E. Witt-Brattström http://www.helsinki.fi/hum/kotim.kirjallisuus/CS-sivusto/esitelmat/e__wi...

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Professor Ebba Witt-Brattström,

Södertörn University College

The "Narcissistic Turn"

in the Aesthetics of the
Fin de Siècle

I will start by quoting a Vienna critic, Rudolf Lothar, who in

1891 expressed the construction of a new, modern
subjectivity in terms of deep, anguished "gendertrouble" in
what another Vienna critic called the "vaginal age" (Karl
Kraus):

Nervous sensibility is the characteristic of the

last years of our century. I am inclined to call
this trend feminism, for everything goes to show
that women´s will to power, their desire to
compete with men, has meant that the female
hypersensitivity of gaze, of pleasure, of thought
and of feeling, has been communicated to men
and is taking them over.

In this quotation the topography of feminism becomes a

primary site of contradictory projections of philosophical
(will to power), social (competition with men), aesthetical
(hypersensitivity), erotical (pleasure) and symbolical
(thought and feeling) meanings. Above all feminism is
depicted as a focal point of infection; "communicated to
men" and "taking them over". This threat was still there
twelve years later, in 1903, when the young Vienna
philosopher, Otto Weininger, published his thesis, Sex and
Character, which was to become the unofficial bible for the
modernist male tradition (Joyce, Kafka, Broch, Musil,
Canetti, Wittgenstein, D H Lawrence and Günther Grass).
Deeply influenced by Kant, Nietzsche and (a
misinterpreted) Freud, this monstruous example of phallic
science proclaimed the hysterical woman as the figure of
true femininity, which equaled nymphomania. Thus the
prostitute became the heroine of modernity, acting out
woman´s nature.

Reading Weininger, one realizes the revolutionary potential

of feminist thinking of the fin de siécle. The original title of
his thesis was “Eros & Psyche”, and there is in this book a
suppositious polemics with the notorious Eros-thinker of

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the time, Ellen Key´s friend, Lou Andreas-Salomé, who in

1899 (on the demand of Martin Buber) published a booklet
called Der mensch als Weib (The Human being as
Woman). Here she points out that feminine eroticism is
ensured "the deeper beauty" because of the "more
undifferentiated being of woman, the not-yet-divided drives
toward intimacy, and the intensive reciprocity of all the
drives". One can easily imagine the frustrations of a Rudolf
Lothar or an Otto Weininger, on reading passages like this
one, strongly advocating a "narcissistic turn" on behalf of
Woman, independently defining herself as powerfully
different from Man:

Until /women.../ try to conceive themselves in

their difference from man and, for the moment,
exclusively in terms of that difference, with as
much surrender and depth as possible - honestly
using all the most subtle physical and psychical
hints - until then, they will not know how broad
and powerful they could prove to be in the
structure of their own being and how wide the
boundaries of their worlds are in reality. Woman
still has not been sufficiently with herself and,
for that reason (and to that very extent), has not
become sufficiently "woman".

No wonder that Weininger goes to extremes in order to hold

on to the old "hysteric order" where women were subjected
to men´s fantasies and diagnosed as objects for their
pleasure solely. In Salomé´s mystic-narcissistic eros-
doctrine the woman is her own double, or sistertwin;
becoming "sufficiently Woman", is synonymous with being
"sufficiently with herself". From a feminist point of view,
time seemed ripe. Now it was possible to construct a woman
who could dwell "in the structure of /her/ own being". To
this womantype, the world lay open ("how wide the
boundaries of their worlds are in reality").

Lou Salomé (1861-1937) and her friend Ellen Key, were two
influential women who set this new agenda. Keywords in
their time were ‘the New Woman’ and ‘Eros’, her
companion. Key´s concept of free love (and her opinion that
women should pick the fathers of their children) attracted
New Women all over Europe. In the Nordic countries
intellectual women were often nicknamed "Nietzschean
crazy women" (Nietzschegalna fruntimmer), and their
thinking was a convergence of the New Woman and
Nietzsche´s concept of Superman. Key stated that the New
Woman was the first embodiment of the Superman. When
Nietzsche proclaimed God´s death, long live Superman,
these women said that the highest in human being, Eros,
should take the place of God in a secular society. Femininity
and Eros are natural partners, Salomé stated in 1910, in Die

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Erotik (Eroticism), where Eros is made the sign for

difference between masculinity and femininity, man has to
look for Eros outside himself, in woman, whereas woman
always has Eros. She proposes Eros as a higher state to
make possible the reunion of body and soul, an interiour
merging with oneself (man could learn that from woman).
Woman should use Eros to maximize her subjectivity (a
recommendation that Edith Södergran took literally in her
Eros-poems). Eros is defined by Salomé as the capacity of
human beings not only for eroticism, but also for artistic
inspiration, creativity, an ‘Inwendiges Liebesverhalten’, a
love-relationship with oneself (narcissism).

