". . . eine Mischung von Sinnlichkeit und Witz . . .". Ironische Inszenierung der Geschlechter in Heinrich Heines Lutezia by Anne Stähr (review)

One of the topics that were, for a time, somewhat neglected in the modern phase of Heine scholarship was his relationships with and attitudes toward women, perhaps because the results would not quite fit the project of making him in all matters the ally of our progressive convictions today. In more recent years there have been a number of treatments of these matters, sometimes coming to uncomfortable conclusions. Anne Stähr in her Humboldt University dissertation is determined to go about this inquiry in a different way. Following the current theories about gender as not an essential or biological category, but as constituting "Geschlechtsbilder, die nicht die Realität abbilden, sondern den Differenzdiskurs über Geschlecht gleichzeitig rezipieren und führen" (168), she pursues Heine's employment of gender in Lutezia as way of differentiating woman as the other and analogously applies chains of equivocating associations to further phenomena of otherness, such as Jewishness, orientalism, homosexuality, foreignness, or physical disability.

An introductory chapter on the changes in gender relations in the nineteenth century with a claim that Lutezia is a unified, Romantic novel and that the title is meant to echo Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde (which Heine professed to despise) is followed by a lengthy theoretical second chapter. A third treats the sexualization of Jewishness with many examples linking Jewish figures with feminization, physical weakness, and sexual deviance, while the feminine is associated with irrational emotionality, even in the apparent defense of the alleged murderess Madame Lafarge. The Jewish narrator ironically feminizes himself by identifying himself with Scheherazade, at the same time indicating his subversive attitude. A fourth chapter, taking off from Heine's treatment of Horace Vernet's painting Juda und Thamar, discusses the orientalization of the "beautiful Jew" as a way of creating an alien distance between gentile and Jewish communities. Judah is a sexually driven Jewish male, Tamar a femme fatale and Jewish prostitute. The theme of the femme fatale leads to Heine's legend of the "Willis," the source of Adolphe Adam's ballet Giselle, and thence to performers, such as Pauline Viardot, defeminized by orientalization. This topic continues in a fifth chapter to a contrast of the virginal Jenny Lind with the association of actresses and dancers with prostitution—to be sure, a familiar topic—and thence to depictions by the flâneur of prostitution in the sexualized urban site of Paris. A sixth chapter treats images of woman as a demonic Melusine, Amazon, Undine, wood nymph, and witch, then turns to the depiction of Victor Hugo as bodily deformed and sexually damaged (the well-read author has missed here Michel Espagne's treatment of this matter from 1982) and to George Sand's gender masquerade.

This summary may make the argument seem more helter-skelter than it is; the chain of associations is tighter than I have been able to indicate. My abstract may also suggest in Heine's text a kind of automatic writing extracting attitudes and clichés from the environment. But Stähr sees all the assertions, especially the commonplaces about gender, destabilized and in some cases nearly deconstructed by irony, which gives the reader the impression of an unreliable narrator who ambiguates what seems to be vigorous assertion. Irony is, of course, an old topic in Heine studies; every reader must have had the sense that he says contradictory things at the same time. Stähr is wise enough to understand that Heine's irony does not simply turn meanings into their opposites, as some contemporary commentators claim, including one whom Stähr unwisely professes to admire. The irony sublates assertion, so to speak, leaving it intact but unstable and ambiguated with contrary implication. Sometimes Stähr seems uncertain whether Heine does this all the time; she seems to suspect that antisemitic and misogynist tropes are taken over intact. But in general she sees irony as the governing device in...