Volume 40, Number 12 · June 24, 1993
The Skull Beneath the Skin
By Gabriele Annan
Sweet Days of Discipline
by Fleur Jaeggy, translated by Tim Parks
New Directions, 101 pp., $9.95 (paper)
Sweet Days of Discipline is a novel—or rather novella—about a girls' boarding school. Discipline is the pivot, as it is in the two best-known examples of the genre, both set in the 1920s: Antonia White's Frost in May and Christa Winsloe's Mädchen in Uniform (the novel on which the more famous film was based is actually called Gestern und Heute). In both of them discipline is the killer responsible for the tragic denouement. The German novel takes place in a school for the daughters of impoverished officers; the discipline there is military, rooted in an ethos of honor. In White's convent story the discipline is Catholic, rooted in the concept of original sin, and exercised through penance.
Review, 1370 words
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