An Ecofeminist Reading of Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall
III. The Misanthropic Tendency
While Defoe’s Crusoe dreams of meeting another human being and having a mate as a companion as time goes by, the woman in The Wall desires no human companions at all. She takes measures to protect herself from being attacked, such as hanging the loaded gun on the wall. Although she feels her action is ridiculous, she still does so because, according to her experiences, she can only be threatened by mankind. As she says in her report, “The only enemy I had ever encountered in my
life so far had been man” (Haushofer 15). The longer she stays in the forest alone, the more she becomes worried about encountering any human being. She supposes that because “strangers, who will find a stranger” might come back and get her, “[i]t would be better for [her] if they never came” (88). Unlike Crusoe, who appreciates Friday’s youth and beautiful body, the woman reveals no interest in the male intruder, let alone any sexual appeal. What she reveals is a total distaste and dislike for the man.
She is not excited by the appearance of the man and instead shoots him at the expense of her opportunity (perhaps the only one) to have a male partner and later generations.
The Wall not only presents an indictment of the patriarchal system but also blames humankind for their primacy over animals and nature. The novel criticizes the human devastation of nature. The forest, which is part of nature, is not static but is dynamic and lively for the woman. She thinks that although she will no longer exist,
“later the forest will push as far as the wall and win back the land that man has stolen from it” (Haushofer 161). She feels that “the forest doesn’t want human beings to come back” (161). When the mother cat first appears and subsequently lives in the woman’s house, the cat appears friendly to the dog yet suspicious of the woman, so the woman, knowing “how poorly cats are often treated, particularly in the country,”
speculates that the cat’s “experiences with people must indeed have been bad” (39).
The woman betrays her misanthropic attitude in her report. The woman pities animals and people because they are “thrown into this life without being consulted”
(Haushofer 210). Although neither can choose their life to be born or not, she pities people more than animals, for humans “have just enough intelligence to resist the natural course of things,” and this “has made them wicked and desperate, and not very lovable” (210). Her words suggest that humans turn out to be malicious creatures because of their violence done to nature. Among humankind and animals, she prefers the latter. After the disaster happens, she starts to like and miss her cousin Luise,
although she used to find Luise “very strange, and sometimes repulsive” (106).
However, the narrator admits that she in fact knows more about Bella and the cat than about her cousin and confesses that “it’s much easier to love Bella or the cat than it is to love a human being” (106).
After living alone and spending more time with nature, the woman gradually observes its beauty and reconsiders her relationship with it. She admits that since her childhood she has forgotten how to use her eyes to see things, and thus has also forgotten that the world was once “young, untouched and very beautiful and terrible”
(Haushofer 185). However, because of living in the forest, she can “see the great brilliance of life again” (185). She also reflects on human pride and self-centeredness.
As she says, “It was almost impossible . . . to remain a single and separate Self, a little, blind, independent life that didn’t want to fit in with a greater Being. Once my major source of pride had been that I was just such a life, but . . . it suddenly struck me as pathetic and absurd, an overinflated Nothing” (161; emphasis added). Attuning more to the natural milieu, the woman realizes that she is part of nature, and thus cannot remain her own self without integrating herself into “a greater Being.” Furthermore, after living alone in the forest for more than one year, the woman starts to realize that she is “no longer in search of a meaning to make [her] life more bearable” (184). She comments that “[h]uman beings had played their own games, and in almost every case they had ended badly” (184). However, as a human being, she thinks that “[i]t was better not to think about human beings. The great game of the sun, moon and stars seemed to be working out, and that hadn’t been invented by humans” (184). Praising nature and enjoying staying with nature, she criticizes human vanity and
anthropocentrism, realizing that human creation is not superior to nature. She has a new look at the world as well as the connection of her life with it.
If Defoe’s Crusoe, as Stephen H. Gregg comments, is “like Adam” in the Eden,
given the right to name and take charge of animals, then the woman in The Wall is an Eve in the Eden but without Adam (86). Although many discrepancies exist between Crusoe in Defoe’s version and the woman in The Wall, mainly owing to their different genders, these two protagonists have something in common. That is, both of them reveal the least interest in the opposite sex and both lack sexual desires and urges. Ian A. Bell comments that Crusoe’s lack of “sexual fantasies” during his stay on the island for twenty-eight years is “one of the most curious of incidents” (29, 29-30). On the island, Crusoe mentions almost nothing about his wife in his diary or monologue (although at the beginning of Robinson Crusoe’s sequel, The Farther Adventures of
Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe expresses how he misses his wife). Similarly, the woman
rarely mentions her husband, apart from twice in her report. However, while no potential female partners appear on Crusoe’s island in Defoe’s version, one potential male partner for the woman appears in The Wall.The ending of The Wall invokes a radical ecofeminist position. As the woman gets used to her life in the enclosure and forms a harmonious relationship with
animals, a man abruptly intervenes. It is not until the final few pages that the man first appears in the novel. The male intruder kills Lynx, a male dog, and Bull, a male calf.
