59 pages • 1 hour read
Marie BenedictThe Other Einstein: A novel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Female Empowerment in a Patriarchal Society
The title of this novel immediately positions the central character, a woman named Mileva, as the “other.” Lost to history, Mileva is the “other” Einstein, not the world-renowned figure. The title is important symbolically because Einstein is both a person and a way of being. In Benedict’s reader’s contemporary world, calling someone an “Einstein” implies, sometimes sarcastically, that they are extremely intelligent. Thus, Mileva, who is extremely intelligent, is an “Einstein” both literally in that she married Einstein and figuratively in terms of her great intelligence. This title is important because it reveals her othering as a female scientist whose husband took credit for her contributions.
Mileva’s empowerment in a patriarchal society begins at a young age. Her father notices her natural curiosity and deep intelligence. In an unorthodox move, he pushes her to pursue an education. In the 19th century, girls were raised to fulfill roles in the home as mothers, wives, cooks, and cleaners, but Mileva found an ally in her father, He used his influence to ensure her admission into male-only spaces of education. Her mother had no choice but to agree because of her own status as a woman in the 19th century and her belief that Mileva would not be able to get married and have children because of her disability. For most women of the late 19th- and early-20th century, the future held only marriage and children as a possibility. Mileva is both liberated by and oppressed by these social norms and codes.
She finds further empowerment in a new circle of female friends. When she moves into a boarding house for women in Zürich, she is nervous about being surrounded by other young women, having experienced only bullying at the hands of other girls. The women of the pension are all smart, hardworking, and unconventional, and they create a support system for Mileva that fundamentally changes her mindset about herself. Helene is at the forefront of this female empowerment. She encourages Mileva to leave behind her visions of herself as unattractive. Helene and Mileva make a youthful pact to never marry and to spend their lives committed to their work. Both women break this pact and end up in unhappy marriages, proving that their sisterhood was more nurturing and permanent than what men had to offer them. Mileva is empowered by the support and respect of women like Helene. Her loss of some of these friendships to her relationship with Albert is Benedict’s first foreshadowing that he will negatively impact her life. The other girls at the pension don’t trust him and are displeased by his uninvited intrusions into their private space. Mileva doesn’t see this in the moment, but she later understands that her happiest times were when she was a student and a friend to other women.
Another important moment of feminism inspires Mileva at the end of the book. When she meets the famous Marie Curie, she sees who she could have been had she not married Albert or had he not been oppressive and self-centered. Curie notes that she and Mileva are the same; they made different choices. The timing of this meeting is crucial to the novel’s structure. In Part 1, Mileva is inspired by other women at the pension. In Part 2, Mileva has no women to rely on for empowerment, although her mother eventually nurtures and sustains her. In Part 3, Mileva meets Curie, who inspires her. Thus, Mileva begins and ends her story with the understanding that women, not the structures of the male patriarchy, can and will support, love, and respect her.
Psychological Manipulations of Love
In The Other Einstein, characters vacillate between expressing true love and repressing their spirits due to the threat of losing it. In this novel, romantic love is presented as complicated and contradictory.
When Einstein first starts pursuing Mileva, she is caught off guard. As a woman in academia, she cannot risk being seen as sexualized. Any reminder of her position as a female risks diminishing her reputation as a scientist, but Albert pursues her with respect. He expresses his love by including her in conversations with his friends about progressive theories. He makes her feel equal to him. The start of their relationship is beautiful: Neither he nor Mileva can shake their feelings for one another, even after she attempts to take a break from the Polytechnic to avoid him. Their attraction to one another outlasts Mileva’s concerns about a man interfering with her career. Despite her father’s warnings and her friends’ resentment of Einstein, Mileva decides to embrace their love. In Albert, she finds a direct challenge to the years she spent believing she was unlovable. Their love, early in the relationship, changes Mileva’s dreams for her future. With Albert, she believes that love will enable her to have a career and a husband, rather than having to sacrifice love to succeed in her work.
