SOURCE: Petschauer, Peter. “Sophie von La Roche: Novelist between Reason and Emotion.” The Germanic Review 57, no. 2 (spring/summer 1982): 70-77.

[In the following essay, Petschauer discusses La Roche's moderate Romanticism.]

During and after her life, Sophie von La Roche was acclaimed for many reasons. Most importantly, she was the first great love of the poet Christoph Martin Wieland, and she was hailed as one of Germany's first successful female novelists. Just as importantly, years before Theodore von Hippel and Mary Wollstonecraft, she concerned herself with issues that later were at the core of feminist discussions.¹ It was a reading of her best known and most acknowledged achievement, Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim, which sparked this further investigation.²

Why did this advocate of better educated and more socially involved women not have a greater permanent appeal? Why did she not emerge as the leading writer of the Romantic movement? Did her sentimentalism get trampled during the general stampede into romantic extremism? Why did her ideas about education, love, and the female role lose their currency so quickly? Did she exhaust any real future personal and intellectual development with her first work? Did she succumb to the dilemma of many transitional figures by embracing fully neither Enlightenment nor Romanticism?

Sophie Gutermann/La Roche lived from 1731 to 1807. At the outset of her long life, Voltaire had not yet published his Lettres philosophiques; at its end, Johann Gottlieb Fichte was just beginning to deliver his famous Reden an die deutsche Nation at the University of Berlin. Sophie achieved her initial notoriety not with her Christian name but as “Doris” in one of Wieland's early poems.³ Long before her story of the Maiden of Starville appeared in print, Germans knew her as the beautiful girl who kissed well. Wieland was not Sophie's first love, but their relationship determined to a considerable extent the way she viewed herself as a growing woman, the way she saw others in her family and circle later, and the way she succeeded and failed in some of her literary efforts. Her first attachment was an otherwise unknown Italian-born courtier Bianconi; she had to give him up at her father's insistence. Her romance and engagement to Wieland did not lead to marriage either, because this time both sets of parents prevented a permanent union. Her parents felt in both cases that the suitor lacked the proper attributes. Bianconi was considered a footloose foreign courtier unsuitable for a burgher's daughter, and Wieland was viewed as a poor poet with little potential.

The man she finally married in 1753, Georg Michael La Roche, later von La Roche, was a mature and understanding person who provided the security of a comfortable household. Through Georg Michael, Sophie gained access to the social and intellectual world of several small German courts, beginning with Mainz. In that city on the Rhine, La Roche served as the secretary to the city's first minister, Count Anton Friedrich Heinrich von Stadion, and Sophie emerged as the unifying intellectual force in their household.⁴ Since La Roche was Stadion's illegitimate son, he was able to carve out such a secure position with Stadion that the eight years at Mainz became a perfect training ground for his wife. She did not have to concern herself with the routine chores of the household and had the time and energy to grow mentally and to develop into its spiritual center.

When Stadion retired in 1762, the LaRoches moved with him to Warthausen near Biberach in Württemberg; once again Sophie excelled as the leading figure of the establishment. By now her fame had spread, and a number of leading figures came to the castle to enjoy its intellectual stimulation. Stadion's death six years later destroyed this beautiful arrangement; because of the hardships and isolation that his passing placed on the LaRoches, Georg Michael had to accept a minor post in Bönnigheim and Sophie turned to writing again. It was this isolation, much intensified when their two daughters left for school, and financial need which spurred Sophie to complete Sternheim.⁵ When Wieland saw the first draft of it, he was so impressed that he offered to help with its launching.⁶ Precisely this help, however, especially some abrasive comments in the first edition of the novel, is said to have put a severe strain on their relationship. For a time, it caused them to seek separate ways.

In many ways the publication of Sternheim was the highlight of Sophie's early life. She began writing the story in the late 1760's and finished it in 1770 or 1771. Conceiving it initially as an admonition to her daughters, she did not contemplate its publication until much of it had been done. This background explains why her style reflects a high degree of spontaneity and the fluctuations of her mental conditions; the second half of the novel, for example, shows clearly that she had regained hope at the end of the stay at Bönnigheim.

In the story itself, a woman, Sophie von Sternheim, plays the chief role. Sternheim's parents died early, and the heroine was brought up by relatives. The overall contest of both experiences instilled in Sternheim an appreciation for the unpretentiousness of the middle and lower rural classes and the duality of the public and private roles of upper-class women. The stay with her relatives also advanced her education and provided her with intensive training in the domestic arts. In addition, she learned to value certain basic moral and ethical standards. After this, she was brought to a nearby court. At this point La Roche took the opportunity to provide, as a backdrop to the advances of a prince and Sternheim's rejections of him, a comparison of simple country life with complex court activities.⁷ Aside from the prince, Sternheim interacted with three other men at court. Two appeared as acceptable examples of male heroes and one as a convincing villain. It was the villain who maneuvered her into a fake marriage. However traumatic the later disasters connected with this union were for Sternheim, she gained the opportunity to live in England, La Roche's favorite place. Already before leaving the continent, Sternheim had discovered the truth about her marriage and Derby, her supposed husband. After he had whisked her away from friends in an exciting capture and after her extended stay in England, he realized that she might cause him difficulties, had her abducted and sent to the lead mines in Scotland where he imprisoned her with a poor mining family. In spite of these and other vicissitudes in England and Scotland, she maintained and strengthened the values and beliefs of her youth, discussed educational ideas, and lived and symbolized La Roche's conceptions of love. After what seemed an eternity, Sternheim was saved by her later husband, Lord Seymour, just as Derby, on his deathbed in England, attempted to have her killed.

