Introduction
The collection
The Human Family is the first complete translation of
Menschenkinder, the cycle of ten novellas that Lou Andreas-Salome (1861-1937) wrote between 1895 and 1898 and published in 1899. It is intended to further recent criticism's rediscovery of Andreas-Salome's significance as a thinker and writer, above all with regard to her literary contribution to modern feminism and the principles of women's emancipation. It will also enhance the recognition of Andreas-Salome's enduring skill as a storyteller whose prose works augment her nonliterary writings on women's issues by couching her critical perspectives on conventional relationships in subtly variegated form in narratives that remain compellingly readable and relevant.
Lou Salome was born in St. Petersburg, the youngest child and only daughter of a German career diplomat stationed in that city. She grew up in the German enclave there, in a family that encouraged her in the formal and autodidactic pursuit of her studies. At seventeen she began a relationship with the Dutch theologian Hendrik Gillot-the first of what was to become a pattern of relationships with an older male mentor with whom the stimulating intellectual exchange soon brought with it problematic sexual impulses. The relationship brought the young student to the brink of a nervous breakdown and proved fundamental in her decision, at age nineteen, to study theology and philosophy at the University of Zurich-German universities did not admit women until 1902.
In 1882, when overwork jeopardized her health, she journeyed to Italy, where she entered into a second tempestuous relationship. This time the man in question was none other than Friedrich Nietzsche, whom she came to know through his close friend Paul Ree. The relationship was brief, lasting barely a year, but intense. The captivated Nietzsche was moved to propose marriage, resolved to preside over the philosophical indoctrination of his brilliant new pupil/wife. Salome's own misgivings about such submission combined with the machinations of Ree and Nietzsche's sister to end the affair. But the relationship had a stimulating effect on the writing of both. The contact with Salome left its mark on Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra (1882-1886; Thus Spoke Zarathustra)-and not merely in that work's notoriously misogynist passages. In addition, the interaction with Nietzsche and Ree provided the basic plot for her first novel, Im Kampf um Gott (1885; The Struggle for God), as well as the material for Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken (1894; Friedrich Nietzsche as Revealed in His Works), the first major study of Nietzsche: an analysis of his life, work, and illness that contemporary reviews praised as a "psychological masterpiece" (Resch 10). In Berlin in 1887, she married Friedrich Carl Andreas, an orientalist and professor of Persian eighteen years her senior. Their union remained unconsummated throughout its forty-three years, having from the outset taken the form of a chaste child-father relationship. The marriage was not without its crises. In the early 1890s Lou, infatuated with social-democrat politician Georg Lebedour, asked for a divorce but bowed to her husband's demand that she terminate the relationship. At this time, while working on her analyses of Ibsen's social dramas, she also dramatized her own marital tensions to the point of pondering a suicide pact with Andreas. The frequent recurrences of her earlier ill health were likely also a result of Andreas's affair with Marie Stephan, the couple's housekeeper since 1901,whoin 1904 bore and helped raise Andreas's illegitimate daughter, Marie. Yet the unusual marriage stabilized and endured until Andreas's death in 1930, enabling Lou to balance her intense artistic and intellectual activity with a tie to the everyday, bourgeois world of the domestic household.
Around the time of her marriage Andreas-Salome began to establish herself as a theater critic, leading to ties with the German naturalist dramatists around Gerhart Hauptmann and also to another book, Henrik Ibsens Frauengestalten (1892; Ibsen's Female Figures), one of the first studies to grasp the emancipatory thrust of Ibsen's social dramas and an early document of Andreas-Salome's own position against traditional women's roles. Starting in the mid-1890s Andreas-Salome ventured outside her marriage into relationships that were both intellectually and sexually fulfilling, first with Friedrich Pineles, a physician, and then, from 1897 to 1901, with the considerably younger Rainer Maria Rilke.
These years were also her most productive in writing fiction and theoretical essays on women's issues of the day. The novels Ruth in 1885 and Ma: Ein Portrait of 1901 bracket the publication both of "Fenitschka." "Eine Ausschweifung": Zwei Erzahlungen (1898; "Fenitschka." "A Deviation": Two Novellas) and of the Menschenkinder cycle of 1899, the latter year seeing as well the publication of her essay "Der Mensch als Weib" (The Human Being as Woman): feminist critics still debate the degree to which the last-named work's essentialist starting point detracts from its feminist position against the confinements of conventionally constructed femininity.
