Escape to America: Social Reality and Utopian Schemes in German Women's Novels Around 1800
America! The land of milk and honey, the cradle of democracy, home of the noble savage, the symbol of freedom, the image of an unspoiled, natural way of living. We are still familiar with the lure of this myth.1
Without ever having set foot on American soil, German writers around 1800 frequently projected their ideals of freedom and justice onto the New World. Between the time of the American Revolution and the mid-nineteenth century, America became the primary focus for diverse social and political projections, ranging from the idealization of primitivism in a bountiful nature to Jacobine yearnings for equality and freedom in the American Republic. Far from showing realistic living conditions on the Frontier, some of these works portrayed alternative communes in idyllic natural settings. Their self-absorbed societies are intentionally designed to voice strong criticism over political terror, traditional class structure, or legal and social restrictions in Europe.2
When considering such 18th century literary visions of “America,” the inherent emancipatory potential of utopian fiction immediately comes into focus. As Peter Uwe Hohendahl has demonstrated with Wieland's novels, eighteenth-century utopian thought is based on a “concept of reality in which the world appears to the individual as an unfinished field of operation that needs to be improved upon,” (92). While older utopias tend to present more or less systematic political systems in the distant past or future or in a mythical place, eighteenth-century narratives put their utopian schemes into a realistic fictional context, either in the traditional genres of novels of travel, of adventure or, towards the end of the century, in the novel of development. After carefully establishing a fake authenticity of the epic context by providing exact dates, places, and documents such as letters and diaries, utopia is then placed in a geographically plausible, yet remote location. When the transition between the well-known world and the imaginary realm is gradual and smoothed over, specific features in utopia, such as innovations in education, religion, marriage, technical or economic institutions gain an immediate relevance. In activating their readers' sense of discrepancy between an ideally functioning social order and their own experience of reality, writers propose their utopian schemes as models for social change.
Such an emancipatory intent of utopian fiction clearly assumes special significance in times of rapidly changing social conventions. By the late 1700s, literary works had gained an increasingly important role as the mediators of moral values for the rising middle class. The development of a literary market oriented toward new readers and opposing courtly and clerical domination fostered a new emphasis on the potential of individuals as autonomous, self-directed personalities who, through their use of reason and morality, would enable themselves to unfold freely their talents and interests. Such a process of self-empowerment would set free productive energies and result in universal progress in culture, in the economy, and in overall social cooperation.
The fact that women were included as helpmates in this process of progressive self-improvement, but not as publicly autonomous, self-directed human beings, was initially not seen as a contradiction in the demand for egality, brotherhood, and freedom. The discussion about woman's nature and intellectual capabilities had assumed new vigor since the late 17th century. Early enlightenment reformers promoted the goal of education for women, whereas, at the end of the century, new cultural images of feminine naturalness and innate intuition were valued most. By 1800 a broad spectrum of contradictory goals for women existed side-by-side. In France, the Revolution had publicly formulated, and then rejected, legal and educational equality. In England, Mary Wollstonecraft responded to Edmund Burke's opposition to the Revolution by stressing the same rights for women as Thomas Paine had claimed in the name of all humanity.
In Germany, vigorous discussions about various appropriate patterns of ideal womanhood took place at this same time. The range of speculations extended from a congenital and never-changing female nature to highly energetic demands for education and legal rights—a change of female conditions. When confronted with such a broad variety of conflicting opinions, some writers, such as Goethe, Schiller or Hölderlin also portrayed more independent female figures, ranging from idealized images of woman as the ennobling and inspiring muse which would enable man to aspire to a new humanism, to woman as misplaced politician—scheming and powerhungry—or as an erotically demonic force. Yet the vast majority of German authors promoted ideal womanhood in a sphere of happy middle class domesticity: the pious, virtuous and passive mother, wife, and daughter. This latter cultural pattern, by far the most dominant, also matched the evolving division of labor between the female sphere of the home and the male's role of active achievement in the public realm of a business or a profession.
Yet the beginnings of a rift in the bourgeois concept of women's private and men's public spheres were already apparent. By 1800, women had become a large part of the reading audience without having the legal rights to participate actively in the public realm. This is also the time when female writers entered the literary market in greater numbers. Their acute sense of being outsiders in a well-established male domain is documented again and again.3 When choosing to depict imaginary societies in their works, these authors do not focus primarily on comprehensive political or technological systems, as male utopian writers tend to do. Their attention is on a new social order and a redefinition of gender roles, which they assume will assure human happiness in a harmonious society. Their various formulations of women's social and cultural functions reflect the range of discussions about female roles around 1800 as much as they present individual attempts to transform an imperfect social order into a perfect one.
