Ann Radcliffe’s landscapes: Christa Wolf (No Place on Earth) and the Siege of Mainz

Christian Wilhelm Dietrich, Landscape with Bridge

Dear friends and readers,

I rejoice to report that I’ve finished my Ann Radcliffe paper: “‘What are men to rocks and mountains?'”: The content of Ann Radcliffe’s Landscapes” (see proposal). It takes something under 21 minutes to read and if anyone is interested in it, I’d gladly share it (ask me and I’ll send it by attachment). It focuses heavily on Radcliffe’s 1794 Journey Made in Summer book, and I learned a lot in doing it. This blog is on two of the books I read which I could not go into in detail in the paper.

First: Christa Wolf’s No lace on Earth, a historical fiction which imagines the great German writers of the later 18th into 19th century, Karoline von Gunderrode (1780-1806) and Henrich von Kleist (1777-1811), met and walked and talked in a village by the Rhine (they could have but alas didn’t). Both Kliest and Gunderrode killed themselves. Another woman writer of the era (life-writing), Bettine von Armin (I’m not sure the later Elizabeth married into that family) wrote a life of Gunderrode and told why Gunderrode killed herself: forced into a nunnery, when Gunderrode got out (she was as ill as Fanny Burney at court), there was no place for reading intellectual women, and she did away with herself.

Christa Wolf’s essay on this novel and an interview she let someone shed light on Radcliffe for me. It is headlong, no chapters, just an intense rush of two subjectivities. We move back and forth between Kleist and Günderrode with the connectives supplied by the present tense narrator (unnamed, but of course Christa Wolf). It’s all about modern poetry in Germany too, men and women’s relationships, about coping with social life’s demands. About unearthing this pair from the grave. An ironic level is provided by the details of the room, position of the people, and the costumes. Kleist and Gunderrode take a walk together — this reminds me of Jane Austen novels where characters gain a modicum of liberty & peace by leaving the house and going for a walk. As they walk, they express their radical or individual thoughts. Talk of sexuality — or at least think. It’s not clear all the time whether someone is talking or thinking. But what are they wearing? He is in a military uniform, she a nun’s outfit. They are encased, imprisoned, endlessly imprisoned even by their clothes.

I admire Wolf’s ability to imitate and call to mind the way people talk to one another in social life, the bitter acid underneath the depiction doesn’t corrode me, but rather makes me feel the keen knife of truth. The way Karoline is accused of being arrogant struck me; also (as I wrote on Austen-l) They did have it worse in some ways than the English (and French). I was struck by one phrase Wolf has Gunderrode use of herself: “ignominious loneliness.” Gunderrode lives in fear that her she will be seen as living in this kind of state: she is unmarried and no one wants to marry her; she is given no options she can stand. This state is one she is determined to hide and present another face to the world. I felt that this phrase again could be one that Miller is suggesting Austen lives in and that he has lived in when he found she stretched out her consciousness to him. It’s the state of Miss Bates for while the novel shows her socializing, that’s a tiny percentage of her hours. The 2009 Emma (by a woman, Sandy Welch, and that’s significant) makes a point of showing us the Bates household when alone

Wolf puts thoughts into the minds of Kleist and Gunderrode which I have when faced with analogous strained and alienating situations. It’s validating and comforting to see them there because they are expressed with nobility and as intensely understandable, even right. This is how I feel when I read George Sand in some of her earlier works and her non-fiction.

The thoughts she puts into the minds of Kleist and Gunderrode also express or articulate thoughts I have imagined other contemporary rebellious/romantic or simply highly intelligent people of the age had or which seem to predict, describe patterns of behavior I have recognized but rarely see others acknowledge, much less argue for. This is true for Radcliffe as to her behavior: she stopped publishing at the height of her success and simply fell silent but for one slender publication of poems. She did attempt to publish her pageant romance; that is, she actually put it to the press to set up, but then backed down and withdrew it.

It’s true for Jane Austen (!). I believe Jane Austen had a special relationship with her brother Frank, and do think it went as far as erotic love. I doubt they ever came near to doing anything about it, but I see enough in the letters of Frank’s behavior to feel he knew it (Farrar, Strauss Giroux translation by Jan Van Heurck, p. 94). The section on Kleist and hia sister, Ulricke, and sentences like “This is the thing concerning which they cannot and must not ever, with a single word, with even so much as a single glance, show each other that they understand their own and one another’s feelings [fully I’d add] … Which they tolerate by failing to perceive what their blood is urging deep down in its abysmal muteness. (Alas, incest is in some ways natural.) Frank is said to have carried Austen’s packets of letters to him (they amounted to 3) every where he went; within a few days of his death, a great-great niece or granddaughter is said to have destroyed them. Maybe she was acting on understood orders. Now he’s dead, get rid of them. There are other many such insights: Shelley, Mary Shelley and others.

