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

Almost from the beginning of the French Revolution, according to a new monograph by Julie Koser, German travellers and publicists were transfixed by the role that women played in the armed uprisings and protests taking place in Paris. German observers tended to see these female militants not just as eager participants in the Revolution but as sources of particular excess. Unconstrained by either the traditional customs of warfare or the limits of reason, women were considered capable of acts of extreme violence. Newspapers brimmed with erotically tinged accusations of women mutilating corpses and taking part in acts of cannibalism (30–31). These reports served to characterize the threat of the French Revolution as civilizational––threatening not only the collapse of the state but the breakdown of the family and the household.

One should perhaps not be surprised that these same German observers were willing enough, as Koser notes, to contradict themselves when it came to celebrating the role of more politically amenable figures such as Charlotte Corday––the young woman and Girondist sympathizer who assassinated Jean-Paul Marat in 1793––and hailing German women on the home front who resisted French invasion in the subsequent Napoleonic Wars. But Koser points out that even these positive examples of armed and rebellious women were mainly intended to reinforce, rather than subvert, gender norms (46). As fascinated as they appear to have been by these women taking up arms, most German writers understood even positive examples of female revolutionaries as a threat to the stability of the German bourgeois domestic order. And they carefully worked to contain these women's influence, either by describing them exclusively in terms of defending the household, by treating them as exemplars of a specifically feminine virtue of self-sacrifice, or by considering them as instruments (vessels, as it were) of God's will, in the manner of Joan of Arc, rather than as subjects in their own right.

These mythic representations of armed women were, in short, as Koser puts it in a particularly apt phrase, "precarious and provisional" (107), a temporary reversal of the prevailing gender hierarchy that could be considered justified only in times of crisis. These armed women were, in this sense, carnivalesque (15). Their cross-dressing served as a temporary break from the norm, a momentary release, that may be considered allowable only in the interest of securing the norm and reinforcing its permanence.

If these representations of armed women were primarily intended to rein force and shore up gender norms, they remained ambiguous and could find themselves subject to multiple ways of reading. A key question for this study is about the role of literature in the growth and development of this myth of the female militant. If on the one hand these literary examples could serve to reinforce gender norms, they also, by their very nature, could draw attention to the contradictions and paradoxes inherent in those norms. The very notion that women could, even if temporarily, join the fray, engage in combat, and even excel on the battlefield, at least suggests, as Koser points out at multiple points in her study, that these gender norms are cultural rather than biological and that they are, in this sense, socially and historically constituted. This is perhaps why, even in the most canonical literary representations that Koser discusses, the authors of these texts––Schiller's Die Jungfrau von Orleans, Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea, and Kleist's Penthesilea––seem so incapable, in spite of their conservative viewpoint, of staying on message. These canonical works are, in light of Koser's reading, full of contradictions and brimming with unexpected reversals. They rarely seem to result, in the end, in a domestic order that is fully restored. The female warrior might be returned safely to the home, but she seems transformed by the experience. Gender norms are, as Judith Butler...