Hausfrau
By Jill Alexander EssbaumRandom House, 2015Jill Alexander Essbaum’s novel Hausfrau fits in a long tradition of novels that take women’s unhappiness as their central subject (Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Tess of the d’Urbervilles). But our contemporary literary culture seems drawn to novels about a particular form of discontent: the struggle some women experience trying to create meaning for themselves at a time when the possibilities for women are — or at least seem to be — wide open. Why, these books ask, is this meaning-creation such a challenge? Why are marriage and motherhood still fraught, contested experiences that promise fulfillment but too often turn into traps? These questions might explain the popularity of novels such as Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs, Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train, and Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation (as well as those by Gillian Flynn, Nell Zink, Meg Wolitzer, and Siri Hustvedt), with their female protagonists who have freedoms women from earlier centuries could only dream of but who do not feel satisfied.Essbaum’s protagonist, Anna Benz, is miserable. She is a thirty-seven year-old wife and mother living with her Swiss husband, Bruno, in a small town outside Zurich. For the nine years she has been an American ex-pat, her identity has been almost entirely defined by the phrase “wife and mother,” but from the novel’s opening line — “Anna was a good wife, mostly” — we see that this identity is beginning to crumble. She loves her three children: eight-year-old Victor, six-year-old Charles, and ten-month-old Polly, but none of these children were expected or planned for, and Anna seems to spend little time caring for them, shuttling them off to their paternal grandmother’s house nearby. Anna has very few friends, only the self-absorbed, sharp-edged Edith and the mild-mannered, overly-earnest, generous-to-a-fault Mary, two women who are clearly meant to be foils.Anna has been in therapy with a Jungian who analyzes her dreams and also, more practically, encourages her to find hobbies and interests. The analyst does not understand why Anna’s life feels so empty when she seems to have the world before her, modern woman that she is: “A modern woman needn’t live a life so circumscribed. A modern woman needn’t be so unhappy. You should go more places and do more things.” And then, “Doktor Messeli’s voice didn’t hide its impatience.” Bruno has even less patience. In a revealing parenthesis only a few pages into the novel we learn “it was Bruno who’d insisted she see a psychotherapist: I’ve had enough of your fucking misery, Anna. Go fix yourself, is what he’d said to her.” Doktor Messerli’s most concrete advice is that Anna take German lessons; she has lived in Switzerland for nine years, after all, and yet cannot speak the language fluently.Anna takes those German lessons, and it’s here that she meets Archie Sutherland, with whom she begins an affair. This is not at all what Bruno meant by “go fix yourself,” or what Doktor Messerli meant when she said, “It’s time you steer yourself into a trajectory that will force you into participating more fully with the world around you.” But the affair does get Anna to participate more fully in the world, and, at times, it’s what gives her meaning and purpose. Soon, we learn that this was not Anna’s first affair, nor will it be her last. There was also Stephen, whom she met two years earlier, and Kurt, whom she will soon meet at a party. She never tells her analyst about these affairs, which both connect her to other people and isolate her, acts that provide solace and something to do with her time but that also threaten to destroy the life she has been living, dissatisfying as it is.What is at the heart of Anna’s suffering? She and Doktor Messerli both blame it on what they call her passivity:
Anna’s passivity. The hub from which the greater part of her psychology radiated. Everything came down to a nod, an acquiescence, a Yes, dear. Anna was aware of this. It was a trait she’d never bothered to question or revise, which, through the lens of a certain desiccated poignancy, seemed to be its proof. Anna was a swinging door, a body gone limp in the arms of another body carrying it. An oarless ocean rowboat.
She may be a “modern woman,” but she has never acted like one. As Doktor Messerli points out, she is not all that different from earlier, much more circumscribed, generations of women who “didn’t drive cars or have bank accounts either.” When asked what she thought as a child she might be when she grew up, her answer is “Loved. Protected. Secure.” Her college major was Home Economics, something she admits with embarrassment. The analyst says she has a responsibility to do something with her life, and Anna doesn’t disagree, but neither does she change anything.There is something empty at the heart of the analyst’s urgings. Doktor Messerli’s vision of a good life sounds high-minded and noble, but also unlikely, unusual, perhaps impossible, and even a little boring:
The kind of success I mean comes from living a life that satisfies a woman in such a way that when, in her old age, she looks back upon her years in contemplation, she is able to announce with certainty, ‘I have led a conscious, useful life, whole and complete, and I filled it with as many worthy things as it could possibly hold.’
