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Ludwig Tieck's “Der Blonde Eckbert”: A Psychological Reading

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Victoria L. Rippere
Victoria L. Rippere*
Affiliation:
University College London London, England
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Abstract

Bertha's warning to Walther that her narrative not be taken for a Mdrchen provides a clue to an “intrinsic” Freudian psychological reading of “Eckbert,” a work which, like a dream or a fairy tale, has a “latent” as well as a “manifest” level. Bertha's narration is interspersed with compulsive confessions that point to her own repressed awareness of the symbolic meaning of her acts. On its latent level, her story is that of a narcissistic child's failure to attain the norm of productive social adaptation explicitly prescribed for her in the world of the work. Only in the fantastic “Waldeinsamkeit” does she approximate, briefly, “normal” socialization. Her theft of the jewels and killing of the two animals, in the context of her psychosocial and sexual development, is her definitive rejection of what they represent–the possibility of a productive life as wife and mother. The incestuous marriage symbolizes the fruitless union of two narcissistic characters who in the other love only themselves. Approached on a level other than that of logical causality, the story appears to have an inner coherence not previously appreciated.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 85 , Issue 3 , May 1970 , pp. 473 - 486
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1970

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References

Note 1 in page 473 The text used is Ludwig Tieck's Ausgewahlte Werke in vier Banden, lirsg. G. (Leipzig: G. Witkowski, n.d.), i, 72–89. Page references are hereafter given in the text. Where the German has been translated or paraphrased, relevant words, whose sense might otherwise be lost, are also given.

Note 2 in page 473 Das Inzest-Moliv in Dichtung und Sage, 2nd ed. (Leipzig and Wien, 1926; orig. 1912), pp. 570–571. Page references hereafter in text.

Note 3 in page 473 Minder, Un poète romantique allemand: Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853), (Paris, 1936), pp. 104–105; Hubbs, “Tieck, Eckbert, und das kollektive Unbewusste,” PMLA, LXXI (1956), 686–693; Immerwahr, “ ‘Der blonde Eckbert’ as a Poetic Confession,” GQ, xxxiv (1961), 103–117. Page references to these works in text.

Note 4 in page 474 This term is introduced in Elements of Writing About a Literary Work: A Study of Response to Literature by Alan C. Purves, with Victoria Rippere, National Council of Teachers of English, Research Report No. 9 (Champaign, 111., 1968), p. 38. Subsequent page references, in text, to Purves, Elements.

Note 5 in page 475 Ernst Kris and Abraham Kaplan in their paper “Aesthetic Ambiguity,” in Ernst Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (London, 1953), pp. 243–264, have resurrected Croce's parallel, and useful, distinction “between the ‘empirical’ personality of the artist, with which the standards of intent [one of their ‘stringencies of interpretation’] are concerned, and his ‘aesthetic’ personality—what is manifested in and accessible through the art work considered in itself and not as a fact about the artist as a person.” It is, they say, “the aesthetic personality with which the standards of coherence [another ‘stringency,‘ discussed in n. 16 below] deal” (p. 261 n.).

Note 6 in page 475 The Compulsion to Confess (New York, 1959). Page references in the text.

Note 7 in page 476 For a fascinating discussion, which provides clinical corroboration for the extreme finesse of Tieck's intuitive observation, see Harold F. Searles, “Concerning a Psychodynamic Function of Perplexity, Confusion, Suspicion, and Related Mental States,” Psychiatry, xv (1952), 351–376; reprinted in his Collected Papers on Schizophrenia and Related Subjects (London, 1965), pp. 70–113.

Note 8 in page 478 The latent connection of the jewels with Bertha's role as housekeeper is suggested by the verbal linking of “wirtschafte” here with her earlier explanation, “Ich lernte mich bald in die Wirtschaft finden” (p. 79). This is one of many such verbal pointers used throughout the story to signal significant inner relationships. Others of note are “recht,” “scheinen,” “so,” “Wunsch.”

Note 9 in page 479 “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914), in Complete Psychological Works, ed. J. Strachey, xiv (London, 1957), pp. 67–102. Page references in text.

Note 10 in page 480 The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, 3rd ed. (London, 1948), p. 9.

Note 11 in page 481 In The Interpretation of Dreams (Complete Psychological Works, v, 357–358) Freud notes that “according to Stekel, ‘right’ and ‘left’ in dreams have an ethical sense. The righthand path always means the path of righteousness and the left-hand one that of crime. Thus ‘left’ may represent homosexuality, incest or perversion, and ‘right’ may represent m arriage, intercourse with a prostitute and so on, always looked at from the subject's individual moral standpoint.”

Note 12 in page 482 In evaluating this aspect of her behavior positively, Immerwahr fails to take sufficient account of the world of literature, what ?. H. Gombrich has called the social “institution” (Meditations on a Hobby Horse, London, 1963, p.36), in which the work was written. Although she is nowhere in the story explicitly called a “Schwàrmerin,” for example, Bertha clearly approximates to this common eighteenthcentury type. A well-known prototype is Recha, in Lessing's Nathan der Weise (1779), whose father castigates her by asking the—proverbial—question whether she is aware how much easier “andàchtig schwârmen als gut handeln ist”—a “moral” applicable to Bertha as well. Furthermore, in his almost exclusive concern for the workings of Tieck's putative “empirical,” as opposed to his empirically “aesthetic” psyche, he likewise overlooks the late eighteenth-century commonplace matter of the abuses of literacy, a matter which would appear to inform the predominantly negative judgments passed upon Bertha's reading and its effects upon her, in the work's own—conventional—moral universe. This matter, incidentally, would make an interesting subject for a detailed study.

Note 13 in page 483 Cf. Freud, “On Narcissism,” pp. 89–90: “Even for narcissistic women, . . . there is a road which leads to complete object-love. In the child which they bear, a part of their own body confronts them like an extraneous object, to which, starting from their narcissism, they can then give complete obiect-love.”

Note 14 in page 485 In their discussion of the “stringencies” of interpretation, Kris and Kaplan (pp. 260–261) introduce the extremely useful concept of standards of coherence, standards that refer to the interrelation of the elements of the interpretation and according to which “an interpretation of a particular part of the work is tested by the coherence with the rest of the work it gives to this part.” The same standard of coherence might well be applied to evaluation also.

Note 15 in page 486 For a recent critique of Freud's theory of primary narcissism, see Michael Balint, The Basic Fault: Therapeutic Aspects of Regression (London, 1968), esp. pp. 35–65. It may, however, be that the Freudian theory does help explain the characters in this story because both were formulated in the same literary language, with its core of implicit assumptions about the possibilities of human being and doing. For a discussion of Freud and his ideological background, see Harry Guntrip, Personality Structure and Human Interaction: The Developing Synthesis of Psychodynamic Theory (London, 1961), esp. p. 82. For a comprehensive study of Freud's language, see Walter Schonau, Sigmund Freuds Prosa: Lilerarische Elemente seines Slils (Stuttgart, 1968).

Note 16 in page 486 This paper, originally written in 1965, has benefited, in numerous revisions over four years, from the helpful comments and criticisms of Professors Henry Hatfield, Jack M. Stein, Elizabeth M. Wilkinson, Dr. A. W. Foshay, Mrs. Joyce Crick, Miss Rhea Jacobs, and Mr. Kenneth Tigar.