eJournals Colloquia Germanica 39/3-4

Colloquia Germanica
cg
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/91
2006
393-4

ULRIKE GLEIXNER AND MARION W. GRAY (EDS.): Gender in Transition: Discourse and Practice in German-Speaking Europe 1750–1830. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006. x + 391 pp. $ 75.00 (cloth); $ 29.95 (paper)

91
2006
Laura Martin
cg393-40404
404 Besprechungen / Reviews «benign force» (the latter on the Märchen). The discussion of the individual tales is quite brief and cursory, engaging minimally with the scholarly literature on these, and hence the harvest of new insights does not live up to the promise in the introduction. In Brown’s defense, it should be said that her intention was not to provide a close reading of the individual tales, but rather to highlight their connection to the serapiontic principle. Through this perspective, two chapters do achieve new insights. The exploration of the transposition from the visual to the verbal sheds light on the nature of poetic truth as it emerges from the interplay between historical source and poetic imagination. The chapter on Märchen adds a further dimension to the duplicity of being: the child’s naive and spontaneous relationship to the world of magic is reproduced, yet also filtered through the necessarily exegetic and ironic perspective of an adult narrator. Brown’s investigation of the dark side of the supernatural (based on only two tales) is weaker than the rest of Part II and does not materially advance discussion on the subject. The links Brown forges between individual texts and the serapiontic principle are occasionally strained, and the case for the novelty of her findings is somewhat overstated. However, these shortcomings only slightly mar the merits of the book. Brown succeeds in showing the presence of a consistent poetics underlying all of Hoffmann’s works, and she does provide a lucid and convincing account of this poetics. By her choice and grouping of the tales, Brown intended to show that Hoffmann, to be properly appreciated, must be read «in the round,» that a «reductive canon» (200) of four or five tales fails to do him justice - a view which should be hailed as an essential corrective to long-standing tendencies in Hoffmann scholarship. University of Guelph Paola Mayer U LRIKE G LEIXNER AND M ARION W. G RAY (E DS .): Gender in Transition: Discourse and Practice in German-Speaking Europe 1750-1830. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006. x + 391 pp. $ 75.00 (cloth); $ 29.95 (paper) This collection of 14 essays (plus an introduction) grew out of a conference held in 1998, after which the contributors collaborated to ensure a reasonable amount of cross-referencing between the pieces. The long preparation time does not seem to have led to any great loss of topicality: this is an anthology which anyone interested in the field will want to read. The essays range from ones addressing the big questions of the Sattelzeit to specific case studies which analyse a particular marriage, or compare two individuals’ journals, for example, thus bringing very concrete evidence to bear on generalized conclusions. In this way, the volume goes far to redressing sometimes simplistic assumptions about this important era in German (and European) history - either that it represents a great leap forward in human «progress» or conversely that it was a time when women (as well as other «others») were repressed absolutely. To take an example: one essay (R. Habermas) analyses a single marriage of the early nineteenth century to show that while the wife was very much confined to the increasingly re- Besprechungen / Reviews 405 stricted roles of wife and mother, her letters also show evidence of positive outcomes for her in her marriage. It is through her husband that she gains an education, gradually becoming an equal partner in their sometimes thoughtful correspondence. Letter-writing may be less prestigious than other forms of written self-expression, yet it is by means of it that a woman like Käthe Roth could communicate with those outside her own domestic sphere, not only for emotional support, but also to develop her own ideas of a weightier nature. Woman as reader, too, must now be regarded not merely as a passive recipient of patriarchy’s indoctrination through the medium of entertaining novels or other reading «proper» for a woman, but also as an active creator of her own inner world. Such an inner world is, of course, precisely the precondition for developing the «selfhood» supposedly denied to women in this era. Lastly, as Roth’s own daughters went on the become activists for women’s rights, clearly the seemingly passive attitude of the mother in this regard is shown to have masked a quiet progress in what could be imagined for women. Taken as a whole, the collection gives a nicely rounded view of the Sattelzeit in German-speaking Europe, allowing increasingly differentiated views of the concepts of «patriarchy,» «separate spheres,» the «polarization of gender roles,» the «gender system,» the «sexual contract» or «sexual system.» Unsurprisingly, the investigators find conflicting evidence, either within their own studies, or in contrast to other essays in the volume. In this way, the complexities involved in the rise of the bourgeoisie and the concomitant social, political, economic and ideological