental heroine than death” (165). After the initial publication, Ebner made various changes - as she often did - in response to reviewers’ criticism and to accommodate views expressed by family members. 18 These changes may have undermined the “literary integrity” (166) of the text, as Woodford suggests. While the end of the novel may suffer from what Polt-Heinzl called “Kitschverdacht” (26), it can also be read quite differently: as an affirmation of the utopian Genre, Gender, and Aesthetic Evaluation of Novels of Adultery 143 - unreal - project that maintains the possibility of gender equality and mutual respect thereby contributing to the exploration of authenticity and sincerity that also lies at the heart of modern sensibilities and the promise of modernity. Beinahe zugleich mit dem Priester trat Wolfsberg [Maria’s father] in das Sterbezimmer. Die Fenster waren weit geöffnet. Am Himmel schwebte eine finstere Wolke; sie glich einem riesigen Vogel mit weit ausgespreizten Flügeln. Der von ihr verhüllte Mond warf eine Fülle silbernen Lichtes auf eine Stelle am Horizont. Auf dieser ruhten Marias schon gebrochene Augen. Dort, wo es hell war, wo der verklärende Schimmer sich breitete, - lag Dornach. (143) Referencing both the Assumption of Mary (Offenbarung 12; see Woodford 156— 60) and, through the word “verklärende” which is so pregnant with meaning for realist authors, the Transfiguration of Jesus as well as his resurrection, 19 this ending figures Maria’s struggle while also maintaining a vision of equality. Her father and a pater - the two representatives of the old-style patriarchal system - rush in vain to bring help. Maria’s life was shaped by her cold-hearted father who treated his daughter’s intellectual and artistic efforts condescendingly because she was a woman. Maria’s later life was ruined by Tessin’s advances which were aided by the resentment born out of an illegitimate child’s bitterness towards the distant father. She dies with her eyes firmly set on the utopian locale of a marriage that showed the potential for a different path, evoked by the notion of “Verklärung,” because Maria had experienced her husband’s devotion to her as a moment when he was “wie verklärt von tiefster Seligkeit” (20). The struggle will continue; for now, all we see is the ruined potential of a marriage built on equality lit up by the promise of the utopian brightness of transfiguration� In conclusion, the contrastive reading of these two novels of adultery shows the gendered approaches that Fontane and Ebner take to work within this genre. While Fontane uses the clichéd form of the novel of wifely adultery as a scaffold for his modernist experimentation, Ebner-Eschenbach uses it to struggle with the genre’s socially ingrained implications for the place of women in both personal relationships and society, as well as the ethical issues of being an authentic female individual that the genre presents. She explores the social impacts and moral implications of emotional and physical betrayal with less attention to modernist techniques, but with a radical (modern) questioning of the gendered implications of this deeply misogynistic genre. Fontane went on to publish the modernist texts Die Poggenpuhls and Der Stechlin, both of which do not rely on a scaffold of a generic form - and both of which were at first criticized as showing that the old author had lost his creative capacity to give form to his novels, but both of which have more recently gained in critical appreciation pre- 144 Peter C. Pfeiffer cisely because of their modernist characteristics. 20 Effi Briest and Unsühnbar are showcases of how the gendered nature of an aesthetic form can give rise to divergent aesthetic evaluations: Fontane’s novel is canonical; Ebner-Eschenbach’s had almost been forgotten. Thankfully, though, it has recently been reissued to resounding success. Notes 1 On the history of the genre see Overton’s two books (1996 and 2002) as well as Maria R. Rippon’s (2002) narratological comparative analysis of six prominent examples. 2 While some of these novels - like Effi Briest and Unsühnbar - are set in aristocratic circles, the fundamental issues of morality and ethics are largely defined by bourgeois values. The title of Fontane’s novel which leaves out the aristocratic “von” points in that direction. 