Women Write Back: Strategies of Response and the Dynamics of European Literary Culture, 1790-1805. (Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen & Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft)

Women Write Back

Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft

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In Verbindung mit Norbert Bachleitner (Universität Wien), Dietrich Briesemeister (Friedrich Schiller-Universität Jena), Francis Claudon (Université Paris XII), Joachim Knape (Universität Tübingen), Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz), John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University), Alfred Noe (Universität Wien), Manfred Pfister (Freie Universität Berlin), Sven H. Rossel (Universität Wien)

herausgegeben von

Alberto Martino (Universität Wien)

Redaktion: Ernst Grabovszki Anschrift der Redaktion: Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Berggasse 11/5, A-1090 Wien

Women Write Back Strategies of Response and the Dynamics of European Literary Culture, 1790-1805

Stephanie M. Hilger

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009

Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire (1940) Oil on canvas, 18 1/4 x 25 3/8 inches © Salvador Dalí. Fundación Gala-Salvador Dalí, (Artist Rights Society), 2006 Collection of the Salvador Dalí Museum, Inc., St. Petersburg, FL, 2006. C/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2009. Cover design: Pier Post Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de “ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence”. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. Die Reihe „Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft“ wird ab dem Jahr 2005 gemeinsam von Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York und dem Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin herausgegeben. Die Veröffentlichungen in deutscher Sprache erscheinen im Weidler Buchverlag, alle anderen bei Editions Rodopi. From 2005 onward, the series „Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft“ will appear as a joint publication by Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York and Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin. The German editions will be published by Weidler Buchverlag, all other publications by Editions Rodopi. ISBN: 978-90-420-2578-3 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009 Printed in The Netherlands

For my father

Acknowledgments

I want to express my thanks to the people who have read and commented on various parts of this project: Nancy Blake, John Dussinger, Laurence Mall, Carl Niekerk, and Mara Wade. I would also like to acknowledge my research assistants, Martina Hamidouche-Huber and Sonja Wandelt-Schoene, who assisted me at various stages of researching, writing, and proofreading this book. Thank you to the College of the Holy Cross and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for granting me research stipends and research leaves for completing this book. Special thanks go to the readers and editors at Rodopi for their guidance and support of this project, as well as to my copyeditor, Ann Youmans. Thank you to my husband, Wail Hassan, for his patience, encouragement, and help. Most of all, I wish to thank my parents for their unflagging support throughout the years. To my father, who saw me begin writing this book but could not witness its completion, I dedicate this book. An earlier version of chapter 2 appeared in Intertexts 10.1 (2006): 65–86. Part of chapter 4 was published in French Review 79.4 (March 2006): 737– 748.

Contents

Introduction: Women Write Back

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Chapter 1 Gender and Genre: Helen Maria Williams’ Julia, a Novel

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Chapter 2 Adventurous Tales: Ellis Cornelia Knight’s Dinarbas; a Tale: Being a Continuation of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia

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Chapter 3 Staging Islam: Karoline von Günderrode’s Mahomed, der Prophet von Mekka

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Chapter 4 The Letter and the Body: Julie de Krüdener’s Valérie

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Conclusion: Writing Back, Reading Forward

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Bibliography

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Introduction Women Write Back

This book is about the stakes of writing in politically turbulent times. It focuses on four women authors who published in the fifteen-year period following the French Revolution: Karoline von Günderrode, Ellis Cornelia Knight, Julie de Krüdener, and Helen Maria Williams. They wrote in three languages—English, French, and German—and thereby engaged different literary discourses and political contexts, yet the common theme was the question of leadership in the context of a gradually changing body politic. The authors wrote in an era that remembered Revolutionary ideals but had also seen these ideals’ perversion through the Terreur and the far-reaching effects of Napoleon’s rule on European politics. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, the iconic representation of Marianne waiving the flag of freedom was replaced first with the hissing sound of the guillotine and then with the thunder of Napoleon’s canons. The air was thick with questions of social and political reform, not only in France but also in England and the German territories, where monarchs and absolutist statesmen ruled subjects that were at once fascinated and repulsed by the events of 1789 and their aftermath. These four authors serve as case studies for understanding the mechanisms of literary production and women authors’ self-positioning on the literary landscape at a time marked by simultaneous intellectual ferment and fear of unruly expression. Each of the four women produced a fictional work that engaged a wellknown text by a male author who had already become a canonical figure during his lifetime. Karoline von Günderrode’s Mahomed, der Prophet von Mekka responds to Voltaire’s Mahomet ou le fanatisme; Ellis Cornelia Knight explicitly presents her Dinarbas as a continuation of Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas; Julie de Krüdener’s Valérie engages the epistolary framework of Goethe’s Werther; and Helen Maria Williams’ Julia enters into dialogue with Rousseau’s Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloise. Writing a response to or a continuation of a famous text in order to attract attention was, of course, a widely used strategy in the eighteenth century. The argument of this book is therefore not that Günderrode, Krüdener, Williams, and Knight were the only authors participating in intertextual dialogue at a time when authors passionately responded to and liberally borrowed from each other, especially

when it came to authoring a novel, a form still perceived as new, malleable, and financially profitable. Instead, I argue that what unites these four authors and sets their work apart from other types of intertextual discourse is their manner of response, which I will term writing back. This concept, borrowed from postcolonial theory and most explicitly theorized in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back (1989), highlights power dynamics in the process of writing and publication at times of social and political upheaval. Parallels can be drawn between authors in the postcolonial period and women writers from the French Revolution to the end of Napoleon’s rule. Postcolonial literature emerged at a time when the justification for colonial rule was being questioned. Authors living under colonial rule found themselves in the paradoxical position of being both fluent in and at the same imprisoned by the colonizer’s discourse. One way to an independent voice was to acknowledge and then question the colonizer’s literary tradition by rewriting and responding to its important works. One of the best-known examples is the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), which challenges the premise of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), one of the most important, controversial, and influential narratives of empire. Published two years before Nigerian independence, Achebe’s novel claims the agency of postcolonial authors by strategically inhabiting the colonizer’s literary conventions in order to transcend their narrow boundaries.1 While not all postcolonial authors “wrote back” in this explicit way, many of them, educated in the colonial system, used the master’s tools in order to uncover the flawed foundation of the master’s house. Using a well-known text as an anchor caused an ambivalent reception; it ensured visibility yet also exposed authors to harsh criticism from the literary establishment. In a manner that perhaps foreshadows the postcolonial writers who questioned the colonizer’s discourse of enlightened benevolence, women authors of the late eighteenth century scrutinized the paradoxical deployment of the Revolutionary concepts of liberty and equality in contemporary discourse by “writing back” to it. They questioned the literalization of the concept of fraternity as solidarity between men to the exclusion of women in the literary sphere. The clash between ideals and realities was especially 1

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For readings of postcolonial responses to specific authors see Thomas Cartelli, Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (London: Routledge, 1999); David Attwell, J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (Berkeley: U of California P, 1993) for a response to Defoe; and Byron Caminero-Santangelo, African Fiction and Joseph Conrad: Reading Postcolonial Intertextuality (Albany: State U of New York P, 2005).

acute considering changing perceptions of women authors in the late eighteenth century. The space that women authors had established for themselves over the course of the century came under attack as late eighteenthcentury discourses on gender and propriety projected women into a sphere that was constructed as an apolitical retreat from European political turmoil. This apolitical space was imagined in conjunction with a gradually developing discourse of women’s “incommensurable difference.”2 Thomas Laqueur argues that, for centuries, women were seen as lesser versions of the male ideal, but in the eighteenth century, they began to be viewed as total opposites of their male counterparts as a result of a gradual switch from the one-sex to the two-sex model of gender. Yet, despite the ideals of liberté, égalité, and fraternité, this difference was not interpreted as neutral. Instead, difference was translated as mystery, as the comments of the encyclopédiste Denis Diderot demonstrate: “[L]e symbole des femmes en général est celle de l’Apocalypse, sur le front de laquelle il était écrit Mystère” [“The symbol of women in general is that of the Apocalypse on the forehead of which was written Mystery”].3 Woman was seen as incomprehensible and was projected into the realm of biological alterity and, ultimately, naturalized inferiority. The womb was no longer imagined as a negative phallus but as the uterus, “an organ whose fibers, nerves, and vasculature provided a naturalistic explanation and justification for the social status of women.”4 The difference of this organ was thought to make it function in mysterious ways that permeated the entire body, as demonstrated in detail by Londa Schiebinger’s analysis of female skeletons of the period.5 As Schiebinger argues, “even in this age where males and females were considered essentially perfect in their

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Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990), p.149. Denis Diderot, “Sur les femmes,” in Qu’est-ce qu’une femme?: A.L. Thomas, Diderot, Madame d’Epinay, ed. by Elisabeth Badinter (Paris: P.O.L., 1989), pp. 163–85 (p. 180). Laqueur, p. 152. Laqueur’s Making Sex (1990) begins his cultural history of medicine and biology with the Greeks and ends with Freud. Londa Schiebinger’s The Mind Has No Sex?: Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989), Schiebinger’s Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), and Schiebinger’s Has Feminism Changed Science? (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999) focus on the period from the seventeenth to the twentieth century and discuss early women scientists and gender in medical discourse. An in-depth analysis of medical treatments of women, especially with respect to pregnancy, can be found in Barbara Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany, trans. by Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991) and Duden’s Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn, trans. by Lee Hoinacki (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993).

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difference, difference was arranged hierarchically.”6 The threat emanating from the bearer of this mysterious difference called for its control through the discursive consolidation of women’s roles as wives and mothers in an apolitically imagined domestic sphere under patriarchal control. The further women strayed from this gender hierarchy in the postRevolutionary period, the more they were criticized. Not surprisingly, women authors writing for publication, especially those engaging political matters, faced the harshest attacks. Their explicit transgression of ideologies regarding gender and politics made them easy targets for those contemporaries who objected to women’s position in the publicity of the literary sphere. Richard Polwhele’s 1798 poem The Unsex’d Females laments an imaginary past in which women were true to their so-called feminine nature, writing literature without any relation to public matters: “Ah! once the female Muse, to NATURE true The unvalued store from FANCY, FEELING drew Won, from the grasp of woe, the roseate hours Cheer’d life’s dim vale, and strew’d the grave with flowers But lo! where, pale, amidst the wild, she draws Each precept cold from sceptic Reason’s vase.”7

Polwhele contrasts this picture of the feeling and submissive muse with the “unsex’d female,” the woman writer who reasons about the affairs of her time. The British commentator’s harsh judgment is echoed in Goethe’s dismissal of a woman writer who had thematized a contemporary political affair: “Die würdige Verfasserin der Tragödie der Charlotte Corday hätte besser gethan, sich ein warmes Unterröckchen für den Winter zu stricken, als sich mit dem Drama zu befassen” [“The worthy author of the tragedy of Charlotte Corday would have done better knitting a warm winter underskirt for herself instead of dealing with this drama.”8 Goethe here speaks about Christine Westphalen who had published a play on the murderess of the Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat in 1804. Women’s substitution of the needle with the pen also drew harsh criticism from contemporaries writing in French. In Émile, ou de l’éducation, Rousseau proclaimed that “[l’]’aiguille et l’épée ne sauraient être maniées par les mêmes mains. Si j’étais souverain, je ne permettrais la couture et les 6 7

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Londa Schiebinger, The Mind, p. 191. Richard Polwhele, The Unsex’d Females (London: Cadell and Davies, 1798), pp. 11–12. Emphases in the original. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “An Eichstätt, 3. Oktober 1804,” in Goethes Werke (Weimar: Böhlau, 1895), XVII, p. 204 (my translation).

métiers à l’aiguille qu’aux femmes, et aux boiteux réduits à s’occuper comme elles” [“the needle and the sword cannot be handled by the same hands. If I were sovereign, I would permit sewing and the needle trades only to women and to the lame who are reduced to occupations like theirs”].9 In France, Rousseau’s exclusion of women from the sphere of the sword was first literalized by the banning of all women’s clubs in 1793 and the subsequent executions of such vocal women as Olympe de Gouges and Marie-Jeanne Roland. The Code Napoléon then institutionalized the subordination of women to their fathers and husbands in legal and civic matters. This curtailing of women’s rights was reflected in Napoleon’s views on women’s education: La Religion est une importante affaire dans une institution publique de demoiselles. Elle est, quoi qu’on puisse dire, le plus sûr garant pour les mères et pour les maris. Élevez-nous des croyantes et non des raisonneuses. La faiblesse du cerveau des femmes, la mobilité de leurs idées, leur destinée dans l’ordre social, la nécessité d’une constante et perpétuelle resignation et d’une sorte de charité indulgente et facile, tout cela ne peut s’obtenir que par la Religion, par une religion charitable et douce.10 [Religion plays an important role in a public institution for young girls. It is, despite what one could say, the best guarantee for mothers and husbands. Women should be raised as believers and not as thinkers. The weakness of women’s brains, the mobility of their ideas, their destiny in the social order, the necessity for a constant and perpetual resignation and for an indulgent and easy kind of charity; all of this can only be obtained through religion, a charitable and kind type of religion].

Napoleon—who himself had literary aspirations11—expressed his hostility towards women who challenged his gender prescriptions when he exiled Germaine de Staël, salonnière and one of the most famous women of the time, in 1803.12 9

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile ou de l’éducation (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966), p. 259 (my translation). See Mary Trouille, Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment: Women Writers Read Rousseau (Albany: State U of New York P, 1997) for a discussion of eighteenthcentury women authors’ responses to Rousseau's statements about women. Quoted in Rebecca Rogers, Les demoiselles de la legion d’honneur: Les maisons d’éducation de la Légion d’honneur au XIXe siècle (Paris: Plon, 1992), pp. 332–33. Napoleon’s statement stems from a letter written on May 15, 1807 to the chancellor of the légion d’honneur, which financed houses for the education of the légionnaires’ daughters. See Andrew Martin, Napoleon the Novelist (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). See Waltraud Maierhofer et al., eds., Women against Napoleon: Historical and Fictional Responses to His Rise and Legacy (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2007), for a discussion of Napoleon’s female opponents, the most famous ones being Germaine de Staël and Queen Luise of Prussia.

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Women authors of end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century came under increasing pressure to exchange the pen of reason with the needle of feminine handiwork and to replace the act of thinking with devotion to a higher male power, worldly or divine. Their expression was curtailed by a discourse of incommensurable difference that served to reduce women’s influence in the increasingly profitable literary sphere. The act of writing back in which Karoline von Günderrode, Ellis Cornelia Knight, Julie de Krüdener, and Helen Maria Williams engaged enabled these four women to position themselves as authors by strategically navigating gender prescriptions and the literary conventions of the publishing marketplace of their day, in England, France, and the German-speaking territories. In addition to studying women authors’ navigation of post-Revolutionary discourses, this book reflects on the effects of these discourses on the formation of eighteenth-century literary canons. These canons, gradually consolidated in the nineteenth century, often duplicated contemporaries’ fear of the “unsex’d female” wielding the unruly pen of thought and the sword of reason. Women authors were gradually excluded and had become nearly invisible by the middle of the twentieth century, except for a few prominent figures who were constructed as exceptions to the rule. In the British tradition, Ian Watt’s 1957 dismissal of eighteenth-century women authors’ literary production as quantitatively superior yet qualitatively inferior to male writers exemplified the century-long accumulation of gender biases in the conception of literary history, especially with respect to constructing the history of the “rise of the novel” as the ascendance of the male bourgeois subject.13 Watt’s mid-century assessment exemplifies the type of misogynist literary history that came under attack by the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. As a result of the practical application of French and AngloAmerican feminist theory to literary analysis, the 1980s were a crucial decade for the reappraisal of women authors. Since then, scholars have worked to expand the canon to include women authors in all three national literary traditions—British, French, and German. As a result, scholarship has come a long way since the dismissive comments of Watt and, before him, Polwhele, Napoleon, and Goethe. While the scope of this book does not allow for a 13

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Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), p. 298. Josephine Donovan reminds us that Watt stands in a long line of Marxist scholars such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Lucien Goldmann, and Georg Lukács who, while investigating the connections between the rise of the novel and its economic bases, largely ignored the role of women. See Josephine Donovan, “Women and the Rise of the Novel: A Feminist-Marxist Theory,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 16.3 (Spring 1991), 441–62.

discussion of all the critics active in the recovery process—a testament to the efforts of a great many scholars—the following sections will outline some milestones, especially as they pertain to the analysis of eighteenth-century women authors who write back through their use of fiction. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s influential 1979 study on literary representations of women, The Madwoman in the Attic, paved the way for a number of investigations into literature not only about but also by women in a variety of time periods. “Images of women” criticism from the 1970s was, in the subsequent decade, extended by the inquiry into literature created by women, among them eighteenth-century women authors. In the British tradition, Jane Spencer’s The Rise of the Woman Novelist (1986) and Dale Spender’s Mothers of the Novel (1986) constitute important steps in recovering women’s literary contributions. Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987) presents a Foucauldian approach to the issue by examining the role of the middle-class woman at the center of the class struggle, first between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy and later between the bourgeoisie and the laboring classes. In the 1990s, Cheryl Turner’s Living by the Pen (1992) explored the professionalization of women’s authorship and Margaret A. Doody’s The True Story of the Novel (1996) discussed women’s literary contributions in the context of her challenge of the myth of the novel’s self-contained development. Clifford Siskin’s The Work of Writing (1998) discusses the “Great Forgetting that became The Great Tradition,” the neglect of every woman author in the period 1700–1830 in Britain except Jane Austen.14 More recently, Michael McKeon’s monumental The Secret History of Domesticity (2005) provides readers with an exploration of women’s role as producers of literature, a topic largely omitted from his earlier The Origins of the English Novel (1987). These are some of the works of the past twenty years that have questioned Ian Watt’s dismissive claim and that have led to further discussions and debates.15 Even today, critics feel compelled to engage Watt’s thesis because a number of its presuppositions persist. The 2000 double issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction, which was devoted to “Reconsidering the Rise of the Novel,” demonstrates that the work of recovering 14

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Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998), p. 195. For responses to Nancy Armstrong and Michael McKeon’s theses, in particular, see Leila Silvana May, “The Strong-Arming of Desire: A Reconsideration of Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction,” English Literary History, 68.1 (2001), 267–85 and Homer Obed Brown, “Of the Title to Things Real: Conflicting Stories,” English Literary History, 9 (1988), 917–54.

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women’s roles as producers of literature is by no means complete and needs to continue in several national literary traditions.16 In the German tradition, the period designation “Weimarer Klassik,” a term coined by the nineteenth-century critic Heinrich Laube, loomed as large over scholarship on eighteenth-century literature as Ian Watt’s theories did over the English tradition.17 This concept of national literary history established a cult of genius, which centered on Goethe and Schiller and their work at the court of Weimar. A de facto exclusion of all those authors—men and women—who were not working on “classical” themes in Weimar resulted, which profoundly shaped the writing of German literary history. The term “classical” not only referred to the themes of this literature but also expressed a value judgment paralleling Watt’s distinction between quality and quantity. Similarly to the British tradition, the advent of feminism and its foray into academia has challenged such restrictive conceptions of German literary history over the course of the past three decades. In 1987, Barbara Becker-Cantarino published Der lange Weg zur Mündigkeit, which has become a seminal work in understanding women’s social role and their position as authors in German-speaking lands from 1500 to 1800.18 In the

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For further explicitly feminist responses to Ian Watt’s analysis, see Ros Ballaster, “Women and the Rise of the Novel: Sexual Prescripts,” in Women and Literature in Britain 1700– 1800, ed. by Vivien Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), pp. 197–216; Josephine Donovan, Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405–1726 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Susanne Fendler, “Intertwining Literary Histories: Women’s Contribution to the Rise of the Novel,” in Feminist Contributions to the Literary Canon: Setting Standards of Taste, ed. by Susanne Fendler (Lewiston: Mellen, 1997), pp. 31–64; Catherine Gallagher, “Nobody’s Story: Gender, Property, and the Rise of the Novel,” in Eighteenth-Century Literary History: An MLQ Reader, ed. by Marshall Brown (Durham: Duke UP, 1999), pp. 27–42; Elissa Gelfand and Margaret Switten, “Gender and the Rise of the Novel,” French Review, 61.3 (February 1988), 443–53; Nancy Miller, French Dressing: Women, Men and Ancien Régime Fiction (New York and London: Routledge, 1995); Hilary Schor, “Notes of a Libertine Daughter: Clarissa, Feminism, and the Rise of the Novel,” Stanford Humanities Review, 8.1 (2000), 94–117; and Charlotte Sussman, “‘I Wonder Whether Poor Miss Sally Godfrey Be Living or Dead:’ The Married Woman and the Rise of the Novel,” Diacritics, 20.1 (Spring 1990), 88–102. Heinrich Laube, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur (Stuttgart: Hallberger’sche Verlagshandlung, 1839). For a detailed discussion of the coinage and dissemination of the term “Weimarer Klassik,” see Klaus Berghahn, “Von Weimar nach Versailles,” in Die Klassik-Legende, ed. by Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (Frankfurt a.M.: Athenäum, 1971), pp. 50–78. Also see Gisela Brinker-Gabler, Deutsche Dichterinnen vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart: Gedichte und Lebensläufe (Frankfurt a.M: Fischer, 1978) and her Deutsche Literatur von Frauen (München: C.H. Beck, 1988) for a discussion of women authors throughout the ages. For women poets in specific, see Susan Cocalis, ed., The Defiant Muse: German

following decade, Susanne Kord’s Ein Blick hinter die Kulissen (1992) focused on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German-language dramatists by exploring the complex relation of women and the stage, gender and genre. Her book Sich einen Namen machen (1996) analyzes women’s authorial strategy of anonymity in various genres. In addition to discussing women’s position in the literary sphere, these critical works function as sourcebooks and have been extremely influential on later generations of literary critics. While the British tradition’s early recovery efforts focused on fiction in response to Watt’s Rise of the Novel, German scholarship simultaneously recovered women’s novels and dramas in response to the conception of the German eighteenth century as the age of Goethe, the novelist, and Schiller, the dramatist. Becker-Cantarino and Kord are not the only critics active in rethinking the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German literary canon, yet their work constitutes an important milestone in the study of women authors working “in the shadow of Olympus,” as Katherine Goodman and Edith Waldstein describe the eighteenth-century German literary scene.19 Alongside critical discussions of neglected authors, new editions of eighteenth-century texts have become a vehicle for expanding the canon under the auspices of pioneering feminist scholars. The Canadian publisher Broadview holds an extensive collection of reprints of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels by British men and women. The University Press of Kentucky reprinted nine women’s novels in its “Eighteenth-Century Novels by Women” series. In the past years, Eighteenth-Century Collections Online has been expanding the corpus of texts available for scholarship and classroom use by digitizing a vast amount of literature. The online Brown University Women Writers Project has focused its digitization efforts on texts by women writers from the past to the present, and the online Orlando Project provides a wealth of pertinent background information on women authors. For German literature, the Georg Olms Verlag has published facsimile reprints of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century women’s texts in the twenty-six-title series “Frühe Frauenliteratur in Deutschland.” The renewed accessibility of this literature has created new impetus for scholarly work on authors ranging from Caroline Auguste Fischer to Charlotte von Stein. Previously unavailable texts by eighteenth-century German women can be found as digital editions in the Deutsche Literatur von Frauen volume in the CD-ROM Digitale Bibliothek series. Various online projects have also

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Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to the Present (New York: Feminist Press at the City U of New York, 1986). Katherinne R. Goodman and Edith Waldstein, eds. In the Shadow of Olympus: German Women Writers Around 1800 (Albany: State U of New York P, 1992), p. xi.

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increased the number of German-language authors’ texts available for research and teaching, such as Sophie: A Digital Library of Works by GermanSpeaking Women and Wortblume, which focuses on women’s poetry.20 In conjunction with the creation of easily accessible editions of the originals, scholars of eighteenth-century literature by women also spearheaded a translation project. This makes it possible to include German and French women authors in the English-language classroom and thereby widen their dissemination. Jeannine Blackwell and Susanne Zantop’s anthology of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women writers, Bitter Healing, is an example of this translation effort. The Modern Language Association of America’s “Texts and Translations series” has established another subset of eighteenth-century literature by women authors. While the only text by a German eighteenth-century woman currently included in this bilingual series is Eleonore Thon’s Adelheit von Rastenberg, edited and introduced by Karin Wurst,21 the list already contains six titles by French women authors: Isabelle de Charrière’s Lettres de Mistriss Henley and Trois Femmes, Sophie Cottin’s Claire d’Albe, Claire de Duras’ Ourika, Françoise de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne and Marie Riccoboni’s Histoire d’Ernestine.22 These new bilingual editions of novels by women authors reflect the rethinking of the French tradition by those who have been at the forefront of reinserting women’s writing into the literary canon, which once more illustrates the interaction between scholarship and the teaching of eighteenth-century literature. Joan DeJean, Nancy K. Miller, Margaret Cohen, Margaret Miller, Joan Hinde Stewart, and Philip Stewart—all prominent scholars of eighteenth-century literature and culture—serve as editors for the volumes in the MLA series. The partial overlap between the authors in the MLA series and Raymond Trousson’s 1996 anthology Romans de femmes du XVIIIe siècle, published by Robert Laffont, demonstrates the gradual consolidation

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Eighteenth-Century Collections Online ; Brown University Women Writers Project ; Orlando Project ; Deutsche Literatur von Frauen, ed. Mark Lehmstedt, in Digitale Bibliothek (Berlin: Directmedia Publishing, 2001), XLV; Sophie: A Digital Library of Works by German-Speaking Women ; Wortblume . Karin Wurst also edited Frauen und Drama im achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Köln: Böhlau, 1991), which contains four eighteenth-century plays by German women. The only other German-language text in the MLA series is from a later period, namely Elsa Bernstein’s Dämmerung (1893), edited and translated by Susanne Kord. For full publication information on the novels in the MLA series, see bibliography.

of a counter-canon of French literature by women authors.23 Recovery of French women authors in print is paralleled by online projects such as The ARTFL French Women Writers Project, a searchable database of texts from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.24 The process of recovering eighteenth-century novels by women in the French tradition has taken a path different from the English context, where the eighteenth century had been hailed as the age of the rise of the novel, and from German literary historiography, in which the eighteenth century figured as the age of the Goethian Bildungsroman and the Schillerian drama. The recovery of eighteenth-century French novels by women was a two-step process. Traditionally, literary histories emphasized the nineteenth century as the age of great novels, establishing Stendhal and Balzac as its beacons. In 1963, the critic Georges May lamented this fact: “L’histoire du roman français reste à faire [...] Le volume qui serait consacré au roman du XVIIIe siècle fait tout particulièrement défaut” [“The history of the French novel remains to be written [...] The volume that would focus on the eighteenthcentury novel is especially missing”].25 May’s comments point at the association of the eighteenth century with the Lumières and the treatises of its philosophes, which led to the scholarly neglect of its fictional production. Many scholars followed May’s suggestion by filling the gap in the reception of the eighteenth-century novel, yet they initially ignored the role of women. In one of the earliest attempts to define a canon of French eighteenth-century fiction, René Étiemble’s 1966 Pléiade anthology Romanciers du XVIIIe siècle, the absence of romancières is especially palpable.26 From the 23

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Raymond Trousson, ed., Romans de femmes du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, 1996). Trousson’s anthology contains novels by Alexandrine de Tencin, Françoise de Graffigny, Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, Isabelle de Charrière, Olympe de Gouges, Adélaïde de Souza, Sophie Cottin, Caroline de Genlis, Julie de Krüdener, and Claire de Duras. ARTFL French Women Writers Project. http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/ FWW/. Also see the searchable database of the new collaborative project, New Approaches to European Women’s Writing. At its inception, the database focused on eighteenth-century French authors, yet it has widened its scope to include the international reception of pre1900 European women writers from different national and linguistic traditions. While these authors’ texts themselves have not been digitized on this site, bibliographical references as well as hyperlinks are provided, if available, at http://www.womenwriters.nl/index.php/ Database_WomenWriters. Georges May, Le dilemme du roman au XIIIe siècle: Étude sur les rapports du roman et de la critique (1715–1761) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), p.1. Étiemble’s two-volume anthology contains works by Hamilton, Le Sage, Abbé Prévost, Crébillon fils, Duclos, Cazotte, Vivant Denon, Louvet, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Sade, and Sénac de Meilhan. René Étiemble, ed., Romanciers du XVIIIe siècle, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1960 and 1965).

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seventies onward, “images of women” criticism was followed by scholarly interest in French women authors, as was the case in British and German literary studies. Pierre Fauchery’s 1972 La destinée feminine dans le roman européen du dix-huitième siècle, 1713-1807 identified French, alongside British and German, novels about and by women authors. Nancy K. Miller’s The Heroine’s Text (1980), The Poetics of Gender (1986), Subject to Change (1988), and French Dressing (1995) uncovered the “highly masculinist mode of critical pleasure” governing the exclusion of women from the French canon.27 In the French context, the recovery of eighteenth-century women authors highlighted continuities with French women’s literary production of earlier and later centuries, such as Joan DeJean’s Fictions of Sappho (1989) and DeJean and Miller’s The Politics of Tradition (1988) and Displacements (1991). DeJean’s 1991 Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France cautions readers against uncritically applying observations about the English context to French literature written by women authors, the origins of which she locates in the seventeenth-century writings of authors such as Madeleine de Scudéry and Madame de Lafayette. DeJean and Miller’s work illustrates the close and productive ties between scholarship about women authors, images of women criticism, and feminist theory in the past two decades. Among others, these critics also reflect on the position of these lines of inquiry in literary scholarship of the present and the future. The discussion of the rethinking of the canon in these three national literatures demonstrates that the recovery of women authors has, in practice, correlated with feminist scholarship, beginning in the 1970s and peaking in the two subsequent decades. This observation highlights the question of the role of feminist scholarship in the twenty-first century, which is often depicted as an academic discipline in trouble. One of the most controversial and thereby influential articles on this topic is Susan Gubar’s “What Ails Feminist Criticism?” published in the Summer 1998 issue of Critical Inquiry. Gubar uses the metaphor of disease to express her “apprehension about the state of feminist literary criticism.”28 Gubar explains that she switched the image from death to disease to “argue that [...] feminist criticism suffers from internal ailments about which one can postulate possibilities of recovery.”29 Gubar’s article triggered widespread debate, and her premises were 27

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Nancy K. Miller, “Men’s Reading, Women’s Writing: Gender and the Rise of the Novel,” in Displacements: Women, Tradition, Literatures in French, ed. by Joan DeJean and Nancy K. Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991), pp. 37–54 (p. 41). Susan Gubar, “What Ails Feminist Criticism?” Critical Inquiry, 24.4 (Summer 1998), 878– 902 (p. 880). Gubar, “What Ails,” p. 880.

questioned. Some of the objections were encapsulated in Robyn Wiegman’s response, “What Ails Feminist Criticism? A Second Opinion,” published in the Critical Inquiry Winter issue the following year. Wiegman argues that Gubar postulates a decline of feminist criticism throughout the generations and thereby “purifies her heroine—the first stage generation—exempting it from the political responsibility that has accompanied white feminism’s fall into epistemological contingency.”30 In the same issue, Gubar responded to Wiegman with “Notations in Medias Res,” explaining that her “tongue-incheek representation of the beginning of feminist criticism as a paradise lost was meant to capture the intellectual excitement of humanists during the seventies” and that “from its onset feminist criticism included lesbian, African American, and postcolonial voices arguing against monolithic versions of womanhood.”31 As a result of the publicity and contentiousness of the Critical Inquiry debate, other journals published special issues on the future of feminism in general and of feminist literary criticism in particular, such as Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature (“Feminism and Time,” Spring 2002), Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (“Feminisms at a Millenium,” Summer 2000 and “Gender and Cultural Memory,” Fall 2002), Modern Language Quarterly (“Feminism in Time,” March 2004) and, most prominently, the October 2006 issue of Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, which devoted its entire “Theories and Methodologies” section to the topic of “Feminist Criticism Today.” Rather than conclude that these internal debates indicate the endpoint of feminism –its death—I would argue that the self-reflexive turn indicates that it is very much alive. The wide array of books and journal articles published in the past decade on the issue of feminism’s future in academia bears witness to its vitality.32 Far from being a 30

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Robyn Wiegman, “Critical Response I: What Ails Feminist Criticism? A Second Opinion,” Critical Inquiry, 25.2 (Winter 1999), 362–79 (p. 379). Susan Gubar, “Critical Response II: Notations in Medias Res,” Critical Inquiry, 25.2 (Winter 1999), 380–96 (p. 382). The Winter 1999 issue also published letters by Carolyn Heilbrun and Sandra Gilbert. For book-length studies on the future of feminism see Rory Dicker and Alison Piepmeier, eds., Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the Twenty-First Century (Boston: Northeastern UP, 2003); Rita Felski, Literature after Feminism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003); Stacy Gillis et al., ed., Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration (London: Palgrave, 2004); Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham: Duke UP, 2005); Astrid Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister Sister: Generational Conflict and ThirdWave Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2004); Daisy Hernández and Bushra Rehman, eds., Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism (New York: Seal, 2002); Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake, eds., Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing

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sick patient—let alone a dead one—feminism has reached the point discussed by Martin Heidegger in his 1969 essay on “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking:” “We understand the end of something too easily in the negative sense as a mere stopping, as the lack of continuation, perhaps even as decline and impotence [...] In contrast, what we say about the end of philosophy means the completion of metaphysics.”33 Positing feminism’s future as a discussion of its end illustrates Heidegger’s theory on the development of intellectual thought processes and the elusive ideal of originality and novelty. Rather than viewing this self-questioning as an end— in the sense of decline and impotence—we can also consider it as having the end—in the sense of a goal—of critically reflecting on the disciplinary future. Like philosophy, feminism has changed. The fact that feminism has a past does not make it passé. Despite disagreements and internal debates, feminist scholars share the concern of positing feminist criticism in the future. This concern unites even Gubar’s and Wiegman’s seemingly irreconcilable positions. Gubar concludes her essay by saying that “feminist criticism needs to get into training to assume the vital roles we will undoubtedly want it to play in the twenty-first century.”34 Wiegman similarly reflects on feminism’s future vitality: “Feminism in the academy, after all, lacks the kind of institutional support that can guarantee its reproduction (which is one of the many reasons that its reproduction becomes the locus of so much discontent) and we have yet to adequately consider what constitutes, at this date, a continuing political intervention.”35 Feminism finds itself in a double bind. On the one hand, it is portrayed as an ailing interpretive practice, while, on the other, unlike other disciplines that face similar self-questioning, feminism occupies a less secure institutional position due to its interdisciplinary nature. Sharon Marcus argues that “[f]eminist criticism is no longer the latest trend and is unlikely to

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Feminism (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997); Devoney Looser and E. Ann Kaplan, eds., Generations: Academic Feminists in Dialogue (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997); Ellen Messer-Davidow, Disciplining Feminism: From Social Activism to Academic Discourse (Durham: Duke UP, 2002); Chandra Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham: Duke UP, 2003); Ruth Robbins, Literary Feminisms (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000); Robyn Wiegman, ed., Women’s Studies On Its Own (Durham: Duke UP, 2002); Elizabeth Wilson, Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body (Durham: Duke UP, 2004); and Linda Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005). Martin Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in On Time and Being, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002), pp. 55–73 (p. 56). Susan Gubar, “What Ails,” p. 902. Wiegman, “Critical Response I,” p. 379.

become a tradition.”36 This is certainly true for feminist literary criticism. While feminist literary criticism played a pioneering role in the establishment of women’s and gender studies departments in the 1970s and 1980s, much of the work currently happening under this umbrella takes place in other disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, and political science. Feminist literary scholarship has gradually moved to the margins of both women’s studies programs and departments of literature. In literature departments, feminist scholars find themselves in the paradoxical position of old-fashioned rebels arguing for revisions to reading lists and syllabi that should no longer be dominated by canonical male authors, but in practice often still are. In women’s or gender studies programs, feminist literary critics appear comparatively apolitical among fellow feminists who, in fields such as sociology or health care policy, expose gender inequalities and argue for legislative change. Answering the question of feminism’s future and, within it, the role of feminist literary criticism, involves inserting feminism’s internal debates into the wider perception of feminism in popular discourse. The conjecture that academic feminism might be passé is paralleled by a popular perception that the conclusions reached by feminists have become self-evident and therefore no longer need to be discussed. As a result of this view, feminism has, in Toril Moi’s words, become an “f-word.” Moi retraces the process by which words such as “feminazi” and other disparaging remarks were first used by the likes of Rush Limbaugh before gradually entering mainstream discourse. Moi posits that the premise for this hostility is the view that “since every sensible person is in favor of equality and justice for women, feminists are a bunch of fanatics, a lunatic fringe, an extremist, power-hungry minority whose ideas do not merit serious assessment.”37 Taking gender equality for granted initiates its erosion by labeling those who insist on highlighting persisting inequalities as old-fashioned fanatics. This undermining is palpable in popular discourse on gender issues and also in responses to scholarship and teaching done from a feminist perspective. Such views not only halt future research but also undermine the work of the past three decades. Consequently, feminism’s future lies in counteracting the nonchalant attitude toward past, present, and future feminist work. This applies to popular feminism as well as to academic feminism. For feminist literary criticism in particular, this involves recasting the concept of political 36

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Sharon Marcus, “Feminist Criticism: A Tale of Two Bodies,” PMLA, 121.5 (October 2006), 1722–28 (p. 1726). Toril Moi, “’I’m Not a Feminist, But …’: How Feminism Became the F-Word,” PMLA, 121.5 (October 2006), 1735–44 (p. 1737).

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intervention in light of the current erosion of past scholarship and correlating teaching practices grown out of feminist scholarship with the concept of political intervention. Sharon Marcus maintains that [i]t would be absurd to argue that because what we teach does not produce direct political change—assigning Virginia Woolf does not lead to more women in Congress—it therefore has no effect on social attitudes and the politics of knowledge. When there are no women writers on the syllabus, or fewer than there could be, the message is that women’s writing is less valuable than men’s, that women, by extension, are worth less than men and that female students will be valued only if they devote themselves to what really counts—the masterworks of genius that too many syllabi still assert to be male handiwork.38

The implications of course syllabi are political; they establish value hierarchies through the choice of texts deemed worth teaching. The politics of knowledge influence the availability of eighteenth-century texts in userfriendly and affordable editions and this availability, in turn, shapes the content of course syllabi. Eighteenth-century women authors’ texts have been republished and reedited, yet this endeavor has been spearheaded mainly by smaller publishing houses. The large publishers continue to be reluctant to venture beyond a narrowly circumscribed corpus of women authors. Smaller companies, which have a tighter profit margin than the publishing conglomerates, face an increasing financial strain, heightened by the competition with new online venues. While new online editions of texts by women have been useful for scholarship and, to some degree, teaching, not arguing for more printed editions of this literature establishes a new bias based on old premises. Despite all advances in electronic and web publishing, the equation between literary value and printed matter persists. If new editions of women’s texts are exclusively relegated to the electronic medium, the ghettoization of literature by women will be reestablished in a new form. Once more the majority of women authors would be presented as electronic footnotes to a printed literary history that includes only a select few and thereby presents them as exceptions to the rule of the qualitative inferiority of women’s writing. One of the political interventions by feminist literary criticism consists in reflecting on a select few women authors’ edification in order to create a productive and meaningful space for the reception of others. This intervention involves investigating the relation between these writers’ academic and popular reception, which are connected in the same manner as popular and academic feminism. The figure of Jane Austen is perhaps the most 38

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Marcus, p. 1724.

instructive in this regard. The visibility that Austen has attained in both academic and popular consciousness is unmatched by any other eighteenthcentury British—or even European—woman writer. Austen’s work figures prominently in the main publishers’ catalogues, her novels are widely translated, entire seminars are devoted to her life and work, and scholarly publications abound. There exist big-budget Hollywood adaptations of her novels, movie interpretations of her life, and twentieth-century incarnations such as Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones character. The argument is not that Jane Austen’s ubiquity is to be deplored; after all, the focus on Austen has stirred popular and academic curiosity about the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century and its other women authors. Instead, I want to highlight the implications of this intense focus on Austen, as they recall Ian Watt’s academic bias from a half century ago: The majority of eighteenth-century novels were actually written by women, but this had long remained a purely quantitative assertion of dominance; it was Jane Austen who completed the work that Fanny Burney had begun, and challenged masculine prerogative in a much more important matter. Her example suggests that the feminine sensibility was in some ways better equipped to reveal the intricacies of personal relationships and was therefore at a real advantage in the realm of the novel.39

Watt’s evaluation of Jane Austen is a two-handed compliment in more than one way. First, it establishes Austen and Burney as the exceptions that prove the rule. Second, it postulates “feminine sensibility” as more apt at dealing with the “intricacies of personal relationships.” While scholars such as Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Claudia Johnson, Mary Poovey, and many others have shown that Austen’s novels are more than expositions of interpersonal relationships, the popular reception of her novels and her life is Wattian in its focus on this issue, the female protagonist’s search for the perfect heterosexual relationship.40 Hollywood adaptations of Pride and Prejudice (2005) and Sense and Sensibility (1995) demonstrate this in a particularly forceful way, as does the recent Becoming Jane (2007), a Hollywood interpretation of the young Austen’s life. 39 40

Watt, p. 298. See Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979); Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995); Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988); and Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984).

