English Modernism, National Identity and the Germans, 1890–1950 by Rau Petra

Author:Rau, Petra.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2009-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 4.3 ‘I am going in here’. Bad Nauheim, entrance to bathhouse 7 from the Sprudelhof

Figure 4.4 Bad Nauheim, bathhouse 7, lobby (c.1906)

Figure 4.5 Bad Nauheim, individual bath cells (c.1906)

In this way, then, The Good Soldier is not just compensatory dirty talking but also a periphrastic narrative; it performs what Con Coroneos has called modernism’s ‘anxious discourse of a troubled interiority’ by letting the narrator volubly project his pathology onto his environment.68 Like a Baedeker, the spa offered prescribed activities, both medicinal and social. Spa guides advocated strict deference to the higher authority of the Kurarzt (spa doctor), whose orders were passed on to the hotel and the spa institutions where an arsenal of waiters and attendants supervised their observation. When Mark Twain underwent the cure in Baden-Baden, he realized that the spa’s unique combination of narcissism and masochism lucratively furnished an entire industry for the benefit of stoking social delusions (which was perhaps just as palliative as the treatments endured): ‘The appointments of the place are so luxurious, the benefit so marked, the price so moderate, and the insults so sure, that you very soon find yourself adoring the Friederichsbad and infesting it’. (133) With subtler irony Dowell also first notices the pose of elegant suffering appropriate for a cure in the Excelsior’s dining room in ‘the mien of the diners as they came in every evening – their air of earnestness as if they must go through a meal prescribed by the Kur authorities and their air of sobriety as if they must seek not by any means to enjoy their meals’ (23).

This quasi-masochistic subjection was, however, liberally dosed with hedonistic pleasures precisely because the cure was a medical and psychological compensatory treatment for the damaged modern bodies of an industrial consumer society, restoring them to maximum productivity or at least functionality.69 The spa officially prescribed a disciplinary regime that was understood to include transgression (gambling, flirting, prostitution, adultery). Guides to European spas such as Hermann Weber’s The Mineral Water and Health Resorts of Europe (1898) pointed to the detrimental effects of both ennui and slavish obedience, and implied repeatedly that stringent observance of a medical regime without any strategic relaxation would simply tax the afflicted too much and have virtually no benefits for the healthy. The social aspects of spa life were ‘healthy mental influences’ and clearly regarded as beneficial.70 If doctors did not overtly recommend sexual licentiousness (as they had formerly done with gambling), it was common knowledge that the social life afforded erotic possibilities that were not available at home. In this respect the spa may be the very location that the Misses Hurlbirds take it for: ‘a sink of iniquity where strange laxities prevailed’ (59). After all, this is where the seeing eye of Florence the social climber immediately spots the man who for her embodies status and virility rather than merely money without sexual obligation. Certainly the literary trope of the spa joins illness and eroticism in which the resort becomes the stage

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