Subsequently, the female protagonist shoots the man to death before he speaks anything. The scene of shooting the man is rather shocking and surprising, not only because this plot comes too suddenly and unexpectedly, but also because in doing so she loses her only hope to speak with a human being as well as to have a potential partner. Yet, she does not regret it at all because her animals are more important than the man. Even after killing the man, she does not care about him but does care about her animals. It is at this point that the world seems to become a world without males because all male characters (the man, the dog, and the bull) are dead. It is also at this point that the novel more openly reveals a radical ecofeminist standpoint because it
highlights the connection between woman and nature by the death of males. To retrieve a compatible and balanced relationship with nature, the woman opts to side with animals by counterattacking man.
The wall denotes several meanings in the novel. On a literal level, the wall is the separation between the outside world and the enclosure. On a metaphorical level, it represents the separation between genders. In a sense, the wall can be understood as a space, an enclosure that limits women’s agency and positions them in a passive role.
On a psychological level, as Caviola points out, the wall is “the frontier of the narrator’s mind,” i.e., “a psychic object” that goes beyond human understanding and exposes “the limited character of human knowledge” (104). Moreover, the wall also represents “the narrator’s worst fears” and “the phantasmagorical representation of these fears”; the woman’s report, whose language is “neutral, unemotional,
dispassionate and deeply melancholy,” is a wall that she “builds around her
exposedness and vulnerability” (105). The wall is reminiscent of the woman’s fear in her childhood. In her report, she mentions that she, as a child, had the fear that everything she saw would disappear once she turned back (Haushofer 162). The wall embodies her childhood fear, for it makes everything around her disappear by taking it away.
As mentioned, the appearance of the wall separates the outside world from the enclosure and hence creates two worlds—inside and outside, city and country, a destroyed world and a preserved world, as well as man and woman. The wall renders the outside world dead and left untouched by human beings. Toward the end of the novel, the wall metaphorically becomes the war between genders. The man in The
Wall is not the counterpart of Friday but is more like that of Crusoe, who manages to
control nature. The novel conceives of a world without men, and the only survivor in the world is never a man but a woman. The novel charges men with their leading theworld to the path of destruction and suggests that the world should be governed, saved, and preserved by the female.
The Wall, as discussed previously, reveals a radical ecofeminist standpoint.
However, this standpoint, I think, has its limitations. While building a close
relationship with animals, she cannot help but admit that she is a human being. She identifies herself as a human being and fails to completely remove her human
perspective when viewing nature and the animals around her. For instance, the woman regards herself as the caretaker of the garden and presumes that the cow cannot live without her because the cow, without her help, is unable to be grazed.
Moreover, the scene of killing the man weakens the novel’s appeal to nature.
Echoing the thoughts of radical/cultural ecofeminism, The Wall suggests that patriarchy, seeking to domesticate the wildness of women and nature, is the main factor that persecutes women and hinders nature from growth. Nevertheless, the surface “radical” ideas in the novel, I think, undermine ecological thoughts underlying the novel because the novel connotes biological gender essentialism as radical/cultural ecofeminism does. As Merchant puts it, “For cultural feminists, human nature is grounded in human biology. Humans are biologically sexed and socially gendered”
(Radical Ecology 191). As mentioned previously, radical/cultural ecofeminists stress the connection between woman and nature and use it as an effective strategy to counterattack patriarchy. However, social/socialist ecofeminists oppose the woman-nature association not only because it suggests an essentialist view that
assumes the inherent link between women and nature without noting how this link has been formed socially, cultural, or politically by the patriarchal system, but also
because it strengthens the stereotypical view of gender roles in which women, closer to nature, are regarded in roles of nurturers or caretakers (Carlassare 222; Chang 82).
Just as radical/cultural ecofeminists develop their theories based on the biological
difference, The Wall marks the difference between a man’s and a woman’s attitude toward nature. Therefore, the novel, siding with radical ecofeminism, easily tends to fall into biological gender dualism or essentialism, and thus appears “not radical”
enough.
The novel emphasizes a close rapport between woman and nature, while
suggesting that the male is the bane of the woman’s life and that of nature. Killing the man in The Wall becomes the woman’s resort to eliminate the patriarchy and liberate woman and nature from the patriarchal system. The text reverses traditional gender roles and, more importantly, challenges male chauvinism, which is represented by the man. However, the text has its limitations. First, it entirely negates the male’s ability to coexist with nature, and thus dispenses with him, overlooking the fact that the male is also part of the ecosystem. Second, it fails to break the dualistic thinking of gender and instead deepens the divide between genders. Although the woman overwhelms the man in the end and reverses the traditional gender roles, the line between man and woman, or between man and nature, still cannot be crossed just as the transparent wall in the novel can never be broken off. Because of this, the demarcation between
humankind and nature still exists and fails to subvert the dualistic view of man and nature.