[In the following essay, Voris examines the construction of female self-identity and aspects of alienation in The Quest for Christa T., drawing attention to the representation of women as creative agents—both biologically and intellectually—and the narrative's appropriation of bildungsroman literary conventions.]

But for this reason I fancy that I am seeing myself lying in the coffin, and my two selves stare at each other in wonderment.

—Karoline von Günderode

Man likes woman peaceful—but woman is essentially unpeaceful, like a cat, however well she may have trained herself to be peaceable.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

To compare woman to a cat is banal. Yet the comparison is found in numerous texts of Nietzsche and Freud and for the same reasons as in Christa Wolf: the cat is an independent animal, little concerned with man, essentially narcissistic and affirmative, like a child and as such both self-sufficient and dependent.¹ For example:

that black green-eyed cat (2[frac12]) which was delicate and graceful and in an unmistakably oriental manner seductive, yet inside, alas, impudent and arrogant and lusty [gierig], in short: a woman.²

her supple [geschmeidigen] movements. …³

Femininity and narcissism are key concepts around which Christa Wolf's works revolve, including The Quest for Christa T. They are linked to alienation, the sinister motive in modernism and the modernist text, and Wolf's aesthetics and art as well. The question that disturbs me is: why are nearly all her female figures⁴ mothers? And what is the relation between motherhood, art, and aesthetics? Was there, is there for Wolf, an alternative to alienation? Is it motherhood? Is it art? Is it female narcissism? Or is it a combination of all three?

Freud, who in his essays on female sexuality offers massive affirmation of the “natural sexual inferiority” or “deficiency” of women, tells a different story of woman's sexuality in his essay “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914).⁵ There he does not take sexual identity to be an inborn, biological essence, but in fact sees it as an unstable subject position that is socially and culturally constructed in the process of the child's insertion into society. The passage I have in mind concerns the difference in the love life of men and women. Freud argues the following thesis: there are fundamental differences between the sexes in their relation to the type of object-choice. Male narcissism is characterized by object-love of the anaclitic type (Anlehnungstypus) which includes the nurturing woman and the protective man (89–90). It shows a striking sexual overvaluation of the love object. The overvaluation has its source, Freud explains, in the original narcissism of the child which subsequently is transferred onto the sexual object. Verliebtheit, love and passion, is hence a neurotic condition, since it originates in the libidinal impoverishment of the ego that accompanies the sexual overvaluation of the love object (88).

Woman's development in her relation to a type of object-choice is different. Female narcissism, Freud argues, is characterized by object-choice of the narcissistic type, which includes the love for: (a) what one oneself is, (b) what one oneself was, (c) what one oneself would like to be, and (d) the person who once was a part of one's own self (90). This type of love is most frequently found in women, not, however, because of some biological determinant, but rather because of the woman's place in culture and society. It seems that, at the onset of puberty, the formation of the female sexual organs intensifies the original narcissism, which is unfavorable to the development of a normal (ordentlichen) object-love with its accompanying sexual overvaluation. Especially if she develops beauty, a state of self-sufficiency (Selbstgenügsamkeit) settles in, which compensates the woman for society's unwillingness to allow her freedom of object-choice (die ihm sozial verkümmerte Freiheit der Objektwahl) (89). The woman's “wildness,” her “unpeaceable nature,” is domesticated by the norms and rules of (patriarchal) society in that her Otherness, heterogeneity, is tamed through narcissism. Strictly speaking, such women love only themselves, and they do so with the intensity with which a man loves them. Their need does not make them aspire to love, but instead to be loved, and they are pleased by the man who fulfills this condition. The importance of this type of woman for the love life of humankind (Menschen) is of immense value, Freud concludes, for such women exercise the greatest charm (Reiz) over men for two reasons: (1) aesthetic, because they are beautiful, and (2) psychological, because a person's narcissism exerts a great attraction over those who have fully relinquished their own narcissism and are in quest of object-love. Analogously, the charm (Reiz) of a child rests to a large extent on his or her narcissism, her self-sufficiency (Selbstgenügsamkeit) and inaccessibility (Unzugänglichkeit). Hence, also the charm of certain animals who seem indifferent toward us, such as cats and large beasts of prey (89). Is a woman ever able to love according to the male model (and vice versa)? Yes, Freud says, since “male” and “female” do not refer to biological but instead to psychological and cultural phenomena, to “functions” (Funktionen) (89) within a cultural field or social practice (such as writing). And if this is so, the obvious question is what determines the model according to which a woman loves? In his answer, Freud draws on the psychology of repression and the mechanism of displacement. Repression, as we know from Freud, originates in the ego, from the ego's self-esteem (Selbstachtung). Its condition is an ideal, an ideal ego (Idealich) that one has either erected or not erected in oneself. It explains why the same impressions, experiences, impulses, or wishes, which one person allows in herself or at least consciously deals with, are rejected in another or suppressed (erstickt) before they can ever become conscious. In case of the latter, narcissism is substituted for this new ideal ego, that is, whatever she projects as her ideal is the substitution for the lost narcissism of her childhood in which she was her own ideal (93–94).

In light of this theory and in keeping with this volume's questioning of material (including linguistic) conditions of women and men writing, I will undertake a reading of Wolf's novel, which deals with woman as well as with narcissism or alienation, by studying the arrangement and function of the main signifying units used in the narrative message, in order to determine the way in which this text represents feminine creativity. Since the title gestures toward the subject of the novel, a woman's “quest” for (self-)knowledge and (self-)development, I will begin by reading it as a text that quotes two literary traditions. The first is the classical German Bildungsroman (written by men), whose paradigm contains the fantasy of an originally unified subject split asunder in the confrontation with civilization, society, reality, a conflict that is solved—in however melancholy a way—by the integration of the individual, the (male) artist, into practical, active life; Goethe's Wilhelm Meister (1795/96 and 1821) constituted that model. The second literary convention cited here is the feminine version of that model, the nineteenth-century woman writer's Bildungsroman, whose paradigm contains the same individualistic fantasy of an originally unified subject that in the feminine version, however, is split asunder not by a “universal” conflict between the individual or the “self” and civilization or society and so on, but instead by the conflict between the desire for art and knowledge and the complete negation of that desire by a society whose norms and conventions restrict the woman to one role only: that of the mother (and not that of the physician, for instance, like Wilhelm Meister). The conflict is therefore not solved by the integration of the woman into active public life, but by her exclusion from it, a plot that almost invariably results in the death of the artist as a young woman; Bettina von Arnim's Günderode (1840) constituted this model.

In quoting these two literary conventions, a different paradigm emerges in Wolf's Bildungsroman. The conflict between vocation and role (= the masculine model) as well as that between art and womanhood (= the feminine model) are both interiorized, and in that movement are both recuperated and revised to become a conflict between two vocations: art and womanhood! The desire to create and the desire to recreate—two different but equal “selves”—are presented as that which defines the whole and essential woman. The question that motivates The Quest for Christa T. is therefore: when and where and why did the two “selves” that originally formed a harmonious whole become alienated, “staring” at each in wonderment or even enmity?⁶ When and where and why did the alternatives that define the figure Christa T. collapse, and how did she experience that?

For Christa T. appears without a center. She resists coherence and structure by oscillating between creativity and procreativity, silence and speech, madness and mimicry, as well as “female” sexuality and “male” morality, childish play and parental control. Her “characterlessness” is contained in the novel's dominant rhetorical figure, repetition. In repetition, identity is split, since every repetition occurs in a different context. Meaning then appears to flicker between identity and nonidentity, sameness and difference, reconstruction and deconstruction. The novel's double-edged codeword, Nachdenken, supports the tension,⁷ and so does the syntax that coordinates the transitive and the intransitive, in that the unconnected members of the essentially paratactic structure are connected by the use of anaphora.⁸ On the semantic level, this text then plays out at once what Julia Kristeva has called the two fates of woman in Western culture: that of the classic hysteric who is denied her place in language, yet represents in that negativity a sort of disturbance of the symbolic order, of power and domination, and that of the mimic who takes her place in language and represents in that positivity a submission to the symbolic order, to masculine power and authority. In other words, the speaking subject occupies a position that alternates between feminine heritage and masculine heritage; the question that concerns me here is which of these two moments wins out in the end.

