Friday 17 June 2016

Maimed Hero: Frankenstein Exhumed . . . Tragic Monster in Nelson’s Own Image? A Bicentennial Investigation.

Frankenstein was born exactly 200 years ago (the draft plotted on June 17 1816, following a terrifying ‘waking’ nightmare dreamed by Mary Shelley induced by a conversation at the ‘witching hour’ on the reanimation of a corpse by galvanic stimulus). 
           A nightmare induced by galvanism? Undoubtedly. But then came the long process of composing the novel and a different question arises, namely: When Mary first came to breathe galvanic life into her accursed Promethean creature, was Britain’s greatest naval hero its true inspiration? 
           A challenging claim, yes, but when the two lines of my enquiry are closely examined it may be observed that, where the Shelleyan and Nelsonian strands intermesh, a startling picture begins to emerge to reveal Admiral Nelson in a new guise as, in actuality, the true father of the high Gothic novel, and, moreover, the maimed hero whose death of recent memory is sublimated in Frankenstein as an unsuspected Nelson resurrection myth.


  ‘The world expects every being to do its duty,’ paraphrased the teenaged Percy Bysshe Shelley in defence of his callow egalitarianism, and it was this defiant personal motto that would become the rallying cry of a literary triumvirate, with Nelson’s words transfigured as their English Romantic Credo. 
  Yet that transfiguration had a darker meaning . . . because, for Shelley, Byron and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, mindful of the perfectibility of man travestied by a hero’s mutilated corpse, the wounds of the late admiral still very much possessed their thoughts.


Galvanic Augury.

Remarkably, within hours of Shelley’s eighteenth birthday, an augury of this galvanic fusion of classicised Heroism and protoscientific Romanticism could be said to have appeared in the sky when, on Sunday August 5th 1810, the heavens split to hurl a lightning-bolt at the first civic monument in Britain to commemorate Nelson’s victories, searing the obelisk with numberless millions of zeitgeist-animating volts.  At that precise moment there was ignited a drama that would unite the Hero of Trafalgar with the two greatest Romantic poets of their age and the eighteen-year-old progenitress of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley. 
 
The Nelson Monument struck by lightning,
Sunday 5th August 1810. Print from an oil painting by John Knox
in the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow.

  For I claim a synchronicity was announced by that electric charge, insofar as Lord Byron on that August day, having just heroically swum the Hellespont, and carousing in the distant lands of the Levant, was yet in the same breath still fretting in a letter home for news of his idealised oil portrait; an iconic image in which he had famously personified himself as Nelson in an attitude struck for the painter, Sanders, the previous year.
 
Byron personified himself as Nelson.
(George Sanders’ 1809 portrait of Byron,
Queen’s Collection.)
 
  And, while Byron continued to refine his heroic posturing in emulation of the Great Admiral, his young rival, Shelley, too, was in thrall to the ‘Immortal Memory’ of Nelson and – as a proselytiser of egalitarianism and the liberty of Everyman – was formulating his own life’s motto in homage to the naval commander’s celebrated signal: ‘England expects that every man will do his duty.’ 
  So, in the summer of 1810, the imaginations of the two future co-inspirators of Frankenstein, were both evidently coloured by the vividness of the Nelsonian myth. Moreover, in the case of Shelley who had sculled at Eton, the sailoring ambitions had taken palpable shape in the eighteen-year-old poet’s improvised boats he launched on his father’s country estate in Sussex, and in his designs for the steam-yachts he would later attempt to build in Tuscany at Livorno, the location of his drowning.


Kindred Souls in the Age of Galvanic Fluid.

Shelley, more than any other poet of the brief reign of George IV, recognised the Dawn of the Age of Electricity (albeit, in Shelley’s philosophising, an age of alchemistical ‘Transcendental Technology’, according to a contemporary satirist), and even as a prankish pupil at Eton had experimented with the ‘galvanic fluid’; a highly-charged Leyden Jar in his rooms had delivered a severe shock to one of his tutors.
            However, in August 1810, that lightning bolt was but a portent of the classic tale that would be engendered six years later. The dawn of electricity could not be said to have risen in its full splendour, for only in 1810 did Michael Faraday begin his studies that would lead to his discovery and formalisation of the principle underlying the generation of electricity two decades later.  In fact, it was not until 1816 that Faraday published the first of his many scientific papers.
  1816 was significant date in the history of the New Science for another reason; two kindred souls were conjoined. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley were married in 1816.

‘The world expects every being to do its duty,’
paraphrased the teenaged Percy Bysshe Shelley.


A Year Without Summer.

Devoted students of the legend of Frankenstein will know this novel was born in 1816, and will be aware that the events which prompted its creation took place in the year following the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and the tenth anniversary of Nelson’s funeral . . . the funeral of an archetype who was to enter the collective psyche.
          So the mythopoeic origin of Frankenstein stems from a period in which a world-spirit of triumphalism took wing over war-torn Europe, stimulating the thoughts and emotions of three great English Romantics, confined in fate-favoured conjunction in the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland: the authoress herself, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and Shelley and Lord Byron, together with Byron’s personal physician, Dr. John Polidori, author of that first vampiric bestseller, The Vampyre.

The Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland.

           Inspired by readings of phantasmagorical stories, on June 16 1816, the jaded Byron challenged this literary coterie, as a diversion from a ‘wet, ungenial summer’, to write the scariest ghost story ever conceived to unsettle the imagination. Thus Mary, while still a girl of eighteen years, came to begin the writing of Frankenstein.
           (1816 was known as ‘the year without a summer’ owing to the cataclysmic eruption of the Tambora Volcano in Indonesia, the most powerful eruption in recorded history. Global temperatures were lowered by as much as 3 degrees C. Even a year after the eruption, most of the northern hemisphere experienced sharply cooler temperatures during the summer months. Byron wrote in the same year, 1816, in Darkness: ‘The world was void . . . Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless . . .’)


‘The year without a summer’ . . . 
the cataclysmic eruption of the Tambora Volcano 
in Indonesia in 1816.
      ‘The world was void . . . 
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless . . .’

          So a shuddering chill was in the air both meteorologically and metaphysically.
          Yet, until now, no scholar it would seem has attributed Mary’s inspiration for the monstrous apparition of her High Gothic novel to the iconic corpse of Lord Nelson, then but a decade cold.


Our Hero Quietly Inurned?

