Demonic lover
The demonic lover or the demonic seductress (or seducer ) is a literary motif that can be proven in ballads and folk tales and also plays a role in novels of fantastic literature . The supernatural beings of the female or male sex, whose origins often lie in mythology , appear with characteristics that prove to be fatal for their earthly partners.
to form
A demonic lover can be a demon or the devil himself who appears as a human. Further figures are vampires and the undead who, bound by a vow, must return as dead lovers.
Females are usually magical-demonic and seduce men. Often they drive their mischief as vampires, undermine the morality of the erotically decrepit and plunge them into misery.
The bond between seducer and victim is often of two types in male and female beings. The seduced victim is aware of the dangers, but accepts them because of the erotic pleasures. In addition, there is sometimes a pleasant chill in the face of one's own downfall.
history
Demonic seducers show up throughout literary history from antiquity to modern times. The old Babylonian version of the Gilgamesh epic already contains the figure of the seductive woman and prostitute Samḫat . On the orders of Gilgamesh alienated with their sexual arts rival Enkidu the animals and by persuading the city Uruk visit where he met Gilgamesh coincide .
The seduction of Adam by Eve , described in Genesis, belongs to a comparable world of ideas , a name with which Western intellectual history repeatedly referred to the apparently ruinous female influence. This was not changed by the fact that the seductive role was divided between two figures: Eve and the devil in the form of the “cunning” snake who persuaded her . Eva remains the “mouthpiece of evil”, while the man is a victim of seduction.
Outside of the ancient and Judeo-Christian tradition, there is another type of fairy tale with the motif of demonic seductresses that is widespread worldwide . This was a historically long marriage marriage , in which the bonds between the elemental beings and the man were closed under conditions that were ultimately impossible for mortals to fulfill. If he violated the supernatural commandment, the being returned to its origins, since the covenant was destroyed. The creatures were often bird girls, water women , mermaids or fairies . An important ancient example of this is the myth of the eternal singer Orpheus and the tree nymph Eurydice, who, after Orpheus turned to face her while rising from the underworld, "falls back" forever into Hades. Other demonic figures can be explained by reversing ancient myths that merged with Germanic and Celtic ideas. Thus, the dove of Phlegon of Tralles traditional covenant of love with a dead woman in the Karl forecast on where Charlemagne was captivated by his dead lover, who later as a nymph called, was transformed from bourgeois tradition, however, in a wife.
The legend of the Venus ring or of the statue engagement , which was further developed in Romanticism , is explained by the demonization of the goddess Venus . If someone put a ring on the hand of a statue of Venus while playing, this led to a bond with the goddess of love, which prevented the Roman from getting married.
Bürger's ballad Lenore can be seen as a classic figure representation of a ghost bride and a demonic lover . The erotic component dealt with there is also evident in the early short story “A Picture of the Painter Schalken” by the Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu .
In the relationship between high romanticism and folk tales, elements of trivial literature were often mixed , which opened the buried access to female demons and beings of natural mythology. The vampires, descendants of the lamias and empuses from antiquity, whose bloodthirsty were combined with sexual desires, came from popular belief in the Balkans . The often female vampire first appeared episodically in Robert Southey's “Thalaba, the Destroyer”.
Haunting and complex thought Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is in his ballad " The Bride of Corinth " Specify in which the beautiful, dead in reality girls appear in the witching hour with a white veil and gown which had traveled groom a "sweetheart" whose members " how the snow is so white, but cold as ice ”and that brings him to death on this first and last night of love. The work, which caused quite a stir when it was published - Herder rejected it from his Christian-spiritualistic point of view , while Humboldt was enthusiastic - and of which Goethe himself spoke as a “vampyric poem”, goes back to a story from antiquity. In his commemorative edition Emil Staiger wrote that the ballad would stay in the “otherwise so bright and vital world” like an “uncanny and strange” guest. The “intimate bond of love and death” is just as strange as “the vampire saga with its seductively gruesome mood!” The figure Lilith of Sumerian mythology was described by Goethe in his tragedy Faust as “Adam's first wife” and associated with characteristics of a demonic seductress . Mephistopheles in the Walpurgis night scene to Faust: “Lilith, Adam's first wife. Be careful of her beautiful hair, if she catches the young man, she won't let him go again anytime soon. "
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While some valued the ballad as a plea against the ascetic and hostile tendencies of Christianity , Max Kommerell , for example, pointed out that with its violent, sultry, tense and eerie love mood, it does have a world-historical scope, but given Goethe's complexity, it is not an anti-Christian manifesto should be understood.