In the following, I will trace the relationship between diverse gender depictions and women's own reformist discourse about their situation. Since the discussion of utopian schemes merits a descriptive approach, I will set up a systematic comparison, measuring three novels on a narrative scale. Ranging from initial pre-utopian representations of an imperfect European reality to diverse constructions of utopian harmony in an American colony, my scale allows insight into particular points of cultural tension for women around 1800 and their specific proposals for the achievement of human fulfillment. It will also enable us to judge the measure of consistency within each novel's various proposals for social reform. I will consider three novels. The first is Erscheinungen am See Oneida4 (Occurrences at Lake Oneida 1798), one of the later works of the well-known enlightenment writer Sophie La Roche (1731-1807), the first successful woman author in eighteenth-century Germany, and the first female editor of a women's journal. La Roche was influenced by Richardson and Rousseau and highly regarded for her first novel Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (1771) which introduced the middle class sentimental novel as a genre to German literature. The second is Das Blüthenalter der Empfindung (The Blossoming of Sensibility, 1794) by Sophie Mereau (1770-1806), a prolific and gifted author and translator between the classical and romantic eras; central figure of a literary salon in Jena which attracted major writers, among them Schiller, Jean Paul, Fichte, Schelling, and the Schlegels. Mereau was one of the first economically successful women writers in Germany. The third, Virginia, oder die Republik von Kentucky (1820), by Henriette Frölich (1768-1833), a very little known author of short stories and a play, who published this only novel of hers anonymously.
These three works, written by women who represent two generations, voice very diverse views in their common theme of addressing the French Revolution and the colonization in America. Together they not only present a spectrum of women's responses to their own conditions of legal inequality, lack of access to education, and various degrees of consent or alienation about the division of private vs. public spheres. All three novels also understand their utopian impulse as a universal quest: the newly designed social reforms will be carried back to Europe in order to regenerate the old world.
In general, utopian narratives reflect a tension between the depiction of reality and the construction of a vision. In many cases, a protagonist experiences an imperfect reality, is uprooted by choice or circumstance from the familiar world, and arrives at or helps to build an ideal society. The narrative attention is first on the dramatic interaction of characters and circumstancial conflict; thereafter it shifts to the didactic exposition of a perfect community. Within utopia, only those situations, events, and figures are introduced which further our understanding of the doctrinal statement. Contrary to his or her character development in the pre-utopian phase, the protagonist ceases to serve as the focus of the action and merely functions as a guide to the information about the new society at hand.
When first considering the pre-utopian settings, all three novels point to alienation, tragedy, and severe political conflict within their different situations in Europe. Mereau's heroine Nanette experiences social persecution and inequality before the law. She is manipulated by an older brother, her legal guardian and the avaricious custodian of her inheritance. At first she must reject his wish that she enter a convent, and then she flees from his immoral demand that she become the companion of a lusty cardinal. With an elderly aunt she escapes from Genoa via Paris to Switzerland. The experience of revolutionary enthusiasm in France confirms her inner convictions of human equality and personal freedom. Mereau shows us an unusually strong-willed young woman whose social protest ranges from the rejection of female legal dependency to severe criticism of moral corruption within the Catholic church, bourgeois materialism, and philistine adherence to arbitrary social barriers between the different confessions.
La Roche's novel, by contrast, derives its pre-utopian conflict squarely from the psychological injury of a French aristocrat who, with his wife, barely escaped the revolutionary mob. Initially resentful of the post-revolutionary American republic, his earlier life in Europe now appears to him as a period of lost innocence: “In America the seeds for the unfortunate revolution were fetched, that troubled my soul.—America now was not anymore the place of refuge for my angel Emilie and for my own heart, it was the soil in which our distress germinated.” (In Amerika ward der Saame zur unglücklichen Revolution geholt, [das] beklemmte meine Seele.—Amerika war nun nicht mehr der Zufluchtsaufenthalt für meinen Engel Emilie und für mein Herz, es war der Boden, auf welchem unser Elend keimte, La Roche, I, 119). In this situation of reluctant exile, nature alone can re-establish the natural order which was destroyed by the Revolution.
