Suddenly a crushing terror overcame her. Who was her child's father? “So abruptly came this question over her naïve soul that she fancied for a moment that this might be the punishment of fate for her longing for Soelver. This longing was desire, and desire was sin no less than the love itself. Her wish for him had grown to a fire in her blood and now she was stained by her own passion, pregnant from her own sin. God's punishment had visited her and soon would be visible to all the world. Gro saw however immediately the foolishness of her thought. For one moment she lingered at the thought of the one woman of all the earth, who had immaculately conceived. Then she uttered an inward prayer that the Mother of God would lighten her understanding and give her clearness of vision that she should not go astray in her brooding over this mystery.”
When she questioned her nurse and the latter finally put it to her, “Have you spent no night under the same roof with Soelver?” then there occurred to her the many nights “when she had dreamed of the lonely imprisoned man, who was being punished because of her. When she lay in her bed in the dark, a strange curiosity had overcome her to imagine his lot there below and, when sleep seized her and dreams chased away the bitter, hard thoughts, her heart had become softer and the sun had shone over the visions of her dreams as the spring day over the woods blossoming with the green May bells. Many a night and many a morning was she awakened by a strange burning desire in her thoughts, and her mouth was as though touched with fresh dream kisses, and she had entered into judgment with her own weak heart and had so inflamed herself to scorn and hatred that she had done nothing to soften the fate of the prisoner. But how could Soelver have been the guest of her dreams? And how had he been able to command the virgin love fed by her slumber? Then came the nurse to her aid and made it clear to her. She knew that the maiden Gro had walked in her sleep; the servants had told of a white ghost on the stairs and once she herself had seen it and recognized Gro, who had disappeared upon a secret stairway, which led down into the dungeon. She had kept still about it, for she thought it was a voluntary sleep walking to the young nobleman.”
Thus was Gro enlightened as to the source of her pregnancy. “She quivered with shame that the desire in her dreams had the power to drive her down to the lonely prisoner and she shook in her inmost soul at the memory of that happy dream, which she had had the night before her father's death. Now her love suddenly burst into the light like a wonderful flower, which suddenly springs up with a thousand fragrant buds. Now it was impossible to stem it or to conceal it. She had wanted to suppress every germ, with her father's coldness and the day's dispassionately proud haughtiness she had been willing to stifle every impulse toward love, every longing for self avowal. Now she found her pride was dead and buried and her being within and without was permeated by love.
“For she had loved Soelver from the first springtime kiss, which he had imprinted upon her cheek as she wandered among the fresh May bells, loved him in the blow which she had inflicted upon his head when he had touched her chaste nakedness, loved him in those nights when he had slept uncomplaining in the cellar dungeon, loved him in those bitter moments of his humbling when he, in spite of scorn and insult, maintained his pride, loved him that evening when he kneeled at her father's bier and kissed the hand of his enemy now dead, loved him day by day all the time they were together, loved him in that hour when she saw his banner disappear among the hundred others, and today upon Aebeloe when she heard that new life singing within hers. And now she rejoiced; for she bore him always within her, she could never again lose her Soelver.”
As we glance over the material of this tale, we find as the nucleus of the night wandering and moon walking the strong repression of every conscious love impulse and the breaking through of the unconscious in sleep and dream wherever the censor's rule is relaxed. For the maiden Gro had loved Soelver from the first moment, yet this love was confessed only in moments of occasional self forgetfulness, as by the first meeting with the young nobleman, when her hand met his, yes, even pressed it for the moment. Only Gro should not have been frightened out of her half unconscious action by a kiss or a passionate desire, for at once there arose to life within her the coldness and haughtiness of her father and the highhanded reaction which her mother had manifested to her conqueror. The determining factor, to speak in psychoanalytic language, is the struggle between the strong sexual rejection and the equally compelling sexual desire. At first the former held the upper hand with our heroine in her waking and conscious action, the latter in the unconscious. Through the force of her will Gro seemed cold, even as she had learned of her father. She defended herself from her lover's craving by force and blow; even when conquered finally through the noble spirit of her enemy, she would see in him only the friend for life and death. She directly refused to think of love and displaced it to external things, she even bade the young man go rather than desire her as his wife. Soelver's devotion reminded her most significantly of her mother's tenderness, his pride, of the brother of her childhood. “It is as if in you the proud brother of my childhood had returned. Your spirit is his. Leave it so, stay with me as my brother or leave me like my brother, but never speak to me of love, neither in words nor in looks, for I know no reply!”
