In 1771, with the publication of her first novel, The Story of Miss von Sternheim, Sophie La Roche's subjective portrayal of women and her use of a more personal, colloquial language catapulted her to fame among a new generation of German authors and readers. Despite her initial success, however, La Roche's fate was typical of numerous women writers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: her work soon faded from the public eye and was excluded from the literary canon. In his 1875 study of Richardson, Rousseau, and Goethe, Erich Schmidt claimed that La Roche's works were forgotten for a reason. Although he acknowledged that her lively and skillful style revealed progress in comparison to novels by her immediate predecessors, Christian Fürchtegott Gellert and Johannes Timotheous Hermes, he seemed disturbed that her writing retained something female-like (etwas Frauenzimmerliches).¹ Indeed, La Roche's gender contributed to both the success and, because of prevailing gender ideology, the limitations of her literary compositions.

As a product of the Enlightenment and of sentimentality, as an admirer of Richardson and Rousseau, and as a female author, Sophie La Roche represents a woman in conflict with herself; she provided a new insight and a female perspective on women's lives, but she was also influenced by an emerging ideology that designated women as more passive than active, as more receptive than creative. The designation of supposedly natural masculine and feminine attributes denoted a shift in the philosophical arguments concerning gender difference in the latter third of the century from an emphasis on nurture to a focus on nature as the essential determinant of male and female character and function.² This shift is evident in La Roche's novels and marks her as a transitional author struggling to harmonize conventional ideas of gender distinction with her own desire to apply rational ideals of self-improvement and human dignity to the female as well as the male sex.

The idea of two distinct, complementary personalities based on gender emerged after 1760 in conjunction with the gradual change in middle-class family structure from the self-sufficient household, consisting of extended family as well as servants, apprentices, and the like, to the nuclear family, in which woman was increasingly defined in terms of her new role as household manager, consumer, reproducer, and nurturer within the domestic sphere.³ Whereas previous theories utilized the Bible and social necessity to defend the separate roles of the sexes and the subordinate position of women, theories influenced by Rousseau described woman as destined by nature for her position as a self-effacing, gentle, devoted wife and mother.⁴ A woman's desire to transgress her predetermined function in life was therefore no longer simply socially unacceptable, but could be denounced as unnatural and degenerate.

The idealization of traits ascribed as natural to the female sex was accompanied by a subtle devaluation of her work in the household and a repression of qualities that would enable her to openly fight mistreatment. As exemplified in the 1795 novel by Karoline von Wobeser, Elisa or Woman as She is Supposed to Be, the ideal woman was expected to apply her inborn kindness, generosity, and unselfishness to transform an abusive husband into a good, loving man. This ideology rapidly became established as social convention. German literature in the last decades of the century became the forum for the construction of a bourgeois feminine ideal suitable for middle-class woman's self-sacrificing, pleasing role within the nuclear family idyll.⁵ This crippling idealization of women was accentuated by the simultaneous trend toward a literary depiction of more individualized male heroes as singular, struggling, developing characters.

Although Sophie La Roche's epistolary novels The Story of Miss von Sternheim (1771) and Rosalia's Letters (1779-81) reveal a tendency toward the construction of feminine ideals and the exaltation of sentimental love and marriage as indispensable to a woman's fulfillment and happiness, the author simultaneously undermines these ideas by creating proud female characters, narrative twists, and subplots that seem to subvert the more overtly didactic messages of the dominant story line. La Roche seems to celebrate a sentimental view of femininity, expressed in the self-denying love, modesty, and physical weakness of many of her fictional females, while also advocating a rational education for women and acknowledging their diverse talents. The contradictory aspects of La Roche's two best-known epistolary novels exhibit a conflicting mixture of literary innovation and convention, though the author's challenge to the bourgeois ideal of passive femininity in Sternheim is muted in Rosalia's Letters. La Roche's increasing conventionality in her second novel seems to reflect and reinforce the power in the late eighteenth century of a newly established ideology based on the distinction between inborn masculine and feminine characters.

It is not surprising that La Roche's first published literary accomplishment was an epistolary novel, nor is it surprising that she began writing in the period of sentimentality. The sentimental movement in the latter half of the eighteenth century simultaneously promoted and limited women's cultural development. Qualities highly valued in the age of sensibility were those increasingly being regarded as “feminine”: sensitivity, modesty, compassion, moral goodness, self-denial, and the ability to express feelings. Sentimental friendships, letters, melancholy walks, and novels provided emotional outlets for middle-class women tired of the boredom and routine of their daily lives.⁶ Recognition of women's particular aptitude for epistolary writing and the new value placed on “female” traits gave women of the educated bourgeoisie an awareness of their personal assets, which created the appearance of a “separate but equal” world for the “other sex.” As the private virtues and the themes of love, family, and the heart edged into the public arena of literature, some women felt encouraged to take up the pen themselves as creators of poems, essays, travel journals, and even novels.⁷

The Enlightenment's emphasis on reading and education for both sexes led to substantial gains in the numbers of female readers by the end of the century. The result was twofold: greater influence of the female reading public in the book market on the one hand, and dire warnings against Lesewuth, or reading mania, as deleterious to the development of women as suitable wives and mothers on the other.⁸ This ambivalent response to a more visible female role in German culture after 1750 corresponded to the paradoxical effects of sentimentality for women.

