Hausfrau wears its comparisons to 19th-century novels of domestic ennui – Fontane's Effi Briest, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina – proudly on its sleeve. Anna Benz is a 37-year-old American expat living in the tranquil suburb of Dietlikon on the outskirts of Zürich. Her Swiss husband Bruno is a banker at Credit Suisse, and while he's out at work, Anna looks after their three young children.
She's "a good wife, mostly", but like her literary predecessors, adultery offers her fleeting respite from the tedium of domesticity – one passionate affair with an American man she falls in love with, followed by a series of meaningless encounters after he abandons her and returns to the States. As the novel progresses, echoes of Anna Karenina reverberate the most clearly, not simply in the mirroring of the central protagonist's name, but also in Jill Alexander Essbaum's plot. This, however, isn't to say that Hausfrau is predictable; indeed, it's testament to the skill of Essbaum's writing that knowing Anna's heading for the same tragic fate does nothing to detract from the impact of the narrative.
Essbaum offers a piercingly astute psychological portrait of a woman sleepwalking to self-destruction. She should also be applauded for transposing what is essentially a 19th-century narrative trope onto a contemporary setting, and still have it resonate with reality and truth, even if her heroine’s “tightly circumscribed” existence is entirely of her own making. We must acknowledge, of course, that Switzerland’s own conservatism looms largely in the background, but to claim that Anna’s held hostage by the same societal expectations and limitations that inhibited Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina would be preposterous. Instead, it’s Anna’s individual circumstance that reinforce her passivity; circumstances, it’s important to point out, that she chose, subsequent ambivalence and all. This, though, is precisely what makes her such a fascinating character, and for a debut, Essbaum shows considerable dexterity in creating a heroine who remains sympathetic despite being exasperatingly apathetic.
Anna doesn’t have a job, therefore doesn’t earn her own money – as is the case with many wives looking after their children, you might argue – nor does she drive, so the environment she has access to is necessarily limited, but curtailing her independence ever further is the language barrier.
Despite nine years in the country, she speaks only the “barest minimum” of Schwiizerdütsch and her German remains “rudimentary”. Unable to deal with even the most basic of bureaucratic paperwork – the annual filling out of her own residency permit included – she’s as helpless as a wife from a long-ago era, the management of the family’s taxes, finances, insurance and property-related issues all falling to her husband: “Anna didn’t even have a bank account.”
Her lack of communication skills – or, to put it more accurately, her refusal to integrate with the wider community around her (“Anna did know an elementary level of German. She got around. But hers was a German remarkable only in how badly it was cultivated and by the Herculean effort she had to summon in order to speak it”) – is both a huge part of what keeps her isolated, but also a powerful metaphor for this entrapment. “But Anna’s grasp of grammar and vocabulary were weak, her fluency was choked, and idioms and proper syntax escaped her completely,” Essbaum elucidates, emphasising verbal impotence. It’s hardly surprising then to discover that Anna’s in analysis. Like a Victorian hysteric, Anna’s struggle to speak becomes a broader battle for her own agency.
It’s Doktor Messerli who proposes her patient join the German language classes that Anna should have enrolled in when she first arrived in Switzerland. “It’s time you steer yourself into a trajectory that will force you into participating more fully with the world around you,” the doctor prescribes. And interestingly, Anna’s engagement with lexical intricacies often tells us more than her sessions on the couch. “We make the passive voice in German with the verb warden. ‘To become’,” the teacher explains, prompting an existential reflection in her student: “‘To be’ is static. ‘To become’ implies motion. A paradoxical move towards limp surrender. Whatever it is, you do not do it. It is done to you. ‘Passivity’ and ‘passion’ begin alike. It’s only how they end that’s different.”
Essbaum’s use of the German language is inspired, especially since some might find solace in the regimented rules of its grammar, but not so Anna. “But how often is the past simple?” she asks herself. “Is the present ever perfect?”
Hausfrau is avaialable on Amazon
Lucy Scholes is a freelance journalist based in London.
