SOURCE: Joeres, Ruth-Ellen B. “‘That Girl Is an Entirely Different Character!’¹ Yes, But Is She a Feminist?: Observations on Sophie von La Roche's Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim.” In German Women in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: A Social and Literary History, edited by Ruth-Ellen B. Joeres and Mary Jo Maynes, pp. 137-56. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

[In the following essay, Joeres explores Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim for its feminist aspects, which center on the literacy and education of the author and main character.]

The pinpointing of feminist thought in literary works from centuries other than our own is fraught with many problems, not the least of which have to do with the pitfalls of anachronism and ambivalence. The former plagues us, because an investigation of any past era is bound to involve the danger of incorrect assumption not only about historical facts, but even more about past attitudes and subjective reactions that we simply cannot verify with any certainty.² The latter is equally bothersome, because we as feminist critics, not liking what we find, may well experience considerable frustration that will cloud our vision. To paraphrase Ruth Yeazell, despite our wanting to read women's fiction from the past with the pleasure felt at such public assertion of women writing, we are bound to find ourselves disturbed by the narrow circle of influence we see mirrored in the lives of female characters.³

The multiple methodologies and points of view that are accommodated under the general heading of feminist criticism only complicate the issue further. Thus, for example, one can clearly distinguish the extremes of both an optimistic and a pessimistic school of thought among feminist theorists, yet conclude by seeing validity and possibility in both. The pessimism that says it finds nothing but limitation and repression in women's past, conditions that clearly affected an already slow and often uneven progress toward emancipation and equality, can find its verification in considerable textual evidence. At the same time, the optimism that acknowledges the validity of such pessimism nevertheless goes beyond that apparent dead end. It examines how women learned, often subversively, to assert themselves despite their oppression and thus gained and imparted an important sense of their power. Both schools, however, may well use the same texts for their proof. The pessimists see equality in male society as the necessary given, as the ultimate, but not yet attained goal for women; the optimists, while agreeing, also show women gaining power from their uniqueness as women quite apart from male society, developing as human beings not entirely determined and controlled by the patriarchy. In all probability, the pessimists are liberal, the optimists conservative. Nevertheless, the search for accuracy and enlightenment, complicated by the biases of the feminist critic who by definition and intent will not distance herself from the material—and who so often is in search of her own history—is thus made all the more problematic.

An added complexity of defining feminism and then of locating evidence of it in the past is the absence of the word itself until comparatively recent times. Certainly in the case of Germany, were we to confine ourselves to a study only of those years in which the word has actually been in use, we would scarcely be able to go farther back than the present century.⁴ Feminism, if viewed most generally as a combination of self-awareness and the resulting self-assertion among women, would in any case hardly seem to be characteristic of German women before the onset of the first formal efforts toward equality in the nineteenth century. Hedwig Dohm as an example of such thought comes immediately to mind; in fact, Janssen-Jurreit has said that except for her writings, all the other products of that first generation of socially critical German women writers consisted merely of “a feeble collection of the provincial literature of upper-class daughters.”⁵ Despite that, I can see valid reasons for investigating some of those provincial daughters, Luise Dittmar, Louise Otto, Louise Aston, Fanny Lewald, Johanna Kinkel, among others. But Louise Otto's acknowledgement of the influence of earlier writers on the shaping of her own philosophy of equality⁶ indicates that it would be inaccurate, were we to trace the concept of feminism back to its origins, to assume that it was only as of the 1840s that German women began to express a concern with their self-image and their role in the larger context of society. Publishing itself is an assertive action: an exploration of earlier women writers would thus help to tell us more about how women viewed themselves before the organized women's movement, and how in fact they may have influenced the formation of that movement. To this end, I shall offer a reading of an eighteenth-century German novel that has only recently caught the attention of feminist critics.

In a 1981 discussion of an eighteenth-century American text, Annette Kolodny detailed two specific concerns of the feminist critic that are appropriate for any discussion organized around literary and social history: “(1) How do contemporary women's lives, women's concerns, or concerns about women constitute part of the historical context for this work? and (2) What is the symbolic significance of gender in this text?”⁷ The interdisciplinary nature of her questions is apparent: the social and cultural circumstances that determined the writings of the female chroniclers of a past era are as significant as the less easily established information, what Yeazell calls our need to “read [a text] metaphorically.”⁸ We can no more judge literature in isolation than we can confine our study of the past to historical accounts of Great Men and Significant Events, and our use of every available source, from quantitative data to the less obvious symbolic aspects of a work of literature, is an imperative step in forming a portrait of past generations—especially in regard to the tracking of the elusive women in those generations.

Sophie von La Roche's Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (The Story of Miss von Sternheim), published anonymously in 1771 but almost immediately attributed to her, has been called the first German Frauenroman (woman's novel) by literary historians, and because of that label has not been allowed to fall into the oblivion assigned to so many writings by German women in previous centuries.⁹ Acknowledged favorably by the younger male writers of La Roche's day (notably Goethe, Herder, and Merck), the novel was published under the aegis of another male, Wieland, who took it upon himself to edit the text. Although it is a fiction that, as Wieland reports in his preface, Sophie von La Roche was not aware of his plans to have the book appear, it is also clear that without his strong support and influence, Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim might well have remained in manuscript. It is a novel that has noticeable connections to the philosophical, literary, and social context of its age: it employs the epistolary techniques of Samuel Richardson, it echoes sentiments expressed by contemporary thinkers such as Rousseau and Kant, and it reflects aspects of rationalism, sentimentality, and pietism. Accordingly, it has been designated by critics as a work that was to influence the development of the sentimental novel,¹⁰ as an imitative, conservative reassertion of the status quo,¹¹ or as a permissible literary structure in which a woman writer was allowed to assert herself at a time when the relaxation of the rigidly defined letter form and the acceptance of the epistolary novel as a valid subgenre were in vogue.¹² No one has accused it of possessing feminist tendencies; indeed, Sophie von La Roche herself is so utterly straightforward in her message of female limitation and her apparent acceptance of woman's traditional role that any other interpretation would seem Procrustean. Yet there is enough that is unusual about the novel and its principal character to make another look at it appropriate. Whatever dangers of anachronistic error or ambivalent uncertainty may arise, a discussion of Fräulein von Sternheim can offer insights that may ultimately help to explain the development of German feminist thinking in the following centuries.

