The Female Corpse:
Sacrificed Bodies of Enlightenment Tragedy and Nazi Cinema
Olivia Ryan Landry
Department of German Studies
McGill University,
Montréal, Québec
September 2008
A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial
fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of
Masters’ of Arts
Copyright © 2008 of Olivia Ryan Landry
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to my two supervisors, Professor Andrew Piper and Professor Michael
Cowan. From the beginning, they offered invaluable advice and inspiration. Without
their intellectual stimulation and critical engagement with my project, this thesis would
not have come together in its present form. I am also indebted for the support of my
friends and colleagues, Renée Barter and Nathalie Lachance, who have offered
intellectual guidance and general support.
Furthermore, I would like to thank Professor Karin Bauer and the Department of
German Studies at McGill University for the continuing support during my masters’
degree.
ii
ABSTRACT
This thesis approaches the topic of feminine representation through comparative
readings of two eighteenth-century Enlightenment tragedies, G. E. Lessing’s Emilia
Galotti (1772) and Charlotte von Stein’s Dido (1794), as well as two twentieth-century
Nazi films, Leni Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light (1932) and Veit Harlan’s Jew Süss (1940).
In addition to the obvious diachronic dimension of this project, my framework for
examination is thematically structured. Drawing on numerous theories and secondary
sources, I will investigate these texts under three specific topics – namely, female
sexuality, female sacrifice, and finally, the female corpse. All three chronologically
represent the junctures of the rhetorical instrumentalization and abuse of the female body
in these texts.
In light of this, the thesis seeks to thus reveal not only the unexpected diachronic
parallels between the texts and therefore between the Enlightenment and the Nazi period,
but more importantly, it seeks to reinterrogate hitherto accepted readings of these texts
vis-à-vis feminine representation.
iii
SOMMAIRE
Ce mémoire aborde le sujet de la représentation de la femme à travers des lectures
comparatives de deux tragédies de l’époque de les Lumières, Emilia Galotti (1772) de G.
E. Lessing et Dido (1794) de Charlotte von Stein, ainsi que de deux films nazis, La
lumière bleue (1932) de Leni Riefenstahl, et Juif Süss (1940) de Veit Harlan.
Outre la dimension diachronique évidente de ce projet, ma recherche est organisée
par thèmes. En me référant à plusieurs théories et sources secondaires, j’explore ces
œuvres en me concentrant sur trois thèmes spécifiques : la sexualité féminine, le sacrifice
féminin et finalement le cadavre féminin. Ces trois thèmes illustrent les étapes de
l’instrumentalisation et de l’abus rhétoriques du corps féminin dans ces œuvres.
Ce mémoire révèle donc ainsi non seulement les parallèles diachroniques
imprévues entre les œuvres, et, donc, entre les Lumières et le Nazisme, mais, de façon
plus significative, ce mémoire remet en question les interprétations que l’on a faites de
ces œuvres quant à la représentation de la femme.
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ii
ABSTRACT
iii
SOMMAIRE
iiii
INTRODUCTION
1
CHAPTER 1
Her Body is a Battlefield: Female Sexuality and Male Struggle
1.1
Introduction
1.2
Male Struggle
1.3
Sexual Violence
1.4
Conclusion
9
10
20
28
CHAPTER 2
Female Sacrifice: The Maternal Abject and the Heroine
2.1
Introduction
2.2
Destruction of the Maternal Abject
2.3
Heroism and the “Hidden Sacrifice”
2.4
Conclusion
31
32
44
54
CHAPTER 3
Exhuming the Corpse: The Aesthetics and Affect of Feminine Death
3.1
Introduction
3.2
A Shift in the Aesthetics of Death
3.3
“Something is Rotten…”: Affect through Deflection
3.4
Conclusion
55
56
66
75
CONCLUSION
77
BIBLIOGRAPHY
80
v
INTRODUCTION
The almost dogmatic swiftness with which we can label narratives anti-Semitic or
racist but still, on the other hand, hesitate to label others anti-feminine is astounding. For
example, following a recent screening of Veit Harlan’s film Jew Süss at the Montréal
Goethe Institute, the usual discussion about the horrors of the film’s blatant antiSemitism and lack of overall cinematic value ensued. While I certainly do not disagree
with the former criticism, I was surprised that during this frenzied attack not once was
the, I would argue, equally strong anti-feminine message of the film ever mentioned.
While research on this particular topic, even apropos this film, has surfaced in recent
decades, a general resistance to anti-feminine labeling or even recognition vis-à-vis film
and literary narratives nevertheless subsists.
Motivated by a desire to address this oversight, I propose a comparative reading
of two eighteenth-century “heroine” tragedies, G.E. Lessing’s Emilia Galotti (1772) and
Charlotte von Stein’s Dido (1794) as well as two National Socialist melodramatic films,
Leni Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light (1932) and Veit Harlan’s Jew Süss (1940) within the
context of their representations of women.
In their shared rhetorical abuse and
instrumental negation of the female body, I argue that all four narratives project a strong
anti-feminine message. Thematically, this project may appear to duplicate numerous
other feminist investigations; however, my selection of texts and time periods –
Enlightenment and National Socialism – add a consequential historical-ideological frame
to my argument. Indeed, this thesis is especially interested in the question of why the
female body becomes a key site of representational focus during these two pivotal
moments in the rise and fall of bourgeois Germany. Through an examination of this
phenomenon of feminine representation, I believe that we can expand our understanding
of the genre of bourgeois tragedy as well as Nazi film. Furthermore, this thesis aims to
gain insight into their respective periods, and through this scope achieve a better
understanding of that which we call “modernity.” I argue that by examining the role of
women in these texts we can uncover an historical continuum at work here.
The most crucial question I pose here is why does the German bourgeois tragedy,
according to Georg Lukács, the first emancipation genre to grace early modernity,1
employ and instrumentalize the female body as a means to represent the struggle for
bourgeois freedom and subjectivity, when this struggle, it seems, has absolutely nothing
to do with the woman? This is a question that has not been posed enough in this area of
scholarship, even despite the plethora of secondary literature on the topic of the heroine
and the bourgeois tragedy.
Starting chronologically, my first text, Emilia Galotti, is indeed the archetype of
the German bourgeois tragedy genre and fundamentally representative of German
Enlightenment literature. My second text, a later and much less known tragedy, Dido,
although not a bourgeois tragedy per se, employs many of the same motifs, including,
specifically, its utilization of the female body. It is pertinent here to refer to Peter
Szondi’s argument that the bourgeois tragedy is not just about the bourgeois family, but,
1
“Das bürgerliche Drama, Lukács explains, “ist das erste, welches aus bewußtem Klassengegensatz
erwachsen ist; das erste, dessen Ziel es war, der Gefühls- und Denkweise einer um Freiheit und Macht
kämpfende Klasse, ihrer Beziehung zu den anden Klassen, Ausdruck zu geben. Daraus folgt schon, daß in
dem Drama meistenteils beide aufrücken müssen, die kämpfende sowohl als die, gegen welche der Kampf
sich abspielt.” Lukács, Georg. Zur Soziologie des moderenen Dramas. See Peter Szondi’s Die Theorie des
bürgerlichen Trauerspiels im 18. Jahrhundert. (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1973), 17.
2
rather, about the socio-historical cementing of bourgeois values in society, including, for
instance, virtue and self-control, a dimension that can certainly be found in Dido.2
The other two texts, The Blue Light and Jew Süss, are films from the pre- and
latter Nazi period. Although their ideological and political messages seem to clearly
oppose those of the bourgeois tragedy, these films continue to use the female body as a
site for male struggle and subjectivity. Again, the question must be raised: why is the
female body utilized to symbolically represent, in this case, the Nazi “struggle”?
Released in 1932, The Blue Light does not immediately assume the fascist label,
especially when one considers that Riefenstahl made the film with the prominent Jewish
filmmaker Béla Bálazs.3 However, it is undoubtedly responsible for propelling her career
as the Nazi party director,4 and arguably contains elements of Nazi ideology, not least of
all in its supposed fervent anti-modernity message. My other film, Jew Süss, by contrast,
is undisputedly a National Socialist film, commissioned and financed by the Nazi Party’s
Propaganda Ministry. Moreover, its director, Veit Harlan, was the only Nazi director to
stand on trial in Nuremberg following the collapse of the Third Reich.
2
The thesis of Szondi’s examination of the eighteenth-century bourgeois tragedy focuses on re-defining and
broadening the parameters of traditional interpretations of this genre. He argues that many of the themes
and motifs we attribute to the genre, including its requisite depiction of the bourgeois family in the centre
of the text, for example in the case of Miss Sara Sampson are not present. This bourgeois tragedy is, rather,
the story of an aristocratic family, already indicated by the titles of father and daughter: “Sir Sampson” and
“Miss Sampson.” Instead, as I mention above, Szondi argues that the bourgeois tragedy depicts a sociohistorical “Verbürgerlichung” of society. (Ibid.) Also, von Stein’s decision to model her tragedy after the
Justin source, which depicts Dido as faithful widow, whose actions are motivated by honour and politics,
rather than the much more well known sources, for instance, from Virgil or Ovid, wherein Dido is
motivated by her love for Aeneas, and becomes pregnant with his child.
3
It should be noted, however, that although Bálazs wrote the screenplay for the film, it is also well known
that Riefenstahl refused to pay him for it. See for example Rentschler, Eric. “Fatal Attractions: Leni
Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light.” October 48 (Spring 1989): 47-68. 66.
4
It was indeed this film (which marked her debut as a director) that so impressed Hitler and interested him
in Riefenstahl’s filmmaking skills.
3
The disparities even within the genres themselves are not uninteresting in so far as
they broaden the parameters of this study. In other words, instead of opting for two
classical bourgeois tragedies, I chose Dido, not only for its obscurity, but also for its
unconventionality; it does not categorically and diachronically fall under the genre of the
German bourgeois tragedy. This is also true for The Blue Light, whose (proto-) fascist
categorization has been a constant source of debate among film scholars.5 Furthermore,
in consideration of the nature of my study – namely, feminine representation – it seems
appropriate to address female- as well as male-authored texts.
Above all, what draws me to these four texts are their intrinsically analogical
patterns of feminine representation. They are clearly indicative of this representational
tradition, which I intend to bring to light here. One main factor makes these texts
interesting in a comparative sense: their treatment and sacrifice of the female body
through sexuality and death, and moreover, in so far as this sacrifice, both symbolic and
real, appears ironically essential to two otherwise “opposing” politico-ideological
landscapes: eighteenth-century Enlightenment and twentieth-century National Socialism.
All four narratives can be organized into three junctures of the instrumentalization
and negation of the female body: the sexualized body, the sacrificed body, and the dead
body. Within each juncture, the female body serves as a site for misdirected violence – it
is the victim of patriarchal assertion and negotiation. The woman’s role in each narrative
5
While Susan Sontag and Eric Rentschler have recognized The Blue Light as a fascist film, others, like for
instance Linda Schulte-Sasse argue to the contrary. Schulte-Sasse contends that the death of the main
character Junta prevents the film from offering an imaginary reconciliation of modern tensions, otherwise
pinnacle to Nazi texts. See Schulte-Sasse, Linda. “Leni Riefenstahl’s Feature Films and the Question of a
Fascist Aesthetic.” Framing the Past: The Historiography of German Cinema and Television. Ed. Bruce A.
Murray and Christopher J. Wickham. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992), 159.
4
is essentially passive: her body is merely a rhetorical tool, instrumentalized and abused
not only on a narrative level but also on an aesthetic and affective level.
Via close readings of these texts, this thesis aims to demonstrate a continuity of
the symbolic utilization of the female body between the Enlightenment and Nazi periods,
which, I believe, is fundamentally suggestive of the representational affinities between
these two ideological moments in German history. By uncovering the parallels between
these texts, we will be able to recognize parallels between two these periods, which we
might not otherwise want to look at or believe.
These textual parallels, named above as the junctures of the instrumentalization
and negation of the female body, are delineated individually in each chapter. For my
examination of female sexuality in these four texts, I refer to Klaus Theweleit’s Male
Fantasies 1 (1980), specifically his characterization of women’s bodies as “territories of
desire” (Wunschterritorien), which offers an insightful and historical look at the way in
which female sexuality has traditionally served as a utopian site for the projection of male
desires. I demonstrate how this representation is actually two-sided in my texts, as
female sexuality constitutes both male desire and struggle. Furthermore, I also refer to
Michel Foucault’s work on the genealogy of sexuality and bio-power in his first volume
of The History of Sexuality (1976). His postulation that sexuality has traditionally been
the basis for power discourses, offers a critical point of departure from which to examine
the representation of female sexuality as essentially a site for negotiating power. As a
result, the body of the woman also becomes the site of misdirected sexual violence.
The following chapter will investigate themes and economies of sacrifice in my
four texts. Here, I address René Girard’s pivotal investigations of secular sacrificial
5
discourses, delineated most prominently in his Violence and the Sacred (1972). Beyond
that, I turn my attention to the writings of Luce Irigarary and Julia Kristeva, whose
respective texts “Women, the Sacred, Money” (1984) and Powers of Horror: An Essay
on Abjection (1980) offer feminist perspectives on the topic of sacrifice vis-à-vis the
maternal body, feminine self-sacrifice, and martyrdom. It becomes clear that all four
texts not only embrace the theme of female sacrifice, but that woman is coded as the
ultimate sacrificial victim, whose death is instrumental in reconciling patriarchal
antagonism.
Finally, this thesis will conclude with an examination of the female corpse. With
Elisabeth’s Bronfen’s comprehensive study of death, femininity, and aesthetics, Over her
Dead Body (1992) as my backdrop, this chapter will take a closer look at the role of the
female corpse and the aesthetic and affective strategies evident in my four texts.
Moreover, I will also refer to Lessing’s own aesthetic writings, especially Laokoon
(1766), and Saul Friedländer’s pivotal work on Nazi aesthetics Reflections of Nazism
(1984). The reduction of the female protagonist into a corpse in each text is a significant
and symbolically charged culmination of this instrumentalization and negation of the
feminine. Even the abjection generated by her dead body is strategically deflected
through a strategy of aesthetic affect, engendering a kind of double sacrifice of the
woman in these texts.
This theoretical corpus shall guide as well as challenge my methodology and
approach of deconstruction and reinterrogation of hitherto received views of Emilia
Galotti, Dido, The Blue Light, and Jew Süss and their representations of women. Indeed,
for the most part, these theoretical texts focus on rethinking otherwise conventional
6
narratives.
Furthermore, through my juxtaposition of Enlightenment and National
Socialist texts, I also set out to question the notions of emancipation, agency, and
subjectivity (specifically with regard to women) considered imperative to Enlightenment
discourses.
In the tradition of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, this thesis thus
peripherally addresses “the dialectic of Enlightenment.” That is, simply by suggesting
possible parallels between Enlightenment and National Socialist texts, one cannot avoid
asserting a certain critique against the former. Then, if we choose to call Enlightenment
the “age of reason and emancipation” or “the paradigm of norms,” National Socialism
must necessarily be its opposite – the manifestation of “unreason” and the complete
deviation from normality.
But what if, as a parallel reading of Enlightenment and
National Socialist texts would suggest (and as Horkheimer and Adorno indeed propose)
its opposite already exists within Enlightenment? What if the (un)logic of totalitarianism
is not a deviation, but, rather, an inherent dimension of Enlightenment itself?6 While I do
not assume to further this philosophical debate, as my focus is primarily a close-text
analysis of the representations of women in these selected works, this project irrefutably
stems from and underscores the basic tenets of this anti-Enlightenment tradition.
To be certain, then, it is also not my intention to once again point out the misuse
of classical German texts and codes by the Nazis, as Linda Schulte-Sasse has done in her
seminal comparative study of Jew Süss and the eighteenth-century bourgeois tragedy,
Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Otherness (1996).
6
7
I nevertheless
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor Adorno. The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Ed.
Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002).
7
The basic thesis of Schulte-Sasse’s study is that there are obvious parallels between the eighteenthcentury bourgeois tragedy (especially Emilia Galotti) and Harlan’s film, which misappropriates the classic
7
acknowledge the marked influence of her work on this project. Nor do I set out to trace
the relative genealogy of “Trivialliteratur” (trivial literature) – namely, the development
of the melodrama through to the apoliticization of the bourgeois tragedy8 – as suggested
by Jochen Schulte-Sasse in his Die Kritik der Trivialliteratur seit der Aufklärung (1971)
or in Jürgen Link’s article “Von ‘Kabale und Liebe’ zur ‘Love Story’ – Zur
Evolutionsgesetzlichkeit eines bürgerlichen Geschichtentyps (1979). Instead, I aim to
take a more thematic as well as synchronic approach to the general problem of feminine
representation in the literature and film of these periods respectively.
genre to create a familiar framework within which to disseminate anti-Semitic propaganda. See Linda
Schulte-Sasse. Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema. (Durham: Duke UP,
1996).
8
Melodrama was an especially privileged genre of Nazi cinema. My two selected films arguably contain
elements melodrama.
8
CHAPTER 1
Her Body is a Battlefield: Female Sexuality and Male Struggle
1.1 Introduction
This first chapter will focus on the depiction and symbolism of female sexuality
in G.E. Lessing’s Emilia Galotti, Charlotte von Stein’s Dido, Leni Riefenstahl’s The Blue
Light, and Veit Harlan’s Jew Süss. I shall argue that the female body (and sexuality)
becomes a site for male struggle, and thereby also a site for sexual violence. The woman
herself plays a passive role – this is not a gender struggle. Rather, this is a patriarchal
struggle. Instead, in each text, the female body becomes the victim of sexual violence in
an act of displaced enmity.
