6 - Günter Grass and gender

Summary

“'The truth', said Siggie, 'is that we're through. Completely washed up and useless. We men just don't want to admit it. From the standpoint of history, the one thing men were good for, we've failed.'” / In Grass's The Flounder, the male narrator or narrators weigh up the contribution of the male gender, including the narrators themselves, to human history to date. In the end analysis, as we see from the opening quote, the men are found wanting. The novel ends with the lines 'Ilsebill came. She overlooked me, overstepped me. Already she had passed me by. I ran after her' (F, p. 547). Ilsebill is at once the narrator's wife and the fisherman's wife from the Grimm fairy tale, 'The Fisherman and his Wife', on which this novel is based. In this passage, she symbolises the progress of womankind in general. Thus, The Flounder concludes that, towards the end of the twentieth century, women have overtaken men, and men have comprehensively proven themselves to be useless, power-hungry, warmongering and violent. Yet, despite this apparent defence of women, and this copious self-criticism on the part of the narrator, The Flounder unleashed a torrent of condemnation from feminist critics. Far from empowering women through a sympathetic rewriting of history, critics accused Grass of writing a novel that rejoiced in male chauvinism, sexual objectification, gratuitous violence, self-indulgence, narcissism and more besides. This chapter seeks to understand the virulence of such criticism in the context of the feminist movement of its time.