shifts come through in the often incisive essays. Some essays seek to justify, explain or deplore women’s invisibility in the contemporary public sphere. Dawson correctly shows how «enlightenment» in Kant’s sense of free (public) thinking was by definition denied to women, who had no forum in which to express themselves critically and publicly. This is perhaps not new material for the student of women’s history, but it is expressed in graphic, precise and convincing detail. Gray shows how even with contemporaneous staunch defenders of women’s rights - Hippel, Wollstonecraft, de Gouges - women could still not find a vocabulary in which to assert their rights as individuals. Two women cited - A. Holst and D. Gürnth - support an education for women in the humanities and in sciences, respectively, so that they might be better wives and mothers. However, these two women’s acceptance of the commonplace that «a woman’s place is in the home» occurs just as the household has lost all status and importance as a place of productivity. Thus, their arguments seem weak and out of place to us today. Rasch makes a similar case about Schleiermacher’s and Henriette Herz’s attempts to create a utopian scene of sociability: rather than a neutral third space, however, all that is truly created in the salons is an extended domestic sphere, still conceived as a place for men to recuperate from the stresses of the alienating world of work. The separation of the spheres is once again confirmed rather than undermined. Rosenhaft gives an interesting history of two Witwenkassen in Germany, showing how the poor accounting skills of the men who ran them left widows in the lurch when the schemes eventually collapsed. Attempts to overhaul and improve the actuarial methods had been resisted by the widows, who stood to lose a great deal. In this way, women were made to side with irrationality and unreason, not because of their supposed feminine nature, but because 406 Besprechungen / Reviews of the situation. Women were demonized as howling widows or conniving wives who selfishly wheedled their husbands into a bad business. Lastly, Weckel explains the loss of journals targeted at women or edited by women as a positive decision (women no longer needed separate journals, but could read the mainstream ones) with a negative outcome (women lost this one public forum). All four of these essays explain some aspect of how conditions were made bad for women despite very good intentions: the patriarchy as a bad situation rather than as an active conspiracy against women. Essays which show instead how women were actually empowered in the era include, in addition to Habermas’s, Gleixner’s on religious discourse and Aalsted’s on fashion as self-expression. Rabuzzi describes a sensational divorce case in which the wife was by no means the loser in a complex scenario of class differences and connections. Other essays explain a particular aspect of the way things tended to worsen for women in the era: Hüchteler on the gender politics of poverty, for example, or Michalik on changing laws regarding infanticide. Interestingly, she finds that the murder of illegitimate babies (as opposed to legitimate ones) was less severely punished throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but for different reasons: under Frederick’s enlightened law, the mother’s fear of poverty and of loss of honour was acknowledged, and measures were taken to limit these dangers rather than to punish the mother more severely. In contrast, late nineteenth-century law explained its leniency by saying that such a baby belonged to no father, anyway, and that infanticide was preferable to making legal claims on the alleged father: the infanticidal mother at least showed some sense of shame. Schäfer-Bossert has interesting material on the active «cleansing» of religious art in Catholic and Protestant churches to eliminate powerful women figures. Ceranski gives a very clear and concise account of women’s opportunities to participate in science, and how institutionalization eliminated the already limited access women had to scientific knowledge and pursuits. Only one essay focuses on men: Stanislo on physical education. As is inevitable in a volume such as this, the results are somewhat uneven. Possibly partly due to the linguistic difficulties of working between two languages, the stylistic level varies considerably, and not all the essays are equally convincing. Some jump right into the topic, while others introduce the material as if for the newcomer, so it is hard to tell what the intended readership is. Gray’s, Dawson’s, Ceranski’s and Rabuzzi’s articles stand out as particularly clearly written, and could be appropriate material to give to students (NB: the introduction to the volume itself is not amongst these.) A final criticism might be that in this volume, with one exception, «gender» is still largely taken to mean «women» only: perhaps we have indeed come a long way in Gender Studies since this volume was apparently first conceived. University of Glasgow Laura Martin L EON C HAI : Romantic Theory: Forms of Reflexivity in the Revolutionary Era. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006. 283 pp. $ 55. In Athenäum Fragment No. 216, Friedrich Schlegel announces that «the French Revolution, Fichte’s philosophy, and Goethe’s Meister are the greatest tendencies of