Little Louise by Thomas Mann (1900)
Herr Jacoby, a wealthy but grotesquely obese and physically abject counsellor-at-law, is married to Amra, a beautiful, indolent, and intellectually shallow young woman whose sensuality masks a capacity for cruelty. Jacoby loves his wife with a humiliating, self-abasing devotion, kneeling at her bedside at night to beg assurances of her gratitude, while Amra, bored and contemptuous, has for over a year carried on an open secret affair with Alfred Läutner, a vain, charming young composer of popular salon pieces known for slipping a single strange, affecting modulation into otherwise trivial music. Amra proposes a large spring-beer party to be held in Herr Wendelin's hall on the Lerchenberg, and organizes a planning committee that includes the actor Hildebrandt and his wife, the barrister Witznagel, a young painter, several students, and Läutner. At a committee meeting in the Jacobys' drawing room, after routine entertainment numbers are settled, Witznagel calls for one climactic comic turn. In a charged, strange moment, Amra suddenly proposes that her own husband perform as "a chanteuse in a baby-dress of red silk," dancing to a song Läutner will compose and accompany. The suggestion visibly disturbs the room; Jacoby stammers refusals, mortified, while Läutner, oddly excited, enthusiastically offers to write the piece. The committee disperses without Jacoby's consent. That night Jacoby anxiously asks Amra whether he offended the guests; she rebukes him for his rudeness and makes him feel he failed his duty as host, and he submits, agreeing to perform "it is only a lark." The next day Amra visits Läutner at his rooms, where, in an intimate moment, she tells him to compose the piece for four hands so they can accompany Jacoby together, and both are seized by suppressed, convulsive laughter. The party takes place in Wendelin's festively lit hall before over a hundred fifty guests, with beer, speeches, and entertainments including minstrel-style dancers, Frau Hildebrandt's songs, Hildebrandt's impersonations of famous men, and a comic lecture. Jacoby sits miserable and largely silent through the festivities. The advertised final number, "Little Louise," draws anticipation. Jacoby appears in the red silk dress, wig, and gloves, dancing clumsily and singing in evident wretchedness while Amra and Läutner accompany him at the piano, and the audience is struck with horror rather than amusement. The song's refrain contains a daring musical modulation Läutner has built into it as his showpiece. At the precise instant this modulation sounds, Jacoby stops short, mid-word, staring out at the crowd and then at the couple at the piano with sudden, dawning comprehension of the scandal and his own public humiliation. His face flushes crimson, drains to a waxen pallor, and he collapses on the stage. Amid the shocked silence and ensuing tumult, the curtain is dropped; Amra and Läutner remain seated at the piano, turned from each other, he still absorbed in his modulation, she blankly uncomprehending. A young doctor who rushes to examine Jacoby returns and tells the crowd simply: "All over."
By Thomas Mann · First published 1900 · Genre: Literary Fiction, Psychological Drama, Tragedy · 7,221 words
First lines
There are marriages the origin of which not even the most practised literary imagination could possibly conceive. One must accept them as one accepts adventurous combinations of contrary qualities in the theatre -- such as old and stupid with beautiful and vivacious -- which are given as assumptions and serve as the basis for the mathematical composition of a farce.
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Little Louise is listed on Textopian as a short story by Thomas Mann, dated 1900 CE.
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- Work type: Short story
- Author: Thomas Mann
- Date: 1900 CE
- Language: English
- Genres: Literary Fiction, Psychological Drama, Tragedy, Social Satire, Dark Comedy
- Length: 7,221 words
- Structure: 1 section, 62 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Fairly Difficult (10th-12th Grade)
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- Work identity for Little Louise by Thomas Mann
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Genres
- Literary Fiction — Mann's sophisticated narrative technique, psychological complexity, and artistic merit place this firmly within serious literature; the work demonstrates characteristic modernist concerns with inner consciousness and social observation.
- Psychological Drama — The central focus on Jacoby's self-contempt, humiliation, and psychological collapse drives the narrative; Mann's detailed exploration of character interiority and emotional states is fundamental to the work's structure.
- Tragedy — The narrative follows tragic arc: Jacoby's hidden awareness of his inadequacy, the mounting humiliation, and his fatal collapse in the climactic scene constitute a complete tragic structure.
- Social Satire — Mann critiques bourgeois hypocrisy, class pretension, and social cruelty through the contrast between Jacoby's self-abasement and society's casual brutality; the party sequence exemplifies satirical exposure of social performance.
Tags
infidelity · public humiliation · scandal · betrayal · grotesque · drag · spectacle · music · beauty and ugliness · cruelty · satire · irony