Katja Kauer

The mystique of a Feminine aesthetic

                            

"Malina" is a work of sharp, unforgettable images and an irresistible narrative. Here is the story of lives painfully intertwined: the narrator, haunted by nightmarish memories of her father (…) Malina brutally lays bare the struggle for love and the limits of discourse between men and women.

                                       New York Times Book Review

 

Malina is a strange book that provoked my interest in what it means to love and live- is love obsession justifiable? Bachmann's stream of consciousness style, the book is really difficult to follow especially in the part "The third man", but once you have the patience to read and think consciously, to be shocked and still know you are…

                                         An unknown female reviewer

 

Obsessively miswritten

 

The novel "Malina" was first published at the time of the awakening 2nd wave feminism. The author Ingeborg Bachmann had already been celebrated as a great lyrical genius and the novel, which was the opener of a triology called "Ways of death" (Todesarten),[1] had been awaited with excitement.

The content of the novel is lacking in plot but strong in its style. The story is written from a first person narrator's perspective. The autobiographical "I" in the novel "Malina" has no name. The female narrator only refers to herself as "I" which expresses that she has never gained the proper name of her subjectivity or identity. We learn that this "I" is living with a male partner in an apartment in Vienna. His name is Malina, which is a surname but sounds like a woman's first name. She works at home and we get to know that this nameless female character seems to be a well-known author. Malina is employed at the "Austrian Army Museum" (Herresmuseum), a representation of the patriarchal and monarchical old European values par excellence. Although the female character is an important and respected public figure, we realize that she is absolutely dependent on Malina. She needs him for every practical occasion in her daily-life. However the central figure for her is not Malina, with whom she seems to live in a kind of symbiosis, but Ivan. She loves and adores this man - who is introduced as an average male character - incredibly. The power of her love is on the one hand so overwhelming, that it takes away all her energy. Ivan means for her the crucial point of her whole existence, but on the other hand her love does not seem enough to affect Ivan. He would see her as an affair but nothing more. He bluntly tells her that he is not willing to fall deeply in love with anyone at all. (He told me.) I am sure, you've figured that out. I don't love anyone. The children, of course, but no one else. I nod, although I hadn't known, and it's obvious to Ivan that it should be so obvious to me (p.33).

There is no communication between Ivan and her because everything that she tries to say is not understood or could not even be imagined by him. He always stays within a frame of objectivity that does not permit her to talk subjectively. She can neither speak her mind, nor she can declare her love. The telephone is the "key" to their communication, and simultaneously a key symbol for this lack of real communication. He often calls her, but she is not allowed to call him and that is why she waits for his calls night and day. For him these calls are kind of orders. "I want you to be here at once, do this or that", but for her these briefly expressed orders mean everything.

During the summer season the protagonist "I" has to stay at her suffocating home while Ivan  is taking a trip to the Mondsee (moon lake). Everything that she has hoped for - to leave the town with Ivan for a holiday - fades away. This seems to be the end of the "love"-relationship, because everything that happens between them afterwards is even more painful for her. She feels her inability to awake Ivan's love or to bind him to her. This story sounds rather banal.

The real action takes place in the narrator's stream of consciousness. The second chapter,

"The third man", deals with her dreams of the father who is in this sense really the representation of the symbolic order, that forces her to get resolved into the male character Malina. In the end the female "I" and Malina become one, but it is obviously a hegemonic assimilation of female subjectivity by the strong male counterpart Malina.   

This novel is a kind of opposite of the German (romantic) Bildungsroman (kind of female emancipative narrative form, in which the female protagonist develops her own subjectivity). In the beginning the female character was at least detectable in the narrative structure. There were aspects of  her love, for instance her description of what it means to make herself up for the lover that depicted a "typical female experience" with a pleasant irony in it. The only remaining excitement is a hasty search for hairpins and stockings, a sight quiver while applying mascara and manipulating eye shadow, using narrow brushes on the lid (…) I run back and forth between the bathroom and the hall (…) because it is afternoon latter (...) It is Ivan and Ivan again and again (p.14). Because of the lack of communication, resulting in a lack of identity, and the central father figure who is constantly haunting her, she is forced to disappear (literally in the wall).

There is no woman here- is one of the last sentences of the novel. At this point the sentence is  spoken by Malina who stays alone in the apartment without the woman at his side. The female narrator "I", the poetess, whose great obsession was to write reality down, has been weeded out by the all in all male voice of Malina. It was murder is the final comment after the "I" has disappeared. 

The novel is a rich philosophical source dealing with problems of time, place and identity. The philosopher Bachmann does not hide her knowledge of the German philosophical heritage but it is nothing the narrator has a real connection to.

Kant's or Wittgenstein's thoughts – these are just letters on a sheet. She looks for an "injection of reality" instead, which can only be done by love and not by knowledge.  

 

The notion of fascism is everywhere. Bachmann herself  tells her readers in the prologue of the "Ways of death" that she wants to explain the relation between the sexes as genuinely fascist. Fascism takes places in every day life and occupies people's minds before it might become a politics of the state. 

The duality between the male perpetrator as a man of power, war and knowledge and the female victim of his gun (= signifier of power) is not as unreflected as one might suspect. She identifies women as agents of their own subordination more than once. My father is beating  Melanie, then, because a large dog begins to bark in warning, he beats his dog who completely submits to this thrashing. In the same way my mother and I also allowed ourselves to be thrashed. I know that the dog is my mother, absolute submission. (p.124)

But this is all the level of the content.

Since it is my aim to speak of a Feminine aesthetic, I will reflect rather on the narrative structure, which is strange, shocking and extremely difficult to decipher, but which is provocative, ironic and obsessive, too.

There is no doubt; Bachmann is the queen of the German Feminine aesthetic discussion. She is (mis)used as an example for all kinds of theories that arise around this issue. 

 

 

 

It is obvious that "Malina" does not offer a positive or emancipative female ideal. Bachmann herself has always characterized the book as an imaginative autobiography[2]. To do so meant that the shortcomings of that strange "I" were extended to the person Bachmann, who was never divided from her writing. "The lyrical genius has faded away in triviality"; which was one of the less harmful reactions. "This is a 'poetical revenge' against her highly gifted former lover Max Frisch from whom she felt let down"[3] was another idea that meant to shed light onto the background of that novel. I am afraid these critics have read too many trivial books otherwise I do not see how one can draw this superficial and cheap conclusion.

In the context of the patriarchal literature critic (see Reich-Ranicki) Bachmann[4] was a strange virus, and for the "new women" who just had raised a new consciousness of womanhood, her obsessive writing was embarrassing[5] (see Gabriele Wohmann). How can an intellectual woman focus all her energy on a "sonny boy" who is too young, too ignorant, too masculine and just a man.

Why does she waste herself on someone like Ivan?

Interestingly enough, even though the book was considered more or less senseless, after Bachmann's tragic death – she accidentally burnt herself – the burning woman in Manila seemed to be anticipation of her fate. Is this irony of literary criticism?  

I don't know.

To rework the first feminist criticism of Bachmann is not necessary[6]. The interesting reflection began in the 1980's. While Bachmann was first seen as a betrayer of an emancipative ideal who wrote from a male perspective, who willingly submitted to a certain gender ideal, later she was re-invented as a foremother of deconstructive feminism. Her writing was an urgent appeal, a struggle against overwhelming patriarchy, and since the French deconstructive method was everywhere in feminists' minds, she was celebrated as the "blind spot", the "feminine desire" as such and the "revolutionary of poetic language". 

 

 

 

We have to be aware that somebody else is something else than we read in (her) (…) or more than this, to read in (her) that (she) is properly someone else, that perhaps (she) is absolutely someone else than what we have read in (her).

