The Ballad and its Families - Christina Rossetti, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Friedrich Hebbel and the Anti-Balladry of Sisterhood Adrian Daub Stanford University Abstract: During the nineteenth century the ballad was understood in hereditary terms: it was a tradition passed down from generation to generation, its authority rested on its supposedly oral ancestry, and it, like the fairy tale, tended to tell of families in disarray that had to be brought back into line� This association of poetic form and family politics made sisterhood a useful topic for ballads that wanted to critique and interrogate the ideology of the ballad. Through detailed readings of Christina Rosetti’s Goblin Market , Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s balladry and Friedrich Hebbel’s family ballads, this article traces how sisterhood allowed for a kind of anti-balladry - poems that looked and sounded like ballads, but that undercut the ballad’s claim to represent popular knowledge, oral culture, and the ancestry of the Volk � Keywords: ballad, sisterhood, form, tradition, descent Putting children to bed with song or story is a practice as old as parenting itself, but the nineteenth century obsessively analyzed and sought to structure that quotidian transaction - from Grimm’s Hausmärchen to Proust’s bedtime vigils, from Heinrich von Ofterdingen’s dreams to Freud’s Wolf-Man. In the oedipal age, the question of how lessons, stories, Geist moved from generation to generation felicitously, and what might disrupt their movement, became the source of immense anxiety� The ballad form was an important technology of transmission� Since ballads have implicit narrators, ballads tend towards monovocality of a very different kind than, say, lyric poetry. Where the lyric places a single subjectivity at the origin of poetic locution, the ballad puts a single epistemic unit� The story exists to convey information rather than feeling, and when the story is re-told, it is re-told for information� 70 Adrian Daub Insofar as it participated in intergenerational transmission, the ballad intervened in childhood development later than the nursery rhyme, picture book, or fairy tale� Ballads were a thing of elementary school Lesebücher , of poetry anthologies given as communion gifts, of learning to read and recite and memorize� By the middle of the nineteenth century, a number of writers used the family scene as a way of disrupting the logic of transmission that made the ballad such a standby in schoolhouses and music recitals� For them the monovocality of the ballad told of the inertia, solidity and force of the family line; and for them challenges to that inertia, disruptions of that force could be lodged in the ballad� This article argues that a balladic poetics of sisterhood functioned as precisely this sort of challenge� These ballads of sisterhood used siblinghood to challenge descent as a mode of ascertaining transmission� They describe a sisterhood that seems to exist at the exclusion of intergenerational family structures: sisters are ballad-subjects because they have no mother� This is not an innocent omission� As Friedrich Kittler has argued, “the construct of the originary text, which has no basis in the real, can be possible only through a parasitic relation to the Mother’s Mouth.” (Kittler 86) By absenting the mother these ballads create deeply questionable narratives either unwilling to construct an “originary text” of the kind Kittler describes, or flagrantly obvious in the construction. 1. The Ballad and the Missing Mother Perhaps the clearest reflection of this dynamic comes in a poem outside of the German tradition, and a poem that is not immediately recognizable as a ballad� Christina Rossetti wrote “Goblin Market” in 1859 and published it in 1862� Its story certainly qualifies as balladic: two sisters, Lizzie and Laura, live by themselves in the woods, Laura is tempted by the Goblins who each evening proffer their wares across the glen� Quickly she becomes addicted to their fruit, and returns to the glen each night. After she can no longer afford her addiction, and slowly begins to age and wither away, Lizzie tries to buy the fruit for her� When the Goblins realize she is buying for her sister, they set upon her and try to force-feed her their fruit� Lizzie escapes, and tells her sister to drink the fruit juice off her body. Repulsed by the fruit, Laura falls into a deep sleep, but wakes up cured� It is a story of redemption that would not be out of place in a German ballad of the same era - but Rossetti’s telling of it doesn’t quite fit the mold. The meter is irregular, and varies between three and four stresses; the rhymes vary between simple ABAB couplets and far more outré schemes, the internal rhymes and assonance give the poem the structure of a nursery rhyme� At 567 lines, it goes The Ballad and its Families 71 on far too long to tell a properly balladic story, indulges in fanciful lists and digressions, and foregoes any metafictional markers that would give it an air of minstrelsy� None of these generic markers need to be determinative, of course, and “Goblin Market” is balladic enough, a just-so ballad� As a consequence, its nineteenth-century readers oscillated on what genre to ascribe to the poem, and, by extension, who they believed the poem was for� In an 1863 article on the poem in MacMillan’s Magazine “the Hon� Mrs� Norton” (Caroline Norton), suggests that readers “not too rigorously inquire,” and identifies “Goblin Market” as “a ballad which children will con with delight, and which riper minds may ponder over, as we do with poems written in a foreign language which we only half understand” (Norton 402). The poem’s dual address is a moment of intergenerational transmission: parents and their children read or hear the same