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Beyond Patriarchy: Marxism, Feminism, and Elfriede Jelinek's Die Liebhaberinnen

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SOURCE: Haines, Brigid. “Beyond Patriarchy: Marxism, Feminism, and Elfriede Jelinek's Die Liebhaberinnen.Modern Language Review 92, no. 3 (July 1997): 643-55.

[In the following essay, Haines utilizes the theories of feminist theorist Luce Irigaray to delineate the relationship between Marxist and feminist thought in Die Liebhaberinnen.]

Despite their common roots in enlightenment discourses of liberation, Marxism and feminism have always regarded each other with a degree of friendly exasperation. The central problem of Marxism from a feminist point of view is its failure to theorize adequately either subjectivity or gender. In addition, though Marxism explains the workings of capitalism with great conviction and, when pushed, can comment on women's place within capitalism (this is broadly what Marxist-feminists have attempted to do)1 it has not thrown significant light on the origins of the oppression of women endemic to most known societies.2 Indeed, it has often been convenient for Marxists to overlook the oppression of women since that oppression serves the interests of men (Hartmann, p. 5). From a Marxist point of view on the other hand, feminism has often been perceived to incline towards ahistoricism and essentialism in its claims to speak for and about women as a group. Feminism has arguably never theorized patriarchy as convincingly as Marx theorized capitalism3 and, as a consequence, has lacked a coherent political programme.

Marxism and feminism seemed to find common ground in the seminal statement by Simone de Beauvoir that ‘one is not born a woman, one becomes one’, which laid the basis for the sex/gender distinction, and provided a meeting-point for Marxism, feminism, and psychoanalysis on the all-important question of subjectivity.4 Generations of students on gender studies courses felt the penny drop when they heard it argued that while biology is immutable (we are born male or female), the acquisition of gender identity depends on a complex mix of psycho-sexual, historical, political, and cultural factors mediated through the family and through Althusser's other Ideological State Apparatuses.5 Thus the materialism of Marxism was harnessed for feminism in a model that also included insights drawn from psychoanalysis, and a theory of (gendered) subjectivity could be added to a Marxist analysis of society (though as Terry Lovell and others were quick to point out, Althusser's theory left little room for resistance and agency).6

Since those days of lively debate in the 1970s and early 1980s Marxist-feminism has, as a movement, to some extent run out of steam, with theorists such as Hartmann and Barrett arguing for an alliance between the projects rather than a merger,7 but that Marxism and feminism still need each other, many take to be self-evident: a revolutionary theory that does not seek to end the oppression of women is clearly deficient, while feminism continues to find Marxist theories of historical change, value, and ideology, to name some of the more obvious ones, of enormous relevance to its own concerns, not least in the field of literary studies.

Recently, of course, both Marxism and feminism have been challenged as master discourses by post-structuralism, post-colonialism, and post-Marxism. Western feminists, for example, have been made conscious of the imperialism inherent in the gesture of attempting to speak for women,8 and a question mark has been placed against some Marxist categories such as the social totality.9 Even the seemingly obvious sex/gender distinction so dear to feminists has been deconstructed by Judith Butler and others and shown to be an historically produced binary division that serves as a regulatory fiction to perpetuate heterosexuality.10 It has been argued that clinging to the sex/gender distinction has prevented feminists from historicizing sex.11 However, some important work has come out of precisely the encounter between post-structuralism and Marxist-feminist debates, such as in the work of Gayatri Spivak, Seyla Benhabib, Drucilla Cornell, Rosemary Hennessey and in Michéle Barrett's recent post-Marxist account of ideology, The Politics of Truth, which moves beyond Althusser's ‘scientific’ and epistemological definition of ideology to a more Foucauldian view of ideology as discourse.12

The theorist on whose work I draw might seem at first sight to owe more to radical feminism than to either Marxism or post-structuralism, though I believe this not to be the case.13 The liberatory project developed by the feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray picks up some of the threads of de Beauvoir's argument, though with a difference of emphasis. While de Beauvoir demanded equality for women and conceded sexual difference reluctantly, Irigaray proclaims sexual difference as the first stage in changing the symbolic order in order to effect real change for both men and women. As a philosopher she sees her own role in this to lie in speaking as a woman in order to show up the masculine bias in all Western systems of thought. Since we cannot speak from outside the phallogocentrism of culture, however, Irigaray adopts the tactic of strategic mimicry:

To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to locate the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it. It means to resubmit herself […] to ‘ideas’, in particular to ideas about herself that are elaborated in/by a masculine logic, but so as to make ‘visible’ by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible: recovering a possible operation of the feminine in language.