3 I note this relationality between the institution of marriage and the nation state - and therefore that between the genre of the novel of adultery and nationalism - but I will not explore it here further. 4 Fontane research has a long history of looking at Effi Briest in the context of European novels of adultery, from J.P. Stern’s article from 1957 to more recently Wolfgang Matz’s book of 2015. Usually, Fontane’s novel has been found lacking in comparison with the others. Rippon (136) has a more positive evaluation of Fontane’s novel. Occasionally, Fontane’s and Ebner- Eschenbach’s novels have been compared; see Helen Chambers’ article on the gendered spatial characterizations in Unwiederbringlich and Unsühnbar (258—65). 5 See also Hans Werner Seiffert (255—300). 6 Quoted in Theodor Fontane, HA I/ 4: 710. 7 The German translation is more explicitly titled Marx’ Gespenster (1996). 8 See Pfeiffer 1990 on this textual self-reflexivity of the novel. There is a long research tradition going back at least to Richard Brinkmann’s Wirklichkeit und Illusion (1957) that looks at the “modernity” of realist texts and relates the level of modernity (however defined) to their aesthetic quality (or lack thereof). The textual self-reflexivity of the epistemological status of realist texts has been established at least since Ulf Eisele’s Der Dichter und sein Detektiv: Raabes Stopfkuchen und die Frage des Realismus (1979). Begemann’s somewhat overlapping articles and Strowick’s book are more recent examples. On the end of realism and the ending of Effi Briest see also Berman, especially 362. Genre, Gender, and Aesthetic Evaluation of Novels of Adultery 145 9 This is the case even though one might point to some variations in comparison to Flaubert or Tolstoy whose heroines, in contrast to Effi, die quite violently. However, within the general structure of the plotline, there are always variations as the stories of the novels mentioned at the beginning of this essay can attest. 10 For other examples in Effi Briest, see GBA I/ 15: 153, 265, 284, 347. 11 The ghost of the Chinese servant and other ghostly elements have been staples of the critical literature on Effi Briest and are addressed in almost every article in some fashion. See, for example, Subiotto and Begemann, “Ein Spukhaus.” 12 Unfortunately, these have been edited out in the widely-used Hanser edition of Fontane’s works. 13 https: / / boydellandbrewer.com/ beyond-atonement-hb.html. Web. June 29, 2020 14 Trilling’s quote (3) is slightly different because he must be referring to a different (unreferenced) edition of Shakespeare’s tragedy. 15 See the materials in Unsühnbar 242� 16 See Burkhard Bittrich’s collection and detailed comments on critical responses throughout the publication history of the novel in Unsühnbar 235—96. Koopmann, who acknowledged that Ebner showed a differentiated social awareness in his 1994 essay, savages her aesthetic failings in his 1999 essay on “Schloss-Banalitäten” in which he often misquotes and mischaracterizes Ebner’s texts. 17 I use both sincerity and authenticity to characterize Ebner-Eschenbach’s characters because they seem to exist in a historical moment where sincerity and the more psychologically intense authenticity are equally present. Trilling himself does not clearly define the terms either, preferring to let his examples speak, though sincerity is clearly the older model he uses whereas authenticity the more contemporary. 18 See Bittrich’s detailed listing Unsühnbar 244—248. 19 Luke 9.28-36; Mark 9.2-9; Matt. 17.1-8. Begemann (“Gespenster” 237—38) emphasizes this reference to the Resurrection of Christ as an additional dimension in the meanings of Verklärung� 20 See the overview in Jolles (88—101), especially her comments on Wandrey and Demetz (90; 92). 146 Peter C. Pfeiffer Works Cited Arndt, Christiane. Abschied von der Wirklichkeit: Probleme bei der Darstellung von Realität im deutschsprachigen literarischen Realismus. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2009� Begemann, Christian. “Gespenster des Realismus. Poetologie - Epistemologie - Psychologie in Fontanes Unterm Birnbaum.” Realism and Romanticism in German Literature - Realismus und Romantik in der deutschsprachigen Literatur. Ed. 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