verses, but each party hears or reads quite different things. This may well be why Mrs. Norton identifies “Goblin Market” as a ballad: ballads frequently are intergenerational communications� A more experienced speaker initiates the younger listener into certain wisdoms and moral precepts� Ballads are lessons for a time before there are lessons; like fairy tales they may teach something without the pupil noticing it� To be sure: there is no indication that just because “Goblin Market” has a didactic angle, it was therefore read by parents or caregivers to the children under their tutelage. But the poem’s assonance and sound-painting, its seductive lilt and cheeky internal echoes, nevertheless speak of the maternal body, speak of it moreover at the moment at which it begins to recede into the distance� The poem’s viscous, “sugar-sweet” sap are its gorgeous sonorities that can almost be better enjoyed without fully understanding the words: “and whisper’d like the restless brook: / ‘Look, Lizzie, look, Lizzie, / Down the glen tramp little men.’” By contrast, the poem’s villainous, seductive Goblins are masters of signing: where the sisters Laura and Lizzie lie self-sufficiently in each other’s arms, the Goblins we meet are “signalling each other, / Brother with sly brother�” Their seduction is to some extent the seduction of signification, the pull of the Symbolic. The somatic pull of the poem’s sonority, by contrast, which draws the sisters back towards each other with dreamlike ease, emerges from what Julia Kristeva has called the “semiotic�” As Judith Butler has put it, “on its semiotic mode, language [for Kristeva] is engaged in a poetic recovery of the maternal body, that diffuse materiality that resists all discrete and univocal signification.” (Butler 112). Kristeva’s “revolution” in poetic language attaches to the rhythm, rhyme and homophony - all the sense that we can make without attending to the meanings of the words themselves (Kristeva 179). Perhaps this is the existential note behind Mrs. Norton’s puzzlement as to where the meaning of “Goblin Market” is to be located: we can imagine a child- 72 Adrian Daub like hearing of the poem, and a highly suspicious hearing (or more likely reading) of it, but neither mother nor child can clearly locate themselves along the spectrum between the extremes. How much does the child understand? Which fruits prompted the mother to reach for the book? Which will the child feast on, the extravagance of lines like “She suck’d and suck’d and suck’d the more,” or the measured life-lessons like “twilight is not good for maidens”? Christina Rossetti’s most famous collection of nursery rhymes puts that question right in its title: the volume is called Sing Song . Here the mother’s body is an explicit subject, in the dual sense that a lot of the rhymes talk of parents and that many of them are meant to be enunciated by parents� Often enough the rhymes and rhythms that assure the child of the present parents articulate the possible absence: My baby has a father and a mother, Rich little baby! Fatherless, motherless, I know another Forlorn as may be: Poor little baby! (Rossetti 3) Likewise, if the retreat of the maternal body structures the prosody of “Goblin Market,” we cannot ignore that its disappearance triggers the events told in the poem, and its return vouches for the safe deliverance from those events� For Laura and Lizzie appear close to the point of incest, and their world seems almost perfectly self-enclosed; we never hear of parents, an extended family, and until the very end nothing of children (Welter 138). Unperturbed by reproductive sexuality the two sisters live “cheek to cheek and breast to breast / Lock’d together in one nest�” And we get a sense that they may remain unperturbed until Laura’s curiosity, and her expeditions into the forest, bring change into their idyll� There is something intensely seductive, even utopian, in “Goblin Market,” but it is noticeable that this utopia isn’t exactly stable. For Jill Rappoport, “Goblin Market” tells the story of domestic femininity disrupted by the lure of consumerism (the open market) (Rappoport 92). The sisters’ domestic arrangement is always already under threat, and Lizzie’s recue mission cannot remove that threat. Only leaving the idyll in a different direction, namely the transition from sisterhood to motherhood brings the narrative to a definitive close. Of course, if Mrs� Norton is right, it is probably through this generation of a moral out of a story that Goblin Market enters the realm of balladry. While the poem lingers with the fruits and forests and remains occupied with its lilting, dreamy lists, it is far closer to a nursery rhyme� Once it reveals itself, or reinvents itself as a didactic poem, it is much more clearly a ballad: the point of the The Ballad and its Families 73 story is no longer the pleasure of the telling, but rather something to be refined from it, like sugar from its fruits� In more than one way balladry speaks by means of tradition: mother had an ulterior motive for telling you this story� She coated it in just enough rhythmic sugar, but by the end you can taste the medicine� Balladry is the act of passing something on, its voice is that of the forebears and we have absorbed their wisdom long before we can say to ourselves, like little Marcel, “I am falling asleep�” And yet balladry has also resisted this patrilineal, or matrilineal, or any lineal thrust - it has picked up the slack where, as in the case of Rossetti’s “poor little baby,” there is no father or no mother to give voice to the past and to impose it on the future: Days, weeks, months, years Afterwards, when both were wives With children of their own; Their mother-hearts beset with fears, Their lives bound up in tender lives; Laura would call the little