Enlightened Reactions. Emancipation, Gender, and Race in German Women's Writing by Traci S. O'Brien (review)

In this monograph, O'Brien examines "the rhetoric of emancipation" used in works by Ida von Hahn-Hahn (1805-1880), Fanny Lewald (1811-1889), and Ottilie Assing (1819-1884). The unifying concept of this analysis is not an emphasis on a narrowly defined message but on a common rhetorical strategy. All three authors are critical of the nineteenth-century, bourgeois liberal, exclusionary, white-male enactment of the Enlightenment's universal notions of personhood and citizenship and argue for the inclusion of women (Hahn-Hahn and Lewald), Jews (Lewald), or blacks (Assing). However, as O'Brien demonstrates, "their expanded view of selfhood or individuality" is equally rooted in these Enlightenment ideals and thus re-enacts the same exclusionary-inclusionary dynamic (56). O'Brien's purpose is to make her readers aware of the contradictory "logic of these texts" (86) which allows for an arguably progressive "defin[ition] of the individual" but one that is based on an "excluded non-individual" (154). Specifically, each author makes use of a racialized other—the Oriental (Hahn-Hahn, Lewald), the black (Hahn-Hahn, Lewald), or the Native American (Assing)—to support her expanded definition of personhood.

In setting up her theoretical framework, O'Brien uses Isabel Hull's Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700-1815 (1996) to lay the foundation for her argument that "universal rights and particular exclusions could come to peacefully coexist" in bourgeois liberal society (25). For O'Brien, Hahn-Hahn, Lewald, and Assing use "the universal concept of the individual as a source of power for women" (44). This allows them, primarily through their writing, to be contributing members of society, a central pillar to their understanding of personhood. O'Brien then goes on to layer this theoretical cornerstone with theoretical discourses on gender (Frevert et. al.), race (Eigen and Larrimore et. al.), colonialism (Zantop et. al.), orientalism (Said et.al.), and imperialism (Yeǧenoǧlu et. al.). This is necessary because what she writes in particular about Hahn-Hahn applies equally to Lewald and Assing: "concepts of human development, gender, race and knowledge are inextricably linked" (146). In using this complex of theoretical approaches, as opposed to a single-strand model, O'Brien shifts her readers' attention from focusing solely on what the authors argue for (inclusion) to how they make their arguments (exclusion). O'Brien's point is not to minimize these women's progressive, emancipatory impulses but to highlight the dynamic between the what and the how in order to "reveal [ . . . ] a desire to acquire power of the self and achieve autonomy" (306). In the chapters on the individual authors, O'Brien analyzes their use of a "non-individual [racialized] other" as a key rhetorical strategy that allows them "to expand the notion of individuality" (299). Although the rhetorical strategy employed is similar, O'Brien is careful to articulate the differences between the authors. This is perhaps best illustrated by the contrast in their use of blacks.

In the cases of Hahn-Hahn and Lewald, whose primary concern is women's emancipation, O'Brien reads their use of the black as a metaphor "to endorse the female self" (cf. 280). Hahn-Hahn, according to O'Brien, "render[s] the [black] Oriental invisible, inhuman, and unworthy of space" (153) in order to underscore her own development as a European female capable of producing knowledge (cf. 154-56). Lewald, she argues, often makes use of an "Uncle Tom" analogy in order to highlight the unjust oppression of women in her and her readers' space (Europe) while expressing no "empathy [ . . . ] for the situation of actual slaves" (233). Assing, "in contrast to both Hahn-Hahn and Lewald, [ . . . ] depicts actual slaves as the truly oppressed" (239). As an Abolitionist who seeks to expose the pronounced discrepancy between the Constitution and the practice of slavery, Assing sets up a "primitive" (Native American) in contrast to "civil" society. Blacks, most notably exemplified by...