Thomas Marshall January 2014 Word count: 1984 "Not only Effi, but also Innstetten is a victim of the male code of honour in the Wilhelmine period." Discuss. Fontane's oeuvre is located in an interesting position with regards to Western literary history: a little late for Austenian histrionics, a little early for modernism's all-consuming doubts, whilst his own highly subtle, highly selective brand of 19th century realism sits somewhere between the two. Yet still more noticeably, his work Effi Briest (1894/5) is contemporary or 'of its time' in one major aspect, and that is the social backdrop of the questions he addresses. The book is rooted in the very specific Prussia of this period. It is little wonder that a nation born out of victories against the Danes, the Austrians, and finally in the Franco-Prussian War (1871) - indeed, formed in, by and through a success that was primarily military rather than economic - should place such an emphasis on the importance of military might. Such imagery dominates the novel's canvas: we hear of the Rathenowers, the local hussars, who are regular visitors to the von Briest estate; Effi recalls playing on the knee of a colonel as a child; and throughout life at Kessin the question of soldiers' outposts remains an important one (e.g. it symbolises for Effi how much of a backwater it is - 'es soll ja keinen Garnison haben'). Battles such as Fehrbellin, Rathenow, Waterloo and for that matter more recent triumphs like Königgrätz and Sedan are directly or indirectly mentioned in the texts several times. This is not window-dressing, since Fontane 'maintained that if there was anything superfluous at all, then it was a flaw' (Chambers). Rather, it is a consciously built sequence of images with which Fontane hopes to convey the significant entrenchment of military life and values on not only the customs of the aristocracy, but also of the bourgeoisie. The male code of honour is one such crucial element of Effi Briest - indeed, perhaps the axis around which Fontane's machinery pivots. Schneider and others have made the case that the work is less an 'Ehenbruch-roman' such as Anna Karenina with which it is often compared, and more of an 'Ehren-roman'. The novel finds significance and drama less in the adultery as such, but the social fallout and the aftermath, and the questions which are left dangling in its wake, not to mention the pressures it places on individuals. Men were expected to be soldierly, to have affairs outside of marriage, and to suffer no slight or blemish to their reputation of honour; and though duelling was technically illegal it was still widely practised, the upper class thus maintaining their self-respect outside the law. With this important context in mind, then, we must examine the effects such an honour code as on the novel's principal characters of Effi and Innstetten. Though some might place the emergence of the code as a key element of the narrative at Chapter 27, when Innstetten first discovers