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In addition, a whole new literary subgenre of Jane Austen-inspired novels has emerged in the past ten years, in the wake of the success of Bridget Jones. These novels thematize the long and arduous search for Prince Charming with Austen’s life and work as the inspiration. These texts’ focus on the love plot and their casting of Austen as one of her own heroines depoliticize not only her writings but also the authorial self-positioning of the late eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century woman. The titles and descriptions of some of these novels illustrate this conflation of life and work under the umbrella of a romance: Dear Jane Austen: A Heroine’s Guide to Life and Love (Patrice Hannon); Lost in Austen (Emma Campbell Webster) is described as a “labyrinth of love and lies” on the back cover; The 101 Things You Didn’t Know about Jane Austen (Patrice Hannon) states that its subject is the “intriguing romantic literary heroine,” as does Just Jane (Nancy Moser), subtitled “A Novel of Jane Austen’s Life.” Those novels that do not conflate Austen with one of her heroines all focus on the romantic plot: Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife (Linda Berdoll); Me and Mr. Darcy (Alexandra Potter); The Second Mrs. Darcy (Elizabeth Aston); and Letters from Pemberley (Jane Dawkins). In addition, the Jane Austen franchise has profited by extending its reach into the self-help section, advising readers on the pitfalls of romantic relationship and domestic endeavors: Jane Austen’s Guide to Dating (Lauren Henderson), the Jane Austen Cookbook (Maggie Black), and In the Garden with Jane Austen (Kim Wilson).41 This list of Jane Austen-inspired publications, which is by no means exhaustive, shows that shrewd crossgenre marketing holds seemingly limitless possibilities. The extent of interest in these publications is not limited to the English-speaking world; some of the above-mentioned books have been translated into languages such as German, Polish, Portuguese, and Japanese. As a result of this focus, novels by Austen herself are now prominently displayed in big-chain bookstores alongside the twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury sequels. Austen’s novels and those created in her vein are often marketed as “chick lit,” a term gaining increasing currency. This designation is problematic on more than one level. The popular term “chick lit” not only evokes helpless, naïve, yet loveable creatures, but also contains the same ambiguity as the designation “women’s literature” often used in academic discourse. This classification does not specify whether the referent is literature by, for, or about women, thereby assuming an underlying correlation between the three possibilities. Critically investigating such gendered categorizations has become especially important at a time when the 41

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For complete publication information on these novels, see bibliography.

practice of feminism has been subject to (self-)questioning. While there is no seamless overlap between the popular and the academic discourse on an author, the example of Jane Austen illustrates the complex intersections between these two discursive spheres at a time when the reinvestigation of the idea of “women’s literature” is inextricably linked to the question of feminism’s future. The fact that one of the roundtables at the 2008 American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies was devoted to “Jane Austen: Vital Critical Questions” is telling. The session title echoes Gubar’s inquiry into the current vitality of feminist studies, and the description of the panel acknowledges Austen’s ubiquity not only in the “chick lit” section of the local bookstore but also on the bookshelf of the eighteenth-century scholar: “The aim of this panel is to develop an energetic exchange on an author who seems to have emerged as one of the most compelling objects of study for ASECS members.”42 The questions posed by the panelists address the need to critically reflect on the implications of the intense popular and academic focus on Austen: “Does the fact that Austen's work elicits genuine affection from scholarly as well as general readers help or hinder academic study?” “How do Authors become Cultural Systems?” “Is Austen the endgame for author-centered literary studies?”43 These reflections on Jane Austen’s ubiquity in the popular and academic marketplace ultimately lead to the investigation of her contemporaries’ comparative absence from it, whether they be British or from other European literary traditions. One of the productive tools for studying this issue is the application of critical analyses of the present-day book market to the investigation of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century women’s position in the literary marketplace of their day. In her PMLA article, Sinead McDermott argues that this mode of inquiry constitutes the type of “political intervention” for which feminist literary scholarship has been searching in the past few decades: One significant strand in this new research focuses on the relation between women’s literature and the marketplace: the culture of literary prizes, the connection between (post)feminism and popular fictional forms such as “chick lit,” and the celebrity culture surrounding particular female authors. As each of these examples suggests, there is a pressing need for work that explores the significance of the female author as a literary and cultural construct, and here the work of literary feminists may be particularly useful.44 42

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Vickie Cutting, “ASECS Annual Meeting Announcements.” E-mail to ASECS listserv advertising and describing session 71, “Jane Austen: Vital Critical Questions” at the ASECS Annual Meeting in Portland, OR, on March 27, 2008. 17 March 2008. Ibid. Sinead McDermott, “Notes on the Afterlife of Feminist Criticism,” PMLA, 121.5 (October 2006), 1729–34 (p. 1733).

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A “(post)feminist” perspective is particularly well-suited to explore reception mechanisms and the celebrity culture that construct Austen as the pioneer of chick lit well beyond the English-speaking world. This exploration is closely linked to the analysis of the female author as a literary and cultural construct by reconsidering the work of Austen’s contemporaries who do not occupy the same prominent space in current popular and/or academic consciousness, such as Günderrode, Knight, Krüdener, and Williams. The move beyond the scholarly realm to consider the popular discourse on feminism and the popular marketplace of chick lit allows for a (post)feminist—not in the sense of past, but self-aware—analysis of gender and authorship in the eighteenth century through the concept of writing back as a specific form of intertextuality. The twenty-first-century Jane Austen franchise demonstrates that intertextual dialogue can span several centuries. Considering the discourse within which these responses are situated is crucial in determining the type of intervention that they constitute. Chick lit is the product of an environment in which those who persist on highlighting gender dynamics and inequalities are labeled “feminazis.” Such labels result from a self-contented perception that, in the democratic West, equality, liberty, and fraternity have long since been achieved. Rewriting Jane Austen’s novels and her life from a chick lit perspective establishes authors within a profitable literary franchise that does not directly challenge this ideology of the presentday fruition of past egalitarian ideals. These novels highlight the writing woman’s private plot of love and domestic life; they focus on their Jane Austen-inspired characters’ romantic adventures rather than highlighting their predecessor’s role as a feminazi in the public field of writing of her time. In the late eighteenth century, the threat of being labeled a feminazi was wielded by some of the most public and vocal figures of the time, such as Napoleon, Goethe, and Polwhele. In the post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic period, excluding female agents from the public terrain fulfilled several functions at once. This exclusion established an apolitically imagined domestic sphere as a retreat from public conflict at the same time that it attempted to stifle dissent in its own ranks—regarding gender politics—in order to present a united front to potential enemies. Women experienced a discursive curtailing of their public expression during this period, which was marked by increasing nationalistic sentiments not only in Britain and France, but in the fragmented German-speaking territories that began to feel a sense of national unity as a result of outside threats. While not all vocal women suffered the tragic end of Olympe de Gouges, character assassination commonly resulted from their involvement in the public sphere. Politically vocal women especially were portrayed as the feminazis of their time.

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Perceived national disloyalty was cast as a gendered defect, as was straying from the discursive ideal of feminine propriety. Helen Maria Williams, a British woman who reported sympathetically on the French Revolution, was viewed as a Jacobin supporter and described as a “strumpet”; Julie de Krüdener, who advised the Russian emperor Alexander I to draw up the Treaty of the Holy Alliance, was labeled a “whore”; Ellis Cornelia Knight’s precarious position at the English court made her an object of disdain when she insisted on financial remuneration from the prime minister; and Karoline von Günderrode was accused of being too philosophical and not poetic enough in her Mahomed. Not conforming to their contemporaries’ perception of feminine privacy and domesticity drew harsh criticism of these women’s lives and affected the reception of their work when it thematized questions of political change from the ambivalent vantage point of writing back. At the same time, however, this ambivalence enabled these authors to navigate the late eighteenth-century literary marketplace and to achieve a means of subsistence, either through active marketing of their writings or through the remainders of the patronage system. The four authors discussed in this book are ambivalent figures since their lives and writings call into question the discursive binary of the public and private spheres deployed during their lifetime to enforce gender roles. In eighteenth-century discourse, the sphere of the “public” was equated with “masculine” and “political,” whereas the realm of the “private” was associated with “feminine” and “domestic.” Jürgen Habermas’ Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962), translated as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1989, has been one of the most influential studies of this binary for the field of eighteenth-century studies. While Habermas’ thesis has been criticized for conceptual limitations from a variety of vantage points,45 it is important to remember that he uses the terms “public” and 45

Habermas was criticized for projecting the British situation onto France and the Germanspeaking lands, which were different in their social and political structures. For the German context, see Peter Uwe Hohendahl, The Institution of Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982); Isabel Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815 (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996); and Ernst Manheim, Aufklärung und öffentliche Meinung: Studien zur Soziologie der Öffentlichkeit im 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart—Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1979). For France, see Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994) and Rémy Saisselin, The Literary Enterprise in Eighteenth-Century France (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1979). In addition, scholars objected to Habermas’ construction of a bourgeois master narrative (Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopf, 1976)), his focus on the public sphere to the detriment of the private realm (Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, Histoire de la vie privée, 5 vols (Paris: Seuil, 1985–1987)), his neglect of the role of gender in the public sphere (Elizabeth Eger et

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“private” to designate a mode of discourse rather than to describe a historical reality. Habermas, in fact, highlights the existence of more than two spheres and explores the complex intersections and mutual infiltrations of these realms in the eighteenth century. He argues that the opposition between the “intimate sphere of the conjugal family” and the “public sphere” was, above all, a discursive construct.46 He also points out that the intimate/domestic sphere formed an integral part of the private sphere of the gradually developing market economy, in which individuals could act as their own agents, thereby exploring the nuances in the concepts of “intimate” and “private:” “The sphere of the market we call ‘private;’ the sphere of the family, as the core of the private sphere, we call the ‘intimate sphere.’ The latter was believed to be independent of the former, whereas in truth it was profoundly caught up in the requirements of the market.”47 Even though discursively the intimate domestic sphere of the family was imagined as unaffected by the workings of the private realm of the market economy due to the division of work and family life, both were connected not only to each other but also to what Habermas calls the “public sphere in the world of letters” and “the public sphere in the political realm.”48 The intersections of the various spheres created hybrid spaces of expression for historical agents who challenged the eighteenth-century classificatory binary and whose writings were excluded as a result of the subsequent naturalization of its discursive aspect. A (post)feminist analysis of women authors’ strategies of writing back acknowledges the hybrid space within which women authors wrote and published, and thereby continues the work done by feminist scholars in the past decades. The self-reflexive turn in feminist criticism is a particularly apt moment for examining the hybridity of these authors’ texts, since one of its interventions consists in scrutinizing the conditions for textual production as well as the mechanisms of reception. Highlighting the ambivalence of eighteenth-century women’s authorial self-positioning allows for an

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47 48

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al., eds., Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001); Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988); and Johanna Meehan, ed., Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse (New York: Routledge, 1995)); and his oversight of such issues as nationalism, religion, science, and class (Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT, 1992) and Eighteenth-Century Studies 29.1 (Fall 1995)). Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. by Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT, 1998), p. 51. Habermas, The Structural Transformation, p. 55. Ibid., p. 51.

understanding of their responses to male authors outside the interpretive framework of women’s writing as merely imitative of men’s. This interpretive dismissal is, at times, wielded as a refusal to reflect on the implications of women’s textual responses to famous authors. The simple act of considering responses to texts such as Goethe’s Werther, Johnson’s Rasselas, Rousseau’s Julie and Voltaire’s Mahomet can be met with hostility because it is viewed as an attempt to overthrow the canon. Yet rather than destroying what is already known about eighteenth-century literature, the analysis of strategies of writing back allows for a more complex understanding of the literary production in this time period because it acknowledges its hybridity. Günderrode’s, Knight’s, Krüdener’s, and Williams’ strategic navigation of the late-eighteenth- and the early-nineteenth-century literary marketplace was reflected in their choice of fiction as the vehicle for their literary expression. Fiction was one of the eighteenth-century textual forms that, in its malleability, allowed these authors to position themselves in the hybrid spaces created by the intersections between discursive spheres. Fiction— alongside such developing media of expression as newspapers, periodicals, yearbooks, essays, and epistolary exchanges—allowed authors to cross boundaries in a period that, as John McCarthy argues in his history of essay writing in German, was characterized by a “spirit of innovation and experimentation,” in which “[t]he new mentality was paired with a novel manner of expressing it.”49 Authors explored the uses of fiction by fusing seemingly opposite elements; they thereby created new spaces for discussing questions of politics and leadership in the contentious post-Revolutionary period. The case studies in this book—presented chronologically—show how four women’s self-positioning by means of hybrid fictional creations allowed them to navigate gender prescriptions while participating in the debates of the post-Revolutionary period. Fiction allowed these women authors to situate themselves in the strategic space between publicly performed drama and privately consumed poetry. By writing back, they experimented with the genre by exploring its fluid boundaries and incorporating elements from philosophical essay writing, epistolary exchange, poetry, and the dramatic genre. The following chapters will explore these authors’ imagining of a new 49

John A. McCarthy, Crossing Boundaries: A Theory and History of Essay Writing in German, 1680–1815 (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1989), p. 316. For a discussion of the multitude of (new) eighteenth-century forms of textual expression, also see Paul Korshin, ed., The Widening Circle: Essays on the Circulation of Literature in EighteenthCentury Europe (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1976) and Monika Estermann et al., eds., Buchkulturen: Festschrift für Reinhard Wittmann (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005).

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body politic through the experimental body of their texts; the analytical approach will combine close reading with the analysis of these texts’ production and marketing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and beyond. The first chapter, “Gender and Genre: Helen Maria Williams’ Julia, a Novel,” focuses on the author’s representation of social and political change. A writer of poetry and reporter on the French Revolution, Williams also explored the medium of fiction by responding to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761). Her Julia (1790), a third-person narrative that embeds elements from various textual genres, diverges from the epistolary form of her predecessor in order to construct a vision of an alternative lifestyle for women based on female bonding and compassion, a utopia that unsettles strict distinctions between private and public. Williams forsook Rousseau’s epistolary medium, yet she crafted a sentimental domestic plot similar to Julie. This allowed her to embed comments on the changing body politic and disseminate them to a widened audience of readers of fiction without explicitly violating gender decorum. The question of social and political change is reflected in the discussion of leadership in Ellis Cornelia Knight’s Dinarbas; a Tale: Being a Continuation of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1790), which is the focus of the second chapter. Knight challenged what she perceived as the pessimistic ending of Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759). Knight rewrote Johnson’s philosophical tale by echoing literary forms deemed appropriate for women authors: the epistolary, gothic, and sentimental novel. She thereby seemingly conformed to prescriptions for domestic subject matter, only to link such topics to larger political issues of leadership and government by highlighting the role that social class played in the marriage market of her time. Foregrounding the private aspect of love in Dinarbas allowed her to circumvent possible accusations of meddling too directly in public affairs in the contentious post-1789 period. At the same time, however, this strategy necessarily implied the mingling of these spheres. Questions of leadership also inform the third chapter, “Staging Islam: Karoline von Günderrode’s Mahomed, der Prophet von Mekka.” Günderrode used the “Lesedrama”—a drama for reading—as a way to fuse fiction, history, and religion. This hybrid literary form enabled her to engage in a complex ideological debate that, on the literary scene, had started with Voltaire’s tragedy Mahomet ou le fanatisme (1741) and Goethe’s translation of it (1800). Instead of presenting the protagonist of her Mahomed, der Prophet von Mekka (1805) as a figure of religious and political fanaticism, Günderrode created a character driven by the desire for knowledge. This

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allowed her to present a culturally and religiously different body politic. In addition, the remote setting served as a disguise for her own self-fashioning, which establishes the prophet as an image of the visionary Romantic poet. The fourth and last chapter, “The Letter and the Body: Julie de Krüdener’s Valérie,” traces the effect of debates concerning the body politic on the body of the protagonist Gustave. Krüdener’s 1804 novel adapts the epistolary framework and the language of sensibility of Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774) to represent the epistolary subject’s frustrated attempts to integrate his individuality into the social fabric of his time. Gustave’s diseased body and masochistic tendencies serve as an image of the painful reconfiguration of the body politic in the post-Revolutionary period. Krüdener strategically explores epistolary conventions and expectations created by this genre in order to market her novel successfully without throwing disrepute on her own moral character. In addition to analyzing the four women authors’ strategic selfpositioning and their exploration of the malleability of the fictional genre, each chapter will discuss the effects of these authors’ acts of writing back on their reception, from the eighteenth century to the present day. The interweaving of political material with supposedly private story lines caused their contemporaries discomfort, which affected the subsequent transmission of their texts. The following chapters will outline the ways in which a biographical interpretive approach was engaged in order to obliterate, discredit, and attack these women’s role as producers of literature by fitting them into the categories of salonnière, amateur, friend of a famous male contemporary, or even national traitor. The intent of reconstructing these biographical readings is not to duplicate this mode of interpretation but, instead, to strive for a critical, (post)feminist reconsideration of the conditions of not only literary production but also textual transmission and canon formation.

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Chapter 1 Gender and Genre: Helen Maria Williams’ Julia, a Novel

In Helen Maria Williams’ two-volume Julia, a Novel (1790), two of the main characters—Julia Clifford and Frederick Seymour—passionately discuss Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther. Julia argues that “it is well written, but few will justify its principles,” to which Seymour responds that Werther is “subject to the power of passion.”1 The title of Williams’ novel and this discussion explicitly establish the author’s literary reference points. Rousseau’s Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and Goethe’s Werther (1774) are everpresent in Williams’ novel of passion, unrequited love, and despair. Yet rather than dutifully imitating, Williams (1761–1827) creatively diverges from her models and claims her own space as an author on the literary scene of the time. The premise of her narrative is different from Goethe’s and Rousseau’s. Williams’ Julia is neither the impetus for an epistolary exchange between male correspondents, as Lotte is in Goethe’s narrative, nor is she what Katharine Ann Jensen has termed an “Epistolary Woman,” a letterwriting subject such as Rousseau’s Julie who pines for and writes about her lover.2 Williams abandons the epistolary framework of her models and instead constructs a third-person narrative. This allows her to create a virtuein-distress novel at the center of which stands a heroine of whose moral fortitude the reader is assured—unlike Rousseau’s Julie—and whose actions are directly visible, since they are not mediated by the epistolary agent’s interpretation—as is the case with Lotte, who is mainly presented through 1

2

Helen Maria Williams, Julia, a Novel, ed. by Peter Garside, 2 vols (London: Routledge/ Thoemmes Press, 1995), II, pp. 202–3. All further references to this novel will be to this edition and will be made parenthetically within the text. The page reference will be preceded by the volume number in Roman numerals. Katherine Ann Jensen, Writing Love: Letters, Women, and the Novel in France, 1605–1776 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1995), p. 3. Williams’ choice of the name Julia for the title and her omission of any reference to Eloisa distanced her novel from the epistolary tradition, especially because Rousseau’s novel was translated and commonly referred to as Eloisa in English. See James H. Warner, “Eighteenth-Century English Reactions to the Nouvelle Héloïse,” PMLA, 52.3 (September 1937).

Werther’s eyes. The third-person narrator’s presentation of the protagonist as a moral rock enables Williams to market her novel as appropriate reading material for women. Williams fits her Julia into the domestic realm of the virtue-in-distress narrative, thereby echoing contemporary prescriptions regarding gender and genre, publicity and privacy. This strategy allows her to embed elements from a variety of other textual genres—poetry and letter writing—that address contemporary developments in the public realm of writing and politics and to disseminate them to a novel-reading audience. The novel’s hybrid form mirrors Williams’ identity as a writer and intellectual. She was educated by her mother after her father’s death. As a young woman, Williams distinguished herself as a poet. With the help of Andrew Kippis, a dissenting minister, she published socially and politically engaged poems such as Edwin and Eltruda about families separated during the War of the Roses, Peru about the European exploitation of South America, and A Poem on the Bill Lately Passed for Regulating the Slave Trade. Her Poems had over 1,500 subscribers.3 Williams’ poetry was not only financially profitable, it also earned her the respect of her contemporaries. Williams’ “poetry was so popular that several people addressed verse compliments to her, including George Harding, Anna Seward, and the young William Wordsworth”4 in his 1787 “Sonnet on Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress.” After the success of her first poem Edwin and Eltruda, Williams relocated to London, where she came into closer contact with well-established literary and political contemporaries such as Samuel Johnson and the Bluestocking and salonnière Elizabeth Montagu.5 Eventually, the Williams women—Helen Maria, her sister, and their mother—opened their own salon in London and invited the leading dissenters of their time. During this period, Williams continued to write poetry and made an acquaintance that would be important for her future life as a writer, 3

4

5

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Helen Maria Williams, Edwin and Eltruda: A Legendary Tale (London: T. Cadell, 1782); Helen Maria Williams, Peru, a Poem: In Six Cantos (London: T. Cadell, 1784); Helen Maria Williams, A Poem on the Bill Lately Passed for Regulating the Slave Trade (London: T. Cadell, 1788); Helen Maria Williams, Poems. In Two Volumes (London: T. Cadell, 1786). For information on the popularity of Williams’ poetry, see Carol Shiner Wilson, “Helen Maria Williams,” in An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers, ed. by Paul Schlueter and June Schlueter (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1998), pp. 680–82 (p. 680). Janet Todd, “Williams, Helen Maria,” in A Dictionary of British and American Women Writers 1660–1800, ed. by Janet Todd (Totowa: Rowman and Allanheld, 1985), pp. 323–26 (p. 324). For more information on Williams’ social circles, see Jack Fruchtman, ed., An Eye-Witness Account of the French Revolution: Letters Containing a Sketch of the Politics of France (New York: Peter Lang, 1997).

her French tutor Monique du Fossé, who had fled to England after a mésalliance. Du Fossé’s life story made Williams aware of the abuses of the ancien régime and the social and political revolution across the Channel.6 When, in 1790, the du Fossés invited Helen Maria and Cecilia to Paris, the sisters accepted and moved to the European continent. At this point, Helen Maria Williams switched her focus from poetry to letters in order to record her reactions to the French Revolution with more immediacy. Probably written to a fictional correspondent, these letters chronicle Williams’ response to the Revolution from its early days to 1796. In contrast to other contemporaries who initially welcomed the social and political changes but lost their enthusiasm during the Terreur, Williams never abandoned hope that the Revolution’s ideals could be realized. Therefore, her letters represent a unique voice among the copious writings of this tumultuous period. Williams’ unwavering support of the French Revolution affected not only the reception of her Letters but of her entire oeuvre. From the moment Williams published the first volume of her Letters Written in France in 1790, she was accused of betraying both her sex and her country.7 While early criticism of her correspondence was merely disapproving, it soon turned into harsh personal attacks, especially after the first general enthusiasm for the Revolution had waned. The harshness of these ad hominem attacks attests to degree to which Williams’ letters were perceived as a threat: the more readers the letters attracted, the more scathing critics’ comments regarding gender and politics became.8 As Vivien Jones observes, “In the eyes of anti-Jacobin propagandists, the spectacle of women writing republican history was a triple violation—of sexual morality and generic decorum as well as national 6

7

8

Monique had married the son of Baron du Fossé. This attachment outraged the baron, because his son had chosen a social inferior as his spouse. The baron requested an immediate annulment of the marriage. The son refused and was imprisoned. Monique fled to England, where she lived in poverty and survived on tutoring. When the baron died, his son was released and reunited with his bride in France. He renounced his aristocratic status during the Revolution and shared his estate with his brothers. See Jack Fruchtman, An EyeWitness Account, pp. 5–6. Helen Maria Williams, Letters Written in France, in the summer 1790, to a friend in England; containing, various anecdotes relative to the French Revolution; and memoirs of Mons. and Madame du F--- (London: T. Cadell , 1790). Mary Favret observes that Williams’ Letters “were widely excerpted, quoted, applauded and attacked in the British press. In The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740–1815, Robert D. Mayo calls Williams ‘the overwhelming favorite among writers of popular history and biography [...] [T]hanks to the labors of piratical miscellany editors, [she] became perhaps the best-known contemporary author to magazine writers of her generation’” (Mary Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), pp. 53–54).

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political loyalty.”9 One of the attacks came from Richard Polwhele, who, in his 1798 poem The Unsex’d Females, objects to women’s engagement with contemporary political affairs. While he directs his criticism at the “Wollstonecraftian” in general, a footnote singles out Williams and criticizes her choice of the French Revolution as a subject matter: “But is it not extraordinary, that such a genius, a female and so young, should have become a politician—that the fair Helen, whose notes of love have charmed the moonlight vallies, should stand forward, an intemperate advocate for Gallic licentiousness—that such a woman should import with her, a blast more pestilential than that of Avernus.”10 And Polwhele was not alone in attacking Williams. The form and content of her Letters from France clearly made her contemporaries uncomfortable. The British Critic labeled Williams a “‘misguided female’” in 1796 and criticized her for wielding a “‘polluted pen’” in 1801.11 To bolster the assertion that Williams had transgressed the codes of proper female behavior, reviewers tried to establish her sexual impropriety by commenting on her relationship to John Hurtford Stone, her literary collaborator and a divorced man considered a traitor in England. In April 1798, the Anti-Jacobin described her as “a Poissarde more bloody, [...] a st--mp-t more shameless, than any which [...] Paris ever vomited forth.”12 Her contemporaries’ suspicions about Williams’ national disloyalty culminated in the hypothesis that she was a British spy, which gained in currency after her naturalization as a French citizen in 1817. She was presented as a negative example to her (female) contemporaries, a warning for them not to embark upon her public path. As a result of the scathing anti-Jacobin criticism, Williams’ name—wellknown to her contemporaries—was gradually obliterated from popular consciousness in the nineteenth century. In 1817, the critic William Beloe asked, “What is she now? [...] If she lives (and whether she does or not, few know and nobody cares), she is a wanderer—an exile, unnoticed and unknown.”13 While Williams had been a widely read if controversial figure during her 9

10 11

12 13

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Vivien Jones, “Women Writing Revolution: Narratives of History and Sexuality in Wollstonecraft and Williams,” in Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts 1780–1832, ed. by Stephen Copley and John Whale (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 178–99 (p. 179). Richard Polwhele, The Unsex’d Females (London: Cadell and Davies, 1798), p. 19. The comments in the British Critic are reported in Deborah Kennedy, “Benevolent Historian: Helen Maria Williams and Her British Readers,” in Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution, ed. by Adriana Craciun and Kari E. Lokke (Albany: State U of New York P, 2001), pp. 317–36 (p. 324). Quoted in Kennedy, “Benevolent Historian,” p. 324. Quoted in Favret, Romantic Correspondence, p. 55.

lifetime, she gradually vanished from literary and historical accounts, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century. Her name only resurfaced in the early twentieth century with Lionel Woodward’s 1930 biography Une anglaise amie de la Révolution française: Hélène-Maria Williams et ses amis.14 While this study was crucial in rescuing Williams’ legacy from oblivion, it also implicitly subscribed to a common mechanism in the recovery of women authors. Williams was seen as a worthwhile object of study because of her connection to famous friends, such as Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, William Wordsworth, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Significantly, Woodward’s book was republished in 1977 with the abbreviated title HélèneMaria Williams et ses amis.15 This title completely omitted her connection to the Revolution and focused on her role as salonnière and correspondent. Many pages of his biography are filled with lists of people whom Williams met, befriended, and with whom she corresponded. Woodward’s recovery was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it reinserted Williams into literary and historical consciousness. On the other, it placed Williams in the famous-by-association category and implicitly justified Williams’ exclusion: “Le public, peu fidèle, oublia vite l’auteur qui l’avait autrefois charmé. Les ouvrages de l’Anglaise, pleins de préventions et d’inexactitudes, seront remplacés dans le domaine de l’histoire par des travaux d’une érudition spéciale” [“The audience, not very faithful, quickly forgot the once-charming author. The works of the English woman, full of prejudice and inaccuracy, will be replaced by studies of special erudition in the field of history”].16 By belittling Williams’s contribution to historiography on the basis of her “prejudice and inaccuracy” and her lack of erudition, Woodward ushered in a period of benevolent patronizing in Williams criticism. 14

15 16

Lionel Woodward, Une anglaise amie de la Révolution française: Hélène-Maria Williams et ses amis (Paris: H. Champion, 1930). This book was also published as Woodward’s PhD thesis with a slightly different title: Lionel Woodward, Une adhérente anglaise de la Révolution française: Hélène-Maria Williams et ses amis (Paris: H. Champion, 1930). Lionel Woodward, Hélène-Maria Williams et ses amis (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1977). Woodward, Une anglaise, p. 267. In another comment of the same kind, Woodward warns his readers of Williams’ mistakes in observation and judgment: “Il faut cependant avertir le lecteur que miss Williams, dans certaines observations qu’elle portera sur les hommes et les événements, se trompera assez souvent, ou parce que’elle n’a pas pu se dégager tout à fait de l’influence de ses premiers amis, ou parce qu’elle n’a jamais pu oublier les peines qu’elle a souffertes [...] Cependant, il ne faut jamais perdre de vue que miss Williams a toujours été sincère” [“The reader needs to be alerted that Miss Williams makes frequent mistakes in certain observations about people and events, either because she could not completely liberate herself from the influence of her first friends, or because she could never forget the hardships that she suffered [...] However, we should not lose sight of the fact that Miss Williams has always been sincere”] (Woodward, Une anglaise, p. 33).

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This well-meaning gesture of belittlement was duplicated by subsequent critics, as the 1962 example of M. Ray Adams demonstrates. He bewails the fact that “[n]o modern appraisal has been made in English of this record in thirteen volumes of her more than thirty years’ residence in France.”17 Yet he also voices the complaints all too familiar in the appraisal of women authors’ texts by male critics: Her style lacks simplicity and would be more elegant, if it were less ornamental. She revels in poetic periods. Crowded figures of speech, emotional ecstasies, and barbarous diction often rob her style of the gravity and decorum which the subject demands. In particular, she often shows an exasperating contempt of anglicism. Such words as “epocha,” “phasis,” “meridional,” “centrical,” and “epuration” are without excuse. Her use of un-English idioms leads one reviewer to observe that she has almost forgotten her own language. This handicap, which she never overcame, sometimes puts the English reader almost out of sympathy with her enthusiasm and generous sentiment. In general, as Saintsbury [author of the 1896 History of English Literature in the Nineteenth Century] has remarked, her prose is “formal but not ungraceful, neither Johnsonian nor in any way slipshod.”18

At the same time that Williams is praised for the fact that “no one of them [women radicals] knew as much of the French Revolution first-hand [...] as Helen Maria Williams,”19 her use of the English language is scolded because of its lack of simplicity, its un-English expressions, and its un-Johnsonian characteristics. Williams is defined by everything she is not; she is neither Johnson nor a loyal linguistic patriot. Adams is exasperated at Williams’ linguistic and ideological switch to the French side. His judgment not only parallels Saintsbury’s, whom he quotes, but also Richard Polwhele’s 1790 attack of Williams’ “Gallic licentiousness.” Williams’ ambiguous allegiances in an era of increasing national sentiment gradually erased her from the writing of (literary) history. Only in the late 1980s did Williams’ name resurface without the usual negative qualifications attached to it. This newly awakened interest can be ascribed to the confluence of two specific factors: the celebration of the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, including the large number of related colloquia and publications, and the gradual recovery of eighteenth-century women’s texts that was gaining force at the time, prompted by the awareness of the need to expand “the 1790–92 British canon of revolutionary debate,

17

18 19

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M. Ray Adams, “Helen Maria Williams and the French Revolution,” in Wordsworth and Coleridge: Studies in Honor of George McLean Harper, ed. by Earl Leslie Griggs (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), pp. 87–117 (pp. 87–88). Ibid., pp. 99–100. Ibid., p. 86.

usually comprised of Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and Mary Wollstonecraft.”20 In this context, her Letters from France were republished in multiple editions,21 which, in turn, prompted an important number of scholarly articles exploring her journalistic activity outside of the interpretive framework of the question of her national allegiance.22 As a result of the 20

21

22

Jacqueline LeBlanc, “Politics and Commercial Sensibility in Helen Maria Williams’ Letters from France,” Eighteenth-Century Life, 21.1 (February 1997), 26–44 (p. 26). Helen Maria Williams, Letters from France, ed. by Janet M. Todd (Delmar: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975); Helen Maria Williams, Letters Written in France, ed. by Jonathan Wordsworth (Oxford and New York: Woodstock Books, 1989); Helen Maria Williams, An Eye-Witness Account of the French Revolution: Letters Containing a Sketch of the Politics of France, ed. by Jack Fruchtman (New York: Peter Lang, 1997); Helen Maria Williams, Letters Written in France: in the Summer 1790, to a Friend in England, Containing Various Anecdotes Relative to the French Revolution, ed. by Neil Fraistat and Susan S. Lanser (Peterborough, ON and Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2001); and Helen Maria Williams, Letters from France containing a great variety of original information concerning the most important events that have occurred in that country in the years 1790, 1791, 1792, and 1793. To which are annexed, the correspondence of Dumourier with Pache, the war minister, and with the commissaries - letters of Bournonville, Miranda, Valence, & C. & C.; Vol. 1, ed. by Caroline Franklin (London: Routledge, 2006); Helen Maria Williams, Letters Containing a Sketch of the Scenes which Passed in Various Departments of France during the Tyranny of Robespierre, ed. by Stephen Bending and Stephen Bygrave (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007). See, for example, among others, the following articles and books on the Letters: Sandra Adickes, The Social Quest: The Expanded Vision of Four Women Travelers in the Era of the French Revolution (New York: Peter Lang, 1991); Matthew Bray, “Helen Maria Williams and Edmund Burke: Radical Critique and Complicity,” Eighteenth-Century Life, 16.2 (May 1992), 1–24; Ulrich Broich, “Revolutionstouristen: Britische Literaten besichtigen die Französische Revolution,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 54.3 (2004), 283–300; Julie Ellison, “Redoubled Feeling: Politics, Sentiment, and the Sublime in Williams and Wollstonecraft,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 20 (1990), 197–215; Mary A. Favret, “Spectatrice as Spectacle: Helen Maria Williams at Home in the Revolution,” Studies in Romanticism, 33.2 (Summer 1993), 273–95; Jack Fruchtman, “The Politics of Sensibility: Helen Maria Williams’s Julia and the Terror in France,” EighteenthCentury Women: Studies in their Lives, Work, and Culture, 1 (2001), 185–202; Lia Guerra, “Helen Maria Williams: The Shaping of a Poetic Identity,” DQR Studies in Literature, 39.1 (2007), 63–76; Chris Jones, “Helen Maria Williams and Radical Sensibility,” Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism, 12.1 (May 1989), 3–24; Vivien Jones, “Women Writing Revolution: Narratives of History and Sexuality in Wollstonecraft and Williams,” in Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts 1780–1832, ed. by Stephen Copley and John Whale (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 178–99; Deborah Kennedy, “Spectacle of the Guillotine: Helen Maria Williams and the Reign of Terror,” Philological Quarterly, 73.1 (1994), 95–113; Deborah Kennedy, “Responding to the French Revolution: Williams’s Julia and Burney’s The Wanderer,” in Jane Austen and Mary Shelley and their Sisters, ed. by Laura Dabundo (Lanham: University Press of America, 2002), pp. 5–17; Deborah Kennedy, Helen Maria Williams and the Age of

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newly awakened interest in Williams’ letters, critics are also turning their attention to her other writings, among them her only novel, Julia, published in 1790. The novel was republished twice in the twentieth century after not having been published for nearly two hundred years.23 In addition, a new critical edition is planned by Broadview Press.24 Williams’ Letters and her novel mirror each other in a number of ways. Williams’ reports on the French Revolution fuse journalistic writing with the terms of sentimental fictional discourse. In her letters, she uses the popular virtue-in-distress narrative to construct a plot at the center of which stands Liberty, the female heroine, whose virtue is besieged by the Terreur’s personification, Robespierre. Williams presents this plot from the perspective of the “English outsider/‘spectatrice’ of revolutionary events and politics, while simultaneously making a public spectacle of herself, her sentimental attachments, and the domestic virtues she espoused.”25 In her Letters, Williams mixes genres and carefully crafts an authorial persona that is both removed and at the center of Revolutionary events. The Letters’ generic instability and Williams’ authorial stance have been discussed in secondary literature, yet these characteristics and their implications, which are also present in Julia, remain largely unexplored in this novel. While the Letters reference virtue-in-distress-narratives, Julia is a virtue-in-distress novel in the third person with interspersed elements from the epistolary genre and poetry.

23

24

25

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Revolution (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2002); Jacqueline LeBlanc, “Politics and Commercial Sensibility in Helen Maria Williams’ Letters from France,” Eighteenth-Century Life, 21.1 (February 1997), 26–44; Mark B. Ledden, “Revolutionary Plots: Helen Maria Williams’s Letters from France,” Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism, 3 (1995), 1–13; Anne K. Mellor, “English Women Writers and the French Revolution,” in Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution, ed. by Sara Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992), pp. 255–72; Judith Scheffler, “Romantic Women Writing on Imprisonment and Prison Reform,” Wordsworth Circle, 19.2 (Spring 1988), 99–103; Richard C. Sha, “Expanding the Limits of Feminine Writing: The Prose Sketches of Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) and Helen Maria Williams,” in Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices, ed. by Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley (Hanover and London: UP of New England, 1995), pp. 194–206; and Nicola Watson, “Novel Eloisas: Revolutionary and Counter-Revolutionary Narratives in Helen Maria Williams, Wordsworth and Byron,” Wordsworth Circle, 23.1 (Winter 1992), 18–23. Helen Maria Williams, Julia, ed. by Gina Luria (New York: Garland Publishing, 1974); Helen Maria Williams, Julia, a Novel, ed. by Peter Garside (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1995). Both of these editions are facsimile reprints. Marjorie Mather, “Re: New edition of “Julia”?” E-mail to Stephanie Hilger. 18 April 2008. Mather, editor at Broadview Press, confirmed that Julia, edited by Orianne Smith, is forthcoming in the next few years, although an exact publication date has not yet been set. Favret, “Spectatrice,” p. 275.

Like the allegorized figure of Liberty, the protagonist is under siege in the novel’s main plot; Seymour’s advances repeatedly threaten Julia’s moral and physical integrity. Yet the novel’s meaning exceeds that of a virtue-in-distress novel. Some of the embedded poems, most notably “The Bastille,” and epistolary accounts, for example, of Sophie Herbert during the American Revolution, refer to the contemporary political situation beyond the protagonists’ immediate domestic setting. These textual elements are inserted in ways that correlate with developments in the main plot. Julia’s actions therefore always signify more; the hybridity of Williams’ text transcends the virtue-in-distress narrative that we are ostensibly reading. Julia’s body is suffering metonymically for the social body politic. Writing a novel with references to contemporary political events allowed Williams, the journalist, to broaden her audience. Her experimentation with the genre of fiction was geared at (young) female readers who, oftentimes, were barred access to explicitly political reading material. Disseminating political references through a virtue-in-distress novel was, therefore, a strategic move. Williams strove to market her novel as appropriate reading material for young women, a moral tale, through a number of narrative techniques. She changes the plot of her textual model in a way that allows her to emphasize Julia’s irreproachable character. Instead of two men vying for one woman’s love as in Rousseau’s Julie, in Williams’ novel, there is only one man, Frederick Seymour, caught between his wife Charlotte and Julia, her cousin. Yet, it is not Frederick who expresses ethical considerations. Instead, Julia is the one who represents the moral center of the novel. When she learns about Frederick’s passion for her, she suffers from the awkwardness of her position, not the least because of the strong friendship that ties her to her cousin. Yet Julia never wavers; she consistently rejects Frederick’s advances and tries to protect Charlotte from the painful knowledge of her husband’s misguided infatuation. Julia’s morality made contemporary reviewers from such established journals as the Analytical, the European Magazine, and the Monthly present the novel as appropriate reading material for young women.26 In her review of Julia, Mary Wollstonecraft “warmly recommend[s] her [Williams’] novel to our young female readers, who will here meet with refinement of sentiment, without a very great alloy of romantic notions.”27 While she complains that 26

27

For an overview and discussion of contemporary reviews, see Peter Garside, “Introduction,” in Julia, a Novel, ed. by Peter Garside (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1995), pp. v– xxi (p. xvii). Mary Wollstonecraft, “Rev. of Julia, by Helen Maria Williams,” Analytical Review, 7 (May 1790), pp. 97–100 (p.98).

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“Julia’s principles are so fixed that nothing can tempt her to act wrong; and as she appears like a rock, against which the waves vainly beat,” she concedes that “[t]his plan gives the author an opportunity to display the most exemplary degree of rectitude in the conduct of her heroine.”28 By characterizing Julia as an example of conduct literature, Wollstonecraft highlights the novel’s didactic value and thereby establishes Williams’ propriety: “[H]er [Williams’] mind does not seem to be debauched, if we may be allowed the expression, by reading novels [...] Without any acquaintance with Miss W. only from the perusal of this production, we should venture to affirm, that sound principles animate her conduct, and that the sentiments they dictate are the pillars instead of being the fanciful ornaments of her character.”29 Wollstonecraft establishes a parallel between the author’s “sound” and the protagonist’s “fixed” principles. While Wollstonecraft’s appreciation of the novel is not unqualified, she repeatedly emphasizes the author’s morality, which was all the more important since, unlike many women authors, Williams did not publish her novel anonymously or under a pseudonym. Wollstonecraft’s focus on Williams’ propriety, and her silence on the novel’s explicitly political narrative insertions represent her strategic echoing of contemporary discourses of gender and genre. The review’s presentation of Williams as conforming to contemporary expectations attached to female authorship shows Wollstonecraft’s awareness of the repercussions of the label of impropriety when it was attached to a woman author; her review is more than a sympathetic account of a fellow author who addresses the Revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The review can also be read as Wollstonecraft’s reflections regarding her own self-presentation as a woman engaging contemporary political debates, the most forceful expression of which would be her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which was published in 1792, two years after Williams’ Julia. Creating a virtue-in-distress novel with an irreproachable female character allowed Williams to echo the discourse of feminine authorial propriety while embedding elements that question this discourse. The author took a number of precautions to establish the morality of her tale and, ultimately, of herself. The “advertisement” to the novel, which blurs the line between the authorial and the narratorial voice, exemplifies this strategy: “The purpose of these pages is to trace the danger arising from the uncontrouled indulgence of strong affections [...] The materials of the following sketch are taken from nature” (Julia, I, iii). Besides closely mirroring Rousseau’s preface to Julie, 28 29

46

Ibid., “Rev.,” p. 99. Ibid., “Rev.,” p. 98.

which claims that the narrative does not result from his imagination but from nature, Williams’ advertisement displays the tone of modesty expected of women authors of the time, referring to the “little confidence” (I, iv) with which this text is offered to the reader: “[P]erhaps, the pen which records this narrative may, in vain, have attempted to rescue it from oblivion” (I, iii). The reference to the inadequacy of the writer’s pen is part of what Ros Ballaster terms eighteenth-century women authors’ “self-conscious display of incommensurability.”30 This gesture is an ambivalent move that draws upon the eighteenth-century discourse on women’s difference by displaying the author’s adherence to the code of modesty while, at the same time, asserting the quality of her work.31 The advertisement’s approximation of the narratorial and the authorial voice permeates the entire novel. When the third-person narrator claims her ignorance of Latin, the reader also hears the author’s voice: “Chartres then added a Latin quotation of some length, which we believe was very apposite; but which, as we are entirely ignorant of Latin, we must leave our learned readers to guess” (Julia, I, 124). The formal “we” truly becomes the plural form in the reader’s ears. The audience is flattered at the same time that the narrator/author belittles her intellect and thereby establishes her modesty. Readers are not the only ones who are cajoled in Julia; so are the literary “greats” of Williams’ time. In the same way that Williams invokes Rousseau’s Julie and Goethe’s Werther as literary reference points, she also acknowledges the influence of other authors. For example, when Charlotte’s father returns from the East Indian colonies, a scene of celebration is described in the following terms: “The tenants were seated in the hall; the ale flowed liberally; nothing was heard but the rejoicing: and the Vicar of Wakefield, who had a taste for happy human faces, would have found this a charming spectacle” (I, 74). By invoking Oliver Goldsmith’s 1766 novel The Vicar of Wakefield, Williams legitimates her description of idyllic family and community life. At the same time, this allows her to display her familiarity with contemporary works. This is not the only time that Williams refers to her literary contemporaries, as can be seen, for example, in the description of a minor character: “He was one of those persons whom Sterne describes as walking straight forward through the path of his world; turning neither to the right hand, nor the left” (I, 171). By paraphrasing one of Laurence Sterne’s 30

31

Ros Ballaster, “Women and the Rise of the Novel: Sexual Prescripts,” in Women and Literature in Britain 1700–1800, ed. by Vivien Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), pp. 197–216 (p.197). For further discussion of this issue, also see Cheryl Turner, Living by the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).