ones And tell them of her early prime, Those pleasant days long gone Of not-returning time: (Rosetti 8) In these final stanzas sisterly self-containment gives way to an extension in time, and sisterhood, with all its mysterious glories becomes a teaching: how to be a mother (Casey 70): “For there is no friend like a sister In calm or stormy weather; To cheer one on the tedious way, To fetch one if one goes astray, To lift one if one totters down, To strengthen whilst one stands.” (Rossetti 8) These final lines turn the story into a message, we get a reassuring sense of why it is being told and what moral it is meant to impart� Story turns into teaching; and the sisters turn into mothers, in what appears to be a parallel process. Sisterhood becomes a story to be told to one’s children, a steadying moral to be imparted, when before it behaved more like a destabilizing, disquieting force� Siblinghood becomes, in other words, a mere buttress in intergenerational transmission. The verticality that was missing from the sisters’ mysterious dyad now drafts this very mystery into its service� At the same time, the pleasure of communication from body to body becomes mediated through discourse - it 74 Adrian Daub loses its beautiful, luxuriating pointlessness, leaves behind the nursery and enters the stultifying atmosphere of the classroom� Friedrich Hebbel appears to have completed “Vater und Sohn” the same year Christine Rossetti published “Goblin Market�” And in completing it, he appears to have responded to similar pressures as the didactic, or perhaps more precisely “balladic,” ending Rossetti gave “Goblin Market�” In a diary entry from October 1862, Hebbel notes that he removed a stanza from “the ballad,” which most scholars believe must have referred to “Vater und Sohn”(Hebbel, Tagebücher 4: 343). If that’s true, Hebbel’s lapidary note hides a rather revolutionary intervention into his poem: for the lines Hebbel removed (and which he notes in his diary) belong to a narrator, who comments on and explains the characters’ psychology� The poem we have today has some rudimentary descriptive narration, but is largely made up of dialogue - and much of the poem’s capacity to disturb comes from this willingness to let the characters’ discourse dominate the story. What is lost when one narrates family from the outside? The final stanza of “Goblin Market” provides a suggestion: it risks turning the vagaries of emotional life into a lesson to be imparted; it risks turning family into a standing reserve for melodramatic convention; it risks turning the nursery rhyme into a ballad. Where “Goblin Market” winds up capitulating to this balladic demand, Friedrich Hebbel and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff both experiment with ballads that problematize the narrative, the melodramatic, the dynastic dimensions of family� In doing so, they problematize the notion of tradition itself, for which and of which the ballad cannot help but speak� 2. Balladic Inheritance At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the poet George Borrow posited that the ballad is a “compressed epic.” Goethe’s famous Urei -remark, which proposes that the ballad is the larval form of the dramatic, poetic and epic arts, similarly seems to understand the ballad as a result of compaction� The thematic compression and formal precision of the ballad came to vouch for its connection to the Volk and oral traditions� Throughout the nineteenth century, this compression was often understood in terms of tidiness� Unlike the lumbering epic or the jagged novel, the ballad condensed and domesticated the great wide world. It was an efficient housekeeper, requiring little foreknowledge and little afterthought. Frequently, as articulated most clearly in Franz Lucas’s 1906 dissertation on the topic, Droste-Hülshoff’s Kleinepik is understood in terms of its “art-economic purposes [ kunstökonomischen Zwecken ]” (Lucas 32) - linking the form to the oikos � The Ballad and its Families 75 But in fact Droste-Hülshoff’s domestic scenes used the form’s compression to play off the epic, dramatic and poetic against each other in ingenious ways. And they seem to have done so to complicate the popular perception of ballads, specifically the valorization of oral transmission that lies implicit in the form. Others proceeded the same way: telling stories about the family to talk about the nature of orality, of tradition, of Geist . Droste-Hülshoff’s and Friedrich Hebbel’s balladry critiqued the tendency to understand the process by which Volksballaden survived in a population in essentially familial terms� Both poets treat family relationships as concerned with transmission (of affect, of knowledge, of identity), and understand this transmission as somehow interrelated with the transmission effected in and through the ballad. They reflect on the bonding and restrictive force of family and analogize it with the bonding and restrictive force of poetic form� In terms of its form, the ballad pretends not to have been invented� Like an heirloom of which no one can say exactly when it came into the family, it is handed down and passed on, and if its origins are supposed to be murky, the line and lineage it traces in the process of its transmission is supposed to be deeply meaningful� Ballads belong to national families and what speaks through them was understood to matter differently to the individual depending on whether they belonged to that national family or did not� In this, it strikingly resembled other kinds of inheritance the nineteenth century worried about: what, in a society increasingly dominated by bourgeois values, was the role of hereditary and traditional roles, fiefdoms and privileges? How much freedom did the individual organism have before the will of the species, the drift of its genetic