Who Learns a Lesson?: The Function of Sex Role Reversal in Lessing's Minna von Barnhelm

Who Learns a Lesson? The Function of Sex Role Reversal in Lessing's Minna von Barnhelm Judith P. Aikin Feminist criticism is providing an ever-increasing variety of possible approaches for literary interpretation and textual analysis. Those approaches particularly ap.plicable for the works of male authors, contextual/sociological and stereotypical, have thus far produced important definitions of women's social role and status, both in societies of the present (e.g. Kate Millett's analysis Qf passages by Norman Mailer and Henry Miller in Sexual Politics ) and of the past. Such analyses almost invariably discover a pattern of female submission and male dominance in works written by European and American men. Thus far, such feminist approaches have primarily served as devices to help raise the level of consciousness about sexual prejudices and stereotypification of sex roles. However, the procedures for analysis of sex role stereotypification and relative status of the sexes can sometimes be utilized to solve problems in literary works for which other attempted solutions have not succeeded. They can and should be admitted to the canon of literary methodologies available for all critics and interpreters. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Minna von Barnhelm is a case in point. Although it can be demonstrated that the ideal behavior of male and female characters in European literature before the twentieth century usually conforms to stereotypes which change little from century to century, it is the number of literary works which concentrate on deviations from this norm that is astonishing. In such works, which deal with masculine and feminine behavior per se, the plots usually follow a single pattern: the man is displaying an extreme version of "masculine" behavior because the woman has usurped his normal, moderate masculine role. To remain more masculine than she, he must exaggerate his masculinity. His behavior has become-a parody of masculinity not as a counterpart to her femininity, but rather to reinstate the sex role and status distinctions which her "masculine" behavior has threatened. The idea that "masculine" or "feminine" behavior is roleplaying , independent of anatomical gender, is not new. This is particularly evident in Shakespeare's comedies, in which the plot often revolves around female characters disguising themselves as men, complete with swagger and swear words. The confusion of sex roles and resultant humor is amplified by knowledge on the part of the Elizabethan audience that the female roles are played by 47 male actors. The comic complications can only be resolved, however, by a return to "natural" sex roles, thus indicating that such reversals of sex role were abnormal and to be rejected. These physically apparent sex role reversals are paralleled in other literary works by a more subtle reversal of sex role, as female characters display the "masculine" characteristics of assertiveness and dominance. But role-playing is seen in these pre-twentieth-century works as a possibility for masculine or feminine behavior only in sex role reversals, not for the feminine behavior of a woman or the masculine behavior of a manthen considered totally instinctive, and thus "natural." Drama seems to be the literary genre which most often deals with deviation from sex role stereotypes, perhaps because of the concern with role-playing inherent in theater itself. Not only does this literary form have a non-literary aspect—performance by physically present persons each of whom pretends, for an audience which expects to be presented with verisimilitude, to be someone else—but it also frequently reflects ironically on this mode of presentation. In Lessing's Minna von Barnhelm, such self-consciousness that it is a play with actors playing roles appears, for example, in Tellheim's appe-llation for Minna and Franziska: "Komödiantinnen" (V.xi i, 547). Minna responds that playing a role had presented difficulties for her. Such objectifications of human behavior provided by drama have probably, in fact, formed and informed the way that modern European culture, and particularly the social sciences, view social or political behavior as "role." The modern uses of the word, now a term in general use meaning a function assumed by someone, and at the same time jargon referring to behavior or societal function in the social sciences, derives from the traditional metaphor...