Sophie, the heroine of the novel, is the daughter of a military officer and a slightly melancholy woman who, because she dies in childbirth while her daughter is still young, plays little more than a symbolic role in Sophie's development. The father also dies before his daughter reaches maturity and can be safely delivered into the care of a husband. Her precarious state is recalled by her later in reporting the words of an English friend: “a female of your class and charm must either move in with close relatives or be under the protection of a worthy man.” (250) Initially, she is given into the care of a pastor, whose daughter Emilie is the eventual recipient of Sophie's thirty-one letters that make up the bulk of the novel; then she is sent to an aunt and uncle at the court of D, where an intrigue is begun to make her the mistress of the Prince, thereby facilitating a sphere of influence for the aunt and uncle, who are in financial difficulties. In the process, Sophie makes the acquaintance of two Englishmen: Seymour, a good, yet weak man who has been ordered by his uncle to keep his distance from Sophie while the attempts to win her for the Prince are in progress; and Derby, the evil wisecracking young Lord who is intrigued and attracted by the innocent charm of the girl and decides to use that vulnerability to his own advantage to win Sophie for himself. He succeeds when the unsuspecting Sophie is informed that she is indeed the victim of an immoral plot; in her desperation to escape, she agrees to marriage with Derby, unaware that the ceremony is a sham performed by his disguised and equally evil servant John. After forty days in a village where Derby has confined her while he continues his revels, she is abandoned by the now bored ex-suitor who, finding her frigid and bland, tells her of the invalidity of their marriage before he leaves.

A period of recovery at the house of Emilie is followed by Sophie's establishment of a school for poor girls that is financed by an old, wealthy woman who has taken her in, and by a journey to England as the companion of another woman at whose English estate Sophie organizes another school on a similar model. There she is wooed by a middle-aged Englishman who has almost won her over when Derby, now married to the Englishwoman's niece, gets word of her presence. In fear of her exposing him, he has Sophie abducted and taken to a remote section of Scotland to pine away and die in the imprisonment of warders who once before had watched over the death of another of Derby's victims, a young woman who was brought there with his and her illegitimate child. The readers are led to believe that Sophie does indeed die after John reappears to offer her a last chance to rescue herself by returning to his master, who has tired of his new wife. For when Sophie refuses, choosing death over life with Derby, John shoves her into a dank cellar where she is confined for a time, and then, in her last letter fragment, tells of her waning strength and details the conditions of her will and her wishes for her burial. When Seymour and Lord Rich, Sophie's older suitor and the brother of the younger man, come to Scotland to find her, however, having been sent by a dying and remorseful Derby, their discovery that she has died and their sad pilgrimage to her grave are interrupted. Sophie's warders admit that her death is an invention of the Lady who has rescued and taken her and the illegitimate child of Derby to her estate to recover. The novel ends happily, with Sophie married to Seymour, the mother of two sons, the younger of whom has been given into the care of Lord Rich, with Rich himself ensconced in a house on their estate, and with Sophie's continued efforts at educating poor girls. Derby, whose plea to Sophie that she come and forgive him his sins is rejected by her in a show of uncharitable but independent strength, is dead, and Sophie's world is in harmonious equilibrium.

Sophie La Roche's own life story is in many ways equally reflective of the acquiescence and submissiveness which a pessimist feminist critic would immediately point to in the fictional namesake. Despite what amounted to an education that went beyond the normal training for girls in the eighteenth century, La Roche still acceded to her father's wishes when it came to the choice of a husband by not marrying the man she had initially chosen and by becoming instead the wife of her father's choice. The publishing history of her first novel also involved less than an assertive move on her part; Wieland's prefatory comments may exaggerate the central importance of his role, but he was nonetheless responsible for the book's appearance. And despite the general acclaim with which the volume was greeted, the review most often cited includes a telling statement that illustrates the special, non-literary status accorded her novel: “But the gentlemen [critics] err if they think they are judging a book—it is a human soul. …”¹³ The book does not agitate against acceptable ideas either in its form or in its overt message. Indeed, the often moralizing nature of epistolary novels, their effort to teach appropriate social behavior, might well explain La Roche's novel's popularity in a patriarchal society that liked to see its women trained in ways pleasing and beneficial to men.

