The Spectre-Barber

"The Spectre-Barber" (German: Stumme Liebe: "Silent Love", also translated under the titles "Dumb Love", "The Dumb Lover", and "Mute Love") is a short story, written by Johann Karl August Musäus included in his satirical retellings of collected folk stories, Volksmärchen der Deutschen (1786).[1] The story was translated into French by Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès as part of his collection of German ghost-stories Fantasmagoriana (1812), which inspired Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and John William Polidori's "The Vampyre" (1816).[2] This French translation was then partially translated into English in Tales of the Dead (1813), followed by more complete translations from the original German, such as those by Thomas Roscoe (1826), and Thomas Carlyle (1827), with a child-friendly abridged version being published in 1845.[3][4]

"The Spectre-Barber"
AuthorJohann Karl August Musäus
Original title"Stumme Liebe"
TranslatorSarah Elizabeth Utterson
Thomas Roscoe
Thomas Carlyle
LanguageGerman
Genre(s)Satirical folk story
Published inVolksmärchen der Deutschen
Publication date1786
Published in English1813

Plot
Illustration by John Fischer, engraved by Allen Robert Branston

"The Spectre-Barber" is set in sixteenth century Bremen. A wealthy merchant named Melchior dies suddenly and his son Franz (called François in Eyriès' translation, and Francis in Utterson's) inherits his father's wealth. Franz foolishly squanders his inheritance.

Franz spies a neighbour's daughter, a spinner named Meta, and falls in love with her. With an eye towards regaining fortune and earning Meta's hand in marriage, Franz sells his last possessions, purchases a horse, and sets out on a journey.

On his journey, Franz seeks shelter in a castle, despite rumours that the castle is haunted. In the middle of the night, Franz is awakened and sees the ghost of a barber sharpening his razors. The ghost motions to Franz, who complies and sits in front of the spectre. The spectre "placed the shaving-bib round his neck" and proceeds to remove all hair from Franz's head. Sensing that the spectre wants something, Franz "beckoned the phantom to seat himself in the chair", after which Franz shaves the spectre.

The ghost had been a barber during his life, whose lord would play "all sorts of malicious tricks" on strangers, including preparing a bath for guests, then having the barber shave guests beards and heads closely before suddenly throwing them out "with raillery and ridicule". One victim, a holy man, cursed the ghost to haunt the castle until someone "without being invited or constrained, shall do to you, what you have so long done to others".

In return for Franz having freed the ghost from the curse, the ghost tells Franz to return to Bremen at the Autumn equinox and wait for someone who will tell him what to do. At the appointed day, Franz meets a beggar who tells Franz of a dream in which an "angel stood at the foot of my bed" and told the beggar where to find buried treasure. Franz recognises the location from its description as a garden that had belonged to his father.

Franz re-purchases the garden and discovers the treasure. His fortune restored, Franz proposes marriage to Meta, who accepts.

Development

Johann Karl August Musäus was an early collector of German folk and fairy stories. From 1782 he began to publish his most famous work Volksmärchen der Deutschen, in which he retold these stories in a satirical style.[5] Within this, "The Spectre-Barber" belongs to the subgenre of Kunstmärchen ("art fairy-tales") which typically centres around a moral allegory, with any horrific elements only secondary to fulfilling that.[6] The tale was inspired by a story told to him about a garden in Bremen's New Town by his niece Caroline Amalie Gildemeister (née Kotzebue), with whom he corresponded frequently.[7] It was completed and published in volume four of Volksmärchen der Deutschen in 1786.[1]

Publication and translations

"The Spectre-Barber" was first published in 1786 in the fourth of the five volumes of Volksmärchen der Deutschen (1782–86).[1] Volksmärchen der Deutschen was collected into a single volume in 1842, extensively illustrated by Ludwig Richter, and has been republished many times in Germany since then.[8]

The story was translated anonymously into French by Jean-Baptiste Benoît Eyriès as "L'Amour Muet", the first story in his collection of German ghost-stories Fantasmagoriana (1812). An English translation of most of the stories from Fantasmagoriana, including "The Spectre-Barber" was published anonymously by Sarah Elizabeth Utterson as Tales of the Dead (1813). She gave this story the title "The Spectre-Barber", but abridged it "as it contained much matter relative to the loves of the hero and heroine, which in a compilation of this kind appeared rather misplaced".[9]

More complete translations from the original German were produced in the anonymous Popular Tales and Romances of the Northern Nations (as "The Spectre Barber": vol 2, 1823), Thomas Roscoe's The German Novelists (as "The Dumb Lover": vol 3, 1826), and Thomas Carlyle's German Romance (as "Dumb Love": vol 1, 1827).[4][10] J. T. Hanstein's Select Popular Tales from the German of Musaeus (1845) included the story as "Mute Love", condensed and translated for a child audience.[4]