In any case, I read Wolf's novel as one that performs the rift experienced by women writers in bourgeois as well as socialist society, where the use of language itself may reinscribe the very structure by which the woman is oppressed.⁹ I shall argue that this is indeed the story here, that The Quest for Christa T. is a most paradoxical text in that it challenges authority and patriarchy in a most authoritarian and patriarchal manner. My final question will be whether this paradox is offered to us for adherence or for criticism.

Wolf's novel, one of the most thoroughly discussed in scholarship on contemporary German literature,¹⁰ appeared in 1968 in her home country, the (then) German Democratic Republic, amidst a debate among writers, literary scholars and critics, philosophers, and politicians about the question of the relation between subjectivity and history, the individual and (socialist) society, language and ethics. The debate centered on the familiar question of Western metaphysics that also moves the classical German Bildungsroman: how, if at all, and under what circumstances can one realize oneself in a work of art, a question the novel quotes (95) and varies by providing the socialist version of it: how, if at all, and under what circumstances is it possible for the artist within a planned (and rigidly organized) society to realize herself and be productive as an active member of that society (102)? The question for Wolf, the theorist, is the classical version, paraphrased from the first to the last sentence of the novel: “the attempt to be oneself” / “When, if not now?” The question of what role gender plays in the production and reception of art was not an issue, had never been an issue in the GDR, not for literary theorists or literary historians or Christa Wolf, as her essay of the same year, “The Reader and the Writer” (1968), as well as all subsequent writing on poetics and politics, show.¹¹ It remains a curious contradiction in her theory of literature that she subscribes to a materialist conception of art—with time and place as her major categories—but ignores entirely the materiality of language—that is, the discursivity of sex (or race, ethnicity, or even class)—and consequently overlooks the boundaries of a person's existence (just as did Georg Lukács, the most powerful and influential literary theorist in the cultural politics of the GDR during the first twenty years of “reconstruction”—Wolf's immediate social, biographical, and literary context). The question of women and fiction—as Virginia Woolf pondered it in 1928, for example, in the meaning of “women and what they are like,” or “women and the fiction that they write,” or “women and the fiction that is written about them,” or “somehow all three”¹²—is a question that Wolf prefers not think aloud. In her silence she is a figure of her country, reproducing the vision (or delusion) that structures political, social, and cultural discourses: that with the coming of socialism and the abolition of class structure, workers as well as women will have been freed from oppression. That the system of patriarchy survived the transition from capitalism to socialism is only marginally contemplated, even by Wolf, thus revealing her and her society's blind spot: the repressive tendency in questions of sexual ideology.¹³

Yet it is precisely that relation—between language, body, and society—that is discreetly articulated in her textual practice, beginning with her first tale, Moscow Novella (1961). A curious struggle then structures her works, a struggle that is represented in The Quest for Christa T.: between the reader-philosopher-theorist, who ponders the problematic epistemology of selfhood in terms of universals, and the writer-artist-practitioner, who performs it in terms of specifics.

The novel's plot revolves around death and birth. Its protagonist is ostensibly a woman who wanted to be a poet and became a mother instead. How that came about is told in twenty chapters whose main signifying units are childhood, adulthood and motherhood, and death by leukemia at the age of thirty-five. They are ordered chronologically from the present point of view by another woman, or mother, the narrator, who begins her tale with a eulogy, a sermon beyond the grave, circling around memory and forgetting. The dead woman has left behind a husband, three children, and the narrator, a friend since childhood. Besides the family and the friend, the dead woman has also left behind a large oeuvre—diaries, notebooks, sketches, and a thesis on the writer Theodor Storm, as well as short stories, poems, dialogues, and letters, all in no discernible order, mixing all sorts of discourses at times—autobiographical, theoretical, philological, poetic, polemical—written in part in the margins of books, even cookbooks, or on scraps of paper taken from her husband's desk. Why this woman—immensely privileged, it seems, for she is well educated, financially secure, artistically talented, with a love for words and the time to reflect upon them (“To think that I can only cope with things by writing!” 34, 96)—why this woman of letters and mother of three children has no paper, let alone a room of her own, is a mystery indeed, one the narrator wants to solve in her investigation into the “mess” (147). For it is she who, upon the death of the other, is charged by the husband with ordering the details of the wife's domestic and intellectual life; she is called upon in her capacity as witness (as a mother to a mother) and as examining magistrate, whose task is to inquire into the truth behind Christa's demise. “What do I reproach her for?” the narrator quotes a mutual friend. “For dying, for really dying. She always did everything as if it was for fun, as an experiment” (49–50). With the central opposition in place—play versus control—the narrator sets out on her own experiment in writing and living, gathers the fragments of the alien chaos and begins by thinking out the enigma of Christa T. on the model of the hysteric who holds a secret of which she herself is unaware and which she hides to herself (“a person with prospects, latent [geheimen] possibilities,” 136). The narrator's goal is then the solution to the enigma, motivated both by death as a fact of life—Christa T.'s death and her own (“Not a person or thing in the world can make her dark fuzzy hair go gray as mine will,” 4)—and by death as a subject of meditation and conquest:

So there she was, walking along in front, stalking head-in-air along the curb, and suddenly she put a rolled newspaper to her mouth and let go with her shout: HOOOHAAHOOO—something like that. … For me, unlike the others, it wasn't the first scene of this kind. I tried to recall a previous occasion when she could have walked on ahead of me, yet found there wasn't one. I'd simply known it. … suddenly I felt, with a sense of terror, that you'll come to a bad end if you suppress [erstickt] all the shouts prematurely; I had no time to lose. I wanted to share in a life that produced such shouts as her hooohaahooo, about which she must have knowledge.

(9–11)

The word terror contains at its roots both the awesome and the fearful. It introduces the theme of repression and points to the accompanying mechanism of displacement, both condensed in the metaphor of suffocation (erstickt), which in turn echoes the metaphor Freud uses in his essay on narcissism. This then is the other tale told here, the narrator's tale. Its protagonist is a woman who became a mother first and is now also becoming a writer. It is the reversal of Christa T.'s tale.

But it is of course one and the same story, as the passage suggests, a story of a (self-)conscious quest for love. What kind of love? A scene that punctures the narrative three times, each time in a slightly different form, presents the meaning—an ideal meaning of love. The first time—and, not by chance, in the eulogy—the narrator resurrects the dead in the image of Woman-as-Child:

Effortlessly she walks before me, yes, that's her long stride, her shambling walk, and there too, proof enough, is the big red and white ball she's chasing on the beach.

(4)

The second time she inserts the frame into the narrative is at about midpoint and at a time when she is concerned with Christa's bohemian lifestyle as a university student (chapter 8). What had seemed a child in the picture turns out to be a Woman-as-Mother:

How she runs, Christa T., after the huge white and red ball that the wind is driving across the beach, how she reaches it, laughs aloud, grabs it, brings it back to her small daughter, under our gaze, which she feels and to which she responds with a side glance, in no doubt as to our admiration. Justus, her husband, walks up to her, runs his hand through her hair, pulls her head back, hi Krischan! She laughs and shakes herself. And all the people along the beach can see her practicing How to Take Big Strides with her little Anna, using as background, brown and slim as she is, the whole sea which is foaming slightly and the pale sky overhead. Hi, Justus! she shouts.

