Schwellenüberschreitungen. Politik in der Literatur von deutschsprachigen Frauen 1780-1918 (review)

This volume of thirteen essays is the first of two generated by a conference, "Crossing the Boundaries. Writing by German-Speaking Women, 1780–1918," held at the University of Sheffield (UK) in April 2006. The premises underlying this volume are 1) that the boundaries between the public and private spheres are "fluid or at least more porous" (9) than Habermas originally described or social norms of the nineteenth century would seem to have dictated, and 2) that literature, especially in the first half of the nineteenth century, was a space ("Zwischenraum" [9]) in which female authors could more easily cross over from one sphere into the other. While this is not exactly a new framework for examining women's writing of this period, what this volume nevertheless demonstrates is how much work remains to be done in uncovering and critically examining the "Vielfältigkeit des weiblichen Blicks auf die Machtverhältnisse des langen 19. Jahrhunderts" (18). Only then can today's scholars and students of the nineteenth century grasp the significance of "women's influence on society" (7), even though their direct participation in the political process was stifled.

The volume is organized in three sections: border crossings in the area of gender politics, self-determination, and geographies. Parallel to the fluidity between the public and private, these topic emphases in the three sections are also not mutually exclusive. In all three there are analyses of the ways in which sexuality, marriage, and / or motherhood play a key role in defining the possibilities (or lack thereof) for female agency in nineteenth-century society. On one end of the spectrum are the comedies of Amalie von Sachsen in which, as Elin Nesje Vestli demonstrates, the choices women make in choosing a partner "offer them a more liberated intellectual horizon, i.e. education, the possibility to travel and to engage in social work" (59). This predominantly optimistic position, albeit not without criticism of women's legal status, stands in stark contrast to the sense of entrapment and overwhelming frustration that led to murder in Helene Böhlau's Halbtier as discussed by Nancy C. Richardson, or the determined blurring of gender roles in the works of Annette Kolb and Franziska zu Reventlow outlined in the essay by Isabelle Stauffer. Another unifying theme of the volume is the explicit attempt by some female authors to connect to the philosophical and aesthetic ideas of their times, while simultaneously re-inscribing them with a female perspective (cf. Catherine Grimm's analysis of nature philosophy in the epistolary memoirs of Bettine von Arnim or Karin Baumgartner's essay on the aesthetics of Helmina von Chézy).

A justifiable criticism of the volume is that with two exceptions—Sabine Schmidt's contribution on Kathinka Zitz-Halein and Caroline Bland's comparison of Lily Braun's and Clara Viebig's novels about World War I—none of the contributions focuses on literary works that explicitly deal with political issues that are not highly self-referential, such as the "social question" or nationalism. However, the coherence of the volume lies in its emphasis on self-reference, either in the form of mirroring one's own life or projecting a new ideal of womanhood. The two essays mentioned above do a good job of demonstrating, at least in the case of war, that this is an issue that affects life in the private sphere and that can shape women's thinking about motherhood in particular.

Given the fact that over twenty authors and a wide spectrum of genres—(auto) biography, novels, comedies, ego documents, etc.—of the period from the French Revolution in 1789 to the end of World War I are discussed, the decision to maintain a coherent focus is laudable. Seldom have I encountered an edited volume with such consistently high-quality and readable contributions that invites scholars to (re)read the primary texts being discussed. This makes the work very...