The Left-Handed Woman by Peter Handke

First published:Die linkshändige Frau, 1976 (English translation, 1978)

Type of work: Philosophical realism

Time of work: 1975-1976, from winter to spring

Locale: An unnamed city in West Germany

Principal Characters:

• Marianne, the woman of the title, a thirty-year-old translator
• Bruno, her husband, a sales manager for a porcelain firm
• Stefan, their eight-year-old son
• Jurgen, Stefan’s friend and schoolmate
• Grandfather, Marianne’s father, a writer, who comes to visit
• Franziska, Marianne’s friend and Stefan’s schoolteacher
• Ernst, a publisher who gives Marianne employment
• The Chauffeur, Ernst’s driver
• The Actor, an unemployed film actor who falls in love with Marianne
• The Salesgirl, who sells Marianne a sweater and later attends Marianne’s party

The Novel

Peter Handke tells the story of a woman determined to break with her husband and her past and to form a new life for herself. Marianne, a mother and hausfrau in her thirtieth year, begins to examine her life keeping house in the suburbs of a large industrial city in West Germany. Her husband, Bruno, who works as sales manager for a porcelain company, is due to return from an extended business trip to Scandinavia. Her eight-year-old son, Stefan, is a student who is working on an essay entitled “My Idea of a Better Life.” The theme of his essay apparently becomes the theme of the novel. Since the story is told from a detached, objective, dramatic point of view, however, this possible connection is left for the reader to make.

Mother and son drive to the airport to meet the returning father. The story opens in winter, at an unspecified time after Christmas. Returning from Helsinki, the father is exhausted but happy to be back in Germany with his family. He explains that he was “afraid of going mad with loneliness” in Finland, where he did not understand the language.

Bruno’s key statement introduces the contradictory logic that dominates the story. After telling his wife that he loves her and feels bound to her, he adds, “I now feel I could exist without you.” The statement has more meaning for his wife than he might guess. There is a slight suggestion that Bruno might have been intimate with his German-speaking interpreter in Finland, “a woman with a child and no husband.”

After sending their son to bed, Bruno takes his wife to a hotel for a festive dinner, then gets a room for the night. The next morning, the woman tells her husband about “a strange idea” she had, a discovery, an “illumination.” The idea is that they should separate, that her husband should leave her. Surprised, Bruno agrees to a separation, thinking it may be only temporary.

The rest of the novel concerns the woman’s attempt to adjust to her life as a single parent. She discusses her new status with her friend Franziska, who is also Stefan’s schoolteacher. Marianne once worked as a translator at a publishing house and knows that she can earn money translating books. Franziska invites her to join a women’s group, but when she approaches the group, she apparently is not interested. She is an enigmatic and private person. When Bruno comes to take his belongings, he begins to show resentment about his wife’s decision. The child seems to be absolutely neutral concerning the separation.

Some days later, Bruno confronts his wife on the street as she, seeking employment, goes to mail a letter. He treats her roughly, shoving her into a telephone booth. He accuses her of being mentally ill, burns her photograph in protest, then offers her money. Back home, she rearranges her furniture, an attempt, presumably, to put her new life in order. Eventually, the publisher Ernst, a weary man of fifty for whom Marianne once worked, brings her the autobiography of a young Frenchwoman to translate at home.

Marianne and Stefan visit Bruno at his office, and Bruno shows his son how he intimidates people who come into his office. The husband’s frustration is shown by the fact that “he hammer[s] his face with his fist” after they leave. Some time later Bruno visits Marianne at home and threatens to break down the door. He insults her in his anger, saying “I’ve never known a woman to make a lasting change in her life.” Apparently he feels out of control and defeated by her resolve.

The everyday details of Marianne’s new life alone are described meticulously: the long hours spent at her typewriter, the long walks she takes. She seems to be determined to master her loneliness on her own terms. Although Franziska urges her to attend one of the meetings of her women’s support group, Marianne prefers to be alone. At times she is even irritated by the presence of her son and his fat friend Jurgen.

