I plan to focus on the reading, “The Day After the Wedding” from Undine by Friedrich de la Motte Fouque, examining how he uses Huldbrand’s nightmare of women transforming into monsters not only as a foreshadowing but as a symbolic dramatization of the emotional strain already present between Undine and her husband. By clarifying how the supernatural reflects the couple’s unspoken fears–specifically Huldbrand’s anxieties about female power, intimacy, and the instability of his new marriage–I argue that the nightmare becomes a way for the text to surface the tensions neither character can articulate. Because Fouque blurs the line that is between dream and waking reality through Romantic imagery–“pale and cold” moonlight, shifting feminine specters, and Huldbrand’s momentary fear of Undine–the story ultimately suggests that love becomes most unstable when desire clashes with suppressed emotional fears. In this way, the story uses the supernatural not simply for atmosphere, but to highlight the emotional vulnerability at the core of relationships in the Romantic era.

I will be honing in on how the nightmare functions not just as a foreshadowing but as a window into Huldbrand’s suppressed fears about women and marriage, showing how Romantic literature uses the supernatural to expose emotional tensions that characters cannot openly express.