Literature Library study guide
Die Liebhaberinnen
Two young women pursue marriage, work, and security along different paths, while a merciless narrator exposes how narrow choices are marketed to them as romantic destiny.
- Literary form
- Novel
- First published
- 1975
- Literary period
- Late twentieth-century Austrian feminist fiction
- Region / tradition
- A rural and small-town Austrian setting
- Original language
- German
What happens in this work?
Die Liebhaberinnen, translated into English as Women as Lovers, places Brigitte and Paula in an Austrian world where a woman’s future is repeatedly described as a choice among factory labor, marriage, motherhood, and social failure. Brigitte works in an underwear factory and studies Heinz as a possible route out. He is not presented as a great love. He is a young electrician with the prospect of his own business, and therefore a future that may expand. Brigitte calculates how her body, attention, pregnancy, and labor can secure a place in that future. The narrator calls this a success while making its costs impossible to miss.
Paula begins with a different hope. She wants to train as a seamstress, a desire that joins imagination with practical skill and the possibility of earning independently. Her family environment offers little support and much control. She falls for Erich, a handsome forestry worker whose drinking, attachment to cars or machines, and violence are visible before marriage. Paula interprets attraction and pregnancy through the romantic language available to her. Marriage does not transform Erich into the partner she imagined. It reduces her time, safety, and economic choices while the domestic future that was supposed to prove love becomes another form of work.
The novel alternates the women’s stories even though they do not become friends or rescue one another. Brigitte turns herself into the person Heinz and his family will accept. Pregnancy helps make the relationship socially permanent. After marriage, she contributes unpaid labor to the household and business, gains material stability, and measures her success partly against women who remain in the factory. Heinz’s advancement is described as his achievement even when Brigitte’s work supports it. The narrator refuses to tell readers that security is worthless, because escaping factory labor matters. At the same time, the price is a life organized around maintaining a man and the position he provides.
Paula’s route is labeled the bad example. Erich’s drinking and violence intensify, and the family economy offers no romantic solution. When a man at a station offers Paula money for sex, she accepts and continues earning in that way. The novel does not treat this as the sudden arrival of moral corruption. Paid sex extends the economic logic already governing marriage, factory work, and bodily value, but it breaks the rule that a husband should control the exchange. Discovery costs Paula her marriage and children. By the end she is divorced and economically independent through work, yet the narrator’s social world treats her as the loser while Brigitte’s protected unhappiness counts as winning.
Jelinek’s achievement is not a lesson that Brigitte made the sensible choice and Paula made the foolish one, or the reverse. Their options have been produced by family violence, limited training, class hierarchy, gender expectations, and the idea that a woman’s body must purchase a future. The narrator uses the language of romance, advice, advertising, fairy tales, and moral judgment until those familiar phrases sound mechanical. Students should track every time the text says that a woman is fortunate, good, bad, natural, or destined for something. The label usually reveals the system doing the judging. Brigitte and Paula are different people, but the comparison between them is also one of the tools that keeps each isolated and compliant.
What was happening when it was written?
Jelinek published Die Liebhaberinnen in 1975; Martin Chalmers’s English translation is titled Women as Lovers. The book is set in a rural or small-town Austrian economy where factory employment gives women wages but little status or control, and marriage is promoted as the main path to material security. Jelinek parodies the Heimatroman, romance plot, advice language, and the traditional coming-of-age story. German nouns normally begin with capital letters, but the novel’s lowercase style visibly refuses that convention. Content includes domestic violence, coercive family behavior, sexual exploitation, and loss of child custody. Discuss those events without blaming Paula for the violence or pretending Brigitte’s material security is imaginary.
Who matters, and why?
Brigitte
Brigitte is strategic, disciplined, resentful, and determined to leave factory work. She learns to present herself as the woman Heinz’s future requires. Her eventual security is real, but it depends on suppressing desire and turning unpaid support into someone else’s visible success.
Paula
Paula wants both love and skilled work, but family opposition and romantic language narrow what she can imagine. Her mistakes do not cause Erich’s violence. Her later paid work exposes how every available route assigns an economic value to her body.
Heinz
Heinz has access to training, business ambition, and a future assumed to belong to him. Brigitte’s labor helps that future while remaining secondary in its public story. His ordinariness matters because inequality does not require an extraordinary villain.
Erich
Erich is attractive to Paula and socially excused by his family, but his drinking, mechanical hobbies, limited ambition, and violence shape the marriage. He receives freedoms after fatherhood that Paula cannot claim after motherhood.
The narrator
The narrating voice sounds like advertising copy, a cruel instructor, a social scientist, and a fairy-tale judge. It announces winners and losers so mechanically that the categories expose themselves. The voice is not a gentle guide, but its harshness targets the language that dehumanizes the women.
Big ideas to track
Love as economic planning
Romantic language promises personal fulfillment, while both plots repeatedly calculate wages, housing, business prospects, pregnancy, childcare, and bodily value. The novel does not say feeling is fake; it shows that feeling must operate inside unequal material choices.
