Abstract
This paper begins by exploring the censorship of The Song of Songs (1909), the first English translation of Hermann Sudermann’s Das Hohe Lied (1906).1 While the novel’s British reception is contextualized by the perceived social dangers of sexual representation in foreign literature, the essay demonstrates that Sudermann’s novel not only inscribes a critique of moral censure and the aesthetic idealism that often underpinned it, but also parodies the Naturalist novel which itself was believed to radically challenge sexual reticence in British fiction.
Writing in his column for The New Age under the pseudonym Jacob Tonson, Arnold Bennett (1911: 303) claimed that January 1911 marked ‘the gravest event that has yet happened in the fight for the freedom of literature in England’. The event to which Bennett refers was the withdrawal from circulation at the behest of the police of The Song of Songs (1909), an English translation of Hermann Sudermann’s novel, Das Hohe Lied (1906). The banning of the novel by both private and public lending libraries a month earlier had provoked Bennett (1910: 110) to attack the kind of prudish English philistinism that censored worthy novels but permitted the publication of Elinor Glyn’s His Hour (1910), ‘a vastly more sensual novel’ in Bennett’s opinion. Given that The Song of Songs had avoided censorship elsewhere, its banning revealed, according to Bennett, a peculiarly British attitude to artistic creation. Similar comments to Bennett’s were advanced a month later by Austin Harrison in ‘The new censorship’, an editorial essay in the English Review. Harrison (1911: 533) asserted that the English suppression of Sudermann’s novel along with Neil Lyon’s Cottage Pie (1910) indicated that a new censorship had become ‘a matter of public concern’. Harrison (1911: 537) complained of those elements of the public who ‘flesh their appetites upon a book like His Hour and consider The Song of Songs to be utterly immodest and harmful’. In Harrison’s opinion, the former was just bad, the latter true art.
In the history of British literary censorship, the banning of Sudermann’s novel has been largely forgotten. 2 Given the novel’s relative obscurity, a brief synopsis might prove useful. As with many Naturalist novels, The Song of Songs charts the life of a demi-monde: in this case, that of Lilly Czepanek. Lilly is abandoned first by her father, an impecunious composer, and then by her mother who eventually succumbs to insanity. Without the stabilities of family life, like many Naturalist heroines, she is thrown out into the world to make her living. Lilly is initially placed in the care of Mrs Amussen, the owner of a private lending library. Like Zola’s Nana, Lilly is sexually attractive, but unlike Nana she does not succumb to prostitution, but undergoes a series of failed romantic encounters before marrying the much older Colonel von Mertzbach. After marrying the colonel, Lilly has an affair with her husband’s employee, Walter von Prell. After the end of her marriage and the affair with Prell, Lilly is pursued by a number of lovers, becomes the mistress of Richard Dehnicke for several years and then falls in love with Konrad Rennschmidt from whom she hides her disreputable past. When her past is eventually discovered, Rennschmidt abandons her and the novel seems destined to end in standard Naturalist fashion with the main female protagonist’s decline and death. At the novel’s close, she contemplates suicide but surprisingly changes her mind and marries Richard Dehnicke.
If the banning of the novel in Britain has largely been forgotten, the name of the publisher of its English translation, John Lane, will come as no surprise to those cognizant of the politics of publishing in late Victorian Britain. In the 1890s, Lane published The Yellow Book, as well as a number of provocative novels and short stories including Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did (1895) and George Egerton’s collections of short stories Keynotes (1893) and Discords (1894). On hearing that the police had asked for The Song of Songs to be withdrawn, Lane canvassed a number of prominent writers, including Thomas Hardy, May Sinclair, Arthur Conan Doyle and George Bernard Shaw, to ask their opinion about whether he should proceed with publication. Shaw and Sinclair were in favour, Hardy on pragmatic grounds advised withdrawal, and Conan Doyle, while suggesting that it would be best if no woman under 40 read it, argued that to claim the novel was obscene was in itself an abuse of words. Lane did withdraw the novel but republished it in 1913 with a new translation by Beatrice Marshall. With typical marketing acumen, Lane included the letters of advice he had solicited from Hardy et al. in the preface of the 1913 edition. 3
The furore surrounding the publication of the novel in 1910 is clearly reminiscent of the panic caused by Lane’s publication of fin-de-siècle fiction; however, Lane’s later brush with censorship also resonates with another publisher’s legal vicissitudes in distributing English translations of foreign writers. Henry Vizetelly’s publication of Émile Zola’s novels in the 1880s led not only to the English translation of Zola’s novels being suppressed, but also to the septuagenarian publisher being sent to prison. Considering that 30 years separate Vizetelly’s trial from Lane’s withdrawal of Sudermann’s novel, the debates circulating around issues of sexual representation, philistinism, morality and censorship as they relate to a decidedly national perspective of literature seem remarkably similar. As with The Song of Songs, the censorship of foreign Naturalist novels raised broader issues of British morality and artistic licence. While many literary commentators such as Bennett and Austin viewed such censorship as an example of the prudish philistinism of popular British culture, many detractors perceived Naturalist novels to be pernicious continental imports that would weaken the moral fibre of the nation.