My point at this moment is not to advertise narcissism as a

feminist strategy in 2002, but to emphasise that there was a
tussle of hysteric and narcissistic conceptions of femininity
in this earlier period. A balance trick - and we don´t know
yet who won, since the reception history of modernism has
been written from the point of Weininger, and not of
Salomé. My suggestion is that the "narcissistic turn" has
been more influential than the "hysteric order" on the
womanside of modernist tradition. It has influenced many
woman writers, yet to be analyzed from this perspective. I
will contribute by exemplifying with a poem by Edith
Södergran in a moment. I claim that Södergran´s
elaboration of Salomé´s narcissistic eros-doctrine
transformed the aesthetic gendertrouble-discourse of the
fin de siècle into a modernist poetics including
representations of the female subject ("das Ich als Weib", to
paraphrase Salomé).

To me it is obvious that a new, modern, and thus

ambivalent female subjectivity could not come about
without the over-estimation of femininity of the constructed
essentialism of a Salomé. This feminist shift is observable
on a thematical level in all kinds of literature, like the
popular New Woman novels, where one, in Alexandra
Kollontai´s words of 1913, can observe how woman is
changing "from having been an object in man´s love
tragedy to becoming a subject of her own, independent love
tragedy". This is a consequence, Kollontai argues, of the
"much higher demands on man" made by the New Woman.
The emphasis now is on love, self-identification/individual
satisfaction and the power-relationship between the sexes,
more than on social structures and patriarchal institutions,
such as marriage. The New Woman of the fin de siècle
turned from the discussion of social conditions to sexual
conditions and tried to reformulate the erotic contract
(Birgitta Holm). In Die Erotik, Salomé makes man a means
for woman to achieve a higher stage of womanhood. Man is
to woman only what the carpenter Joseph was to Mary at
the side of God, she writes.

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There is radical potential in this essentialist position, which

interests me. Essentialist constructivism, I would like to call
it, since it has a strong anti-patriarchal potential. The New
Woman should be understood less as a real woman fighting
for emancipation in our sense of the word, than as a figure
negotiating between 19th century discourses of sexuality
and the contemporary feminist movement. In the sense of
contemporary lived experience (Simone de Beauvoir), the
New Woman and her companion, Eros, is an indispensable
entrance to the thinking of the fin de siécle. In art and
literature, as well as in feminist political rhetorics, the
development of a feminist erotic (including the
social/spiritual motherhood interpreted as a cultural power
by Key) manifests itself in a gender disturbing way,
affecting male as well as female artists, writers and
thinkers. Literature from this period is gendered, often
accused of being decadent, mystical, pathological, feminine,
crazy; it speaks of difference, more than ever before. The fin
de siècle looks at gender through the prism of the aesthetic
rather than the other way around, thereby discovering a
poetics of gender that formed one of the most potent
discourses of the aesthetic ever developed. An alternative
aesthetic grounded in the social experience of new gender
roles that incorporated connections between discourses of
the New Woman and the building-up of the modern
masculine subject emerged. Outlines of a process where self
and other is defined and negotiated, were drawn, a radical,
anti-Kantian aesthetic. In this War of the Words (Gilbert &
Gubar), the question of woman as lived body, an
epistemology based on embodied subjective experience, was
for the first time considered, I claim, and not only at an
ideological level.

Of course, some requirements were already there: the

modern breakthrough had introduced not only an
emancipatory discourse, but also a new coarseness in sexual
matters and in the relationship between the sexes
(Strindberg). Sexology and medicine had already focused on
sexuality as a problem, especially when women´s bodies
were involved (syphilis, double standard, prostitution). The
"morality debate" (sedlighetsdebatten) of the 1880s is now
transposed to gendertrouble, expressed in aesthetic
categories: decadence, symbolism, modernism.