(Irigaray, quoted in Whitford, p. 71)

Irigaray's project inaugurates, claims Jean-Joseph Goux, a new moment in the history of feminism.14

Irigaray's strategic mimicry is one aspect of her work that I consider in relation to Jelinek's text Die Liebhaberinnen (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1975). The other is the theory, developed in her article ‘Women on the Market’, of the exchange of women in patriarchal economies.15 While her starting-point here is Marx's theory of the law of value, she works with a deliberate conceptual imprecision which, while it might irritate purists, allows for many fruitful interdisciplinary associations to be made (Whitford, p. 37). Other modern theorists have also developed Marx's law of value away from a strictly Marxist context. For example, Spivak, whose work crosses the boundaries of Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, and post-colonialism, has described it as Marx's most enduring legacy but pleaded that it should be liberated from its narrow use:

‘Value’ is the name of that ‘contentless and simple [inhaltslos und einfach]’ thing by way of which Marx rewrote not mediation, but the possibility of the mediation that makes possible in its turn all exchange, all communication, sociality itself. Marx's especial concern is the appropriation of the human capacity to produce, not objects, nor anything tangible, but that simple contentless thing which is not pure form; the possibility of mediation (through coding) so that exchange and sociality can exist. Marx's point of entry is the economic coding of value, but the notion itself has a much more supple range.16

Irigaray's use of Marx's theory of value and the exchange of commodities is indebted to Gayle Rubin's feminist theory of patriarchy, which also derives insights from anthropology. In her influential 1975 essay, ‘The Traffic in Women’ (see note 3), Rubin develops Lévi-Strauss's theory that the essence of kinship systems lies in the exchange of women between men. These systems are-based on the gift, which creates a social link between the partners of an exchange, and the incest taboo, which is ‘less a rule prohibiting marriage with the mother, sister, or daughter, than a rule obliging the mother, sister, or daughter to be given to others. It is the supreme rule of the gift’ (Lévi-Strauss, quoted in Rubin, p. 173). The sex/gender system, which Rubin defines as ‘the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied’ (p. 159), leads to the division of labour by sex, a device ‘to insure the union of men and women by making the smallest viable economic unit contain at least one man and one woman’ (p. 178). The importance of Rubin's theory is that it places the oppression of women within social systems rather than in biology (p. 175) and shows how gender, obligatory heterosexuality, and the constraint of female sexuality underwrite social organization under patriarchy (p. 179).

Irigaray's analysis of the exchange of women, to which I shall return in my reading of Die Liebhaberinnen, places this exchange in a still wider context: not just within capitalism or societies based on kinship but also within the symbolic order and indeed the whole of western metaphysics. In brief she argues that under patriarchy, which she defines as a hom(m)o-sexual economy (that is, an economy of relations between men), women, like commodities, are valued according to an exterior system of value. This places them in competition with each other, subjects them to a schism between private use and public, social use, and renders them liable to fetishization as a manifestation of the power of the phallus.

Elfriede Jelinek is a Marxist-feminist writer and this fact is consistently reflected in her work.17 Jelinek's project, as Allyson Fiddler has shown in the first full length study of her œuvre, is to ‘rewrite reality’ in a Brechtian sense, to ‘expose the way in which patterns of oppression—particularly those of a class or sexual nature—are masked by the ruling ideology of patriarchal capitalism and represented as immutable facts about the “natural” world’.18 Jelinek seeks to ‘demystify’: ‘Ich wollte ja immer die Wahrheit hinter einem Schein oder die politische Geschichte hinter einem unschuldigen Bild hervorholen. Das ist das, was als roter Faden durch meine Texte hindurchgeht’,19 and to suggest that ‘the “reality” of life is more accurately portrayed by her own very negative and exaggerated picture of brutality, ignorance and perversion’ (Fiddler, Framed by Language, p. xii). Jelinek's works thus aim to enlighten and mobilize the reader through presenting a negative picture. As one interviewer remarked, her texts do, however, contain, in their continued faith in language, a utopian element,20 but I would add that the heavy negativity marks her off from the Brecht of the ‘Lehrstücke’, who provides an explicitly upbeat political message to the audience, and also, I believe, in some respects from the later Brecht. The question I want to raise at this stage is whether the negativity in Jelinek might spring from a feminist awareness that the causes of women's oppression lie much deeper than merely in capitalism, and that something far more radical than the overthrow of capitalism is therefore required to liberate them. While Die Liebhaberinnen may demonstrate (in a Brechtian way) the partnership of capitalism and patriarchy, it also reveals (in a confirmation of Irigaray) that patriarchy is based on the exchange of women, and in its aesthetic it illustrates (in an Irigarayan way) the need to subvert and change the symbolic order.

Jelinek's characteristic ‘aesthetics of exaggeration’ (Rewriting Reality, p. 126) and her Marxist-feminist principles are used to great effect in this 1975 work. Telling the story of two young women who set out to do what patriarchal capitalist ideology tells them to do (namely, to secure themselves husbands and thus legitimacy as women through motherhood) but who nevertheless fail to achieve happiness, this story provides in microcosm a picture of the deadly, exploitative power structures of capitalism, which work hand in hand with those of patriarchy, and also shows how these power structures reproduce themselves so that capitalism continuously creates the submissive and compliant subjects it requires.

