Woman Alone

Whenever I am in a new area, I begin a process of mapping. I start with a digital survey, then I take my investigations to the field. My priorities are finding bookstores and, more importantly, somewhere to go for a bushwalk alone. Throughout 2023 and 2024, I drove all over Western Sydney in search of both. To the (failed) bookstore search, people respond with a gratifying sense of scandal. In response to the solitary bushwalks, I am met with unanimous concern: ‘What if you die?’ 

The danger to the lone woman is three-fold. First is the danger the world poses to her. She could be killed, jumped, mugged, stalked, stuffed in the boot of a car. She could be perceived as aberrant, or never be perceived at all. Second is the danger she poses to herself. She could choke on a piece of meat in her apartment, or slip and crack her head in the shower, or slice an artery while opening an avocado, or be electrocuted. A woman alone may become overwhelmed, of a sudden, by the half-death of her aloneness – a condition which can be imposed, inherited, asphyxiating. 

Third is the danger she poses to the world – but this is trite. Here I might argue, as Virginia Woolf has done, that the danger of a lone woman in a quiet room is that she may begin to think. There’s some truth to this, although thankfully women have had all manner of thoughts despite the chokehold of real and figurative binds. I imagine that a woman truly alone in the world – the last person alive – would be almost too busy to think. She would need to throw herself into survival. She would have to strengthen her body, acclimatise her senses, sharpen her intuitions. She would have to be as industrious as any person sustaining themselves in the ‘wild’, which she would soon realise is not wild at all, but the miracle of the natural world. At the very least, she would not be distracted, she would not have her thoughts commandeered by other people. Instead of labouring constantly to be a woman in the social sense, she would be free in the way that a female oak is free to be a tree.  

This is the hypothesis of Marlen Haushofer’s 1963 novel, The Wall. 

1. DANGER: BOUNDARY

An Austrian woman, a wife and mother, follows her cousin to a hunting lodge in the mountains for the weekend. Here begins Haushofer’s novel, written in moments stolen from the busy occupations of wifedom and motherhood. Haushofer gives her alter-ego an escape: the day after her cousin goes to spend the night in the village, the narrator wakes up alone in the forest to find that an invisible wall has encircled the valley, and that all living things outside the wall – including her husband, children, and everyone she has ever known – are dead. She is the last person alive. 

She responds to her fate with remarkable pragmatism. The first lines of The Wall read, ‘Today, the fifth of November, I shall begin my report. I shall set everything down as precisely as I can.’ She backtracks in the next breath: ‘But I don’t even know if today really is the fifth of November.’ This vacillation between incompatible states – between the resolve of the ‘shall’ and the uncertainty of the ‘even’ – becomes, in lieu of interpersonal conflict, the driving tension of the book. 

But tension is not quite the word. The ‘report’ is written with abandon. ‘I don’t expect these notebooks will ever be found,’ Haushofer’s narrator admits early on. Accordingly, she writes without consideration of a potential reader. She casually mentions the future deaths of her animal companions, despite their narrative role as secondary ‘characters’ of the book. The way that the report devolves without warning into speculation or reminiscence can feel impolite, dismissive of the reader. And one does not get the sense that, in her society days, she was an impolite woman; rather, she gives the impression of having been polite to the point of strain. One can imagine her introducing herself to her husband’s friends with an absent, courteous look. She does not pay the reader that respect. At some point she remembers, ‘I haven’t written down my name. I had almost forgotten it.’ She shrugs the nicety off: ‘No one calls me by that name, so it no longer exists.’ 

From the well-mannered Austrian housewife, another figure emerges, and this is a figure who finds herself unable to persist with names, with ornamenting her body, with making gendered sense. ‘My face was thin and tanned,’ she writes. ‘I could simply forget I was a woman. Sometimes I was a child […] or a young man sawing wood, or […] watching the setting sun, I was a very old, sexless creature […] more like a tree than a person.’ The being she becomes, trapped indefinitely by a physical wall, is in all other ways unbound. Borders dissolve not in an act of revolution or defiance, but in a process of easing into her true nature, which happens so radically only because she is utterly beyond the reach of human perception. 