But, gendertrouble as a cultural category still carried along

a pathological undercurrent, which can be explained by the
concept of reverse discourse (Foucault). When different
cultural stages are dynamically replaced by one another,
Foucault says, the painful break with the preceding one
contains mechanisms that repeat aspects of the culture of
the past. While enacting as a reverse ideology, the new is
strongly linked with the old power. This is why, I would like
to suggest, we find this overemphasis on feminist,

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narcissistic essentialism in this period. The New Women

revolted by trying to reverse the discourses defining them as
inferior: a philosophical tradition refused them a brain with
which to think, a sexological and medical tradition claimed
that sexuality was women´s destiny and refused them
sexuality on their own conditions. The New Women had to
use the definitions, diagnoses and categories of femininity
from the 19th century when they redefined and upgraded
women to the "first sex". The new discourse of (women´s)
modernity is, to a large extent, the upside down version of
the old medical-psychological discourse on female
sexuality: pathologically hysterical bodies, victims of
frustrated frigidity. This is why woman becomes the most
perfect human being, who "reposes in herself...a completed
state" (Salomé), whereas man is tragically split in
soul/body, as Lou Salomé suggested in Der Mensch als
Weib. If the subject positions offered to femininity always
had been connected with the processes of othering, now was
the time to make men the Other. In trying to change the
preferential, patriarchal right of interpretation, where
Man/the One is regarded as the norm, while Woman/the
Other is defined only in relation to the first and seen as
negative and devalued (de Beauvoir), Salomé stated that
woman is the norm, the One: "Woman is first and foremost
something completely for herself, just like the man, and all
further relations follow from that" (Der Mensch als Weib).

In psychoanalytical terminology, one could talk of a

changing scene: a transposition from an analogy of the
hysteric (an object interpreted by Charcot, Breuer, Freud) -
expressing pleasure but not knowing it - to an analogy of
the narcissistic female subject- seeking pleasure in her own
being-, a radical position. This position, expressed so
beautifully by Lou Salomé at the turn of the century could
not be left untouched by the masculinist master discourses
for long. In 1914, Freud redefined and subordinated it in his
introduction of narcissism as a concept. To Freud,
narcissism was a pathological phase when the object of
libido was oneself, exemplified by beautiful women, and
their attractiveness to men (secondary narcissism). He even
juxtaposed female narcissism with hysteria, the link being
female sexuality, which had to be controlled at all cost, one
realizes. In 1898, Freud wrote: "it is in the interest of the
people/nation that men go into sexual life with full
potency":

Dessa /narcissistiska och hysteriska/ kvinnors

betydelse för människornas sexualliv måste
rankas mycket högt. Sådana kvinnor utövar den
största lockelse för männen, inte bara av
estetiska skäl, därför att de vanligen är de
vackraste, utan också på grund av en
kombination av intressanta psykologiska

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egenheter.

To Lou Salomé, who in 1914 had become one of the first

female psychoanalysts in Freud´s school (she wrote a book
with that title) narcissism was more like recovering a lost
part of yourself, forgotten in archaic times (cf Julia
Kristeva´s theory of abjection and idealisation in primary
narcissism). In her 1921 essay "Narzismus als
Doppelrichtung", she redefines Eros as the embodiment of
the emergent mobility of the libido, still affiliated at the
roots. Narcissicm became, in her new terminology of
psychoanalyses, a pleasurable entrance to the repressed, to
the subconscious. Still it was connected to her old
essentialist thinking on gender difference. Already in 1910,
before becoming a psychoanalyst, she noted in the essay
"Gedanken über das Liebesproblem", that Narcissus´ first
delight was not in himself as an object (as Freud would say),
but in his reflection as part of a greater image, nature. He
"may have seen not only himself reflected in his pool but
also himself-as-still-in-all", which is a formulation reserved
for women in Salomé´s Der Mench als Weib! Thus one
could say that, Salomé creates a feminine Narcissus, not
surprising since one detects a hymn to Narcissus in her
earlier praise of Eros.

In all she wrote, from the 1890s to the 1930s, Salomé tried
to open a space for Woman within the master discourses of
philosophy (she wrote the first book on Nietzsche), cultural
theory (she wrote the first book on Ibsen´s female
heroines), and fiction (her novels diagnosed masculine
projections of femininity, and the coming to womanhood of
young girls). Her taking to psychoanalysis is consequent,
since her project in negotiating gender differences consisted
of manipulating the imaginary of her time. She understood
that fantasy/fiction was the only register in which
femininity could develop without being socially restricted
(Biddy Martin).