The type of employer—worker relations depicted are those prevailing in the rural Austria of the 1970s, where many features have changed little since the nineteenth century. Work is scarce and competition for it fierce; the contract between worker and employer is not freely entered into. Working conditions for all workers are harsh and have a brutalizing effect;21 nevertheless fear of unemployment is a major motivating factor.22 All profit disappears into the hands of invisible capitalists. For some families the husband's earning power is sufficient to allow the wife not to work, but for most the depth of poverty is such that women are obliged to work too: the concept of the family wage has barely penetrated to this isolated corner of rural Austria. Nevertheless the work that women do is less well paid and of lower status than that of the men, which ensures that men's control over women is maintained.23

The major locus for the exploitation of women is, however, not the workplace but the family. According to Donna Haraway, the three major stages of capitalism (commercial/early industrial, monopoly, and multinational) are related dialectically to specific forms of family, and this is borne out by Die Liebhaberinnen, where, corresponding to the capital depicted (which is primarily a mix of Haraway's first stage and to a lesser extent her second), we see the patriarchal nuclear family, structured by the dichotomy between public and private, and, but only to a very limited extent, ‘the modern family mediated (or enforced) by the welfare state and institutions like the family wage’.24 In such a society opportunities for women are extremely limited; they are absolutely subject to the institutions of marriage and the family. Marriage is equated with death for both men and women: ‘schrecklich, dieses langsame sterben. und die männer und die frauen sterben gemeinsam dahin’ (p. 17). Family life is brutal in the extreme, the stress resulting from exploitation at work leading to domestic violence, shown in particular detail through the depiction of Erich's violent family.25 Paid work thus oppresses and also makes the (male) worker complicit in an hierarchical social system in which men have power over women. This, in addition to the deadly effect of women's (unpaid) work in the home which, in a Marxist-feminist analysis, contributes to the economy by servicing male workers and producing new workers (see Barrett, pp. 208-26), means that life is one stage worse for the women than it is for the men.26

If men have a better deal than women, this raises the question of why women allow it to be so. The book contains, as does much of Jelinek's work, a searing indictment of the role of the media and the culture industry generally in serving the interests of patriarchal capitalism, which bears witness to Jelinek's reading of Frankfurt School theory. Like Friedrich Engels before her, Jelinek believes in the importance of paid employment, however menial or low paid it might be, as a first stage in a women's emancipation.27 Nevertheless her female protagonists are blind to the liberatory potential of work, and seek marriage as a way to escape from its constraints. It does not occur to them to see work as a way of achieving independence from men, as it might have been, particularly for Paula, who starts an apprenticeship as a seamstress, thus breaking out of the pattern of choice for local women between sales assistant or housewife. Brigitte seeks marriage as a way to escape her work in the underwear factory and share in Heinz's earning power as businessman. Susi feels superior to Brigitte in that she finds a husband who can support her, whereas in her eyes Brigitte merely swaps a menial job for a better one: after marriage she still has to work in Heinz's business (their married life consists of ‘arbeit arbeit arbeit’ (p. 143)). After the failure of her marriage Paula ends up where Brigitte began, on the assembly line in the underwear factory, condemned to work away her life.

The reason for the women's blindness is the fact that, to use Althusser's term, they have been successfully interpellated by the ideology of love and marriage perpetuated by the media. This suggests that Jelinek holds an epistemological view of ideology as false consciousness that places the author/narrator and the reader outside it, though, as I shall show later, this is only partly the case. Paula, the only ‘character’28 towards whom the narrative voice displays sympathy, is depicted as a victim of the romantic ideology of love and marriage that blinds her to the (slim) liberatory potential of work and the truth about Erich.29 In the first sexual encounter between Paula, ‘die dumme kuh’ (p. 71), and Erich, we are not told of the love between them because, as the narrator tells us in an uncharacteristically serious moment, there was no love, ‘es war wie ein loch, in das man hineinstolpert, und nach dem man wieder weiterhumpelt. gebrochen ist nichts, auβer einem menschenkinde in der blüte seiner jahre’ (p. 91). Nevertheless Paula believes that her dreams can come true (p. 51), and even after she has been beaten up by her mother she can think of nothing other than the romantic wish-fulfilment that has claimed her and she has made her own:

in paula klingt ein lied, aber sehr schwach.
statt der wunden ein bodenlanges weiβes spitzenkleid samt schleier.
keine seifenlauge, sondern eine schöne blumenhaube.
keine aborte, sondern eine gute hochzeitstorte.
kein toter embryo kein, sondern ein guter braten vom schwein.

(p. 97)

The pathos aroused by Paula's silent song is very different from that aroused by the moment in Der kaukasische Kreidekreis when, though they have remained true to each other, Gruscha and Simon are separated by circumstances.30 Unlike Gruscha and Simon, Paula has no inner core to which she can remain true, her core is the ideology of love out of which she has been constructed.

True to the ‘modellhaft’ construction of the story, ‘immer abwechselnd mit dem guten beispiel brigittes schleppt sich das schlechte beispiel paulas dahin’ (p. 26), the ruthless Brigitte prospers while Paula is brought down. And though Paula is not a ‘real character’ but a demonstration piece, the reader is left with a sense of waste as strong as that conveyed at the end of Effi Briest (whose heroine's downfall is also caused by her ‘Schritt vom Wege’), made explicit by the narrator's final, condemnatory comment:

aus dem hoffnungsvollen lehrmädchen der schneiderei im ersten lehrjahr ist eine zerbrochene frau mit ungenügenden schneidereikenntnissen geworden.


das ist zu wenig.

(p. 154)

Thus far, then, we see an exaggerated Marxist-feminist account of life under capitalism, in which men and women are exploited and alienated by capitalism, women are further oppressed by men as a result of capitalism, and all go along with the system because they have been socialized into so doing through economic competition for jobs and through Ideological State Apparatuses, in particular the media and the family. But this is not the whole picture. I suggested above that women function under patriarchy (not just capitalism) as objects of exchange between men, and I want to show now how this is depicted in Jelinek's text following Irigaray's formulation of this phenomenon in her essay ‘Women on the Market’.