There exists a long tradition of the topos of the female (sexual) body as a site for
patriarchal assertion and projection. As a result, this body often constitutes the site for
male sexual domination vis-à-vis an imaginary power struggle. For instance, in his Male
Fantasies I (1980), Klaus Theweleit argues that women’s bodies have traditionally been
objectified as “territories of desire” (Wunschterritorien) upon which masculine utopias
are projected.9 I agree with Theweleit to a point – traditionally, men have sublimated
their “real” desires (to conquer and/or destroy the “enemy”) through conquering and/or
destroying the woman (the easier target). Rape, for example, is not about sexual desire,
but, rather, about power. In the case of these texts, however, I would argue that the
9
“So kann hinter jeder neuen Entgrenzung die Summe der Leiber der Frauen erscheinen, Meere von
bewegtem Fleisch und jungfräulicher Haut, Haarströme und Augenseen, ein unendliches unbetretenes
Wunschterritorium auf das in jeder Phase historischer Deterritorialisierung die Wünsche von Männern sich
ergießen konnten auf der Suche nach dem Material für die (unkonkreten) Utopien.”Theweleit, Klaus.
Männerphantasien 1: Frauen, Fluten, Körper, Geschichte. (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980), 303-304.
9
women’s bodies are as much dystopian sites as they are utopian, for they ultimately
constitute an imaginary place of struggle.
In this chapter, I shall examine this patriarchal struggle and its displacement onto
the female body within each text. Referring specifically to Michel Foucault’s seminal
text on sexuality, namely, his first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976), this chapter
will examine the link between sexuality, domination, and power relations. In doing so,
this reading will afford us new insights into these texts apropos their rhetorical
instrumentalization of the female sexuality.
1.2 The Male Struggle
It is impossible to discuss sexuality, especially within the socio-historical context
of the eighteenth century, without evoking Michel Foucault’s genealogical theory of
sexuality. As Foucault delineates, this epoch witnessed the so-called “birth of sexuality,”
in which sexual discourse was suddenly blown open. Categories and theories of sexuality
were introduced. Sociological studies of sexual practices and reproduction were taken
up. Sexuality became, in effect, a critical tool for controlling population and cutting
down on disease, a method that Foucault famously refers to as “bio-power.” The first to
be “sexualized” was the “idle” woman10 (the reproducer, not the producer), whose
fundamental role was to populate the world with healthy, strong workers. Perhaps most
interesting to us at this point is the notion that sexuality, according to Foucault and
others, has traditionally been linked to power discourses.11 Sex was manipulated and
employed as means of exercising power. While Foucault argues that this is what started
10
Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. (New York:
Vintage Books, 1990), 121.
11
Ibid., 90.
10
happening on a social-political level, I would argue that this is also what started
happening to a degree on a symbolic level in literature.
In this section, I shall examine the power discourses present in my four texts. As
I mentioned in the introduction, these are essentially male power struggles (between men
and between man and himself) not so much for control over the woman – she is by no
means the “prize” of masculinity – but more specifically, for subjectivity, hegemony,
self-control, and finally racial purity. Furthermore, I shall demonstrate how the female
body (and sexuality) is no more than the symbolic site of this struggle.
In the case of Emilia Galotti, there is a plethora of contemporary scholarship that
tends to privilege Emilia’s sexual agency, often declaring her final fatal act as an
incestuous, masochistic desire for her father.12 However, I argue that Emilia, on the
contrary, has no real sexual agency. Instead, her body is a vessel for the exertion of the
traditional opposing powers of the bourgeois tragedy: on one side the Prince, representing
the aristocracy, and on the other side her father, Odoardo, representing the bourgeoisie.
This is most apparent in the dialogue between Emilia’s mother, Claudia, and Odoardo (II,
4). Although we are made aware of the political dissent between the Prince and Odoardo
(I, 4)13 earlier in the play, this scene, as Brigitte Prutti rightly claims, “contains the
genesis of the Prince as the father’s erotic archrival.”14 Here, Claudia naively tells her
husband about Emilia’s encounter with the Prince at the Grimbaldi’s vegghia. As Prutti
further points out, the mother’s anecdote, which is supposed to dispel Odoardo’s
12
See, for instance, Heidi M. Schlipphacke, “The Dialectic of Female Desire in G. E. Lessing’s Emilia
Galotti.” Lessing Yearbook XXXIII (2001): 55-77.
13
“PRINZ: Auch kenn ich ihren Vater. Er ist mein Freund nicht. Er war es, der sich meinen Ansprüchen
auf Sabionetta am meisten widersetzte. – Ein alter Degen; stolz und rau; sonst bieder und gut!” – (I, 4)
14
Prutti, Brigitte. “Coup de Théâtre–Coup de Femme: What is Emilia Galotti dying from?” Lessing
Yearbook XXVI (1994): 1-27. 14.
11
suspicions about the Prince’s hatred for him (“Der Prinz haßt mich—“II, 4) achieves the
opposite effect.15
Claudia: Denn hab ich dir schon gesagt, dass der Prinz unsere Tochter gesehen hat?
Odoardo: Der Prinz? Und wo das?
Claudia: In der letzten Vegghia, bei dem Kanzler Grimbaldi, die er mit seiner Gegenwart beehrte. Er
bezeigte sich gegen sie so gnädig -Odoardo: So gnädig?
Claudia: Er unterhielt sich mit ihr so lange -Odoardo: Unterhielt sich mit ihr?
Claudia: Schien von ihrer Munterkeit und ihrem Witze so bezaubert -Odoardo: So bezaubert? -Claudia: Hat von ihrer Schönheit mit so vielen Lobeserhebungen gesprochen -Odoardo: Lobeserhebung? Und das alles erzählst du mir in einem Tone der Entzückung? O Claudia!
Claudia! eitle, törichte Mutter!
In this highly rhetorical dialogue Odoardo clearly demonstrates his distress at the news of
Emilia’s encounter with the Prince. He is unable to respond to his wife with more than
simple questions, each time repeating her words in disbelief, as though to allow himself
the opportunity to fully digest the information. This lack of comprehension on the part of
the father also indicates his preoccupation with his own thoughts; he is likely imagining
the Prince gazing desiring at his daughter.
Although little is actually said in this
dialogue, the repeated use of the double hyphen at the end of almost every speech act
throughout seems to replace the ellipsis, thereby intentionally omitting words at the end
of each sentence. The use of imagination, therefore, becomes essential here, even to the
audience.
In my view, it is neither the over-protective nature of the father nor his incestuous
jealousy of the usurping gaze of the Prince over his daughter, which is the product of
Odoardo’s imagination and source of his discontent; rather, he clearly interprets the
Prince’s advances on his daughter as an attack on his person. When his wife asks him
15
Ibid.
12
why he is so upset, he responds: “Ha! Wenn ich mir einbilde – Das gerade wäre der Ort,
wo ich am tödlichsten zu verwunden bin! – Ein Wollüstling, der bewundert, begehrt.”
(Ibid.) Many scholars believe that these dark imaginings of the father, on the very day of
his daughter’s wedding, are directly linked to his anxiety about being replaced and thus
relinquishing the patriarchal power over his daughter. I believe that a closer look at this
statement reveals another possible reading.
The employment of the word “Ort” to describe his daughter’s body is especially
relevant to my argument, that the woman’s body is indeed a site of male struggle – as it is
at this site where Odoardo can be fatally wounded, this “Ort” is a battlefield. Not only
the tragic outcome of the play, but also Odoardo’s criticism of Emilia’s budding sexuality
(which she also strongly criticizes later), indicate the personification of “der Ort,” as well
as Odoardo’s relative indifference for the health and safety of his daughter vis-à-vis his
own loss of power and subjectivity at the hands of the Prince, who is ultimately his
sovereign. In this regard, I believe we could go as far as to interpret the use of the term
“Wollüstling” (“sensualist”) to refer to “der Ort” (the daughter’s body) and not “der
Prinz,” as for example Friedrich Kittler argues.16
The sexualized body of Emilia Galotti finds its analogue in von Stein’s Dido, in
which the queen’s body can be read in a similar way. Once again, what little secondary
literature exists on the play (including comments by von Stein herself) argues that the
Dido character demonstrates agency apropos her own body, and that the struggle depicted
here is not simply patriarchal, but essentially between man and woman.17 However, I
16
Kittler, Friedrich A. “Erziehung ist Offenbarung: zur Struktur der Familie in Lessings Dramen.”
Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft (1977): 111-137. (Especially page 131.)
17
See Susanne Kord (Ed.), “Einleitung.” Charlotte von Stein: Dramen (Gesamtausgabe). (Hildesheim:
Georg Olms, 1998), VIII.
13
interpret the Dido character differently, and her body and sexuality in particular. The
barbarian King Jarbas’s marriage proposal as the alternative to a bloody attack on her
kingdom evokes interesting parallels between the two texts. Clearly, such a “trade”
would never come into question if Dido were a man. In fact, at the end of the play, when
Dido hands over her kingdom to her most trusted male advisor and then destroys herself,
Jarbas throws his hands up in defeat. Although I find this ending rather ambiguous, it
further emphasizes the critical role of Dido’s body as a space of potentiality for Jarbas
(which is finally destroyed). Moreover, it appears as though the possibility of waging
war on Carthage dies with Dido.
However, more than just an object of “homosocial” trade (in the sense of Luce
Irigaray)18 between men, Dido’s body is a metaphor for her kingdom – a feminized (i.e.,
sexualized) “Staatskörper.” The act of a forced marriage, and the accompanying forced
coitus, therefore, become symbolically parallel to the act of war on her kingdom. Both
Dido and her kingdom are too weak to resist Jarbas. Moreover, according to Jarbas’s
claim that “Sklavinnen sind alles, was ich begehre” (I, 9); it is not the queen herself
whom Jarbas sexually desires; rather, the power over the queen’s body (in a sense, her
enslaving) and the “Schätze” (wealth and knowledge) of Carthage comprise the object of
his desire.
The conquering of Dido’s body can, therefore, be interpreted as the
conquering of her kingdom. Thus, Dido’s body becomes a site of both potentiality and
struggle for Jarbas – a symbolic battlefield in his pursuit of power and material wealth.
18
Irigaray argues that women have been traditionally traded as “commodities” by men in order to establish
what she refers to as homosocial bonds. See Luce Irigaray, “Women on the Market.” Literary Theory: An
Anthology. Trans. Catherine Porter. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 799811.
14
The topos of the female body as the site of both potentiality and struggle also
arises in both films. To begin chronologically, the Junta figure in Riefenstahl’s The Blue
Light can certainly be examined along these lines. In his investigation of the film, Eric
Rentschler argues that “Woman stands as a site of projection: either as an image of male
fascination or as a mental screen whose sole content is male presence.”19 This statement
is quite pertinent to my examination of Junta and the overall thesis of this chapter.
However, I believe that “woman as a site of male projection” can be further defined
within the framework of this film. Again, I argue that this projection onto the female
body is essentially that of male struggle.
Junta’s body is clearly a sexual object of scopophilia, both diegetically and extradiegetically, as the object of the gaze not only of the men in the film, but also of the
camera and thereby of the audience.20 Just as the men of the village persistently gaze at
her longingly, with her ripped, rather revealing clothing and wild hair, the camera also
fetishizes Junta’s body with low-key lighting, filters, and pregnant compositions: for
instance, she is often framed against the backdrop of the rushing waterfall, strongly
invoking what Theweleit considers the quintessential symbol for uncontrolled female
sexuality.21 This projection of sexual desire is, of course, coupled with a projection of
danger, as there is traditionally nothing more threatening and potentially dangerous to a
man than female sexuality.
The danger of female sexuality is pervasively depicted in the film. The blue light
emitted from a crystal-enriched grotto at the top of the Mount Cristallo, reflected by the
19
Rentschler (Note 17), 55.
See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Issues in Feminist Film Criticism. Ed.
Patricia Arens. (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990), 35.
21
This is one of the main themes found in Klaus Theweleit’s first volume of Männerphantasien, (Note 8).
20
15
full moon, lures the young men of the village to a fatal climb (interestingly, this
phenomenon attracts the young men exclusively). The light from the crystals creates
such frenzy in the village that shutters of houses are closed, and young men are forced
inside. Junta, because of her perceived sexual evocation and her ability to climb the
mountain herself, is inevitably blamed for the tragic deaths of the young men of the
village.
I can recognize how, at first glance, this struggle could be interpreted as a male
struggle with the vagina dentata, that is, against the castrating force of female sexuality.
The ubiquitous use of water symbolism could certainly support this argument: the almost
overwhelmingly sublime shots of the waterfall, which at every moment threatens to
consume the village, again brilliantly evoke a Theweleitian interpretation of the male fear
of being consumed by unleashed female sexuality. Furthermore, there is a river that
separates the village from the mountains, and ultimately from Junta – a “dangerous”
threshold, which is only crossed by the villagers near the end of film.
Junta, although presented as the object of sexual desire and vaginal threat, is, I
would argue, by no means a femme fatale figure.
She is more like a child – a
“Naturkind” – and her sexual naïveté and innocence (and resulting lack of sexual agency)
are even more evident than in the case of Emilia and Dido.
This was, in fact,
Riefenstahl’s intention with the creation of the Junta figure: “She [Riefenstahl] conceived
Junta as an embodiment of purity, ‘a young girl, intact and innocent, whom fear made
retract at any contact with reality, with matter, with sex.’”22 Moreover, I read the
simultaneously foreboding and alluring shots of the Mount Cristallo as the creation of a
22
This quote was taken from an interview with Riefenstahl in Interviews with Film Directors. See Eric
Rentschler. “A Legend for Modern Times: The Blue Light.” The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its
Afterlife. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996), 48.
16
phallic symbol. Indeed, the young men of the village, especially the innkeeper’s son,
gaze just as longingly at the mountain as they do at Junta. Of course, the allusion to
Novalis’s symbolic “blue flower” as the quintessential symbol of the romantic quest for
the sacred and sublime cannot be overlooked. However, I believe that the crux of this
struggle is not between man and the world, or the divine, but, rather, between man and
himself, in a conflict with phallic, not vaginal potency. While Theweleit might contend
that it is phallicized vaginal power (represented by the phallic Mount Cristallo), in other
words, the masculinized woman, who is the greatest threat to man,23 I would argue
instead that there is in fact an Oedipal imbroglio represented in this film. The phallic-like
Mount Cristallo as metaphor for the patriarchal is indeed the obstacle, which the young
men must overcome in order to reach the grotto, which Eric Rentschler appropriately
interprets as Junta’s (maternal) “womb-like retreat.”24 This male struggle, then, can be
equated with the symbolic Oedipal struggle. While, even despite her innocence, Junta
may appear to play an antagonistic role in this struggle as a kind of femme fatale figure, I
would argue, that her role is essentially symbolic: her connection to the grotto
underscores her role as Lacan’s maternal Thing – the embodiment of the unobtainable
desired object. Thus, this is not a struggle for the woman (the mother), but, rather, it can
be read as the male struggle into the patriarchal social order.
23
In a retelling of a scene with a “red” woman (who was most despised by the Frei Corps), Theweleit
elucidates the men’s fear of the masculinzed woman: “Die zwei Pistolen in jeder Hand deuten darauf hin,
daß mehr (oder etwas anderes) als nur Pistolen gemeint sein müssen. Die Vermutung, es handle sich um die
Phantasie eines bedrohlichen Penis, wird von der ganzen Erscheinung der “Spartakidenweiber” gestützt:
mit fliegenden Haaren auf struppigen Pferden, pistolenbestückt, bieten sie das Bild schrecklicher sexueller
Potenz. Sie wird nicht als vaginale, sondern als phallische Potenz phantasiert und gefürchtet. Theweleit
(Note 8), 73
24
Rentschler (Note 18), 64.
17
A similar psychoanalytical reading is not possible vis-à-vis my second film.
Rather, my examination of the last female protagonist, Dorothea in Harlan’s Jew Süss,
shares many thematic parallels with my first text, Emilia Galotti – parallels, which
Schulte-Sasse insightfully points out in her aforementioned comprehensive study of the
film.25 Among other things, the sexuality of Dorothea, the main female character in the
film, is again, and even more manifestly, a site of male struggle between her father and
an outside force; however, this is no longer merely a political struggle, as within the
framework of the bourgeois tragedy, but, rather, it is essentially a racial struggle between
Aryans and Jews.
In many ways, Dorothea is reduced to her value as reproducer of the race in this
film.
Numerous shots of her at the harpsichord or framed by the window of the
bourgeois home strongly symbolize her connection to domestic harmony, racial
homogeneity, and reproduction.26 In fact, it is only during the two occasions in which
she leaves the safety of the domestic feminine sphere and enters the public male sphere of
production, unaccompanied by her father and fiancé that she falls into “danger.”
Contrary to Emilia, the downfall of the young woman cannot be attributed to her own
sexual awakening, but, rather, to her complete ignorance. It should be added that this
film, even more strongly than the other three texts, contains a blatant anti-feminine
message: as elucidated by the fact that, as Régine Friedman points out, Süss’s rise to
power is greatly facilitated not only by the lasciviousness and greed of the Duke, but
25
See Schulte-Sasse (Note 6).