The irony of transgressing borders only when no one will notice is similarly present within Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail. The novel is narrated by a Palestinian woman living in Ramallah; she attributes her own strangeness to the absurdities of life under military occupation. Instances of violence – Israeli soldiers boarding her bus and holding her at gunpoint while she looks for her ID – strike her with the same incomprehensibility and arbitrariness as a vegetable seller overcharging her for lettuce. The effect of social oppression and extortion is to detach her from reality, draw her into a dense isolation, where she reflects: 

To ‘trespass borders’ from within ‘the confines of [one’s] solitude’ is an enticing paradox, especially for the oppressed. It suggests that resistance can be enacted internally, out of the reach of one’s oppressor, doubling its threat.  

It is a theme I revisit often in my own fiction: a smothered woman merging into her husband’s identity so she can usurp his freedoms; a woman whose body has been consumed literally and figuratively all her life, relishing death as the triumphant ascension of her soul to a God who ‘does not eat’.  I revisit this thread also in my own life and the lives of women writers I admire, such as Emily Dickinson, a woman pitied for having been confined to her little bedroom for years. Dickinson, who jumped from persona to persona – a corpse, a Loaded Gun, a Czar – often within a single poem, and who wrote verses as transgressive as ‘Rearrange a “Wife’s” Affection!’ and as enormous as ‘This is my letter to the World’ – all within the confines of a solitude widely imagined as pathological. Would she have been freer outside, without her poems? Had she abandoned her secret papers and sought escape from her severe father, her ailing mother, her small home would she have ever understood her own colossal, ever-shifting self? My instinct is to answer, ‘No.’ But it can be a trap to rely solely on internal liberty. Resistance begins in the soul, the heart, the mind; shouldn’t it, after this, aspire to tangible ends? 

In The Wall, the narrator’s liberation through confinement at first appears to occur in the opposite order: body then soul. Her transformation begins with the physical changes effected by agriculture, foraging, carpentry, animal husbandry, and adaption to extreme weather. Then, as months pass, writing stirs her to consciousness of her condition. Often, she voices desolation at her fate. When she watches one of her kittens have a seizure and die, or when she is wracked with pain from a tooth abscess, she becomes hopeless. Even still, she asserts, ‘Here, in the forest, I’m actually in the right place for me.’ These assertions come off as surrender until, in moments of spiralling confession, the older origin of her resistance becomes clear: 

This ‘dim sense of discomfort’ is tied not only to womanhood, but to the capitalist militarism of the world beyond the wall. Immediately upon learning of the wall’s existence, she assumes it to be an army experiment or a weapon of mass destruction. Later she wonders if the military miscalculated, claiming lives on a scale they did not understand. 

In the no-man’s-land of the forest, she finds herself aiding in the birth of a calf at midnight, and more than the loss of her own children, she laments that the world never thought this skill valuable enough to be taught to a suburban housewife. She recalls, instead, a culture idolatrous of ‘gas-pipes, electrics and oil conduits’, where she suffered boredom like that of a ‘rose-grower at a motor-car manufacturer’s congress’. ‘Every time I got anywhere I would have to spend ages waiting,’ she says. ‘Sometimes I became quite clearly aware of my predicament […] but I wasn’t capable of breaking out of the stupid way of life.’ That she is only able to liberate herself from industrial capitalism after an apocalypse is not cause for hope; nor is the suggestion that a woman can only experience her true nature without judgement when everyone else in the world has died. In that sense, Haushofer’s novel holds a desperate wish for women, including herself: that they might find the time and space to awaken, before it is too late. There are moments in which Haushofer hints at the possibility of present-day revolt. It is there in a description of the narrator’s cousin’s black Mercedes: ‘almost new when we came here in it. Today it’s overgrown with vegetation, a nest for mice and birds.’ In spring, she notices the upholstery ‘pulled apart by tiny teeth’. 

