Girls from Good Families: Tony Buddenbrook and Agathe Heidling

Gabriele Reuter's Aus guter Familie: Leidensgeschichte eines Madchens (1895) and Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie (1901) were two of the best-selling novels in Imperial Germany. However, as their titles suggest, these novels share more than sales figures. Each family chronicle traces the negative life trajectory of a girl from a middle-class family, beginning with her education into gender- and class-appropriate roles and ending with the picture of her shattered adult life. The thematic contiguity of the novels and their enthusiastic reception by the reading public invite a side-by-side reading. They are connected in other ways as well, ranging from the fact that both were written at the turn of the last century to Thomas Mann's discussion of AMS guter Familie in an early essay.1 In his reading or, more precisely, misreading of Aus guter Familie, Mann employs a critical vocabulary to talk about Reuter's novel and its heroine Agathe Heidling, a lexicon that I intend to use to take a fresh look at Mann's own girl from a good family, Tony Buddenbrook.2 Presenting insights gained from recent scholarship on Aus guter Familie, I hope to move toward a fuller understanding of Buddenbrooks and to underscore the connections between Tony Buddenbrook and Agathe Heidling as they are both formed and deformed by gender politics.3 At the end of the 19th century, men and women shared a sense that the world they knew was rapidly changing. Technological advances and increasing urbanization were physical markers of this change. Darwin and his German popularizer Haeckel were read for their theories of evolution and survival of the fittest, Schopenhauer for his cultural and philosophical pessimism, and Nietzsche for the primacy he gave to Life writ large. In this social landscape, the gender-based theories of character advanced at the end of the 18th century by male theorists were coming under scrutiny. The ideology of a dichotomous Geschlechtscharakter held sway throughout the 19th century and was reinscribed in countless novels, etiquette manuals, popular magazines and, of course, schools and families. This ideological framework relegated middle-class women to a private sphere where they were to evidence a selfless devotion to family. Theirs was a realm marked not by intellect but by a natural physicality and piety. Educational and professional opportunities for women were extremely limited. Middle-class men lived under no less stringent gender-appropriate codes that defined a polar-opposite realm. Since middle-class men were to act rationally in the public sphere, their education aimed at developing a well-defined, autonomous, energetic, and rational self. By the late 19th century, these gender-based prescriptions for the middle classes came under scrutiny by different groups for different reasons. At this juncture the asynchronicity in the history of men and women with respect to the ideal of an individuated, autonomous self surfaced in stark relief. The continued viability of the reigning middle-class construct of an independent, integrated (male) self active in the public sphere began to be questioned. Authors such as Thomas Mann and Hugo von Hofmannsthal pictured a state of cultural development in which men's nerves and sensibilities had become so over-refined as to preclude the continuance of the Enlightenment ideal. The self, the subject, began to be viewed as something fragmentary, incomplete, conflicted and unreliable. Other authors-very often women-had markedly different concerns. Although these authors may also have experienced the world of 1900 as one of change, what merited change in their view was the self-less lives of women at home in the family, heteronomous lives formed by a patriarchal society. What had been the ideal for the middle-class man around 1800 became in varying degrees the ideal of women reformers: middle-class girls were to be educated to develop an autonomous self, able to function in the public sphere as well as at home. …