Schulte-Sasse contends that the shots of Dorothea at the harpsichord evoke an 18th-century iconographic
tradition, which reads the harpsichord as a standard-bearer of Western culture and, therefore, an instrument
of harmony. This is true of the music itself as well. Women’s connection to harpsichord is meant to
visually represent their role as “producers of a race.”(Ibid.), 57-58.
26
18
especially by the greed and ignorance of the women in the film.27 It is indeed the Duke’s
attempt to fulfill his wife’s wish for expensive jewels, which incites the meeting of Süss
and the Duke, and it is Dorothea who ignorantly brings Süss safely into Stuttgart after his
carriage breaks down.
The home as a symbol of domesticity and intimacy is generally an interesting
motif in the film. In my view, Süss’s “destruction” of the home (as witnessed in the case
of the blacksmith’s house, literally torn in half and completely exposed because it sits on
one of Süss’s roads) foreshadows and draws parallels to the demise of Dorothea.
Rentschler refers to the destruction of the house as “the virtual plague upon the House of
Württemberg.”28 This “virtual plague” becomes a real “plague” upon the people of
Württemberg with the rape of Dorothea.
It is, in fact, Süss’s desire for Dorothea – the quintessential symbol for
domesticity and reproduction in the film – which represents the greatest threat to
Württemberg – the threat to the racial purity of not only the Sturm family, but also that of
the hitherto “judenfrei” city of Stuttgart, of Württemberg (and, by extension, of Nazi
Germany). In an attempt to hinder Süss’s sexual and, therefore, racial usurpation of his
daughter’s body,29 the father Sturm swiftly and secretly marries Dorothea off to her
fiancé Faber, resolutely stating: “[Meine] Tochter soll keine Judenkinder auf die Welt
setzen.” It is not a question of what Dorothea would or could want, nor a question of
27
Friedman, Régine Mihal. “Male Gaze and Female Reaction: Veit Harlan’s Jew Süss.” Gender and
Cinema: Feminist Interventions. Vol. 2. Eds. Sandra Friedman et al. (Providence: Berg, 1993), 124.
28
Rentschler (Note 21), 151.
29
This fear of so-called racial “usurpation” of the Aryan woman by the Jew was not with regard to
offspring but also to the woman herself, who, it was believed, could be “made” Jewish through the
absorption of Jewish sperm into the lining of her womb. The following is a quote by Julius Streicher: “Der
männliche Same wird bei der Begattung ganz oder teilweise von dem weiblichen Mutterboden aufgesaugt
und geht so in das Blut über. Ein einziger Beischlaf eines Juden bei einer arischen Frau genügt, um deren
Blut für immer zu vergiften. See Klaus Theweleit, Männerphantasien 2: Männerkörper – zur
Psychoanalyse des weißen Terrors. (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980), 12-13.
19
power, money, or status; instead, the father is concerned only with the racial purity of his
family and descendants. This erupts in a direct struggle between the father and Süss in
the Sturm home, when Süss visits him a second time to ask for his daughter’s hand in
marriage. The normally calculating and composed Sturm becomes so enraged that he
physically attacks Süss for his audacity and throws him out of his house.
Dorothea’s body, as the vessel for reproduction and for the perpetuation of the
race, is discernibly the site of struggle between her Aryan father and the Jew Süss – a
racial struggle which is ultimately representative for the entire film, and again, by
extension, for Nazi Germany.
In my view, theses existing male struggles are most prominently manifest through
misdirected animosity toward the site of female sexuality itself. As I shall explain in the
second part of this chapter, no struggle is concluded or sublimated without the physical or
symbolic sexual violation of the woman in each text.
1.3 Sexual Violence
The topos of the female body as a site of sexual violence is nothing new. This is,
in fact, what feminist authors have been working to subvert for a long time, what I like to
call: excavating centuries of damage to the site of the female body. Although this is not
the project of these texts (as I reject self-appropriating feminist readings of these texts –
especially of Emilia Galotti – as examples of masochistic perversion, self-sacrifice, or
rape-fantasy), I do not deny that my own approach is, in a sense, one of excavation and
re-evaluation. In this section, I shall further examine how the male struggle and female
sexuality as a site for this struggle are linked through acts of sexual violence. These are
20
symbolic or literal acts against the woman, whose purpose and function are often unclear.
I argue, however, that these are acts of displacement, essentially misdirected onto the
female body.
In the penultimate scene of Emilia Galotti, Emilia’s sexuality is symbolically
reduced to the rose in her hair – a “fetish for female innocence.”30 In a provocative and
violent act, Emilia rips the rose from her hair, as though, ripping out her own sex.
“EMILIA: Herunter mit dir! Du gehörest nicht in das Haar einer, – wie mein Vater will,
dass ich werden soll!” (V, 8) This forceful statement is interesting, albeit somewhat
ambiguous. The act itself appears to foreshadow the violence to come, but it is perhaps
just as critical to the scene as the final act of “real” violence that follows it. Many
scholars read Emilia’s gesture as a symbolic self-defloration or the self-realization of a
defloration, which has already occurred or which will occur;31 however, I believe that we
can take this reading further. First of all, the gesture is clearly for the sake of her father,
thus demonstrating how Emilia, according to Raimund Neuß, has completely internalized
the fatherly principles of virtue and self-control.32 Her reference to herself as “einer,”
reduces her to a body, or what Prutti refers to as the repulsive paradigm of the “maternal
body,”33 which Emilia rejects here on the basis of these aforementioned principles. It is,
30
See, for instance, Prutti (Note 13); Raimund Neuß, “Lessings Emilia Galotti als Anti-Märtyrerdrama.”
Tugend und Toleranz. Die Krise der Gattung. Märtyrerdrama im 18. Jahrhundert. (Bonn: Bouvier, 1989),
198-234.
31
It is most likely that Emilia is predicting her own loss of control at the questionable “Haus der
Grimaldi,” where her father is suggesting she be taken. “EMILIA: Ich kenne das Haus der Grimaldi. Es ist
das Haus der Freude.” (V, 7)
32
See Neuß (Note 29), 200.
33
See Prutti (Note 13), 18.
21
nonetheless interesting to remember that the mother figure is never depicted favourably
within the bourgeois tragedy.34
This defloration scene comes to a climax with Odoardo’s stabbing of Emilia, in
what P.H. Neumann describes as a “Hauch von Inzest.”35 There is no denying the
incestuous symbolism of this act by the father. The dagger is clearly a phallic symbol,
overpowering the hair needle, which kept Emilia’s rose in place. “ODOARDO: Kind, es
is keine Haarnadel.” (Ibid) Moreover, his violent act completes the deed, which was
symbolically initiated with the rose. The violence of the scene is overwhelming. And
most astounding is this exaggerated portrayal of defloration as such a violent act – one
“schlimmer als tot,” according to Orsina in an earlier scene (IV, 7). Shortly before
stabbing Emilia, Odoardo alludes to her defloration by saying: “Und wenn du ihn
kenntest diesen Dolch! – ” (Ibid). In his words one hears, “if only you knew the “real”
phallus, i.e., the penis, you would not want it.” Again, the dagger as phallus comes to the
fore.
However, the dagger was borrowed from Orsina and was essentially destined for
the heart of the Prince. In my view, Emilia merely presents herself as a willing and easy
target for Odoardo’s revenge on the Prince.36 I reject here the argument that the father is
saving Emilia from her own loss of self-control and honour, or that Emilia, as the
“orchestrator” of this act, is fulfilling some kind of perverted incestuous, masochistic
fantasy. Instead, I interpret Odoardo’s violent rape/murder of his daughter as a cowardly
34
As I will elucidate in later chapters, this rejection of the maternal body can be interpreted as the
Kristevian abjection of the mother. See Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans.
Leon s. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.
35
Neumann, P.H. Der Preis der Mündigkeit: Über Lessings Dramen. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997), 49.
36
Although there is also a plethora of secondary literature contradicting this argument, it has also been
presented by Raimund Neuß. See (Note 24), 194.
22
act, merely sublimating the act of killing his real enemy, the Prince. This is especially
apparent when one considers that this phallic dagger was borrowed, not in the sense of a
borrowed insignia of power, as the king’s crown, but, rather, this phallus does not even
belong to him, already indicating Odoardo’s own impotence and lack of authority.37
In a similar way, coitus is alluded to as act of horrific of violence against the
woman in Dido. From the beginning of the first scene, Dido’s three treacherous advisors
attempt to convince her to accept Jarbas’s offer of marriage on the basis that the widowed
queen is still young and fertile. We are reminded that as a queen, Dido’s sexuality and
body do not belong to her but, rather, to the state and the people, comprised mostly of
men.38 With a highly contrived, not to mention violent, lyrical gesture, the poet and
advisor Ogon, compares Dido’s sexuality to grapes painted on the wall.
OGON: Die Orginale dieser schön gemahlten Trauben, haben schon
längst ihren Saft in die Kelter gegeben: Auf süsses Mädchen! erwache und bring uns den Morgentrank in einem weiten
Becher! und leide nicht, daß die reichen thracischen Weine länger
Gehäuft werden. (I, 1)
The violence of this metaphor draws further parallels between forced coitus upon Dido’s
body and war upon her people, which I mentioned in an earlier section. The employment
of the word “Kelter” (“wine press”) to describe the sex act, or possibly the penis itself,
again draws a terribly violent picture of coitus: the woman’s sex is literally crushed to
destruction. Nonetheless, Ogon calls upon Dido’s sexuality (possibly even a re-birth of
her virginity), beckoning her/it not only to produce an heir – the wine as a product of the
grapes and the wine press – but also to perform anew in Jarbas’s bed with his “Auf
37
Theweleit refers to the Bourgeois man of the eighteenth century as castrated. “Bürgerliche Männer,
selbst Darsteller von Aufklärungsposen, überschlagen sich, um die eigene Kastration unter Beweis zu
stellen […]. See Theweleit (Note 8), 358.
38
There are only two female figures in the whole play: Dido and her lady-in-waiting, Elissa.
23
junges Mädchen!” Although I stated above that these works are not subversive, I cannot
deny that this poetic gesture could be interpreted as tongue-and-cheek. It is well known
that von Stein’s Ogon character is supposed to be a caricature of Goethe, with whom she
had had falling out.39 Nonetheless, it is interesting to note that Dido’s reaction to Ogon in
the play is not at all hostile, (a reaction) which suggests her relative complacency.
The allusion to conquering (or colonizing) Dido’s body in a violent sexual act is
merely a means of gaining political power for Jarbas, and also for the three advisors.
Although it is Dido who eventually kills herself with a phallic dagger, thereby ending
Jarbas’s attempts to overthrow her kingdom, it is clear that her body, as the imaginary
site for this power struggle, is not only symbolically, but also quite literally, the victim of
unnecessary, sexually charged violence.
A parallel argument can be made in the case of Riefenstahl’s Junta figure. The
sexual violation of Junta is masterfully constructed through powerful imagery and filmic
technique. In an effort to unravel the secret of the blue light, and to save the villagers
from its “curse,” the visiting Viennese artist, Vigo, discovers Junta’s safe path up the
mountain to what turns out to be a rich crystal-filled grotto. He immediately informs the
villagers, and a swift mining of the grotto ensues, leaving it completely empty. As
Junta’s “womb-like retreat,” the grotto aptly symbolizes what Rentschler further
describes as “the most intimate female space.”40 Indeed, when Vigo discovers Junta
there, it is as if she is in kind of hypnotic state, completely at peace. Already, Vigo’s
presence in the grotto feels like one of forced entry, as if he had indeed violated her most
39
Dido is considered to mark the end of von Stein’s friendship with Goethe, and her Ogon figure is often
viewed as an attack on Goethe. See Susanne Kord’s “Not in Goethe’s Image.” Thalia’s Daughters: German
Women Dramatists from the Eighteenth Century to the Present. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1998), 55.
40
Rentschler (Note 18), 64.
24
private sphere.
This figurative violation, however, completely eludes Vigo and
subsequently the villagers as well.
In the context of the film’s imagery, then, the excavation of the grotto becomes a
symbolic rape of Junta. The mining is followed by an ecstatic celebration, not only for
the villagers’ newfound riches, but also what Rentschler refers to as their successful
taming of eros.41 The alluring blue light has been extinguished once and for all. A
powerfully constructed dissolve from the mined crystals in the grotto to the clinking wine
glasses at the celebration, and finally to the image of the spilled wine on the table
connotes spilled blood.
This imagery of violence not only foreshadows Junta’s
subsequent death, but also strongly alludes to the sexual violence committed against
Junta through the mining of her grotto. As Schulte-Sasse points out, Riefenstahl reuses
this motif of the spilled wine in her later film Tiefland (Lowlands, 1952) to demonstrate
the actual sexual violation of Martha by the Marquis.42
The taming of eros is therefore achieved through its symbolic fulfillment via the
sexual destruction of the woman’s body: somewhat paradoxically, rape and especially
defloration can often be interpreted as the destruction of female sexuality. The idea that
this male struggle concludes with the annihilation of the imaginary object of desire
suggests that woman exists solely in her connection to male desire. This brings us back
to my earlier citation of Rentschler, namely that “[w]oman stands as a site of projection:
either as an image of male fascination or as a mental screen whose sole content is male
presence.” It furthermore suggests that if man gets rid of this fascination, woman also
41
42
Ibid., 63.
Schulte-Sasse (Note 4), 159.
25
ceases to exist.43 Despite arguments that this film may be read as an actual critique of the
double violation, on one hand the destruction of nature and on the other hand the robbing
of Junta both for capitalist ends, this film is not a critique of the sexual abjection of
woman. Then, as I have demonstrated, this film is just as much about the critical taming
of eros, a theme which corresponds well to Nazi ideology: as Susan Sontag claims in her
much-quoted essay on Riefenstahl “Fascinating Fascism,” “[t]he fascist ideal is to
transform sexual energy into a ‘spiritual’ force, for the benefit of community. The erotic
(that is, woman) is always present as a temptation, with the most admirable response
being a heroic repression of the sexual impulse.”44 Although the “spiritual” force can be
better described as a capitalist force in this film and the “heroic repression” can be better
interpreted as a “heroic conquering,” I believe this quote offers crucial insight into the
reading of this film.
Of course, the desiring threat of female sexuality does not completely disappear
once the crystals have been mined and the blue light forever extinguished. The symbolic
rushing waterfall, for instance, is still very much present. The two final shots of the film
are especially interesting from this perspective. The penultimate shot shows the falls
through the barred window of the inn, suggesting the successful repression of unleashed
female sexuality; however, this shot dissolves into another of the view of the unbarred
falls, leaving the viewer with a certain degree of ambiguity.
Finally, I return to Dorothea, who is interestingly the only figure to actually be
physically raped. As I have demonstrated, the other three texts only offer us an imbroglio
43
This was taken from a documentary on cinema narrated by Slavoj Zizek. See The Pervert’s Guide to
Cinema. Dir. Sophie Fiennes. Perf. Slavoj Zizek. Lonestar-Mischief Films-Amoeba Film, 2006.
44
Sontag, Susan. “Fascinating Fascism.” Under the Sign of Saturn. (New York: Farrar-Straus-Giroux,
1980), 93.
26
of symbols, making the audience unsure of what is “really” being alluded to. Although
we do not actually “see” the rape of Dorothea by Süss on the screen, it obviously
occurs.45 Nonetheless, this conflict between ‘real’ and ‘implied’ rape is an interesting
point of departure in my examination of the film within this context of sexual violence as
displacement.
Although Dorothea’s rape is real, it ultimately serves as a symbolic rape of the
men of Württemberg46 (and by extension again, the rape of Nazi Germany). Moreover,
one could certainly argue that this symbolic rape, as opposed to the real rape of Dorothea,
constitutes the principal crisis within the film. The parallels between Dorothea’s rape and
the simultaneous torture of Faber (with thumbscrews), literally “just across the way,”
demonstrate this quite explicitly. In fact, his screams can be heard from Süss’s bedroom,
but those of Dorothea in Süss’s bedroom cannot be heard in the torture chamber. The
audience is also privy to his torture and thereby his pain, whereas we see nothing of the
rape of Dorothea. While Faber’s bloody and wounded hands bear the signs of violation,
Dorothea’s body, even after being fished from the river, is still completely intact und
possibly even more radiant than before.
Moreover, shortly after Dorothea is raped, Faber is also released without having
confessed to anything. We observe him, in a castrated gesture, painfully attempting to
pull on his coat. More powerfully than in any of the other texts, the sexual violation of
the woman here is irrefutably the sublimation of a greater desire to destroy one’s enemy
or achieve one’s goals. Süss’s revengeful declaration before raping Dorothea can indeed
be read in this way. He tells Dorothea his (Jewish) God is that of “Rache”: “Auge für
45
46
A further critique of this film is indeed its blatant images, which one could argue, cheapen the film.
See Schulte-Sasse (Note 6), 55.
27
Auge, Zahn für Zahn.” Thus, not only his sexual desire for Dorothea, but also, and
perhaps especially, his desire for revenge on the “men” of Württemberg, are meant to be
read as the strongest incitements for his insidious act of sexual violation against
Dorothea.
