ABSTRACT
The idea that Emily Dickinson must have selected both Günderode and Bettine von Arnim as “her own society” (F409) occurred to me at the 1999 ICR Conference held at Indiana University, when I heard Kari Lokke apply Arnim's term “floating religion” to George Sand. 1 I then suggested to Kari that Dickinson's vision of poetry as an “unobtrusive Mass” (F895) may have taken its clue from Arnim's “Schwebe-Religion.” 2 This was the beginning of our dialogue and of my acquaintance with Arnim's Günderode. I have since realized that both writers created new frameworks to test, challenge and transform the conceptions of love and death prevalent in their cultures. 3 Moreover, for both writers, none of the then existing literary genres, be it the epistolary novel à la Werther, the bourgeois novel (in the case of Bettine), the elegy, the epitaph, or the Gothic ballad (in the case of Dickinson) would have adequately rendered this new conceptualization of Liebestod. Significantly, not only did both choose death—the most threatening event to individuality—as a central 192shaping force in their works, but each created a hybrid form flexible enough to engage the reader as a subject. Although a full account of these transformations would exceed the scope of this paper, I would like to reflect on them in terms of a life that, to borrow Walter Benjamin's observation about the life of the tragic hero, indeed, “unfolds from death, which is not its end, but its form” (The Origin of German Tragic Drama).