material, its familial or national unconscious? The question of whether transmitting one’s individual will to future generations through testaments was a practice to be encouraged was hotly debated during the time. Broadly speaking, proponents of positive law (for instance Savigny) emphasized the importance of inheritance and inherited will, while natural law theorists tended to regard it as problematic and hubristic to want to project one’s own will past one’s own death - among the latter camp numbered Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s favorite cousin, Clemens August. In his Lehrbuch des Naturrechts oder der Rechtsphilosophie , he writes that “der Wille des Verstorbenen ist ein Grund, welchen […] niemand zu achten hat” (Droste Hülshoff 105; par. 55). Droste-Hülshoff understood herself as someone who would live on through future legacy rather than contemporary presence� In fact, she famously insisted that she did not care to have a contemporary reception: “Aber nach hundert Jahren möchte ich gelesen werden” (Droste-Hülshoff to Elise Rüdiger, July 24, 1843; cited in Sichelschmidt 256)� Inheritance, legacy and transmission would 76 Adrian Daub seem to have mattered to her quite intensely, and yet she was all too aware of the risks and strictures of such acts of bequeathing� The ballad “Vorgeschichte (Second Sight)” from 1840 / 41 picks up on this problematic of transmission: how does one impose one’s will into the distant future? And how does one deal with the past’s will reaching out into one’s own present? A Freiherr finds himself awake at night, worrying about his son, a sickly child who is the last scion of an illustrious family line� Each night he puts the boy to sleep before an immense, looming family tree “schier ohne End’”: Hat er des Kleinen Stammbaum doch Gestellt an des Lagers Ende, Nach dem Abendkusse und Segen noch Drüber brünstig zu falten die Hände; Im Monde flimmernd das Pergament Zeigt Schild an Schilder, schier ohne End‘� Eventually the Freiherr has a vision of a funeral, only to realize he is seeing his own. But the mystical vision of how powerless he is before his family’s ultimate demise leads to a moment of empowerment, an empowerment (not insignificantly for a supposedly originally oral form) through writing: “Dann hat er die Lampe still entfacht, / Und schreibt sein Testament in der Nacht�” As Ulrike Vedder writes, the poem strongly links “Sehergabe und Genealogie” (41). In “Vorgeschichte” it is a matter of a particular kind of sight, but more generally in Droste-Hülshoff we could speak of a connection between genealogy and visibility. What stories are recorded, passed on, or even tellable in the first place, has to do with genealogical and familial structures� But what Vedder does not specifically thematize is the poem’s form itself: the ballad, which manages to combine the family tree (with “Schild an Schilder, schier ohne End’”) with the premonition that inspires the writing of a will. The poem is about an ambient sense (“welch ein Gewimmel! - er muß es sehn, / Ein Gemurmel! - er muß es hören”) that eventually inspires a very precise genre of written transmission. Not only does Droste-Hülshoff’s ballad seem to contain a theory of family inheritance, it seems to allegorize the origin myth of the form of the Kunstballade itself: it transforms an uncertain, visionary, sensuous form of transmission into a carefully regulated (and written) form. It is, however, to put it mildly, an ambivalent allegory� Certainly, “Vorgeschichte (Second Sight)” is not a celebration of genealogy - if anything, the Freiherr and the weak young boy he frets over, suffer from an overabundance of past� In many ballads, balladic knowledge presents a kind of heterodox history-writing, compensating for the defects of the “official” version. In “Vorgeschichte,” by contrast, the ballad records something not being recorded, transmits The Ballad and its Families 77 something that cannot and will not be transmitted� The Freiherr ’s ghostly vision of his own death will pass down to no one; his last will and testament does� What families transmit from generation to generation emerges as a problem analogous to what the ballad transmits and how� Droste-Hülshoff’s “Die Schwestern” deals with a single generation: quite like “Goblin Market” it constructs a story of sisterhood at the exclusion of parents and children� Unlike “Goblin Market,” it foregrounds the question of who exactly is doing the constructing� “Die Schwestern” tells the story of Gertrude and Helene. In the first part, Helene has not returned from an errand in town and a half-mad Gertrude rushes madly through the forest searching for her� The second part tells of what may have been a missed encounter in town years later. In the third part, Gertrude finally finds her sister’s corpse washed up at the shore - Helene, apparently a well-known prostitute, has drowned� In the fourth part we learn that Helene’s death drove Gertrude into madness and eventual suicide; she is said to haunt the grove where the narrator, an aristocratic hunter traveling with his Bursche , comes to stalk his prey� Or at least, that is the story the reader is eventually led toward� For Droste- Hülshoff’s poem largely mimics Gertrude’s cognitive processes - her desperate, confused attempts to bring into some sort of order a mad, incomprehensible rush of events, which are mimicked in the poem’s breathless and episodic narration� But this desire for order is double-edged: like Gertrude, the reader is invited to construct meaning and coherence, and seduced into forgetting that these are constructions. Especially when the poem’s narrator finally enters the scene, the question of what, if any, legitimacy these shopworn narrative constructions possess is thrust to the forefront of the poem� “Die Schwestern” is rife