ABSTRACT
In Wilhelm Jensen’s story Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fancy (1918), Norbert Hanold, a young archaeologist, gives the name of “Gradiva” to the woman with a singular gait represented on an antique bas-relief with whom he falls in love and who, he believes, perished during the volcanic eruption that destroyed Pompeii. “Gradiva,” Jensen explains, means “the girl splendid in walking,” “an epithet applied by the ancient poets solely for Mars Gradivus, the war-god going out to battle, yet to Norbert it seemed the most appropriate designation for the bearing and movement of the young girl” (Jensen, 1918, p. 5). According to Freud’s (1907 [1959]) interpre - tation, Gradiva represses the figure of Zoë, a childhood friend. More precisely, repression bears on the erotic trace left by this childhood passion, a trace that the figure of Gradiva “reawakens.” On Freud’s reading, Hanold, who used his passion for antiquity to repress his love for Zoë, falls in love
“with the marble portrait of Gradiva, behind which, owing to an un - explained resemblance, the living Zoë whom he had neglected made her influence felt” (Freud, 1907 [1959], pp. 35-36). The childhood love returns through the love of antiquity that was used to repress it, and this by means of a strange physical resemblance: Gradiva, the dead antique figure, “looks like” the contemporary Zoë, whose very name means “life” in Greek.