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ideas, Williams bows to literary authority while presenting herself as a wellread and therefore readable author. Williams acknowledges the literary output of her contemporaries, yet she also displays her knowledge of the literature of the past, a strategy which is especially palpable in “An Address to Poetry” (I, 15–24). In this poem of twenty-two stanzas, she invokes the power of poetry and its masterful handling by Homer, Milton, Shakespeare, Thomson, and Pope. This is Williams’ first use of poetry in the novel; she inserts the poem into the narrative as one of Julia’s compositions: “We shall venture to insert the following Address to Poetry, written by Julia a short time before her visit to town, as proof of her fondness for that charming art” (I, 14). “An Address” illustrates the protagonist’s morality, and it allows the author to graft her voice onto Julia’s, establish her poetic calling, and insert it in a literary tradition: Oh Poesy! Oh nymph most dear, To whom I early gave my heart, Whose voice is sweetest to my ear Of aught in nature or in art; Thou, who canst all my breast controul, Come, and thy harp of various cadence bring, And long with melting music swell the string That suits the present temper of my soul. (I, 15)

The focus on the protagonist’s sensitivity also legitimizes her creator’s authorial aspirations. Deborah Kennedy argues, that “[t]hough she lacked the benefits of a formal education [...] Williams could still legitimately enter the public sphere as a poet of sensibility and [...] she presented her credentials as those of the heart, not the head, consciously excluding herself from the more intellectual arena reserved for talented and educated men.”32 By echoing gender expectations and claiming the feminine domain of the private, the heart, Williams strategically carves out a space from which she ventures into what the discourse on “incommensurable difference” considered to be the public/masculine domain of the head. Yet, again, she is careful not to appear immodest: she prefaces the poem with the remark that “even where the talents of the poet are altogether inadequate to the acquisition of fame, the cultivation of them may still confer the most soothing enjoyment” (Julia, I, 13–14). Williams strategically echoes her contemporaries’ interpretation of Julia’s 32

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Deborah Kennedy, “‘Storms of Sorrow:’ The Poetry of Helen Maria Williams,” Man and Nature: Proceedings of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 10 (1991), 77–91 (p. 79).

moral character as a reflection of her creator’s propriety in order to establish and reflect on her position as a late eighteenth-century English author. Williams’ strategic mix of self-denigration and self-assertion enables her to position herself in an illustrious line of poets: Thy page, Oh SHAKESPEARE! let me view, Thine! at whose name my bosom glows; Proud that my earliest breath I drew In that blest isle where Shakespeare rose! — Where shall my dazzled glances roll? Shall I pursue gay Ariel’s flight, Or wander where those hags of night With deeds unnam’d shall freeze my trembling soul? (I, 17, capitals in original)

The speaker identifies Shakespeare as her inspiration and extends her flattery to “that blest isle where Shakespeare rose,” that is, Britain. This extension is used to include her, who drew her “earliest breath” in that same place. She, the poem argues, is therefore able to continue the grand literary tradition that is represented by figures such as Milton, Thomson, and Pope: In those still moments when the breast [...] Glows by some higher thought possest [...] Then, awful MILTON, raise the veil That hides from human eye the heav’nly throng! [...] Then, THOMSON, then be ever near, And paint whatever season reigns [...] And POPE, the music of thy verse Shall winter’s dreary gloom dispel, And fond remembrance oft rehearse The moral song she knows so well (I, 18–22, capitals in original)

Praising Shakespeare, Milton, Thomson, and Pope was especially important for Williams who had, by the time of the novel’s publication, moved to France and was reporting on the events there from a sympathetic perspective. This flattery allows Williams to insert herself into the English literary tradition by displaying her knowledge of and respect for it. Through the intermediary of her protagonist, Williams inserts her name besides those of the male “greats” in the British tradition. She balances this self-assertion with a display of propriety through her choice of poetic genre. By inserting occasional poetry meant to demonstrate the sensibility of its author, Williams opts for a genre deemed acceptable for women writers. The narrator explains, “Verses were sometimes composed by Julia, merely to amuse her grandfather” (I, 68). Again, Julia’s—and by extension, the 49

author’s—creative talent is framed in a discourse of modesty and selfeffacement. These poems are presented as pastime; the lines are composed in the service of others. On the level of the plot, Julia writes them to entertain the patriarchal figure of the grandfather. On the level of the novel’s composition, Williams’ “advertisement” explains that she inserted these poems to please her readers: “I have been encouraged, by the indulgence with which my former poems have met with, to intersperse some poetical pieces in these volumes” (I, iii). Julia and her author present themselves as proper women writing not for fame and fortune but for others’ entertainment and pleasure. In addition, they present their writings not as sparked by “unsex’d” intellectual reflection but by commiseration with fellow creatures. The inserted poem entitled “The Linnet” demonstrates Julia’s compassion and her propriety; she composes it after witnessing “a black cat seize a linnet that was perched upon a neighbouring tree, and to whose song she had been listening” (I, 68–69). After the maid “rescued the linnet from its gripe [sic],” “Julia scrawled the following lines upon this incident” (I, 69, my italics): When fading Autumn’s latest hours Strip the brown wood, and chill the flowers [...] A Linnet, among leafless trees, Sung, in the pauses of the breeze [...] A prowling cat, with jetty skin [...] Drew near—and shook the wither’d leaves [...] And grasps the victim in his jaws. The linnet’s muse, a tim’rous maid, Saw, and to Molly scream’d for aid [. . . ] Heroic Molly dauntless flew [...] Snatch’d from Grimalkin’s teeth his prey. (I, 69–71)

In the same way that Williams’ “advertisement” was replete with selfbelittling gestures, Julia’s writing is presented as “scrawling,” amateurish with no consequence except innocent entertainment of the writer’s immediate surroundings. Williams was successful in constructing her authorial personality as that of a self-effacing, proper, and feeling woman through the intermediary of her poem-writing protagonist. Reviewers praised what they described as the elegant poetry in the novel.33 Besides “The Linnet” and the “Address to Poetry,” there are six more poems in the novel that fit this description: “Song” (I, 151–52), “Ballad” (I, 153–54), “Sonnet to Hope” (I, 204), “Elegy” (II, 27– 33

50

For a discussion of reviewers’ reactions to these poems, see Eleanor Ty, Unsex’d Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993), p. 76.

29), “Song” (II, 137–38), and “Sonnet to Peace” (II, 159). “The Linnet” in particular was singled out for praise as the best representative of poetry “cast in a polite ‘feminine’ literary mode.”34 The domestic propriety of these poems was reassuring from the pen of a woman who had not only published politically and socially critical poems on the slave trade and colonial exploitation but who also participated in a public debate on the French Revolution in her Letters. What is puzzling is that none of the reviews mentioned the longest poem in the novel, “The Bastille” (II, 218–23), a fourpart poem of twelve stanzas that occupied six pages in the novel and had an explicit political reference point. Was the poem so well concealed amid the virtue-and-distress narrative and the other proper feminine poetry that it passed by reviewers’ critical eyes? Were reviewers puzzled by its presence and did not know how to discuss it? Were reviewers reticent to point out its existence for fear of hurting Williams, as was perhaps the case with Mary Wollstonecraft, sympathetic to Williams’ authorial strategies? While these questions cannot be answered with certainty, the absence of “The Bastille” from contemporary reviews is telling in that it reveals, at least, that the presence of such political matter in a supposedly private and domestic narrative was unexpected and hence unspeakable. “The Bastille” is inserted in the narrative when the tensions between Frederick Seymour, Charlotte, and Julia reach their highest point. The poem’s gloomy mood echoes the sense of danger that permeates the main plot: “Mr. F— called at Mr. Clifford’s one evening, and finding Charlotte and Julia sitting at work, he desired their permission to read to them a poem, written by a friend lately arrived from France, and who, for some supposed offence against the state, had been immured several years in the Bastille, but was at length liberated by the interference of a person in power. The horrors of his solitary dungeon were one night cheered by the following prophetic dream” (II, 217). Mr. F—, a family acquaintance, is the transmitter of the political material regarding the French revolution. Deborah Kennedy argues that by “using Mr. F—, a male intermediary, to introduce the political material into the novel, Williams avoids directly involving her heroines in politics.”35 In fact, Williams creates a double removal by means of two male intermediaries: Mr. F— and the prisoner/author of the poem himself. By not directly involving her female characters in the public aspects of politics, Williams ostensibly keeps the barrier between private/female and public/male intact.

34

35

Peter Garside, “Introduction,” in Helen Maria Williams, Julia, a Novel (London: Routledge/ Thoemmes Press, 1995), pp. v–xxi (p. vii). Deborah Kennedy, “Responding to the French Revolution,” p. 6.

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Yet on a metafictional level, the author, who has aligned herself with the narrator in the preface and with the protagonist through the insertion of her poetry, does meddle with public affairs. Therefore, additional layers of protection are inserted between the author and politics. The subtitle of “The Bastille” describes the poem as a “vision,” which it is in a double sense. On the one hand, the poem describes the fall of the Bastille as a hopeful dream by one of its prisoners. On the other, it predicts events in the future. While Julia was published in 1790, the novel is set in 1776. These strategies create a sense of indirection, which functions as a protective barrier for the author. In addition to these mechanisms of protection regarding the author’s gender, Williams also attempts to diffuse criticism of national disloyalty through the speaker of the poem. The speaker is a British prisoner who strategically contrasts the tomblike atmosphere of the ancien régime with the “blissful vales” of his birth country: Stretch’d helpless in this living tomb, Oh haste, congenial death! Seize, seize this ling’ring breath, And shroud me in unconscious gloom— Britain! Britain! thy exil’d son no more Thy blissful vales shall see; Why did I leave thy hallow’d shore. Distinguish’d land, where all are free? (Julia, II, 218–19)

Williams’ reference to Britain’s “hallow’d shores” serves as strategic flattery of her readers’ national allegiance, displacing fear of power abuses onto the neighbor across the Channel in order to thematize the danger for abusive leadership in a more general sense. The speaker describes the effect of incarceration on his physical and mental health: Drear cell! along whose lonely bounds, Uninvited by light, Chill silence dwells with night [...] Where long inaction wastes the frame, And half annihilates the mind! [...] Terrific visions hover near [...] Oh, tear me from these haunted walls [...] Lest madness seize my soul (II, 218–20)

When the symbol of absolutist power falls, his narrative changes from a description of claustrophobic confinement to the praise of absolute personal freedom: 52

Those troubled phantoms melt away! I lose the sense of care— I feel the vital air— I see, I see the light of day!— Visions of bliss! eternal powers! What force has shook those hated walls? What arm has rent those threat’ning towers? It falls—the guilty fabric falls! (II, 220–21)

In this vision, the walls of the Bastille tumble and the prisoner escapes from the surveillance of its threatening towers. He experiences freedom with all his unbridled senses. Williams uses the story of an individual to illustrate the effects of political change. This allows her to make public observations within the relatively unthreatening framework of an individual’s personal story, which is embedded in the narrative of yet another individual, Julia. In “The Bastille,” the defeat of arbitrary power ushers in a new era that, far from being firmly established, has to be protected from new injustices and attacks: Shall Freedom’s sacred temple rise, And charm an emulating world! ‘Tis her awak’ning voice commands Those firm, those patriot bands, Arm’d to avenge her cause, And guard her violated laws!— Did ever earth a scene display More glorious to the eye of day, Than millions with according mind, Who claim the rights of human kind? (II, 221)

Williams personifies Freedom in light of new social and political ideals. Freedom becomes the besieged and threatened virtuous young maiden who needs to be protected. Her predicament parallels that of the novel’s protagonist, Julia, whose virtue is also under attack. This parallel allows Williams to package her political ideas in the principles of propriety and modesty that shape popular virtue-in-distress narratives. Yet Freedom—and, by extension, Julia—is not merely a passive character who needs protection; she is also an assertive figure who commands those who fight on her behalf. Freedom is represented as the Goddess Liberty and is linked to Europe’s Republican past: “Does the fam’d Roman page sublime, / An hour more bright unroll, / To animate the soul, / Than this, lov’d theme of future time?” (II, 222). Williams’ description of Freedom echoes contemporary representations of Liberty: 53

Attached to her tricolor sash, she wears a lion-headed sword, attesting symbolically to her triumph over superstition, despotism, and the monarchy. Syncretically combining Christian and republican symbols, this virginal figure wears the phrygian cap, yet is surrounded by an aureole. She is figured as young, innocent, and pure; precisely the kind of transparent, natural representation that a reading of Rousseau inclined the revolutionaries to adopt [...] As opposed to the sexually threatening images of the female aristocratic body, this feminine representation of the reinvented body politic seems almost to call out for the protection of virile republican men.36

In this allegorical representation, Liberty is an ambivalent figure. Her lionheaded sword attests to her strength, but her innocence and purity signal a need of protection. Williams’ Freedom—the author, accused of “Gallic licentiousness,” significantly abandons the Latinate “Liberty” here—displays the same characteristics; she needs to be defended even though she is the protector of the weak and helpless: The peasant, while he fondly sees His infants round the hearth, Pursue their simple mirth, Or emulously climb his knees, No more bewails their future lot, By tyranny’s stern rod opprest; While Freedom guards his straw-roof’d cot, And all his useful toils are blest. (Julia, II, 222)

Under Freedom’s reign, arbitrary power no longer tyrannizes the peasant who is able to imagine a better future for his offspring. The allegorized figure of freedom protects the family from violence and oppression even though she is in danger herself. “The Bastille” is inserted at a point in the narrative when Julia’s role as the guarantor of happiness is increasingly compromised. With Charlotte, she has created a safe domestic haven, a retreat from the pleasures and temptations of city life: “This young lady [Julia] lamented nothing so much in leaving London, as her separation from Charlotte; for she found that the joys of dissipation are like gaudy colours, which for a moment attract the sight, but soon fatigue and oppress it; while the satisfactions of home resemble the green robe of nature, on which the eye loves to rest, and to which it always returns with a sensation of delight” (I, 57). When Frederick Seymour courts Charlotte and is introduced to Julia, he at first fits into the cousins’ “domestic 36

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Joan Landes, “Representing the Body Politic,” p. 28. The image that Landes analyzes is La Liberté Patronne des Français (c. 1795) by Louis Charles Ruotte, after Louis-Marie Sicardi, finished by Jacques-Louis Copis.

circle” (I, 114). Frederick enjoys his conversations with Julia, yet soon the seeds for the disturbance of domestic contentment are sown because Frederick “discovered that Charlotte’s society lost its charm when Julia was absent” (I, 116). Julia strives to maintain the domestic harmony by keeping Frederic’s infatuation from Charlotte. Yet her attempts to maintain happiness are marred because she faces intensifying threats as a result of the externalization of Frederic’s intensifying desire. The ensuing attacks on Julia’s body parallel the threats experienced by the new body politic established according to the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Frederick’s attacks on Julia are presented as a series of tests of the protagonist’s character. The first one occurs when Frederick comes into possession of an object that both highlights Julia’s inattainability and alleviates its effects: One evening Charlotte, while she was making tea, requested Julia to try some new music, which she had received from London, on the piano forte. Julia pulled off her gloves, and placed them hastily on her lap: one of them dropped on the floor while she was playing. Frederick Seymour, who was walking up and down the room, seized a moment when Charlotte was talking to Mrs. Seymour, and pretending to be looking over some songs which lay on the piano forte, dropped one of them on the spot where the glove lay, which he contrived to pick up, at the same time putting it hastily into his bosom [...] Seymour, when he reached his own apartment, locked the door, pulled the precious prize from his bosom, pressed it to his heart and lips ten thousand times, and was guilty of the most passionate extravagancies. (I, 184–86)

The glove becomes the fetishized substitute for Julia, allowing Frederick to indulge in what the novel describes as “the most passionate extravagancies.” When Julia searches for her glove, she feels a sense of physical encroachment, “disturbed and uneasy from a suspicion of what had really happened” (I, 185), and fears the revelation of the material proof of Frederick’s passion. The second attack on the protagonist’s integrity takes place when Frederick, Julia, Charlotte, and Chartres, one of the cousins’ acquaintances, make an excursion to the ruins of an abandoned abbey in the countryside. Chartres decides to climb one of the crumbling towers. Charlotte does not dare to ascend, but Julia joins him, to Frederick’s dismay. Frederick’s fears become reality upon the group’s departure: At that moment a gust of wind shook the building, and some loose stones fell from the top of the wall and rolled with velocity down the hill, in the direction where Julia was walking; whom they would inevitably have crushed in their passage, if [Frederick] Seymour had not flown with impetuosity and snatched her from the impending destruction. She received no other injury than a blow from a small stone, that struck her ancle, which was bruised by the

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stroke, and became swelled and painful from the swiftness with which he had hurried her over the rough and hilly grounds. (I, 196–97)

Even though Frederick’s quick reaction prevents a serious physical injury, Julia’s overall suffering continues precisely because of him. Saving Julia from the crumbling building allows Frederic to get into physical contact with her. The passage exceeds its literal meaning and Julia’s ankle becomes her Achilles’ heel. She strives to avoid the traps of Seymour’s attraction. The road on which she walks is therefore long and treacherous: “Julia walked with great difficulty along that narrow and dangerous road which has been before described, and which was two miles in length; but she had not gone far before her ancle swelled so much, that it could support her weight no longer, and she was unable to proceed” (I, 197–98). Julia’s impaired ankle foreshadows the literal and figurative bruises that she will experience on her “path of rectitude” (II, 4). The third and most violent test of Julia’s character also takes the form of a physical attack. One evening, Julia leaves a social gathering to prevent an encounter with Frederick. As she is about to slip away, Frederick appears and entreats her to let him accompany her to the carriage: “A few minutes after, a violent noise and confusion were heard in the hall [...] one of Julia’s chairmen had fallen near Frederick Seymour’s door: the chair was broken, and the glasses were shivered. When Charlotte reached the hall, Seymour and the servants were taking Julia out of the chair: her forehead was cut with the broken glass, and bled violently” (II, 206–7). This passage establishes the possibility that Frederick might have attempted to force himself onto Julia. While the chairman’s fall prevents a literal rape, on the symbolic level the violation of the virginal heroine has occurred. Framing her novel as a didactic virtue-in-distress narrative enables Williams to present Julia as appropriate reading material to young women because the protagonist never strays: “Rectitude stood in the place of indifference; and, since she could not entirely controul her feelings, she disregarded them altogether, and only studied, with a fervent desire of acting right, to regulate her conduct by the strictest propriety” (II, 2–3). Constructing the novel as a third-person narrative rather than a Rousseauian epistolary account shifts the focus from Julia’s ambivalent sentiments for Seymour to a description of her propriety. In contrast to an epistolary novel, Julia’s feelings are never explored at length; they are only mentioned obliquely in the above-cited passage. This shift in focus in the virtue-in-distress narrative allows a move away from a discussion of romantic feelings and relationships in order to focus on female friendship as the most

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powerful sentiment linking not only the characters in the main plot but also the various narrative pieces. Williams’ use of the virtue-in-distress model establishes parallels between Julia and the personified figure of Freedom in “The Bastille.” The friendship linking Julia and Charlotte is mirrored in the relation between Freedom and the equally feminized figure of Philosophy, described at the end of the poem: Philosophy! oh, share the meed Of Freedom’s noblest deed! ‘Tis thine each truth to scan, Guardian of bliss, and friend of man! ‘Tis thine all human wrongs to heal, ‘Tis thine to love all nature’s weal; To give each gen’rous purpose birth, And renovate the gladden’d earth. (II, 222–23)

Philosophy and Freedom’s cooperation are integral to the improvement of man’s condition. Both are feminized in their association with maternal functions; female friendship is established as the crucial element in the restoration of social justice and harmony. The importance of female bonding, and the disastrous effects of the lack thereof, are further illustrated on a different narrative level, the intercalated epistolary love story of Sophia Herbert and Captain F—, Mr. F—’s brother. The story of Sophia, which is set in 1776 during the American Revolution, is introduced by a male character in a similar way to “The Bastille.” Once more, Julia and Charlotte are protected from direct involvement in political affairs. Mr. F—, Julia’s suitor, “in the course of a walk [...] took an opportunity of telling Julia, that he had lately lost his only brother” (I, 241). The narrator highlights the fact that Julia does not request his brother’s story but that Mr. F—, whom Julia will eventually reject, sends her related documents: “‘The circumstances of his [Mr. F—’s brother] death [...] are such as I am unable to relate, but they were particularly affecting, and, if you will give me permission, I will send you a packet which contains the account, and which, I believe, will interest you’” (I, 241). Julia learns about current political affairs not through her own initiative but through the insistence of her male acquaintance, who forwards her the story of his brother and Sophie Herbert. The account consists of two sets of letters written by the couple’s friends: one by a comrade of Captain F—, who fought with him for the British in the American War of Independence, and the other by Sophia Herbert’s friend, Frances Lawrence. The following story emerges: Sophia Herbert is the daughter of a landowner in Norfolk, Virginia. She has two brothers, one of

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them a soldier, “personally known to General Washington, [who] had been appointed one of his aid-du-camps” (I, 246). Upon the British declaration of war, the father and his soldier son rush toward town to fight. Sophia remains by herself on the estate (I, 247). When she learns that the British have set the town on fire, she runs toward it, and, “[c]areless of danger, and almost insensible of her situation, Sophia still pressed forward, till she was stopped by a bleeding corpse which opposed her passage” (I, 248). When she realizes that she has stumbled over her brother’s lifeless body, she faints and is rescued by a British officer, Captain F—, who leads her back to her family’s burning estate. Sophia’s father survives the battle; he is reunited with his daughter and both retreat to a hamlet in the neighborhood, where the British officer visits them regularly. There, Sophia is wooed by “her generous lover,” and “although Mr. Herbert lamented that Captain F— was an Englishman, he did not suffer political prejudice to subdue those sentiments of esteem and gratitude which the conduct of that young man had nobly merited, and consented that his daughter should marry Captain F— at the end of the summer compaign [sic]” (I, 255–56). The father leaves for battle and eventually dies. At this point, Sophia’s second brother “heard with the utmost indignation of her engagements to Captain F—, and seemed to feel less concerned for his father’s death, than regret at the weakness which had led him to bestow his daughter on a man who had drawn his sword against America” (I, 257–58). Sophia, however, defies her brother’s intolerance and insists on marrying Captain F—. Yet soon afterwards, the fatal tidings of her lover’s death arrive: “She shed no tear, but her blood seemed chilled in her veins: she started frequently, and there was a wildness and disorder in her countenance, that alarmed us for her reason [...] her fever increased every moment, and the following night her reason entirely forsook her” (I, 258–59). Sophia, griefstricken, eventually dies and becomes a symbol of tolerance in times of war and conflict over the interpretation of ideals such as freedom and equality. The figure of Sophia plays an important role in the author’s selfpresentation. Sophia’s plea for tolerance toward people of complex national allegiances constitutes the author’s disguised defense of her own position as a British woman in favor of the French Revolution. Through an intermediary male character, Williams quotes from the Book of Ruth in the Old Testament: “This valuable domestic [Robert, the British servant of the American Mr. Herbert] had felt towards his master that sentiment of steadfast fidelity which Naomi expresses to Ruth, in the beautiful language of Scripture, ‘Whither thou goest I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God shall be my God; where thou diest will I die, and 58

there will I be buried. The Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me’” (I, 251–52). Williams’ use of the Bible contributes to her self-presentation as a moral woman while commenting on political events and underlining the importance of female solidarity. Naomi and Ruth, Freedom and Philosophy, and Julia and Charlotte become the protagonists in this story on the role of women in changing times. The disastrous effect of these ties’ destruction is presented by Frances Lawrence, whose letters relate Sophia’s story: “I have been visiting the grave where the remains of my friend repose [...] She is at rest, and this cruel war had made her happiness impossible. Alas, how dreadful are the effects of war! Every form of evil and misery is in its train: the groans of despair are mingled with the song of triumph, and the laurels of victory are nourished with the tears of humanity” (I, 263). Frances’ record of Sophia’s life during the war focuses on women’s suffering. Sophia becomes engulfed in the panicked crowd of women when she searches the burning town for her brother: “Sophia [...] flew with precipitation towards the town; but, as she approached, the sight of the spreading flames, the tumultuous cries of the women, and the clash of arms, made her shrink back involuntarily. She had, however, gone too far to retreat, and was mingled with a crowd of helpless women and children, who were flying in desperation, they knew not whither” (I, 247–48). Women and children are presented as the victims of men’s actions. Sophia dies of grief because her lover’s “thirst for military fame” (I, 243) led to his death. Captain F—’s ambition not only destroys Sophia’s life, it also severely impacts her friend Frances: “I have poured out my complaints; but the sorrow I feel is not for her, but for myself” (I, 263). The destruction of this friendship serves as a warning to Julia and Charlotte. Sophia’s story outlines the danger of letting Frederick Seymour’s misguided infatuation cause a war that would transform Julia and Charlotte’s idyllic cohabitation into a battlefield with the women’s friendship as the primary casualty. Warning against unbridled passion’s insalubrious effects therefore constitutes a crucial element of Williams’ authorial self-presentation; she fashions herself as a writer of didactic literature for young women: Women have even greater reason than men to fortify their hearts against those strong affections, which, when not regulated by discretion, plunge in aggravated misery that sex, who, to use the words of an elegant and amiable writer, “cannot plunge into business, or dissipate themselves in pleasure and riot, as men too often do, when under the pressure of misfortunes; but must bear their sorrows in silence, unknown and unpitied; must often put on a face of serenity and chearfulness, when their hearts are torn with anguish, or sinking in despair.” Though a woman with rectitude of principle, will resolutely combat those feelings which her reason condemns; yet, if they have been suffered to acquire force, the struggle often proves too severe for the delicacy of the female frame; and, though reason, virtue, and

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piety, may sustain the conflict with the heart, life is frequently the atonement of its weakness. (II, 239–40)

In a footnote, Williams identifies the “elegant and amiable writer” as John Gregory (1724–1773). Gregory, a physician, was the author of the influential A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters, a manual on the education of girls, written after his wife’s death in 1761 and published posthumously in 1774.37 This is the same writer whom Mary Wollstonecraft will criticize with “affectionate respect” in her 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Woman.38 Williams’ reference to Gregory, author of a widely disseminated yet misogynist advice manual, which argues for women’s modesty and the concealment of their learning, is another manifestation of her strategic negotiation of social and literary conventions in her presentation of gender roles. Williams adopts a conservative persona cautioning women against tales of passion and the desire to base marriages on such sentiments. Quoting the pedagogical writings of Gregory—and thereby seemingly subscribing to his essentialization of gender roles—establishes the propriety of Williams’ work while undermining such naturalized constructions of gender behavior. While the novel confirms Dr. Gregory’s claim about the destructiveness of strong affections, it turns his premise of women’s special vulnerability on its head by establishing a male character, Frederick Seymour, as its prime victim. Julia and Charlotte, who eventually learns of her husband’s passion for her cousin, suffer from the strain of the situation, yet it is the “unhappy Seymour, [who,] agitated by the utmost violence of conflicting passions, resembled one of those plants which are scattered on the bleak mountains, undefended, and exposed to all the fury of the elements” (Julia, I, 123). The “oppressive pain in his head” (II, 225) turns into delirium: “Mr. Clifford and Julia sat by his bed-side all night. He continued talking at intervals with the wildest incoherence; sometimes raving of Julia, then fancying he was kneeling to Charlotte for pardon, and calling to his infant to plead for him. Mr. Clifford considered all he said as the inexplicable wanderings of frenzy; but Julia, who well understood their force, listened to them with unutterable agony” (II, 231–32). Seymour’s condition worsens, and he eventually dies. The clash between the overtly didactic passages and the actual plot establishes a tension in the novel that forces readers to reconsider the relation between these elements. Williams voices Gregory’s description of women’s susceptibility to 37 38

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John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (London: Strahan, 1774). Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, ed. by Ulrich H. Hardt (Troy: Whitston Publishing Company, 1982), p. 209.

passion’s dangers only to demonstrate the limitations of his theory through a case study of her male protagonist who gradually loses his reason. The tension between explicitly didactic passages and the novel’s case studies also permeates the discussion of love and passion as the basis for marriage, which acquired particular currency in the eighteenth century. In Love as Passion, Niklas Luhmann argues that reciprocal feelings were becoming increasingly important as reasons for agreeing or refusing to marry someone.39 Julia, who “revolted at the idea of marrying where she did not love” (I, 187–88), reflects this development. Yet Julia’s echoing of the new discourse is couched within a didactic passage cautioning against basing marriage on “romantic feelings”: It must be acknowledged, that the young people of the present age have in general the wisdom to repress those romantic feelings which used to triumph over ambition and avarice, and have adopted the prudent maxims of maturer life. Marriage is now founded on the solid basis of convenience, and love is an article commonly omitted in the treaty. But Julia, who had passed her life in retirement, was not so far advanced in the lessons of the world. Her heart, delicate, yet fervent in its affections, capable of the purest attachment, revolted at the idea of marrying where she did not love; and, though she was now unhappy, she determined not to fly from her present evils to a species of wretchedness, of all others the most intolerable to a mind of her disposition. (I, 187–88)

The passage’s didactic voice praises young people’s repression of romantic feelings in favor of the considerations of maturer life. In addition, the focus on love is presented as a passing fad since “young people of the present age” “now” base marriage on convenience. Julia’s refusal of her numerous suitors is couched in a conservative discourse, which creates a tension regarding the philosophy of marriage. The tension in this specific passage permeates the entire novel and transforms it into irony. “Convenience,” “ambition,” and “avarice” are presented as a “solid basis” for marriage, yet the case studies of various characters suffering precisely because of such attachments contradict this statement. Williams echoes regressive and misogynist statements—such as Dr. Gregory’s—and then undermines their claim to absolute truth. The story of Miss Forbes, a secondary character in the novel, is a particularly forceful example of this point. The death of Miss Forbes’ parents leaves her without resources or shelter. A newlywed couple welcomes Miss Forbes into their home, but the husband makes improper advances and Miss Forbes decides to abandon this arrangement. As a woman without means, her only escape is marrying Captain Meynell, who, “it was said [...] had a good deal of 39

Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, trans. by Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986).

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money in the stocks” (II, 74). Yet, soon after the marriage, it is revealed “that Captain Meynell had no money at all, and only married her in hopes that her great friends would provide for him” (II, 76). The exploitation of Miss Forbes does not stop at this point. It is revealed that the marriage to Meynell was her original benefactor’s scheme to “get her more into his own clutches” (II, 76) and “keep her for his own vile ends” (II, 75–76). The above-praised motives of ambition and avarice are at the basis of this marriage of convenience, which turns out not to be convenient at all for Miss Forbes. This is only one of the numerous unhappy marriages described in the novel’s various subplots, Charlotte and Seymour’s being another. Even though their attachment was not based on an extreme interpretation of the idea of convenience, it is no more viable than Miss Forbes’. At the same time, the novel only presents love in its extreme manifestation, passion. Passion results from the impossibility to attain the love object and therefore only exists outside of the matrimonial relationship. The novel shows love and marriage as occupying different realms and thereby portrays the dilemma of many contemporaries, namely the impossibility to combine these two elements in practice. Marriage and romantic love are presented as undesirable human attachments. The only functioning relationships are those between Charlotte and Julia, Liberty and Philosophy, Ruth and Naomi, and Sophia Herbert and Frances Lawrence. Female friendship becomes the most reliable form of interpersonal interaction. In the main plot, Seymour’s death not only demonstrates the shortcomings of marriages of convenience and passion’s devastating effects but also becomes a necessary precondition for Williams’ alternative social vision based on women’s friendship. Whereas in Julie, the dying female protagonist hopes to be reunited with her lover after death, in Julia, the man dies, rendering a complete reconciliation between Julia and Charlotte possible. In a fateful twist, it is the birth of Seymour’s son that reconciles the cousins and strengthens their friendship. Charlotte’s hope that, after the birth of their child, “Seymour would have an additional reason for loving her” (II, 160) does not come true. Instead, the birth allows the cousins to overcome the alienation caused by the revelation of Frederick’s passion: “When Charlotte’s hour of danger approached, she intreated Julia to come and stay at her house during her confinement. Julia was gratified by this mark of confidence, but excused herself from staying in the house; promising, at the same time, to spend with Charlotte the greatest part of every day” (II, 224). While Seymour’s misguided infatuation had been a source of discord for the cousins, his offspring becomes a reconciling force. Julia nurses her cousin back to health when, after the birth, Charlotte is afflicted with a fever and “Julia, terrified at her danger, no longer hesitated to remain at the house; 62

where she scarcely quitted her bed-side for a moment, and attended her with unremitting care” (II, 224–25). Charlotte’s weakness strengthens Julia—who, as a result of the tension, had also grown “pale and thin, lost her appetite, and her health [had] sensibly declined” (II, 213). The intensity of the female bond is an important factor in her own and in Charlotte’s recovery, who “at length [...] regained her health, and found comfort in her infant, whom she nursed herself, and in whom she centered all her hopes and affections” (II, 241–42). Their friendship heals their individual bodies in the same way that Liberty and Philosophy’s mutual support mends the suffering body politic in “The Bastille.” After Seymour’s death, Julia and Charlotte form an alternative social sphere from which men in their function as husbands, suitors, and soldiers are excluded while other women such as Miss Forbes are welcomed and integrated. Williams was part of an increasing number of women authors who devised female communities as self-sufficient spheres of existence.40 In this alternative social sphere, respect, friendship, and kindness are the key principles that unite the characters. Williams’ presentation of female bonding in this safe space has the characteristics of what Janet Todd terms “sentimental friendship”: Sentimental friendship is a close, effusive tie, revelling in rapture and rhetoric. Unlike the sentimental romance which so often ruins, it aids and saves, providing close emotional support in a patriarchal world. If heterosexual love has proved violent or painful, it may even threaten and replace this love. Outside the text, sentimental friendship becomes a means of befriending the female reader; through her relationship with her friend, the heroine can display her exemplary state, and under her mask of sentiment, stand as a model for other young ladies who may unwisely yearn to stray.41

Charlotte and Julia create an all-female community that enables their existence outside heterosexual relationships and allows other women such as Miss Forbes to seek refuge from the disappointments of love and social constraints. Williams’ use of a virtue-in-distress narrative rather than an epistolary romance allows her to present her protagonist as an example of moral conduct:

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For an insightful exploration of alternative ways of life for women during this time period, see Alessa Johns, Women’s Utopias of the Eighteenth Century (Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2003) and Rebecca D’Monté and Nicole Pohl, eds., Female Communities 1600– 1800: Literary Visions and Cultural Realities (London: Macmillan, 2000). Janet Todd, Women’s Friendship in Literature (New York: Columbia UP, 1980), p. 3.

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She found consolation in the duties of religion, the exercise of benevolence, and the society of persons of understanding and merit. To such people her acquaintance was highly valuable, and she lived admired, respected, and beloved. She refuted many honourable offers of marriage, and devoted much of her time to the improvement of Seymour’s child, whom she loved with the most partial fondness. But the idea of its father still continued, at times, to embitter the satisfaction of her life; which, but for that one unconquered weakness, would have been, above the common lot, fortunate and happy. (II, 244–45)

Even though Julia’s ambiguous sentiments for Seymour are never fully explored in the novel, this passage emphasizes their centrality in her moral struggle. She never strays from the path of rectitude yet remains troubled by her barely acknowledged and never explored attraction to Seymour, her “unconquered weakness.” Using a morally irreproachable character to demonstrate the negative outcome of both marriages of convenience and romantic love allows Williams to construct her novel as exemplary reading material for young women while offering her audience alternate social models based on female bonding and solidarity. This female community provides the novel’s scarred and emotionally bruised women with a legitimate sphere of existence outside the bounds of marriage. Yet the novel points at the precariousness of this alternative because the women have no means of independent subsistence. They remain dependent on patriarchal power structures. They live under the roof of Charlotte’s father who made his fortune in the East Indies and receive further financial support from Miss Forbes through the intermediary of her husband: “Mrs. Meynell [Miss Forbes], on the departure of her husband for India, was received into Mr. Clifford’s family, where she was treated with every mark of respect and kindness. Captain Meynell, a few years after, died in India; and the fortune he had acquired was transmitted to his wife, who still continued to live in Mr. Clifford’s family” (II, 242). The colonial enterprise, in which both Captain Meynell and Charlotte’s father participated, serves the financial wellbeing of the female characters. Julia’s alternative community protects helpless women from evil men at the same that it depends on the financial support derived from the colonial activities of benevolent fathers and dead husbands. Julia and Charlotte’s relative independence becomes possible only because of the dependence of colonized subjects. The novel does not resolve this tension. Julia thereby points at the limited means available to eighteenth-century women to earn their subsistence while continuing to maintain the appearance of propriety and decorum. Julia and Charlotte’s alternative female community is only possible because of their male relatives’ wealth. That this solution was not available to all eighteenth-century women is demonstrated by the author’s

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careful and strategic negotiation of writing as a means of securing an income with discourses regarding appropriate gender behavior. Considering Williams’ Julia in the context of the late-eighteenth-century literary marketplace and its conventions of gender and genre allows for an analysis that both uncovers and transcends a nineteenth-century reception focused on Williams’ supposed national disloyalty and impropriety. By writing from France for an English-speaking audience, Williams occupied a precarious social and political position. She therefore carefully navigated contemporary discourses of gender and politics, both echoing and strategically questioning their presuppositions. Her novel is a palimpsest, the total meaning of which exceeds the sum of its constituent parts. The various narrative levels interact in such a way that the domestic setting of the main plot is intimately intertwined with the political references in the various subplots. Julia’s body is not the only one that comes under attack; the body politic is also in turmoil. The novel describes a society in transition, marked by enthusiasm for the principles of equality and liberty yet also by fear of their corruption through greediness, avarice, and political calculation. The stories of Charlotte and Julia, Liberty and Philosophy, Ruth and Naomi, and Sophie Herbert and Frances Lawrence are strategic ways of inserting political material into the novel while outlining an alternate, peaceful, all-female social model, the utopian character of which this woman author’s careful acts of self-positioning forcefully illustrate.

