The Surplus Woman. Catherine L. Dollard

an orphan, eight-year-old Clothilde is introduced as “an extraordinarily thin small child, dressed in a flowered print frock, with lusterless ash-colored hair and the manner of a little old maid.”⁶⁹ Her prospective old maidenhood is established well before adolescence; by the age of 21, “her long face already showed pronounced lines; and with her smooth hair, which had never been blond, but always a dull grayish color, she presented an ideal portrait of a typical old maid.”⁷⁰

      Clothilde exhibits two pronounced yet seemingly irreconcilable characteristics: hunger and resignation. Her hunger serves as a source of both wonder and cheap laughs: “Truly it was amazing, the prowess of this scraggy child with the long, old-maidish face…She ate: whether it tasted good or not, whether they teased her or not, she smiled and kept on, heaping her plate with good things, with the instinctive, insensitive voracity of a poor relation—patient, persevering, hungry, and lean.”⁷¹ At a family baptism, she “is moved by the words of Pastor Pringsheim and the prospect of layer-cake and chocolate;”⁷² on a summer afternoon after coffee, “Clothilde, looking thin and old-maidish in her flowered cotton frock, was reading a story called ‘Blind, Deaf, Dumb, and Still Happy.’ As she read, she scraped up the biscuit-crumbs carefully with all five fingers from the cloth and ate them.”⁷³ Her hunger is larger-than-life: “It was a mystery how much good and nourishing food that poor Clothilde could absorb daily without any result whatever! She grew thinner and thinner…Her face was long, straight, and expressionless as ever, her hair as smooth and ash-coloured, her nose as straight, but full of large pores and getting thick at the end.”⁷⁴ The insistent refrain of Clothilde's insatiability bears the imprint of a sexual anaesthetic, diseased through disuse.⁷⁵ Mann's pen led Clothilde toward her destiny as an increasingly unattractive old maid whose cravings can never be met. But Clothilde's complete resignation to her fate as an inborn alte Jungfer equals her ravenous hunger: “She was content; she did nothing to alter her condition. Perhaps she thought it best to grow old early and thus to make a quick end of all doubts and hopes. As she did not own a single sou, she knew that she would find nobody in all the wide world to marry her, and she looked with humility into her future.”⁷⁶

      Clothilde combines the characteristics of the stereotypical trio; though she looks like a shrew, her insatiability mirrors the folly of the romantic—and she lives the selfless devotion of die Tante. Clothilde's destiny is complete when she secures a spot in a home for single women from elite families (through the extant, if wavering, influence of her cousins).⁷⁷ Only an institution specially made for archaic misfits could be Clothilde's destination in the advancing world of the Buddenbrooks. Along with the other old maids of the novel, Clothilde cannot be made modern. Mann elucidates this point in a passage in which Thomas Buddenbrook, the last head of the family, ruminates on his own limitations and on his (ultimately futile) desire to extend a paternal bridge to his sensitive son, Johann:

      Sometimes when the family were invited to dinner, Aunt Antonie or Uncle Christian would begin to tease Aunt Clothilde and imitate her meek, drawling accents. Then little Johann, simulated by the heavy red wine which they gave him, would ape his elders and make some remarks to Aunt Clothilde in the same vein. And then how Thomas Buddenbrook would laugh! He would give a loud, hearty, jovial roar, like a man put in high spirits by some unexpected piece of good luck, and join in on his son's side against poor Aunt Clothilde, though for his own part he had long since given up these witticisms at the expense of his poor relative. It was so easy, so safe, to tease poor, limited, modest, lean, and hungry Clothilde, that, harmless though it was, he felt it rather beneath him. But he wished he did not, for it was the same story over again: too many considerations, too many scruples.⁷⁸