Reception and influence

"The Spectre-Barber" (as "L'Amour Muet") was the first story in the French collection of German ghost stories Fantasmagoriana (1812). This book was read by Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John William Polidori and Claire Clairmont at the Villa Diodati in Cologny, Switzerland during 1816, the Year Without a Summer, and inspired them to write their own ghost stories. Lord Byron wrote a fragment of a novel that is considered the first modern vampire story, Polidori wrote The Vampyre (1816) based on this, and Mary Shelley went on to write Frankenstein (1818); these books went on to shape the Gothic horror genre.[2] Maximiliaan van Woudenberg examines what influence "L'Amour Muet" had on Frankenstein, and points out the "bedside apparition" motif occurs here as well as in several other of the Fantasmagoriana stories. He also comments on the "silent love" between Franz and Meta, which is paralleled by Victor and Elizabeth, that in both cases they cannot fully express their love until a quest is fulfilled, and the theme of isolation that this introduces.[11] However, Brian Stableford notes that both Frankenstein and The Vampyre broke away from the horror-conventions of these stories. The authors attempted to get the same reaction of fear from readers, but shunned the tired motifs of lineage, family loyalty and inheritance, and instead replaced them with a highly charged and unsettling sexual subtext.[6]

"The Spectre-Barber" is also traced as the source of the "three times recurring dream" motif in Washington Irving's "Wolfert Webber" (from Tales of a Traveller, 1824) according to Walter Reichart.[12]

Additionally a German opera, Arnelda, by Andreas Mohr with libretto by Otto Eick was based on "The Spectre-Barber", which was first performed in 1894 at the Würzburg Stadttheatre.[13]

David Morse sees "The Spectre-Barber" as an allegory showing the difficulty of being an artist, but also how "the artistic sensibility can triumph in a world of recalcitrant fact".[14] Laura Martin points out that Musäus was an Enlightenment rationalist, but is retelling folk superstitions; he uses humour at points in "Stumme Liebe" to debunk the need for magic, despite the supernatural elements preceding it, which makes any moral to the story and its purpose unclear. Martin also questions Musäus' tendency to turn presumably originally peasant characters, into bourgeois figures, such as Franz.[15] David Blamires describes "The Spectre-Barber" as managing to "combine a sentimental love-story with the hero's hair-raising encounter with a ghost in a haunted castle, followed by a version of the dream of hidden treasure", claiming that these themes are "of dubious interest to children". He writes that satire was a clear part of Musäus' literary purpose, though this was "kept in check by his deeper devotion to the idyll of domestic harmony".[4]

References
  1. Musäus, Johann Karl August (1786). Volksmärchen der Deutschen. 4.
  2. Macdonald, D. L.; Scherf, Kathleen (2008). "Introduction". The Vampyre and Ernestus Berchtold; or, The Modern Œdipus. Peterborough: Broadview Editions. p. 10.
  3. Ashley, Mike; Contento, William G. (1995). The Supernatural Index. Greenwood Press. ISBN 9780313240300.
  4. Blamires, David (2009). "Musäus and the Beginnings of the Fairytale". Telling Tales: The Impact of Germany on English Children's Books 1780–1918.
  5.  One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Musäus, Johann Karl August". Encyclopædia Britannica. 19 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 43.
  6. Stableford, Brian (2009). "Seeds of Inspiration". New of the Black Feast and Other Random Reviews. pp. 67–69. ISBN 9781434403360.
  7. Laudowicz, Edith. "Caroline Amalie Gildemeister, geb. Kotzebue" (in German). Archived from the original on 2016-12-12.
  8. Muir, Percy Horace (1971). Victorian Illustrated Books. Praeger Publishers. p. 228.
  9. Utterson, Sarah Elizabeth (1813). "Advertisement". Tales of the Dead. p. i.
  10. Vijn, J. P. (1982). Carlyle and Jean Paul: Their Spiritual Optics. John Benjamins Publishing. p. 179. ISBN 9027222037.
  11. van Woudenberg, Maximiliaan (17 January 2014). "Frankenstein and Fantasmagoriana, Story 1: L'Amour muet". Romantic Textualities. Cardiff University Press. Retrieved 23 May 2019.
  12. Reichart, Walter A. (1972). Washington Irving and Germany. Greenwood Press. p. 156. ISBN 9780837164595.
  13. Griffel, Margaret Ross (2018). Operas in German: A Dictionary. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 34. ISBN 9781442247970.
  14. Morse, David (1982). Romanticism: A Structural Analysis. Palgrave MacMillan. pp. 196–97. ISBN 9781349052653.
  15. Martin, Laura (2004). "Reviews: Märchen und Meta-Märchen: Zur Poetik der "Volksmärchen der Deutschen" von Johann Karl August Musäus". Marvels and Tales. 18 (1). doi:10.1353/mat.2004.0012. S2CID 162207171.


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