Sophie von La Roche’s Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (1771): Conceptualizing Female Selfhood around 1800

Literary texts that describe female protagonists are usually excluded from the genre of the Bildungsroman. There are two options to answer such exclusion: first, the introduction of a new genre, the “female Bildungsroman,” or second, the questioning of the concept of the self that forms the basis of traditional definitions of the genre. The following article focuses on the second option by paying close attention to dress and masquerade in Sophie von La Roche’s Lady Sternheim. I argue that La Roche develops a discursive notion of the self, which allows her to open up a space for female Bildung.