A perfect intimacy with death: death, imagination, and femininity in the works of Annette von Droste-Hulshoff.

This article investigates the complex interrelation between death, femininity, and art in Annette von Droste-Hulshoff's work. It traces a development from Droste's early works, in which creative expression of the female protagonist is associated with disease, death, and madness, to her later works, in which Droste has succeeded in breaking up the fear-inspiring entanglement of death and creativity by creating a dead muse for herself. Particular attention is devoted to Droste's drama fragment Bertha oder die Alpen and her prose fragment Ledwina.

 
   Mich graute, doch ich sprach dem Grauen Hohn, 
   Ich hielt das Bild in Reimes Netz gefangen 
   Und frevelnd wagt' ich aus der Totenkron 
   Ein Lorbeerblatt zu langen. --Annette von Droste-Hulshoff 
 
   I shuddered but defied the fear, 
   Captured the image in the net of rhymes 
   And blasphemously I dared to reach 
   For laurel from the crown of death. (1) 

Introduction

In his essay on the social history of the Vormarz period, Dirk Blasius states that during the first half of the nineteenth century, death had an immediacy that is difficult for any person in the twentieth century to imagine (28). (2) Whether or not this assertion is valid in general, it is certainly true for the life and works of Annette von Droste-Hulshoff (1797-1848). Death, both as a metaphor and as a very real and haunting event, played a crucial role in Droste's life and art. Her work abounds with characters who bear the signs of death, such as Bertha in Bertha oder die Alpen (Bertha or the Alps) or Ledwina in the eponymous prose fragment. In several poems, Droste envisions the death of the poetic "I," as in "Die Mergelgrube" (The Gravel Pit) or in "Im Moose" (In the Moss). Often, too, the painful loss of close friends and relatives became a driving force for her writing. Droste dedicated several poems to deceased friends and family members, among them "Sit illi terra levis" for the family chaplain, "Clemens von Droste" for her friend and cousin, and "Katharine Schucking" for another friend and colleague. In a comment on her poetry edition of 1844 she even asserts that the poems to and about the dead are among the best of the whole book:

 
   At first I had grouped together all poems to and about the dead, but it 
   appeared dreadfully monotonous and gloomy. One would have thought that 
   these are the worst poems in the entire book while really they are all 
   among the better ones (3) (letter to Levin Schucking, 17 January 1844, X, 
   I: 144). 

The importance of this "perfect intimacy with death" ("vollkommene Befreundung mit dem Tode"), as she calls it in a letter to her friend Elise Rudiger (7 August 1847, X, I: 426), is also expressed in the fact that she chooses the title "Meine Toten" (My Dead Ones) for one of her poetological poems.

Droste scholarship has long been aware of the frequency of death motifs in Droste's writing. Frederiksen and Shaft, for example, stress the "overwhelming plethora of death motifs and images" in the early works (120); Artur Brall speaks of "Droste's attachment to the world of the dead" (5); and Peucker calls Droste "a poet who creates for herself a dead muse" (385). In spite of this awareness, however, the connection between the death motifs and Droste's specific situation as a woman writer still awaits further investigation. In the present analysis, I want to examine the elective affinity between death and femininity in Droste's work, and to link this peculiar constellation to some striking aesthetic features in her writing. By noticing changes in Droste's use of the death motif one can also trace the author's changing attitude toward her role as a woman writer.