On the one hand, the mother tried her best to avoid the influence of love and aesthetics on her daughter in the patriarchal society and controlled Erica's every move for a long time. "Once she can't see her daughter, she will immediately feel bad influence. Her first thought is to protect Erica and prevent men from shaping her into something else. " Cultivating her daughter as an economically independent pianist is her mother's resistance to male chauvinism. On the other hand, mother has always played a role similar to that of father. It is the ultimate embodiment of patriarchy and patriarchy when exercising the power entrusted to her by patriarchy in a family where only mother and daughter lack patriarchy. At the beginning of the article, the actual role of mother is put forward: "Mother is universally recognized as a person who combines the heretical court of the century, the interrogator and the person who ordered the shooting" in national life and family life. All the habits, order and laws in the patriarchal society suppress Erica through her mother and deprive her of all her happiness.
Power is everywhere and has penetrated into all fields of human spirit and material. Modern power is capillary-shaped. It is not emitted from a core source, but distributed in every corner and seemingly smallest end of social organisms. There is no need for violence, just a supervised gaze, and everyone will consciously become their own supervisor. This kind of monitoring of everyone is actually imposed by everyone. Even women who are willing to resist the patriarchal society will unconsciously restrain their behavior and thoughts according to social norms under the gaze of this power, and even become the subject of power and oppressor of other women. Looking at the mother's educational behavior, whether it is the dream of making her daughter an artist or the behavior of excluding men in order to control her daughter, there is no escape from the values of judging personal achievements under the background of patriarchal society.
The end of the novel-finally, the world is unscathed, there is no pause, and all the resistance seems to have never happened. "Erica knows where she is going. She went home. As she walked, she slowly quickened her pace. With many scars, Erica returned to the cage built by her mother and really became a "little beetle enclosed in amber". The ending shows the helplessness and pain of women in the face of powerful male discourse power. Although the heroine is so unusual and even abnormal, she eventually becomes the other in the relationship between the two sexes and the prey on the battlefield between the two sexes. Although there is no solution to the female problems revealed in the works, the crying is deafening. In Jelinek's novels, a series of baby female images are depicted. They represent not the innocence, innocence, romance and simplicity of babies, but a kind of incompetence and intellectual naivety in dealing with real life, which is superficial. At a deeper level, this is not the result of some kind of family education, but a shaping of women's collective by our social culture.
Women's infantilization is first of all physical infantilization. In the name of love, through meticulous care and care, women lose the opportunity of self-exercise and growth, always stay in the state of babies, always need care and supervision, and eventually become children in personal and social life, without independence and determination, and lose the opportunity to be their own masters, so they can only be controlled by others.
Erica, the piano teacher in Piano Teacher, is a typical adult baby. Her biological age is 40 years old, and her performance in daily life is still a child. Erica is a baby. She is a "small insect in amber" and a "fish in mother's amniotic fluid" and has never left her mother. Erica can't do housework, and her daily diet is completely arranged by her mother. In order to make her daughter a world-class pianist, the mother undertakes all the housework and thinks that her daughter's hands controlling the keyboard should not do any rough work. Mother cooks and cleans the room on time every day. Even at night, she will put fresh cold water and delicious fruit in front of her daughter's bed. Erica enjoys her mother's meticulous care like a baby in a cradle. In the eyes of her mother, Erica is a very young child and needs her mother's supervision at any time. Mother called Erica "a lively little guy". Erica has no room to live independently. Erica and her mother sleep in the same bed. At night, her mother will always be on guard for fear that Erica will put her hand in the wrong place. "There is no lock on the door of Erica's room, and the child has no secrets." No matter where Erica goes, be sure to let her mother know that she will call her anytime and anywhere. She has to go back to her parents' house every minute. "Erica's time is slowly becoming like a plaster. On one occasion, my mother gave a rough blow with her fist, and the time was immediately broken like a plaster. In this case, Erica's thin neck is like a collar made of plaster for plastic surgery. She sat there lazily, becoming the laughing stock of others, and had to admit: I must go home now. Go home. Whenever someone meets Erica outside, she almost always walks on her way home. "
Under the meticulous care of her mother's life and constant mental supervision, Erica has completely become a child. She has no friends and never associates with her colleagues. Although she has a career, she has no real social life. Erica was instilled by her mother that she was a genius and conceited, but at the same time no one loved her since she was a child, and she never loved anyone else. She is like a puppet, completely manipulated by her mother, living in a closed world, far from growing up. Erica's infancy is evident in her love relationship with student Kramer.
