Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach. Tragödie, Erzählung, Heimatfilm by Peter C. Pfeiffer

Abstract

210 AUSTRIAN STUDIES l6 (20 8) were seen by Stifter as more private or more public, we see how the chaotic is made over into the ritually organized, and gain a glimpse into how neurotic individual and unique prose stylistare one and the same. The next two essays both offer accounts of Stifter's relationship to important authors. Franziska Sch??ler, also writing on Der Nachsommer, provides indis pensable information about Stifter and the history of science, with specific reference toAlexander von Humboldt, while Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek looks at Stifter and Jean Paul, in the context of the literary history of the idyll in modernity. Finally the other editor, Sabine Becker, offers what might to some be a surprisingly unsympathetic account of Stifter's deficiencies as a realist and feminist. She includes a disparaging reference to the 'Fangemeinde' (rather than the genuine 'Lesepublikum') that alone, according to her, has a high regard for Stifter's prose, but towhich, presumably, the book she and Professor Gr?tz have been at considerable pains to edit is addressed. Fortunately, many of their contributors have a more positive view of the great man, and, with all appropriate academic rigour, let us know why. Neither of the editors, however, seems to enjoy reading Stifter. Stifter's realism isjudged to be artificial, which strictlyspeaking is true of all realism, but one knows what theymean. Jesus College, Cambridge Michael Minden Mane vonEbner-Eschenbach. Trag?die, Erz?hlung, Heimatfilm. By Peter C. Pfeiffer. T?bingen: Francke. 2008. 189 pp. 39,90. isbn 978-3-7720-8268-9. Peter Pfeiffer suggests thatMarie von Ebner-Eschenbach is the sort of writer who really needed saving from herself. She consciously fostered a public image counterproductive to her being taken seriously as a writer in the post-Habsburg era. Together with her 'tame' biographer Anton Bettelheim, she presented herself as a de-sexualized, gentle old woman, writing stories which may have been socially critical but were also 'sozialkitschig' (p. 10). Pfeiffer's well-argued case-studies examine a range ofwidely available works by Ebner-Eschenbach in order to challenge preconceived ideas about her. Importantly, he has written this particular contribution to Auslandsgermanistik (Pfeiffer isAmerican-based) inGerman in the hope of revising perceptions of Ebner-Eschenbach inGerman speaking countries, where all too often a negative image of Ebner-Eschenbach's fiction has been conditioned by memories of reading a narrow selection of stories in school. To show the extent towhich our image of Ebner-Eschenbach is itselfa work of fiction, Pfeiffer begins by examining photographic images of her as author.He suggests that in the late nineteenth century there was a sudden consciousness of the potential of photographic images as a way of linking written texts in the public imagination with the authors who produced them. He reads photographs as part of the paratext for Ebner-Eschenbach's literaryworks, something that conditioned readers' response to the stories. One of Pfeiffer's main objectives is to show how Ebner-Eschenbach struggled AUSTRIAN STUDIES l6 (20 8) 211 throughout her works to depict gendered experience in the traditional forms inwhich audiences expected her towrite. He develops this idea through his analysis of Ebner-Eschenbach's autobiographical work, Meine Kinderjahre, which he reads as a substitute for the aesthetic reflections which most male writers of the period leftbehind. Men commonly included aesthetic reflections either in the preface to a work ? as Stifter did with Bunte Steine ? or in their reviews of other's writings. Women, however, were excluded from the genre of aesthetics. Meine Kinderjahre, he argues, expresses the emergence ofwomen's literature out of suffering. Female subjectivity is for Ebner-Eschenbach intrinsically associated with suffering ('Leidenspathos', p. 58), and such suffering forms the basis for her definition of female authorship. Ebner-Eschenbach's emphasis on the hurdles she has overcome and the opposition she faced is seen as paradigmatic for that of the female author per se. In Ebner-Eschenbach's tragedyMane Roland, the eponymous protagonist is trapped by traditional concepts of femininity. Pfeiffer suggests that traditional feminine notions of personal morality and ethical action come into conflict with the conventional model of historical tragedy when the tragic protagonist is a woman. Marie isbound to...