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6 / Revealing the Phallus, Concealing the Breast The Revolutionary Fictions of Wilhelm Heinse and Therese Huber From Wieland’s rococo fantasies of submission to a phallic breast and the modest breast-based communities of La Roche, with their flickering emancipatory moments, we now move to Wilhelm Heinse and Therese Huber, contemporaries of the brash generation identified with the Sturm und Drang movement. Although these two authors are indebted, respectively , to Wieland and La Roche, each individually radicalizes the tropes of these predecessors, develops fantasies of liberty and libertinage, and rewrites the sexual order from the position of the breast. Despite these authors’ crucial importance to the development I am tracing in this book, neither is well known either in English-speaking circles or even in Germany. The scholarship on both figures is limited, and there are no English translations of any of their texts. Diªerent reasons explain their obscurity. In the case of Huber, her work, like that of virtually all other German women writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was ignored and forgotten by scholarship until the advent of scholarly feminism in the 1970s. Facsimile editions of her nov168 els and stories have been available only since the late 1980s. As for Heinse, despite the enthusiasm with which a far from prudish German reading public received his first books in the 1770s and 1780s, a veil has since been drawn over his works because of their libertine philosophy and their quasi-pornographic narratives. A specialized scholarly readership accessed him occasionally under the sign of the Dionysian.1 More recently, his descriptions of paintings and sculptures and his aesthetics generally have been the subject of careful and sympathetic analysis.2 In sum, a generally censorious public and scholarship have occluded Wilhelm Heinse from our view, whereas Therese Huber, apart from the initial publication of her novels and stories, never even had a chance to appeal or oªend. But Heinse and Huber are not insignificant writers. Both wrote novels that vie with and, with respect to the dynamics we are tracing, surpass the major novels of their forebears. Heinse’s Ardinghello und die glückseligen Inseln, his novel set in Renaissance Italy, challenges Wieland’s Die Geschichte des Agathon, just as Huber’s Die Familie Seldorf rewrites La Roche’s Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim.3 Heinse was, for all intents and purposes, the Philip Roth of the late eighteenth century (there will be more to say about Roth in chapter 8). His novels and occasional writings on art, aesthetics, political philosophy , and metaphysics are dedicated to a single-minded eªort to expose the repressed law of desire at work in all things and to advocate for a social order based on an approving recognition of that law. As a young man in his twenties, he made his way for university studies to Erfurt, a city that briefly boasted a renowned faculty of Enlightenment professors positively disposed to materialist, sensualist, and anticlerical positions . Chief among these figures was Christoph Martin Wieland, professor of philosophy and of “the beautiful arts.”4 Throughout the 1770s, Heinse was a prodigy of the doting bachelor poet Ludwig Gleim, master of a far-flung homosocial network.5 Heinse also maintained a troubled acquaintance with the generally tolerant Wieland, who occasionally attempted to find him a livelihood or otherwise contribute to his support but was exasperated by Heinse’s complete lack of restraint in the depiction of erotic matters. The first of Heinse’s works to oªend Wieland was his translation, in 1774, of Petronius’s Satyricon,6 (under the title Die Begebeheiten des Enkolp), which included an unusually 169 revealing the phallus, concealing the breast provocative and scatological foreword from Heinse’s pen.Within months, Heinse had also sentWieland the so-called Stanzen, fifty strophes of erotic verse, eventually published, again in 1774, as an appendix to his Laidion; we will have occasion to discuss these texts as well as Wieland’s uncharacteristically vociferous responses. From 1780 to 1783, supported by Gleim and by Friedrich Jacobi, Heinse sojourned through Italy, recording his remarkably vivid and individual descriptions of classical and Renaissance artworks. He is, in the opinion of some, easily the rival of the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Much of the material that Heinse wrote during those three years was taken up in Ardinghello und die glückseligen Inseln, and with its publication, in 1787, he was appointed reader for the archbishop and grand elector of...

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