Effi Briest Read Free Page A

called her Betty von Ottersund, making pointed reference to her elemental, aquatic affinities, but in the end he chose Effi Briest for its sound, ‘because of all the “e’s” and “i’s”; those two are the fine vowels.’ 9 Effi is not a common name in German and it has been speculated that he may, as a keen reader of Scott, have taken it from Effie Deans in
The Heart of Midlothian
. The echo of ‘Eve’ with implications of the fall from grace is surely intended too. Many of Fontane’s characters’ names are invested with symbolic overtones. Innstetten’s first name ‘Geert’ not only means ‘a tall slender stem’ as old Briest remarks, but also a ‘switch’, an instrument of punishment and control. Innstetten is cast in the role of trainer and tamer of the spontaneous inclinations of his young wife. The titles of over a third of Fontane’s novels are women’s names, bearing out Ebba Rosenberg’s dictum in
Beyond Recall (Unwiederbringlich):
‘Women’s stories are usually far more interesting.’ Of course Fontane is not alone among nineteenth-century novelists in choosing such titles, but the preponderance of women protagonists is striking, and a comparison with the often-invoked sister novels of adultery is instructive. 10
    Flaubert’s title
Madame Bovary
suggests that the problem, the central concern is the marriage, the turning of Emma into the wife of someone whosebovine name proclaims his character. The marriage fails to satisfy her, but equally she fails to assert a separate valid identity as Emma. Tolstoy’s
Anna Karenina
articulates the conflict inherent in the simultaneous existence of the private individual Anna, who experiences true love and passion, and the social role as Karenin’s wife.
Effi Briest
is quite another matter. Effi’s problem is that she cannot complete the socially required metamorphosis from Fräulein von Briest to Frau von Innstetten, for this would entail a denial of her self, her natural, playful exuberance, the self-confident magnetic personality we see in the games in the garden on the one hand, and on the other her risk-loving nature, her propensity to let herself be carried away, her desire for the out of the ordinary, her unpredictability. As her mother says, she is ‘altogether a very odd mixture’. Ironically, although Innstetten is attracted by her natural, youthful charms it is precisely those sides of her that he then sets about stifling. That she remains Effi Briest at the end of the novel, a fact explicitly asserted by her instructions for the wording on her gravestone, is a sign that although she has succumbed physically in the draining conflict with the rigid forms of society she has managed to hold on to her own inner integrity, she has not lost her self. She has not been sacrificed like Anna to a grand passion. Her affair with Crampas was not a crucial emotional experience, it was merely a symptom of her need to preserve some area of freedom and spontaneity; nor has she been sacrificed like Emma to romantic notions and an egocentric personality. She has been sacrificed – and the motif of sacrifice runs through the narrative from the gooseberry skins’ watery grave at the beginning to the sacrificial stones by Lake Hertha and beyond ( Chapter 24 ) – to a set of conventions which Wüllersdorf and Innstetten recognize as empty: ‘this cult of honour of ours is idolatry’, without being able to extricate themselves from the power of ‘that social something which tyrannizes us’ ( Chapter 27 ), but she has not relinquished her irreducible sense of her own independent identity. That she finds her way back to being Effi Briest – a unique, beautiful name free of its aristocratic ‘von’, its social indicator, in her chosen, natural setting in the garden of her youth is an assertion of a triumph of a kind. It is an ambiguous one, for she has not survived to grow into mature adulthood, but the fact of her death constitutes an accusation levelled