Humor and Irony in Annette von Droste-Hulshoff's "Heidebilder"-Cycle

Abstract

On the face of it, this statement seems to justify the generally accepted image of Droste as an essentially serious poet whose occasional flights of humor are of little or no consequence. This image, resulting from the combined agency of historical circumstance and critical prejudice, has remained virtually unchanged in spite of recent attempts to do justice to structures found in some of her poetic works.2 It is important to realize that in the comment cited above, Droste does not attest to her own lack of humor but to her deliberate restraint in its poetic exploration on account of the limitations imposed on a woman writer by decorum and convention. I have discussed elsewhere the manifestations of Droste's ever-creative humorous vein in her letters to family and friends, and have suggested the need for a reevaluation of the nature and role of elements in her entire oeuvre.3 The present paper offers my first contribution to this comprehensive task. Wolfgang Kayser's important and illuminating discussion of Sprachform und Redeform in Annette von Droste-Htilshoff's (1940)4 seems to have dazzled subsequent commentators into a peculiar blindness to the function and structural significance of clearly perceived elements within this much-touted poetic cycle. Kayser has argued that the characteristic attitude (Haltung) informing the Heidebilder, as also Droste's other works, is one of intellectual impotence (geistige Ohnmacht) vis-a-vis an inscrutable reality (236), giving rise to an Urtiimlichkeit eines Sprechens, das zu seiner Wirklichkeit noch keinen Abstand gefunden hat (241). Nouns without an article, deverbative nouns (notably infinitives and collective coinages), unusual genitive combinations, participial constructions, paratactic sentence formation, apposition, asyndeton, anacoluthon these are the most salient features of Annette's poetic style that combine to bring about its distinctive prerational character. So befinden sich die Heidebilder gleichsam noch in einem dichterischen Urzustand vor aller entschiedener Formung (241). In fairness to this gebildete und geistig hochstehende Frau (241) Kayser points out that the observed primal nature of her poetic language is the product of a deliberate fashioning process (236). However, focusing on the various aspects of this one Redeart he has set out to expose, he does not pay comparable attention to other modes of speaking whose presence he is obliged to acknowledge but whose significance he plays down before any serious examination: Es gibt Stellen, in denen andere Readearten einbrechen, ohne dem Beschreiben eingeordnet zu werden (241). This, it seems, has to do with the perception of Annette von Droste-Huilshoff as an utterly unsmiling poeta perception Kayser shares with other commentators. W~ihrend Goethe