First, and fundamentally, in Irigaray's account women, like commodities, are valued according to an exterior system of value. The system is set by men, for patriarchy is a hom(m)o-sexual economy, an economy of relations between men:

The law that orders our society is the exclusive valorization of men's needs/desires, of exchanges among men. What the anthropologist calls the passage from nature to culture thus amounts to the institution of the reign of hom(m)o-sexuality. Not in an ‘immediate’ practice, but in its ‘social’ mediation. From this point on, patriarchal societies might be interpreted as societies functioning in the mode of ‘semblance.’ The value of symbolic and imaginary productions is superimposed upon, and even substituted for, the value of relations of material, natural, and corporal (re)production.


In this new matrix of History, in which man begets man as his own likeness, wives, daughters, and sisters have value only in that they serve as the possibility of, and potential benefit in, relations among men. The use of and traffic in women subtend and uphold the reign of masculine hom(m)o-sexuality, even while they maintain that hom(m)o-sexuality in speculations, mirror games, identifications, and more or less rivalrous appropriations, which defer its real practice. Reigning everywhere, although prohibited in practice, hom(m)o-sexuality is played out through the bodies of women, matter, or sign, and heterosexuality has been up to now just an alibi for the smooth workings of man's relations with himself, of relations among men. Whose ‘sociocultural endogamy’ excludes the participation of that other, so foreign to the social order: woman.

(pp. 171-72)

In Irigaray's analysis value does not inhere in the object (a woman), but appears only in exchange. Three fetishized roles are imposed on women in relation to value: that of mother, who has (been) withdrawn from exchange, of virgin, who represents pure exchange value, and of prostitutes, explicitly condemned by the social order but implicitly tolerated because the break between usage and exchange is less clear-cut (p. 186).

Jelinek makes explicit the commodity function of women in both main protagonists' quest for marriage, making repeated use of the vocabulary of capital and the market: Brigitte, for example, is described as ‘austauschbar und unnötig’ (p. 12), all that she has to offer being a body, which is, however, only one of many on the market: ‘brigitte hat brüste, schenkel, beine, hüften und eine möse. das haben andre auch, manchmal sogar von besserer qualität’ (p. 13). Her market value is declining with her age, ‘brigitte wird immer älter und immer weniger frau, die konkurrenz wird immer jünger und immer mehr frau’ (p. 13). In a nice piece of Jelinekian irony, Heinz's choice between the two commodities, Susi, Brigitte's rival, and Brigitte, though disavowed, is laid out for the reader:

susi ist etwas feines, brigitte nicht.
man kann die beiden nicht gegenüberstellen. das ist unmöglich.
man kann das eine mögen oder das andre, entscheiden muβ heinz.
hat er das lieber oder das.

(p. 63)

The commodification of women could not be clearer. And after marriage and motherhood Brigitte's transformation from object of exchange to one withdrawn from exchange is made complete when she loses her name and is now referred to as ‘mama’ (p. 149).

The course of Paula's life is also related in terms of her relative value. At first she is aware that she must not allow her ‘marktwert’ (p. 30), measured in terms of her virginity, to diminish by sleeping around, a fate that does in fact befall her when she becomes pregnant by Erich:

paulas mickriger bauch, der bald schon dick aufgeschwollen sein wird, sodaβ man für das gleiche geld plötzlich viel mehr kilogramm paula bekommen könnte, steht zur versteigerung. aber keiner will ihn haben. bei einem schwein wäre das ein enormer wertzuwachs. bei paula ist es ein zeichen, daβ sie leicht zu haben war, zu leicht, und jetzt umso schwerer anzubringen ist.

(p. 100)

Paula's status as commodity is underlined again when she confronts Erich in the bar, and the narrator makes an extended play on the word ‘Wert’:

alle meinen, daβ erich, wenn er schon nachgeben muβ, erst nachgeben soll, wenn das kind schon anwesend, und so die wertreduzierung paulas zu einer entwertung geworden ist.


wenn einer so abgewertet ist, dann sind sie alle dadurch ein wenig aufgewertet. die demütigung paulas entschädigt sie für ihre eigenen, manchmal viel schrecklicheren demütigungen.


plötzlich sind sie alle wieder personen gegenüber einer unperson geworden.

(p. 120)

Indeed, as the narrator points out in an unusually unambiguous didactic moment, ‘dieser roman handelt vom gegenstand paula’ (p. 130), and the object Paula finds herself in an hierarchical structure of domination: ‘über den gegenstand paula bestimmt erich, über dessen körperkräfte wieder andre bestimmen, bis sich seine eingeweide einem frühen tod entgegenzersetzen, bei dem der alkohol das seine leistet’ (p. 130).

Interestingly, when Paula, working as a prostitute, is spotted by one of Erich's friends, even though she claims that her motives were to support her family, her actions are seen as a betrayal not only of her husband but also of the local hom(m)osexual economy, for she is caught with a stranger:

paula hat ihren mann verraten. paula hat ihren mann mit einem oder mehreren andren männern betrogen.


es war noch dazu ein ortsfremder. keiner von den hiesigen burschen. ein ortsfremder hat ihnen ins nest geschissen.

(p. 153)

Paula's descent into prostitution means of course total devaluation and consequent exclusion from the social group.

