Effi Briest (2 page)

There are crucial differences, some of them surprising, between the facts of the case and Fontane’s fictional treatment of them. The age gap between Effi and her husband becomes twenty-one years. In the social context of the novel this allows Innstetten to have achieved an elevated position in society, albeit at a relatively early age. As Landrat in Kessin he is a senior civil servant with responsibility for a large rural district and so requires a wife as fitting social appendage. Effi with her blue blood suits the job description admirably, and it takes no effort of imagination on Innstetten’s part to find her. He simply returns to his home ground and seeks out the family of the sweetheart of his youth – Effi’s mother. For her part Effi at seventeen is already so conditioned by the expectations of her social sphere that it never crosses her mind to object to this marriage of convenience which mirrors her own parents’ union. In contrast to most English novels of the period money plays no part in the arrangement. The prerequisites are status and background.

There are psychological, sexual and political dimensions to the age difference too, and the mismatch between Effi and Innstetten is partly a function
of the wide gap in their educational experience. Their relationship can be seen as symbolizing the conflict between nature and culture. Effi is associated from the outset with fresh air, plants and water, playing games in the garden. Her own associations with the classroom are of exotic tales of fallen women and other improper anecdotes from the geography lesson, and much later she tells her studious daughter that mythology was her favourite subject. This is all a world apart from her husband with his law degree, plodding pedantically through the churches and art galleries of Italy on their honeymoon and taking notes for conjugal culture sessions during the long winter evenings in Kessin. Major Crampas to whom, ironically, Effi turns in her anguished attempts to comprehend what she instinctively perceives as threatening in her marriage, deliberately undermines her loyalty to her husband by calling Innstetten a ‘born pedagogue’. This contrast between them is a modified reprise of a motif in the earlier Berlin novels
Cécile
and
Delusions, Confusions:
Cécile in constant danger of making gaffes in cultivated company and Lene’s spelling not passing muster. This is more than just a symptom of the couples’ incompatibility, it is part of the sexual politics of relationships where the inexperienced child-wife is manipulated by her knowledgeable husband. Education was, and still is, a cardinal aspect of German cultural identity. The subtext of
Effi Briest
– and even more strikingly so in
Frau Jenny Treibel
– is subversive with regard to education. The narrative stance favours nature and questions culture – not in any extreme polarizing way, but it does urge a critical adjustment of currently cherished values. In this as in so many areas Fontane is drawing attention less to the ‘what’ than the ‘how’. Education and culture are all very well, he is saying, if pursued with an appropriately human and flexible emphasis. They fail in their function if they become instruments of repression which eliminate freedom of thought and scope for imagination, instead of facilitating them.

The sexual dimensions to the age gap remain beneath the surface in this discreet and allusive novel. They are suggested, as is much that is vital in the inner action, by the symbolic texture of the narrative. Effi’s sexual inexperience at the beginning of the novel is beyond question, and the premature loss of her virginity is prefigured by the twins calling her back to the garden through a window framed by Virginia creeper. The allusion becomes less subtle in English for the plant in German has two names. Fontane chooses ‘
wilder Wein’
, literally ‘wild wine’ suggesting both freedom and Dionysian pleasures, but it is also known as ‘
Jungfernrebe’
, ‘virgin’s vine’ (after the botanical name
parthenozissus
) which adds a further layer of meaning to the scene. Effi’s apprehension at her introduction to sexual relations is reflected by her unease at the strange, exotic creatures in the Kessin house: the stuffed shark and crocodile, and the Chinaman’s ghost which is associated with problematic
sexual experience.
⁵
Innstetten, however, perhaps because of his early exclusion from sexual fulfilment with Effi’s mother, proves to be dysfunctional here. Through years of bachelorhood he has become accustomed to a variety of displacement activities. His career has first claim on his energies and his young wife is left with ‘one or two tired if well-intended caresses’ at the end of the day or, as she points out, on their way back from the dull round of duty visits to local gentry, he has constant recourse to his cigar and sits there beside her in the carriage ‘frosty as a snowman’. It seems that after years of self-discipline and mortification of the flesh Innstetten has regulated his natural urges into a state of atrophy. That Effi then seeks sexual experience with another, admittedly also older, but not previously celibate man, is presented less as the fulfilment of overwhelming unsatisfied sexual desire than as the need for natural human warmth and freedom from the constraints of artificially acquired self-denial and rigour.

