“The friendship of our distant relations”: Feminism and animal families in Marlen Haushofer’s Die Wand (1963)

Richards, Anna (2020) “The friendship of our distant relations”: Feminism and animal families in Marlen Haushofer’s Die Wand (1963). Feminist German Studies 36 (2), pp. 75-100. ISSN 1058-7446.

Abstract

This article considers Marlen Haushofer’s novel Die Wand (1963) in the contexts of animal (eco)feminism from the 1970s onwards and the animal essays of philosopher Cora Diamond. It argues that Haushofer’s novel, in which the female narrator survives behind an invisible wall with a ‘family’ of animals, anticipates feminist theories of intersection between the oppression of women and of nonhuman animals and illustrates a feminist ethic of care, based on a broadly-conceived concept of maternal love. The novel attends to animal characters as individuals with agency, and, setting up a stylistic and thematic tension between the everyday and the extraordinary, it exposes the reader to difficult ideas that typically resist our modes of thought. Despite the novel’s challenge to the conventional way of seeing animals, the narrator ultimately concedes that there is a barrier between human beings and other species, but of the two she values non-human animals more highly.

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