Many of the supposedly typical feminine traits celebrated in this era were private virtues more appropriate to devoted wives and self-sacrificing mothers in the developing nuclear family than to active creators of culture. In other words, characteristics valued in the age of sensibility may have given women a new sense of gender autonomy, but they also prescribed for the female gender the practice of receptivity rather than creativity, feelings rather than deep reflection or analysis, and unselfishness rather than self-love. Female authors thus found themselves in a perilous position. In order to avoid being labeled unnatural or unwomanly, many defended their writing as useful for the edification of young women, or as merely a peripheral part of their more important roles as wives and mothers. Women writers were thus limited to a mainly private, modest role in a society and culture still defined and dominated by men.

La Roche's strengths as a female author accounted for both her enthusiastic reception by the educated, middle-class reading public in the 1770s and her subsequent marginalization as a writer devoted to raising “paper girls,” making fictional harmonious matches, and extolling feminine virtues. Recent reprintings of Sternheim, a 1983 publication of her collected letters, and a surge of articles and dissertations attest to the renewed interest in her work in the past fifteen years, especially among young scholars and feminist critics.⁹ Current studies recognize La Roche's significance as the first prominent female novelist in Germany and as contributor to the development of the epistolary novel, the subjective novel, and the so-called “women's novel” that proliferated in the realm of popular literature at the end of the eighteenth century.¹⁰

La Roche's The Story of Miss von Sternheim is a transitional novel whose heroine presents a combination of conflicting rational and sentimental tendencies. Sophie Sternheim is simultaneously an outspoken, well-read, proud female role model and a modest, unselfish example of sentimental femininity. The result is the depiction of a conflicted female protagonist who has certain features of the bourgeois feminine ideal but, as a speaking subject, changes and develops within the narrative.

La Roche's contemporaries hailed Sternheim for its unique heroine, whose freer use of language (variously described as natural and heartfelt) contributed to an innovative use of the epistolary form.¹¹ The author's omission of addresses' letters in her first novel provided a compact narrative structure and a more subjective text, increasing the tension and excitement of the plot.¹² The reader of the novel is forced to take a more active role, as the reader adopts the position of the absent addressee. Letters by various characters provide the reader with different versions of events relevant to the motivation of the main characters and to the plot in which Sophie is entangled.

In contrast to Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, Hermes's Sophie's Travels, and Rousseau's Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse, La Roche's Sternheim is neither cumbersome nor overloaded with subplots. La Roche did of course make use of many traditional epistolary techniques perfected by her predecessors: presenting the book as a collection of letters by the heroine's friend and former servant, as well as insisting on the authenticity of the letters and on their usefulness as moral edification for the eighteenth-century reading public.¹³ Similarities to Richardson's Clarissa and Pamela, which are obvious in the plot and in the characterization of Lord Derby, reveal the influence of her forerunners.¹⁴

The novel begins with a biographical introduction of the heroine's parents and childhood by her friend and later servant/companion, Rosine. Sophie von Sternheim was raised with bourgeois values on a country estate, the only daughter of a noble family committed to the Enlightenment principles of the landholder as benevolent patriarch. La Roche carefully outlines her heroine's education and stresses the importance of learning and environment for the development of the individual character. The loss of her mother at the age of nine and her father at nineteen reinforced Sternheim's sentimental inclination toward melancholy and set the stage for the subsequent tests of her virtue, moral principles, and strength of character.

Sophie von Sternheim's letters begin a year after her father's death when she arrives at court D∗ with her mother's half sister, the haughty Countess of Löbau. Sophie becomes ensnared in her aunt's plan to further her husband's prospects at court by offering her unsuspecting niece to the prince as his new mistress. Sophie addresses her letters to her friend Emilie, Rosine's sister. Letters by two Englishmen at D∗, the sentimental Lord Seymour and the diabolical rake Lord Derby, supply alternate perspectives of events and provide information unknown to the heroine. Although Sophie and Lord Seymour are depicted as related souls, their budding love is impeded by court intrigue. Despite her expressed virtue and austere ideal of sentimental love, Sternheim's role at court is mainly a sexual one: she is pursued by the prince, Count F∗, Lord Seymour, and Lord Derby.

Alone at court, bereft of friends, and scorned by her aunt and uncle for thwarting their plan, she is easy prey for Lord Derby, who convinces her to marry him and secretly leave D∗. After several unhappy weeks at an inn some distance from the court, Derby angrily leaves her. His farewell letter informs her that their marriage was false; Sophie falls ill and returns with Rosine to Emilie. Unlike some sentimental heroines with a similar fate, however, she does not languish and die; instead she assumes the sentimental name Madame Leidens,¹⁵ and with the help of a rich widow founds a school to train poor girls as domestic servants.

An elderly Englishwoman, Lady Summers, convinces Madame Leidens to live with her and continue her good work in England. Their neighbor, the rational Lord Rich, falls in love with Sophie but, devastated by her first “marriage,” she is determined to remain single. The plot thickens when Derby marries Lady Summers's niece. Afraid Sophie will betray him, he has her abducted and carried off to a destitute family in a desolate area of Scotland. Derby's evil servant nearly kills Sternheim when she refuses to become the lord's mistress.