I remember a bushwalk I took through Keith Longhurst Reserve, on Dharawal country, in the late afternoon. It was warm, I was walking with my neck craned to search for the birds I could hear in the high gums. The track wound down into the shadow of a valley, the canopy closing over me in an embrace. I became aware of a man walking twenty or so metres ahead of me. This distracted me from the birds and the eucalypts, from the beginnings of the short story I had been writing in my mind. If I found myself gaining on him, I would stop and listen for the creek I assumed lay at the base of the valley; I told myself that once I reached the water, I would turn around. The track fell off abruptly to my left and bush shot off this slope in dense, oblique outgrowths so that I could not see the base. I only had the crescendo of moving water to guide me. The track plunged into shadow. Whenever I couldn’t see the man, I became half-convinced that he had leapt behind the trunk of a eucalypt, waiting to pounce on and then dispose of my body over the edge of the track, leaving it to rot in the gully. He disappeared for a long while. Then I saw him walking back towards me. My mind ran through a hundred scenarios. I walked so close to the edge of the track I risked tripping and plummeting to the rocky valley below. I could almost feel his hatred and his impulse to kill me radiating in waves. He closed in. I stopped breathing. He passed me by.  

I was alone again. In increments, the frantic, vital rush of the creek returned, and insects rattled the air. I emerged at last at the base of the valley: all around me, the earth rose up in furred, green mountains, and to my right, a wide smooth river dropped over the edge of a small waterfall, feeding the rocky creek that had cheered me on my way. I climbed over some large stones, using trunks to steady myself, and slinked through shrubbery, waving away spiderwebs, so I could get to the waterfall. The water was clear, cool, full of the air into which it was leaping, and the sound filled my ears. Then a red sign lodged in the rising slope on the other side caught my eye: 

I don’t know why I laughed. I looked around at bush that stretched upwards in every direction as far as I could see, and wondered what the military was doing here, and whether or not they could see me. I laughed because I thought it was obscene. Let me trespass, see what will happen. Their boots, their guns, their signs, their uniforms, their little tents – everything they were using to desecrate this land that wasn’t theirs would one day be used as nests by birds and mice, would be torn apart by ‘little teeth’. 

2. Surely in These Moments

In childhood, our senses are magnified in a way that makes us porous. The sediment of age clogs them up. We lose access. Sometimes a child can reactivate it in us through demonstration. I recently watched an eighteen-month-old spend ten minutes enthralled by the feeling of a river lapping at the tips of his toes. 

It is possible, also, to reawaken this sense in solitude. This is the craving that compels me to drive out as far as I can go from my apartment after spending day and night working, masked, in a fluorescent-lit, linoleum-floored hospital. Without a periodic injection of eucalyptus leaves, I succumb to constant nausea. 

The first sense I notice losing is smell. As a kid, I found it impossible to ignore the bush scents – the bark and chlorophyll and the dirt – that would flush through, but maybe my face was just closer to the earth in those days, from lying down in it, from falling on it and grazing skin. Down there the scale of things was more apparent: I used to sit and watch slaters and little skinks hiding in stone cracks, transfixed. 

On lone bushwalks I can pay full attention to sensitising myself again. When I see a little dirt track branching off from the main one, I have to follow it. But I sometimes become uncertain of the trail and find it hard to distinguish a designated track from a path carved by a dried rivulet. Panic sets in, and I remember that snakes exist, and maniacs. With every stumble I realise I could fall, crack my head, and be left undiscovered, my body decomposing and bloating for days. The sudden precarity of my life heightens my sense of being alive, allowing the smells and sounds and sights of the world to permeate me. Most times, I don’t need fear – I just need to exert the effort of attention; then I become astounded by the size of the ants in orderly parade around my boot, by the creeks teeming with larvae, algae, and eels, by the bright, damp scent of wattle that, when pressed to my face, makes me heady. The trees I love intensely. I can’t pass a woolly bush without feeling its feathers. Tea trees distract and delay me when in bloom. And to the eucalypt, there is no comparison. I find my way again by recognising the treescape. If not, I follow dried brooks down to the inevitable clearing around a pool of water, and from there I can reorient myself. 

