Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | W | West Virginia University Philological Papers

Imagination and procreation: Schnitzler's "Andreas Thameyers letzter Brief".

Article Excerpt
Metaphors of birth and procreation are familiar occurrences in poetic and philosophical discourses. From the origin of an artwork to the birth of a genre, generative metaphors have coded instances of artistic and intellectual labor so often that one could speak of a metaphorical relation between art and procreation themselves. (1) If art and imagination are fed by the imagery of birth and sexuality, discourses like gender or motherhood incorporate in return imaginative resources so as to expand their limits. In Vienna around 1900, literature and psychoanalysis reinforced the link between sexuality and creativity.

Schnitzler's lesser-known short story "Andreas Thameyers letzter Brief" is the suicide letter with which Thameyer, thirty-four, employee at the Austrian Savings Bank, is trying to defend his wife's fidelity. Yet his attempts seem ridiculous in the face of the evidence: just fourteen days before, his wife had given birth to a child whose father Thameyer cannot possibly be, since the child is black. Apparently, she had to spend some time alone during a promenade in Vienna's famous zoo, which sheltered at the time an ethnographic exhibition of African people. Their sight must have frightened her terribly: "Sie sagte mir, niemals in ihrem Leben habe sie ein solches Grauen empfunden als an jenem Abend, da sie allein bei den Negern war," writes Thameyer (Schnitzler 1: 518). Since she understandably denies any intercourse of a sexual nature, and her husband is also unwilling to acknowledge a possible betrayal, the awkward birth can only be explained by some mysterious influence that the scare must have had upon her. Andre, as Thameyer's last letter tries to prove, by appealing to philosophical and popular science arguments, that this is a real possibility and that the unsettling sight of the black people, by leaving such strong traces in the woman's imagination, was eventually imprinted onto the unborn child.

The proofs Thameyer brings to his wife's defense oscillate between naive superstition and philosophical speculation. He reiterates some of the old fantastic stories about how a mother's imagination can influence at the moment of conception the physical aspect of the future child. From simple birthmarks to severe deformities, various marks on the child's body are thought to be caused by the imagination--or desire--of the mother. Thameyer takes great care in emphasizing that many such phenomena are mentioned by authoritative writers, like Malebranche, Martin Luther, or Heliodorus. Moreover, he has to take them at face value and insist that they are "beglaubigte, wissenschaftlich feststehende Tatsachen" (515) if he wants to base his wife's defense upon them. For example, he cites Malebranche, who tells of a woman who bore a child resembling St. Plus, which was explained at the time as being the result of the intensity with which she beheld his portrait. Thameyer's mention of Malebranche's work on imagination inevitably has the character of hearsay, especially when he lists less-than-relevant details of a forced resemblance: "seine Arme waren tiber die Brust gekreuzt, seine Augen gen Himmel gerichtet" (514).

The piece de resistance in Thameyer's argument is the incident documented by Heliodorus in his Libri Aethiopicorum, according to which the black queen Persina, after ten years of childless marriage with the king of Ethiopia, gave birth to a white daughter (Heliodorus 251-83). This remarkable incident was explained by the queen's admiring gaze being directed at marble statues of Greek gods during lovemaking. What neither Schnitzler nor Thameyer brings up is that one of the most popular histories of monstrous births, Ambroise Pare's On Monsters and Marvels from 1573, also lists the reverse case--a black child born from white parents--which overlaps perfectly with Thameyer's situation:

Hippocrates saved a princess accused of adultery, because she had given birth to a child black like a Moor, her husband and she both having white skin; which woman was absolved upon Hippocrates' persuasion that it was [caused by] a portrait of a...