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

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments According to Melanie Klein, Sigmund Freud’s early feminist rival, cultural production is a work of reparation oªered to the maternal breast. Undoubtedly there is a significant relation between Missing the Breast and my own “breast-feeding” experience, however irretrievable the latter. My mother’s minute documentation of my first year of life includes tantalizing details, but I detect no resonance in memory. Still, throughout the writing of this book, which coincided with the birth of my two sons, I have had the distinct feeling of making amends—not to my mother, directly, but to the breast in the sense elaborated at length in my study. Gratitude is one of the forms reparation takes, and I am very happy to grasp the occasion to thank many people who played a role in the realization of this project and to thank as well the institutions that made it possible. Let me begin by thanking the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for a fellowship that enabled me to spend 1995–1996 conducting research at the University of Würzburg. In Würzburg I had the pleasure of being associated with Helmut Pfotenhauer and his assistants vii (Thomas Wirtz and Christian Begemann, foremost among them) and graduate students in the Institut für deutsche Philologie.When Helmut invited me to teach a course, I accepted and would now like to remember a group of some forty German and international students who took my seminar titled “Mutter/Sprache,” in which I first tried out a number of the readings included here. Back in the United States, I enjoyed the generous support of the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, in the form of two administrative leaves and a sabbatical . Deans Sam Preston, Rebecca Bushnell, and Joe Farrell have been particularly helpful in making it possible for me to balance the pleasures and obligations of teaching, administration, research, and family. I also owe a great debt of gratitude to my wonderful colleagues and students in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures. Many people took an interest in my project, read early versions of chapters or the entire manuscript, discussed specific points, invited me to their universities, provided a forum for trying out ideas, and generally supported me in my endeavor. I’d like to single out a few, knowing full well that many others also contributed: Jane Brown, Horst Daemmrich , Christina Frei, Rick Gray, Susan Gustafson,Werner Hamacher, Maria Hendrix, Alice Kuzniar, Sue Lanser, Larry Lloyd, Matuschka, Catriona MacLeod, Tina Muller, Karin Schutjer, Bob Miller-Sobel, Sally Poor, Sondra Richter, Londa Schiebinger, Jerry Singerman, Frank Trommler, LindaWarner,StevenWarner,LilianeWeissberg,ChristopherWild,Sabine Wilke, and Daniel Wilson. One person must be named in particular: Matthew Kalamar, my tireless and reliable research assistant, who learned far more about the breast than he ever hoped to. Parts of Fantasies of the Breast were published in journals and anthologies , and I gratefully acknowledge the kind permission of publishers and editors to incorporate them into my book. “Ammenmärchen: Wieland , La Roche und die weibliche Brust,” in Körper, Diskurse, Praktiken: Zur Semiotik und Lektüre von Körpern in der Moderne, ed. Sabine Wilke and Brigitte Prutti (Dresden: Synchron, 2003), includes sections that are now in chapters 2, 5, and 6. Sections of chapter 7 were first published as “Heinse, Sexualität und Öªentlichkeit” in Ein Mann von großer Seele ist sich selbst genug: Wilhelm Heinse (1746–1803), ed. Gert Theile (Munich: Fink, 1997). Parts of chapter 5 and chapter 7 are from “Wieland viii and the Homoerotics of Reading” in Outing Goethe and His Age, ed. Alice Kuzniar (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996; © 1996 by the Board of Trustees of Leland Stanford Jr. University, by permission of Stanford University Press), an essay that was first published in German as “Erektionen machen’: Wieland und die Erotik der weiblichen Physiognomie” in Geschichten der Physiognomik: Text-Bild-Wissen, ed Rüdiger Campe and Manfred Schneider (Freiburg: Rombach Verlag, 1996). Chapter 3 is essentially a revision of “Wet-Nursing, Onanism, and the Sexuality of the Breast in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” first published in The Journal of the History of Sexuality 7 (1996). And, finally, “Wieland and the Phallic Breast,” published in a special issue of German Life and Letters 52 (1999), edited by Nick Saul, found its way into chapter 4. In chapter 8, I quote “Archaic Torso of Apollo” in its entirety from Translations from the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke by Rainer...