But Einstein starts manipulating this love right away. He convinces Mileva to go to Lake Como with him, even though they both know how deeply her reputation will be harmed if it is discovered that she’s been traveling alone with a man outside marriage. Einstein says that he understands Mileva’s situation as a woman in a male-dominated science world, but he clearly doesn’t. His insistence on the trip is proof of this, as he acts only in terms of his own privilege and desires. Mileva finds him persuasive because she is in love, but the fallout of the Lake Como trip fundamentally changes them forever. Mileva finds herself pregnant and unmarried. Einstein's reaction to the news demonstrates his inability to empathize with Mileva, which calls into question the idea that he truly loves her. He is dismissive of her needs and agrees with her father that the baby should be put up for adoption. His psychological manipulations begin: Einstein tells Mileva one story while living out another. During her first pregnancy, he writes her that he loves her and promises they will marry despite their families’ mutual disapproval. However, when Mileva travels to him, pregnant and alone, he claims he doesn’t have the money to see her. She risks her reputation, her career, and her relationship with her family for Albert, while he risks nothing.
This manipulation continues after Lieserl’s death. Albert leaves Mileva’s name off her scientific discoveries and the projects that they collaborate on. He claims this is for their own good because their work won’t be taken seriously if the science community knows it comes partially from a woman who doesn’t have a degree or a doctorate. But Albert doesn’t tell Mileva ahead of time that he’s leaving her name off their work, which signifies that he knows he’s doing something wrong and doesn’t want her to know until it’s too late to make changes. He wants to take full credit for Mileva’s ideas, so he twists the story to pretend that he’s doing so for the benefit of their relationship. Knowing that he has power over Mileva because of their marriage and their child, Albert knows he can get away with it.
As the years go on, Albert’s use of love to manipulate Mileva widens in scope. He has affairs with other women and blames her for them. He accuses her of being selfish and is uninterested in how his behavior hurts her. In the later years of their marriage, he manipulates her into staying with him. He dismisses her valid complaints about their life together by making it seem like she’s the problem. This again is a power move: He knows that her career is over and that their children keep her reliant on him.
There is real love in this book. Albert and Mileva start their relationship with love, and Mileva’s love transfers to her children. She sacrifices herself for their security and never stops longing for her beloved daughter, from whom she was separated for most of the child’s young life due to Albert’s control of her. Mileva’s love for her surviving sons and her realization that she can find a way to provide for them without remaining chained to Albert frees her and inspires her to start loving herself again.
Science and Math as Religion
The Other Einstein is a novel about a woman’s journey to free herself of restrictive societal norms, but it is also a love letter to science and math. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, there was tension between institutions of science and religion. Religious codes were still important to the way most people lived their daily lives, and science progressed rapidly, often presenting to views of God. A tension developed: If humans can explain the wonders of the natural world with science, then perhaps God may be proven not to exist.
Mileva presents her own solution to this tension. For her, physics is so beautiful that it must encompass the presence of God. Mileva sees science and math as evidence of God’s greatness, not proof of his absence. Mileva’s mother is more traditionally Christian than she is, but Mileva’s communion with God occurs when she is deeply into her research and theorizing. This proximity to God’s work is part of what inspires her passion for science and mathematics. When she is separated from her work, she is also separated from her faith in God.
Science and math as a religious practice become even more important after the death of Lieserl. Mileva calls her discovery of the theory of relativity an “epiphany,” a message from God. This epiphany occurs in Mileva’s darkest moments. She is suffering alone through her grief over losing Lieserl, a daughter she didn’t really get the chance to know because of Albert. The theory of relativity, therefore, is like a gift from the universe to keep her motivated to continue with her life and work. This makes his robbery of the theory a direct insult to Mileva’s role as a mother. For her, the connection between the loss of Lieserl and the discovery of relativity is sacrosanct. Mileva wants the world to know about the theory of relativity as her own private homage to Lieserl, a symbolic apology for Mileva’s absence from her daughter’s short life. In the epilogue, Mileva spends her final moments bearing internal witness to the theory of relativity’s leading her directly back to her long-lost daughter. The light at the end of the tunnel is Lieserl, and that tunnel is God and physics.
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