with melodramatic plot points, but again and again the reader is led to doubt that those plots accurately describe what is going on� The poem is rife, even overripe, with Gothic and melodramatic trappings, from rocky outcroppings to dark forests. In the first section of the poem a group of Knechte at the local mill listen to the “irre Gespenst im Tanne,” a ghost that turns out to be Gertrude - very much alive, very much sane, and very much in need of their aid� She will end up mad and a ghost, of course, but at this moment Gertrude is simply a desperate woman in a desperate situation� It is a male gaze, as secure as it is blinkered, that turns her into a trope, and thus into a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is, indeed, worth noting that to claim, as I have just done, that in the end Gertrude will conform to their melodramatic projection, that is to say will wind up both crazy and spectral, means to once again credit a male gaze with an objectivity that elsewhere in the poem it manifestly does not possess� It is a gaggle of male sailors who identify dead Helene (bulging with lake water) as a local 78 Adrian Daub prostitute; it is our male narrator who claims that Gertrude went mad, and who claims that she haunts these woods. Why would we believe them? It is easy to think of “Die Schwestern” as a story of a family undone by the disappearance of paternal authority - Helene has been entrusted to Gertrude by her dying mother, and while there is no father in the picture, Gertrude early on invokes “Vater unser.” Neither real nor spiritual parents offer succor to the sisters and so their sisterhood comes to naught� But this, too, appears to be an interpretation of the facts, rather than a fact in its own right� The paternalistic reading of “Die Schwestern” constitutes itself a paternalistic imposition of meaning on facts that may well not support it� The most important projection, however, has long slipped past us by the time we become suspicious� It is almost at the end of this lengthy poem that the narrator makes the somewhat startling admission that “Die Schwestern” of the title may be anything but. Why did one break down at the sight of the other’s corpse? The reader has been led to assume that their connection is somehow established or explained, but it turns out their relationship lingers only as a suspicion: “Ob ihres Blutes? man wußte es nicht! / Kein Fragen löste das Schweigen. The ballad can do what no “Fragen” is able to accomplish: it fills the silence that surrounds, that in some sense constitutes the sisters’ sisterhood. That would put “Die Schwestern” in a whole class of nineteenth-century poems that celebrate poetry’s ability to speak for things that the prose of the world has no access to, such as the nocturnal vision behind the prosaic writing of the will in “Vorgeschichte�” But that would require that the narrator knows more than the “man” who doesn’t know whether Gertrude and Helene are sisters. In “Vorgeschichte” this seems likely: omniscient balladic narration transcends both the objective account of family (the family tree and the will) and the subjective experience of it. But in “Die Schwestern,” Droste-Hülshoff pointedly refuses this gesture: at the very moment when poetry as such could take over for embodied narration, she instead insists on filling us in on who is narrating, and who has been narrating all along. Who then is narrating the poem and how does he know the story, specifically how does he know the sisters are sisters? This situation foregrounds the problem of narrative technique in Droste- Hülshoff’s ballad more generally: We could decide that the title knows something that the poem does not. Could it be that the different parts of the poem are focalized through a polyphony of poetic speakers? This would seem to violate important formal requirements in a poem, which tend to ask us to suppose a single speaking subjectivity behind the poetic speech� And in the case of the ballad, there is an additional contextual requirement: We are supposed to be able to imagine a lone bard, ancient minstrel, or a carnival barker telling the story, which means it has to be focalized through a personalized voice� “Die Schwest- The Ballad and its Families 79 ern” foregrounds this problem by actually staging the scene of performance: the second part begins with a market day in town, with town criers, a hurdygurdy man, and even a Hanswurst � This is, in other words, the world into which the ballad imaginatively inserts itself, of which it pretends to be a surviving sediment. The poem reminds us poetologically: ’My genre tells you that I am supposed to issue from a specific situation; I am to be imagined emitting from a specific speaker and to be received by a situated audience.’ The narrator of “Die Schwestern” is, if anything, far more intrusive than is necessary for a ballad� The identical opening and closing lines, statements like “mich dünkt, wir müssen sie kennen,” foreground the fact that here one person is speaking to another person, or more likely persons, and that both groups remain identical from stanza to stanza. When the narrator does appear in the poem, he does so with far more dramatic definition than the usual ballad-speaker: he is a he, for one, since we meet him hunting with a rifle; he is wealthy, wealthy enough to have a manservant, and he is from the same area as the sisters� This raises the problem of how this person can know what he knows. Why does he narrate what he narrates? Is sisterhood his creation? The poem asks about knowing at the end: how did “man” know these two women are sisters? How do the poem’s speaker and the poem’s audience know this? The answer seems to be: the poem has worked quite hard to manufacture that impression� Even the moment of recognition, Gertrude leaning over the dead