Fatalism and Family Life
Killing Stella by Marlen Haushofer, translated by Shaun Whiteside (New Directions, 2025)
Reviewed by Zoë Kaufmann
What exactly qualifies a house as haunted? Is it the presence of ghosts, as in The Amityville Horror and The Turn of the Screw, or the conscious malevolence of the house itself, as in The Haunting of Hill House? Or does the real supernatural horror come from the secrets a home helps keep, as in Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects or Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca? Despite its straightforward name, Killing Stella, a novella by Austrian author Marlen Haushofer, does not fit neatly into the "haunted house” category of horror stories. The house could be haunted, but the real hideousness of the book lies at the core of the nuclear family.
While Killing Stella was originally published in 1958, its new English translation (completed by Shaun Whiteside, also translator of her ecofeminist survival story The Wall, and published by New Directions this year) seems today to be totally ahead of its time in its grim psychological realism. The original German title is even more direct: Wir töten Stella, we murder Stella. Directness is hardly the point, but Haushofer accomplishes in 87 pages what a lesser writer might be unable to do in hundreds, folding the stream-of-consciousness narration of a sometimes-guilty conscience into a feminist domestic horror story.
Killing Stella is narrated by Anna, a housewife in her forties who spends her days drifting through her house, staring out of the windows at her garden, and occasionally tending to her two children. As a favor to a friend (who, Anna tells us, she dislikes but cannot extricate herself from), Anna and her husband Richard take in the friend’s nineteen-year-old daughter. This is the titular Stella, whose catastrophic love affair with Richard leads her to suicide and around whose death the narration spins. By the end of the novella, it’s no clearer who is actually to blame for Stella’s death: all that remains is repressed into silence, a thick fog obscuring everything. The actual question that Haushofer poses is not who is responsible for Stella’s death, but how we live with the crushing awfulness of being an adult in the modern world.
Even before Stella enters the stage, Anna’s family is defined by a tense and uneasy equilibrium. Anna is completely devoted to her elder son Wolfgang, but cannot bring herself to love her daughter Annette—the little girl resembles her father, Richard, too much.
Richard is somehow both more and less than human. He is, Anna tells us, “a considerate paterfamilias, a valued lawyer, a passionate lover, traitor, liar, and murderer” (28). He is manipulative, virile, compelling, a hedonist who loves women and wine but who is entirely invested in maintaining the sheen of order in their home; “No one is a stricter guardian of morality than the secret lawbreaker,” Anna explains, “for it is clear to them that humanity would crumble and perish if everyone lived as they did” (44). He is completely amoral yet devoted to the illusion of virtue, existing firmly in the world while Anna floats in her own head. His physical and psychic power over Anna dominates her completely—though she could theoretically leave him, she knows that she could never escape the disillusionment her marriage has engendered. So Anna maintains their home, tends to the children, and stares out the window at her garden, choosing oblivion as her shield.
This code of repression which maintains their family cannot withstand disruption, and Stella’s intrusion consequently begins its slow unraveling. When she arrives, Stella is an awkward overgrown girl, dressed in browns and greys. Anna helps her into womanhood, arranging tchotchkes on her bedside table, giving her colorful new dresses, and saying nothing when Stella begins an affair with her husband.
Haushofer is a writer deeply attuned to sensual details and to the corporeal. The writer describes Richard vividly, as a
superficially tamed predatory beast that, when well fed and looked after, settles for going on little nocturnal raids, after which it comes back to its lair, purring contentedly. And sometimes that animal forgot to erase the traces of its raids in time. Then it would smell of the strange perfume of its victim and wear blood-red lipstick stains on its white shirt collar (52).
He regularly comes to bed at night smelling of other women’s Chanel No. 5; it is when he comes to bed smelling only of his own aftershave that Anna realizes that he’s seduced Stella, who is still too immature to wear perfume.
One might expect Anna to behave like a prototypical jilted wife, but she remains entirely passive, a decision which wracks her with guilt once Stella kills herself. Anna has long been aware of Richard’s many dalliances, and he seems to do little to truly hide them from her, secure in the knowledge that he possesses her completely. This is, in fact, what maintains their marriage, and Stella is merely the latest in a long line of girls that Richard has seduced. Anna is constitutionally unable to put her only sliver of happiness—the peace of her garden viewed from the window, her son, her quiet home—at risk, so she watches silently as Stella sobs, takes to her bed, and eventually runs in front of a yellow truck.
Because Stella is dead from the very first page, the question of guilt hangs over the novel: who is responsible? Is it Anna, who brought Stella into womanhood but refused to protect her at the crucial moment? Is it Stella’s irresponsible mother, who starved her of love? Is it Richard, who seduced a vulnerable nineteen-year-old? Is it Stella, who, after all, ran in front of that truck? Anna wavers over the course of the book. At times she believes that she killed Stella, that Richard killed Stella, or that Stella was doomed by her own inability to adapt to the cruelty of adult life. Perhaps Stella made a successful escape attempt, freeing her from the crushing anxiety of existing as an adult in the world, or merely experienced a failure of will to keep going.
