Gender and Narrative Crisis in Christoph Martin Wieland’s “Novella without a Title”

In “Novella without a Title,” Christoph Martin Wieland positions himself outside of the eighteenth-century debates on “the women question.” Written in 1805, when the two-sexed model of gender complementarity allegedly was firmly in place, Wieland’s cross-dressing and passing protagonist defies easy categorization. The novella presents a model of gender and sexual ambiguity that is echoed and reinforced by an analogous narrative crisis presented through the framing narrative. Thus it offers a more complicated vision of sexual and gender identity around 1800 than either historical gendered binaries, or contemporary theorists, such as Butler, Garber, and Halberstam can explain.