Helene, is engineered for the benefit of an outside gaze (“ Als habe sie etwas gefunden”), and is engineered by poetic language itself: the third section of the ballad begins with a prolonged, and rather forced, reflection on eyes, then moves on to describe the “Leich mit dem Auge des Stieres,” and then has that gaze transmit itself to Gertrude (“so stier und bohrend verweht ihr Blick”). In no case is the recourse to eyes truly necessary, none of these metaphors sit very comfortably in this section� Our balladic narrator is manipulating the dials, creating echoes where properly there are none, and Droste-Hülshoff is careful to have him leave fingerprints doing so. But if knowledge is always at the intersection of projection and datum, where does sisterhood fall? What sort of knowledge is it and what sort of knowledge (or gaze) produces it? If the poem simply posits it, why does it posit it at all? It would be easy to read the ballad as salvaging what the world of men doesn’t and cannot know - namely that Gertrude and Helene are long-separated sisters� But the gendered emphasis on gazing and knowledge makes it clear that sisterhood may well be a male projection - two women come to die in horrible but predictable ways, and a male gaze constructs the melodramatic structure around their deaths� 80 Adrian Daub Why is this projection necessary? Is it simply that melodrama makes for good, morbid entertainment for a wealthy hunter and others like him? The poem doesn’t say, but its paratextual arrangements (title, section breaks, etc.) suggest that constructing the sisterhood-narrative matters immensely to the poem. It needs this to be true, even if it perhaps isn’t. It’s easy to say that the ballad form speaks for the dispossessed, for those who don’t usually get to narrate their own stories (the apprentice rather than the sorcerer), but “Die Schwestern” submits the ballad’s Standesklausel to rather strenuous scrutiny� Just as plausible as the reading that the poem protects a heterodox counter-history is the reading that the poem imposes a masculinist fantasy of common tropes on the relationship between two women� This ambiguity in how we are to interpret the poem’s very telling of its story places particular emphasis on the repeated line that opens and closes the poem� It is a bit of Naturlyrik and first describes the scene of Helene’s disappearance and concludes the poem by depicting the desolate landscape that inspires the narrator to comprehend (or invent) the earlier scene: “Sacht pochet der Käfer im morschen Schrein, / Der Mond steht über den Fichten�” The poem ends with its own inspiration� And the nature of this inspiration is precisely the question: is nature suggesting something to our narrator, something that society has perhaps repressed? Or does nature simply function here as the instigator for a melodramatic flight of fancy? This tethers the specific question of what it means that the line is repeated in each of the poem’s two worlds to another, much broader one: What does it mean that ballads are repeated? Friedrich Hebbel raises just this question in the ballad “Vater und Sohn�” For decades the ballad form had contained the dream of a story handed down from generation to generation, passed along orally without ever requiring the brittle supplement of the printed page. Hebbel’s ballad presents that fantasy as a nightmare: he presents a shadow of violence, guilt and madness being handed from generation to generation. The ballad form recapitulates (and in a climactic moment of possible salvation comes to disrupt) a familial form of inheritance� 3. The Weight of History On October 8, 1862, Hebbel jots down a quick anecdote in his diary� It is about an ekphrastic rather than narrative poem, but a poem that likewise deals with family. His fifteen-year-old daughter Christine, also known as “Titi,” recites his poem “Drei Schwestern�” He writes that “Ich ahnte nicht, daß sie es auswendig weiß�” Hebbel then relates the following episode: The Ballad and its Families 81 Als sie an die Stelle kommt: ‘Sie weiß noch kaum, daß sie ein Mädchen ist’, versteckt sie sich hinter ihrer Mutter und fängt herzlich zu lachen an� Ich dachte, sie fühle den Bezug auf sich selbst und verrathe das naiver Weise durch ihr Lachen; es war aber das Ergebnis einer noch größeren Naivetät, sie fand den Vers doch gar zu dumm, denn ‘daß sie ein Mädchen sey, werde die Jüngste doch wohl wissen’. ( Tagebücher 223) The poem in question is a description of Palma Vecchio’s painting of three sisters. It, like Droste-Hülshoff’s “Die Schwestern,” is a poem about the mysteries of sisterhood. But unlike Droste-Hülshoff, and perhaps not unlike her narrator, Hebbel fills in the mysteries by overinterpreting. Palma Vecchio’s painting is subtle, and while it is strange to treat a poem like a piece of art criticism, the poem almost asks its readers to do so: how much of the poem’s psychological detail, how much of its life philosophy, how much of its moralizing, can we really make out in Palma Vecchio’s painting? Der einen zuckt es schmerzlich um den Mund, Sie trug den Kranz der Schönheit, voll und rund, Doch glitt er schneller, als sie’s je geglaubt, Hinüber auf der Nächsten schlichtes Haupt, Und still empfindet sie die Macht der Zeit Im ersten Schauer der Vergänglichkeit� Hebbel opens the poem by acknowledging that every emotion ascribed to the three young women is in fact a male projection, and a projection born out of a kind of paternalistic impulse� For the story the painting tells the poetic I - that the three girls are starting to cope with adulthood, with the inevitable fading of youth - is an emphatically sentimental one� The three girls are being described in all the physical expressions of naiveté popular at mid-century: Drei Schwestern sind’s, von sanftem Reiz umstrahlt, Ihr eigner