Marianne’s father comes to visit. He was once a successful writer. They have their pictures taken and meet a man whom the father recognizes as an actor. He criticizes the unemployed actor for holding back and not taking risks, which may denote approval of his daughter’s behavior. Some time after the father returns to his home, the woman again meets the actor, by chance, at a cafe. The actor is fascinated by Marianne and has been following her. He confides in her, perhaps following her father’s advice about not holding back. He confesses that he desires her, then runs from the cafe in embarrassment.

Bruno telephones one night to invite himself to Marianne’s house with Franziska. Ernst also comes to call and is invited in with his chauffeur. Then a salesgirl from whom Marianne has purchased a sweater for Bruno, arrives. The actor is also invited. A fight breaks out between the jealous Bruno and the actor, who is sitting in Bruno’s chair. Later on, they reconcile, play Ping-Pong, then leave together.

The party ends, the guests leave, and Marianne reflects to herself: “You haven’t given yourself away. And no one will ever humiliate you again.” The novel ends with an epilogue from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, stating that “one goes on living as though nothing were wrong.”

The Characters

Handke’s characters are fairly conventional but extremely abstract and oddly presented in a detached and absolutely external manner. In fact, the novelist, who had previously written two film scripts for Wim Wenders—including the script adapted from his own novel Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (1970; The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, 1972)—first imagined his story as a motion picture and went on to direct a film version.

The novel, which differs in some particulars of setting and action from the film, was written as a challenge. As Handke has explained in his notes for the film production, “I wanted to try a kind of prose in which the thinking and feeling of the individual characters would never be described—in which, instead of ‘she was afraid,’ the reader would find; ‘she left,’ ‘she walked over to the window,’ ‘she lay down next to the child’s bed.’...—And I felt this form of limitation actually acted as a liberating force on my literary work.”

The reader senses the psychology behind the characters’ motivation, in spite of the generally dramatic framework, stripped of soliloquizing or internal monologues. At first the characters are simply described by function: the woman, the boy, the schoolteacher, the publisher, the actor, and so on. The woman’s name is not mentioned in the first quarter of the narrative. The publisher’s name is not given until the last quarter.

Despite this purposeful detachment, the characters are vividly delineated. Bruno, the husband, is very traditional in his understanding of his role as husband and father. An establishment figure, his politics tend toward the right wing; his business affairs have conditioned him to intimidate other people; in dealing with frustration, his tendency is to become abusive, first toward Marianne, later toward the actor, whom he considers a rival.

The narrative is totally lacking in sentiment. Marianne’s “strange idea” of liberating herself from a domineering husband, her “illumination,” as she calls it, causes her to redefine her other relationships as well. Her friend Franziska and, later, the actor offer her companionship, but she prefers to be a loner and hold to her own notion of independence. The actor’s sentimental desire to possess her is no more appealing than her husband’s advances when he returns from Finland in the novel’s opening section.

She is not entirely antisocial, however, as shown at the party in the novel’s closing section, but she is determined that the people who gather at her home be on an equal footing. For that reason, the publisher’s chauffeur is invited as an equal. As he says to his employer at the party, “[t]omorrow you won’t speak to me anyway.” Marianne gives the man a taste of liberation.

Marianne has a talent for breaking down barriers between other people, but she will not give herself away and she will only accept people on her own terms. At the end of the novel, after her visitors have left, she articulates this point, adding, “no one will ever humiliate you again.” Before, Bruno treated her as a possession and humiliated her in public. She has now redefined her life, purposefully, choosing loneliness as a consequence of independence.

The other characters exist only to give definition to Marianne and her rebirth. The boy is cared for, but there seems to be no close sentimental attachment between mother and son. Handke offers a bleak design for living in this story, strongly suggesting that self-dependency is necessary to lead a well-balanced life in the industrial world. The novel’s title (which is never explained in the text) would seem to be ironic, attaching the stigma of social awkwardness to Marianne, who first seems to be a withdrawn, social misfit. Despite the apparent bleakness of her chosen life, however, as critic J. Hoberman wrote, the story is strangely “affirmative, without being sentimental.” There is something admirable in Marianne’s strength of character.

