Earlier this year, I attended a discussion at a local bookstore about Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer’s 1963 novel The Wall, which was recently rediscovered and translated (by Shaun Whiteside) by New Directions. In this—her most famous book—Haushofer recounts the story of a rural woman who awakens one morning to find herself completely sealed off from the outside by an invisible wall, beyond which the world seems to have come to a standstill. She quickly sets to work becoming self-sufficient and caring for the farm animals who are now wholly reliant on her, and vice versa.
For many of us at the meeting, it was a portrait of a middle-aged woman for whom isolation was not a curse but a reprieve from the demands of others and the expectations of conservative mid-century womanhood. Haushofer had, albeit complicatedly, imagined what it might be to become unknowable, to act without precedent, to find one’s own rhythm, to be uninterrupted… But for one young man in the room, such a feminist reading was impossible: to him, Haushofer had reinscribed the gendered expectations of care and domesticity by hemming in the narrator with her dog, cats, cows, and chores. “Why doesn’t she try to escape?” he raved, complaining that she just sat around and accepted her fate before adding—without a wink of irony—that the narrator was “definitely not girl-bossing!”
His response was perhaps telling of the very problem Haushofer turns to again and again, including in her newly reissued novella Killing Stella, which preceded the publication of The Wall by five years. How could women of a certain class and age “escape” from their lives? What did escape look like when it was only through marriage that they had access to money and property? In the case of The Wall, escape from the drudgery of marriage and family requires exercising our imagination almost to the point of science fiction, since for the narrator to experience her freedom, the world must come to an end. In Killing Stella, however, it is the narrator Anna’s own death that is posited as a seed of possibility: when she is charged with taking care of Stella, a friend’s teenage daughter who intentionally steps in front of a car and dies, Anna begins to wish that this ending had been her own, envying Stella’s courage to get out of the domestic trap into which she sinks further.
Both Killing Stella and The Wall offer narrow glimpses of retreat in a world—and imagination—contoured by middle class heterosexual women’s economic dependence on men and their duty to their children. This observation is true of much women’s writing from the 50s and 60s, and yet it has arguably been decentered in more recent feminist texts, which have abandoned a critique of the family for stories of economic or career advancement. In the contemporary women’s novel, film, or fable, capital is treated as a balm for the isolation of the family and not its raison d’etre (many have also started to observe the inverse phenomenon, where novels in the tradition of Sally Rooney may treat normative heterosexual domesticity as a site of relief from work). What is interesting about Haushofer’s task here then is that her protagonists do not want to trade the private sphere for the public—rather, they undo this binary by wanting more solitude, by pushing back against the idea that they had any to begin with in a life so thoroughly dictated by others.
Killing Stella first came out in 1958, the same year that Haushofer re-married her first husband, with whom she had continued to live even through their divorce. The novella is shot through with marital ambivalence: Anna takes comfort in the material pleasures of her husband Richard’s success, but she also dreads his coming home from work and spoiling her peace and quiet. The extent to which Anna clings to Richard is complex given her disdain for him, especially after he begins an affair with young Stella. In this vein, one can read Stella’s suicide as a release valve for Anna, one that marks both the end of Stella’s threat to her marriage or a proxy for her own fatal wish.
Haushofer is thus clever about keeping Anna (and us) isolated from her true feelings; written as a first-person report on Stella’s ill-fated final weeks, the narration is not confident and direct, but often circles around itself, sidling up to startling revelations about illicit desires and discontents, confessing in fits and starts. Anna refers elliptically to her love of looking out the window at her garden, but we never see her in it—just watching from the other side of the glass. Over time, however, she remarks: “If I’m not mistaken, the garden has even moved further away from the house […] Perhaps this has something to do with the windows. They are gradually becoming more opaque until they finally obstruct my view.” Even this account of something she perceives so regularly is hedged (“if I’m not mistaken” and “perhaps”), as if accommodating for the declaration that precedes it, wherein she claims that her “gilded cage has turned into a dungeon.”
This is where her desire to find reprieve through the home is double-edged—her retreat into the manicured house and nuclear family does not protect her from chaos, but is instead its very seat. Stella’s presence reveals this quite plainly, as she arrives in Anna and Richard’s home as a dull and quiet girl, but under Anna’s tutelage, begins to dress up and discover her beauty and sexuality. As she is built up in Anna’s image, the arc of normative womanhood turns lethal: Richard grows tired of Stella, who becomes his simpering shadow, broken-hearted and probably pregnant. Anna’s care to induct Stella into their home is, as she fusses in retrospect, murderous. Knowing this reveals the flaw not in their individual family, but in a whole structure of norms that teem with hidden violence:
“Of course I could have fled, and I toyed with the idea for years, but in truth it is impossible to leave. Life with Richard has corrupted me and rendered me useless. Anything I started would be pointless, since I know that kind murderers exist. Legal representatives who violate the law every day, bracing cowards and faithful traitors. I had become so familiar with the monstrous mixture of angelic countenance and devil’s grimace that any pure, unstained image could only arouse my deepest suspicion.”
Haushofer captures Richard’s banal immorality with incredible precision, describing him as “a born traitor… equipped with a body that grants him constant pleasure” and a capacity to entrance others, appearing as a stand-up member of the community, dignified father, and noble lawyer, all of which conveniently mask his taste for serial infidelity, booze, roughhousing. Interestingly, his love of all things normie is motivated by, rather than at odds with, his transgressions; Anna muses that it is those who are the most corrupt who insist on traditional values and rules, knowing what evil would transpire without at least the appearance of some guardrails. In other words then, the home and family operate as veneers for the lust and violations that are their public antitheses.