1.4 Conclusion
The topos of the female body as a site for male struggle and sexual violence can
be traced throughout these four texts. And even within this narrow framework we can
surmise that the female body holds a significant place in these historically defining
genres. Subtle differences are evident with regard to the use and treatment of this topos
from one work to the next. However, I cannot conclude that it can be defined according
to its period of use. It is all too easy, on the one hand, to regard the eighteenth-century
female figures as martyrs and heroines in charge of their own destinies, and on the other,
to interpret the figures of fascist cinema as National Socialist constructs of femininity –
submissive, naïve, and ultimately unimportant. This interpretation, however, is far too
categorical. What I have attempted to show here is that this topos must to be exposed for
what it is – regardless of whether it is part of Enlightenment or National Socialist
narratives – namely, dangerously anti-feminine.
Before concluding the chapter, I would like to return to Foucault, and so end this
chapter with a set of questions, which shall guide my work further. Although I chose not
to specifically address the topic of subjectivity in this chapter, I do believe it is critical to
this whole project.
With regard to Foucault, it is essential to note that these
aforementioned power discourses of sexuality are ultimately linked to subjectivity, in
28
what Foucault refers to as “different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are
made into subjects.”47 I do not wish to examine these specific modes here; however, I
would like to further examine this so-called “making of the subject.”
As I have
demonstrated in this chapter, all four texts can also be interpreted as a struggle for male
subjectivity. Indeed, is this not the nature of most human struggles? Odoardo is seeking
subjectivity as a bourgeois in an aristocratic world (here embodied by the Prince). In his
effort to conquer Dido and her kingdom, Jarbas also wants to learn the enlightened ways
of her people, be delivered from his barbarian status, and thereby gain a new subjectivity.
In contrast, the village men in The Blue Light attempt to establish their sexual subjectivity
against the force of the paternal phallus. And, finally, Süss also seeks new subjectivity
other than just “the Jew.” He attempts to assimilate himself not only in the court, but also
in the Aryan city of Stuttgart by completely changing his appearance, language, and
overall mannerisms. Of course, the film Jew Süss also addresses the subjectivity of
Württemberg’s men, which is ultimately threatened by both Süss and the Duke.
How, then, can we interpret the female body as simultaneously the possibility and
the impossibility of male subjectivity – the imaginary battlefield upon which the male can
win or lose it? Is it merely the process of objectifying (i.e., the woman; the foreigner,
etc.) in order, in turn, to make oneself a subject? In her study of the bourgeois tragedy,
Dorothea von Mücke claims that bourgeois subjectivity clearly depends on at least the
representational abjection of the female body.48 This is irrefutably the case in Nazi
47
Quoted in Paul Rabinow (Ed.), “Introduction.” The Foucault Reader. (New York: Pantheon Books,
1984), 7.
48
Although von Mücke’s examination focuses on Lessing’s first bourgeois tragedy Miss Sara Sampson;
however, parallels can certainly be drawn to other bourgeois tragedies. See Dorothea von Mücke, Virtue
and the Veil of Illusion: Generic Innovation and Pedagogical Project in Eighteenth-Century Literature.
(Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991), 57.
29
narratives as well – the cinema of heroic men and subservient women.49 In both genres,
what begins as the debasement of the female body ultimately leads to its destruction: all
four female figures are literally killed off in these texts. I will explore this further in the
following chapter on female sacrifice.
49
“Leni Riefenstahl’s art fulfilled a timely service by imparting form to völkisch feelings. It created
beautiful images that fueled Nazi fantasies, images of heroic men and subservient women.” However, I
believe that this categorization encompasses much of Nazi cinema, certainly in terms of its depictions of
“images of heroic men and subservient women.” See Rentschler (Note 18), 51.
30
CHAPTER 2
Female Sacrifice: The Maternal Abject and the Heroine
2.1 Introduction
As I demonstrated in the first chapter, the female body becomes a site for a male
power struggle, which ultimately erupts in displaced (sexually charged) violence against
this very site. In this chapter I shall examine sacrifice – the subsequent juncture of this
violent domination and negation of the female body.
Indeed, the discourse of sacrifice is broad and rich in its history, literary usage,
and theoretical rendering. Its virtual disappearance as a ritual practice in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries seemed to prompt its simultaneous appropriation in literature
and art, as that which, for example, Georges Bataille refers to as “the heirs of religion”
and “the continuation of ancient sacrificial rites.”50 Literature and art became, in many
ways, a nostalgic space of historical reenactment, including sacrifice, which no longer
had a place in a socially and politically enlightened world.
renaissance in aesthetic representation.
Here it discovered a
My selected texts are examples of such
representation; they all employ the economy of female sacrifice.
But what is this economy of female sacrifice? Moreover, why do these narratives
revert to the representation of such a barbaric, violent ritual at the expense of the
woman’s body?
These texts appear to be promoting an aesthetic, which, I argue,
ideologically equates maternity with abjection and female heroism with martyrdom.
Anthropologist René Girard’s work is particularly illuminating in the examination
of sacrificial economies. In Violence and the Sacred (1972), he argues that sacrifice
50
Bataille, Georges. Literature and Evil. Trans. Alastair Hamilton. (London: Marion Boyers, 1997), 50.
31
quells violence and dissension most often provoked by mimetic desires, finally restoring
harmony in the community and securing social order.51 That is, desiring what another
man desire results in mimetic rivalry and invariable ends in reciprocal violence. Through
sacrifice, this violence can be localized and death contained. While Girard’s theory
provides an interesting point of departure, his overall neglect to treat the topic of the role
of sexuality and women in sacrifice leaves discontinuities in his work.52
I shall thus turn my attention to the feminist scholarship of Julia Kristeva and
Luce Irigaray, which posits female sexuality and motherhood at the fore of sacrificial
interpretations. In fact, a two-fold feminist reading is possible here. Kristeva’s text on
abjection, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980), will provide a critical
theoretical framework in this first section of my chapter, wherein I will examine how
themes of female sacrifice become immersed in the discourse of the destruction of and
relief against the despised maternal body – the maternal abject. Secondly, I will refer to
Irigaray’s essay on the “hidden” sacrifice of women, “Women, the Sacred, Money”
(1984), and investigate the suppressed underbelly of the exalted cult of the female martyr.
2.2 Destruction of the Maternal Abject
Female sacrifice is essentially contiguous to sexuality and, often maternity. This
section will investigate two of the four texts, namely, Emilia Galotti and The Blue Light,
whose sacrifice narratives articulate the concurring constitution and destruction of what
Kristeva refers to as the “maternal abject.” I argue that these two texts elucidate how
51
Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977),
145-8.
52
Feminist writers Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Toril Moi have all criticized Girard’s work for its lack
of attention given to the role of women in sacrifice. This is especially evident in the texts I examine here.
32
female sacrifice signifies the annihilation of the abominable maternal abject, delineated in
Powers of Horror as essentially the alien entity of the (m)other, which is both desirable
and terrifying, nourishing and murderous.53 The womb has been traditionally codified as
horrifying yet fascinating abject inside the maternal body – the representation of
woman’s body as impure and animalistic within patriarchal discourse.
Hence, the
sacrifice of the maternal abject necessarily engenders a kind of restoration of patriarchal
order and power.
Kristeva’s interpretation of sacrifice will provide my argument with a provocative
theoretical backdrop.
Drawing heavily on Girard’s work on sacrifice and strongly
influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis, specifically his observations about death-work
and representation, in Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), Kristeva postulates that
sacrifice puts an end to what she refers to as “semiotic” or “presymbolic” violence by
focusing it onto a victim. This victim becomes the “first” symbol of the new symbolic
order.54 That is, a regulatory displacement of violence becomes the foundation for a
social order, which doubly oppresses woman not only because, according to Lacan, there
is no place for her – “la femme n’existe pas” – but also because the symbolic order
fundamentally involves the primordial sacrifice of the maternal Thing. 55
To a degree, Girard shares Kristeva’s reading of Lacanian psychoanalysis;
however, Kristeva parts ways with Girard in her treatment of the role of sexual difference
and the privileged victimization of women in sacrificial violence. She asserts that it is
not the menace of the castrating patricidal sign, but, rather, that of the threateningly
53
Kristeva, Julia. “Approaching Abjection.” Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S.
Roudiez. (New York: Columbia UP, 1982).
54
Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. (New York: Columbia UP,
1984), 75.
55
Ibid.
33
destructive matricidal abject, which is being displaced onto the body of the sacrificial
victim.56 For this reason, Kristeva argues that women predominate among the victims
within the sacrificial economy.
Although I do not intend to apply Kristeva’s theory prescriptively, nor would this
be advantageous to my argument, as her rigorously psychoanalytical approach is
somewhat limiting, her theory does serve as an effective point of departure in the
examination of sacrifice within Emilia Galotti and The Blue Light, especially with regard
to the representation of the mother figure. While this approach may appear impertinent at
first, as both Emilia and Junta are not in fact maternal figures, a more exhaustive reading
of the respective texts will reveal the representational structures evident here.
On the topic of Emilia Galotti and sacrifice Sabrina Völz’s dissertation, Women
and Sacrifice in Eighteenth-Century Drama: Lessing’s Emilia Galotti, Goethe’s Stella,
and Schiller’s Räuber (1998), addresses, above all, the semantic ambiguity of the term
sacrifice (Opfer; Aufopferung) in Lessing’s play, which achieved particular resonance
towards the second half of the eighteenth century.
As a way of setting up the denouement of the play’s real sacrificial act at its close,
the audience is repeatedly confronted with profane vernacular uses of sacrifice. The first
appearance of the word Opfer is ironically a self-reference made by the prince vis-à-vis
his engagement to the Princess of Massa. “PRINZ: Mein Herz wird das Opfer eines
elenden Staatsinteresse.” (I, 6) It is clear that he does not want to marry her but must
because of his status. In the same scene the verb “aufgeopfert” is also used to describe
Orsina’s fear of being replaced not by the Prince’s new wife but by a new lover.
56
See Martha J. Reineke’s reading of Kristeva’s aforementioned text in: Sacrificed Lives: Kristeva on
Women and Violence. (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1997), 86.
34
“MARINELLI: Nicht so einer Gemahlin fürchtet sie aufgeopfert zu sein, sondern – –.
[…]” “PRINZ: Einer neuen Geliebten.” (Ibid) In Orsina’s eyes, the Prince’s marriage to
the princess would merely serve political duty; therefore, her role as “Geliebte” would be
secure. In both cases, the word Opfer appears to be trivialized. Völz points out the irony:
the Prince is clearly not the victim, but, rather, the victimizer of both Orsina and Emilia,
and Orsina is perhaps a victim, but by no means a sacrificial one.57
But what about Emilia’s husband-to-be, Appiani? Is he perhaps a sacrificial
victim? Even before his untimely death, the prince refers to the count’s marriage to an
“unadlige” woman as a great sacrifice. This seems ironic given the Prince’s reference to
the sacrifice he is making by marrying the princess. He asks Marinelli for whom the
count is willing to give up his status. “PRINZ: Aber so nennen Sie mir doch, der der
dieses so große Opfer bringt.” (I, 6) As Marinelli remarks earlier, this marriage will
certainly be Appiani’s ruin at court. Appiani is sacrificing his status for his ‘Herz’ and
the Prince his ‘Herz’ for his status. But this example too lacks the markings of a real
sacrificial act. In the end, Appiani, similar to Orsina, arguably becomes a victim of the
Prince’s ploys, but even his death cannot be read as sacrificial.
The only true sacrificial victim in this play is Emilia, who is curiously one of the
only figures never actually referred to as Opfer in the narration. That Emilia becomes a
sacrificial victim is a broadly accepted interpretation. However, while there exists an
abundance of literature delineating the drive behind Emilia’s sacrifice, which I also
outline in my first chapter, Emilia is clearly caught in the middle of a power struggle
57
Völz, Sabrina R. Women and Sacrifice in Eighteenth-Century German Drama: Lessing’s Emilia Galotti,
Goethe’s Stella, Schiller’s Räuber. University of Pennsylvania: Doctoral Dissertation, 1998. 74.
35
between her father and the Prince – between bourgeois Tugend and aristocratic Willkür,58
there is a paucity of literature addressing the underlying philosophical structures at work
here. What precisely differentiates Emilia’s sacrifice and the result thereof from the
others in the text? I argue that her death restores patriarchal order and protects the values
of the bourgeoisie. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, Emilia’s death is an act of
displacement – instead of regicide, Odoardo kills his own daughter, whom Girard and
Kristeva would refer to as the “surrogate victim:” “When unappeased, violence seeks and
always finds a surrogate victim. The creature that excited its fury is abruptly replaced by
another, chosen only because it is vulnerable and close at hand.”59 Had Odoardo killed
the prince this would have been viewed as a revolutionary act, instead of a sacrificial one,
and it would have incited further violence (just think of the French Revolution).
In fact, Klaus Theweleit strongly criticizes this as the German bourgeois “nonrevolutionary structural displacement within power relations of society, one which
operated on the basis of female sacrifice” as the demonstration of masculine impotence.60
Although this is but literary representation, and some even argue censorship played a
weighty role here (ending the tragedy with a revolution likely would have been
problematic for Lessing),61 we should not overlook the fact that there was historically no
revolution in Germany and the bourgeois tragedy is regarded as the emancipation genre
of the German bourgeoisie.62
59
Girard (Note 50), 2.
Theweleit (Note 8), 344.
61
Völz (Note 56), 100,
62
Lukács, Georg. Zur Soziologie des moderenen Dramas. See Peter Szondi’s Die Theorie des bürgerlichen
Trauerspiels im 18. Jahrhundert. (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1973), 17.
60
36
Despite his great loss, Odoardo feels as though he has won this battle against the
prince by disposing of the prince’s object of desire, the one thing over which Odoardo
has control: his daughter’s body. “ODOARDO: Zieh hin! – Nun da, Prinz! Gefällt sie
Ihnen noch? Reizt sie noch ihre Lüste? Noch, in diesem Blute, das wider Sie um Rache
schreiet?” (V, 8) Emilia’s sacrificed body ‘screams of her (father’s) revenge.’ Although
I agree with Judith Frömmer, who indicates that Emilia’s death does not cast a new
political order,63 I do believe that this sacrificial act assumes to assert a new bourgeois
authority and subjectivity. Again, von Mücke’s claim that bourgeois subjectivity clearly
depends on at least the representational abjection of the female body resonates strongly.64
Emilia’s sacrifice manifestly represents what I refer to in the first chapter as the
destruction of Brigitte Prutti’s “repulsive paradigm of the ‘maternal body.’”65 Prutti,
however, interprets Emilia’s rejection of the mother’s body as an incestuous gesture for
the love of her father; that is, she believes that Emilia has to destroy her own body in
order to completely gain her father’s love. I do not deny Emilia’s willingness to submit
herself to death at the hands of her father; nevertheless, I again disagree with notions of
masochistic agency. Emilia’s deprecating self-reference as “einer:” “einer, – wie mein
Vater will, dass ich werden soll!” (V, 8), which is also cited in an earlier chapter, is
interpreted by Prutti as the rejection of the despised mother’s body, and, to which Susan
Gustafson rightly points out, speaks directly to Kristeva’s notion of the maternal abject.66
63
Frömmer, Judith. “Vom politischen Körper zur Körperpolitik: Männliche Rede und weibliche
Keuschheit in Lessings Emilia Galotti.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und
Geistesgeschichte (2005): 169-195. 170.
64
Von Mücke, Dorothea. Virtue and the Veil of Illusion: Generic Innovation and Pedagogical Project in
Eighteenth-Century Literature. (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991), 57.
65
Prutti (Note 13), 18.
66
With direct reference to Julia Kristeva’s work, Gustafson concludes that the paternal represents the
paragon of all virtue, while the maternal symbolizes all that is abject. See Absent Mothers and Orphaned
37
By marrying her off to the count, it is clear that Emilia’s father wants her to become a
mother. Nevertheless, I believe it is essentially Emilia’s aforementioned declaration of
maternal rejection, and not only her allusion to the Roman story of Virginia and her
father as so many scholars claim,67 which incites Odoardo to violence. It is, as Prutti
befittingly articulates, “[als] Medium des müttlerlichen Körpers” which Odoardo sees his
daughter, and it is “diese in Claudia leibhaftig gewordene Gestalt einer begehrlichen
“Emilia,” vor der er hier in panischer Angst die Flucht ergreift.”68
In fact, Claudia, the only mother figure in the play, is wretchedly portrayed as
“eitel” und “töricht” (II, 4). After all, she has conceded the unraveling of this miserable
turn of events, starting with her enthusiasm at Emilia’s first encounter with the prince at
Grimbaldi’s Vegghia. She is even to blame for Emilia’s own sexual awakening, which,
as Prutti asserts, is mediated through the mother’s own sexual desire (witnessed here via
the historically sexual connotations of the word “entzückten”): “im Anblick und in der
Rede der “entzückten” Mutter der sexualisierte Körper der Tochter zum Vorschein
kommt.”69 The mother in the bourgeois tragedy is an unequivocally abject figure, often
absent from the narrative altogether, and certainly not a privileged member of the fatherdaughter dyad.70 Although I do not share Gustafson’s symbolic interpretation of Emilia
Fathers. Narcissism and Abjection in Lessing’s Aesthetic and Dramatic Production. (Detroit: Wayne State
UP, 1995), 171.
