Reading Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall during a time of a well-established pandemic is surreal, to say the least. Reading it alongside Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble makes it even more of an out-of-body experience. My Contemporary Criticism and Theory class had me do just that. Throughout my Fall 2020 semester, I followed an unnamed protagonist adapt to a new life where she is the only human inhabitant trapped inside a clear, unbreakable wall that appeared overnight. She is in complete, involuntary isolation. Protected yet trapped. Sound familiar? Although America has been in a process of reopening and leaving isolation for a few months, there are still days that go by where no one sees me except for my girlfriend and our roommates. During this time I’ve noticed, I find the narrator of The Wall relatable whereas a year ago I may have thought she was going crazy. After experiencing a very watered down experience of this isolation, I now have a better understanding of what she was going through. The very small peak into being alone and confined is enough for me to not question any feelings the narrator experiences. Gender theorist, Judith Butler would agree that when the narrator is no longer repeating her gender performance actions every day, questioning her identity is bound to happen. It would be more strange if she continued her normal day to day preformative life. The book would be much different if she showered and put on makeup every day.

Judith Butler asks in her book Gender Trouble, “Does being female constitute a “natural fact” or a cultural performance, or is “naturalness” constituted through discursively constrained performative acts that produce the body through and within the categories of sex?” (Butler 2376). When the narrator is alone, not including her animals, she takes on a lot of new tasks she never attempted before in her previous life. Some examples are hard hands-on labor such as chopping down trees, pushing wheelbarrows, hunting deer, and fishing trout. Some of her responsibilities are stereotypically female tasks such as cleaning, cooking, and sewing. These tasks happen one after another most days. She does not experience one day as masculine and another as feminine. Instead, the two blend together. Butler may note that this is the catalyst to the narrator’s gender confusion. The stereotypical masculine, lumberjack-like acts disrupt the repetition of her “natural” femininity. Her feminine characteristics are not “natural” enough to prevail in true nature. Hence, hinting at the fact they were never natural to begin with and it was all pre-formative for her society.

Early in the novel, the narrator reveals she found her former life “unsatisfactory” (Haushofer 50). Throughout the story, she slowly reveals more reasons why she was so unhappy before her isolation. Two big ones that are tied to her gender identity are being a mother and a wife. At the beginning of her time behind the wall, readers still see characteristics of motherhood in the mother. She worries about her kids as she comes to the realization they are dead, but then she thinks about it and decides it is not too big of a loss. She complains about how after the age of five kids become strangers and they are no longer your children (Haushofer 31). This may be shocking and upsetting for the readers, but it is really interesting to think about how the narrator really only shares this with herself. The novel is written as a journal or diary. The narrator’s reflections imply this is the first time she is expressing being unsatisfied with raising teenagers. Without societal pressures to be a perfect mom, she is feeling free to speak her truth on the subject. The narrator is able to develop what is 100% of her thoughts without fear of shame or backlash. Old habits die hard however because we see the narrator’s motherly instincts rekindle when she notes herself as “the head of [her] curious family,” the family in question being a misfit group of animals and herself (Haushofer). If the narrator has already acknowledged that she did not enjoy being a mother, why is she taking on this motherly role when she does not need to? It cannot be all an act then. Who would she be doing this for if not herself? Butler would disagree with this and say that the narrator is just re-experiencing the role of being a mom because new children have been introduced. As mentioned before, the narrator mourned for who her children were when they were younger. When she is faced with new “children” such as Bella the cow, she believes they need her to look after them for survival. Taking motherly control of the family is a product of muscle memory in a sense. The longer she stays in isolation, however, she loses this motherly touch. When Pearl is born, there is a shift in attitude. The narrator makes sure to point out she is not the mother of this cat (Haushofer 61). The narrator earlier in the book would have been much more engaged with this new life. However now, the motherly role is no longer expected of her. She has come to a realization that she works with the animals to survive rather than being a caregiver to them. Without the repetition and social pressures to keep up her motherhood tasks, there is no drive to continue them. As Butler says, these tasks are for “public action” and “temporal” so without the praise from her peers, she does not feel compelled to be a mother.

