Girls and Their Creators: Jane Austen’s Marianne Dashwood and Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest

My previous blog about Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest has instigated me to make some comparisons between Effi and Marianne Dashwood, from Jane Austen’s novel Sense and Sensibility.

Effi and Marianne are both seventeen years old, they both go through the world with an open heart, and they both pay a price for that. But there are also differences between them which are as powerful as the similarities. Effi never matches Marianne’s confidence, which leaves her incapable of finding happiness and satisfaction in her own accomplishments. Effi also breaks the moral norm by having an extramarital affair to escape the boredom of her life, a feeling that is unknown to Marianne, who is always occupied with reading and playing music. Finally, in a stark contrast between the two, Effi is left to her own devices from her young age on, while Marianne constantly lives under the moral leadership of her eldest sister Elinor.

Both Effi and Marianne experience cruelty. Effi never gets to know real love. But Marianne’s passionate love for John Willoughby is also unreal for it is occasioned by her own wishes rather than knowledge of his true character –“her opinions are all romantic”–. When his perfidy is revealed, and his selfish designs understood, Marianne’s world collapses. And yet it is this perfidy that prevents her from marrying him, and to marry him at seventeen, for his gravitating toward wealthy women removes him from Marianne, a woman of little means.

I am intrigued by how Theodor Fontane resolves to make Effi die and Jane Austen to let Marianne live. Perhaps their decisions are influenced by their genders. Fontane uses Effi to ridicule Prussian pride, but he is not prepared to challenge this pride in a radical way; for although he is criticizing traditional conventions, he is also eager to bow to them by denying Effia second chance, an opportunity for redemption. In not allowing her child to bring meaning into Effi’s life, and by turning mother and daughter into enemies the male writer Fontane anticipates some features of the moral paradigm of the twentieth century.

Austen rescues Marianne from Willoughby but still she makes her pay for her mistakes.  The life threatening illness that Marianne experiences is a punishment for her unjust behaviorstowards her friends– “with a heart hardened against their merits, and a temper irritated by their very attention” –. When at the age of nineteen, Marianne accepts to marry the man whom just two years earlier she had violently rejected, this turn of events looks like a second punishment for having once allowed herself to be fascinated by charisma rather than modesty.

Austen wrote her story in 1811, Fontane in 1894. That within seventy years the life of two similar girls could change so dramatically shows the shifting power of gender in the literature of that time. Male authors writing about the life of women mark the rise of new difficulties.

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