LOCATING FEELING: EMOTION, SPACE, AND PLACE IN MIDDLE HIGH GERMAN COURTLY LITERATURE AROUND 1200 Nicolay Ostrau A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. Chapel Hill 2011 Approved by: Kathryn Starkey Jonathan Hess Clayton Koelb Ann Marie Rasmussen Brett Whalen ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A doctoral dissertation is never the work of one individual. I am forever indebted to the many people who made it possible for me to complete this project. I am most especially grateful to my advisor, Kathryn Starkey, for her extraordinary guidance, her remarkable support and her unlimited patience. I am equally grateful to Ann Marie Rasmussen for her invaluable advice, encouragement, and faith in this project. This project also benefitted greatly from the expertise of the other members of my dissertation committee, Jonathan Hess, Clayton Koelb, and Brett Whalen. Their encouragement and support for this project were invaluable. I am no less grateful to Haiko Wandhoff, Horst and Edith Wenzel, and Janice Koelb who helped me to think about this project in new ways. I am also greatly indebted to my wife, Colleen, and my children, Jonas and Emma, for their sacrifices and unbroken optimism. Last but not least, I am thankful for the support from the faculty, staff, and graduate students of the German programs at UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University who shared this incredible journey. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Spatial Practices of Emotion in Middle High German Texts (1200) 1. X Marks the Spot: Place Versus Emotional Space in Parzival……………….1 2. Courtly Subjects: Community, Individuality, and Emotional Space………….5 3. Space and Place in the Courtly Romance……………………...…………….11 4. History of Emotions.…………………………………………………………20 5. Emotions in Literature.………………………………………………….…...28 6. Chapter Organization………………………………………………………...31 7. Heroes in Motion: Courtly Emotions and Movement ……………………….36 PART I: Internal Spaces/ External Places: Lordship, Grief, and Power Chapter 1: Paragons of Male Grief: Lordly Suffering in Communal Versus Personal Places 1. Paragons of Male Grief: Lordly Suffering in Communal Versus Personal Places……………………………………..………………………………….43 2. Karl Weeps—Grief in Perfect Balance in the Rolandslied…………………..54 3. Willehalm: Karl as a Model of Perfect Suffering…………….………………65 4. Willehalm Moves—Grief and Hero in Motion ……………………………...67 5. Transgressions: Personal Grief in the Communal Place…………………..…74 iii Chapter 2: Dislocation of Lordly Grief: Etzel‘s Unspeakable Suffering Place 1. Disintegration of Grief in Die Klage..……………………………………….79 2. Personal Suffering Before the Group: The Conflation of Communal and Personal Grieving Space……………………………………………………..80 3. Overpowering Unmaht: Political Repercussions of Etzel‘s Personal Grief…84 4. Leader Without External Sense(s): Etzel‘s Grief as Focus on the Self……...90 5. No Place With God: Renouncing Christ, Renouncing Lordship………….....98 6. Lost in Suffering/Lost in Translation: The Lord‘s Unspoken Grief and the Narrator‘s Dilemma of Unspeakable Grief………………………………....103 PART II: Entering Medieval Interiors: Love Castles as Places of Internal Feeling Chapter 3: Locating Feeling: Subjective Experiences of Love in Castles 1. Castles as Allegories: Emotion and Architecture in Ancient and Medieval Narrative……………………………………………………………………111 2. The Love Castle in Apuleius‘ ―Cupid and Psyche‖………………………...118 3. Multiplication of Feelings: Emotional Spaces in Laudine‘s Castle in Yvain and Iwein…..………………………………………………………………..122 4. Beyond the Body: Castle Space and Interior Space………………………..128 Chapter 4: Transforming Place: Constructing Emotional Spaces and Emotional Response 1. The Production of Courtly Space…………………………………………...135 2. Dido‘s Fortress in the Eneasroman: A Constructed Place of Love………...136 3. Condwiramurs‘ Fortress: Constructing a Place of Chastity and Desire in Parzival …………………………………………………………………….146 4. House of Shame, House of Honor: Transforming Place by Courtly Imagination………………………………………………………………....155 iv PART III: Feeling Out of Bounds: Emotional Healing in the Wilderness Chapter 5: Wild Forms of Female Grief—Agency and Emotional Healing in the Forest 1. Nature and the Individual: Wilderness as a Space of Emotional Healing …167 2. The Porous Border: The Court—A Joyful Place? …………………………174 3. Resisting Reintegration: Sigune‘s Wilderness Cell in Wolfram‘s Parzival..182 4. A Place Without Grief: Herzeloyde, Parzival, and the Journey From the Court to the Wilderness and Back Again………………………………………….190 Chapter 6: Tristan and Isolde—From the Jamergarten to the Lover‟s Place 1. Tristan and Isolde: An Emotional Journey…………………………………201 2. A Place for Suffering: The Garden at Mark‘s Court………………………..203 3. Interspace: The Position Between the Orchard and the Court as a Space of Emotional Transformation………………………………………………….205 4. The Lovers‘ Place in the Wilderness…………………………………….…208 5. Access Denied: The Lovers‘ Cave as the Lovers‘ Internal Emotional Space……………………………………………………………………..