Academic methodologies continue to evolve, and recent changes in practical and theoretical approaches to historicisation can now provide Shelleyan scholars with new insights into the socio-cultural contextualisation of Mary’s classic text, enabling Frankenstein to be contemporaneously revisited from the standpoint of a vast corpus of Nelsonian studies.
           To judge the textual basis for this re-evaluation, we should first revisit Mary’s nightmare vision which inspired Frankenstein, recorded in her novel’s exegetical preface, to learn how her troubled recollections hint at the true interpretation of events:
. . . I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think . . . I saw with . . . acute mental vision . . . the pale student of unhallowed arts standing before the thing he had put together, I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion . . . frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handiwork, horror stricken . . . but he is awakened [to] behold, the horrid thing . . . looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes. 
          Unremarked by biographers, these words I believe reflect the temperament of a brilliant young woman, still in her late teens, who had sought to impress upon Byron the force of her own personality by exhibiting to him, in a coded narrative, their shared affinity with Lord Nelson through the ghoulish fascination their hero’s mutilations held for them, a belief borne out by reference to their own writings and favoured authors. 
          Lord Byron boasted of the fact that his cousin, Captain Bettesworth, who had brought home despatches from Nelson at Antigua, was notable for having ‘. . . received four and twenty wounds in different places, and at this moment possesses a letter from the late Lord Nelson, stating Bettesworth as the only officer in the navy who had more wounds than himself.’  Similarly, Shelley’s uncle and benefactor, Captain John Pilfold, was the heroic commander of a ship in Nelson’s division at the battle of Trafalgar.
           Likewise Mary, in the two years prior to that momentous glacial summer of 1816, was no stranger to the Nelson legend. She had read widely, encouraged by Shelley, pursuing a programme encompassing the great poets, including Coleridge, Milton, Petronius, Shakespeare, Spenser, and, significantly, Robert Southey, who had become Poet Laureate in the year of the first publication of his greatest prose work, The Life of Nelson, which was hailed at once as a masterwork.  
           As Southey wrote in his moving final passages of the second volume, referring to the autopsy performed on Nelson and the condition of the corpse: 
There was reason to suppose, from the appearances upon opening the body, that in the course of nature he might have attained, like his father, to a good old age.
          Southey’s profound sense of loss, the mourning for a fallen hero, recalls not only the emotional impact the memory of Nelson’s death had on the writers of those times, but the powerful influence exerted on their imaginations both by Southey’s personality and his other literary works. (It’s fascinating to reflect on the fact that without Robert Southey’s urgings, his fellow poet Shelley would not have so soon become acquainted with William Godwin, Mary’s father, in 1812.) 
           In Frankenstein, for example, it is from Southey, due probably to the promptings of Shelley, that a name of one character derives. The ur-text of Frankenstein first accords the name of ‘Maimouna’ to ‘Safie’, in the De Laceys’ episode concerning the history of the cottagers (Chapter 15), a name that can be traced to Southey’s Thalaba, a work Mary records reading in 1814, two years before her own book’s genesis.
           The common connection of Nelson’s first biographer to the Shelley/Byron literary circle, of course, is more memorably summoned when we recall Southey as the alleged scandal-monger whom Byron asserted spread rumours about the Shelleys and Mary’s step-sister, Byron’s lover Claire Claremont, slandering them as the ‘League of Incest’. 
           Yet, Southey it may be believed figures in their literary lives far more prominently than their love affairs. In 1813, for example, Byron could record in his journal that Southey’s ‘appearance is Epic; and he is the only existing entire man of letters.’ And, Byron affirms, ‘His prose is perfect . . . The life of Nelson is beautiful.’  This was the diarist who would five years later pillory ‘Bob’ Southey, in the dedication to Don Juan, as a pretentious sterile poet who posterity would see ‘. . . fall, for lack of moisture, quite adry, Bob!’ (A dry bob was Regency slang for intercourse without ejaculation.)
            So here we can see that Byron’s veneration for Nelson could clearly coexist with a robust revilement of his biographer. As Byron wrote in Don Juan, more than a dozen years after Trafalgar: 

                                Nelson was once Britannia’s God of War,
                                And still should be so, but the tide is turned;
                                There’s no more to be said of Trafalgar,
                                ’Tis with our Hero quietly inurned . . .

           That Mary, like Byron, was conversant with the life of Nelson, and that her imagination, too, was stirred and stimulated by his exploits, was adduced in an article in the Keats-Shelley Journal written over a quarter of a century ago.
           Considering the chronology of the novel, the author, A. D. Harvey, proposes that the climax of Frankenstein, the ice-locked ship of the polar expedition from Archangel, aboard which Frankenstein seeks refuge, was suggested by a ship on an earlier voyage whose crew included the young Nelson.
It is possible . . . Mary Shelley had in mind [a] man of the 1770s, Captain the Honourable Constantine Phipps, who in 1773 led an expedition to try to find the Northeast Passage to India. The fact that [Frankenstein’s ship] departs from Archangel indicates that [the ship] too is sailing east . . . to find a polar route to India . . . Phipps’s attempt to go east was however still remembered in Mary Shelley’s day if only because one of the then popular Baron Munchhausen stories [1786] is set on board Phipps’s ship, and because the young Horatio Nelson, who was still fresh in all Britons’ minds as a naval hero, had accompanied Phipps as a coxswain and had had an adventure with a bear that had become famous as one of the earliest incidents of his legend. 
            Southey recounts young Nelson’s voyage to the polar wastes with a gusto only matched by Mary’s. Southey writes:
They sawed through pieces of ice twelve feet thick; and this labour continued the whole day, during which their utmost efforts did not move the ships above three hundred yards . . . One night, during the mid-watch, he [Nelson] stole from the ship with one of his comrades, taking advantage of a rising fog, and set off over the ice in pursuit of a bear. It was not long before they were missed. The fog thickened . . . Between three and four in the morning the weather cleared, and the two adventurers were seen, at a considerable distance from the ship, attacking a huge bear. 
            So, both Munchhausenian and Nelsonian myth-making are seemingly interwoven into the themes threaded through Mary’s text.  And both Mary and Byron, then, judging by their predilection for stories that, according to Mary in her introduction to Frankenstein, would ‘awaken thrilling horror’ and ‘curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart’, gloried in the gory, as though St. Sebastian were their patron saint; and both expatriated writers, ten years after Nelson’s interment, would, no doubt, have continued to lament the disfigurement of Nelson as though he were a Horatian dismembered poet, ‘disiecti membra poetae’
            Indeed, in that early romantic portrait, Byron aged 21, on preparing to embark for the Mediterranean, paradoxically affirms his allegiance to ‘Britannia’s God of War’, despite espousing the ideologies of a revolution which Nelson, the defender of reactionaryism, had routed. 


Triumphalist Nelsoniana.

