Beastly Specters: from Hubris to Hybridity in German Romanticism and Beyond

Abstract

This dissertation project investigates narrative modes and strategies for writing about non-human animals that challenge the idea of a clear animal-human divide. Beginning with works from German Romanticism, the first half of the project analyzes texts popularized at a time when humans’ relationship to other animals underwent a seismic shift, stemming from an increasing drive toward objectification and commodification of nature brought on by the Industrial Revolution and urbanization. Chapter one begins with an analysis of Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and Ludwig Tieck’s Der Blonde Eckbert, arguing that each implies that a kind of hybrid paradise exists beyond the human-animal dichotomy as traditionally understood. In both works love appears as a powerful unifying force, uniquely capable of bridging divides of all kinds. Yet in each case the protagonists find their attempts to reach or even describe a utopia beyond such simplistic categories sabotaged by a persistent anthropocentrism; unable to acknowledge their hubris, these figures falter in the face of a divide the crossing of which appears both necessary and impossible. Chapter two further explores this tension, reading Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s famous tale of a love-lorn mermaid Undine through the lens of Donna Haraway’s concept of companion species. Here too, love appears as a possible means of overcoming the mutual alienation of humans and animals. In practice, however, Undine’s husband proves unable to recognize the significant otherness of his new companion. Appalled by her irreducible alterity, he withholds the openness and respect that Haraway’s concept would demand of each party. In attempting to sever their bond, he soon finds himself haunted, like Eckbert’s wife, by a vengeful specter intent on showing him the error of his ways. This inability to acknowledge and remedy his anthropocentrism connects him to the discourse surrounding human animality in chapter one; the impossible necessity of crossing the divide leads to the destruction of both parties, resulting in harmonious hybridity only in death.Shifting focus to examples from contemporary literature, chapters three and four explore the ways in which this contradictory understanding of the divide continues to influence modern conceptions of animality and its relation to the human. The third chapter focuses on Carmen Stephan’s 2012 debut novel Mal Aria, which relates the final days of a young malaria victim through the eyes of the mosquito who bit her. Published almost exactly two centuries after Undine, Mal Aria offers a more urgent critique of rigid hierarchical thinking, omitting Fouqué’s redemptive coda that sees the hybrid couple united in death. With the horrors of DDT fresh in her mind and faced with the looming prospect of ever-increasing human control over the environment, Stephan’s narrator challenges anthropocentric orthodoxy through the recruitment of her reluctant “blood sister.” In a process analogous to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming-animal, the mosquito and her victim achieve a strange new kind of hybrid existence, the significance of which fails to be recognized until it is too late. Pivoting to post-apocalyptic literature, chapter four explores animal-human relations in Marlen Haushofer’s Die Wand. Unlike Mal Aria, which resolves the tension present in its romantic forebears negatively through the deadly dissolution of the hybrid family at its center, the protagonist of Die Wand enjoys a modicum of success, creating a hybrid utopia which appears as the antithesis of the failed anthropocentric patriarchy. By drawing on theoretical understandings of care from scholars like Rachel Adams, this chapter argues that the protagonist’s nascent society is characterized by an acknowledgement of cross-species interdependencies. This admission of mutual reliance serves as a basis for something akin to non-human personhood, an expanded notion of more-than-human morality whose power in the novel is matched only by its precarity. The concluding section revisits the works analyzed in previous chapters to draw out similarities between them in their use of the “beastly specter”, an animalistic figure who persists from the 19th century texts analyzed in the first half of the project through to the modern examples handled in chapters three and four. This liminal figure is shown to present particularly effective and increasingly urgent critiques of anthropocentric hierarchical thinking by repudiating human attempts at domination and misguided individualism.