Several elements in the story of Fräulein Sternheim made it fascinating in the eyes of La Roche's contemporaries. First of all, the story was written by a woman and highlighted some of the author's life.⁸ Then too, a woman played the leading role. More importantly, it was a woman who did not view marriage as the most significant female pursuit. Connected with this, the story's success must be attributed to the honesty of the principal character and the message that accompanies her. Also, even though the story was different in this sense, it contained some stylistic modifications of late baroque novels; for example, La Roche used letters from three different individuals to highlight or explain a certain point or action.⁹

Sternheim can be viewed readily as an aid to others struggling to define, refine, and enhance their characters. Perhaps most importantly, the novel appealed to those who admired the still fashionable imitations of English works, like Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and Pamela, and allusions to England and who favored the latest rage from France, Jean Jacques Rousseau's Emile and La nouvelle Héloīse. Just as importantly, as sentimental as the novel is, some aspects of it are almost romantic in tone. This trend comes out in the intensity of some of the passions described and of some of the intuitive behavior illustrated.¹⁰

Further, the success of the story must be ascribed to La Roche's interesting social analysis.¹¹ Her perspective was rooted in the thinking of the philosophers and the Aufklärer, but modified by a sentimental view of peasant life. Indeed, her social analysis was rooted both in the Enlightenment and the still embryonic Romanticism. She lauded the poor, simple, yet upright and rich rural life of eighteenth-century Germany; and she captured well the intensifying rejection by the growing middle class of the Frenchification of German society.¹² As Burghard Dedner put it: “As a miserable house, the hut can be the object of disdain and sympathy, as an abode of the virtuous poor, it can be the symbol of an ethical ideal.”¹³

Finally, and in line with these points, the initial success of the story must be attributed to the mix of a new intensity of love and a hope for this kind of love in marriage.¹⁴ La Roche thought that love should be at the center of marriage and that it should be both intense and restrained. She considered love essential to any healthy marital relationship, yet she remained a rationalist in the sense of never allowing love to take on the extreme intensity propounded by the later Romantics.

Not to the least extent, the success of the novel hinged upon La Roche's education ideals, many of which were aimed at improving the training of upper- and lower-, and to some extent, middle-class girls. Sternheim symbolized her ideal female: she was a virtuous, lovely, cultured, educated, and independent woman; in a sense, she was both aristocratic and middle class. La Roche presented an active female who was, at the time of the publication of the novel, an ideal admired by many upper-class and educated persons. Simultaneously though, like Rousseau, she questioned the value of providing advanced education for the vast majority of women and introduced a school model for the job training of lower-class girls which would have kept them from the general public education being introduced especially in Protestant Germany in the 1760's and 1770's. Both concepts, especially the latter, were as up-to-date and modern in 1771 as those of Johann Bernhard Basedow's contemporaneous work on educational theory, the famous Elementarwerk.¹⁵

As successful as Sternheim must have appeared to contemporaries and remained to some extent for several decades, reasons for its decline in public favor are not difficult to find. The most important of these is connected with the shift in the tenor of the German literary scene soon after its publication. What had at first been an advantage quickly turned into a disadvantage. Borrowings from English and French authors were favored less as Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich Schiller issued their first masterworks. Then, too, La Roche did not live up to the expectations of Fräulein Sternheim and retained much of the content of her first book's ideas and opinions in her later efforts.

Two sets of ideas lend themselves especially well to showing the content of her early attitudes and their later advancement beyond that point by the Romantics. Both sets, one dealing with love, and the other with women's education and role, demonstrate how La Roche's moderation was overtaken by her contemporaries' extremism.

Opinions about love changed as quickly in the 1770's as opinions about the education and role of women. Although La Roche did not emphasize marriage, when she proposed that love exert a more profound influence in the arrangement of marriages and a more meaningful place for it in marriages, she reflected the attitudes of many young contemporaries who wanted love, not parental arrangement, to be the reason for and the basis of marriage.¹⁶ When she pleaded for such a marriage in Sternheim, representatives of the Storm and Stress movement hailed her perception and courage, but their image of her was tarnished when she was viewed by some as less natural than Sternheim and, more importantly, when she did not give her own two daughters, Maximiliane and Louise, the choice of marrying for love; for all too practical reasons, they had to enter their unions in traditional eighteenth-century style.¹⁷

To be more specific, throughout the story La Roche struggled with a new conception of love. She showed Sternheim's efforts to preserve her virtue at the nearby court and her determination to find a way to live her kind of life when faced with four different options of love and marriage. Sternheim was first confronted with the flirtatious “love” that was related to love itself only in the sense that some of the same words and gestures were being used. Her sound value structure and deep moral considerations saved her from giving in to the advances of the local prince. At the same time, she improved her emotional and moral strength for future bouts with forms of love La Roche did not approve.¹⁸

La Roche then used the three serious suitors whom she had her heroine meet in these early years of her life to illustrate three other varieties of love and to demonstrate how courtship and love may be used for personal development. While each of these types of love could be considered a reason for getting married, she recommended only one variety as workable. Lord Derby was, of course, the villain who used love as a means of getting his way and succeeded in maneuvering Sternheim into a fictitious marriage.¹⁹ Of the other two suitors, one seemed too forward and the other too reticent. But in the end, the taciturn Lord Seymour won Sternheim's heart; his love combined the emotional attachment he felt for Sternheim with the practical ramification of saving her from Derby's clutches and of providing for her after the marriage ceremony.