Vater hat sie uns gemalt, Sich ähnlich an Gestalt und an Gesicht, Sogar an Augen, nur an Mienen nicht, Und lieblicher hab’ ich den Horentanz Noch nie erblickt in seinem Zauberglanz� Note that Hebbel ascribes to his own daughter a similar naiveté: He is surprised she knows the poem and misunderstands her amusement� His sentimental pleasure at her naïve acceptance of her father’s description of a young girl’s fate is deeply paternalistic. And yet, there is more going on in Hebbel’s little note: For ironically, young Christine actually rewrites her father’s poem. At least the published version renders the line in question as: “Die dritte hat noch eine lange 82 Adrian Daub Frist, / Sie weiß noch kaum, daß sie kein Kind mehr ist�” Young Christine turns that into “Sie weiß noch kaum, daß sie ein Mädchen ist�” Given the age of the three women Palma Vecchio depicts, this would indeed be surprising. But perhaps that isn’t the motivation of Christine’s, conscious or unconscious, reworking of her father’s line. She ascribes to the youngest of the three women a degree of naïve grace that transcends the bounds of common sense: and she turns a story of aging and maturation seemingly accidentally focused on three women, into a story about gender� She exaggerates the extent to which these women mean only insofar as men force them to mean, either by pictorial or poetic means� And given that Palma Vecchio imposes meaning on his daughters, and “Titi” recites a poem by her father, the little episode seems to speak to the role of paternal imposition in art: how fathers force their offspring to realize meaning they have imposed on them� This is an abiding fascination of Hebbel’s balladry as well, to the point that ballads may be seen as inheritances of just the kind that Hebbel’s fathers force upon their reluctant offspring. “Vater und Sohn” is perhaps most blunt in making this link, but many of the poems collected in Hebbel’s Ausgabe Letzter Hand under the rubric “Balladen und Verwandtes” treat the passing-on that happens in ballads and the passing-on of (often undesirable) familial traits as analogous. In the poem “Aus der Kindheit,” for instance, another largely dialogue-based ballad, a mother (at the behest of an absent father) forces her son to drown the family cat, and almost ends up killing him in the bargain� Just like Droste-Hülshoff, Hebbel worries about what such passing on leaves out - unlike her, it is not with the intention of transmitting new stories from new speakers, but instead with a view to escaping from the suffocating strictures of having to transmit� “Vater und Sohn” tells a straightforward story, a gothic whodunit of sorts, but in so doing manages to reflect on and trouble the very lucidity of the story and its telling. Whatever it makes clear it indicts; and whatever it manages to make murky it tends to regard as a source of hope� A grandfather has made his grandson set fire to their house, and his son decides to put an end to the old man (“so steck ich dir heut das Ziel”) and thereby to his deviltry� This is presumably to protect the boy from following in the grandfather’s footsteps, although it turns out the father himself is following in his father’s footsteps: repeating his father’s patricide with his own father. The poem outlines a lineage consisting not just of the three generations that interact in the poem proper, but also of past and future generations� But the poem’s central gesture, that of inheritance from father to son, confuses its meaning more than it clarifies it. The poem is called “Vater und Sohn,” but the poem is really talking about three different relationships that can be characterized in that way: the grandfather and the father he slew, the grandfather and the father The Ballad and its Families 83 who wants to kill him, and lastly the father and the son who may be next in the parricidal line, but who is, as of the time of narration, simply a mute onlooker� The poem’s first stanza is all about the fire, which the little boy has set, but his father correctly surmises that this was at his grandfather’s instructions. Knowledge moves through the patriarchal line, it, like murderous madness, is an acquired trait that is passed down the family tree, as though on the Y-chromosome� “Wer hat die Kerze ins Dach gesteckt? ” Mein Sohn, dein Knabe tat’s! “Mein Arm ist zu kurz, wie hoch er ihn reckt! ” Ich hob ihn empor, er erbat’s. The story the ballad tells is concerned with the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next: the father has witnessed his grandfather’s murder, and he is about to visit the same fate upon his father� Wer fault denn dort? “Mein Vater, Sohn, Schau, eben zeigt er sich! ” Wem droht der Schatten? “Wem sollt er drohn? Dem Mörder, und das bin ich! ” The realization that his son might see the same, which may beget an identical development down the generations, eventually stays his hand� Der Mond ergießt sein blaues Licht Durch eine Wolke schwach, Es trifft ein blasses Kindergesicht, Das Knäblein schlich sich nach� But the patrilinear relationship that so uncannily transmits knowledge in the poem’s story comes to undercut it in its form. That’s because the poem deliberately compounds generations upon each other, and insists on narrative repetition so obsessively that it is often hard to parse which father does what to which son at any one point. The poem delights in maneuvering different relations into adjacent positions, usually through apostrophe and repetition: “Mein Sohn, dein Knabe tat’s,” “Mein Vater, Sohn,” “Mein Sohn, mein Sohn, nicht dorthinein.” What moves the strange carousel of appellations in Hebbel’s ballad is the linguistic fact that “father” and “son” are sliding signifiers, that, in other words, everyone has a father, but that the locution “my father” only rarely means the same person in