Christa Wolf when young

In Wolf’s essay on the novella she does not say what she wants to rebel against, what she wants to do, how she feels particularly. She dare not. Well she did it here; it’s an indirect defense of herself — at times not a justification but defense of not so much suicide but chosing the path which is not safe: “freedom falls to our lot who are destined to be destroyed.” (p. 118). I did like the dark ending and wish she had included more imitations 20th century style of intimations of landscape 18th century mode:

Now it is getting dark. The final glow on the river.”
Simply go on, they think.
We know what is coming.

Karoline will soon kill herself, and Kleist when still very young in a few years. See especially “Culture Is What You Experience: An Interview with Christa Wolf,” by Christa Wolf and Jeanette Clausen, New German Critique, 27 (Autumn, 1982):89-100

One of my foremother poet postings was on Gunderrode.

The only one

How all my wits are now enslaved,
To one, to one alone I cleave;
To embrace this only one
Is my sole desire’s aim;
If I this secret wish employ,
Or fool myself in many a dream
And let my longing me consume,
To give birth to what would kill me.

Resistance is no use to me,
I come back even though I flee,
I rage, my conscience to bestir,
But cannot wean myself from her,
Must groan in anguish in my joy.
My drinking cup is filled with tears,
I sink in dreams and crazy fears;
I do not hear the dance’s sound
As it swells aloft, around.

Wave on wave swells in delight,
But I can’t see the colours bright
Streaming from the source of light.
Springtime airs try to caress,
Scents of flowers try to kiss,
But all of that is lost on me,
Is as though unborn to me,
For my spirit is held fast
By one desire above all else
To possess but one, and one alone.

Hungry amid many a guest
I sit at the joyous feast
Which Nature on the earth bestows:
Ask myself:will it soon end?
Can I then escape at last
From the nauseous repast
Which feeds other guests so lavishly,
But brings no sustenance for me?
For I have but one desire,
One longing and consuming fire;
My world is held in captive bond
By one desire, and one alone:
To possess but one, and one alone.

— Karoline von Gunderrode (English translation of “Die Einzige”

**************************

Kostheim, 1793: just before the terrible seige of Mainz began, where a series of fierce sea and land battles were fought.

Radcliffe has a very long section in her Journey book about the seige of Mainz. She journeys to the place, describes the ruins, gets a pamphlet, reads and tells the story and then re-tells what she sees with the insight she’s gained. Her thesis: it’s not over when it’s over by a long shot especially for poor civilians and women and children.

My second book was about the Siege of Mainz by Arthur Chuquet: The Wars of Revolution: VII: The Siege of Mainz and the French Occupation of the Rhineland, 1792-1793, trans and annotated by Wm D. Peterson. Chucquet tells a story uncannily familiar to anyone who has studied failed (many are utter failures) revolutions; those who take over (the French) supposedly wanting to free the oppressed actually don’t pay attention to the middling people who had learned to survive reasonably well under the old corrupt order and fear and don’t want change; they end up themselves domineering and exploiting. The poor and powerless fear all people above them and don’t know how to rule (deliberately left untaught). The old establishment fights back successfully with its priests. I’ve summed up a story told about fascinating individuals. The French who came in and Germans who joined them were the intellectuals, the artisans, the middling sort with real ideals and how their weaknesses come out. A real lesson for today. Goethe who lived in Weimar (not far off) wrote a famous account of this seige and the re-installation of the ancien regime.

The city had been a bye-word for luxury and corruption When the old order was put back much had been destroyed physically and was never rebuilt as it had been. That’s the moment Radcliffe is traveling through.

When the revolution began, and the aristocrats and their flunkies and soldiers fled what happened? A group of people who came to be called the Clubmen (they were part of a differently elite club) took over. They came to an astonishingly tactless and anti-liberty decision to incorporate this part of Germany into France. They could not get the old trade routes back for the bourgeois; the ancien regime types would not deal with them (reminds me of capitalism’s response to communism). I assume the clubman were terrified of the combined forces of Prussia, Austria, England which soon gathered force, but this will not give the people their liberty (pp. 70-72.) Each of these groups is out for specific interest: Prussia wants to expand to take some of Poland for example.

Some people saw how bad all of this was right away: “barbaric, terrible,” others said it was the “tragic necessities of war.” Immediately demanded are loyalty oaths to France. An anti-emigre law. We then get a long series of portraits of people fighting for Mainz, the revolution. The besiegers bring home how militaristic the whole culture, revolutionaries and aristocrats, all male. These are indidividuals who spend their lives making war. If you see this as indicative and widespread, you can understand why Napoleon upon getting into power made and spread continual war. Not just high aristocrats, that’s why middling males were taught to do and be (p 102)

Then a long section on the battles, the sea fights, the ships, the sorties, attempted tricks and betrayals (people disguised and telling lies about Paris), trying to get someone who is Prussian and in prison to negotiate; the failure of a political settlement when Danton falls from power.

