Effi Briest Read online

  Fontane chose his title and the name of his heroine with care. In early drafts he called her Betty von Ottersund, making pointed reference to her elemental, aquatic affinities, but in the end he chose Effi Briest for its sound, ‘because of all the “e’s” and “i’s”; those two are the fine vowels.’9 Effi is not a common name in German and it has been speculated that he may, as a keen reader of Scott, have taken it from Effie Deans in The Heart of Midlothian. The echo of ‘Eve’ with implications of the fall from grace is surely intended too. Many of Fontane’s characters’ names are invested with symbolic overtones. Innstetten’s first name ‘Geert’ not only means ‘a tall slender stem’ as old Briest remarks, but also a ‘switch’, an instrument of punishment and control. Innstetten is cast in the role of trainer and tamer of the spontaneous inclinations of his young wife. The titles of over a third of Fontane’s novels are women’s names, bearing out Ebba Rosenberg’s dictum in Beyond Recall (Unwiederbringlich): ‘Women’s stories are usually far more interesting.’ Of course Fontane is not alone among nineteenth-century novelists in choosing such titles, but the preponderance of women protagonists is striking, and a comparison with the often-invoked sister novels of adultery is instructive.10

  Flaubert’s title Madame Bovary suggests that the problem, the central concern is the marriage, the turning of Emma into the wife of someone whose bovine name proclaims his character. The marriage fails to satisfy her, but equally she fails to assert a separate valid identity as Emma. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina articulates the conflict inherent in the simultaneous existence of the private individual Anna, who experiences true love and passion, and the social role as Karenin’s wife. Effi Briest is quite another matter. Effi’s problem is that she cannot complete the socially required metamorphosis from Fräulein von Briest to Frau von Innstetten, for this would entail a denial of her self, her natural, playful exuberance, the self-confident magnetic personality we see in the games in the garden on the one hand, and on the other her risk-loving nature, her propensity to let herself be carried away, her desire for the out of the ordinary, her unpredictability. As her mother says, she is ‘altogether a very odd mixture’. Ironically, although Innstetten is attracted by her natural, youthful charms it is precisely those sides of her that he then sets about stifling. That she remains Effi Briest at the end of the novel, a fact explicitly asserted by her instructions for the wording on her gravestone, is a sign that although she has succumbed physically in the draining conflict with the rigid forms of society she has managed to hold on to her own inner integrity, she has not lost her self. She has not been sacrificed like Anna to a grand passion. Her affair with Crampas was not a crucial emotional experience, it was merely a symptom of her need to preserve some area of freedom and spontaneity; nor has she been sacrificed like Emma to romantic notions and an egocentric personality. She has been sacrificed – and the motif of sacrifice runs through the narrative from the gooseberry skins’ watery grave at the beginning to the sacrificial stones by Lake Hertha and beyond (Chapter 24) – to a set of conventions which Wüllersdorf and Innstetten recognize as empty: ‘this cult of honour of ours is idolatry’, without being able to extricate themselves from the power of ‘that social something which tyrannizes us’ (Chapter 27), but she has not relinquished her irreducible sense of her own independent identity. That she finds her way back to being Effi Briest – a unique, beautiful name free of its aristocratic ‘von’, its social indicator, in her chosen, natural setting in the garden of her youth is an assertion of a triumph of a kind. It is an ambiguous one, for she has not survived to grow into mature adulthood, but the fact of her death constitutes an accusation levelled at a society whose warped logic it has exposed.

  This reading requires qualification to the extent that the assertion of Effi as herself at the end, only in death, equally implies that the individual cannot survive independent of a particular social and historical context. Even if society’s values are wrong the only possible existence is social existence, and you either conform or go under. Going back to the garden – Hohen-Cremmen has frequently been seen as a paradise from which Effi is expelled – is not a viable option. On the other hand Innstetten’s option is only viable in very reduced terms. The career to which he sacrifices Effi, Crampas, home life and happiness brings him no joy in the end for he comes to see the price he has paid for shoddy goods.

  The central question of a theory of time-limits raised by Fontane’s placing the discovery of the adultery at a remove of almost seven years from the act is a further aspect of the way in which he used an individual case as representative of wider social and political questions. That the loyal servant of the state should agonize over this matter of form and convention and decide in favour of a traditional code which demands the meaningless sacrifice of human beings and human values signals that the society portrayed is a society in decline. It is an age of transition and Fontane spotlights this transition and illuminates the unease, diagnoses the illness without being able to help the patient, except by the bracing and sympathetic clarity of his vision. The cult of honour, which derives from the military code, a male construct, is shown to lack moral foundation and be unequal to the dilemmas of real life in the social and domestic sphere, and indeed politically irrelevant too in the age of Bismarck’s Realpolitik, where pragmatism and opportunism have determined the very shape of the contemporary state. The inflexibility of the code is radically at odds with ‘the re-evaluation of all values’ – to use a phrase from Fontane’s contemporary Nietzsche – that was going on in Germany, above all in the young metropolis Berlin in the years of industrial expansion that followed unification.