Convinced that Sophie is dead, the dying Lord Derby remorsefully summons Seymour and Rich to erect a monument in her name. The two good lords, who are now revealed to the reader as half brothers, rush to Scotland to find Sophie alive and rescued by a kind Scottish lady. Lord Rich generously renounces his love for Sophie in deference to his sensitive, sentimental younger brother Lord Seymour. After some hesitation, Sophie agrees to the marriage, and the three live happily on Seymour's estate in England.

Throughout the novel, La Roche stresses the importance of women in Sternheim's life: her friends Emilie and Rosine; the widows she lives with in Germany and England, Madame Hills and Lady Summers; the woman who rescues her in Scotland, Lady Douglas; and numerous others of various ages and classes, who give her support and friendship. Sophie's success as teacher and social worker demonstrates La Roche's belief in the significance of women's accomplishments within and outside the private sphere and thus contradicts messages elsewhere in the narrative that project marriage as the only respectable goal for the female sex. Recent readings of the novel have emphasized the author's representation of a strong, active female protagonist, who serves as a “hero to her sex,” and a plot that at least temporarily grants Sophie a free space outside the patriarchal society, before her virtue is rewarded with marriage to the man of her choice.¹⁶

The multifaceted perspective of the narrative provided by the epistolary form applies to gender as well. On the one hand, La Roche's novel offers a personal, subjective account of women as survivors. Her emphasis on the diversity of female skills and characters, and on personal development for women as well as men, imparts a female perspective to the action. Sophie Sternheim's letters and journal in Scotland form the core of the narrative, supplemented by Rosine's introduction and description of the heroine. Sternheim's “I” reveals to Emilie her inner doubts, moralistic observations, and struggles to accept both self-love and self-sacrifice. Her letters demonstrate her internal conflicts and growth as the offspring of a father of bourgeois background and a mother of noble birth, and as a woman defined according to an ideology in flux.

The female voice is counteracted, however, by the letters of the male protagonists, in particular Lord Seymour and Lord Derby, who judge Sternheim's actions from an androcentric perspective and superimpose their ideals of virtue and love upon her with disastrous results.¹⁷ Seymour's letters present a view of Sophie's behavior based on court gossip and social definitions of feminine morality. Although he loves Sternheim “at first sight,” he obeys his uncle's wish not to intervene in the intrigue surrounding the girl until she proves beyond all doubt her innocence, so as not to endanger his career by marrying a woman of questionable reputation.

Lord Seymour's exalted idea of Sternheim as an omniscient goddess of virtue blinds him to her naïveté and prevents him from seeking to discover the truth behind activities which the court misinterprets as proof of Sophie's relationship with the prince. As he later regretfully admits: “First I did not want to speak of my love, until she had revealed herself completely in accord with my concepts in the full splendor of triumphant virtue. She went her own pretty way, and because she did not follow my ideal plan, I appropriated for myself the power to punish her in the most painful way.”¹⁸ Seymour's all-encompassing love for Sophie is possessive and selfish, since it is founded on his idealized image rather than on attempts to understand her thoughts, character, and behavior. Once his ideal of her is shattered, his love is overshadowed by rage at having loved an unworthy object, and he names himself judge and jury, nearly destroying her in the process.

Similarly, Derby's observations of Sophie are colored by his own view of women as objects of conquest and sexual pleasure. His reports of Sophie's experiences at court are interspersed with mocking comments on her generosity and modesty, whereas his account of their brief “marriage” is distorted by his unrealistic demands on Sophie's capacity to express ardent desire for a man she doesn't love. Ironically, Derby is the only one in D∗ who really attempts to know her character, even though his motives are selfish. He hopes that by feigning virtue and magnanimity he can win Sophie's affection. He mistakenly believes that he can convert her passion for good deeds and helping others to passion for enjoyment and pleasing him.

Deluded by his improbable ideal of Sophie as a sensuous lover, Derby can read his young bride's cool kisses and unhappiness only as signs of repressed love for another man, Lord Seymour. Derby's jealous assertion that he is not the man she loves is true, since the character he had originally revealed to her was nothing but pretense. When Sophie no longer fits his exaggerated conception of female sensuality, he considers himself free of all responsibility to her. “She is no longer the creature that I loved, therefore I am no longer committed to remain what I seemed to her to be at the time” (Sternheim 191).

Both these male protagonists set up ideals of the female character based on their own imagination and desires, rather than permitting her to define and reveal herself to them. When Sophie proves incapable of meeting their fantastic demands, both men react with rage and reject her. Although the shattering of each hero's ideal and her subsequent abandonment leave Sternheim broken and ill, it is significant that the heroine herself survives and that the author grants her at least some determination of her own existence. La Roche thus depicts and subsequently undermines the idealizations of her heroine by exposing them as destructive fantasies of Sophie's suitors, thereby providing a subtle critique of the projection of unattainable feminine ideals. The clear juxtaposition of male and female perspectives in the narrative provides added tension to the text.