(74)

The third and last version—inserted toward the end of the novel when Christa's (fantasized) romance with her husband's hunting buddy is the context (chapter 17)—projects Woman-as-Wife:

I really must come back to the day we spent on the Baltic coast. To the gigantic white and red ball which the wind was driving along. To her supple [geschmeidigen] movements and to Justus's admiring looks and the way she tossed her head. To her laughter, which I can certainly never describe, but also never forget. She had a dark tan and I said: This has been your summer, she laughed, white teeth and tanned face. Justus took her by the hair, which she wore short, and kissed her on the mouth in front of all the people. She took it all seriously, laughing all along. I can still see the look in her eyes.

(150)¹⁴

Reading the images vertically, and separately from the narrative context, our perception or sensibility is split between two conventionally conflicting figures. At the center stands the image of Woman, defined in the sequence first as Child, then as Mother, then as Wife. In the repetition and its variation, the figure seems interminable, unstable in its meaning, being both playful, indifferent, and self-sufficient, as well as controlled, object-oriented, and dependent. What controls her are the two empirical eyes that watch her, parental eyes (“under our gaze”), behind which appears a somewhat “gigantic” or godly third eye that peeps at the world out there as a stage (“in front of all the people”). It is a voyeuristic eye—Nietzsche called it the “Theatre-Eye”—the eye of the spectator/narrator amusing herself by watching the figure(s) on the beach/stage act out a morality play, the family plot. It is the eye that watches her (us?) or that she herself (we ourselves?) imagine watching her (us?) whenever she (we?) acts as a moral subject and views the world in terms of morality. The moral world needs a spectator, Nietzsche said, and he admonishes us to open up this gigantic third eye which looks at the world through the other two. The fact, though, that the subject has access to this godly, transcendental eye implies a paradox: it elevates it to the level of a god at the price that it is reduced to nothing.¹⁵

Identity or feminine sameness—mother and daughter having the same body—is the essential/essentialist presupposition structuring the vertical. Yet it serves also an image, authoritative and central, of man. This authoritativeness is present on the level of language, in the break in the logic of the third version (“She had a dark tan and I said: This has been your summer”), and on the level of structure, in the metonymic displacement of the metaphoric system. For if we read the three versions of the image within their temporal context, heterogeneity collapses into homogeneity, the unstable image into the stable sign “womanhood” with all its familiar connotations—the hearth, the home, the womb, the tomb. What seems unstable in the image becomes stable in the narrative, connecting form to meaning, word to substance. Moreover, an explicit dualism is established—female/male, exhibitionism/voyeurism, passivity/aggressivity, inside/outside, emotion/intellect, belly/head—with the first pole of the opposition as the positive to the negative: female-exhibitionism-passivity-inside-emotion-belly. Woman, the narrative's syntagmatic units and paradigmatic variations argue, does indeed have two desires. And yet she should not live them, should not “be” both child and adult, narcissus and nurturer, beast and mother. Woman must make a choice. And since it is she who by virtue of her anatomy, the womb, embodies, literally, nurture, the choice is clear: motherhood first (like the narrator), and only then a little bohemianism, a little individuality, a little romance. Thus, whether dead or alive, past or present, whether silent because she is physically dead, whether restless because she refuses conformity, whether creative because she resists domesticity, Christa T. is within this narrative always already confined to the statute of womanhood.¹⁶

Hence, woman in this text functions as a moral spectacle for the purpose of enlightening and educating its viewer (reader). It explains why the eye, exteriorized in the “big” and “huge” and “gigantic” (eye-)ball of the beach scene, is the privileged organ in the text, linking the kind of showing and telling here to a philosophical tradition, the Age of Enlightenment, whose most privileged emblem was the sun (the sky in Wolf's system) and whose most privileged organ the eye, wanting above all, as Foucault has argued, to see and oversee.¹⁷

Yet it may also mean the repetition of an all too familiar paradigm: that the female subject¹⁸ is considered insufficient to occupy the position of the speaking subject, that she is, so to speak, spoken for, which might be one reason for the peculiar discourse. It appropriates Christa T.'s verses and cadences and uncanny babble (“HOOOHAAHOOO”) by combining them with the narrator's showing and telling and chatter, evoking in that combination at once unreliability and discipline. Yet specular and linguistic authority rest with the reader-writer (= narrator), who legitimizes her posture by the “compulsion,” she says, “to make her stand and be recognized” (5). This telos points to the hidden problem: a need for a looking glass that reflects that which is not: a whole and intact and powerful (female) figure. The genesis of a writer is plotted whose condition is the death of the Other. In the process, a series of genealogical connections is established—author/text, text/meaning, reader/interpretation—underneath which lurks the imagery of succession, authority, and maternity: “to think her further” (weiterzudenken) (5). The discourse of power?

It functions as a compensation for psychological and social injuries:

The voice I hear isn't the voice of a ghost: no doubt about it, it's her voice, it is Christa T. Invoking her, lulling my suspicions, I even name her name, and now I'm quite certain of her. But all the time I know that it's a film of shadows being run off the reel, a film that was once projected in the real light of cities, landscapes, living rooms. Suspicions, suspicions: what is this fear doing to me?

(4)

The phantom produces fear and fascination, expressed in the moving snapshot and described in the scene from girlhood recording Christa's enigmatic babble. The emotions are the same that one feels before a double or a ghost, before the abrupt reappearance of what one thought was forever overcome or lost, and what now exercises the greatest charm over the spectator/narrator and that for two reasons: aesthetic, because Christa T. is beautiful, and that is the first reason for the charm she exerts over her, and indifference, indifference and silence (“Not a word about this to me,” 11), except for her laughter which, compared to language, is unstructured and more like singing, a sound rising from the body. This apparently monstrous laughter echoes the onomatopoeic babble from childhood, a terrifying, inaccessible sound around which the narrative curls itself¹⁹ as if it wanted to contain it, in the dual sense: preserve and restrain it. The ambivalence unites the aesthetic and psychological (and social) and points again to the narrator's project, which defines itself in terms of finding an adequate language for the essence of that sound, that body, that alien Other (“To her laughter, which I can certainly never describe, but also never forget,” 150).

This Otherness, heterogeneity, is present in the figure of narcissus or the child (“Effortlessly she walks before me,” 4) or the cat (“her supple movements,” 150), figures with whom the narrator is in love, passionately (fetishistically?), from the legs up (“How she runs,” 74). As a Girl-Woman-Wife, Christa T.'s charm rests on her playfulness (“She always did everything as if it was for fun,” 50) and her inaccessibility, aspiring not to love, but to be loved, a need the narrator condenses first in the figure of the Pan Piper seducing all by her mysterious howl, then in the figure of the tomcat roaming the city (umherstreunen)²⁰ as if in search of prey (49), and finally in the figure of the bourgeois or socialist housewife attracting guests and preventing strife by the sheer virtue of her presence (164). As a sexed (female) body, she seems painfully self-sufficient, indifferent, and theatrical, whether young (“The truth was: she didn't need us,” 8), or adolescent (“She hardly ever talked about love. She kept herself to herself,” 36), or mature (“our gaze, which she feels and to which she responds with a side glance, in no doubt as to our admiration,” 74). No matter what time or what place therefore—in the schoolyard, on the beach, in the house—she exerts great charm over both women and men, while granting nothing in return, taking pleasure only in herself with an acute awareness of her own force (“about which she must have knowledge,” 9–11).

Even as a writer, she seems indifferent to conventional fetishes, such as the work of art, reviews, praise, and critique, does not publish her works, scribbles wherever she can find a blank page, a scrap of paper, an empty margin, has no room of her own and does not seem to mind it, sits instead at her husband's desk during the early morning hours and writes about “The Big Hope, or The Difficulty of Saying ‘I,’” only to toss away the sheet of paper on which it is written (“I saw the sheet of paper there …, but now it has disappeared,” 169).