Yet not all is as it seems. Sophie von La Roche herself was far from being undistinguished or usual: when one realizes that in 1789, eighteen years after the appearance of her novel, less than 20 percent of the 23 million inhabitants of the German state were literate, and out of that number certainly far less than half were women,¹⁴ it is clear that La Roche was unusual even within her privileged class.¹⁵ Her character Sophie is also different in spite of the unanimity of most critics, contemporary and current, who have dismissed her in the manner of Ian Watt's generalizing description of the post-Pamela heroines he claims were in vogue until the end of the Victorian era. Watt's depiction of such a model as “very young, very inexperienced, and so delicate in physical and mental constitution that she faints at any sexual advance,” as “devoid of any feelings toward her admirer until the marriage knot is tied,”¹⁶ simply does not correspond to Sophie, who never faints,¹⁷ who shows open affection for her later husband Seymour, first as a friend, then as a potential mate, and who is a difficult challenge for the villainous Derby precisely because, as he complains, she “loves intellect and knowledge.” (101) To write her off, as Caroline Flachsland did in a letter to her fiancé Herder as “my complete ideal of a female: soft, gentle, charitable, proud, virtuous, and betrayed”¹⁸ is witty, but not entirely accurate. To label her variously, as more recent critics have done, by echoing Richardson and calling her “persecuted innocence,”¹⁹ or glorifying her as “a person open to everything that is beautiful and noble and able to realize the harmonious balance of all the powers of her spirit and soul”²⁰ is to provide ultimately unsatisfying, stereotypic answers to a figure whose complexity is thereby ignored. To equate Sophie Sternheim with Lessing's tragic and passive Miss Sara Sampson, as Wolfgang Martens has done, and to typify them both as “the Richardsonian girl who is all too soft, absolutely bashful, modest, angelically soulful and probably an innocent sufferer”²¹ borders on the derogative opinion that sees women in general, whether as writers or characters, as inferior objects whose thoughts and activities are childlike. There is considerably more to both Sophie von La Roche and her character Sophie than any of these descriptions implies. Even the abbreviated plot summary given above provides evidence of nuances and strengths that neither Ian Watt nor the critics of La Roche's novel have encompassed within their assessments of the possibilities open to eighteenth-century heroines.

What helps to explain the discrepancy between the comments of Watt and other critics and the portrayal in La Roche's text may well be the novel's date of appearance. Karin Hausen has convincingly argued that the latter third of the eighteenth century saw the establishment and defining of Geschlechtscharaktere (acculturated sexual role-typings) that would provide prescriptive guidelines for socially acceptable behavior for men and women from that time until well into the present century.²² If Hausen's thesis is correct, then La Roche wrote and published her book in an era in which the defining of the role and responsibilities of women was marked by a growing tendency to depict women in general as passive recipients, as keepers of the hearth, as mothers, and as defenders of culture. According to Hausen, once the home as center of work and life activities had been replaced by the new perception of it as a retreat from the world at large where work was now located, a search for new ways to legitimize what was already the traditionally narrow sphere of women's activities occurred. Geschichte des Fraüleins von Sternheim appeared when the new designation of a woman's sphere was still in flux, and the resulting portrait of its principal character provides evidence of that state of change: the strong woman who has a clear sense of her far from modest place in life, but who represents as well some of the uncertainties of her existence in the midst of a waning ideology that allowed her a degree of freedom and possibility, and the new way that would culminate in the German classical pedestalization of her, thus removing her effectively from all arenas of public action. The following discussion will keep Hausen and the critical questions of Kolodny in mind in its effort to review La Roche's novel.

Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim is a work that frequently repeats words and phrases both as structural motifs for the novel as a whole and as characterizing labels for its principal figures. The word most often attached to its heroine is Erziehung (education); emerging from the duality of Geist (intellect) and Herz/Tugend (heart/virtue), which represent the outward manifestations of her upbringing, and Eigenliebe (self-love), an inner strength, it shapes and dictates her entire existence. In all of its forms, this determining education goes far beyond the passivity and limitation of the Richardsonian heroines: Sophie is said from the outset to be well educated, trained by her father in all aspects of philosophy, in history, and in languages (she is fluent in English and on one occasion speaks Italian), as well as in the expected areas of music (singing and lute), dancing, and the economics of running a household (42). Her dying father declares that his first and most important task has been Sophie's “‘appropriate and blessed education’”;²³ when she is left an orphan at nineteen to tend her grandmother, the latter's words are deliberately chosen to paint a portrait of a less than passive woman: “‘You have the intellect of your father. … You are left on your own and shall commence the realization of your independence with the exercising of charitable acts for your grandmother!’”²⁴Geist, defined in a 1796 lexicon as “the simple substance that is bound up with the human body and that is blessed with the power to think and to will … most often applied to the powers of the intellect,”²⁵ provides Sophie with the concrete knowledge for her life; the charity mentioned by her grandmother can be associated with the heart and virtue that are often in evidence as the outward philanthropic manifestations of Sophie's education, the practical moral imperatives that she carries out in her care and assistance of those less fortunate. There is no evidence here of the sex-determined split described by Hausen in her depiction of the new sexual role-typings.²⁶ Instead, by representing both sides of the duality, Sophie Sternheim seems to echo the early rationalist urging that women become knowledgeable in the aesthetic and pragmatic spheres of life.²⁷

Sophie's progression through difficult situations is noticeably marked by her dependence on both aspects of her education. From the outset, the emphasis is on a woman alone, placed against the evils and intrigues of the world, defended essentially by no one and dependent on her own acquired knowledge and capabilities. There is clearly no time for fainting or, for that matter, for dying: thus Sophie responds to the first major blow that occurs when she is made aware of the plot to align her with the Prince by immediately confronting him and demanding his permission to leave the court. When the invalidity of her marriage is revealed to her, she can within hours express her grief in a letter; once she has reached the protection of her friend Emilie, she can recover rapidly and while doing so, find the strength to teach her goddaughter to read. Even in the darkest moment of her life, when she seems to have reached a level of utter powerlessness, when she has been abducted and finds herself in a raw place where not even the language is comprehensible to her, she turns to her intellect as well as to her heart: she learns the dialect, trains the children of her warders to read and perform handiwork, and writes letters and diary entries so that her fate may be recorded and not entirely forgotten. Her reaction to great distress is intellectual as well as moral; in every case, she recovers by using the knowledge she has attained and her sense of what is good to react positively and assertively to counteract each challenge. To claim, as Peter Hohendahl does, that she never questions the system that creates the poverty that she tries to ameliorate, to say, as he does, that she lives by the “basic color of the axiom of success … : he who is poor is also morally suspect,”²⁸ is too facile.