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Chapter 2 Adventurous Tales: Ellis Cornelia Knight’s Dinarbas; a Tale: Being a Continuation of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia

Like Helen Maria Williams’ Julia, Ellis Cornelia Knight’s (1757–1837) Dinarbas; a Tale: Being a Continuation of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1790) explicitly invokes the text of a well-known male author, Samuel Johnson’s 1759 The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. Knight responds to Johnson’s Rasselas by taking the title of his last chapter, “The conclusion, in which nothing is concluded,” as her justification for writing Dinarbas. In her introduction, she refers to “Sir John Hawkins [who], in his life of Dr. Johnson, says, ‘that the writer had an intention of marrying his hero, and placing him in a state of permanent felicity.’”1 Knight quotes the statement made by Johnson’s biographer in 17872 in order to justify her work: “This passage suggested the idea of the continuation now offered, with the greatest diffidence, to the reader, and without any thought of a vain and 1

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Ellis Cornelia Knight, Dinarbas; a Tale: Being a Continuation of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, ed. by Ann Messenger (East Lansing: East Lansing Colleagues Press, 1993), p. 9. All further references to this novel will be to this edition and will be made parenthetically within the text. Hawkins describes Johnson’s intent as follows: “The tale of Rasselas was written to answer a pressing necessity, and was so concluded as to admit of a continuation; and, in fact, Johnson had meditated a second part, in which he meant to marry his hero, and place him in a state of permanent felicity: but it fared with this resolution as it did with that of Dr. Young, who, in his estimate of human life, promised, as he had given the dark, so, in a future publication, he would display the bright side of his subject; he never did it, for he had found out that it had no bright side, and Johnson had much the same discovery, and that in this state of our existence all our enjoyments are fugacious, and permanent felicity is unattainable” (John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson (New York: Macmillan, 1961), p. 157). The “pressing necessity” that Hawkins mentions was a financial one. Johnson wrote and published Rasselas quickly, either to provide for his mother in her last illness or, according to James Boswell, to pay for her funeral and some of her debts (James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 2 vols. (New York: George Routledge and Sons, 1892), I, p. 195). Hawkins’ reference to a future publication clearly serves as a springboard for Knight’s text, which she constructs in opposition to Hawkins’ conclusion that Johnson viewed permanent happiness as an unattainable goal.

presumptuous comparison; as every attempt to imitate the energetic stile, strong imagery, and profound knowledge, of the author of Rasselas, would be equally rash with that of the suitors to bend the bow of Ulysses” (9). Modestly bowing before Johnson’s authority by claiming that she is neither vain nor presumptuous and is in “want of genius and literary fame” (10) are moves typical for women authors of the time, enabling them to publish their stories while echoing the contemporary discourse of female propriety and privacy. As the analysis of Helen Maria Williams’ Julia has demonstrated, flattery of literary authorities and self-belittling gestures are central elements of this strategy of what Ros Ballaster calls “self-conscious display of incommensurability.”3 Yet even though Knight claims that her tale is secondary to Rasselas, it soon becomes clear that she has no intention of quietly existing in Johnson’s shadow. In Dinarbas, Knight employs existing literary and social conventions in strategic ways that allow her to appear nonthreatening to the status quo while carving out a space for divergence at a time when the Western European body politic was undergoing violent and tumultuous change. Knight’s strategic response to Johnson was a factor in the novel’s success in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. Dinarbas was published in several editions and translated into various languages.4 Contemporary reviews were generally positive. Although there were objections to Knight’s supposed impertinence of rethinking Johnson’s narrative premise,

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Ros Ballaster, “Women and the Rise of the Novel: Sexual Prescripts” in Women and Literature in Britain 1700–1800, ed. by Vivien Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), pp. 197–216 (p. 197). Various critics have discussed the ambivalence of these self-belittling gestures. For insightful analyses, see Ballaster, Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1984), and Cheryl Turner, Living by the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). Knight’s strategic balancing act paid off during her lifetime: “Five editions of Dinarbas alone were published in England in Ellis Cornelia Knight’s lifetime (1790, 1792, 1793, 1800, 1811); others were published as an additional volume of Rasselas, and several appeared in the United States” (Ann Messenger, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Dinarbas: a Tale; Being a Continuation of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, ed. by Ann Messenger (East Lansing: East Lansing Colleagues Press, 1993), pp. 1–6 (p. 5)). C.J. Rawson states that “there were at least ten editions by 1820” (Claude J. Rawson, “The Continuation of Rasselas,” in Bicentenary Essays on Rasselas, ed. by Magdi Wahba (Cairo: Société Orientale de Publicité, 1959), pp. 85–95 (p. 86)). In addition, Barbara Luttrell mentions that “Dinarbas was translated into French and Italian … and reached four English editions by 1800” (Barbara Luttrell, The Prim Romantic: A Biography of Ellis Cornelia Knight 1758– 1837 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965), p. 87).

her literary production was treated with respect.5 Despite Dinarbas’ popular and critical success during the author’s lifetime, the novel gradually fell into oblivion during the course of the nineteenth century. By the twentieth century, the novel had largely become absent from literary histories, mainly due to the general neglect of women’s contributions to the history of the novel. When, in the second half of the twentieth century, Dinarbas slowly reemerged in critical discussions due to renewed interest in Rasselas on the occasion of the novel’s bicentenary anniversary, Knight’s novel was frequently dismissed as inferior because of its supposed audaciousness, as a 1959 article by C.J. Rawson demonstrates. Rawson summarizes the plot of Dinarbas and concludes that Knight’s text is an example of “the minor fiction of the period”; he characterizes Dinarbas by the “cheerful incomprehension of its original” and argues that Knight “never really meets Johnson on his own terms.”6 Rawson argues that examples of Johnsonian “cadence or sentiment [. . .] do not make Miss Knight’s book Johnsonian.”7 This article exemplifies a strain of criticism that does not take Knight’s text on its own terms but, instead, focuses on the author’s shortcomings at imitating Johnson.8 As Robert Uphaus observes, Rawson’s perception of Dinarbas as a failed sequel to Rasselas was perpetuated in the 1970s, and, instead of exploring the significance of her divergence from Rasselas, Knight was blamed for her presumptuousness.9 5

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Fanny Burney even recommended the novel as reading material to the Queen’s daughters. Burney’s reaction is symptomatic of the contemporary reception: “If you can forgive the presumption of the idea, I think you must be pleased with the execution” (Quoted in Luttrell, p. 86). Rawson, p. 91, p. 92, p. 94. Ibid., p. 87. In 1965, even Knight’s twentieth-century biographer, Barbara Luttrell, praised what she calls Rawson’s “lucid and detailed appraisal of Dinarbas” while arguing that Knight should not be blamed for her efforts: “Dinarbas, judged as a sequel, was a failure both in degree and in concept, but there were many who had read Rasselas, and many more who had not, who were to enjoy it for its own sake; and no one could blame the youthful author too harshly for her inability to match Johnson in philosophy or acquired wisdom. Her story has its own merits: a neat plot, action—impossible though some of the adventures are that befall the quartet of lovers—and at least an attempt at convincing characterization” (Luttrell, p. 86). Luttrell considers Dinarbas to be a failure as a sequel. She recognizes that Knight’s text only superficially fits this description and that it has its own merits. Yet, by implicitly deferring to Rawson’s judgment, the assessment of Dinarbas as a text in its own right is undermined. For a concise overview of the reception history of Dinarbas from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, see Robert W. Uphaus, “Cornelia Knight’s Dinarbas: A Sequel to Rasselas,” Philological Quarterly, 65.4 (Fall 1986), 433–46. For a discussion of Knight’s novel in the context of other responses to Rasselas, see Jessica Richard, “’I am Equally

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While the dismissal of Dinarbas reflects a general reticence to rethink the eighteenth-century literary canon, it also correlates with a specific issue in Johnson criticism, namely the construction of Johnson’s Rasselas as the locus criticus, the key text for understanding Johnson’s work: Rasselas has been the most widely read and continuously commented upon of all of Johnson’s writings. Since its publication in 1759 hardly a year has gone by that has not produced a new edition of or essay upon the text. Even during the nineteenth century, when Johnson’s own writings were neglected in favor of Boswell’s Life, Rasselas continued to be reissued and analyzed. In fact, because of the Victorian neglect of the Johnson canon, Rasselas is the only one of Johnson’s literary works with a continuous critical history.10

Rasselas’ ambivalent genre has been a main issue for discussion. As Tomarken observes, “After nearly two and a half centuries of almost continuous dispute, critics are still unable to decide whether Rasselas is a novel, oriental tale, or apologue and whether its conclusion is to be seen in religious or secular terms.”11 This discussion has impacted the reception of Knight’s Dinarbas. Critics struggling with the complex nature of Johnson’s text have been reticent to consider Dinarbas seriously for fear of further complicating the analysis of Rasselas. Taking Knight’s subtitle, Dinarbas, Being a Continuation of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, on a literal level has allowed critics to dismiss the novel as unoriginal and presumptuous and thereby to neglect its complex textual politics. Only recently have critics begun to study Dinarbas in its own right, a development that correlates with the publication of new editions of Knight’s text after nearly two centuries of neglect.12 Considering Dinarbas within the framework of writing back allows for an analysis of this woman author’s negotiation of the eighteenth-century literary marketplace and discourses regarding gender and publication. In order to justify her decision to publish Dinarbas and to maintain her propriety, Knight engages in a careful balancing act that reflects the author’s

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Weary of Confinement:’ Women Writers and Rasselas from Dinarbas to Jane Eyre,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 22.2 (2003), 335–56. Edward Tomarken, Johnson, Rasselas, and the Choice of Criticism (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1989), p. 5. Ibid., p. 5. Two new editions of Dinarbas were published in 1993 and 1994: Ellis Cornelia Knight, Dinarbas: a Tale; Being a Continuation of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, ed. by Ann Messenger (East Lansing: East Lansing Colleagues Press, 1993) and Ellis Cornelia Knight, Dinarbas; A Tale: Being a Continuation of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, ed. by Lynne Meloccaro (London: Dent, 1994). A joint edition of Dinarbas and Rasselas was also published: Lynne Meloccaro, ed., Dinarbas and Rasselas (North Clarendon: Everyman’s Classic Library, 1994).

complex relation to literary and social authority. The novel’s genesis is intertwined with the financial situation faced by the family in 1775 after the death of Knight’s father and provider, Sir John Knight, a naval officer who had been knighted and promoted to rear admiral of the White. Knight’s mother had applied for a government pension without success, and the family was facing difficult times. Publishing was one of the few means for a middleclass woman to engage in financially remunerative activity in the late eighteenth century.13 Even so, conforming to gendered expectations of propriety in the publicity of the literary marketplace was an important concern for women writers. Knight’s mother claimed that Dinarbas was written for her private enjoyment when she was ill rather for than public fame, which constituted one of the strategies employed in marketing Knight’s writing.14 Publishing anonymously and delegating negotiations with the publisher to a family friend were other strategic decisions taken to disassociate Knight from the public aspect of the literary marketplace.15 This cautious self-positioning was important in responding to a popular text by a well-known author, whom Knight knew personally. However, her identity soon became known. On the one hand, writing what she herself called a “continuation” of Rasselas provided the opportunity for success and financial reward. Yet on the other, it invited comparisons to Johnson by literary critics and book reviewers. Moreover, Knight risked alienating Johnson himself, a family friend who, as she put it in her Autobiography, “was always kind to me, but he was very intimate at our house, had a high opinion of my father, and conversed willingly with my mother.”16 Knight had known Johnson since her childhood: “When I first knew Dr. Johnson, I was a little afraid of his deep tone of voice and great wig; but when I had reached my seventh or eighth year, I was accustomed to all this, and felt grateful for his indulgence.”17 In her

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16

17

For an insightful discussion of writing as a financially remunerative activity for women in the eighteenth century, see Cheryl Turner, Living by the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). Barbara Luttrell quotes a letter from Ellis Cornelia Knight to one of her friends, in which she reports her mother’s presentation of Dinarbas: “My child (she announced) is now about to put into the world a work written to amuse me in illness, which has had the happiness of meeting the approbation of some friends. She publishes it, not from vanity, but to make up in some sort to me the reduction in our little pittance by the lease of our house being expired” (Luttrell, p. 84). The family friend was the dramatist and translator John Hoole, who negotiated publication of Dinarbas with the London publishing house Dilly. Ellis Cornelia Knight, Autobiography of Miss Cornelia Knight, Lady Companion to the Princess Charlotte of Wales, 2 vols (London: W. H. Allen and Co., 1861), I, p. 12. Ibid., I, p. 14.

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Autobiography, written during the last years of her life, Knight describes Johnson as a venerable yet sympathetic man, yet she also undermines his aura by relating less positive character traits. When in 1776, the nineteen-year-old Cornelia and her widowed mother were leaving for comparatively cheaper continental Europe, Johnson alienated the daughter: “When I went abroad, Dr. Johnson gave me his blessing, and exhorted me not to become a Roman Catholic, adding, that ‘if I extended my belief, I might at length turn Turk.’ I was insensible of the goodness of the advice, because I knew it to be unnecessary, and was therefore hurt at the supposition.”18 Johnson’s insinuations of her immaturity and susceptibility to foreign influences hurt the teenager and were vividly remembered and recounted by the old lady who spent much of her adult life abroad.19 Relating Johnson’s comments in her autobiography constitutes a retrospective justification of her conception of Dinarbas. Knight underlines that Johnson—one of the celebrated authors of her time—was, after all, just a flawed human being and that, therefore, it was not presumptuous to respond to his tale.20 Knight’s strategic mix of deference and defiance was crucial in her self-presentation and the creation of a new tale that would interest and intrigue readers. Knight, who socialized with Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, was well-positioned on the literary scene to gain access to publication venues. At the same time, however, her relation to the author of Rasselas shows that she occupied an uneasy position

18 19

20

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Ibid., I, pp. 14–15. As an expatriate, Knight had to preempt the accusation of national disloyalty insinuated by Johnson before her departure. Therefore, Knight highlighted her allegiance to the British nation in a manner similar to Williams’ praise of England as the “blessed isle” in “The Bastille.” In her Autobiography, Knight describes her reaction to Admiral Nelson’s victory over the French fleet in the Battle of the Nile (1798) while she is in Naples. She expresses her national pride by painting a lively picture of the “shouts, bursts of applause, [and] the toasts drank” (Knight, Autobiography, I, p. 111) when the King of Naples welcomes Nelson’s ship: “Bands of music played our national airs […] No Englishman or Englishwoman can hear those airs without emotion in a foreign land, however trifling may be the effect they produce in our own country; but under such circumstances as these they created a powerful excitement” (Knight, Autobiography, I, p. 115). At the same time that Knight, the expatriate, expresses relief at being in a place sympathetic to the English, her depiction of national pride also serves to flatter those on whom she would become dependent after her mother’s death. Another belittling remark by Johnson is related by Barbara Luttrell. The night before the Knights’ departure for Europe, Johnson had apparently said, referring to Ellis Cornelia’s unusual height: “‘Go, my dear, for you are too big for an island’” (Luttrell, p. 39). Even though the veracity of such assertions is difficult to ascertain, their recording points at a tension in the relationship between Knight and Johnson.

with respect to literary authority. Knight’s strategic presentation of Dinarbas, a direct engagement with Johnson’s tale, illustrates one of the efforts of negotiating her privileged yet precarious relationships with literary and social patrons. Dinarbas was written during her mother’s lifetime, a period of intense literary patronage, which was followed by an era of social patronage intimately entwined with the political developments of the late eighteenth century. Before she died in 1799, Knight’s mother “had particularly commended me to their [Lord Nelson’s and Sir William Hamilton’s] care.”21 By enlisting the protection of Hamilton, British ambassador to the court of Naples, and of Nelson, the most celebrated admiral of the French Revolutionary Wars, Knight’s mother had attempted to secure her daughter’s social, financial, and emotional welfare. Knight, without any financial or emotional family support after her mother’s death, became part of Hamilton and Nelson’s entourage from 1800 to 1805. She accompanied Hamilton and Nelson on a triumphal return back to England. Yet Knight’s fortune changed when she discovered Nelson’s illicit affair with Hamilton’s wife, Emma, that had begun in 1798. She was in a difficult situation: “Most of my friends were very urgent with me to drop the acquaintance, but, circumstanced as I had been, I feared the charge of ingratitude, though greatly embarrassed as to what to do, for things became very unpleasant.”22 Although she wanted to distance herself from the illicit affair, she felt loyal towards those who helped her in difficult circumstances. Instead of openly alienating her benefactors, Knight gradually distanced herself from Nelson and the Hamiltons and formed new social connections that allowed her to secure a different type of livelihood: One morning in March, 1805, Lady Aylesbury communicated to me the queen’s wishes with regard to myself. Her Majesty had been pleased to express a desire that I should be attached to her person without any particular employment [. . .] Her Majesty added, that she would allow me three hundred pounds a year, and that I should be present at her evening parties, when invited, and always on Sundays and red-letter days, and be ready to attend upon her in the morning when required to do so; but that I should have leave to visit my friends.23

Knight emphasizes her modesty by mentioning that she accepted this position “gratefully, and the more so that it was unsolicited on my part.” Knight would act as lady companion to the queen’s granddaughter, Princess Charlotte. This position was fitting considering Fanny Burney’s recommendation of Dinarbas 21 22 23

Knight, Autobiography, I, p. 138. Ibid., I, p. 162. Ibid., I, p. 168.

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as appropriate reading material for the queen’s female offspring. The royal family provided for Knight’s financial as well as her intellectual needs because the queen “was fond of reading aloud, either in French or English, and I had my work. Her library […] was well furnished with books in those languages and in German, and she was so good as to give me a key, with permission to take home any that I liked.”24 The title of her autobiography— Autobiography of Miss Cornelia Knight, Lady Companion to the Princess Charlotte of Wales—points at the importance of these nine years (1805– 1814), as does the fact she devotes half of her account to this period. The social and financial security experienced in the royal household was upended when, in 1814, amid the political turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars, Knight was dismissed by the regent, apparently for not preventing meetings between Princess Charlotte, the regent’s daughter, and her secret lover.25 Knight’s autobiography remains vague on this issue; keeping her respectability intact in this situation was as important as it was ten years earlier when she discovered Nelson and Lady Hamilton’s illicit relationship. In a letter, she describes her feelings upon her dismissal: “I mean no complaint against the Regent. I was much hurt when he dismissed me, and felt angry; for which reason I made apologies in my letter, though I am not conscious of having said or done anything to offend him.”26 This letter demonstrates Knight’s awareness that maintaining her good reputation was crucial for securing her future livelihood. Once more, Knight finds herself alone and abandoned by authority and friends. She describes her efforts at securing an adequate income: I wrote to inquire about the time of payment of my pension, when I heard of it from Lord Liverpool the last time I was at Rochetts. I was advised by Lord St. Vincent to explain to Lord Liverpool how inadequate it was as a compensation to what I had with the Queen, as, besides the 300 l. a year, I had apartments, &c. I saw Lord Liverpool on this subject, and showed him letters which contained great promises: but nothing more was done, and I am tired of the subject, being at the same time truly thankful to Providence that I am in the situation in which I am. I have received for answer to my last inquiries, that it is dated 28th October, and that the first quarter will not be paid for some time.27

24 25

26 27

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Ibid., I, p. 169, 170. Princess Charlotte’s secret lover was Frederick William Henry Augustus, nephew to Frederick the Great. Their relationship eventually led the princess to cause a scandal by breaking off her engagement to William, Prince of Orange (Luttrell, pp. 184–86). Knight, Autobiography, II, p. 11. Ibid., II, pp. 29–30.

Knight was as dependent on compensation from the government as her mother, who, despite her efforts, never managed to secure a pension. Luttrell relates that, “after a disdainful silence he [the Prime Minister] informed her that the salary she had received from the Queen, £300 a year, was to be continued. Cornelia’s reminder that at Warwick House it had been £500 was answered with a cold bow. Asked when the pension would begin, Lord Liverpool said distantly that it depended on what money was in the Exchequer.”28 Faced with these vague promises, Knight spent the remainder of her life moving back and forth between England and continental Europe fueled by feelings of alienation and financial worries.29 Knight’s negotiation of her precarious social position is reflected both in her Autobiography, written at the end of her life, and in Dinarbas, published in 1790. Dinarbas illustrates how the genre of fiction could be used strategically by an author such as Knight to comment on the social and political upheaval in the late eighteenth century. Knight’s novel allowed her to highlight her propriety while subtly engaging social debates. By maintaining the physical displacement of her model—Johnson’s tale takes place in the half-real, half-legendary kingdom of Abissinia—Knight achieves two things: she dutifully pays homage to Johnson’s fictional craft while allowing oblique social commentary in this fashionably remote setting.30 Yet, whereas in Rasselas the Abissinian setting serves as a backdrop for the characters’ philosophical discussions about life, in Dinarbas Knight explores the narrative possibilities of the exotic terrain to create a story that, as Ann Messenger puts it, is a “much busier book than Rasselas, with battles,

28 29

30

Luttrell, p. 195. For extensive information on Knight’s life, see her two-volume Autobiography of Miss Cornelia Knight, Lady Companion to the Princess Charlotte of Wales, Barbara Luttrell’s biography, The Prim Romantic, and Lady Eliott-Drake, ed., Lady Knight’s Letters from France and Italy 1776–1795 (London: A. Humphreys, 1905). The origins of the discourse on Abissinia can be traced back to Herodotus’s History, in which the Abissinian—one of the people that the historian encounters during his travels—is described as being “scorched on the burning sands that surround him” (Herodotus, The History, trans. by George Rawlinson (New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1947), p. 93). In the medieval period, Abissinia became the dominion of the legendary Christian king, Prester John, and was thought to be located in modern-day Ethiopia. In historiography, Abissinia has always been a mythical domain, an overdetermined signifier inscribed with cultural conflicts and ideologies. For an insightful account of Abissinia as this mythical locus in Rasselas, see M. Van Wyk Smith, “Father Lobo, Ethiopia, and the Transkei; or, Why Rasselas Was Not a Mpondo Prince,” The Journal of African Travel Writing, 4 (1986), 5–16.

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treachery, politics, love affairs, and other adventures.”31 Knight explores the malleability of the fictional genre by integrating narrative elements from romances, thereby creating a hybrid textual form that is as difficult to classify as Johnson’s Rasselas. This strategic fusion of an old and a new narrative tradition allows Knight to diverge from her predecessor. In Knight’s text, the characters thematize socially and politically contentious issues through their actions, whereas in Rasselas they merely discuss and philosophize about them. Her characters undergo adventures, encounter obstacles, and engage in battles to prove their honor, which allows Knight to enact questions of leadership and social class. In addition, the characters’ amorous quests illustrate the relation between the sexes and the connection between love and marriage. This allows her to thematize two elements simultaneously, an individual’s public role in society and his/her private identity, of which the domestic forms only one, if an important, part. At the same time that her novel reflects the discursive binary of the public and the private sphere, it also acknowledges the limitations of this construct since her characters’ actions repeatedly demonstrate the interdependence of these domains. Whereas Knight’s characters enact the intermingling of the public and private aspects of love and marriage, Johnson’s Rasselas and Nekayah merely discuss marital relationships. In their discussions, Johnson’s siblings disagree on the utility of marriage. Rasselas claims that “marriage is evidently the dictate of nature; men and women were made to be companions of each other, and therefore I cannot be persuaded but that marriage is one of the means of happiness.”32 Nekayah disagrees with her brother’s conviction that humans are guided by an instinctual matrimonial drive. She cites examples of early and late marriages, where, on the one hand, the couple, once married, “discover[s] what nothing but voluntary blindness had before concealed” or, on the other, husband and wife realize that “long customs are not easily broken.”33 Yet Rasselas maintains hope for a positive outcome of these institutionalized attachments: “The union of these two affections, said Rasselas, would produce all that could be wished. Perhaps there is a time when marriage might unite them, a time neither too early for the father, nor too late for the husband.”34 While Nekayah considers the desires of both husband and wife, Rasselas highlights only the interests of the father and 31

32

33 34

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Ann Messenger, His and Hers: Essays in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1986), p. 201. Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (London: Oxford UP, 1971), p. 73. Ibid., pp. 76–77. Ibid., p. 78.

husband. This patriarchal logic also manifests itself in Rasselas’ thoughts on the issue of personal choice: “But surely, interposed the prince, you suppose the chief motive of choice forgotten or neglected. Whenever I shall seek a wife, it shall be my first question, whether she be willing to be led by reason?”35 In Johnson’s book, this moment never arrives: Rasselas remains a bachelor. The tension in the siblings’ discussion regarding marriage and personal choice is never resolved; it becomes one of the unanswered questions about what Johnson calls the “choice of life” in his text. By contrast, Knight’s additions to Johnson’s cast of characters allow for a narrative enactment of various matrimonial scenarios. In addition to Johnson’s protagonists—Rasselas, his sister Nekayah, her servant Pekuah, the philosopher Imlac, and the astronomer—Knight’s novel is peopled by characters whom the original cast encounters at a fortress on the Abissinian border: the governor Amalphis, his son Dinarbas and his daughter Zilia, and the priest Elphenor. By introducing a new set of siblings, Dinarbas and Zilia, who are roughly the same age as Rasselas and Nekayah, Knight creates the possibility of a relationship that transcends the mere friendship uniting Johnson’s characters. This possibility manifests itself early on; we hear of Rasselas’ interest in Zilia’s “irresistible charm” (23) and of Dinarbas’ attraction to the “natural sweetness of her [Nekayah’s] temper” (23). The focus on the men’s attraction might indicate a duplication of the patriarchal logic of Johnson’s Rasselas, yet Knight’s novel is guided by different premises. When her Rasselas asks Amalphis for permission to marry his daughter Zilia, the father disregards social conventions by invoking his daughter’s right of choice: as for your request, Sir, I thank you for the honour you are disposed to confer on my family; but, contrary to the custom of our country, I disclaim all right over the choice of Zilia: if she consents, I shall be happy to bestow her on a man, whose conduct and principles I have ever esteemed, and whose kindness I am ambitious to preserve: permit me to consult her inclinations; Zilia is sincere, and will soon determine my answer. (68)

Although Knight has a male character speak on behalf of women, she attributes to him a socially contested statement regarding marriage practices that carries the authority of his position on the fictional social hierarchy. Amalphis allows his daughter to choose her partner, which reflects the gradual move away from marriages of convenience to marriages based on, if not love, at least mutual affection. Knight uses patriarchal authority to subvert the patriarchal order in a similar way to Helen Maria Williams in her Julia. 35

Ibid., p. 77, my italics.

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Amalphis paves the way for his daughter’s self-assertion, thereby obviating the need for a female protagonist who fights the establishment. Knight’s strategy parallels Williams’, who also relies on male characters to introduce the political material in her novel. Amalphis’ statement allows for Zilia’s personal choice, which she expresses in a letter to Rasselas.36 Knight uses the conventional association of the epistolary form with femininity to give voice to Zilia’s sentiments: As sincerity and candour are the ruling principles of Zilia, let my sovereign pardon me if I disclose my heart to Rasselas: think, O prince! what must be my sensations, when I learn that fortune and thy own merit have placed thee in a rank above my fondest hopes […] I thank thee for the assurance that thou wishest me to share thy honours […] Zilia could never doubt the honour of Rasselas; but is she assured of his love? […] The throne of Abissinia, even dignified as it is by thy virtues, has no charms for me, if the place which I once flattered myself with possessing in thy breast is no longer mine […] Hast thou the same sentiments from which we sometimes derived the highest felicity […] ? If the emotions of thy heart impelled thee to summon Zilia to the court of Gonthar, she will obey their summons. (107–8, my emphasis)

This letter, marked by the eighteenth-century discourse of sensibility, is inserted at a point in the novel when various subplots are resolved and Rasselas is able to ask for Zilia’s hand.37 Zilia’s letter voices her feelings but also questions Rasselas’s motives. While Zilia presents herself as a demure epistolary woman, she is not a representative of what Thomas O. Beebee calls the “male ventriloquis[t]” epistolary tradition that can be traced back to Ovid’s Heroides, in which “the women write to absent husbands and lovers, who apparently have better things to do than to write back.”38 She is not what Katharine Ann Jensen has termed an “Epistolary Woman”; she does not practice “a form of self-alienation by accepting [her] own abandonment as the

36

37

38

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The name of Amalphis’ daughter alludes to one of the most famous eighteenth-century epistolary heroines, Françoise de Graffigny’s Zilia from her 1747 novel Lettres d’une Péruvienne. Graffigny’s Zilia stands in the tradition of reverse Othering, also employed by Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721). In her letters, Graffigny’s protagonist criticizes French society from the viewpoint of an outsider trying to understand a different culture’s social conventions. See Stephanie Hilger, “Comment peut-on être Péruvienne? Françoise de Graffigny, a Strategic Femme de Lettres,” College Literature, 32.2 (Spring 2005), 62–82. For an extensive discussion of the language of feeling and sensibility in eighteenth-century fiction, see Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993). Thomas O. Beebee, Epistolary Fiction in Europe 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), p. 106.

premise for [her] writing.”39 Zilia writes from a different premise and, therefore, her letters are not an expression of lament but an assertion of her agency. Zilia holds the power of decision. Marrying Rasselas has become a possibility, but she wants to ensure that he reciprocates her feelings and does not merely act out of honorable motives: “Zilia could never doubt the honour of Rasselas; but is she assured of his love?” (107). She wants Rasselas to give proof in writing of his love and desire: “as thy prudence was then superior to thy passion, and as, since that time, every thing has prevented thee from conveying to me thy sentiments, an explanation is now necessary, both for thy satisfaction, and for my own” (107). While Rasselas’ honorable restraint of passion has prevented Zilia from becoming a seduced and abandoned epistolary woman, he now has to prove his passion as a condition for their marriage. Both Knight and Williams strategically enter into dialogue with the premises of the epistolary tradition, thereby interrogating the relation of two of its main components, love and marriage. The tension that arises from the author’s critical engagement with the epistolary tradition reflects a social process that was moving toward equating marriage with love rather than with convenience, honor, esteem, and friendship. As Niklas Luhmann argues, while the idea of passionate love as the basis for the choice of a spouse was still developing in the eighteenth century, increasing “attention was paid […] to the inability to love each other as a reason for refusing to marry.”40 Zilia exemplifies this standpoint; she does not want to marry Rasselas if he does not love her. A similar discourse is invoked in the developing relationship between Nekayah and Dinarbas. Conflicted about her feelings for him, Nekayah exclaims to herself, “Did not my sentiments too nearly regard himself [. . .] how excellent a friend might I have found in him” (49). Earlier in the century, “of the old alternative of love and friendship, the latter was clearly opted for as the basis for both intimacy and the special tasks assigned to the family in society” (Luhmann 100), but in Dinarbas friendship can no longer encompass the relationship between Nekayah and Dinarbas. Yet, at the same time, Dinarbas reassures Nekayah that he is not going to transform her into an “Epistolary Woman” by seducing her: “you are mistaken in Dinarbas, if you suppose him capable of passing the bounds of that respect which he owes you: his conduct might have assured you of his efforts to subdue a passion, of which he is no longer master” (50). Dinarbas acknowledges his passion, yet this avowal is hidden beneath a third39

40

Katharine Ann Jensen, Writing Love: Letters, Women, and the Novel in France, 1605–1776 (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1995), p. 88. Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, trans. by Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986), p. 129.

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person voice, also employed by Zilia at certain points in her letter. This rhetorical indirection allows the characters to maintain propriety by displacing agency at a time when love and passion had become important elements in the choice of the matrimonial partner, yet remained difficult to speak of. Social realities were gradually changing, but the shift was still incomplete and, therefore, gave rise to tensions that were subject to negotiation during this transitional phase. This unspeakability—the impossibility of establishing love as the exclusive basis for matrimony in Dinarbas and Julia—stems from the fact that social considerations still play a role in the characters’ choice of a partner. Social standing creates a hurdle when Nekayah reveals that she is the daughter of the emperor of Abissinia. She points to her responsibilities towards her father and country, which she would ignore by marrying the socially inferior Dinarbas: “It is true I consider as a prejudice the difference of our birth; but it is a prejudice established by the universal custom of ages, and consequently ought to be respected by all who regard their fame: virtue is wholly in our power, but fame depends on the breath of the multitude, and the multitude is governed by prejudice” (51). Confronted with Nekayah’s interpretation of their situation, Dinarbas is “astonished and distressed” (52). He asserts the superiority of feelings over social customs: “only remember that though we may be masters of our actions, we cannot command our sentiments: mine will never alter; but your sincerity has found the only means of imposing on them an eternal silence” (52). He echoes the tradition of the romance by leaving her with words that indicate that he might, through his deeds, overcome social prejudice: “I thank you for the confidence you have reposed in me: you will soon judge whether I deserve it” (52). The relationship between the protagonists expresses a changing social reality, yet Knight refrains from creating socially subversive characters, especially women. In Knight and Williams, the female characters are strategically established as conservative agents. These authors embed the gradually emerging discourse on love as the basis for marriage in a social conformist stance that shields them against possible accusations of being too radical in a time when these issues were subject to intense debate. The question of the characters’ social rank also affects Zilia and Rasselas. While Zilia’s father expresses his daughter’s right of choice, Zilia has internalized the status quo to such a degree that she does not agree to marry Rasselas until his social rank, which he hides from her, is revealed. Like Nekayah, Zilia is reluctant to marry a social inferior. Their reluctance causes the postponement of the marriages and, as a consequence, narrative suspense. This suspense is heightened when the couples are temporarily separated 80

because Rasselas and Dinarbas engage in military expeditions. The question of marriage remains unresolved until a letter reaches Abissinia that recounts Rasselas’ accession to the throne in the Happy Valley after his father’s death. Now that his social and political position is strengthened, Rasselas reveals his rank to Zilia and Amalphis. The epistolary medium mixes the narrative of public events with the expression of Rasselas’ private feelings. While the characters’ mutual attraction reflects the gradually developing acceptance of love matches in the late eighteenth century, they can only act on these feelings if social considerations do not hinder their union. In the pragmatic logic of a time in which this shift is still incomplete, both couples can now get married: Convinced of the sentiments of Rasselas, she [Zilia] no longer hesitated to accompany her father to Gonthar. They were received amidst the acclamations of a people who considered the felicity of their sovereign as their own. A day was fixed for the celebration of the marriage, which was to take place immediately on the expiration of the first month’s mourning for the late emperor. Dinarbas and Nekayah had a more particular share in the general joy. Rasselas willingly bestowed his sister on his friend and benefactor, and appointed the same time for their union. (109)

Zilia envelops her acceptance of Rasselas’ proposal in a discourse of love while hinting at the importance of the revelation of Rasselas’ “rank above [her] fondest hopes” (107). This upholding of the status quo also affects Nekayah and Dinarbas’ relationship. The new ruler of the Happy Valley’s sanctioning of his sister’s love for a social inferior renders their marriage possible. However, the process of legitimization is not exclusively one-sided since Dinarbas played an active role in enabling Rasselas to marry his sister. Shortly before his death, the late emperor “no longer considered the alliance [between Rasselas and Zilia] as derogatory from his dignity” because Zilia “was the sister of his deliverer” (100). On his quest to prove the nobility of his character, Dinarbas had rescued the emperor from imprisonment and thereby prepared the way for his sister’s union with Rasselas. Therefore, rather than being an act of social and political defiance, the couple’s marriage conforms to social convention while simultaneously highlighting the gradually changing factors in determining the basis for marital relationships. Knight’s strategically careful discussion of developments in marriage practices and her emphasis on the intersection of its private and public aspects are extended by her thematization of public leadership. For this purpose, Knight adds a plot line that is not present in Johnson’s Rasselas. This plot line focuses on the struggles for political leadership in the Happy Valley and provides Knight with an opportunity to comment on the post-1789 situation. By introducing more family members—Rasselas and Nekayah’s brothers,

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Menas and Sarza—Knight explores the battle for political power in the context of a family story, thus once again connecting the public with the private and thereby embedding the novel’s political referentiality. After Rasselas left the Happy Valley, Menas and Sarza started a rebellion against their father and eventually overthrew him. When Rasselas returns, he is first imprisoned, then pardoned, and later accedes to the throne after the repenting Sarza dies and Menas is killed in battle. These events prompt Rasselas to reflect on the basis for leadership. Rasselas condemns his brothers’ radical political overthrow as decisively as the other characters reject abrupt change with regards to marriage practices. Instead, he believes in the gradual reform of the corrupt, but potentially salvageable, system of his father’s reign. The thematization of political leadership in Rasselas reflects contemporary discussions on the role of the British monarchy in particular and state forms in general. This debate was not new in Britain but was acquiring new urgency as a result of the events across the Channel and the 1790 publication of the influential Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke, with whom the Knights socialized.41 As Marilyn Morris observes, the debate on political leadership in Britain had begun with the revolution of 1688, after which it had taken “a whole century for the monarchy to develop a coherent philosophy of rule along with a self-confident identity.”42 The British monarchy’s search for self-justification suffered a blow from the French Revolution, so that “although the Crown had strengthened its place in the polity by the mid-1780s, its ideological underpinnings remained shaky until the mid-1790s.”43 Knight’s representation of Rasselas as a benevolent and enlightened monarch participates in this debate by returning to a nostalgic past, the reign of Louis XIV, the Sun King: “A monarch should in this imitate the sun, whose rays bestow colour and radiancy on the flowers which spring up beneath his influence, but who stops not his fiery chariot to contemplate their beauty, lest he should endanger the safety of the universe, to which it is his essential office to communicate light and heat” (122). The enlightened monarch is a figure of goodwill and justice. Rather than abusing his privileges, he shares them with all his subjects, who consequently bloom under the radiance of his reign. Rasselas’ first act of office, the celebration of the two couples’ weddings, establishes his benevolence: “The nuptials of Rasselas and Zilia, Dinarbas and Nekayah, were celebrated without 41

42

43

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Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 2nd edition (London: Printed for J. Dodsley, 1790). Marilyn Morris, The British Monarchy and the French Revolution (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1998), p. 26. Ibid., p. 38.

ostentatious magnificence, but with a dignity becoming their rank. The poor had the greatest share in the rejoicings, because the superfluous treasures, consumed on similar occasions, were distributed among them” (136). Simplicity and dignity are introduced at court, and the common good is established as the ruler’s guiding principle. Despite Rasselas’ benevolence, poverty still exists in the Happy Valley. Material hardship is presented as a consequence of his father’s reign and, therefore, as an ailment that needs to be remedied. The sore on the social body is a reflection of the ruler’s diseased body. Contemporary political thinkers, philosophers, and moralists considered the problems of the body politic to correlate with the ruler’s physical body and its weakening by a life of luxury. When Rasselas accedes to the throne, he identifies the reasons for the failures of the previous reign in his father’s excessive lifestyle: But the emperor only retained the exterior of royalty; the power had passed from his feeble hand into the grasp of Menas: his anger was therefore derided, and his remonstrances were neglected; and finding, with grief, that the only means to retain the poor appearance of sovereignty, was to consent unconditionally to the desire of his son, he took the road of the valley, surrounded by every new professor of the arts of luxury whom he could collect, seeking to forget the power he had lost in scenes of magnificence and pleasure. (80–81)

As the body of the monarch weakens, his power erodes and the body politic goes to waste. Roy Porter argues that the idea of the body politic was based on an “epistemology accustomed to map the body politic upon the body human”: “In other words, just as, in the kingdom, wealth easily mutated into waste, so in the individual, excessive consumption could, seemingly paradoxically, produce not strength but physical dissolution.”44 Over the course of the years, the imperial persona of Rasselas’ father gradually became an empty shell, weakened by comfort and leisure and therefore in need of reform. Rather than completely overthrowing the status quo, Rasselas endeavors to reform the “poor appearance of sovereignty” (81). In contrast to his father, who “made few reflections on the revolutions which replaced him on the throne” (100), Rasselas strives to be a self-conscious ruler who foregoes luxury for his own version of realpolitik. In order to ensure order, stability, and prosperity, Rasselas “applied himself with unremitting vigilance to the forming of an army” (109). He “applied himself seriously, with the assistance of the most eminent for learning and rectitude, to form a code of laws, which

44

Roy Porter, “Consumption: Disease of a Consumer Society?,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. by John Brewer and Roy Porter (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 58–81 (p. 59, 62).

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might for the future rather prevent crimes than chastise them” (112). He also abstains from “erecting [him]self into a judge of religious causes” (114) and promises to “encourage all men of letters” (121). Rasselas pronounces his military, legal, religious, and educational guidelines. His self-construction as an enlightened ruler and his strictness are presented as complementary, not mutually exclusive. Rasselas’ guidelines on law and order are to reverse the erosion of social barriers that occurred during his father’s reign. Rasselas’ father argues that his mistaken notions of social equality were the precursor to the disintegration of the body politic. The deposed ruler warns his son to “beware of [his] errors” as a politician: “we [. . .] are placed in a sphere, in which it is our duty to direct [. . .] a mistaken notion of humanity has made me detest war, and consequently neglect my army; the desire of being loved has induced me to court the friendship of my slaves, and you see the gratitude of my favourites” (103). Rasselas’ father presents himself as a counterexample of positive leadership; his son is therefore compelled to look for other role models. In his search for models of political authority, Rasselas returns to an idealized past before his father’s time and organizes society according to hereditary class privilege. He presents this idea as the guarantee for order and general prosperity. Significantly, it is not Rasselas but his social inferior Dinarbas who voices the rationale for a society based on class divisions: I found how unjustly we often attribute to greatness fastidious and oppressive insolence: he who finds himself by birth superior in rank to the rest of mankind, can have neither the motives of jealousy, nor of emulation: his condescension will scarcely be abused, or his courtesy humiliated: it is not so with him who has risen above his equals by the caprice of fortune, and whose ambition makes him still aim at loftier distinctions: he fears lest affability and ease should again sink him to his former station; and as his greatness is only comparative, he thinks himself obliged to support it by artificial means. (86)

Dinarbas argues that stable class divisions ensure general welfare whereas social mobility creates an aggressive atmosphere conducive to despotism and tyranny. In the eighteenth century, there was great optimism for the possibilities of class mobility, yet there also reigned fear of the shifts that, although less violent than in France, British society was undergoing: “Contemporary commentators noted the almost infinite gradations of economic and social status between one group and the next above it, such that the people in any one grade were not sharply set apart from the one above them and, moreover, could hope by emulation and material success to elevate them-

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selves into their ranks.”45 Dinarbas’ comments reflect the fear of the chaotic potential of social emulation. His function as the conservative agent with respect to social mobility is similar to Zilia’s cautious attitude towards changing marriage practices. Yet, paradoxically, Dinarbas himself successfully climbs the social ladder and becomes governor of Servia, albeit with the help of his patron and brother-in-law, Rasselas. The novel is riddled with such moments of ambivalence regarding new social mobility and the old system of patronage. For example, Dinarbas accepts the government of Servia offered to him by the sultan of Constantinople only after the sultan agrees to form an alliance with Rasselas. Dinarbas climbs the social ladder on the condition that it does not upset the social and political status quo too profoundly. Social change is presented as a necessary development, yet Dinarbas is apprehensive of abrupt and violent upheavals. In this sense, the characters’ actions parallel their creator’s strategic balancing act on the literary scene of her time. The relationship between Dinarbas and Rasselas illustrates the ambiguity of patronage in a changing society, which Knight experienced as protégée of Lord Nelson and lady companion to Princess Charlotte. She also felt its effects through her father’s social position and its consequences on the family. As a naval officer, Knight’s father was knighted, which allowed his family to rise socially and economically. His nobility of character was recognized by social institutions in the same way that Dinarbas’ worth is consecrated by his marriage to Nekayah. Yet, whereas Dinarbas becomes part of the power structure, Sir John Knight was never able to ensure financial security and social stability for his family. On the contrary, after his death, officer Knight’s social ascension propelled his wife into a protracted and futile fight to obtain a government pension and his daughter into a constant search for benefactors and subsequent quarrels over remuneration. While the knighting caused the Knight family to rise socially, it caused financial hardship for the women who, now bound by class decorum, were at the mercy of those who had elevated them. Knight’s ambivalent evaluation of the shifting social fabric reflects on the possibilities of social mobility and illustrates the problematic transitions in a society where the social shift is not yet complete and where titles have become empty shells devoid of meaning. Dinarbas’ cautious attitude with regard to the supposedly limitless possibilities of social mobility can be read as a critique of Johnson’s Rasselas. In Rasselas, Imlac, the poet, expresses confidence in the social

45

Ian R. Christie, “Conservatism and Stability in British Society,” in The French Revolution and British Popular Politics, ed. by Mark Philp (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991), pp. 169–87 (p. 170).