And yet, in the same breath with which she charges Richard, Anna offloads his culpability onto herself: “I have known for a long time that he is not to blame if I react like this to the fact of his presence. There are so many others like him, the whole world plainly knows and accepts it, and no one puts him on trial. Whose fault is it that I can’t just accept things as they are?” Anna grieves her failed assimilation—this might tell us something about her desire to be alone, rather than with others in the world. It is a breakdown of what feminist theorist Sara Ahmed has called “the promise of happiness,” in which one is raised to believe that certain things beget universal satisfaction, and that the failure to be made happy by the right objects indicates a personal shortcoming, a lack of effort or maladjustment that in turn spoils the happiness of others.
Her feelings of a private failure reveal to the reader however a more systemic one: the fly has not just landed in Anna’s ointment, but is one of its constituent parts. In fact, when Stella becomes too attached to Richard and so threatens the stability of their home, Anna remarks that while she “had been very happy for a short time […] she was unable to learn the rules of the game, she couldn’t adapt and she had to perish.” In this tragic but unavoidable end, we see flashes of Anna Karenina, or of Madame Bovary and Tess Durbeyfield, off-ed as closure to their sexual transgressions, unable to be contained by narrative’s moralizing arc. There is also the pained domestic strife and suicidal ideation of Clarissa Dalloway, and a whole barrage of literary women whose desires—wishes for escape—can be practiced only through death, or optative rehearsals of it.
In Killing Stella however, the housewife does not only imagine herself in the position of the deceased, but also as her executioner, as if in raising Stella to assimilate into her family, and in some respects become her mirror, she has concocted a scenario through which to bear witness to or even actively make possible her own suicide. Indeed, Anna does not just want to die but at times feels she has already, or that while Stella is dead, she is at least “loved in the damp earth, and held by a hundred little root fingers”, apostrophizing her to lament: “how much more definitively dead am I than you!” Death is to be alive but trapped, or made to remain alive, in contrast to Stella’s defiant end, which reads alternately as punishment or liberation. To be or not to be, to kill oneself or their avatar, to be guilty or innocent—Anna’s secret wishes and feelings cause her to equivocate, to fussily show all the incongruent angles under domesticity’s smooth sheen.
Interestingly, the novella’s original title is Wir töten Stella, which translates literally as We Murder Stella. The English edition, however, goes with the passive and non-terminal Killing Stella, which, divorced from a subject, grammatically obscures the party responsible for her death. “Murder” likewise takes a willful, gruesome tack as opposed to the comparative indifference of “killing.” One could read this as ostensibly removing some of the responsibility for Stella’s death from Anna and Richard’s shoulders—it also makes the cause of her demise more diffuse: was it the world that killed Stella, that inducted her into the suffering of heterosexual womanhood, to which she could not conform (or at which she conformed enough to be injured by its fatal trap?). In imagining Stella’s death as an ongoing and unassigned event, we find more evidence of Haushofer’s novella as a critique not just of this particular family but of the traditions of gender and sexuality that are their undoing. (Moreover, in crafting a tale about the inaction and everyday cruelty of well-to-do Austrians so soon after World War II, Haushofer may be indicting complicities in a much broader scope of tragedy than that of a suicidal girl or housewife.)
But what of our intrepid ally of the bookstore discussion, and his concern for female protagonists who do not escape their lives, who do not evolve into independent, self-serving girlbosses? I’d like to put the question otherwise—what would escape be for Anna? For Stella? What can we picture and what can they picture for themselves? I am venturing that Killing Stella’s exaggerated morbidity makes a claim that traditional kinds of escape are not available to Anna, so reliant is she on the system that is destroying her, but also, so broad is that system’s reach, its infection of everything and everyone; likewise, it is capitalism that this plucky young man sees as a site for Haushofer’s protagonists’ potential independence and freedom that is in fact the cause of their dependence and immobilization. Capitalism requires domestic labour and reproduces its inequities en masse—for Anna to trade the housewife’s work for the secretary’s would likely only tether her to another system of exploitation and hierarchy, with more “cowards” and “traitors” to abstract her labour and body for their pleasure and profit.
Perhaps then, Anna’s obsession with death is something more like an early cry of heteropessimism, or an anti-futural thrust that resists the reproductive logic of the family and capital. Though Haushofer seldom writes of Anna’s children (save for a quasi-erotic attachment to her eldest son Wolfgang), the novel ends with her looking into her young daughter Annabelle’s eyes and seeing reflected in them the figure of a murderer—rather than a giver of life, then, the mother here is destructive, one who has not only had a hand in a literal death, but also reproduced a cycle of confinement, displeasure, and tedium. If Anna raised Stella for slaughter, is she suggesting that Annabelle is on the same trajectory? Is death here being posited as a kindness or a cruelty—in other words, for Haushofer, what is more lethal: dying of normative femininity, or having to live through it?
Tia Glista
Tia Glista (she/her) is a writer and PhD candidate in Toronto, where she researches 20th-century American feminist cultural production, ethics and aesthetics, and bodily comportment. Her criticism for the public appears in The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Document, and elsewhere.