Every being is a silent scream to be read differently.

                                                        Ingeborg Bachmann on Simone Weil 

 

There were three different lines of feminist critics who began to acknowledge Bachmann.

One went in an autobiographical direction (done mainly by male interpreters)[7], the others were more concerned with her subjectivity and her obsession to speak,[8] (Gudrun Kohn-Wächter). A discussion of fascism as expressed by the threatening father figure that appears as the threatening symbol[9] also began with Bachmann (Eva Kloch-Klenske). 

What is striking about the language is the use of absolute metaphors, the resting in paradoxes and the inadequacy of vocabulary in the speech of dialogues.

Since this book deals with fascism in a metaphorical sense as the hegemonic relation between the sexes but also in a very concrete sense, because she refers in passing to her childhood experience during the fascist dictatorship, it is not surprising that the interpreters found in her paradoxical way of speech the expression of captivity. In the chapter "The third man" Bachmann compares the abused daughters with the Jews in the gas chambers.

The chamber is large and dark. (…) My father has imprisoned me (…) and before I can scream I am already inhaling the gas. More and more gas, that‘s what it is, the biggest gas chamber in the world, and I am in it alone. There is no defence against gas. (…) Here is no defence. (Malina p. 114)[10]

 

Her prison is her language; the female writer is condemned to use a language that denies her, rejects her, subjugates her but still she has no alternative apart from being silent. The concept of female writing was identified as the inability to speak in front of the (male) audience. Such interpretations were very concrete. The overwhelming male persons (mainly artists by themselves) in Bachmann's life have abused her to a certain extent and hindered her talent. With "Malina", Bachmann passed sentence on this exploitation and the whole literary market because they had disrupted her creativity. This is of course not very subtle to take the men (Ivan and Malina) as the natural descriptions of men around us or around her instead of viewing them as metaphors for a practice that stands behind "the reality" we can actively observe. Is her writing a special attempt at authenticity? How can we call this, which may be found behind? What is this "behind the scene"? It is commented to the paradoxical ending. The female first person narrator vanishes when her voice gets cut down by a man. Her voice is supplanted by a man's. This man is Malina, who takes her position and has always been a part of her (every person has both male and female dispositions) but proved to be the stronger one.

Bachmann was not willing to call herself a "Dichterin" or "Schriftstellerin"[11]. It is not conventional that she was always using the male form of grammar instead of the female one. That could not be accidental all the time. But actually it is not surprising that she rejected the female suffix.

To write meant for her to see from a male perspective. A woman cannot win the struggle with the language. It's always war. Here there is always violence. Here there is always struggle. (p. 155) I'm speechless. I cannot longer cry out. (p. 148)

Christa Wolf, another very important female author of the same generation, has interpreted Bachmann's "Manila" in the mid 80's. She – who is herself an artist – identified the nameless "I" as Bachmann, not as the real person, but as a personification of Bachmann's own female experience. The novel "Malina" is an expression of failure for Wolf. Not a failure in terms of talent but a failure to produce a stringent novel out of female experience[12]. Bachmann's  literary writing formulates what the common language declines to express. This expression is necessarily inadequate and wrong according to the standards, which it betrays. It is the logical consequence that the narrator will not find an identity. Even if this work can be judged as a political articulation of the person Bachmann, we must not misunderstand the way in which  this works. What she is doing foremost is placing a description of social practice rather than making an active confession of criticism.

Although the name deconstruction was not yet used in this stage of interpretation, what many critics were saying, reminds me of the very idea of deconstruction whether it is a feminist method or the clue in literary criticism in general. Feminist critics emphasized that Bachmann estranges female reality by describing it. The female location in patriarchy is absurd. Order is the same as murder.[13]

To get rid of this order one needs to build up a paradoxical anti-order. The artistic device of a Feminine aesthetic is to confuse order and to shift the truth.

It is less an artistic device than a necessity. The use of metaphors has to be absolute. He cannot understand what she is trying to say. Men and women cannot converge. The dialogic structure of questioning and answering is not upheld by the female voice. Her answers are themselves monologues  that undermine the conditions of the male questions with unconsciously evasive answers. The structure of communication just does not work. Even if she tries to react to the male needs, her reactions are in themselves a contradiction. She contradicts through her answers not just the male questions but the whole method of answering.

This artistic method is more than desconstruction. Writing is the strategic to survive and conquer some space for expressive freedom. These unclear, hardly intelligible statements and contradictions are so enormous that it seems impossible to solve them through a logical argumentation. They appear to be mysterious but they rather make obvious the problem of writing as a female narrator.[14]

 

Even more than by the sophisticated issue of communication, which was often enough commented with Wittgenstein's "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world", the critics were fascinated by the 2nd chapter "The third man", which deals almost exclusively  with her dreams of the father.

Somehow it seemed as if Bachmann had planned to inspire the new feminist interpretation.  Had she read Kristeva's philosophy before it was written? If Bachmann can foresee her death she might also foresee the advent of new feminist theories.

Nobody would dare to suspect this although the mysterious Bachmann could be assimilated even to such a theory. 

The semiotic principle vs. the symbiotic one was definitely not theoretically in Bachmann's mind. Her writing traced it in practice rather than propounding it as theory.

The law of the father forbids the daughter to speak. Art in her sense then is not good at all if it does not function as an accusation. But this accusation appeals to another law, it is made in another grammar of language and in another order of content. The daughter whom one can read as the personification of femininity has no place. Femininity has no place. Whenever the "I" wants to build up an identity whether it is through writing or through loving, the third man, the father, forbids her to do so. It is a double murder of femininity. He commits two crimes against her. Not just that her femininity has already been shaped by patriarchal ideology, but even within this stereotyped picture, a woman cannot survive the order of which she is an effect only. The woman was taught a different language, a different play of love. Her language is not heard, her love is not wanted. She as a person is not wanted. In her nightmares all her attempts to produce something are cut off by this overwhelming man who is called "father". My father has taken me to prison, but I would like a sheet of paper, something to write (...) it's no use you are not allowed to write to your father (p.150).

 

 

These nightmares are understandable as metaphors and symbols but these only emotively connected nightmares also make up the plot. Her savoir Ivan is not available. Her femininity has an a priori utopia inside which is one of love. This utopia is expressed by the "Karagan legend" in the novel, the "I's" daydream. This "Kargan legend" consists of passages written in italics which are arranged to disturb the bitter flow of the novel. Before there was this order there had been a stage of love and this is the scent of an old, forgotten time that she smells whenever she thinks of Ivan. But the gas in which she will be choked is stronger. Femininity is both a prison and a death sentence.

Fascist ideology defines and detaches people as harmfully as patriarchy does.

In the end the definers murder the defined humans. Their subjection has been a way of death. They cannot defend themselves, because this ability had already been ripped out of their identity. The "I" is telling the nightmare of femininity in a patriarchal world. 

The headline "The third man" reminds us of Graham Greens[15] "The Third Man" who does not exist as the great stranger, but who is already known, already part of society. He is neither the real father nor is he only a ghost of father. He is in Malina, in Ivan and most of all in herself. He is real within his irrealiy. 

Are there more words to add?

Yes, of course, there is a large body of theory to add. It may prove the interpretations with their highly developed philosophical potential. At least, after the mid 80's, every feminist critic of Bachmann, whose number is legions, began to add a chapter introducing Irigaray, Cixous or Kristeva or all of them. The more or rather less "light" commentaries were framed by psychoanalytical theory, that actually did not help to make it much more understandable.

