Abstract
In Berlin, on the night of 29 December 1834, Charlotte Stieglitz (aged 28) sent her husband Heinrich to a concert in order to be alone while committing an incredible act. After having washed, dressed in a clean white nightgown and placed a white cap on her head, she went to bed and there stabbed herself directly in the heart with a dagger she had bought as a bride.1 In her farewell note, Charlotte suggested that her suicide be understood as an act of self-sacrifice meant to inflict such pain and sense of loss on her manic-depressive husband that he would break free from his psychic lethargy. In this way she hoped to liberate his petrified poetic powers. His wife’s violent death would enable him to regain what he had lost — his self and his poetic genius.
Woman is not a poet: She is either Muse or she is nothing. (Robert Graves, The White Goddess)
Death is the actual inspiring Genius or the Muse of Philosophy. (Schopenhauer)
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References
See Susanne Ledanff, Charlotte Stieglitz. Gescilichte eilles Dellkmals,(Frankfurt/M: Ullstein, 1986) for a detailed discussion and documentation of this incident.
Ledanff points out that the confusion was shared by her contemporaries as well. Gutzkow calls her Caroline Stieglitz.
See Susanne Kappeler, Writilzg alld Reading ill Hellry James(New York: Columbia University Press, 1980) chapter 7, ‘A literary Taboo’,pp. 75-82.
See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravory Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) p. 159, and Barbara Johnson, ‘Translator’s Introduction’ to Jacques Derrida, Dissemillatioll (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981) pp. vii-xxxiii.
For a discussion of reanimation and its rhetorical function see Barbara Johnson, ‘Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion’, in A World of Difference (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987) pp. 184- 99.
Plato, The Collected Dialogues, Editor by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press) p. 492.
Homer, The Iliad, translated by Richard Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951) pp. 91–2 (lines 594–600).
See Sarah Kofman, Melallcolie de l’art (Paris: Galilé, 1985).
Steele Commager, The Odes of Horace. A Critical Study(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967) p. 9.
Ibid., p. 3.
Ibid., p. 8.
Ibid., p. 20 and p. 23.
Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) p. 279.
Roland Barthes, Fragments d’un discours amoureux (Paris: de Seuil,1977) p. 22: ‘Ia mise en scene langagiére [de l’absence] éloigne Ia mort de I’ autre[ ... ] manipuler I’absence, c’est allonger ce moment[ ... ] où I’autre pourrait basculer séchement de l’absence dans Ia mort’. Barthes is referring to Chapter 2 of ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in which Freud describes a child’s game with a spool and the articulation of the two words ‘fort’ (away) and ‘da’ (here) that significantly accompany this game: see ‘Jenseits des Lustprinzips’ (1920), in Studies usgabe, Band 3 (Frankfurt: Fisher, 1975) pp. 222–7. What has not sufficiently been appreciated to my knowledge by critics discussing this text is the way in which it is in part informed by the death of Freud’s favourite daughter Sophie, who died of influenza! pneumonia on 25 January 1920, at the age of 26. Though most parts of the manuscript were written several months before Sophie’s illness, it was completed between her death and her cremation. And while Freud negated his friends’ challenge that his formulation of the concept of a ‘death drive’ was to be seen as a response to this personal loss, he did call this death a big, irreparable insult (Kränkung) to his narcissism. Far more pertinent to my suggestion that Sophie Freud can be seen as a muse who, through her death inspires the grieving survivor, is the way Freud builds his daughter into his text on the death drive only to efface her. In two highly curious footnotes to this chapter, Freud explains that the child’s fort-da game with the spool is not only a way of symbolising and thus controlling the absence of the mother but that this game changes into one which it plays with itself in front of a mirror, thus staging the possibility of a triumphant control over its own absence. In the second note Freud claims that this symbolisation of maternal loss was so successful that the child felt no serious grief when his mother really died some time later. What Freud significantly omits to say is that the ‘lost mother’ whose absence is staged long before any real absence occurs was in fact his daughter Sophie, and, if nothing else, the cryptic note pertaining to her death must have been added after the event of her death. Thus, since the woman, whose absence calls forth both Freud’s and Ernest’s symbolic representation is the same, a certain interconnection between the two acts suggests itself. Freud’s own text seems to repeat his grandson’s game with the spool and both can be seen as acts of making present while simultaneously effacing an absent woman. While Sophie’s figurative death is understood at least by Freud, as the inspirational source for Ernest’s important game, her literal death leads Freud not only to a theory about the relation between death and symbolisation but also to the imagery necessary for formulating it. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Coming into One’s Own’, in Pyclromwlysis and the Questions of the Tex, Editor by Geoffrey H. Hartman (Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore, 1978).
J. Gerald Kennedy, Poe, Death, and theLife of Writing (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1987) p. 61.
Novalis, Werke, Tagebueclrer und Briefe Friedrich von Hardenhergs, Editor by Richard Samuel (Muenchen: Hanser, 1978) vol. 1, p. 456.
Novalis, p. 462.
Novalis, p. 465. ‘Sie ist das Hoechste — this Einzige [. . Alles in Beziehung auf ihre Idee zu bringen.’
Novalis, p. 468: ‘Unauthoerliches Uenken an mich selbst und das, was ich erfahre und thue.’
Novalis, p. 471: ‘Der Liebende muss die Luecke ewig fuehlen, die Wunde stets offen erhalten. Gott erhalte mir immer [. ..] die wehmuethige Erinnerung — diese muthige Sehnsucht — den maenn-lichen Entschluss und den felsen festen Glauben. Ohne meine Sophie bin ich gar nichts — Mit Ihr Alles.’
Novalis, p. 633. ‘Dennoch habe ich eine geheime Freude, so nah ihrem Grabe zu seyn. Es zieht mich immer naeher [. ..] es [ist] mir ganz klar [. ..] welcher himmlischer Zufall Ihr Tod gewesen ist — ein Schluesel zu allem, ein wunderbarschicklicher Schritt.’
Novalis, p. 151: ‘zarte Geliebte [. ..] du hast [. ..] mich zum Menschen gemacht — zehre mit Geisterglut meinen Leib, dass ich luftig mit dir inniger mich mische und dann ewig die Brautnacht waehrt.’
Marie Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe. A Psycho-Analytic bnterpretntion (London: Imago, 1949) p. 260.
Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry and Tales (New York: Library of America, 1984) pp. 89–91.
Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry mid Tales, pp. 102–3.
See Henry James Letters, Editor by Leon Edel, vol. 1, 1843–1875 (London: Macmillan, 1974), especially the letters to Mrs Henry James, Sr, William James, and Grace Norton, pp. 218–29.
Henry James, ‘Altar of the Dead’, in Selected Tales (London: Dent, 1982). Further references in the text are also taken from this edition.
Henry James, ‘Maud-Evelyn’, 14 Stories by Henry James (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1947). Further references in the text are also from this edition.
Robert Graves, The White Goddess. An historical graimnar of poetic myth (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983) p. 449.
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© 1990 Regina Barreca
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Bronfen, E. (1990). Dialogue with the Dead: the Deceased Beloved as Muse. In: Barreca, R. (eds) Sex and Death in Victorian Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10280-8_14
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