The love most favored by La Roche was thus geared to create a morally and emotionally stronger being whose attachment to an individual of the opposite sex led to marriage. According to her, this kind of love enhanced honesty and decency, it almost guaranteed marital happiness; but in order to accomplish these benefits, it had to remain restrained. By contrast, the love advocated by the earliest Romantic works was intense and total and did not necessarily lead to marriage or take place in the marital setting.

The struggle between these two conceptions of love did not flare up seriously until the middle of the 1770's, after the publication of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther.²⁰ By that time, La Roche had spent the three years of isolation in Bönnigheim, and Georg von La Roche had been called into the employ of the bishop of Trier (Treves). Once more she began to lead a fascinating intellectual circle. At their house in Thal-Ehrenbreitstein she renewed the friendship with Wieland as they met again in one of the more romantically described reunions of the century. Friedrich Jacobi, best known for his philosophy of “feeling,” was not the only one who savored the embrace of the two friends at the entrance of the La Roche establishment.²¹ This was also the time in which Sophie began the complex relationship with Goethe. It started very pleasantly in the charmed circle of family and friends, but it ended soon after the publication of Werther. Most importantly, as the head of a household and an intellectual circle, Sophie did not find as much time as she would have liked for writing. In fact, it was not until the late 1770's and especially after her husband was forced into retirement in 1780, that she found the peace and had the financial need to write and publish again.²² At that point she began to address some of the issues about love that Goethe had raised half a decade earlier, but she did not make her fullest statement on the subject until 1801.

Although using Werther as the principal example of the emergent Romantics' view of love may impose some limitations on the present discussion, the personal and familial interaction between Goethe and La Roche and the publication of Goethe's work just three years after Sternheim give the comparison specific meaning.²³ Goethe wrote his seminal work in part because he had experienced great difficulty with resolving the conflict over his unfulfilled love for Maximiliane Brentano, Sophie's daughter and Peter Brentano's wife.²⁴ Whatever the intensity of his agony, either about “Maxe” or the usually mentioned and somewhat earlier Charlotte Buff, he felt moved to have Werther take his life, this suicide being an illustration of a new kind of inner conflict and torment. Goethe portrayed love as uncontrolled, irrational, even capable of total character destruction.

La Roche could not agree with such a radicalization of love. She may have felt that Goethe directed himself against her—it is known that they broke soon after the issuance of Werther²⁵—and that he had espoused a perturbing intensity of love. Although her reaction appears to have been immediate, her most considered judgment of Werther's-Goethe's dilemma came out much later in Schönes Bild der Resignation.²⁶ Toward the end of the second volume, Sir George, one of the principal characters, found his way out of his unanswered love for Eugenie, the heroine. He reconstructed his life by building a school and a hospital in his beloved son's and her own name: suicide was not an alternative for him.

It is almost astonishing how rapidly opinions about the education and role of women changed in the later 1700's and how detrimentally this advance affected Sternheim. One of the major reasons for this was La Roche's presentation of an upper-class woman who was trained to live the traditional dual female role. She felt that the ideal woman should attain a balance between the know-how required to manage a large household and the attributes admired in a learned person.²⁷ It was a conception and a style of life that may be compared to the leading females of French and German salons. On the one hand, these exceptional women arranged for the various needs of the inner house, including appointment of furnishings, managing the supervision of staff, and planning of meals.²⁸ Sternheim represented the ideal La Roche had in mind, especially since she considered only a minute number of women capable of fulfilling this dual role; in her opinion very few women were capable of advancement to higher learning. Even though Sternheim, like La Roche, had only a superficial familiarity with the actual functionings of a household, she had acquired other accepted female talents because of the early death of her father.²⁹ She had, as she said herself, learned to bear sorrow, to sing, to play the lute and to dance. Her morals and conduct were simple, her behavior was “natural”; she was free of passion, only loving virtue ardently. She was pleasingly beautiful in body and mind.³⁰

On the other hand, leading women of salons, similar to La Roche, hosted a circle of intellectuals, engaged in extensive correspondence, and paid numerous visits and received numerous visitors. Somewhat like La Roche, Sternheim parallels them. She was educated under the supervision of her father after the death of her mother, learning several languages, becoming well-versed in history and natural science. Also like her creator, she read every day and probably carried a great portion of her library with her in several suitcases.

La Roche's woman was able to survive in almost any circumstance because of her sound training, moral fortitude and strong character. But at that point, La Roche emphasized the balance of good character and refined intellect, with the first possibly being highlighted. In Scotland Sternheim said, for example, “I have lost a great deal, suffered a lot. But should I forget the happiness of my first years and view indifferently future opportunity to do good. …”³¹

In these emphases one may see a key to the ultimate failure of the novel. La Roche portrayed a woman who was the ideal female of some Aufklärer: traditionally trained and capable of leading a household: rational, reasonable, sensible, and able to engage in mental activity.³² Indeed, according to the Aufklärer, everyone's strength originated with the mind. As a matter of fact, in learning to take care of a household, Sternheim had not fallen out of the even more widely accepted female adult role requirements of the time. However well-educated women might become, it was generally accepted that they should know how to execute properly the basic component of their roles, namely that of being, in the phrase of the time, housemothers.³³ Nevertheless, and in spite of her domestic training, Sternheim was different in that marriage was not an absolute goal for her: for a long time, she chose to remain alone and to do good for the community and not a family.