Interestingly, although Sophie's and Rosine's voices predominate throughout the novel, Seymour's rational brother, Lord Rich, describes the final scene of the Seymour's marital bliss and family idyll. Nevertheless, Sophie's public role is not totally stifled by the confinement of marriage. Rich portrays Sophie's active involvement in the community on their estate, that is, in a sphere bridging the public and private.¹⁹ In addition, Sophie enjoys the love of not one, but two men, forming an unconventional, though socially acceptable, ménage à trois, as Ruth-Ellen Joeres points out. Even though Rich's affection for his sister-in-law is strictly platonic, he refuses to marry, chooses to reside with his in-laws, and raises their second son as his own.²⁰ In this sense, La Roche's family idyll in Sternheim contrasts with the increasingly privatized function of women in the bourgeois nuclear family as experienced by many of her readers.

The fictional female narrator of the text, Rosine, is countered by a male editor, the well-known novelist and La Roche's friend, Christoph Martin Wieland. Despite his good intentions and his helpful role in advising Sophie La Roche on her first published work, Wieland's patronizing preface and critical footnotes run counter to the meaning of the text and evoke a male presence throughout the novel.²¹

Of greater significance, however, is the androcentric perspective that occasionally disrupts the female point of view. This is most obvious in Sophie's conversation with the rational scholar and author Mr. ∗∗∗, whom she meets on a visit with her aunt. Conceived as a tribute to her friend Wieland, Mr. ∗∗∗ also reveals the strong influence of Rousseau's Emile on Sophie La Roche. He warns Miss von Sternheim to avoid a “masculine tone” in her writing and speech, and prescribes for men and women different spheres and talents based on the distinct qualities endowed them by nature.

Nature itself designated this by making man fervent and woman tender in the passion of love; by equipping the former with rage and the latter with sentimental tears in the face of insult, and by imparting for business matters and learning the masculine mind with strength and deep thought, and the feminine spirit with flexibility and grace; in misfortune the man with resoluteness and courage, the woman with patience and resignation. In domestic life nature has charged the former with the responsibility to obtain the resources for the family and the latter with the adept distribution of these funds, etc.

(Sternheim 108)

The concept of neatly complementary, inborn masculine and feminine character traits in this passage contradicts La Roche's emphasis elsewhere on education and socialization as essential to the development of the heroine's character. Moreover, the homogeneous ideal of bourgeois femininity articulated in this conversation contrasts with La Roche's heterogeneous representation of women throughout the novel. The female characters in Sternheim represent all social classes. Whether married, widowed, or single, they lead useful lives, and their productivity and value are acknowledged. However, in an era in which the lower classes far outnumbered the bourgeoisie, and middle-class women were often unable to marry owing to lack of dowry, the ideas proposed by Mr. ∗∗∗ define the entire female sex as if all members were middle-class and married. These theories exemplify an androcentric perspective, which undercuts the author's recognition of women's varied contributions both within and outside the private sphere.

Like The Story of Miss von Sternheim, La Roche's Rosalia's Letters could be classified as a transitional novel, marked by an uneasy combination of rational and sentimental characteristics and contradictory definitions of women's character, abilities, and functions. On the one hand, La Roche's experiments with changes in narrative voice, open structure, and a more realistic depiction of country life,²² as well as her intriguing portrait of Madame Gudens, are innovative aspects of her second novel. On the other hand, these elements are offset by an increasing conventionality in tone, didactic message, and idealization of marriage and motherhood.

Written in the years between 1773 and 1780, Rosalia's Letters differs sharply from The Story of Miss von Sternheim. Although Rosalia appears as the major protagonist and main correspondent, her travels and acquaintances primarily provide a framework for a series of interwoven and independent stories, which she relates in her letters in the third person, in dialogue form, or in the first person. Rosalia's tale is quite simple; she leaves her friend Marianne in order to accompany her uncle, a lawyer and privy councillor, on his official travels in Germany and Switzerland. She and her uncle settle in a city where she makes friends among the upper bourgeoisie and lower nobility and takes small trips into the countryside. In the second volume she marries her fiancé, Cleberg, a higher magistrate in a village nearby; volumes two and three trace her inner development as a wife and mother.

The purpose of Rosalia's Letters is more overtly didactic than that of the first novel and is almost overwhelmed by the subplots and stories of numerous characters, some of whom are more interesting than the protagonists, Rosalia, her uncle, and Cleberg.²³ La Roche frees her epistolary novel from the constriction of one major plot and thus approximates an actual correspondence or journal, with multiple topics and reports on events, conversations, and people surrounding the letter writer. These new uses of the epistolary form and shifts in the narrative voice lend the work an original quality, but also contribute to a loose, unwieldy structure. Even though Rosalia's letters far outnumber those by Madame Guden or Cleberg, her character lacks the depth and complexity of a heroine like Sternheim, and her correspondence often revolves around the lives and experiences of friends and acquaintances.

