practice piano, results in Erika's self-mutilation. Walter Klemmer, an engineering student, is introduced very early on. He comes early to class and watches Erika perform. He eventually becomes Erika's student and develops a desire for his instructor. Erika sees love as a means of rebellion or escape from her mother and thus seeks complete control in the relationship, always telling Klemmer carefully what he must do to her, although she is a sexual masochist. The tensions build within the relationship as Klemmer finds himself more and more uncomfortable by the control, and eventually Klemmer beats and rapes Erika in her own apartment, her mother in the next room. When Erika visits Klemmer after the rape and finds him laughing and happy, she stabs herself in the shoulder and returns home. Reception According to Larson Powell and Brenda Bethman, musicality is a very important aspect of the book: they argue that Jelinek (herself a former student of the Vienna Conservatory) uses musicality to underscore the perversity of the main character, who participates in a musical tradition that trains women to play the piano in order to attract a husband. Erika's failure as a pianist is a sign of her perversion: both the pervert and the artist attain pleasure, but where the artist reaches pleasure as a sublimity, thus becoming a desiring subject, the pervert fails to achieve subjectivity and remains bound to object status. Thus, Erika remains the object of her mother's desire, unable to attain subjectivity which the principles of her musical education had denied her in the first place. Other criticism has been directed toward the lack of a father figure within the novel. Just as much as Erika's mother is suffocatingly present, so is her father noticeably absent. This provides her mother with sole psychological discretion as to Erika's upbringing. Worth noting is that: "the mother's power and influence increase with the absence of the father, who is admitted to an asylum and spatially exiled. Aside from the fact that the exclusive bond between mother and daughter remains uninterrupted and maternal domination obstructed, his displacement suggests the cause for Erika's failed separation from the mother and her excessive masochistic drive." Critic Beatrice Hanssen refers to the novel as "an anti-Bildungsroman and anti-Künstlerroman" and writes further that The Piano Teacher is a "satirical critique...of the literature, popular during the 1970s and 1980s, that idealized the pre-oedipal mother-daughter bond." References