The experience of isolation and female identity in The Wall by Marlen Haushofer (1963)

Abstract

The novel The Wall (1963) by the Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer; initially received in the field of fantastic literature and science fiction, it offers an invaluable rereading of female identity as a cultural construction determined by a social and historical order. Firstly, the concept of women as a construction will be analyzed insofar as it is a prior antecedent to the great later movement of women for gender emancipation. Secondly, the meaning of confinement will be observed from the existentialist perspective. When the work first appears, it is immediately associated with The Plague (1947) by Albert Camus in the sense of the closure of the human being in his reality, which isolates him from the other and forces him to reflect on his existence and, therefore, on the human existence in general. On the occasion of the pandemic suffered by Covid 2020, the work belongs to the corpus of universal literature on novels about the pandemic and its social effects.