Once, I was in the densest part of Mulgoa Nature Reserve. This is land that belongs to the Mulgoa people of the Dharug Nation as well as to the people of the Gandangara community. At some point, I had veered off the trail. Suddenly, I came upon a car that had completely rusted away to its skeleton and had been stripped of its wheels. I stared at it for a long time and could not figure out how the car had ended up on that slope surrounded by old gums, the gaps between not wide enough to let a car through. A feeling of terror descended. Though, when I kept walking, it was quickly overtaken by the idyll humming and glowing all around. 

This same wonder – sometimes paired with terror, sometimes overwhelming it – runs through Haushofer’s novel like a river. In the absence of other people, a different form of intimacy is woven into The Wall. Nature becomes that alluring, mercurial force flowing from all directions into the narrator’s life. Moving from the valley up to the alpine meadows she calls the Alm, the narrator adjusts uneasily to her changed environment. As she begins to settle, she documents her surroundings as though noticing attraction to a stranger: ‘the great, curved bow of the sky, the moon hanging, a pale circle […] The air was sharp and I breathed more deeply. I began to find the pasture beautiful, strange and dangerous, but, like everything strange, full of mysterious enticement.’ In the alteration of her breath is the subtle, bewildered reaction of love. 

In one of the most arresting sequences set in the Alm, the narrator sits outside her cabin to watch the stars. The language she uses is one of slow widenings, ‘infinite abysses opening up between the constellations’. The experience is both physical and transcendent: ‘I preferred to look […] with my naked eye,’ she says – at the sky that she ‘had never really known […] before, locked in stone houses behind blinds and curtains’, at the night that used to frighten her unveil itself with tenderness. She follows this with spilling devotion: ‘Even when it rained and a layer of clouds covered the sky, I knew that the stars were there […] even during the day, when I couldn’t see them.’ The beauty and terror of the world are things she had known in childhood, and only loneliness, she asserts, has reminded her how ‘to see the great brilliance of life again’. 

Is this the other danger of leaving a woman alone? A habit of solitary retreat is the common precursor to prophethood for a reason, and it’s why so many prophets of the Abrahamic faiths were shepherds before they received revelation. Alone, in the mountains, is the only place Moses could have spoken to God. What is more dangerous than revelation? Is revelation not what Haushofer was alluding to in the moments where ‘the great brilliance of life’ overcomes her narrator all at once? I struggle to think of many women I know now who possess the freedom, or sense of safety, to sit alone for several nights in a cave, contemplating the Creator of their universe, and their place in it as a unique and everlasting soul. 

There is a sacred waterhole in Dharawal National Park that I hesitate to describe for fear of men. The Tharawal Local Aboriginal Land Council has placed signs all along the track leading up to the pool, asking that only women and children enter its waters. Shrouded by a thick, soft curtain of casuarinas, which are otherwise sparse, the land around the waterhole seems to huddle to protect the women it loves, for their privacy, their pleasure. Beyond the casuarinas are tall eucalypts in full flower, and the Eastern whipbird flings its call like a glass marble hitting water from a height. The sky above the clearing is open. Over a wide rock shelf warmed by the sun, water streams. The stone heats the water, and the water has worn the stone so smooth that to lay your bare stomach upon it is a luxury. This stream spills into a pristine waterhole, its rock border overhung by vines and small ferns. On the under-face of those outcroppings, the surface of the water projects glittering light.  

