The Cadaverous Bodies Of Vampiric Mothers And The Genealogy Of Pathology In E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Tales

In Hoffmann’s works vampiric mothers with cadaverous bodies traumatise their progeny. The mother’s body and her melancholy demeanour propel her children into states of despondency and other psychopathologies. The structure of doubled depression to which Hoffmann returns throughout his stories crushes the mother’s male offpring within the contradictory injunction simultaneously to express the most intense, exclusive, incestuous desire for his mother and to participate in a mother‐son dyad which effaces all desire. The mother’s status as a melancholic and her forbidding, pregnant, and corpse‐like body are shown to be linked in several of Hoffmann’s narratives to both a physiology of reproduction and a psychosomatic generation of pathologies. The babies born to cadaverous mothers are psychic monsters. Vampirism, cannibalism, murder, and incest are but some of the perversions and criminal tendencies passed from mothers to children in a relentless genealogy of maternal monstrosity.