67
A common interpretation of the play reads it as an adaptation of the Roman story of Virginius and his
daughter Virginia by Livy, wherein the father “consensually” kills his daughter in order to save her from a
life of slavery. There is clearly direct reference to this in the play. “EMILIA: Ehedem wohl gab es einen
Vater, der seine Tochter von der Schande zu retten, ihr den ersten den besten Stahl in das Herz senkte – ihr
zum Zweiten Male das Leben gab.” (V, 8)
68
Prutti, Brigitte. Bild und Körper. (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1996), 75.
69
Prutti directs our attention to the Grimm Deutsches Wörterbuch. Bd. 3 (München: dtv, 1984), 667-669.
See Ibid.
70
See, for example, Lessing’s earlier Miss Sara Sampson (1755), where the mother figure has been
completely extracted from the narrative; or Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe (1784), which offers a completely
loathsome portrait of the mother.
38
as a “battlefield, upon which the father and mother or virtue and desire struggle for
control,” as I read the mother’s role here as completely lacking in agency, I do agree that
Odoardo projects his abject fears onto Emilia’s body.71 Sacrificing Emilia’s body thus
becomes a mode of symbolically destroying the maternal abject and restoring patriarchal
order.
Emilia’s self-sacrifice as the destruction of the maternal abject can also be applied
to that of Dorothea in Harlan’s Jew Süss, albeit along slightly different lines. Similar to
Emilia Galotti, the mother has been extracted from the constellation altogether and here
replaced by Dorothea’s rather inert maid.
Dorothea rejects her maternal body by
drowning herself in the river. However, she rejects not the maternal body as such, but,
rather, her own racially defiled maternal body; after being raped by Süss, she fears not
only the potential of giving birth to a Jewish child, but also the racial defilement of her
own blood caused through intercourse, which she could subsequently pass on to her
children. However, this just as an aside, I would like to focus, instead, more thoroughly
on Riefenstahl’s film The Blue Light within the framework of this examination of selfsacrifice and the maternal abject.
An analogous destruction of the maternal abject is also significant to the reading
of sacrifice in Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light. Junta’s death is, in effect, carried out in two
stages: the excavation of her grotto (the symbolic death) and her plummet from Mount
Cristallo (the corporeal death). The latter is fundamentally a result of the former. It is
her symbolic death, identified through the visually constructed “bloodletting” of the
71
Gustafson (Note 65), 177; 214-215.
39
excavation introduced in my first chapter, which is particularly intriguing within the
context of Kristevian sacrifice discourse.
In a similar semiotic gesture as in Emilia Galotti, there appears on the one hand to
be a fetishization of the apotheosis of sacrifice in western culture: Jesus on the cross. In
fact, the image of carved crucifix appears three different times throughout the film. The
crucifix is situated on a mural etched onto a rocky cliff next to the carved figures of the
young men who lost their lives in a failed attempt to climb the Mount Cristallo. I believe
that the carved male figures are comparable to the profane uses of the words Opfer and
Aufopferung in Emilia Galotti: they are not true sacrificial victims, despite the reverence
bestowed upon them by the mourning village inhabitants and their visual relationship to
the crucifix.
On the other hand, contrary to Emilia, Junta effectively fits the profile of a
traditional sacrificial victim: she is an outsider whose rather public death directly restores
harmony in the community of Santa Maria. According to Girard, sacrifice serves to
protect a community from its own violence, and, therefore, prompts the community to
seek victims outside itself.72 On a first approach, one could quite effortlessly interpret
Junta’s sacrifice within traditional frameworks – she embodies the Girardian prototype –
and perhaps had she been killed during, for example, the frenzied witch-hunt scene in the
village, such an interpretation would suffice. Indeed, when the film was reedited for
post-war release in the Federal Republic and Austria it bore the title The Witch from
Santa Maria (Die Hexe von Santa Maria) (1951).73 I believe, however, that Junta’s
sacrifice is much more abstruse than previous scholarship has posited. Rentschler’s
72
73
Girard (Note 50), 8.
Rentschler (Note 21), 31.
40
aforementioned widely accepted reading of the crystal-filled grotto as a womblike space74
provides crucial groundwork for a more in depth examination of the sacrifice of Junta and
a reading of Junta as a symbolic mother figure, whose relegation to the interior of the
womb, one could argue, also explains her lack of voice: when she speaks, which is hardly
ever, she does so with an Italian dialect which no one understands.75 To be certain, the
destruction of Junta’s grotto symbolizes a destruction of the maternal body (represented
by and reduced to the womb).
First, let us examine the link between the grotto as a symbolic womb and its
seductive, yet destructive, blue light. The seductive/destructive dimension of the womb
symbolically aligns itself to its iconography as house/room/cellar, in this case “grotto,” or
any other enclosed space in the horror film. The representation of the womb, as Barbara
Creed rightly indicates, is a place that is both familiar and unfamiliar, a place easily
characterized within the context of Freud’s theory of the uncanny (das Unheimliche): that
which arouses dread and horror.76
To briefly recapitulate, the phenomenon of the blue light within the film has
essentially been explored within the parameters of its Romantic namesake; that is, as a
quest for the sublime. However, the sexual dimension of the blue light’s source and
attraction – having an effect on young men exclusively – is imperative to this
examination. As I argue in the first chapter, the blue light can be interpreted in terms of
an Oedipal attraction – emanating from the womb of the mother, yet made inaccessible to
the young men by the insurmountable phallic Mount Cristallo. The eventual successful
74
Rentschler (Note 23), 66.
Silverman, Kaja. “The Fantasy of the Maternal Voice.” The Accoustic Mirror. (Bloomington: Indiana
UP, 1988), 112.
76
Creed, Barbara. “Woman as Monstrous Womb: The Brood.” The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism,
Psychoanalysis. (London: Routledge, 1993), 53-55.
75
41
climb to the top of the mountain and the patricidal defeat is thus coupled with the (sexual)
domination of the maternal treasure-filled grotto.
But how does sacrifice fit into this Oedipal imbroglio? What is being projected
onto the victimized body of Junta? She is not, as some might wish to conclude based on
an Oedipal reading, the murdered “father.” Rather, the blood imagery created from the
powerfully charged dissolve directly from the excavated crystals in the grotto to the
traces of spilled wine on the table suggest much more strongly an image of the blood of
the mother, whose womb has been completely annihilated through a symbolic act of
sexual violence (the rape of mother-nature). Therefore, I would argue that it is first and
foremost the mother’s body that is sacrificed here.
The sacrifice, nonetheless, economically serves a two-fold purpose in the film:
bringing on the one hand collective relief from further deaths provoked by the blue light
and, on the other hand, bringing welcome prosperity to the village from the sale of the
crystals. Junta’s inherent connection to the grotto and her axiomatic branding as the
village scapegoat, illustrated most prominently at the prompting of the aforementioned
witch-hunt chase incited by the blind accusatory screams of a mourning mother: “There
she is, the devil’s witch. Damn you! It’s all her fault,” clearly place Junta in a privileged
position as a marked sacrificial victim. Moreover, despite her child-like innocence, Junta
appears to embody distinct maternal qualities, for instance, her guardianship of the feral
shepherd-boy and her almost performative offering of milk to Vigo upon his second visit
to her mountain hut. Thus, Junta’s position as sacrificial victim and a “menacing”
symbolic mother figure postulate a possible Kristevian reading of the sacrifice of the
maternal abject.
42
Junta’s demise is instrumental in fomenting change in the community of Santa
Maria, witnessed most effectively by the frenzied hordes of children peddling trinkets to
the honeymooning tourists, at the beginning of the film’s frame. On the one hand, the
children urgently symbolize new life in the village: the lives of the future fathers have
been spared (along with their virility) through the extinguishing of the blue light and
lifting of the village “curse.” On the other hand, the children’s actions, busy trying to sell
something, suggest an unleashed influx of capitalist values: even children must sell
goods. If we compare Vigo’s arrival to the village, merely met on the road by the
reserved, rather unfriendly, innkeeper, to that of the young honeymooning couple in the
frame, we notice an overwhelming contrast. To be sure, The Blue Light exhibits a
“questionably” ameliorative modernization of values and ethics by illustrating the swift
inception of a modern capitalist society.77 Although this film often provokes a critical
reading vis-à-vis the sacrifice of Junta, and its accompanying loss of a pre-capitalist,
redemptive space, I would argue, it can (and should) be read much more ambiguously.
Indeed, Riefenstahl’s move to re-release the film in 1952 without the frame only
generates further questions.
Emilia Galotti and The Blue Light may appear to offer markedly disparate
perspectives on sacrifice: while Emilia willingly submits herself to an honour killing in
order to save herself and family from public shame, Junta is indirectly destroyed by the
self-serving, capitalist endeavours of the village inhabitants.
However, as I have
demonstrated, the symbolic and semiotic coordinates of sacrifice within these narratives
77
Schulte-Sasse asserts that the film actually serves as a nostalgic longing for that other space lost to
modernity. See (Note 4), 154.
43
are fundamentally analogous. Both disclose a blatantly anti-maternal discourse through
representations of the Lacanian primordial sacrifice of the maternal Thing.
2.3 Heroism and the “Hidden Sacrifice”
The bourgeois notion of self-sacrifice, which accompanied notions of selfrestraint and self-denial, grew in significance during the eighteenth century, especially
apropos literature, philosophy, and pedagogy concerning women, as it was believed that
self-sacrifice was a female virtue.78 Consequently, bourgeois women were socialized as
future wives and mothers, and prepared for a life of sacrificial caretaking.
Comparatively, National Socialism also thrived on an ideology of sacrifice. As
the period of what Michel Foucault calls the “eugenic ordering of society,” one was
indeed exposed to what he refers to as “total sacrifice.”79 In order to populate the Aryan
race, women under National Socialism were expected to sacrifice their bodies to a life of
submission and reproduction, not dissimilar to their eighteenth-century counterparts.
According to Susan Sontag, the fascist ideal was “a society in which women are merely
breeders and helpers, excluded from all ceremonial functions.”80
Regardless, this form of female sacrifice has been, for the most part, enduringly
overlooked as, I would dare to argue, it lacks the spectacle of revolution or holocaust. In
an essay entitled “Women, the Sacred, Money” (1984), Irigaray refers to this
phenomenon directly as the “hidden sacrifice” of women, boldly claiming, “no social
78
79
80
Völz (Note 56), 45.
Foucault (Note 9), 149.
Sontag (Note 43), 90.
44
body can be constituted, developed, or renewed without female labour (travail),”81 that is,
without the labour of work and labour of giving birth.
However, woman’s labour
(especially through childbirth) so often goes unrecognized as such, and, of course,
unpaid. Thus, this “hidden sacrifice” of woman is not her murder, but rather a hidden
crime of aggression against, and a sacrifice of, woman and fertility.
Now, although the approach to female sacrifice presented by Irigaray discernibly
complements that of Kristeva, not least its similarly strong Lacanian grounding,
Irigaray’s assertions ultimately transcend the boundaries of the symbolic, allowing us to
reconsider the primordial sacrifice of the woman in more practical terms. Moreover,
Irigaray addresses the ramifications of female sacrifice ideologically.82 In another text on
sacrifice, “Belief Itself” (1980), she expounds the ideological rationale of the sacrifice of
a different body and flesh as a way of rendering belief “safe” (paradigm: Christianity).
She explains further, that it is precisely through sacrifice that we are able “to forget the
Real.”83 But what is the Real? I think it is relevant to once again turn our attention to
Lacanian psychoanalysis here.
Lacan posits the Real as the maternal Thing: the
forbidden object of desire (jouissance), which provokes unbearable suffering.84
Therefore, by sacrificing the maternal Thing we are able to forget our suffering and, I
would argue, also hers.
81
Irigaray, Luce. “Women, the Sacred, Money.” Sexes and Geneologies. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. (New
York: Columbia UP, 1993), 78-79.
82
Here, Dennis King Keenan’s article has is particularly insightful. See “Irigaray and the Sacrifice of the
Sacrifice of Woman” Hypatia 19:4 (2004): 167-183.
83
Irigaray, Luce. “Belief Itself.” Sexes and Geneologies. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. (New York: Columbia UP,
1993. 26.
84
Lacan, Jacques. “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialect of Desire.” Ecrits. Trans. Bruce Fink.
(New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2002.), 699.
45
Within a historical-ideological context, this theory affords a pertinent standpoint
from which to contextualize not only the aesthetic representation of sacrifice and
concomitant representation of the heroine within my selected texts, but also the
pedagogical dimension of sacrifice mediated in these narratives vis-à-vis their respective
periods.
While these texts were not actively seeking to encourage women to stab
themselves on altars or drown themselves in rivers for the betterment of the community,
there is no doubt an underlying message at work here. For this investigation, I will focus
my attention on the other two works, namely, von Stein’s Dido and Harlan’s Jew Süss.
Dido has been considered the counter-portrait to Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris
(1786), the latter being a central canonical text of German Classicism and an essentially
anti-sacrifice narrative. In fact, von Stein herself reportedly had great misgivings about
the aesthetic concepts both Goethe and Schiller assigned to women in their works.85
Indeed, as Arnd Bohm points out, Dido and Iphigenie auf Tauris share similar
economies, “whose essential themes are the sacrifice of woman, the sexual desires of a
‘barbarian’ ruler, and finally the progress of Enlightenment.”86
The fundamental
difference between the two plays lies in the latter’s canonical disavowal of sacrifice in
favour of a more enlightened solution to animosity through rationality and rhetoric. This
juxtaposition thus underscores the significance of the ‘return’ of the sacrifice narrative in
Dido, as it seems that von Stein deliberately re-adapted and altered Goethe’s version
Iphigenie auf Tauris (which itself also diverts from the original story of “Iphigenie” –
traditionally a victim of sacrifice). Furthermore, I would argue, the disparity in these
85
Kord, Susanne. “Not in Goethe’s Image.” Thalia’s Daughters: German Women Dramatists from the
Eighteenth Century to the Present. Eds. Susan Cocalis and Ferrel Rose. (Tübingen: Franke Verlag, 1996),
55.
86
Bohm, Arnd. “Charlotte von Stein’s Dido, Ein Trauerspiel.” Colloquia Germanica 22 (1989): 38-52. 46.
46
texts gestures toward von Stein’s own re-visting of the bourgeois tragedy narrative. To be
certain, Dido’s violent death with the sacrificial dagger – the favoured death instrument
for young women in tragedy87 – arguably mimics that of Emilia. It is not clear precisely
why von Stein wanted to readvocate female sacrifice; however, von Stein’s rejection of
Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris should be considered within the context of the latter’s
politics-before-violence reaction to the French Revolution, which von Stein did not agree
with.88
The material for von Stein’s tragedy was carefully selected among several
versions of the “Dido” story. It is not uninteresting that von Stein deliberately avoided
more popular versions by Virgil and Ovid, and opted, instead, for a lesser known version
by Justin. While Bohm asserts that this choice was likely motivated by Dido’s keenness
for a historical accuracy, as Virgil’s version, for example, has come under attack for its
chronological problems,89 others, like Susanne Kord, purpose that the Justin version
appealed to von Stein for its rendering of the Dido character as a virtuous martyr, whose
prime incentives for self-sacrifice were honour and politics.90 To be sure, in Virgil’s
version Dido falls in love with another man, namely Aeneas, and even becomes pregnant
with his child in the Ovid version. Although I agree that von Stein’s choice of source text
likely goes beyond the pedantics of chronological accuracy, I do not believe that the selfsacrifice of von Stein’s Dido is driven exclusively by honour and politics.
87
Loraux, Nicole. Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman. Trans. Anthony Forster. (Cambridge: Harvard UP,
1987), 4.
88
Kord, Susanne. Ein Blick hinter die Kulissen: Deutschsprachige Dramatikerinnen im 18. und 19.
Jahrhundert. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1992), 180-184.
89
Bohm (Note 85), 46.
90
See Susanne Kord (Ed.), “Einleitung.” Charlotte von Stein: Dramen (Gesamtausgabe). (Hildesheim:
Georg Olms, 1998), IX.
47
As the play opens, the audience is immediately witness to Dido’s interminable
mourning for the loss of her late husband, Acerbas, who was murdered by her brother
Pygmalion. Notwithstanding the reigning prosperity and beatitude in her land, Dido
remains despondent. “DIDO: So weit also kann es die menschliche Natur nicht bringen,
ein fremdes Glück sich im Gefühl zuzueignen? - - - O mein Acerbas! Mein Gemahl! Mit
dir ward mir ein Weltall geraubt!” (I, 2) Her regrettable inability to share the happiness
of her people already contradicts the patriotism voiced in an earlier sentence: “aus
meinem geliebten phönizischen Vaterland.” (Ibid.) Consequently, from the beginning,
Dido, I argue, is caught between her commitment to two patriarchal forces: her
“Vaterland” and her deceased husband. Hence, Dido’s greatest challenge is to achieve a
compromise between these two commitments.
Deceived by her learned advisors, Odon, Aratus, and Dodus, Dido seals her own
fate by condoning “Aufopferung” in the name of patriotism. “DIDO: Das hätte ich nicht
gedacht, also keiner wäre Aufopferung fähig, die sein Vaterland zuletzt beglücken könte!
O glaubt mir! Unsrer Nachbarn Weisheit bringt uns Heil! So wie ihre Thorheit uns auch
über die Gränze kommt.”(I, 5) Unbeknownst to her, she is in fact the desired sacrifice.
