Effi Briest and the End of Realism

Summary

The final scene of Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest (1895) recapitulates the agenda of literary realism, while exposing its limits, as well. As this novel, surely the most recognized and among the best achievements of German realist fiction, draws to a close, it reviews the fundamental elements of its aesthetic program, savoring it one last time, before announcing its conclusion: the end of Effi Briest and the end of realism. The idyllic setting of the garden at Hohen-Cremmen and the casual domesticity of the exchanges — hallmarks of the literary movement as a whole — stand in stark contrast to the substance of the fictional moment. For it has only been a month since the single child of the house, the heroine of the novel, has died, and a marble gravestone has just been set to mark her final resting place in a round flower bed. It was here that Effi, as a spirited young woman full of fantasy and adventure, had been introduced to the reader at the outset of the novel; and it is here that Fontane buries that same youthful romanticism. Realism in German literature had, in effect, always represented an effort to control, to bridle, and to dismiss the romantic legacy of the beginning of the century, with its capacity for imagination in art, as well as in politics. Realism operated as the repression of the romantic past, designed explicitly to assert the order of nature and society after the suppression of the revolution of 1848. Effi's grave buries that past one more time: hence the narrator's satisfied observation that putting in the stone had not even required disturbing the heliotropes; and hence, also, the placid and unmoved tenor of the parental discussion. This is a world where emotions are as orderly as a well-tended garden, even if one's only child is buried in it.

The scene highlights a second aspect of realism, as well: its systematic prohibition of certain classes of speech. For when Briest, the father, ventures a speculative comment, his wife reprimands him and breaks him off. His language has always been too ambiguous for her strict taste, and she is prepared to blame his robust linguistic registers and frequent wordplays for Effi's adultery and, by implication, her death, as well.