As in Sternheim, the female perspective in Rosalia's Letters stresses the value of women's work and directs the reader's attention to women's everyday lives. La Roche portrays a variety of women from different social classes, both single and married, but her idealized world centers on the educated upper bourgeoisie. Rosalia's letters offer insight into the feelings and experiences of a young woman of the upper middle class, and disclose aspects of women's existence usually overlooked in fiction of this era: adjustment to the commitment of marriage, fear of childbirth, problems with in-laws, and the like. The supporting characters, Mrs. Grafe and Madame Guden, nevertheless impart a female perspective much more rigorously than La Roche's designated bourgeois feminine ideal and major protagonist, Rosalia.

Mrs. G∗∗ (Grafe), is a sarcastic, witty woman who prefers a lightly mocking discourse and consistently subverts and interrupts serious discussion. Mrs. Grafe often directs her humor and criticism toward the male sex and the unjust rules of a male-dominated society.²⁴ She reacts with skepticism to Rosalia's enthusiastic accounts of female domestic bliss and feminine docility. In response to Rosalia's glowing praise of a woman who, after years of isolation from society because of the bitterness of her mother-in-law, chose to continue her reclusive life in devotion to her husband and children, Mrs. Grafe warns Rosalia of the risk of telling the story to men.

There could be rich greedy devils, or other house tyrants among men who would go home and banish their wives and daughters to the miserable nests where the poor creatures already have to spend most of their lives; the men, however, would go prancing off every day, like that Councillor …, to their coffee house, and would have their freedom and their fun, while the poor woman would have to wait patiently by her whirring spinning wheel for her sullen and bull-headed master.²⁵

Even though Rosalia often protests against Mrs. Grafe's comments, the latter is portrayed as a kind-hearted, sympathetic character, and the former usually recognizes the justification of the older woman's complaints. Mrs. Grafe thus functions as a dissenting voice to Rosalia's complete acceptance of self-sacrifice and willing submission to male authority.

Whereas in Sternheim La Roche created a complicated heroine who embodied both a sentimental feminine ideal and an active female protagonist, in Rosalia's Letters she split the conflicting halves of Sophie's personality into two separate characters. Determined by her desire to please the men in her life, Rosalia internalizes their ideals of woman as cheerful, devoted niece, wife, and mother. Madame Guden, however, La Roche's most original character, represents a stubborn, passionate counterpart to Rosalia.

Madame Guden is a wealthy, well-educated young widow with artistic and musical talents, irrepressible energy, and creativity. Still suffering from an unhappy love for a weak, extravagant man when she meets Rosalia, Madame Guden nonetheless enjoys a degree of autonomy that Rosalia has never known. Her independence has a high price in La Roche's world, that of renounced love and a tinge of melancholy, but Madame Guden achieves a full life because of her generosity and concern for the welfare of those around her. By the end of the novel she has gained in self-respect and accepted the differences that kept her and her beloved Mr. Pindorf apart, rather than blaming their unfulfilled love on fate, as he has done. Through Guden the author depicts the importance of self-love in the development of the female as well as the male character. It is not so much her magnanimous desire to help the poor Wolling family and to educate Pindorf's children that mark her as a unique woman, as it is her ability to create her own happiness, to construct her own world, and to define her own family.

A shift in narration emphasizes Guden's increasing significance in her heroine's fictional community. First described by Rosalia, then appearing in conversation, Guden's story is told in the third person before she begins writing to Rosalia and gains her own voice. In her letters, Guden subsequently becomes a narrator herself, relating her own experiences and repeating conversations in which others tell their stories, mirroring Rosalia's narrative role. Guden's growing recognition of Mr. Pindorf's weak, helpless character demonstrates her development as a woman aware of her own strengths.

La Roche's choice of Rosalia rather than Madame Guden as her main protagonist is crucial to the author's shift in favor of male-defined feminine ideals and conventional messages of female passivity and conformity. On the one hand, Guden is a more well-rounded, intricate character, her past and present experiences are more varied and interesting than Rosalia's, and her philanthropic activities and generosity serve as models for her class and sex. On the other hand, she is too unconventional, unique, and independent, her temperament is too strong, and her love too passionate to function as the major role model in La Roche's didactic novel. Even though Rosalia's ideas and experiences as a new wife and mother are presented as exemplary for her bourgeois readers, Madame Guden's significant role transmits a strong signal of women's multiple talents, intelligence, and active ways to achieve a meaningful life.

As in Sternheim, the female perspective in Rosalia's Letters is countered by an androcentric point of view, which is evident in Rosalia's thoughts on women's subordinate role in marriage, in her enthusiastic stories of blissful courtships, and in Cleberg's letters. Indeed, Rosalia's personality and behavior betray the author's growing adherence to the prevailing ideology that defined women merely in relation to men, children, and the intimate bourgeois family idyll, thus revealing the increasing conventionality in the content and tone of her work.

Throughout the novel, Rosalia's life is controlled and determined by dominant, strong-willed men. Modeled on La Roche's husband, Rosalia's uncle is depicted as a rational, generous, kind man, yet his patriarchal rule over his niece's life is absolute.²⁶ His decision that Rosalia be given only a moment's notice before her wedding is but one example of his well-intentioned but manipulative gestures.