I cannot do this here. First, because these theories are not my academic background, they are somehow out of fashion and they are becoming a taboo, I am not really in agreement with them, secondly because I just do not think it to be necessary at all. Nevertheless, I will follow some argumentative lines bought up by researchers who were mainly influenced by the French deconstructive front.

What most of these interpretations are saying does not sound like a violation or assimilation of  "Malina" to me. Obviously, the novel offers many footholds to those who would read in a deconstructive way and construct a Feminine aesthetic on these readings.

However, the conditions of such an interpretation rest deeply in a duality of gender ideals, which gynocentrically identified one style of writing as female and the other one as male.

 

A very famous feminist literary critic, Sigrid Weigel, who is both an important academic figure and an admirer of Bachmann, wrote an often cited essay on the topic of Feminine aesthetics in the mid 80's. The essay called "The squinting gaze" (Der schielende Blick)[16],  was published in a small essay collection with the significant title "The Hidden Woman" (Die verborgene Frau).

Weigel both, refers to the French deconstructivists and criticises their concept of femininity as well.

In the last chapter she deals with Bachmann's "Malina". Her concept of Feminine aesthetics was – as I  see it – one of the most influential in the academic sphere.

Weigel sees femininity as something which is only male defined and cannot be satisfyingly fulfilled by any woman at all. (We do not need Weigel's theory to know that.) For her the strict division between the feminine image (Frauenbild) and the real woman (Frauenleben) is the most important one. A woman who writes betrays her picture to a certain extent even if she keeps on describing the female characters in her writing according to the idealistic assumptions made by patriarchy. A woman has to use the aesthetic norms that are male although she herself is only an object of these norms. These norms produce the feminine images of women that degrade the real woman, but still this degraded woman is always a (passive) part of this degrading practice. She obviously can never rule the norms but is ruled by them. The German translation of rule="beherrschen" lays bare that a woman can never be the subject of this complement because it is etymologically deeply connected with the word "Herr"= master who is definitely male. Her part is the status of the other –  how well we know this all – the subjugated other, of course. The struggle towards female authencity is a struggle for something, which does not yet exist.

Referring to Elaine Showalter, she says that women as empirical subjects have to traverse three stages to bear this authenticy. First their writing will rest in the "imagined" women and it is feminine - perhaps with the negative connotation the term "Frauenliteratur" has within andocentric criticism. Secondly, their women's writing will become a protest against these feminine images that do not fit an intellectual woman at all, but that do not yet have a healthy anti-concept. Showalter calls this practice feminist. Last but not least, a female writing, released from limiting patriarchal images will make its way into literature.

According to this definition "Malina" is rather a feminist novel – because there is much struggle and protest in it – than a feminine one. Even if the "I" is defined by and really portrays femininity according to patriarchal scales, the "I" struggles against these scales. This is expressed by irony or literary images: A dress that is too small, a nightmare she tries to awaken from. Comparisons like this are literally suggested in the novel to explain what the woman is suffering from. 

The concept of the "The squinting gaze" is an idea which goes back to Elisabeth Lenk's famous preceding image "The woman in the mirror"[17] which was a proto-poststructuralist feminist theory. Lenk's essay about this image is called "The woman is doubling herself". The writing or even every woman looks for her identity and tries to reflect on herself to find out who she is. By looking at the mirror she understands that what she believed herself  to be is an image. This image might be very beautiful or very ugly - a saint or a whore -  yet she, the searching woman, realizes that what she looks like, is not her.

The discourse about femininity needs to be traversed as well as her "so called" identity.

The German term "verrückt" (mad, crazy, insane) symbolizes a process, whereby someone  literally leaves the place of normalized status. Usually, this is done to objects when they are moved from one place to the other. If it is done by human beings to themselves, it has a terrifying impetus. A woman who realizes that she was merely a reflection of patriarchal ideals, goes mad. She leaves the place of normalized identity because she has to question her existence. Gazing into the mirror gives her a double image (the doubled women in herself). This shocking experience forces her to begin to reflect on other feminine subjects instead of measuring herself by male standards. A search inside the female community for the mysteries of femininity must begin. It is not explicitly written, but Lenk believes in a sisterhood between women that may resist and destroy the male power of defining.

 

Weigel's concept uses another metaphor than Lenk does. Instead of gaze into the mirror, a woman looks through the patriarchal glasses she has on her eyes.

She is created in this way of seeing, but gets lost in it as well. A woman necessarily has the patriarchal glasses on her eyes, because there are no other ways of seeing. She sees, judges and perceives things with the ("non-")help of them.

Even if she were to look down at herself, she would have to use these glasses. The glasses are the language in which she articulates herself, the reason she needs to draw conclusions and all the other abilities that divide humans from animals.

But the paradox status of a woman in patriarchy as both subject and object allows her to squint, with one eye she sees through the glasses but with the other eye she dares to sneak a look at another reality. To glimpse with one eye and to see things, which are blurry through the glasses, but clear without them, makes her leave the normal place she is used to.

Similar to Lenk's concept, this gives a positive definition of the negative symptom hysteria – as an understanding of female madness. Weigel sees illness such as anorexia as the revelation of such a squint. The disorder in women destroys their acquired images when it comes to terms of consequently living them. The woman dies into the image. As the ideal of virginity fades as soon as it would be possessed by a man, all patriarchal ideals can be understood as something that cannot be touched by men. Thus no "real" woman can outlive such an ideal. This knowledge is such a forbidden sight and is the first step towards liberation, too.

 

Weigel's critique of the French deconstructivists is, that they had addressed their theories to femininity. Femininity was something hidden and abused, but also a utopia for both sexes to discover if people would search inside the patriarchal discourses and direct their interest to an anti-order. She argues against this viewpoint. There is not a lack of femininity in our social order, femininity is not hidden under the ashes of patriarchal knowledge. We miss the empirical subjects women, who were burnt in the name of femininity. We have to address our interest to the real woman and find her. To figure out her place is a harsh demystification of femininity at first, instead of a revaluation/ re-evaluation, but afterwards it will come to a happy ending.

Feminists' critics in the 80's probably saw all creative women necessarily in a stage – that is  a speech of inexistence. What a writing woman carries out is a rebellion that says I am not here, yet, but I will be here soon. The female utopia is to conquer reality.

Her concept of Feminine aesthetic is an appeal for the inexistence of women. Femininity in writing is the shift between the female body and its embodiment in the text. With regard to Bachmann's novel it is obvious in this reading that the "feminine I" will not survive.

This feminine death is positively speaking in the name of women rather than in the name of femininity, yet the concept of a "Feminine aesthetic" is more or less the same deconstructive method as pointed out in Cixous' "The circulating desire". Both theories rest in biology, even if one is rather interpreted as inherently sexist by critics, whereas Weigel herself more or less consciously argues against losing sight of woman as political subjects. There is the idea that something comes through - becomes true - even if it was buried away. This other reality, which is female, will celebrate its revelation in the text.

What divides Weigel's Bachmann interpretation from most of the others, whether they argued with the deconstructive method or not, is that she sees the "I's" death in the novel and Malina's victory not as something negative, but just normal. The method of writing the "I's literal death" down might be negative and harmful, but the achievement is a positive step towards the real female body.

The destruction of the feminine "I" is the deconstruction of patriarchal values, which gives implicit birth to a female writing. Deconstruction of femininity means not deconstruction of the discourse: it happens instead inside the real body of the woman, which means consequently her death.

The "Karagan legend" (the fairy tale about the matriarchal princess who was saved by the beautiful prince in ancient times) is judged as a glimpse of a utopia, how things could be if they were not still hidden under terrifying illusions. What is happening to the woman is a loss but also a win. She is stripping her femininity, which is an attempt to resolve her illusion and gain something like authenticy in a male-defined world. Malina is a shield against limiting feminine illusions and Bachmann's male author-position is not a defeat because this consequent death gives hope that things might change after authors like Bachmann have given  their insight to many other women.

