Mann's "The Black Swan"

Midway Upon the Journey of Her Life: Thomas Mann's "The Black Swan"

Thomas Mann's beautiful novella "The Black Swan", published in 1953 when Mann was 78, returns to the great subject of his "Death in Venice" from 1912: the almost unspeakable infatuation of an aging person for a young one. 

This time the perspective is that of a woman going through what would now be described as a midlife crisis. Male critics misunderstood and were shocked by the frank manner in which Mann depicts the carnal desires a woman in her middle years feels for a young American twenty years her junior and they were all but appalled by the book's unflinching gynecological details; this conservative prurience proscribed them from recognizing Mann's masterly prose and the freshness of his subject matter. 

He writes directly yet lyrically about Rosalie, 50, and the relation her erotic self has to self-deception, illness, motherhood and death. Thus, as critic Nina Pelikan Straus says in her introduction to the novel, "Mann's subject warrants the serious consideration which a pre-feminist reading public tended to deny it". 

This is one of the great books about human desire and the delusions that often accompany it. That Mann, at nearly eighty and during the repressive mid-1950's, had the capacity to take the longings of women seriously was all but miraculous, though it is important to remember that his own identity as a husband and a father was complicated by homoerotic relationships; he was certainly able, as in "Death in Venice", to feel the seductive powers of the beautiful male body as Rosalie felt them. As Straus also notes, "Mann was  imagining himself in a woman's body and writing under the influence of an impulse we might today call feminist".

Search for an available copy here.

The Lost & Found Book Group will discuss "The Black Swan" at 6:30 PM, Thursday, March 26, 2020. Lost and Found Book Club meets on the last Thursday of each month at 6:30pm in the Administration sitting room on the 2nd floor. For more information or to join this intrepid group in rediscovering lost 20th century classics, contact Gregory at glowry@eolib.org.