“ARATUS: Königin, du hast dein Urteil gesprochen!” (Ibid.) As I have illustrated in the
previous chapter, Jarbas desires Dido’s hand in marriage in a subterfuge attempt to seize
power over her kingdom. Thus, she regards a union with Jarbas fundamentally as a
transgression of her vow of fidelity to her husband, as she declares: “Diese Hand, mit der
ich ein Gelübde tat, sie nie einem zweiten Gemahl zu reichen – ein Herz hatte ich so nicht
mehr zu geben.” (II, 4). Divided between her allegiance to two divorced patriarchal
manifestations, on the one hand, her “Vaterland” and on the other her deceased husband,
48
Dido chooses self-renunciation, first by relinquishing the throne to her brother-in-law and
abandoning Carthage, and finally by publicly killing herself.
Her self-sacrifice at the end of the play seems to adapt well to a Girardian reading,
as a means to quell violence and localize death. Indeed, Dido’s death simultaneously
averts war and revolution among her people, and subverts Jarbas’s underhanded pursuits
at her throne. Nonetheless, the representational bifurcation of Dido’s sacrifice must also
be considered here. To be certain, Dido’s renunciation “restores” patriarchal rule, not in
Jarbas’s favour, but in the favour of Dido’s brother-in-law. Moreover, I read her death as
a double sacrificial gesture to patriarchy. In the final scene, Dido, adorned in veil and
wreath, offers her hand to Jarbas in the temple as a gesture to her submission to his desire
for their union, thereby symbolically calling for an end to his war upon Carthage – her
“Vaterland.” Following this, she springs onto her husband’s funeral pyre and stabs
herself, declaring her unequivocal allegiance to her husband: “Und nun, mein Acerbas, zu
dir!” (V, 15) Contrary to Bohm’s interpretation of Dido’s sacrifice as a triumph of
female autonomy,91 I would argue that at no time does Dido demonstrate agency or
autonomy; her actions, even her death, are propelled by patriarchal obligation. As Kord
indicates, Dodus’ rhetorical question posed to Dido at the beginning of the play “Wem
geziemt die Aufopferung?” (I, 4) reminds us all too well of the distorted “feminine”
qualities of self-renunciation and self-sacrifice projected onto women,92 qualities which
Dido ultimately embraces.
What seems to have been hitherto neglected by scholars is von Stein’s curious
juxtaposition of the two “Dido” characters, namely, Dido and Elissa.
91
92
Bohm (Note 85), 46.
Kord (Note 89), X.
49
It cannot be
incidental that Dido’s best and only female friend bears the name Elissa, as sources often
cite this as Dido’s own name. I interpret the Elissa character as Dido’s alter ego, as it is
Elissa who possesses the eloquence and political candidness, which Dido lacks (or cannot
afford).
In fact, as Bohm rightly points out, her language appears to echo that of
Goethe’s Iphigenie in deference to the codes of German Classicism.93
ELISSA: Die Liebe einer schönen Seele strebt mit dem hohen Ideal, das sie in dem
Geliebten erkannt, einzustimmen; und damit ist alles übrige Begehrungswürdige
unter ihr, und leicht zu entsagen; sie lebt nur ihrem abgeschiedenen Gemahl. (III, 6)
The semantic resonance of classically imbued expressions like “schöne Seele” and “das
Streben nach dem hohen Ideal” were certainly apparent to von Stein.
Granted von Stein does not appear to satirize Goethe’s Iphigenie figure here, she
does devalue the role of her double (Elissa) in the narrative. Although Elissa’s speech
acts arguably serve the play on a rhetorical level, they have little bearing on the events of
the plot and ultimately cannot save Carthage or Dido from Jarbas.
Furthermore,
notwithstanding her devoted friendship to Dido, she is portrayed as less-than-virtuous –
unmarried but apparently at one time involved with the poet Ogon.94 She is, I would
argue, not the alternative heroine of this tragedy. Thus, von Stein’s message rings loud
and clear: a true heroine must be virtuous and self-sacrificing.
The heroine of Nazi cinema provides a perfect analogue to von Stein’s model: she
too is the epitome of virtue and self-sacrifice.
In fact, one of Germany’s most
“homogenous” actresses during the Nazi period was Kristina Söderbaum, actually a
93
Bohm (Note 85), 50.
At the beginning of the third act, Elissa reveals her relationship with Ogon. It seems where she was once
involved with him she is now cynical: “Einmal betrog ich mich in dir, jetzt aber sehe ich allzugut,
ohngeacht des schönen Kammstrichs deiner Haare und deiner wohlgeformten Schuhe, dennoch die
Bockshörnerchen, Hüfchen und dergleichen Attribute des Waldbewohners, und diesen ist kein Gelübde
heilig.” (III, 2)
94
50
young Swede, who was made famous by her many performances as the sacrificed corpse,
and even became known as “The Reich’s Water Corpse” (Reichswasserleiche).
Arguably, the most exemplary of these typecast personae was her role as Dorothea in
Harlan’s Jew Süss.
The sacrificed body was also a privileged trope in Nazi cinema. This body,
however, was not only that of the Jew – the scapegoat of National Socialism – but, rather,
predominantly that of the woman. It is easy to disregard the female sacrifice vis-à-vis the
more significantly charged death of the Jew in Harlan’s film. Indeed, the sacrifice of
women in the Nazi cinema is often overlooked. It seems, nevertheless, crucial to note
that the female sacrifice is one of the most pivotal moments of Jew Süss – a film codified
as the moment in Nazi narrative cinema history.
Dorothea’s sacrifice differs significantly from the others examined.
To
recapitulate what was brought to light in the previous chapter: Dorothea’s fatal end is a
direct result of (or synonymous with) her rape by Süss, similar to Junta’s symbolic rape
in The Blue Light. Citing Linda Williams, Linda Schulte-Sasse refers to Dorothea’s rape
as vampiric: “Rape by the Jew effects an irreversible contamination of the victim, much
like vampirism.”95 “Jewish semen,” she continues, “stands for the contamination of
woman by Jewish blood.”96 Not only that, but Dorothea has been raped as a married
virgin (there has been no time to consummate her hasty marriage to Faber), inviting the
audience to recognize the crime as doubly heinous.
Although there is no verbal
explanation for Dorothea’s suicide, nor does the film’s narration, as Schulte-Sasse points
95
96
See Schulte-Sasse (Note 6), 85.
Ibid.
51
out, allow her the opportunity to display her will to die, as in the case of the both Emilia
Galotti and Dido, her demise is clear.
From the torture chamber, there is a crosscut to the bank of the river Neckar:
Dorothea runs stumbling and dazed, with her clothes in disarray.
Again, we hear
Dorothea’s song, a leitmotif in the film, “All’ mein Gedanken, die ich hab’, die sind bei
Dir,” which is played now as a lament.97 Having been robbed of not only her virginity
but also her virtue, death becomes at the same time a source of relief and a vindication of
her lost innocence. Consequently, her death by drowning symbolically cleanses her
defiled body.
Dorothea’s death, however, does not conform faithfully to a classical reading of
sacrifice. For example, it does not quell violence and restore order to Württemburg, in
fact; on the contrary, her death directly incites violence by empowering the film’s male
collective to actively reassert itself against Süss and the duke. Instead, it is Süss’s death
at the end of the film which restores political and social order to Württemburg, and
inspires a symbolic atonement visually represented by the purifying snowfall at his
hanging and the redemptive return of Dorothea’s song on the soundtrack, strongly
echoing the symbolic coordinates of Dorothea’s death.
While I would agree with
Rentschler in his reading of the return of the song, as well as its insistent presence in the
film, as “a motto for National Socialism’s privileged and obsessive relationship to the
Jew,” characterized as a kind of symbolic moment revealing a desire for the “Jew,”98 I
argue further that its return at the end of the film articulates an essential link between the
two deaths, and therefore between the two figures. The Jew and the woman constitute
97
98
Tegel, Susan. Jew Süss. Jud Süss. (Trowbridge: Flick Books, 1996), 34.
Rentschler (Note 21), 163.
52
the double sacrifice of Aryan rule in Württemburg, and by extension in Nazi Germany.
As Régine Friedmann points out, drawing on Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, the
subjugation and abjection of women proves no less than that of the Jew in the film.99
Christianity, it is contended, has affirmed a long tradition of female oppression: “woman
bears the stigma of weakness; her weakness places her in the minority even when she is
numerically superior to men. […] as with the Jews among Aryans, her defenselessness
legitimizes her oppression.”100 In this film, woman is even twice oppressed, as she is also
defenseless against the Jew.
Woman was the absolute “Other” in National Socialism, and her role in society
was, according to Goebbels, to be beautiful and bring children into the world.101 Once
this was accomplished she should disappear into the shadows of domesticity.102
Although the “cult of the mother” was idealized, it remained, nevertheless, hidden. This
is lucidly congruous to Irigaray’s theory of the “hidden sacrifice” of the woman, who
under National Socialism was not exterminated for her gender, but was certainly
exploited and oppressed. The mother figure of Nazi cinema is ironically either nonexistent, as in the case of Jew Süss, or inert and repudiated. The real heroine of Nazi
cinema was she who conveniently negated herself in a glorified self-sacrificial gesture for
her husband, father, and by extension, of course, her “Vaterland.”
99
Friedmann (Note 26), 126.
Horkheimer and Adorno (Note 5), 86.
101
Geber, Anke. ““Only Man Must Be and Remain a Judge, Soldier and Ruler of State.” Female as Void
in Nazi Film.” Gender and Cinema: Feminist Interventions. Vol. 2. Eds. Sandra Friedman et al.
(Providence: Berg, 1993), 116.
102
It is interesting to note here that Süss’s most heinous “crime” in the film is his corruption of the
domestic sphere. As I expound in my first chapter, this is symbolically manifested through Süss’s
destruction of the blacksmith’s home.
100
53
2.4 Conclusion
My intention with this investigation of the work of sacrifice within these four
texts was to disclose and thereby demystify the aesthetic and ideological economy of
female sacrifice within the eighteenth-century drama and twentieth-century Nazi cinema
as anti-feminine, and thereby reveal the ideological continuities within bourgeois society,
from its reputed rise in the eighteenth century to its flagrant fall in the middle of the
twentieth century.
As I have demonstrated in this chapter, both Emilia Galotti and The Blue Light
promulgate the sacrifice of the maternal body, through the codification of the Kristevian
“maternal abject.” Furthermore, by applying an Irigarayan reading to both Dido and Jew
Süss, we are able to reveal the often-overlooked negation of woman in art and real life
through a pernicious rhetorical device of female sacrifice.
While their employment and coordinates of sacrifice may differ, these narratives
manifestly witness an anti-feminine paradigm, which, I argue, seeks to rationalize,
through the employment of an ancient ritual, the collectively beneficial destruction of the
female body: a veritable “coup de femme.”103 In other words, to paraphrase a terribly
slanderous old saying, the only good woman is a dead woman.104 This investigation will
continue in the next chapter where I shall focus my attention on the representation and
codification of the female corpse in these works.
103
I have borrowed this term from Brigitte Prutti’s article title: “Coup de Théâtre–Coup de Femme: What
is Emilia Galotti dying from?” See (Note 13).
104
Slavoj Zizek also calls attention to this old saying in his examination of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo,
wherein the main male figure attempts to bring back his deceased lover by mortifying a new one. See (Note
42).
54
CHAPTER 3
Exhuming the Female Corpse:
The Aesthetics and Affect of Feminine Death
3.1 Introduction
In a final investigation of the rhetorical instrumentalization and negation of the
female body in my four selected works, this concluding chapter will turn its attention to
the topic of the female corpse. Beyond its material corporality – it is essentially a
cadaver – the female corpse is a symbol imbued with historical and theoretical
connotations. To be certain, the ambiguity and enigma affixed to the female corpse has
rendered it a fascinating trope within cultural discourse. Constantly addressed, but never
completely defined, the matter of the female corpse has inspired a myriad of literature,
art, philosophy, and theory. Are not femininity and death the ultimate manifestations of
otherness? Indeed, Elisabeth Bronfen and Sarah Webster Goodwin call femininity and
death the “blind spot” of the representational system,105 on the one hand, rejecting
definition, on the other hand, unceasingly inviting representation. Thus, the female
corpse seems to embody what Bronfen also refers to as “the aporia of the superlatively
real and the superlatively tropic.”106
This chapter seeks to examine this peculiar
representational authority of the female corpse, and moreover its place and treatment in
Emilia Galotti, Dido, The Blue Light, and Jew Süss.
A historically framed aesthetic examination will open this chapter. While this
first section demonstrates an incongruity in aesthetics with regard to the female corpse in
105
Webster Goodwin, Sarah and Elisabeth Bronfen, eds. “Introduction.” Death and Representation.
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993), 14.
106
Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, femininity and the aesthetic. (Manchester:
Manchester UP, 1992), 434.
55
the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries respectively, a more in-depth investigation in
the second section will reveal inherent continuities in these texts apropos the creation of
affect through the aesthetic rendering of the female corpse.
In this chapter, I shall refer to Bronfen’s comprehensive study on death,
femininity, and aesthetics, Over her Dead Body (1992), which offers an insightful look
into the role of the female corpse in an aesthetic context. In addition, Lessing’s aesthetic
writings, specifically Laokoon (1766), will provide a critical framework for the
examination of affect in the bourgeois tragedy.
Furthermore, Saul Friedländer’s
prominent work on Nazi aesthetics, Reflections of Nazism (1984), will accompany my
investigation of the two films. Finally, Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1980) will
offer a kind of philosophical counter-perspective to our narrative representations of the
female corpse.
3.2 A Shift in the Aesthetics of Death
While corporeality, pain, and dying were indeed major concerns of eighteenthcentury aesthetics, the corpse as an object of aesthetic study outside of anatomical
discourses was, for the most part, neglected.107 It was not until the nineteenth century
and the work of the Romantics that the corpse began to inspire writers and artists as an
aesthetic object. As Bronfen points out, probably one of the most significant works with
respect to this decadent late romantic development is Edgar Allen Poe’s essay entitled
“The Philosophy of Composition” (1846), in which he declares the death of a beautiful
107
For example, Goethe’s later novel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1821) demonstrates this persisting
eighteenth-century connection between the aesthetic corpse and anatomy well. See “Drittes Kapitel.”
Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre. Ed. Ehrhard Bahr. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982: 351- 363.
56
woman as the most poetical topic in the world.108 Indeed, it was the female corpse, not
the male corpse, which gained representational privilege in the nineteenth century, as the
embodiment of mystery, beauty, and passivity.
This aesthetic shift manifested itself perhaps most markedly via the phenomenon
of the “Inconnue de la Seine” (The Dead Girl from the Seine). As the story goes, around
the turn of the century, a young woman was found drowned in the Seine. A medical
assistant at a Paris morgue was so taken by her beauty, with her apparent “sublime smile
of satisfaction,” that he had a plaster cast death mask made of her face. While, her
identity and the cause of her death remain shrouded in mystery, the beautiful death mask
has become a fixture for artists and an inspiration for many literary works after 1900.109
What seems like a rather insignificant episode in history in effect exerted great influence
on aesthetics vis-à-vis perceptions of the female corpse in the early twentieth century. To
be certain, the fetishized death mask of the Inconnue de la Seine is often deemed the
iconic symbol of this new wave of aestheticism concerning the female corpse. As this
chapter will further demonstrate, this symbol is critical to my investigation of the female
corpse, especially with respect to my two Nazi films.
Keeping this shift in mind, in this section, I shall diachronically examine the
respective representations of the female corpse present in my selection of eighteenth- and
twentieth-century texts. Where I have previously sought to avoid periodization, it is
unavoidable here. The distinct aesthetic treatment of Emilia’s and Dido’s corpses as
compared to those of Junta and Dorothea is in many ways historically grounded. This
108
Poe, Edgar Allen. “The Philosophy of Composition.” The Portable Edgar Allen Poe. Ed. J. Gerald
Kennedy. (New York: Penguin, 2006), 548.
109
Seidler, Anje. “Influence and Authenticity of l’Inconnue de la Seine.” A Reader's
Guide to William Gaddis's The Recognitions. 2000-2005. 10. May. 2008.
<http://www.williamgaddis.org/recognitions/inconnue/index.shtml>
57
diachronic juxtaposition will nevertheless provide a critical point of departure for a
further (more synchronic) investigation of the role of the female corpse in these works in
the final section of this chapter.
Beginning chronologically, Emilia and Dido arguably die in a manner traditional
for classic tragedy. In Tragic Ways of Killing Women (1985), Nicole Loraux affirms that
the death of a woman in tragedy is always violent and self-inflicted – often either by
hanging or with the sacrificial knife.110 Both Emilia and Dido die from a stab wound to
the heart with a knife. Their bloody corpses thus bear the mark of their violent fate.
Emilia Galotti ends with a brief but laconic description of Emilia’s corpse. It by
no means possesses the beauty or mystery evoked by the Inconnue de la Seine; rather,
Emilia’s bloody corpse is simply a horrific sight. Odoardo indeed refers to it as “der
blutige Zeuge meines Verbrechens” (V, 8). Furthermore, the Prince observes it with
“Entsetzen” and “Verzweiflung” (Ibid); Emilia’s body as corpse has lost all of its sensual
allure for him. This also finds expression in Odoardo’s mocking rhetorical question.