Being a wife is also a role she outgrows. One section in particular that I believe is worth exploring is when the narrator talks about how her husband bought her “dainty and pretty things” because he liked to see her wearing them meanwhile, she preferred “big [and] practical” things (Haushofer 229). The narrator does not outwardly say “feminine” and “masculine” when she describes the accessories she prefers to wear, but it is easy for the reader to assume “dainty and pretty” are rather “girly” characteristics. The narrator not naming the items as feminine or masculine demonstrates how the lines of such binaries can be blurred when isolated. One of the items her husband bought for her was a watch, “a tiny, gold watch, really nothing but an expensive toy that never showed the right time” (Haushofer 2). She wore said watch to be a pretty female and good wife even though she did not like it, yet she wore it during isolation. Why didn’t she take it off immediately when she realized she was alone? Especially when from the beginning of her journaling, she acknowledges she does not care for it? I try to answer this question using Butler’s surface theory: “Acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause” (Butler 2384). In other words, the narrator wore the watch to be a good wife, which is one of her defining elements from her past life. Perhaps she kept it on trying to keep that element of her humanity with her. When she breaks it, she acknowledges it is not a big loss and stores it in a drawer. Similar to her children, it represented a role she was unhappy in. A dainty watch has no place being on the wrist of a woman cutting timber.

Jewelry plays an important role in the narrator’s gender crisis. Perhaps this is because it is the most tangible aspect of her femininity. “I had taken off my rings ages ago,” she says as she reflects on her current gender expression, “Who would decorate their tools with gold rings? It struck me as absurd, even laughable that I had done so before… At the same time I lost the awareness of being a woman” (Haushofer 68). Although mentally the narrator may have been undergoing a gender crisis, it appears seeing the physical changes is what causes a revelation. Her reaction to her past self is to laugh. It seems odd and almost inappropriate. Butler explains the “laughter emerges in the realization that all along the original was derived” (Butler 2386). This indicates that the narrator is not necessarily dealing with these conflicts for the first time, but now with there being no “normal,” she can express herself more clearly. It is funny to hear that she ever saw rings as a pretty decoration. She may have always thought they looked silly or got in the way of her “tools” accomplishing tasks but only now has the opportunity to see how happy she is with bare hands.

I would like to take Butler’s theory one step further than gender identity and expression and focus on human identity. If all acts are performative because of our surrounding environments, when one is alone in a human sense but around animals, do they then begin performing for the animals? My immediate response would be no because the narrator is aware the animals do not care what she looks like, “they certainly didn’t love me for my appearance” (Haushofer 227). Early on in her storytelling though, the narrator says that her name “no longer exists” because she has not had to write it down or respond to it (Haushofer 35). She does not pick a new name for herself. She continues to be the nameless narrator. The loss of meaning for her name can be stemmed from Butler’s theory of how without repetition people no longer feel the need to conform to gender roles. The narrator no longer cared about their name, so clearly a name is not crucial to their identity in isolation. What strikes me as odd about this is most folks take a lot of pride in their name, especially when having a gender crisis. For most, picking out a new name is a monumental step. Is giving up her name a part of letting go of performative gender or instead is she letting go of performative humanity? Butler writes

If gender attributes and acts, the various ways in which a body shows or produces its cultural signification, are preformative, then there is no preexisting identity by which an act or attribute might be measured; there would be no true or false, real or distorted acts of gender, and the postulation of a true gender identity would be revealed as a regulatory fiction. (2388)

Is it possible for this to apply to all identities and not limiting itself to gender? Can this explain what the narrator is going through being the only human surrounded by animals? The narrator admits to not understanding being human is anymore. Early in her isolation she said she got dressed and washed herself every day to hold onto her humanity, but has stopped caring about hygiene and appearance by the end. Towards the very end of her retelling, she shares that she “forgets that Lynx is a dog and [she] is a human” (Haushofer 234). If there is no pre-existing identity in which a body is culturally significant like Butler says, then what does it mean to be human? In some cases of only children growing up around animals, they learn the behavior of such animals like how to eat and play. Although the narrator is in her late forties, is it possible she is performing her identity for these animals? They are her only companions, it would make sense to want to better bond with them. I believe that Butler’s theory of gender is true in pure isolation or even minimal contact with the outside world, but once nonhuman elements are added to the equation, things can be complex. Although it is too early to find studies of the matter, I am positive that there was a large influx of people experimenting with gender identification and expression during the quarantine. I then wish to push the question of identity even further; if gender is all about performance, are their performance elements to being human as well? Not biological ones, we can clearly see when someone is physically human but is acting humane, orderly, and hygienic attributing to creating a fabricated identity of what being human is?

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. From Gender Trouble. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 3rd ed., edited by Vincent Leitch, Norton, 2018, pp. 2375-2388.

Haushofer, Marlen. The Wall. Claassen Verlag, 1968.