Yet she avoided Soelver's searching eye and as he reminded her of her dreams, she was smitten in the depths of her soul. For her dreams, she well knew, chased away the bitter and hard thoughts, the repressed unconscious broke through and the true feeling of her loving heart. This already appeared clear to her when her beloved languished in captivity at her father's hands. The strange desire to work out the fate of the young nobleman, who suffered on her account, had overcome her lying there in her bed in the dark. And in the morning she awoke with a strange burning desire in her thoughts and her mouth was flecked with his fresh dream kisses. Still she consciously kept back every outer manifestation of love and met the young man while her father was alive with coldness and suspicion and later even merely as a brother. The great distance separating her beloved from her and above all the child which she bore from him under her heart for the first time conquer her haughty pride and her conscious aversion. And as she dreams one night again of the loved one far away she finds herself suddenly awake, going about cold and naked in her room and perceives as the lingering sound of her heart's unconscious avowal, “Soelver, I love you!”
So severe is this struggle between conscious sexual denial and unconscious desire, that it even forces itself through in her sleep and her night wandering. Her dreams had indeed, as she later acknowledged with shame, the force and the power to compel her below into the young nobleman's dungeon. She had clasped Soelver's hand in her sleep, she had told him everything in the moonlight, with eyes closed, everything which she secretly felt, and had pressed him to herself. Yet when he asked her why she could never confess to him that she had always loved him so deeply, she repulsed him: “That I will never tell!” Even when he had united himself to his beloved, she had slumbered on as if nothing had happened and the next day knew nothing of it all.
This leads now to that which, according to folk belief, constitutes the very core, the chief ground for sleep walking and moon walking in a maiden. It is easy to understand the wish, on the part of the female sex with their strongly demanded sexual repression, to come to the beloved one and taste all the delights of satisfaction but without guilt. This is possible only through wandering in unconscious sleep. For, as my first patient explained, one is not accountable for anything that happens in this state, and thus can enjoy without sin and without consciousness of what is not permitted. Convention demands that the maiden wait until the lover approaches her, but in that unconscious state she may surrender herself. The need for repression explains then the subsequent amnesia. Yet wandering by night is not concerned merely with sexual enjoyment, over and above that it fulfills a second desire that arises out of childhood, as we know from psychoanalysis. Every small maiden has, that is, the wish to have a child by her father, her first love, which is often in later years defined thus, one might have a child, but without a husband. The night wandering fulfills this desire to have a child yet without sin. Therefore has that motive of an unconscious, not to say immaculate, conception inspired not a few poets, as it has already, as is well known, been active in the creation of the drama.
Less transparent than that chief motive is the action of the light, sunlight as well as moonlight. The heroine of the story stands toward both in a special relationship. Her body is almost illuminated by its own light, her hair sparkles electrically when it is touched, “warm waves of light” emanate from her, which Soelver noticed at their first meeting, the sun seems expressly to seek her, a halo of impalpable beauty surrounds her and above all glows from the depths of her eyes. Not only so, Gro seems to dwell chiefly in the light, whose last drops she greedily absorbs within herself. When the light fades, her body becomes cold as ice like a corpse. In similar manner the shining of the full moon affects her, the light of which the stones of her gold cross have absorbed. The first time that the slumbering youth saw Gro wandering, it seemed to him as if the moonlight had been loosed from the planet and floated only in his room like a living being. The poet, to be sure, has offered no explanation of this mystical effect of light and what the reader may think for himself would be merely drawn from other sources. For this reason I will not pursue this point further.
The narrative affords somewhat further means for an understanding in another direction. It is not explained more fully just why Gro follows the sunlight and moonlight or why both exercise upon her a peculiar attraction, yet the tendency to a motor breaking through of the unconscious may be derived from an inherited disposition. The father is a rough, violent robber knight while the mother shows distinctly sadistic traits and a truly ready hand at fighting. That confirms what I explained in the first part, a heightened muscular excitability and muscle eroticism, which strives to break through again on the sexual side in sleep walking. Finally it may be affirmed without doubt that the ghostly white figure upon the stairs was no other than the maiden in her shift.