Missing the Breast: Gender, Fantasy, and the Body in the German Enlightenment

7 / The Breast in Ruins: Heinrich von Kleist and the Language of the Breast

7 / The Breast in Ruins Heinrich von Kleist and the Language of the Breast Given the focus of this study, the turn to Heinrich von Kleist at this point is all but inevitable. We’ve already introduced him as Wieland’s virtual godson, a relationship that points to a submerged a‹nity in terms of breast fantasies and other fantasies of cannibalistic incorporation,1 and that redounds to Wieland’s credit, especially in view of the fact that Weimar’s more famous resident, Goethe, whom Kleist particularly wooed, was appalled by the products of Kleist’s imagination and kept him at a distance. What makes Kleist irresistible for our purposes is his Penthesilea, a play about the tragic encounter between an Amazon queen and the Greek hero Achilles. If Wieland and Huber allow for the subtle exploration of the meaning of the phallic breast, Kleist displays it in all its ambivalent and aggressive glory. And if La Roche and Huber permit a glimpse of the possibility of power relations that are not based on “having” or “being” the phallus but on “having” the breast, Kleist aªords us a sustained and even systematic view of the complementary position of “being” the breast. Kleist’s play operates in a post-Heinsian 216 world, that is, a world in which the phallus as signifier has been deprivileged and the breast rules. It goes without saying that language itself will be aªected by these radical transformations. Kleist stretches the resources of metaphor beyond the limit, to the point where metaphor is literalized and thus assumes the properties of metonymy. Achilles’ desperatequestion—“Thenitistrue,thismonstroustalewe’veheard?”2— is another way of asking if the Amazon is a metaphor for something else (for example, female emancipation from patriarchy), that is, the literary figure of a wish or threat, or something unexpectedly real (a mutilated breast, a breast in ruins) that establishes a new rule. Amazon Fictions Any engagement with the idea of the Amazon necessarily involves us in etymology. Who were the Amazons? Did they ever exist? And if they did exist, did they really perform the ritual operation that the etymology of their name seems to imply? Since Herodotus’s time, the word Amazon has traditionally been understood to consist of the alpha privative and the Greek word for breast: a-mazos, the breast that is not. The name itself seems to contain the dialectic of lack and abundance that we have identified as the basic structure of the German fantasy of the breast. The breast that is missing is the gratifying and compliant breast. As the missing breast, the Amazon breast is the bad breast in its most extreme form, a point that is not di‹cult to grasp: not only the refusing breast, the breast of which the infant is deprived, but also the militant and persecuting breast. Kleist will latch on to this etymological tradition for his representation of the Amazons. There are alternative etymological traditions not only for explaining the name of the Amazons but also for identifying who they were. As Josine Blok points out, the etymology of the word Amazon is a complicated aªair, not only because of conflicting traditions but also because of the desires motivating the etymologies and the fantasies behind them.3 A Byzantine scholar, for example, records both the breast-related etymology and a variant on the alpha privative: “they did not eat bread [maza], but tortoises, lizards and snakes.”4 The legend of St. Agatha as well as the oral association would allow us to link these etymologies, but the 217 the breast in ruins important point, evidently, is the strangeness of the Amazons’ diet. Other etymologies avoid the alpha privative and the idea of lack. In one case, the name is said to derive from Amazo, a priestess of Artemis. More interesting are the Hellenistic etymologies that turn on the Greek preposition ama, meaning “together with.” Two such etymologies have been oªered in competition with the privative variety: ama-zoosai and ama-zonais. As Blok argues, the avoidance of the privative results in the depiction of the Amazons as a people distinguished in a positive way. They no longer lack something , but they possess something special—a community of their own. This is expressed in the term [ . . . ] “girdle,” whether as [zoostèr] indicating the internal hierarchy of this people, or as [zoonè] emphasizing the physical femininity of the Amazons. In other words, in the case of the...