Abstract
Stubbornly associated with eighteenth-century neoclassical aesthetics, in the nineteenth century sculpture comes under scrutiny as a species of obsolete, sensualistic object. This essay considers the ambivalent status of sculpture in German Realist Theodor Storm’s novella Psyche (1875). Storm’s text is preoccupied with questions of decency and indecency, questions that were raised not only by Storm himself, but by contemporary reviewers, as well as viewers of sculpture in the novella. Psyche, this chapter argues, flirts with the eroticism of antique sculpture, but also uses sculpture cathartically to dispel the indecency of its source. The chapter also considers the pairing of this classicizing Psyche with the grotesquely corporeal Nordic sculpture of a “Walküre,” a juxtaposition couched in strongly nationalist terms, in the years following German unification.
I would like to express my thanks to the editors of this volume, Jana Funke and Jen Grove, as well as to Adrian Daub, who helpfully shared his expertise on Wagner.
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Notes
- 1.
See Catriona MacLeod, Fugitive Objects: Sculpture and Literature in the German Nineteenth Century (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 17–47. Both Schlegel and Hegel downgrade sculpture in their aesthetics from the primacy it enjoyed in Neoclassicism. Schlegel’s distinction between what he terms the plastic and the picturesque opposes sculpture (Classical, finite, self-contained, generically pure) with painting (Romantic/modern, infinite, open-ended, mixed) and anticipates Hegel’s view of the uncanny spiritual inaccessibility of antique sculpture, whose very materiality proves a barrier to the imagination.
- 2.
Charles Baudelaire, “Why Sculpture Is Tiresome,” in Art in Paris 1845–1862: Salons and Other Exhibitions Reviewed byCharles Baudelaire, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 41–120 (111–3).
- 3.
Ibid., 112.
- 4.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Diderots Versuch über die Malerei,” in Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, eds. Dieter Borchmeyer et al., 40 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–), 1.18: 559–608 (569).
- 5.
August Wilhelm Schlegel, “Pygmalion,” in Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Eduard Böcking, vol. 1 of 12 (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1846), 38–45.
- 6.
Achim von Arnim, “Die Weihnachts-Ausstellung: Ein Schwank,” in Werke, eds. Roswitha Burwick et al., vol. 3 of 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1989), 976–98. See MacLeod, Fugitive Objects, 77–9.
- 7.
For an excellent overview of the ever intensifying concern in the second half of the century with public decency, and the changing landscape of obscenity laws in the German states, especially of the 1871 law (Paragraph 184 of the Criminal Code) passed banning the sale, distribution, and public display of obscene material, see Gary D. Stark, Banned in Berlin: LiteraryCensorshipin ImperialGermany, 1871–1918 (New York: Berghahn, 2009), 191–4; and Sarah Leonard, Fragile Minds and Vulnerable Souls: The Matter of Obscenity in Nineteenth-CenturyGermany (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). Leonard mainly considers print culture and popular urban entertainments. My focus will be on other spaces in which anxieties about respectable bodies surface, namely bathing resorts and museum exhibition spaces.
- 8.
Johann Peter Eckermann: Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, ed. Christoph Michel, in Sämtliche Werke, 2.12: 221.
- 9.
Gerhard Neumann, “Theodor Storms ‘Psyche’: Ein Wahrnehmungsmodell des Realismus,” in Wirklichkeit und Wahrnehmung: Neue Perspektiven aufTheodor Storm, eds. Elisabeth Strowick and Ulrike Vedder (Bern: Peter Lang, 2013), 131–47 (137).
- 10.
Theodor Storm, “Psyche,” in Sämtliche Werke, eds. Karl Ernst Laage and Dieter Lohmeier, vol. 2 of 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987), 312–45 (318). Compare with the old “Badefrau” (bathing attendant), who is repeatedly apostrophized as “die knochige Gestalt” (the bony form), e.g. 312, 313. (All further references will be provided parenthetically and are to this edition. All translations are by the author.)
- 11.
On the Goethean notion of “Gestalt,” see Ernst Osterkamp, Gewalt und Gestalt: Die Antike im Spätwerk Goethes (Basel: Schwabe, 2007).
- 12.
Johann Gottfried Herder, “Plastik: Einige Warhnehmungen über Form und Gestalt aus Pygmalions bildendem Traume,” in Werke, ed. Wolfgang Pross, vol. 2 of 6 (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1987), 401–542 (483).
- 13.
Jean-Didier Urbain, At the Beach, trans. Catherine Porter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 268.
- 14.
See the editorial notes on the novella’s reception in Storm, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 894.
- 15.
Editorial notes on the novella’s genesis, in ibid., 2: 889.
- 16.