On my first visit to the pool, I climbed down several boulders, after which I emerged into the clearing and was astounded by the blow of peace. There were three other women lying upon the rocks. Their presence did not disturb my solitude. We were alone together. On the shadowy hike there I had been hot and humid, but now I lay down and let the cool breeze play with my shirt, feeling the rocks warming me from underneath. With trepidation and gratitude, I let my hand rest in the stream. The water was so cleansing. The other women saw what I was doing and moved so they could do the same. In privacy we rested. 

Though I felt overwhelmed by the beauty, grief began to sink through me in equal measure. At any moment I looked up, I expected to see women and children from the communities who had first enjoyed the wealth and abundance that this land had gifted to them. I thought I could hear kids screaming with laughter, jumping from a rock ledge into the water. I thought I could see the women who loved those kids, smiling at each other in confidence, their joy reflected in the water. But we were alone. Only, why were we alone? What were we doing here without those women and children? In the most moving description I have read of this continent, Thomas Mayo reminds Australians of those moments they witnessed ‘green valley vistas’, a ‘cool breeze caressing’ many-coloured wildflowers, ‘white surf and silver fish playing’, ‘a deep orange dusk’, flocks of native birds foraging ‘at the foot of an ancient escarpment’. Then he says, ‘Surely in these moments you have considered what a wonderful life my people lived before [colonisers] tore the most successful social fabric on the planet to pieces.’ In every one of my walks through Western Sydney and beyond, signs of the crimes against that life are omnipresent. In the poorly tended Western Sydney Parklands, overrun by weeds and choked by the giant exhaust pipe of the M7, in George’s River Nature Reserve that costs eight dollars to enter … At the entrance to the waterhole, someone has underlined the Tharawal Land Council’s request in permanent marker because men keep intruding.  

Violations against land are violations against its people. As the daughter of a Palestinian refugee, I can’t reconcile myself to my complicity in settler-colonialism. I’m haunted by a line from an interview with a Palestinian refugee who has settled in Sydney: ‘I feel like I stole the land […] It’s the same what happened in my country […] I came to Australia and live on [Aboriginal] land without their permission. Always thinking, why. Why I did the same?’ Whenever I am alone in the bush and enjoying the revelations of solitude, I ask: Whose sublimity is this? Why am I alone here? Why did I do the same? 

3. Abject Freedom

Those three questions help explain why The Wall is often called a dystopia. For one thing, not only is Haushofer’s narrator left bereft of her people – so is the land. Had Haushofer set her novel on colonised country, it would have been a loss twice-over. I imagine a person seeking solitude in one of the many ghost towns of the United States, and I cannot see that any sublimity could be experienced without the spectre of that doubled erasure. The myth of the lone pioneer attempts to overlook these ghosts. It is a trope prominent in the literatures of colonial nation-states; one only need look as far as Henry David Thoreau to see its falsities. While lone pioneer stories, like The Wall, do pursue sublimity (Thoreau was a Transcendentalist, after all), they are also largely written by men invested in drawing borders, staking claims, and glorifying the individual.  

Despite understanding the freedoms afforded by a woman’s solitude, Haushofer never allows her isolation to be romanticised. Her narrator has occasional spasms of despair at forgetting what it means to be human in the absence of other people, and these moments bring to mind the fact that solitary confinement is a form of torture. For all the discomfort she claims to have felt in society, for all the relief and harmony she professes in the forest, she still fantasises about a crowded gathering. In one of the most devastating moments in the book, after months of utter aloneness, the narrator describes a dream: 

She attempts to numb herself by treating herself ‘like a robot: do this and go there and don’t forget to do that. But […] I’m still a human being who thinks and feels.’ Freed from the incarceration of her family and social life, she experiences the confinement of her liberty. One could call it abject freedom. 

Within this abject freedom, the narrator experiences a new grief; while her animal companions exhibit complex behaviours of loyalty, curiosity, fear, bereavement, and desire, she alone suffers the urge to moral action. A fox kills one of her kittens, so she considers shooting the fox – then falters, struck by her responsibility as the only moral being alive: ‘I alone can show mercy,’ she realises, adding it is a burden from which only death can free her. 