But if Lou Salomé creates a feminine Narcissus, (not, like

Freud said about women, in love with him/herself in order
to attract "humanity", or the first sex) in love with life, in
the Nietzschean wording "Das Leben is alles" (which is why
he has to die, a victim of his discovery), we shall see how
Edith Södergran, second generation New Woman, sees
Narcissus as the figure discovering the self-referential or
empty sign, death in life ("the object of Narcissus is psychic
space; it is representation itself, fantasy”, Kristeva writes).
But it is still, for Södergran as for Salomé, a figure of
primary identification, describing the imaginary space
necessary for embracing the sign as remembering the body,
as we shall see. As Salomé remarked in 1900, in connection
with Narcissus, love is an illusion, and yet it clings to the
most real of all, the body: "it attaches entirely to the body,

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taking it entirely for a symbol" ("Gedanken über das

Liebesproblem"). Contrary to Salomé, Södergran uses
Narcissus´ neglected sistersoul, Echo, which gives her
recourse to a different version of the myth. Otherwise said:
in a poem by Södergran I detect the transposition from the
"narcissistic turn" to the "linguistic turn", the modernist
awareness that language constructs us and our "reality"
more than the other way around. But as a poet, she can hold
on to both the essentialist-narcissistic and the linguistic-
modernistic positions, and thereby focus on the pain in the
body as the feminine (figured within the binary as the
specular feminine, as Irigaray reminds us) that survives in
language as the inscriptional space of phallologocentrism, a
specular surface. Södergran actually freezes this moment,
which gives patriarchal mythology a feminist twist. Let´s
have a look at the poem, "Alla ekon i skogen" from
Rosenaltaret, 1919.

Nej, nej, nej, ropa alla ekon i skogen:

jag har ingen syster.
Jag går och lyfter upp hennes vita sidendräkt
och omfamnar den maktlöst.
Jag kysser dig, all min lidelse lägger jag i dig,
du tanklösa väv,
minns du hennes rosiga lemmar?
Hennes skor stå kvar i solskenet,
gudarna värma sina händer därvid.
Fall snö över min systers kvarlevor.
Yr över dem snöstorm ditt bittertunga hjärta.
Med rysning skall jag beträda detta ställe,
såsom den otäcka plats där skönheten begrovs.

(All the Echoes in the Forest

No, no, no cry all the echoes in the forest:

I have no sister.
I go and lift up her white silk dress
and embrace it powerlessly.
I kiss you, I lay all my suffering upon you,
you thoughtless cloth!
Do you remember her rosy limbs?
Her shoes still stand in the sunshine,
the gods warm their hands at them.
Let snow fall over my sisters remains.
Let your bitter heart drive, snowstorm, over them.
With a shiver I shall tread that spot,
as the dreadful place where beauty was buried.)

Elsewhere I have claimed that Edith Södergran (influenced

by the early Salomé) creates her own aesthetics in her
infatuation with the figure of Snow White, and her death-
in-beauty, a drastic representation of the complex of death,
woman and the sublime in the same (metaphysical) body

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configuration, made up by the totality of representations of

the feminine in history. Especially in her late eros poems, in
Framtidens skugga she lets Snow White desire herself in an
uncanny, narcissistic way ("Sällhet", "Instinkt"). To get the
maximum effect of focusing the bod, she uses the
apostrophe, a stylistic device she often used, as Inga-Britt
Wik has showed. The apostrophe gives the impression of
instant action, in the same way as the now of desire in your
body is felt always in the present. This gesture gives
prominence to the narcissistic body in these poems, as the
apostrophe is addressed directly to the body ("O du
härligaste av allt härligt, min kropp,/varför vet du, att du
har makten?"). Such a self-desiring body is even presented
as a symbol for the future ("Aning"). However, in the very
mystical "Alla ekon i skogen", this narcissistic essentialist
rhetorical is questioned.

Let´s for a moment recall the myth of Narcissus, as Ovid

tells it: Echo, a gossiping nymph, is punished by the
goddess Juno by losing her voice. She is sentenced to the
vicarious reproduction of sound; she can only repeat the
endings of an other´s speech. An echo is to original sound
as a reflected image is to a body. It is worth noting that an
echo can never say I; it follows the predicates of others, only
replying, never being answered. She is a disembodied
duplicate, an afterthought in the myth of Narcissus. In a
paraphrase of Lacan one could say that Echo is the proof
that there is no language in which the feminine can
represent its desire to itself, or to the other, as Echo is
unable to declare her love to Narcissus.

