Brides of the Fantastic: Gautier's Le Pied De Momie and Hoffmann's Der Sandmann

Fantastic narrative is often viewed in terms of its opposition to Realism. Traditionally, the fantastic in literature has been regarded as a threat to the rational. Pierre-Georges Castex defines it as a brutal intrusion of mystery on real life;¹ Eric Rabkin sees in it a "diametric reversal of the ground rules of a narrative world;"² and Tzvetan Todorov points to its link to morbid states of the human unconscious and to its rendering of such other-worldly forces as the devil, in order to address otherwise unacceptable social and sexual taboos.³ As well as a subversion of the natural, the fantastic has been viewed as an escape from reality in the physical, social, and psychological domains. For Castex, its texts reflect the disappointment of the entire generation of the 1830s. Its authors, unable to bear their reality, turn to this genre for distraction and comfort. Thus, the fantastic, according to Castex, emerges from a more or less conscious refusal to deal with the world as it is, or even as it could be one day thanks to those who would make the effort to change it (400).

Yet the literature of the fantastic is perhaps most compelling for what it shares with Realism—that is, its preoccupation with a profoundly material world. Deborah Harter, in Bodies in Pieces: Fantastic Narrative and the Poetics of the Fragment, explores the relation of the fantastic to Realism. She is interested not so much in the differences between these two literary forms as in their similarities. Ultimately, the difference between them, as Harter suggests, lies far less in the world which they portray than in the opposing ways in which they strive to recompose it in their fiction. While the Realist novel points towards the wholeness of the world represented, fantastic narrative evokes that same world in all its partialness, even subjecting the human body to morselization.⁴ Thus, fantastic literature would be not the opposing, but rather the reflective "other" of the Realist novel. Its preoccupation with material objects, its attention to physical detail, its efforts to describe its world in the terms of the familiar, its promotion of parts as a cover for an alternative search for the whole, and its construction of the alien in the terms of a body which even in its dismembered form we know well, link fantastic narrative—"both as counterpart and as twin"—to the project of Realism (Harter 9).

Physically sensible objects abound in nineteenth-century literature of the fantastic. Many of its texts focus on objects and the relationships which humans establish to them. Théophile Gautier's 1840 tale, "Le Pied de momie" ["The Mummy's Foot"], is about a mummified foot acquired as a paperweight in a junk shop; E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1817 "Der Sandmann" ["The Sandman"] presents a mechanical doll with whom a student of Physics falls in love. Gautier's foot-paperweight can be seen as a curiosity in the sense that it is sold as a bibelot in a Parisian boutique de bric-à-brac.⁵ Yet since it is a relic of a dead woman, it is also, in a way, human. Hoffmann's doll, on the other hand, is a puppet without life which is taken for a "real" woman and elevated to a god-like status. But it is not only that these objects are female-figured: as the stories unfold, the objects actually change into "real" living women. Inanimate objects are thus endowed with autonomous life: they are, in other words, fetishized. As the fantastic emerges, the paperweight, in "Le Pied de momie," is transformed into a seductive Egyptian princess for whose hand the narrator asks in marriage in exchange for her own lost foot. In "Der Sandmann," the student proposes marriage to the pretty doll, forgetting his own fiancée over it. In this way, objects not only become "brides," but the "real" women are also simultaneously depicted as exchangeable and purchasable by men. Viewing the status of marriage as above all an economic institution in which the bride...