11 - Bertha von Suttner’s Die Waffen nieder! and Gabriele Reuter’s Aus guter Familie: Sentimentality and Social Criticism

Summary

Bertha Von Suttner (1843–1914) And Gabriele Reuter (1859– 1941) began their careers out of financial need, writing feuilleton and trivial fiction for serialization. Their bestselling novels, Suttner’s Die Waffen nieder! (Lay Down Your Arms, 1889) and Reuter’s Aus guter Familie: Leidensgeschichte eines Mädchens (From a Good Family: The Sorrows of a Young Girl, 1895), combine with realism or naturalism some of the popular aesthetic strategies of that early work, including some elements of sentimentality. They use sentimental narrative style, in particular, to protest against gender inequality in contemporary society, and what they perceive as the aggressive masculinity of modern nationalism. Both authors powerfully encourage the reader’s identification with the protagonists, through whose suffering the reader’s own discontent with society can be channelled. Above all, the novels empower the individual readers to think of themselves as part of a reading community of like-minded companions, to feel their own concerns acknowledged and understood by others through fiction.

Reuter uses sentiment in Aus guter Familie to protest against the gender double standards of the German nation, its exclusion of women from the public sphere and repression of both women’s sexuality and their intellect. Suttner’s antiwar protest novel—with its depictions of conflict, epidemics, and death—also relies heavily on the reader’s emotional response. She followed it up with public lectures in the cause of the peace movement and in 1905 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Although both authors make free use of the sentiment conventionally associated with women’s novels, the content of their works deliberately offers a challenge to conventional means of representing women’s lives. In the nineteenth century, women’s success in the literary marketplace had depended on their novels reinforcing bourgeois gender ideology. The sentimental romances of the influential family journal Die Gartenlaube (The Garden Bower) upheld a conservative image of the middle-class family. Gartenlaube novels were not allowed to allude to sex or to take issue with politics or religion. Suttner was an admirer of Marlitt’s writing, praising her novel Goldelse (Gold Elsie, 1866): “Wie fesselnd und tiefsinnig diese edle Frau doch schreibt!” (But how gripping and melancholy this noble woman writes!).