![]() ![]() Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina, 1971 (reissued 2019). But, at a certain point, this fictional retreat converges with her reality, and escape is seemingly attainable only at the cost of her evanescence. Throughout the novel, to counteract the negative forces encircling her, the woman attempts to maintain a fairy-tale world: one in which there is a suggestion of a third, utopian state between the spheres of female and male, public and private, where she can regain sovereignty over her own body and mind. As a result, sharing an intimate space entirely removed from these vast events becomes untenable, destroying any chance of reciprocal relationships, contributing to what she terms the ‘virus’ of love, and eroding her sense of self. The narrator delineates, however, that the distinction between spheres is problematic and that the private-sphere aggressions shown by the male individuals around her have merged with the public-sphere traumas of fascism. The private sphere is a precinct of social life over which an individual usually enjoys a degree of authority, unhampered by interventions from governmental or other public institutions. ![]() Ingeborg Bachmann’s novel Malina (1971 reissued by New Directions this year) follows the confessions of ‘an unknown woman’ as she shows the ways that the threshold of her private sphere is being manipulated, eroded and trespassed upon by three different men. ![]()
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