From the Back:
The setting is an idyllic Alpine village where a women's underwear factory nestles in the woods.
Two factory workers, Bridgette and Paula, dream and talk about finding happiness, a comfortable home and a good man. They realize their quest will be as hard as work at the factory. Brigette subordinates her feelings and goes for Heinz, a young, plump, up-and-coming businessman. With Paula, feelings and dreams become confused. She gets pregnant by Erich, the forestry worker. He's handsome, so they marry.
Bridgette gets it right. Paula gets it wrong.
Women as Lovers is undoubtedly a book by Elfriede Jelinek. It is my third read of one of her novels [my first being The Piano Teacher and my second being Lust]. While I am, loosely, familiar with her writing style, I never acclimate to her use of satire and dynamic wordplay [also shout out to the people who translate her books]. I continually appreciate the honesty Jelinek conveys through cynicism and the almost flippant tone in which she writes. I always end up feeling read to filth by her throughout various points of her novels. Rarely does she show empathy to her characters, but she’s not quite apathetic either. She writes from a condition that I can only describe as “exhaustively knowing better".
Structurally, Jelinek did not follow the expected grammatical rule of capitalization at the beginning of sentences or proper nouns. This visual stylistic approach did much work in further conveying the emotional pressures each main character felt from one another, as though they were perpetually under the weight of their circumstances. Along with this, the main characters, Paula, Bridgette, Erich, Heinz, and Susi, are the only characters named, creating a dichotomy between their importance to the plot and their lack of personhood and awareness. The absence of a name for the parents of the main characters helps contrast this key detail. This illustrates that the parents are only reactive toward their children, not fully affected by them. They are merely external forces and not worth fleshing into beings. Other actors largely irrelevant to the main characters, besides interactions with their presence or physicality, also receive this same treatment with no descriptors. This brought a significant sense of isolation to the story, especially to Bridgette and Paula. The only things that affect them most coincide with their pursuit of a liberated life. There is no other option.
Throughout Women as Lovers, I found myself relating often to the thought processes of 15-year-old Paula, one of the main characters. I have feelings of entitlement to an intrinsically positive and beautiful romance, similar to that of Paula towards Erich. Girls and women eat this fantasy up. This is the same appetite and need for male validation that is unconsciously felt by everyone and requires serious recognition, self-motivation and intention to quell. I have had a similar experience of falling in love and wanting to give up my life for a man with the end goal of bearing children. Obviously, a femme woman's existence only receives purpose when she belongs to someone else's livelihood. It is peculiar to think that the desire to be a “good woman" completely overrides a woman's personhood to the point that it could, and would, derail her from the reliability of being educated and independent [of course, this is spoken within the circumstance that a woman can be her own liberator]. In the end, the only difference between Paula and me was that I have had sufficient sex education.
Paula’s sections throughout the novel had me asking who is to blame for her conclusion. I was overwhelmed by this question because it is so painfully easy to blame her, and through Jelinek’s prose, I feel she is baiting the reader into doing so [if not already doing it herself]. Did Paula make an ill-fated choice? Yes, but instead of generally implicating who is culpable for the fate of Paula, I’d rather ask: does putting blame, whether it be on Paula, her family and friends, what media said about love, or the society she lived in, actually matter? I say no and that the answer is far more defeatist; Paula would experience blame regardless of the outcome.
Tangential to placing blame on the main characters, I found myself struggling to empathize with Bridgette despite the fact she was getting it right. Before beginning the novel, I understood that her only key to any form of self-liberation was through her attachment to Heinz [it’s literally written on the back of the book], yet I found myself frustrated by her improper and clumsy display of femininity, and I am still trying to figure out why… Maybe my difficulty with figuring that out results from me having to explore my limited view of femininity and the work I think such expression should do for the exhibitor and their audience.
One of my more pinpointed stances with Bridgette and femininity seems to come from a place of an unwanted and not fully understood competitiveness within myself as a woman reared by American culture to exhibit "fitness" in order to earn a man. Bridgette experiences this same competitiveness throughout the book towards Susi. Susi’s textbook femininity comes to her fluidly. She is the stereotypical blond-haired, blue-eyed, well-rounded, educated, and ambitious (but not too much) good girl who loves to cook. Bridgette is the opposite of all of these things. It makes sense why she was as uncoordinated and guarded towards Heinz and his possessions as she was. There’s no way Bridgette could compare to such a symbol and there was no way a symbol would take her future away from her. She could not compete so she didn’t. What’s the point in performing if it’s not going to get you to your goal? There is none. I will give Bridgette her coins, though. She may have continually fumbled the demeanor of “housewife material” femininity, but she excelled at making her woman-ness temptingly distinct, which ultimately forced Heinz to cough up the ring without him even realizing it.
If this commentary piqued your interest, read Women as Lovers.