  The novel is set in the 1880s and Fontane was working on it during the first half of the ’90s. He claims to have written it ‘as in a dream and almost as if I were using a psychograph’.11 In fact the birth of the novel was prolonged and difficult and this comment can only apply to the initial draft written in 1890. In 1892, the year in which he returned to it, Fontane suffered a severe physical and nervous breakdown from which he recoverd by following his doctor’s advice and writing down memories of his childhood (Meine Kinderjahre, 1893). The main work of revising and correcting, always a laborious process for Fontane, took place in winter and spring 1893-94. Comparison of the final result with earlier versions reveals the extent to which the finished text is the product of constant refinement, reduction and paring away of redundant material.

  Fontane’s particular brand of realism with its subterranean dynamic, not unlike Jane Austen’s, is based not on the naming or describing of an abundance of people and things. It works rather through glimpses and allusions. There is a strictly limited circle of characters whom we encounter in small groups. Large social occasions such as Effi’s wedding tend to be referred back to. The most striking example of this deliberately oblique, retrospective technique is Fontane’s treatment of Effi’s adultery. Only when we read the letters over Innstetten’s shoulder seven years after the event do we become sure that it actually took place, and we may then examine earlier chapters to find what we missed. Fontane was well aware of this aspect of his artistry. He wrote in a letter to Ernst Heilborn in 1895:

  I’m glad to see that you’re in agreement with my leaving a lot to the reader’s imagination; I would find it quite impossible to do otherwise, and for me complete obscurity would always be preferable to the gas-light illumination of certain things whose depiction, even if it’s skilful (which is very seldom the case) still doesn’t really work.12

  Such deliberate avoidance of dramatic scenes is rare in nineteenth-century literature. When Fontane does portray significant occasions directly in the present of the novel, as is the case with Ring’s New Year party and Annie’s christening, then we are given access to a series of dialogues which expose attitudes and interrelationships, not decisive turning points in the development of the plot. They are reflective rather than active and the reality of the characters is created in terms of their discourse, of what they say, rather than what
they do or how they look. Dress and external appearance have little role to play in creating an authentic sense of location and period. Such details as there are point to the underlying concerns of the novel. Effi’s loose tunic at the beginning, authentic and realistic in the sense that in it Fontane replicated the dress and demeanour of a fifteen-year-old English girl he saw on a hotel balcony in the Harz, symbolizes her natural, childlike state, just as Johanna’s corseted ‘shapely bosom’ inChapter 35 is a detail used to epitomize the opposite: correct but artificial restraint and denial of natural impulse.

  Fontane’s narrative technique is very different from the leisurely, discursive style of many more familiar nineteenth-century English novelists. It is different in kind in its concentration and density of symbolic pattern and reference. In this respect it is closer in form and intention to the dominant genre of German realism, the Novelle, whose symbolism and taut structure Fontane reproduces in Effi Briest. The Novelle form has been defined as a circular line drawn around a central point, so that every detail refers back to that centre. This description fits Effi Briest, although readers cannot immediately see the connections, and it would spoil the cumulative effect if they could. They can nonetheless sense that the references are there to be unravelled in retrospect.

  The connections take many forms. The light-hearted discussion of Crampas’s death by drowning at the end ofChapter 15 is characteristic of Fontane’s use of ironic patterning. The reader senses that in this conversation about death on a sunny day late in the year, with Crampas’s prediction that he will the a proper and, he hopes, an honourable soldier’s death, there is more going on than meets the ear. It is only later that we comprehend the full irony of this exchange; that it has been a central concern of the novel to show that what is ‘proper and honourable’ in this society, and perhaps in every society, is at best relative and at worst fatal. The opening paragraph of the novel too, typically for Fontane, is a classic example of the way in which his symbolic charging of the text is achieved unobtrusively before the reader’s eyes, while its full impact can only be appreciated in the light of the narrative as a whole. When we put the book down at the end with the sense that what has happened had to happen, it is worth going back, to find the signs that pointed the way from the beginning, before the characters themselves ever appeared on the scene. Looking again at the opening, we can more readily pick up what is so clearly signalled in the Prussian manor-house: its social and historical place, the deceptive idyll which is a combination of nature and civilization, park and garden, the enclosed space with the boat moored in the pond suggesting but denying the possibility of escape, while the only real ways out are either into the house, or through the gate into the churchyard. Looking again at the rickety swing which at intervals in the novel allows Effi to experience danger and exhilaration, to fly in the air, we recognize it as a highly ironic symbol of the inadequacy of the spirited heroine’s wings of desire. Above all, in the very first sentence of the novel our attention is drawn to the roundel, the circular flowerbed – in the beautiful and apparently salubrious environment which both nurtured and trapped her – whose ultimate function is seen in the final passage.