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developments caused by the technological advances of Johnson’s day. During his travels, Imlac “conversed with great numbers of the northern and western nations of Europe; the nations which are now in possession of all power and all knowledge; whose armies are irresistible, and whose fleets command the remotest parts of the globe.” Imlac states that the Europeans “are more powerful, Sir, than we, […] because they are wiser; knowledge will always predominate over ignorance, as man governs the other animals.”46 He illustrates European predominance by highlighting specific technological developments: In enumerating the particular comforts of life we shall find many advantages on the side of the Europeans. They cure wounds and diseases with which we languish and perish. We suffer inclemencies of weather which they can obviate. They have engines for the despatch of many laborious works, which we must perform by manual industry. There is such communication between distant places, that one friend can hardly be said to be absent from another. Their policy removes all publick inconveniences: they have roads cut through their mountains, and bridges laid upon rivers. And, if we descend to the privacies of life, their habitations are more commodious, and their possessions are more secure.47

Johnson’s Imlac presents eighteenth-century Europe as a convenient and secure place.48 Technological advances allow for a more comfortable life and, therefore, a healthier social body. In contrast to Johnson, who does not explicitly address the issue of social class in this context, Knight discusses problems caused by social transitions. Through Rasselas’ search for positive models of leadership, Knight looks beneath the shiny exterior of so-called enlightened progress and thematizes the paradoxical situation of those who are excluded and live on the margins of late-eighteenth-century society. Instead of establishing the European present as a model social body, Knight’s Dinarbas returns to an idealized past. Dinarbas visited the shores of Greece and, upon his homecoming, answers Rasselas’ question of “whether the scenes so beautifully described by the ancient European poets are really as interesting as we should believe from their works” (92). Dinarbas explains that “the noble simplicity of the Grecian temples, the elegance of their 46 47 48

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Johnson, p. 30. Ibid., p. 32. Steven Scherwatzky argues that this Eurocentric moment expresses Johnson’s skepticism of the colonial enterprise and his endeavor to strip “the colonies of their exotic appeal” in an attempt to “deromanticize utopias” (Steven Scherwatzky, “Johnson, Rasselas, and the Politics of Empire,” Eighteenth-Century Life, 16 (November 1992), 103–13 (p. 106)). This skepticism, present not only in Rasselas but also in Johnson’s essays and political writings, led Johnson to insist “upon the benefits of his own world, which he believed were many, though often abused, neglected, or taken for granted” (Scherwatzky, p. 107).

proportion, the harmony of the parts, and the majesty of the whole, give an impression of awe and of satisfaction, which no modern building affords” (95). He “found the same characteristic feature [simplicity and elegance] in all their remaining productions” (96). Dinarbas establishes ancient Greek architecture as the marker of an ideal society and the “illustrious men of ancient Greece and Rome” as examples of positive leadership: “their enterprises were vast, and their minds capacious; they formed a comprehensive plan, and acted up to it. It is not by adding one little idea to another, that perfection is insensibly attained. Alexander had conceived his scheme for the conquest of the east, before he left his native Macedon; nor did Caesar take the command in Gaul, without a previous design of becoming the first in the republic” (96). Instead of directly attacking the current state of affairs, Knight engages in a more cautious critique by highlighting strong leadership in the antiquity. However, while Europe’s classical past was frequently invoked as a model for a possible republican present in the eighteenth century, Knight does not foreground its republican ideals but the leadership qualities of individual historical figures. Her presentation of the classical past supports her vision of firm, yet enlightened, monarchical rule in the figure of Rasselas. Rasselas establishes his leadership by outlining law and order and by heeding the negative example of his father’s lax reign. At the same time, he insists on the monarch’s respect for his subjects as the basis for a stable monarchy: I cannot see what the sovereign gains by debasing the faculties of his subjects: a good prince will be respected and beloved by a wise nation, and, what he can never rely on from a herd of willing slaves, will be sure of their fidelity: he will not be deserted at the first appearance of a foreign enemy, or domestic usurper, who, in our despotic governments, obtains the same tribute of obedience as the rightful monarch, because he has the same authority, that of terror. (97)

Terror and arbitrary absolutist rule are established as negative counterexamples as is lax leadership that erodes the basis for political authority. From this perspective, continuity in class privilege and leadership is seen to ensure not only a stable society but also the loyalty of the ruler’s subjects. At the same time, however, Dinarbas advocates the necessary reforms for general welfare that ensure this loyalty and stability. Knight comments on the dangers of totalitarian monarchy and on the pitfalls of revolutionary chaos, thereby situating her novel in a larger contemporary debate on the national body politic. By strategically embedding her criticism of contemporary social and political affairs into the narrative of a family affair—that of the main characters’ marriage—Knight infuses the public with the private. As a result, Dinarbas is characterized by a hybridity of genre that allows Knight to 87

negotiate conventions regarding gender and genre with respect to political subject matter. Knight uses a similar strategic mixture of public and private elements to participate in another contemporary discussion, the debate on gender roles and the position of women in society. She thematizes and ultimately criticizes the issue of gender prejudice in the figure of her Rasselas who, “though he had acquired much philosophy by his reading and observation, still retained the idea that women, if not beings of an inferior class, were at least not worthy of gaining too great an ascendancy over the minds of men” (20). In contrast to Johnson, who does not extensively discuss his Rasselas’ notions about women, Knight highlights her character’s gender prejudice. The misogynist perspective of Knight’s Rasselas is paralleled by Amalphis’ fear of women’s destructive and destabilizing influence in the realm of politics: The good or the bad dispositions of women have a very extensive influence in society, and could we be so fortunate as to discover the motives of what we call by the general name of caprice, we might probably succeed in preventing the effects. Empires have been ruined by the jealousies of women; to them are owing many of the great revolutions that have decided the fate of nations; and if we join to theirs the sacerdotal influence, I fancy we shall prove that statesmen and conquerors have often been simply the machines put in motion by weak hands, and versatile heads. (123)

In giving voice to these objections against women’s involvement in public affairs, Knight can expose the social reasons for women’s “caprice” and, thereby, denaturalize it. Pekuah observes that “the jealousy of women is fomented by the influence of men” (123). Knight responds to various plot lines in Rasselas where Nekayah and Pekuah meet women who are “embittered by petty competitions and worthless emulation [. . .] always jealous of the beauty of each other,” who compete “with each other in obsequiousness and reverence,” and who engage in “childish play.”49 Pekuah’s observation that men “foment” this behavior uncovers the reasons for women’s so-called caprice. Knight thereby criticizes the contemporary discourse on “incommensurable difference” that constructed women as total opposites of men and naturalized this difference as inferiority. At the same time that she criticizes the idea of “incommensurable difference” by denaturalizing gender behavior, Knight strategically echoes other contemporary discourses regarding gender and politics. In this context, Imlac highlights the role of women as the educators of future leaders in Dinarbas:

49

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Johnson, p. 63, 102, 103.

If women [. . .] frequently do great hurt by interposing in affairs which seem foreign to their sex, how useful are they when they turn their thoughts to the education of their children, and by these domestic and natural cares provide happiness in future, not only for themselves but for their country! The first impressions are difficult to efface, and the first impressions are given by women; their mistaken tenderness has formed cowards, and their capricious anger has reared up tyrants. (123–24)

These comments tie the private to the public and, more specifically, to the political. The body of the mother has the power to establish a healthy body politic by preventing the formation of tyrants and cowards. Imlac’s speech echoes Rousseauian ideas concerning gender and education, yet Rousseau’s patriarchal approach is transcended in the chapter entitled “Education.” Imlac praises the positive influence of mothers on their children, yet he also explains the advantages of public education to Rasselas, who depends on Imlac’s guidelines to restructure the Abissinian body politic. Imlac’s focus on public education liberates women from their Rousseauian role as mothers by referencing an educational model that includes them: “The greatest model of this sort is the Lacedaemonian school, which was imperfect only in what was ill-planned from the first” (124). The Lacedaemonian school in ancient Sparta consisted of public education for boys and girls and emphasized physical training. To Knight’s late-eighteenth-century readers, Imlac’s reconceptualization of the new Abissinian educational system offers an educational paradigm based on gender equality and legitimized by the authority of Greek antiquity. Knight strategically concedes that something about that model was “ill-planned” in order to mitigate the radical nature of such a proposition. Is the reader to understand that this something pertained to gender equality or to the emphasis on physical education? Or to another aspect? Not defining the model’s shortcomings allows Knight to offer a radical alternative while giving her readers room for interpretation. She thereby shielded herself from accusations of being too radical, which is a strategy that the author employed throughout her text. As a result of Knight’s strategic negotiation of discourses regarding writing and gender, Dinarbas is marked by a pragmatism that stands at the center of her response to Rasselas. Rasselas ends on a disillusioned and cynical note. The characters talk and philosophize about “various schemes of happiness,” but they never put them into action.50 Johnson’s Rasselas, for example, dreams about a “little kingdom, in which he might administer justice in his own person, and see all the parts of government with his own eyes; but he could never fix the limits of his dominion, and was always adding to the 50

Ibid., p. 133.

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number of his subjects.”51 In contrast to Johnson’s disillusioned presentation of human greed, Knight constructs her Rasselas not as a greedy dreamer but as a ruler who negotiates legal and territorial disputes. Whereas the conclusion of Rasselas states that “of these wishes that they [the characters] had formed they well knew that none could be obtained,”52 the characters in Dinarbas have to “return to the busy scene of action where [they] are called” (139) instead of musing on the impossibility of their daydreams. Although they are as aware as Johnson’s characters of the dark realities of the human condition, they come to a different conclusion: Youth will vanish, health will decay, beauty fade, and strength sink into imbecility; but if we have enjoyed their advantages, let us not say there is no good, because the good in this world is not permanent: none but the guilty are excluded from at least temporary happiness; and if he whose imagination is lively, and whose heart glows with sensibility, is more subject than others to poignant grief and maddening disappointment, surely he will confess that he has moments of ecstacy and consolatory reflection that repay him for all his sufferings. (139)

Rather than submit to a pessimistic view of the vanity of human wishes, Knight argues for the individual’s need to find a “scene of action” despite difficult circumstances. Knight’s acknowledgment of social realities does not lead her to despair or to submit unquestioningly to the status quo, but rather to carve out a space for pragmatic agency and self-fulfillment by apparently subscribing to, yet ultimately questioning, social convention and prejudice. Knight situated her authorial persona in that ambivalent space between literary patronage and writing as a financially remunerative activity created by the gradually changing conditions for literary production. This ambivalence is at the center of Knight’s creation of a hybrid fictional form that allows her to comment on contemporary political topics by using the supposedly private narrative convention of the romance, the love conquest. Dinarbas thereby echoes the discursive binary of the public and the private and the theory of the incommensurable difference separating women from men. Yet rather than naturalizing such differences, she highlights the limitations of these constructs through her characters’ actions, which repeatedly demonstrate their interdependence.

51 52

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Ibid., p. 133. Ibid., p. 134.

Chapter 3 Staging Islam: Karoline von Günderrode’s Mahomed, der Prophet von Mekka

The examples of Helen Maria Williams and Ellis Cornelia Knight demonstrate that a multitude of factors determine how a woman author’s name is recorded in literary history, with, paradoxically, the least influential one often being her literary works. As a result of her reporting on the French Revolution, Williams was mainly remembered as a cultural go-between with suspect national allegiances. Knight was associated with her position in the British courtly household, her role as lady companion to Princess Charlotte and her social contacts with famous contemporaries such as the national hero Lord Nelson. Williams’ Letters and Knight’s Autobiography have been read as reflections of these contacts, yet their literary production—Julia and Dinarbas—has largely been neglected. While contextualizing women authors’ writing is crucial in understanding their strategic negotiation of the literary marketplace and discourses of gender difference, limiting this contextualization to their contacts with famous (male) contemporaries runs the danger of turning these women into appendices to other historical and literary figures rather than authors in their own right. Karoline Friederieke Louise Maximiliane von Günderrode (1780–1806) illustrates this phenomenon of celebrity by association, which Susanne Kord has termed “Biographismus in der Kritik” [“biographical critical approach”].1 In literary histories, her name appears most frequently in conjunction with that of the renowned Brentano family who lived in Frankfurt. Günderrode met the Brentanos when, at the age of seventeen, she moved to a Frankfurt “Damenstift,” a Protestant institution for unmarried noblewomen.2 Her move

1

2

Susanne Kord, Sich einen Namen machen: Anonymität und weibliche Autorschaft, 1700– 1900 (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1996), p. 147. See Max Preitz, “Karoline von Günderrode in ihrer Umwelt I. Briefe von Lisette und Christian Gottfried Nees von Esenbeck, Karoline von Günderrode, Friedrich Creuzer,

to the “Damenstift” was prompted by her family’s financial difficulties after the death of her father, a chamberlain at the Württemberg court in Karlsruhe. In Frankfurt, Günderrode devoted her time to her studies and writing and socialized with the Brentanos. Her extensive correspondence with the most prominent literary members of the family, Clemens and Bettina, has been a point of interest for generations of literary critics. Günderrode’s letters were reedited, excerpted, and widely discussed, mainly for their insights into the Brentanos’ social and literary world. An additional point of interest, also linked to Günderrode’s Brentano connection, was her passionate love for Friedrich Karl von Savigny, whom she also met in Frankfurt. Even though he was attracted to Günderrode, in 1804, he married another member of the Brentano family, Kunigunde. Around the time of this disappointment, Günderrode published her first collection of poems, Gedichte und Phantasien, and, a year later, Poetische Fragmente.3 The simultaneity of her disappointed love and these publications transformed Günderrode into the perfect incarnation of Romantic Weltschmerz for literary historians. This critical construction was strengthened by the repercussions of her second love affair, with the married Friedrich Creuzer. When Günderrode realized that Creuzer was not going to divorce his wife, she stabbed herself to death on the banks of the Rhine River. The spectacular manner of her death inserted her into a generation of unhappy Romantic poets such as Novalis and Kleist. Günderrode was received as the Romantic woman writer par excellence. Her dramatic death and her connection to the Brentanos triggered a wealth of biographies and biographical essays on Günderrode, which focused on her correspondence with famous contemporaries and on her poetry as an expression of Romantic despair. The most influential of the biographical writings on Günderrode were those produced by Bettina von Arnim (née Brentano) in the nineteenth and Christa Wolf in the twentieth century. In 1840, Bettina von Arnim published her version of Karoline’s life, Die Günderode.4 Arnim’s text consists of a collection of letters exchanged between herself and Günderrode and some of Günderrode’s poems. Arnim claims to write the authoritative version of her

3

4

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Clemens Brentano und Susanne von Heyden,” Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts (1962), 208–306 (p. 212). Karoline von Günderrode [Tian], Gedichte und Phantasien (Hamburg und Frankfurt: J.C. Hermannsche Buchhandlung, 1804) and Karoline von Günderrode [Tian], Poetische Fragmente (Frankfurt a.M.: Friedrich Wilmans, 1805). In the remainder of the chapter, I will refer to Bettina Brentano-von Arnim by “von Arnim” as this is the name most frequently used in secondary literature.

friend’s life by introducing the collection with one of her own letters that testifies to the two women’s close friendship: Der Plaudergeist in meiner Brust hat immer fort geschwätzt mit Dir [...] Durch dich feuert der Geist wie die Sonn durchs frische Laub feuert, und mir gehts wie dem Keim, der in der Sonn brütet, wenn ich an Dich denken will, es wärmt mich und ich werd freudig und stolz und streck meine Blätter aus. [The chatterbox in my bosom continuously chatted with you [...] The spirit flames through you in the same way that the sun fires through new foliage. I am like the seed sitting in the sun; when I want to think of you, I warm up and become happy and proud and unfurl my leaves.]5

Bettina von Arnim refers to her intense communication with Günderrode, thereby authenticating her account. By immortalizing her friend as “die Günderrode,” Arnim ensured that the name was remembered by subsequent generations. At the same time, however, Arnim’s account became one of the cornerstones of the Günderrode cult that focused on her connection to famous contemporaries and on her poetry as the expression of Romantic sensibility. Despite the important number of biographical accounts published since Arnim’s Die Günderrode, none has been as influential as Christa Wolf’s writings in ensuring that Günderrode’s name lived on in the twentieth century.6 Christa Wolf’s 1979 publications Karoline von Günderrode: Der 5

6

Bettina von Arnim, Die Günderode (Berlin: Verlag von Wilhelm Hertz, 1890), p. 1. All translations of foreign-language texts in this chapter are mine, unless otherwise noted. Von Arnim and Wolf were not the only biographers of Günderrode. In the twentieth century, a wealth of biographical essays appeared, as well as an important number of monographs, some of which combined Günderrode’s biography with a selection of her letters. For booklength monographs, see, for example, the following works: Geneviève Bianquis, Caroline de Günderode 1780–1806: Ouvrage accompagné de lettres inédites (Paris: Alcan, 1910); Ludwig Geiger, Karoline von Günderode und ihre Freunde (Stuttgart, Leipzig, Berlin, Wien: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1895); Dagmar von Gersdorff, Die Erde ist mir Heimat nicht geworden: Das Leben der Karoline von Günderrode (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel-Verlag, 2006); Otto Heuschele, Karoline von Günderrode: Trost in der Dichtung (Halle: Werkstätten der Stadt Halle, Burg Giebichenstein, 1932); Markus Hille, Karoline von Günderrode (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999); Waltraud Howeg, Karoline von Günderrode und Hölderlin (Halle: Dissertation 1953); Ernst Jeep, Karoline von Günderrode: Mittheilungen über ihr Leben und Dichten (Wolfenbüttel: Zwissler, 1895); Margarete Lazarowicz, Karoline von Günderrode: Portrait einer Fremden (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1986); Margarete Mattheis, Die Guenderrode: Gestalt, Leben und Wirkung (Marburg: Dissertation, 1934); Annelore Naumann, Caroline von Günderrode (Berlin: Dissertation, 1957); Birgit Weißendorn, ed. “Ich sende Dir ein zärtliches Pfand”: Die Briefe der Karoline von Günderrode (Frankfurt a.M. and Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1992); and Richard Wilhelm, Die Günderrode: Dichtung und Schicksal (Frankfurt a.M.: Societäts-Verlag,

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Schatten eines Traumes (The Shadow of a Dream) and Kein Ort. Nirgends (published in English as No Place on Earth in 1982) attest to Günderrode’s importance as a reference point for subsequent generations of women authors.7 In the introductory essay to Der Schatten eines Traumes—an edition of Günderrode’s poetry, prose, and excerpts from her letters—Wolf amalgamates Günderrode’s life story and her writings to comment on the position of women authors in the patriarchal society of early-nineteenthcentury Germany and on the identity crisis of all post-Goethe authors writing in German. Wolf enters into dialogue not only with Günderrode but also with Arnim when she comments on the reception of Arnim’s Die Günderode: Dieses Buch hatte das Unglück, in die Hände staubtrockener Textkritik zu fallen, deren Instrumenten es ein leichtes ist, es als “Fälschung” zu entlarven. Daß die Bettine mit ihrem Material frei umgegangen ist, Briefe zusammengezogen, Stücke aus anderen Briefwechseln hineingenommen, manches erfunden hat, ist ihr angekreidet worden. Authentisch ist dies Buch dennoch, in einem poetischen Sinn: als Zeugnis für eine Freundschaft zwischen zwei Frauen, ein Beleg aber auch für Lebensformen und Sitten einer Zeit und für eine Kritik an diesen Sitten, die sich nicht scheut, an die Wurzeln zu gehn. (29) [This book was so unfortunate as to fall into the hands of dry textual critics, for whose instruments it is easy to unmask it as a “forgery.” The fact that Bettine treated her material freely, shortened letters, included letters from other correspondences, and invented some things has been held against her. But still, this book is authentic, in a poetic sense: as a testimony to the friendship between two women, but also as a document of an era’s social forms and customs and a powerful criticism of these customs.]

Wolf’s remark about poetic authenticity and her defense of Bettina von Arnim’s editorial liberty is both an homage to Arnim and a justification of her own version of Günderrode’s life and work, Der Schatten eines Traumes,

7

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1938). The authoritative edition of Günderrode’s letters remains the one edited by Max Preitz for the 1962 and 1964 issues of Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts: Max Preitz, “Karoline von Günderrode in ihrer Umwelt I” and Max Preitz, “Karoline von Günderrode in ihrer Umwelt II. Karoline von Günderrode’s Briefwechsel mit Friedrich Karl und Gunda von Savigny,” Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts (1964), 158–235. Also see Max Preitz and Doris Hopp, “Karoline von Günderrode in ihrer Umwelt III. Karoline von Günderrodes Studienbuch,” Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts (1975), 223– 323. Despite being the authoritative version of Günderrode’s personal writings, in terms of popularity, Preitz’ edition lags far behind the collections assembled by Bettina von Arnim and Christa Wolf, two of the most famous German women writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Christa Wolf, Kein Ort. Nirgends. (Darmstadt and Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1979); Christa Wolf, Karoline von Günderrode: Der Schatten eines Traumes; Gedichte, Prosa, Briefe, Zeugnisse von Zeitgenossen (Darmstadt and Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1981); Christa Wolf, No Place on Earth, trans. by Jan van Heurck (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1982).

which she constructed with some liberty herself. Wolf’s postscript to Der Schatten eines Traumes emphasizes the fact that “diese Auswahl aus den Texten der Karoline von Günderrode subjektiv [ist]. Sie erhebt nicht den Anspruch, eine Werkausgabe zu ersetzen” [“this selection of Karoline von Günderrode’s texts is subjective. It does not claim to replace a critical edition”].8 Wolf’s presentation of Günderrode’s life is conceived of as a feminist monument to the nineteenth-century author. Kein Ort. Nirgends, Wolf’s other published monument to Günderrode, is a novel in which the author enters the minds of two poets who committed suicide, Kleist and Günderrode, and imagines a conversation between them. The book focuses on Günderrode as an unhappy lover who meticulously plans her dramatic suicide: Das ist es, was ich von ihm haben kann: den Schatten eines Traums. Sie verbot sich zu weinen und vergaß den Traum und den Grund für ihre Trauer [...] Sie kennt die Stelle unter der Brust, wo sie den Dolch ansetzen muß, ein Chirurg, den sie scherzhaft fragte, hat sie ihr mit einem Druck seines Fingers bezeichnet. Seitdem, wenn sie sich sammelt, spürt sie den Druck und ist augenblicklich ruhig. Es wird leicht sein und sicher, sie muß nur achten, daß sie die Waffe immer bei sich hat.9 [This is what I can have of him: the shadow of a dream. She forbade herself to cry and forgot the dream and the reason for her sorrow […] She knows the location beneath her breast, where she has to apply the dagger; a surgeon whom she asked jokingly showed it to her with the pressure of his finger. Since then, when she collects herself, she feels the pressure and is quiet instantaneously. It will be easy and reliable; she only has to carry the weapon with her at all times.]

Christa Wolf’s omniscient point of view in this novel and her collection of Günderrode’s letters claim authenticity not on the literal but on the poetic level. Wolf’s work is part of the early feminist effort to recover women’s literary voices, which tended to focus on biographical genres perceived as most illustrative of the precariousness of the female condition such as letters and poems. 8 9

Wolf, Karoline von Günderrode: Der Schatten eines Traumes, p. 271. Wolf, Kein Ort. Nirgends., p. 10. The phrase “den Schatten eines Traumes” [“the shadow of a dream”] originally appeared in a letter from Günderrode to Karoline von Barkhaus. This letter, written in 1799, expresses Günderrode’s love for Friedrich Karl von Savigny, who would, in May 1804, marry her friend Kunigunde Brentano: “Wenn Sie etwas von S.[avigny] hören darf ich Sie dann bitten es mir zu schreiben, verargen Sie mir diese Bitte nicht, es ist ia [sic] das Einzige was ich von ihm haben kann, der Schatten eines Traumes” [“If you hear something about him, please write to me. Do not hold this request against me; it is the only thing that I can have of him, the shadow of a dream”] (Preitz, “Karoline von Günderrode in ihrer Umwelt II,” p. 166).

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As a result of these critical tendencies, there were comparatively fewer nonbiographical discussions of Günderrode’s literary work and little interest in her literary production beyond her letters and her poetry; it was not until 1990 that a reliable historical-critical edition became available that claimed more than poetic truth and that contained all of Günderrode’s works, including her tragedies.10 Her “private” expression of feelings in the form of her letters and poems dominated critical discussion at the expense of her more “public” engagement with political issues through her dramatic production. In its focus on Günderrode’s private writings, this scholarship perpetuated her contemporaries’ uneasiness regarding drama written by women, which was marked as inappropriate due to its public associations. Günderrode was aware of the problematic image of women dramatists. In one of her letters to her lover Savigny, “moving into a mood of irony, Günderrode presents her literary production as a form of impermissible imagining and speaks of the ‘flaw’ of writing a drama.”11 At the same time that Günderrode echoes contemporary discourse concerning gender and genre she also mocks it because she continues to write plays such as Hildgund, Nikator, and Mahomed. Her friends’ reactions to her 1804 play Mahomed, der Prophet von Mekka illustrate in forceful ways that Günderrode did not conform to their expectations. Friedrich Creuzer told her that “ich bei wiederholter Lesung viele Stellen in dem Dialog Ihres Mahommed zu räsonnirt in Gedanken u Ausdruck—zu philosophirend in Ton u Farbe u folglich zu wenig poetisch gefunden habe” [“upon repeated reading I find many places in the dialogue of your Mahommed too reasoning in thought and expression—too philosophizing in tone and color and, as a result, not poetic enough”].12 By swerving from “feminine” forms of expression and discussing

10

11

12

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Karoline von Günderrode, Sämtliche Werke und ausgewählte Studien, 3 vols, ed. by Walter Morgenthaler (Basel and Frankfurt a.M.: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1990). This critical edition of Günderrode’s complete works consists of three volumes. The first volume contains her works (excluding her correspondence). The second volume reports variations and texts with questionable authorship. The third volume outlines editorial policies, evaluates previous editions, and contains materials relevant for understanding Günderrode’s writing. Morgenthaler’s edition has replaced the three nineteenth- and early twentieth-century editions of Günderrode’s collected works, which do not comment on editorial principles: Friedrich Götz, ed., Gesammelte Dichtungen von Karoline von Günderode (Mannheim: Götz, 1857); Leopold Hirschberg, ed., Gesammelte Werke der Karoline von Günderode, 3 vols (Berlin: Bibliophiler Verlag O. Goldschmidt-Gabrielli, 1920–1922); and Elisabeth Salomon, ed., Karoline von Günderode. Gesammelte Dichtungen (München: Drei Masken, 1923). Dagmar von Hoff, “Censorship in the Work of Karoline von Günderrode,” Women in German Yearbook, 11 (1995), 99–112 (p.100). Karoline von Günderrode, Sämtliche Werke, III, p. 135.

a controversial topic in a drama, Günderrode upsets her readers’ expectations, which can also be seen in the request from her friend Lisette Nees: “Warum willst Du mir doch den Mahomet nicht schiken? Ich bitte Dich darum, hauptsächlich der beygefügten Gedichte wegen” [“Why don’t you want to send me Mahomet? I ask you for it, mainly because of the attached poems”].13 Although Nees requests the tragedy, she does so because of the genre that she expects from Günderrode’s pen. Günderrode’s “philosophizing” and “reasoning” literary production was criticized by her contemporaries and gradually forgotten over the course of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries as a result of the focus on her socially more acceptable literary composition, her poetry.14 As a result of the patterns governing the reception of Günderrode’s literary works, there exists less criticism on Günderrode’s plays than on her poetry or letters. Günderrode’s dramatic production has only become a topic of scholarly interest relatively recently, in the wake of the foray of feminism into literary scholarship.15 Within this body of work, Mahomed, der Prophet von Mekka rarely stands at the center of discussion. This could be linked to the fact that German literary scholarship has been slower than the British or French to privilege texts that explore cultural and religious difference in the

13 14

15

Quoted in Preitz, “Karoline von Günderrode in ihrer Umwelt I,” p. 270. For an overview of Günderrode criticism in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century in specific, see Birgit Wägenbaur, “Literaturwissenschaftliche Frauenforschung 1890 bis 1930 (Beispiel: Günderrode-Rezeption),” in Akten des X. Internationalen Germanistenkongresses Wien 2000: “Zeitenwende—Die Germanistik auf dem Weg vom 20. ins 21. Jahrhundert,” X, ed. by Peter Wiesinger (Bern: Peter Lang, 2003), pp. 21–29. For an outline of Günderrode scholarship in the second half of the twentieth century, see Helga Dormann, “Die Karoline von Günderrode-Forschung 1945–1995. Ein Bericht,” Athenäum: Jahrbuch für Romantik, 6 (1996), 227–48. See, for example, among others, Barbara Becker-Cantarino, Schriftstellerinnen der Romantik: Epoche—Werke—Wirkung (München: C.H. Beck, 2000); Hoff, “Censorship”; Susanne Kord, Ein Blick hinter die Kulissen: Deutschsprachige Dramatikerinnen im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1992); Elisabeth Krimmer, In the Company of Men: Cross-Dressed Women Around 1800 (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2004); Patricia Ann Simpson, The Erotics of War in German Romanticism (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2006). The most extensive treatment of Mahomed in specific can be found in Ruth Christmann, Zwischen Identitätsgewinn und Bewußtseinsverlust: Das philosophisch-literarische Werk der Karoline von Günderrode (1780–1806) (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 200– 212; Ingeborg Solbrig, “The Contemplative Muse: Karoline von Günderrode’s Religious Works,” Germanic Notes, 18.1/2 (1987), 18–20; and Ingeborg Solbrig, “Die orientalische Muse Meletes: Zu den Mohammed-Dichtungen Karoline von Günderrodes,” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft, 33 (1989), 299–322.

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context of postcolonial studies.16 Susanne Zantop suggests that “[t]he shortness of the colonial period, the absence of vocal ‘colonial’ subjects in the German ‘metropolis’ (the lack of a metropolis, for that matter), and the preponderance of the Holocaust in all post-World War II discussions have obscured the significance of colonial fantasies in the formation of German national identity and of race relations within Germany.”17 These factors may have contributed to German studies’ comparatively late investigation not only of its colonial fantasies but also of cultural difference, certainly in the literature of earlier periods, which had already been defined by a canonized body of works. This canonization also explains scholarship’s reticence toward a play such as Günderrode’s Mahomed, which explicitly engages texts by two canonical figures from the French and the German literary tradition, Voltaire’s Le fanatisme ou Mahomet le Prophète (1741) and Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s Mahomet (1800), which was a translation of Voltaire’s play.18 Günderrode was aware of the prejudice against a woman author writing a drama that explicitly engages a different religion and a famous male contemporary’s text. She, therefore, strategically crafted Mahomed—which also addressed the contemporary issue of leadership—in such a way as to ensure its publication. The play was published under the pseudonym “Tian,”19 which, however, provided her with incomplete protection since she wrote openly about the play’s composition in her letters. She established an additional layer of protection by crafting Mahomed as a Lesedrama, a play meant for reading rather than performance, one of the most famous examples being Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan der Weise (1779).20 Writing a 16

17

18

19 20

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Günderrode’s use of oriental and ancient Egyptian myths in her poems and narrative works has received greater critical attention than her treatment of Islam. See, most recently, Helga Dormann, Die Kunst des inneren Sinns: Mythisierung der inneren und äußeren Natur im Werk Karoline von Günderrodes (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004) and Annette Simonis, “’Das verschleierte Bild.’ Mythopoetik und Geschlechterrollen bei Karoline von Günderrode,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 74 (2000), 254–78. Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham: Duke UP, 1997), p. 3. Voltaire, Le fanatisme ou Mahomet le Prophète, in Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1877), IV. Voltaire’s play is sometimes referred to by the abbreviated titles Mahomet ou le Fanatisme or Mahomet. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Mahomet, in Sämtliche Werke, XI (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1998). These will be the editions used in this chapter. Another pseudonym that Günderrode used was “Ion.” At the time, Lessing himself was not allowed to write about religion. This censorship resulted from the controversy sparked by his edition of the writings by Hermann Samuel Reimarus, who was critical of the teachings of Christianity.

Lesedrama allowed Günderrode to avoid many of the negative associations regarding female authorship and the theater by situating herself in the hybrid space created by the intersection of the dramatic and the fictional genre. Günderrode’s strategic presentation of her play as a Lesedrama also affected her choice of a title. When her editor and agent Christian Nees von Esenbeck objected that Mahomed “scheint mir mehr eine dialogisierte Geschichte als ein Drama” (“appears to me more a history in dialogues than a drama”), Günderrode agreed to alter the title of the play.21 She changed it from “eine dramatische Dichtung”—reminiscent of the subtitle of Lessing’s Nathan der Weise: Ein dramatisches Gedicht [“Nathan the Wise: A Dramatic Poem”]— to a “dramatisches Fragment.” Günderrode strategically combined selfcensorship with self-assertion by calling Mahomed a fragment yet not omitting the reference to the dramatic genre. Nees responded favorably to what he called the “voluntary limitation of her task.”22 However, Günderrode eventually forsook him as the agent for her Fragmente von Tian, which included Mahomed. She turned to Creuzer to help oversee the publication of the collection but dismissed him as well.23 In November 1804, she secretly sold the drama to the publisher Friedrich Wilmans in Frankfurt am Main with the help of an unknown intermediary. While Günderrode was pragmatic about the necessity of a male intermediary in publishing negotiations, she prevented any of them gaining too much control over her rethinking of Goethe’s and Voltaire’s version of the prophet’s story. Günderrode had to engage in a strategic balancing act since Mahomed participated in a complex and fraught debate. Both Goethe’s and Voltaire’s plays on Muhammad were embroiled in heated ideological disputes and personal conflict.24 Günderrode’s version was therefore marked as contro21 22

23

24

Quoted in Preitz, “Karoline von Günderrode in ihrer Umwelt I,” p. 238. Nees wrote: “Durch die vorgeschlagene Umtaufung und Namensveränderung Ihres Mahomeds haben Sie alle meine Zweifel in Bezug auf deßen Herausgabe völlig beseitigt. Sie bezeichnen durch den Titel ‘Dramatisches Fragment’ eine freywillige Beschränkung Ihrer Aufgabe” [“The proposed rechristening and name change of your Mahomed have dispelled all my doubts about its publication. The title ‘Dramatic Fragment’ indicates a voluntary limitation of your task”] (Quoted in Preitz, “Karoline von Günderrode in ihrer Umwelt I,” p. 241). Before taking matters into her own hands, Günderrode wrote to Creuzer: “Mahomed u alle Gedichte die Sie kenen sind verkauft brechen Sie also alle Unterhandlungen deshalb ab” [“Mahomed and all the poems that you know have been sold; therefore stop all negotiations”] (Quoted in Preitz, “Karoline von Günderrode in ihrer Umwelt II,” p. 232). When referring to the protagonists of the plays, I will follow the authors’ spelling of their names: “Mahomed” (Günderrode) and “Mahomet” (Goethe and Voltaire). I will use the standard spelling that is closest to the Arabic, “Muhammad,” when referring to the historical/religious figure of the prophet of Islam.

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versial and provocative from the outset. The first performance of Voltaire’s Le fanatisme ou Mahomet le Prophète in Lille in 1741 had sparked vigorous debate, and the play had to be withdrawn after only three performances at the Comédie Française in Paris because of its controversial content.25 It was only performed again after 1751, with great success. Although on a literal level the play attacked Islam, it also offended those who read it as an Enlightenment satire-in-disguise on Christian, or more specifically on French Catholic, society and its political and religious leaders.26 Although Voltaire’s negative treatment of the prophet in Mahomet has to be relativized in light of his other writings, his one-sided representation cannot be dismissed as a mere allegory that did not affect the perception of the literal Other in eighteenth-century consciousness. As Djavâd Hadidi points out, two opposing traditions were interpreting Islam at the beginning of the eighteenth century: one presented Islam as a heresy, whereas the other, informed by travels to Muslim countries and the actual study of Islamic texts, contradicted this negative representation.27 Voltaire’s play appeared on stage at a crucial point in the representation of Islam. Voltaire was aware that he was being unfair to Muslims, yet he was willing to perpetuate the misrepresentation of Islam in order to attack all kinds of power abuse.28 25

26

27 28

For a discussion of the performance history of Voltaire’s play, see Haydn Mason, “Fathers, Good and Bad, in Voltaire’s Mahomet,” in Myth and its Making in the French Theatre: Studies Presented to W.D. Howarth, ed. by E. Freeman, H. Mason, M. O’Regan and S.W. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988), pp. 121–35. Despite, or perhaps because of, his opinions about power abuse and religious fanaticism in his own country, Voltaire dedicated the play to Pope Benoît XIV. This was an attempt, possibly even with a touch of irony, to evade censorship and ensure the authorities’ protection, yet the play’s two levels of interpretation—literal and allegorical—forced it off the stage. On this topic, see Magdy Badir, “Faut-il tromper le peuple? L’idéologie bourgeoise dans la tragédie Mahomet de Voltaire,” French Literature Series, 15 (1988), 41–49. Djavâd Hadidi, Voltaire et l’Islam (Paris: Langues et Civilisations, 1974), pp. 9–12. In one of his letters to Frederick the Great, Voltaire acknowledged the inaccuracy of his portrayal of Muhammad: “Je sai que Mahomet n’a pas tramé précisément l’espèce de trahison qui fait le sujet de cette tragédie” [“I know that Mahomet did not exactly plot the kind of treason that is the topic of this tragedy”] (Voltaire, “To Frederick II, King of Prussia.” 20 January 1740. Letter D2386 in The Complete Works of Voltaire (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1971), XCI, p. 383). In another letter, to Madame Denis, Voltaire writes about the possibly offensive potential of his tragedy: “Il n’appartenait assurément qu’aux musulmans de se plaindre, car j’ai fait Mahomet un peu plus méchant qu’il n’était” [“Assuredly, only Muslims had a right to complain because I made Mahomet appear a little bit meaner than he actually was”] (Voltaire, “To Marie Louise Denis.” 29 October 1751. Letter D4597 in The Complete Works of Voltaire (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1971), XCVI, p. 305). By acknowledging his unfair treatment of Islam, Voltaire relegated the interpretation to the literal level, which served to invalidate criticism by those who saw

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Voltaire portrays Mahomet as a ruthless leader and inhuman parent in a plot revolving around two father figures, Mahomet and Zopire, and Zopire’s biological children, Séide and his sister Palmire. As a young boy, Séide was abducted from Zopire by Mahomet, who raised him as his own son. Time passes and the separated siblings grow up. Palmire, now a young woman, attracts Mahomet’s attention and triggers his desire to conquer Mecca. Mahomet’s officer Omar orders Séide to kill Zopire, his biological father, whom he does not know. Séide believes he works in the service of God but also hopes to liberate Palmire, with whom he has fallen in love, unaware of the fact that they are siblings. When Zopire dies, he realizes that Séide, his killer, is his abducted son and orders him to take vengeance. However, Mahomet has already issued orders to poison Séide. Séide dies slowly and painfully, which Mahomet presents as God’s punishment for his actions. Upon learning of Séide’s death, Palmire throws herself onto his dagger and dies. The biological father and his children perish, whereas Mahomet, the one responsible for their demise, survives. The reductive characterization of Mahomet as the incarnation of absolute evil was criticized by Voltaire’s contemporaries because of the lack of vraisemblance/plausibility and the absence of tragic potential of the title character. Voltaire himself, perhaps aware of these objections, shifted the emphasis from Mahomet to Séide as the protagonist in his discussions of the play. In his dedicatory letter to Frederick of Prussia, Voltaire establishes Séide as the focus of the play: C’est un jeune homme né avec de la vertu, qui séduit par son fanatisme, assassine un vieillard qui l’aime, et qui dans l’idée de servir dieu se rend coupable sans le savoir d’un parricide; c’est un imposteur qui ordonne ce meurtre, et qui promet à L’assassin un inceste pour récompense.29 [A young man, born with virtue but seduced by fanaticism, murders an old man who loves him. Because he thinks he serves God, he unknowingly commits parricide. An impostor orders this murder and promises the murderer an incestuous relationship as a reward.]

Shifting the focus from Mahomet to Séide and positing an Oedipal drama with the timeless topoi of parricide and incest allows Voltaire to deflect some

29

Mahomet as a disguised attack on the Catholic church and established authority in general. See Ahmad Gunny, “Tragedy in the Service of Propaganda: Voltaire’s Mahomet,” in En marge du classicisme: Essays on the French Theatre from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. by Alan Howe and Richard Waller (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1987), pp. 227–42. Voltaire, “To Frederick II,” pp. 380–81.

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of the criticism regarding his choice of subject matter and the question of his title character’s tragic potential. The ideological debate accompanied the text when Goethe translated it into German in 1800. Although Voltaire’s play had been available in a German version since 1748, Goethe’s translation, commissioned by the Duke of Weimar, soon became the authoritative text.30 Like Voltaire’s play, Goethe’s Mahomet did not escape censorship. In Vienna, “the notorious censor Hägelin prohibited the production because he believed he saw allusions to Napoleon in the figure of Mahomet.”31 Goethe’s translation of Voltaire’s Mahomet was part of an endeavor to invigorate German drama through the adaptation of texts from other national traditions, especially the French, in ways most suitable for the German context. Goethe took great care in making his translation appear natural by transforming Voltaire’s alexandrines into blank verse. However, Goethe did little to alter the overall content; he only softened the tone and sometimes deleted harsher words and lengthy monologues.32 Two of the most visible changes were Goethe’s elimination of the word “fanaticism” in the title of his translation, Mahomet, and his alteration of the ending, with which Voltaire himself was dissatisfied. Goethe abridges the play’s final scene by shortening Palmire’s last words before her death. In Voltaire’s version, Palmire dies with the following speech:

30

31

32

The first German translation of Voltaire’s Mahomet appeared anonymously in 1748. Two different, subsequent translations appeared in 1749 (by Heinrich Gottfried Koch) and in 1764 (by a translator who signed his name “C.S.F.v.S”). Another translation of the play, by Johann Friedrich Löwen, was performed on December 4, 1767. For further information on the translation history of Voltaire’s play, see the accompanying materials in Goethe, Mahomet, p. 1182. Ingeborg Solbrig, “The Theater, Theory, and Politics: Voltaire’s Le fanatisme ou Mahomet le Prophète and Goethe’s Mahomet Adaptation,” Michigan Germanic Studies, 16.1 (1990), 21–43 (p. 26). Yet the relation between Napoleon, Goethe, Voltaire and the figure of the prophet Muhammad goes far beyond the censorship imposed by Hägelin. Edward Said discusses Napoleon’s project of conquering Egypt, and his “admiration for Islam and Mohammed and […] his obvious veneration for the Koran, with which he seemed perfectly familiar” (Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978), p. 82). Napoleon also knew Voltaire’s Mahomet. Said points out that Napoleon “discussed Voltaire’s Mahomet with Goethe, and defended Islam” (Said, p. 82). This observation attests to the struggle over the representation of Islam in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. As Solbrig points out, Goethe “translated the first half of the text almost literally; however, in the second half, he occasionally mitigated the more drastic words and exaggerated monologues by changing a word, but mostly by eliminating phrases, even entire lines (Solbrig, “The Theater,” p. 31).