Yet it is during puberty that her narcissism appears most intense, as she assumes the role of the Pan Piper before a crowd of spectators. The exhibition expresses the social dimension of woman's narcissism and is a sign of her place in patriarchal culture and society, a society that denies her freedom of object-choice, as Freud formulates it. And the narrator enacts it, not, however, in a tableau, but in her figures of speech, as she traces the development of the female child from “girl” (Mädchen) to the (neuter) “miss” (Fräulein) to, abruptly, “the mother who cooks the soup” (21–22, 159), while the father roams the village archives in search of history (17) or the husband travels across the countryside in pursuit of (sick) cows (147).

The opposition movement/containment defines the law that governs the relation between the sexes, past and present, in bourgeois as well as socialist society. Accordingly, the little girl stands inside the fence, watching the boy leave the village (“He's free to do as he pleases,” 22, 57); the adolescent maiden stays inside the fence, tempting the young man outside with a cherry (37, 91–92), like Eve with an apple inside a different yard; the adult women (Christa T. and the narrator) move inside the homely sanctuary, gazing out the window or over the balcony, while the men are, god only knows where (136, 143). Or the lonely lover hovers wretchedly behind the window, looking for the beloved to pass below (155–56). And, to end it all, the wife designs a house, lying down and dying in it.

Woman is present as a spectacle indeed, playing out the old bourgeois tragedy of sacrifice and sexuality, reminiscent of those nearly forgotten (historical/fictional) figures, Karoline von Günderode, the artist in Bettine von Arnim's novel, or Makarie, the eternal feminine in Goethe's novel. Both roles belong to the same repertoire, with von Arnim fantasizing the woman's essence to be art, fantasy, imagination, feeling (as opposed to the drudgery of motherhood and housewifery), and Goethe imagining woman's essence to be beauty, silence, selflessness, feeling (as opposed to the drudgery of fatherhood and public roles). What links them is the narcissistic woman, which is a type of woman men (and women) have fantasized as being the very essence of her, the eternal feminine. They have done so because this type corresponds best to the desires of men, since she represents the lost part of their narcissism,²¹ which is the function, of course, that the figure of Christa T. has for the narrator. And she serves that function despite or, more exactly, because of the incongruity she exhibits.

For Christa T. appears to occupy the position consciously; she plays at one moment Dostoevsky's great criminal roaming the city in secrecy and with great cunning (49, 54), the next moment Sophie La Roche's Fräulein von Sternheim indulging in a feminine orgy of charity (118, 137–38), and then Flaubert's Madame Bovary searching for eternal love and passion (156). In her impersonations, she seems closer to the figure of Wilhelm Meister than to Karoline von Günderode, since Christa T. has the power, the narrator tells us, of choosing her role (“Christa T. couldn't say that she hadn't chosen her own role, and she didn't say it,” 137).

In her art, however, she resembles Günderode, a broken voice with her slight lisp (6), a (symbolic) speech impediment, uttering here a sound, there a laugh; here a sentence, there a story; here a strophe, there a poem; here a letter, there a dialogue: unreliable, fragmented speech, as with Günderode who published her works under the pseudonym Tian. The masquerade is contained in the image of the woman of letters sitting at the husband's desk during the early morning hours, writing in secret, it seems, about “The Difficulty of Saying ‘I,’” for fear perhaps of offending someone, including, significantly, her own sex—the narrator, who watches her undercover (168–69). It is a gesture in which a whole social situation can be read, showing not only how the political is inscribed in the relationship between men and women and the way these are institutionalized in marriage—with woman as both victim and perpetrator of her confinement to the sphere of domestic isolation and narrow social experience—but revealing moreover the social and cultural situation of the female artist as represented in German literature, past, present, and future: the female artist in the past (Makarie, for instance) as the bearer of silence; the female artist in the present as the breaker of silence (Günderode and Christa T. who write clandestinely); and the female artist in the future (the narrator) as the bearer and breaker of silence, realizing Christa T.'s “vision of herself” (117), of totality, in her desire to create, to be a poet, and her desire to recreate, to be a mother. In the imperfect, however, which is Christa T.'s time, voice and body are “still” dismembered, a vision expressed in the present in the interstices of the inserted fragments of poetry and chatter. The Other is absent, silent, figuring in that silence the classic hysteric who breaks out of a fixed and stable structure of identity by refusing to take her place in language: “Krischan, why don't you write?” (33, 171).

So the narrator does it for her, speaks both for and “as a woman,” more precisely, as a mother who rigorously inserts the unreliable, the verses and cadences of the poet, into a whole and unified story about the effects of alienation in woman, in art, in aesthetics, a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, disciplining the fragments into closure of representation. For it is in the rupture, rather: in the purposeful submission to the voice of that alien body as well as in the explicit indifference to interruption, that the feminine heritage is enacted here, revealing the cat that the narrator is: the domesticated cat! It is she who is narcissus, projecting onto paper the image of woman, with whose (imagined) intactness she is in love: in love with the mother that she is, in love with the child that she was, in love with the writer she is becoming, and in love with the person who once was part of her own self, her “brain child,” Christa T., who is a wholesome form indeed, offered to “us” for love. The language of feeling begs it—pathos: “When should one live, if not in the time that's given to one?” … “When, if not now?” (70, 185) Her domestication then is the issue here, domestication that she aims to revise through, paradoxically, mimeticism.

Hence, the “wild” discourse as “an attempt to be oneself,” juxtaposing quotation (the strange, the impersonal “one”) and commentary (the familiar, the personal “self”) in an often abrupt and disorienting manner, intending to formalize the effect of alienation in speaking. But speaking as what? “As a woman”? In the most erotic scene of the text, female desire does indeed “speak.” There they are, two women, laughing, giggling, touching, woman in love with woman's body, woman feeling her way to her body, woman getting in touch with her sex (27).²² Bliss, momentary in-sight, displaced instantly by the sight that controls the narrative thread: here they are, two women, huddled against the wall under a glaring spotlight (the empirical and fantasized paternal/maternal stare), divided, silent, mourning (“losing one another and ourselves,” 14). It reveals the affect that moves the imagery—fear of feminine self-sufficiency—and the myth that moves the narrative—woman as victim—with the wall functioning as synecdoche to signal the whole, the house, the container, in which the female artist was once entrapped and in which the female artist is now contained and protected.

Therefore, the gynaeceum as the setting of the novel. It is the (dream-)house that contains and protects the nurturing women and that offers the difference of view. What the male artist once perceived (and perhaps till today) to be his conflict, that between vocation and role, and what the female artist once perceived (and perhaps till today) to be hers, that between art and motherhood, is here united to mirror the whole of woman's interior, her two vocations, that is, to create poetry (present in the verses and cadences of the other) and to recreate humankind by bearing “our” children and loving them (present in the narrator's chatter). This wholeness is evoked aesthetically in the closed form, pragmatically in the various versions of the snapshot, and thematically in the figural constellation of two women who share the “joys and burden of creation,” literally, in the moment of motherhood, figuratively, in the moment of writing. The men are nearly always absent or just marginally present, like Justus. On the one hand, this exclusion signals woman's attempt to be “one self,” to sound a voice that is in its duplicity distinct and separate from the voice of the male artist, like Wilhelm Meister who cannot speak literally, from the body, and perceives it therefore always as Other.

On the other hand and nevertheless, the exclusion magnifies what is within—repression, alienation, and amputation. Fear functions as agent, fear, significantly, of physical violence:

She wakes up in the night, the farmer and his wife are still there … the phonograph is playing. I'll dance with you into the skies above. … A screech. The farmer's wife has stepped on the tomcat, our good black tomcat, he's gentle and old, but he's hissing at the farmer's wife now … silence … then the farmer comes out with the tomcat, has grabbed him, cursing and swearing, as he flings him against the stable wall. Now you know how it sounds when bones crack, when something alive a moment ago drops to the ground.