Although Sophie begins with the ample inheritance of her parents, she assigns (at least for three years) the profits from that estate to her aunt and uncle when she flees with Derby, and she then undergoes progressive financial deterioration in her dependence on the two women who take her in, ultimately identifying herself completely with the poor: “I am really a part of the circle of the poor and serving.” (234) The difference between her warders and herself is seen by her to be a matter of intellect, not class; the contrast between them is that of upbringing: “There is no difference between us,” she comments, “but how many of their soul's abilities have been and remain dormant!” (266) Even the larger social sensitivity that Hohendahl finds lacking in her is not entirely absent; on observing the weak character of her warders, in fact, she observes: “Hideous fate of poverty—it seldom has enough heart to stand up against the force of the oppressive rich!” (274) Despite the limitation on the spheres of activity open to Sophie Sternheim, she clearly makes up for it with countless forays, both mental and physical, beyond the boundaries normally imposed upon the women of her era.

In keeping with the pedagogical aims of the novel is Sophie's discussion on several occasions of the importance of her education. In only one instance is the message unambiguously oppressive: a lengthy report on the educational philosophy of an unnamed Mr. ∗∗, who echoes Rousseau by assigning women to primarily nonintellectual pursuits, concludes with Sophie's calling the time she spent with him one of the most fortunate occurrences of her life.²⁹ The modern feminist reader/critic can find only modest encouragement in the fact that the entire text of Mr. ∗∗'s remarks is given in the indirect subjunctive, thus placing responsibility for it on Mr. ∗∗ and not on the preached-to Sophie. At the same time, the novel frequently speaks of Sophie's love of reading and writing. When, for example, her aunt, jealous of the books that distract Sophie's attention from her, has them removed, the girl's response is not quiet acceptance but renewed and intensified activity. Describing the disappearance of what she calls her “best friends,” she comments: “A nasty joke that will not help her at all! Because now I'll write all the more. I don't want to buy new books, since my stubbornness would just anger her.” (67).

There are other examples of this combination of overt obedience (praising and apparently reinforcing Mr. ∗∗; not asking for more books) and inner assertion, if not revolt (modifying the impact of Mr. ∗∗ by having him speak the words; renewed stress on writing). Although Sophie's first plan to assist a family that has fallen into poverty is improved on by a male mentor, it is essentially her idea that is used. A second plan, worked out during her stay with the German woman, is formulated and carried out by Sophie alone. Two conversations with a young widow on the advantages of remarrying also present a double-edged message: although in the first, Sophie urges the widow to remarry, in the second she has accepted the woman's reluctance as valid and is willing to suggest an alternative and presumably equally useful course of activity, namely that of educating the daughters of the widow's friends and relatives. It can hardly come as a surprise that Sophie speaks out against purely intellectual activity for women, yet the language she employs is less than absolute. When the widow asks if she should encourage her charges to be “scholarly,” Sophie's response, although firmly negative, still indicates that intellectual women exist, albeit in minute numbers. (232) While accommodation and pragmatic purpose are placed above individual self-assertion, at the same time there is no passivity, no retreat on Sophie's part.

The voices of a novel are all those of its author. La Roche did not create only Sophie, but also the widow. It is worth noting that the first conversation has the widow express her desire for freedom (“I want to enjoy my freedom.” [217]) and point out the restrictions on the rosy picture of love and marriage that Sophie paints. Although she listens and comments favorably on much that Sophie says, the widow remains determinedly antimarriage and concludes “but my neck has been so wounded by the first yoke that even the lightest silk ribbon would hurt.” (221) Sophie herself, having not won her debate with the woman, wonders at her own rigorous defense of marriage, and the portrayal of the widow, whose views are clearly not those of the novel's heroine, is not a negative one. The perception of marriage as a self-contained, economic unit is clearly no longer valid. Now that its meaning and purpose are in flux, it is understandable that Sophie and the widow could begin to perceive of alternate routes to take in spite of the growing rigidity and containment that were to mark the new role determinations for women.³⁰

Sophie Sternheim is nineteen when she is put on her own resources and expected to live according to the education that she has been given. She is approximately twenty-four at the novel's conclusion. Her sustained level of activity is all the more astonishing for the relatively short span of time: in a period of five years she has managed to educate countless poor girls, to retrain two families in the art of living, to set up two schools on two continents, and even in the depths of her despair to teach the children of her landlord (in the village where Derby has placed her) and of her warders to read and to perform useful tasks.³¹ She credits the practice of her intellect and virtue with her own salvation. As she declares in her final ecstatic letter:

Knowledge of the intellect, goodness of the heart—experience has proved to me even at the edge of my grave that you alone compose our true earthy happiness! My soul depended on you when my sorrow wanted to lead it to despair. You shall be the support of my happiness; I want to lean on you in the serenity of my well-being, and to ask eternal Providence to make me capable of becoming an example of appropriately exercised power and wealth at the side of my noble, generous husband!

(297)

Sophie's method of recognizing her limited sphere of activity, but using that sphere to the fullest, represents a dubious victory, but one worth noting. The fact that she concentrates her efforts entirely on women and on the family as an institution worthy of attention is also not to be overlooked: it is clearly women who are improved because of her actions, and that overt attention to her sex was certainly not lost on her readers.