Emilie is the idealized model of a lady of sensibility.5 As a devoted wife, she considers herself an extension of Carl. Careful not to increase her husband's bitterness about their situation, she weeps in private about their lost home and insists on maintaining a cheerful politeness in their daily lives, even in utmost poverty and seclusion. She listens to her intuitions and is certain that Carl will overcome his political anger and that he will turn his attention to her, the source of his strength. La Roche's protagonists' strictly defined gender roles and their nostalgic cultural behavior point to a Burkean view of a well-ordered, patriarchal class-society which has been severely disrupted by senseless political chaos and crime.
In contrast to this anti-revolutionary stance, Frölich's novel, written twenty-one years later, protests the French Restauration's return to such conservative concepts as defended by La Roche. Frölich's protagonist Virginia is born into a family of French country gentry. Her father voluntarily institutes land reform before the Revolution. Virginia comes of age under the tutelage of an uncle who reclaims the estates, pressures his niece to marry for financial reasons, and orders her to forswear her Republican ideals. As a woman, Virginia has no legal recourse to defend what she considers her natural human rights. She is also forbidden to pursue her growing attachment to the republican-minded student Mucius. Since she fervently believes in the early, emancipatory goals of the Revolution, she escapes the restrictions of Europe and secretly heads for America, a most radical and unconventional decision for a woman.
All three novels begin at very diverse levels of critique of European reality—ranging from very specific demands for women's legal rights and public representation to a strong defense of the pre-revolutionary social order. At the same time, however, they set up similar idyllic realms of human fulfillment before they attempt to create a social utopia. In each case, this amounts to a personal compromise between a loving couple which removes itself from destructive societal requirements into a private bucolic setting. Yet these idyllic interludes cannot be sustained. Mereau's heroine Nanette experiences love and harmony in the seclusion and majestic beauty of the Swiss Alps. When she again happens to meet the narrator Albert, a Protestant, enthusiastic affection and alpine beauty bring about their happiness. This innocent interlude comes to an end with their increasingly erotic attraction to each other. Their marriage—a civil procedure—is made impossible by the legal authority of Nanette's guardian brother and by religious barriers. After various other attempts to solve their predicament fail, the couple's resolution is clear. There is no possibility of self-determination within the European context; only their escape to America will ensure personal fulfillment without legal and social restrictions.
La Roche's novel constructs a Robinsonade on a secluded island as her protagonists' apprenticeship for a utopian quest.6 This interim period between their escape from the French Revolution and their integration into a commune within the post-revolutionary American republic is clearly shown as not truly befitting an aristocratic couple, yet it is the necessary first step towards psychological healing in nature:
You want to live in solitude! Take me wherever you want, where only our love and benevolent nature will surround us … My Carl! Your love alone can never be the foundation of my contentment, your own piece of mind, your own contentment must be connected with it.
Du willst einsam leben! Führe mich hin wo du willst, wo nur unsere Liebe und die gütige Natur um uns seyn werden … Mein Carl! deine Liebe allein kann nie der Grund meiner Zufriedenheit werden, deine Ruhe, deine Zufriedenheit müssen damit verbunden seyn.
(La Roche, I, 123)
While Carl initially spends much time brooding over the destructive direction of human civilization, Emilie gladly takes on the basic tasks of survival. Then, in complete solitude, they learn to survive with the help of their Encyclopedia and their three-hundred-volume library. They stay committed to their self-perceived mission to ensure the survival of European culture and begin to transform the island into an idyllic paradise. Each basic task also acquires a gender-specific, artistic, and semi-religious dimension. Carl builds a dam to divert the rain waters, Emilie decorates it with an artful mosaic of shells; Carl works the fields, Emilie gathers wild flowers for the garden; together they build temples and resting places from which to watch the sun set over the lake, and they design neo-classical monuments for their murdered relatives. This idyllic isolation comes to an end with the imminent birth of their child. And only here, suddenly breaking out of her patient resignation, Emilie asserts her own will. She declares that with or without Carl, she will swim to the opposite shore to seek help from the neighboring Oneida Indians. Throughout the birth episode, Emilie remains a resolute and firmly determined woman. The idyllic spell is broken. The couple realizes that they must return to a social context.
Frölich's pre-utopian harmony is first sketched in retrospective, with Virginia's early childhood as idyllic interaction between the freed tenants and her family in the country. This sense of freedom and justice for all social classes, first introduced by her reformist father, later extends for Virginia also to social and legal self-determination which she can only hope to enjoy in the American republic. After her arrival, she eagerly sets out to explore her new country—a risky undertaking for a single woman. Her unusual independence is reaffirmed by the author through a wondrous happenstance. While she admires the Niagara Falls Virginia accidentally meets her French fiancé Mucius. The idyllic period which follows is also a busy time of planning for a happy and secure future. The couple assembles a group of like-minded immigrants and friends. Together, men and women first draw up and then vote on a democratic constitution. Next they buy machinery and provisions and head west to found their new colony.
