Isabella of Egypt (original: Isabella von Ägypten) was written by Ludwig Joachim von Arnim and first appeared in Vier Novellen (1812). The German von Arnim (1781-1831) was one of the leaders of the Heidelberg Romantic school, in the second generation of German Romantics. He was a writer and familiar of Goethe, Ludwig Tieck, Heinrich von Kleist, and the Brothers Grimm. Arnim today is best remembered for his collection of folk songs, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1805-6), although Isabella of Egypt has become a canonical work of German Romanticism. Isabella of Egypt is more interesting in its ideas and conception than in its execution.

Isabella of Egypt is about Bella, a poor Romany girl whose father, Duke Michael, was the leader of the Romany until he was killed. While mourning for him Bella finds a book of magic that teaches her how to obtain a mandrake root and then harvest it and grow it so that it will gain life–a living mandrake root can find any amount of hidden treasure. Before Bella can do that, however, she has to fool Prince Charles (later King Charles V of Spain), who on a bet stays the night in the house in which Bella is hiding. (She is a Romany and would have to flee if she were discovered). The house is reputed to be haunted, and Charles is trying to show some bravery by staying the night there. But Bella slips into bed next to him and kisses him while he sleeps. This wakes him up. He is terrified of her and runs away, but he has also fallen in love with her. She falls in love with him as well. Bella waits for the right weather and then goes mandrake harvesting, a complicated and dangerous ritual. Her heart is pure, however, and she survives the harvesting and gets the mandrake. She instantly falls in love with the mandrake root (maternally rather than romantically). She cares for it, feeds it, and gives a mouth and two sets of eyes, one in the back of its head. It becomes fully grown quickly and is mischievous and disobedient, but it also finds treasure for Bella. However, Braka, the malicious old Romany woman who acts as Bella’s aunt, tells Bella and the mandrake (which calls itself “Cornelius Nepos” after Braka’s brother-in-law) the story of the Bearskinner, a soldier who in the time of Sigismund made a deal with the devil deal with a ghost. Recounting the story summons the Bearskinner, who agrees to become a servant to Cornelius. The group sells the treasure Cornelius has found, buys good clothing, and then, all dressed up, goes into the city. Bella is taught the proper ways of society by tutors and governesses and Cornelius enters school. Cornelius meets the Archduke and announces that he is going to marry Bella. Charles, hearing this, decides that he must meet Bella. On being informed of Charles’ desire to meet Bella, Braka advises Bella to seduce Charles and then tell him she loves him. Bella is hesitant but agrees to do as Braka says. When the time of the assignation occurs Charles is initially too nervous to do anything, and then a drunken Cornelius interrupts matters. Bella goes forward with the plan, but backs down before anything can happen and tells Charles everything. Charles, angry at being lied to, leaves. Charles is jealous of Cornelius for marrying Bella, and when his friend Cenrio tells him about golems Charles orders a golem made to look like Bella. Golem Bella is Bella’s physical duplicate, but is a calculating minx, and pretends to be the real Bella. Golem Bella runs away with Cornelius, who Charles has appointed as his minister of finance due to Cornelius’ ability to find money. Bella, meanwhile, takes up with Charles. Their love affair goes through various twists and turns before Bella, realizing that Charles will never marry her, leaves. Charles is thus deprived, through his own actions and his greed, of bringing about a new golden age for Europe as well as for himself. Had he followed his heart and married Bella, he would have been rapturously happy, and their happiness would have transformed Europe. Golem Bella is reduced to dust when her name is erased (the traditional way to destroy a golem). Braka dies. Cornelius, deprived of Bella, is taken by a demon which his rage summons up and which he can’t control. The Bearskinner is eventually allowed to rest. And Bella, who gives birth to Charles’ son “Selrahc,” is faithful to Charles from afar until the day she dies.

Isabella of Egypt is viewed by critics as an important work in the German Romantic tradition. Arnim knew many of the important figures in the movement, and even more than most other Romantics he delighted in making his work difficult, with complex and confusing plots, an “artless” mixture of fantasy and reality and folk culture and intellectual learning.

It displays humor, some irony, and a distinctly nonrational tinge—so distinct in fact that the unwary reader is quickly disoriented. The present and the past, the natural and the supernatural, the mimetic and the imaginative flow into one another free of authorial markers. “Romantic” elements—such as ghosts, the occult, the night, mistaken identity, disguises—abound along with the grotesque and the fantastic.¹

Like the other Romantics Arnim sought and achieved a feel of conversational prose, with repetitions, interruptions, and discursions, while also using rhetorical devices to call attention to his art. Arnim succeeded in these goals, which has the effect of making Isabella of Egypt difficult to enjoy. This was deliberate on Arnim’s part; he took pride in his fiction being “like the Kingdom of Heaven: only the few may enter.”²

So Isabella of Egypt is not to be read for enjoyment. It is disjointedly episodic, obtuse and distancing in tone. Its attitude toward sex is smirking. The novella has little regard for historical accuracy, something Arnim thought overrated. (His response to criticisms of his inaccuracies was that he was aiming for a mythical or poetic truth which transcended mere fact).³