(20–21)

The wall and the dead cat again, this time as empirical event. The trauma haunts the narrative; its symptom is the paradoxical structure. Here, in the play with pronouns (she/I/you), the paradox expresses itself directly, for in it gender boundaries are at once transgressed and cemented, experience generalized and specified, history equated with biology: the death of the cat and the death of the child (22) and the death of the baby birds (31) and the death of the toad (109) show acts of absurd and “irrational” cruelty, directed against those who cannot defend themselves, namely women, children, animals, by those who can, namely men. Men, the text argues in the repetition of “male” violence outside a circle of nurturing women, men are strong, active, and violent while women are weak, passive, and nonviolent.²³ Thus, whereas the opposition movement/containment that structures the narcissistic system is presented as a cultural phenomenon, the opposition violence/nonviolence is grounded in sexual metaphysics.

This “lapse” represents next to the revolutionary moment—in the figure of narcissus or the hysteric—the reactionary instance of this text and supports my thesis that The Quest for Christa T. is a project that defines itself not in terms of undermining the notion of essence or ontology, but in terms of finding an adequate language for woman's Otherness, defined however in a most conventional way. “Female love” (as opposed to desire) is fantasized as the essence of woman, projected as originating in anatomy and, within that logic, as an alternative to “male aggressivity.” It means that the problematic epistemology of selfhood, which the philosopher-theorist-reader poses in terms of universals (“how, if at all, and under what circumstances, can one realize oneself in a work of art,” 95), is revised by the female artist-practitioner-writer not in terms of woman's difference but in terms of woman's anatomy. Consequently, in affirming the opposition masculine/feminine as a biological phenomenon, her question becomes how she can talk about herself as a woman and say “I” if the “I” secures the father's heritage (violence) and displaces the mother's (love). “She, with whom she associated herself, whom she was careful not to name, for what name could she have given her?” (170)

The name given to her is “Christa T.,” abbreviating the father's name and thereby questioning the name as an index of sexual and social identity. “She” is then placed into a gynaeceum, a place full of harmony, free of domination and reification. It is the place from which the “one” speaks, in the form of quotation, and from which the “self” speaks, in the form of commentary. It is an “I” then that contains not only the paradigmatic (masculinist) fantasy of a unified subject, but also its negation, enacted in the play with pronouns of the third and first person. What holds the “she” and the “I” together is the conventional figure of Woman-as-Nurturer. It is present as a literal sign, referring to the physical process of lying spread-legged and supine, exposing the locus of the child's generation, the womb. It is present also as a metaphorical sign, identifying the creative act with bearing “brain children”: “Feeling pain, longing, something like a second birth. And saying, finally, ‘I’: I am different” (57, 22). The first birth? The real child:

Her first child was born during this time, and the delivery was difficult. The child was in a bad position. For hours she strained uselessly. Of course it weakened her, but she didn't retreat into the feeling that the pains were an injustice being done to her. She had no sentimentality to spare and couldn't forget that she wanted to have the child and that the strict rhythm of rending strain and relaxation was necessary to produce it.

(134)

This description serves well—and is meant to serve, especially in view of the genealogical connection established in the “preface” (“to think her further”)—as an index of the narrative's rhythm of quotation and commentary, poetry and chatter, giving birth to the female artist from the spirit of Christa T.

Thus, just as in “male” fiction of past and present centuries, woman's brain is still connected to the womb. The metonymy signifies the recuperation of sexual metaphysics, subjecting the artist to the philistine (“She sees the advantage of being a woman,” 123) and the hysteric to the mimic (the scenario of the eternal feminine) who lets the other speak only in order to subordinate her speech to the (sexist) narrative of procreation. So the text is dominated by the other figure of consciousness, one that has assumed her place in language and submitted to power and authority because, as Kristeva writes, she identifies with it and wants to take its place (“to think her further”).²⁴ While it can be argued that the centrality of childbearing here aims to revise the convention of the male artist who has used the birth metaphor to legitimize his “brain children” and ascribe female creativity to the womb,²⁵ it can also be argued that it affirms the paternal metaphor because it links the woman of letters to the mother of children. The female artist writes from the body, so argues the text in its metaphors and metonymies, from the rifts and pains of childbearing (in the dual sense). It is her (metaphysical, not social) “fate” as an artist, in fact the origin of her speech, which is “female” precisely because of its (tragic) division between biological and intellectual energies, a no-win situation: “She wanted to unite that which cannot be united: to be loved by a man and to produce a work that can be measured against absolute standards,” writes Christa Wolf about the woman artist Karoline von Günderode.²⁶

And how does Christa T. experience the collapse of her alternatives? As a collapse of her vital system, literally. Symptomatic is her illness, leukemia, a disease of the blood where an overproduction of white (light = reason) blood cells kills the red (dark = vitality) blood cells. In the final analysis then, being a female artist is shown once again as self-sacrifice to woman, a plot that repeats what is (or ought to be) familiar not only from fiction written by men, but particularly by women, harking back to the literary convention of the nineteenth-century woman writer's Bildungsroman and forward to popular culture of the twentieth century, “women's magazines,” for instance, where female artists are nearly uniformly represented with a book under one arm and a child under the other.²⁷ The strife between the two “selves”—or between sexuality and morality—is resolved by the mimic in favor of womanhood, of “life” (185, 69–77), of motherhood. The novel rewrites therefore the auto/biography of a female artist in the name of a certain ethic, with the narrator functioning as some sort of archaic mother, one yet with fatherly attributes, wanting to lead “her self” (and analogously her reader) down the redemptive path of object-love: the path of pregnancy. The nursery functions as a room of her own, which represents the vision (or delusion) of a society without contradictions, the feminine world, the gynaeceum, with women as nurturers and men as (hidden) protectors.²⁸

This wishful vision explains why the female figure is erected as an object of the paternal/maternal gaze, as an organizing spectacle, an absence that structures the symbolic order here and sustains “our glances.” Aesthetics is subjected to ethics, the erotic to morality, breaking the “spell of subjectivism” that the official propaganda of her country commands (67). But the motive is not just historical. It is also psychological, in that Christa T., the narrator's double, defines the other figure of consciousness, the “real,” that “character” that has fully relinquished narcissism and is in quest of object-love. The “female model of love” (Freud), narcissistic “immoral” love, is displaced onto the “parental model” which is, as Freud reminds us, the most moral love of all. For it sacrifices the desire to be loved for the need to love, placing in the (absent) center “His Majesty the Baby” (Freud), a figure that functions as a substitution for the fantasy long lost. The child, therefore, is to become what the father is not, a “great man and a hero,” or what the mother is not, a princess to a “prince.” It serves as a substitution for the unfulfilled wishes and dreams of the parents. “Parental [childish] love,” Freud concludes, “is nothing but the parents’ narcissism born again, which, transformed into object-love, unmistakably reveals its former nature.”²⁹

A “Majestic Baby” is this (brain) child, Christa T., indeed. “She was all there,” the narrator jubilates (174), lived “according to the laws of her own being” (170), produced, pell-mell, children and art, which, put together in the present, make her intact, unique, perfect, “most valiant” (73), without “sentimentality to spare” (134), a woman of genius, without deficiencies, including “childish sexuality,” to use Freud's phrase (kindliche Sexualität). Considered in this context, narcissism appears a perversion indeed.

