The third act of the drama moves to the estate of a wealthy nobleman, amateur playwright and owner of a private theatre, who has applied to Kunz for the services of his intriguing “male” star. Most pertinent to the present study is an interlude in which Franziska, in eighteenth-century man’s costume, appears to the count in a species of symbolic vision as the wish-fulfillment of his most secret dreams. She tells him she is neither boy nor woman, but the ideal of all those incapable of real passion; for love of another cannot go beyond love of self in these “Wunschlosen.” This technical description of narcissism (along with the drastic effect upon Franziska of early hatred of her father) shows Wedekind’s familiarity with the then very new doctrines of psychoanalysis. The remaining acts show Franziska first sufficiently feminized by early pregnancy to play the part of Delilah on the stage, and to become infatuated and run off with the actor cast as Samson, who treats her with rough and contemptuous masculine superiority. Veit Kunz is prostrated. At fifty he sees his lifelong conviction controverted that happy sexual and professional association on a footing of equality must guarantee a permanent union. His brilliant intellectual acumen is outplayed by female biology—Woman beats the devil!—and he is barely saved from suicide. Finally Franziska, persuaded to abandon her career for the sake of her son’s health, is shown living in rural poverty with him. She refuses support from either Kunz or “Samson,” each of whom is sure her child is his, and accepts the protection of an ascetic artist who paints her as the madonna. Here Wedekind hits the narcissist complex dead center. It is proof against both homosexual and heterosexual experience and only partially resolved by maternity, since she can tolerate only a man weaker than herself and one romantically deluded about her. Because of the Eulenberg scandal in 1907 literary reference to homosexuality was checked for a time in Germany, and no doubt only Wedekind’s established reputation and his disparaging treatment of the theme made the theatrical production of _Franziska_ possible in 1911. By 1914 Dr. Kurt Heller was asking in the _Jahrbuch_: “Wo bleibt der homoerotische Roman?”[21] He was referring to male homosexuality, and he deprecated the moralistic tone of Thomas Mann’s _Death in Venice_, considering it disappointing from the author of _Buddenbrooks_. His answer to his own rhetorical question was that no sympathetic work could clear the hurdle of state censorship, for even a wholly “spiritual” treatment must be defined by some contrast with the sensual. Only true literary freedom could provide incentive for creative writing of first quality.