By contrast, in the year of Byron’s first poetic success in 1812, Mary, aged fourteen and motherless since birth, embarked on a more prosaic voyage on a packet boat bound for Dundee, in the charge of a passenger, a Mrs Nelson, who was journeying to be reunited with her invalid husband. At this most impressionable age, therefore, Fortune chose as Mary’s custodian, the wife of a surrogate Nelson, as she ventured out to sea alone for the first time in her young life, borne by the fair tides of Britain’s newly liberated oceans. (Her life, like those of her countrymen at that time, was suffused with triumphalist Nelsoniana; in November 1814, for instance, she moved, with Percy and Claire, to 2 Nelson Square, Blackfriars Road.)
            In Scotland, as Mary writes, in her introduction to Frankenstein
‘I made occasional visits to the more picturesque parts . . . the eyrie of freedom, and the pleasant region where unheeded I could commune with the creatures of my fancy . . . It was . . . on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered.’ 
            This voyage to Scotland with the petticoated Nelson, and the solitariness of her surroundings, are very likely to have prompted the passage in Chapter 19, in which Mary dispatches Frankenstein to the Orkney Islands to create a second creature as companion to the monster. 
I determined to visit some remote spot of Scotland and finish my work in solitude.  I did not doubt but that the monster followed me and would discover himself to me when I should have finished, that he might receive his companion. With this resolution I traversed the northern highlands and fixed on one of the remotest of the Orkneys as the scene of my labours.    
           That Byron profoundly venerated Nelson is also attested by the fact that he named his beautifully formed, exceptionally ferocious, bull-mastiff after Nelson. 
           Byron fought with this canine Nelson, according to one account: ‘The bull-dog, Nelson, always wore a muzzle, and was occasionally sent for into our private room, when the muzzle was taken off, much to my annoyance, and he and his master amused themselves with throwing the room into disorder . . . But, one day, Nelson unfortunately escaped out of the room without his muzzle, and going into the stable-yard fastened upon the throat of a horse from which he could not be disengaged.’  Those in pursuit, took a loaded pistol and ‘. . . shot poor Nelson through the head, to the great regret of Byron.’
           Indeed, Byron’s remorse must have been redoubled to learn his anthropomorphised Nelson had been shot, since the lame Byron, with his club foot, identified himself very closely with the maimed Admiral who perished, too, by ball shot. Byron was self-conscious about his disablement and sought in Horatio Nelson, I believe, a contemporary model of heroism which overcame his own failure to match the perfections of ancient Greek classical statuary then the vogue as the ideal of human beauty. Byron’s weight was variable and he was a cranky martyr to the fad of extreme dieting. 
           Mary Shelley in her encounters with Lord Byron, then, must have been aware of the poet’s powerful identification with his naval hero, and regarded the poet as virtually the alter ego of her first lover and husband, the poet Shelley, for she writes that when Byron ‘. . . speaks & Shelley does not answer, it is as thunder without rain.’
           In pursuing her protagonist Victor Frankenstein’s noble theory on the perfectability of man, therefore, whose aim is to create life in an idealised image from the disinterred body parts of the dead, did Mary Shelley attempt to conciliate Byron and win his approval by creating a model for empathic identification? 
           In short, was Frankenstein’s creation perceived within Mary Shelley’s most intimate circle of readers as a hybrid of Byron and Nelson, restored to life as Perfected Man, unmaimed? (A perfectability in marked contrast to Frankenstein himself who, at length, admits his own imperfection, as one who exists like ‘unfashioned creatures, but half made up’ unless aided to ‘perfectionate [their] weak and faulty natures.’) At the time of its writing, Shelley and Byron discussed ‘the principle of life and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered.’ 


A New Species of the Undead.

Was, then, Mary’s ‘new species’ of undead both a wish-fulfilling resurrection of Nelson and an artful tribute to Byron whose complex split personality she recognised?  In other words, can Frankenstein be regarded in one aspect as a Nelson resurrection myth, proposing the possibilities of a new science for the rebirth of a nation’s hero.
             Consider the moment of Frankenstein’s creation of the Ideal Man whom Frankenstein delineates, amazed that such should be the phantasm that . . . .
. . . with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! — Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.
           Note Mary’s emphasis on limbs of perfect proportion (redeeming Byron’s deformity); and Frankenstein observes one ‘eye of the creature open’ no longer blinded in its socket (remedying the one armed-Nelson’s monocular vision).  Is this not an image of Nelson resurrected? (Many paintings of Nelson’s death, incidentally, depict him in the manner of Christ’s deposition from the Cross. See also the 1831 frontispiece to Frankenstein for a similar disposition of limbs, a disposition which also closely resembles Samuel Drummond’s classic painting, The Death of Nelson, 21 October 1805’ painted in 1807.)


A Deposition of an Immortal?

             ‘. . . I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper.’ Thus wrote Mary Shelley of ‘. . . the demoniacal corpse to which I had so miserably given life.’
            Well, in my own view, the legend of Frankenstein has prospered and grown large in the imaginations of countless millions, with few suspecting Admiral Lord Nelson as the source of the image which holds them in thrall.
            The closest any scholar has approached this exegesis of Frankenstein (so far as I am aware) is Simon Bainbridge in his From Nelson to Childe Harold: The Transformations of the Byronic Image. Focusing principally on George Sanders’ 1809 portrait of Byron, Bainbridge contends that most accounts of the Byron iconography have missed the fact that 
Byron has himself represented in terms of the pre-eminent and already mythical hero of the hour, Horatio Nelson, an astonishing act of heroic self-conception and self-presentation that anticipates his more famous and ambiguous identification with the major world historic figure of the age, Napoleon Bonaparte.
            Mary Shelley knew, too, of Byron’s complex divided self, this split personality which, in composite, embraced both Nelson and Napoleon. Remember, too, the year of Frankenstein’s composition was the year that followed Napoleon’s exile to the island of St. Helena – a barren, wind-swept rock located in the South Atlantic Ocean. Frankenstein literally means ‘the rock of the Franks’ (i.e. the rock of the French) and is it too fanciful to suppose that Napoleon, the man described by Chateaubriand as the ‘mightiest breath of life which ever animated human clay’, is also a Byronic co-model for Frankenstein’s creation?
           As to the continuing evolution of Byronic iconography, Bainbridge argues that Byron’s initial heroic and very public image was transformed in later portraits into the figure of an ‘isolated and a-historical romantic wanderer.’  
          Yet, the idealisation of Byron (a.k.a Nelson) as a Romantic wanderer is not neglected in Frankenstein, whose chapters are consumed by the Creature’s wanderings.


Romantic Wanderer.