Although similarities in the reception of these novels abound, The Song of Songs is in many ways a very different kind of Naturalist fiction to La Terre, Nana and Pot Bouille. While provocatively challenging censorship as Zola’s novels frequently did, Sudermann’s novel also offers a critique of European Naturalism itself. If The Song of Songs challenges the values of sexual morality and the principles of aesthetic idealism that were often deployed in attacking Naturalist fiction, it also satirizes the pessimistic Weltanschauung of Naturalism through reworking a core narrative thematic of its fiction: the downfall of the demi-monde. While keeping Naturalist faith in the depiction of what Maupassant referred to as ‘the lower elements’, the novel also satirizes the limitations of the kind of formulaic realism offered by Zolean Naturalism.
English fears of being swamped by pernicious literature from foreign shores, and particularly from France, reached its zenith with the distribution of French Naturalist novels in English translation. Between the publication of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) and Zola’s Nana (1880) a spate of French novels dealt with the figure of the amoral woman, most notably J.-K. Huysmans in Marthe: histoire d’une fille (1876) and Edmond de Goncourt in La Fille Elisa (1877). Such novels often fell foul of the censor not just for their content but because of the absence of an ostensible moral centre from which immoral behaviour could be judged by the reader. Indeed, Flaubert’s trial centred on such an understanding (see, for example, La Capra, 1978). In England, Naturalist novels became synonymous with graphic depictions of sex, and were perceived by many as a foreign attack on core British moral and aesthetic values. W. S. Lilly’s (1885: 252) comments, in an essay entitled ‘The new Naturalism’ written for the Fortnightly Review, were not untypical: The issue of the Naturalistic Evolution is the banishing from life of all that gives it glory and honour: the victory of fact over principle, of mechanism over imagination, of appetites, dignified as rights, over duties, of sensation over intellect, of the belly over the heart, of fatalism over moral freedom, of brute force over justice, in a word, of matter over mind.
Naturalism offends because it inscribes the sexualized body into serious fiction. The opposition between elevating aesthetic ideal – the ethereally invisible – and foul animal − the all-too-visible base − collapses and leaves nothing but the bête humaine. As such Naturalism could have a pernicious effect on readers. Such a view prevailed long after the historical moment of Naturalism. In Towards Racial Health, written as late as 1915, Norah March writes: A quick, vivid imagination is priceless, but just in proportion to its value, is it capable of being abused and degraded. Nowhere is that more evident than in novels. Facts concerning the sad things of life, social evils, pass through the brain of a Dickens or a Scott … and become purified and educative: through the brain of a Zola, pernicious and infective as with deadly moral plague. (1915: 318)
The effect of reading Zola is still perceived as dangerous, the trope deployed that of deadly infection. Indeed tropes of moral contagion and comparisons of physical and moral health would prevail well into the twentieth century. 4 However, it is within this context of the residual perceptions of reading as dangerous, and specifically of reading Naturalism as dangerous, that The Song of Songs and its British suppression must be understood.
Although Sudermann’s novel was considered equally offensive to those who wished it withdrawn from circulation, a brief comparison between The Song of Songs and the Naturalist demi-monde novel par excellence, Zola’s Nana (1880), reveals the extent to which Sudermann’s novel diverges from the earlier Naturalist treatments of sexuality. Both novels typically chart the life and decline of their female protagonists without passing moral judgement on their sexual behaviour, although Sudermann is perhaps more discreet in depicting sexual acts. The Song of Songs, however, also satirizes the Naturalist dysphoria of Nana most forcefully in its parody of the decline plot which was the formula ending of a Naturalist novel. David Baguley (1992: 19) has noted that the decline plot ‘submits man (or, more frequently, woman) to an ironic, humiliating destiny, exposing the fundamental corruptibility and emptiness of human existence as they manifest themselves in daily life and in the baseness of bourgeois manners’.
