The Virginal Mother in German Culture: From Sophie von La Roche and Goethe to Metropolis by Lauren Nossett (review)

Lauren Nossett’s well-researched study presents moments of upheaval in German history that become stable in the presence of the fictional virginal mother, offering new emphasis on a ubiquitous figure not yet highlighted in the scholarship of fictional mothers. The idealized virginal mother inhabits the contradictory space between “social expectation and reality” (3), where she glorifies motherhood, fetishizes virginity, and views sex and pregnancy as taboo topics.

The fictional virginal mother emerges as changing eighteenth-century discourses of science, religion, and philosophy failed to fully explain human female behavior. Beyond Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s influential position on women’s maternal instincts, an attempt to strengthen male control over the female body eluded the scientific community. The virginal mother emerges in the cultural imagination as a solution to her absence in reality.

Sophie von La Roche and her epistolary novel Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (1771; The History of Lady Sophia Sternheim, 1991)— an example of the private, informal, supposedly female genre— provides the first example (22). The novel’s emphasis on the patriarchal order of gender and class is disrupted via the narrator Sophie’s dispersal of pedagogical advice to women. As in each insightful chapter, Nossett begins with brief historical context and author biography, followed with close readings that trace two virginal mother motifs: first, the caregiving and self-sacrificial figure who replaces “bad” mothers (24); and second, the virginal heroine who overcomes “the seduction plot” (27).

In chapter 2 the focus is Goethe’s ideal of the nonbiological virginal mother. In Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1779), Lotte’s chaste, maternal care for her siblings differs from the “dangerous maternal body” (53), a theme repeated in unrealistic female characters in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 1824) who bolster the virginal mother as feminine ideal. Where the biological female body appears in the figure of Gretchen in Faust I (1808), she proves murderous. Nossett’s excellent reading notwithstanding, Marianne Ehrmann’s (1755–95) infanticide fiction— the only female contemporary of Goethe’s to have written on the topic, as discussed by Helga Madland in a 1992 Monatshefte article— would be better matched for the female authorship the book otherwise pursues.

Chapter 3 considers the virginal mother as a “heroine of pulp fiction” in E. Marlitt’s Das Geheimnis der alten Mamsell (1867; The Old Maid’s Secret, 1871) and Die zweite Frau (1874; The Second Wife, 1887) (75). Amid political upheavals, Marlitt’s virginal mother provides social stability within middle-class domesticity, reinforcing Rousseau. At the same time, her heroines offer slight variations on eighteenth-century romance-driven models: women in Marlitt’s world suffer from vanity rather than adulterous behavior.

In chapter 4, evidence of actual caregiving and motherhood in autobiographical texts of Hedwig Dohm, Adelheid Popp, and Ottilie Baader, shift s away from idealized motherhood elsewhere (99). Rare are glimpses of satisfying or idealized maternal labor in Dohm’s middle-class view or Popp’s and Baader’s working-class life stories, where economic, social, and political realities challenge maternal images found in aristocratic or bourgeois fictional worlds.

In chapter 5, Thea von Harbou’s screenplay for Metropolis (1927) allows maternal images to overcome destructive patriarchal forces, where biological mothers are portrayed in a positive light (Joh Fredersen’s mother and his wife, Hel, appear in the novel). However, Maria as virginal mother does not exist in a domestic sphere, leaving no opportunity for critique either. Ideal femininity here is redemptive and extends to women as well as feminized men.

In conclusion, in her propensity to act chastely and to offer free labor, the idealized, selfless German female caregiver differs from US and British examples. The end of the idealized virginal mother in Germany comes with the Nazi push for utilitarian, biological motherhood.

Nossett’s examinations are well...