Domesticating the Public: Women’s Discourse on Gender Roles in Nineteenth-Century Germany by Daniela Richter (review)

As Volume 12 of Women in German Literature, initiated in 1998 by Peter D.G. Brown with the publication of Helga S. Madland’s Marianne Ehrmann: Reason and Emotion in her Life and Works, Daniela Richter’s Domesticating the Public nicely fulfills the double goal of the series to publish scholarship on women authors and women’s issues. This compact and tautly written study offers a rich and varied look at women’s writing and writing about women across approximately six decades. Its examination of works that addressed women’s lives within nineteenth-century German domesticity also inevitably leads us across genres. In choosing not to focus exclusively on feminist writers, fiction writers, or women authors of high literary aspiration, Richter has charted a course different from that of well-known and important work by Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres, Carol Diethe, and Karin Tebben, taking a broader literary-sociological view of (largely middle-class) women’s cultural contributions ca. 1840 to ca. 1900. In so doing, she has produced an original study that attempts a comprehensive, if concise, view of women writers as agents in the production and interrogation of domesticity; the rewards for the reader, especially the student and the teacher, are many.

Cleverly titling and constructing her chapters according to those phases of life—childhood, adolescence, singlehood, marriage, maternity—that often determine chapter structures in women’s advice writing about women and for women, for example, in such long-enduring works as Elise Polko’s Unsere Pilgerfahrt von der Kinderstube bis zum eignen Herd, she unites in each of her five chapters writers across the generic spectrum—from pedagogical literature to reform literature to fiction. Her emulation of the framing of women’s lives in advice literature provides the occasion for exploring culturally affirmative writing of the period as well as women’s critical voices. The chapter title “‘Im siebten Himmel?’: Reforming Marriage,” for example, reproduces the gushing language of advice literature, informed as it is by the ideology of marriage and family that bolstered the German middle classes, and at the same time pointedly evokes the historical push for reform. The chapter itself explores both kinds of writing, but especially foregrounds fiction and non-fiction that begins to question the institution of marriage.

In addition to putting diverse genres and views in dialogue in each chapter, Richter frames her analysis with a brief account that situates the specific works in their cultural moment, and she returns to that frame throughout each chapter to draw out and highlight the significance of the writing addressed. Her approach results in such novel pairings as Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach’s Gemeindekind and Henriette Schrader-Breymann’s writing and work on behalf of the Kindergarten under the rubric “childhood” and, in a later chapter, E. Marlitt’s Im Hause des Kommerzienrates, advice literature, and the reformist writing of Helene Lange under the headings of adolescence and female mentorship. Such contextualization lends fiction by women greater depth and enables us to penetrate the sometimes-bland surface of popular writing to reach a deeper understanding of its meanings for contemporary readers; the dialogic relationship of genres also adroitly sidesteps questions of literary quality, which often have led to apology and narrow labeling in scholarship on women’s writing. I will return to the problem of apologies and labeling below.

Each of the richly informative chapters offers engaging reading. Perhaps the most striking among these chapters is that on unmarried women, since the focus on women outside the cycle of reproduction and generations initially appears to deviate from the central concerns of nineteenth-century German middle-class ideology. As Richter reminds us, however, unmarried women do in fact significantly populate German fiction by women, including those works whose trajectory is a happy ending in marriage; advice literature, as Richter demonstrates, also takes up the unmarried woman and the critical issues she faced—and not necessarily in the condescending...