The novel had hardly been printed when Romantics began to idealize another kind of woman: traditionally trained in the arts of the inner house and thus capable of being a housewife, but just as capable of being a partner and lover. It was now thought that woman's strength originated in her soul. The ideal Romantic's wife married because she loved her husband, because he loved her, and because they both believed that the closeness of their home contained the secret of life-long happiness. The ideal of the female as the housemother of the aristocratic household and of the salon receded as the ideal of the sensitive housewife emerged. The traditional housemother and the sophisticated lady of the salon were replaced by the loving wife and supportive companion. In the intimacy of the small family and the middle-class home, intellectualism was soon crushed.³⁴

The reasons for this change in attitudes were many, and La Roche's inability to grasp its content is part of her personal tragedy. Just as urbanization, governmental centralization and proto-industrialization began, and what one may call the middle class first developed, men and women all over Germany discovered an altered role for women. Whereas the ideal of the first two thirds of the century remained the “Hausmutter” with its complex responsibilities, particularly in the inner spheres of the house, in the last third, the “Hausfrau” (the housewife of the nuclear family) emerged. In a very real sense, Sternheim was not different from the ladies presented in the declining “Hausväter” and “Hausmütter” literature of the late eighteenth century.³⁵ In these books, women were presented as good wives, competent supervisors of the inner house, and readily copied examples for the male and female help. Whereas the generation who came of age in the 1770's and 1780's deemed it less necessary to establish and to maintain large households with large staffs and much ostentatious display, only some members of La Roche's slightly older generation began to reject display for content.

All along, one sees Sternheim develop into more than either a traditional housemother or a loving wife; she was primarily an involved and informed sophisticate. Whereas, however, one or two generations before La Roche's felt encouraged to participate in the discussion of certain aspects of public affairs and scientific inquiry, her own generation began to swing away from such involvement; in this sphere too, it emphasized the private over the public.³⁶ Sophie La Roche presented and stood for ideals that were on their way out.

The same must be said about her educational plans. They were part of the other ideas which La Roche presented and dealt with the methods of training lower-class girls for jobs and possible careers. In Sternheim she put forth an educational program for the young women in this social group that contains the following character and career combination. Through Sternheim she suggested that

1. Gentle, good hearted creatures, I formed into nurses (Kindermädchen)
2. those disposed to jest and manual dexterity, into maids;
3. thoughtful and diligent girls, into cooks, housekeepers;
4. and the last class of those who could work well (dienstfähige) into house and kitchen servants.³⁷

Sternheim was to set up a special school with fourteen girls who were to be trained with these suggestions in mind. But aside from these points, La Roche thought such girls should only acquire some general knowledge. She felt that some basic information about air, planets, earth, plants, and animals, a bit of history and detailed instructions on the subject of the noble soul would be sufficient for them.

The most interesting aspect of this proposed method of training was its inclusion of both urban and rural lower-class girls. La Roche's own consciousness of class is reflected in the unwillingness to plan for the training of girls in this social group beyond the particulars required for their jobs. From the broader perspective of German educational history, this approach agreed with the tenor of much of the other literature of the seventies.³⁸ Like much of that literature, La Roche's suggestions must be seen as amateurish at a time when Prussia, Austria and nearly every German state undertook far-reaching reforms. However, precisely when the bureaucracies of these states committed themselves to public education and outlined structures which continued the tradition of Württemberg's “General Schul-Ordnung” of 1559,³⁹ La Roche's recommendations culminate in a different, yet supportive and feminist, tradition.

Nevertheless, however powerful the immediate impact of La Roche's first work and however profound some of the underlying vision, it is quite possible that she experienced a triple shock which entrenched her initial opinions. She felt most uncomfortable about Goethe's attraction to her daughter, she did not fully participate in the Romantic intellectual breakthrough and experienced a profound questioning of her opinions, and later she was rejected by Goethe and most other leading lights of Weimar. Even though she adjusted parts of her outlook on women, love and writing, she would not and could not stay abreast with the Romantics. Of the later publications in which this inability to keep pace shows up most clearly, the Pomona für Teutschlands Töchter, Rosaliens Briefe, Briefe über Mannheim and Liebe-Hütten are of most immediate interest here and became known best.⁴⁰

These works, and many others, streamed from her pen after the 1780's, when she and her husband had settled in Speyer. The wish and necessity to escape the quietude of their retirement home was the major reason that kept her at her desk; she also needed to earn money for her costly tastes and frequent travels. Indeed she wrote a great deal in those later years, but she never recaptured the excitement and intensity of her first novel.

The disappointment about the reception of her mature works was not the only setback of her declining years. The greatest personal tragedies of this period were the serious shortcomings of the marriages of her daughters and the death of her son Franz. As indicated, contrary to her stated belief in the need for love as a basis of marriage, she had allowed financial and social considerations to guide her in the arrangements of her daughters' unions. Then, in 1791, the death of Franz came as a profound blow not only because he was her son and she had placed considerable hope in his talents, but also because they had attained a very comfortable relationship.⁴¹ These tragedies were mitigated to some extent by the tranquillity found in her last home near Offenbach, the “Grillenhäuschen,” and the hope she gained from being a helpful grandmother to Clemens and Bettina von Brentano (von Arnim).⁴² The personal satisfaction and the enthusiastic, though rare, admiration she attained through her writing helped also.

