The "Odd" Woman as Heroine in the Fiction of Louise von François

The "Odd" Woman as Heroine in the Fiction of Louise von François Linda Kraus Worley Louise von François writes to Conrad Ferdinand Meyer in 1881 of a mutual friend, "FrI. Doctor" Druskovitz: es ist ein braves, tapferes Mädchen und ihre Stellung zur Gesellschaft, präciser ausgedrückt die Existenz-frage sehr zweifelhaft . Noch gilt in Deutschland das Schillersche Frauenideal und vom Standpunkte des Geschlechtes Nummero Eins aus betrachtet, gewiss mit Recht. Nur daß den vielen Unbegehrten und den wenigen nicht Begehrenden nicht der Raum versperrt werden darf, auf eigenen Füssen zu einem würdigen , menschlichen Ziele zu gelangen (Bettelheim, Franqois-Meyer 26). François (1817-1893) was one of the few writers of fiction in the nineteenth century deeply concerned with the existential problems encountered by the "vielen Unbegehrten " and the "wenigen nicht Begehrenden." Thérèse Huber had dealt with similar problems in works such as Die Ehelosen (1829) as had Friederike Helene Unger earlier, but the situation of such women was by no means a popular theme. This relative neglect is all the more astonishing in light of the fact that approximately fifty percent of all German women were unmarried in midcentury (Twellmann-Schepp 27-29) . The British novelist George Gissing focused on the lives of unmarried women in his novel The Odd Women published in 1892. The heroine of his novel remarks on the fact that there are half a million more women than men in England: "So many odd women—no making a pair with them. The pessimists call them useless, lost, futile lives. I, naturally—being one of them myself— take another view. I look upon them as a great reserve" (37). Annis Pratt, very likely referring to Gissing's novel, uses the term in Archetypal Patterns in Women's 155 Fiction to refer to fiction in which the heroine tries to live on her own. The heroine is "odd" because she is not half of a couple and therefore does not fulfill a set function in a nuclear family (113-14). The term can be profitably extended to include all women, even those eventually pairing up, who do not fulfill the functions in the nuclear family set by the strict nineteenthcentury norm of appropriate female behavior. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the ideology of complementary gender-based character traits, Geschlechtscharakter , was firmly entrenched. Traits such as passivity, emotionality, dependency, sensitivity, and Anmut were hypothesized as being specifically "female." In Complaints and Disorders, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English document how doctors, psychologists, and anthropologists in the latter part of the nineteenth century attempted to prove "scientifically" that these traits were anchored in woman's very biology. Any deviations from this prescriptive norm were decried as contrary to nature. By mid-century, earlier models for women such as the Gelehrte had long since become figures of either derision or horror. After the Industrial Revolution had caused the strict separation of the workplace from the home, middle-class women were literally confined to the isolated and isolating realm of home and family, to the roles of wife and mother. There was no place in this rigid socio-cultural matrix for the unmarried woman. Louise von François never directly attacked the dominant ideology of gender-based character traits, the "Schillersche Frauenideal." In Die andere Frau Renate Möhrmann documents how the women writers of the Vormärz spoke up against this ideology by stressing women's right to a profession and the emancipation of the heart. Their overt calls for social change were almost completely silent by the 1850s when François began publishing . Feminists such as Louise Otto-Peters and Hedwig Dohm were notable exceptions to the tendency surfacing in the Nachmärz to concentrate on "Bestätigungsliteratur anstatt Tendenzpoesie, Verinnerlichungsbemühungen anstatt Veränderungsbestrebungen, Comfort des Herzens anstelle intellektueller Mobilität . . ." (Möhrmann 151). Yet within this specific historical constellation, Francois 's concern for the "odd" woman opens up a fruitful line of inquiry, one that may modify the prevalent view of women's literary history as well as the common view, held even by feminist critics, of François as a "conservative " author.1 Francois's achievement in...