Male dominance and female complicity in Frau Brechenmacher

Katherine Mansfield’s “Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding” is a short tale dealing with the relationships between husband and wife in late 19th Century German society. This is achieved by viewing the attitudes of people in various stages of their relationship: A newly married couple at their wedding, Frau Brechenmacher’s own marriage and that of a three-times widowed old woman. I believe that these characters and relationships are used to deal with the subjugation of women in the late 19th Century German society, but more specifically, woman’s complicity in the oppression of others by the dominant male.

The story’s subject is the wedding in which Herr and Frau Brechenmacher attend, including their preparation beforehand and a post-mortem afterwards, which, if read by itself, would not intimate anything sinister or unhappy about the idea. However, the theme of suppression and domestic violence is developed very soon within the tale. Frau Brechenmacher’s husband, from the first, is presented as a dominating, patriarchal man who controls her absolutely. The Frau calls him “The Father”, which at once distances him from being wit

This theme is repeated later on in the story, as Herr Brechenmacher eats the meat that his wife offers up to him. The description of him eating it, as he: “broke the bread…smeared it round… and chewed greedily” is a prolepsis of the unseen sexual act that takes place after the story finishes. The Herr is portrayed as being brutish, coarse and animalistic; the “breaking” of the bread is also a reminder of the first time Herr Brechenmacher slept with his wife; like the bread, she too, needed to be broken.

Furthermore, this “breaking in” of wives is implicitly approved of by the society in which Herr Brechenmacher exists. He shows no remorse or shame for having raped his virgin bride, but instead reminisces about it fondly. This interlocks with the ideas generally held by men at the turn of the century of therapeutic rape; that is, women were not supposed to desire men, (the bride, Theresa, is held up as a bad example because she dared give herself to a man and has a dirty-looking child at her wedding as a reminder of her taint). Instead a nice woman would be virginal and wish to remain so, but like a child would need to be forcefully guided by her patriarchal husband into performing her wifely duties (Dijkstra 118). However, the masculine approbation of this is subtly undermined as in the last paragraph, Frau Brechenmacher “lay down on the bed and put her arm across her face like a child who expected to be hurt as Herr Brechenmacher lurched in.” The reader is shown that rape is anything but therapeutic and that the Frau is anticipating pain, suggesting that this is a regular occurrence.

However, even more disturbing is the implication that women were complicitous in their own oppression. In a strongly homosocial environment where men bonded with each other and women were seen as a sub-class, for servile and procreative purposes only, we are shown no camaraderie amongst the women that would help to strengthen the woman’s dignity. In “Frau Brechenmacher attends a Wedding”, the women accept their roles and do not appear to question their inequalities. As Frau Brechenmacher enters the festivities, Frau Rupp, the butcher’s wife exclaims “My dear your skirt is open at the back. We could not help laughing as you wal

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