I will quote Weigel's last sentence although I think we share the same problem and mistake the adored poetess as someone we like to see in her.

Bachmann could not yet articulate feminist ideas because an audience suspectable to such themes has only developed since her death. (…) She herself has smuggled ideas which anticipate recent feminist theories into moments of her work (…). She was a secret feminist like many of us, too.[18]

 

Nice, but I am sure she was not. I do not think the comparison with a smuggler fits the honest woman and being a secret feminist sounds to me like being a living dead person. I know   researchers in the 80's liked paradoxes.

I will leave these paradoxical claims about Bachmann and turn to Sara Lennox,[19] who was only slightly refering to the French decontructivits and wrote a feminist interpretation of Bachmann's "Malina" in English language. She very thoughtfully describes and expresses her thought that Bachmann's "Manila" was a poststructuralist critique of phallologocentricity. The fate of every woman writer is that she has to become a genderless (that is to say male liberal bourgeois) subject suppressing her female qualities[20]. Malina in the novel is such a persona. Malina produces reality whereas the "I" disorders and troubles it until she is killed and buried at the crematory of the dead daughters. What Lennox sees as important to mention and what I see as an advantage of that interpretation, which not many shared at the time, is that the duality between symbolic order and feminine disorder does not entail a demonization of men as somehow necessarily incompatible with the female. As it is the burden of deconstruction to show, male subjectivity is not altogether unproblematic or identical with it either.[21]  

The omnipotent father who murders the "I" is male/masculine, but not a man, as for Weigel the murdered "I" is feminine, but not a woman.

All the stories which are not included in the formal content because the "I" is not permitted to tell – Malina forbids her to do so – they appear in the dreams, for instance the dreams of her destruction, of her near annihilation by a prehistory brought about by the powerful father figure, about whom we discover that this father is the murderer, and more precisely, the murderer whom we all have within us.

This is patriarchal, an Oedipal tragedy, which strikes all of us.

Under threat of the most horrible punishment, the deprival of our sexuality, we submit ourselves to the Law of the father which spells death to an independent desire expressing itself outside socially prescribed channels.[22] This forbidden desire is more or less Cixous' desire that finds its way through speech, and Irigariy's femininity that is a utopia of fluidity and instability. A desire can only exist and have power as long as it is not brought to terms that try to define and fix it. It has to be a promise, a disruptive promise as I understand the theories, which cannot be fulfilled in the sharp patterns of our social order at all.

Although Lennox is careful not to mix the male order and men, she mostly defines women as paradoxical effects of this order, positively interpreting the mis–writing of the female narrator in "Malina" as a survival of femininity within the patriarchal order. Perhaps from within the cemetery of the murdered daughters men's knowledge can be turned against them.[23] Bachmann is neither the "I" (the dead) nor Malina (the male). She invented a language to write the story without language. This is Lennox's belief.

Lennox doesn't want us to take the "I's" death as the literal death of femininity that gets its "feminist" revenge. Her arguments are almost exactly the opposite of Weigel's thoughts.

 

In 1989 Margaret Bruegmann[24] published an essay in the "German bible for Feminist literary critics" with the title "Femininity plays with the language" (Weiblichkeit im Spiel mit der Sprache). She summarizes the writings of the Écriture féminine (something which became very updated later on) and says that Germans hesitated to reflect on the influence of French deconstructivists. She speaks of two extremes. Whereas one group of researchers only paraphrases the French concepts (or imitates them without naming the source of their imitation), the other group simply rejects these ideas without having understood their content. 

It might be true that the variety of concepts of the Écriture féminine had not reached the former Federal Republic of Germany to the extent that it may have influenced academics in the US. In passing, I might add that there was no serious reaction in the former East Germany to this concept until the wall fell down.

In regard to reflection on Bachmann it is rather fair to speak of a Feminine Écriture féminine hype that has lasted until the end of the 90's.

Interesting for me is that Bruegmann pleads for Irigary's concept of the "sex which is not one" not as a better psychoanalytic explanation than the Freudian one, but as a parody of all the former theories which ignorantly focused  "the male signifier" as something absolute.

 

There are of course interpretations that link Bachmann's writing with Irigary's concept of femininity. Although Bachmann's irony in "Malina" can hardly be missed, no one thought that it could be a form of parody. This surprises me because it was one of the first impressions I had even if I did not have in mind the concept of the Écriture féminine as a parody of the so-called universal aesthetic. I will spell out my insistence on parody later.

Viewing the theories of the 80's, we find an idea of a Feminine aesthetic elaborated upon Bachmann's text, which is no longer the former emancipative concept but the deconstructive principle. It was a (con-)fusion of deconstructive concepts and occasionally changed the name in which it was speaking: femininity, woman or de-gendered language. Those - sometimes "very French" - ideas were preserved in thoughts until now. 

 

With the beginning of the 90's[25] it seemed too boring to claim the sufferings of femininity and interpretation became even more careful to distinguish the symbolic order from actual men. The author-position in "Malina", which is a male one, results not from Bachmann's personal sufferings but from a law. This law is gender-politics that does not deny femininity, but re-produces it in a very limited way.

To avoid biologicistic assumptions, psychoanalytical discourse, usually with the help of Kristeva (without the label feminist) was chosen to explain why Bachmann wrote the overture of the novel cycle "Ways of death" in which the female position is taken by the male.

One of those interpretations that question the psychosocial position of the author works with the terms "male" and "female" within the concept of gender, which is then "masculine" and "feminine". It does not rest in biology any longer, and is significantly titled Outstanding, awkward, upside- down feminine[26]. What makes an author position a male one is mainly the socially inscribed assumption that favours one sex as being the productive one. Still Elke Brüns, who deals with Bachmann's author-position in an entire book, looks at Bachmann's love affairs – as we know it from former interpretations – to explain what made it so hard for her to write down female experience. Her first lover Hans Weigel – like "all the others" also an artist, older than her – introduced the young student to the literary scene in Vienna. He is seen as a key figure for Bachmann's division. The gifted and female person Bachmann was divided into the object woman and the subject poet. In her relationships with men she was used to being an object of desire and literary description. Brüns gives examples that Bachmann had served as a role model for the female protagonists in Weigel's and also in Frisch's writing[27]. What happens if she has to be that observing and recording man by herself? 

Just as I do not think Frisch is an important answer to the riddles of "Malina" as a revenge figure, so I do not see Weigel as the answer, either. Even if he was her "first man", that does not mean he is the key to Bachmann's writing. Nevertheless, it is interesting for me to have a look at Bachmann's autobiographical background, because her life with men tells us something about the model of heterosexual love, she was more than once trapped in. Her criticism of such a love stands beyond men whether they were real in her life or just a discursive figure she directed her fears to. The prison of such a love model is the target of "Malina" for me. I will come back to this later.

 

Let's go back to Brüns' arguments. She claims that the female author has to become schizophrenic, if she wants to write about female experience.

It is not only that she – the author – treats herself, the described person, like an object just as the men did with whom Bachmann had lived. She does the same to herself that  happened to her when the men wrote about their lover Ingeborg. It is the contradiction of two conflicting gender-positions. To live as a female means to be socialised according to standards of female subjectivity to be a beautiful and a strange object men can look at but to write means to be socialised according to the opposing standards of objectivity. The writing "I" has to be male, because the enlightened discourse dictated that productivity has to be in male hands. To achieve status like the male author – even if it may sound paradoxical – is the condition that makes it possible for her to write about female experiences. What is obvious in Bachmann's aesthetic is that she knew about this paradox. For me, it is one of my oldest and most hidden memories, that I always knew I have to write this book. - (...)