The political dimension to the age difference, like the sexual one, is less close to the surface than its more obvious social and psychological aspects. Throughout his life, which spanned the greater part of the nineteenth century, Fontane closely followed the political developments of the age. In March 1848 joining the radicals he briefly manned the Berlin barricades with a theatrical-prop musket. In 1860 he joined the editorial staff of the conservative ‘Kreuzzeitung’. By the end of his life his attitude to Prussia and the Prussian establishment, always ambivalent, had become increasingly critical. The question of Fontane’s shifting political position is currently a matter of perhaps over-zealous scrutiny by Fontane specialists. Christian Grawe’s clear overview of his attitude to Prussia concludes, ‘Prussianness thus represented to Fontane’s contemporaries a mixture of militarism, Lutheranism, loyalty to state and king, order, ambition and obedience, the Kantian ethic of doing one’s duty and Hegelian apotheosis of the state – a combination of elements which Fontane regarded highly critically and to which he attributes the essential reponsibility for Effi’s destruction’.
⁶
By placing Effi and Innstetten in different generations Fontane is showing a society in the process of change, where the old, atrophying values have lost their ethical validity but are still in place to the extent that they can vitiate the life of the up-and-coming generation in a way that is fundamentally questioned by the narrative point of view. The age difference is at the heart of an undercurrent of political commentary which questions the hold of the old age over the new. Innstetten’s final, impotent recognition of the hollowness of his establishment principles coupled with the dying out of his family name prefigures the inevitable demise of an antiquated social and political construct. Fontane agrees with Charlotte Brontë: ‘conventionality is not morality’.
⁷

The role of Bismarck on the periphery of the narrative – mentioned and
visited but not seen – is a central aspect of Fontane’s critique. It has even been suggested that the Chinaman’s ghost, which in Fontane’s celebrated and in terms of subsequent critical enquiry uniquely stimulating words is ‘a pivot for the whole story’, represents Bismarck.
⁸
Bismarck stands for much that threatens Effi and the literal dividing of the ways in
Chapter 6
:right to Kessin and domestic life, left to Varzin, Bismarck’s residence and official duty, like all the geographical details in the novel has more than literal significance. However, it would be misleading simply to equate Innstetten with Bismarck and see him as the representative of Prussian orthodoxy. As with so much in Fontane’s fictional world the opposite is also true. In his last, great novel
Der Stechlin
the aging Junker Dubslav von Stechlin says, ‘There are no such things as incontrovertible truths, and if there are, they’re boring.’ This paradoxically self-invalidating statement encapsulates the quintessential Fontane: humorous, self-reflexive, distrustful of absolutes. He functionalizes Bismarck in a characteristically shifting set of constellations of characters, on the one hand – parallel to Innstetten – as the correlative of duty, absolute obedience, career-conscious striving, and also as inimical to women and family life for Effi is excluded from the invitations to Varzin; but also as parallel to Crampas, for Fontane saw and despised in Bismarck the opportunist who disregarded principle in favour of expediency, that is the opposite of Innstetten the ‘stickler for principle’, incidentally a label Fontane also applied disparagingly to Gladstone.

Fontane chose his title and the name of his heroine with care. In early drafts he called her Betty von Ottersund, making pointed reference to her elemental, aquatic affinities, but in the end he chose Effi Briest for its sound, ‘because of all the “e’s” and “i’s”; those two are the fine vowels.’
⁹
Effi is not a common name in German and it has been speculated that he may, as a keen reader of Scott, have taken it from Effie Deans in
The Heart of Midlothian
. The echo of ‘Eve’ with implications of the fall from grace is surely intended too. Many of Fontane’s characters’ names are invested with symbolic overtones. Innstetten’s first name ‘Geert’ not only means ‘a tall slender stem’ as old Briest remarks, but also a ‘switch’, an instrument of punishment and control. Innstetten is cast in the role of trainer and tamer of the spontaneous inclinations of his young wife. The titles of over a third of Fontane’s novels are women’s names, bearing out Ebba Rosenberg’s dictum in
Beyond Recall (Unwiederbringlich):
‘Women’s stories are usually far more interesting.’ Of course Fontane is not alone among nineteenth-century novelists in choosing such titles, but the preponderance of women protagonists is striking, and a comparison with the often-invoked sister novels of adultery is instructive.
¹⁰

