Männlichkeit und soziale Ordnung bei Gottfried Keller. Studien zu Geschlecht und Realismus Von Stefan Voß (review)

With this volume 147 of the de Gruyter series Studien und Texte zur Sozialgeschichte der Literatur, Stefan Voß turned his University of Kiel dissertation into a detailed and theoretically sophisticated study of Gottfried Keller's narrative work. Carefully designed and meticulously documented, this analysis of masculinity and realism draws on a wealth of critical sources and provides a grand overview of Keller's male novella protagonists in their relations with female characters. It places both sexes against the background of nineteenth-century sociohistorical developments and frames gender relations through the ideological and aesthetic demands of bourgeois realist literary practices. Combining the two huge topics of gender and masculinity studies and realism, even 408 densely printed pages and around 2000 footnotes struggle to contain Voß's findings. But they are well worth pursuing in their rich detail and ultimately simple conclusion: Keller's novellas depict a staunch male order to which even his often-praised strong and independent female characters are subordinated. Voß's study presents the nuances, internal tensions, and contested details.

For a theoretical framework Voß adapts elements of Foucauldian discourse analysis into an operational form applicable to arguments and representations in literary texts, thereby picking up on historical changes and their effects on the construction of social realities in narratives. This move foregrounds the texts themselves instead of a discourse about them, yet integrates context by internalizing it. Beyond such a modified and hermeneuticized Foucauldian theory Voß draws on the subjectcritical position of poststructuralism. Together, the two theoretical frames eliminate the influence of authorial-biographical data and circumvent the long-dominant psychoanalytical strand in Keller reception that ties his characters and their contexts to the author's own life experience. For Voß's study, then, the text-producing consciousness is not an autonomous author-subject but the creative entity (Textinstanz) that is co-produced by the extra-textual discourses and social givens of the time.

Voß's inquiry rests on the key assumption that (poetic) literary realism is a descriptive method deployed toward the utopia of narratively reconstituting the readability of the world that is becoming ever more opaque in the modernizing, technologically advancing, and socially changing world of the nineteenth century. This premise, combined with theories of gender studies, yields four main categories of masculinity in Keller's novellas: examples of deficient masculinities; selective and comparative masculine designs; narratives of masculine socialization and initiation; and masculine compensatory strategies to incorporate the feminine. In Parts Two through Five of the book, followed by a brief final section on characters' deaths, Voß illuminates these categories through captivating, interpretive close readings of a large sample of Keller's novellas, from Die Leute von Seldwyla, the Züricher Novellen, and Das Sinngedicht, with reference to Das Fähnlein der sieben Aufrechten.

Part Two opens with Der Schmied seines Glücks, an example of homo economicus in a patriarchal order that is both upstaged and confirmed in this tale of an illegitimate affair by a young wife. The potent but socially unacceptable suitor produces an heir for her old, impotent but wealthy husband. The offspring is legitimated, the male order wins—and not just by overcoming the female challenge to it but, just as importantly, by properly hierarchizing the males within it.

Capitalism, conformity, and dehumanization are the key angles of interpretation for Die drei gerechten Kammmacher, a race to the bottom by the three titular protagonists in a labor environment under the dictates of modern capitalist self-exploitation. The central masculinity is ruinous not only in the realm of work but also in the erotic, where the wooing of Züs Bünzlin amounts to another, hoped-for but sadly disappointing, way of socio-economic advancement. And while it can be argued that the woman is a winner of sorts, she is so only thanks to her paternal capital, herself only a link in the patriarchal order.

The...