…219 6. Into the Wild: In Pursuit of Individual Emotional Space…………………..223 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………….229 Works Cited…….…………………………………………………………………………..236 v Introduction: Spatial Practices of Emotion in Middle High German Texts (1200) 1. X Marks the Spot: Place Versus Emotional Space in Parzival In the middle of his journey through the forest‘s pathless thicket, Wolfram‘s von Eschenbach hero Parzival is at one point stopped dead in his tracks. By the light of dawn, the young hero discovers three drops of blood in the snow-covered meadow that stretches out before him. The narrator comments that these drops of blood will cause Parzival great emotional distress because of the hero‘s devotion to his wife. The triangular arrangement of the red blotches immediately remind the hero of Condwiramurs‘ face, whom he had to leave behind when he began his quest for the grail. Gazing at the ground, Parzival‘s movement immediately ceases and his mind is locked into a feeling of burning heartache over the absent beloved. Scanning the drops of blood on the ground, the hero enters into an internal space where his mind is no longer aware of his physical environment but only of his feeling for Condwiramurs (―des helden ougen mâzen…zwen zaher an ir wangen, den dritten an ir kinne…sus begunder sich verdenken, unz daz er unversunnen hielt./his eyes scanned the ground for two drops forming her cheeks and a third forming her chin…thus he succumbed to his feelings with his senses frozen in place,‖ 283.16—17). The listener of the story is exposed to the pain that Parzival feels, because he/she is a witness to the stark contrast of Condwiramurs‘s felt presence inside Parzival on the one hand, and her physical distance on the other. This episode presents spatial arrangements within the narrative topography as powerful signposts of human feeling. The blood drops in the meadow function like a mental map in Wolfram‘s topographic system: from the position of the blood drops the audience gains a measure of the great distance between the lovers and of the extent of the hero‘s emotional pain. The spot in the meadow allows the audience to locate the hero‘s external position in relation to his wife and also his internal emotional disposition.1 This example from Parzival illustrates the innovative way in which courtly poets linked their romance characters‘ feelings with the places and spaces of the physical and emotional topography through which they move. The meadow with the blood drops brings to the foreground the hero‘s feelings about his separation from his wife, and his reaction to them is a comment on the relationship between the movement of the hero‘s body, the movement of his feelings and his ability to control his actions, both external and internal. Parzival‘s loss of external agency is caused precisely by his internal feelings taking control over his body; the hero‘s body, which is shut down, plays no significant role in expressing internal feeling. The episode‘s focus on Parzival‘s internal feeling separates the emotional space of the individual hero from the external place shared by the knightly community.2 The approaching group of Arthur‘s knights misinterprets the hero‘s stationary gesture of holding his weapon aloft, as an invitation to fight. They challenge him individually and Parzival unseats each one, returning each time to the spot where he perceives Condwiramur‘s face: ―Parzivâl reit 1 Discussing narrative portrayals of maps, Robert Stockhammer points out that “Die Karte ist eine Zeigefläche, die den Leser dazu herausfordert, auf sie zu deuten. Der Zeigefinger, der auf eine bestimmte Stelle gesetzt wird, aktualisiert nur eine der unbegrenzt erscheindenden Möglichkeiten, die Karte zu verwenden, die selbst, unablässig und an jeder Stelle, ‘hier ist…’ oder ‘hierher’ zu murmeln scheint,” 13. See: Robert Stockhammer, Kartierung der Erde: Macht und Lust in Karten und Literatur. (Munich: Fink, 2007). 2 My notion of ‘place’ versus ‘space’ in the context of emotional experience in the medieval romance is similar to that of the philosopher Michel de Certeau. De Certeau defines “space as practiced place,” 117. In the romance, emotional spaces are places that become ‘felt’ by the community, yet more frequently and interestingly also by individual characters. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, transl. Steven Rendall (Berkely : University of California Press, 1984). 2 âne vrâgen dâ die bluotes zäher lagen. do er die mit den ougen vant, fou mine stricte in an ir bant./ Without hesitation, Parzival rode to the place where the blood drops were located. As soon as his eyes had made contact, Lady Love put him on her leash,‖ 288.27—30). Only when the knight Gawan intervenes by covering the image out of empathy (‗waz op diu mine disen man twinget als si mich dô twang…?‘/What if love binds this man [to this place] as it did to me in the past…?,‘ 301.2223), does Parzival return to his external senses and to the communal place. Becoming aware of his surroundings, the hero is once again able to move and fully engage with the Arthurian knights.