Education is, however, not entirely based on overt actions, on the philanthropy that constitutes an acceptable realm for women even in the late eighteenth century. Sophie is not simply a public figure who, as one critic states, has made a career of her good deeds.³² Although letter writing presupposes the existence of a dialogue, its very nature also tends to impart a sense of intimacy, the opportunity to reveal inner thoughts that might not necessarily be expressed out loud. Sophie Sternheim's channeling of her energies into open, public aid for her sex is enhanced by her need for the intimate friendship of women, a need she fills by the letters to Emilie: as she tells her friend on one occasion, “I write you about the part of my soul that I cannot reveal here [in England].”³³ The letters provide a forum not only for the detailing of Sophie's many public activities, but also for an evaluation of the inner self and the ways in which she defines and perceives that self. The pessimist feminist critic might point out that the essential passivity and lack of clear self-identity that one finds in Pamela and Clarissa are also present here: thus Sophie denies her female self so completely that she dons male clothing in order to flee with Derby (79-80), and then changes her name emblematically to Madam Leidens (Madame Suffering) after Derby's departure. The two occasions on which she employs nature metaphors to describe herself seem bereft of personal power: there is the “sad winter of my fate,” (208) the way in which she describes her life with the German woman who has befriended her. And there is the tree to which she compares herself after her move to England: having been damaged and having needed rest, it is only just now beginning to stir in its depths, sending forth “fresh but small branches of charity and usefulness.” (240) Although there is eventually a brief restoration of her real name (292), Sophie replaces it almost immediately with the name of another, her new husband Seymour, and the last nature metaphor is reserved for him, who in the words of his brother is “a lovely but powerfully rushing stream that carries many pure specks of gold in its center.” (295) Sophie is a passive, indeed a damaged tree, while her husband is the moving force of a stream, of rushing, fruitful water.

The picture, however, is not complete. The inner side of Sophie's nature is frequently bound up with the term Eigenliebe (self-love) which, in contrast to the egoistic Selbstliebe (selfish love) is defined in a contemporary lexicon as “the love of one's self … in a positive sense, since self-love tends to be happy in its natural state, which is the basis of all physical and moral life.”³⁴ Sophie's effort to understand and define the word's place in her life is a strong motif of the novel. A particularly revealing passage in which it plays a role is the one fantasy that Sophie allows herself to engage in shortly after her arrival at court. Since her negative observations of the empty life she sees around her have created a need for “moral reflection,” she turns to her inner self and feels that self increasingly invigorated by the “principles of my education.” (93) But in contrast to those aspects of her upbringing that have involved her in the outward tasks of doing good, her words here concentrate on the useful pleasures of fantasy, on imagining from her limited vantagepoint how things might be were the world educated as she has been:

My fantasy places me in turn in the position of those whom I judge, then I measure the general moral duties that our Creator has assigned to every human being, whoever he may be, according to eternally unchanging laws, according to the potential of each and the intention he has to use that potential. In this fashion I was already a prince, a princess, a government minister, a lady-in-waiting, a favorite at court, the mother of these children, the wife of that man, once even a powerful mistress—and in every case I found a chance to practice good and to impart wisdom in many ways, without having the characters or the political circumstances become unpleasantly monotonous.

(93-94)

Despite the clearly rationalist bias to her thinking—the unchanging universal laws that are acknowledged and thereby validated as the determinants of social class and position—there is also the role playing in which Sophie engages, as well as the manner in which she describes such dreams as “these fantastic journeys of my self-love” that in turn serve to strengthen “my knowledge of myself.”³⁵ The use of Eigenliebe is an indication of self-awareness, and its frequent appearance in the course of the novel concentrates the reader's attention on its importance as an element of Sophie's view of herself. Her self-love is at times a positive force: shortly after referring to its “delicious nature” (134) for example, Sophie can conclude that, supported by the inner love of self, she cannot be harmed by whatever overtures the Prince may make toward her. But it can also be untrustworthy: Sophie prophetically describes it as “erring” (184) after Derby has taken her to the village, and when he leaves her, she comments: “Self-love, you have made me miserable.” (194) With a growing awareness and consciousness, however, she can also redefine the term once she has gone to live with the German woman as “polyplike: all its branches and arms can be removed, even its main trunk can be injured—it will still find ways to send out new growth.” (204) At this point the word begins to take on a far larger significance, for Sophie aligns self-love, as she now perceives it, with “the charitable love of one's neighbors,” which she describes as “bound up completely with my self-love.” (204) Here the philanthropic, active love of others is related to the inner strength and conviction of self-love, with each complementing and aiding the other: Sophie's outwardly-directed activities are thus seen as not only an obedient performance of what she has been taught is correct, but also as a way to help her own self. The assertion of public tasks—whether educating girls or writing—is given validity and importance as a revelation and function of self, even of the limited self of a woman who, faced with boundaries, can thereby begin to stretch the edges of those boundaries. Indeed, an early comment that begins by reinforcing the need for controls concludes with the thought: “But who knows whether even the overstepping of boundaries does not have its catalyst in the desire to increase our perfection?” (96)

It is significant that the final mention of Eigenliebe occurs after Sophie's marriage to Seymour, where it is tied to the knowledge that she has stressed throughout her travails. Here too the relationship of outwardly-directed and inner love is apparent:

My knowledge, the support of my suffering self-love and the method by which I could experience some pleasure now and then, is to be consecrated to the service of human life; is to be used for the happiness of those who live near me and for the revelation of every single hidden misery of my fellow humans, so that I can find every great and small loving way to help.