That I was always searching for a narrator. That I always knew (s)he will be male. That I would only be able to narrate from a male author position. But I have often asked myself why? I did not understand, even in the short narratives I always had to take the male position, which is the only position I can narrate from. (…).[28] Quoted by Brüns.  

 

When Brüns argues from the premises of the psychoanalysis what it means to write and what order we are in, her ideas enter slightly into myths about the nature of women.

But what is important to keep up in mind in the discussion of Feminine aesthetics is that from now on we have to be aware of facing two different gender ideals as the primary conflict a writing woman is exposed to. 

In 1960 Bachmann herself lectured about the writing "I", and this lecture fits very well into this interpretation of a conflicting author position. In these early days she had already arrived at the claim that the author is  more or less a fiction and that this fiction has already taken the place of the writing person before (s)he may have thought to take the pencil in her/his hands. I call her viewpoint proto-poststructuralist. Bachmann gives us a hint when she says that the "I" in a novel is a dreamt, very fictional identity. This "I" is only a chiffre, an objectivity tries to decipher it. All experts take possession of their "I"; they bring light into it, touch it, distort it, break it, evaluate it, separate it and draw a circle around it.[29] 

She goes on to argue  that the drawing and the drawn "I" are never the same. The border between them is the necessary change of roles.[30] You have to play a different role according to whether you are an object or an objectivist.

And what do we call this change of roles? As researchers, we describe this process with the same term in whose name the discussion about the Feminine aesthetic was launched: that is the complicated term "gender".

But when one spoke about the conflict of female writing, the conflict to change roles, even in the 90's, the core concept of Feminine aesthetic was still bound to sex, the sex of the author.  The Feminine aesthetic expresses a conflict between the person who is female (the writer) and what is written down as feminine (the text). The female human feels alienated when she has to write down all the inscriptions that define her, but that she is not.

She has to leave her femininity behind for the sake of her writing, but through her writing she may become aware of  what "her femininity" actually was and is. She is forced to be de-gendered in order to realize which gender defines or controls her. Her gender is communicated through her writing, as another norm and form of identity she once had. What gender is, what her gender was, is told her by writing.

The representation of both the woman and the female author, who is naturally the heritage of   our civilisation and also not belonging to it, describes the inner gap, in which the signified subject "woman" can never fully be comprehended within the social construct of female gender: women continue to become women (...) although we know we are not that.[31]

By quoting this I understand the psychosocial – position of the author according to our gender dichotomy as a betrayal of that very system. The female author is cheating on her femininity. She is a destabilizing factor.

Gender studies of "Malina" should now be extended to this destabilization of gender ideals. 

 

The German discussion of gender had and still has to face two problems. The first one is that gender as a structural and interdisciplinary category of textual criticism arrived very late in the German academic sphere. Not until the mid of the 90's did critical voices begin to broach the question of gender and its components, instead of asking about sex and its unfavourable effects. "Woman" became the target of criticism and was now referred to as “feminine gender” in the text. The enormous shift between German and American gender discussions is mainly expressed in the practical usage of this term. In Germany "gender" is now theoretically up to date, but no one seems to be comfortable with it. Since the American philosopher Judith Butler has become such a super-star, what is known about gender is almost always connected with Butler's "Gender trouble". I, as a student, was introduced to the field of gender by the highly complicated writings of Butler. This means that it was forgotten that Butler's notion of gender stepped beyond what classical Gender studies would look for. Maybe theoretically it is known that the search for gender in texts need not necessarily  follow Butler's strict anti-essentialist viewpoint. Yet, this theoretical knowing is not expressed in the practice of literary critics.

Many do reject Gender studies as going too far beyond what they believed to be true. But this is not surprising since the step from feminist research to the classical form of Gender studies was not made and now people feel overwhelmed when they hear "no doer behind the deed proclamations", because they have just learned that there was a patriarchal doer. I cannot solve the problem here, although it is one.

The practical refusal of Gender studies can be an answer to the question, why did critics not reflect on the construction of gender that is portrayed in Bachmann's novel. I would like to introduce one interpretation by Christine Kanz[32] that is concerned with gender clichés although I would say it is not really Gender studies in a pure sense that she undertakes with Bachmann's text. Nevertheless, she seriously reflects one cliché brought up in "Malina", which is socially and culturally connected to the feminine gender. This stereotype is that of anxiety. Kanz uses the German expression "Ängstlichkeit", which covers a range of stereotypes of weakness such as to not be self-confident, to be helpless, ill, - or, to paraphrase it without any elegance, it means to be a scaredy-cat.

The advantage of the interpretation is that it makes obvious how from within the text masculine and feminine inscription are produced. The author is no longer only submitting to these sexist clichés, but is willingly and consciously establishing feminine stereotypes like the cliché of anxiety.

What makes Malina and Ivan male and the "I "female?

Is her femininity her non-existence, her loss of proper names?

Kanz always remains pretty much within the frame of the anxiety cliché. For her it is the most functional one, because woman's fear is the strongest stereotype brought up in Bachmann's literature. 

Kanz  not only argues with the help of category gender, she also gets to very feminist questions about the nature of anxiety like the question: where does such an anxiety come from? Is it the narrow social sphere that presses women into such a complicated state of nerves? Kanz  also emphasises that the female/feminine anxiety is more than an inner feature of the woman, it is rather the case that anxiety is bodily inscribed. To some extent a body/soul dualism is left behind in Bachmann's writing, since the "I" carries her soul on her back. Her body is in a Foucauldian sense imprisoned by that feminine soul. 

The "I" is trembling, tossing and turning, suffering from nightmares and so on. You read her fears in her face, which is commented by Ivan: I can often see it in your face. You look old then. Sometimes you look really old. (p. 64) To reflect upon anxiety in this way also brings typical answers to the question of Feminine aesthetics.

The female body is the medium for a secret that the male letters refuse to transmit.

Bachmann inscribes femininity into the body, which is then the clue to produce her own feminine form of art. In this sense, similar to Lenk's and Weigel's concepts, the weakness of the female subject, her de-stabilized anti-social status, is a sign of the author's superior understanding of oppression. Oppression not only produces fears, it produces bodies. 

When in 1973 Reich-Ranicki, the pope of  German literature, ridiculed Bachmann's writing by saying that her female protagonists are pitiable, unhappy, eccentric "girls" who need a psychiatrist, he on his part could feel no regret for them because the characters are unbelievable, they roam shyly, unworldly, sensitively and helplessly. They cry very often, suffer from fainting and anxiety, let burning cigarettes fall down everywhere, collide with panes of glass and lose the ground under their feet.[33] This is a description Kanz would agree with, but of course not with the conclusion he draws, which is to see Bachmann's writing as a failure.

He both understood and misunderstood. He sees there is something wrong with the women, they do not characterise a normal woman at all, but he failed to see it as the strength of Feminine aesthetics to dismantle female sufferings that are socially established by documenting such a femininity in the text. 

Bachmann's aesthetic not only breaks away from the laws of language, but celebrates a typical cliché.

I do not believe this interpretation helps to solve the problem of Feminine aesthetics and the aim to demystify the author's sex is also not fulfilled. Even if gender is only a construction, does this necessarily mean that we have to forget the idea a woman has a special capacity in dealing with this gender? Is there still a female authencity behind this construction of gender? Is Bachmann able to show this authencity as it shines through bodies?