Critical Context

Peter Handke may be regarded as an avant-garde iconoclast reacting against accepted narrative traditions and criticizing the complacency of the generation of German writers who preceded him. Handke first gained notoriety in 1966 when he challenged the “realistic” achievements of the prestigious Gruppe 47 writers who represented the establishment. Distrustful of language and of conventional notions of reason, Handke’s early works were an assault against the literary establishment of his time. His plays, one of which bears the title “Offending the Audience,” were antitheatrical Sprechstucke (literally, pieces of speech) that assailed time-honored conventions of drama.

His first novel, Die Hornissen (1966; the hornets), was recognized as a German equivalent of the French New Novel and enhanced his reputation as an experimental writer. In addition, his alliance with Wim Wenders connected him with a new generation of filmmakers who were revitalizing the German cinema.

For Handke, characters take precedence over the story being told. Interviewed in 1979, he said “What is ‘story’ or ‘fiction’ is really always only the point of intersection between individual daily events.” He described narrative as “an ‘I’...writing a narrative poem about the time in which he lives, about the self, and about others.”

The psychology of the central characters of both The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick and The Left-Handed Woman is irrational and mysterious, but, unlike Marianne, the central character of The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick is apparently quite mad. Both characters, however, are responsible for their extreme actions, and both are threatened by the consequences.

Because Handke distrusts language and its deceptive nature, his writing is sparse and primarily descriptive and his point of view dramatic or objective, with the narrator assuming the perspective of a mobile film camera, picturing the action, but not interposing to mediate or to interpret the story or the characters for the reader.

Novelist John Updike has noted that Handke writes “from an area beyond psychology,” and the point is well taken, if a little obscure. Handke does not put the reader in touch with the minds of his characters, but he does suggest something about Marianne’s psychology through what she says and through the way she responds to what she reads (while translating the autobiography of a Frenchwoman, not unlike herself) and to what others say. Though motives are not fully explained, the advantage is that psychology is not simplified to banal and manageable levels.

Writing in The Yale Review, Maureen Howard described The Left-Handed Woman as “a tale of modern perversity,” a “novel about the unsaid,” documenting “solitary pain” and “deranged loneliness.” Howard claims that the characters lose their names as their identities recede in the mind of the central character, but one could argue the opposite, for as Marianne (who is not herself named until the narrative is well in progress) comes to grips with her new identity and her existential rebirth, those characters who are meaningful to her are called by their Christian names. Bruno is always Bruno, moreover, and Franziska, her closest friend, is always Franziska.

The stance is one of defensive integrity, an ideal that is approached toward the end, as Marianne grows into her intense individualism and her sense of self-preservation eclipses the danger of self-destruction. At the novel’s end, Marianne seems relatively in control of her life, having found employment and having advanced beyond the self-doubts that accompanied her decision to separate from her husband. Reading this novel requires more than a little patience, but the work is extremely well crafted, and the development goes beyond the potential banality of another mid-life crisis. Handke is able to take an ordinary life and make it interesting.

Bibliography

Gray, Paul. “A Formidable and Unique Austerity,” in Time. CXIV (June 19, 1978), p. 80.

Hoberman, J. “The Left-Handed Woman,” in The Village Voice. XXV (April 7, 1980), p. 27.

Howard, Maureen. “The Left-Handed Woman,” in The Yale Review. LXVIII,no. 3 (March, 1979), pp. 439-441.

Klinkowitz, Jerome, and James Knowlton. Peter Handke and the Postmodern Transformation, 1983.

Pawel, Ernest. “Sleeping Beauty as a Housewife,” in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXIII (June 18, 1978), p. 10.

Updike, John. “Northern Europeans: Discontent in Deutsch,” in Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism, 1983.