Flaubert’s title
Madame Bovary
suggests that the problem, the central concern is the marriage, the turning of Emma into the wife of someone whose
bovine name proclaims his character. The marriage fails to satisfy her, but equally she fails to assert a separate valid identity as Emma. Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina
articulates the conflict inherent in the simultaneous existence of the private individual Anna, who experiences true love and passion, and the social role as Karenin’s wife.
Effi Briest
is quite another matter. Effi’s problem is that she cannot complete the socially required metamorphosis from Fräulein von Briest to Frau von Innstetten, for this would entail a denial of her self, her natural, playful exuberance, the self-confident magnetic personality we see in the games in the garden on the one hand, and on the other her risk-loving nature, her propensity to let herself be carried away, her desire for the out of the ordinary, her unpredictability. As her mother says, she is ‘altogether a very odd mixture’. Ironically, although Innstetten is attracted by her natural, youthful charms it is precisely those sides of her that he then sets about stifling. That she remains Effi Briest at the end of the novel, a fact explicitly asserted by her instructions for the wording on her gravestone, is a sign that although she has succumbed physically in the draining conflict with the rigid forms of society she has managed to hold on to her own inner integrity, she has not lost her self. She has not been sacrificed like Anna to a grand passion. Her affair with Crampas was not a crucial emotional experience, it was merely a symptom of her need to preserve some area of freedom and spontaneity; nor has she been sacrificed like Emma to romantic notions and an egocentric personality. She has been sacrificed – and the motif of sacrifice runs through the narrative from the gooseberry skins’ watery grave at the beginning to the sacrificial stones by Lake Hertha and beyond (
Chapter 24
) – to a set of conventions which Wüllersdorf and Innstetten recognize as empty: ‘this cult of honour of ours is idolatry’, without being able to extricate themselves from the power of ‘that social something which tyrannizes us’ (
Chapter 27
), but she has not relinquished her irreducible sense of her own independent identity. That she finds her way back to being Effi Briest – a unique, beautiful name free of its aristocratic ‘von’, its social indicator, in her chosen, natural setting in the garden of her youth is an assertion of a triumph of a kind. It is an ambiguous one, for she has not survived to grow into mature adulthood, but the fact of her death constitutes an accusation levelled at a society whose warped logic it has exposed.

This reading requires qualification to the extent that the assertion of Effi as herself at the end, only in death, equally implies that the individual cannot survive independent of a particular social and historical context. Even if society’s values are wrong the only possible existence is social existence, and you either conform or go under. Going back to the garden – Hohen-Cremmen has frequently been seen as a paradise from which Effi is expelled – is not a viable option. On the other hand Innstetten’s option is only viable in
very reduced terms. The career to which he sacrifices Effi, Crampas, home life and happiness brings him no joy in the end for he comes to see the price he has paid for shoddy goods.

The central question of a theory of time-limits raised by Fontane’s placing the discovery of the adultery at a remove of almost seven years from the act is a further aspect of the way in which he used an individual case as representative of wider social and political questions. That the loyal servant of the state should agonize over this matter of form and convention and decide in favour of a traditional code which demands the meaningless sacrifice of human beings and human values signals that the society portrayed is a society in decline. It is an age of transition and Fontane spotlights this transition and illuminates the unease, diagnoses the illness without being able to help the patient, except by the bracing and sympathetic clarity of his vision. The cult of honour, which derives from the military code, a male construct, is shown to lack moral foundation and be unequal to the dilemmas of real life in the social and domestic sphere, and indeed politically irrelevant too in the age of Bismarck’s
Realpolitik
, where pragmatism and opportunism have determined the very shape of the contemporary state. The inflexibility of the code is radically at odds with ‘the re-evaluation of all values’ – to use a phrase from Fontane’s contemporary Nietzsche – that was going on in Germany, above all in the young metropolis Berlin in the years of industrial expansion that followed unification.