In addition to the vampires that became fashionable in the 19th century, incarnations from folk poetry such as sorceresses , fairies , water women ( Loreley ) and mermaids increasingly played a role; for example in Käthchen von Heilbronn , in which Miss Kunigunde reveals herself to the knight Wetter vom Strahl as an increasingly dangerous demon, while in Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's Undine the mermaid proves to be lovable, but the knight Huldbrand - with no bad intent - ultimately misfortune brings.
The work related to the legend of the fairy as a pagan natural being who cannot enter into marriage and requires the partner to hide the relationship and not to marry.
Even in Thomas Mann's early work there are female figures who are reminiscent of the mysterious, "seductive" Kundry from Richard Wagner's Parsifal . Gerda von Rinnlingen from little Mr. Friedemann or Amra Jacobi from Luischen, for example. They use the submissive admiration of their devotees to soar and in the end coldly reject, deceive, and ridicule those who have decayed. So they break because of the aloof majesty and distant beauty, because they cannot resist the magical charm of seduction.
From here it continues through other figures of seduction to the “Esmeralda” of Doctor Faustus : In Leipzig, a dubious, “devilishly speaking” tourist guide “with a red cap and brass plaque” does not take the tragic hero of the novel, Adrian Leverkühn, to an inn but in a brothel. There sit "Nymphs and daughters of the desert ... glass-winged, Esmeralden ... dressed transparently, in tulle, gauze and glitter, hair long open ... and look at you with expectant eyes glistening from the chandelier."
One of the girls, who later turns out to be the devil's tool , "in a Spanish jacket, with a big mouth", strokes his cheek with her arm. Adrian escapes, but returns after a while because the "touch burned on his cheek." When he is informed that she, who he calls Esmeralda from now on, has moved, he follows her and spends a night with her, despite her warns him of her syphilis infected body. Instead of solemnly signing the devil's pact with his own blood, the composer willingly infected himself with syphilis, the time until the brain decomposes is the set deadline. This fateful, for the devilishly inspired creative power of the composer, however, significant encounter takes place in Graz , of all places , where the Austrian premiere of Salome by Richard Strauss is being performed under the direction of the composer, a groundbreaking work in which the seductive beautiful princess for the tetrarch Herod will dance to claim the head of Jochanaan from him at the end .
As for Salome, Oscar Wilde portrayed the enchanting dancer in his drama of the same name as a seductress, in which the demonic takes on psychological rather than mythical forms, a femme fatale , as she appeared as the fascinatingly exotic outsider Carmen and caused the common problems. Later, as Lulu , she becomes the prototype of the modern vamp and appears as a reflection of the "original seductress" and incarnation of unleashed lust, under whose spell many men are ruined until the fatal woman as a prostitute becomes a victim of Jack the Ripper .
With the brothel scene, Thomas Mann referred to a fatal experience of Nietzsche in Cologne. The girl's name appears at the beginning of the novel as the name of the rare butterfly Hetaera esmeralda , which resembles a wind-blown petal in flight and is described in "transparent nudity, loving the twilight shade of leaves". The talk of the “daughters of the desert” can also be found in Nietzsche, for example in his Zarathustra .
When Adrian strikes chords on a piano and modulates from B to C major on his first visit to the brothel, as if he wanted to escape the sultry atmosphere and his own confusion , he seeks (in Keppler's interpretation) the creative and spiritual of seduction to counteract in a saving manner. A kind of Apollonian counter-sound to the Dionysian intoxication and goat singing of the whore house. Touched by Esmeralda, however, he is emotionally infected, so that the soothing chords and the world of pure classical chastity cannot withstand the demonic power and the chromatic and magical counter-worlds of Lohengrin and Tristan and Isolde open up.
Erotic backgrounds
The vampire's bite had an unmistakably sexual component. The vampire myth with its manifold literary forms , often slipping into the trivial , was used, especially in the 19th century, to depict erotic relationships that were perceived as "perverse". With the motif of the demonic lover, the diverse sexual implications behind the facade are equally recognizable.
In literature and painting , the mask of the fantastic often fulfilled the function of expressing forbidden areas of human life in a veiled form. A reference to the loss of innocence and the emergence of shame and punishment through the expulsion in the paradisiacal myth of Adam and Eve after the knowledge of their sexual otherness is obvious.
Further erotic backgrounds can also be found in Gottfried August Bürger's ballad Lenore , in which the ghost of Wilhelm his “ghost bride”, who was guilty of blasphemy out of desperation over his death , in a wild, midnight gallop past funeral procession to the wedding bed in the cemetery kidnapped and dissolves into a skeleton in the light of the moon. The zone of sadomasochistic relationships, which was taboo in much of the literature of the time , becomes clear here as in other vampire stories.