This double attack on both conventional sexual morality and Naturalistic pessimism is evident in the novel’s treatment of Lilly Czepanek’s reading habits. In similar mode to a Naturalist text such as George Moore’s A Mummer’s Wife, Sudermann registers the falsity of Lilly’s romantic illusions caused by reading circulating library novels. In Naturalist novels, female reading is often symptomatic of a dangerous bovaryisme in which the idealism engendered by reading romantic fiction leads to disillusion and decline. In Moore’s novel, the perceived dangers of reading Naturalist fiction are rhetorically displaced onto the dangers of reading romantic fiction, although a gendered division remains that perceives women as more susceptible than men to being influenced by what they read. Lilly Czepanek’s romanticized notion of victimhood – largely acquired through reading romantic books at Mrs Amussen’s circulating library – is shown to provide a wholly inadequate interpretation of life, as her reflections on the letter she writes, but never sends, to her prospective fiancé Konrad Rennschmidt demonstrate: Phrases like ‘dull night in which my spirit was enveloped’ and ‘tried desperately to struggle’ belonged in sentimental novels. They were inapplicable to her life. She had suffered not so much from despair as from boredom and during that ‘dull night’ she had enjoyed herself greatly on many an occasion. (Sudermann, 1909: 578)
In Sudermann’s novel the seduction of romantic reading proves to have a less drastic effect on Lilly Czepanek than on Kate Ede in A Mummer’s Wife. Bovaryisme does not lead to suicide as it does in Madame Bovary or an alcohol-induced death as it does in Moore’s novel. Unlike Kate Ede or Emma Bovary, Lilly Czepanek can distinguish between reality and romance and her romantic illusions, ‘compounded of marble statues and temple pillars, of evergreen cypresses and a sky eternally blue’ (1909: 21) are understood as an immature stage of a Bildungsroman rather than a chronic socio-psychological illness. By granting Lilly Czepanek the ability to recognize the falsity of the kind of romantic fiction available in Mrs Amussen’s circulating library, the novel dissents from the commonly held belief that women were more vulnerable to the dangers of reading than men, whether the danger stems from romance as often portrayed in the Naturalist novel or from Naturalist fiction as frequently voiced in moral protest.
The end of The Song of Songs, however, most strikingly satirizes the Naturalist novel. Kate Ede’s elopement ends in her alcoholic demise; Nana’s life as a prostitute terminates in her miserable death from smallpox; however, Lilly Czepanek is saved, or rather saves herself, from suicide, her rescue daringly left until the last page of the novel. This volte-face was objected to by the American critic William Lyon Phelps (1910: 154−5). Writing a year after Lane’s English publication of the novel, Phelps states: But this ending leaves us completely bewildered and depressed. It seems to imply that, after all, these successive steps in moral decline do not make much difference, one way or the other … The reader not only feels cheated; he feels that the moral element in the story, which through all the scenes of vice has been made clear, is now laughed at by the author … A novel may take us through woe and sin, and yet not produce any impression of cynicism; but one that makes a careful, serious study of subtle moral decay through over six hundred pages, and then implies at the end that the distinction between vice and virtue is, after all, a matter of no consequence, leaves an impression for which the proverbial ‘bad taste in the mouth’ is utterly inadequate to describe.
What leaves a bad taste in Phelps’s mouth is that Lilly’s narrative survival denies the closure of moral fatalism. His reading of the text is predicated on the notion that fiction should reward virtue and castigate vice. Only if Lilly succumbs to suicide, alcoholism, destitution or the poverty of working-class prostitution could her previous actions be read as determined by moral weakness and thus determining and justifying her end. Phelps locates Sudermann’s novel within the tradition of the novel of Victorian character based on an aesthetic that insists on the sexual apathy of good women and equates sexual interest with lower-class vulgarity and sexual deviance as deserving of harsh punishment. Sudermann’s novel complicates both the aesthetic and the morality: Lilly is sexually interested and her fall into vice does not lead to her destruction, but to relative middle-class respectability and the achievement of her lifelong ambition to travel to Italy.