While all three novels include such an interim, pre-utopian realm of idyllic existence, Frölich is the only author who does not limit her goals to the happy domesticity of a loving couple or a nuclear family in a secluded country setting—the eighteenth-century metaphor for an ideal life close to nature—a theme we find in so many novels influenced by Rousseau. From the outset, Frölich's attention is focused on the reshaping of economic and social structures which will then permit the individual happiness of men and women within the practical reality of legal and social contexts. Frölich's conviction that personal fulfillment must necessarily be rooted in a larger interaction with society comes only as an interruption and ex-post-facto realization to the idyllic harmony depicted by Mereau and La Roche.
Let us now enter their utopias. In Mereau's novel, Nanette and Albert do not actually set out for America. Instead, they envision a free republic where each person can determine his or her own fate according to their inner needs:
In America … lives a free people, there the genius of mankind rejoices in all its rights, there the new fortuitous circumstances of a youthful state will preclude the restitution of adverse reforms for a long time to come. Let's go there!
In Amerika … wohnt ein freies Volk, dort freut der Genius der Menschheit sich weider seiner Rechte, dort lassen die neuen glücklichen Verhältnisse eines jugendlichen Staates noch lange keine widrigen Reformen befürchten. Laß uns dahin!
(Mereau, 1920, 100)
Mereau's vision of unrestricted freedom in “America” is based on the various individual agreements between a loving couple rather than specific legislation for women's civil and legal rights. It is for herself that Nanette claims equality and intellectual independence. Her desire for a separate realm of love and tolerance to which the state has no access, her unashamed claim to erotic fulfillment, and her enthusiastic affirmation of the French Revolution place the author in distinct opposition to the moral and social reality of women in 1794. Her poetic dream of America is voiced as a Romantic longing for human completeness in a new Golden Age. This utopian yearning does not include specific proposals for a new social system:
Why did so few nations discover the secret to the happiness of the individual in the well-being of society at large? These and similar contemplations became for me inexhaustible sources for [mental] pictures, sketched by an innocent heart and in which imagination happily was blending the colors.
Warum fanden so wenig Nationen das Geheimnis, das Glück des Einzelnen im Wohl des Ganzen zu begründen? Diese und ähnliche Betrachtungen waren mir ein unerschöpflicher Stoff zu Gemälden, die ein schuldloses Herz entwarf, und wozu eine lachende Imagination die Farben mischte.
(Mereau, 1920, 16)
In such subjective visions, “America” stands for what is not to be found in Europe: personal freedom, women's equality, and religious tolerance.
La Roche's novel, on the other hand, imagines her utopia as a patriarchally structured international commune. Her colony is founded on the promise of its members to renounce all strife and political passion. Each family must pledge its willingness to work hard and live piously; only then will it receive a plot of land and a cabin. However, in stressing the cultural superiority of those born into the aristocracy, La Roche also sets up the beginnings of a traditional class structure. The narrator asserts
… that the spirit of beautification, which … touches everything is an endowment of the aristocracy by birth. Some of the colonists are glad that he [Carl] now also has to share in the field work, but the best among them pity and admire him. I told the Wattines about this, both were glad, and slightly blushing and smiling to herself, Emily said: so the idea of nobility which has been eradicated in our fatherland, is germinating again in the wilds of Onatoga, surrecting itself in the souls of the new inhabitants.
… daß der Geist der Verschönerung, welcher alles was er berührt, ganz eigentlich dem gebornen Adel gegeben sey. Einige der Colonisten freuen sich, daß er [Carl] nun auch Feldarbeit versuchen mußte, aber die besten von ihnen bedauren und bewundern ihn. Ich sagte es den Wattines, es freute beyde, und Emilie sagte erröthend und vor sich hin lächelnd: also keimte die in unserem Vaterlande ausgerottete Idee der Classe des Adels, in den Wüsten von Onatoga, in den Gemüthern der neuen Bewohner wieder in die Höhe.
