Public Voices: Political Discourse in the Writings of Caroline de la Motte Fouqué (review)

Karin Baumgartner’s monograph does an excellent job of investigating “the rhetorical strategies” used by Caroline de la Motte Fouqué in her non-fictional works as well as in her historical and domestic fiction in order to delineate Fouqué’s conservative, aristocratic responses to the times in which she lived (10). To set a framework for the analysis of Fouqué’s fictional œuvre, Baumgartner first discusses Fouqué’s participation in four seminal discourses of the early nineteenth century: education, mythology (linked to history, religion, and poetics), history, and fashion. Unifying Fouqué’s theoretical non-fictional approach to these topics is a consistent emphasis on women and the central role they have played and should continue to play in these parts of society.

In addition, Baumgartner asserts that by using discourses “available to women [ . . . ], [Fouqué] model[ed] for her readers how women could exploit existing gender stereotypes to make a case for their involvement in the public sphere” (40). The reference to and implied critique of Habermas is obvious, a topic that will be returned to subsequently.

In the chapters that follow, Baumgartner focuses on literary responses to the French Revolution (Chapter Two) and to the Wars of Liberation and the years immediately following (Chapter Three) before turning to Fouqué’s historical fiction (Chapter Four), and finally, her domestic fiction (Chapter Five). In all of the main chapters, Baumgartner deftly delineates influences on Fouqué’s thinking—Fichte, Kant, Schelling, Adam Müller, and Madame de Staël—and the way in which she deviates from them developing her own unique socio-political theory. Baumgartner is definitely at her best in these specific interpretations of Fouqué’s texts in their social and historical contexts. In chapters Two and Three, she also compares and contrasts Fouqué’s writings with those of other German women writers who dealt thematically with the same issues—Sophie von la Roche, Therese Huber, and Engel Christine Westphalen in regard to the French Revolution and Anna Amalie von Helvig, Karoline Pichler, and Westphalen in regard to the Wars of Liberation. In part, these comparisons with other women writers serve the purpose of documenting that “women did not share a unified political view, but were significantly influenced by local and class considerations” (74). While this is certainly a valid point, Baumgartner goes a bit too far in her assertion that “men managed to bond as universal brothers,” i.e., regardless of such considerations (81); the political spectrum and definitions of masculinity among men were just as broad as among women. Furthermore, had this been as easy as Baumgartner makes it seem here, there would not have been the crisis of aristocratic male identity that she identifies as a major theme in Fouqué’s works starting around 1815.

Throughout her analysis, Baumgartner documents particularly well the “battle between tradition and modernity” and Fouqué’s particular resolution of this conflict (241). This includes the centrality of Fouqué’s acceptance of gender polarity and her belief that “women should be drawing on the power derived through motherhood and family life to enter the public sphere” (45). For Fouqué, who “advocate[s] for a society based on feudalism,” [ . . . ] “the family is the location of the public sphere” (51). At times, however, it seems that Baumgartner, in her desire to highlight Fouqué’s conservative, feudal response to the socio-political change occurring all around her, fails to acknowledge the extent to which Fouqué’s position appropriates aspects of what is typically associated with the bourgeois definition of the female role. For example, the ideology of “republican motherhood” that Fouqué embraced was not the way most aristocratic women viewed themselves nor did it correspond to their actions with regard to their children (82). As Ute Frevert has pointed out, aristocratic women were known for their egotistical behavior and seldom had anything to do with their own children (Frauen-Geschichte. Zwischen bürgerlicher Verbesserung und Neuer Weiblichkeit, Frankfurt am Main, 1986...