Reading Agnon's In the Prime of Her Life in Light of Freud's Dora

Reading Agnon's In the Prime of Her Life in Light of Freud's Dora

In modern hebrew fiction, Agnon's influential novella In the Prime of Her Life establishes a plot pattern that has been so prevalent among Hebrew novels that it can be regarded as a distinctive national paradigm. This paradigm links two dysfunctional generations through the figure of a shared lover, who is carried over from one generation to the next as a troublesome inheritance. I believe that this structure has been particularly attractive to Hebrew writers during an extended period of national formation because it lends itself to the portrayal of a history-in-the-making, where a family's physical and ideological continuity are always at stake.¹

If In the Prime of Her Life indeed crowns the literary history of this recurrent plot pattern in Hebrew fiction, it is essential to investigate how and why Agnon came to develop it in the first place. What were his sources? How did he alter them to project a family microcosm onto the historiosophic preoccupations that characterize his work and that of subsequent Hebrew writers indebted to him? A reading of Agnon's novella in light of Freud's Dora allows us to address these questions, deepening our understanding of a paradigm that has been remarkably prevalent in Hebrew literature.

In his psychocultural analysis of Zeruya Shalev's Love Life, Yigal Schwartz notes that this Israeli bestseller belongs to a category of narratives that mythologize the Western woman by intermingling two common plots: the predicament of a young woman who seeks a father substitute with that story of a young woman who tries to reenact and repair her parents' love affairs.² Among this category of narratives Schwartz includes fairytales such as Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, novels by Israeli women such as Leah Goldberg, Ruth Almog, and Amalia Kahana-Carmon, Agnon's novella In the Prime of Her Life, and Freud's case study of the patient he calls "Dora."

While these examples are undoubtedly linked by cultural patterns that derive from myth and determine the image of the Western woman, their similarities also result from a genealogy of literary influence. Leading Israeli authors such as A. B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz have openly acknowledged, for instance, that In the Prime of Her Life exerts a very strong impact upon their work.³ They draw "threads of gold" from this master text, using them to weave their own stories.⁴ Did Agnon in turn draw threads from Freud's Dora to weave his story? Or are similarities on almost all levels of Agnon and Freud's texts merely coincidental?

There is no hard and fast evidence that Agnon ever read Freud's account of Dora's case. In the course of his constant self-mythologizing he denied reading Freud altogether, but in his Nobel Prize address he admitted that as a young man he had devoured every German publication that came his way, and we know that during his 1912–24 sojourn in Germany, Agnon belonged to intellectual circles where Freudian ideas were widely discussed.⁵ "Dora's Case" was first published in 1905 in a professional journal, but after three reprints in Freud's Sammlung kleiner Schriften, it was readily available by 1923, when Agnon composed In the Prime of Her Life shortly before leaving Germany.

Beyond the likelihood of direct influence, the extensive similarities between In the Prime of Her Life and Dora warrant a careful comparison that in itself deepens our appreciation of Agnon's enigmatic tale as its status in contemporary Hebrew fiction and criticism continues to rise. Such a comparison will help to answer the question of how and why Agnon developed the particular intergenerational plot structure that characterizes In the Prime of Her Life, which then replicated itself across Israeli literature.

To be sure, many of the similarities between Freud...