9 - Boarding-School Novels around 1900: The Relation ofMale Fear of Women to Male-Male Seduction and SexualAbuse in Hesse, Musil, and Walser

Summary

IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY, the German-languageliterary scene witnessed the sudden proliferation ofboarding-school novels, many of which featurescenarios of (predominantly) male-on-male sexualabuse and/or seduction at crucial points in theplots. Hermann Hesse's UntermRad (1906; Beneaththe Wheel, 1968), Robert Musil's Verwirrungen des ZöglingsTörleß (1906; The Confusions of Young Törless, 1955), andRobert Walser's Jakob vonGunten (1909; Jakobvon Gunten, 1969), three highly prominentworks in the German-language literary canon, share acommon setting: all-male boarding schools. As theseinstitutions sequester students from theirsurroundings, contact with girls and women islimited. In each of the novels, there is only onefemale figure who plays a larger role and who thusserves as a semantically overcharged representationof womanhood as such. Especially in Unterm Rad and Törless, the lone femalecharacter embodies the dangerous world outside theinstitutions. She is portrayed as a voracious,lascivious, overpowering, and swamp-like entity thatthreatens to destroy the orderly recursive formalismof the teenage boys’ lives.

It may seem counterintuitive that some men perceivedwomen as menacing, violent forces, not only innovels but in the broader masculine imagination assuch at a time when, by any objective standards,woman's emancipation and empowerment faced muchgreater resistance than they do today. This is evenmore puzzling if one considers the contemporarytrope of the “hysterical” woman. It would appear,however, that a hundred years ago, the maleprotagonists of many a novel and autobiographytraded accounts of how they had suffered and fearedunsolicited sexual advances by women: #they too,that is. Such (oftentimes fictional) anecdotescannot belie the larger historical reality ofoppression and sexual abuse inflicted on women atthe hands of men. Unlike today's #metoo accounts,those anecdotes often targeted a unitary bogeywomanand, in doing so, were more invested in constructinga distorting cultural trope5 than relating actualexperiences.

Nonetheless, at the level of rhetoric, such male fearof women is oddly similar to the “female fear ofmale aggression” that is strongly emphasized inparts of the #metoo movement.