See ibid., 2: 894–5. Even Storm’s friend and advisor on technical matters related to sculpture Hans Speckter confessed to Storm that he could not say the novella was among the writer’s best works. Letter to Storm, 28 December 1875, in Theodor Storm-Otto Speckter,Theodor Storm-Hans Speckter,Briefwechsel, Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Walter Hettche, vol. 12 of 19 (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1991), 94.
- 17.
Storm, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 895.
- 18.
Letter to Julius Rodenberg, 5 May 1875. Ibid.
- 19.
Winfried Freund, “Die Versöhnung von Stoff und Sinn: Theodor Storms Programm-Novelle Psyche (1875),” in Theodor Storm: Studien zur Kunst- und Künstlerproblematik, ed. Walter Zimorski (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1988), 101–25 (101). Freund assigns “matter” and “spirit” gendered roles, following eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions conjoining sculpture and female materiality.
- 20.
Neumann, “Theodor Storms ‘Psyche’,” 132.
- 21.
Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 102–3.
- 22.
Critic Franz Stuckert, for example, criticized the novella like Paul Heyse before him as “allzu dezent[e]” (overly modest); Theodor Storm: Sein Leben und seine Welt (Bremen: C. Schünemann, 1955), 327.
- 23.
See John G. Robertson, “Theodor Storm,” in The Gentleman’s Magazine 279 (1895): 619–33, who notes that “the theme is open to the objection of conventionality and improbability” (629), and that the subject matter is “very hackneyed” (629) and “uncongenial” (631). Twentieth-century commentators shied away from the novella for these very reasons. See for example John Pizer, who remarks on its clichéd sentimentality in “Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Totalität: Raabes ‘Pfisters Mühle’ und Storms ‘Psyche’,” Jahrbuch der Raabe-Gesellschaft 39 (1998): 115–25 (120); and Fritz Martini’s judgment that the work represents “verflachte Könnerschaft” (trivial expertise), in Deutsche Literatur im bürgerlichen Realismus 1848–98 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1962), 650. More recently, Heinrich Detering’s Kindheitsspuren:Theodor Stormund das Ende der Romantik (Heide: Boyens, 2011), with its critical focus on Storm’s sexuality, opens up avenues for rereading “Psyche” through the lens of (adolescent) desire. Detering reads the erotic poetry that Storm began writing as a nineteen-year-old to the then ten-year-old Bertha von Buchan as a red thread of paedophile desire that runs through his works. Michael Wetzel juxtaposes Hans Christian Andersen’s 1861 tale ThePsyche, in which the Medusa-like living statue disgustedly and powerfully rejects her creator, with Storm’s “kitschy” corrective to the story. See “Mignon im Norden: Fortwirkungen der goethezeitlichen Modelle des ‘Kindsbraut’-Phantasmas bei Theodor Storm,” in Zwischen Mignon und Lulu: Das Phantasma der Kindsbraut in Biedermeier und Realismus, eds. Malte Stein, Regina Fasold, and Heinrich Detering (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2010), 113–32 (131).
- 24.
See the editorial notes on the novella’s genesis in Storm, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 887. Storm refers to the news story without further specifics regarding the newspaper in question in a letter to Julius Rodenberg of 5 May 1875.
- 25.
Apuleius, Cupid&Psyche, ed. E.J. Kenney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 79. Storm’s German source is Heinrich Wilhelm Stoll, “Amor und Psyche,” in Die Sagen des classischen Alterthums, vol. 1 of 2 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1862–1863): 391–422. Christian Neumann codes water in Storm as feminine and erotic, by contrast: Zwischen Paradies und ödem Ort: Unbewußte Bedeutungsstrukturen in Theodor Storms novellistischem Spätwerk (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002).
- 26.
Quoted in editorial notes on the novella’s reception, in Storm, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 893. Also at issue in Heyse’s remark is the shift from nude bathing earlier in the century to the introduction of swimming costumes when “family,” mixed sex swimming became more widespread. Storm replies in a letter that he had no intention of implying nudity. Ibid., 893–4.
- 27.
See the discussion of this novella in MacLeod, Fugitive Objects, 77–94.
- 28.
I disagree on this point with Laage’s claim that Dannecker’s sculpture was a “Vorbild” or model for the Psyche novella in Unterwegs mitTheodor Storm: Ein literarischer Reiseführer (Heide: Boyens, 2002), 95. Laage mentions in passing (95) that Dannecker had also sculpted a Psyche, but does not offer further details. Christian von Holst’s catalogue Johann Heinrich Dannecker: Der Bildhauer (Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 1987) lists, in fact, numerous sculptural treatments of the subject (See Footnote 31).
- 29.
Ivan Nagel, “Dannecker, die Schöne und das Tier. Zur Lage der Frau um 1800,” in Kunst um 1800 und die Folgen: Werner Hoffmann zu Ehren, eds. Christian Beutler, Peter-Klaus Schuster, and Martin Warnke (Munich: Prestel, 1988), 108–26.
- 30.
