The Emigrant Heroine: Gender and the Colonial Fantasy in Henriette Frölich's Virginia oder Die Kolonie von Kentucky

The heroic woman in the literature of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany seemed destined to suffer. Unlike her male counterparts, who explore new lands, fight in great battles, and return home to be rewarded with a beautiful and submissive wife, the heroic woman rarely ventures out of the domestic sphere. Her journeys, if she has any, are accompanied; her adventures are romantic intrigues; and her greatest aspiration is to marry for love and not convenience. To be worthy of this, she must not transgress the socially prescribed boundaries of her sex. She must wait patiently, obey submissively, and resign herself to the life her father, brother, or uncle chooses for her. In the course of the plot, her moral fortitude will be tested. If she patiently endures her suffering, the fates may smile upon her and give her the man she loves. Or, if she must marry a man she cannot love, at the very least, fate will grant her a "triumphant death bed scene" (Blackwell 145), as is the case in Wilhelmine Karoline von Wobeser's (1769–1807) Elise, oder, das Weib wie es sein sollte (1799) and Johanna Schopenhauer's (1766–1838) Gabriele (1819–20). However, if she transgresses her femininity by aspiring to intellect, independence, or influence beyond domesticity, she will suffer a fate considered worse than death by many self-respecting women of the day. She will be denied the fulfilment of her "natural" destiny. She will be doomed to spinsterhood. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's "schöne Seele" in the sixth book of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795/96) offers a classic example of a woman exiled from her "feminine destiny." Unwilling to conform to society's expectations of womanhood – in this case, that she be submissive and at least feign intellectual inferiority – her engagement falls apart. She lives isolated and dies a spinster. Even her "schöne Seele" title is rescinded at the end of the novel, when the more compliant Nathalie marries Wilhelm and is acclaimed as the real "schöne Seele" (23: 307). Certainly there are isolated exceptions to this paradigm for female characters. In Amanda und Eduard (1803) by Sophie Mereau (1770–1806), the heroine escapes her oppressive marriage by having an affair and eventually marries her lover. However, even this "happy ending" is tempered by the heroine's death just days after the wedding. Though there may be isolated exceptions, we might nonetheless generalize that a woman was deemed heroic not on the basis of her courageous actions, but rather on the length and intensity of her suffering. Goethe codified this formula when he wrote: "Epische, halbepische Dichtung verlangt eine Hauptfigur, die bei vorwaltender Thätigkeit durch den Mann, bei überwiegendem Leiden durch die Frau vorgestellt wird" (41: 5).

Generally considered the greatest among such heroines are those called upon to suffer death willingly. In Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Emilia Galotti (1772), for example, the heroine begs her father to stab her to death to avoid seduction and preserve the family honour. To persuade him, she recalls the story of the Roman daughter Virginia, the ancient symbol of martyred femininity. In this historical account, Virginia's father defends his freedom and her virtue by giving his daughter liberty in death. He plunges a knife into her heart before the eyes of her would-be seducer, Appius Claudius, sparking a revolution that returns the rule of Rome to the people.

In 1819, amid the disillusionment following the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars and situated within that cultural tradition that valued women for their sacrificial potential, Henriette Frölich (1768–1833) tried to imagine a new kind of Virginia, a heroine who is not defined by her predominate suffering but nonetheless provides the heroic spark for freedom. In her novel, Virginia oder Die Kolonie von Kentucky (which she published under the pseudonym "Jerta"), Frölich transforms the dutifully suffering heroine into a courageous emigrant heroine, thereby allowing her the freedom to explore and occasionally even transgress the physical and metaphorical borders between "Mutterboden" and "Vaterland," between Europe...