ETA Hoffmann's "Sandman" could easily be read as a satire that attacks meek and docile women. However, looking at the form of feminism in this story, we see that the protagonist Nathaniel seems to struggle with an abstract mind, while the women around him are focused on the material world. The women he grew up with, namely his mother and his fiancée Clara, clearly display materialistic principles, leaving Nathaniel alone with his more philosophical thoughts until he is able to project a similar mindset onto the world. Olympia automaton. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why violent video games should not be banned”?Get the original essay Essentialism states that men are more attracted to abstract thinking while women, whose unimaginative minds do not cannot understand the abstract, are attracted to the materialistic. For the purposes of this argument, “material thinking” will be defined as Nathaniel's idea of ​​the prosaic: unimaginative, factual, and devoid of deeper emotions. This definition appears when Clara writes to her fiancé and practically diagnoses him with a derangement, and is quickly dismissed and ignored. The letter is described as "sensible", but it does not satisfy Nathaniel's preference for the mysterious. Meanwhile, the abstract can be described as Nathaniel's poetic idea: a mystical and deeper thought. This concept emerges in Nathaniel's reaction to Clara's letter when he attempts to "initiate her into the mysteries" by reading her books with much more imagination than she would have been accustomed to. Nathaniel tries to draw her into something a little less logical, less practical and more fanciful. In other words, he tries to show Clara the abstract, but she resists him. Nathaniel's penchant for the abstract is seen in his emphasis on his mysticisms. When he tries to explain his idea of ​​"dark powers" to Clara, he begins reading her "all kinds of mystical books" to try to persuade her to understand. After being rejected, he writes a dark poem about their relationship and how Coppélius destroys it (Hoffman 10). Rather than seeing Coppélius as something in his mind to conquer, or taking some other practical approach (as an essentialist woman would), he lets his dark imagination take over his childhood memories. In doing so, he thinks abstractly, as essentialism commands men to do. The very first material-abstract struggle Nathaniel faced occurred with his mother. When Nathaniel, after being sent to bed early, asked him who the Sandman was, his only response was that the Sandman was not real (Hoffman 1). Unsatisfied, he turned to his sister's nurse for a much more gruesome story of gouged out eyes. Nathaniel, in his abstract thinking, was unable to accept his mother's practical explanation of his childhood story and sought reasoning from a mind that functioned more similarly to his own. The mother, for her part, has a much more materialistic spirit. She rejects information that is neither realistic nor pragmatic. By failing to conform to her son's imagination, the mother fulfills the role of the essentialist woman. Clara is described as lucid, practical and intelligent. However, Nathaniel ends up rejecting her, claiming that she is “cold, unreceptive” and “prosaic” (Hoffman 9-10). What Clara calls intellect, Nathaniel considers closed-minded and unacceptable. Clara is always looking for practical explanations, as we see in the letter and again when Nathaniel returns.