Making Sense Through Our Senses: The Embodied Reader in Arthur Schnitzler's "Fräulein Else" and Paul Czinner's Filmic Adaptation
Creators: name: Zimbelius-Klem, Tatjana
Publisher: name: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries
Year: 2016

description: The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a period in which interiority
and the human experience were thoroughly examined in many artistic and academic
fields: the young discipline of psychoanalysis dug into depths of the human mind that had
not been explored before; in physics and philosophy the positivism of the so-called
Wiener Kreis around Ernst Mach put a new emphasis on the importance of sensory
experience as the primary source of knowledge.1 Part of the intellectual elite of fin-desiècle
Vienna, Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931) was familiar with all these new
developments and personally acquainted with many of their proponents. He was a
physician like his father, and like Sigmund Freud he was greatly interested in the
workings of the human mind. Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else (1924) is a novella about a
young woman who is asked by her parents to beg an older man for money in order to pay
for the father’s debts. It is written in the form of an interior monologue which abandons
an independent observer who orders and evaluates events and instead assumes the
perspective of the narrating self. The novella’s subject is the disintegration of cultural and
social certainties and how this disintegration necessarily leads to a dissolution of the
personal construct.
I will pay close attention to how the haptic and the visual merge to allow for both
clear vision and a visceral Schwindelgefühl that adds a layer of sensuous cognition. The
term “haptic” is derived from the Greek word ἅπτω (hápto) and its many meanings range
from “I kindle, set on fire, fasten fire to” to “I fasten to, bind fast, join to” or “I cling to,
hang on by, lay hold“ (1 Cor 7, “don’t hold on to a woman” is a prohibition of sexual
intercourse, for instance). The Oxford English Dictionary defines haptic not only as “of
the nature of, involving, or relating to the sense of touch, the perception of position and
motion (proprioception), and other tactile and kinaesthetic sensations,” but also as
“having a greater dependence on sensations of touch and kinaesthetic experiences than on
sight, esp. as a means of psychological orientation.”
It is the aspect of the haptic as a mediator between the distance senses of vision
and hearing and the proximal sense of touch and visceral response that I will be most
interested in, especially the relationship between the kinesthetic experience and
(psychological) orientation, being moved by sensation both literally and figuratively.3 As
I will lay out, a sense of Schwindelgefühl is at the heart of the protagonist’s experience.
The German term does not have an exact correspondence in English, but it refers to a
sense of vertigo or dizziness—when our senses betray us and trick us into experiencing
movement when there is none. Schwindel, as it happens, not only refers to this feeling of
instability when the world seems off kilter, but it also means “swindle” or “fraud.” As we
will see, in Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else it is the father’s act of swindling others that sets the
events in motion and propels the story forward, throwing Else into a maelstrom of the
conflicting forces of filial piety and a strong desire to defend herself and her individual
freedom. In Fräulein Else Arthur Schnitzler puts under the microscope of his
psychoanalytical gaze a society that is pathologically preoccupied with the surface,
keeping up appearances at all costs, concealing that which is not golden, pretending it
does not exist. As a physician who was interested in hypnosis as a tool to diagnose and
treat psychological disorders, Schnitzler—who wrote a Traumtagebuch himself—was
familiar with the latest insights and theories of the “Father of Psychoanalysis,” Sigmund
Freud. Eros and thanatos, the two major drives of human existence, are also the drivers of
the novella, and the theme of the oedipal is clearly at play in the text.