(La Roche, III, 12)
Possessing this “natural” inclination towards beauty and order, those born noble also have a natural right to establish themselves as the privileged. Carl and Emilie are the only Oneida colonists who hire a young couple, “who considered it as their duty of love towards their good masters, and also as an honor, to work as industriously and as skillfully as they themselves,” (welche es für Pflicht der Liebe gegen ihre gute Herrschaft, und auch als Ehre ansehen, eben so fleißig und eben so geschickt zu arbeiten als sie selbst, La Roche, III, 11). Emilie is now freed from heavy work. Chiefly occupying herself with needle work at home she functions as a model for feminine virtue. Carl concerns himself with public goals by designing a distinct work ethic to benefit other colonists. He points out instances of industry and efficient organization; communal coins imprinted with “work” and “blessings” are circulated; under his guidance the village not only establishes itself as an ideological unit within, he also deliberately plans it as an ideal mythical model society for the neighboring Oneida Indians, perceived as noble, but immature, savages. At the end, the narrator, our guide to this utopia, returns to Europe in order to promote Carl and Emilie as role models for the establishment of new social harmony which will make obsolete the ever-present threat of revolutions.
Frölich's “Eldorado” in Kentucky appears radically modern in comparison. Her fictional commune is partly influenced by the utopian thinker Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (1709-1785) who promoted the abolition of private property, and the French enlightenment philosopher Morelly about whose life and person is little known today. His utopian model, based on the principles of natural law, the abolition of private property, and free love was referred to by Babeuf and intensely debated around the time of the French Revolution.7
When Henriette Frölich reconsidered these revolutionary theories around 1820, communitarian ideas were intensely debated in Germany. A number of utopian colonies had been established in the American republic, among them the Shakers who in 1805 alone founded five new communities in Kentucky and Ohio, or the Harmony Society who had migrated from Southern Germany to a new settlement in Pennsylvania. In 1814, under the leadership of Georg Rapp, this group founded the new, highly successful community of New Harmony on the Wabash River in Indiana. Three years later, Josef Bäumler from Württemberg purchased land in Ohio. The members of his group insisted on their land in common rather than to divide it as originally planned. Based on egalitarian religious doctrines, these communitarian systems had a great impact on the German public; they were regarded as proof that egalitarian, utopian colonies could be economically successful (Bestor, 33-37).
There is no doubt that Henriette Frölich was influenced by the news of these religious groups. Her own fictional American colony, however, is based on secular, socialist principles. In her republic “Eldorado” in Kentucky each family owns no more than their clothing, house, and garden; all other material goods are pooled. Men, women, and children take their meals in dining halls where social contacts between young and old promote a sense of community and continuous learning. All members of her large multi-national and multi-racial republic profess to a Deism which stresses nature as the God-given realm of human productivity and harmony. There are no social or legal differences based on race or class:
We have arrived in the blossoming garden of Eden … A general shout of joy reverberated through the air; we all jumped up at the same time and ran down the mountain, exultated with open arms … This moment turned us into one people, all differences of color, of origin, of education were eradicated, we all became brothers, with equal rights and equal duties.
Angelangt sind wir in Edens blühendem Garten … Ein allgemeiner Freudenruf tönte durch die Lüfte; wir sprangen alle zu gleicher Zeit auf und liefen mit ausgebreiteten Armen jauchzend den Berg hinunter … Dieser Augenblick machte uns zu einem Volke, aller Unterschied der Farbe, der Heimat, der Bildung war vernichtet, wir wurden alle Brüder, mit gleichen Rechten und gleichen Pflichten.
(Frölich, 1963, 174f.)
Individual rights are based on social cooperation in Eldorado. Each adult chooses a particular trade or profession according to personal inclination and communal need. There is a new interest in learning: the better educated members teach the others, and many of the women voluntarily enhance their less than equal schooling by taking lessons in academic subjects. Childcare is a communal effort as well. After a few months with their mothers, babies are cared for in daycare centers; after work hours, fathers and mothers both foster their development. Children are taught in co-educational schools; girls receive additional instruction in domestic and community tasks, while boys are trained in paramilitary sports. Yet the stronger young women are also encouraged to fight alongside the men, if they so choose. Women initially have only half a vote in the pre-utopian planning stage, and men a full vote, but afterwards each family has one block vote in the public decision-making process within utopia. By assigning equal public and private space to men and women, Frölich optimistically asserts equal constitutional rights which predate those of German women by one century.8
In the context of tracing women's reformist discourses about their own situation in their novels it is interesting to note a number of inconsistencies in their utopian models. La Roche's work is concerned with setting up Emilie as a cultural example for women: a submissive and cheerful helpmate to her husband, promoting happy domestic seclusion, pious trust in her intuition, and silent suffering in order to heal her man. This idealization of feminine acquiescence does not lead her, however, to falsify genuine female experience. When it comes to the survival of her child, Emilie's resolute decision against Carl's obsession with solitude is common sense female behavior which breaks through the established fictional concept of cheerful feminine subordination and passivity. Despite this interesting inconsistency, La Roche's retrogressive utopian concepts present an idyllic reaffirmation of the past, yet enriched with new middle-class patterns of strictly polarized male and female attitudes. In this view, woman's voluntary sacrifice of her legal and public rights will contribute to a harmonious, patriarchal society, dedicated to the aesthetic and moral improvement of each individual whose personal and social goals are defined according to what is proper of his or her gender. La Roche's reformist impulse is carried by a strong pacifist conviction which, so the author hopes, will be decisive in circumventing a new plunge into terror and chaos.
