ABSTRACT

He makes a point of insulting both her sex and her nationality, a characteristic flourish in a work in which women and England are repeated targets of his mocking wit and sardonic abuse. In fact he is less savage in his dismissal of her than he is in his assault on writers whom she admired, such as Rousseau and George Sand. The former is excoriated as an ‘idealist and rabble in one person … sick with unbridled vanity and unbridled self-contempt’ (552-3), and the latter as a ‘fertile writing-cow’ (516). The ‘literary female’ as a type is a particular object of his contempt: he sees her as haunted by having to choose between writing books and having children, implying that the proper function of women is simply biological. Yet amid the bigotry and abuse there are quieter moments of good sense, as when he praises Goethe – the last German he can revere – for his realism, his openness and his pursuit of wholeness. The stature of Goethe is such that he transcends the limitations of his nationality and becomes for Nietzsche ‘not a German event but a European one’ (553). The only other German writer, apart from philosophers, on whom he bestows the accolade ‘European’ is Heinrich Heine, and the fact that he singles out the two German writers George Eliot admired enough to write about in British journals is both testimony to the European quality he asserts and, at the same time, an indication of some affinities between his thinking and hers that he would doubtless never have acknowledged.2