“ODOARDO: Zieh hin! – Nun da Prinz! Gefällt sie Ihnen noch? Reizt sie noch Ihre
Lüste? Noch, in diesem Blute, das wider Sie um Rache schreiet” (V, 8). It is as though
Odoardo is proudly taunting the Prince with his own violent deed: the murder and desexualization of Emilia, who, as corpse, no longer possesses sexual appeal (Reiz); let us
not forget, then, my earlier symbolic reading of Emilia’s death from the thrust of the
phallic dagger.111
Through death, I would argue, Emilia’s body becomes materially real; that is, it
reveals its physiology – she too is just a composition of blood and guts. This final image
110
Loraux (Note 86), 3-10.
In the first chapter, I demonstrate how Emilia’s death from Odoardo’s borrowed dagger can be
symbolically interpreted as incestuous rape, as the dagger clearly represents a phallic symbol.
111
58
of Emilia marks a stark contrast from the mediated or virtual image we are introduced to
at the beginning of the play through Conti’s portrait of her, which he describes as “das
Studium der weiblichen Schönheit” (I, 4). This consequential change vis-à-vis Emilia’s
image from the beginning to the end of the play suggests that the greater the abstraction
from the real body, the more pleasurable the representation.112 One could certainly argue
that the Prince is merely disappointed by the loss of the idealization of the perfect object
through Emilia’s death. Indeed, Gustafson illustrates how Lessing himself speaks of the
disappointment at realizing that a beautiful woman within one’s view is actually a mere
painting and not real:
Dort in der Entfernung werde ich das schönste, holdseligste Frauenzimmer gewahr, das mit der
Hand auf geheimnißvolle Art zu winken scheint. […] Nun gehe ich darauf los. Himmel! Es ist
nichts als ein Gemälde, eine Bildsäule! Nach Ihrer Erklärung, liebster Freund, sollte nunmehr das
Vergnügen desto grösser seyn, weil mich der Affekt von der Vollkommenheit der Nachahmung
intuitiv überzeugt hat. Aber das ist wider aller Erfahrung; ich werde vielmehr verdrießlich; und
warum werde ich verdrießlich? Die Lust über den vollkommen Gegenstand fällt weg, und die
angenehme Empfindung des Affekts bleibt allein übrig.113
On the contrary, I would argue that quite a different affect is evoked through the visual
confrontation of Emilia’s corpse at the close of the play. The prince’s disappointment
stems not from the loss of the idealization of the perfect object, but, rather, from Emilia’s
“destructive” materialization. The ideal of the perfect object (Emilia’s beautiful virtual
representation through the painting) is destroyed, and the veil of her beauty is lifted to
reveal only a bloody corpse, soon to decay and be consumed by worms. One could argue
that the representation of Emilia’s corpse recalls the allegorical figure of the medieval
Frau Welt, who personified worldly sins. From a distance, she appears beautiful and
112
113
Gustafson (Note 65), 53.
See Ibid.
59
alluring, but if you come too close you see that her back is already in a state of decay,
crawling with worms and rodents.
Emilia’s corpse and its representation are similar to that of Dido. Although there
is no description of Dido’s corpse within the narrative of the play, the similar manner in
which she dies and the publicness of her death intimate the possibility of a parallel
reading of the female corpse in the two plays. There is no physical portrait of Dido
offering a contrasting image to her corpse; however, Dido’s public figure as queen might
be read as a kind of virtual image or idealization. To most of her people, she is only
known and admired from a distance. In fact, Dido’s status, as well as the relationship she
appears to maintain with the men of her kingdom (again, the only other woman present in
the narrative is her lady-in-waiting, Elissa), is analogous to that of a Lady and her vassal
in a constellation of courtly love. The Lady represents the sublime object – she is
essentially devoid of any real qualities. She is to be admired and serenaded from afar, but
never approached and certainly not possessed. In other words: the strata of the real must
remain hidden. This finds expression in the following conversation between Jarbas, his
military commander, and the poet Ogon:
OGON: Gewiß. Denn auch der mittelmäßigste Dichter findet ein Weib, das ihm huldigt, ob ich auch
gleich von der Königin dieses nicht rühmen kann.
FELDHERR: Sollte es nicht die Güte des Geschlechts beweisen, das auch das kleinste Verdienst
anerkennt? Aber die Königin will nur deiner Bescheidenheit nicht zu nahe treten.
OGON: Das wollen wir dahinstellen. Ich gestehe, daß ich mich gern loben höre, es mag von Güte,
Schmeichelei oder Albernheit herrühren; ich sehe nicht gern hinter den Vorhang. (V, 2)
In an incredibly misogynist gesture, Ogon voices his support for Jarbas’s conquest of
Dido’s kingdom with the argument that the queen serves as no more than a
commodifiable inspiration for poetry. The military commander suggests that perhaps
60
Ogon does not understand the proper rules of “courtly love” – Ogon attempts “zu nahe
[zu] treten.” To this, however, Ogon rebuts that, on the contrary, he keeps his distance.
However, we know that he is probably lying, as he later muses that he would prefer to
serenade a “Mädchen” rather than a Lady (eine Dame), inferring that his motives are
likely more sensual than poetic or spiritual. Moreover, his reference to the unappealing
view “behind the curtain” (hinter den Vorhang) points back to my argument that Dido
has two images: the ideal one and the real one.
I believe it is also via her violent and public death in the temple that the material
Dido, composed of flesh and blood, is revealed unmediated to her people, and the result
is indeed shocking. A private death, alone in her chambers, far from the gaze of others,
would have better suited her public image and would have served to maintain her status
as the abstract ideal. Similar to Emilia, Dido’s bloody corpse thus symbolizes her
“horrific” materialization.
In other words, witnessing a person’s death is like
experiencing the reality of their corporeal existence.
While the two eighteenth-century dramas appear to represent the female corpse as
the disturbing materialization of the sublime object of femininity, The Blue Light and Jew
Süss have, at least at first glance, distinctly different aesthetic aspirations for the female
corpse. With respect to my above examination of the late nineteenth-century shift in
aesthetic perceptions of the female corpse, the differences to come to light in the
twentieth century are not surprising. Indeed, I would argue that a reverse process is at
work in these filmic texts. Junta and Dorothea become abstract ideals through their
deaths.
Their corpses are beautified and fetishized both diegetically and extra-
61
diegetically in a mode of rhetorical violence: the body appears to be severed from its
materiality and context.
Although the aestheticization and fetishization of death often attributed
phenomenally to National Socialism is actually borne out of a longer aesthetic tradition
beginning in the nineteenth century, it can be argued that Nazism embraced this aesthetic
technique and employed it dogmatically. In Reflections of Nazism, Saul Friedländer
unpacks the juxtaposition of kitsch and death as the bedrock of Nazi aesthetics, summing
it up with the much-quoted catch phrase “the kitsch of death.” 114 In the words of Susan
Sontag, this aesthetic form is a fixture of fascist art that “glorifies surrender, exalts
mindlessness, and glamorizes death.”115
The topos of “the kitsch of death” is immediately evident in The Blue Light,
whose narrative is even framed by Junta’s “beautiful” death mask. In fact, the first image
we see of her is a small picture set into an ornate crystal-encrusted picture frame being
peddled to the tourists in the street by a young child. This image is followed by two more
like it: we see her first on a clock in the inn and then set into the cover of a lavish book
containing the story of Junta’s life and death. Her death mask nostalgically takes us back
in time to an imaginary lost space of pre-capitalism and natural harmony.
Junta’s death, which concludes the embedded narrative, is not by drowning, like
the Inconnue de la Seine, but, rather, by falling. She plummets to her death from the
Mount Cristallo as the young men before her. Nevertheless, her corpse is miraculously
intact – radiant even – not at all mangled from her fall. We encounter her dead body
through Vigo’s gaze, who finds her corpse lying peacefully under the early morning sun
114
115
See Saul Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism. Trans. Thomas Weyr. (New York: Harper Row, 1984), 26.
Sontag (Note 43), 91.
62
in a meadow of wildflowers. Her eyes are closed and, save for her lifeless limbs, she
appears to be sleeping. Through a powerful filmic dissolve, the image of Junta’s face is
recast as a death mask, as what Eric Rentschler refers to as “a votive image.”116 In fact,
through the filmic apparatus, her perfect, immaculate face is solidified into an object of
art, as this dissolve returns us to the frame of the film and to the original image of Junta
framed by the crystals.
Vigo’s gaze differentiates itself from that of the prince in Emilia Galotti or even
possibly that of Jarbas in Dido. Junta’s corpse does not reveal her materiality; on the
contrary, it seems to distance her from the spectator. Not only do the diegetic coordinates
create an idyllic mise-en-scène through which to present the angelic, almost surreal
image of the dead Junta: the light of the sun radiates on her face and she is enveloped in
the early morning mist from the mountain; but Riefenstahl also deliberately uses a soft
focus lens for this scene, which simulates a soft glowing atmosphere and subtly changes
the image to convey a desired interpretation to the viewer. Thus, I would argue that death
abstracts Junta further. On this basis, Vigo’s expression of perplexity at the sight of her
limp body and the creation of art through the image of her death exhibit this abstraction
well. Moreover, what is especially striking about Junta’s death is that it seems to render
her completely innocuous; that is, the former hostile, even murderous attitude of the
villagers transforms into an albeit questionably remorseful reverence for Junta. This is
evident through the myriad of iconic images of her in the frame and in the final words of
the story: “This was the tragic end of poor Junta from Santa Maria. But her memory lives
on in the village, and the people who persecuted her got rich from the crystals of Mount
116
Rentschler (Note 18), 65.
63
Cristallo.” Death earns Junta a kind of morbid celebrity, and her death mask becomes a
fixture for a village legend and for the film itself. Furthermore, the image of her dead
body is both diegetically and extra-diegetically fetishized in a similarly scopophilic
manner as her sexual body is at the beginning of the film. Therefore, she is not only
rendered non-threatening, but, to once again cite Laura Mulvey, her corpse is also
stripped of its potentially castrating dimension.117
The representation of Junta’s corpse finds its analogue in that of Dorothea. The
influence of both the kitsch of death and the nineteenth-century story of the Inconnue de
la Seine are even more discernible here.118 In fact, as I mentioned in a previous chapter,
the water corpse was a kind of trope of Nazi cinema. The actress Kristina Söderbaum’s
nickname “The Reich’s Water Corpse” (Reichwasserleiche) was indeed ironically earned
through her frequent filmic drowning.119
In Jew Süss, Dorothea’s drowned body is recovered from the river Neckar in a
mis-en-scène that, as Régine Mihal Friedman points out, recreates the aesthetic
composition of F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927).120 The men of
the town are in boats, and their torches cast light and shadows through the mist.
Bystanders line the banks watching in horror. Finally, we see Faber standing in one of the
boats with the lifeless Dorothea in his arms. As he steps ashore, a kind of procession to
Süss’s house commences. A Bach-like variation of Dorothea’s musical motif plays in the
background. Faber then gently places Dorothea’s corpse on the steps of the house and
117
Mulvey (Note 19), 35.
Schulte-Sasse also points this out. See (Note 6), 86.
119
Other such films include Veit Harlan’s Jugend (Youth) (1937/38), Die goldene Stadt (The Golden City)
(1942), and Opfergang (The Sacrifice) (1943).
120
Friedman also points out that Harlan, independent of Jew Süss, also did a remake of Murnau’s film
called Die Reise nach Tilsit (The Voyage to Tilsit) (1939). See Friedman’s L’image et son Juif: Le juif dans
le cinéma nazi. (Paris: Payot, 1983), 233-236.
118
64
the camera zooms in for a long close-up of her face lasting eleven seconds. The camera’s
fetishization of Dorothea’s corpse recalls the scene in The Blue Light in such a way that
we almost anticipate a similar dissolve from Dorothea’s face to her death mask. SchulteSasse refers to this scene and its cinematic celebration of Dorothea’s limp body as “the
height of pathos” in the film.121
Like that of Junta, Dorothea’s body is also radiantly intact and her face,
previously distorted in horror after being raped by Süss, has been restored to its child-like
innocence and placidity. Even her clothes, which had been in disarray, seem to have
shifted back into place. There are no visible signs of violence or violation. In a similar
manner, Harlan also makes use of a soft focus effect here in order to create this radiant
image of the dead Dorothea. In Over her Dead Body, Bronfen asserts, “death is often
encoded as the translation of the body into a dematerialized form that eternally preserves
the virgin girl.”122 The death of Dorothea can certainly be read in this way. Despite her
sexual “defilation” by the Jew, in death, she is abstracted into the ideal image of purity
and innocence – the perfect Aryan woman.
It is evident that the aesthetic codification of the female corpse is diachronically
marked and differentiated.
In the eighteenth-century narratives, the female corpse
represents a materialization of corporeality, whereas the post-nineteenth-century filmic
narratives appear to be doing the complete opposite: the corpses of Junta and Dorothea
represent a dematerialization of their bodies, a kind of virtualization. This conclusion
presents nothing new. It is clear that the bourgeois tragedy embraced a newfound realism
hitherto absent in the idealism of French classical theatre, which ultimately strived to
121
122
Schulte-Sasse (Note 6), 86.
Bronfen (Note 105), 91.
65
depict the horrible reality of everyday struggle of class and power. Furthermore, Nazi
cinema valorized sacrifice to such an extent that the violence, which it incubated and
perpetuated through propaganda films like Jew Süss was often immediately overlooked
through a form of glorification. However, I believe that a more thorough examination of
the rhetorical role of the female corpse may offer another more parallel reading of these
texts within the context of the representation of the female corpse.
3.3 “Something is Rotten…” : Affect through Deflection
While, in the first section of this chapter, I illustrated the historically-coded
contrariety of the aesthetic representations of the female corpse vis-à-vis the juxtaposition
of eighteenth-century tragedies and the Nazi films, this section will argue that both genres
and mediums can also be examined comparatively in so far as they rely on a semiotics of
‘looking away’ from the abject of the corpse. In so doing, I will demonstrate how the
texts promote a similarly encoded affect, which ultimately defines our experience and
perception of the female corpse in these texts.
Indeed, the perplexity of the representation of the female corpse here offers a final
basis for comparison.
This, I argue, can be elucidated through a reading of Julia
Kristeva’s interpretation of the corpse. In Powers of Horror, Kristeva describes the
corpse as the abject that infects life. “It is something rejected from which one does not
part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness
and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us.”123 Here, Kristeva points out
the utter impossibility of “looking away” from the corpse. However, she defines the
123
Kristeva (Note 52), 4.
66
infectiousness of the corpse not as a disease-ridden carcass, but, rather, as that which
disturbs identity, system, and order.124 Why, then, does the female corpse appear to
restore order in these narratives as a kind of mors ex-machina?125 Herein, I believe,
resides a compelling point of departure for a more in-depth investigation of the
representation and instrumentalization of the female corpse in these narratives in the
production of affect.
I would dare to argue that affect is a tenor of the aspirations of both the bourgeois
tragedy and Nazi cinema. Was it not Lessing’s endevour to “appeal” to the sympathies of
his increasingly bourgeois audience, which revolutionized drama at the time?
Furthermore, was it not cinema, which provided the apparatus for the most infamous
propaganda machine in western history? Historically, these aims are clearly different; on
the one hand, the bourgeois tragedy manifested the making of a national theatre, and, on
the other hand, Nazi cinema paid witness to the complete mobilization of politicized antiSemitism and military jingoism. Nevertheless, there appears to be a common affective
functionality among these four texts even despite the disparate coding of their aims,
which I believe needs to be examined further. I will demonstrate that this functionality
can (and should) be situated in relation to the representation of the female corpse in each
text.
While the first section of this chapter historically traces the aesthetic differences
of the representations of the female corpse in my four texts, this final section will
illustrate the deeper structures of the aesthetic apparatus at work in each narrative and
thus disclose the parallels between the female corpse and affect, which inhere in these
124
Ibid.
I believe Linda Schulte-Sasse reference to Junta’s corpse, in her citation of Jürgen Link, is fitting here.
See (Note 4), 159.
125
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works. I argue that these texts employ an aesthetic technique of deflection from the
reality of the horror of death. Deflection can thus be defined as the act of perceiving and
recognizing an object without giving oneself over to it. In so doing, each text attempts to
overcome the presence of Kristeva’s utmost abjection – namely the female corpse.126
That is, the corpse’s immediate affective provocation as the embodiment of death and
lack is subdued.
Moreover, the exhibition of corpse works, instead, to create
disconnected affective qualities of pity and harmony in the bourgeois tragedy and Nazi
film respectively. Thus, the female corpse serves as a kind of aesthetic instrument of
deflection from which the audience must avert its gaze.
My examination of affect in these texts finds its theoretical backdrop in the
aesthetic writings of Lessing’s Laokoon and Saul Friedländer’s Reflections on Nazism.
Both are representative of the study of aesthetics and affect in their given era and offer
critical insight into the reading and interpretation of the corpse in my narratives. Here, I
will focus specifically on Emilia Galotti, The Blue Light, and Jew Süss.
In Emilia Galotti, the female corpse does not seem to pose aesthetic difficulties
for Lessing, who clearly had no problem with its dramatic representation, as I have
demonstrated in an earlier section. In fact, Lessing’s disregard, even disdain, for the
female body in his aesthetic writings leads us to question his apparent privileging of the
127
woman and the female body in his dramas.
seminal work on aesthetics, Laokoon.
