Avowing that love awakens one’s attention to the material world and to one another, Corinne provides a theory for establishing human–nonhuman connection, the energizing and curative praxis of belonging with. The heroine’s thing therapy positively associates women with materiality and, while exercising her right to connect with things, she sustains her élan vital. This chapter argues that she harnesses her feminist thing theory to teach her lover to respect the female body’s integrity and rights and to challenge his repressive politics: If Oswald could belong with materiality by sensuously responding to things, he could remedy his commitment to abstraction and his nationalistic gender proscriptions. Diagnosing Oswald’s melancholy as also emerging from his identification with “modern” (post Renaissance) art, associated with Napoleon’s tyranny and a self-absorptive grief that paralyzes creative potential, Corinne offers a remedy: companionship with classical art. Her thing theory has political ramifications, for it provides a workshop for practicing an embodied cosmopolitanism that itself ameliorates nationalism’s intolerances.

In an 1835 review in the Leipziger Tageblatt, Robert Schumann pronounces the young Clara Wieck an ‘art-prophetess’, compares her to a ‘prophesying sibyl’ and describes the aspects of her tempestuous performance that provoke these impressions. While the image of the mature Schumann as prophetess or priestess is well established, the honorific is typically equated with her commitment to the Werktreue ideal and her artistic relationship with her husband. As ‘the priestess’, Schumann is understood to be devoted, dignified, self-denying, and nearly disembodied as a performer.

This chapter draws attention to the younger Wieck as a prophetess figure. Sources from the 1830s indicate that critics associate markedly different performance ideals with prophecy at this point in her career. In her youth, critics construct the musical prophetic as a mode of performance that relies on a strong demonstration of personality and a sense of abandon cultivated through an improvisatory character and bold physicality. By examining Wieck’s critical reception in the context of contemporaneous representations of sibyl-figures, most notably the artist-heroine of Madame de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy, this chapter suggests that, far from being self-denying, this image is used as a model of feminine ephemeral authorship.