Love at First Sight

Abstract

E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1817 Gothic novella, Das öde Haus, and Gérard de Nerval's 1853 novella of personal reminiscence, Sylvie, may not at first sight seem obvious choices for comparison. But their presentations of deluded love disclose both the paradoxical approach to ‘marginality’ in the nineteenth century, and the inextricable conjunction of theme and form in narrative more generally. In these stories, the protagonists are given undiluted narrative authority. They are socially and literarily central figures who are drawn to the margins of society. Yet their modes of storytelling belie their pretentions of social ‘normality’. Both narrators transform the dimensions of time and space in their retrospective accounts of deluded infatuation. In so doing, they illustrate their own collusions in the creation of and identification with liminal figures. The novellas depict strikingly similar presentations of voyeurism, narcissism and fetishism, suggesting that ultimately it is the partial nature of the gaze that imbues the women with desirability. ‘Otherness’ becomes appealing as its unknowability allows the projection of the protagonists' own fantasies. As the mysteries are unveiled, desire evaporates. Marginality thus infiltrates theme and form in these novellas, while the narrators occupy an unstable space between centre and periphery.