Although Cleberg is depicted as a dedicated, hard-working husband, his schemes to observe his new wife under the adverse conditions of illness and jealousy indicate a concern governed by curiosity and the will to dominate. Even Cleberg's defense of women demonstrates a paternalistic attitude toward the “beautiful” sex, as he criticizes the injustice of men's expectations of women: “We inform ourselves so much with the superior power and talents of our minds; and yet our equanimity succumbs to the most minute offence in the course of business, fate, or due to a small accumulation of work. And from you frail children we demand a constant equal cheerfulness and serenity” (Rosalia's Letters 2:386). La Roche's fictional females applaud Cleberg's reproach of his own sex, yet the passage illustrates how important were vulnerability and weakness to the bourgeois ideal of femininity in the last decades of the eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century.

Like Seymour's, Cleberg's love is genuine, but it is neither unselfish nor unconditional; it is a possessive, demanding love, based on an idealistic view of woman and marriage. Unlike in Sternheim, however, in which Seymour has to reassess his image of his beloved once his ideal is shattered, Cleberg's expectations are fulfilled, because Rosalia fits his concept of a feminine ideal. Rosalia passes his tests with flying colors, and even though she subtly indicates her displeasure with his obtrusive behavior, she nonetheless swallows her resentment and represses her anger. The heroine in La Roche's second novel clearly exemplifies resignation, patience, and unquestioning support of husband and children as essential qualities of a bourgeois feminine ideal. Whereas Sophie Sternheim expresses an inner conflict between opposing elements of self-determination and passive acceptance, Rosalia's sensitivity, willingness to please, and submissiveness easily prevail over any budding notions of obstinance or pride. Her sentimental soul is more harmoniously balanced, and her character approaches the innocent, self-sacrificing feminine ideals of the Storm-and-Stress dramas, the static idealized femininity of Goethe and Schiller's classical works, and the exalted image of woman as symbol of undying love and beauty in Romanticism.²⁷

La Roche's adherence to social convention and androcentric perspective, in particular her emphasis on love and marriage as the determining factor of women's happiness and usefulness, is undercut through the narratives of both Sternheim and Rosalia's Letters. Although the disruptive instances are greatly reduced in her second work, each novel transmits ambivalent messages to her female readers. In The Story of Miss von Sternheim, Sophie's disastrous false marriage to Lord Derby and her dialogue on the pros and cons of matrimony with the Widow von C∗∗ counteract the idyllic scenes of domestic bliss that open and close the novel. La Roche's depiction of widows and single women leading contented, productive lives offsets her emphasis on Sophie's marriage to Seymour as the destined end of her aimless wandering. Only the subplots provide the dissenting perspective in Rosalia's Letters. The illness and tragic death of Henriette Effen warn of the destructiveness of boundless sentimental love.²⁸ Madame Guden's resoluteness and creative use of her time and money to provide herself with a productive life and loving friends offer an alternative to Rosalia's protected, predetermined existence within the private sphere.

Rosalia's Letters is neither a didactic fictional correspondence with a weak narrative structure, as Eva Becker has argued, nor is it La Roche's most skillfully crafted novel, as maintained by Christine Touaillon.²⁹ There are elements in this neglected work that justify its reevaluation by literary critics, however, such as its more open narrative structure, which encompasses the experiences of men and especially women at various social levels. The emphasis on community is reflected in Rosalia's integration of group conversations into her letters, while the stories related in the correspondence stress cooperation, tolerance, and compassion as essential human characteristics.

Indeed, Sophie La Roche creates a kind of utopia for the women in both Sternheim and Rosalia's Letters that mirrors the contradictory elements of these texts. On the one hand La Roche projects a world in which her fictional females are loved and respected, active and useful, surrounded by friends and admiring neighbors.³⁰ On the other hand, the fictional community is still a patriarchal, male-dominated world, and in her second novel, it is increasingly withdrawn from the larger commercial world of paid work.

While Goethe's epistolary novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, had in 1774 initiated a trend away from the didactic novel, it is telling that La Roche intensified her commitment to pedagogical letter fiction in her second novel. La Roche internalized the prevailing justification of women authors as public mothers and teachers of female middle-class readers, particularly in Rosalia's Letters and her subsequent works. Sophie La Roche's emotional and financial dependence on men until her husband's death in 1788 as well as her insecurity as a late-developing woman writer further reinforced her desire to please and her willingness to adapt to roles projected upon her. Despite her pride and ambition, her correspondence attests to an increasing need for reassurance and sensitivity to criticism.³¹ These personal qualities, in addition to growing dependence on the earnings from her books, prevented La Roche from taking risks and contributed to her conformity to popular gender ideology.

