Gender and technology in Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach's "Ein Original".

This interpretation of Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach's story "Ein Original" (1898) highlights the positive portrayal of the title character's daughter, a girl genius in the male-dominated field of technology, and her role in transforming her emotionally indifferent father into a man capable of love. Parallels to Ebner's own relationships to her husband and her father are reflected in her attempt to resolve fictionally the conflict between creative work and love. The daughter's death suggests that the resolution is unattainable, but in the metaphor of the precision motor driven by a powerful energy, Ebner thematizes her own writing as itself an "original." (LD)

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach's "Ein Original" ("One of a Kind") is the remarkable story of a father and daughter who share a passion for technology. It is one of Ebner's late stories, first published in the Vienna paper Die neue freie Presse in May 1898. She was 67, and her 82-yearold husband and cousin Moriz von Ebner-Eschenbach (1) had just died in January of that year. Her diaries indicate that this was the first story she wrote and published after his death. (2) Together with eight others, it appeared again in 1901 in her collection Aus Spatherbsttagen: Erzahlungen (From Late Autumn Days: Tales). Although it has never received detailed interpretation, (3) it ought, for a number of reasons, to be of great interest to feminist readers and critics. Its positive portrayal of a girl who excels in the privileged male sphere of technology, indeed in cutting-edge technology, offers clear evidence of Ebner's resistance to the social and cultural enforcement of gender roles. Moreover, because the father-daughter relationship in the story parallels in significant ways the author's own relationships to her father and to her much older husband, it can be argued that Ebner expresses here certain unresolved issues surrounding those two important patriarchal figures in her life. In particular, she imagines a resolution to the conflict between following her creative calling and earning the love of distant and disapproving father-figures, a conflict that is representative for the experience of many women. Finally, because the technical know-how thematized in the story functions as a metaphor for the technical know-how of story-telling itself, Ebner lays claim to status and recognition for her own literary achievement. At the same time, however, the somber ending highlights the risks that a woman takes when she ventures into fields dominated by men.

The "Original" of the title is Gabriel Teufenberg, a wealthy gentleman. What is original, that is, odd or "one-of-a-kind" about him is that he is a man completely without affect, emotionally indifferent to the people around him, and interested only in machines. His mother, as warm a person as he is cold, urges him to marry one of his orphaned cousins, who live with them: "But Gabriel paid his cousins no more attention than wax dolls would have received from him, that is, motionless wax dolls, for ones that moved would have awakened his liveliest interest." (4) As a child he constructs miniature pumps, mills, and elevators. Later he spends summer days alone in his workshop on the family estate, tinkering--not very successfully--with the farm machinery. Asked which of the pretty cousins he will take for a wife, he answers as he does to every question about preference: "It's all the same to me" (574). Eventually, after the death of his mother, he does marry someone, the beautiful young widow Cacilie, who is not in love with him, but appreciates him for "his placid nature, his fine, dignified comportment, and his moral uprightness" (575). She insists to her friends that some day a warm feeling will awaken in this phlegmatic, indifferent man. But there is no sign of it, even after three children are born, two boys and then a girl. While in England visiting a machine factory, Gabriel is too fascinated by the model of a crane to answer the telegram announcing his daughter's birth. He has his friend reply. A month later, he returns home with gifts, everything that the latest English technology has to offer: "bicycles, tandems, telephones and graphophones, typewriters and sewing machines, and a marvelous little naphtha-powered boat. But the most important acquisition for him was a transformer" (575). The latter, which will convert electricity generated by a nearby mill into highvoltage current to run his machines, suggests the figurative transformation that is about to occur. (5) From the moment he touches his infant daughter Gabriele, Gabriel becomes a loving father and husband.

 
   There followed days when he did not enter the workshop. He was filled with 
   joy at the development of the young life growing up beside him; it melted 
   away what was frozen and hard in his being and made his dull eyes see the 
   wealth of happiness that he had long since possessed, without knowing of it 
   (577). 

Gabriele not only shares her father's name, she shows from an early age "an astonishing thirst for knowledge and a decidedly inquiring mind. Above all in the field of mechanics." She turns out to have a genius for technology that far surpasses her father's dilettantism. She too constructs miniature pumps, mills, and elevators, "[b]ut they were executed much more finely and delicately and functioned with more precision" (577). She even hollows out the wooden figures of her Noah's ark set and fills them with tiny clockworks so that they can move on their own. Her father becomes her proud and devoted assistant as she invents electro-mechanical devices that bring her an international reputation. At the age of fifteen she is invited to exhibit "the model of an electromagnetic motor" at a London trade exhibition. She agrees to send it and her parents promise that they will travel there with her. But on the night before she is to pack the motor for shipment, she is awakened by a nightmare in which her creation will not start, no matter what she does. Highly agitated and for some reason worried about her parents' disapproval, she hurries to the workshop to make sure it still works. With uncharacteristic haste she reaches for the power source and electrocutes herself. At her funeral, her father seems numb and unresponsive. Afterwards his wife turns to him in her grief: "she spoke, a shade of reproach in her tone: `Gabriel, I have lost my child, too,' and went over to him and held out her hand. He avoided her touch." He has, of course, reverted to his former state of emotional apathy. Asked by his son "`What shall I do, Father.... go or stay?'" he replies, "`It's all the same to me'" (580).

What is fascinating about this story is not just the bizarre psychopathology of the title character, the father, but Ebner's daring characterization of the daughter. In 1898 a fifteen-year-old girl genius in mechanical and electrical engineering was nearly unimaginable. At the time, research and invention, especially in the new electrical technologies, even when pursued by amateurs, was with few exceptions an exclusively male preserve. As Carolyn Marvin has shown in her book When Old Technologies Were New, technical and popular publications of the time commonly presented the expert language of the field as something women could not understand and should not trouble their pretty heads about anyway (22-50). In terms of cultural expectations, the character of Gabriele Teufenberg is the 1890s equivalent of a teenage female computer genius in the 1970s: a rarity, even a freak.

This is not the first time Ebner portrayed a technologically inclined female character. "Lotti, die Uhrmacherin" ("Lotti, the Watchmaker," 1880), the first of her stories to appear in Rodenberg's Deutsche Rundschau (Henn 155), tells of a woman who makes an independent living as a watchmaker, a trade she learned from her father. Ebner herself had loved clocks and watches since childhood (Meine Kinderjahre 88), had privately trained as a watchmaker in 1879, and built up a substantial collection of rare and unusual timepieces. It is reasonable to assume that in her positive portrayal of Lotti as a gifted practitioner of the same trade, she was projecting a facet of herself. Yet Lotti is ultimately presented as admirable not so much for her competence in that maledominated profession, but for the "feminine" characteristic of selfsacrifice: she sells her beloved watch collection to help her former lover out of financial difficulties. (6) Writing in 1896 in Velhagen und Klasings Monatshefte about her own collection, Ebner herself expresses a stereotypically feminine modesty about her technical expertise (Klostermaier 150). In "Ein Original," she returns to the motif of the daughter practicing the father's craft: Gabriele begins as a sort of watchmaker, building clockworks into her Noah's ark figures. This time, however, Ebner has her young craftswoman progress without apology or compromise to cutting-edge electro-technology. (7)