ABSTRACT
Lou Andreas-Salome is perhaps a paradigmatic case for how women writers fared in twentieth-century literary criticism. This chapter offers a close reading of Andreas-Salome's novel Das Haus: Eine Familiengeschichte vom Ende des vorigen Jahrhunderts. It argues that the novel's aesthetic programme of concealment and veiled suggestion deliberately renders opaque a challenging depiction of a woman's ambivalent response to her first pregnancy. A glimpse at the cultural history of birth control enables us better to understand the choices women of Andreas-Salome's generation were making with regard to their reproductive lives. The power of Andreas-Salome's prose in Das Haus lies in her intriguing exploration of Gitta's psychology through language implying that she enters a state of cognitive dissonance as a result of her loss of pregnancy. Das Haus, with its sensitive exploration of liminal states of being, is itself on the threshold between realism and modernism. Andreas-Salome explores the newly-married protagonist's instinctive fear of the path conventionally regarded as a woman's destiny.