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Je meurs. Je cesse de te voir, imposteur exécrable. Je me flatte, en mourant, qu’un Dieu plus équitable Réserve un avenir pour les coeurs innocents. Tu dois régner; le monde est fait pour les tyrans.33 [I’m dying. I cannot see you any more, atrocious impostor. Dying, I pride myself that a more equitable God Reserves a future for innocent hearts. You will reign; the world is made for tyrants.]

Goethe omits the pathos. His Palmire dies without Voltaire’s didactic reference to God and salvation: Ich sterbe, fort! Dich nicht zu sehen ist das größte Glück. Die Welt ist für Tyrannen, lebe du!34 [I’m dying. Leave! Not to see you, is the greatest happiness. The world is for tyrants—you live!]

Not only does Goethe shorten Palmire’s words, he also omits Mahomet’s final speech, with which Voltaire’s version concluded. Voltaire had often been criticized for this monologue, in which Mahomet appears remorseful and asks Zopire and his children for vengeance: “Père, enfants malheureux, immolés à ma rage, / Vengez la terre et vous, et le ciel que j’outrage. / Arrachez-moi ce jour, et ce perfide coeur, / Ce coeur né pour haïr, qui brûle avec fureur” [“Father, unfortunate children, sacrificed to my rage. / Avenge the earth, yourselves, and the sky that I insult./ Tear out my treacherous heart today, /This heart born to hate and burning with fury”].35 The speech struck readers as overly didactic because of its lack of vraisemblance. Mahomet’s regret does not sound sincere, since Voltaire did not outline any development in his one-sided protagonist that would make such an ending plausible.36 Goethe was limited in the changes he could undertake because his text was a commissioned translation, and his resulting play was criticized for the same reasons as the original: the lack of tragic potential in a completely one33 34 35 36

Voltaire, Le fanatisme, p. 161. Goethe, Mahomet, p. 588. Voltaire, Le fanatisme, p. 162. For extensive discussions of Voltaire’s ending, see Gunny, “Tragedy in the Service of Propaganda,” and also Solbrig, “The Theatre.”

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sided character and the parallels that audiences might draw between the tragedy and the contemporary political situation, in Goethe’s case between Mahomet and Napoleon. One of Goethe’s most prominent contemporaries, Johann Gottfried Herder, who respected Islam, criticized the tragedy for its negative portrayal of the prophet Muhammad. Herder posits a clash between form and content. He praises Goethe’s German translation but criticizes the “French” content, which portrays Muhammad in an extremely negative light.37 Goethe himself strongly disagreed with Voltaire’s portrayal of the prophet, but the medium of the translation only allowed him to express a limited degree of divergence. Katharina Mommsen observes that Goethe was conflicted when the Duke of Weimar, Carl August, ordered him to translate Voltaire’s Mahomet for a performance at his wife’s birthday celebration. Mommsen refers to various letters that “machen es deutlich, wie sehr er [Goethe] sich Gewalt antun mußte, um den Wunsch seines Landesherrn zu erfüllen” [“make it clear how he [Goethe] had to force himself to fulfill his sovereign’s request”].38 Goethe could not refuse Carl August’s request, however, because it was the Duke who financed the Weimar theater that Goethe directed. Whenever Goethe mentions his Mahomet, his inner resistance surfaces in his reference to the translation as a “sonderbar,” a strange, task and in his refusal to discuss this play explicitly.39 Despite his status as the poet in Weimar, Goethe was subject to the economic and political workings of the court. Goethe, whose patron rewarded him with the honorary title “Meccanus” for his translation, was all the more conflicted about making Voltaire’s play available in German because he himself had planned to write a tragedy about Muhammad, den ich nie als einen Betrüger hatte ansehn können [...] Ich hatte kurz vorher das Leben des orientalischen Propheten mit großem Interesse gelesen und studiert, und war daher, als der Gedanke mir aufging, ziemlich vorbereitet.40

37

38

39 40

Karoline Herder describes her husband’s reaction in a letter to her friend Karl Ludwig Knebel: “‘Vortreffliche, vortreffliche Verse,’ sagte mein Mann, ‘aber der Inhalt ist eine Versündigung gegen die Menschheit und alles’” [“‘Superb, superb verses,’ said my husband, ‘but the content is a sin against humanity and everything’”] (Quoted in Goethe, Mahomet, p. 1196). Katharina Mommsen, Goethe und die arabische Welt (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel Verlag, 1988), p. 222. For Goethe’s comments about his play, see Goethe, Mahomet, pp. 1185–90. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit, in Sämtliche Werke (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1986), XIV, p. 685.

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[whom I was never able to consider a deceiver […] Shortly before, I had read and studied the oriental prophet’s life with great interest, and was therefore, when I had the idea, fairly well prepared.]

In 1773 Goethe had composed an outline and had written a number of scenes for the tragedy, which he wanted to title Mahomet.41 He lost these documents and stalled at the reconstruction effort: “Ich erinnere mich auch noch der Intentionen einzelner Stellen, doch würde mich die Entwickelung derselben hier zu weit führen” [“I also recall the intentions at certain passages, yet elaborating on them would lead me too far”].42 Goethe had planned to focus on the clash between the protagonist’s religious mission and the loss of integrity caused by his political functions. Goethe’s outline sketches Muhammad’s struggle with these opposites, his downfall over the course of four acts and his eventual purification in the fifth and last act.43 Goethe’s protagonist is a figure of German Idealism who represents the struggle between an individual’s ideals and their actual manifestation. The clash between the content of Goethe’s own planned tragedy and the commissioned Voltaire translation indicates the complexity of Goethe’s relation to the Muhammad topic, which was shaped by his conflicting positions as intellectual authority and subject in the service of local power. This tension resulted in a peculiar mixture of resistance to, and fascination with, the figure of the prophet, a character who is led yet also leads. Goethe’s abandonment of his own Muhammad project prevented a potential conflict with his 41 42

43

For detailed information about Goethe’s planned tragedy, see Mommsen. Goethe, Aus meinem Leben, p. 687. When Goethe refers to this play, his complex relationship with the Muhammad topic surfaces. He uses the passive voice, obscuring agency, to refer to the hymn at the beginning of the play which “verloren gegangen [ist]” [“has been lost”] (Goethe, Aus meinem Leben, p. 686). The outline of Goethe’s play and the other fragments were found after his death. Goethe had sketched the play as follows: “Das Stück fing mit einer Hymne an, welche Mahomet allein unter dem heiteren Nachthimmel anstimmt [...]. Nachdem sich also Mahomet selbst bekehrt, teilt er diese Gefühle und Gesinnungen den Seinigen mit [...]. Im zweiten Akt versucht er selbst, heftiger aber Ali, diesen Glauben in dem Stamme weiter auszubreiten [...]. Im dritten Akt bezwingt er seine Gegner, macht seine Religion zur öffentlichen [...]. Im vierten Akte verfolgt Mahomet seine Eroberungen [...] es fehlt nicht an Grausamkeiten [...]. Im fünften fühlt er sich vergiftet [...]. Er reinigt seine Lehre, befestigt sein Reich und stirbt.” [“The play began with a hymn, which Mahomet strikes up by himself beneath the clear nightly sky [...]. After Mahomet converts, he shares these feelings and convictions with his entourage [...]. In the second act, he, but even more Ali, tries to propagate his faith further among the tribe [...]. In the third act, he defeats his opponents, makes his religion the official religion [...]. In the fourth act, Mahomet continues his conquests [...] there is no lack of brutalities [...]. In the fifth, he believes to be poisoned [...]. He purifies his teachings, secures his empire and dies] (Goethe, Aus meinem Leben, pp. 685–87).

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financier, yet it also prevented the perception of cultural difference from evolving and thereby fixed the representation of the religious Other on the eighteenth-century stage. While Karoline von Günderrode faced difficulties as a woman author, she did not write in the service of any authority. This creative independence freed her from those anxieties that shaped Goethe’s ambivalent relation to the Muhammad topic. As a result, she was able to challenge the representation of the cultural and religious Other in the early nineteenth century. In her letters, Günderrode expressed her reaction to writing an alternate life story of the prophet of Islam: [I]ch schreibe ein Drama, meine ganze Seele ist damit beschäftiget, ja ich denke mich so lebhaft hinein, werde so einheimisch darin, daß mir mein eignes Leben fremd wird; ich habe sehr viel Anlage zu einer solchen Abstraktion, zu einem solchen Eintauchen in einen Strom innerer Betrachtungen und Erzeugungen.44 [I am writing a drama, my whole soul is occupied with it, yes, I think myself so vividly into it, I feel so at home in it that my own life becomes strange to me; I have a disposition to such abstraction, to this kind of diving into a stream of inner reflections and emanations.]

Although the reference to a sense of personal estrangement caused by literary activity is a conventional Romantic gesture, Günderrode’s observation that she becomes alienated from her own life (“fremd”) while feeling at home in that of her character (“einheimisch”) takes on special meaning due to the nature of the topic, namely the exploration of a religious figure from a different culture. In contrast to Voltaire’s Mahomet and Goethe’s translation, which present cultural difference as inhumanity, Günderrode recovers the familiar in the religious Other and explores those aspects of Islam that show an affinity with Christianity. At the beginning of her play, the reader is cautioned against hasty judgments. The first chorus presents the Lesedrama as a riddle: “Selig, selig! wer ergründet / Was hier Wahrheit sey und Trug; Wer des Räthsels Lösung findet, / Denn es bringt der Irrthum Fluch” [“Blessed be the one who fathoms what is truth and what is fraud and who solves the riddle, because erring brings malediction”].45 Günderrode questions her predecessors’ portrayal of the prophet by encouraging an

44 45

Quoted in Preitz, “Karoline von Günderrode in ihrer Umwelt II,” p. 199. Karoline von Günderrode, Mahomed, der Prophet von Mekka, in Sämtliche Werke und ausgewählte Studien, ed. by Walter Morgenthaler (Basel and Frankfurt a.M.: Stroemfeld/ Roter Stern, 1990), I, p. 112. All further references will be to this edition and will be made parenthetically within the text.

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alternative vision, which she achieves by strategically presenting her protagonist as a familiar, yet complex, character. Günderrode achieves this familiarity by portraying her Mahomed as a figure of German Idealism. Her protagonist is torn between his worldly and spiritual sides, his greed and the desire for moral integrity. By presenting her protagonist in the framework of this recognizable literary tradition, Günderrode ignored the perception that religious figures in general, and prophets in particular, lack tragic potential.46 Günderrode allows her Mahomed to doubt and thereby establishes his internal struggle as the center of her play: Schon Morgen! Wahrlich, ja! jener Purpurstreif in Osten verkündet das Licht des Tages, das schon der Sonne Feuerschoos entquillt. Das Gestirn der Zwillinge, das auf dieser ganzen Reise mich stets begleitet, auf das ich hoffend stets geblickt, erlischt im Morgenstrahl. Zweifaches Leben floß aus diesem Gestirn auf mich herab, und ein Sinnbild war es mir, meines doppelten Lebens, das mich theilweise an die Erde und die Geschäfte der Welt knüpft, und mich theilweise zu dem Ueberirrdischen und zu seltsamen Offenbarungen führt. Wenn die Gestirne um Mitternacht hoch über meinem Scheitel steh’n, so fallen mit ihren senkrechten Strahlen allerlei wunderliche Lichter in meine Seele, die dann verschwinden, wenn die Sterne vom Sonnenlicht verschlungen werden. (111) [Morning already! Truly, yes! The purple streak in the East announces daylight, already flowing from the sun’s lap of fire. The Gemini constellation, which has accompanied me throughout my journey and on which I have always looked full of hope, is extinguished by the morning rays. From this constellation, double life flowed down onto me, and, to me, it 46

Christian Nees von Esenbeck, a contemporary reviewer for the Jenaische Allgemeine Zeitung, wrote: “Kann nun ein Prophet Subject eines wahren Drama seyn? Ich glaube nicht [...] er ist der Mund des Schicksals [...] n o t h w e n d i g ist alles, was er thut, und nicht wie s e i n Werk” [“Can a prophet be the subject of a real tragedy? I do not think so [...] he is the mouthpiece of fate, therefore nothing that he does is h i s deed”] (Quoted in Karoline von Günderrode, Sämtliche Werke, III, pp. 130–31). Günderrode attempts to anticipate this criticism by creating a character who is wrought with doubt and inner division. Yet the same reviewer also criticizes this decision. He appears uncomfortable with Günderrode’s unconventional way of thinking about a prophet, especially one from a foreign religion: “Um den inneren Kampf des irdischen Geistes mit dem Propheten-Geiste [...] zu verlängern, und die tragische Tendenz des Stückes zu erhalten, lassen Sie Mahomed [...] dem Zweifel an seiner höheren Bestimmung Raum geben [...] wodurch der Leser und Zuschauer leicht in den Sündenfall einer psychologischen Deutung der Denk- und Handlungsweise Mahomeds [...] gestürzt werden könnte” [“In order to prolong the inner struggle between the worldly spirit and the spirit of the prophet [...] and to maintain the play’s tragic tendency [...] you give space to Mahomed’s doubts about his higher calling [...], as a result of which readers and the audience can easily be plunged into the sin of interpreting Mahomed’s way of thinking and acting [...] from a psychological perspective”] (Quoted in Karoline von Günderrode, Sämtliche Werke, III, p. 131). Günderrode diverges from her predecessors since neither Voltaire nor Goethe psychologized Muhammad.

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was a symbol of my double life that partly ties me to the earth and the business of the world and partly leads me to the celestial and to strange revelations. At midnight, when the constellations stand right above me, all kinds of curious lights fall, with their vertical rays, into my soul and disappear when the stars are devoured by sunlight.]

The Gemini constellation represents Mahomed’s double life. He is caught in between the business of the world and the celestial. Günderrode’s presentation of Mahomed as a figure of German Idealism trying to overcome physical desires and material greed establishes what Edward Said has termed “sympathetic identification” for her readers. Günderrode, like Herder, is an example of the “eighteenth-century mind [that] could breach the doctrinal walls erected between the West and Islam and see hidden elements of kinship between himself [herself] and the Orient.”47 Günderrode makes the Orient appear familiar by presenting Mahomed as a human being wrought with inner doubt rather than a dogmatic religious leader or a fanatic monster. In order to achieve this identification, she uses a number of strategies to highlight similarities between Occident and Orient, Christianity and Islam. The first strategy is the presentation of Mahomed as a regular human being with his own specific history rather than an unidentifiable and frightening Other. Whereas, in Voltaire’s tragedy, Mahomet is mainly characterized through his opponents’ words, Günderrode lets Mahomed speak for himself. Mahomed is humanized when the audience sees him act as a husband and father. Upon his return home, his wife Kadischa exclaims, “Du bist wieder zu Hause, mein theurer Gemahl? [...] Sag, darf ich wissen, was dich vergnügt, daß deine Freude größer werde durch den Zusatz der meinigen?” [“You are back home, my cherished husband? [...] Could you tell me what puts you in high spirits, so that your happiness may be increased through the addition of mine?”] (133). The audience’s sympathetic identification is elicited when Mahomed is depicted as a husband who is eagerly awaited by his wife. As a father, he has suffered as much as Voltaire’s Zopire: “Einst, da meine Söhne starben, da war ich sehr traurig, jetzt sind sie mir auferstanden, darum bin ich fröhlich” [“When my sons died, I was very sad; now they have been resurrected for me, therefore I am cheerful”] (133). Mahomed’s parental grief explains his religious mission: “Gott hat mir die Völker dieser Erde zu Erben meiner Thaten gegeben, hier meinen Nahlid und den tapfern Ali, zu Kindern meines Herzens” [“God assigned the people of this earth as heirs to my deeds; he made my Nahlid and the brave Ali children of my heart”] (133). Mahomed becomes a foster father to those who surround him and thereby gives meaning to the loss of his own children. Although 47

Said, p. 118.

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Voltaire also mentions the death of one of Mahomet’s sons, this reference stresses the unbridgeable divide between Mahomet and Zopire. Voltaire’s Zopire refers to his killing of Mahomet’s son as a response to the murder of his whole family: Le cruel fit périr ma femme et mes enfants: Et moi, jusqu’en son camp j’ai porté le carnage; La mort de son fils même honora mon courage. Les flambeaux de la haine entre nous allumés Jamais des mains du temps ne seront consumés48 [The cruel one killed my wife and my children. And I carried the carnage into his own camp. The death of his own son honored my courage. The torches of hate that are lit between us will never be consumed by the hands of time].

Whereas in Voltaire’s play hate begins an unstoppable cycle of violence and is the principal motivation for the conquest of Mecca, Günderrode foregrounds love as the point of departure. Günderrode’s Mahomed is humanized as he recounts his individual development, “was lange, lange meine Seele schon gebrütet hat” [“on what my soul has been brooding for a long, long time”] (115). The form of the Lesedrama allowed Günderrode to insert a long monologue in which Mahomed summarizes his Bildung and the resulting inner conflict: Ich war ein Knabe noch, als die Häupter unserer Vaterstadt mich erwählten, den geweihten Stein in der heiligen Kaaba an die bestimmte Stelle zu tragen [...] Ich ward ein Jüngling [...] und ob meine Seele gleich rein war, wie ein Tempel Gottes [...] so ward ich doch verworfen [...] mußte den stolzen Nacken in ungewohnte Knechtschaft beugen [...] [bis] der ehrwürdige Boheira, sich mir [nahte] [...] und mir die Herrschaft über Arabien [weissagte]. (115–16) [I was still a boy when the city’s chieftains selected me to carry the blessed rock in the holy Caaba to the specified location [...] I became a youth [...] and even though my soul was as pure as a temple of God [...] I was rejected [...] and had to submit to the yoke of unaccustomed servitude [...] [until] the venerable Boheira approached me [...] and predicted my reign over Arabia.]

From the moment that his reign over Arabia is predicted, luck is on his side until, one day, a messenger is sent to Mahomed with the news of a friend’s illness. Before the envoy even opens his mouth, “wußte ich alles voraus, ja ich hätte ihm jedes seiner Worte in den Mund legen können, und als er 48

Voltaire, Le fanatisme, p. 108.

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ausgesprochen hatte, war es mir, als habe ich diese Begebenheit gerade so schon einmal erlebt” [“I knew everything in advance, I could have put each of his words into his mouth. When he had finished speaking, it was as if I had already experienced this same incident”] (116). Instead of rejoicing over his visionary gift, Mahomed falls into “ein tiefsinniges Nachdenken [...] ich suchte die Einsamkeit und brachte ganze Nächte in den Gebirgen dieses Landes zu” [“deep reflection [...] I longed for solitude and spent whole nights in the mountains of this country”] (116). Mahomed is burdened by what he sees; the images “beherrschten mich vielmehr und quälten mich” [“held sway over me and tortured me”] (117). Günderrode explores her readers’ familiarity with narratives of Bildung and explains the process by which Mahomed’s torturous visions developed into his inner conflict. As a result, rather than being an unfathomable religious and cultural Other, Mahomed is presented as an individual with a past that explains his present predicament. Günderrode’s second strategy for establishing her readers’ sympathetic identification with Mahomed is her use of sources. Voltaire and Günderrode probably used the same accounts, those most widely available in the eighteenth century: the Count of Boulainvilliers’ Vie de Mahomed (London, 1730; translated into German in 1786) and Jean Gagnier’s La vie de Mahomet (Amsterdam, 1732; translated into German in 1802/04).49 Even though Voltaire and Günderrode had the same sources at their disposal, they came to radically different conclusions. This is less astonishing considering the fact that the sources themselves disagree vehemently over the life of the prophet of Islam. In the preface, Gagnier positions his text in opposition to Boulainvilliers’ earlier Vie de Mahomed. Gagnier states that he was invited to write a life of Muhammad after Boulainvilliers died.50 Gagnier justifies his writing of a new account by arguing that “Mr. de Boulainvilliers écrivoit plutôt un R O M A N qu’une Histoire” [“Mr. Boulainvilliers wrote a N O V 49

50

Henri de Boulainvilliers, La vie de Mahomed (London: Pierre Humbert, 1730); Henri de Boulainvilliers, Leben des Muhamed. Aus dem Französischen des Grafen von Boulainvilliers mit einigen Anmerkungen übersetzt von J.A. Mebes (Halle: Johann Christian Hendels Verlag, 1786); Jean Gagnier, La vie de Mahomet; traduite et compilée de l’Alcoran, des traditions authentiques de la Sonna et des meilleurs auteurs arabes, 2 vols (Amsterdam: Wetsteins & Smith, 1732); Jean Gagnier, Leben des Mohammeds, des Propheten. Nach dem Französischen des J. Gagnier, mit einigen Anmerkungen. von C.F.R. Vetterlein, 2 vols (Köthen: I.A. Aue, 1802–1804). See Gunny, pp. 229–30; Erich Regen, Die Dramen Karolinens von Günderode (Berlin: Philosophische Fakultät der Friedrich-WilhelmsUniversität zu Berlin, 1910), p. 29; and Günderrode, Sämtliche Werke, III, p. 126 for a discussion of eighteenth-century works on Muhammad and Islam. Boulainvilliers’ account only went up to the fifth or sixth year after the Hegira, Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina.

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E L rather than a history”].51 Boulainvilliers’ account is sympathetic to Muhammad, a fact to which Gagnier strongly objects: Mr. le Comte [Boulainvilliers] étant donc plein d’admiration pour la personne de Mahomet, & pour les grandes choses qu’il a éxécutées dans l’établissement de sa nouvelle Religion, & en même tems indigné contre les Adversaires d’entre les Théologiens Chrétiens, s’emporte ainsi à s’écrier: Effets prodigieux! & qui se rapportent mal à l’idée que l’on nous donne de Mahomet, comme d’un Imposteur, haïssable & malin, également rempli de défauts dans le corps & dans L’Esprit, & c.52 [The count [Boulainvilliers] was full of admiration for Mahomet and for the great things he executed through the establishment of his new religion. At the same time he was indignant at the adversaries among the Christian theologians; he was carried away and exclaimed the following: His prodigious effects contradict the image that we are given of Mahomet, as an impostor, detestable and cunning, filled with shortcomings in the body as well as in the spirit, etc]

Gagnier contrasts his own objectivity with what he presents as Boulainvilliers’ subjective admiration of Muhammad. Gagnier claims that, in his version “il y a cette différence que je n’y ai mis rien du mien” [“there is this difference, that I have included nothing of my own”].53 Gagnier’s claim to objectivity and his commitment to write a history rather than a novel conceals his ideological investment in constructing his Muhammad as the opposite of Boulainvilliers’: as a false prophet and a despicable character. In order to present the “faux Prophéte Mahomet, & sa Religion, ou plutôt sa folle & impie Superstition” [“false prophet Mahomet and his religion, or rather his mad and impious superstition”], Gagnier invokes the authority of Christian theologians, which Boulainvilliers undermined.54 Gagnier thereby claims truthfulness for his own picture of the one who “a dit, avec d’horribles

51

52 53

54

Gagnier, La vie de Mahomet, I, p. ix. The eighteenth-century spelling from these sources has been preserved. Ibid., I, pp. xx–xxi. Emphases in the original. Gagnier, La vie de Mahomet, I, p. xxxix. Gagnier insists on his objectivity”:[I]l y a cette différence que je n’y ai mis rien du mien, que l’ordre & l’arrangement des matériaux pour composer cette Histoire, qui est toute tirée des monumens authentiques de l’Alcoran, & de ses Commentateurs, de la Sonna, ou Livre de leurs Traditions généralement reçuës, & de leurs plus célébres Historiens, au lieu que Mr. le Comte y a mis presque tout du sien” [“[T]here is this difference: I have included nothing of my own except the order & the arrangement of the material for this history, which has all been drawn from authentic monuments of the Qu’ran, & its commentators, of the Sonna, or the book of their generally accepted traditions and of their most famous historians, in contrast to which the count’s history is nearly all of his own invention”] (Ibid., I, p. xxxix). Ibid., I, p. xi.

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blasphêmes, ce qu’il y a de plus faux contre notre Sainte Religion, l’attaquant dans tous les principaux Articles & les dogmes essentiels de sa créance” [“divulged, with horrible blasphemies, inaccuracies about our holy religion, attacking it in its main articles & the essential dogmas of its belief”].55 In his preface, Gagnier establishes a polarity between Islam and Christianity, which Boulainvilliers avoids in his Vie de Mahomed. The above description demonstrates that Günderrode’s attitude towards Muhammad is closer to Boulainvilliers’ sympathetic than to Gagnier’s hostile interpretation, even though many of her dramatic scenes are based directly on Gagnier.56 One strategy which Günderrode uses to trigger the audience’s sympathy for the religious Other is her selection of episodes from her sources that have an affinity with scenes from the New Testament; Günderrode’s Mahomed appears as a version of Jesus at certain points in the Lesedrama. One of these scenes, related in great detail by Gagnier, occurs when Mahomed enters Mecca and destroys the pagan gods in the Caaba, thereby replacing polytheism with monotheism.57 Günderrode takes this episode from Gagnier and inserts it into one of Mahomed’s speeches. Mahomed’s fury at the false gods reminds her Christian readers of Jesus’ anger at the money changers in the temple. By presenting the scene in Lutheran biblical language, Günderrode further increases the sense of familiarity and recognition: Er ist ein Gott des Lebens, sein ewiges Seyn strömt in frischen Quellen durch den ganzen Weltkreis, durch alle Räume und alle Himmel. Und diesen Gott habt ihr verlassen? habt ihn

55 56 57

Ibid., I, p. xxvii. See Regen, p. 30. Gagnier describes the scene in the following words: “Ensuite voulant entrer dans la Ca’aba, il mit pied à terre, mais appercevant dans l’intérieur des statuës d’Idoles en forme d’Anges, comme aussi la figure d’Ibrahim, tenant en sa main des fléches ou des baguettes, dont les Idolâtres se servoient pour tirer les sorts, il s’arrêta tout court, sans y entrer, & dit: Que Dieu les perde! Ils ont fabriqué la figure de notre Grand-père le représentant avec les fléches du sort. Qu’a de commun Ibrahim avec ces fléches? [...] Et en même tems il commanda qu’on les abbattit, il les fit traîner hors de la Ca’aba, & les mit en piéces. Il y avoit encore dans ce Temple une Colombe de bois: il la rompit de ses propres mains & la jetta par terre” [“When he wanted to enter the Caaba he put his feet to the ground but when, inside, he perceived idols in the form of angels, as well as the statue of Abraham, holding in his hand arrows or sticks which the idolaters used to draw lots, he stopped abruptly and, without entering, said: God forsake them! They created the figure of our grandfather and represented him with arrows of fate. What does Abraham have in common with these arrows? [...] At the same time, he gave the order to knock down the statues; he had them dragged out of the Caaba, and broke them. In the temple, there was still a wooden dove: he broke it with his own hands and threw it on the ground”] (Gagnier, La vie de Mahomet, II, p. 126).

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zersplittert in eure Götzen, Feuer, Sonne, Mond und Thiere? [...] Der Gott, den ich euch verkünde, kann keine Götzen neben sich dulden, er wohnt nicht in einem Tempel oder einem Herzen, das die Abgötterei befleckt hat; darum stoßt die schnöden Altäre um, auf denen ihr euren Götzen sündige Opfer gebracht habt. Reinigt euern Tempel, daß ich euch dort den Geist der Wahrheit und seine Gebote noch ferner bekannt mache. (128–30) [He is a God of life; his eternal being flows from fresh sources into the whole world, into all the spaces and skies. And you forsook this God? You split him up into your idols: fire, sun, moon, and animals [...] The God that I proclaim cannot allow any idols besides himself, he does not live in a temple or in a heart that has been stained by idolatry; therefore overthrow the shameless altars, on which you brought sinful sacrifices to your idols. Clean your temples so that I can further reveal the spirit of truth and its commandments.]

Mahomed’s speech echoes, in its references to the temple and idols, the verses John 2.13–16: Und der Juden Ostern war nahe, und Jesus zog hinauf gen Jerusalem. Und er fand im Tempel sitzen, die da Ochsen, Schafe und Tauben feil hatten, und die Wechsler. Und er machte eine Geißel aus Stricken und trieb sie alle zum Tempel hinaus samt den Schafen und Ochsen und verschüttete den Wechslern das Geld und stieß die Tische um und sprach zu denen, die die Tauben feil hatten: tragt das von dannen und macht nicht meines Vaters Haus zum Kaufhause! [And the Jews’ passover was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem, And found in the temple those that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting: And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers’ money, and overthrew the tables; And said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father’s house an house of merchandise.]

Günderrode’s adaptation of familiar scenes from the New Testament in Lutheran language presents Mahomed as a protagonist with relatable Christian traits to her early-nineteenth-century Christian readers.58 Within her echoing of familiar biblical scenes, Günderrode embeds the unfamiliar by relating the history of the prophet Muhammad in long monologues typical for a Lesedrama. These summaries refute Voltaire’s version and highlight not only Mahomed’s humanity but also his visionary qualities. In order to achieve this effect, Günderrode diverges from the main lines of the Muslim tradition. One such divergence occurs in her presentation of Mahomed’s prophetic calling. She conflates two key moments in traditional accounts of the prophet’s life, the opening of the child

58

See Ingeborg Solbrig’s “Die orientalische Muse Meletes” for an insightful discussion of Günderrode’s use of biblical language in her works on Muhammad.

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Muhammad’s chest and the angel Gabriel’s revelation to the adult Muhammad: 59 An einem schwülen Tage [...] verirrte ich mich in der Wüste [...] Plötzlich ward ich von fürchterlichen Stimmen erweckt, tiefes Dunkel war um mich her [...] und versunken wär’ ich in gräßlichem Wahnsinn, wäre mir von Ost her nicht ein tröstender Engel erschienen [...] und nun führte er mich auf einen hohen Fels, den eine unermeßliche Ebne umgab [...] Der Engel aber sprach zu mir: siehe! glaube! thue! Aber ich antwortete: ich bin ein Sterblicher nur, und dies ist ein unsterbliches Werk. Da nahm der Engel das Herz aus meiner Brust und drückte es gewaltig, bis ihm ein dunkler Tropfen entquoll, es war die irrdische [sic] Angst und der Zweifel; und als er das Herz wieder in meine Brust gefügt hatte, war es mir sehr wohl und leicht, denn die enge Schranke der Sterblichkeit war von mir abgefallen. (117–18) [On a sweltering day [...] I got lost in the desert [...] Suddenly horrible voices awoke me, deep darkness surrounded me [...] and I would have plunged into frightful madness had a comforting angel not appeared from the East [...] and he led me atop a high rock that was surrounded by an immense plain [...] The angel spoke to me: See! Believe! Act! But I answered: I am only mortal and this is an immortal undertaking. Then the angel removed my heart from my chest and squeezed it forcefully until a dark drop emanated from it; it was worldly fear and doubt. When he had reinserted the heart into my chest, I was at ease and felt relieved because the narrow barrier of mortality had fallen off.]

Günderrode’s conflation of Muhammad’s childhood and his adulthood is significant because both her sources follow the main lines of the Muslim tradition. Gagnier and Boulainvilliers both locate the opening of Muhammad’s chest in the prophet’s childhood. Unlike the traditional image of Muhammad as a prophet already chosen as a child and, therefore, not in doubt about his religious mission as an adult, Günderrode’s protagonist, who 59

Compare Ibn Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, trans. by A. Guillaume (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978), pp. 71–73. Ibn Ishaq’s (702–68 C.E.) biography of Muhammad is one of the authoritative texts in the Muslim tradition. In Boulainvilliers, the removal of the heart is described in the following terms: “Now, one day, when the child was at the pasture of the flocks, being about four or five years old [...] Mahomet had indeed been carried away by two unknown persons into a neighbouring mountain [...] the men who carried him away told him they were angels, sent to take out of him that root of evil which every man brings with him into the world: that immediately they laid him on his back, ript open his breast with a knife of fire, and having taken out his heart, one of them squeez’d it ‘till it discharg’d certain black drops; that afterwards, they washed it in snow, and weighed it in a balance, first against ten other hearts, and then against an hundred, and still it was heaviest. This done, they put his heart into its proper place again, and having closed up his breast, they set him upright upon his feet” (Boulainvilliers, The Life of Mahomet (London: J. Osborn, 1743), pp. 196–97). Gagnier differs slightly from Boulainvilliers’ account. He locates this event “à l’âge de trois ans” [“at the age of three”], refers to only one “certaine tache noire” [“certain black spot”] and says, “ils lui remplirent le ventre de lumière” [“they filled his belly with light”] (Gagnier, La vie de Mahomet, I, p. 88).

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receives his calling as an adult, can be seen struggling with his vocation. Günderrode thereby invests her protagonist with tragic potential; he continues to question his religious role even after his heart is supposedly emptied of fear and doubt: “Der Zweifel hat den Himmel aus mir verdrängt.—Das Heiligthum Gottes ist ein Tummelplatz der Leidenschaften. Wie andere bin ich geworden, der Geist herrscht nicht mehr in mir, mein Wunsch und Entschluß, Muth und Zagheit, Glauben und Furcht kämpfen menschlich in meiner Seele” [“Doubt has displaced the heavens in me.— God’s sanctuary is a playground of passions. I have become like others, the spirit no longer reigns in me, my desire and decision, courage and timidity, belief and fear battle in my human soul”] (152–53). Mahomed remains human; the angel Gabriel failed to remove all of his doubts. Mahomed is, therefore, not simply an agent of a higher force but a character who thinks and questions. He is a prophet struggling with his faith and fear, which humanizes his actions when he orders the avoidance of violence in the conquest of Mecca: “dringt alle zugleich in Mekka ein, laßt jedem, der sich unterwirft, Gnade wiederfahren, denn, beim Allah! ich will jede Grausamkeit, die ihr gegen besiegte Feinde verübt, blutig rächen, höret und gehorchet!” [“all enter into Mecca and be merciful to everyone who capitulates. I swear by Allah that I will bloodily avenge each cruelty you commit against vanquished enemies; listen and obey!”] (191). Mahomed’s religious doubts inform his political leadership. His conscience supersedes any absolute divine command, making him a strong yet humane religious and political leader. By depicting her Mahomed as a Christ-like figure, Günderrode questions Voltaire’s one-dimensional presentation of his protagonist. In her Lesedrama, Mahomed, like Jesus, is a religious visionary who is not immediately recognized as such. Mahomed’s followers ask him when their prophet will appear, not knowing that it is Mahomed himself. Mahomed responds with religious language and a narrative form that would have been familiar to Günderrode’s readers, a parable that establishes the connections between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.60 The parable concludes, “Dies ist der 60

Günderrode uses the familiar form of the parable to establish Mahomed as the prophet and to underline the connections between the three religions. Mahomed tells the story of a father and his two sons. The father is Moses, identified by the “Gesetztafel” [“tablets of the law”] (138) in his left hand. His first son is Jesus, recognizable by his “Dornenkrone” [“crown of thorns”], and the second son—Mahomed—is characterized by the fact that he has “zwei Augen, das eine richtet er gen Himmel, das andere zur Erde” [“two eyes; he directs one toward heaven and the other toward earth”]. Mahomed is caught between his spiritual mission and practical concerns, as a result of which he, in this parable, carries, “in der einen Hand [...] ein Buch, in der andern ein Schwerdt” [“in the one hand [...] a book, in the other a sword”] (138).

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Ueberwinder. Einst wird es euch klar werden nach dieser Zeit, jetzt aber bleibt es euch noch dunkel” [“He is the redeemer. In the future, this will become clear, but now it is dark to you”] (138). These words echo John the Baptist’s assertion about Jesus: “aber er ist mitten unter euch getreten, den ihr nicht kennt. Der ist’s, der nach mir kommen wird, welcher vor mir gewesen ist” [“but there standeth one among you, whom ye know not; He it is, who coming after me is preferred before me”] (John 1.26–27). Only later in the play will Omar, one of Mahomed’s most loyal followers, fall on his knees and exclaim: “Ja, wahrlich, Mahomed! du bist ein Seher, du hast die tiefen Gedanken meines Geistes, die nie Worte wurden, durchschaut! Ja, ich bekenne, du bist der Prophet des einzigen Gottes” [“Truly, Mahomed, you are a visionary, you have seen the deep thoughts that I have never expressed! Yes, I declare, you are the prophet of the only God”] (160). Günderrrode’s presentation of Mahomed as a misunderstood Christ-like visionary fulfills two functions. First, it allows her to participate in the ideological debate on Islam by presenting an alternative version to Voltaire’s play and Goethe’s translation. Second, this presentation enables her to portray a character who, like the creative visionary, is misunderstood by his contemporaries. This double displacement strategically camouflages Günderrode’s reflections on the role of the author, especially the woman writer, in the early nineteenth century. Mahomed, the religious visionary, comes to stand for the poet who faces criticism by his or her contemporaries. Günderrode’s Mahomed, a misunderstood and doubting character, stands in for the Romantic woman writer’s feeling of alienation from her surroundings and her inner struggle and doubt. In one of her letters, Günderrode presents this feeling as a conflict between her feminine and masculine sides: Gestern las ich Ossians Darthula [...] Schon oft hatte ich den unweiblichen Wunsch mich in ein wildes Schlachtgetümmel zu werfen, zu sterben, Warum ward ich kein Mann! ich habe keinen Sinn für weibliche Tugenden, für Weiberglükseeligkeit. Nur das Wilde, Grose, Glänzende gefällt mir. Es ist ein unseliges aber unverbesserliches Misverhältniß in meiner Seele; und es wird und muß so bleiben, denn ich bin ein Weib, und habe Begierden wie ein Mann, ohne Männerkraft. Darum bin ich so wechselnd, und so uneins mit mir.61 [Yesterday, I read Ossian’s Darthula [...] I have often had the unfeminine desire to throw myself into battle and to die. Why was I not born a man! I have no taste for female virtues, for female bliss. Only wild, great, and shining things appeal to me. There is an unfortunate but incorrigible incongruity in my soul; and it will and must stay this way because I am a woman and have a man’s appetites, without a man’s strength. This is why I am so undetermined and divided within myself.]

61

Quoted in Preitz, “Karoline von Günderrode in ihrer Umwelt II,” pp. 170–71.

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This letter voices Günderrode’s feeling of being torn between her contemporaries’ expectations that she compose poetry and her desire to venture into the unfeminine sphere of drama to discuss such topics as religion and history. Günderrode’s choice of the Lesedrama expresses her awareness of the discursive binary regarding gender and genre and her strategic negotiation of it. With Mahomed, der Prophet von Mekka, Günderrode ventured beyond poetry to discuss the life of the Islamic prophet and the more general question of leadership. At the same time, however, she refrained from writing a drama in the traditional sense. Instead, she composed a Lesedrama, a hybrid genre that allowed her to deflect some of her contemporaries’ objections while challenging their expectations. The Lesedrama was situated on the border between drama and fiction; it could be performed but lent itself just as well— if not better—to private as well as public reading. Karoline von Günderrode, like Helen Maria Williams and Ellis Cornelia Knight, explored the possibilities presented by the realm of fiction and its intersection with different genres and traditions. Günderrode chose a fluid generic space within which to position her response to the work of two literary authorities, Voltaire and Goethe. Presenting her protagonist as a hybrid character in a hybrid genre allowed Günderrode to paint an alternate picture of the Islamic prophet at the same time that it expressed her own alienation as a woman author in the early-nineteenth-century German literary marketplace.