Conversely, misery is idealized: “But how does one cut oneself away from oneself?” (27). Through will, sheer will: “Now she would have to answer the question: what are you going to be? She would have to say: I want [Ich will] to get up early every morning, first to look after the child and then see to breakfast for Justus and me” (137). This is life in the subjunctive, but “life” nevertheless. Its opposite, death, is caused by blindness to the needs of the other—the death of the cat(s): “That's what happens when you're not being attentive” (21). This somewhat Jesuitic morality reveals the mimic's blind spot, that is, history and (internalized) structures of power. Accordingly, narcissism is substituted by an ideal ego erected in herself and enabling her to reject the shadow, her own double, “as if possessed, plays out the shadow figures and overcomes to some extent what has brought him to the brink of destruction or self-destruction in the ‘real’ world.”³⁰ Major uncertainties are thereby explained away, particularly woman's essentially unpeaceful nature, which is domesticated over again in the representation of femininity through motherhood.

Left for us to view is the image of the “Great Mother”—protective (“Worst of all, the fly circling the lamp every morning when you awake. Your mother can chase it away. To forget,” 135), creative (“She cut blue fishes and yellow flowers out of colored paper and pasted them like an ornamental frame around the margins of the white paper; she painted big clear letters,” 140), sacrificing (“as any mother would she quells the child's sense of strangeness by hugging Anna; but she doesn't have the illusion that she's hugging a part of herself. She lets the child go, and lets herself be looked at,” 145), and nurturing (“She only cried when the doctor placed the child on her breast, when she called it by name: Anna,” 134).³¹

But why link motherhood to biology? Why insist on a semantic identity between form and content, woman and tenderness (“Does one remember tenderness? Is it tenderness the child still knows today when it hears the words ‘your mother’?” 134)? Why link it to anatomy, to a substance, rather than to a function that men can perform as well? And is the multiplicity not really a singularity since it is absurd to identify female sexuality with woman's reproductive function?

One reason for the reduction is psychological. The world has to have a center, since a centerless world is unthinkable, impossible to live. But the “old” center, the Father whose substance is violence, needs to be substituted by the Mother whose substance is love. “She” now stands high in the center and provides the single principle of coherence, one that controls the play with forms (child, artist, mother, wife, lover, etc.). Its opposite, plurality of meaning and plurality of the subject, caused by the absence of that transcendental signified (Love, in the sense of the Christian Agape), leads to chaos, violence, the apocalypse. Longing for presence—or “the inability to tolerate chaos,” as Nietzsche would say—motivates the act of mastering heterogeneity, the uncanny, of collapsing instability into stability. The enigma of Christa T., that violent “wild” subject-in-process, flickering between pronouns, between the veils and cadences of the other and the showing and telling of the “self,” is cemented into a Monument-of-the-Ideal-Woman, the Great Mother, whose condition is repression and whose mechanism is displacement. “Writing means making things large” (168). Indeed, but at the price of reducing the subject to nothing.

The other reason is historical. It is significant that narrated time begins under fascism (chapters 1 and 2) where the social, political, and cultural discourses aim at reducing woman to her sexual and reproductive function, conceiving her as nurturer (of man) and man as her protector and exaggerating thereby the division between the sexes. It leads/led, paradoxically, to belligerence and militarism.³² Narrated time ends, equally significant, under socialism where political, social, and cultural discourses aim at securing woman's public function—as worker, writer, theorist, politician—while simultaneously assigning to her once again the essential quality of the nurturer of children and men.

The mimic repeats and affirms that ideology by adapting and obeying the moral rule of her condition without compromising about the dogma on which it rests.³³ That “gigantic” third eye is indeed present then, seeing the eye that watches her (us) whenever she (we) acts as moral subject and views the world in terms of morality. But does this mean that the little morality play staged in the gynaeceum is offered to us for criticism?

No, it is offered to us for adherence. The novel's structure serves as evidence, as does Christa Wolf's entire oeuvre in which female figures are if not already mothers, then at least always already married. Women in Wolf's works are shown without exception in their relationship to men, including in this novel, where the men are practically nowhere and therefore everywhere, like the sky, an authority that at once determines and limits the woman's condition, outside as well as inside.³⁴

The novel's point of view also serves as evidence, as it is characterized by a propensity toward caricature, beginning with the moving snapshot of the lady on the beach and the meaning it takes on in the various contexts. Woman is presented there and here as almost eternally pregnant, literally, as being with child, and figuratively, as being with brain child. In the centrality of childbearing, which orders the images and sustains the narrative thread, woman's distinctive feature, the womb, is exaggerated to the point of being ridiculous. Perhaps that is the “real” significance of the red and white ball that in the three versions of the beach scene grows steadily from “big” to “huge” to “gigantic,” pointing to the mother's womb as seen from below. The propensity toward caricature signifies what Elisabeth Lenk has called “pariah consciousness,” that is, woman perceiving herself as an inferior being to man.³⁵

Like the mimic here, a batlike soul, rather than a great cat, as her uncanny double, a soul yet waking to the consciousness of itself, but in darkness and secrecy and loneliness, tarrying a while, loveless and sinless.

Notes

1. For the comparison of woman to cat, see Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966), pp. 87 and 169, and Nachgelassene Fragmente 1, Werke, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari, pt. 7, vol. 1 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1977) sec. 1[30], p. 12; also Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), vol. 14, pp. 73–102, Compare the German original “Zur Einführung des Narzissmus,” Freud—Studienausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1975), vol. 3, pp. 37–68. Subsequent references are to the English translation, cited parenthetically in the text; the translations have been modified in places where the English text reduces, in my view, the complexity of Freud's text. The following discussion of Freud's essay is indebted to Sarah Kofman, “The Narcissistic Woman: Freud and Girard,” diacritics (September 1980), 36–45. See also Sarah Kofman, Autobiogriffures: Du chat Murr d'Hoffmann (Paris: Christian Bourgeois, 1976), pp. 36–37.

2. Christa Wolf, “Neue Lebensansichten eines Katers,” Gesammelte Erzählungen (Darmstadt/Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1981), p. 98 (my translation). I am aware that Wolf's tale aims to satirize from a contemporary perspective her (socialist) society's philistinism in its view of the artist, just as E. T. A. Hoffmann did in the figure of the cat Murr and its view of the (Romantic) artist Kreisler in Lebensansichten des Katers Murr (1820/1822), a novel to which Wolf explicitly alludes. What escapes her is the philistinism in the cat's view of woman, as I shall argue in the following.

3. Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T., trans, Christopher Middleton (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), p. 150, originally in German Nachdenken über Christa T. (Halle: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1968). Subsequent references are to the English translation, cited parenthetically in the text. I have altered Middleton's punctuation and retained the original, since it captures Wolf's peculiar habit of constructing what we call run-on sentences which function for Wolf as an approximation of written speech to oral communication. Important for my argument is Wolf's use of the adjective geschmeidig which in German applies to people's bodily movements only in reference to women: “Sie ist geschmeidig wie eine Katze” (see Duden's and Grimm's dictionaries).

4. A note on terminology: “female figure” and “female artist” refer only to the fictional characters; “woman writer” refers to the person who invented the narrative.

5. Freud (see note 1). Kofman sees a connection between Freud's story of woman's sexuality in society and culture here (1914) and his being “particularly taken” at the time with Lou Andreas-Salomé (Kofman 36). For a most exhaustive interpretation of the Freud-Salomé relationship see Biddy Martin, Representing Woman: The (Life)Styles of Lou Andreas-Salomé (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 267–320.

6. See my headnote which quotes Wolf's headnote to her novel about the poet(s) von Günderode (and Heinrich von Kleist), No Place on Earth, trans. Jan van Heurck (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982), originally in German Kein ort. Nirgends (Berlin/Weimar: Aufbau, 1979).