In Frankenstein’s voyagings to the polar icecaps in search of the wandering Fiend, the ‘tremendous being’ who by galvanic black arts had been created, Mary evokes the resoluteness of Nelson when the ship’s sailors threaten mutiny. Frankenstein exhorts: ‘Oh! Be men, or be more than men . . . Return as heroes who have fought and conquered and who know not what it is to turn their backs on the foe.’ 
            The onboard catastrophe of Frankenstein’s death, in a ship’s cabin, at the hands of the daemonical monster also recalls the death of Nelson. At Frankenstein’s death, there looms over him ‘a form . . . gigantic in stature, yet uncouth and distorted in its proportions. As he hung over the coffin, his face was concealed by long locks of ragged hair; but one vast hand was extended, in colour and apparent texture like that of a mummy . . .’ 
            Certainly Mary’s description of the ghastly mummified hand, and of the coffin, reminds us of Nelson’s morbid humour, and of a dead hero bereft of one arm.  In the final passages of Mary Shelley’s epic novel her Monster and Creator are seemingly united in death, a gothic horror which Horatio Nelson had anticipated by almost two decades. 
           After the battle of the Nile, a coffin was made for Nelson from part of the wreck of L’Orient, burnt at the Battle of the Nile, as a reminder of his own mortality, and Nelson had it placed upright, with the lid on, against his cabin’s bulkhead on his flagship.
           Nelson, seeing his officers looking at it appalled, said one day: ‘You may look upon it, gentlemen, as long as you please; but, depend on it, none of you shall have it.’ However, despite the provision of a coffin, it is popularly known that Nelson’s corpse was shipped home in a barrel filled with alcohol as a preservative. Legend has it that when sailors learned of this, they drank the liquor, thenceforth known as ‘Nelson’s Blood’, as though he would, Redeemer-like, inspirit them.
           Correspondingly, Mary describes her ghoulish excitement at the scientific probability of animating a lifeless subject ‘preserved’ in a ‘case, till by some extraordinary means’ it should begin ‘to move with voluntary motion.’  Hence, as Mary suggests in her Preface to Frankenstein, she could not escape the new science of galvanism as a primary stimulus to her powerful imagination.
           However, though it is possible to detect the product of Nelson’s morbid humour prefiguring the climactic scene of Frankenstein, it must be recorded that the Admiral of ‘Immortal Memory’ never anticipated the immortality of his own resurrection by galvanism, a topic of which he could not have been unaware.
           As Professor George Rosie has written, when describing the genesis of his book, Death’s Enemy: The Pilgrimage Of Victor Frankenstein
It is intriguing that Shelley made Geneva the home town of Dr Frankenstein. During her sojourn in that under-rated city, she may have heard of Jean Jallabert, a professor at the University of Geneva who spent much of 1747 sending jolts of electricity into the semi-paralysed body of a locksmith called Jacques Chaumier. It seems that the treatment worked. After more than a decade of helplessness, Chaumier had the use of his limbs back. 
          Jallabert’s detailed account of the procedure he had devised was soon the talk of Europe’s salons. So, for Nelson, in the 18th century, the facts of galvanism were undoubtedly known; due, extraordinarily enough, to his liaison with Lady Hamilton.
          According to Prof. Rosie, the newfound fascination that surrounded the science of electricity in the Romantic epoch of Mary Shelley sparked her powerful imagination to create one of the great myths of the last two centuries. 
Mary Shelley was articulating the Romantic (in the literary sense of the word) fear that science is running out of control and is outstripping the bonds of religion, morality or even common sense.
As Prof. Rosie writes: ‘By the 1770s, there were “electric clinics” in just about every city in Europe . . . The most notorious was probably the Temple of Health in London, which a medical showman called James Graham ran with the help of a glamorous assistant called Emma Lyon.’ Emma, scantily-clad, was one of many beautiful young women who posed as classical statues in a salon which exhibited a curious medico-electrical apparatus, ‘The Celestial Bed’, across whose headboard electricity crackled, filling the air with a magnetic fluid ‘calculated to give the necessary degree of strength and exertion to the nerves.’   
           Who was Emma Lyon?
           Emma Lyon later married the Duke of Hamilton, and earned renown as the mistress of Horatio Nelson, and brought him the notoriety of L’affaire Hamilton.
          Today, Napoleon’s arch-nemesis Nelson is condemned by revisionists for the colour of his reactionary political instincts, and for his unquestioning anti-republicanism, despite being remembered as the anti-authoritarian spirit who rebelliously raised his telescope to his blind eye to disregard a flag signal commanding him to retreat.
           Similarly, in the writings of Byron, who described himself as ‘the Napoleon of rhyme’, we can detect antithetical statements in which there sounds the clash of his two conflicting natures . . . Reactionaryism and Romanticism.
          As Karl Marx wrote, it was fortunate that Byron had died so young, ‘. . . for he would have become a reactionary bourgeois had he lived longer . . .’
          For Byron, his emulation of Nelson extended not only to the abandonment of a wife but to duplicitous affairs and to sharing the advocacy of Free Love with Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mary (as daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, authoress of A Vindication of The Rights of Women) and Shelley, faithful acolyte of Byron, both subscribed to the ‘Otaheite’ philosophy within their own circle, a reference to Tahiti, the mythical home of free love. So in this respect, if in no other, the empathic link of the early 19th Century Romantics with Nelson cannot be broken. (Significantly, Mary was born in 1797, the year of Nelson’s knighthood following the battle of Cape St Vincent.) 

The Nelson Touch.
It is my intention, in proposing Admiral Nelson as the true Father of the Gothic Novel, springing as it does from the Trafalgar bicentennial, that my studies will in time induce further scholarly observations of the ‘Nelson Touch’, revealed to be palpably evident in the Shelleyan narrative. The existing evidence is strong. Not least is the connection that can be drawn between those two begetters of High Gothic fiction, the twin pinnacles, Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) and Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre and Shirley). 
            How?
            Charlotte’s father, Patrick Brunty, inspired by Lord Horatio Nelson, changed his surname to Brontë in honour of the admiral being ennobled in Sicily in 1799 by King Ferdinand of Naples with the Italian title, Duke of Bronte, as reward for routing the French fleet in the Mediterranean. A devotee of Nelson, Charlotte’s father changed the family surname to Brontë, placing a dieresis on the ‘e’.
            In Jane Eyre, too, we see the re-emergence, in high Gothic fashion, of the disfigured hero and scandalous ménage à trois: the Byronic Rochester (divested of an inconvenient wife confined in the attic) is maimed and blinded in a fire which has consumed his ancestral home. Wish-fulfilment, directly mirroring Nelson’s misfortune, resolves Charlotte’s fable, for miraculously, Rochester’s sight is partially restored.
            That Charlotte, too, venerated Nelson may be adduced from Chapter 26, in Part 3 of Shirley, where Shirley affirms: 
Admiral Horatio, Viscount Nelson, and Duke of Bronti; great at heart as a Titan; gallant and heroic as all the world and age of chivalry; leader of the might of England; commander of her strength on the deep; hurler of her thunder over the flood. 
           After the death by drowning of Mary’s husband, the poet Percy Shelley, in 1822, the spectacular reanimation of a corpse into a living body would, we can assume, no longer preoccupy a woman more closely absorbed in publishing her late husband's Posthumous Poems (1824).
          Besides, due in part to the sensational central proposition of Frankenstein in the context of the contemporary prevalence of grave-robbing gangs who supplied surgeons with newly buried bodies for dissection, the anatomy reform debates of the 1820s began to change the public’s perceptions of this seminal SciFi novel.


           Mary Shelley had good reasons to revise her intimations of immortality; the woman who had believed, like Frankenstein, that she ‘might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing’, kept Shelley’s heart wrapped up in silk until she died.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley; Percy Bysshe Shelley
by George J. Stodart, after monument by Henry Weekes.
Stipple engraving (1853).



Summer of a Dormouse?