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Chapter 4 The Letter and the Body: Julie de Krüdener’s Valérie

The focus on women authors’ biographies and their connections to famous contemporaries has profoundly shaped the reception of their works. The biographical approach has resulted in privileging those literary forms seen as the expression of the author’s personal life—her letters, autobiography, and poetry. Helen Maria Williams is often remembered either for William Wordsworth’s sonnet on her sensibility or for her relation to John Hurtford Stone and the questions it posed about her national allegiance and propriety. In a similar way, Ellis Cornelia Knight is usually associated with her guardian Lord Nelson or Princess Charlotte; Knight’s autobiography has therefore been read for its revelations about these political figures while her novel Dinarbas gradually fell into oblivion. Karoline von Günderrode, who drowned herself in the Rhine, is frequently mentioned either in relation to the Brentanos or to unhappy male Romantic poets such as Novalis and Kleist. As a result of this focus, criticism has concentrated either on her letters or on her poetry to the neglect of her dramatic—and more political—production. The case is not much different for Julie de Krüdener (1764–1824).1 Most of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century references focus on her life and her connections to important people on the literary and political scene, such as Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Chateaubriand, and the Russian emperor Alexander I, and on her influence on the Treaty of the Holy Alliance (1815).2 1

2

In secondary literature, Krüdener is referred to either as Juliane von Krüdener or Julie de Krüdener, usually depending on whether her work is discussed in the context of the German or the French national literary tradition. In this chapter, I will use “Julie de Krüdener” as the French spelling reflects the language in which she wrote her novels. See the following nineteenth- and early twentieth-century works on Krüdener’s life: Charles Eynard, Vie de Madame de Krüdener, 2 vols (Paris: Cherbuliez, 1849); Abel Hermant, Madame de Krüdener: L’amie du tsar Alexandre Ier (Paris: Hachette 1934); Paul Lacroix Jacob, Madame de Krudener, ses lettres et ses ouvrages (Paris: Paul Ollendorf, 1990); Ernest John Knapton, The Lady of the Holy Alliance: The Life of Julie de Krüdener (New York: AMS Press, 1966); Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Oeuvres I: Fin des portraits littéraires, Portraits de femmes (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1951). For a complete list

The biographical interest also influenced the reception of her literary work. While most of her writings fell into oblivion, one of her novels, Valérie ou Lettres de Gustave de Linar à Ernest de G. (1804), sparked considerable interest and was an instant international success. In 1804, the text appeared in four French editions, as well as in translations, three in German, one in English, and one in Dutch. Another German translation appeared in 1805 and one in Russian in 1807. Even after Krüdener’s death, Valérie continued to be republished until 1898.3 Part of the reason for this success was the reception of Valérie as an autobiographical novel, or at the very least a novel with autobiographical underpinnings, a roman à clef of sorts. Reading a novel by a woman who was on intimate terms with important literary and political figures led readers to focus more on expected celebrity revelations than on the text itself. While the biographical interest in Valérie ensured the transmission of the novel and of the author’s name, it also bore dangers. The biographical reading eventually resulted in attacks on Krüdener’s lifestyle, her political sympathies, and the perceived immorality of the novel. As a result of these ad hominem attacks, Krüdener criticism reached its most negative tone in the middle of the twentieth century.4 Only in the second half of the century did critics once more investigate Krüdener’s novel outside of the biographical approach that shed a negative light on the author’s moral character. The year 1974 witnessed the publication of a new critical edition of

3

4

of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century works on Krüdener’s life, see Francis Ley, Madame de Krüdener et son temps 1764–1824 (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1961), pp. 637–40. Ley lists thirty-three biographical accounts in seven languages: French, English, German, Russian, Danish, Norwegian, and Dutch. In the second half of the twentieth century, Ley, who identifies himself as Krüdener’s last descendant, sparked new interest in Krüdener. He published an extensive list of books and articles on her life and work, which also contain selections from her correspondence: Francis Ley, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Madame de Staël, Chateaubriand, Benjamin Constant et Madame de Krüdener (Paris: Editions Montaigne, 1967); Francis Ley, “Goethe et Mme de Krüdener,” Etudes Germaniques, 23.1 (1968), 54–57; Francis Ley, “Le roman Valérie jugé par Goethe, Jean-Paul et Sophie Laroche,” Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France, 96.2 (1996), 313–16; Francis Ley, “Madame de Krüdener (1764–1824),” in Études sur le XVIIIe siècle: Portraits de femmes, ed. by Roland Mortier and Hervé Hasquin (Bruxelles: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles), 2000, pp. 61–74; Francis Ley, “Madame de Krüdener à Paris (1802–1804),” Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France, 99.1 (1999), 99–108. For an overview of Valérie’s publication history, see Francis Ley, Madame de Krüdener et son temps and Michel Mercier, Valérie: Origine et destinée d’un roman (Lille: Service de Reproduction des Thèses de l’Université de Lille III, 1974). For the reception history of Valérie, see Walter Pabst, “Juliane von Krüdener, Jacques Delille und die mémoire involontaire,” in Themen und Texte: Gesammelte Studien zur romanistischen und vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft von Walter Pabst, ed. by Eberhard Leube and Ludwig Schrader (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1977), pp. 198–233.

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Valérie by Michel Mercier as well as the related publication of Mercier’s dissertation Valérie: Origine et destinée d’un roman.5 Then, in 1996, the influential eighteenth-century critic Raymond Trousson included Krüdener’s text in his anthology of eighteenth-century French women novelists, Romans de femmes du XVIIIe siècle.6 The appearance of Valérie in readily available editions spurred the publication of critical analyses of Krüdener’s novel, frequently in the context of discussions of other late-eighteenth- and earlynineteenth-century women authors.7 While much attention has been paid to Krüdener’s contacts with famous contemporaries, little investigation has been done of the author’s selfpositioning on the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century literary scene. Julie de Krüdener’s publishing strategies illustrate the workings of the turn-of-the-century literary marketplace in particularly forceful ways. Krüdener deliberately devised Valérie as a work that would cause a stir in literary circles. She wanted Valérie to be a sensation; she wanted it to be the novel that everyone would talk about when it appeared. In order to ensure the success of Valérie, Krüdener launched an ingenious public relations campaign that capitalized on the developing market for goods and accessories associated with fictional characters. She publicized her novel by creating a demand for objects à la Valérie the moment the novel appeared: [P]endant plusieurs jours se dévouant avec la plus persévérante ardeur à assurer son triomphe, elle [Krüdener] courut les magasins de mode les plus en vogue pour demander incognito, tantôt des écharpes, tantôt des chapeaux, des plumes, des guirlandes, des rubans à la Valérie. En voyant cette étrangère, belle encore et fort élégante, descendre de voiture d’un air si sûr de son fait pour demander les objets de fantaisie qu’elle inventait, les marchands se sentaient saisis d’une bienveillance inexprimable et d’un désir si vif de la contenter qu’il 5

6

7

Julie de Krüdener, Valérie, ed. by Michel Mercier (Paris: Editions Klincksiek, 1974) and Michel Mercier, Valérie: Origine et destinée d’un roman. Raymond Trousson, ed., Romans de femmes du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, 1996). The most recent edition of the novel contains other works and previously unpublished material: Michel Mercier, Francis Ley, and Elena Gretchanaia, eds., Autour de Valérie: Oeuvres de Mme de Krüdener (Paris: Champion, 2007). See, for example, Tili Boon Cuillé, Narrative Interludes: Musical Tableaux in EighteenthCentury French Texts (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006); Beatrice Guenther, “Letters Exchanged Across Borders: Mme de Staël’s Delphine and the Epistolary Novels of Juliane von Krüdener & Sophie Moreau,” The Comparatist, 22 (1998), 78–90; Stephanie Hilger, “Epistolarity, Publicity, and Painful Sensibility: Julie de Krüdener’s Valérie,” French Review, 79.4 (2006), 737–48; K. Wesley Lacy, “A Forgotten Best-Seller: Madame de Krüdener’s Valérie,” Romance Notes, 18 (1978), 362–67; Paul Pelckmans; “L’impasse imaginaire. Notes sur la sensibilité familiale dans le roman français sous le Premier Empire,” Orbis Litterarum, 34 (1979), 33–52; and Rachel Sauvé, De l’éloge à l’exclusion: Les femmes auteurs au XIX siècle (Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2000).

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fallait bien qu’on parvint à s’entendre [...] Avec ses emplettes, elle se transportait dans un autre magasin, feignant d’y chercher ce qui n’avait jamais existé que dans sa fantaisie. Grâce à ce manège, elle parvint à exciter dans le commerce, une émulation si furieuse en l’honneur de Valérie que pour huit jours au moins tout fut à la Valérie. Des amies, complices innocentes de ce stratagême allaient après elle, sur ses indications, constater son triomphe et en portaient la renommée au faubourg Saint-Germain et à la Chaussée d’Antin.8 [For several days she [Krüdener] committed herself with the most persevering zeal to ensuring her triumph; she ran incognito to the most fashionable boutiques and asked for scarves, hats, feathers, garlands, and ribbons, all à la Valérie. When the shopkeepers saw this foreigner, who was still beautiful and very elegant, descend from her coach and ask with a self-convinced demeanor for the fantasy objects that she had invented, they were touched with inexpressible benevolence and an intense desire to please her so that an understanding was eventually established [...] She went to another store with her purchases, pretending to look there for something that only existed in her fantasy. Thanks to this show, she managed to excite such a furious emulation in the business world that, at least for eight days, everything was à la Valérie. Friends of hers, innocent accomplices of this stratagem, went to the stores afterwards, following her instructions; they saw her triumph and brought her fame to the Faubourg Saint-Germain and the Chaussée d’Antin.]

At the same time that Charles Eynard, Krüdener’s nineteenth-century biographer, reproduces the contemporary discourse on gender when he characterizes her as “malicieuse” [“malicious”],9 he cannot hide his fascination with Krüdener’s ingenious marketing campaign. Krüdener publicized her novel by creating demand for objects that did not exist yet. Consumer demand eventually triggered these objects’ manufacture; only two months after the publication of Valérie, the first cup with a Valérie motif was produced.10 8

9 10

Charles Eynard, Vie de Madame de Krüdener, 2 vols (Paris: Cherbuliez, 1849), I, pp. 136–37. Translations of all foreign-language texts in this chapter are mine, unless otherwise noted. Ibid., I, p. 137. Krüdener’s letter to her friend Camille Jourdan indicates that, only two months after the publication of the novel, there were already plans to produce the objects that Krüdener had created in her fantasy: “Je n’ai pas pu vous envoyer le livre ni le souvenir que je vous destinais, ce sera une tasse avec quelque chose de Valérie. Je n’ai pu l’avoir assez vite à Paris, mais ce sera une occupation chère dès que j’aurai un moment de loisir. Ce sera à Berlin probablement. Si Dayott y exécute bien mon idée, ce sera à Paris même que vous l’aurez et où on le fera. On va imprimer la seconde édition de Valérie avec estampes. J’aime donc mieux que ce soit ce livre-là qu’un autre qu’on vous remette” [“I was not able to send you either the book or the souvenir that I had in mind for you, it will be a cup with something from Valérie. I was not able to get it quickly enough in Paris, but I will gladly procure it once I have a moment of leisure. It will probably be in Berlin. If Dayott executes my idea successfully, you will get it in Paris, where it will also be produced. The second edition of Valérie will be printed with engravings. Therefore, this book shall be given to you rather than another”] (Quoted in Ley, Madame de Krüdener, p. 236). Krüdener’s marketing

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The success of Krüdener’s marketing campaign was made possible by what Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J.H. Plumb have termed the “birth of a consumer society” in the late eighteenth century and its subsequent development in the nineteenth century.11 Krüdener tapped into the reality of consumption by influencing not only consumers but also suppliers. By referring to a literary work, she established a cultural coordinate that merchants could not ignore if they wanted to appear cultured or fashionable. As Grant McCracken, a theorist of culture and consumption, points out, “Fashion had become unambiguously the uppermost design consideration for most of the consumer goods of the eighteenth century.”12 In order to be fashionable in the early nineteenth century, consumers and suppliers had to know of, or pretend to at least have heard of, objects with a design à la Valérie. Consumption acquired a symbolic function; it could determine who was “in” and who was “out.” Significantly, Krüdener’s fictional products are designed for female consumption—scarves, hats, feathers, garlands, and ribbons. While Krüdener’s marketing strategy acknowledges the growth of a female reading public, it also reflects the perception that the woman, rather than the man, is the main consumer, especially in the bourgeois household. As Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace points out, “Over the course of the long eighteenth century, two processes occurred simultaneously. The first was a cultural struggle to define both the meaning of consumption and the practices of modern consumerism. The second was the ideological construction of the female subject.”13 The confluence of consumption and gender identity from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century explains the shopkeepers’ response to Krüdener. They saw a rich and fashionable woman asking for products that could have existed at a time when images of literary heroines graced all sorts of objects. The demand for new fashionable products triggered a process of emulation, a pressure to keep abreast of the latest developments in fashion, because of the “triumph of style over utility, of aesthetics over function.”14 While one did not need yet another scarf as a

11

12

13

14

efforts paid off during her lifetime. Valérie entered the circuit of fashionable consumption; readers could look at engravings accompanying the text while sipping tea from a cup with a decorative design à la Valérie. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982). Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988), p. 21. Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia UP, 1997), p. 5. McCracken, p. 19.

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protection against the cold, one wanted a scarf à la Valérie as a symbolic indicator of one’s knowledge of the latest cultural trends. The most suitable place for exploring the symbolic quality of objects was Paris. By running to Parisian stores and asking for objects à la Valérie, Krüdener created demand for the novel in the fashionable quarters of the city, the Faubourg Saint-Germain and the Chaussée d’Antin, a demand that would ultimately cross not only city limits but also national boundaries. Yet living in Paris was a mixed blessing for the author. On the one hand, it allowed Krüdener to publicize her novel through the intermediary of related consumer goods, while on the other, the demands of fashionable society imposed a strain on her economic resources and her mental well-being. Her marketing shrewdly explored the confluence of culture and consumption, yet Krüdener herself fell victim to its vicious cycle. A letter to her mother leaves no doubt about her precarious financial situation: Voici, ma bonne et tendre mère, l’état de mes dettes faites en 1803 [...]. Mais depuis douze ans, obligée de vivre d’après mon rang, avec le modique revenu que j’avais, tout ayant renchéri presque du double partout, comment aurais-je pu suffire avec à peu près cinq mille roubles [...] mon rang, la considération du monde plus ou moins attaché à l’extérieur, ne m’obligeaient-ils pas à avoir toujours du monde autour de moi, soit une gouvernante pour ma fille, ou une dame de compagnie [...]? Si mes ouvrages, comme tout l’annonce, réussissent, ils me rapporteront de l’argent. Et cet argent éteindra peu à peu, si le Ciel m’accorde la vie, mes dettes [...]. Personne ne peut me remplacer ici; il faut être présente, et influente par les avantages qui appartiennent à une femme, pour avoir mille moyens utiles pour faire réussir l’ouvrage.15 [My good and tender mother, these are my debts accrued in 1803 [...]. But how could I have had enough with approximately five thousand rubles when, for twelve years, I have had to live according to my rank with my modest income and the doubling of prices everywhere [...]? Didn’t my rank and the opinion of the world, which is more or less attached to the exterior, force me to always keep people around me, either a governess for my daughter or woman companion for myself [...]? If my works are a success—as it appears they will be— they will make money. And this money will, if Heaven grants me life, gradually cover my debts [...]. No one can replace me here; I have to be present, and use my feminine influence a thousand ways to make my work successful.]

Krüdener is caught in the paradox of promoting her novel in a city where she cannot afford to live, yet where the contacts to build a successful marketing campaign are located. In addition to straining her financial resources, life in Paris exhausted Krüdener mentally. She wanted to escape to the quieter countryside, as she

15

Quoted in Ley, Madame de Krüdener, pp. 228–30.

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explained in a letter to her friend Mme. Armand: “Le temps a été des plus sauvages ici; aussi depuis deux mois, mes nerfs s’en ressentent-ils bien. Paris m’ennuie; je soupire après notre lac, votre présence et le calme [...] Un été passé sans oiseaux me paraît une banqueroute” [“The weather here has been most savage; my nerves have been feeling it for two months. Paris annoys me; I long for our lake, your presence and the quiet [...] A summer spent without birds is a bankruptcy in my eyes”].16 While the opposition between the city and the countryside was a conventional literary trope, Krüdener’s nervous strain also stemmed from her negotiation of female propriety with the realities of the literary marketplace for a woman author. Krüdener performed a precarious balancing act; she published her novel anonymously yet was directly involved in its marketing and strategically explored the autobiographical reading, thereby lifting at least a corner of the protective veil of anonymity.17 Her opposition of the country to the city is a discursive encapsulation of the dissonance between the private act of writing and the public aspect of selling the text. Krüdener published her writing since it allowed her to earn an income when she was in the final stages of separating from her husband. While publishing promised financial reward for herself and her daughter Juliette, it also made Krüdener, the divorcing wife, even more suspicious. In order to fare well under this intense scrutiny, Krüdener took a couple of steps to protect her reputation while marketing Valérie as effectively as possible. One of the strategies for keeping her respectability intact was Krüdener’s choice of influential male mentors and intermediaries who could help shape public opinion even before the novel appeared. In order to preempt the abuse that women authors often suffered from contemporary reviewers and publishers, Krüdener contacted the prominent French author François René de Chateaubriand. She sent him the manuscript of Valérie in order to prompt him to publish a favorable review in one of France’s major literary journals. One of Krüdener’s letters suggests that the author of René received it favorably: “Châteaubriand a été enchanté de ma Valérie” [“Châteaubriand was pleased with my Valérie”].18 However, Chateaubriand left Paris to accept a position at the French embassy in Rome before writing any kind of review of Valérie. After Chateaubriand’s departure, Krüdener contacted Joseph François Michaud, literary critic and poet, who eventually published a 16 17

18

Quoted in Eynard, I, p. 135. The first three French editions appeared anonymously. Only in 1837 did a signed edition appear with a foreword by Sainte-Beuve. See Mercier, Valérie: Origine et destinée d’un roman, p. 625. Quoted in Ley, Madame de Krüdener, p. 227.

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favorable report on the novel in the Mercure de France, one of the main journals of the time. Krüdener also enlisted her long-time friend Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and recorded his optimism about the prospects of the novel: “M. de Saint-Pierre est enthousiasmé de Valérie, les autres journalistes, gens de lettres, aussi: ils prétendent que ce sera une des choses les plus marquantes qui auront paru depuis longtemps” [“M. de Saint Pierre is enthusiastic about Valérie, as are the other journalists and men of letters: they believe it will be one of the most striking things that have been published in a long time”].19 In one of her letters, Krüdener invoked the positive response of eminent figures on the French literary scene and thereby presented her novel as the literary work to appear in Paris: “Elle [Valérie] est attendue ici avec une extrême impatience; les libraires sont assaillis de demandes; comme plusieurs gens de lettres en ont parlé et que d’ailleurs une femme connue dans la société inspire toujours de la curiosité, que d’ailleurs mes amis ont employé des moyens pour faire valoir beaucoup cet ouvrage, cela n’est pas étonnant” [“She [Valérie] is awaited here with extreme impatience; the booksellers are assailed with requests. This is not astonishing considering the fact that various literary people have talked about it and that a woman known in society always inspires curiosity. Also, my friends have used their means to make this work known”].20 Krüdener used her social position to market her novel on the fashionable Parisian literary scene. She deployed her private correspondence and public reviews by such figures as Chateaubriand, Michaud, and Saint-Pierre to ensure the success of Valérie upon its publication. Krüdener’s other strategy was to time the release of the novel. Despite the fact that Valérie had already been completed and had received positive reviews by spring 1803, Krüdener delayed publication until the end of the year in order to wait for the return of those Parisians who had retreated to the countryside for the summer.21 When the novel appeared, Krüdener’s mentor Saint-Pierre praised it as a work by a foreign author in an article for the Journal des Débats. He characterizes the novel as le premier coup d’essai d’une dame étrangère. S’il s’y rencontre quelques négligences, quelques hardiesses de style, vous ne pourriez refuser votre indulgence au génie et au sentiment qui ont quelquefois leur privilège pour le choix des couleurs et de l’emploi des mots et des images [...] Tous ces sujets sont peints avec des couleurs naïves, mélancoliques et quelquefois brûlantes, qui auraient fait honneur au pinceau de Sterne et d’Young [...] Quoi

19 20 21

Quoted in Ley, Madame de Krüdener, p. 228. Quoted in ibid., p. 232. Valérie was published at the beginning of December 1803 with the date 1804.

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qu’il en soit, vous ne verrez pas sans intérêt une dame étrangère allumer avec tant d’éclat le flambeau de la littérature française.22 [the first attempt by a foreign lady. If there are some oversights, some bold stylistic choices, you cannot refuse your indulgence to genius and sentiment, which are sometimes more important for the choice of colors and the use of words and images [...] All these subjects are painted with naïve, melancholic, and occasionally flaming colors that would have honored the brush of Sterne and Young [...] Be that as it may, you will not, without interest, observe a foreign lady light the torch of French literature with such splendor.]

Saint-Pierre praises Krüdener’s treatment of the topics in her novel at the same time that he refers to her stylistic oversights, which was a gesture typical in reviews of works by women authors during this period.23 Yet in contrast to other contemporary reviewers who locate supposed shortcomings in the author’s gender, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre attributes them to the fact that Krüdener is a foreigner. By highlighting Krüdener’s foreignness, SaintPierre sparked interest and confirmed the impression of those who, like the French poet Chênedollé, already thought that Krüdener had “quelque chose d’asiatique” [“something Asiatic”].24 Promoting Krüdener as an exotic author strategically marketed her hybridity although it did not completely escape the condescending tone of male critics’ reviews of women’s work. Contemporaries’ observations regarding Krüdener’s exotic, “Asiatic,” nature were comments on her provenance. Krüdener came from a culturally, ethnically, and linguistically hybrid European border region. She was born Barbara Juliana von Vietinghof in Riga in the Russian Baltic, a place that had undergone continuous change. After Teutonic, Polish, and Scandinavian rule, Livonia—containing today’s northern Latvia and southern Estonia—had come under Russian overlordship in the eighteenth century.25 As Ernest 22 23

24 25

Quoted in Ley, Madame de Krüdener, pp. 232–33. Mary Poovey explores male reviewers’ ambivalent praise of women authors: “The kind of critical indulgence male reviewers accorded women served to keep them in their proper place more effectively than even the most hostile criticism would have; it flattered the more tractable women into complaisance and humiliated the more discerning. Women were praised for their ‘quickness of apprehension,’ ‘delicate taste,’ and for not presuming to ‘strong judgment.’ Even the critical vocabulary applied to women’s writings calls for special interpretation; to say that a lady’s novel is “in the main correctly written” is to praise grammar and spelling rather than ideas” (Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1984), p. 39). Quoted in Ley, “Madame de Krüdener (1764–1824),” p. 61. For an overview of the history of the region in relation to the Vietinghof family, see Ernest John Knapton, The Lady of the Holy Alliance: The Life of Julie de Krüdener (New York: AMS Press, 1966).

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Knapton points out, “The Vietinghof family was a typical product of this Livonian world.”26 The Vietinghof family ancestry can be traced back to the German Ruhr valley. As early as the fourteenth century, the name Vietinghof was recorded in accounts of the Baltic provinces and referred to administrators, diplomats, soldiers, and the landed nobility. As the daughter of one of these wealthy and influential landowners in the eighteenth century, Krüdener was educated in French and traveled extensively throughout Europe, first with her parents and then with her husband, the diplomat Burckhard Alexis Constantin, Baron von Krüdener. As a consequence of her education in the literary and cultural lingua franca of the day, Krüdener wrote and published in French, yet she also strategically explored her hybrid identity of Germanic and Baltic elements to market her novel beyond the borders of the French literary tradition. In the same way that Krüdener had enlisted famous French contemporaries such as Saint-Pierre to promote her novel, she also contacted well-known German literary authorities. Krüdener corresponded in German with the poet Jean Paul. In a private letter to Krüdener, he praised the novel for its reformation of corrupt French manners: “Valérie führt die Höfe zu einem moralischen Gesundbrunnen. Frankreich ist ein kranker Hof, und die Quelle, wozu Sie führten, springt ebenso glänzend wie heilsam” [“Valérie is a moral fountain for the courts. France is a sick court and the spring toward which you lead gushes forth both radiantly and salutarily”].27 Jean Paul explores the trope of the French body politic’s disintegration and contrasts it, by implication, with Krüdener’s Germanic wholesomeness. While Jean Paul did not write a review proper of Valérie, he nevertheless mentioned the novel approvingly in his Vorschule der Ästhetik. Reviews of the novel in major German literary journals paralleled Jean Paul’s favorable evaluation. Zeitung für die elegante Welt, the Französische Miscellen, the Hamburgische Correspondent, and the Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung all published positive commentaries on Valérie.28 The novel’s success in German-speaking lands is reflected in the comments of Sophie von La Roche, who was one of the most famous women authors at the time. In a letter from 1804, La Roche writes: “Ich bereue, Valérie [...] an Fürstin Isenburg gegeben zu haben [...] denn nie, nie gab es etwas Schöneres [...] Frau von Krüdener [...] hat dadurch allen englischen Romanen auf lange Zeit den Weg und den Kredit gesperrt. Reine Moral, reine Liebe, fürtreffliche Ideen über Italien und Freundschaft” 26 27

28

Knapton, p. 6. Quoted in Dorothea Berger, Jean Paul und Frau von Krüdener im Spiegel ihres Briefwechsels. Factum, non fabula (Wiesbaden: Limes Verlag, 1957), p. 57. Ley, Madame de Krüdener, pp. 238–39.

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[“I regret having given Valérie [...] to the Princess Isenburg [...] because there has never ever been anything more beautiful [...] With it, Mme de Krüdener [...] has barred the credit for all English novels for a long time. Healthy morals, pure love, and pertinent ideas about Italy and friendship”].29 La Roche praises the novel’s impeccable morals and its representation of love and friendship by establishing British literature as a reference point in a manner similar to Saint-Pierre’s reference to Sterne and Young. Yet La Roche is confused by Krüdener’s hybrid national background. She congratulates Sweden, rather than Russia to which the province of Livonia had been annexed by that point, on this author: “Schweden kann stolz auf diese Schriftstellerin sein” [“Sweden can be proud of this woman author”].30 These comments demonstrate the positive response to Krüdener’s novel and her contemporaries’ fascination with her complex, if bewildering, international background. Krüdener became the image of the cosmopolitan author transcending narrow linguistic and national boundaries. She not only positioned her novel in the French and German literary market but also actively contributed to its transmission in the Russian context, to which she also had personal and cultural ties. She asked her friend Bérenger to place an excerpt of Valérie in the Journal des dames: “Par ce moyen, j’espère le voir en Russie, car ce journal y arrive” [“By this means, I hope to see it in Russia, because this journal gets there”].31 While Krüdener’s contemporaries received her international self-positioning as that of a citizen of a cosmopolitan and multilingual republic of letters, subsequent generations living in times of gradually solidifying national allegiances and consolidating national literary canons were uneasy with this author, who did not fit into one single national literary history. Valérie’s autobiographical referentiality—the marketing of Krüdener’s hybridity being one of its manifestations—gradually caused the obliteration of the author’s name from later generations’ literary histories, yet it was crucial in ensuring its dissemination to her contemporaries. Krüdener situates her novel on the fine line between a fictional story and a narrative with autobiographical underpinnings by echoing familiar contemporary literary discourses. Valérie is the story of a woman who is married to an older man 29

30 31

Quoted in Kurt Kampf, Sophie Laroche, Ihre Briefe an die Gräfin Elise zu Solms-Laubach (Offenbach: Offenbacher Geschichtsverein, 1965), p. 97. For the reception of Valérie by German authors, also see Francis Ley, “Le roman Valérie jugé par Goethe, Jean-Paul et Sophie Laroche” and Francis Ley, “Goethe et Mme de Krüdener.” Quoted in Kampf, p. 97. Quoted in Ley, Madame de Krüdener, p. 231.

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and becomes the object of a younger man’s passion. Readers and literary critics were quick to draw parallels between Valérie and Krüdener because certain episodes in the author’s life resembled those described in the novel: Krüdener’s marriage to a diplomat eighteen years her senior and the existence of Alexander de Stakiev, an ambassadorial secretary, who fell in love with the author yet never told her about his passion. In addition, the characters’ travels through Italy mirror her husband’s diplomatic mission in that country. Krüdener established these parallels, yet she also limited the autobiographical reading by modeling her Valérie on famous epistolary novels of her time, in particular on Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774). The comments of a reviewer for the Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung demonstrate that her strategic modeling was recognized: “Valérie gehört zu den wenigen Romanen, die wie Göthe’s Werther, Rousseau’s Heloise, die Delphine der Frau von Stael, den höchsten Gipfel der Dichtung erreichen” [“Valérie belongs to that small number of novels which, like Goethe’s Werther, Rousseau’s Héloïse, and Mme de Staël’s Delphine attain poetry’s highest peak”].32 Placing her novel in a successful literary tradition allowed for an interpretation beyond an exclusively autobiographical reading. At the same time, however, choosing the epistolary tradition as her reference point maintained this interpretive possibility since her predecessors’ novels had also been subject to biographical interpretations. Krüdener’s strategic use of epistolary conventions placed the author in a literary tradition, yet it also made her vulnerable to attacks by those authors to whom she was compared. While Goethe, for example, had advised Chancellor Müller to read Valérie,33 he was extremely displeased with the above-quoted review that compared Werther to Krüdener’s novel. He even wrote in protest to the editor of the Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung: “Verzeihen Ew. Wohlgeboren, wenn ich Sie vor dem Herrn GDZ warne: die Recension der Valérie ist die erste, die ich ungedruckt wünschte” [“Forgive me, Sir, if I warn you about Mr. GDZ [the author of the review]: The review of Valérie is the first one that I wish would never have been published”].34 Goethe claimed that the novel was worthless: “Das Buch ist null, ohne daß man sagen kann, es sei schlecht, doch die Nichtigkeit erweckt gerade bei vielen Menschen Gunst” [“The book is nil, even though one cannot say that it is bad, but nothingness awakens appreciation in many people”].35 Goethe had, by that time, developed ambivalent feelings toward Werther, a work of 32 33 34 35

Quoted in Berger, p. 71. Ley, “Le roman Valérie,” p. 314. Quoted in Berger, p. 72. Quoted in ibid., p. 58.

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his youth, and resented the comparison to Krüdener, who had openly expressed her dislike of certain aspects of the book in literary salons.36 Krüdener had criticized Werther because, in her opinion, it focused only on one thought and advocated suicide; she also disagreed with Faust and described Goethe as the “Grand Prêtre du Paganisme germanique” [“grand priest of Germanic paganism”].37 By echoing Werther, Krüdener placed her novel in distinguished company while highlighting her model’s perceived shortcomings. She claimed her novel’s moral superiority, thereby echoing the discourse on female propriety yet also provoking an influential literary figure by criticizing his work in the half-public, half-private sphere of the literary salon. Goethe’s resentment of the comparison between Valérie and Werther was still audible in his later ad hominem attacks regarding Krüdener’s involvement in European politics during the last decade of her life, in particular her influence on Alexander I’s role in the Treaty of the Holy Alliance between Russia, Austria, and Prussia in 1815. In a harsh invective written in 1818, Goethe compared her influence on the Russian emperor to that of a whore roaming through Europe.38 When Krüdener died in 1825, 36

37 38

Goethe had been told by Germaine de Staël, who herself had developed a competitive relationship with Krüdener because of the comparison of Valérie to Delphine, that Krüdener had criticized his Werther. Krüdener’s opinion about Werther is recorded in the journal of Chênedollé, a poet and one of Krüdener’s mentors: “Le 22 au soir (22 floréal 1802) chez Mme de Beaumont, elle (Mme de Krüdener) critiquait Werther. Elle disait qu’il n’y avait pas de pensée, et qu’il n’y avait que le mérite de la passion exprimée—Comment, lui dis-je, point de pensée? Il n’y a point de pensées détachées, mais c’est une pensée continue!” [“On the evening of the 22nd (22nd floréal 1802), at Mme de Beaumont’s, she (Madame de Krüdener) criticized Werther. She said that there was no thought and that it only had the merit of giving a voice to passion—How, I asked her, no thought? There are no separate thoughts, instead it is one single continuous thought!”] (Quoted in Ley, “Goethe et Mme de Krüdener,” pp. 54–55). Quoted in Ley, “Goethe et Mme de Krüdener,” pp. 56–57. Goethe’s invective attacks Krüdener’s involvement in the political affairs of her time: V. Krüdener Jena, den 4. April 1818 Junge Huren, alte Nonnen Hatten sonst schon viel gewonnen, Wenn, von Pfaffen wohlberaten, Sie im Kloster Wunder taten. Jetzt geht’s über Land und Leute Durch Europens edle Weite! Hofgemäße Löwen schranzen, Affen, Hund und Bären tanzen— Neue leidge Zauberflöten— Hurenpack, zuletzt Propheten! (Goethe, “V. Krüdener,” Sämtliche Werke (Zürich: Artemis Verlag, 1953), II, p. 432)

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Goethe commented to Chancellor Müller: “Nekrolog der Frau von Krüdener: So ein Leben ist wie Hobelspäne; kaum ein Häufchen Asche ist daraus zu gewinnen zum Seifensieden” [“Necrology of Mrs. Krüdener: Such a life is like wood shavings, you can barely extract enough ash from them to simmer soap”].39 Goethe’s acrid comments demonstrate his resistance to Krüdener entering the literary and political sphere of his time. Krüdener’s strategic echoing of Werther triggered Goethe’s resentment, yet it also allowed her to use epistolary conventions in ways that emphasized the morality of her text and, consequently, the propriety of its author. Highlighting her propriety was all the more important in light of the novel’s autobiographical underpinnings. Krüdener wrote a preface that is typical for eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century epistolary novels. She disclaimed all responsibility for the indecency that readers might perceive by emphasizing the novel’s didactic purpose: Mon sincère désir a été celui de présenter un ouvrage moral, de peindre cette pureté de moeurs dont on n’offre pas assez de tableaux, et qui est si étroitement liée au bonheur véritable. J’ai pensé qu’il pouvait être utile de montrer que les âmes les plus sujettes à être entraînées par de fortes passions, sont aussi celles qui ont reçu le plus de moyens pour leur résister, et que le secret de la sagesse est de les employer à temps.40 [It has been my sincere wish to present a moral work, to paint that purity of morals of which not enough paintings are made and which is so closely linked to true happiness. I thought it might be useful to show that the souls who are most likely to be carried away by strong passion are also the ones who have received the means to resist them, and that the wise secret is to use them in time.]

39 40

[V. Krüdener Jena, April 4, 1818 Young whores, old nuns, had in other times already gained a lot, when, following the advice of priests, they worked miracles in the cloister. Now they travel through Europe’s noble stretches and trample upon land and people! Lions behave like courtiers, Apes, dogs and bears dance— New, accursed magic flutes— Pack of whores, even prophets!] Quoted in Berger, p. 59. Julie de Krüdener, Valérie, in Romans de femmes du XVIIIe siècle, ed. by Raymond Trousson (Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, 1996), p. 836. All further references will be to this edition and will be made parenthetically within the text.

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This didactic disclaimer establishes the morality of Krüdener’s novel while teasing the reader with the intimation of a scandalous and possibly autobiographic narrative by a femme du monde. Krüdener explores her novel’s autobiographical underpinnings and simultaneously distances herself from them. One of the distancing devices in this epistolary novel is the creation of a narrator who transmits a story of love and passion related to her by a third party and recorded in a manuscript. The emphasis on the narrative’s indirect transmittal acts as a distancing device, yet it also invites a conflation of the narrator and the author: Je me trouvais, il y a quelques années, dans une des plus belles provinces du Danemark [...] la rêveuse mélancolie invitait à s’asseoir sur les tombeaux des anciens Scandinaves [...] Ce fut au milieu de ces rêves, de ces fictions et de ces souvenirs, que je fus surprise un jour par le récit touchant d’une de ces infortunes qui vont chercher au fond du coeur des larmes et des regrets. L’histoire d’un jeune Suédois, d’une naissance illustre, me fut racontée par la personne même qui avait été la cause innocente de son malheur. J’obtins quelques fragments écrits par lui-même: je ne pus les parcourir qu’à la hâte; mais je résolus de noter sur-lechamp les traits principaux qui étaient restés gravés dans ma mémoire. J’obtins après quelques années la permission de les publier: je changeai les noms, les lieux, les temps; je remplis les lacunes, j’ajoutai les détails qui me parurent nécessaires; mais je puis le dire avec vérité, que, loin d’embellir le caractère de Gustave, je n’ai peut-être pas montré toutes ses vertus; je craignais de faire trouver invraisemblable ce qui pourtant n’était que vrai. (835– 36) [A number of years ago, I was in one of the most beautiful provinces in Denmark [...] dreamy melancholy invited me to sit on one of the ancient Scandinavians’ tombs [...] It was in the middle of these dreams, of these fictions and these memories when, one day, I was surprised by the touching account of one of these misfortunes that bring forth tears and regrets from the bottom of the heart. I was told the story of a young Swedish man of illustrious birth by the person who herself had been the innocent cause of his unhappiness. I obtained some fragments that he had written himself; I was only able to skim through them hastily, but I resolved to jot down at once the principal traits that were engraved in my memory. After a number of years, I obtained the permission to publish them: I changed the names, the location, the time; I filled the gaps, I added details that appeared necessary to me, but I can say with truth that, far from embellishing Gustave’s character, I might not even have shown all of his virtues; I feared to make appear implausible what was true nevertheless.]

While the epistolary narrative frame creates remove, it is also an expression of Krüdener’s strategic conflation of narrator and author. This conflation allows Krüdener, like Helen Maria Williams, to highlight her efforts to enter the early-nineteenth-century literary scene. The narrator’s comment about the delayed publication becomes a disguised hint at Krüdener’s considerable publicizing and marketing efforts.

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The epistolary tradition provided Krüdener with the didactic disclaimer and the fiction of the found manuscript. In addition, it furnished the title format of a protagonist’s first name, Valérie. Krüdener adapted this tradition in order to further underline her own morality through her protagonist. The titles of most epistolary novels refer to at least one of the correspondents, yet Valérie is not one of them, as the subtitle, Lettres de Gustave de Linar à Ernest de G., indicates. The subtitle thwarts the intimation of a female perspective on love and passion. The letters are not written by Valérie but about her. The dialectic tension between the title and the subtitle reflects Krüdener’s strategic positioning of her novel. The title markets her novel as a woman’s story, yet the subtitle’s reference to male correspondents is another means of warding off accusations of the author’s immorality. It is not a woman, or more specifically Krüdener in an autobiographical reading, who describes passion’s disastrous effects, but a man. Krüdener paints an irreproachable image of femininity that circulates between herself and her protagonist. Like Helen Maria Williams’ Julia, Krüdener’s Valérie is a moral rock. Valérie’s feelings for Gustave remain a mystery throughout the novel; she stays loyal to her husband and never strays from the path of rectitude. By contrast, Gustave’s physical and mental suffering, caused by his infatuation with Valérie, is described at length. His predicament is similar to Seymour’s in Julia. In the same way that Seymour’s private pain is linked to the suffering of the post-Revolutionary European body politic, Gustave’s individual crisis reflects a society in turmoil. In contrast to Williams or Knight, whose novels consist of intertwined plot lines that portray the characters’ private predicaments on the one hand and explicit political struggles on the other, Krüdener fuses these two strands by creating what Lynn Hunt has called a family romance. This genre can be considered “a prepolitical category for organizing political experience.”41 The individual’s diseased body and the diseased body politic are intertwined through a narrative of the smallest social structure, the family. Hunt argues that the “vogue of novels about orphans after 1795” reflects the disruption of social structures in the aftermath of the French Revolution.42 Gustave is such an orphan who is reinserted into a new family structure. He is adopted by a count, a friend of his deceased father: Il se plaît dans l’idée [...] qu’il pourra, en achevant lui-même mon éducation, remplir le saint devoir dont il se chargea en m’adoptant. Quel ami, Ernest, que ce second père! Quel homme 41

42

Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: U of California P, 1992), p. 196. Ibid., p. 14.

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excellent! La mort seule a pu interrompre cette amitié qui le liait à celui que j’ai perdu, et le comte se plaît à la continuer religieusement en moi [...] il trouve que je ressemble beaucoup à mon père, que j’ai dans mon regard la même mélancolie; il me reproche d’être comme lui, presque sauvage, et de craindre trop le monde. (837–38) [He [the count] enjoys the idea [...] that he will, by completing my education himself, fulfill the holy mission that he took upon himself when he adopted me. What a friend, this second father, Ernest! What an excellent man! Only death could interrupt the friendship that linked him to the one that I lost and that the count enjoys continuing religiously with me [...] he thinks that I resemble my father, that my gaze has the same melancholy; he reproaches me of being like him, nearly wild, and of being too afraid of the world.]

The count acts as a second father to his “fils d’adoption” [“adoptive son”] (947) and Gustave recognizes him as such. The cause of death of Gustave’s father remains mysterious. Gustave’s identity as a “jeune Suédois” [“young Swede”] (835) precludes any explicit reference to the French political situation, but the mention that Gustave is “d’une naissance illustre” [“of illustrious birth”] (835) echoes popular narratives of orphans of executed French aristocrats as does Gustave’s adoption by a count. The countess, Valérie, complicates Gustave’s insertion into his adoptive family. She is twenty years younger than her thirty-seven-year-old husband and therefore of the same age as Gustave. She “veut que je la regarde comme une soeur” [“wants that I think of her as a sister”] (838). The substitute family structure immediately sounds socially, if not biologically, incestuous. Gustave forces himself to consider her a sibling, yet soon his descriptions reveal his physical attraction to Valérie. Gustave attempts to subdue his gradually increasing passion by constructing her as an ideal, an ethereal rather than physical being: he observes that Valérie has “quelque chose d’idéal et de charmant … On dirait, à la voir si delicate, si svelte, que c’est une pensée” [“something ideal and charming … She is like a thought, delicate and svelte as she is”] (841). However, Gustave’s attempt to repress his incestuous longings for Valérie propels him even further into the social taboo. His sublimation of Valérie into an ideal also functions as a belated manifestation of his Oedipal desire for his mother when he was an adolescent. At the end of the novel, the narrator inserts the fragmentary journal of Gustave’s deceased mother, in which she records key episodes in Gustave’s life. One such moment occurs at the age of fifteen when he tells his mother about his solitary longings for “un être ideal, charmant” [“an ideal and charming being”] (953). She warns him against idealized conceptions of love, to which Gustave responds:

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Oui, ma belle maman, la vertu ne m’effraie plus depuis qu’elle a pris vos traits. Vous réalisez pour moi l’idée de Platon, qui pensait que si la vertu se rendait visible on ne pourrait plus lui resister. Il faudra que la femme qui sera ma compagne vous ressemble, pour qu’elle aie toute mon âme. (953) [Yes, beautiful mother, virtue no longer frightens me since it took your traits. You incorporate Plato’s idea. He thought that when virtue revealed itself, one could no longer resist it. The woman who will be my companion will have to resemble you in order to possess my entire soul.]