  Writing of Confusions, Delusions Fontane referred to the ‘tausend Finesseri,’ the thousand subtleties in the novel. The apparently straightforward, restrained and undemanding realism of the surface conceals a web of cross-reference at a virtually inexhaustible variety of levels. Some critics, like Karl S. Guthke, have asked the question ‘art or artifice?’13 about Fontane’s style, finding his use of symbolic allusion and techniques of suggestion and anticipation overdone. The broad consensus however finds the finely woven texture an unfailing source of new discovery and delight in the novels.14 The range of possible points of entry into the interior of Effi Briest may be exemplified by Klaus-Peter Schuster’s study which approaches the text via references to paintings, especially those of the Pre-Raphaelites, developing an elaborate theory whereby Hohen-Cremmen is both the hortus conclusus of the Annunciation and the Garden of Eden, and Karla Bindokat’s analysis which approaches Effi Briest via the history of traditional literary motifs, examining Fontane’s borrowings from folk legend, myth and saga all of which feed into the social criticism in the novel.15 Numerous examinations of individual details in the novel, ranging from the heliotrope in the garden as a symbol of divine and earthly love and of Effi’s need for light and warmth to Cousin Dagobert’s Christmas card with its huddled bird in a snowy landscape with a telegraph pole as metaphor for her emotional deprivation and isolation, have progressively cast more light on the work’s intricacy.16

  One effect of this all-pervasive allusiveness in a work of realism is the active involvement of the reader to an extent that is belied by the unassuming surface of the novel. In the space between the relatively few characters and their uncluttered milieu Fontane has left room for readers to interpret events and bring their own experience and observation to bear on what has been offered. This is quite deliberate on Fontane’s part; as we have seen, he was always in favour of too little rather than too much. He maintained that if there was anything superfluous at all, then it was a flaw.17 The realistic detail in Effi Briest all serves a wider scheme or structure, that of the historically and socially determined world in which the characters live.

  The framework in which Fontane operates, as recent studies have shown, is one which points firmly forward to twentieth-century preoccupations. Patricia Howe sees this modern tendency in terms of the overriding of the conventional moral design of nineteenth-century realism. When Effi reads David Copperfield, a novel of wickedness punished and virtue rewarded, she has chosen a fiction that does not correspond to her own world. At the end of Effi Briest, Howe argues that neither Effi’s death nor that of her seducer restores order, but signals its disintegration, and that the final ‘injunction against further questioning’ must be seen as ironically undermining the apparent closure of the text.18 Walter Müller-Seidel in his authoritative study of Fontane’s novels sees the modernity of Effi Briest in terms of its ‘missing or reduced tragedy’.19 He attributes this to the almost ridiculous seriousness with which Innstetten reacts to an offence so far in the past, and to the fact that the fatal repercussions derive from an unintended sliding into a state of guilt. The serious consequences arise out of a combination of the everyday, the trivial, and the ridiculous. He sees in this disillusioned view of the novel which is no longer tragic but founded on half-comic absurdity, evidence of a tendency towards a modern consciousness. One of the problems in the earlier reception of Effi Briest by academic commentators accustomed to tragedy and passion in the novel was precisely this perceived lack, this shift in awareness that was then negatively judged against the high seriousness and emotional intensity of say Anna Karenina or Middlemarch. The scene that follows Innstetten’s fateful discovery of the letters is indeed remarkable for its comedy. It is a game of nicely observed one-upmanship between the servants, which may owe something to the Shakespearean tradition of comic relief, but which equally serves as an instant corrective to any more serious or indeed sentimental interpretation of events. The prosaic age of relativism and pragmatism has laid claim to the idealistic preserves of love, honour and loyalty.

  Fontane’s realism has a characteristic flavour of its own which derives from a compound of refined irony, restraint and perspectivism. He created an ironic narrative tradition in German literature which was to be followed by Thomas Mann, Heinrich Böll and others. Like most great modern novels Effi Briest is a self-reflective narrative, a fact which can be seen more clearly in the original in the recurrence of the word Geschichte, ‘story’, which for reasons of idiom has sometimes been rendered by ‘affair’ in the translation.20 In the first chapter, two of Effi’s comments both anticipate and call into question the entire narrative to come. She says, ‘A tale of renunciation is never bad’ and, ‘What happened was what was bound to happen, what always happens.’ The reader’s response in accepting these propositions at the end
is proof of the aesthetic truth, coherence if you like, of the novel and in rejecting them of its moral force and coherence. That these responses can be harboured simultaneously demonstrates the sophistication of a work that evokes assent at one level and rebellion at another.

  Effi Briest is the finest of Fontane’s portrayals of women living in a male-dominated society and, as the title of one Fontane study, The Woman as Paradigm of Humane Values,21 suggests, it is the female values that are vindicated against the male ones. In Effi Briest there is a warmth of human understanding and a non-judgmental attitude to human weakness which affords the reader a critical view of reality without destroying a sense of coherence and order. The intimate sphere of a broken marriage is a barometer of the health of the state and society as a whole, but in Effi Fontane has equally created a warm, attractive personality who, whatever she represents, is above all a vital, convincing character whose life and world we come to know and understand, and in knowing and understanding them we may know ourselves and our own world better too.