At the book’s most horrifying moment, a madman appears and kills her beloved calf by lodging an axe in his skull. The senselessness of this sudden violence renders the narrator’s lengthy, laborious kindnesses pitiful. It becomes tempting to sentimentalise mankind after the apocalypse, but with this incident, Haushofer drives home a reminder that the lost world was one of incomprehensible cruelty. And yet, in the narrator’s ability to mourn this injustice, the simultaneous beauty of humanity reveals itself:  

Even if she’d had enough plant food for survival, without her animals and their ‘troublesome business’, she would have died. But even animals are insufficient. This is the quandary: what good is it to trespass or resist, if you cannot translate these moral feelings into social action? How real is a sublimity that only holds up when you are never tested by the material world? Could it ever be ‘radical’ to rage against the evils of colonisation only in one’s heart?  

I don’t think I’ve ever spent more weekends in the company of strangers than in the months following the inception of Israel’s genocidal campaign against Gaza. The same ‘me’ who loves and craves solitude couldn’t have made it this far with my heart (barely) intact without the sweeping community that came together from all corners – most movingly of all from the First Peoples of this country, whose generosity in labour and sacrifice amidst their own grief has been overwhelming. Through all the protests and vigils and documentary screenings and sit-ins and sermons, I re-awoke to a communal aspect of storytelling I had neglected in my reliance on writing as my primary mode of resistance after the pandemic. Perhaps writers, generally solitary creatures, find it easiest to write about characters of a similar ilk, whose journeys are primarily inwards, characterised by reflections on reflections on reflections. I wonder about oral traditions of storytelling that permit, by nature, less of an inwards spiral than the modern written word. Self-illumination is vital and can be radical in its own right, particularly in the case of peoples whose interiority has been denied. But is there not a certain selfishness or laziness in setting self-reflection as the end goal? An exploration of interiority does not prevent a great story from then inquiring into the consequences of an individual’s revelations for their worldly interactions, or the world’s impact on an individual’s actions despite their revelations. Self-reflection, when genuine and effectual, can’t help but raise the question of responsibility for one’s behaviour. 

The last thing distinguishing Haushofer’s protagonist from an animal is the ability to hold herself responsible. In the world outside Western liberal capitalist atomisation, this is the role of community – for people who know you and share your burdens to love you, uplift you, and then hold you accountable to your own humanity. Intentions are one thing, and as Islam would say, a person’s intentions are only knowable to themselves and to God. But Islam also pairs action and intention inextricably, and it is the ability to control one’s actions and take responsibility for their consequences that distinguishes human beings. Without people around to register the effects of one’s actions, it may seem there is little obstacle to moral perfection, or at least to blamelessness. A life without accountability may sound freeing. But it is within this very liberty that Haushofer’s protagonist’s suffering reaches its peak. The animals present her with ethical dilemmas, but they lack consciousness, or the ability to judge her intentions and actions, which would render her moral efforts meaningful. The fox has no concept of the agony it caused her by killing her kitten; nor could it ever understand the effort of her forgiveness, her grace. 

On my lone bushwalks, an expansive gratitude and wonder carry me back with good intentions to the company of people who in turn leave me wanting solitude again. Without time alone, my soul would become dormant. But without community, it would do the same. Practically all world religions, including Islam, have a strong tradition of spiritual retreat. Islam, however, in its true form, prizes moderation, and so disavows monasticism as an ideal. The Prophet had a saying that the one who mixes with people and bears their annoyance patiently will have a greater reward than the one who does not mix. It is less meaningful to be good up in a mountain than it is to be good down with the mob. In spending most of my time alone, I have come to consider myself a peaceable being. But I think often of Olivia Laing’s assessment in Crudo: ‘You think you know yourself inside out when you live alone, but you don’t, you believe you are a calm untroubled or at worst melancholic person, you do not realise how irritable you are, how any little thing […] will send you into apoplexy.’  