Who is able to look back on their life with such assured contentment? Perhaps only those on their deathbeds can truly say, but all the evidence from literature suggests that this is rare indeed. Anna isn’t sure that such certainty is even something to aim for. But there is very little that she is sure of and even less that she will admit to her analyst. Even her claim that passivity is at the heart of her problems comes to seem false, or at least too simple. The narrator describes Anna as passive again and again, to the point that it comes to feel like a pose or a role that she plays to hide a deeper truth. Her passivity is described as theater: Anna imagines an “invisible marquee” above a theater door with film titles such as “You Could Speak up, Have Your Say!” or “You’re No Victim, You’re an Accomplice.” Many of her actions are not passive at all. She says to her soon-to-be lover, Archie, “Anna does as Anna desires.” That she refers to herself in the third person may undermine the self-assertion in the statement, but she is purposely experimenting with taking exactly what she wants. Over time, she comes to recognize that “I may not be as passive as I think I am. The bus is mine. Goddammit, I’ll drive it.” Passivity is a convenient excuse, a too-easy explanation, a way of deflecting her analyst’s knowing gaze.So we return to the question: just what is Anna’s problem? The novel offers many potential answers, and it’s possible to read this plenitude of answers as a weakness. Essbaum throws so many explanations at the reader that they don’t cohere into a meaningful picture. It could be that Anna lost her parents at a young age. Or that Bruno is a demanding, distant husband who sometimes leaves Anna sexually frustrated. Perhaps it’s that Anna is entirely out of place in Switzerland and never really wanted to move there. Or that she has no sense of purpose in her life, not from a career, from friends, or from her children. Or that she fell deeply in love with Stephen, with whom she had her first affair, who then left her abruptly to return to the U.S.It’s unclear how all these causes of suffering fit together and which ones really matter. This task is not made easier by the sometimes awkwardly shifting point of view. The narrator usually stays very close to Anna’s perspective, reporting on her thoughts so that we almost feel she herself is telling the story. But now and then the perspective zooms out to a much wider view or even looks ahead into the future with a knowing wink: “But she wouldn’t know that for a very long time.” We are shuttled confusingly between what appears to be commentary by an omniscient narrator and a report of Anna’s thoughts: “But Anna. What were her tendencies? It was no mystery. With Anna it was all verbs. She was sloppy in her conjugations, reckless in her positioning…Anna laughed at these conclusions. How evident I am! And she was.” Because of this switching, it can be hard to tell if a line such as “Even weak, Anna was occasionally wise” is Anna’s self-assessment or a detached narrator delivering judgment. We are not sure how much Anna knows about herself and how much is she deliberately hiding from everyone, including the reader, and possibly including herself.Is Anna as a character a mystery or merely a muddle, to borrow E.M. Forster’s famous formulation? Ultimately, the novel’s uncertainty about Anna’s suffering points to a very bleak view of life. A clear accounting of her pain would provide some relief and possibly a way forward, but there is no satisfactory explanation. There isn’t anything for her to do, no solution and little hope for an end to the misery. Misery just is, and attempts to account for it will fail in the end. The analyst’s attempts to push Anna into a deeper, more meaningful life are really just attempts to distract her from life’s final meaninglessness.This dark vision is a powerful one, and the novel gets more and more engrossing as it moves towards its conclusion. The earlier sections are not uniformly successful, however, and in addition to the awkward viewpoint shifts, some of the novel’s organizational principles are too transparent. There are several through-lines that structure the novel, one of which is grammar as a method for analyzing character, which, with repetition, becomes too obvious and pat. The narrator tells us that Anna “confused tense with mood and relied too often on the passive voice,” a description that does not tell us anything new and feels like mere cleverness. As Anna learns German, she uses it in an attempt at self-analysis, but her conclusions don’t satisfy:
That morning’s German lesson left Anna pensive. The German language, like a woman, has moods. On occasion they are conditional, imperative, indicative, subjunctive. Hypothetical, demanding, factual, wishful. Wistful, bossy, of blunted affect, solicitous. Longing, officious, anhedonic, pleading. Anna tried to make a list of every mood she’d ever been in but ran out of words before even half of her feelings were named.
There is much to admire here: the list of moods and the way they move from the grammatical to the emotional is wonderful. That words fail Anna in her attempts to understand herself is one of the novel’s basic points and is perhaps at the heart of her problems. But the generic phrase “like a woman” mars the passage and sounds glib. Similarly, many of the novel’s short sections begin with Anna asking Doktor Messerli to make distinctions between words: “What’s the difference between passivity and neutrality?” or “Is there a difference between destiny and fate?” These questions signal the importance of language in Anna’s analysis and the ways that language continually fails her: none of the doctor’s answers are satisfactory or illuminating and the questions serve as just another distraction from the truth of Anna’s pain. But they are also too direct in their role as transitional techniques and signifiers of the novel’s themes. They become tiresome.This is a novel that constantly moves in circles. Yes, there is forward motion towards a climactic ending, but along the way the narrative returns again and again to the same settings and ideas. It’s built out of short sections, a scene with Anna and her analyst followed by a scene in her German class, followed by a scene at home, followed by one with Archie, and so on. The repetitions and the short sections circle around Anna’s pain, constantly looking at it from different angles but refusing to settle in one place for very long. It’s a restless form of storytelling, just as Anna herself is restless, unable and unwilling to peer very deeply or at length into her own mind.With all its flaws, its occasional awkwardness and obviousness, Hausfrau still has power to keep the reader absorbed because we wonder how far Essbaum is willing to take her protagonist toward tragedy. She is not in the least interested in making her readers comfortable, and she doesn’t seem to be worried about complaints that her main character is “unlikeable.” Like many of today’s novelists, she asks crucial, as-yet-unanswered questions about how women can create meaningful lives in a world where they have gained a lot of freedom yet somehow do not feel truly liberated. Essbaum’s vision in this novel is unapologetically grim, and this is one of its greatest strengths.____Rebecca Hussey teaches English at Norwalk Community College in Connecticut and blogs at Of Books and Bicycles.
