Fissures of Empfindsamkeit: Tonal Shifts and Literary Depictions of Femininity in Goethe and Wezel

This article traces tonal shifts between the comic and the tragic in Goethe's drama Der Triumph der Empfindsamkeit and Wezel's novel Wilhelmine Arend, oder die Gefahren der Empfindsamkeit against the backdrop of late eighteenth-century theories of femininity and sentimentality. Although Empfindsamkeit became increasingly satirized and pathologized across the eighteenth century, its literary depictions in the works of Goethe and Wezel highlight the difficulties imposed by the social conditions of womanhood. My reading of these two works against the grain of their prevailing affect aims to illuminate the ways in which what is, explicitly, a critique of feminized, sentimental characteristics can also implicitly serve as a more nuanced and sympathetic exploration of the conditions of women in the eighteenth century.