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5 E. Marlitt, Feminine Representation, and Codified Closure

E. Marlitt’s phenomenal popularity lies more in her appeal to social equality and fictional transgressions of nineteenth-century gender norms than in a romanticized support of the status quo. As a woman writer, she faced obstacles as real as her physical disability. The prevailing social construction of gender defined male endeavors within the public realm of productivity, while relegating females to the private sphere of domesticity.1 Educational models, which differentiated by both social class and gender, further limited the fields of inquiry deemed appropriate for young girls. The discussion of education in Das Heideprinzeßchen in Chapter 3 drew attention to the multi-layered parameters contained within the happy ending. The maturation of the girl to woman/wife/mother/published author and the representations of women working domestically and in factories, or pursuing training for education or nursing, depict an array of potential roles for women that encompass more than motherhood. Analyses of the novels from the second decade of Marlitt’s career, once she has established a successful following, reveal a more striking pattern of closure: they appear to reconfigure the construction of gender with highly progressive images, and then introduce a promise of marriage and acquiescence to the status quo. Patterns of duality challenge and subvert standard norms by introducing alternative readings. This chapter explores how ironic forms of closure in Im Hause des Kommerzienrates [At the Councillor’s, 1876], Im Schillingshof [In the Schillingscourt, 1879], and Die Frau mit den Karfunkelsteinen...