Brigitte and Paula are defined in terms of what they represent to men for ‘they are the manifestation and the circulation of a power of the Phallus, establishing relationships of men with each other’ (Irigaray, p. 183).31 Brigitte becomes a mother, Paula a prostitute, and even Susi, who tries to live femininity positively, will have to submit to the violence of patriarchy, as Heinz observes to himself with a characteristically obscene turn of phrase, ‘susi wird den schwanz fest in die möse und das familienleben fest in den kopf gepflanzt bekommen’ (p. 83).

Secondly, in Irigaray's account, the exchange of women means certain things for them: that they are in competition with each other; that, as a result of this, far from rebelling, they speak to and are anxious to confirm their value; that they are subject to a schism between private use and public, social use; that they have no right to their own pleasure; that, unlike men, they have no access to the symbolic. This last point is crucial, for in both Irigaray's analysis and Jelinek's text the symbolic provides positive symbolization only of the power of the phallus and of relationships between men, not of those between the sexes, the maternal/feminine, or of relationships between women. The competition between Brigitte and Susi for Heinz thus represents a systemic competition between women, based on the defence of what they see as their property: ‘es ist ein allgemeines hassen im ort, das immer mehr um sich greift, das alles ansteckt, das vor keinem halt macht, die frauen entdecken keine gemeinsamkeiten zwischen sich, nur gegensätze’ (p. 29); women who are ‘herrenlos’ are seen by other women to be a threat (p. 92). Nowhere is this lack of solidarity more striking than in the relations between mothers and daughters, where mothers wish the worst for their daughters, for ‘warum soll die tochter nicht verbraucht werden, wenn die mutter auch verbraucht worden ist?’ (p. 16). Paula, indeed, receives no support from her mother when she becomes pregnant, but rather violence.

Far from showing solidarity with each other, the women assert their legitimacy through their men, their only access to the power of the phallus: Brigitte's main concern is to obtain Heinz's name for herself; Heinz's and Erich's mothers want to protect them from the predatory girls; when talking of their men, the women of the village use one word only, ‘MEINER’: ‘sonst nichts, nicht mein mann, nur meiner […] paula beobachtet das siegerlächeln, wenn die mutta oder die schwestern sagen: meiner. die einzige gelegenheit, wo die besiegten ein siegerlächeln im mundwinkel haben’ (p. 31). The women all aspire to motherhood (in Irigarayan terms this represents speaking to their value) though Susi resists it for a while and Brigitte hates babies. Motherhood brings justification, jubilation (‘sie hats geschafft’ (p. 37)) and security (though not for Paula, since Erich does not earn enough to support a family). Motherhood is, however, condemned by the narrator as monotonous drudgery, a series of useless tasks that weigh on the individual like a ‘zentnergewicht, das einen letzten endes zu brei schlägt’ (p. 88). Paula's status as commodity on a market means that she is subject to a schism she visualizes in terms of two bodies:

frühzeitig lernt paula, ihren körper und das, was mit ihm geschieht, als etwas zu betrachten, das einem andren passiert als ihr selbst. einem nebenkörper gewissermaβen, einer nebenpaula.


alles material aus paulas träumen, alle zärtlichkeit geschieht mit paulas hauptkörper, die prügel, die vom vatter kommen, geschehen dem nebenkörper.

(p. 31)

That women have no right to their own pleasure is shown graphically through the description of Brigitte's sexual encounters with Heinz, which fill her with disgust (pp. 55-56), and of Paula's with Erich, which bear no relation to the amorous exchanges she has read about in magazines (p. 91). Men's sexuality is symbolized positively (though mocked by the narrator) in imagery of panthers (p. 41), sunsets, and natural catastrophes (p. 56), and male promiscuity and lust are implicitly condoned:

als holzarbeiter hat er einen schweren und gefährlichen beruf, von dem schon oft einer nie mehr zurückgekommen ist. daher genieβen sie ihr leben unheimlich, solange sie jung sind, ab 13 ist kein mädchen mehr sicher vor ihnen, das allgemeine wettrennen beginnt, und die hörner werden abgestoβen, von welchem vorgang das ganze dorf widerhallt. der vorgang hallt durchs tal.

(p. 15)

Women's desire, by contrast, is simply left unfigured and a woman's attractiveness defined solely in terms of her ‘sauberkeit’ (p. 53) and ‘häuslichkeit’ (p. 65). Similarly, the only supportive and positively symbolized relationships are those between males: between Erich and his companions in the pub, for example (p. 20), or between Heinz's father and his son: ‘der opa kann dir auch beibringen, was ein mann wissen muβ, wie man auf bäume klettert […] weil der opa auch ein mann ist, weiβt du’ (p. 142), whereas supportive relations between women are impossible.

Jelinek thus shows that women's exploitation, their alienation from each other, from desire, and from the symbolic order are not explicable by the mechanics of capitalism alone but can also be explained in terms of their status as commodities within a patriarchal economy. That these often overlap (the regulation of women's sexuality is a key part of Marxist-feminist analysis) shows that capitalism has taken over and reinforced pre-existing practices. This takes us beyond a Marxist analysis and back into the realm of the symbolic and makes Jelinek's picture more bleak, for the practical advice suggested to her female readers (that women's liberation might start with the financial independence afforded by employment) is undermined by the other factors stacked against them.