(297)

Sophie Sternheim successfully combines her active determination to aid those less fortunate with a self-aware love, an assertion that is possible precisely because she loves that self. As to determining whether her success makes her a hero, we need to turn to feminist criticism and those scholars like Lee Edwards who have attempted to broaden the definition of heroes to encompass women. And Sophie Sternheim is indeed recognizable in Edwards's statement that “heroism involves both doing and knowing, … the pattern of action that characterizes heroism exists to support an underlying development and growth of consciousness. Action, then, exists not for its own sake but as a support or, more accurately, as a symbolic expression of underlying psychic structures.”³⁶ Edwards's assertion that “heroism depends on the transforming and transcendent qualities that link social change to love and individuation for both men and women”³⁷ also is applicable to a woman whose self-love is reflected in the outward loving acts toward others. La Roche's message is limited in its potentiality; nevertheless, the assertion of self in a female character who neither faints nor succumbs, and who, despite her marginal position in society at large, effects positive change while contributing actively to her own self-worth, who thinks as well as feels, is worthy of note.

Having dealt in the manner of the mostly optimistic feminist critics with the meaning of the specifically female hero of La Roche's work, I find it imperative that I also acknowledge my ambivalence by illustrating briefly how the same text is easily open to more than one interpretation. In her study of femininity, Silvia Bovenschen speaks at length of the many forms of censorship that act on us, apart from the usually understood political controls that affect men and women alike.³⁸ Sophie von La Roche was a victim of such censorship even if she does not overtly acknowledge it. The confining prescriptive comments of Wieland in his preface—his assumption that the novel may well be greeted harshly, his reference to the “twenty little sour tones” he has discovered in the text (6), to La Roche's problems with form and method of writing (8), and his comments on women in general, “who are not professional writers” (10)—as well as the controlling mechanism of his footnotes and his clarifying additions to the text itself, are only the most obvious control. The far more subtle presence of ideas indicating the pressure of a dominant male society on the self-expression of a female author creates a struggle in any present-day reader to discover any power specifically emanating from the author as woman. Sophie Sternheim may well assert herself in successful ways, but the skeptic in me then asks whether the final result is to her benefit—or merely an acknowledgement of her acceptance of the male perception of what she should be.

A single example will suffice to illustrate this dilemma. When Sophie admits to Derby that “she notes with pleasure whenever her intellect and her figure are favorably commented upon. …” (191), she suddenly seems very ordinary, a woman who is exhibiting the vanity of which women have often been accused, or perhaps embodying the assertion of Rousseau in the fifth book of his Emile that “society's opinion is the grave of virtue for men, but for women it is their throne.”³⁹ The need for Sophie Sternheim to accrue the acceptance and blessing of male society by being pleasing to it is interiorized and so obvious to her and to her creator La Roche that it need not even be explicitly stated. John Berger could well have used the La Roche novel to illustrate his assertion that woman, born “within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men,” must be able to see in two directions: “She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another.”⁴⁰ Sophie may well be a hero, an ideal figure who, however, knows that the given of her life is her ability to be acceptable to men, who will in any event dominate her life. Whatever positive characteristics we may find in her depiction must always be judged in the light of their being observed by both the fictional characters around her and the real-life men who controlled and organized La Roche's life and writing. As Berger continues:

How a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated. To acquire some control over this process, women must contain it and interiorize it. That part of a woman's self which is the surveyor treats the part which is the surveyed so as to demonstrate to others how her whole self would like to be treated. And this exemplary treatment of herself by herself constitutes her presence. … Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. … The surveyor of woman in herself is male; the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object. …⁴¹

Whether it is Bovenschen's subtle censor who is in control or Berger's self-conscious censorship of the surveyed and surveying woman, the effect is bleak. La Roche may impart encouragement to her female readers by presenting a hero who is strong and assertive, but the controls on that hero provide a powerful shaping of her message. It is the limitation of Sophie Sternheim's existence that most contemporary readers would have registered: the novel ends, after all, with a marriage, with the reaffirmation of an institution that involves the subjection of the woman to legal and social dependence on her male mate. Sophie functions independently for all but the final pages of the novel, yet her reward for such active independence is her willing surrender of power to a man whose superiority she seems not to question.

In light of that, can I claim that there is a feminist message in Sophie von La Roche's novel? Any such assertion would, of course, have to go beyond the stress on the limitations of both character and author or the acknowledgement of Wieland's overt interference as well as La Roche's own homilies on the confined role of women. What remains, however, is the very obvious strength of the novel's main character. Sophie Sternheim is clearly to be viewed as a success, able to face the most severe of odds. Her education, that harmony of intellect and virtue that complements her self-love, provides her with the power of self-realization in her fight for existence. Her particular emphasis on the importance of educating and aiding women is not to be slighted: if she is to serve as a hero for her sex, then it is significant that she can not only handle every degree of problem on her own—without fainting or waiting for a male to rescue her—but that she can also assist less fortunately-endowed women, a message of particular significance for her female readers. Here they were not faced with the uncertain image of Pamela, or of a Clarissa, who followed one standard course of tragic heroines by dying—or even of a German creation who was to appear in the following year, Lessing's Emilia Galotti, who unlike Sophie would already give up when confronted with the symbol of Sophie's first challenge, the lust of the aristocracy.