The novella regrettably displays Arnim’s antisemitism. The antisemitism of the Romantic movement has traditionally been difficult for scholars to grapple with because of its

inconsistency and ambivalence, a simultaneous attraction to, and revulsion from, Jews and Judaism…on the one hand, the notion of Jewish mutability informed both Christian calls for conversion and the Enlightenment idea of human perfectibility, with its corollary model that Jews are especially in need of improvement. On the other hand, this model of transformation conflicted with the historically new sense of Jewish physical, and therefore immutable, difference. Indeed, scholars tend to regard Romantic antisemitism as a transitional phenomenon on the route from traditional Christian anti-Judaism to modern antisemitism or, alternately, from the 18^th-century beginnings of Jewish emancipation to the 19^th-century backlash against it.⁴

Arnim’s own antisemitism springs from the antisemitism of the German Romantics. Some critics feel that his antisemitism has either been overblown or is altogether a false charge, but in fact “Arnim’s work offers an example of how strategies commonly thought to temper romantic antisemitism—including textual ambiguity, religious syncretism, and literary self-reflexivity—may become ideologically charged and redeployed.”⁵

Isabella of Egypt has some other notable aspects. One of Arnim’s goals, similar to what his contemporaries were doing, was to combine disparate material, creating a fusion of motifs from very different sources. In Isabella this results in the combination of folklore with historical fact. Arnim’s use of folklore is accurate—which is to be expected, given his friendship with the Grimm Brothers and the assistance he gave them in gathering folktales. At some moments in the novella this produces surprising results: the moment when the Bearskinner first returns from the dead retains the power to chill the reader. At other moments the use of folklore is more complicated. The figure of the artificial bride becomes not the Romantic personification of the sublime and the divine, but something quite different:

The Romantic beloved is usually a sublime figure of womanhood, her carnal aspect transformed into an artistic ideal…in the Venus statues, dolls and automata of Arnim, Hoffmann and Eichendorff, the divine tips over into the monstrous, the spiritual becomes sexual, and life once intensified by art becomes an enervated mechanism of death. Arnim goes so far as to make this feature of his androids central to his work. For him, the artificial creature represents not the sublime bur rather the earthly being shorn of spirituality….in [Isabella of Egypt’s] substitution of the mortal for the divine, Arnim seeks to undermine the Romantic intensification of life represented by the artificial bride in Brentano and Tieck. Thus, the creation of Arnim’s Golem is linked less to the Romantic inspiration that transcends borders than to its opposite: envy, jealousy, vengeance and betrayal.⁶

Especially interesting is the use of the Golem as Bella’s doppelgänger. The term “doppelgänger” was only coined in 1796, and was a recurring motif in Gothic fiction. But in the Gothics the doppelgänger figure was the evil side of the protagonist’s psyche, while Golem Bella anticipates the id/super ego distinction later seen in, among others, Edward Hyde (see: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde).

Isabella of Egypt is disjointed, and the flow that fiction requires for narrative coherence is often disrupted. But von Arnim’s choice to make the novel disjointed was a deliberate one and has to be evaluated on those terms. Von Arnim’s choice prevents the reader from becoming involved in the story and leads the reader to observe and even appreciate the novel’s individual elements. The Surrealists found this disjointedness fascinating, and André Breton thought well enough of Isabella to translate it into French.

Ironic texts of the Romantics, such as Achim von Arnim's Isabella von Ägypten (Isabella of Egypt) or Heinrich von Kleist's Der Zweikampf (The Duel), are often based on historical events recorded in partially factual accounts, but they contest and question the facticity of such events and expose the uncertainties of historical memory by the use of various narrative framing devices and multiple endings. In this way, they raise the ambiguities of human stories and histories to a self-reflexive level where they can be lived with effectively.⁷

Isabella of Egypt is a carefully crafted novella in which irony, disjointedness, and narrative incoherence are deployed to produce various effects. We can admire Arnim’s skill in using these things while admitting that they detract from the enjoyment of the novel.

Print: Ludwig Achim von Arnim, Ludwig Achim von Arnim's Novellas of 1812 : Isabella of Egypt, Melück Maria Blainville, the three loving sisters and the lucky dyer, Angelika the Genoese and Cosmus the tightrope-walker. Lewiston, NY: E. Mellon Press, 1997.

¹ Sara Friedrichsmeyer, “Romantic Nationalism: Achim von Arnim’s Gypsy Princess Isabella,” in Patricia Herminghouse and Magda Mueller, ed., Gender and Germanness: Cultural Productions of Nation (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1997), 51.

² Bruce Duncan, “Introduction,” in Bruce Duncan, ed, Ludwig von Arnim’s Novellas of 1812 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997), viii.

³ Bruce Duncan, “Achim von Arnim 1781-1831,” in Matthias Konzett, ed., Encyclopedia of German Literature, first edition (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000), 28.

⁴ Katja Garloff, “Figures of Love in Romantic Antisemitism: Achim von Arnim,” The German Quarterly 80, no. 4 (Fall, 2007): 427-428.

⁵ Garloff, “Figures of Love,” 429.

⁶ Michael Andermatt, “Artificial life and Romantic brides,” in Gerald Gillespie, Manfred Engel, and Bernard Dieterle, eds., Romantic Prose Fiction (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 2008), 209.

⁷ Azade Seyhan, “Allegory as the Trope of Memory: Registers of Cultural Time in Schlegel and Novalis,” in John Whitman, ed., Interpretation and Allegory: Antiquity to the Modern Period (Boston: Brill, 2000), 447.