SOURCE: Howe, Patricia. “Breaking into Parnassus: Annette von Droste-Hülshoff and the Problem of Poetic Identity.” German Life and Letters 46, no. 1 (January 1993): 25-41.

In the following essay, Howe argues that Droste-Hülshoff's most widely read works present a false picture of the poet's identity, proposing that her collected works reflect a divided self searching, unsuccessfully, for unity. Howe explores some of the cultural forces driving Droste-Hülshoff to create a split self in her writing.

This paper originates in an earlier one that surveyed lyrical portraits by women of themselves.¹ In the mid-nineteenth century these portraits begin implicitly to confront problems of identity by revising images of women derived from poetry by men. In the discussion that followed that paper, the question arose how the apparent desire for an achieved identity in women's poetry about themselves relates to the contemporary notion of the decentred self. It seemed to...