Officer and Lady: Pants and Politics in Caroline de la Motte-Fouqué's Das Heldenmädchen aus der Vendée (1816)

Officer and Lady: Pants and Politics in Caroline de la Motte-Fouqué's Das Heldenmädchen aus der Vendée (1816) ELISABETH KRIMMER /. Hybrid Existences The secondary literature on novels and dramas by German women writers of the eighteenth century often stresses the fact that these texts are thematically limited to the realm of home and family. Lydia Schieth, for example, maintains that "the portrayal of a reality outside of the home and of alternative life choices constitutes a taboo for novels by women writers ."1 According to Karin Wurst, neither the female protagonists nor their authors were able to "imagine adventures outside of the house."2 Dagmar von Hoff writes that "controversy, deviation, motion, the Other" are sacrificed in dramas by women writers: "They chose confinement, final forms, stagnancy, death."3 It cannot be denied that these analyses are adequate representations of a large number of novels and dramas by eighteenthcentury women writers. But one should also keep in mind that they do not do justice to many other such texts. In historical reality as well as in fiction, women devised strategies that enabled them to expand their sphere of action and to lead—or at least imagine—a life of adventure and excitement. One such strategy was cross-dressing. It is generally acknowledged that questions of authorship are inseparable from the gender of the writing subject. The demarcations are especially clear-cut in the eighteenth century when authorship was construed 165 166 / KRIMMER as masculine territory upon which female writers were transgressing. In writing, a woman assumed male prerogatives and lost her claim to pure femininity. Authorship thus made a hybrid of the woman writer, and this hybrid revenged itself by haunting her text in the form of a cross-dressed heroine.4 In numerous texts by eighteenth-century women writers, crossdressers leave behind the proclaimed values of female domesticity and conservative femininity and venture out into the murky terrain formed by the intersection of gender, aesthetics, and politics. In the following pages, I want to focus on Caroline de la Motte-Fouqué's novel Das Heldenmädchen aus der Vendée [The Heroic Maiden from the Vendée] (1816), a text that features a female protagonist who dons male attire and leaves her home in order to become a soldier. In this novel—just as in Thérèse Huber's novel Die Familie Seldorf [The Seldorf Family] ( 1795/ 96)—the royalist uprising in the Vendée in the wake of the French Revolution opens up a new sphere of action for the heroine. But while the plot evolves around the Vendée events, the date of publication and letters by Fouqué suggest that the actual frame of reference for this novel is not the battles of the French Revolution but the German Wars of Liberation. I want to begin my investigation with a brief survey of the historical events that provided the backdrop for Fouqué's text. In doing so, I intend to show that Fouqué's cross-dressed heroine is not a singular fictional creation but rather part of a long tradition of female soldiers in male attire; a tradition which teaches us that the ideal of female domesticity and compliance that we have come to associate with eighteenth-century womanhood was not as all-encompassing as we make it out to be. But in perceiving the newly gained freedom of the woman underneath the clothes, we should not overlook the masculine attire that hides her body. If a woman entered the public sphere and engaged in masculine activities, she abandoned her own gender. The adoption of the exterior trappings of the other sex is the visible manifestation of this transgression.A woman who lives free and heroically forfeits her femininity and becomes an exile from her own gender . This conflicted identity manifests itself in Fouqué's text. The second part of this paper therefore analyzes Fouqué's sophisticated argumentation . Fouqué is walking the tightrope between her heroine's unwomanly participation in the war on the one hand, and her endeavor to conform to traditional stereotypes of femininity on the other. In tracing the destiny of the cross-dressed heroine, I intend to reveal the...