Playing House: Motherhood, Intimacy, and Domestic Spaces in Julia Franck’s Fiction by Alexandra Merley Hill (review)

Julia Franck is a prominent voice in contemporary German literature and it is appropriate to have a study devoted to her work. Playing House examines the depiction of motherhood, one of the key features in Franck’s fiction, in five of her novels (Der neue Koch, Liebediener, Lagerfeuer, Die Mittagsfrau, Rücken an Rücken) as well as in the short story collection Bauchlandung: Geschichten zum Anfassen. I suspect that Playing House originated as a dissertation for it carries some of the genre’s features, such as a diligent study of primary and secondary literature and far-reaching goals, which, however, are not always met.

In five chapters, Merley Hill focuses on aspects of motherhood and her central argument is that “Franck’s protagonists perform their identities just as they perform the feminine” (11). In Chapter One, she draws on Judith Butler to show “the tension between performance and performativity in Franck’s works” (16); Chapter Two examines how place affects the female protagonists; Chapters Three, Four, and Five apply a psychoanalytic perspective in order to explore daughters, mothers, and fathers and sons respectively. A short introduction serves to situate Franck’s work within current literary and cultural contexts.

Merley Hill has a good command of the principal theorists she draws on (in addition to Butler these are Marc Augé and Nancy Chodorow), and she provides insightful summaries of their work. I also agree with her that each of these theoretical perspectives can be usefully applied in examining Franck’s fiction. However, Merley Hill’s engagement with these approaches, each in itself highly complex, lacks depth and, at times, thus comes across as superficial. A case in point is her treatment of space. Space has generated a huge secondary literature but the author only draws on Augé and his—admittedly—influential concept of places/non-places and the latter’s dominance in supermodernity. However, Augé’s distinct binaries and the assumptions informing them have met with considerable criticism, none of which is referred to by Merley Hill. In addition, she packs too many distinct concepts into her discussion of space and place. “Domestic Space” is accorded less than two pages as is “Theorizing the Home,” which concludes with the statement: “From this brief overview, it is clear that home is an important but problematic site for Franck’s characters” (61). Such generalizations, which also occur in other chapters (see the cursory treatment of “feminism” in the introduction) yield little analytic insight. Equally disappointing is the lack of references when making broad claims. Merley Hill states, for example, that “the vast majority of scholarship” (63) on the subject of matrophobia, the daughter fearing to become like her mother, assumes the existence of this phenomenon but she does not cite any sources.

This kind of simplification is all the more lamentable since Merley Hill’s “theory of maternal drag” (11) is really intriguing, but her application of this concept to the character of Helene in Die Mittagsfrau lacks, in my view, depth as well as detail. In sum, this study is to be credited for identifying an important topic and exciting approach but its execution is not on par with the conception.