Editors’ Introduction

The month of July is dedicated to putting the final polish on the manuscript of the Women in German Yearbook and writing its introduction. This is difficult work, to be sure, but it is also a pleasurable task because as editors, we enjoy the privilege of being the first to read the Yearbook from cover to cover. And volume 29 is a good read. It contains seven articles, five of which constitute the Focus section, titled “Around 1800.” These studies introduce and analyze texts in a variety of genres (prose, poetry, drama, and travelogue) written by German women in the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth centuries when it was widely believed—especially following the publication of Rousseau’s Emile in 1762—that biology dictated the nature of woman. European societies assumed that women were intellectually inferior to men and put the emphasis for the Bildung (education) of middle-and upper-class women on training them in so-called accomplishments, such as music, dance, and drawing, so that they would attract a suitor and fulfill their destiny of marriage and motherhood. While men controlled and participated in the public sphere of politics, business, and artistic achievement, women were restricted to the private sphere of home and family. The doctrine of separate spheres put the writing woman in direct conflict with her social role.

While women’s ambition to write was frowned upon, a notable number of women entered the literary marketplace around 1800 and achieved success in a profession that continued to be dominated by men. It was also a time of great political and social change. Nationalism and imperial expansion, revolution and war, industrial progress and labor protests forged modern Europe; and the making of modern Europe was also the making of modern woman (Abrams, 2002).

The Focus section includes five studies that deal with the writings of such enlightened modern women as Sophie von La Roche (1730–1807), Caroline Auguste Fischer (1764–1842), Sophie Mereau-Brentano (1770–1806), Friederike Brun (1765–1835), Elise Bürger (1769–1833), Ida Pfeiffer (1797–1858), Ida von Hahn-Hahn (1805–80), and Luise Mühlbach (1814–73). Informed by the paradigms of new historicism and post-colonial and gender theories, these studies examine the role of Bildung in the context of the eighteenth-century cultural discourse of “Otherness”; analyze the era’s gender ideology and its repressive authority over both women and men; illustrate the tension between the women writers’ ambition for recognition and influence and the restrictions imposed on them by gender; and reveal female cultural agency and feminine subjectivity as a sense of self.

In the first of the five articles in the Focus section, Christine Lehleiter studies, within the context of the Bildungsroman, the conceptualization of female selfhood in Sophie von La Roche’s novel The History of Lady Sternheim (1776, Die Geschichte des Fräulein von Sternheim [1771]). This novel, a sensation during its time, is representative of the Enlightenment and sentimentalism (Empfindsamkeit) movements and is valued as a foundational text for the German female literary tradition. The contemporary notion of the “beautiful soul” (schöne Seele)—utilizedin Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre [1795–96]) to serve as a catalyst for men on their educational journey toward harmonious maturation—influenced La Roche’s conceptualization of Lady Sternheim and the message that the heroine embodies: virtue, charity, and truth triumph over self-love. Drawing on the idea of a formative force, Lehleiter argues that female writers around 1800 conceptualized a self that did not need outside stimulus for its development because it originated from within. Moreover, La Roche’s novel offers an alternative concept for Bildung, namely, performance. Lehleiter highlights La Roche’s focus on performativity and draws helpful conclusions for the construction of female selfhood within the context of the Bildungsroman.

While La Roche was the sentimental Pietist who derived her “opportunities for cultural agency from the idea of the sensitive woman” (Dawson 115), Caroline Auguste Fischer (1764–1842) was the radical thinker who vehemently rejected the notion of “natural” femininity and masculinity. She rebelled against the contemporary constructs of...