ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the cultural echoes of Arnim's record of Karoline's performance of Liebestod, both in her life and art, and suggests that they made their way into Emily Dickinson's poetry through the vehicle of Arnim's book written in her honor. The ideas and associations presented here were developed in dialogue with Lilach Lachman whose contribution will emphasize Dickinson's radical departures from Arnim's Romanticism. If St. Armand is correct, then the paucity of scholarship devoted to the relationships among the writings of Karoline von Gunderode, Bettine von Arnim, and Emily Dickinson is much to be regretted. It focuses on the role that the dramatization of an address to a lover or readerfigured as a teacher or pupil-plays in the constitution of poetic self in Arnim. Instead her fear that she will never be able to fulfill her desires or accomplish her aims because of what she terms the narrow confines is drawn for my sphere of action.
