The Dagger is the Pen: Violence and Writing in Lessing's Emilia Galotti

The final scene of Lessing's Emilia Galotti presents a violent and disturbing image that has drawn critical attention since its initial performance in Braunschweig in 1772. The two most frequently referenced criticisms of Emilia's death are Matthias Claudius's statement: "Mich dünkt, ich hätte an ihrer Stelle halb nacket durch ein Heer der wollüstigsten Teufel gehen wollen, und keiner hätte es wagen sollen, mich anzurühren" (89); and Goethe's remark about Emilia's puzzling suicide: "denn entweder sei sie eine Gans, sich davor zu fürchten, oder ein Luderchen" (qtd. in Steinmetz 230; emphasis in the original). Since that time, so much attention has been devoted to this final scene that it appears the drama's essential import is framed by its final tragic tableau: a father "rescuing" his daughter's reputation by stabbing her. Yet this explicit image of cutting is not the only act of dissection, chopping, or tearing in the play. Nor is this the only scene where violent hands engender aesthetic production. This final act of cutting, of excising the female protagonist from the play, is the last act in a series of metaphorical hand-to-hand confrontations that fragment and tear female essence in order to represent her in a mosaic of the male-idealized woman. That Lessing's drama presents a theme of androcentric self-definition is not surprising. The play is particularly intriguing because it suggests that artistic production is itself a violent exchange between subject and object, artist and art, and that the female may reflect the artist's etchings with jabs of her own, scarring the artist's self-definition.

This violent exchange of scarring the "other's" flesh defines the play's aesthetic program and suggests that the play's male voice is unstable. The text's discourse, a reflection of eighteenth-century patriarchal theories surrounding aesthetics, is infused with a two-fold female component: Orsina with her flesh-ripping furies, and Emilia with her intertextual allegory of self-destruction. Orsina bestows the instrument of inscription, the dagger, and Emilia acts as a provocative muse for aesthetic production, becoming the inscribed, both character and text. Moreover, this female-infused male discourse undercuts its own attempts at self-definition: Orsina's dagger, which Odoardo thrusts into Emilia, becomes a pen that erases aesthetic creation and self-definition as it attempts to write it. The etymology of the verb reißen (signifying both tearing and marking) contributes to the double meaning of "dagger" as an instrument that marks and signifies (creates presence) by creating gaps and gashes (absence). Specifically, Odoardo's act of cutting not only marks and inscribes Emilia's flesh with a sign, a text, but also carves a negative space of absence that calls the presence of that text into question. The reading offered here argues that this final scene presents the culmination of a paradoxical theory of artistic creation that is born of violence, where acts of tearing and stabbing are synonymous with writing the play Emilia.

This figurative act of writing the play develops out of a violent discourse between male and female voices. Not surprisingly, men speak most often and with the loudest voices. Throughout the play, men strive to possess, to penetrate, and to inscribe the female body both physically and figuratively as a means of ensuring their domination and their own self-affirmation. Males wield the brush, the visual component of male aesthetics, epitomized by Conti's paintings of Orsina and Emilia. Men possess and unleash the power of the pen, a vehicle of codified, patriarchal law, exemplified by the prince's signatory mark granting a petition from a certain Emilia. And the father, Odoardo, employs the dagger, a euphemistic pen that literally stabs female flesh and metaphorically inscribes phallic desire upon the female body. Odoardo's deadly autograph kills Emilia, the character, yet it also engenders Emilia, the play, the aesthetic product of Odoardo's dagger/pen.

However, Lessing's females are not entirely docile or silent. They offer an alternative aesthetic that confronts and questions the...