Precisely because she belongs to that old world,
the world before Enlightenment
she is unobtainable,
a creature of the imagination, who is ethere alised and placed out of reach. What is obtained is not Gretchen, for whom faithful marriage is the only goal, but the debauched remnant of Gretchen, the body in which the soul is no more than an anxious memory, and which is cast loose from the moral or der The theme is a Leitmotif of Romantic literature. Conscious- ness lies outside the moral order, observing, regretting, tragically sundered from the thing that it would possess. But possession, when it comes, is both supremely erotic and also a desecration, a removal of the object from its domestic shrine. The tragedy of Enlightenment is enacted in every erotia adventure, as love runs free from marriage to become a personal acquisition, a mark of distinction, with no rite of passage into the moral community From object to object the observing consciousness wanders never satisfied, never at home, animated by an incurable