La Roche's heroine does not fulfill Derby's cynical prophecy that she will either die or flee (158). Although she occasionally experiences emotional uncertainty and physical illness or accident, her way of confronting the trials placed upon her involves continued useful activity, a genteel, yet determined spirit of confrontation, and a strong sense of purpose. There is no other character in La Roche's novel, male or female, who can rival her in intellect or heart; indeed, the men who woo her are more like the passive heroine described by Watt, capable only of helpless observation of her struggles. In this instance, the final vignette of the novel is symbolically, if not realistically, significant. The potential problem of a triangle—both men love and want her—is resolved in what amounts to converting the dilemma into an advantage for Sophie. It is true that she chooses the younger man, but the older brother is not discarded, does not find another wife, but remains on the estate to educate the second son, his namesake, clearly a child who is at least figuratively his and Sophie's offspring. The menage à trois allows both men to benefit from Sophie's wise presence, while giving her the pleasure of both of them: the mature love and respect of her brother-in-law are complemented by the youthful joys of her original love. Polygamy—at least theoretically—is the utopian vision with which the readers are left, but the patriarch who usually rules is replaced by a matriarch. Marriage is not the end for Sophie, does not reduce her to the obliging conformity, the role of the Other, that it normally signifies for women, but allows her rather to carry on her useful activity and particularly to attend to members of her own sex.

If feminism is to be viewed as a possibility long before any formal move was underway for the emancipation of women, indeed long before the word itself came into use—if we can be permitted, as the optimists urge, to view the power in women while also taking into account their essential powerlessness—then it can be asserted that evidence of prefeminist thought is to be found in as ostensibly conservative a novel as Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim. Sophie von La Roche herself, encouraged by her first success, went on to write and publish other novels (including one with a character who is outspokenly critical of men⁴²), to edit and publish the autobiography of Friderika Baldinger, who wrote of problems between women and men,⁴³ and to publish the journal Pomona, which Schumann has described as “the only journal of the time that consciously viewed itself as a challenge to the women's journals edited by men and that for the first time reflects a change in the self-perception of the woman.”⁴⁴ Sophie Sternheim is, according to male thought, an appropriate figure, obliging, moral, humble to a level of occasional self-deprecation, and utterly pliable; such traits make her ultimately welcome to the society in which she has to live. At the same time, whatever else is at stake here, from the pedagogic aims of rationalism, to the emotional extremes of sentimentality and the urging for self-examination of pietism, Sophie von La Roche shows subversive intent by also making her heroine a successful survivor on her own terms, a self-loving figure who shares that self with other women. It is no doubt a minor victory, but it is a message that brings with it in this first Frauenroman an encouraging initiation for the role of women authors in German prose writing.

Notes

1. Sophie von La Roche, Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim. Von einer Freundin derselben aus Original-Papieren und anderen zuverlässigen Quellen gezogen herausgegeben von C. M. Wieland (Munich: Winkler, 1976), p. 121. This modern reprint of La Roche's 1771 novel has been supplemented by an epilogue and a selected bibliography by Günter Häntzschel. The citation is taken from a letter written by Derby, the novel's villain, about the title figure. All translations from the German in my essay are my own. Where possible, page numbers from this text will be provided in the body of the article.

2. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965), p. 154, provides a comment on the problems of applying social history to literary interpretation.

3. Ruth Yeazell, “Fictional Heroines and Feminist Critics,” Novel VIII, 1 (Fall, 1974), p. 29.

4. See Richard Evans's contribution to this volume for a discussion of the difficulty of establishing a historically valid meaning for the concept of feminism.

5. Marieluise Janssen-Jurreit, Sexismus. Über die Abtreibung der Frauenfrage (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1976), p. 13. This text has recently been published in English translation in an abridged version: Sexism: The Male Monopoly on History and Thought (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., 1982).

6. An essay by Louise Otto on the writer Agnes Franz appeared in Otto's journal Neue Bahnen XXIX, 8 (1 April 1894), pp. 59-61. An abridged version is to be found in a modern reprint in Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres, Die Anfänge der deutschen Frauenbewegung: Louise Otto-Peters (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1983), pp. 256-57.

7. Annette Kolodny, “Turning the Lens on ‘The Panther Captivity’: A Feminist Exercise in Practical Criticism,” Critical Inquiry 8, 2 (Winter 1981), p. 345.

8. Yeazell, p. 32.

9. Although the term is used by Renate Möhrmann in her brief discussion of La Roche's novel (see Die andere Frau. Emanzipationsansätze deutscher Schriftstellerinnen im Vorfeld der Achtundvierziger-Revolution [Stuttgart: Metzler, 1977], especially pp. 21-23), it was Christine Touaillon who popularized the designation in her Der deutsche Frauenroman des 18. Jahrhunderts (Vienna, Leipzig: Wilhelm Bräumuller, 1919). She deals at length with Sophie von La Roche; see particularly pp. 69-206.

10. See Adolf Bach, “Sophie von La Roche und ihre Stellung im deutschen Geistesleben des 18. Jahrhunderts,” Zeitschrift für Deutschkunde 40 (1926), pp. 165-82 for a general discussion of La Roche and her most famous novel. Bach is one of the few earlier critics to acknowledge La Roche's indirect influence on the development of the women's movement in the nineteenth century (p. 170).

11. Peter Hohendahl, “Empfindsamkeit und gesellschaftliches Bewusstsein. Zur Soziologie des empfindsamen Romans am Beispiel von La Vie de Marianne, Clarissa, Fräulein von Stemheim und Werther,” Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft, 16. Jg. (1972), pp. 176-207.

12. See Silvia Bovenschen, Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit. Exemplarische Untersuchungen zu kulturgeschichtlichen und literarischen Präsentationsformen des Weiblichen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979), esp. pp. 190-200.