7. English, to reflect, a verb that unites sight and reflection, (historical) object and (critical) subject, spatiality and temporality, as well as the limit and the infinite, since it means both to ponder something, someone, in order to know and understand, and to reflect, from the Latin reflectere, to bend back, to become mirrored. Compare the myth of Narcissus where we are confronted with a love for an object which is a mirage (Ovid, Metamorphoses, III). Useful for my discussion of the function of the myth in Wolf's novel is Jacques Lacan's “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” in Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 1–7, and more important Julia Kristeva's “Narcissus: The New Insanity,” where she points out that “Narcissus after all is guilty of being unaware of himself as source of the reflection” because “he, in fact, does not know who he is”; in Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 103–21. Similarly, the narrator in Wolf's novel, who turns sight into origin without her knowing it.

8. For example: “Da mag sie schon monatelang in unserer Klasse gewesen sein. Da kannte ich ihre langen Glieder,” and so on. See also Inta Ezergailis, Women Writers: The Divided Self (Bonn: Bouvier, 1982), pp. 66–67, 93–116, who reads this syntax as a refusal to superimpose an air of certainty or closure on the unfinished and uncertain life of her friend (67). I agree only partly with Ezergailis and fully instead with Adorno who argues that parataxis functions to express relations of power which include, by definition, both the role of the adversary and the aid (see my argument about the narrator's double role of hysteric and mimic); Theodor W. Adorno, “Parataxis,” Noten zur Literatur III (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), pp. 156–209.

9. About this paradox of women's writing, see especially Mary Jacobus, “The Difference of View,” Reading Woman (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 27–40. Regarding the coupling hysteric-mimic, see Julia Kristeva, “Die Produktivität der Frau,” Alternative 19 (1976), 166–72; also “Narcissus” where Kristeva argues that the “feminine facet of [ideal] love is perhaps the most subtle sublimation of the secret, psychotic ground of hysteria” (Tales 112–13); also relevant is Kristeva's essay “Woman's Time,” trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, Signs 7.1 (1981), 5–35.

10. I consider the following the most incisive treatments of the novel—from a historicist perspective, Heinrich Mohr, “Produktive Sehnsucht. Struktur, Thematik und politische Relevanz von Christa Wolf's Nachdenken über Christa T.,” Basis 2 (1971), 191–233; Christa Thomassen, Der lange Weg zu uns selbst. Christa Wolfs Roman “Nachdenken über Christa T.” als Erfahrungs—und Handlungsmuster (Kronberg: Scriptor, 1977). From a philosophical perspective, Andreas Huyssen, “Auf den Spuren Ernst Blochs. Nachdenken über Christa Wolf,” Basis 5 (1975), 100–16; Ortrud Gutjahr, “‘Erinnerte Zukunft’—Gedächtniskonstruktion und Subjektkonstitution im Werk Christa Wolfs,” Erinnerte Zukunft, ed. Wolfram Mauser (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1985), pp. 53–80; Wolfram Mauser, “‘Gezeichnet zeichnend’—Tod und Verwandlung im Werk Christa Wolfs,” Erinnerte Zukunft, pp. 181–205. From a psychoanalytic perspective, Bernhard Greiner, “Die Schwierigheit, ‘ich’ zu sagen: Christa Wolfs psychologische Orientierung des Erzählens,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 55.2 (1981), 323–42; Sylvia Schmitz-Burgard, “Psychoanalyse eines Mythos: Nachdenken über Christa T.,” Monatshefte 79.4 (1987), 463–77. From a poetological perspective, Wolfram and Helmtrud Mauser, Christa Wolf: Nachdenken über Christa T. (Munich: Fink, 1987); Ester Kleinbord Labovitz, The Myth of the Heroine: The Female Bildungsroman in the Twentieth Century (New York: Peter Lang, 1986), pp. 201–43. From a feminist (cultural theory and social history) perspective, Jeanette Clausen, “The Difficulty of Saying ‘I’ as Theme and Narrative Technique in the Works of Christa Wolf,” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur Neueren Germanistik 10 (1979), 319–33; Elizabeth Abel, “(E)Merging Identities: The Dynamics of Female Friendship in Contemporary Fiction by Women,” Signs 6.3 (1981), 413–35; Inta Ezergailis (see note 8); Sara Lennox, “‘Der Versuch, man selbst zu sein’: Christa Wolf und der Feminismus,” in Die Frau als Heldin und Autorin: Neue kritische Ansätze zur deutschen Literatur, ed. Wolfgang Paulsen (Bern: Francke, 1979), pp. 217–22; Anna K. Kuhn, Christa Wolf's Utopian Vision: From Marxism to Feminism (New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Anne Herrmann, “The Elegiac Novel,” in The Dialogic and Difference (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), pp. 62–89. For a good selection of essays in English on Wolf, see Responses to Christa Wolf, ed. Marilyn Sibley Fries (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989). The study that I find the most provocative and therefore the most influential on my work is Myra Love, “Christa Wolf and Feminism: Breaking the Patriarchal Connection,” New German Critique 16 (1979), 31–53. Yet while I agree with Love that Wolf's novel breaks down the “patriarchal system” of dichotomous and mutually exclusive opposites, with the male as center over and against a female other, I disagree that that scenario contains the whole story and argue instead that besides the deconstructive the novel contains a reconstructive moment, with the female as center over and against a male other, which is of course a farce. Love ignores the process of signification, of ideological trickery, that is, the narrator as the bearer of accepted opinion. Moreover, to postulate that “female subjectivity” (Love's key category) is defined by intersubjectivity and non-reification and “male subjectivity” by self-reflection and reification repeats in its reference to biology (“female”/“male”) the kind of dichotomous thinking Love aims to revise.

11. I do not mean to say that Wolf is not reflecting upon patriarchy, indeed she uses the term ten years later in her introduction to Maxie Wander's Guten Morgen, du Schöne (1975), a collection of interviews with women in the GDR, and again, still more polemically, in her lectures on poetics at the University of Frankfurt in 1982, which appeared in English under the title Conditions of a Narrative: Cassandra and were appended to Wolf's novel Cassandra, trans. Jan van Heurck (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1984), pp. 141–305. But Wolf never concerns herself with the question of the relation between gender and writing or, more precisely, with the question of what language actually is, how it functions in constituting subjectivity, and, moreover, what the relationship is between subjectivity (including “female”) and power. (And power as a discursive—and not just as an economic—phenomenon was already a category in postwar German culture, West as well as East, not in Lukács's writing, to be sure, but indeed in Brecht's, for instance, whose works are, as Wolf herself tells it in her essay on Brecht, part of the literary canon in schools and universities.) Thus, in the name of—ironically—the bourgeois liberal notion of a split but harmonized unitary subject (“das Subjektwerden des Menschen—von Mann und Frau,” see Wolf's essay to Wander), Wolf evades the consequences of her earlier theoretical (and radical) argument that “I without books am not I” in “The Reader and the Writer” (1968), The Reader and the Writer: Essays, Sketches, Memories, trans. Joan Becker (Berlin/GDR: Seven Seas Publishers, 1977), pp. 177–212. See also her essays on Karoline von Günderode and Bettine von Arnim which reveal the same blind spot(s), in Wolf, Die Dimension des Autors (Darmstadt/Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1987), pp. 511–610, as well as the series of interviews published as “Documentation: Christa Wolf,” German Quarterly 57.1 (1984), 91–115. A good essay (in English) on the status of feminist discourse in the East-German academy and society is Chris Weedon's “Introduction” to her anthology Die Frau in der DDR (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988).

12. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York and London: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1957), p. 3.

13. Terry Eagleton writes that much of classical Marxist thought “was clearly incapable of explaining the particular conditions of women as an oppressed social group, or of contributing significantly to their transformation” because of its narrowly economic focus or the concomitant ignorance vis-à-vis the question of “sexual ideology, of the ways men and women image themselves and each other in male-dominated society, of perceptions and behaviour which range from the brutally explicit to the deeply unconscious.” Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 148–49). Is that Wolf's legacy, especially since she insists throughout her writing on equating patriarchy with capitalism (“Klassengesellschaft, das Patriarchat,” see the essay on Maxie Wander and the lectures on poetics, as well as “Documentation,” note 11)? It certainly is the legacy of her critics (see note 10) in East-as well as West-Germany (and the United States) whose writing on Wolf can be linked by the refusal to pose the question of the effect of sexual ideology in works by women, in this case, works by Wolf. (The question is usually reserved for writing by men).