      Throughout the novel, Thomas Buddenbrook combats his scruples, believing that his overactive conscience prohibits him from becoming “a Caesar even in a little commercial town on the Baltic.”⁷⁹ Thomas asks himself, “Why must he be for ever opposing these scruples against the hard, practical affairs of life? Why could he never learn that it was possible to grasp a situation, to see around it, as it were, and still to turn it to one's own advantage without a feeling of shame? For precisely this, he said to himself, is the essence of a capacity for practical life! And thus, how happy, how delighted, how hopeful he felt whenever he saw even the least small sign in little Johann of a capacity for practical life.”⁸⁰ Bourgeois advancement rested precisely in that capacity for practical life. Fearing that he had passed a scrupulous and philosophical nature on to his son, Thomas Buddenbrook yearned for signs that his son would grow to be a reasonable man. Despite his better instincts, Thomas is delighted whenever Hanno abandons his artistic presentiments and engages in the pedestrian and eminently practical exercise of ridiculing the family old maid.

      Such gamesmanship meant success in the modern world—and Mann utilized unwed women as key items in the game. Ceaselessly objectified (indeed, Tony describes Ida as a standing piece of furniture),⁸¹ Mann's timeless, resilient alte Jungfern provide the old-fashioned mark against which Buddenbrook success would be measured. The old maids of the novel stand in opposition to all of the markers of modernity: bourgeois ambition, personal vanity, technological advancement, and, most of all, the corruption of an idealized domestic sphere through marriages based on acquisitiveness. As Tony remarks to Clothilde in the book's closing pages, “You are just as well off as we are now. Yes—so it goes. I've struggled against fate, and done my best, and you have just sat there and waited for everything to come round. But you are a goose, you know, all the same.”⁸² Tony's history of failed marriages reveals how the pursuit of ambitious advancement destroyed the family that it was intended to enhance. The last male Buddenbrook—sensitive, overwhelmed Hanno—cannot survive the world of bourgeois capitalism and the barren competition of modern ambition. But the old maids remain, ridiculously placid and fixed in their passive opposition to a world of change.

      In the novel's final scene, the old maids (absent Ida, who has been dismissed) are joined by Tony and her daughter Erika, both of whom have been rejected by marriage and have stumbled into the ranks of unwanted women through calamitous divorces and separations. As they gather to say goodbye to a departing Gerda (Thomas Buddenbrook's widow and mother of the dead Hanno), they reflect on all that has been lost. Mann underlines the family's destruction by closing his epic with “eight ladies…dressed in black.”⁸³ He revisits the stock caricatures, evoking the Broad street sisters wearing “their old affronted and critical air” and Clothilde having “done wonders at the supper table…lean and gray as of yore.”⁸⁴ The last word of the novel is given to the immutable Sesemi, who swears with spiritual fervor that there will be a reunion of all Buddenbrooks in the afterlife. The battle in this life has been spent, and the Buddenbrooks have been vanquished. But old maid Sesemi stands ironically as “a victor in the good fight which all her life she had waged against the assaults of Reason: hump-backed, tiny, quivering with the strength of her convictions, a little prophetess, admonishing and inspired.”⁸⁵ Reason fails, but the old maids live on.

      Buddenbrooks is a novel of the Kaiserreich, reflecting the slowly mounting crisis of a culture of untrammeled gain. In his minor cast of single women, Thomas Mann set forth a feminine sphere that could never compete in that culture of gain. At the end of the novel, they stand as they did in the beginning: the ultimate losers of the nineteenth-century sweepstakes. The family's failure to advance is complete when it is relegated to the hands of these unwed, unwanted women. Who better to demonstrate the final futility of that process than the alte Jungfer, Mann's iconic caricature of anti-Reason? Refusing ambition, the unmarried women of the novel occupy a passive space in bourgeois culture, never adorning its garb nor pursuing its material rewards. The Buddenbrook family stands between capitalist advancement and “the worrisome ministration of old traditions—an unconscious regression from the work of creating a future for [the family] house.”⁸⁶ The sphere into which the Buddenbrook family inexorably regressed was the anti-modern world embodied by Mann's alte Jungfern.

      Adelheid Weber concluded that the trinity of the shrew, the romantic, and die Tante, “were the alte Jungfern of the past…For our current girl no longer becomes an alte Jungfer… she knows her own strength and