The Sandman

In the novella “The Sandman,” its hero Nathaniel is gripped by a panicking fear of the outside world, and this fear of the world gradually turns into something painfully—essentially—clinical. Nathaniel’s fiancée, Clara, tries to set him straight: “… I think that all the terrible, dreadful things you’re talking about happened only in your own soul, and that the actual outside world is only very little involved in it…
Not giving dark forces a place in your own soul is the problem that troubles Hoffmann, and he grows more and more suspicious that this romantically exalted consciousness of weakness is especially susceptible. Clara, a simple and sensible girl, tries to cure Nathaniel in her own way: as soon as he begins reading her his poems with their “gloomy, dull mysticism,” she cuts through his exaltation with a sly reminder that she might lose her coffee. But that only makes him not inclined to listen to her—so it turns out she’s just a poor bourgeois girl. Meanwhile, the wind-up doll Olympia, who knows how to sigh languidly and, while listening to his poems, periodically lets out a delighted “Ah!,” turns out to be preferable to Nathaniel—seemingly, she is his “kindred spirit.” And he falls in love with her, not seeing, not understanding that she is nothing more than a cleverly designed mechanism—an automaton.