Soren Kierkegaard

in the person of Edvard, the son of a merchant named Baxter, whose sole
task it is to induce in Cordelia a veritable disgust for the more conventional
forms of love .When ordinary Edvard and calculating Johannes take up their
positions in the cozy parlor with the tea urn simmering away quietly, the
roles are assigned as follows: Edvard, in his desperate attempt to enchant
Cordelia, plays his part down to the most trivial detail, and Johannes, mean-
while, converses knowledgeably with Cordelia’s aunt about market prices
and butter production .But at regular intervals during these discourses on
rural economics Johannes lets fall a remark that “permitted a hint of some-
thing from a quite different world to flicker on the distant horizon,” thus
causing Cordelia to understand that the tenacity with which he was divert-
ing the aunt is in fact false .“Sometimes I push things to the point that I
make Cordelia smile at the aunt—entirely covertly,” he optimistically notes
in his diary .“This is the first false lesson: We must teach her to smile ironi-
cally .But this smile applies to me almost as much as to the aunt, because
she simply does not know what to think of me... .Then, when she has
smiled at her aunt, she becomes indignant with herself; then I reverse my
course and look at her entirely seriously while continuing to converse with
her aunt—then she smiles at me, at the situation.”
While Cordelia is smiling at her aunt, the reader can smile at Edvard,
who cuts an increasingly pitiable figure that approaches caricature, as Johan-
nes notes in his diary: “Poor Edvard! What a shame that he isn’t named
Fritz.” Johannes explains that he is thinking of Fritz inThe Bride, a popular
operetta with music by Auber and words by Scribe .The piece features a
man by the name of Fritz, a Tyrolean by birth, an upholsterer, and a corporal
in the civil militia, who like Edvard must relinquish to someone else the
woman he loves .The comparison might seem farfetched, which it is, but
it has a straightforward and malicious logic: Fritz is notthatFritz, but a
completely different Fritz—namely Regine’s new fiance ́, Fritz Schlegel!
Emerging from her status as her aunt’s sweet niece and as the adored
object of her boring adorer, Cordelia gradually becomes aware of an inde-
finable unrest within her own being .With the assistance of Edvard, the
erotic is still onlyadumbrated negativelyas a longing without an object or as
a silhouette of no particular subject .And Johannes, furthermore, serves only
as an external occasion: “She herself must be developed within herself....
She must owe nothing to me... .Regardless of the fact that I indeed intend
for her to sink into my embrace as if by natural necessity, that I strive to
bring things to the point when she will gravitate toward me, it is nonetheless
also important that she fall not as a heavy object but rather in the manner
in which spirit gravitates toward spirit... .She must be neither my physical