Andreas-Salome continued sporadically to write theoretical works and fiction through the first decade of the twentieth century-for example, Im Zwischenland: Funf Geschichten aus dem Seelenleben halbwuchsiger Madchen (1902; In the Land In-Between: Five Stories from the Spiritual Life of Adolescent Girls) and Die Erotik (1910; Eroticism)-until 1911, when she decided to devote herself to the study of psychotherapy. At the age of fifty she gained permission to attend Sigmund Freud's seminars and became his longtime colleague and friend. Though a dedicated psychotherapist for the rest of her life, she nevertheless found time to write and publish again, most notably the novel Das Haus: Familiengeschichte vom Ende des vorigen Jahrhunderts (The House: A Family Story from the End of the Previous Century) in 1919 (but written around 1900), the expressionistic drama Der Teufel und seine Grossmutter (The Devil and His Grandmother) in 1922, Rodinka: Russische Erinnerung (Rodinka: A Russian Memoir) in 1923, and books on Rilke (1928) and Freud (1931).
Andreas-Salome's sequence of relationships with prominent men ensured her a fame-and often notoriety-that could never be long obscured. But recognition of her significance as a thinker and writer in her own right has emerged primarily only in the last two decades. Her theoretical writings on women's issues struck even feminists of her own day (Hedwig Dohm, for example) as "antifeminist" and "essentialist," and critics long tended to read them as evidence of her privileged remove from social realities and of her subservient relationships to male masters. It was a common critical view that she merely followed or even exploited great thinkers she had known, or that she adhered to a view of women that held conservatively to their essential-and thus, by assumption, merely subjugated and supportive-difference to men. Her works of fiction, after an initial period of approval and interest, soon fell into neglect, considered to be merely fictionalized reworkings of her own experiences expressing the ideas in her essays through hackneyed plot and dialogue.
In the 1960s the enthusiasm and detective work of such critics as Heinz F. Peters and Rudolf Binion reawakened interest in Andreas-Salome's life, although even the titles of those landmark studies reflected a tendency to reduce her to the object either of male desire (Peters, My Sister, My Spouse: A Biography of Lou Andreas-Salome) or of schoolmasterly deprecation (Binion, Frau Lou: Nietzsche's Wayward Disciple; see Kreide 3-9). Analyses since the late 1970s, while pleading in biographical detail for the recuperation of Andreas-Salome as a noteworthy thinker and writer, continued to focus on her significance in the lives of famous men, either discounting her fictional writings entirely or seeing her merely as a female exponent of themes well established in the male canon.
Only since the late 1980s have critics begun to move away from a perspective dictated by masters and master narratives and toward revealing Andreas-Salome as a writer of theoretical works and fiction that developed a critical dialogue with the conventional modes of discourse and writing (e.g., Haines; Martin; Whitinger). These more recent studies view her relation to her great male mentors, for example, less as that of a disciple and more as an interacting and constructively critical colleague. Also, they link her to the feminist movement, arguing that her innovation and emancipatory concern have been overlooked as a result both of a simplistically rigid division between the theoretical and literary components of her oeuvre and of a narrow perspective on concepts such as female difference and essence.
Recent studies on her theoretical writings such as "The Human Being as Woman" have found in that 1899 essay an underlying feminist position that aligns her with such thinkers as Georg Simmel and suggests her significance as a forerunner of recent feminists who, by taking female difference as a point of departure for constructing woman, have arbitrarily been discounted as "essentialist" or assumed to be antifeminist. Other studies have focused on her works of fiction as narrative expressions of this feminist struggle, showing her involvement with fable and fiction to reveal a position on the status and image of women that is not at all consonant with a retreat into antifeminist essentialism. This latter direction in criticism has dealt primarily with the stories "Fenitschka" and "Eine Ausschweifung"-available in translation since 1990-with relatively few analyses of works such as Das Haus, the Menschenkinder cycle, and Der Teufel und seine Grossmutter. However, Brigid Haines makes a compelling case for the significance and relevance of the Menschenkinder cycle for the feminist debate as it has evolved through the twentieth century, above all in the way the stories anticipate ideas of contemporary feminist writers such as Julia Kristeva and Helene Cixous and prefigure "many current debates about sexual difference" (Haines 82).