In the Pomona (1783-84), La Roche provided not only the first major educational and literary journal by and for women but also some further personal insight on the education and role of women. Although she retained her ambivalence toward advanced learning for women, she defended such learning and the ability of women to master the most sophisticated topics. “Men,” she asked in 1784, “how many sciences do you have whose sanctity women have not yet entered with dignity?”⁴³ In regard to female training as such, she advocated that it be done by men and women. She wanted women involved because she felt that men do not understand that the difference in male and female anatomy may not necessarily reflect on mental capacities.

When La Roche returned to this theme in the Erinnerungen meiner dritten Schweizerreise (1793), she praised Condorcet's views on the education of boys and girls, but deviated considerably from his implications.⁴⁴ “Girls, she thought, should receive the same instructions (‘Unterricht’) as boys, so that they can undertake all the better the education of their sons.”⁴⁵ Her emphasis was on the second part of this quote. She also could never bring herself to espouse professional education for women, that is, potential liberation, as did women like Therese Huber and men like von Hippel.⁴⁶ Thus La Roche held on to the duality which she had evolved in Sternheim, especially since she advocated, similar to the Romantics, a role that saw one and the same woman as the tender housewife and mother and as the supportive and intelligent companion.⁴⁷ Also, with her, the peculiar idealization of women was much less pronounced than with the Romantics. She could not bring herself, for example, to see women as capable of that mythical contact of souls hailed by most Romantics. Thus, even though she used many of the same words as the Romantics,⁴⁸ she stayed with her own first steps beyond the Enlightenment and modified her views only to the point of agreeing with the majority of her contemporaries that education of women and love between men and women should remain directed toward the home. As she pointed out in the Briefe über Mannheim: “You know my conviction that a female person of our class should become familiar with the value and scope of all the arts and sciences in order to be able to value the accomplishments of her father, her husband and her brothers and to be able to encourage her sons to imitate them, not to be bored during the conversation of intelligent men and to be able to read with pleasure a good book in her leisure time.”⁴⁹

It was Sophie von La Roche's dilemma that her life work fit into the critical moments of the transition from Enlightenment to Romanticism. Her tragedy as a writer was that she did not understand, first, that her work was transitional and, second, that leading the emerging Romantic movement required greater intelligence and flexibility than she had to offer. Her dilemma was all the more devastating because she thought that she had found a sound combination of acceptable ideas from England and France and the torrent of newly-arising German perspectives. Her tragedy was intensified when she could not propel herself beyond her initial synthesis and espouse the extremism of the Romantics. The tragedy was deepened by her inability to compete intellectually with the literary giants of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany who—some say—surpassed any other intellectual/literary peak in Western tradition.⁵⁰

All the same, La Roche achieved and represented more than the average middle- or upper-class German woman. She was reasonably intelligent, she was well-trained, she founded a brilliant salon before this phenomenon had become fashionable in some parts of Germany. Unlike such women as Henriette Herz, Rahel Varnhagen von Ense and Adelheid Amalie von Gallitzin who adopted the ideas of the Romantics and thus found acceptance in the leading German political and intellectual circles, and such women as the wives and companions of leading Romantic literati who played well-known, yet supportive roles to their mates, La Roche thought and wrote independently. Although criticized, she either did not understand it as such or ignored it; the latter indicating the fullness of her tragedy.

As brightly as Sophie von La Roche's star shone in the early seventies, she lacked variety in her intellectual and emotional experiences and, because of the peculiarities of her own make-up, could not attain an inner affinity with the earliest Romantics and the others who followed in Romanticism's second stage both in Jena and in Heidelberg.

La Roche may not have realized fully that she advocated a kind of womanhood and love which appeared to match in its essentials that propounded by many male writers who were not immediately influenced by the giants of the “Sturm und Drang.” While the earlier eighteenth-century view of marriage permitted considerable flexibility in the degree of intimacy of the marriage partners, the new view of love allowed only for intensity and thus tended to chain women to their husbands and/or lovers in an unprecedented fashion. Although some of the male writers may have understood the implications of the early Romantics' view of this altered relationship, the degree of La Roche's understanding is questionable. It is curious though that she insisted on the rationalistic approach to love and marriage both in her life and work; maybe she had a sense of the changing implications. Whether she understood or not, however, she did not make as profound a literary and educational contribution as the Romantics and leading educational reformers precisely because she remained convinced of the need for and validity of restrained behavior and because she was an outsider both to the movement and to the bureaucracies.

Notes

1. One may be inclined not to call any eighteenth-century women, except possibly Mary Wollstonecraft, feminists; but La Roche spoke out on female intelligence and for female educability and published one of the few significant early journals, the Pomona für Teutschlands Töchter (Speyer: Johann Paul Andreas, 1783-84), by and for women and was thus concerned with some of the same issues as the first feminists. About Sophie La Roche in general compare Werner Milch, Sophie La Roche. Die Grossmutter der Brentanos (Frankfurt a.M., 1935); Kurt Kampf, Sophie La Roche. Ihre Briefe an die Gräfin Elise zu Sohms-Laubach, 1787-1807 (Offenbach, 1965); Hansjörg Schelle, “Unbekannte Briefe C. M. Wielands und von LaRoches aus den Jahren 1789 bis 1793,” Modern Language Notes 86 (1971): 649-695; and Elisabeth Blochmann, Das “Frauenzimmer” und die “Gelehrsamkeit.” Eine Studie über die Anfänge des Mädchenschulwesens in Deutschland (Heidelberg, 1966), pp. 21-22. The writer is particularly grateful to Leberecht von Guaita, a direct descendent of La Roche, for help in several conversations in Stuttgart. For the difficulties encountered by women writers, even today, see Tillie Olsen, Silences (New York, 1979).