See Karin Görner, “Neue Weiblichkeitsideale,” in Sklavin oder Bürgerin? Französische Revolution und Neue Weiblichkeit 1760–1830, ed. Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff (Frankfurt am Main: Historisches Museum, 1989), 838–52 (848).
- 31.
On Dannecker’s returning attention to the motif, spanning his entire artistic career, see Holst, Johann Heinrich Dannecker: Der Bildhauer, 133–5, 221–5, 318–9, 361–3, 399–401. The sculpture of Psyche and the river god has not survived. As Holst points out, with reference to a figure in marble from 1821 to 1825, later representations of Psyche by Dannecker seem increasingly to strip away her conventional attributes (362), so that by this point she stands simply for an innocent girl, rather than for Eros’s divine lover.
- 32.
Berlin sculptor Reinhold Begas’s well-known PanComfortingPsyche, of 1857–1858, which reprises the theme of Psyche’s rescue by the river god, is one exception to this pattern, though Psyche is notably demure and girlish in this sculpture. For a general overview of the Psyche motif in Western art, see Sonia Cavicchioli, The Tale ofCupid&Psyche: An Illustrated History, trans. Susan Scott (New York: George Braziller, 2002).
- 33.
A recent volume on the Kunstverein explores the connections between the middle-class patronage of art by successful Bremen merchants and colonial trade. See The Blind Spot: Bremen,Colonialism, and Art, ed. Julia Binter (Berlin: Reimer, 2017).
- 34.
As noted by Bernhard Maaz, Skulptur in Deutschland zwischen Französischer Revolution und Erstem Weltkrieg, vol. 1 of 2 (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2010), 32–5. See also Katalog der Skulpturen in der Kunsthalle Bremen (Bremen: Kunsthalle Bremen, 1993), 454–5.
- 35.
See the editorial notes on the novella’s genesis, in Storm, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 888. For the correspondence between Storm and Speckter in the spring of 1875 on modeling in clay, Briefwechsel, 12: 86–9. Speckter’s friend the Norwegian artist Christian Meyer Ross in turn added four explanatory sketches. See Storm, Sämtliche Werke, 2: 889.
- 36.
Monika Wagner, Das Material der Kunst: Eine andere Geschichte der Moderne (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2001), 123.
- 37.
Briefwechsel, 12: 88–9.
- 38.
Valentin Groebner, Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the LateMiddle Ages, trans. Pamela Selwyn (New York: Zone Books, 2004).
- 39.
G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox, vol 1 of 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 364, 479 (where he describes the transformation of the “Mißgestaltete” into “Gestalt” by the Greeks).
- 40.
See Christian Neumann, Zwischen Paradies und ödem Ort: Unbewusste Bedeutungsstrukturen in Theodor Storms novellistischem Spätwerk (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002), 137.
- 41.
Thomas Mann, Pro and Contra Wagner, trans. Allan Blunden (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), 54. Mann’s Wagner critique is from Reflections of a Non-political Man (1918).
- 42.
Hans A. Pohlsander, National Monuments andNationalismin Nineteenth-CenturyGermany (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008), 139.
- 43.
See Ulrich Schulte Wülwer, Das Nibelungenlied in der deutschen Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Giessen: Anabas Verlag, 1980), 145–60. On Germania as Valkyrie, see “Introduction: Looking for Germania,” in Gender and Germanness: Cultural Productions of Germanness, eds. Patricia Herminghouse and Magda Mueller (Providence: Berghahn, 1997), 1–18 (5–6); Lothar Gall establishes the intensifying visual identification of Germania with a Valkyrie in the 1860s and 1870s, for example in Lorenz Clasen’s painting Germania auf der Wacht am Rhein (1860) and Johannes Schilling’s Niederwalddenkmal with its massive Germania, commemorating the end of the Franco-Prussian War (1871–1883); Die Germania als Symbol nationaler Identität im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), 48–9; also, Franz J. Bauer, Gehalt und Gestalt in der Monumentalsymbolik: Zur Ikonologie des Nationalstaats in Deutschland und Italien 1860–1914 (Munich: Stiftung Historisches Kolleg, 1992), 21. See also Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly, Beautyor Beast: The Woman Warrior in the German Imagination fromthe Renaissanceto the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). As Watanabe-O’Kelly notes (95) in her survey of literary adaptations of the Nibelungen materials, as early as the 1760s (thus over a generation before Friedrich von der Hagen’s modern translation of the Nibelungenlied), Herder had incorporated a poem into his folksong collection about Valkyries as bloody agents of death.
- 44.
Neumann, “Theodor Storm’s ‘Psyche’,” 135.
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MacLeod, C. (2019). The Indecent Body of Sculpture: Theodor Storm’s Realist Psyche. In: Funke, J., Grove, J. (eds) Sculpture, Sexuality and History. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95840-8_5
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