BlackOxford's Reviews > Fear

Coming Out of the Proto-Feminist Closet

Zweig was a close friend and confidant of Sigmund Freud. And this little novella is clearly influenced by psycho-analytic theory. However it suggests to me at least a nod to the concepts of Carl Jung in its development and resolution.

Who is this Frau Irene Wagner really? Merely a bourgeois socialite, a Mme Bovary, who decides to engage in a little adultery out of boredom with her established matronly routine? A hedonist pushing for that extra frisson of pleasure? A neurotic housewife trying to escape the horrible fate of relationships without apparent meaning? Or perhaps just a selfish bitch? What fundamental motivation lies behind her behaviour?

If nothing else, Frau Wagner is certainly what Carl Jung termed an Objective Introvert. She lives mainly in her own head as indicated by the scarcity of dialogue throughout. But almost nothing exists in that head of her own making. She is defined by the views of the people she is with, her ‘set’, those others who have apparent regard for her, and particularly by her husband. She moulds herself to this society, as she does to her family’s expectations of her. Even her children can command that she not deviate from their expectations for their care-taking.

Woe to the Objective Introvert who intuitively can see the limits of their own psychology. The only thing they can do to, as it were, broaden their perspective on life is to expose themselves to contradictory external demands. If they are within a sedate, stable society, they purposely but unconsciously seek out passion and danger as a corrective environment. Their life then, of course, becomes miserable, not because of the passion and danger but because of the radical conflict in the demands upon their personality.

Frau Wagner, therefore, becomes dissociated into two separate selves, so that “All that had passed and been forgotten was no longer her crime at all, but that of another woman whom she could not herself understand and whose mind she could no longer even enter into.” In fact each aspect of her personality feels guilt about the other. Whether she turns to her husband or her lover for solace she will be judged inadequate.

Like all of us, according to Jung, Frau Wagner wants to have her psychological cake and eat it. She wants what the Jungians call ‘integration’, that is, the acceptance of both parts of herself into a coherent whole. She in fact wants to be ‘found out’ and thus healed: “Deep inside her she longed for what she had hitherto been afraid of: the lightning flash of redemption that would come when she was caught.”

The only resolution to this fracture in the self appears to be annihilation of both aspects of her personality, “She considered all routes to death that she was familiar with, weighing up legion possibilities of self destruction, before she suddenly recollected with a kind of joyous terror that the doctor, on account of her insomnia during a painful illness, had prescribed morphine.” The internal contradiction is simply overwhelming.

But the solution isn’t actually in her hands. It is the environment that has to change to accommodate her. This is precisely what happens. While I find his resolution a bit too much deus ex machina and abrupt, I am not entirely dissatisfied with Zweig’s resolution of Frau Wagner’s dilemma. She has at least learned that it is not she who is always required to adapt to the demands of the world.