Erica's love affair with student Kramer is a child. On the surface, Erica cares about this relationship. At the age of 40, she has no real love life. Adolescence is a "hunting-free period" A mother who wants her daughter to achieve success and world-class honor holds her daughter tightly with vanity. Erica is immersed in her lost dream of genius and has completely lost her sense of reality. The appearance of young and handsome Kramer aroused Erica's passion for love. She is self-righteous and thinks that her unique spiritual charm makes students fall in love with her.
She thinks this is the best one, the best one for so many years. She even fantasized that Kramer would marry her, which was a naive dream of a child, beautiful but unrealistic. Erica went to her adult style with a fantastic narcissistic passion. Some researchers believe that Erica's love tragedy lies in her abnormal sexual desire destroying the original warm sexual relationship, and she lost the ability to love. However, through Erica's heart, we see the inevitability of this tragedy, that is, Erica doesn't really want to be with Kramer. This is her unconscious behavior. She unconsciously resisted the man's invasion of the closed territory of herself and her mother. In her heart, she is a child who has not been weaned, and she can't adapt to the outside world. Her mother's house is both an authoritarian prison and a warm shelter. The novel shows such a psychological process of constant resistance in acceptance. The piano teacher, a female work, is mixed with a lot of bloody, violent and cruel sexual descriptions. Although some plots seem disgusting to read, Jelinek takes advantage of this to show the relationship between men and women naked to readers, share the absurd relationship between sadist and abused mother and daughter and the rules of sex in the novel, and at the same time penetrate the complex and bizarre alienation of human nature in modern society.
The psychological description of novels is very successful, and there are often very amazing descriptions. The observation of human nature can be described as bleak. The unique brushwork of a talented woman writer has produced an aesthetic effect of a stunning talent.
As Jelinek used to be a music artist and the protagonist of the novel was also a piano teacher, the content and form of his works have distinctive and rich musical artistic features. Novels often involve European musicians, such as Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Schumann, Schubert and so on. When describing and playing the works of these masters, the rhythm of music flows in language and words, with discussion. For example, Erica and Walter's piano duet began with Schubert's Fade Out. "This song" Fade Out "is in Schumann's fantasia in C major. It flows away into nothingness, but it can't cover up the solemn ending of consciously "fading out". Gradually disappear, unconscious, unintentional. " Walter practiced playing Schubert's sonata in A major, a German dance music with Billd Mayer style beyond his time. Erica laughed at him and said that he "has never seen a particularly steep rock, a special canyon, a particularly swift stream rushing through the canyon, or overlooking the magnificent newly opened lake." Schubert expressed such a strong contrast, especially in this unparalleled sonata. "
Jelinek is not a conformist writer. He not only made bold experiments in language, but also made innovations and changes in the form of expression, showing his own characteristics. Piano teachers' musicality is also reflected in written form. The novel is divided into "one" and "two" in the overall structure, and each part is divided into many sections by the curve of the note "P" arranged in the staff. In order to highlight the uniqueness of the protagonist Erica, large letters are used in some places in the book (translated in bold). The dialogue between characters is directly inserted into the narrative, without single column or quotation marks.
This novel is the author's most influential work, which aroused people's attention and controversy as soon as it came out. Some people think that the description of sexual psychology, sexual fantasy, sexual organs, sexual abuse and sexual metamorphosis in the book is too explicit and extreme; Some people say that Jelinek is the most ruthless moralist; It has also been pointed out that the novel describes a shocking twisted and abnormal human story, and it is a novel with profound critical significance and high artistic level to subtle human nature. Indeed, The Piano Teacher is a rare and unusual work, and it was written by a woman writer. With extremely indifferent attitude and sarcastic style, she shows the poor inner world and completely abnormal sexual psychology and lust of a middle-aged female artist, and shows the abnormal and unequal relationship between men and women in a patriarchal society: the relationship between hunters and prey, and sex becomes violence. There is no happiness, romance and sweetness of love in the book, only ugliness, cruelty and pain; There is no human dignity and humanity, only humiliation and vulgarity. It can be said that Piano Teacher is a report about women's sexual psychology.