Not mentioned by Chuquet: Heinrich von Kleist was there. It was one of his shattering experiences, and became a setting for some of Kleist’s own worst emotional experiences. Kleist was forcibly packed off to follow his family’s century-old military tradition as a 14-year-old and was only 16 when his guards regiment took part in the siege of Mainz (another Kleist, a major general, actually commanded one of the assaults on a further enemy position). Not exactly ideal for any young man and definitely not for such an over-sensitive one as Kleist. Mainz was also where he had his later nervous breakdown in the aftermath of his burning of his uncompleted ‘Robert Guiscard’ manuscript and absurd, first failed suicide bid.

Goethe was an eye-witness and darts in and out here and there. So that’s where he got his (to Germans and 18th century scholars) famous book.

It’s an extraordinary book about a significant siege. I doubt I can do justice to the details of what it reveals happened stage-by-stage during this siege. Each set of events has direct analogies with what happens politically today in reality during wars; the biggest difference of course is modern warfare when contemporary weapons are used does not permit this kind of fighting over a piece of land in this way. Single individuals in combat or leading groups of individuals cannot cope with much modern technology; but in places where this technology is not used (that means outside the purview of the modern US empire, or where it doesn’t reach beyond its bombs and drones) simulacra probably do. It’s the jockeying for position and ways in which treaties are just negotiating stances behind fierce anger and rage and struggle for land, wealth, money, position. I was struck by repeated refusals of groups of men to fight — called cowards but it was their lives — how the powerful once back in power returned immediately to reactionary laws and so the French new ideals and norms were actually missed at first and might have done good had they had some means really to implement them, which it seems they never quite did, as those who had their hands on trade and commerce which were needed to back up these norms, immediately refused to trade. As I say, how reminiscent of what happened after 1945.

One learns what thwarted the French revolution from having the good effect it might have, and why terror so often emerges from such revolutions — atrocities from all sides.

The bombardment of Mainz: burning the cathderal, engraving by Tielker after drawing by Schutz

The book is part of a larger series of such books published by Nafziger, on a plethora of wars and individuals battles or sieges or sites. If each one is as good as this, they immensely valuable. My problem with the books I had on the Peninsula war was they were so fat and about so many others things beyond the battles and wars, and here it’s shown if you just go that thoroughly (extrapolating out to economics or other social arrangements that make for whatever is happening), how much you can learn.

To conclude on Radcliffe: in almost 50 pages she depicted the same siege that Chuquet did from the same humane and insightful stance (about politics) with the significant difference she continually emphasizes the effect on the civilian population (hardly mentioned by Chuquet), she details the destruction of buildings and art (only in passing), and imagines how it felt to endure these war conditions. She names the same people in charge; she sees how important the clubmen were who took over Mainz and how badly they handled the bourgeoise. She notices how few people vote. She notices and talks of people thrown out of the city, fleeing who were terrified when no one would take them back. How the people were surveyed and monitored and forced to produce such and such food and such and such water. The sick.

She differs from Chuquet and he comes out better in this in blaming Custine, the head of the French forces for the defeat. He was executed. Not that she wants the place to have been totally destroyed, but she does not see that Custine was a brave man for refusing to take the situation to this. On the other hand, she describes the quay size, traffic, burgesses and concludes *it was not an important city commercially* Aristocratic cities are good for aristocrats; it seemed prosperous because it was admired as an icon and all the impoverished parts of the city, the real lives of ordinary people ignored. And now the destruction of property as the result of war will not be remedied easily or any time soon she says because in the first place its reputation was skewed and the city’s real basis and economy never truly described. Radcliffe’s husband had a hand in this book and she says so but I’m loathe to say everytime she has a remarkable insight it’s just him.

Wm Turner’s Buttermere Lake, with part of Cromackwater, Cumberland (a near contemporary painting)

Non-sequitor: Ive found an Italian article which says the beautiful, lyrical part of Radcliffe’s book about her time in the Lake District — a suspiciously over-long autumn — may have been written earlier and is the product of more than one trip. That makes sense to me and the writer seems to be sound on this.
Sanna, V. “La datazione del libro di viaggi di Ann Radcliffe.” Critical Dimensions: English, Germand and Comparative Literature Essays in Honour of Aurelio Zanco, edd. Mario Currelli and Alberto Martino. Cuneo, Italy: Saste, 1978. 291-312.

Ellen