Arthur Schnitzler's Fraulein Else and the end of the bourgeois tragedy.(women and sexuality in German literature)

Schnitzler's novella Fraulein Else can be read as the last representative and "death-sentence" of the bourgeois tragedy. A comparison with Lessing's Emilia Galotti informs my reading of the later story and shows how new socio-economical realities have a major impact on the way the beautiful female body is treated in late bourgeois society. By ultimately taking possession of her body, the daughter wins her lonely fight against an objectifying male society that mandates a new literary form, the interior monologue. Additionally, striking similarities between Schnitzler's and Lessing's texts suggest that Fraulein Else is a conscious commentary on Emilia Galotti. (BM)

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The noble daughter sells herself for the sake of her beloved father and ends up by finding great joy in it.--Arthur Schnitzler (1)

This is one of the possible scenarios that the heroine Else T. of Arthur Schnitzler's 1924 novella Fraulein Else tests in her head in response to her parents' plea to help remedy a disastrous financial situation that they are facing. As inconspicuous as this line seems in the context of Else's many approaches to her situation, it contains the core features of the dilemma with which this woman sees herself faced, exactly those features that have been at the center of many scholarly discussions about this novella and its main character. As the quotation suggests, Fraulein Else is Schnitzler's variation on the themes of female sexuality, the place of the daughter in the early twentieth-century family, and the impact of modern socio-economic realities, especially capitalism, on the private sphere and the family. These traits have led a few critics to view Fraulein Else in the context of the tradition of the bourgeois tragedy. (2) However, among all the critics who have detected a proximity between Schnitzler's novella and the bourgeois tragedy, William H. Rey is, to my knowledge, the only one to claim a direct connection between the two. After a thorough examination of the father figure in Fraulein Else, he concludes that this novella is, in fact, "a late-bourgeois tragedy in prose" (63). However, Rey does not follow up on this important thought, as his "diagnosis" serves more as a justification for his positive assessment of Else's father than as an observation that warrants further investigation. It thus remains to examine to what extent Rey's assessment is correct or justified and what this would mean for our understanding of Fraulein Else as a socio-historical document from the first half of the twentieth century as well as a literary response to a century-old tradition and its cultural and social ramifications.

Before we can undertake any comparative reading, it is of course necessary to define the (sub-)genre of the bourgeois tragedy. As it is not the purpose here to discuss the bourgeois tragedy as a dramatic genre, that is, in poetological terms (which would require engaging in a discussion of eighteenth-century poetics), I will limit my definition to those aspects that will be pertinent for reading Fraulein Else as "a bourgeois tragedy in prose": the main character-constellation (father--daughter--"seducer"), the distribution of power within this constellation, and the ideological institution of the bourgeois family as the main "stage" on which the tragedy is acted out. In these three categories, the female body, i.e., the body of the daughter, emerges as the main site of attention over which individuals, the family as a group, and society negotiate their relationships. An inquiry into the status of this female body as subject to the domineering male gaze and the woman's self-positioning within this power structure will help to show how the bourgeois tragedy has developed and possibly come to an end by 1924, the year when Fraulein Else was published.

As Rey's statement suggests, the genre shifts in Fraulein Else are major since it is not just the dramatic conflict that changes, but the form in which it is presented as well. A discussion of Fraulein Else as the endpoint of the tradition of the bourgeois tragedy must thus also take into account the radical change in literary presentation from drama to prose. It is my contention that this shift is also a direct result of the changed social as well as cultural (and possibly literary) circumstances that already modified the dramatic conflict. This is even more interesting if one considers that only twenty-five years earlier, Schnitzler had published his play Flirtations (Liebelei), which Axel Fritz can still convincingly categorize as a late representative of the traditional bourgeois tragedy (305 ff.). It must thus be asked why Schnitzler refrained from writing Fraulein Else as a drama. The author himself answered this question in a letter to Stefan Zweig when he pointed out how well the subject of Fraulein Else was suited for the form of the interior monologue, thus claiming that the material itself suggested the form that he gave it. (3) However, this is only part of the answer, and I will try to provide a more complex one in the course of this paper. Schnitzler decided to write a literary text that features certain key aspects of the traditional bourgeois tragedy and thus set us up for a specific literary experience. Yet he then disappoints these expectations by only partly fulfilling them, and I suggest that we have to read this "deception" as a conscious move that makes a more general statement about the possible dramatic qualities of bourgeois conflicts in Schnitzler's time.

In order to understand Fraulein Else as a late bourgeois tragedy, it will be helpful to read it in comparison with one of the established representatives of this genre in German literature such as Lessing's Emilia Galotti, arguably the best-known and first important bourgeois tragedy in German literature. (4) However, it is not just this pragmatic aspect that suggests Emilia Galotti for comparison. If one reads both texts carefully, striking similarities in the general dramatic set-up, dramatis personae, and even wording become visible that strongly suggest that Schnitzler's Fraulein Else is a direct response to or reworking of Lessing's older model, a finding that has been overlooked so far. Especially when we compare these similarities in the two texts, it will become possible to determine Schnitzler's take on the literary tradition that he challenges as well as the social realities that inform his later tale. My discussion will thus be divided into three parts: first, it will be necessary to provide a (working) definition of the bourgeois tragedy in order to point out those aspects that need to be examined in a comparative reading of Lessing's and Schnitzler's texts. This comparative reading will then lead to a discussion of Fraulein Else as the last representative of this sub-genre, which ultimately suggests the impossibility or death of the bourgeois tragedy in postwar literature.