In some ways, all three authors' concepts of marriage are similar, since all are preoccupied with affirming the bourgeois notion of the certainty of each partner's happiness within the context of a nuclear family. Such idyllic depictions of woman's greatest fulfillment in loving devotion to her husband can still be found to influence female consciousness in our time.9 Yet the authors differ on how such mutual harmony is to be achieved. La Roche feels that a young girl's interest is best protected when her parents place her into a pre-arranged marriage, thus ensuring the similarity of cultural and financial backgrounds between her and her future husband. Mereau and Frölich—born thirty-nine and thirty-seven years later than La Roche—strongly reject such traditional matches of convenience for their heroines. Nanette and Virginia both rebel against their legal guardians and choose their husbands freely. Each bases her choice on the new middle-class values of personal agreement and erotic attraction between man and woman.
Other utopian schemes which these three writers present also result in divergent goals for women's self-realization and public competencies. La Roche, a well-known personality and successful writer, overstepped in her own life (as a publishing author) the social and cultural limits of the private female sphere while propagating a strongly idealized version of the new middle-class model of feminine submissiveness, quiet virtue, and legal dependency. Mereau, in contrast, openly questions polarized gender ideologies for men and women which in her view result in severe restrictions of the individual's talents and natural rights. Her demands for self-determination, social equality, and intellectual cooperation between man and woman, as well as her celebration of feeling and personal freedom over social conventions illustrate a yearning for human completeness which anticipates androgynous romantic concepts of love. Frölich's proposals for equal rights and duties for men and women purposefully transgress most gender definitions of her contemporaries.
While all three writers base their hopes for human happiness on love and cooperation within a nuclear family, Frölich's reform proposals specifically demand legal rights and economic independence for women and men. The communal structure of her utopia permits both partners private and public spheres of independence, but the family is still assumed to be a single patriarchal unit with one family vote in the public decision-making process. There are no single heads of households, neither male nor female, and the possibility of disagreement between husband and wife, resulting in a split family vote, is never considered. In spite of this truly utopian detail, Frölich's reordering of gender roles and of legal, educational, and social institutions point to a practical reformist impulse. Her attention to the political and economic situation of women most radically calls into question eighteenth-century cultural and literary images of an innate, ahistorical nature of woman, such as the “eternal feminine,” Goethe's Gretchen in Faust; of woman as muse of sensibility and humanity, Hölderlin's Diotima, Goethe's Iphigenia, the princess in Goethe's Tasso; or as pious homemaker as depicted in Schiller's poem “Die Glocke.”
Are these writers “in the shadow” or, even worse, “rejects from Olympus?” A cautious “yes” is warranted, looking at the critical response all three works received. But rather than arguing the explicit rejection and intentional subjugation of female authors around 1800, I will point to the ambiguous nature of the developing bourgeois gender ideology which was formulated and propagated by men, primarily. The groping attempts of the middle class at cultural and social emancipation resulted in hierarchical and stereotypical categories—the effects of which all three authors experienced. Among the “Olympians,” Schiller, for instance, liked to encourage gifted women writers to contribute to the new image of “the dignity of women” (die Würde der Frauen). Mereau enjoyed a very supportive student-professor relationship with him and was lauded: “I am really amazed how our women now, in a merely amateurish way, have come to achieve for themselves a certain skill in writing which comes close to art.” (Ich muß mich doch wirklich darüber wundern, wie unsere Weiber jetzt, auf bloß dilettantischem Wege, eine gewisse Schreibgeschicklichkeit sich zu verschaffen wissen, die der Kunst nahe kommt).10 But she was hindered in her work by the poet Brentano who, when he became her husband, resented her intellectual independence. Ironically, her works survived because of the public's attention to biographical detail in Brentano's life. La Roche was initially encouraged by the writer Christoph Martin Wieland and her first work was widely read. Then she was considered outmoded and was quickly forgotten, except by a faithful following of female readers. Frölich's work appeared in a limited edition only and, until its rediscovery in 1963, never came to greater public attention. According to Gerhard Steiner, only one review appeared in a literary journal, which resented a woman author envisioning a utopian society. All three works fall into the large grey area of “ladies' literature,” a quickly consumed and always replenished fictional source of entertainment which, at that time, was not considered as fitting into any aesthetic category of literary works of art. The greater humanistic and emancipatory impulses reflected in these novels were therefore not registered.