two instances. This slide works only because of the poem’s determinism; that is the fact that we cannot distinguish the various fathers and sons by their actions, because they all behave (at least at first) the same way. 84 Adrian Daub What complicates matters further is the use of quotation marks throughout. These aren’t strictly necessary in ballads, many were printed entirely without them in the nineteenth century. Hebbel includes them to offset the different dialogue partners (one person speaking in quotation marks, the other speaking in the same Schriftbild as the poem’s narrator), but in a way that again confuses rather than clarifies who is speaking. Sometimes the father’s discourse is marked by quotes and the son’s is presented as just plain poem-text, at others the reverse is true. And again, it is very difficult to determine who is screaming bloody murder, since both candidates are interchangeable in their murderousness. But the final line, the poem’s moral, brings a final respite from the churn of tainted heritage, as the father offers his father the clemency the older man never extended to his sire: “Steh auf, und steckst du auch morgen mir Die Hütte ganz in Brand, Ich setze den Stuhl in der neuen dir, Der in der alten stand.” ( Sämtliche Werke 1.6: 428-29) Just as in Droste-Hülshoff’s “Vorgeschichte,” the poem thus plays with a juxtaposition between oral tradition and written transmission, and again the poem includes its own materiality in their play. After all, the poem’s penchant for apostrophizing and repetition makes it a very tough poem to read or hear� The poem, which is about acts of oral transmission of knowledge, depends on the written form, above all the magic of the comma, which helps us make at least some sense of who is talking to whom at different moments. Writing down the events gives rise to a kind of civilizing process: fathers and sons no longer wantonly collapse into one another, we are able to prize apart the generations� The comma creates a caesura in the heedless repetition of the previous generations’ crimes and defects� This is a tradition of murder and mayhem that writing does all too well to disrupt� As different as Hebbel’s and Droste-Hülshoff’s poems are, they coincide in this distrust of the patriarchal power of orality� Balladry tends to celebrate the wayward, heterodox and anarchic power of oral literature against the alienation of the written word: it avoids the rarefied realm of high literature and reproduces Volkes Stimme . Hebbel and Droste-Hülshoff were far more suspicious of the oral� They in many respects reverse the value system that had animated balladry during its resurgence in the late eighteenth century: Better to write a testament, to set down a comma, than to just prick up your ears and listen obediently to a poetic heirloom� The written word is less beholden to the inherited prerogative of whoever gets to speak� Volkes Stimme to them spoke not truth to power, but spoke rather power, the power of tradition, the force of habit, the The Ballad and its Families 85 inertia of patriarchy� They are leery of the force of inherited convention and the convention of inheritance� Sisterhood becomes important to the ballad’s family politics as an index of that of which the ballad seems ill-equipped to speak: there is something so private about sisterhood in Rossetti, in Droste-Hülshoff, in Hebbel that it resists transmission without damage. When one speaks it, one speaks it in the language of the father, as pèreversion� For if balladic gestures, like the didactic turn “Goblin Market” takes seemingly almost against its own better judgment, appear to these three poets as part of a tainted heritage, an index of how form prejudices content, this forces them into something of a bind� The reason Christina Rossetti gives her long poem the ending that she does is to be able to transport the lilting, fruit-soaked juice in the allegedly purifying goblet of form� To demand that the ballad speak of that of which it cannot speak, would be to ask it to pull itself out of the bog by its own hair - and that only happens in fairy tales, or perhaps ballads� Works Cited Casey, Janet Galligani. “The Potential of Sisterhood: Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market,” Victorian Poetry 29.1 (1991): 63-78. Droste Hülshoff, Clemens August von. Lehrbuch des Naturrechtes oder der Rechtsphilosophie � Marcus, 1831� Hebbel, Friedrich� Tagebücher � Berlin: Behr, 1904� Hebbel, Friedrich� “Vater und Sohn�” Sämtliche Werke (Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe) � Berlin: Behr, 1904� Kittler, Friedrich� Discourse Networks 1800 / 1900 � Stanford, CA : Stanford UP , 1992� Kristeva, Julia� The Revolution in Poetic Language � New York: Columbia UP , 1984� Lucas, Franz� Zur Balladentechnik der Annette von Droste-Hülshoff � Münster: Regensberg, 1906� Norton, Caroline. “‘An Angel in the House’ and ‘The Goblin Market.’” MacMillan’s Magazine 8 (1863): 398-401. Rappoport, Jill� Giving Women: Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture � Oxford: Oxford UP , 2012� Rossetti, Christina� Sing Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book � New York: Macmillan, 1893� —� The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti � New York: Macmillan, 1904� Sichelschmidt, Gustav� Allein mit meinem Zauberwort: Annette von Droste-Hülshoff Droste � Düsseldorf: Droste, 1990� Weigel, Sigrid and Willer, Stefan. Erbe: Übertragungskonzepte zwischen Natur und Kultur � Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013� Welter, Nancy. “Women Alone: Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ and Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market.’” Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre � Ed� Kimberly Harrison and Richard Fantina� Columbus, OH : Ohio State UP , 2006