One last mystery remains. Did Mary Shelley ever conduct a love affair with Lord Byron, as often rumoured? (Indeed her step-sister, Claire Clairmont, in the manner of a procuress, wrote to Byron before Mary’s 1816 visit to Lake Geneva, predicting an affair between Mary and the celebrated poet: ‘. . . you will I dare say fall in love with her; she is very handsome & very amiable & you will no doubt be blest in your attachment . . .’)
           There is an encrypted answer to this conundrum in Byron’s famous aphorism: ‘When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation), sleep, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning — how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse.’
            Mary Shelley’s pet name was ‘Dormouse’, because of her shyness. In 1822, the year of Percy Shelley’s drowning, she wrote to Byron, ‘. . . If I am awkward at first, forgive me. I would, like a dormouse, roll myself in cotton at the bottom of my cage, & never peep out.’ 
            Was the ‘Frankenstein summer’ of 1816 truly a Byronic ‘summer of a Dormouse’ – in quite another amatory sense?
            And, at a deeper level of religio-intellectual mythologising, did both Mary and Charlotte, as Ur-feminists, seek in their narratives to usurp the omnipotence of a patriarchal godhead and, by that empowerment, conceive legends in which their archetypes could raise the dead and heal the lame and the blind?
            Or, in truth, is the Frankenstein myth of Mary, a recently bereft mother, a more elemental work altogether, delineating a young mother’s trauma and guilt of afterbirth, as many feminists with great perception propose. In her persuasive and emotionally grounded keynote article on Feminine Gothic, Ellen Moers writes: 
. . . Mary Shelley’s book is most interesting, most powerful, and most feminine: in the motif of revulsion against newborn life, and the drama of guilt, dread, and flight surrounding birth and its consequences. Most of the novel, roughly two of its three volumes, can be said to deal with the retribution visited upon monster and creator for deficient infant care.  
On March 6 1815, Mary’s two-months-premature daughter Clara died, less than a month old. The baby had been conceived when Mary was aged seventeen.
           A fortnight later, on March 19 1815, Mary records a powerful dream:
Dream that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire and it lived. Awake and find no baby. I think about the little thing all day. Not in good spirits . . .
          Needless to remark that Mary, who remythologised Prometheus (her original title, as we know, was Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus), also in her dream sought Promethean fire, the divine gift to mortals, to knead cold human clay into living flesh.   
          Nevertheless, I remain convinced that, beyond this primal stimulus for Mary Shelley’s novel, the symbolic reanimation of Britain’s greatest national saviour, the archetype for a dismembered hero, is a kind of ‘fantasia variation’ (to employ a useful musical term for this intertext) freely evolving, as I have attempted to demonstrate, from the predominating theme of Gothic resurrectionism propelling her epic tale.  


Dammit, Brigid. Miaow! (18.08.2019)
Wouldn’t you know it! Now fourteen years after I wrote this text (originally to mark the 2005 Nelson Bicentennial of his victory and death) oh dear, oh dear, today I read this passage from a 1967 critique of Jane Eyre by Brigid Brophy:
It is more to the point, however, that Charlotte Brontë’s daydreams had clearly been formed by the Oedipal stress. The little girl [viz. Jane Eyre/father-figure Rochester] can escape the guilt of her erotic relation to her father if her father is castrated : before Jane Eyre can marry her father-figure, he is mutilated in the fire that destroys his house. He loses an arm and almost all his sight — an emphatic symbolic castration, betokened twice over, by the direct loss of a limb and by the blinding that is the symbol used in the Oedipus story itself. (Mr Rochester is phallicized and castrated yet again by being likened to a tree — whose blasting by lightning forecasts, according to Mrs [Q.D.] Leavis [literary critic], his mutilation.) Charlotte Brontë’s choice of mutilations was, perhaps, influenced also by an historical example. The sightless and armless Mr Rochester seems to be formed on the lines less of the clubfooted Lord Byron than of the war-wounded Lord Nelson (duke, of course, of Brontë). 
These words are from the excoriating Fifty Works of English Literature we could do without, which displays the bared claws of Brigid Brophy’s feline wit to full advantage (this 1967 demolition job on English and American classics has contributions from BB and Michael Levey and Charles Osborne). I assume this passage is by BB as it seems characteristic of her insights but, please note, all fifty hatchet jobs have no byelines.

For my appreciation of the enviable wit of Brigid Brophy, see:
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2013/10/slaves-to-seconal-droguee.html

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)

Monday 13 June 2016

The Murder of a Doctrinaire Freudian by Her Analysand Nephew . . . . Oneiric Precognition of Parricide . . . . The Case of Hermine Hug-Hellmuth.

QUESTION: Is it possible for an infant of 5½ years to dream of his committing a violent crime . . . a murder to be committed thirteen years later?

ANSWER: Yes, if you’re the infant analysand and nephew of the psychoanalytic pioneer Hermine Hug von Hugenstein (defined as the first child psychoanalyst recognised by Freud and the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society) . . . and if the murder victim thirteen years later is destined to be your aunt.

A garden intruder from the
Fin de Siècle Viennese Crime Sheet:
Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt

Extraordinarily . . . and, indeed, sinisterly . . . the nephew in question – Rudolf  Hug (‘Rolf’, illegitimate son of Hermine’s illegitimate half-sister) – was the infant subject of one of the earliest analyses of Kindheitsträume (childhood dreams), an infant whose premonition of the circumstances of his own adult degeneracy were clinically documented in 1912 by his Aunt Hermine in her paper for the Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse und Psychotherapie under the title of Analyse eines Traumes eines Fünfeinhalbjährigen (The Analysis of a Dream of a -Year-Old-Boy) and written, in consequence, in dutiful adherence to prevailing Freudian psychoanalytic methodology.

A dispassionate record, maybe, but Rolf’s dream is surely one of the most startling testaments in psychoanalytic case histories from the Viennese wellspring, notwithstanding the analyst’s self-censorship – in her eagerness to be recognised by Freud as an accomplished unraveller of childhood’s pharaonic visions – leading to a calamitous failure to interpret the symbolic language of a dream that in so many coordinate details is a parable for the prefiguring of her own death.


Symbolic determinism.

The infant Rudolf is described by his eminent aunt as ‘. . . a strong [sexual] exhibitionist . . . a little tyrant . . .’ of ‘. . . precocious intelligence . . .’ yet ‘. . . an excrement smearer . . .’ who ‘. . . kept up an active interest in his and others’ defecation.’ At five years of age he could read and write. He looked like a ten-year-old, but was pale, according to a neighbour who knew the family. The boy never looked healthy.
  
His prophetic dream was described by Rolf thus: ‘I am so afraid. A big bear wants to eat me. There was also a big picket fence there and lots of pointed arrows on top. The bear wants to hug me with his front paws. In the middle of the ceiling there was a gigantic black spot, no, a big blot.’

Let us be clear. Hermine Hug-Hellmuth (the name by which she was latterly known following the abolition of nobiliary particles under the Habsburg Law of 1919) is remembered certainly for the professional detachment of her meticulous analytic method but – particularly in relation to her principal object of study, the child Rolf – that cold-eyed detachment is revealed to be a process of observation that saw the 5½-year-old as more an object of scientific enquiry than as a vessel receptive of familial affection.

Beyond the Pale? To be ever banished from a tender heart by barbed defences ?
‘. . . a big picket fence there and lots of pointed arrows on top.’

Visceral wish-fulfilment.

Let us examine Hermine’s analysis of Rolf’s dream more closely. 

1 – ‘I am so afraid.’ In his aunt’s view, Rolf was attention-seeking by ‘forcing affection for himself through the pretended fear.’