If Jelinek, like Althusser, in dwelling on their constructedness as subjects, seems to deny her characters the possibility of resistance, and if, like Irigaray, she backs this up by showing how patriarchy exerts its powerful hold through the symbolic, in her aesthetic she is less ‘scientific’ and less negative. Unlike Irigaray she does not explicitly seek to speak as a woman, but she does have in common with her a desire to attack and subvert language in order to expose its role in oppressive power structures and thus hint at the possibility of change. For Irigaray this is in direct contradiction to the tactics of Marxism.32 Jelinek, as I have shown, does present for her readers a Marxist view of the deadly functioning of capitalism and exposes the harmful effects of patriarchal capitalist ideology, particularly for women. Capitalism, it is clear, must be changed. But her attacks on language show that this is not in itself enough. As she said in a recent interview: ‘Ich zwinge sofort den Ideologiecharakter der Worte hervor. Ich lasse die Sprache sich nicht ausruhen. Ich reiβe sie immer wieder aus ihrem Bett heraus. […] man muβ die Sprache foltern, damit sie die Wahrheit sagt’ (Meier, p. 73).

Jelinek's narrator in Die Liebhaberinnen does violence to the discourses that do violence to people through ruthless mimicry, whether it be of the discourse of the idyllic Austrian ‘Heimat’ (pp. 5-7), or of the human face of capitalism (p. 9), the clichéd discourse of ‘common sense’ or of course the powerful discourse of romance that leads Paula astray. Thus when the reader reads that Brigitte's hair shines like chestnuts (p. 21), or hears of ‘die heilsamen schmerzen des kinderkriegens’ (p. 28), or meets Heinz's mother, ‘die heinzmutter, von natur aus gutmütig’ (p. 33) and finds her to be anything but goodnatured, or hears that ‘alles ist in ordnung’ (p. 147) when what is actually being described is Paula's miserable circumstances, what comes through is the mismatch between language and truth and yet also the very real power invested in ideologically loaded language.

It is at this point that the narrator's standpoint becomes crucial. Margret Brügmann has analysed the difference between Brecht's inbuilt comments on the action of his ‘Lehrstücke’ and the comments of Jelinek's narrator in Die Liebhaberinnen, which is that while Brecht's comments show the false consciousness depicted to be correctable, Jelinek's narrator speaks from a position much closer to her protagonists and deliberately refrains from stating the essence of what is being depicted, thus making the reader work harder and denying him/her the catharsis resulting from a clear analysis.33 I would add that the narrative voice shifts, sometimes appearing complicit in patriarchal ideology, thus turning the reader into a voyeur (‘susi ist kein kleines mädel mehr, sondern schon eine richtige frau, was man beim räkeln genau merkt’ (p. 65)), sometimes directly mimicking it in order to open it up to scrutiny (‘heinz und brigitte erschrecken vor der gröβe dieses gefühls. brigitte erschrickt mehr als heinz, weil gefühle mehr weiblich sind’ (p. 23)), sometimes achieving the same effect by use of a rhetorical question (‘seit brigitte heinz kennt, drängt es sie dazu, ein kind zu gebären. wenn das kein gefühl ist, was ist dann ein gefühl?’ (p. 106)), and occasionally drawing an unambiguous moral, as in the key passages above concerning Paula. That close attention should be paid to the shifting positions of her narrative voice was confirmed by Jelinek in a recent interview: ‘Bei mir gibt es oft diese objektivierenden Kommentare. Wenn ich über mich eine Doktorarbeit schriebe, würde ich wahrscheinlich die Bedeutung des Wir, des auktorialen Kommentars in der Erzählung, analysieren, der ja ständig seine Perspektive ändert’ (Meier, p. 28). The constant shifting of narrative position in relation to the language used and the repeated drawing attention to the ideological character of language suggest a different relationship on the part of the Brecht of the ‘Lehrstücke’ and Jelinek to ideology and to truth, with both viewing ideology as false consciousness but Jelinek less ready to identify her own position outside it. Jelinek's position here is post-Foucauldian, and implicitly post-Marxist: she is aware that truth, like ideology, is also discursively constructed.

Jelinek does not propose a way out of the impasse of women's role in symbolic exchange because an alternative is literally unimaginable. Paula and Brigitte are nothing outside this economy, they have no being. Jelinek showed in this 1975 work that women are excluded from the symbolic order, not just from economic power. Nevertheless, she saw hope for change: her technique in Die Liebhaberinnen, while indebted to the (masculine, Marxist) Brechtian tradition of uncovering and demonstrating false consciousness from outside, also has affinities with Irigaray's feminist and post-structuralist strategic mimicry, which speaks from a position within ideology and allows for resistance by ‘make[ing] “visible” by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible: recovering a possible operation of the feminine in language’.34

Notes

  1. The best introduction to this topic remains Michèle Barrett's influential Women's Oppression Today: The Marxist/Feminist Encounter, revised edn (London: Verso, 1988).

  2. Friedrich Engels's early contribution to this debate is seen as flawed, though interesting: see The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986). Heidi Hartmann has shown how patriarchy underlies capitalism in her essay ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union’, in The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: A Debate of Class and Patriarchy, ed. by Lydia Sargent (London: Pluto, 1981), pp. 1-41.

  3. Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’, in Towards an Anthropology of Women, ed. by Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 157-210 (p. 160).

  4. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972).

  5. Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards and Investigation)’, in ‘Lenin and Philosophy’ and Other Essays (London: New Left Books, 1971), pp. 127-186.

