Missing the Breast: Gender, Fantasy, and the Body in the German Enlightenment (review)

Arguing that the breast can play a major role in organizing signification, Simon Richter’s Missing the Breast is an ambitious effort to challenge the primacy of the phallus in the Western tradition. Richter works with a vast array of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German-language texts, ranging from the well-known to the obscure, by authors such as Christoph Martin Wieland, Sophie von La Roche, Wilhelm Heinse, Therese Huber, and Heinrich von Kleist. In sinuously pleasurable prose, he uncovers fascinating details about the cultural history of the breast.

Richter begins with the observation that the breast signifies not only abundant plenitude, but also lack and absence. Indeed, according to the Deutsches Wörterbuch of the Brothers Grimm, the “most original” meaning of the word “Brust” is “caesura, fractura, break, lack” (cited in Richter, 32). Richter cleverly plays on the words “bust” and “busted” to get across that sense of cleavage found in the otherwise so nourishing breast.

In his opening and closing chapters, Richter reports on a variety of modern fantasies in which men gain feminine breasts and women lose them. While men, from the popular scientist Jared Diamond to the fiction writer Philip Roth, imagine an increase in power from acquisition of breasts, the common pattern for women, found in the bodybuilder Bev Francis as well as in the work of the artists Matuschka and Deena Metzger, is that the loss of breasts empowers them.

These seeming contradictions—that the breast can signify both abundance and lack, that in cultural representations men gain power through breasts while women gain power through the absence of breasts—lead Richter to regard the breast in ways that are similar to Lacan’s understanding of being or having the phallus. Being the breast is the kind of objectified position that disempowers many women, while having the breast holds out the fantasy of significance for many men.

Richter clarifies his thesis most clearly at the end of his book: “We have found, particularly in the writing of Wieland, La Roche, Heinse, Huber, and Kleist, that it is not only possible, indeed necessary, to think of the breast in terms of lack, but also that the breast as lack is an origin for a language that challenges the patriarchal system” (283). In eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German literature, Richter finds evidence for an alternative discourse of the breast that disrupts the patriarchal language of the West.

Richter backs up his ambitious claims with tight and insightful analysis. In Wieland’s world of seductive hetaerae, Richter finds a recurrent representation of the phallic breast of mythic figures like Phyrne. Unlike his English contemporary Samuel Richardson, Wieland has no interest in eroticizing the maternal breast—in fact, Wie-land is skeptical that “a mother is bound by the laws of nature to suckle her child herself” (130). Instead he fills his novels with sexually active yet childless women.

Unable to breastfeed, Wieland’s confidante, Sophie von La Roche, withdraws the breast from the gaze of male readers. In Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Stern-heim, her characters no longer wish to be the breast, objects of male desire. Within a community of women, however, they can bond through their own control of the breast. Analyzing the 1798 narrative, Erscheinungen am See Oneida, Richter finds that the female protagonist, a French émigré trying to maintain the standards of the French Empire in the wilds of upstate New York, briefly enjoys having the breast when she cries out, “ich habe Milch!”

Richter imaginatively pairs Wilhelm Heinse, who reveals the phallus, with Therese Huber, who in contrast conceals the breast. Heinse’s project of “sodomizing his readers” with sexually explicit accounts of dildos, orgies, and male-male sex is truly revolutionary because it makes the phallus just one of many organs of pleasure. In contrast, Huber—herself a sexually active woman who grew up in a sexually unconventional household—tells...