2. Sophie von La Roche, Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim. Von einer Freundin derselben aus Original-Papieren und andern zuverlässigen Quellen gezogen, ed. C. M. Wieland (1771 and 1772; republished Leipzig: F. Brüggemann, 1938). The work is discussed by her in Briefe über Mannheim (Mannheim: C. F. Schwan and G. C. Götz, 1791), pp. 188-197. See also Burghard Dedner, “Sophie La Roche: ‘Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim’ and ‘Rosaliens Briefe’: Die Umdeutung der Tradition im Bereich ‘realistischen’ Erzählens,” Topos, Ideal und Realitätspostulat; Studien zur Darstellung des Landlebens im Roman des 18. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen, 1969), pp. 54-87. Compare, in addition, Ursula Nolte, “Die Entwicklung der weiblichen Bildung von der Aufklärung bis zur deutschen Romantik.” (Diss. Mainz, 1952), pp. 77-81; Kuno Ridderhoff, Sophie von La Roche und Wieland. Zum hundertjährigen Todestage der Dichterin (18. Februar 1807) (Hamburg, 1907), pp. 30-39; and F. Brüggemann's introduction to the edition of the Geschichte used here, pp. 7-8.

3. Compare “Ode” dated 23 August 1752 in C. M. Wieland, Werke, (München, 1964 +), ed. Fritz Martini and Werner Seiffert, IV, pp. 23-26, with notes on p. 83. Milch, La Roche, p. 30. About the relationship between the two, refer also to Ridderhoff, Sophie und Wieland.

4. Some insight into Stadion's role at Mainz may be gained from T. C. W. Blanning, Reform and Revolution in Mainz, 1743-1803 (New York, 1974), pp. 101-103.

5. Aside from what La Roche herself said about Sternheim's origins in Briefe über Mannheim, pp. 201-205, compare Martin Rudolf, Johann Jakob Brechter (1734-1772), Diakonus in Schweigern. Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Kultur und Geistesgeschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts (Neustadt/Aisch, 1969), pp. 135-136, and Milch, Sophie La Roche, pp. 77-91.

6. See Nolte, Entwicklung, p. 76.

7. Sternheim, I, pp. 57-88, is particularly relevant. Compare also Dedner, “Sophie La Roche: …,” p. 64.

8. Mannheim, p. 203.

9. Volkner Neuhaus, Typen multiperspektiven Erzählens (Köln/Wien 1971), pp. 59-60. The problems with this approach are analyzed in Silvia Bovenschen, Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit. Exemplarische Untersuchungen zu kulturgeschichtlichen und literarischen Präsentationsformen des Weiblichen (Frankfurt a.M., 1979), pp. 200-244.

10. However one may periodize German literature, the approach used here is similar to that outlined by René Wellek in Concepts of Criticism (New Haven and London, 1963), pp. 163-198. Cf. also W. Warren Wagar, World Views: A Study in Comparative History (Hinsdale, Illinois, 1977), pp. 37-43 and 62-73, and Lilian R. Furst, Counterparts. The Dynamics of Franco-German Literary Relationships, 1770-1895 (London, 1977), especially pp. 7-46. In view of this writer's findings on Sophie La Roche, and for the purposes of this presentation, the unity of the German literary experience is accepted. Also, within that wholeness, the exuberant beginnings of Romanticism in the form of the “Sturm und Drang,” is allowed to stand. It was not only that “This new view emphasizes the totality of man's forces, not reason alone, nor sentiment alone, but rather intuition, ‘intellectual intuition,’ imagination” (Wellek, Concepts, p. 165), but also that its representatives acted and spoke with a painfully intense enthusiasm.

11. See Peter Uwe Hohendahl, “Empfindsamkeit und gesellschaftliches Bewusstsein,” Schiller-Jahrbuch, 16, (1972), pp. 198-199, and Burghard Dedner, “Vom Schäferleben zur Agrarwirtschaft; Poesie und Ideologie des ‘Landlebens’ in der deutschen Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts,” Jahrbuch der Jean-Paul Gesellschaft, 7, (München, 1972), pp. 53-57.

12. Hohendahl, “Empfindsamkeit,” p. 197 and Dedner, “Sophie La Roche,” p. 70.

13. Dedner, “Sophie La Roche,” p. 70. Also the same, “Vom Schäferleben,” pp. 53-57.

14. See, for example, Eduard Shorter, “Illigitimacy, Sexual Revolution and Social Change in Modern Europe,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2, (1971): 237-272. Compare Paul Kluckhohn, Das Ideengut der deutschen Romantik (Tübingen, 1966), pp. 60-77; Ricarda Huch, Die Romantik: Blütezeit, Ausbreitung und Verfall (Tübingen, 1951), pp. 227-269; Genvieve Bianquis, Love in Germany, trans. James Cleugh (London, 1964), pp. 74-95, 110-185 and 208-217.