Although Kanz is quite careful to keep away from sexist assumptions, her answer to the mystery of the Feminine aesthetic seems to be contradictory. One the one hand her arguments stay inside of our sex-gender system. Kanz puts the stress on Bachmann's description of the sex-gender system as a very fascist one. This means there is a strict hegemony of maleness. The female part in our patriarchal civilisation is that of an anxious being. Women's anxieties are real because they result from a struggle she is always losing. A woman is trapped in a role,  which is a model of fear. In a poststructuralist manner, Kanz argues that Bachmann knows that the "realness of anxiety" is actually something which has to be performed in the text. It would not be there, if Bachmann did not write it down. To write it down is for Bachmann  making use of  bodies both to embody it more authentically and to dismantle body-signs of fear (femininity) as an effect. The authenticity of the female fear read in female bodies is performed by the female author. Bachmann is able to show the production of female bodies. This statement is emphasised by a quote from the text which was often cited before (by earlier interpreters) as Bachmann's rebellion against beauty stereotypes.

For an hour I can live without time and space, deeply satisfied, carried off into a legend, where the aroma of a soap, the prickle of facial tonic, the rustle of lingerie, the dipping of brushes into pots of powder, the thoughtful stroke of an eyeliner are the only reality. The result is a composition, a woman to be created for a dress. In complete secrecy designs for a female are redrawn, it is like a genesis, with an aura for no one in  particular. The hair must be brushed twenty times, feet anointed and toenails painted, hair removed from the legs and armpits, the shower turned on and off, a cloud of powder floats in the bathroom, the mirror is studied, it's always Sunday, the mirror, mirror on the wall is consulted, it might be already Sunday. (p. 86)

This sounds very much like a passage which a Feminist criticism inspired by Foucault would use as an argument for the construction of female bodies in the grip of institutionalised body politics. The beauty of a woman is as much a patriarchal construction as her fear and submissive behaviour.  In the beginning Kanz argues this way and her arguments do not make us believe that Kanz is insisting on a feminine speciality of writing.

But on the other hand I think that at the very end of her interpretation Kanz steps back behind her own premises. She believes there is more in the text than the discovery of female body as a product of cultural practices that shape and manipulate it. From her point of view Bachmann struggles in the text with male hegemony, she wants to claim the authenticity of her female suffering when she makes the female protagonists perform their suffering. Anxiety in the text is a signal for the "real". As said above, Kanz admits that the realness of anxiety in the text is something staged, but there is something behind that textual staging, too, that forces the female author to describe femininity in this way. No longer this socially inscribed anxiety is the weakness of those women whom Bachmann describes, but it is rather a strength of women's writing to trouble the sex-gender system and to finally step out of it. Bachmann's writing makes it possible to become aware that the naturalness of the female anxiety is consciously staged. This can help to liquefy ("verflüssigen"), to move ("verschieben") and shift ("verrücken" term with the connotation of madness) the fixed, traditional gender-stereotypes[34].

And this dictum sounds pretty much like a search for another femininity which is not fixed and defined by patriarchy. Or does it not remind you of the Écriture féminine?

 

As briefly as I handled them, Kanz's arguments are not adequately explored.

I  will use Kanz’s idea of gender performance in the text for my own interpretation. I acknowledge the novelty of Kanz’s emphasis that Bachmann made her female character perform something, which is the feminine gender role. But the problem of a Feminine aesthetic still strikes me. How is it with the author herself? Does she not perform femininity herself? Is she the knowing, external person who only describes? Can we forget the thought that behind the "I's" exaggerated performance of anxiety there is nothing that we would call female/feminine?

Does Bachmann insist on such a hidden perspective, on a behind the scenes dimension, or does she not? 

Whether we can hope for a pre-discursive body is a question of belief, we can take to that notion or leave it.

But since this pre-discursive figure of female authenticity has had such a great impact on the notion of a Feminine aesthetic, it is worth more than a cynical comment.

The main concepts in the 90's have actually left this focusing on bodies or defining a feminine speech behind. They mainly argue like Kanz and Morrien[35]. Morrien is another author who linked the psycho-sexual author position even closer to biologic dispositions. They concluded from Bachmann’s writing a complicated relationship between let’s say the female author, who signifies persons as female and the persons who are signified, but finally they came back to a similar pre-discursive figure. This complicated relationship is not only described by the absence of representation that is common to almost every signifying process, it is interpreted as a rebellion against patriarchal signifiers which do not address femininity. And this conclusion is drawn on the fictional ground of something like a real representation of femaleness that presupposes a real femininity.

For me – and this is may be the main difference to the other interpreters – Bachmann never leaves the order. Whenever she dreams of a utopia and tries to awaken a rebellion in people's minds she as the "I" stays within the order. Utopia and rebellion are a part of this order. The concept of the double place of femininity in patriarchy believes in feminine subversion of patriarchy. Weigel and many other theorists who called upon the denial of femininity in our society by the grammar of language and the phallo-centrism of order share the hope to turn things up side down. They think, there was an “inside and outside” of femininity. The order is undermined by writing women who challenge the laws of literary production consciously with absurd metaphors or unconsciously in their precise description of their subjection as women.

However, Bachmann's writing is not fictively stationed “inside” the order and “outside” as well. It is not in a double place.

It is one place. Bachmann's "I" denies herself, marks herself, even kills herself. 

She does not need someone else to kill her, neither Malina, Ivan nor the symbolic father. She is these persons or this act by herself. She is the order by herself. The ambivalence inside her is not an artistic device of feminine aesthetics, it is the truth.

The feminine paradoxes are like the artificial beauty, which the "I" tries to be for Ivan, staged, but we (have to) take her for real. 

The characters in Malina are personas, masks that form a tragic constellation, but this does not mean it is something avoidable.

Bachmann ridicules these masks of femininity and masculinity, but she does not step back from them. She ridicules the feminine values because she consequently performs them. She reduces femininity to what it is, the opposite of masculinity. Our gender politics are hierarchical, maybe brutal and of course a binary system that sets a border between male and female, but this political practice is always arbitrary. A consistent role performance is not possible. To make the binary opposition work, it is necessary to interchange what counts as male and female according to the contexts.

Let us take the context of love as an example. It is cosmopolitan, fairy tale and every-day knowledge that a woman is not allowed to run after a man. In the novel Ivan accuses the "I" and asks her if she had not been taught not to run after men, which is the primary lesson of love play. On the contrary a woman has to be by definition kind and always willing to receive the male attention. She must pay all her attention to him, care for him, prepare the table and make herself up, run for and after him – at least in a stereotyped picture of love relations she has to devote (to give) herself. It is contradictory not to run after but actually run with men all the time. It is a balancing act between being “fatale” and “fragile” as well.

 

What can we make of this contradiction?

The contradiction of gender-positions in different contexts means also to be contradictory in the play of the desire. What is appropriate for a woman to do in the bedroom is not appropriate to do on the street and so on. We cannot actually say gender stereotypes are that  fixed. It is rather our will to keep up with our gender that we might call fixed. We are fixed on gender.

 

 

 

I have stepped into the mirror, I vanished in the mirror, I have seen into the future, I was one with myself and am again not one with myself. (…) For a moment I was immortal and I - I wasn't there for Ivan and wasn't living in Ivan, it was without significance. (p. 87)

 

To me, the great advantage of Butler's gender trouble concept - for which she is often criticised - is that the binary position of gender does result in our compulsory heterosexuality, which is the law that produces gendered bodies as natural sexes.

Is this not a lesson we can learn form Bachmann as well? Does she not show this compulsory heterosexuality to be the underling factor of her whole identity? Is it not her love that makes her (feminine)? And what is the importance of it – does she not show the limits of that conception as just an a priori utopia that has been set up in our minds for ages, that structures our reality? And that even destroys us!