2 – ‘A big bear wants to eat me . . . and hug me with his front paws.’ The bear can be seen, according to Hermine, as the embodiment of his absentee black-bearded father by whom he wished to hugged  and kissed. At the age of ‘approximately three-and-half years of age he visited Schönbrunn Zoo for the first time. He saw bears standing up clinging to the lattice fence . . . His delight knew no end as he even saw the “standing up” bears’ erect penises.’ The appearance of the bear is, therefore, both a wish fulfilling dream of brute potency and an expression of the fierce ‘longing of the boy for his big, strong father.’ The bear, accordingly, is the ‘leitmotif of his nightly experience.’  

3 – ‘There was also a big picket fence there and lots of pointed arrows on top.’ In the child’s bedroom were ‘. . . Venetian blinds . . . and the light of the street lamp creates . . . shadow stripes like an actual fence drawn on the ceiling . . . In the dream the picket fence primarily refers to the railing of his little bed . . . through which he exhibited his penis . . . In connection with his lust to exhibit himself in bed he also had a habit of urinating during walks at every fence . . . for example, on a certain board or exactly through two slats into a crack.’ This exploit recalls for him the transgressive act, age two years, of making the arms or hands of his female carers ‘the target of his stream.’

4 – ‘Lots of pointed arrows.’ These refer ‘at first to his own penis but also to the penises of several boys who lived in the neighbourhood during his second year of life. They were repeatedly seen urinating through the fence into the neighbouring garden.’

5 – ‘A black spot, no, a big blot, in the middle of the ceiling.’ The boy – guilty in his infancy of ‘gross coprophilic activity’ as an ‘excrement smearer’ – was observed ‘some days before the dream’ running ‘obsessively around and around the room, squatting here and there, and calling, “Aunt Hermine, I will sit down and make a blot [faeces].” The dream ‘granted him the fulfilment of his wish, and, further, it was on the ceiling in a very exposed spot where everyone who entered the room could see it. In his defecation games he repeatedly selected to “blot” in the “middle” . . . ’ so, in Hermine’s view, her little nephew’s dream accorded at the most visceral level to Freud’s irrefutable dictum ‘Der Traum ist eine Wunscherfüllung’ (the dream is a wish-fulfilment), and moreover permitted a classical interpretation by which infant urolagnia and coprophilia are seen as simulative of adult sexual gratification and indicative of nascent carnal refinements yet to be fully explored.


13 years later . . .  the murder of Hermine Hug-Hellmuth by Nephew Rolf. 

In the small hours of September 9 1924, eighteen-year-old Rolf Hug climbed over the green fence that ran along the Viennese street on which his aunt lived, and scrambled up to an open window giving him entry to her small, functional ground-floor apartment where the noise of his footfall awoke Hermine whom he at once attacked, attempting to smother her with a pillow when in a fierce struggle for her life she fell on the floor.

When he could not silence her screams he strangled her, then gagged her after he became aware her limbs were still moving. He carried her body to her sleeping-couch in the centre of the room. He placed with care her head on a clean pillow, which concealed the blood-covered pillow that had smothered her. 

One drop of blood remained in her nostril. Her larynx and three ribs were broken. Rolf searched her underwear for money and took 2,600,000 kronen and a gold watch. With the aid of a chair he climbed out of the window and put on his shoes, which he had placed for retrieval in the darkness below, to leave by the way he had come, through the ‘garden of ivy’ that separated Hermine’s apartment house from the neighbouring building. 

In the years preceding the crime, Rolf had approached his aunt and demanded money with menaces on numberless occasions. Since childhood he had been a persistent thief and even neighbours were warned to guard their purses. 

Rudolf Otto Hug – ‘Rolf’ – was apprehended the next day at Mürzzuschlag railway station, some 85 km from Vienna. 

In brief, these are the essential forensic facts and confession evidence as they emerged from the police enquiry and trial.

Dark Street. (1933)
by Nikolai Sinezouboff. 


A child’s foreshadowing of a death

The theory of typological relationships, which sees the Boy as Father of the Man, can be as exegetical for the psychopathography of a patient as those correspondences identified by scholars of biblical prophecy, who find in events in the early scriptures revelatory foreshadowing of the Redeemer . . . sightings of the prefigurative type that anticipates the antitype of the future, proclaimed as the fulfilment of messianic prophecy. 

So, to draw similar parallels, what instructive concordances can we identify when – favoured by 20/20 hindsight – we examine the tragic history of Rudolf Otto Hug and his aunt?

1 – ‘I am so afraid.’ The corollary to Hermine’s dream-analysis of Rolf’s Fear is a counterview that considers the supposed Saviour to whom the infant looks for protection – Hermine herself – from whose hands, she records, he was ‘forcing affection for himself through the pretended fear.’

Yet, according to by Hermine’s biographers, Hermine (as Rolf’s closest surviving relative upon the death of his mother) ‘. . .  [never] entered into a loving relationship with Rolf.  On the contrary, her attitude towards him appears to have been distant, hostile, even mean. She kept away from all others’. She also ‘was unable to relate to other people in an intimate manner . . . ’ and she did not have friends in whom she could confide.

Hermine was a person, then, who positively bristled with resistance to intimacy, and it’s significant that in The Analysis of a Dream of a -Year-Old-Boy she recalls ‘Rolf once saw his aunt by accident in her corset . . . ’; significant because the more-than-figurative steel corset has been the oft-repeated symbol of lovelessness for troubled analysands whose unresolved neuroses surface in adulthood to betray minds tormented by the absence of parental affection in infancy . . . the softness of an embrace denied, literally, by steel ribbing. And Hermine, after all, stood in loco parentis  for her dead sister.

So a palisade stockaded against affection is a persona suggestive of many resonances, not least the emotional resonance to be found in the archetypicality of her given name . . .  Hermine is a feminine form of Herman, a variant of which is Arminius, great chieftain of the Germanic tribes whose warriors – shielded by staked palisades – defeated the Roman army in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD.  Her name is destiny and totemic of indomitable Germania. Nomen est omen. 

Indeed, in addition, the martial defensive connotations of Hermine’s family name, Hellmuth, should not be ignored, composed as it is of the Germanic elements helm (‘helmet’) and muot (‘spirit’ or ‘mind’), a combination redolent of the introspective, cautious, guarded person Hermine evidently was . . . an armour against amour.

      Barbed defences . . . 
Helmeted Arminius
leads the Germanic tribes from
his staked palisade (see rocky heights, above)
to defeat the Roman army in the
Battle of the
Teutoburg Forest, 9 AD. 

Nor, in this regard, should we forget the cursed name of Rudolph, Crown Prince of Austria, and heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who killed his mistress, Baroness Marie Vetsera, at Mayerling and then turned the gun on himself. Can we be sure that Rolf was not condemned to misfortune by his ill-fated namesake, whose death set in motion a chain reaction that saw the heir presumptive Archduke Franz Ferdinand assassinated, an event that triggered World War I, and a defeat that brought about the collapse of the Habsburg Empire.  Nomen est omen.

So it is possible to see that far from a warm maternal-filial relationship, Hermine (Arminius) and Rudolf (Kronprinz) stood in stark opposition: a Victor-Vanquished nexus that could be resolved only in a high tragedy of mythological dimensions such as those Ancient Greek tragedies from which many of Freud’s psychoanalytical methodologies were derived. In short, did child-psychoanalyst Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, a Freudian doctrinaire and Rolf’s second mother, maintain conformity to Freudian doctrine (namely, belief in a variant-Oedipus Complex) even unto her death?