Today we can approach all three writers in our attempt to understand eighteenth-century literary culture as conditioned by rapidly changing social, economic, political, cultural, and gender-specific conventions. In this broader context the three works provide a remarkably comprehensive and varied spectrum of women's views propagated around 1800. For us, it is important to note that their own goals for the improvement of their condition do not suggest a common direction, aside from reflecting the prevailing contemporary social order.
Among the three books, Frölich's utopian vision stands out as the boldest and most comprehensive. Undoubtedly, the author was influenced by her strong interest in alternative communes in America, such as the Shakers, the Rappites, and the Ohio colony of Josef Bäumler. Yet Frölich's thought was based on the principles of enlightenment reform, not on religious doctrine. In her attempt to shape an egalitarian society, she rejected the familiar patterns of religious discipline and celibacy as unnecessarily confining. In addition, her novel calls into question the supposedly natural social and legal restrictions for women around 1800 by first depicting the injustice suffered by them and then by advancing her own specific proposals for a just society. Written six years before the institution of Robert Owen's secular colony at New Harmony in Indiana, we can now recognize Frölich's work not only as a remarkably original contribution to the discussion about gender roles around 1800, but also as a highly original novel in German utopian literature.
Notes
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For critical essays on America as a theme in German literature, see Bauschinger. Compare with the actual experience of German immigrants in Trommler. For an assessment of various mythical projections of “America,” see Boerner.
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A historical overview in Jantz.
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Henriette Frölich's self-justification for publishing under a pseudonym indicates severe alienation: “… since bashfulness and memory of the unjustifiably harsh pronouncement she had often heard mentioned about those educated females who spoke out, made her fear to publicly present her writing attempts or even to identify her name to a publisher [bookseller].” (… da Schüchternheit und Erinnerung der unbilligen harten Urtheile, die sie so oft über sich aussprechende weibliche Bildung des Geistes vernahm, sie furchtsam machten, ihre Versuche öffentlich mitzutheilen, oder auch selbst einem Buchhändler ihren Namen zu nennen, Schindel, 141-42.)
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In the USA, this rare book may be found at the Boston Public Library, a microfilm copy also at Cornell University Library.
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La Roche worked from an authentic diary, and purposefully shaped an energetic French pioneer woman into a feminine role model of sensibility. In a letter of June 21, 1800 she asked Sophie von Pobeckheim to judge for herself “what my brains and my heart made out of this true story” (was mein Kopf und Herz aus der wahren Geschichte machten). Ich bin mehr Herz als Kopf, 451. According to historical sources, the French colonist was a “charming and resolute woman whose energy and friendliness is stressed on all accounts” (Lange, “Visitors”, 60).
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The striking difference between this island experiment in a novel of sensibility and other, more robust island adventures by women in narratives from the early to mid-eighteenth century is apparent; see Blackwell.
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In the context of his research on early socialist thought in Germany, Gerhard Steiner also rediscovered a pamphlet by Henriette's husband Carl Wilhelm Frölich, Über den Menschen und seine Verhältnisse (Berlin: Frankesche Buchhandlung, 1792). This manifesto promotes community living and the abolition of private property. For an intellectual biography of both Frölichs, see Steiner.
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In Germany, female voting rights were decreed November 30, 1918. Early proposals for women's vote initially surfaced among radical reformers in the 1790s. As a political demand it was proposed in the Reichstag by August Bebel only in 1895. It is interesting to note just how anti-establishment this issue was in Frölich's time. For example, in Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and also in his Theatralische Sendung women and men organize as traveling actors. Forming a “republican” senate, each member has the vote and is entitled to a senate seat. According to Victor Lange, this motif is designed to characterize the eccentricity of the troup to show its distance from conventional middle-class and aristocratic behavior (Lange, “Goethes Amerikabild,” 68).
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Renate Böschenstein-Schäfer traces the influence of such idyllic depictions (which carefully avoid personal and social problems) up to 20th century trivial novels. Idylle, 135.