 

I take the idea from Sara Lennox's essay that not only Malina but also Ivan has already been a part of the "I". The "I" constitutes herself according to the social rule of femininity. Despite her factual distance from Ivan, she carries him with her, whenever she brushes her hair for him or waits in front of the telephone. He is in her mind.

Bachmann also raised such a notion in an interview, when she admitted she had realized Ivan to be much more complexly connected with the "I" than just a lover upon whom the “I” was depending[36].

Her verdict that the important things in our lives, our identity maybe, have already been there before we were born explains why Ivan is a part of the "I". The identity of the "I" is permanently shaped inside the order. Her hope for  survival with Ivan is a hope that not surprisingly falls from her mouth; is was dictated by all her achieved knowledge about women and men. It is compulsory heterosexuality that subjects women as the passive and waiting being, waiting for prince charming.

In this sense the "Kragan legend", the legend of a beautiful princess who was "brutally[37]" saved by a powerful rider, is a legend all women carry with them. And Ivan is that man she masochistically loves and adores, because love is inscribed in our culture as something like a sacrifice for physical attraction and femininity is inscribed in our culture as that very habit.

The early reviews of "Malina", which read the novel as  Bachmann’s revenge on the harmful men she had slept with for their inability to love her, is a motif not far away from what I see in the novel. Of course for me this intelligent woman is much too mature to take the men as monsters, who haunted her. She knows that what she had expected from men or what she ironically had learnt to expect from men in patriarchy, cannot be fulfilled. How can a person  prophesied as a savoir because of his gender and forced to be independent, autonomous and exactly the opposite of her in all contexts because of his gender, too, ever save her?

The balancing act between the holy and gentle savoir and the strong warrior with the gun is not possible outside of the female fantasy.

When we read the first chapter "Happy with Ivan" it is pretty obvious that there is no happiness at all. Everyone would maintain that Ivan and I are not happy. Or that for a long time we have no reason to call ourselves happy.

But is the heterosexual value something which can make women happy? Everyone is no one. (p. 48)

It is characteristically shown in the novel that the power of this love results from the absence of Ivan. The greatest happiness is to kneel in front of the telephone, smoking and waiting for a call. But I am on the floor kneeling in front of the telephone (…) I prostrate myself before the phone, like a Moslem on his rug, with my forehead pressed to the wooden floor. (p. 23) Her greatest happiness is to speak with Ivan although they do not say anything, not even banalities. The vocabulary of the phone calls is yes, no and some other meaningless particles.

Bachmann wrote in the unpublished fragment of “Malina” the following, which comments on the afore mentioned characterisation of love. (p. 26)

Where is Ivan, where is it then, what makes him beautiful. 

It is me - it is not in him.[38]

These are only very short sentences but do they not deliver a truth, which can - academically speaking - begin with Adrienne Rich and end with Judith Butler? I read in it Rich's urgent claim that female humans are unfortunately forced, compelled and subjected to focus all their energy on men – and the excuse for this very act is a romantic love model, that surrounds every girl with images to which she is inescapably exposed.[39]

And I hear it ending with Butler, because it tells me the "unfortunate" position is actively taken by the "I". The "I" takes the position in the love play that identifies her as female. Her femininity is described by that act.

She achieves her femininity through her love and that is why it is not bad irony, but truth when the  female "I" says it is Ivan who assures her in the world.

Feminists have always argued that this presupposed assurance by her mainly absent lover is the worst irony Bachmann casts on masculine misbehaviour.

But the irony is on her very inside instead. I live in Ivan. I will not outlive Ivan. (p. 24)

 

The notion of a Feminine aesthetic could now be deduced from this in the old manner. There is a woman setting herself on two different planes (- the woman is doubling herself-), who breaks out of the patriarchal ideal by describing it. This woman – the "I" in the novel – is more than a dumb puppet who is abused by this ignorant Ivan. Instead, she is also the highly gifted philosopher who steps beyond that narrow role.

But neither the "I" nor Bachmann is a superior academic, serving up a reflected image of femininity. Her writing is far too honest; we cannot gain ground in another utopia of femininity. There is not another double of the "I", a reflexive one, because that would not fit  Bachmann's consistent search for one femininity. She does not fall from her feminine role at all. There might be a multiplicity of “her-selves”, but not another safe femininity.

I agree, we are troubled by the picture of femaleness she paints and it is also a very destructive one. Not only for women but for men as well. Wanted or not, willing or unwilling this "I" disturbs the order. There is something wrong with the "I". This female character would grate on every man's nerves after the first night. She is unendurable. Can we feel safe in using the word “deconstruction” for her exalted femininity? I suggest for this outstanding femininity the word “parody”.

It is a theatrical exaggeration of the feminine gender-role. I take this idea from the last chapter of Judith Butler's "Bodies that matter".

She understands the hyperbolic performance of drag queens as something that disturbs the order. It is disturbing, deconstructive because it reiterates sexist norms instead of writing against these norms. It is rather a critique that comes from  the very inside of the order it means to penetrate. There is nothing like an objective, external observer.  Such a hyperbolic performance of femininity - as we find with Bachmann - destabilises gender positions because it makes us discover there is only a gradual difference between what we would call right performance and false performance. The alleged stability that is performed by a drag queen, who is actually more female (feminine) than the real woman, forces us to question the reality of that real, other woman, too. In this sense Bachmann reiterates the norms of femininity as deeply internalised but she also dismantles the norms as mere norms, actually without any truth because they do not really work. Her consistency is unbelievable. She miswrites femininity.

The hyperbolic conformity to the command can reveal the hyperbolic status of the norm itself, indeed, can become the cultural sign by which that cultural imperative might become legible. Insofar as heterosexual gender norms produce inapproximable ideals, heterosexuality can be said to operate through the regulated production of hyperbolic versions of "man" and "woman". These are for the most part compulsory performances, ones which none of us choose, but which each of us is forced to negotiate. I write "forced to negotiate" because the compulsory character of these norms does not always make them efficacious. Such norms are continually haunted by their own inefficacy; hence, the anxiously repeated effort to install and augment their jurisdiction.

The resignification of norms is thus a function of their 'inefficacy', and so the question of subversion, of 'working the weakness in the norm', becomes a matter of inhabiting the practices of its rearticulation[40]

 

There is no deconstruction as a highly reflected method or concept  in Bachmann's writing. It is just the case that the contradictions of single gender-positions are so enormous, that a woman who consistently lives or writes it, is led to shifts. These shifts, paradoxes and gaps are parts of her feminine role. They are not a conscious subversion of it. The subversion, which is of course felt, is similar to an estrangement. It is something done by the readers, who are threatened by the so-called reality. I am married, it must have come to marriage. I will no longer wait for postcards from the Mondsee, I will increase my patience if I stay bound to Ivan this way, I can no longer expel it, for it has happened to my body against all reason, my body which now moves in one continuous, soft, painful crucifixion on him. It will be this way for my whole life. (p. 112) Reich-Ranicki's uncharming reproach against Bachmann's characters was right in the sense that the female character is an absolutely unnecessary and unbelievable one. We cannot imagine her on the street or if we (men and women) met her, we would have fled from her. The alienating exaggeration of female characteristics is one thing, but her writing is done in the same way. This is the feminine way!

This feminine way is extended  by Bachmann from the little improper woman, who is described, to the letters, the improper images by which she is represented on the sheet. 

I will now come to a biographic explanation for Bachmann's Feminine aesthetic, which is nowadays a sin in literary criticism.

 

I am not a woman – I am a mistake.

