Original Blog: Gender Roles in Dark Spring by Unica Zürn
Surrealists don’t always see things at eye level. Their reality is advanced, magical, strange, illogical, unconscious, imaginary,exceptional, unexpected, and more serious than their Dada predecessors.
Dark Spring is a coming-of-age novel written by Unica Zürn in 1969. The novel covers a young girl’s disturbed life, describing depression, neglect, abuse, rape, and ultimately her suicide at the age of the twelve.
Let’s put this novel into the context of Zürn’s life. This book was written in 1967 and published in 1969. Zürn lived 1916-1970. Wikipedia gives us a quick intro to Zürn:
“Born in Germany as Nora Berta Unica Ruth, her childhood was tainted by her family that suffered from a history of mental health issues.[2] Her father, Ralph Zurn, and her mother, Helene Pauline Heerdt, divorced in 1930.[3] The only single male figure who remained part of her life was her bother who she claimed used to inflict acts of sexual violence upon her as a young girl.[4] In 1942 she married a wealthy an named Erich Laupenmuhlen.[5] [She had two children by 1945.] In 1953, she and Erich divorced, forcing her to lose custody of her children.”
Her life is hauntingly similar to the novel. One year after the work was published, she committed suicide with the exact method that the girl in Dark Spring used: jumping out of a window. In the novel, the scene is described with a strange, blissful conclusion: “She imagines how her body will hit the ground, and how these beautiful pajamas will be covered with blood and earth”.
With very concise, vivid language, the book dives deeply into the following main themes and ideas:
Naïveté, innocence, childhood, lack of education
Pleasure in and fetishism of violence and victimization
Throughout the entirety of the novel, Zürn depicts very clear images of the ideal woman and the ideal man. She forms gender roles, two very separate sets of norms that determine what is acceptable for individuals’ attitudes, actions, and personality traits. The girl in the Dark Spring is depressed and doesn’t have self-confidence. Because she is a child and is relatively uneducated, her perception of gender roles is a direct product of her environment. She’s been taught that she should be ashamed because she doesn’t fit into the cookie cutter gender role of a woman. Because of that, she’ll never find a man. To her, that means it’s very likely that she will have a poor and low-quality life. The girl in Dark Spring is “sorry she has to be a girl.” One of her very last thoughts is that she “lacks courage;” this is a reoccurring descriptor of women in the novel.
A woman is “weaker” than men. She is “confident in whatever males do” and “honored to be the center of these men’s attention.” She should “act like a real lady,” cry but not around men, suffer but only silently, “worship” men, and wear “silk slip bordered in white lace,” “skirts,” and “high heels.” She “smells of lilacs.” A woman should act with “complete passivity” because that’s what men like. She should be a “beautiful, elfin dancer,” a “princess,” and “like a movie star.” She is “beautiful,” “elegant,” “exotic,” “young,” “beautiful,” “made up,” “delicate,” “marvelous,” “small,” “fashionable,” and “soft.” Yet a woman “loses her beauty after having children.” She is “jealous,” “selfish,” and “lonely.”
Notice that many of women’s qualities are centered on the male. According to the girl in Dark Spring, women are made to please men, primarily by bearing children and being sex objects. When they are “veiled” and innocent, they are treasured. (I use the word “treasured” because people treasure objects.) After bearing children, women become useless to men. They are “alive for” men. Everything women do is centered on the man.
A man is a “great magician,” a “soldier with weapons,” a “protector,” and a “supernatural creature.” He ”stands guard,” “washes off the blood,” and “bandages the wounds.” He often “forgets the presence of” women. A man is “profound,” “powerful,” “charming,” “godlike,” “admirable,” “foreign-looking.”
He has “a car,” “large hands,” a “deep voice,” a “scratchy beard,” “bushy eyebrows,” and “a long, complicated, aristocratic sounding name.” He “smells of cigarettes, leather, and cologne.” He wears “pants” and “creaky boots.” He “completes” a woman. He is “stronger than” a woman. A man “can accomplish anything no matter how impossible.”
Women know that “their salvation, the cure for all their sufferings, is to come, inevitably, from the male.” (60-61.) A woman is a “horizontal line” whereas a man is a “vertical line;” she lies flat, subjects herself to his bidding, and doesn’t stand up for herself. The vagina is a “lock,” and the penis the “key.” The vagina is a “wound” and the penis is a “knife.” A man and a women don’t make love; by this description, sex is a man continually stabbing a woman’s open wound.
I’d like to conclude on a lighter note, but I’m afraid that this book would not provide that. Today, we’ve dismantled many of these strict gender binary roles, but we are nowhere close to having a society that doesn’t see gender. Since Zürn’s time, I'd argue that widespread sex education has been the most impactful development to dismantling these harmful gender roles.