By examining more closely the remaining strands of 5½-year-old Rolf’s prophetic allegorical dream the embedded truth of Hermine’s analysis may begin to emerge.

2 – ‘A big bear wants to eat me . . . and hug me with his front paws.’ Contrary to the self-censoring interpretation proposed by Hermine (that Rolf’s dream projection is the fierce ‘longing of the boy for his big, strong’ absentee father), the bear’s forepaws can be also interpreted as Hermine’s own repressive hands of his recent infancy. At the age of three, Rolf’s exhibitionism (lifting his nightgown to display his penis) was discouraged by Hermine who admits, ‘In order to distract him [from ‘exhibitionist pleasure’ and the ‘strong auto-erotism’ of the ‘lust to exhibit’ his genitals] . . . I let my hand circle above the bed and swoop down like a swooping bird [pecking?] on his naked foot or hand . . .’ to ‘. . . fly away disgusted if it saw too much nakedness.’ So the [peckish?] hands sought by Rolf for longed-for warm embraces are both desired and feared in equal measure and, moreover, in his dream, become an anthropomorphised expression of a woman’s threat to his sexual potency, and a vision of hands to both clasp and consume him. This sense of repressive menace is more likely the ‘leitmotif of his nightly experience.’

3 – ‘There was also a big picket fence there and lots of pointed arrows on top.’ The significance of the picket fence with arrow-headed palings reappearing at the crime scene thirteen years after its dream occurrence prompts speculations as to second sight, particularly as ‘the picket fence’ of the 5½-year-old boy exerts the same attraction of a taboo as the forbidden barrier to the ‘garden of ivy’ that the eighteen-year-old youth scrambles over: the forest ‘green fence’ – the Arminius-erected palisade – looming in the dark that separates him from the apartment of his aunt.

4 – ‘Lots of pointed arrows.’ If, as Hermine proposes, the dream-arrows refer to penises defiling a garden by their urinating through a fence, in defiance of the rigidities of propriety, then Rolf’s criminal penetration of the ‘garden of ivy’ to reach the murder scene can be viewed as a fulfilment of a rite of desecration long meditated in his quest to be avenged. Hermine in her dream analysis suggests the ‘crack between two [fence] slats . . . could also refer to a vagina’, so the assault on Hermine’s apartment can be similarly seen as a violation preparatory to a virtual necrophilic rape, insofar as Rolf manhandled the half-naked Hermine in her death throes and searched her underwear to steal her long-preserved savings.

5 – ‘A black spot, no, a big blot, in the middle of the ceiling.’ There is conclusive fulfilment, too, of infant Rolf’s prophetic dream in the subconscious stage-directions the eighteen-year-old follows to set the crime scene.

           [Middle] Rolf carried the dying Hermine to the centre of the room.

           [SpotOne blackened drop of dried blood remained in one nostril.  

           [Blot] Her forehead had a swelling with a dark bruise on her neck

Just as Hermine had described Rolf’s childhood games of defilement, so Rolf in adulthood had selected to ‘blot’ in the ‘middle’ of the room and retrace the action of his dream by making a ‘blot’ in ‘a very exposed spot where every one who entered the room could see it.’ 

Murder was the dark stain on the chamber of sleep he foresaw from his infant cot. For Rolf, it was the ultimate act of defiance against the persecutor of his infancy who he believed had treated him with rigidity and without mercy. And indeed, the violence of his resentment can be measured by the smashed larynx and the silenced woman’s three broken ribs, a final breaching of the barricade of aloofness that for so long had resisted him.

Yet, in the end, when the deed was done, was it a simply a matter of basest greed for a benefactor’s possessions compounded by a sense of entitlement compelled by a paranoiac grudge?  In this connexion, we should be reminded that murder for financial gain in those desperate times of hunger and spiralling hyperinflation was a primary cause of homicide, with the highest banknotes then circulating printed in denominations of 500,000 kronen; at the time of Hermine’s death Austria’s money supply had increased by 14,250 percent.

Or was it, for Hermine, a case of an ‘elective victim’* submissive to a preordained slayer? There is substance in this suspicion. In the month before her death, in one of her letters to her principal confidant, Hermine confesses her fear of being strangled by Rolf. ‘I will be killed anyway,’ she predicts.

Deterministically, despite her fear of her nephew, only weeks before her death Hermine had placed in the hands of the same confidant a copy of her will in which she named Rolf as her only heir.

Murnau Street with Green-Fenced Garden,
Bavaria, Germany. (1908)
by Vasily Kandinsky.


A victim of psychoanalysis.

In the words of George MacLean and Ulrich Rappenthe joint editors of her work and distinguished as her quasi-speculative biographers, ‘Rolf can be considered a victim of psychoanalytic study that lacked a true loving relationship.’ In point of fact, after being released from prison, Rolf attempted to get restitution from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association, as a victim of psychoanalysis.

In sum, Hermine’s biographers conclude: ‘Hug-Hellmuth abetted her neglect by others by neglecting herself . . . Lacking friends, she did not create any nucleus of a following of colleagues or students . . She was a closed person who never talked more than was absolutely necessary, and even then reluctantly. One neighbour reported that Hug-Hellmuth talked to his cat more than she talked to him.’

For me, this last observation on Hermine’s detachment summons up the pathos and bathos of the ‘high-functioning sociopathic personality’ that Patrick Hamilton captures so perfectly in the final paragraph of his classic novel, Hangover Square, and the death of his socially-withdrawn protagonist (whose suicide note reads, ‘Please order they look after my white cat which I left behind’):
He died in the early morning, and because of the interest then prevailing in the war, was given very little publicity by the press. Indeed only one newspaper, a sensational picture daily, gave the matter any space or prominence – bringing out (his crude epitaph) the headlines:                                                                  SLAYS TWO                                                                                                            FOUND GASSED                                                                                                      THINKS OF CAT.

A family trait of attention-seeking.

Ironically, when Hermine and Rolf are considered together in a ‘characterological analysis’, the traits that the aunt identifies in her infant nephew’s proclivity for recurring fantasies – ‘attention-seeking statements in his repertoire’ – she, herself, is to be found guilty of, insofar as her calculations to court the attention of Sigmund Freud decidedly succeeded when the Founding Father of Psychoanalysis agreed to write the adulatory introduction to her notorious faux-journal, Tagebuch eines Halbwüchsigen Mädchens – Von 11 bis 14½ Jahren (‘Diary of an Adolescent Girl from 11 to 14½ Years’), an intimate record of the developing sexuality of a ‘young girl belonging to the upper middle class’, first published anonymously in English in 1921.


The fact that Freud wrote in his introduction ‘This diary is gem’ and then withdrew permission for the book to appear after a succès de scandale when doubts arose as to the authenticity of its authorship (purportedly the work comprised the jottings of girl who had later died; an attribution that even today remains an unresolved question) is a measure of the notoriety the Diary won. For reasons of privileged confidential information, the ‘editor’ of the Diary (Hermine herself) protests she must ‘conceal the identity of the author’.


A public thirst for pubertal confessions.

