- Public Voices: Political Discourse in the Writings of Caroline de la Motte Fouqué
In her insightful book Public Voices: Political Discourse in the Writings of Caroline de la Motte Fouqué, Karin Baumgartner examines theoretical and fictional works by the conservative, aristocratic writer Caroline de la Motte Fouqué, in which Fouqué attempted to construct a space for women in the “newly evolving public sphere” (24) of politics and nation building in the wake of the French Revolution, Napoleonic invasions, and Wars of Liberation. Baumgartner’s well-researched and deftly argued study is a direct response to previous scholarship that has reinforced the notion that women were excluded from the political realm of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German society; it is also a reaction to the dearth of feminist scholarship addressing the literary contributions by politically and socially conservative female authors of this time period. Integral to Baumgartner’s project is an examination of the strategies employed by Fouqué and other women writers to navigate the male-dominated public discourse of the period and to claim “discursive positions” (29) within it for women.
In her first chapter, Baumgartner establishes Fouqué’s argument for women’s place in the public sphere, in which Fouqué appropriated the dominant gender discourse to argue that it was exactly woman’s “divine nature” (47) and “role as mother” (49)—claims previously employed to exclude women from the public sphere—that justified and even necessitated her participation in the political realm. Fouqué, Baumgartner argues, promoted this view in her theoretical and fictional texts by utilizing what traditionally were considered “appropriate” genres and subject matter for women—religion, education, and fashion—in order to [End Page 331] actively participate in discourses, such as mythology, history, and politics, which previously had been foreclosed to women. By disguising her forays into these “masculine” fields of inquiry as religious or pedagogical texts aimed explicitly at a female audience, Fouqué granted her female readers access to new fields of knowledge. Perhaps more importantly, Baumgartner’s analysis suggests that Fouqué’s very act of writing a history of mythology or a history of fashion “modeled for her female readers how women could assume a discursive position in the emerging public sphere” (37).
The second chapter places the conservative Fouqué’s historical novel Das Heldenmädchen aus der Vendée (1816) in dialogue with contemporary female writers—such as Sophie von La Roche, Therese Huber, and Christine Westphalen—whose novels, all set against the backdrop of the French Revolution, thematize in complex and differing ways women’s negotiation of the political sphere at the close of the eighteenth century. Baumgartner convincingly shows how Fouqué’s historical novel constructed a space for women in history and asserted their authority in the public realm by revealing the intrinsic, inextricable connection between domestic and political concerns.
Chapter three further explores Fouqué’s theory of “sociability” (117) and the role she envisioned women playing in the newly emerging German nation. Simultaneously, Baumgartner examines how Fouqué’s conception of women’s role in the public sphere differed from the models put forth in the works of fellow female writers such as Amalie von Helvig, Karoline Pichler, and Helmina von Chézy. At the heart of Fouqué’s theory lies the family as a vehicle for female entry into the political discourse. Fouqué’s texts suggest that woman’s influential role within the family made her inclusion in the political sphere of the new nation-state imperative. Baumgartner suggests that Fouqué viewed her theory of sociability as validated by Prussia’s defeat and occupation by Napoleon; namely, that the success of the German nation in liberating itself was contingent upon the efforts of both men and women (133). Fouqué thus redefined the public realm not as a strictly political sphere; rather, she defined it as a “sphere of sociability” (144) to which women had an equal if not greater right.
Chapters four and five address Fouqué’s historical and domestic novels as potential vehicles for writing women into history via aristocratic female protagonists...