In spite of the significance of her literary periodical for women, Pomona, in 1783 and 1784, La Roche's first two novels are her most accomplished works. Steadfastly committed to her mission as moral educator of Germany's daughters, she became ever more conventional in her writing. In her pedagogical Letters to Lina, published in three volumes from 1783 to 1797, La Roche projects an increasingly rigid dichotomy between, on the one hand, female patience, complaisance, and education defined according to men's needs, and male activity, scholarship, and authority on the other.³²

La Roche's contributions as a female author in eighteenth-century Germany should not be underestimated, however. Her ambivalent representations of women in Sternheim and Rosalia's Letters demonstrate an attempt to combine an affirmation of the kindness, compassion, and sensitivity cultivated in her own sex with the idea that the Enlightenment emphasis on education, community, and self-improvement is applicable to the development of both sexes. Her celebration of feminine virtues was made problematic in the 1770s by their justification solely as qualities relegated to the private sphere and unsuitable outside the bourgeois family. She therefore accepted at least in part the prevailing ideology that proclaimed complementary masculine and feminine character traits as “natural” indicators of woman's inevitable identity as pleasing, self-denying wife and mother. The androcentric definition of the female sex, which appeared only sporadically in Sternheim, determined her portrayal of Rosalia in the second novel. An analysis of La Roche's first two epistolary novels demonstrates the degree to which the author internalized the new ideals of bourgeois femininity and domestic intimacy, and indicates the pervasiveness of the nurture/nature shift in gender theories that emerged in the late eighteenth century.

Notes

1. Erich Schmidt, Richardson, Rousseau and Goethe (Jena: Eduard Frommann, 1875), 62.

2. Karin Hausen, “Die Polarisierung der ‘Geschlechtscharaktere’—Eine Spiegelung der Dissoziation von Erwerbs—und Familienleben,” in Sozialgeschichte der Familie in der Neuzeit Europas, ed. Werner Conze (Stuttgart: Klett, 1976), 363-93.

3. Compare Heidi Rosenbaum, Formen der Familie (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1982), 251-309; Dieter Schwab, “Familie,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and R. Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett, 1975), 253-301; Otto Brunner, “Das ‘ganze Haus’ und die alteuropäische ‘Ökonomik,’” in Neue Wege der Verfassungs- und Sozialgeschichte, 2d enlarged ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoech & Ruprecht, 1968), 103 ff.

4. See Gerda Tornieporth, Studien zur Frauenbildung (Weinheim & Basel: Beltz, 1977), 11-73; Dagmar Grenz, Mädchenliteratur von den moralischbelehrenden Schriften im 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Herausbildung der Backfischliteratur im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1981), 6-112; Rosenbaum, Formen der Familie, 261-309; Peter Petschauer, “From Hausmütter to Hausfrau: Ideals and Realities in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Eighteenth Century Life 8 (1982-83): 72-79.

5. Compare Barbara Duden, “Das schöne Eigentum: Zur Herausbildung des bürgerlichen Frauenbildes an der Wende vom 18. zum 19. Jahrhundert,” Kursbuch 47 (1977): 125-40; Silvia Bovenschen, Die imaginierte Weiblichkeit (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1979); Sigrid Weigel, “Die geopferte Heldin und das Opfer als Heldin,” in Die verborgene Frau, ed. Inge Stephan and Sigrid Weigel (Berlin: Argument, 1983), 138-52; Rita Jo Horsley, “A Critical Appraisal of Goethe's Iphigenie,” in Beyond the Eternal Feminine, ed. Susan L. Cocalis and Kay Goodman (Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag Hans-Dieter Heinz, 1982), 47-74. This idea is also developed in my book, Woman as Bourgeois Ideal: A Study of Sophie von La Roche's Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim and Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (New York, Bern: Peter Lang, 1988).

6. See Natalie Halperin, Die deutschen Schriftstellerinnen in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts (Quakenbrück: C. Trute, 1935), 18-26.

7. Julie Bondeli, Sophie Albrecht, Elisa von der Recke, Friderika Baldinger, Philippine Engelhard, Marianne Ehrmann, Sophie von La Roche, Friederike Helene Unger, and Karoline von Wolzogen exemplify this trend.

8. Compare Gerhard Sauder, “Gefahren empfindsamer Vollkommenheit für Leserinnen und die Furcht vor Romanen in einer Damenbibliothek,” in Leser und Lesen im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Rainier Gruenter (Heidelberg: Winter 1977), 83-85; Wolfgang Martens, Botschaft der Tugend (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1968), 531-32, 540-42; Helga Meise, Die Unschuld und die Schrift (Berlin/Marburg: Guttandin & Hoppe, 1983), 66-82.

9. Recent studies of La Roche's life and works include: Ruth-Ellen Joeres, “‘That girl is an entirely different character!’ 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, ed. Ruth-Ellen B. Joeres and Mary Jo Maynes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 137-56; Barbara Becker-Cantarino, “Nachwort,” in Sophie von La Roche, Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1983), 381-415; Jeannine Blackwell, “Bildungsroman mit Dame,” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1982), 109-29; Helen Kastinger Riley, “Tugend im Umbruch: Sophie Laroches Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim einmal anders,” in Die weibliche Muse (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1986), 27-52; Bernd Heidenreich, Sophie von La Roche—eine Werkbiographie (Frankfurt a. M., Bern, New York: Peter Lang, 1986); Günter Häntzschel, “Nachwort,” in Sophie von La Roche, Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (Munich: Winkler, 1976), 301-36; Michael Maurer, “Das Gute und das Schöne: Sophie von La Roche (1730-1807) wiederentdecken?” Euphorion 79 (1985): 111-38; Peter Petschauer, “Sophie von La Roche, Novelist Between Reason and Emotion,” Germanic Review 61 (Spring 1982): 70-77; Petra Sachs, “Sophie von La Roche: Ein ‘Frauenbild,’” in Frauenjahrbuch 1, ed. Hildegard Kuhn-Oechsle and Elizabeth Renz (Weingarten: Drumlin, 1983), 101-49, and Winkle, Woman as Bourgeois Ideal, 45-92.