So the nymph Echo is the hollow space of femininity,

sentenced to echo the patriarchal discourse; she is the lack,
the sign of female castration, weak and insufficiant
mimesis, we could say. She is the reflection in the mirror,
mistaken for real, like the fantasy woman in masculine
imaginary. She is multiple, as in Södergran’s poem, "alla
ekon i skogen", yet all repeat the same word, in this case,
the last wordings of the subject speaking in the poem: a
confirming "no" to the utterance: "jag har ingen syster".
(The poem belongs to the suit "Fantastique" in
Rosenaltaret, consisting of nine poems elaborating on the
loss of a sistersoul.)

We can recall that in Salomé´s pre-war narcissistic eros-

doctrine of 1899 woman was constructed as her own
double, or sistertwin: becoming "sufficiently Woman", was
synonymous with being "sufficiently with herself".
Södergran, writing her poem “1919”, after three wars and
disillusion with the feminist empowerment project of the fin
de siècle, cannot give her poetic ‘I’ a sistertwin. Her double
is instead Echo, the bodyless sign without subject that
points to the repetitive place of woman in patriarchal

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language, echoing Lack and Castration in phallic discourse:

"du tanklösa väv", but also mourning the place where the
female Narcissus of Salomé and the New Woman, is buried,
"den otäcka plats där skönheten begrovs". Snow White is
gone, only her "vita sidendräkt" is left to worship and desire
and "omfamna maktlöst". Note the use of the apostrophe,
addressing the patriarchal representation of female
virginity: "vita dräkt" = "du tanklösa väv", like Echo a
disembodied duplicate, an afterthought in the myth of the
female Narcissus of Salomé. We are at the moment of
disappearance, Snow White´s shoes are still warm, or is it
the sun warming them? Sun is, as we might recall from
"Violetta skymningar" woman´s ("solens dotter") priviliged
erotic source ("endast solstrålar hylla värdigt en ömsint
kvinnokropp") opposed to men´s deadly, penetrating
glances ("O du härskare med kalla ögon" in "Dagen
svalnar").

I read the poem as a negotiation with narcissism as a

linguistic infatuation, as in modernism, where language
means elaborating absence - and narcissism as a feminist
memory function, that is a recuperation of the semiotic
(Kristeva) inframaternal, material undercurrent of and in
language that has to be represented at least as the trace of a
living body ("rosiga lemmar") or the uncanny place "där
skönheten begrovs". The poem remembers, and mourns the
embodied experience of a female Narcissus of the fin de
siécle as it is inscribed. This movement becomes a frozen
moment, monumentalized in whiteness, as if Snow White,
when the female Narcissus, miming Echo´s technique of
being everywhere, spread out in nature, turns to a
snowstorm: "fall snö över min systers kvarlevor. /Yr över
dem snöstorm ditt bittertunga hjärta". At least as historical
essence, the memory of an archaic time when women
thought they could change the fact that language produces
femininity as its negative pole can be symbolized, as the
"narcissic turn" is negotiated into "the linguistic turn". As a
feminist poet, suspicious of patriarchal discourse, Edith
Södergran can hold on to both positions, Narcissus´/Snow
White´s as well as Echo´s, which makes "Alla ekon i
skogen" a metapoem on the patriarchal conditions for
inscribing femininity in language. In the symbolical order,
this is almost impossible; Södergran shows that it has to be
done in the realms of fantasy, tracing the real, where one is
close to death of subjectivity. "Med rysning skall jag beträda
detta ställe,/såsom den otäcka plats där skönheten
begrovs".

References:

Lou Andreas-Salomé: Das "Zweideutige" Lächeln der

Erotik, hrsg IngeWeber & Brigitte Rempp,Kore, 1990.
Lou Andreas Salomé: Die Erotik. VierAufsätze, Ullstein

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1991.
Lou Andreas Salomé: Erotik och narcissism, med förord av
Ebba Witt-Brattström, Natur & Kultur 1995.
Simone de Beauvoir: Det andra könet, Norstedts 2002.
Judith Butler: Bodies that matter. On the discursive limits
of "sex", Routledge 1993.
Michel Foucault: Sexualitetens historia, Gidlunds 1976.
Birgitta Holm, "Begär och modernism", Edda nr 1 1993.
Julia Kristeva: Histoires d´amour, Denoël 1983.
Biddy Martin: Woman and Modernity. The (Life)Styles of
Lou Andreas-Salomé, Cornell 1991.
Karla Schultz: "In defense of Narcissus", The German
Quarterly spring 1994.
Inga-Britt Wik: "'O mina solbrandsfärgade toppar'. Edith
Södergran och apostrofen", Historia och litteraturhistoriska
studier 67.
Ebba Witt-Brattström: Ediths jag. Edith Södergran och
modernismens födelse, Norstedts 1997.

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