To Anna, any of these could be possible, and her narration reveals that even before Stella’s death, adult life seems to be an ongoing form of psychic death. As a character, Anna is coldly miserable: she traces circuits around her house, preferring to stare out of the windows at the garden rather than actually enter it. Whatever unhappiness plagued her before Stella’s arrival has only deepened since the suicide, and she devises feeble attempts to make sense of her own misery, focusing on the color blue or the baby bird dying in the linden tree outside. Something is wrong at the core of Anna’s life, but by the end of the novel we have no real idea what it is. Something happened to her, she tells us halfway through the story, which turned her from a woman into an automaton—but she gives us no indication whether this was her marriage to Richard or an unrelated event. All we understand is its grim result, that she is completely devoid of hope.
In Killing Stella, life is essentially hopeless, which is why the question of who is responsible for Stella’s death is so tortured. All the adults in the book try desperately, in different ways, to escape all the things they cannot live with, all the painful parts of modern existence. Richard chases women, Stella’s mother, Luise, chases younger men, Anna stares at her garden from the window, but Stella escapes—as Anna tells us, “on her first attempt” (8). Was it truly an escape attempt, as she first thinks, or just a waste? Was it a predetermined function of living (death and taxes, etc...), come too early? Anna can’t decide. Stella, she ruminates at one point, “ran dully and inexorably into her fate, condemned from the very beginning to be broken, with her simple, foolish emotion, by our disintegrating, divided world” (11).
It will not shock you, at this point, that Killing Stella is more or less unrelentingly grim. But it’s not uninteresting or bland, as so many books about sadness or existentialism are: Haushofer’s fatalism is deeply textured, lived-in, complex. Killing Stella’s torment feels almost propulsive, as Anna wavers, gets distracted, and paces a metaphorical circuit around her house and her life, trying to find answers or at least a form of unhappy peace. It will be deeply familiar to anyone who has experienced the particular frozen quality of deep depression.
In Anna’s frozen state, there is no chance that the conditions of life can improve; nothing can change except for the worst. So what is there to hope for except, then, for the same? More precisely, Anna wants to write down what she remembers about Stella before she begins to forget what happened. Because, as she writes, “I’ll have to forget her if I want to resume my old peaceful life. Because that’s what I’d really like to do: live in peace, without fear or memory. It’s enough for me to run my household as I did before, to care for the children and look out of the window into the garden” (6). This passive solution—to set down her memories of Stella, her own guilt, and live in this way, “without fear or memory”—is no real solution at all, merely a repetition of the same behavior that led to Stella’s death.
There is no absolution, no possible redemption: only repression, forgetting, and oblivion. This feeling saturates the book. Perhaps the best example of Anna’s mental state occurs roughly thirty pages in, as she writes:
My rage went up in smoke long ago; all that remains is the horror that dominates me completely, and that I inhabit, in which I am trapped. It has entered me, it has saturated me, and it accompanies me wherever I go. There is no escape. My worst thought is that even death could not be deadly enough to extinguish it at least. But horror and the knowledge of the truth that one is not supposed to know belong to the order of everyday life. Yes, I cling to that order, to the regular mealtimes, the work that returns every day, the visits and walks. I love that order, which allows me to live (29).
Even before Stella’s death, Anna has constructed an "invisible wall,” a glass wall against which the monsters of her despair throw themselves; she refuses to comfort Stella in her distress out of the fear that it would break through the wall that separates her from her pain. It is too late to start over, too late to remake her life—there is nothing to do but cling to routine and order. In some ways, it stands as a perfect expression of modern life. We answer emails and go to the dentist, fill notepads with to-do lists and cook dinner, even as the news informs us of genocide and encroaching fascism. In times of crisis, it feels like the world should stop; the most surprising thing is that it doesn’t, so like Anna we cling to “regular mealtimes, the work that returns every day, the visits and walks.”
Ironically, Haushofer is most famous for The Wall (Die Wand), which locates liberation in the apocalyptic rupture of everyday life. In that novel, which appeared five years after Killing Stella, an invisible barrier inexplicably strands a woman in a valley in the Austrian Alps, separating her from the rest of the world. She must find a way to survive with her cow and her dog, which she presumes are the last few living beings on Earth. Forced to leave human society entirely behind, she finds new ways of living with the world and with other living things. In reading Killing Stella and The Wall together, then, it becomes clear that our only path to a better future might lie in a willingness to relinquish the comforts of routine. Who might be willing to move past order to find what lies beyond?
Zoë Kaufmann is a writer and graduate student in Cultural Studies at KU Leuven. She was a 2024-2025 Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Belgium and holds a Bachelor’s degree in History from Bryn Mawr College. She likes long and depressing novels, preferably by women and preferably in translation.