This element can also be seen in the early short story "A Picture of the Painter Schalken" (1836) Joseph Sheridan Le Fanus , a writer who frequently quoted Lenore .
A pretty girl who reciprocates the painter's love is paired with a demonic stranger. The young woman feels deep dislike for this repulsive man, who in his imperious appearances to the painter's guardian and master refers to his wealth and then disappears again and again like a ghost. The ward, however, has to bow to the greedy guardian's decision and follow him. After a few months of disappearing without a trace, the young woman appears in her guardian’s workshop, disturbed and emaciated, and desperately asks for immediate help from a clergyman who alone can free her from her fate, because “The dead can never go with the living be a flesh; God has forbidden that! ”But everything is in vain, because she already feels the proximity of the demonic persecutor and is shortly afterwards kidnapped by him, never to be seen again, from the window of the bedroom, the door of which had been thrown into the lock by a ghostly hand and could no longer be opened.
Later, at his father's funeral, the painter fell into a deep sleep. In a vision he sees the ghost of the beloved girl, who leads him down into the tomb to a four-poster bed in which the "stiffly erect, sitting in the middle of the bed, bluish, corpse-colored, satanic figure" of the demonic stranger can be seen.
The mischievous smile of the beloved, which he immortalized in his painting, which is shown again and again during the tour to the “death bed”, indicates that she has not only got used to her situation, but also finds an erotic pleasure in it. The girl's initial reluctance seems to hide her desire to devote herself to the actually deeply desired demonic seducer, against whom an earthly man cannot compete.
The motif of the mysterious stranger also plays a role in other works by Le Fanu, who invades the well-protected area of the Victorian bourgeoisie and causes confusion and mischief there. Le Fanu often used this element to depict “perverse” erotic relationships and also used fantastic coloring in the apparently realistic novels. Only at first glance do they show Victorian life critically and realistically, while demons and the undead are usually hidden behind the façades of the stranger.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Demonic lover. In: Rein A. Zondergeld : Lexicon of fantastic literature. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1983, ISBN 3-518-37380-3 , p. 272.
- ↑ a b The demonic seductress. In: Elisabeth Frenzel : Motives of world literature. A lexicon of longitudinal sections of the history of poetry (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 301). 6th, revised and expanded edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 2008, ISBN 978-3-520-30106-2 , p. 760.
- ↑ The Demonic Seductress. In: Elisabeth Frenzel: Motives of world literature. Alfred Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 2008, p. 761.
- ^ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe : Poems and Epics I. Goethe's works, Hamburg edition, Volume 1, CH Beck, Munich 1998, p. 271.
- ↑ Quoted from: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Gedichte und Epen I. Goethe's works, Hamburg edition, Volume 1, CH Beck, Munich 1998, notes, p. 663.
- ↑ The Demonic Seductress. In: Elisabeth Frenzel: Motives of world literature. Alfred Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 2008, p. 771.
- ↑ Karl. J. Keppler: The laughter of women. The demonic in the feminine. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2005, p. 157.
- ↑ Thomas Mann: Doctor Faustus. Collected works in thirteen volumes, Volume 6, Fischer, Frankfurt 1974, p. 190.
- ↑ Kindler's New Literature Lexicon. Vol. 11, Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus, Munich 1990, ISBN 3-463-43011-8 , p. 68.
- ↑ The Demonic Seductress. In: Elisabeth Frenzel: Motives of world literature. Alfred Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart 2008, p. 773.
- ↑ Thomas Mann: Doctor Faustus. Collected works in thirteen volumes, Volume 6, Fischer, Frankfurt 1974, p. 23.
- ↑ Karl. J. Keppler: The laughter of women. The demonic in the feminine. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2005, ISBN 3-8260-3092-3 , p. 177.
- ↑ Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu : A picture of the painter Schalken and other ghost stories. German by Friedrich Polakovics, Library of the House of Usher , Insel Verlag, Frankfurt 1973, ISBN 3-458-05820-6 , p. 25.
- ^ Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: A picture of the painter Schalken ... Frankfurt 1973, ISBN 3-458-05820-6 , p. 30.
- ↑ Rein A. Zondergeld, Demonia and Seduction with Sheridan Le Fanu. In: Christian W. Thomsen, Jens Malte Fischer (Ed.): Fantasticism in literature and art. Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 1980, ISBN 3-534-08293-1 , p. 171.
- ↑ Rein A. Zondergeld, Demonia and Seduction with Sheridan Le Fanu. In: Christian W. Thomsen, Jens Malte Fischer (Ed.): Fantasticism in literature and art. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1980, ISBN 3-534-08293-1 , pp. 172-173.