“Steppenwolf” by Hermann Hesse (post 3): As Treatise predicted, Harry finds magic mirror—a female/male, nameless double he names Hermine.

The narrator of “Treatise on the Steppenwolf” had said that Harry “may get hold of one our little mirrors…such possibilities await him…these magic possibilities” (1, pp. 96-97).

And Harry does meets someone who says, “I am a kind of looking glass for you” (1, p. 192), a person whose face, thinks Harry, “was indeed like a magic mirror to me” (1, p. 193). Search “mirror” and “mirrors” in this blog for posts on this recurring topic.

“But now I really must know your name,” [says Harry]…

“Perhaps you can guess it…Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that sometimes my face is just like a boy’s? Now, for example.

“Yes”, thinks Harry, “now that I looked at her face carefully, I had to admit that she was right. It was a boy’s face…that reminded me of my own boyhood friend…Hermann. For a moment it seemed that she had turned into this Hermann…

“If you were a boy,” Harry says “in amazement, I should say that your name was Hermann.”

“Who knows, perhaps I am one and am simply in women’s clothing, she said joking.”

“Is your name Hermine?” Harry guesses. (1, pp. 190-191).

She (or he) nods, in apparent delight with Harry’s guess, and in acceptance of the name “Hermine" (which she is called from then on). But, strictly speaking, this person has not actually said that this had been her name, nor even whether she is definitely female or male; nor, indeed, whether she is one person or more than one person, sometimes a male and sometimes a female. Harry comes to feel that she is “my double, almost” (1, p. 222), which is a literary metaphor for an alternate personality.

In short, more than a hundred pages after Treatise on the Steppenwolf, it is still the novel’s thesis. As Harry recalls:

“In the Steppenwolf treatise that I told you about…it is only a fancy…to believe…that he is made up of one or two personalities. Every human being, it says, consists of ten, or a hundred, or a thousand souls.

“ ‘I like that very much,’ cried Hermine” (1, p. 225).

1. Hermann Hesse. Steppenwolf [1927]. Translation from the German by Joseph Mileck and Horst Frenz (1963). New York, Picador Modern Classics/Farrar Straus Giroux, 2015.