Missing the Breast: Gender, Fantasy, and the Body in the German Enlightenment

5 / Sophie von La Roche and the Communities of the Breast

5 / Sophie von La Roche and the Communities of the Breast In moving from Christoph Martin Wieland to Sophie von La Roche, we may once again appeal to the trope of metonymy, understood in its primary sense as contiguity. Wieland, after all, was not only La Roche’s distant cousin, in whose parents’ home in Biberach she lived for a number of years; he was also her second fiancé, before she acceded to a marriage of convenience with Georg Michael Frank von La Roche, in 1753. Until her death, her life and Wieland’s continued to be intertwined in complex and mediated ways, almost always under the sign of writing . Thus it was under Wieland’s hotly debated tutelage that she wrote the epistolary novel Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim, which propelled her into literary fame. Even so, when the novel was published, in 1771, the title page announced only Wieland as the editor of an otherwise anonymous production. His foreword, in the form of a putative letter to the author of the novel, deftly engages in the discursive sleight of hand necessary to create an acceptable public entrance for a novel by a female author, to reconcile her literary activity with the conventional 137 image of the virtuous woman and mother. Even though critics, both now and inWieland’s time, have often viewed him as a condescending pedant, the evidence of the correspondence and a close reading of the foreword in conjunction with the novel reveal a subtle and savvy complicity on the part of both authors. Significant for our purposes, as we shall see, is that this complicity turns on an analogy between sexuality and writing. There were, of course, real diªerences between La Roche andWieland. Quite apart from the complicated relational politics that involved them in a series of vexed engagements before each was finally married, Wieland , as we saw in the previous chapter, sought an eroticized, corporeal morality that eventually oªended La Roche. Her Sophia von Sternheim and the many other women of her literary production would have nothing in common with Musarion and Aspasia. If Wieland’s texts seem to proªer the breast for male delectation, La Roche’s seem to retract it.When her heroine is presented to the prince at court, she is appalled by the gazes directed at her bosom: “Such looks, my dear! God preserve me from ever seeing them again!—How I abhor that Spanish dress, which allowed me nothing but a tippet [a scant or transparent shawl covering the décolletage]. Oh! if ever I was proud of dress, I yesterday suªered a severe penance for it. I cannot express the anguish of my soul, at being the object of such odious looks.”1 For his part, Wieland had written in Der neue Amadis about men who had the habit “of surreptitiously stealing glances at tippets that had become slightly disarranged” and predictably attributed the disarray to the women “who played their little game so fine and quickly.”2 For La Roche, the unveiling of the breast was no game. It may have been Wieland’s Ammengeschichte, the tale of Biribinker, that established the stakes as well as the terms for their diªering inscriptions and materializations of the breast.3 We recall that the metonymic tale of multiple breast encounters turns on Biribinker’s profound and forbidden aªection for the simple milkmaid Galactine. As Sengle has pointed out, the writing of Wieland’s Die Abenteuer des Don Sylvio von Rosalva, in which the tale of Biribinker is embedded, coincided with the author’s scandalous cohabitation with Christine Hagel, a poor workingclass woman, who became pregnant during this time.4 It was not only that Wieland desperately needed the proceeds from the sale of the book in order to finance their relationship.5 Bibi, as Wieland aªectionately 138 called Hagel, was also probably “his only true passion.”6 In a letter to his friend Johann Georg Zimmermann, Wieland writes: The sirens, Sophie, Julie [Bondeli, another of Wieland’s fiancées], in short, the seraphic ladies have repaid me for every moment of happiness which they allowed me to taste with two thousand years of torture and damnation. My little Philomele is the only girl in the world who only did me good.7 If Sophie von La Roche and Julie Bondeli seemed to withhold the breast from Wieland himself, his Biribinker finds a world of breasts, and he settles for the...