Let us turn our attention to Lessing’s
As David Wellbery rightly points out,
identification in the Laokoon essay “is identification with the Father, with the Law, with
126
127
Kristeva (Note 52), 4.
This is immediately evident in Lessing’s most prominent aesthetic work Laokoon.
68
the Limit.”128 The woman, on the other hand, is always the “Mother,” and is essentially
connected to “das Ekelhafte.” Wellbery reads the Mother’s symbolic role in the Laokoon
statue as the repulsive opening of the mouth – she the embodiment of lack and the
manifestation of excessive emotion at the same time. In fact, Wellbery even suggests, in
his re-visiting of Lessing’s essay, that the Laokoon instantiates what he refers to as “the
integrity of male morphology: that morphology which the Father transmits directly,
without the intervention of the maternal lack, to his sons.”129
In other words, the
Laokoon dramatizes the self-extrication of the Father and his sons from, what further
Wellbery calls, “the material-sensuous constriction of the repulsive […], establishing
themselves as beautiful subjects, as subjects of a humanity grounded in Mitleid (pity).”130
The woman is thus excluded from this process, save for her symbolic role as that which
must be overcome (by the subject). Furthermore, femininity, if mentioned in Lessing’s
essay, is always associated with excess and over-emotionality, which is critically echoed
by Bronfen, who refers to the representation of the feminine death as the aesthetic
moment of excess.131
More recently, Simon Richter reads Lessing’s Laokoon as a euphemistic gesture,
which fundamentally denies the statue – its corporeality and death.132 In his examination
of Lessing’s interpretation of Timanthes’s painting of “Sacrifice of Iphigenia,” for
example, Richter notes Lessing’s appreciation of the artist’s veiling of the abhorrence of
128
Wellbery, David. “Pathos of Theory.” Laokoon Revisited.” Intertextuality: German Literature and
Visual Art. Eds. Ingeborg Hoesterey and Ulrich Weisstein. (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993): 47-63.
59.
129
Ibid., 55-56.
130
Ibid., 65.
131
Bronfen (Note 105), 62.
132
Richter, Simon. Laocoon’s Body and the Aesthetics of Pain. Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, Moritz,
Goethe. (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1992), 62.
69
death as the artist’s own sacrifice to the law of beauty (Gesetz der Schönheit).133 This
euphemism, Richter further argues, is indeed accompanied by “a deflection from a
disappropriation of the woman [the sacrificial victim] in favour of the man.”134
Both Wellbery’s and Richter’s readings of Lessing’s Laokoon can be applied to
Lessing’s dramas, especially Emilia Galotti. In fact, a more exhaustive reading of his
dramas, I would argue, reveals Lessing’s utter disregard for women as aesthetic subjects:
the Father is the subject of pity here. In Emilia Galotti, although we are permitted to look
at the corpse, it is represented as the utmost abjection.
The “Entsetzen” (disgust)
displayed by the Prince upon observing Emilia’s dead body certainly supports this.
Therefore, similar to the Prince, our gaze does not ultimately remain fixed on this abject.
That is, once confronted with the corpse, the spectator must “look away,” as Gustafson
indicates.135 And it is precisely this “looking away” from Emilia’s corpse, which, I
believe, occasions our shift of focus to the Father.
Lessing encourages this visual
experience of the disgusting, horrible abject, but it should remain only momentary. In
other words, the spectator must also liberate himself/herself from this horrible image, not
unlike the Father and his sons of the Laokoon, who must liberate themselves from the
horrible snake, in order to rise up as subjects.136 This is indeed part of the affective
process at work in Lessing’s triad for moral improvement: Horror (Schrecken), Pity
(Mitleid), and Admiration (Bewunderung). Gustafson illustrates this by borrowing a
passage from Lessing’s Hamburgische Dramaturgie:
133
Ibid., 66.
Ibid., 67.
135
Gustafson (Note 65), 70.
136
Wellbery also suggests that this snake may be read as a symbol of the repulsive, suffocating Mother.
This interpretation can also be found in Heinrich Heine’s poem, „Du sollst mich liebend umschließen,“
wherein the woman is represented as the deadly snake.
134
70
Das Schrecken zertheiltet sich in Mitleid… Die Bewunderung setzt dem Mitleiden Schranken. Das
Schrecken braucht der Dichter zur Ankündigung des Mitleids, und Bewunderung gleichsam zum
Ruhepunkt desselben. Der Weg zum Mitleid wird dem Zuhören zu lang, wenn ihn nicht gleich der
erste Schreck aufmerksam macht, und das Mitleiden nützt sich ab, wenn es sich nicht in der
Bewunderung erholen kann. 137
Here, Lessing lays out his strategy for affect. Horror is a prerequisite for pity and
admiration. In Emilia Galotti, we see that through the deflection of horror (the corpse) the
audience’s attention is so strongly and fondly drawn to a foil; it seeks relief from this
uncomfortable confrontation with the corpse.
Indeed, the subject of the bourgeois tragedy is the subject of pity (Mitleid).
Lessing posits pity as the source of the subject’s moral improvement, as the affirmation
of both the subject’s identity and sociability. On this point, Dorothea von Mücke asserts
that the subjectivity present in the bourgeois tragedy is constituted via a process of the
abjection of what she refers to as “undifferentiated otherness and affective ambiguity.”138
In other words, von Mücke contends that the female figure of the bourgeois tragedy must
reject the corporeality of her body – her female sexuality as well as her maternity – in
order to become the subject of pity and the object of the audience’s pity.139 Only through
her own destruction and negation may she gain subjectivity. However, I do not believe
that Emilia, even in her material transcendence, is granted this status. Rather, the subject
of pity at the end of the play is her orphaned father, the figure of identification (as is also
expressed in both Wellbery’s and Richter’s readings of Laokoon).
In light of my aesthetic examination of the role of the corpse in Emilia Galotti,
this rendering of the subject of pity is problematic. As I have demonstrated, the corpse
137
Lessing, G.E. “Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel.” Literaturtheoretische und ästhetische Schriften. Ed.
Albert Meier. (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2006), 24.
138
Von Mücke (Note 47), 113.
139
Von Mücke refers her specifically to the character of Sara Sampson in Lessing’s first tragedy Miss Sara
Sampson (1775); however, it is clear that this argument is also applicable to the case of Emilia. Ibid.
71
can, and I would argue does, represent precisely the materialization of the corporeality of
the body; that is to say, death does not offer material transcendence on a rhetorical level
because in the end we are still left with the corpse. In other words, Emilia’s attempt to
completely erase her abject body only begets a greater abjection: her corpse.
Thus, Emilia’s mutilated body serves as the abject, which, in its horribleness,
strategically deflects our attention to Odoardo – the subject of pity and the object of our
admiration. Odoardo’s final speech act expresses this well. He rejects the desire to turn
the dagger on himself – an “easy” escape from the reality of the situation. “ODOARDO:
Sie erwarten vielleicht, dass ich den Stahl wider mich selbst kehren werde, um meine Tat
wie eine schale Trägodie zu beschließen?” (V, 8) His reference to a “schale” tragedy, I
would argue, seems to undermine Emilia’s own tragic self-sacrifice; suicide is painted
here as a false (schale) act of subjectivity and agency. Rather, Lessing draws our
attention to the father’s will to face the responsibility and repercussion of his crime:
Odoardo is the true tragic figure. The female corpse of the bourgeois tragedy thus serves
as a mere means to an end – an aesthetic-pedagogical tool rhetorically designed to ensure
the spectators’ own moral development through their identification with the father.
The affective function of the female corpse evident in the bourgeois tragedy is not
dissimilar to that of the Nazi film narratives. At first glance, it would appear that The
Blue Light and Jew Süss invoke completely disparate approaches to the representation of
the female corpse. Indeed, as I have demonstrated in the first section of this chapter, the
aesthetic apparatus operates quite differently in the filmic texts: the female corpse
appears as a beautiful spectacle rather than an abject. In fact, the spectator is even
encouraged to affix his/her gaze upon the corpse. The artistically manifested dissolve of
72
Junta’s corpse and the long close-up shot of the dead Dorothea certainly offer support of
this. However, the reality of their death and their corpses is shrouded in an aesthetic
veil.140 While we are again permitted to look, what we are seeing is not what is really
there: death, decay – essentially, a rotting corpse.
Although the bourgeois tragedy plainly represents the authentic corpse without
the aesthetic veils used in the Nazi films, our attention is nevertheless diverted away from
it. In a similar way, Nazi cinema forces us to symbolically redirect our perspective to a
more aesthetically pleasing image of a beautiful and passive female body in a kind of
peaceful sleep. In fact, as Rentschler points out that the visual coordinates of the scene in
which Vigo discovers Junta’s corpse closely mimic those of an earlier scene in which
Vigo watches Junta sleep.141 However, the abstracted corpse in both films, I would
argue, does not appeal to our pity as the orphaned father in the bourgeois tragedy, but,
rather, to our sentimentality through a form of kitsch, as I mention above. That is, the
female corpse of Nazi cinema is meant to appeal to our nostalgic side. Friedländer
explains this as “an appeal to harmony, to emotional communion at the simplest and most
immediate level.”142 Death, then, is neutralized through sentimental idyll. This comes to
light in my earlier examination of the aesthetic representation of both Junta’s corpse and
Dorothea’s corpse, especially in the case of Junta whose corpse is found lying in the
idyllic setting of the mountain meadow bathed in the mist and light of the early morning
sun.
140
It is especially interesting to note that Riefenstahl literally used veils in front of the camera to add to the
soft focus effect of the shot.
141
Rentschler (Note 21), 44.
142
Friedländer (Note 112), 27.
73
Although Friedländer is not convinced that the juxtaposition of kitsch and death
can ever be compatible at the level of experience, I would argue that these films
effectively achieve this in so far as they seem to successfully distance us from the reality
of death. These films do not exactly engender a kind of mode of moral training, as is the
case with the bourgeois tragedy.
Rather, the ambition of this discourse of Nazi
aesthetics, according to Friedländer, is to exorcize not only the total destruction of death
but also its complete negation into a more appeasing affect by showing that this horror of
death is coherent and explainable.143 Thus, we are able to rationally (albeit not critically)
distance ourselves from the death of figures like Junta and Dorothea through their
aesthetic rendering. This distancing effect, I would argue, stands in opposition to a kind
of Brechtian alienation, in that it alternatively, fashions a quasi-virtual reality – an
idealization. In this way, we can easily ignore the vulgar materialization of the corpse.
Friedländer goes so far as to assert that the strategy of this affect of the
neutralization and glorification of death and destruction necessarily represents Nazi
criminality and extermination policies: it is Nazism itself.144 Therefore, the affect of this
aesthetic frisson of harmony and themes of death evident in these films also serves as a
kind of pedagogical tool (even if doctrinaire), not dissimilar in functionality to that of the
bourgeois tragedy.
While Lessing was interested in the moral improvement of his
audience, Nazi cinema was interested in socializing a nation according to the doctrines of
National Socialism. It is, for example, no secret that Jew Süss, the most heinous antiSemitic film every made, was devised to prepare Germans for the Final Solution.
143
144
Ibid., 19.
Ibid., 26.
74
To be certain, pedagogy and propaganda are two very different techniques;
however, it is clear that both the bourgeois tragedy and Nazi film employ a form of
aesthetic alienation apropos the female corpse, which appears to propel both techniques,
and I would argue, blurs the lines of differentiation in so far as feminine representation is
concerned. Indeed, this alienation works in similar ways in both genres in so far as it
serves to instrumentalize the corpse for ideological purposes in a kind of second sacrifice
of the female body, which furthermore neglects the problem of the reality of the corpse.
Affect is created through the manipulation of the corpse in a symbolic “looking away”
from the reality of death. In other words, the juxtaposition of death and pity or death and
harmony fashions a powerful affect of the latter (be it pity or harmony) – we are
necessarily drawn to the latter because we fear and loathe the unknown and horror of the
former: death. In fact, it is not uninteresting to note that none of the four narratives
include a funeral or burial of the dead woman.
This obvious lack of closure and
fundamental disregard for the corpse as the physical representation of death beyond its
aesthetic function remains problematic.
3.4 Conclusion
If we return to Goodwin’s and Bronfen’s previously cited exegesis of the female
corpse as the blind spot of cultural discourse, the semiotic label of a kind of master
signifier that defies signification (pointing instead to other signifiers) seems to fit the
female corpse well. Through its biological and even theological uprooting, the female
corpse, I would argue, is meticulously instrumentalized as both an aesthetic and an
affective trope in these texts.
75
In the first section of this chapter, I surmise that an immediate reading of these
texts reveals a disparity of aesthetic coding vis-à-vis the representation of the female
corpse, which clearly juxtaposes the eighteenth-century dramas and the twentieth-century
Nazi films. In Emilia Galotti and Dido, the female corpse does indeed represent the
material corporality of the woman, and we are permitted to visually perceive the reality
of death and violence. In the case of The Blue Light and Jew Süss, death is shrouded in
an aesthetic veil of beauty and tranquility; that is, while we see Junta’s and Dorothea’s
corpses, we do not see the reality of their death – the violence, destruction, and decay.
The following section, however, takes a surprising turn. Whereas the aesthetic
representation of the female corpse is markedly different between the two periods, its
function in the creation of affect bears fundamental similarity in these texts. It is clear
that the Nazi films shroud death in a veil of beauty in the creation of a more “pleasant”
(virtual) reality. However, the bourgeois tragedy also employs a method of deflection
from the horror of death. Although we are confronted with death’s reality in the two
plays, we are not suppose to give ourselves over to its horrible image; rather, we must
overcome its power and thereby shift our attention to the Father (in the case of the
bourgeois tragedy), who is the real subject of pity in the play.
In both cases, the narrative as well as the spectator essentially neglects the
problem of death and the abject corpse. The absence of a burial or funeral of the young
woman in all four texts arguably strongly alludes to this neglect and further underscores
the lack of narrative subjectivity held by the female figure.
76
CONCLUSION
Within the framework of this comparative reading and examination of Emilia
Galotti, Dido, The Blue Light, and Jew Süss, I have aimed to demonstrate the works’
common treatment and exploitation of the feminine. Abused, negated, and finally utterly
neglected, the female body is even neglected the position of the “Other” in these texts. It
functions as a rhetorical construct essentially devoid of real substance – of even reality
itself.
Furthermore, I have illustrated in what way woman serves as an aesthetic
enactment, whose demise is not only rendered innocuous, but also ideologically
affirmative and aesthetically pleasing.
The role of the woman in each text is characterized through this very trope of her
otherness – her female (sexual) body. She is rhetorically instrumentalized, both sexually
and sacrificially, and finally reduced to complete negation. Indeed, her ultimate material
state as corpse appears to symbolize her essential lack of textual subjectivity as well as
overall narrative presence in these texts. Moreover, even in death the woman is denied
material agency or recognition. The language of the body is assaulted and concealed.
Whereas Elisabeth Bronfen suggests that the act of suicide or self-sacrifice may imbue
the corpse with a certain authorship,145 I would argue, that if the female protagonist holds
any kind of authorial position in these texts, then it is her tragic awareness of her own
inherent lack of consistency, which in turn drives her to erase herself entirely from the
narrative. As I have pointed out in my second chapter on sacrifice, it appears as though
the woman’s most significant narrative contribution is achieved through her own selfeffacement – namely, her death.
145
Bronfen (Note 105), 142.
77
This thesis thus uncovers a shared virtual reality apropos the role of the feminine,
which necessarily differentiates itself from the narrative reality of these texts. In so
doing, it proposes a kind of counter-narrative to each text’s otherwise hitherto received
reading. Although this counter-narrative has not been entirely neglected in scholarship, it
nevertheless remains obscured.
In other words, I have not attempted to restore an
affirmative feminine narrative already present here. (From my reading, these texts clearly
do not offer a “woman’s side of the story.”) However, by examining these works and
their corresponding time periods from the perspective of the role and representation of
the woman, we may be able to address the broader problem of history and the
juxtaposition of Enlightenment and National Socialism in a new light.
The parallels I have drawn between all four texts demonstrate an inexorable
historical continuity. Indeed, there appears to be scant variation in the representations of
women vis-à-vis these two historical eras against the backdrop of these works. It seems,
then, that my introductory reference to the Horkheimer/Adorno dialectical thesis for
Enlightenment is thus reinforced here. That is, do not these virtual parallels within my
four works represent the continuum of (at least a certain dimension of) history from the
eighteenth century to National Socialism, rather than a divide? It seems that National
Socialism shared its treatment of women and female protagonists with a much longer
span of modern culture, already starting in the Enlightenment.146 This thesis irrefutably
offers support to this crucial argument.
146
This argument actually recalls the thesis of Helma Sanders-Brahms’s later film set during National
Socialism and the Second World War, Germany, Pale Mother (Deutschland, bleiche Mutter) (1979), which
claims that from the perspective of the woman, the Nazi period does not represent a break in German
history, but, rather a continuum.
78
Finally, this project serves as a kind of excavation and re-thinking of certain
cultural and historical discourses with regard to the representation and role of women.
By deconstructing these texts (and many others) within feminist frameworks, it is
possible to expose and address some intrinsic problems of feminine representation vis-àvis literary and filmic narratives, which are not always self-evident.
79
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