Armed Ambiguity: Women Warriors in German Literature and Culture in the Age of Goethe by Julie Koser (review)

In this elegantly written and well-researched book, Julie Koser explores the representation of the woman warrior in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Engaging critical theory from Roland Barthes to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Koser discusses the popular fascination with the armed woman both in historical documents (such as newspapers and travel reports) and in literature in the wake of the French Revolution. By contextualizing these texts with essentialist gender theories of the time as represented by Pierre Roussel and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Koser explores the "strategic appropriation of gender myths as a form of contestation" (11). In particular she outlines the difference made in these writings between acceptable and non-acceptable forms of female activism. Whereas the woman as the defender of the family and the moral good was a sanctioned form of female agency, women's demands to be equal participants in the political process and to be allowed to bear arms were considered inappropriate. Koser traces the process by which some texts domesticated women warriors with the goal of nullifying their subversive potential. Yet, despite such attempts to negate the challenge to the patriarchal order that the woman warrior represented, this ambivalent figure nevertheless unsettled the gender binarism and beliefs about the separation of the public/male and the private/female spheres.

The authors discussed in the book's five chapters include canonical and non-canonical writers, both male and female: Christine Westphalen, Johann Heinrich Daniel Zschokke, Benedikte Naubert, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Therese Huber, Karoline von Günderrode, Caroline de la Motte Fouqué, and Heinrich von Kleist. Of particular merit is Koser's close reading of these authors' texts. She highlights their ambivalent representation of the woman warrior instead of attempting to solve the interpretive puzzles posed by this figure through a recourse to the authors' biography and their political affinities. By eschewing this conventional interpretive move, Koser is able to draw parallels between the open-endedness of these texts and the political situation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Of particular note is the fact that she devotes equal amounts of critical attention to canonical and lesser discussed writers, without engaging in the types of discussions of their aesthetic merit that, while outdated in many ways, still inform scholarship on women authors of this period in particular. By treating all texts equally and unapologetically, Koser crystallizes late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century attitudes towards women in the public sphere and the related crisis of masculinity in the aftermath of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. This, in turn, enables her to establish a convincing connection in her epilogue to present-day debates on women in the military. Looking at the Bundeswehr's campaign "Frauen werben Frauen," she posits that "these ads replace old myths with new fictions of what it means to be a woman who actively engages in 'sanctioned' forms of violence for the fatherland" (180), thereby building a bridge from the eighteenth century to the present moment.