THE DEATH OF DIONYSOS - ETD - Vanderbilt University

marriages that are planned in the final chapter. He then concludes, “[S]o könnte man den
Roman nicht nur als ein Buch gegen die Poesie und die Religion, sondern beinahe auch als
ein solches gegen den Eros bezeichnen” [“In the same way one might characterize the
novel not only as a book against poetry and religion, but for the most part as one against
Eros, too”] (195). Certainly, Wilhelm’s aristocratic bride-to-be is herself entirely
suspicious of a romantic or erotic love that she ascribes entirely to “‘Märchen’” [fairy
tales] (538). Her agreement to marry the agreeable burgher boy is largely due to her
supplemental character–her defining urge to match need with surplus–as her brother
Friedrich had predicted earlier. Noting his sister’s inability to appreciate particular love,
he surmised that she never would marry, “‘als bis einmal irgendwo eine Braut fehlt, und
du gibst dich alsdann nach deiner gewohnten Gutherzigkeit auch als Supplement
irgendeiner Exsistenz hin’” (565). [“‘until some bride or other is missing, and you, with
your customary generosity, will provide yourself as a supplement to someone’s
existence’” (EAB 346)]. We will see that her “generosity” is directed at individuals not so
much for their own sake as in the cause of humanity as a whole: to whose peaceful and
ambitious social progress she devotes her whole efforts.
Wilhelm’s only experience of love in an erotic sense is his affair with Mariane in
Book One, the traumatic disruption of which results in his emotional and even physical
breakdown. He does have a later flirt with a countess, but that is never consummated. At
various points in the novel he will recall his love for Mariane with elegiac longing and
even hope for a reunion and reconciliation. But that expectation will be crushed once and
for all toward the end of Book Seven, when Mariane’s former servant Barbara reveals the
awful fate that befell her mistress: after Wilhelm abandoned Mariane in the mistaken
belief that she had betrayed him. The in every sense tragic consequences of her
faithfulness to Wilhelm and their love were pregnancy and social isolation, want, illness,
death. It is a textbook instance of the ultimate middle-class nightmare. Wilhelm does
shed some tears, but he adamantly rejects Barbara’s effort to implicate him in Mariane’s
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