Women and Writing in the Works of Novalis: Transformation Beyond Measure? (review)

This study is based on the author's doctoral thesis at Trinity College Dublin and offers close readings of some of Novalis's best-known texts, including Heinrich von Ofterdingen, as well as of letters and selections from philosophical works such as the Fichte-Studien. The readings are organized under the general theme of Novalis's understanding and portrayal of women and of the feminine. Hodkinson begins with introductory chapters on "Romanticism, Gender, and the Case of Novalis" and "Writing About Women, 1795–1799," and follows these with a chapter on letters and letter-writing. The study then opens up into very interesting and often little-considered territory, with chapters focusing on music and polyphony and the relation of these to Novalis's specific views of femininity.

Hodkinson subscribes on the whole to an approach to Novalis studies popular with poststructuralists, but he does not subsume the author under the theory. He does stress that Novalis's writing about gender and women is a product of an overall theory of writing, one in which "women" and "the feminine" often blur together. Hodkinson does not fully explore the implications of the notion that a particularly Romantic, self-conscious, ironic writing intended to be very precise may actually help produce a sort of conceptual collapse; his focus is more on close readings than on developing a new theory of a Romantic theory of writing. But he does explain what (at least one sort of) "Romantic" writing actually is, and how Novalis's philosophy and poesy fit into that context. In so doing, Hodkinson identifies and begins to explore a promising direction for Novalis (and Early Romantic) scholarship: when he indicates that the same Romantic semiotics that turns women into words and reality into illusion also enables the (in this case) male author to redefine and in effect to recreate women, and himself, Hodkinson encourages us to think of semiotics as a realm that cannot completely shut out the subject. Hodkinson also implicitly asks us to reconsider the Romantic development of the aesthetic into an essentially separate sphere of existence, and instead to re-read Novalis as deeply engaged with reality rather than attempting to flee it. He leaves us wondering, yet again, where Novalis might have taken Romanticism had he lived longer.

A reading of the Hemsterhuis-Studien in particular encourages us to return to Novalis, as Hodkinson shows that Novalis tries to transform love into an organizing principle not only in philosophy, but in biology as well (100–101). This recalls Friedrich Schlegel's argument, in his writings on psychology, that love, not language, is the basis of understanding. In the same passage (in Volume 12 of the Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, 350–351), Schlegel refers to a concept of alterity that Hodkinson finds in Novalis as well: love prompts and permits the self to conceive of an 'other' in the first place. The representation of the other, the "Du," is of course internally generated, and transformed through speech and writing, but that does not mean that real others do not exist. Poetic language does not obscure our path to relationships with real others—it enables those relationships, and enables our constant redefining of ourselves as compared with those others.

On the matter of the significance of Novalis's very young fiancée Sophie von Kühn, Hodkinson uses existing scholarship as well as Novalis's own writing judiciously and persuasively. He essentially rephrases the now-standard thinking on Sophie in the early chapter on Romanticism and gender, but the importance of Novalis's construction of Sophie for his later fictionalizations of "woman" must be addressed. Hodkinson is almost certainly right to assert that the creation of a "consciously artificial" image of Sophie was far more important to Novalis's later work than any prolonged mourning for the real girl. The conviction that Sophie was generally of more use to Novalis as a reconstructed image is also consistent with...