The Queer Voice and Gaze in Eichendorff’s Das Marmorbild

Abstract

This essay investigates the alliance of ocularcentrism and cis-heteronormativity as canonical formations in Joseph von Eichendorff’s 1819 novella Das Marmorbild, which enact a process of masculine subjectivity development through silencing the protagonist’s queer voice of difference. Furthermore, this essay argues that the novella transposes the esthetic encounter of viewing and listening to mimoplastic performances such as tableaux vivants into the narrative and shows how the male protagonist’s ability to articulate his desires vis-à-vis both male and female figures is calibrated through these mutual performances’ queer temporality. Drawing on tropes from the Western visual canon, this essay demonstrates how the story’s visual configurations work in tandem with a cis-heteronormativity to eliminate the disruptive potential of queer voices to cis-heteronormative sensory order. Nevertheless, this discussion problematizes the condition of the possibility of the canonical alignment and influence of cis-heteronormativity and visuality as it locates their motivation in patriarchal culture’s organization around homosocial desires.

Keywords:

• Cis-heteronormativity
• German Romanticism
• mimoplastics
• queer gaze and voice
• queer temporality
• Tableau Vivant

Notes

1 Martha B. Helfer, “The Male Muses of Romanticism: The Poetics of Gender in Novalis, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Eichendorff,” German Quarterly 78.3 (Summer 2005): 301.

2 Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2005), 6.

3 Cavarero, For More Than One Voice, 8.

4 Ibid.

5 Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879), “flōs,” http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0059:entry=flos

6 Cavarero, For More Than One Voice, 5.

7 See Catriona MacLeod, Embodying Ambiguity: Androgyny and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Keller (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1998), 162.

8 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).

9 More precisely, Florio’s encounter with the Venus statues enacts a momentary attitude of this myth, as the work of art comes to life in his gaze. While Eichendorff’s depiction of mimoplastics exemplifies MacLeod’s observation that the “tableau vivant implies an eroticized space, one that is overwhelmingly the domain of female performers and male spectators,” and thus recalls Pygmalion and its cis-heternormative looking dynamics, I argue that Florio does not yet embody the positionality of the active male gaze.

10 Catriona MacLeod, Fugitive Objects: Sculpture and Literature in the German Nineteenth Century (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 150.

11 See Waltraud Wiethölter, “Die Schule der Venus. Ein diskursanalytischer Versuch zu Eichendorffs ‘Marmorbild,’” in Michael Kessler and Helmut Koopmann, eds., Eichendorffs Modernität, Akten des internationalen, interdisziplinären Eichendorff-Symposions, 6.– 8. Oktober 1988. Akademie der Diözese Rottenburg-Stuttgart (Tübingen, 1989), 171–201. Wiethölter relates Eichendorff’s particular use of the term “Doppelbild” to visual constellations in several Italian Renaissance paintings, which involve opposing female figures as allegories of contrary moral agendas that are represented in diptychs. Wiethölter contends that this structural quality, i.e., the recurrently thematized overlap of pagan imagery with real women via their repeating “Doppelbild,” reflects Eichendorff’s own transgressive desire to symbolically articulate “angstfrei “both his “sexuellen Phantasien “and his “perverse[] Wünsche…,” by blending the visual iconographies of Classical paganism and Christianity in an anti-philistine manner. (174).

12 See John T. Hamilton, “Music on Location: Rhythm, Resonance, and Romanticism in Eichendorff’s Marmorbild,” Modern Language Quarterly 70, no.2 (June 2009). Hamilton posits that “acoustic phenomena produce the images that captivate Florio” throughout the course of the story. (210) Moreover, while the text portrays the realm of the auditory as the original point from which Florio’s desire is goaded, Hamilton argues that the repeated representation of acoustic enchantment in the story “plunges [Florio] into a kind of Romantic middle voice, which confounds subject and object, passivity and activity.” (210)

13 Hamilton, “Music on Location,” 199.

14 See Birgit Jooss, Lebende Bilder: Körperliche Nachahmung von Kunstwerken in der Goethezeit (Berlin: Reimer, 1999), 115.

15 Helfer, “Male Muses of Romanticism,” 310.

16 Elisabeth Krimmmer, In The Company of Men: Cross-Dressed Women Around 1800 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 15.

17 Krimmer, In The Company of Men, 165.

18 Elizabeth Freeman, Beside You In Time: Queer Sociabiliites in the American 19^th Century (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019).

19 Helfer, “Male Muses of Romanticism,” 314.

20 Heidi Schlipphacke, “Kinship and Aesthetic Depth: Tableau Vivant in Goethe’s Wahlverwandtschaften,” Publications of the English Goethe Society 87, no. 3 (2018): 150.

21 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Homosexual Male Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 697.

22 Robin Tobin, Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 36.

23 Lee Edelmann, “Homographesis,” Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994), 10.

24 Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985), 13–18.

25 Hamilton, “Music on Location,” 202.

26 Carsten Strathausen, “Eichendorff’s Marmorbild and the Demise of Romanticism,” in Martha Helfer, ed., Rereading Romanticism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 374.

27 Sedgwick, Between Men, 696.

28 Ellwood Wiggins, Odysseys of Recognition: Performing Intersubjectivity from Homer, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Kleist (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2019), 3.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

J. Forrest Finch

Since completing his PhD in German in 2021, Forrest Finch has been an Assistant Professor of German at Pennsylvania State University. Forrest enjoys incorporating his research into his advanced literature courses as well as designing courses on German history and business news.