In Greek mythology, the Shirt of Nessus, Tunic of Nessus, Nessus-robe, or Nessus' shirt was the poisoned shirt (chiton) that killed Heracles. It was once a popular reference in literature. In folkloristics, it is considered an instance of the "poison dress" motif.[1]
Fearing that Heracles had taken a new lover in Iole, his wife Deianeira gives him the garment, which was stained with the blood of the centaur Nessus. She had been tricked by the dying Nessus into believing it would serve as a potion to ensure her husband's faithfulness.[2] In fact, it contained the venom of the Lernaean Hydra with which Heracles had poisoned the arrow he used to kill Nessus. When Heracles puts it on, the Hydra's venom begins to cook him alive, and to escape this unbearable pain he builds a funeral pyre and throws himself on it.
Metaphorically, it represents "a source of misfortune from which there is no escape; a fatal present; anything that wounds the susceptibilities"[3] or a "destructive or expiatory force or influence".[4]
During the anabaptist Münster Rebellion of 1534, a fifteen-year-old girl named Hille Feyken (or Feiken) attempted to deceive Münster's Prince-Bishop Franz von Waldeck, who had been commanding a protracted siege of the city. Her plan was to pretend to defect and entice the Bishop with information about the city's defenses while giving him a handsome shirt soaked in poison. Before her plan could be carried out she was betrayed by another defector, who warned the bishop, and Feyken was tortured and killed.
Major-General Henning von Tresckow, one of the primary conspirators in the July 20 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, famously referred to the "Robe of Nessus" following the realization that the assassination plot had failed and that he and others involved in the conspiracy would lose their lives as a result: "None of us can complain about our own deaths. Everyone who joined our circle put on the 'Robe of Nessus'."[5] Tresckow himself, echoing Heracles, committed suicide by grenade on the Eastern Front, shortly after the failure of the putsch.
The Shirt of Nessus (1952) is the master's thesis of the noted American postmodern novelist John Barth. Written for the Writing Seminars program at Johns Hopkins, which Barth himself later ran, The Shirt of Nessus is in the form of a short novel or novella. It is his first full-length fictional work, but little is known of its content. Barth has revealed himself to be embarrassed by most of his unpublished work before The Floating Opera. The Shirt of Nessus is briefly referenced in both of Barth's nonfiction collections, The Friday Book and Further Fridays. The only known copies not held by the author were kept in the Johns Hopkins and the Writing Seminars libraries, but the Writing Seminars copy disappeared in the mid-1960s, and other has also disappeared. Some Johns Hopkins faculty members who know Barth speculate that he may have removed them. Indeed, when the special collections division notified Barth in 2002 (when the volume was first found to be missing), Barth responded that he "was not altogether unhappy the library no longer had a copy". However, the novelist and scholar David Morell in his John Barth: An Introduction, notes that he has a copy.
In the "Introduction" to Bending the Bow: "Pound sought coherence in The Cantos and comes in Canto 116 to lament 'and I cannot make it cohere.' But the 'SPLENDOUR, IT ALL COHERES' of the poet's Herakles in The Women of Trachis is a key or recognition of a double meaning that turns in the lock of the Nessus shirt."
In Audit/Poetry IV.3, issue featuring Robert Duncan, in his long polemic with Robin Blaser's translation of The Chimeras of Gérard de Nerval, which Duncan believes deliberately and fatally omit the mystical and gnostic overtones of the original, Duncan writes: "The mystical doctrine of neo-Pythagorean naturalism has become like a Nessus shirt to the translator, and in the translation we hear Heracles' tortured cry from Pound's version of the Women of Trachis from Sophokles: 'it all coheres.'"
In Hyam Plutzik's poem "Portrait", which appears in his collection Apples From Shinar, the poet writes of a Jewish-American character in the late 1950s who has successfully assimilated, and is able to "ignore the monster, the mountain—/A few thousand years of history." Except for one problem, "one ill-fitting garment…The shirt, the borrowed shirt, /The Greek shirt." The last line reveals the "Greek shirt" is "a shirt by Nessus."