The Friendship of Our Distant Relations”: Feminism and Animal Families in Marlen Haushofer’s Die Wand (1963)

Abstract

This article considers Marlen Haushofer’s novel Die Wand (1963) in the contexts of animal (eco)feminism from the 1970s onward and the animal essays of philosopher Cora Diamond. It argues that Haushofer’s novel, in which the female narrator survives behind an invisible wall with a family of animals, anticipates feminist theories of intersection between the oppression of women and of non-human animals and illustrates a feminist ethics of care. The novel attends to animal characters as individuals with agency and, setting up a stylistic and thematic tension between the everyday and the extraordinary, exposes the reader to difficult ideas about animal death and human destructiveness. Despite the novel’s challenge to the conventional way of seeing animals, the narrator ultimately upholds the idea of an unbridgeable barrier between human beings and other species, but she reverses the traditional hierarchy: she values non-human animals more highly than human beings.