The great schizophrenia

The Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer (1920-1970) spent her adulthood in a kind of schizophrenia. She had one foot in the bohemian literary world of Vienna — where she was lauded for her writing and had affairs with other authors, poets, critics, editors — and the other foot in the restrained bourgeois world of Steyr, a provincial town 160 kilometers west of the capital. There, she was the wife of, and assistant to, a respected if notoriously irascible dentist, and mother to two sons. Her husband, Manfred Haushofer, had long been a womanizer, one of the reasons Marlen herself first left for Vienna in the immediate post-war years. In 1952, Manfred began an affair with Marlen’s friend, who also worked as an assistant in the family-owned dental practice, just below the Haushofer’s apartment; the three of them practically lived together, a situation Marlen accepted, keeping up appearances in town and accompanying the couple on holiday.

Manfred was not the first disappointment in Marlen’s life; the first man she fell in love with left her in 1940 — aged nineteen, pregnant and unmarried.

Haushofer’s novels all breathe a very particular feminist philosophy: an experience she termed « the great schizophrenia ». While the idea runs unspoken through her entire oeuvre, as far as we know Haushofer only used the phrase once — in a letter she wrote in 1963 to her friend, the novelist Jeannie Ebner. To Ebner, Haushofer wrote:

It is very troubling for me to live perpetually in multiple worlds, each divided from the other by a chasm. That’s why it’s always been my ambition, almost an instinctual compulsion, to reconcile opposites, to produce harmony and to cure the great schizophrenia. But I’m too weak to do it and I need far too much energy just to stop myself falling victim to the chasm.

What is this « great schizophrenia »? More than just a movement between two worlds, it is Haushofer’s expression of a defining aspect of women’s inner lives in the moment in which she was writing. Haushofer was a contemporary of other great feminist philosophers, novelists, poets and activists all endeavoring, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, to give voice to the myriad struggles and experiences of women. What Haushofer captures best, what sets her writing apart, is her singular concern with schizophrenia as a fundamental state of feminist consciousness.