Gustave establishes his mother as the Platonic ideal of virtue; Valérie becomes her substitution in the orphan’s complex process of displacement geared at regaining a feeling of wholeness. Gustave’s private loss of a harmonious family unit is paralleled by the public destruction of the national family. His desire to refashion his adoptive family with the image of the original maternal figure finds expression in his longing for an ideal representation of femininity. Feminine figures occupied a central position in Revolutionary and postRevolutionary political discourse. Female allegorical representations of political ideals were common at a time when political rhetoric established a correspondence between individual bodies and the body politic. The king’s body had occupied a special place in the legal and popular imaginary during the ancien régime. The meaning of the divinely ordained royal body transgressed its physicality since it was both private and public, material and spiritual. The ancien régime’s discursive convergence of the king’s body and the body politic was instrumentalized by the Revolutionary imaginary. The king’s body was presented as corrupted by a life of luxury and leisure. The problems of the body politic were attributed to the disease of the king, who was portrayed as effeminate and weakened.43 Revolutionary rhetoric constructed a counterpoint to the corrupted royal body: the image of the clean, healthy, and virtuous Republican woman/mother based on a reading of Rousseau. Degenerate effeminate manners were replaced with healthy Republican motherhood.44 Yet in Krüdener’s novel, written after the waning 43

44

See Roy Porter’s article on the effects of consumption—in its double sense—on the king’s body and his body politic: Roy Porter, “Consumption: Disease of a Consumer Society?,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. by John Brewer and Roy Porter (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 58–81. On this topic, also see the articles in Sara E. Melzer and Kathryn Norberg, eds., From the Royal to the Republican Body: Incorporating the Political in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France (Berkeley: U of California P, 1998). For a detailed discussion of representations of the body politic in the Revolutionary period, see Bernadette Fort, ed., Fictions of the French Revolution (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1991); Joan B. Landes, Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in

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of Revolutionary enthusiasm, the Terreur, and the Napoleonic wars, motherhood no longer holds the promise of a healthy body politic. Valérie’s body does not bring forth healthy offspring for the new Republic. When Valérie gives birth, Gustave recites a song, copied in Valérie’s hand, that he finds lying on the piano: J’aimais une jeune bergère. Après neuf mois de marriage, Instants trop courts! Elle allait me donner un gage De nos amours, Quand la Parque, qui tout ravage, Trancha ses jours. (879) [I loved a young shepherdess. After nine months of marriage Too short! She was going to give me a token of our love When Fate, which destroys everything, cut her days short.]

The pastoral song’s tragic outcome foreshadows the novel’s ensuing events. Valérie stays alive yet her son Adolphe dies shortly after his birth, plunging the mother into grief and melancholy. Gustave’s mistaken belief that the song is Rousseau’s is significant as it reflects contemporary associations of the discourse on motherhood with this thinker.45 Valérie’s uncorrupted youth provides the basis for the ideal of healthy motherhood, yet her body’s frailty fails to ensure viable offspring. Her inadequacy for the Republican project marks the Revolutionary family romance’s impasse, its lack of a harmonious conclusion. Adolphe is not the only unviable offspring in the post-Revolutionary family romance; so is Gustave. His rebirth as the count’s adoptive son ultimately leads to his self-destruction. Constructing Valérie as an ideal in the image of his mother is Gustave’s attempt to avoid slipping from the role of

45

Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001); Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988); Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture (New Haven: Yale UP, 1989); and Mona Ozouf, La fête révolutionnaire, 1789–1799 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). In his footnote on page 879 of the novel, the editor, Raymond Trousson, states that, while the author of the song is unknown, it is not Rousseau.

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adoptive son to the incestuous position of lover. The effort required by this project of idealization and substitution allows the protagonist to remain a part of his adoptive family, yet it robs him of his mental and physical strength and eventually leads to his death. In order not to succumb to his attraction to Valérie, Gustave replaces his adoptive mother with a number of fetishized substitutes, such as her portrait by the famous Swiss painter Angelica Kauffmann: Je me suis établi dans le petit salon jaune: j’y avais fait placer le portrait de Valérie [...] Audessous du tableau, qui occupe une grande place, est une ottomane de toile des Indes: je m’y suis assis; j’ai fait du feu; j’ai mis auprès de l’ottomane un grand oranger que Valérie aime beaucoup; j’ai arrangé la table à thé; j’en ai pris comme j’en prenais avec elle, car elle l’aime passionément. Le parfum du thé et de l’oranger, la place où elle était assise, et où je n’ai eu garde de m’asseoir, croyant la voir occupée par elle, tout m’a rappelé ce temps de ravissants souvenirs. (891) [I settled in the small yellow sitting room; I had Valérie’s portrait hung there [...] Under the painting, which covers a large space, there is an ottoman of Indian canvas: I sat on it, I lit a fire; and next to the ottoman I placed a tall orange tree that Valérie likes a lot; I laid the tea table; I took tea as if she were there, because she likes it passionately. The scent of the tea and of the orange tree, the spot where she had sat, and where I made sure not to sit, believing it was occupied by her, everything reminded me of this time of delightful memories.]

Gustave’s idealization of Valérie, aimed at maintaining the substitute family structure, turns into idolatry. His attempt to repress his incestuous desire also acknowledges its existence. By establishing a shrine to Valérie and decorating it with exotic objects and pleasurable smells, he creates distance to the object of his desire while, simultaneously, establishing immediacy based on the sensual remembrance of things past. The clash between Gustave’s physical desire for and his idealization of Valérie leads him to seek out imperfect copies of the woman he cannot possess. He is able to maintain the ideal of Valérie by projecting his physical longings onto a different woman. One evening, Gustave wanders the streets of Venice and sees a woman whom he believes to be Valérie. When he hears someone referring to this woman as Bianca, he realizes his mistake but does not want to abandon its salutary effects. He lingers in front of the house Bianca entered; the illusion is continued when someone opens the window and throws out orange peels, which remind him of an evening spent with Valérie and fill his senses with “une volupté inexprimable” [“an indescribable voluptuousness”] (887):

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Il y avait quinze jours, qu’assis auprès de Valérie [...] Valérie avait engagé les autres à aller souper, se plaignant d’un léger mal de tête, et ne voulant manger que quelques oranges qu’elle me pria de lui apporter; nous étions restés seuls [...] elle me jeta quelques écorces d’oranges. J’en vis une que ses lèvres avaient touchée, je l’approchai des miennes; un frisson délicieux me fit tressaillir, je recueillis ces écorces: je respirais leur parfum; il me semblait que l’avenir venait se mêler à mes présentes délices. (888) [Fifteen days ago I was sitting next to Valérie [...] Valérie had asked the others to go and have dinner as she had a slight headache and only wanted some oranges that she asked me to bring to her; we were alone [...] she threw some orange peels at me. I saw one that her lips had touched, I brought it to my lips; a delicious shudder made me shiver; I gathered those peels: I inhaled their perfume; it seemed that the future mingled with my present delight.]

The smell of oranges triggers the remembrance of happy times past. While Gustave cannot approach the count’s wife, he can kiss the orange peels, place an orange tree next to Valérie’s portrait and, later on, approach Bianca, the daughter of a poor opera composer. Bianca becomes the imperfect copy of the unattainable ideal: “je sens que Bianca fait quelquefois une vive impression sur mes sens. Ce n’est rien de ce trouble céleste qui mêle ensemble tout mon être, et me fait rêver au ciel” [“I feel that, sometimes, Bianca makes a lively impression on my senses. It does not compare to that celestial turmoil stirring my whole being and making me dream of heaven”] (903). In contrast to Valérie, Bianca allows him “quelques petites libertés” [“some small liberties”] (903). Gustave attempts to merge the copy with the ideal by asking Bianca to perform as Valérie. He stages an elaborate fantasy with the help of fetishized objects: “Oui, Bianca [...] j’ai encore une prière à vous faire” [...] j’allai dans une des plus belles boutiques à la mercerie, acheter un châle bleu, très beau, comme celui que porte Valérie et qu’elle a presque toujours [...] “laisse moi relever vos cheveux tout simplement [...] il faut encore ôter ce tablier de couleur; il faut que votre robe soit toute blanche.” Et j’arrangeai sa robe afin qu’elle coulât doucement en longs replis jusqu’à terre; puis je tirai le châle bleu, je le jetai négligemment sur ses épaules: “Voilà qui est fait [...] actuellement, Bianca, permettez que je m’asseye là, vis-à-vis de vous.” Je posai les lumières de manière à projeter son ombre vers moi, et à ne l’éclairer que faiblement; je travaillais ainsi à construire le plus artistement possible, une illusion [...] “Chantez la romance d’hier [...] Diminuez votre voix.” [...] Je croyais la voir; je fermais les yeux à moitié pour voir moins distinctement: alors ces cheveux, cette taille, ce châle, cette tête que je l’avais priée d’incliner un peu, tout me paraissait Valérie. Mon imagination se monta à un point incroyable; la réalité était disparue, le passé revivait, m’enveloppait; la voix que j’entendais m’envoyait les accents de l’amour; j’étais hors de moi; je frissonais, je brûlais tour à tour. (906) [“Yes, Bianca [...] I have one more request” [...] I went to one of the nicest boutiques in the haberdashery and bought a beautiful blue shawl, like the one that Valérie wears most of the time [...] “let me simply put up your hair [...] we still have to remove this colorful apron;

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your dress has to be completely white.” And I arranged her dress in such a manner that it flowed in long folds to the ground; then I took the blue shawl and I threw it negligently over her shoulders: “Now we are done [...] at present, Bianca, allow me to sit there, facing you.” I set the lights in such a way that her shadow was projected towards me and that she was only softly lit; I was working to construct, as artistically as possible, an illusion [...] “Sing the romance from yesterday [...] lower your voice.” I thought I saw her; I half-closed my eyes to see less distinctly. The hair, the waist, the shawl, the head that I had asked her to incline slightly, everything resembled Valérie. My imagination heightened to an unbelievable point; reality had disappeared, the past returned and enveloped me; the voice I heard sent me accents of love; I was beside myself, in turn I shivered and burned.]

The hairdo, the dress, and the blue shawl are all items worn by Valérie on a previous occasion. Having staged the illusion, Gustave nearly succumbs to it: “je m’élançai vers elle pour la saisir dans mes bras; ma démence allait jusqu’à l’appeler Valérie; dans ce moment on frappa à la porte” [“I rushed toward her in order to pull her into my arms; my madness went so far as to call her Valérie; at that moment someone knocked on the door”] (906–7). But before Gustave entirely loses control, Bianca’s brother-in-law, Angelo, reerects the barrier separating Valérie from Bianca by intruding on the illusion and thereby destroying it. Bianca discards the shawl and now the doppelgänger merely appears as a “marionnette qui ne se doutait nullement de [s]on âme” [“puppet that had no idea of [its] soul”] (907). Bianca is rescued from the protagonist’s intense desire by a deus ex machina in the form of her brother-in-law. Valérie’s purity is not even sullied in her substitute; her fetishes never fulfill Gustave’s desire. As in Werther, the image of the idealized woman is never in danger because characters do not succumb to their physical desire. In contrast to Goethe’s novel, however, the male letter writer’s restraint does not lead him to shoot himself. Gustave, consumed by passion, reassures his friend: “Ne t’effraie pas, Ernest, jamais je n’attenterai à ma vie; jamais je n’offenserai cet être qui compta mes jours, et me donna pendant si longtemps un bonheur si pur [...] je n’accuserai pas le ciel de mes malheurs, comme font tant de mes semblables; je souffrirai, sans me plaindre, la peine dont je fus l’artisan, et que j’aime, quoiqu’elle me tue: je souffrirai, mais je dormirai ensuite” [“Do not be frightened Ernest, I will never take my own life; I will never offend the being that counted my days and has given me pure happiness for such a long time [...] I will not blame the heavens for my misfortunes, as many of those like me do; I will suffer, without complaining, from the pain that I caused and that I like, even though it kills me: I will suffer, but then I will sleep”] (916). Gustave’s rejection of suicide and his criticism of those who blame God for their misfortunes represent Krüdener’s direct criticism of Werther’s ending. Werther not only commits suicide but also justifies his decision by stating that “du, Geist des 140

Himmels, begünstigst meinen Entschluß” [“Thou, Spirit of heaven, lookest upon my resolve with favour”].46 Gustave’s explicit rejection of suicide differs not only from Werther’s decision but also from that of the other novel to which Valérie was compared, Staël’s Delphine. Staël’s female protagonist poisons herself; Krüdener criticized this ending in a letter to her friend Bérenger: Vous l’avez lu, sans doute, cet autre “roman dont l’héroïne, d’ailleurs si généreuse et si bonne, épouvante tant son sexe par le suicide” [...] Malgré les beautés dont il étincelle, il ne doit pas réussir [...] Et la religion “est là debout” pour frapper de mort cette doctrine, d’autant plus effrayante que le talent qui cherche à la propager est immense [...] Je ne vois dans Delphine que la triste victime d’une passion forte et malheureuse, et dans ses dernières actions, que les inconséquences d’une tête qui ne raisonne plus.47 [You have probably read the other “novel whose heroine, otherwise so generous and good, terrifies her sex by her suicide” [...] Despite its sparkling beauty it cannot succeed [...] And religion disapproves of this doctrine, which is all the more frightening because the talent that tries to propagate it is immense [...] In Delphine I only see the sad victim of a strong and unfortunate passion and in her last actions I see the inconsistency of a mind that no longer reasons.]

Krüdener’s characterization of Delphine’s ending as immoral is audible in this passage, even though she takes great care to underline Staël’s morality at other points in this letter. Gustave’s comment regarding Werther’s end allows Krüdener to emphasize her morality by underlining its religious base. She thereby, once more, strategically explores the approximations between the novel and her life made by readers and herself. The author rejects suicide, yet the protagonist’s death is the only logical conclusion in a narrative that outlines the failure of the Revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity and personifies the body politic in the protagonist’s body. Gustave’s suffering is symptomatic of the body politic’s pain under the Terreur and the ensuing Revolutionary Wars. His refusal to accept the disharmony of his adoptive family and the inattainability of his ideal projects him into a masochistic cycle of lament that ultimately results in his self-annihilation. He rejects Werther’s pistol but gradually wastes away through the “éternelles répétitions” (849) of “tous les détails” (869) relating to Valérie: “T’écrire, te dire tout, c’est revivre dans chaque instant de la nouvelle existence qu’elle m’a créée [...] Tout fortifie sa naissante amitié; 46

47

Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werther (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1986), p. 146. English translation from Johann Wolfgang Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, trans. by Michael Hulse (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 131. Quoted in Ley, Madame de Krüdener, p. 244.

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tout alimente ma dévorante passion: elle met entre nous deux son innocence; et l’univers reste pour elle comme il est, tandis que tout est changé pour moi” [“To write to you, to tell you everything, is to relive every moment of the new existence she has created for me [...] Everything strengthens her nascent friendship; everything feeds my devouring passion: she places her innocence between us; and the universe remains unchanged for her, while everything has changed for me”] (862–63). Gustave’s accounts to Ernest at first relieve his tension, yet they also torture him with inattainability of his ideal. Gustave’s awareness of the clash between his passion and Valérie’s friendship emphasizes his awkward position in his adoptive family. In order to reestablish harmony, Gustave needs to disappear from the family structure. He does not commit suicide directly but begins to self-mutilate. The pleasure and pain of repetitive letter writing are transformed into Gustave’s more physical attempts on his body’s integrity. In the course of a gondola excursion, Gustave is overwhelmed by the awkwardness of his position in the count’s family: Je détestais l’amour, le comte, et moi-même plus que tout le reste; et quand la barque rentra dans le canal et se rapprocha du rivage, je saisis un instant où elle était près de moi, je sautai à terre, ne voulant plus renfermer mes horribles sentiments dans l’espace étroit d’une gondole; je m’accrochai aux branches d’un buisson, et je vis avec délice couler mon sang de mes mains meurtries, que j’enfonçai dans les épines: une espèce de rage indéfinissable me poussait; il s’y mêlait une sorte de volupté; et, tout en détestant les caresses que Valérie faisait au comte, j’aimais à me les retracer; j’en créais de nouvelles; ma jalousie était avide de nouveaux tourments: je sentais aussi que je rompais les dernier liens de la vertu en commençant à haïr le comte. (909–10) [I hated love, the count, and myself more than the rest. When the boat entered the canal and approached the shore, I seized a moment when she was close to me and I jumped onshore. I no longer wanted to contain my horrible feelings in the tight space of a gondola; I hung on to the branches of a bush, and, with delight, I saw blood run from my bruised hands. I drove them into the thorns: an indefinable rage pushed me; a type of voluptuousness mixed with it. While I hated the caresses that Valérie bestowed upon the count, I loved retracing them; I created new ones; my jealousy was avid for new torments: I also felt that I ruptured the last bonds of virtue because I started hating the count.]

Gustave’s Oedipal conflict transforms the accidental experience of pain into a conscious pursuit of it. His love for his adoptive mother and hate for his adoptive father are translated into self-loathing. Gustave’s anger at his impossible position in his adoptive family is turned inward when his mind compulsively repeats painful scenes and his body becomes a displaced target for his frustration.

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Gustave realizes that he needs to separate from the count’s family and travels on his own in search of mental peace. Yet rather than relieving him, this decision further propels him into the self-destructive cycle that he has entered: Mais alors toute la douleur de la séparation vint me saisir [...] Je courus à ma chambre; je me jetai à terre, frappant ma tête contre le plancher, et répétant en gémissant le nom de Valérie. “Hélas! me disais-je, elle ne m’entendra donc plus jamais!” Erich, le vieux Erich entra. Ce n’était pas la première fois qu’il m’avait vu dans cet état violent: il me gronda. Je feignis de me jeter sur mon lit pour le renvoyer; je passai plusieurs heures dans la plus violente agitation, et je résolus de t’écrire. Je retrouvai dans ma tête toutes les situations douloureuses de cette journée; cela me calmait: il est si doux de donner au moins une idée du trouble qui nous détruit! (921) [But then, the pain of the separation took hold of me [...] I ran to my room, threw myself onto the ground and hit my head against the floor while I moaned and repeated Valérie’s name. “Alas! I told myself, she will never hear me again!” Erich, the old Erich entered. This was not the first time he saw me in this violent state: he scolded me. I pretended to throw myself onto the bed to send him away; I spent several hours in the most violent agitation, and I resolved to write to you. In my head, I once more encountered the day’s painful situations; this calmed me: it is so sweet, at least, to give an idea of the trouble that destroys us!]

Gustave repeatedly beats his head against the floor, attempting, not for the first time, to drown his emotional suffering with intensely painful physical sensations. This repetitive physical action parallels his compulsive writing. Gustave inscribes the paper and his body with his mental suffering, which projects him into a repetitive cycle of masochistic lament from which he cannot escape. At the end of the novel, Gustave’s mental suffering has impaired his physical health to such a degree that he can no longer actively hurt himself. He has become too weak to engage in self-mutilation or to write to Ernest. The pen has been removed from his hand; therefore the count narrates Gustave’s last days on his deathbed: une fièvre dévorante le consume; elle est accompagnée d’un délire qui vient tous les soirs à la même heure, et qui empêche le malade de prendre le moindre repos [...] L’agitation la plus violente était dans ses traits, sa poitrine oppressée était découverte, et je frémis en voyant sa maigreur. Ses mains se plaçaient alternativement sur sa tête, où il paraissait souffrir, et retombaient sur le lit. Il me regarda avec des yeux égarés, mais sans témoigner la moindre surprise. (941) [a devouring fever consumes him; it is accompanied by a delirium that returns every evening at the same time and prevents the patient from resting at all [...] The most violent agitation was in his features, his oppressed chest was uncovered and I shuddered when I saw his

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thinness. He placed his hands on his head, which seemed to ache, and then they fell onto the bed. He looked at me with distraught eyes, but without any sign of surprise.]

Gustave is consumed by the literalized fires of passion but only dies after the count expresses his knowledge of his adoptive son’s dilemma and forgives him: “Cher Gustave! calmez-vous. Je sais tout, je vous plains, je vous aime, je donnerais ma vie pour vous” [“Dear Gustave! calm down. I know everything, I pity you, I love you, I would give my life for you”] (944). Gustave is “soulagé d’un poids terrible” [“relieved of a horrible weight”] (944). This relief is heightened by the count’s revelation that Valérie, to whom Gustave wrote a letter confessing his love, also “sait tout” [“knows everything”] (947). After this collective absolution, Gustave, for the first time, calls the count “[m]on père” [my father]” (947) and makes his last arrangements. The novel ends with the count viewing Gustave’s corpse and closing his coffin: “Je posai mes lèvres sur son front glacé: ‘ô mon fils! Mon fils! [...]’ C’est tout ce que je pus dire. Je restai immobile” [“I put my lips on his cold forehead: ‘O my son! My son [...]’ This is all that I could say. I stood there without moving” (961). The count laments the substitute family’s failure to create a healthy social body. The post-Revolutionary family romance concludes with the extinction of Gustave’s body, which functions metonymically in representing the failure of Revolutionary ideals to establish a healthy body politic. Gustave’s story is that of an individual who dies as a result of unrequited passion, yet its implications transcend the private level by engaging contemporary public political discourse. Valérie functions as a family romance in Lynn Hunt’s sense; the novel establishes parallels between the smallest social unit, the family, and the national family in the postRevolutionary social fabric. Krüdener’s use of the epistolary genre for her family romance allowed her to express her concern with, as Elizabeth H. Cook argues, “the boundaries of public and private—and with questions of gender and corporealization that are inextricably involved in this definition.”48 The private story of Gustave’s body has political implications at a time in which the body of the individual was no longer embedded in the old hierarchy and not yet situated in a new stable social universe. The epistolary narrative of the individual’s physical and mental suffering manifests a process that Peter Brooks has called “body work.”49 In the postRevolutionary period, “each body must in turn be made semiotic—receive 48

49

Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the EighteenthCentury Republic of Letters (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996), p. 12. Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 1993).

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the mark of meaning. Narratives often dramatize the making of that mark of meaning, the process by which the body becomes an intelligible sign.”50 The body no longer has an a priori signification and has to go through a painful process of redefinition. Analyzing the pathologies of the “most private of affairs,”51 the human body, implies an interrogation of the failures of the body politic, its public counterpart, in the same way that the family romance is also a story about the national family. Julie de Krüdener’s 1805 epistolary novel demonstrates a private narrative’s public implications at a time when the changes in the French national body politic had caused upheaval in the entire European political fabric, first with the French Revolutionary and then the Napoleonic wars. The impasse with which the novel ends—the reestablishment of peace through the annihilation of the failed social experiment of a substitute family structure— reflects the larger sense of political questioning regarding the long-standing political conflict in which European powers had been engaging in the aftermath of the French Revolution. In the same way that Krüdener shrewdly and carefully combines fictional and autobiographical elements in Valérie, she also strategically embeds the novel’s political referentiality in the recognizable literary form of an individual’s epistolary complaint. The private is the public for this woman author who, in order to successfully market her writings in the cosmopolitan and international republic of letters, deplored the corruption of the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity and their translation into increasingly nationalistic tendencies. Krüdener’s cosmopolitanism constituted an integral part of her appeal for the literary marketplace. Her friends and reviewers presented her foreignness as the exotic appeal of this author writing in French, the literary lingua franca of her time. Contemporaries’ difficulty in correctly pinpointing Krüdener’s national, regional, and linguistic provenance became a constitutive element of her appeal. In order to maintain her identity as an exotic rather than a suspicious femme de lettres, Krüdener was dependent on the free trade of ideas, books, and consumer goods, which was threatened by the increasingly nationalistic tendencies of her time. She strategically situated herself in the cosmopolitan republic of letters that incarnated the ideals of liberté, égalité, and fraternité. When the Terreur, the French Revolutionary Wars, and the Napoleonic period stained the political application of these ideals, Krüdener searched for a political model that could transcend the factionalism of her time. She envisioned an international Christian republic that could end the 50 51

Ibid., p. 54. Ibid., p. 33.

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violence. This vision was based on her desire to “faire revivre le christianisme communautaire primitif en régénérant celui de son temps, entaché des violences de la Révolution” [“participate in the rebirth of communal primitive Christianity by regenerating that of her time which had been stained by Revolutionary violence”].52 In her later life, this desire led her to preach publicly, even to European dignitaries, about her desire to replace Napoleon, whom she saw as the head of the empire’s political violence, with a leader worthy of guiding the Christian republic. Krüdener found this leader in the person of the Russian emperor Alexander whom she exhorted to lead a new Christian Church and to defeat Napoleon. Under her influence, Alexander drew up the Treaty of the Holy Alliance (1815) between Russia, Austria, and Prussia; these countries’ leaders resolved “to take for their sole guide the precepts of the Holy Religion, namely the precepts of Justice, Christian Charity and Peace.”53 Krüdener’s suggestion of an ideal social structure based on the Christian principles of justice, charity, and peace—often portrayed as feminine figures in allegorical representations—is consistent with her construction of an idealized feminine figure in her epistolary novel. Valérie foreshadows these political ideals on a fictional level and allows Krüdener to strengthen her selfpresentation as a moral figure in the early-nineteenth-century literary marketplace. Projecting a “moi idéal pudique” [“ideal and modest I”] was all the more important since Krüdener had engaged in extramarital affairs and even had an illegitimate child.54 Idealizing herself through her protagonist was geared at fading this stain on her reputation, as was her political engagement in the name of Christianity. Yet the establishment of an ideal failed to guarantee a viable body politic both in Krüdener’s 1805 novel and in the aftermath of the 1815 Holy Alliance. In the same way that Gustave’s body eventually wastes away as a result of the inattainability of his ideal, the Holy Alliance’s vision of a Christian transnational body politic would gradually be translated into the signatories’ repressive policies toward nationalist and liberal movements and into Krüdener’s imperialist dreams. Alexander exiled her in 1822 because she publicly expressed her desire to see him “reconquérir les Saints Lieux” [“reconquer the Holy Places”].55 Her desire to see Christianity enter the “murs de Constantinople” [“walls of Constantinople”] amounted to a call for a new Crusade, from which the Russian emperor 52 53

54 55

Ley, “Madame de Krüdener,” p. 66. Quoted in James Hastings and John A. Selbie, Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, 24 vols (Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing, 2003), XXIV, p. 446. Janine Rossard, Pudeur et Romantisme (Paris: Librairie A.G. Nizet, 1982), p. 35. Quoted in Ley, “Madame de Krüdener,” p. 69.

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wanted to distance himself; he exiled Krüdener to the Crimean peninsula, where she died in 1824.56 Valérie expresses the impasse experienced by an author who lived in the post-Revolutionary period and experienced the Terreur, the French Revolutionary Wars, and Napoleon’s rule. Krüdener used the republic of letters to reflect on new ways of constructing a viable body politic via her protagonist Gustave. Valérie leads to the conclusion that political ideals, notwithstanding their imagined purity, eventually lead to the corruption of that body they are supposed to protect from violence, torture, and death. Gustave’s total devotion to the feminine ideal ushers in his gradual destruction; his body—as a representation of the body politic—eventually falls apart. At the same time that the feminine ideal anchors the novel’s political referentiality, it also serves as the author’s strategic selfpresentation. Krüdener presents herself in the image of the idealized feminine character who, unaffected by the fires of passion, never strays from the path of rectitude. This self-presentation was especially important, not only because Krüdener herself had succumbed to extramarital attraction but also because she was politically active and thereby questioned gender roles and the related precepts of privacy and publicity. Krüdener’s play with her novel’s autobiographical underpinnings and her veiling of its political referentiality therefore needs to be explored as her strategic positioning on the earlynineteenth-century literary marketplace and political sphere. Rather than seeing the tensions inherent in this self-positioning as paradoxical, exploring their complexity allows for an understanding of a woman author not as an appendage to a famous male contemporary but as a social agent strategically negotiating the interwoven discourses of gender and genre.

56

Quoted in Ley, “Madame de Krüdener,” p. 69.

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Conclusion Writing Back, Reading Forward

Intertextual dialogue is a feature of all literary discourse. No author writes in a void; any publication is always already a response to prior texts, literary genres, and intellectual debates. The specific type of intertextuality, however, depends on the historical and intellectual context and the author’s position on the literary marketplace. As a result of eighteenth- and early-nineteenthcentury concept of genders, women had to situate their literary contribution carefully and strategically. Responding to a popular text by a well-known author was part of that strategy. It allowed authors such as Helen Maria Williams, Ellis Cornelia Knight, Karoline von Günderrode, and Julie de Krüdener to awaken readers’ curiosity by providing a recognizable literary framework. Referencing Rousseau’s Julie, Johnson’s Rasselas, Voltaire’s Mahomet, and Goethe’s Werther established a launching pad for the successful dissemination of their texts. Financial considerations had become important to authors by the late eighteenth century because the earlier system of patronage had all but disappeared. This observation applies, of course, to both women and men of this period. Yet for those women who were literate, primarily from the upper middle classes and the aristocracy, writing was one of the few acceptable means of earning an income or of contributing financially to the household in economically challenging times. It is, therefore, no coincidence that the four authors’ publishing efforts were triggered by the disappearance of their family’s male provider. For Günderrode, Knight, and Williams, it was the death of their father, and for Krüdener, the separation and eventual divorce from her husband that provided the impetus for publishing and marketing their writing. Referring to a famous text provided a recognizable context for these women’s literary contribution, yet it also highlighted their paradoxical position in the aftermath of the French Revolution. The call for liberty and equality had been heard in France and in neighboring European countries, but a literal interpretation of the concept of fraternity created obstacles to women’s entrance into the publishing world. The discursive consolidation of women’s supposed “incommensurable difference” and its naturalization into narrowly defined gender roles created an aura of disrepute for any woman

seeking access to the late-eighteenth-century public sphere. The Lumières’ ideals of freedom and equality were eroded in the aftermath of the French Revolution. This was the case not only in France but also in other European countries, where the first enthusiasm for the political implementation of Enlightenment ideals had waned after Robespierre’s bloody reign and Napoleon’s emergence as a national leader with international aspirations. In this context, women who were active in the public sphere were either punished physically such as Olympe de Gouges or labeled with terms that reprimanded them for their transgression. By definition, publishing women participated in the public sphere and therefore diverged from the discursively established apolitical realm of femininity. Derogative terminology such as Richard Polwhele’s characterization of Williams as “unsex’d” or Goethe’s description of Krüdener as a “whore” attempted to force these publicly vocal women back into a narrowly conceived sphere of privacy. The dissemination of these labels was inextricably tied to the economic realities of the literary marketplace, which had become a true industry by the turn of the century. The anxiety felt by established authors about women’s increasing presence on the literary scene can be witnessed in Goethe and Schiller’s exchange of letters on this topic and their use of the term “dilettante” to dismiss women writers as amateurs.1 Those authors who could be turned away with the threat of impropriety lessened the competition for publishers and readers. Those women who entered and remained in the literary sphere were characterized as second-class citizens of the republic of letters. The realities of the literary marketplace were closely tied to the emergence and establishment of fiction as the genre, attracting a wider readership and presenting greater financial opportunities than poetry and drama. While the public dimension of the stage still acted as a deterrent to many women, fiction provided them with a literary venue that transcended poetry’s connotations of privacy without foregrounding the public aspect of the writing profession. The case of Helen Maria Williams illustrates this particularly forcefully. At the same time that Williams published political reports on the French Revolution, she also explored the potential of the fictional genre. In Julia, she used the plot of a sentimental romance, changed the narrative premises by abandoning the epistolary form of Rousseau’s Julie, and carefully embedded political reflections. Authors’ perception of the novel as a new genre allowed for a malleability that resulted in hybrid textual

1

For a detailed discussion of Goethe and Schiller’s writing on female authorship and dilettantism, see Helen Fronius, Women and Literature in the Goethe Era, 1770–1820: Determined Dilettantes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), pp. 62–66.

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creations such as Julia, which combined fiction with poetry, and allowed Williams to reach a different readership than her Letters. Williams was not the only author who experimented with fictional forms; so did Knight, Günderrode, and Krüdener. Knight’s Dinarbas fuses the new genre, the novel, with elements from an old narrative tradition, the romance, in order to explore the interdependence between the individual’s public role in society and his or her private identity. The result of Knight’s fusion of genres is that her characters—unlike those in Johnson’s Rasselas— experience adventures that illustrate the mingling of their private and public roles. The creative adaptation of the textual predecessor also informs Günderrode’s text. Rather than responding to Voltaire’s drama with a play of her own, Günderrode chose the form of the Lesedrama, a play meant for reading rather than performance. Situating Mahomed in the hybrid space created by the intersection between the dramatic and the fictional genre allowed Günderrode to creatively avoid the negative associations regarding female authorship and the public aspect of the stage. Günderrode’s careful approach to writing and publishing is paralleled by Krüdener’s selfpositioning. Krüdener’s strategic yet cautious play with the autobiographical dimension of her epistolary novel Valérie allowed her to tease readers with the intimation of potentially scandalous revelations while constructing an image of irreproachable femininity. The expression of this feminine ideal through a Wertherian epistolary account, in turn, serves as the vehicle for the novel’s political referentiality. The epistolary subject’s intense mental and physical sufferings become an allegorical representation of the body politic’s pain in the post-Revolutionary period. The four authors’ exploration of the malleability of the fictional form contributed to the genre’s development and its success with the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century reading public. Günderrode, Knight, Krüdener, and Williams carefully negotiated contemporary requirements for female propriety at the same time that they challenged those prescriptions. On the one hand, these authors seemingly conformed to the expectation of women’s invisibility in the public sphere by publishing anonymously, under a pseudonym, or with the help of a male intermediary. Yet on the other, writing a sequel to or an adaptation of a wellknown text directed a bright spotlight at their publication and heightened curiosity about the author’s identity, as did their active marketing efforts. They thereby hastened the process of lifting the veil of anonymity, which tended to be a short-lived form of protection in the interconnected European literary and social circles of the late eighteenth century. The analytical concept of writing back explores the signification of such ambivalences in

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late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century women authors’ positioning on the literary scene. The idea of writing back highlights the political stakes of being a woman writer in the post-Revolutionary period; it is a tool for retracing the strategies that informed her literary enterprise. The use of a twentieth-century concept for the analysis of eighteenth-century literature is intended as a defamiliarizing gesture. The analytical framework of writing back, imbued with the awareness of the political dimension to the act of writing, enables a reading of Mahomed, Dinarbas, Valérie, and Julia that goes beyond classifying these texts as pure imitations. Each chapter in this book has shown that these women authors’ negotiation of gender discourse with the realities of the political context and the literary marketplace makes them more than secondclass citizens of the republic of letters. Each author’s entrance into this transnational and multilingual sphere constituted an act of writing back, a strategically conceived literary response. These writers were neither opportunistic imitators of fashionable literature nor powerless victims of the dominant discourse. Their literary acts engaged the premises of popular writings of their time through an exploration of the possibilities provided by the genre of fiction. The four case studies in Women Write Back therefore argue for an inclusion of women authors beyond their relegation to appendices or footnotes in traditional literary histories. The analysis of processes of writing back necessarily entails the reconsideration of the texts to which these women responded and their position in the literary canon. Goethe, Johnson, Rousseau, and Voltaire have secured their place in the eighteenth-century canon, yet Günderrode, Knight, Krüdener, and Williams have largely been excluded or have only been received in gender-specific ways. Therefore, uncovering the exclusionary mechanisms of canon formation is a necessary if challenging endeavor as we, in the twenty-first century, attempt to come to terms with the ambivalent legacy of the period of Enlightenment, Aufklärung, and Lumières, commonly invoked as the origin of Western democracy. Women Write Back continues the work done by feminist scholars over the past three decades. While these critics are not the only ones interested in women authors, the recovery of such writers has, in practice, correlated with feminist literary scholarship. The current position of academic feminism— seen as an ailing and even dying discipline by some—poses the question of the future of recovering neglected texts by women. While the appropriateness of feminist approaches for the analysis of non-Western women authors is rarely questioned even during this time of disciplinary crisis, it has come under fire for the discussion of our own literary heritage. In addition to 152

establishing a problematic binary, this assumption presupposes that all women’s contributions to the Western literary tradition have been recovered and that, therefore, all obstacles to true liberty, equality, and fraternity have been overcome. “We” no longer need feminism, but “they” do. But is this really the case? A look at many college syllabi on the literature of this period reveals that the proportion of male authors still by far exceeds that of female writers. Jane Austen might be included, a whole course might even be devoted to her in the wake of the avalanche of cinematic and literary adaptations of her life and writing, yet the basic outlines of many courses on the “age of Johnson,” the “age of Goethe,” and the “age of Voltaire” remain surprisingly similar to those from thirty years ago. Resistance to making course syllabi more inclusive might not even be the main reason for the persistence of these patterns, as material factors play a noticeable role. Anybody teaching an eighteenth-century literature course faces a lack of readily available, user-friendly, and affordable editions of women’s texts for use in the classroom, especially in the case of foreign-language literature. While facsimile reprints or microfiches are necessary research tools, they are less effective for teaching purposes. Photocopies are an option, yet they, once more, contribute to the de facto ghettoization of women authors by establishing a value hierarchy: male authors are reprinted by well-known publishing houses while women writers are photocopied on a machine at the local copy shop. The same applies to online editions if these are the only venues for republishing literature by women. Publishing new print editions of women writers is therefore one of the main goals for scholars who want to ensure that previous generations of feminist literary critics’ work continues to matter. The paradox faced by these scholars is that reediting or translating a literary text, especially one by an unknown author, rarely “counts” in the academic sense of the term. While it renders an “old” text accessible to a “new” audience, its use for tenure and promotion purposes is limited. The realities of the academic publishing market thereby perpetuate the cycle in which these authors’ texts have been caught for two centuries. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, discourses on gender and publishing excluded them; in present times, they continue to be invisible because of the lack of publication venues. Those critics who, despite the obstacles, have produced new editions of women authors’ texts certainly have provided a forceful answer to the question of feminist criticism’s role for the analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. Their work highlights the political dimension of the literary marketplace in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the stakes of

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scholarship in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which are fashioned as the inheritors of the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The use of case studies in Women Write Back reflects the need to look at each woman’s specific act of self-positioning in an era that, in practice, often fell short of the ideals that it propagated. In this sense, the present book is not a history of women authors but an illustration of the complexity of their selfpositioning in the aftermath of the French Revolution, the fifteen-year period from 1790 to 1805. Each author’s accession to the literary sphere followed a unique path. This makes it difficult to generalize about the challenges that all women faced during this period. At the same time, however, patterns emerge in these authors’ crafting of their writing and in subsequent reception patterns in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which were often biographical in focus. The four chapters have reconstructed these patterns in order to show that, while none of these authors have been totally erased from (literary) historiography, they have often been remembered more for their connections to famous (male) contemporaries than for their writing. The aim of this study has been to explore the effect of these women’s personal associations on their creation of an authorial identity and on their subsequent reception. The four case studies in Women Write Back have shown that, in the interconnected literary and social circles of the eighteenth century, a woman’s acquaintance with a famous male contemporary could provide her with an entrance into the literary sphere. Such an acquaintance was, however, also a double-edged sword for the author’s self-positioning and her subsequent critical reception. The case of Ellis Cornelia Knight demonstrates that this self-positioning was even more precarious when it involved the direct response to the acquaintance’s text. Moving in Samuel Johnson’s circles provided Knight with a pathway into the republic of letters, yet it also triggered her subsequent exclusion as an author from literary histories because her direct continuation of Rasselas was received as an improper act of defiance. The biographical approach’s effect on the reception of an author’s oeuvre is also demonstrated by Karoline von Günderrode. Her association with the Brentanos and Friedrich Karl von Savigny led to criticism’s focus on those writings that reflected her relation with these figures, mainly her letters and her poems. A play such as Mahomed did not fit into the biographical pattern of reception and did not, therefore, generate the same amount of critical interest. Similar observations can be made about Julie de Krüdener. Her friendship with famous contemporaries such as Alexander I of Russia secured her a spot in post-Revolutionary historiography as one of the active proponents of the Treaty of the Holy Alliance. This association was an ambivalent one because Alexander eventually exiled 154

her and the Alliance developed the same imperialist and repressive tendencies that it set out to fight in the figure of Napoleon. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Krüdener’s political involvement had not only become suspicious but had also relegated interest in her literary production to the back burner of scholarship. Helen Maria Williams’ political associations had a comparable effect on her reception as an author. As a reporter on the French Revolution and as one of the few observers who maintained the hope that its ideals could be realized, she was excluded from the British literary tradition as a national traitor who had crossed over to the Gallic side, and her reputation was further tarnished by an illicit relationship with John Hurtford Stone. Krüdener’s case illustrates a similar unease over national allegiances. As a result of her multilingual and transnational identity, various national literary traditions are unsure as to whether she can or should be claimed as one of their own. The cosmopolitan realities of the late-eighteenth-century republic of letters necessitate a transnational approach to all of these authors, not only because their allegiances and identities questioned rigidly established national boundaries but because their writing back often occurred across national and linguistic frontiers. The analytical framework of writing back does not imply that women were only responders and that only women responded. Intertextual dialogue was employed by all authors, male and female. Yet when male authors adapted women writers’ literary forms, their engagement was more likely to be read as intertextual dialogue than to be presented as dilettantish imitation. The framework of writing back questions such readings and can therefore be used for the analysis of texts produced by all literary agents who have been erased from traditional literary histories. Creating a space for these writers necessarily extends the past decades’ effort of rethinking the image painted of eighteenth-century literature. How would the canonical figures appear in this image? What would be the position of Goethe, Johnson, Rousseau, and Voltaire in this reconceptualized literary history? My choice of Salvador Dali’s painting “Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire” (1940) for the cover of this book provides a starting point for discussion. The longer we look at Dali’s painting, the more we see. Voltaire’s bust stands at the center, yet it does not occupy the entire space of the painting. Instead, it is surrounded by a bustling scene that seemingly has no direct relation to the eighteenth-century French thinker. Moreover, the bust itself is inhabited by figures and thereby merges into the surrounding scene. When we look at the bust, we simultaneously see Voltaire and two other figures, which have been interpreted either as Dutch merchants or Spanish nuns. The double ambiguity of this image underlines the viewer’s active role in constructing meaning out 155

of perception. The distance between the viewer and the image shrinks as the viewer’s awareness of his/her role in the image’s creation heightens. The spectator is part of the image itself. Like the female figure on the left side of the painting, the viewer is at once outside and inside the main scene of action. The viewer muses on the workings of the marketplace, whether it is the slave market mentioned in the painting’s title or the eighteenth-century literary and cultural marketplace referenced by Voltaire’s bust. In the same way that we create the image on the canvas, we also construct literary history. It does not have an a priori existence but is born from our scholarship. Perceiving the presence of less canonical writers in this painting does not erase a figure such as Voltaire but acknowledges the diversity and interconnectedness of all the agents in the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century literary marketplace.

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