Phelps’s reading of the text as providing a ‘careful serious study of moral decay’ also ignores that long before its end, the novel signals a refusal to adhere to the genre codes of either neo-Victorian realism or European Naturalism. Unlike romantic or Naturalist heroines such as Nana, Lilly is not the dangerously contagious working-class prostitute. The last sentence of the novel, ‘She had always been a dangerous woman, they said’ (Sudermann, 1909: 640), is ironic. As the narrative makes clear, Lilly has been taken advantage of by a series of men, sexually objectified and commodified from the first ‘high school students’ who ‘followed her all afire’ (1909: 19) to the ‘slim young men of fashion’ (1909: 107) who swarm to Mrs Amussen’s library. Her colonel husband describes himself as a ‘connoisseur in women’ (1909: 125) and parades Lilly in front of others: ‘The value of his property seemed to be enhanced in the degree in which people smiled, and envied him the possession of it’ (1909: 158). Richard Dehnicke is also proud of his possession of Lilly as his mistress: ‘So far from hesitating to be seen at Lilly’s side on the streets and promenades, he could not display himself to the eyes of the crowd often enough’ (1909: 368). Lilly is, in fact, neither dangerous nor destructive, but passive and reactive, which invariably leads her to fall under the control of various men. Referring to the colonel, Lilly knows, ‘she would not offer the least resistance, so completely was she in his power’ (1909: 126). Riding with her lover, ‘she felt too much under Von Prell’s control’ (1909: 223). With Richard Dehnicke, ‘She was what he had determined she should be: his courtesan, his creature’ (1909: 359). With Dr Salmoni she feels, ‘entirely in his power’ and thinks she ‘will be whatever he wants you to be’ (1909: 419). This seems to parody ideas of sexual danger promulgated by both the novel of Victorian character and the Naturalist idea that female sexuality once unleashed from its conjugal bed can cause untold havoc as it does in Madame Bovary, and in Zola’s Thérèse Raquin (1867) and Nana.
In fact, Lilly can be figured as neither demon whore nor sexless victim. The novel’s heavy concentration on the ‘spell of an erotic world’ clearly locates The Song of Songs in the later Edwardian wave of sex novels in which, more so than in the sex novels of the first wave of New Woman fiction, female sexual desire is foregrounded, as in H. G. Wells’s Ann Veronica (1909) or Hubert Wales’s The Yoke (1907), the latter also banned after protests from the National Vigilance Association. Lilly might be sexually objectified, and to some extent victimized, but she is not sexually indifferent. Not only does Lilly initially enjoy sex with her husband, ‘giving herself up to him’ (1909: 149), but she also desires other men. This is clear from her eventual response to the promiscuous Mrs Jula, who frequently picks up men on the street believing that ‘the only way to enjoy them is in the plural’ (1909: 379) as she believes that, ‘the more men you possess the more life you possess’ (1909: 381). If Lilly’s initial reaction is to dismiss Jula’s sexual abandonment, ‘though hot and cold waves shivered through her body’ (1909: 381), she later ‘descended into the mire’ by giving herself to the artist Kellerman. She feels herself ‘completely under the spell of an erotic world that every excitement of her mood was immediately transmuted into a desirous love game. And the longing, that eternal toothache, of which Mrs Jula had spoken, had begun to drill her nerves’ (1909: 406). In the context of Edwardian sexual mores and accepted monogamous practices, Lilly’s sexual desire for men outside marriage is more shocking precisely because, as William Lyons realized, her sexual behaviour ultimately goes unpunished.
