Last Woman Standing
A scientific commentary on The Wall
by Elisabeth Kargl
On June 21, the Apocalyptic Cinema screened the film adaptation of Marlen Haushofer’s novel The Wall, with the aim of questioning the function of stories about loneliness as (post-)apocalyptic narratives. Doomsday scenarios express a desire for radical change and new beginnings, creating spaces for alternative social concepts and identity models, often focusing on the motif of the last wo-/man or a small group of survivors. These narratives enable the reimagining of people without social constraints, raising questions about self-redefinition in extreme situations. In (post-) apocalyptic stories, loneliness serves as a profound examination of self and human nature, a critique of civilisation and allows reflection on social structures and ethical issues. Elisabeth Kargl, an expert on Austrian literature and history, comments on Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, which explores the protagonist’s forced loneliness as a narrative of (eco-)feminist interpretations, questioning social power structures. The novel and its film adaptation mix oppression and idyll, depicting loneliness and catastrophe as both liberation and the basis for a new existence.
The motif of loneliness is present in numerous texts by Austrian author Marlen Haushofer. It is almost always female characters who withdraw, who deliberately choose a secluded life, or who are forced by strange and unexplained catastrophes to find their way in solitude. This is probably the case in her best-known novel Die Wand (The Wall) from 1960, but also in Die Mansarde (The Attic), Eine Handvoll Leben (A Handful of Lives) and Die Tapetentür (The Wallpaper Door). In The Wall, an invisible and yet insurmountable wall suddenly appears one morning, forcing the first-person narrator to live a completely isolated life in the mountains. In The Attic, an equally sudden and unexplained deafness strikes the narrator, who is practically banished by her family to a remote forester’s lodge in the forest. In The Wallpaper Door, a text with clear echoes of Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator is banished by her husband to a room with yellow wallpaper.
Haushofer’s motif of being locked up is often read as a symbol of the gender relations of the patriarchal society of the 1950s and 60s, which the author addresses in almost all of her texts. Sometimes, however, it is also understood as an allegory of melancholy or depression. This motif is quite ambivalent in Haushofer’s work, as confinement and loneliness can also harbour a form of freedom that enables the protagonists to free themselves, at least temporarily, from any social burden. Director Julian Pölsler also takes up this ambivalence in his film Die Wand (The Wall), which is very closely based on Haushofer’s novel.
Disaster
In the novel The Wall, the nameless first-person narrator goes on a trip to the mountains with a couple of friends. While her friends go back to the village in the evening, the narrator stays behind in the forester’s lodge. When she wakes up the next morning, an unspecified catastrophe has struck the mountain landscape (and most probably the whole country). The narrator is suddenly trapped behind a transparent wall: “Puzzled, I stretched out my hand and touched something smooth and cool: a smooth, cool resistance in a place where there could be nothing but air. Hesitantly, I tried again, and once more my hand rested as if on the pane of a window”. In the film, the wall materializes with a particularly unpleasant buzzing sound, but neither the novel nor the film provides any further details about the catastrophe or about this mysterious wall, which is simply suddenly there.
The sudden loneliness of being trapped behind the glass wall in the mountains naturally causes fear at first. The narrator notes in her diary: “Fear creeps up on me from all sides”. The director Julian Pölsler, who also worked with the writer and psychiatrist Paulus Hochgatterer, emphasizes in an interview for “” that the novel paints a picture of depression for him. Marlen Haushofer herself also described the wall as a symbol of a mental state: “But, you know, the wall I’m talking about is actually a mental state that suddenly becomes visible to the outside world”.
Protection
At the same time, however, this wall also takes on a protective function, as the narrator notes: “The only enemy I had known in my life so far had been man.” Even if being trapped is the consequence of a (natural?) catastrophe, this does not necessarily mean complete loneliness. The narrator is surrounded by her animals and the close relationship she builds with them seems incomparably more valuable to her than that with people: “It’s just that it’s much easier to love Bella or the cat than a human”. Haushofer describes humans as violent and selfish, and so in Die Wand the animals also replace the narrator’s family.
Freedom
In Haushofer’s work, being locked up can also symbolize freedom. Behind the wall, the narrator is liberated from her former life: “I can allow myself to write the truth; all those for whose sake I have lied all my life are dead”; “The circumstances of my former life had often forced me to lie; but now every reason and excuse for lying had long since disappeared. I no longer lived among people”. And so she can do as she pleases, which had never been the case before “because someone or something had always been found with deadly certainty to ruin my plans”.
Being locked up does not always mean being trapped, but can also imply a form of freedom. However, this freedom is always relative, because behind the glass wall there is no longer any connection or communication with other people.
Hopelessness
Marlen Haushofer’s narrators do not rebel against their circumstances, but accept them almost without resistance and make themselves as comfortable as possible behind walls. This resignation can be interpreted as a symbol of human life itself: “There could never be any talk of external freedom, but I have also never known a person who was inwardly free”. All attempts to escape are impossible; with Haushofer there is no revolt. In an interview she states: “I wouldn’t know what hope I should see. The very fact of death makes everything we do seem futile”. Even writing against the fear of going mad has something pointless about it: “It’s a strange feeling to write for mice. Sometimes I just have to imagine I’m writing for people, it’s a little easier for me then”. For Haushofer, there is no liberation from the human condition. Only organizing life as well as possible and in harmony with nature and animals allows for happy moments.
Ecofeminism
Haushofer anticipates the Anthropocene age in her texts: “Everything we eat has become inedible. Chickens, pigs and calves taste like swollen flannels. Everything is getting more and more expensive, tastes worse and worse and is bombastically packaged”, she writes in Die Mansarde. In the city, parks and gardens are wasting away, nature only seems to exist behind the wall. And only there, in seclusion and without any contact to the outside world, can a form of female utopia (and not Robinsonade!) be temporarily realized. There, it is no longer a capitalist and patriarchal society that determines the course of events, but only nature, which Haushofer does not idealize, however, but also portrays as cruel. But there the narrator can be herself and is forced to acquire new, much more useful skills. However, she does not imitate Robinson’s attitude of making the land and her companions “her own”. The narrator behind the wall is not a mistress but a protector, a “patient sister” to the animals. At the same time, she also becomes a hunter and, in the end, a murderer in order to protect her animals. Haushofer does not deny violence, but sees it as part of human nature. The narrator is aware of the finality of life behind the glass wall and so even the idyllic moments can only be temporary.
About the Author
Elisabeth Kargl is a lecturer at the German Department of the University of Nantes and programme coordinator of the trinational Master’s programme “Media Culture Analysis” in cooperation with Vienna and Düsseldorf. After studying Comparative Literature, Romance Studies and German Studies in Vienna, Nantes and Paris III Sorbonne-Nouvelle, she obtained her doctorate in Vienna and Paris III on the translation of Elfriede Jelinek’s early plays.