10. The most comprehensive study of the “women's novel” in eighteenth-century Germany is still Christine Touaillon, Der deutsche Frauenroman des 18. Jahrhunderts (Vienna, Leipzig: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1919).

11. See Brüggemann, “Einführung,” in Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim, Sammlung literarischer Kunst- und Kulturdenkmäler in Entwicklungsreihen, Reihe Ausklärung, vol. 15 (Leipiz: Philipp Reclam, 1938), 12; Siegfried Sudhof, “Sophie Laroche,” in Deutsche Dichter des 18. Jahrhunderts: Ihr Leben und Werk, ed. Benno von Wiese (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1977), 303-4.

12. Compare Touaillon, 112-16; Ridderhoff, “Einleitung,” in Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim; Sophie von La Roche, Deutsche Literaturdenkmale, no. 138, ed. Kuno Ridderhoff (Berlin: Behr, 1907), 34-35; Wilhelm Spickernagel, Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim von Sophie von La Roche und Goethes “Werther” (Greifswald: Hans Adler, 1911), 33-35; Heidenreich, Sophie von La Roche, 14-15.

13. See Wulf Koepke, “The epistolary novel: from self-assertion to alienation,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 192 (1980): 1277-79.

14. See Kuno Ridderhoff, Sophie von La Roche, die Schülerin Richardsons and Rousseaus (Einbeck: J. Schroedter, 1895); and Schmidt, Richardson, Rousseau und Goethe, 46-63; Touaillon, Der deutsche Frauenroman, 106-11.

15. Leiden means “to suffer” in German.

16. Compare Joeres, “That girl,” 137-56; Becker-Cantarino, “Nachwort,” 407-15; Blackwell, Bildungsroman mit Dame, 120-29.

17. Claudine Herrmann asserts the improbability of a woman's ability to determine her own world within an androcentric culture and society in “The Virile System,” in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 88.

18. La Roche, Geschichte, 178, translation mine. All further references to this work appear in the text.

19. Petschauer, “Sophie von La Roche,” 73-74.

20. Joeres, “That girl,” 153.

21. Compare Touaillon, Der deutsche Frauenroman 120-22; Becker-Cantarino, “‘Muse’ und ‘Kunstrichter,’” MLN 99 (1984): 582; and J. M. R. Lenz, “To Sophie La Roche,” June 1775, Briefe von und an J. M. R. Lenz, ed. Karl Freye & W. Stammler (Leipzig: Kurt Wolff, 1918), 1:121.

22. See Burghardt Dedner, “Sophie La Roche: ‘Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim’ and ‘Rosaliens Briefe’: Die Umdeutung der Tradition im Bereich ‘realistischen’ Erzählens,” in Topos, Ideal und Realitätspostulat: Studien zur Darstellung des Landlebens im Roman des 18. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1969), 78; Heidenreich, Sophie von La Roche, 69.

23. See La Roche, “Vorwort,” in Melusinens Sommerabende, ed. C. M. Wieland (Weimar, 1806), 31-35; Heidenreich, Sophie von La Roche, 67-73; Touaillon, Der deutsche Frauenroman, 125.

24. Compare Touaillon, Der deutsche Frauenroman, 201-2.

25. Sophie La Roche, Rosaliens Briefe an ihre Freundin Mariane von St∗∗, 3 vols., rev. ed. (Altenburg: Richter, 1797), translation mine. All further references to this work appear in the text.

26. Sophie La Roche herself experienced the extent of her husband's rule over her daily routine. Every morning he left books with marked passages for her to read and weave into conversations with Count Stadion, her husband's guardian and employer. When her children were born, she was refused permission to nurse them, for fear her even temper would suffer. See La Roche, “Vorwort,” 50-51, 54.

27. Compare Horsley, “A Critical Appraisal,” 47-74; Weigel, “Die geopferte Heldin,” 138-47; Winkle, Woman as Bourgeois Ideal, 127-36; Barbara Becker-Cantarino, “Priesterin und Lichtbringerin,” in Die Frau als Heldin und Autorin. Neue kritische Ansätze zur deutschen Literatur, ed. Wolfgang Paulsen, Amherster Kolloquium zur deutschen Literatur 10 (Bern, Munich: Francke, 1979), 111-24.

28. See La Roche, Rosaliens Briefe, 1:65-133.

29. Eva Becker, Der deutsche Roman um 1780 (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1964), 65; Touaillon, Der deutsche Frauenroman, 145.

30. See Heidenreich, Sophie von La Roche, 89-91.

31. Compare Michael Maurer, ed., Ich bin mehr Herz als Kopf: Sophie von La Roche in Briefen, (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1983).

32. See La Roche, Briefe an Lina als Mädchen, 2d enl. ed., vol. 1 (Leipzig: Gräff, 1788); Grenz, Mädchenliteratur, 70-74; Heidenreich, Sophie von La Roche, 151-57.