13. Quoted in Adalbert von Hanstein, Die Frauen in der Geschichte des Deutschen Geisteslebens des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts. 2. Buch: Die Frauen in der Jugendzeit der grossen Volkserzieher und der grossen Dichter (Leipzig: Freund & Wittig, 1900), p. 130.

14. Sabine Schumann, “Das ‘Lesende Frauenzimmer’: Frauenzeitschriften im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Barbara Becker-Cantarino, ed., Die Frau von der Reformation zur Romantik: Die Situation der Frau vor dem Hintergrund der Literatur- und Sozialge-schichte (Bonn: Bouvier, 1980), p. 140.

15. According to Hanstein (in the first volume of his history of women, Die Frauen in der Zeit des Aufschwunges des Deutschen Geisteslebens [Leipzig: Freund & Wittig, 1899], p. 210), Sophie von La Roche could read at three and had finished the Bible by the age of five.

16. Watt, p. 161.

17. Sophie does briefly lose consciousness when she is pushed into the cellar by Derby's servant, but it is the result of injury and not a manifestation of the fainthearted nature ascribed to women in Sophie's day.

18. Heinrich Düntzer und Ferdinand Gottfried von Herder, eds., Aus Herders Nachlass. Ungedruckte Briefe …, 3. Band (Frankfurt: Meidinger Sohn und Comp, 1857), pp. 67-68.

19. Marion Beaujean, “Das Bild des Frauenzimmers im Roman des 18. Jahrhunderts,” Wolfenbüttler Studien zur Aufklärung III (1976), p. 15.

20. Bach, p. 173.

21. Wolfgang Martens, Die Botschaft der Tugend. Die Aufklärung im Spiegel der deutschen Moralischen Wochenschriften (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1968), p. 369.

22. See Karin Hausen, “Die Polarisierung der ‘Geschlechtscharaktere’—Eine Spiegelung der Dissoziation von Erwerbs- und Familienleben” in Werner Conze, ed., Sozialgeschichte der Familie in der Neuzeit Europas. Neue Forschungen (Stuttgart: Klett, 1976), pp. 363-93. This article has become a classic of sorts and is now available in English in Richard Evans and W. R. Lee, eds., The German Family (London/New Jersey: Croom-Helms/Barnes & Noble, 1981), pp. 51-83. Also very useful in the matter of sexual role assignations among eighteenth-century German women are: Barbar Duden, “Das schöne Eigentum. Zur Herausbildung des bürgerlichen Frauenbildes an der Wende vom 18. zum 19. Jahrhundert,” Kursbuch 47 (März 1977), pp. 125-40; and the early chapters of Dagmar Grenz's fascinating study of children's literature for girls in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Mädchenliteratur. Von den moralisch-belehrenden Schriften im 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Herausbildung der Backfischliteratur im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1981).

23. La Roche, p. 43. See also Hausen, pp. 385-90.

24. La Roche, p. 47. Italics mine.

25. Johann Christoph Adelung, Auszug aus dem grammatisch-kritischen Wörterbuche der hochdeutschen Mundart, 2. Theil (Leipzig: Brietkopf & Härtel, 1796), p. 433.

26. Hausen provides many examples of the growing split in the assignation of characteristics that occurred in the late eighteenth century. Duden augments those examples and includes a chart of virtues assigned to women and men (p. 138).

27. Martens, p. 523.

28. Hohendahl, p. 198.

29. La Roche, p. 109. Mr. ∗∗ is a nod to La Roche's editor Wieland.

30. See Hausen, esp. pp. 375-82.

31. At times Sophie's determination to remain active borders on the farcical. During the latter days of her imprisonment, for example, when her paper begins to run out, she makes plans to sew into canvas the words she feels she must record (p. 270).

32. See Fritz Brüggemann's introductory essay to his edition of Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (Leipzig: Reclam, 1938), p. 14.

33. La Roche, p. 241. See also p. 243 for a further comment on the value of friendship among women: Sophie, in stressing how much she needs Emilie, indicates that it is only with her friend that she can be open and honest.

34. Adelung, 1. Theil (1793), p. 1316.

35. La Roche, p. 94. At a later point in the novel, Sophie actually acts out her fantasies by assuming the roles of the members of a family whom she is assisting (pp. 211-16). There is a frequent use of the term Eigenliebe in this passage, indicating once again the tie between inner-directed and outward love.

36. Lee R. Edwards, “The Labors of Psyche: Toward a Theory of Female Heroism,” Critical Inquiry 6 (1979), p. 39.

37. Edwards, p. 45.

38. Bovenschen, p. 200-20.

39. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile oder über die Erziehung (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1970), p. 733.

40. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC/Penguin, 1972), p. 46.

41. Berger, pp. 46-47.

42. Published initially and anonymously in Iris (1775-1776), these Frauenzimmer-Briefe later appeared in two volumes under the title Rosaliens Briefe an ihre Freundin Mariane von St.∗ Von der Verfasserin des Fräuleins von Sternheim. The two most intriguing figures are Madame van Guden, who seems androgynous, and Frau Grafe, who is openly and wittily antagonistic of men.

43. Sophie von La Roche, ed., Lebensbeschreibung von Friderika Baldinger von ihr selbst verfasst (Offenbach: Ulrich Weiss und Carl Ludwig Brede, 1791). I am grateful to Sally Winkle for providing me with a copy of this text. Christine Touaillon includes several startlingly open and critical citations from Baldinger in her text.

44. Schumann, p. 151. Indicating the sort of limitations I too have seen, however, she goes on to say: “That phenomenon occurs within the framework of convention and tradition; feeling, grace, and intellect are the poles between which a woman's existence unfolds.”