The Witch in His Head: Rupturing the Patriarchal Discourse in Eichendorff's Ballad “Waldgespräch”

Summary

Abstract: This article offers a gender-conscious reading of Joseph von Eichendorff's famous ballad “Waldgespräch” by highlighting the emancipatory elements embedded in the author's changes to Clemens Brentano’s original tale of Lore Lay. When read “against the grain,” the conversation in the ballad can be viewed as transcribing two opposing discourses: one that encodes hegemonic masculinity by means of a “rational” dualist worldview, and another that disrupts said dominant logic by “conjuring up” an alternative subjectivity to resist patriarchal logocentrism. Furthermore, the article proposes, Eichendorff's Lorelay embodies patriarchy's suppressed Other, meaning that the hunter's supposed death in the forest signifies a victory of the Other.

Keywords: Eichendorff, Waldgespräch, Lorelei, Lorelay, ballad, gender, discourse analysis, patriarchy, feminism

JOSEPH VON EICHENDORFF's first novel Ahnung und Gegenwart (“Premonition and Present Times,” 1815) has been read as the depiction of its two protagonists’ sometimes conjoined, sometimes separate journeys to “genuine” Romanticism, with Leontin embracing natural poetry and Friedrich eventually entering a Catholic monastery. On the way, Leontin finds salvation in Julie, his selfless muse from the countryside, while Friedrich encounters many obstacles, most notably women by whom he is briefly fascinated, such as the seductive Romana or shallow Rosa, before he accepts religion as his redemption. Along with the other women portrayed in the novel, such as the sickly girl-in-disguise Erwine or the sensual Marie, the female figures thus seem to serve as mere stepping-stones in the formation of the male protagonists’ characters and life purposes. There is, however, one significant departure from this imbalanced portrayal of men and women in the male-centric Ahnung und Gegenwart. In the fifteenth chapter of the third book, readers encounter the most famous lyrical interlude of the novel, the balladic poem that attained a life outside of Eichendorff's Bildungsroman when it was later published independently in an 1837 collection of his poems under the title “Waldgespräch” (Conversation in the Forest).

This article offers a gender-conscious reading of Eichendorff's ballad by rejecting its claims of masculinist universality and excavating the female speaker's perspective in its dialogue. To do so, I examine the poem as transcribing two discourses. The first one, articulated by the hunter, encodes hegemonic masculinity by means of a rational, dualist worldview that by default must include both a gendered superiority and its opposite.