11 - “Ob die Weiber Menschen seyn?” Hesse, Women, and Homoeroticism

Summary

. . . in the masculine tradition the text is a woman, the pen a penis, and writing understood as coitus.

— Jane Gallop, Thinking through the Body, 1988

Hermann hesse crept into my consciousness in late 1950s India, not so surprisingly via Siddhartha. At the time I was struggling with my own faith, attempting to distance myself from the Catholic nuns who were my teachers at school. The discussions I had with them about the truth value of religion, and what I perceived as their attempts to discredit Hinduism were very disquieting. I was simultaneously moved and resentful that a Western writer such as Hesse would deign to approach the complexities of a religion that I saw as my spiritual heritage. My carrying around a well-thumbed paperback edition of Siddhartha in my shoulder bag recalled an earlier generation of young readers — some two centuries before — who had carried Goethe’s Werther in their pockets, and were sometimes driven to suicide because of it. But the male protagonist, Siddhartha, did not interest me as much as Kamala, the courtesan turned Bhikkhuni (female Buddhist monastic). She exemplified the ideal of Pativrata (pati = husband; vrat = vow) prescribed by the Hindu Shastras (sacred treatises), of a woman who vows to remain staunchly loyal to her husband and who preserves her purity — physically, mentally, and spiritually. Feminist thought had not yet “threatened” the bastions of Hindu patriarchal institutions in my hometown.

“Saint Hesse among the Hippies”

It was the 1960s; I was studying in Germany. Crises of faith in institutionalized religion, in the establishment, and in the educational system in Europe, and a mounting awareness of illiteracy and poverty in my own country shocked me out of a complacency born of a privileged middleclass existence in India, and catapulted me into the arms of the “Achtundsechziger.” For many of us, German and non-German, Hesse seemed to offer an escape from this multifaceted crisis. The many utopian possibilities he offered in his works appeared seductively within reach, especially in the context of the 1960s counterculture movement. In fact, his appeal, like that of the young Goethe of Werther fame, went far beyond the confines of Germany. And then, quite as suddenly as it had begun, the “Hesse Boom” ended. In Germany the “Golf” generation had come of age. At the same time the United States produced a generation of “Me! Me! Me!” status seekers.