What also separates Sudermann’s novel from both the novel of Victorian character and the Naturalist fiction of Zola is that simplistic delineations of sexual morality are frequently deflated by laughter. Whereas comedy is largely missing from the narratives of Naturalist writers and laughter largely absent from the long-suffering lives of women such as Kate Ede or Esther Waters who succumb to sexual temptation, Sudermann’s novel deploys comedy and Lilly Czepanek utilizes laughter to ridicule her own sense of victimhood and her lofty intentions to improve others. Although she contemplates rescuing her lover, Prell – defined as ‘a man utterly devoid of moral fibre’ (1909: 109) – ‘from his own frivolity, from that fatal condition of his soul which threatened to entangle and choke him in a net of vulgar escapades’ (1909: 220), it is precisely Prell’s frivolity that seduces her and leads to her feeling reduced to the level of one of his previous conquests. Such comic deflation is evident in Lilly’s attempt to help Prell maintain his position after seducing a housemaid: Lilly was helping him, but not with that beautiful dignified air of superiority with which she had wanted to hold out her rescuing hand. She felt she was like a playmate of his, and every few moments a half-suppressed giggle interrupted her speech. (1909: 209)
Prell may be, as Lilly eventually realizes, ‘a little good-for-nothing lieutenant’ (1909: 574) but at least his laughter and sexual honesty debunk the romantic conceit of Lilly’s noble intentions. Indeed, much of the novel’s humour derives from the juxtaposition of Lilly’s romantic self-idealization and the harsher reality of her experience, desire and circumstances. In this sense, Sudermann’s female protagonist is depicted as closer in outlook to the male Naturalist writer than a female Naturalist character. Irony is situated less in a largely male narrative conspiracy between narrator and reader than within the character’s self-realization of the limitations of her previous aspirations. In Sudermann’s Bildungsroman, Lilly is allowed to deflate her own romantic pretensions in ways that Kate Ede and Emma Bovary are not.
Such deflation can be seen at the climax of the novel. As Lilly receives the forgiveness of Konrad Rennschmidt, she feels, ‘With her sins washed away, redeemed, reborn, she stepped back into virtuous society at the side of the beloved man’ (1909: 589−90). However, such hopes of re-entering virtuous society are dashed when she gets drunk in the presence of Rennschmidt and his uncle, dances lasciviously and thus destroys her lover’s idealized view of her as rendered in his poem: ‘With hours stolen I entwine / A crown of flame that heavenly aspires / In tongues of fire up round your head divine’ (1909: 485). Ultimately such idealization proves incommensurable with her behaviour and desire. She cannot be both a saint, all the better idealized because of her suffering (1909: 583), and ‘the famous impersonator, who when the spirit moved her, needed but to open her mouth to evoke a storm of applause’ (1909: 616). Laughter again deflates Lilly’s romantic self-image when she is most concerned about ‘her fallow soul’ (1909: 459) as when: ‘Suddenly she shook with a fit of laughter. It was all nonsense, her regrets and her yearnings, Richard’s snobbish ambitions, his mother’s eternal marriage schemes. Even the respectability she desired was utterly vapid’ (1909: 459−60).
The discrepancy between romantic idealization and Lilly’s experience is underscored by the regular recurrence at key junctures of the narrative of the preciously guarded manuscript of her father’s composition ‘Song of Songs’. Although symbolic of both Lilly’s virtuous fidelity to the past and the noble aspirations for her future, the ‘Song of Songs’ was created by the lothario father who abandoned her, and fought over with the insane mother who stabbed her. Significantly, the manuscript is finally tossed away as Lilly abandons hope of moral or aesthetic amelioration. Arnold Bennett (1910: 110) in his largely sympathetic view of Sudermann’s novel wrote: But the novel is streaked with sentimentality, because it is also streaked with cynicism − outside England the two qualities are seldom to be found apart from one another. In particular the use of the precious musical manuscript, ‘The Song of Songs’, is painfully sentimental.
But Bennett fails to recognize how the comic scepticism of the novel satirically contextualizes such sentimentality. Nowhere is this scepticism more vividly expressed than when Lilly Czepanek destroys the manuscript at the end of the novel as she contemplates suicide. Declining both romantic sentimentality and Naturalist dysphoria, the novel aligns itself through comic deflation with a pragmatic acceptance of the greater complexity of lived experience.
Indeed, it could be argued that Sudermann’s novel prefigures the kind of hypocritical society that will lead in England to its being censored. Although Lilly’s idealistic pretensions are often punctured by her ability to laugh at their absurdities, other characters are less self-aware. Thus irony is deployed to critique the social values that would either romanticize Lilly as a victim of a world that has treated her badly (1909: 576), or criticize her as her colonel husband does as ‘an immoral whore who anybody could tell at a glance was no lady’ (1909: 168). Mrs Amussen is indubitably the finest example of social hypocrisy in the novel. She is a tyrant and a drunk, as well as the novel’s inscription of hypocritical protest against pernicious literature, believing ‘Everything written these days vitiates the soul and lures it to its destruction’ (1909: 50). She censoriously forbids Lilly to read because her daughters had been ‘crammed full of impudence and corruption’ (1909: 50) by doing so. Such a disparity between moral correctness and individual action is echoed in Mrs Amussen’s daughters whose vigorous mores about appropriate sexual behaviour are undermined by ‘permitting themselves to be accosted’ becoming ‘their chief and sole occupation’ (1909: 96).
