Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding – Lit. Crit. 1

A few of Katherine Mansfield’s stories are unremittingly sombre. Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding is a dark continuation of the themes established in the Pension stories. The story exudes anger about the historical and cultural position of women and with the processes that deny them autonomy and press them to court their own enslavement, while their male partners debase themselves as part of the same process. Katherine Mansfield is one of the first writers in the twentieth century to address straightforwardly the anger of women at the injustice of their treatment, and express it in a prose that refuses to soften the accounts of the varieties of women’s emotional response to their subjection.

Frau Brechenmacher begins with the familiar scene of an adult woman training her little girl for female servitude. The Frau and her daughter work frantically to prepare demanding Herr Brechenmacher’s clothes for a wedding. When the man arrives he faults their work and his wife’s appearance, and sends her into the dark passage to dress while he preens himself in front of the only mirror. The Frau gives the lamp and her shawl to her daughter, passing the standard of womanhood to the prematurely adult creature who has already been denied a childhood. The girl is left to guard the four smaller children who represent both her mother’s fate and her own only possible future. The wedding is a farce. The bride, who has been ‘wild’, and who has brought along her illegitimate daughter as a last gesture of defiance, is dressed in white, ‘giving her the appearance of an iced cake all ready to be cut and served in neat little pieces to the bridegroom’, while the air of the Festaal is appropriately fetid, filled with the ‘familiar festive smell’ of ‘beer and perspiration’. When Herr Brechenmacher presents the communal gift it winds up to be a sexual insult – a silver coffee pot containing ‘a baby’s bottle and two little cradles holding china dolls’. The matrons watch the proceedings from the sides of the hall like cattle, quietly bemoaning but never challenging their lot. “Girls have a lot to learn”, says meek Frau Brechenmacher. She has learned her own lesson only too well.

The women are perceived purely as objects by the men – as servants, providers of rough pleasure and as breeding machines. Frau Brechenmacher’s mask is heavy, and beneath it she is a tangle of inadmissible fears. She must hide her terror that others are laughing at her, her sense of weakness, her terror of her husband. The Frau asserts her humanity only through her fear, her stoicism and her silence.

The story reveals its rage in its selection of detail, its unglossed accusations that derive from the brutality of the symbolic objects and actions described. Meaning is made through an indirectness that permeates the narrative.

Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding – Lit. Crit. 2

….The more ambitious "Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding… open[s] with a short sentence which begins the action and locates the point of view within the consciousness of the main character. (Almost immediately …, as though the writer were practising already for the virtuosity of "The Daughters of the Late Colonel," there is a successfully handled, brief shift of viewpoint to the child Rosa, which unfortunately serves no function at all.) Frau Brechenmacher, mother of five, would also like to avoid sexual relations, but her husband, recalling with amusement her innocence and resistance on their wedding night, is unaware of her reluctance. Here is the first Mansfield characterization of the self-centered, crude family man whose overwhelming maleness drains the life of his women. He will shortly be further defined as Andreas Binzer, will evolve through a long line of prototypes of Stanley Burnell, and will end in a final denunciation as the self-pitying boss of "The Fly." (Male characters in other Mansfield stories.)
The full scene necessary for the wedding in "Frau Brechenmacher. . ." demands an extended technical effort. On the way to the wedding Miss Mansfield abandons her limited viewpoint for comments more in the style of her favorite pensioner. She cannot resist denouncing in her own voice first the landlord of the Gasthaus who bullies the waitresses and then Herr Brechenmacher himself. He, "completely overawed, . . . so far forgot his rights as a husband as to beg his wife's pardon for jostling her against the banisters in his efforts to get ahead of everybody else." Control and the Frau's viewpoint are regained as she listens to the guests' spiteful and gossipy conversation, reminiscent again of the German boardinghouse. Her feelings fluctuate but sometimes the material is so raggedly controlled that the author seems to have forgotten where her sympathies lie: surprising non sequiturs appear.
Everybody was laughing and talking, shaking hands, clinking glasses, stamping on the floor--a stench of beer and perspiration filled the air.
Frau Brechenmacher, following her man down the room. . . , knew that she was going to enjoy herself. She seemed to fill out and become rosy and warm as she sniffed that familiar festive smell.
But essentially Frau Brechenmacher responds to her environment like Miss Mansfield's pension persona. She sympathizes with the reluctant, uneasy bride. When her husband presents the newlyweds with the group's present, a silver coffeepot which is opened to reveal the usual comment about having children, the bride screams. The groom is amused and exposes the joke to the laughing guests. But Frau Brechenmacher feels herself derided: "She imagined that all these people were laughing at her, more people than there were in the room even--all laughing at her because they were so much stronger than she was." This response and her image of the bride as "an iced cake all ready to be cut and served in neat little pieces to the bridegroom beside her" prepare the reader for a climactic gesture of pained withdrawal. Walking home and preparing supper, the Frau has asked herself repeatedly the unanswerable question, "What is it all for?" Before going to bed she concludes, "Always the same . . . but, God in heaven--how stupid." Then, as she lies in bed and her drunken husband lurches forward, "she put her arm across her face like a child who expected to be hurt."