Lucinde

Lucinde (1799)

This is a highly modern - almost postmodern - novel in terms of its open, ironic, unsystematic form and its psychological focus. The novel is subtitled ‘Bekenntnisse eines Ungeschickten’; ‘Confessions of an Improper Man’.

The main protagonists, Julius and Lucinde, are based on Friedrich Schlegel himself and Dorothea Veit, whom Schlegel met in 1797 and whom he married in 1804. The novel presents marriage as the means to self fulfillment and happiness.

The book is composed of thirteen chapters. Chapter Four is entitled ‘Allegorie von der Frechheit’; ‘Allegory of Impudence’. Here Schlegel suggests that women are more unconventional and more sensual that men:

Wie die weibliche Kleidung vor der männlichen, so hat auch der weibliche Geist vor dem männlichen den Vorzug, daß man sich da durch eine einzige kühne Kombination über alle Vorurteile der Kultur und bürgerlichen Konventionen wegsetzen und mit einemmale mitten im Stande der Unschuld und im Schoß der Natur befinden kann. An wen sollte also wohl die Rhetorik der Liebe ihre Apologie der Natur und der Unschuld richten als an alle Frauen, in deren zarten Herzen das heilige Feuer der göttlichen Wollust tief verschlossen ruht, und nie ganz verlöschen kann […]

https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/schleglf/lucinde/lucin052.html

Just as female clothing is better than male, so too the female mind has the advantage over the male mind, in so far as it can, through one bold inference, free itself of all cultural prejudices and bourgeois conventions, and in a flash it can transport itself into a state of innocence and in the lap of nature. When the rhetoric of love makes its plea for nature and innocence, what better addressee than all women, in whose delicate hearts the sacred fire of divine sensuality rests enclosed deep down, and can never be extinguished […]

Chapter Five is entitled: ‘Idylle über den Müßiggang’; ‘Idyll on Idleness’. It celebrates the divine quality of idleness:

O Müßiggang, Müßiggang! du bist die Lebensluft der Unschuld und der Begeisterung; dich atmen die Seligen, und selig ist wer dich hat und hegt, du heiliges Kleinod! einziges Fragment von Gottähnlichkeit, das uns noch aus dem Paradiese blieb.

https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/schleglf/lucinde/lucin061.html

O Idleness, Idleness! You are the life breath of innocence and inspiration. The blessed breathe you, and blessed is whoever has you and cherishes you, you sacred jewel! Single fragment of of our likeness to God still remaining to us after leaving Paradise.

The central section, Chapter Seven, is entitled ‘Lehrjahre der Männlichkeit’; ‘The apprenticeship years of manhood’. Here a man gives his wife an account of his past.

Julius’s second letter to Antonio concludes with a meditation on friendship:

Zu dieser Freundschaft ist nur fähig, wer in sich ganz ruhig wurde und in Demut die Göttlichkeit des andern zu ehren weiß.

https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/schleglf/lucinde/lucin131.html

The only person capable of this kind of friendship is someone who is completely composed, someone who knows how to honour humbly the divine nature of the other person.

English Translation

Friedrich Schlegel, “Lucinde” and the Fragments, trans. and intro. by Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971)

Further Reading

Eric A. Blackall, The Novels of the German Romantics (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1983), Chapter 2 on Schlegel and Lucinde

Sara Friedrichsmeyer, The Androgyne in Early German Romanticism: Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis and the Metaphysics of Love (Berne: Peter Lang, 1983)

Martha B. Helfer, ‘“Confessions of an Improper Man”: Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde’, in Outing Goethe and his Age, ed. by Alice A. Kuzniar (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 174-93

Further Reading in German

Barbara Becker-Cantarino, ‘Schlegels Lucinde: Zum Frauenbild der Frühromantik’, Colloquia Germanica 10 (1976-77), 128-39