I have written a whole novel about the tension between the urge, as a woman, to abandon a surveillant, cannibalistic society, and the reward of labouring for community. The balance is still unclear to me. All I learnt is the danger of the idea that seclusion unlocks a truer, or even more morally interesting, state of womanhood. De Beauvoir wrote about the pitfalls of reflexive retreat from a patriarchal world in The Second Sex, describing a girl who ‘closes herself up in fierce solitude: she refuses to reveal to those around her the hidden self that she considers to be her real self and that is in fact an imaginary character […] she becomes intoxicated with her isolation, feels different, superior, exceptional.’ De Beauvoir dismisses this as nonsense: ‘She has no grasp on the world.’ 

In liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s 1958 essay, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, he would identify the liberty sought in the ‘fierce solitude’ of De Beauvoir’s girl – and Haushofer’s isolated narrator – as ‘negative liberty’, meaning the absence of coercion and interference. He calls this ‘freedom from’, which we historically have found easy to conceptualise and extol. However, the totalisation of this negative liberty may be no more than: 

How emancipated are you if you break the chain around your ankles only to find yourself alone, with no signal, in the middle of the forest? 

Berlin explains the ‘point’ of attaining ‘freedom from’ in his second, and historically more confounding, concept of liberty: ‘positive liberty’, or the ‘freedom to’. ‘Freedom from’ oppression is not an invitation to withdraw from the world, which is the realm where the ‘freedom to’ – to be one’s own master, to pursue one’s dreams and full potential – is enjoyed, and where it has any meaning at all. But the effort it takes to conjoin these liberties is easily exploited; oppressors know that striving towards positive liberty is harder when energy has to be directed to the more basic fight for negative liberty – as with the attempts by Israel to exhaust Palestinian efforts towards self-actualisation through night raids or blockades or bombardment that require more consuming strategies for survival. Another abuse of Berlin’s theory is to insist that one group’s liberty is contingent on the unfortunate but more acceptable erosion of another’s. In these cases, the positive liberty of those in power is always more inviolable than the tenuous negative liberty, and the barely imaginable positive liberty, of the oppressed. For example, the West enshrines Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ by whatever means necessary, including the denial of Palestinian freedom from occupation, expulsion, fear, violence. This is in keeping with the Western liberal individualist ideal which Berlin describes as: 

One type of freedom cannot be enjoyed without the other, yet they can come at each other’s expense; and though freedom requires a social world if it is to have any content, it is within this very world that people make each other’s freedoms impossible. 

As The Wall shows, this paradox extends easily to the plight of women. Have not both woman’s freedom from and freedom to been historically sacrificed for the betterment and perpetuation of men’s freedoms? And if her liberty is an inalienable right, then to what extent should she – or can she – prioritise its pursuit regardless of the cost to others? A woman has a duty to herself, and perhaps, as Haushofer argues, she will never be able to understand or fulfil that duty from within the binds of a social structure that works to direct all her energies outwards. But as a human being, she also has a duty to others, and the same structure that estranges her from herself also works to wrench women’s energies away from each other – not only the women we know and must struggle against external demands to love, but all women and oppressed peoples around the world, from whom our collective freedom is inseparable. 

The world is troublesome business. To love it, raise it, labour over it, in joint effort with humanity and nature, is our great honour. Solitude gives a woman the freedom of thought to appreciate this labour and strengthen herself for its sake. The tragedy of The Wall is that, in finally realising her own capacity, in finally finding a ‘grasp on the world’ and the ‘great brilliance of life again’, the self-actualising narrator has no companions upon whom to bestow her love and moral strength. In the loneliness and regret of The Wall’s protagonist, Haushofer seems to understand the paradox of abject freedom: a woman can only be free in isolation – but no human being’s freedom exists in isolation.