Nothing describes better the problematic nature of the hotel for women in the texts to be discussed in this chapter than Arthur Schnitzler's title character Fräulein Else's ironic observation as she walks back from a tennis match to the Hotel Fratazza, the “magic castle” where she spends a short vacation with relatives. As someone who can vacation in this Italian mountain hotel in San Martino, even if only invited by her rich aunt, Else seems part of the leisure class. A a guest, she enjoys all the luxuries of this classy hotel and displays all the signs of “conspicuous leisure” that Veblen mentions in his Theory of the Leisure Class. Those who are assembled here have done so to enjoy life and themselves, to plunge into the worry-free atmosphere that the hotel guarantees with its status and reputation, suggesting the feeling of a fairy-tale-like lightness of being to the one under the spell of its magic. To be a guest means to have the life that goes with this hotel, even beyond its walls. Not being upbeat and carefree would seem like a breach of the implicit rules of the place.

All of the literary hotels discussed here belong to this class of establishments, where a certain suspended reality characterizes life in general.