Besides satirizing social hypocrisy, the novel also critiques the kind of idealism which elevates the aesthetics of a disinterested mind from the appetites of the sexualized body. Such idealism, as W. S. Lilly’s essay demonstrates, underpinned the English attack on Zolean Naturalism. The Song of Songs does this most effectively by satirizing Dr Salmoni. Salmoni lends Lilly pseudo-Nietzschean books which speak of the will to power in which, ‘each pure beauty was extolled as the goal of human endeavours; in each the word individuality recurred numberless times in numberless connections’ (1909: 413). Salmoni’s sole intention, however couched in Übermensch rhetoric, is to seduce Lilly. If Mrs Amussen’s strictures about the evils of reading aim to safeguard Lilly from moral degradation, Dr Salmoni’s inducements to read aim to nurture Lilly’s ‘individual style’ and ‘the will to personality’ (1909: 410) and lead her away from mediocrity and sameness. In fact, both Amussen’s moral conformity and Salmoni’s individual style (1909: 409) can be figured in a binary that juxtaposes a desirable, be it moral or aesthetic, high and a sexually interested and debased low. Humour arises in Salmoni’s case, and the binary collapses, in that a disinterested idealistic aesthetic is employed purely in an attempt to seduce Lilly. This ironic disjunction can be witnessed as Lilly, waiting for him to come, reflects: You promised to lead me up to the heights out of these depths of distress, out of this insipid existence, out of this void! Be true to your word. Do not desert me. I will do whatever you wish. I will be your thing, your creature. But don’t desert me. (1909: 423)
While contemplating the ‘heights’, Lilly is on the verge of being seduced. She is prepared to do what Salmoni wishes, believing that the real object of sexual relations with him is to be raised from an insipid existence to a higher aesthetic plane. Her sense of individuality figured as soul or individual style is further demolished by Mrs Jula, who informs Lilly that Salmoni’s pitch about uniqueness is applied indiscriminately to all women in Lilly’s social group.
At the time of the publication of The Song of Songs, Hermann Sudermann’s stock as either a dramatist or a novelist was not great. Although acknowledging Sudermann’s talent as a playwright, Ashley Dukes (1910: 233) writing in The New Age comments: He has tried to get great drama from second-rate people, second-rate life, second-rate thought. From all his work two facts emerge. The first, that he is technically the most accomplished of living playwrights. The second, that he has never drawn a memorable personality nor said a memorable thing. The curtain falls.
In the English Review, Levin Ludwig Schucking was even more scathing regarding The Song of Songs: We expected something better from him, a book in which there was the breath of the heath he once could describe so excellently instead of the bad perfume of the chambre séparée, a book which lighted up the dark paths which lead to a new future. Fortunately, a new generation of writers seems to be growing. (Schucking, 1909: 171)
Sudermann, although accomplished, is portrayed as belonging to an older generation that will be swept aside: his themes are as old as his artistic view is tired. The scant work that has been done on Sudermann in England seems to verify his position as a minor European novelist and a German dramatist inferior to Gerhart Hauptmann. The Song of Songs, however, merits reconsideration. In the inscription of censorship and the social and moral values that underscore it, in the challenge to simplistic gender distinction, most notably in the thematic of female reading, in the desacralization of sexuality embedded in Lilly Czepanek’s sexual pragmatics, and in the parodic exposition of the limitations of the genre of Naturalism, the novel’s preoccupations seem to have much in common with the growing ‘new generation of writers’ that in only a few years would offend British moral sensibilities all over again. Sudermann’s novel clearly does anticipate ‘a new future’ in ways that Ludwig Schucking does not or cannot recognize. The novel does the opposite of what Phelps claims: it does not sentimentalize the unpleasant. Rather it satirizes both the sentimental fiction of the circulating libraries and the Naturalist fiction associated with unpleasantness. Moreover, and as much as any other contemporary novel, Sudermann demonstrates the power of comedy to mock romantic and aesthetic idealizations invariably ideologically grounded in social injustice and moral hypocrisy.