  6. Terry Lovell, Pictures of Reality: Aesthetics, Politics, Pleasure (London: BFI, 1980), p. 40.

  7. Indeed, Michèle Barrett no longer felt able to use the term ‘Marxist Feminist’, which she had used only eight years earlier, in her 1988 revised edition of Women's Oppression Today: ‘The confident combination of “Marxist Feminist”, a common phrase in the late 1970s when the book was written, uncomfortably reminds us of an attempt to bring together two world-views that have continued to go their separate ways in spite of our efforts at marriage guidance’ (p. v).

  8. See, for example, Adrienne Rich, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (1980)’, in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (London: Virago, 1987), pp. 23-75; Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’, boundary 2, 12:3, 13:1 (1984), 333-58; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘French Feminism in an International Frame’, in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural. Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 134-53.

  9. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985).

  10. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990), and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London: Routledge, 1993).

  11. Donna Haraway, ‘“Gender” for a Marxist Dictionary: The Sexual Politics of a Word’, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991), pp. 127-48 (p. 136).

  12. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Routledge, 1987); Outside in the Teaching Machine (London: Routledge, 1993); The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (London: Routledge, 1990); Feminism as Critique: Essays on the Politics of Gender in Late-Capitalist Societies, ed. by Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987); Rosemary Hennessey, Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse (New York: Routledge, 1993); Michèle Barrett, The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).

  13. My account of Irigaray's ideas is heavily indebted to Margaret Whittord's book, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (London: Routledge, 1991).

  14. Jean-Joseph Goux, ‘Luce Irigaray Versus the Utopia of the Neutral Sex’, in Engaging with Irigaray, ed. by Carolyn Burke, Naomi Schor, and Margaret Whitford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 175-89 (p. 184).

  15. In This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. by Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 170-92.

  16. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Poststructuralism, Marginality, Postcoloniality and Value’, in Literary Theory Today, ed. by Peter Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), pp. 219-44 (p. 226).

  17. For example, Allyson Fiddler argues that it is Jelinek's attachment to the master narratives of Marxism and feminism which, despite her leanings towards post-modernism, makes her work differ from it (‘There Goes That Word Again, or Elfriede Jelinek and Postmodernism’, in Elfriede Jelinek: Framed by Language, ed. by Jorun B. Johns and Katherine Arens (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1994), 129-49). See also, in the same volume, Linda C. DeMerritt, who argues that, even in her most autobiographical and psychoanalytically informed work, Die Klavierspielerin, Jelinek's main theme ‘is the submission of everyone, regardless of sex, to the accumulation of capital and their resultant alienation’ (‘A “Healthier Marriage”: Elfriede Jelinek's Marxist Feminism in Die Klavierspielerin and Lust’, pp. 107-28 (p. 115)).

  18. Allyson Fiddler, Rewriting Reality: An Introduction to Elfriede Jelinek (Oxford: Berg, 1994), pp. xi-xii.

  19. Riki winter, ‘Gespräch mit Elfriede Jelinek’, in Elfriede Jelinek, ed. by Kurt Bartsch and Günther A. Höfler (Graz: Droschl, 1991), pp. 9-19 (p. 11).

  20. Sigrid Berka, ‘Ein Gespräch mit Elfriede Jelinek’, Modern Austrian Literature, 26 (1993), 127-53 (p. 138).

  21. This is stressed on every occasion: Paula's mother's overreaction to the news of her daughter's pregnancy (she beats her up) is occasioned by the stress of work: ‘zu dieser wahnsinnigen arbeit jeden tag auch noch schande und spott’ (p. 95). An appeal to the reader's sympathy, or at least understanding, is made even on behalf of the violent, stupid, and drunken Erich, the woodman, when Paula, not interested in him as a person but merely as father to her child, tries to trap him into marriage, catching him on his way home from work, when he is exhausted to dropping point (p. 103). Work for him is ‘das schlimmste […], was einem passieren kann’ but nevertheless a stark fact of life: ‘sie muβ aber gemacht werden’ (p. 113). Both men and women are alienated and physically and mentally worn out by their work, whether they work on the land, like Erich, a woodman, as ‘Beamte’, like Heinz's father, or in the factory producing women's underwear, like Brigitte.

  22. Both Heinz's father and Erich's stepfather are ill as a result of work (pp. 25, 41), which fact is measured in the heightened economic insecurity of the families and the fact that they both fear losing their working sons to potential wives who are perceived as a threat (pp. 36, 79). To stress the debilitating effects of work, both fathers are referred to metonymically by the narrator in terms indicating their ill health: Heinz's father is called ‘bandscheiben’, since his discs have suffered as a result of his work as a long-distance lorry driver, a job he in fact loses during the course of the novel (p. 99), while Erich's stepfather is called ‘asthma’, his condition a result of his work on the railways (p. 41).

  23. Hartmann makes the point that along with the development of the family wage in the twentieth century, the allocation of low-status and low-paid work to women allows patriarchal relations to remain intact (p. 25).