14. I have altered slightly Middleton's translation and replaced “smile” by “laughter” since the original reads Lachen (and not Lächeln), a sound rising from the body, while “smile” refers to soundless “laughter,” which makes no sense considering the narrator's fascination with that (apparently) uncanny sound.

15. See Friedrich Nietzsche's Aphorism 509 of Morgenröte and Zur Genealogie der Moral. I am indebted for this discussion to Rainer Nägele's lecture “Theatrical Speculation on Marat/Sade,” MLA Convention, Chicago, December 28, 1985.

16. Not only does the narrator's “preface” invoke the birth metaphor, but within the total narrative the female figure is instantly associated with motherhood (and death, of course), as in the opening pages: “Then she began to blow, or to shout, there's no proper word for it. It was this I reminded her of, or wanted to, in my last letter, but she wasn't reading any more letters, she was dying. She was always tall, and thin, until the last years, after she'd had the children. So there she was, walking along in front, stalking head-in-air along the curb” (9).

17. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977). Useful in this context is Wolf's essay of the same year as the novel, “The Reader and the Writer” (1968), which subscribes to a “poetics of the eye,” that is, to the classical doctrine of art as mimesis; also in her lectures on poetics, especially pp. 272–305.

18. What I do not mean by the term is the woman author or some sort of “female” or “feminine” essence, or a “split subject” or a centered, unified subject as such, traditionally fantasized as “male,” recently as “female.” What I do mean by the term is a peculiar place of a thinking, acting, or writing subject, one that refuses a “human” or “female” nature by weaving together heterogeneity and contradiction, without wanting to dissolve them; that is, by a speaking subject (of a text) that repeatedly shifts its position vis-à-vis (gendered) experience and (gendered) discourse. Its object is not an identifiable object—neither the “total woman” nor the “total man”—but representation itself, fantasy, a psychic space, at once structured and heterogeneous. A (potential) example is Christa T.'s fragmented writing, organized around the moment, it seems, and, as one body, radically theatrical as well as perspectivist, reflecting perhaps the heterogeneity of subjectivity—prior, of course, to the intervention of the narrator and the obsession with truth and identity, with ordering, administering, classifying, categorizing, interpreting, and so on.

19. See pp. 4, 5, 6, 26, 117, and 169.

20. German umherstreunen refers to roaming animals, particularly to cats and dogs.

21. See Kofman, “The Narcissistic Woman,” p. 39, and Freud, “On Narcissism,” pp. 89–91.

22. On the demystification of female homosexuality, see Luce Irigaray, “This Sex Which Is Not One” (1977), in This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983). Relevant to the image of giggling women in opposition to belligerent men is Jean-François Lyotard's “Something at Stake in the Women's Struggle,” sub-stance 20 (1977), 9–17. Important in this connection is Wolf's brief “Interview with Myself” (1966), The Reader and the Writer, trans. Joan Becker (Berlin: Seven Seas Publishers, 1977), pp. 76–80.

23. See Wolf's lectures on poetics (note 11) where she consistently identifies aggressivity with “maleness” (e.g., pp. 153, 159, and 173); the double equation structures most of her work, up to her latest piece Accident: A Day's News, trans. Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick Takvorian (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989), originally in German, Störfall. Nachrichten eines Tages (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1987).

24. Kristeva, “Produktivität,” p. 168; compare Kristeva's discussion of “love and the exclusion of the impure” (Tales 109–113). See also Kofman who writes that if Freud “can in the course of his inquiry transform woman into a hysteric by rejecting all speculation and by appealing, as he says, only to the observed facts, it is because most women, throughout the course of history, have in fact been the accomplices of men. Do most mothers not seek above all to turn their sons into heroes and great men and to be parties to their crimes, even at the risk of death?” (Kofman, “The Narcissistic Woman,” 45). For a critique of (Wolf's) Hegelian speculative dialectic, see Jacques Derrida and Christie V. McDonald, “Choreographies” (Interview), diacritics 12 (1982), 66–76.

25. See Susan Gubar, “The Birth of the Artist as Heroine: (Re)production, the Künstlerroman Tradition, and the Fiction of Katherine Mansfield,” in The Representation of Women in Fiction, ed. Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Margaret R. Higonnet (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), pp. 19–59. For a different view on nineteenth-and early twentieth-century women novelists and on the metonymy brain-womb, see Ann Ardis's essay in this volume, “‘Retreat with Honour.’”

26. Christa Wolf, “Der Schatten eines Traumes. Karoline von Günderode—ein Entwurf” (1978); my translation. Lesen und Schreiben. Neue Sammlung (Darmstadt/Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1980), p. 242.

27. See Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “To ‘bear my mother's name’: Künstler-romane by Women Writers,” in Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 84–104. Regarding popular culture, see especially the East-German “women's magazine” Für Dich and the West-German feminist magazine Emma. Relevant to this discussion is Irene Dölling's study, “Continuity and Change in the Media Image of Women: A Look at Illustrations in GDR Periodicals,” Studies in GDR Culture and Society 9 (Lanham and London: University Press of America, 1989), pp. 131–43. Compare Roland Barthes’ incisive analysis of the French weekly Elle in Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), pp. 50–52.

28. Wolf's Büchner-Prize Acceptance Speech (1980) and its discussion of Georg Büchner's female figures (Rosetta, Marie, Marion, Julie, Lucile, and Lena) is relevant here, since Wolf refers to them exclusively in terms of their status as victims, ignoring the difference in social class that also characterizes them—“Unprotected on the perimeter,” yet “unprotected” from what? (“‘Shall I Garnish a Metaphor with an Almond Blossom?’” New German Critique 23 [1981], 6). For an (implicit) critique of the discourse of homologization, see Virginia Woolf, “Professions for Women” (1931), Women and Writing, ed. Michele Barrett (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), pp. 57–63. Also Mary Jacobus, “Review of The Madwoman in the Attic,” Signs 6.3 (1981), 517–23.

29. Freud, “On Narcissism,” p. 91.

30. The Reader and the Writer, p. 206 (my translation and emphasis); woven into this view are the cultural politics of the GDR—of Western industrial nations in general?—which emphasize not only the perverse aspect of the Narcissus myth, but its morbidity (which conflicts with the privileging of such values as normalcy, health, and sanity).

31. I have altered Middleton's translation slightly to conform to the original in its explicit reference to woman's body (ihr das Kind auf die Brust legte).

32. See Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938), and Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, trans. Stephen Convay (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), a fascinating study of the misogynist attitudes of a group of military men, the German Freikorps. Compare to that Wolf's epistolary essay “Come! Into the Open, Friend!,” trans. Maria Gilarden and Myra Love, Connexions: An International Women's Quarterly 13 (summer 1984), 12–14.

33. See Barthes, Mythologies, pp. 50–52.

34. The exceptions are Rita Seidel, the central figure of Wolf's novel Divided Heaven, who leaves her lover in West-Berlin to return home and to work with her (surrogate) father, Metanagel, and Karoline von Günderode, the female artist figure in No Place on Earth, who is also a historical person, the poet of German romanticism, who committed suicide, because of an unhappy love affair—or so we are told by literary historians and, significantly, by Wolf herself in her essay on Günderode in Lesen und Schreiben.

35. Elisabeth Lenk, “Indiscretions of the Literary Beast: Pariah Consciousness of Women Writers Since Romanticism” (1981), trans. Maureen Krause, New German Critique 27 (1982), 101–14.