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  • Performance and Femininity in Eighteenth-Century German Women's Writing: The Impossible Act
  • Gail Hart
Performance and Femininity in Eighteenth-Century German Women's Writing: The Impossible Act. By Wendy Arons. New York: Palgrave, 2006. x + 270 pages. $69.95.

This is a well-written and very useful study of the performance of gender ideals in relation to actual theatrical performance or (semi-) consciously theatrical social dissimulation [End Page 566] and the public aspects of subjectivity. As the author acknowledges, much has been written on gender as performance (Butler) or masquerade (Riviere), but she offers a "different way of looking at a familiar set of issues" (8) in this book that began as a University of California, San Diego dissertation.

The Impossible Act examines a series of works by eighteenth-century women writers, many of whom were also actresses and all of whom knew the interplay of acting and social discourse. Arons is particularly well-qualified to add to our knowledge of gender and subjectivity in this period because of her background in theater. There is often a disconnect in Germanistik (and elsewhere) between drama scholarship and theatrical practice and we frequently forget that the plays we study were mostly written as scripts for performance. Arons is familiar with performance history, the logistics of acting, and the vicissitudes of an actress's offstage life; this familiarity informs her deep consideration of eighteenth-century "ideal femininity" and the role of performance in its expression. Inasmuch as practitioners of "ideal femininity" were required to be naïve, sincere, and authentic—and recognizably so—the question of a self-expression that reflected this transparency and also made it apparent as part of "a woman's proactive management of the public's perception of her" (13) was a vexed topic that Arons finds at the root of a number of lesser-known prose and dramatic texts by women. Performing that which by definition is spontaneous, instinctive, and not performable is the "impossible act" of the title.

Arons begins with Sophie von La Roche (1730–1807) and the Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (1771), the only text in the study that is broadly read today. This is also the exception to her program of examining work on or by actresses, since La Roche was more of a distinguished spectator than a performer; her knowledge of the theater fuels the many scenes of dissimulation and deception that dot Sophie's long and bumpy road to enlightenment. Arons concludes that the novel "depicts the use of art to create the effect of artlessness" (60) and that Sophie comes to be what she is through her engagement with (social) performance. Karoline Schulze-Kummerfeld (1745–1815) was an actress whose two volumes of memoirs were intended to secure her reputation for virtue in the face of widespread moral suspicion of (publicly available) actresses. Schulze-Kummerfeld walks a fine line in that she asserts her sincerity but also her great skill as an actress, seeking to buttress both her personal and professional reputations while courting the contradiction that Arons investigates.

Marianne Ehrmann's (1755–1795) Amalie: Eine wahre Geschichte in Briefen (1788) is a semi-autobiographical epistolary novel which demonstrates that "the rules that govern women's private conduct are unworkable in the public sphere" (132), though this is seen as an indictment of the rules and not of women entering and working in the public sphere. The segment on Elise Bürger (1769–1833) and her relatively scandalous life is interesting but weaker than the rest. Bürger's actress tale, Aglaja (1799), is mined for meaningful details and declared to be an intervention in the dominant discourse on femininity, but this is less convincing than the other textual arguments. Friederike Helene Unger's (1751–1813) Melanie das Findelkind (1804) is a consciously artificial narrative that plays with essence and appearance and indicates that Unger seems to see acting as "one end of a spectrum of performance, rather than as the opposite of 'real' identity" (177). The notion of the continuum is an effective outcome for a study that follows the dynamics of communication of self and subjectivity in the work of early women of the...

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