Weber's mixed review provided a glimmer of hope for unmarried women. While still afflicted by pervasive loneliness, the aunt is also cherished in the domestic realm—where, of course, she ought to have been all along. The comforting embrace of a family could prevent a single woman from becoming vindictive or silly by giving her the opportunity to be “selfless, caring only for others, never for herself.”53
Through such selflessness—the antidote to the more ridiculous forms of old maidenhood—the unmarried woman could as much as possible approximate the experience of marriage. Supportive aunts needed to conform to the goals and desires of the families to which they were attached by internalizing family concerns and making them their own. This subjugation of self to family or parish, community or country, was the only way in which a spinster could participate in any sort of “mutual future.”54 The intimate details of family interaction could create a purpose in life for even the most deprived single women. Amalie Baisch's version of die Tante “in spite of everything would always save a couple of pennies in order to provide sweets for the children of the house.”55 The children crave the sweets and satiate the forsaken woman's need to love. The plight of the surplus woman might have been solved by something as simple as giving candy to babes.
But what if penny candy could not solve the problem? The pariah paradigm of the alte Jungfer hinged precisely on the exclusion of the surplus woman from such cozy moments of family life. The shrew was embittered by her rejection from the family; the romantic was tragicomic in her zeal to be welcomed into it. Only the beloved aunt was partially saved, for through her good works she earned a place in the domestic sphere. But what if no family was available, or needy, or sympathetic? The cycle of rejection continued and the female unmarried was doomed to a more pathetic fate.
Buddenbrooks’ Anti-Modern Old Maids
Thomas Mann's epic novel, Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family, employs the pathetic old maid as a symbol of stagnation in a society wrestling with the challenges of modernity. The book is set in nineteenth-century Lübeck and engages the saga of a prominent merchant family whose pursuit of success ultimately brings about its downfall. Success for the Buddenbrooks came in many forms: esteemed reputation, material comfort, pious respectability, civic influence—each of which could be acquired through two key means: a thriving business and successful marriages. But the family business encounters more bust than boom toward the end of the century, and Buddenbrook marriages falter and fail based on foolish choices and hollow bonds. When the last male Buddenbrook dies of typhoid fever in his teens, all that remains of the family's former glory is a roomful of forsaken, unwed women. In that hopeless circle, the family's decline is fully realized.
Buddenbrooks, published in 1901, was the bestselling German novel of the first half of the twentieth century.56 While the novel follows the story of the core Buddenbrook family, constant witness to the many achievements and tribulations of the family is a sextet of alte Jungfern: governess Ida Jungmann; finishing school director Sesemi Weichbrodt; paternal cousins Friederike, Henriette, and Pfiffi, known collectively as the Broad Street Buddenbrooks; and poor maternal cousin Clothilde. These important supporting characters in the novel emerge at every baptism, marriage, holiday, and deathbed, and are resiliently unchanging in their response to the drama of the main family. Their perpetual presence at family gatherings is a key way in which “the novel chronicles lives that are constantly anchored in the need to stylize experience into recurring rituals.”57
Mann's use of these flat characters echoes the typologies of old maidenhood found in prescriptive literature and in parodies of the women's movement. Ida Jungmann, daughter of a deceased innkeeper, becomes a buttress to the Buddenbrooks, for “her rigid honesty and Prussian notions of caste made her perfectly suited to her position in the family. She was a person of aristocratic principles, drawing hair-line distinctions between class and class, and very proud of her position as a servant of the higher orders.”58 Her lower middle-class roots make her a supportive bit player in the elitist strivings of the Buddenbrooks, a woman who is delighted to “boast of having grown gray in the service of the best society.”59 Yet her indulgent spoiling of little Johann (Hanno), the ill-fated last male Buddenbrook, contributes to the boy's weakness. After devoting much of her life to the family, Ida is dismissed after nearly a half-century of service and disappears from the tale.
Therese Weichbrodt, nicknamed Sesemi, bears the physical markers of the decrepit alte Jungfer. “So humpbacked that she was not much higher than a table,” Sesemi had “shrewd, sharp brown eyes, a slightly hooked nose, and thin lips which she could compress with extraordinary firmness.” Fräulein Weichbrodt runs the pension where the Buddenbrook daughters finished their adolescence and, through the years, she became an extended member of the family. Mann portrayed Sesemi as “somewhat comic, yet exact[ing] respect” due to her “religious assurance that somewhere in the beyond she was to be recompensed for the dull, hard present.”60 She is a “lively old maid,” who, despite continuing certainty that “the end was not far off,” outlasts most of the novel's protagonists.61
The aggrieved Broad Street Buddenbrooks form a carping chorus that consistently criticizes the airs of the wealthy merchant family. Their father had lost much of his inheritance through the willful choice of a wife of whom his family disapproved. The sisters are introduced as a dowry-deficient trio, none of whom “was, unfortunately, likely to marry.”62 The two eldest are variously described as “tall and withered-looking” and “long and lean,” (physical prototypes of the shrew), while their younger sister, Pfiffi, fills out as “much too little and fat”. “with a droll way of shaking herself at every word, a drop of water always . in the corner of her mouth when she spoke.”63 Though Pfiffi resembles the foolish romantic, her nature—like that of her older sisters—is more resentful than ridiculous. Their favorite target of derision is their cousin Antonie, nicknamed Tony, whose two divorces and ceaseless pursuit of the family's glory form an important tributary of the Buddenbrook decline. After Tony's first divorce, they explain to her that “it is every so much better never to have married at all.”64 Throughout the novel, the Broad Street sisters “dart sharp glances at one another” as they take “speechless joy” in the accumulating failures of their wealthier cousins.65 Mann portrays the sisters' passive-aggressive mode of mocking the core Buddenbrooks through a mean-spirited intimacy that can only be gleaned through the continual proximity of family life.66 The Broad Street sisters expose the flaws in the façade of upper-bourgeois respectability so craved by the Buddenbrooks. In developing these figures, Mann embraced and furthered a cutting depiction of hopeless, embittered alte Jungfern who had only “sharp, spiteful smile[s] at everything and everybody,” and who seemed to gain “mild satisfaction” in life only when viewing the “impartial justice of death.”67
These minor figures never waver from their initial characterizations. Ida and Sesemi are unfailing in their commitment to the Buddenbrook project of advancement, codependents paying their penance of earthly service in exchange for eternal salvation. Never seeking personal influence, affluence, or change, Ida and Sesemi champion the ambition of the Buddenbrooks even as they themselves remain fixed in time. Their static presentation and consistent selflessness provide a most anti-modern inversion of the Buddenbrook quest. Alternatively, in their roles as resident harpies, the Broad Street sisters defy modernity much more defensively. While Ida and Sesemi are fulfilled by their absolute acceptance of middle-class servitude (much like Adelheid Weber's Tante), the Fräulein Buddenbrooks are pointedly and resentfully resigned to their fixed status (in the same vein as Weber's shrew). Advertisement of that status becomes their raison d'etre. Mann's old maids collectively stand as the most anti-modern creatures in a tale of failed modernization.
Mann's employment of the alte Jungfer in Buddenbrooks comes to its richest embodiment in the character of poor cousin Clothilde. Clothilde was based upon Mann's paternal cousin, Thekla. According to Thomas Mann's sister, Julia, Thekla was an unattractive, “pious, dreary soul,” the opposite of Mann's aunt Elisabeth (the engaging prototype of Tony Buddenbrook).68 Clothilde is the most