  24. Donna J. Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, pp. 149-81 (p. 167).

  25. His stepfather derives his authority and his ability to give orders from the fact that he was a ‘beamter’ (p. 101). The violence in the family, which may have caused Erich to suffer brain damage as a child (pp. 38, 42, 115), becomes a cycle as he extends the pleasure he gets from secret petty cruelties towards animals or children (p. 89) to the officially sanctioned cruelty against Paula: ‘erich erfaβt, daβ auf einmal seine entschlüsse und handlungen für einen andren wichtig geworden sind. daβ jemand von ihm ABHÄNGIG ist. daβ jemand ihm in gewisser weise AUSGELIEFERT ist. das gibt ein schönes neues gefühl’ (p. 104). When his stepfather ‘Asthma’ dies, the effect of his authoritarian character on that of his wife is revealed. She experiences ‘eine unglaubliche leere’ in the absence of his barked out orders (p. 127) and finds herself confused by being asked to make a decision about whether her son may marry, so unused is she to being agent of her own actions. As the narrator caustically phrases it, ‘einer ist schon weggestorben, wer bleibt denn übrig? gar niemand’ (p. 129).

  26. Heinz's mother, even though her husband's job meant that she did not have to go out to work (p. 12), is called a ‘leiche’ (p. 100); Erich's mother spent most of her life in service, had four children by different men before finding one who would marry her, and is chronically sick (pp. 39, 78); Paula's mother, described ironically as ‘wunschlos glücklich’ because it is too late for her to desire anything, has cancer, which may be a result of self-induced abortions (p. 75); Paula has her first child ‘in mühevoller kleinarbeit’ (p. 122), and her prostitution, engaged in so that she can support her family, is also described as ‘arbeit’ (p. 153). To be without a man is, however, worse, as Brigitte's unmarried mother is aware (p. 24). This is also the case for Erich's old, silent grandmother, who is ‘nur mehr geduldet’, and whose existence ‘hängt an einem seidenen faden’ because, being human, she has to be fed, and is thus a drain on the family's resources (p. 79).

  27. ‘Arbeit ist eine Möglichkeit der Frau, zum Subjekt zu werden, indem sie ökonomische Unabhängigkeit vom Mann erwirbt’ (‘Elfriede Jelinek im Gespräch mit Adolf-Ernst Meyer’, in Elfriede Jelinek, Jutta Heinrich; and Adolf-Ernst Meyer, Sturm und Zwang: Schreiben als Geschlechterkampf (Hamburg: Klein, 1995), pp. 7-74 (p. 57)).

  28. Jelinek's characters are not meant to be ‘realistic’ bourgeois subjects: ‘[das bürgerliche Subjekt] existiert nicht nur in meinem Werk nicht mehr, es existiert überhaupt nicht mehr. Aber es ist natürlich die Illusion eines gigantischen Marktes, den Menschen zu suggerieren, sie wären einmalig und unverwechselbar und imstande, individualistisch zu handeln’ (Winter, p. 14).

  29. ‘zu ihrer schneiderei sagt paula nie: meine arbeit. zu ihrer arbeit sagt paula nie: meine. auch innerlich nicht. die arbeit, das ist etwas, das von einem losgelöst ist, die arbeit das ist doch mehr eine pflicht und geschieht daher dem nebenkörper. die liebe, das ist eine freude, eine erholung, und geschieht daher dem hauptkörper’ (p. 32).

  30. ‘Der Eid ist gebrochen. Warum, wird nicht mitgeteilt.
    Hört, was sie dachte, nicht sagte:
    Als du kämpftest in der Schlacht, Soldat
    Der blutigen Schlacht, der bitteren Schlacht
    Traf ein Kind ich, das hilflos war
    Hätt' es abzutun nicht das Herz.’

    (Der kaukasische Kreidekreis (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1955), p. 75)

  31. The question of defining ‘woman’ causes particular difficulty to the mentally challenged Erich in a passage that reveals that definitions of femininity are man-made. Relating Erich's ponderings on the difference between the two kinds of women he knows (the summer guests whom he services sexually, and motherly types who service his physical needs, both of whom disqualify themselves as women), the narrator laconically observes that ‘erich denkt also an frauen, die für ihn keine frauen sind, weil sie ihm wie die geschlechtlose mutta dauernd fressen und trinken hineinschieben, und an frauen, die für ihn keine frauen sind, weil sie für ihn keine frauen sein dürfen, weil sie es mit jedem machen, ohne mit ihm verliebt, verlobt oder verheiratet zu sein und überhaupt unmöglich ein ganzes haus sauberhalten könnten’ (p. 58).

  32. ‘Contrary to the implications of Marxism […] in order to change the economic structure, it is necessary to change the structure of language’ (Irigaray, quoted in Whitford, pp. 20-21).

  33. Amazonen der Literatur: Studien zur deutschsprachigen Frauenliteratur der 70er Fahre (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1986), pp. 156-57.

  34. In the meantime, however, it seems that Jelinek has become more pessimistic, as her comments on one of her most recent plays, Totenauberg, make explicit. She describes Totenauberg as ‘mein resignativster Text […] ein bitterer Text, da nicht nur alle Hoffnungen auf Veränderung zunichte gemacht wurden, sondern für mich auch klar wurde, daβ die Frau nicht ins Denken Eingang finden kann’. Even Hannah Arendt, a figure in the play, cannot achieve ‘die Souveränität des reinen Ontologisierens […] Gleichzeitig sollte dieser Text auch mein letzter Versuch sein, als Frau in die männlichste aller Bastionen, das Denken, einzudringen, allerdings mit dem Wissen, daβ dies nicht möglich ist’ (Winter, p. 17).

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