Domesticating Nietzsche: Toward a Genealogy of Elisabeth Förster‐Nietzsche's ‘Novellen‐Eierchen’

This investigation of an untitled novella manuscript penned by Elisabeth Förster‐Nietzsche aims to contextualize her writing as an attempt to domesticate Nietzsche and his philosophy. It is argued that the manuscript provides unique insights into Elisabeth Förster‐Nietzsche's incestuous fantasies and conflicted stance toward marriage and motherhood. While explicitly promoting marriage and motherhood, the plot, paradoxically, depicts not a single positive, functioning marriage. Although it romanticizes marriages, the novella challenges the dominant construction of the alte Jungfer as a social, cultural, and sexual deviant and an economic burden to family and society. Thus, while the ideological pronouncements of the novella advocate marriage and motherhood, the novella subverts these pronouncements and develops alternative familial arrangements, such as marriage‐like brother–sister relations and surrogate parenthood. However, the conservative banality of these alternative models indicates that the novella is motivated more by wishfulfillment in the realm of fantasy than by the desire to develop an emancipatory dimension. Ultimately, Förster‐Nietzsche's novella confirms not only her lack of literary talent, but also the vast gap separating Förster‐Nietzsche's petit‐bourgeois consciousness from Nietzsche's yearning for the intellectual risk of the ever‐elusive free spirits.