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IRVING'S "ADVENTURE OF THE GERMAN STUDENT' James E. Devlin Teachers Training College of Lower Saxony Goettingen, West Germany Although it remains one of Washington Irving*s more popular pieces, "Adventure of the German Student" has escaped the critical attention accorded his best known tales. Regarded usually as an eerie hoax on the basis of a trick narration that seems to dismiss any more serious meaning, or seen simply as a Gothic fancy, "Adventure of the German Student" has failed to profit from the sort of scrutiny that has proved so successful in the study of other of Irvings tales. One need be no dyed-in-the-wool Freudian to recognize the host of disguised sexual allusions that haunt the work of the "genteel" Irving and provide considerable insight into his mind. William L. Hedges wrote accurately some years ago that "an interplay of desire, fear and guilt . . . characterizes his treatment of love, sexuality, and marriage."1 Indeed, his two best-loved tales, "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," are now read as replete with sexual innuendo. The first of these, as Leslie Fiedler,2 Philip Young,3 and others have convincingly shown, expresses a desire to escape adult male sexual responsibility and the duties of marriage for a second childhood of advanced old age; of the second, it is enough to note that the devastatingIy seductive EuIa Varner owes both her being and her mentality to Faulkner's vivid recollection of Katrina Van Tassel.4 In short, Dame Van Winkle's depiction represents a disavowal of the mature woman while Katrina Van Tassel's offers an unflattering picture of a nubile maiden. In the latter tale Irving's careful diction, ostensibly used to describe a fertile farm, serves in its plosive bounty to characterize a blouse-bursting Dutch coquette whose chief delight is the torment of young men. It is hardly surprising, then, that the "Adventure of the German Student," one of the Tales of a Traveler (1824), yields considerably more meaning when viewed from a similar perspective. This brief tale, which the reader ultimately discovers is narrated at several removes, recounts, in terms anticipating Poe, the progressive psychic disintegration of young Gottfried Wolfgang, who leaves the University of Goettingen for Paris in hope of escaping "the mental malady preying upon him." The Paris of the Reign of Terror proves Studies in American Fiction93 even less accommodating than his German habitat, however. Crossing a dark, stormy Parisian square late at night in a state of perturbation, he encounters a "female figure" languishing at the foot of the guillotine whom he leads back to his rooms in the Latin Quarter near the Sorbonne . There, agreeing to be his "forever," she "sank upon his bosom." On his return home the next morning from a quest to find "more spacious apartments suitable to the change in his situation," he discovers the woman still lying on his bed and apparently dead. When the police are summoned, an officer immediately recognizes her as a victim of yesterday's guillotine. Stepping forward he undoes the black ribbon around her neck as her head falls rolling to the floor. The distracted student is shortly thereafter committed to an asylum whence his story is ultimately spread. The tale, the plot of which Irving had at second hand from Thomas Moore,5 is clearly more than a ghost story. It turns out to be, in fact, a cautionary tale warning against sexual fantasy and masturbation , with overtones and situations that will remind German readers of Frank Wedekind's pointed assault on sexual repression in the daring Fruehlings Erwachen written some fifty years later. Evidence to support such a "Freudian" reading, one might almost say "orthodox reading" in the light of recent Irving scholarship, appears at every turn. A young man, whose morbid habits of seclusion are constantly reiterated in the story, has "impaired his health" by "indulging in fanciful speculations" of an uncertain nature, but which are later revealed to involve fantasies of "female beauty." Convinced that there is "an evil influence hanging over him," he agrees to exchange his "secluded life" for a less morbid environment lest he "ensure his perdition." His "imagination" is...

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