Monstrous Anatomies

Sonderdruck aus Raul Calzoni / Greta Perletti (eds.) Monstrous Anatomies Literary and Scientific Imagination in Britain and Germany during the Long Nineteenth Century V&R unipress ISSN 2197-1390 ISBN 978-3-8471-0469-8 ISBN 978-3-8470-0469-1 (E-Book) ISBN 978-3-7370-0469-5 (V&R eLibrary) Contents The Body of the Monster between Science and Literature: An Introduction . ................................ 7 Elisa Leonzio Deformity and Monstrosity : Jean Paul between Embryogenesis and the Concept of Life ................................ 25 Raul Calzoni Liminal Figurations of the Vampire in the German Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang and Romanticism . ................... 41 Lorella Bosco A ‘Mosaic Work’: The Poison Mixer’s Body between Monstrosity and Deception . ................................ 61 Micaela Latini Angels and Monsters: On Stifter’s Turmalin ................ 81 Anna Cappellotto Creating Life Artificially: Robert Hamerling’s Homunculus ........ 95 Francesca Di Blasio The Monstrous Gaze: Exotic/Subaltern/Female. Omai in Eighteenth-Century Fin de Sicle London . ......121 Sharon Ruston Has Man “Paid Too Dear a Price for His Empire”? Monsters in Romantic-Era Literature . ...................133 6 Contents Flora de Giovanni Displaying the Anomalous Body. Wilkie Collins’s Freak Show ......149 Alessandra Violi Dead pro tem.: Suspended Animation and the Monstrosity of Death-Counterfeits . ...................169 Laura Di Michele Nineteenth-Century London as Monstrous Body . ......193 Maria Teresa Chialant ‘The Thing’. Unidentified Monstrous Objects in Victorian Fiction . 217 Francesca Guidotti The Dis-Appearance of the Body in an Age of Science: H. G. Wells’s Invisible Man .................................235 Sara Damiani Unthinkable Hybrids: The Somatic Unconscious of the Transplanted Body......................................255 Daniela Crocetti Taming Gender: How Hermaphroditism Became Pseudo and Gender Fled theBody....................................273 Michele Cometa The Survival of Ancient Monsters: Freud and Baubo . ......297 The Authors . ................................311 Micaela Latini Angels and Monsters: On Stifter’s Turmalin It was the merit of Walter Benjamin to have evidenced, in a letter addressed to the composer and writer Ernst Schoen dated June 17, 1918, the demonic character of the female protagonists of Adalbert Stifter’s novels as a sort of rebellion of nature against the constraints of society.1 Figures that represent the unexpected, the unforeseeable, the unthinkable, and are monstrous because of this. This inter- pretation seems particularly à propos for the short story Turmalin (‘Tourma- line’, 1853).2 A monster wanders undisturbed in Stifter’s literary architecture, and in particular in the underground of the eccentric “House Perron” described in Turmalin, whose protagonist is a girl with an abnormally large head.3 The title Turmalin refers to a particularly dark mineral, compared with the other stones of Stifter’s collection of short stories entitled Bunte Steine. Ein Festgeschenk (‘Colored Stones. A Holiday Gift’, 1853), where it was published. This choice is eloquent. The dark colour of the tourmaline reflects the terror and the gloomy atmosphere of the short story, and the venations of the mineral can also be seen 1 See Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence. 1910–1940, trans. by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 138. 2 As it is known, an earlier version of Turmalin had been published for the first time, with the title Der Pförter im Herrenhause, in 1852 in the journal “Libussa”. For a comparison between the two versions of the story see Joachim Müller, ‘Stifters “Turmalin” – Erzählhaltung und Motivstruktur im Vergleich beider Fassungen’, Vierteljahresschrift des Adalbert Stifter-In- stituts, 17, 1–2 (1968), pp. 33–45. See also: Eva Mason, ‘Stifter’s “Turmalin”: A Reconside- ration’, The Modern Language Review, 72, 2 (1977), pp. 348–358. 3 It is worth remembering that in the 19th century the French scientist Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, in his writing Philosophie anatomique des monstruosits humaines, had classified the Hy- drocephalus as a subclass of the Macrocephalus, and the latter as an Anomacephalus, in other words as a monster. For a general study on deformity and its perception, see Monströse Ordnungen, hrsg. von Achim Geisenhansluecke und Georg Mein (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009); Birgit Stammberger, Monster und Freaks. Eine Wissensgeschichte außergewöhnlicher Körper im 19. Jahrhundert (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011); Maddalena Mazzocut-Mis, Mostro. L’ano- malia e il deforme nella natura e nell’arte (Milan: Guerini, 1992; new edition, Milan: Guerini, 2012). 