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

Karin Baumgartner’s monograph aims to shed new light on the role of conservative women’s writing in the public discourse of early nineteenth-century Germany. Her focus is on Caroline de la Motte Fouqué (1773–1831), who, she argues, tried to give women a stronger voice in the male-dominated public sphere by urging them to embrace openly their traditional societal function as mothers and housewives. Promoting a mythologically legitimized form of female agency and working against the exclusion of women from historiographic writing, Fouqué also strove to contribute to the creation of a more stable and harmonious German national identity. Questions of gender played an important role in this undertaking, since the Prussian military losses during the period of Napoleonic occupation had triggered a general crisis of masculinity in the German population. Consequently, Fouqué, applying the popular state-family analogy, saw women as “the natural leaders of cultural renewal” (132)—an opinion many compatriots dismissed as naïve and elitist, since Fouqué was a privileged and proud member of the Prussian aristocracy.

Through a comparison with other contemporary women writers like Sophie von la Roche, Therese Huber, Amalie von Helvig, and Christine Westphalen, Baumgartner examines Fouqué’s curious blend of conservatism, pluralism, and late Romantic nationalism. One of her main arguments is that a thorough examination of Fouqué’s work shows the need for a fundamental revision of Habermas’s notion of the public sphere. Although this may well be the case, Baumgartner does not offer a critical discussion of Habermas’s highly influential theory, but merely states that he “situated the public sphere between the court and the family [while] Fouqué located it inside the parlor” (156). Similarly, her study does not draw on “feminism, new historicism, and hermeneutics,” as announced in the back cover text. Instead, we are treated to an enjoyably untheoretical, yet well argued and insightful investigation into the work of one of the most important German women writers of the early nineteenth century.

Baumgartner’s first three chapters have appeared previously in the form of journal articles dating back as far as 1997. It is thus not surprising that chapter four not only has a different feel, but is also the most effective and compelling part of the book. Here Baumgartner shows how Fouqué, with varying success, modified the Scottean model of the historical novel to serve her political goals, switching to first-person narration and an epistolary format more suitable to her female protagonists and readers. Chapter five, “Voicing a Theory of the State,” offers a concise sociohistorical overview of the radical changes in the structures of both class and gender. Since it situates Fouqué’s political thinking in the historical context, it should, at least in parts, have been moved to the beginning of the book. It is not clear why Baumgartner includes her brief discussion of Fouqué’s last novels in this chapter, instead of analyzing them more in depth in a separate section.

On the whole, Baumgartner’s conclusions are both lucid and sound, while her style is to the point and mostly jargon-free. The book raises a number of important points, and it is to be hoped that Baumgartner’s concluding call for a new theory of reading women’s domestic fiction will be answered in the near future.