In the Company of Men: Cross-Dressed Women around 1800 (review)

Since the path-breaking work of, among others, Marjorie Garber and Judith Butler, the cross-dresser has in the last two decades become the focus of much theoretical scrutiny. Absent from much of the resulting scholarship, however, has been sufficient consideration of the historical and national contexts in which we find transvestite practices. Is transvestism necessarily a subversive practice? Can subversion in turn be co-opted in the Bakhtinian sense? Do male and female transvestism perform different functions or allow for divergent possibilities? Elisabeth Krimmer's study, rich in historical and literary material on transvestite women in Germany in the years around 1800, engages productively with the scholarship on gender performativity, while never losing sight of the fact that the cross-dressing females she considers are always "bodies in history, bodies in culture" (1). What is at stake, Krimmer asks in the opening pages of her book, when in 1721 a woman named Catharina Lincken (who notably changes her religious affiliation as often as her dress) is condemned to death in Halberstadt for donning men's clothing to serve as a soldier? Among the larger historical forces that Krimmer sees as fundamental to the cross-dresser, a figure ubiquitous by the turn of the century, are: the rise of capitalism, with its emphasis on mobile and flexible citizen-consumers, and German responses to the French Revolution (the age of the Amazon), which had undercut hierarchical systems of order yet also generated a huge backlash against women. A concise historical overview of the phenomenon looks at specific occasions or sites for female cross-dressing: military enlistment, the theatrical "breeches part," travel, carnival, and masquerade. Competing cultural meanings have attached themselves to women who dressed as men—Krimmer provides ample evidence for the criminal associations of the behavior yet also points to the holiness of female transvestism in the case of certain Christian saints, notably Joan of Arc. Disagreeing with the view that women's cross-dressing leaves the hierarchies of gender unscathed, Krimmer proposes that it could become a vehicle of empowerment for women writers. Some authors use it, she argues, to deviate from the thematic options of hearth and home more commonly available to them, during a period when gender ("Geschlechtscharakter") was being inscribed as scientific fact, yet seemed paradoxically mobile.

The range of this book is ambitious and illuminating, revealing that the female cross-dresser captivated authors of both genders, of various ideological persuasions, and of both canonical and non-canonical literary works. The book's first chapter (somewhat confusingly the chapters are misnumbered in the introduction) analyzes two lesser-known novels by politically-minded women writers: Therese Huber's Die Familie Seldorf (1795/96) and Caroline de la Motte-Fouqué's Das Heldenmädchen aus der Vendée (1816). Both feature a heroine who fights in the Vendée uprisings, though on opposing sides and with radically different agendas. While these militant cross-dressers ultimately cannot prevail in the public sphere, in Chapter Two, "Trans-Gender/Trans-Nation: Trojan Horses in Women's Literature," three novels by Friederike Helene Unger and Karoline Paulus are discussed in which, according to Krimmer, gender and sexual transgression succeeds by being smuggled in as the work of an exotic national Other, leaving the virtue of the German heroine intact. This chapter—focusing on moralizing national and international discourses about textiles, the engine driving the new economy—deftly weaves in an argument about the link between performative concepts of identity and the emergence of capitalism in Germany. One might add that the novel as a genre itself fits into "the uneasy amalgamation of importation, innovation, and deviance" (99) defining Unger's and Paulus's works.

Krimmer turns to canonical dramas by male authors in the third chapter, which looks at the death of the cross-dresser as a moment that legally or medically guarantees the epistemological "truth" of gender, and metes out justice to the deviant body. Under consideration here are...