15. Johann Bernhard Basedow, Elementarwerk, Ein encyklopädisches Methoden- und Bildungsbuch. …, 3rd ed. (1774; 8 rpt. Stuttgart, 1848). An idea of how this work fits into the present and overall German discussion about female education may be gained from Blochmann, “Frauenzimmer” und “Gelehrsamkeit,” pp. 13-42. Cf. Willy Moog, Geschichte der Pädagogik, 3 vols. (reissued Ratingen, 1967), especially pp. 84-125, for its specific and historical educational context.

16. This situation can be understood readily by comparing the experience of the first two thirds of the century with the last third. In the upper levels of society—at this point the only group that allows reasonably accurate insight into the decisions about marriage partners—one should compare the lives of such women as Elisabeth Christine of Bevern (Prussia), Sophie of Zerbst (Russia's Catherine II), Wilhelmine of Prussia (Bayreuth) and Luise of Prussia, Friederike of Mecklenburg and Elisabeth of Württemberg.

17. Compare Adolf Bach, Aus dem Kreise der Sophie La Roche (Köln, 1924), pp. 127-129, especially pp. 146-159. Compare also the otherwise too narrowly defined Bovenschen, Weiblichkeit, pp. 190-200, especially pp. 193-194.

18. Sternheim, I, pp. 57-134.

19. Ibid., especially pp. 134-165.

20. Their close contact ended with Goethe's move to Weimar in 1775 [see G. von Loeper, ed., Briefe Goethe's an Sophie von La Roche und Bettina Brentano, nebst dichterischen Beilagen (Berlin, 1879), p. xxxii and pp. 118-119], but Goethe's later harsh evaluation of La Roche (see, for example, his comments of 11 August 1797 as quoted in Kampf, La Roche, Briefe an Sohms-Laubach, p. 120) cannot be used as proof for earlier opinions. It is evident, however, from numerous contemporary accounts that La Roche was not happy with Werther and they are the reason for this writer's contention that the break between the two must not only be connected to his move to Weimar. Milch, Sophie La Roche, pp. 126-127 and 130-145, supports this opinion and is at variance with those expressed by Brüggemann in the 1938 introduction to the Geschichte, p. 10. Of course, publicly La Roche continued her display of cordiality, even after Goethe's public insults: see, for example, her Schattenreise abgeschiedener Stunden in Offenbach, Weimar und Schönebeck im Jahr 1799 (Leipzig: Heinrich Gräff, 1800), pp. 58-65, but note that she did not mention having seen him on her return journey through Weimar, pp. 381-443.

21. For an interesting account of the reunion, see Bach, Aus dem Kreise, pp. 8-21.

22. La Roche began Rosaliens Briefe an ihre Freundin Marianne von St[ein] [Altenburg, 1779-1781] before her husband's retirement, but the changed intensity is readily evident from her publishing record after the turn of the decade.

23. See Hohendahl, “Empfindsamkeit,” pp. 195-199.

24. The writer used Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774) vol. III of Goethes Werke in sechs Bänden, ed. Erich Schmidt (Leipzig, 1909), pp. 1-108. Compare Hohendahl, “Empfindsamkeit,” pp. 198-207, for an interesting treatment of the topic. A ready general discussion of Werther is available in Bianquis, Love in Germany, pp. 74-95. The writer is particularly grateful to Heidi M. Rockwood (Georgia Institute of Technology) for discussions on Werther. This statement in the text is based on the insights brought out hesitantly by Albert Bielschowsky, The Life of Goethe, 3 vols., trans. William A. Cooper (1905-08; New York, 1969), I, pp. 188-189. Compare J. W. Goethe, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit in Goethes Werke in sechs Bänden (Leipzig, 1909), V, pp. 422-423. Unlike La Roche, Goethe was able to elevate his to a general human experience.

25. The finality of the break may be seen from the already noted comments in note 20 and may be traced additionally and in greater detail by following the back and forth in the letters of Goethe, Schiller and Wieland as described in Milch, La Roche, pp. 216-221. All this notwithstanding Goethe's comments in Dichtung und Wahrheit, pp. 405-406.

26. La Roche, Schönes Bild der Resignation (Leipzig: Heinrich Gräff, 1801), pp. 205-213, and also Mannheim, pp. 191-194.

27. Sternheim, I, pp. 50-52, and compare pp. 98-99.

28. Compare Deborah Hertz, “Assimilation in Salon and Society: Berlin, 1770-1810,” presented at the Fourth Berkshires Conference on the History of Women, August, 1978, which provides a listing of the ‘salonières’ on whose lives this statement is based.

29. See Milch, La Roche, pp. 52-53.

30. Sternheim, I, p. 57.

31. Sternheim, II, p. 192.

32. The ideal may be seen most readily in such works as Joachim Heinrich Campe's Väterlicher Rat für meine Tochter. Ein Gegenstück zum Theophron. Der erwachsenen weiblichen Jugend gewidmet (Tübingen, 1789).

33. See especially Karin Hausen, “Die Polarisierung der ‘Gesellschaftscharaktere’—Eine Spiegelung der Dissoziation von Erwerb- und Familienleben,” in Sozialgeschichte der Familie in der Neuzeit Europas, vol. 21 of Industrielle Welt, ed. Werner Conze (Stuttgart, 1976).

34. A point detailed by Peter Petschauer in “Changing Education Opportunities for Girls in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Eighteenth-Century Life 3 (1976): 56-62.