82 Micaela Latini as an allusion to the internal stratifications of the plot.4 Indeed, in the incipit of Tourmaline, the author himself advises the reader that the short story is gloomy like the stone at hand. The topics it deals with are gloomy : isolation, pain, death, physical malformation, madness. In fact, to create the atmosphere of the story, Stifter repeatedly avails himself of dark colours. Black is the velvet that borders the portrait of the ‘Madonna with Child’ that hangs on the wall of the room of the protagonist’s apartment.5 In the second part of the short story, black is the colour of the jackdaw (which at the beginning is mistaken for a ouzel), which is the only friend in the girl’s tragic existence. The dark basement recalls the dungeons of Gothic literature and it is here that many events in the story take place. It can be reached through a dark red door. In the second part of the short story all the events occur under the sign of darkness and opacity. This marks a contrast with the first part of the story, where the colour white is the dominant note. There can be no doubt that the basement in which most of the short story’s events take place signalizes a dimension of mental insanity. The central motif of the story is the obscure pain (infirmity), which infects mind and soul with melancholia. In his introduction to Turmalin, Stifter explains how human destiny should be at the centre of the story, highlighting the moment when the light of reason in the protagonist is dimmed, as soon as, in a condition of mental blindness, he abandons its inner law; “when he surrenders utterly to the intensity of his joys and sorrows, loses his foothold” and falls prey to an in- definable condition. In this sense Turmalin is a short story about the monstrosity of insanity, as suggested by the incipit of this very somber tale, where it is said that: Es ist darin wie in einem traurigen Briefe zu entnehmen, wie weit der Mensch kömmt, wenn er das Licht seiner Vernunft trübt, die Dinge nicht mehr versteht, von dem innern Gesetze, das ihn unabwendbar zu dem Rechten führt, läßt, sich unbedingt der Innigkeit seiner Freuden und Schmerzen hingibt, den Halt verliert, und in Zustände geräth, die wir uns kaum zu enträthseln wissen.6 4 See Lori Wagner, ‘Schick, Schichten, Geschichte. Geological Theory in Stifter’s Bunte Steine’, Vierteljahresschrift des Adalbert Stifter-Instituts, 2 (1995), pp. 34–36. 5 Interestingly, in Thomas Bernhard’s novel Auslöschung (‘Extinction’, 1986) the protagonist mentions a painting of a Madonna with a hydrocephalous Child that was in his parents’ home. 6 Adalbert Stifter, ‘Turmalin’, in Bunte Steine. Ein Festgeschenk (Pesth: Verlag von Gustav Heckenast, 1853), vol. 1, p. 195; engl. trans. ‘Tourmaline or the Doorkeeper’, in Limestone and Other Stories, trans. and with an Introduction by David Luke (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968), p. 105: “It [Tourmaline] is like a sad letter that tells us to what extremity man may come when he dims the lights of his reason, when he no longer understands life, when he abandons that inner law which is his steadfast guide along the right path, when he surrenders utterly to the intensity of his joys and sorrows, loses his foothold, and is lost in regions of experience which for the rest of us are almost wholly shrouded in mystery”. See Margaret Gump, Adalbert Stifter (Boston: Blackwell, 1974), pp. 82–84. Angels and Monsters: On Stifter’s Turmalin 83 The “solar eclipse” of the mind frees the underground of the soul and the monsters that inhabit it. The doorkeeper in Turmalin has abandoned the way of the reason, to walk on a dark and lonely road, taking along his daughter, a girl with an abnormal head. It is easy to see in the silhouette of the girl a monster, in the original sense of the word, attested in Friedrich Kluge’s Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, where the entry “monster” points out to the Latin verb monere, i.e. to remember,toadvice, a reference to the warning of the Gods against those who abandon the straight and narrow (path).7 In this sense the verb errare (to wander/to be mistaken, to follow a false way) is evidently a reference to the detour in the underground of the run-down House Perron. It is the underground world from which springs the aggressiveness and emotional violence that Thomas Mann saw hidden in the literary works of Stifter.8 The time of the monster The distant past in which the facts narrated by Stifter take place is lost in the convoluted mists of time. The events are revealed only gradually and are narrated from two perspectives: the main narrator and a friend of his, a woman directly involved in the story. As we read, we become increasingly aware that the inhabitants of Vienna are divided into two groups: the normal ones, who tell stories, and the weird ones, about whom stories are told.9 The two reports, which in overlapping compose the short story but come together only late in the narration, are however insufficient to clarify the story entirely. Many of the turning points remain unclear as though shrouded in the obscurity of a mythical time. They seem to take place in the mythical cave mentioned at the end of the first part of the story and seem to totter on the verge of sinking into the abyss of oblivion.

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