As the writer of an incisive essay in Strange Attractor Journal Two (2005) intimates, there existed in the early 20th Century – an excessively repressive age, particularly in England – an eager reading public furtively grasping after a sexual knowledge that was withheld from the lay reader . . .
It’s now easy to poke fun at those classifications, ‘members of the educational, medical and legal profession’, considered qualified to read such books, but this was the period of the repressive reign of Britain’s infamous puritanical Home Secretary, Sir William (‘Jix’) Joynson-Hicks (the ‘Policeman of the Lord’, 1924-1929) . . . 
As the essayist makes clear, referring to the publication of an imitative work, The Diary of a Public Schoolgirl, (written in 1929 and first published in 1930), the fabricator of the spurious journal  . . .
. . . had again presciently recognised the existence of a specialised readership whose thirst for pubertic confessions he was confident he could satisfy.
Hermine’s journal evidently unloosed a flood of imitators . . .
This fraudulent journal [i.e. Hermine’s Tagebuch, inspired the] spurious Public Schoolgirl’s Diary. And [the faux-diarist’s] motives for the deception are remarkably similar, having at their root a countercultural, feminist-liberationist ideology that was entirely genuine.
In the British Journal of Psychology, 1921, Vol. 1, A Young Girl’s Diary is perceptively reviewed by Cyril Burt, the famous English psychologist, describing it as a journal, telling ‘. . . in her own colloquial phrases, how an Austrian girl [Rita] acquired, during the years of puberty, a knowledge, more or less exact, of the chief biological facts of sex . . . the book is anonymous.’  The publishers note that sale of the book is restricted to ‘. . . members of the educational, medical and legal professions as are interested in psychology.’
Cyril Burt doubted the veracity of this work, and believed the publication was encouraged ‘. . . no doubt, by the popularity attained by such writing as those of Daisy Ashford [1919] and Opal Whitely [1920] . . . purporting to be the unaided work of young children.’
Sigmund Freud exclaims rapturously in his preface: ‘This diary is a gem. Never, I believe, has anything been written enabling us to see so clearly into the soul of a young girl, during the years of puberal development.’ But by 1928 Freud’s laudatory reception of the work had been replaced by doubts. The work is now believed to be bogus, and confected by an adult woman, an ambitious child-psychologist lecturing in Berlin (see Hermine Hug-Hellmuth: Her Life and Work by George MacLean and Ulrich Rappen, Routledge, 1991). 
Its authenticity has been questioned because the document, more fraudulent than Freudian, is understood to have been written to exhibit Hug-Hellmuth’s psychoanalytical knowledge to enhance her stature in the eyes of Freud (she was a rival of Anna Freud).
These remarks from my stable-mate at Strange Attractor (an essay of mine appeared in Journal Three) appear to be a fair summary of the ambiguity of Hermine’s professional reputation, which there can be no doubt was undermined by the suspicions as to her veracity that became associated with her name, due to the obfuscations of her persistent denials of the Diary’s authorship [as Rita].    

So in conclusion, I will add that commentators of this affair, including Cyril Burt, have failed to identity what I would regard as a diaristic precursor of this confessional genre in German, and a work that also attracted similar notoriety. I refer to the best-selling Tagebuch einer Verlorenen** (‘The Diary of a Lost Girl’, 1905) by Margarete Böhme, a literary phenomenon, supposedly the true-life journal of a young woman forced into prostitution. This popular work, which scandalised society by prompting comparisons with the works of Zola, opens with the words:
Aunt Lehnsmann brought me a diary yesterday, as a belated Confirmation present. ‘Such a nice thing for a young girl,’ she said. ‘And such a cheap one,’ thought I.
Hermine, in her own Tagebuch eines Halbwüchsigen Mädchensbegins in a similar racy style (for girls, that is, of a similar period): 
July 12 . . . Hella and I are writing a diary. We both agreed that when we went to high school we would write a diary every day. Dora [older sister] keeps a diary too, but she gets furious if I look at it. 
Artfully/artlessly Hermine,  in the guise of editor, writes in her Preface: 
No attempt has been made to correct trifling faults in grammar and other inelegancies of style. For the most part these must be regarded as the expression of a child’s incapacity for the control of language. Rather they must be looked upon as manifestations of affective trends, as errors in functioning brought about by the influence of the Unconscious.
I have had occasion, in an earlier post, to identify certain suggestive passages from Hermine’s Diary, pointing them up as instructive, see Sex Lessons from Literature Unhindered by 20/20 Hindsight:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/sex-lessons-from-literature-unhindered.html

Under one of my note-headings, Sexual Heat, I quote the following from the young diarist, Rita, in her her twelfth year. She is observing her teacher on whom she has a crush:
When he strokes his beard I become quite hot and cold with ecstasy. And the way he lifts up his coattails as he sits down. Its lovely, I do want to kiss him. Hella and I take turns to put our penholder on his desk so that he can hallow it with his hand as he writes. Afterwards in the arithmetic lesson when I write with it, I keep looking at Hella and she looks back at me and we both know what the other is thinking of.  
The symbolism of dip-pen and pen-holder and the excitement stimulated by these objects need not be dwelt on here, other than to observe that the secret sexual life of adolescent girls in the late 19th century, as expressed by contemporaneous women, must be sought in such almost imperceptible textual glimmers.

Similarly, for mydriatic response to stimulus (pupil dilation) as an index to sexual arousal, see Rita’s diary entry for the same year, observing a schoolboy admirer:
When he says that his eyes grow dark, quite black, although his eyes are really grey and they get very large. Especially in the evening when we say goodbye, it frightens me. I'm always dreaming of him. 
So, when Hermine writes in her Preface that we must regard such writings ‘. . . as the expression of a child’s incapacity for the control of language [under] the influence of the Unconscious . . .’, we correspondingly must observe that such clunking symbols as Pens and Pen-holders are very much within the control of a Conscious Mind anxious to please her mentor by conformity to oneiroid symbols central to the practice of doctrinal Freudians.


*For a fine novella tracing the journey of an ‘elective victim’ to her violent end, The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark is recommended, a work I first read in its entirety in a special issue of The New Yorker published in May 1970.

**Significantly, Böhme’s Tagebuch einer Verlorenen was first translated into English by Ethelind Colburn Mayne, one of the earliest translators of Freud. 
Note also: Ethelind’s own writings are distinguished by her own very elegant Englishing of the Conscious and the Unconscious mind, which she calls the 'Stage-side' and 'Cage-side' of human personality. How exquisitely neat!


Our Lobbying of the Viennese Government for Recognition of Hermine.

It was only after the appearance of this posting (June 2016) and selective, persistent lobbying of the compilers of the Cultural Archive of Vienna that Hermine Hug von Hugenstein was accorded, a month later, recognition on that city’s website. Thanks to these efforts, this permanent record of her status in Austrian cultural development now cites her as a ‘pioneer’ of child psychoanalysis, ‘Hermine Hug gilt als Pionierin der Kinderpsychoanalyse. . .’ 
See :
https://www.geschichtewiki.wien.gv.at/Hermine_Hug-Hellmuth




Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
and A Bad Case (2015)