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Schiller's letter to Goethe, June 30, 1797, in Dagmar von Gersdorff, 125.
Works Cited
Abray, Jane. “Feminism in the French Revolution.” American Historical Review, 80 (1975): 43-62.
Bauschinger, Sigrid et al., eds. Amerika in der deutschen Literatur. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1975.
Bersier, Gabrielle. “Reise als Umrahmung der Utopie.” Reise und soziale Realität am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts. Ed. Wolfgang Griep and Hans-Wolf Jäger. Heidelberg: Winter, 1983, 292-301.
Bestor, Arthur E. Backwood Utopias. The Sectarian Origins and the Owenite Phase of Communitarian Socialism in America, 1663-1829. 2d ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970.
Blackwell, Jeannine. “An Island of Her Own: Heroines of the German Robinsonades from 1720 to 1800.” The German Quarterly, 58 (1985): 5-26.
Boerner, Peter. “Utopia in der Neuen Welt: Vom europäischen Träumen zum American Dream.” Utopieforschung: Interdisziplinäre Studien zur neuzeitlichen Utopie. Ed. Wilhelm Voßkamp. 3 vols. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1982. 2: 358-74.
Böschenstein-Schäfer, Renate. Idylle, 2d ed. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1977.
Cocalis, Susan L. “Der Vormund will Vormund sein: Zur Problematik der weiblichen Unmündigkeit im 18. Jahrhundert.” Amsterdamer Beiträge zur Neuen Germanistik, 10 (1980): 33-55.
Frevert, Ute, Frauen-Geschichte zwischen bürgerlicher Verbesserung und neuer Weiblichkeit. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1986.
Frölich, Henriette. Virginia oder die Republik von Kentucky. Berlin: August Rücker, 1820; reprint, Berlin/DDR: Aufbau, 1968.
Gersdorff, Dagmar von. Dich zu lieben kann ich nicht verlernen. Das Leben der Sophie Brentano-Mereau. Frankfurt/Main: Insel, 1984.
Habermas, Jürgen. Strukturwandel der Offentlichkeit, 3d ed. Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1968.
Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. “Zum Erzählproblem des utopischen Romans im 18. Jahrhundert.” Gestaltungsgeschichte und Gesellschaftsgeschichte. Ed. Helmut Kreuzer, 79-114. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1969.
Jantz, Harold. “Amerika im deutschen Dichten und Denken.” Deutsche Philologie im Aufriß. Ed. Wolfgang Stammler, III, 146-204. Berlin: E. Schmidt, 1962.
Köpke, Wulf. “Die emanzipierte Frau in der Goethezeit und ihre Darstellung in der Literatur.” Die Frau als Heldin und Autorin. Ed. Wolfgang Paulsen, 96-110. Munich: Francke, 1979.
Lange, Victor. “Goethes Amerikabild. Wirklichkeit und Vision.” Amerika in der deutschen Literatur. Ed. Sigrid Bauschinger et al, 63-74. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1975.
Lange, Victor. “Visitors to Lake Oneida. An Account of the Background of Sophie La Roche's novel ‘Erscheinungen am See Oneida.’” Symposium 1 (1948): 48-74.
La Roche, Sophie. Erscheinungen am See Oneida. 3 vols. Leipzig: Heinrich Gräff, 1798.
Martens, Wolfgang. “Das lesende Frauenzimmer.” Die Botschaft der Tugend. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1968, 520-42.
Maurer, Michael, ed. Ich bin mehr Herz als Kopf. Sophie La Roche: Ein Lebensbild in Briefen. Munich: Beck, 1983.
Mereau, Sophie. Das Blüthenalter der Empfindung. Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1794; reprints, Munich: Dreiländerverlag, 1920; Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag, 1982.
Pfaelzer, Jean. “The Impact of Political Theory on Narrative Structures.” America as Utopia. Ed. Kenneth M. Roemer, 117-32. New York: Burt Franklin, 1981.
Schindel, Carl von. Die deutschen Schriftstellerinnen des 19. Jahrhunderts. Drei Teile in 1 Band; reprint, Heldesheim: Olms, 1978.
Steiner, Gerhard. Der Traum vom Menschenglück. Berlin/DDR: Akademie-Verlag, 1959.
Trommler, Frank, McVeigh, Joseph, eds. America and the Germans. 2 vols. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985.
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Introduction to Sophie von La Roche's The History of Lady Sophia Sternheim
Woman's Progress: Sophie La Roche's Travelogues 1787-1788