35. See especially Otto von Münchhausen, Der Hausvater, 6 vols. (Hamburg, 1764-1773) and Chr. F. Germershausen, Die Hausmutter in allen ihren Geschäften, 5 vols. (Leipzig, 1778-1781). Compare Heinrich Schmidlin, Arbeit und Stellung der Frau in der Landgutswirtschaft der Hausväter, Diss. Heidelberg 1940 (Heidelberg, 1940) and Otto Brunner, Adeliges Landleben und europäischer Geist. Leben und Werk Wolf Helmhards von Hohberg, 1612-1688 (Salzburg, 1949).

36. Compare, for example, Friedrich Adami, Luise Königin von Preussen, 18th ed. (Gütersloh, 1906) and Paul Bailleu, Königin Luise, Ein Lebensbild (Berlin/Leipzig, 1908). For a good but overly short introduction to this trend, refer to Blochmann, “Frauenzimmer” und “Gelehrsamkeit,” pp. 13-26.

37. Sternheim, II, p. 193. Compare her opinions on the training of middle-class girls in Ibid., pp. 216-221.

38. Refer, for example, to the literature and experiments of the philanthropists, especially as presented by Rosemarie Ahrbeck-Wothge, Studien über den Philanthropismus und die Dessauer Aufklärung (Halle, 1970).

39. This generally unknown plan for educational action is part of the Württembergische Grosse Kirchenordnung (Tübingen, 1559; Stuttgart: Omnitypie-Gesellschaft, 1968). Compare Eugen Schmid, “Das württembergische Volksschulwesen im 16. Jahrhundert,” in Beiträge zur Geschichte der Erziehung und des Unterrichts in Württemberg [Beihefte zu den Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für deutsche Erziehung und Schulgeschichte, (Berlin, 1906), vol. 2], pp. 89-144. About the impact of the “Grosse Schul-Ordnung” on later German (and other) school systems, see especially Hubert Hettwer, Herkunft und Zusammensetzung der Schulordnungen. Eine vergleichende Studie (Mainz, 1965).

40. The list of La Roche's works is vast and the present writer has tried to put all of them together in chronological order (with the names of the publishers, if they could be determined). She wrote Geschichte (1771); Der Eigensinn der Liebe und Freundschaft, eine Englische Erzählung, nebst einer deutschen Liebesgeschichte, aus dem Französischen (Zürich, 1772); Rosaliens Briefe (1771-81); Tagebuch einer Reise durch die Schweiz, von der Verfasserin von Rosaliens Briefen (1782); Pomona für Teutschlands Töchter (1783-84); Weldone, eine moralische Erzählung (Speyer, 1785); Neuere moralische Erzählungen (Altenburg, 1786); Journal einer Reise durch Frankreich von der Verfasserin von Rosaliens Briefen (1787); Moralische Erzählungen. Nachlese zur 1. und 2. Sammlung (Mannheim und Offenbach, 1787); Tagebuch einer Reise durch Holland und England (Offenbach, 1788); Freunde und Freundinnen von zwei sehr verschiedenen Jahrhunderten und die Bade-Bekanntschaften (Offenbach, 1788); Briefe an Lina als Mädchen (Briefe an Lina als Mutter). Ein Buch für junge Frauenzimmer, 2nd ed., enlarged (Leipzig, 1788-95); Geschichte der Miss Lony und der schöne Bund (Gotha: Carl Wilhelm Ettinger, 1789); Briefe über Mannheim (1791); Erinnerungen aus meiner dritten Schweizerreise. Meinem verwundeten Herzen zur Linderung vielleicht auch mancher trauernden Seele zum Trost (Offenbach: Ulrich Weiss und Carl L. Brede, 1793); Erscheinungen am See Oneida mit Kupfern, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1797-98); Schattenreise abgeschiedener Stunden (1800); Schönes Bild der Resignation (1801); Liebe-Hütten, 2 parts (Leipzig: Heinrich Gräff, 1803-04); Herbsttage (Leipzig, 1805); Melusinens Sommerabende, herausgegeben von C. M. Wieland, mit dem Porträt der Verfasserin (Halle, 1806); Mein Schreibtisch. A complete listing of La Roche's work in Milch, La Roche, pp. 263-264.

41. This hope and despair comes out most clearly in La Roche's Erinnerungen aus meiner dritten Schweizerreise, passim.

42. Her care is expressed in some ways in La Roche, Schattenreise, p. 25.

43. Quoted in Edith Krull, Das Wirken der Frau im frühen deutschen Zeitungswesen, Diss. Berlin 1939 (Berlin, 1939), p. 216.

44. About Condorcet's opinions see especially his “Lettres d'un bourgeois de New Haven,” Oeuvres complètes de Condorcet (Paris, 1804), XII, pp. 19-27, and compare to Katherine B. Clinton, “Femme et Philosophe: Enlightenment Origins of Feminism,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 8 (1975): 283-299, especially 296-297.

45. La Roche, Erinnerungen aus meiner dritten Schweizerreise, p. 131.

46. Theresa Huber is especially well known as having been the editor of the Morgenblatt in Stuttgart at the outset of the nineteenth century. On Theodor von Hippel refer to his Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Weiber (Berlin, 1792) and Nachlass über weibliche Bildung (Berlin, 1801). The first was translated by Timothy F. Sellner as On Improving the Status of Women (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1979).

47. Kluckhohn, Ideengut, pp. 60-77.

48. Mannheim, p. 83.

49. Ibid., p. 155.

50. Wagar, World Views, p. 62.