Work, marriage, and alienation
Factory labor is exhausting, but leaving paid work for marriage does not necessarily create freedom. Brigitte’s domestic and business labor becomes less visible, while Paula’s routes between household, paid sex, and later employment reveal different forms of economic dependence.
Comparison as social control
The narrator and community repeatedly sort women into good and bad examples. Brigitte gains status by not being Paula, and Paula’s punishment warns others. Comparison isolates them from possible solidarity and makes structural limits look like personal ranking.
Reproduction and the future
Pregnancy is described as love, biological destiny, bargaining power, and a trap. Men continue to possess public futures after fatherhood, while women are told that motherhood completes their future. The unequal timeline is central to both plots.
How the writing works
Lowercase typography
Jelinek’s German largely rejects expected capitalization, including the capital letters normally given to nouns. The surface appears flattened and mechanical, matching a world that reduces people and feelings to repeatable social functions.
Parallel plot structure
Brigitte and Paula do not need to meet for their lives to comment on each other. Alternation makes every apparent success answer a failure elsewhere, while differences in class strategy reveal the same restricted system from two angles.
Parody of romance and advice
The narrator borrows promises about true love, good women, handsome men, happy homes, and correct choices. Repetition drains those phrases of innocence and shows how ready-made language can train a person to desire the arrangement that limits her.
Accelerated and frozen time
Men’s careers and business plans are allowed to develop, while women’s futures are described as suddenly fixed by pregnancy or marriage. Pauses around repetitive thought and rapid summaries of consequence make unequal access to time formally visible.
Moments to notice while you read
The factory appears inside an idyllic landscape
What to notice: Compare the language of natural beauty and village order with the repetitive labor and limited futures assigned to women inside the factory.
Why it matters: The contrast parodies a comforting homeland story. An attractive landscape does not make the economic structure natural, and tradition can hide exploitation as easily as a factory wall.
Brigitte selects Heinz as a future
What to notice: List the qualities she evaluates in Heinz, especially training, business prospects, family approval, and what he thinks of her body.
Why it matters: The scene turns romance into planning without making Brigitte foolish. Her calculations reveal what resources she lacks and why attachment to one man appears to be the only exit.
Paula imagines becoming a seamstress
What to notice: Notice the practical steps in Paula’s ambition and the family language used to dismiss, punish, or redirect her plan.
Why it matters: This wish proves that Paula’s future was never only a search for romance. Blocking training helps create the dependence that the community later treats as her personal failure.
Paula chooses Erich despite visible warnings
What to notice: Separate Erich’s behavior from the romantic qualities Paula and his family use to explain or excuse that behavior.
Why it matters: The sequence shows how a ready-made love story can reorganize evidence. It should not be read as proof that Paula causes the abuse she later experiences.
Pregnancy fixes each relationship differently
What to notice: Compare who gains leverage, who loses options, how each family responds, and which labor is expected after the child arrives.
Why it matters: The parallel pregnancies expose unequal futures beneath the language of natural fulfillment. A biological event becomes social policy administered through families and money.
Brigitte enters Heinz's household and business
What to notice: Track the work Brigitte performs, the status she gains, and whose name receives credit as the business and family become more secure.
Why it matters: Brigitte’s path is not simply false happiness. The scene teaches students to value material safety while asking why the labor that creates it makes one partner dependent and nearly invisible.
A station encounter opens Paula's paid work
What to notice: Compare the explicit exchange of money with the less explicit exchanges already operating in marriage, factory work, and family expectations.
Why it matters: The episode unsettles the community’s moral categories. Paula violates a rule about who controls bodily value, while the economic treatment of her body existed long before the offer.
Discovery costs Paula marriage and children
What to notice: Identify who judges Paula, what happens to Erich’s responsibility, and how quickly social punishment is presented as a natural consequence.
Why it matters: The loss completes the bad-example narrative. The unequal judgment protects the system by locating failure inside Paula rather than in violence, blocked training, poverty, or gendered law.
The ending names one winner and one loser
What to notice: Place Brigitte’s material security and restricted self beside Paula’s stigma, loss, paid employment, and economic independence.
Why it matters: The comparison refuses a simple preferred path. Readers must ask who created the scoring system and why women’s different compromises are used to police one another.
Questions to test your understanding
Answer in your own words. Then point to a specific moment in the work that supports your answer.
- What does Brigitte gain from her strategy, and what must she surrender?
- Why is Paula's wish to become a seamstress important to judging her later choices?
- How does the narrator make familiar romantic language sound mechanical?
- What is the difference between paid work, unpaid household work, and economic dependence in the novel?
- Why does society need Brigitte and Paula to represent opposite examples?
- How do pregnancy and parenthood create different futures for women and men?
- Does Paula's final economic independence count as freedom, punishment, both, or neither?
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Jelinek's novel and its translations remain protected. Use a lawful library, print, or ebook edition; the cited publisher and cultural-institute pages identify available editions.