We have to be aware that this obviously talented woman - nobody would dare to doubt her talent or intelligence - was always judged in terms of her gender. It was said you can hear it in her poems, you see it in her shy eyes, you can guess it from the music she likes: she is first of all – a woman. The men fall in love with her because she is first of all an attractive woman, whatever her attractiveness was, brain or beauty.

The definition of gender-roles was stronger than her wish to be first of all a poet ("Dichter").

We speak here of the 50's and early 60's, and it does not take a social historian  to know how strongly the worst gender politics was defended after the lost war in post-war Europe. Our grandmothers can give evidence of desecrating gender-inscriptions, that young girls seem to be a thousand miles away from.[41] Actually, even in our days general attitudes are structured through beliefs which insist on the border between the gentle and strong sex.

The gender role of our grandmothers meant for instance to look for a good man, more intelligent than her, rich maybe, a little better than her in the world's eyes, let's say one step higher on the social ladder than she herself. She would be that grateful girl whom he should be able to care economically for. He will take her higher (the Cinderella – model) and she  will be defined by him from her wedding day on through her name and new social place as the doctor' wife for instance (legal model).

Bachmann comments on this practise of looking for the right man, who assures the female's femininity such a way:

It might be easy to take a good guess at, maybe not every, but every second thought, an Einstein, a Planck, any great genius, a Freud or Liebig has. They are just humans without any real mysteries, excuse me, they are just men (…) I have never understood how a real woman could be only a little interested in an intelligent man, I never understood that a great name or much money could make a man attractive - That is something a woman would fancy. But it is nothing for me. I am not a woman. I mean, I am  not really a woman. I am a mistake[42].

Look at this, it is so ironic but it tells about Bachmann' s suffering not letting people see that she was intellectually superior to most of the others for the sake of her femininity; that her intellectual superiority made her fail as a woman. 

 

Since Bachmann was a person who like every other person needed his or her environment to find an identity. What a tragedy for her feminine identity that she was more famous, maybe a step higher on the stairway to success than the men she fell in love with.

When she began to write prose, which is (according to the book "Women write differently", 1998) not the best form of female expression, she was faced with stupid prejudices. Is Bachmann going to betray her femininity? Is she willing to conquer a field she has not the weapon for?

Not to betray her intelligence, she actively gave in. The word for word translation of to "give in" in German language ranges from “handing in something” to the meaning to “perform a role” ("eine Rolle geben").

She performed what the others expected, but her performance was so consistent, so unbelievably feminine, that it necessarily subverted it. I will call her writing "loosely deconstructive", because it is definitely not what the "holy triangle" of French deconstructivists would understand by the term “deconstruction”.

She wrote herself down, it was written inside of her. This passive voice is a translation of her own ideas that it breaks out of you, what you are writing.

The untranslatable metaphors, one can readily identify as devices of a Feminine aesthetic, signify the position a woman is meant to live in and to write from. 

This role – metaphor is not used to deny, that Bachmann did not see the tragedy of the feminine gender- role, and I will not deny an impulse to rebellion in her writing. Her being beaten, haunted and consequently killed is nevertheless an over-emphasised female game that she plays. For many people it still might be hard to bear that the destabilisation of gender roles does not produce a utopia of other roles but utopia is, after all, always more hopeless than reality.

Some early critics have misunderstood the last sentence of the novel, It was a murder and interpreted it as Malina's death.

Even Bachmann would argue this is an absurd misunderstanding of the plot since the whole novel is dealing with fact that the "I" is killed.

But is this misunderstanding understood yet?

What is true about the order is that also Malina, if we take him as the required opposite, cannot survive without the other extreme which is represented by the "I". Malina is also buried inside the killed woman. As long as Malina is said to live, the "I" will have to live on  as well.

This "queering "of meaning, can open doors to a graspable utopia.

Bachmann invites us to penetrate her female/feminine disguise, to realize that killed   femininity is not all me, because I live. 

I argue for a Feminine aesthetic as an aesthetic bearing the potential of subversion by not being subversive but very strict. Again I can quote from Butler by saying it is working out the weakness in the norm itself. Her writing can not be immediately or obviously subversive, it is rather (…) this turning of power against itself (…) that is nor a  "pure" opposition, a "transcendence" of contemporary relation of power, but a difficult labour o forging a future from resources inevitably impure[43].

To summarize, I will again claim there is no Feminine aesthetic as such since there is no female gender as such and as there is no "woman". Contexts make the aesthetic. It appears to be feminine, if we will imagine an opposite that is universal or feminist spoken male. The changes in feminist history explain why different texts by women were differently read as examples of femininity according to the most recent theory of what “femininity” is. With Bachmann, I and most readers properly feel something which deserves the label feminine. It is her obedience to the discourse that dictated feminine writing upon her. This obedience necessarily appears like a mask, although I do not believe in an unmasked femininity. Bachmann parodied the patriarchal images of women because in her writing she was such a woman. She would have parodied the feminist inscription of women as well, if everybody had demanded of her to be the feminist writer par excellence. An empirical study from the year 1998 that critically dealt with the mystical connection between female sex and feminine aesthetic ends with the finding: Definitely, there are texts where we can find femininity as it is defined by theorists. We then have to find out whether this feminine way of art production is something the female authors have worked out by themselves or they consciously tried to fulfil the theoretical approaches. Especially in the second case we have to be aware that this writing has less to do with mysterious authenticity[44] (p. 298).

I quote this here because it supports my idea of role-play, regardless of whoever might have written this role.

Interestingly enough, my demystification idea as part of the Feminine aesthetic does not come out of the blue. So as not to convey the impression that I am the very first who sees Feminine aesthetics as a demystification, following from the arbitrariness of gender codes, I will mention a text that was written before I was born. The intention of the text  – as it is an early feminist one – differs from mine. Still the author Bovenschen gives one example of Feminine aesthetic that suits my argument very well. She comments on one of the last concert performances by Marlene Dietrich. Everybody in the concert room knew this 70 year old woman is not real. But is she not real? Obviously her performance works and it makes a mockery of our knowledge (that we have about Dietrich's age and beauty case). Whenever Marlene Dietrich sovereignly dealt with the expectations of her audience, she both gave them what they wanted and showed the limits of that wish. Is her beauty really not fading  with time?

She performed as this beauty and unmasked her "real" beauty because everybody in the hall knew this woman is not 30 anymore. Her myth enters the stage and demonstrates itself as a myth, she directs herself. [45] Her conformity to the beauty-ideal is so well done that it makes people question, whether she was ever really beautiful, if there was ever any beauty as such, if there was ever a Marlene Dietrich behind that artificial face. Dietrich's consistent (physical) femininity estranges femininity as Bachmann’s consistent mental femininity estranges the belief in a pure Feminine aesthetic.

Of course, we know about Dietrich's real suffering from getting old and it is maybe naive to put her beauty mask in such an argument of sovereign demystification. But the problem is not to accept their aesthetics as hyperbolic performance, which works as deconstruction, rather the act of sovereignty is to doubt. This is exactly the problem of “no behind the scene”. We cannot say somebody can divide herself from the role she plays. They - as a matter of fact - melt together into one; they are one. 

I would still insist on the notion that Bachmann parodies, hyperbolically performs and stages a female role in her writing for those people, who "only" wanted to see a  "woman" in her.

This does not mean she was somebody else than she played (she was less feminine or less that woman), that she was not hurt in the gender-struggle, but she overshot the goal, meaning she was more woman than anyone could  want and ask for…

And this – ironically and wonderfully – inspires our feminist wishes.

 

 

Thanks to Lissa and Walter for talking about this with me.