The Menschenkinder stories both explain and refute the tendency to fault Andreas-Salome's works as too autobiographical and thematically repetitious-charges that do not stand up to objective comparison of these works to contemporary stories and novels by such writers as Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, and Franz Kafka. As well as remaining untranslated, the cycle-in contrast to the "Fenitschka" and "Eine Ausschweifung" duology-is not easily accessible even to German readers, who must hunt down copies of the original Gothic-script edition by Cotta of Stuttgart. This situation appears to have prevented the emergence of a fair and reliable consensus about the literary quality of the work. Yet such a consensus would have to acknowledge the subtle and complex variety with which the ten stories treat the recurring theme-reminiscent of the author's own experiences but certainly not tied closely to them-of young women, as they relate to men who represent various degrees of enlightenment and tolerance, struggling to express a complete and independent feminine identity in the face of the confining but often seductive roles that convention and tradition impose upon female essence and nature. While some of the stories expose and indict the domination that can confine, pervert, and waste women's potential-for example, "Abteilung: 'Innere Manner'" ("Unit for 'Men, Internal'")-most show their female protagonists facing the challenges and sacrifices required to escape such enclosure into an independent, albeit uncertain, future. The entire cycle combines its socially critical perspective on the conventional perception of women with realistic visions of the necessity, possibility, and costs of liberating change.
No objective reading of the "Unit for 'Men, Internal,'" "Madchenreigen" (translated here as "Maidens' Roundelay"), and "Eine Nacht" ("One Night"), for example, could see those stories simply as "fictionalized" versions of Andreas-Salome's own encounter with Richard Beer-Hoffmann, any more than the complex "Fenitschka" story could be said to owe anything more than the essential action of one brief, early episode to Andreas-Salome's encounter with FrankWedekind. Each of the recurring accounts of a young woman's relationship to a somewhat older doctor departs from the author's personal experiences, and the three vary radically in their portrayal of the male protagonists-from the corrupt and selfish Doctor Griepenkerl of "Unit for 'Men, Internal' " to the anxious young medical student, Berthold, in "One Night" to the more insightful and sympathetic doctor Alex von Vresenhof in "Maidens' Roundelay"-with similar degrees of variation in the emerging maturity and independence of the young women involved. The other seven stories add a remarkable array of further colors and shades to this palette of woman-man interactions, with intricate variations on the degree to which the oppressive and seductive powers of patriarchal tradition complicate prospects of feminine emancipation.
Particularly impressive is the variety and complexity with which the ten stories develop one of the most prominent recurring themes of Andreas-Salome's fiction: her sympathetic but unstintingly critical exploration, usually by favoring the perspective of her male protagonists, "of masculine projections of femininity" (Martin 176-77; see also Haines 86, 87). Some of the stories do indeed proceed from within the female protagonist. "Das Paradies" ("Paradise"), for example, opens with the heroine's dream of flight above the world of conventionally proper expectations, while "Ein Todesfall" ("A Death") focuses on the female foster child and foster sister of a father-son pair of complex artists. But even these stories ultimately emphasize the degree to which conventional outlooks and male perspectives articulate and control women. In most of the stories, readers come to the central women characters mainly from outside, and usually from the perspective of the male figures who attempt to define and control them. While for some of the male figures this involves an appealing attempt at openness and understanding, the tendency is more often either to adhere or to revert to conventional images and ideals-with even the relatively positive male figures, such as Alex von Vresenhof in "Maidens' Roundelay" or Cousin Dietrich in "Paradise," tending in decisive moments to attempt a dominating and, for all its nurturing and protective impulses, patently reductive control of the obedient little "princesses" of their desires. Often-for example, with the portrayal of Vitali Saitsev in "Ein Wiedersehen" ("A Reunion")-the perspective is such as to favor the men with their views and initially appealing good intentions in order to portray in an unfavorable light their readiness to impose simplistic roles and identities on complex women.
Although undertaken in the conviction that the Menschenkinder stories have appeal and relevance for today's readers, this translation has adhered closely to the original's style of narrative and dialogue and attempted to retain those elements evocative of German-speaking Europe in the 1890s. This was done on the principle that English-speaking readers, too, should encounter the stories as documents of another time and place and in the belief that the relevance of the stories becomes all the more compelling when they are shown to develop still-unresolved problems of women-men relationships subtly and complexly in a century-old and foreign context.
Continues...
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