“Liebe, böse, Line! ”: Maintaining Sorority through the Expression of Emotion in the Letters of Karoline von Günderrode and her Sisters Jordan Lavers University of Western Australia Abstract: Karoline von Günderrode and her younger sisters were a part of an extensive network of patrician families in Frankfurt� In 1797, Karoline moved from their family home in Hanau to Frankfurt and, following her departure, the sisters began writing letters to continue their sisterly relationship� The letters by the well-known German poet Karoline von Günderrode and her four younger sisters Wilhelmine, Charlotte and Amalie, have been heretofore neglected in academic scholarship� This essay adopts the letters as a case study to demonstrate how aristocratic sisters configured sorority on the page through emotional, textual, and material practices of letter writing. In the first section, this essay introduces and defines the term sorority as a concept to map kinship from the perspective of sisters� In the subsequent sections, this essay elucidates how the exigencies of sisterhood, including the material and emotional limitations during separation, reinforce the need for maintenance work over time with both loving contributions and responses of anger and admonishment� Key Words: Günderrode, gender history, emotions history, sisters, letters Karoline von Günderrode (1780-1806) and her younger sisters wrote contrasting letters to one another after she moved away from their family home in Hanau to Frankfurt in 1797� The Günderrode sisters wrote poetic and playful letters as much as they wrote pragmatic letters that were ostensibly shopping lists� They wrote letters that were dutiful expressions of love or expressions of anger and disappointment to each other, and sometimes, they expressed love and anger in the same letter, complicating the notion of the dutiful loving sister� The variety of the contents of their letters corresponds to the different material forms that the sisters adopted� The sisters habitually used the same pieces of paper for their 28 Jordan Lavers ’communal’ letters. Occasionally they composed letters individually and when it was necessary they wrote on behalf of one another or by dictation� The sisters thus configured siblingship on the page as a cluster or individually by adopting a plurality of textual and material epistolary practices� I will argue in this article that the Günderrode sisters maintained their sister-group through the repeated exchange of letters� The women visualised their sister-group on the page and co-ordinated the exchange task of their correspondence by adapting epistolary practices to meet ever-changing circumstances. The constant flow of letters between and among the sisters was maintained and inflected by the gendered expression of emotion to configure the sister-group. Through their expressions of Liebe and Bosheit to one another, the Günderrode sisters negotiated their gender identity and the sister-group itself� The success of their repeated exchange had practical consequences for the sister-network within their kin group in relation to matters of inheritance, finance and marriage. Karoline von Günderrode was the eldest of the six children; there were five girls and one boy, who was also the youngest� Following the death of her husband in 1786, the widow Louise von Günderrode moved with her six children from Karlsruhe to Hanau so that she could live closer to her maternal kin� In 1794 the second-eldest daughter, Louise, was the first sibling to die as she succumbed to tuberculosis� Charlotte died in 1801 and Amalie in 1802� Karoline committed suicide in 1806. Wilhelmine, who was the only sister to have married, died in 1819 and Hector died in 1862 (Gruber 128). This paper focuses on letters written by Wilhelmine, Charlotte and Amalie to Karoline between the years 1797 and 1801� In early 1797 Karoline moved from Hanau to the Cronstetten-Hynspergisches Damenstift for widowed and unmarried aristocratic women of the patrician families of Alten-Limpurg in Frankfurt (Lerner 95-109). Between Karoline’s admittance to the convent in 1797 and the deaths of Charlotte and Amalie in 1801 and 1802 the correspondence between the sisters maintained a sorority across the two households of young aristocratic singlewomen� On November 21, 1801, Karoline von Günderrode sent a letter to her mother’s Vermögensverwalter , Herr von Hohim, on behalf of her sisters� Their mother, Louise, worked closely with Herr von Hohim on matters of her daughters’ inheritance. Karoline’s letter reinforced the boundary of the sister-group to the exclusion of von Hohim from the affairs of the sisters. Louise and von Hohim were concerned that a close friend of the sisters, Sofie Blum, during her stay in their household in Hanau, was advising them against their own mother on their inheritance: “Sofie hat uns nie von unserer Mutter zu entfernen gesucht, sondern, welches wir nur allein wissen können, bei uns immer mit Liebe und Achtung von ihr gesprochen” ( FDH -Hs: 8326). (The transcriptions of the manuscript letters are my own� I have retained the original spelling, grammar and Maintaining Sorority through the Expression of Emotion 29 underlining�) At the age of twenty-one, Karoline began a claim for her inheritance against the wishes of her mother. Karoline had intercepted von Hohim’s initial letter to her mother, in which he explicitly queried Sofie’s influence on the relationship between Louise von Günderrode and her daughters� Von Hohim targeted Sofie Blum’s character due to a suspected marital dispute with her new husband, Karl von Daub: Was Sie von Sofiens Gesinnungen gegen ihren Mann sagen, über gehe ich mit Stillschweigen� Der Gegenstand scheint mir so delikat, so ganz außer der Sphäre eines Dritter, daß er nie zur Unterhaltung eines Fremdes dienen kann. - Was Sie von Sofiens geheimen maschinerien sagen, erwidere ich mit gar nichts! ( FDH -Hs: 8326) This letter demonstrates the precedence of the eldest sister in the sisters’ correspondence and the authority of the sister-group to maintain and construct the boundaries of their group� The Günderrode sisters utilize the ethos of the precedent eldest sister and employ reticence to achieve the desired exclusion of von Hohim� As the eldest sister, Karoline took the initiative to stop von Hohim from influencing the all-female household by forcefully maintaining silence and withholding information on the circumstances surrounding Sofie Blum. Furthermore, Karoline rejected any claim he had to influence in whom the sisters confided: “Meine Schwestern und ich kennen Sofie so genau, daß uns über das Vertrauen zu ihr, kein fremder Maßstaab dienen kann” ( FDH -Hs: 8326)� The sisters exchanged letters frequently and adopted a plurality of textual and material styles creatively and strategically to maintain their sister-group� “Guten Tag! gute, alte Line! das war ich - Mine” ( FDH -Hs: 8294)� This address to Karoline by Wilhelmine emphasizes creativity in epistolary practices for the hierarchal configuration of the sisters. The informal greeting was permissible as Wilhelmine was the second eldest, but the eldest sister in the household in Hanau� The significance of the address is derived not only from her jocular address to her “gute, alte Line,” but its position in the manuscript letter itself� The greeting is a Nachschrift in a letter that was predominantly penned by their youngest sister Amalie. Wilhelmine appeared only at the end to make a request on behalf of the second youngest sister, Charlotte: “Lotte lässt dich bitten ihr ein halbes Stük graues Papier bei Nothnagel zu kaufen” ( FDH -Hs: 8294)� All three sisters appeared on the page together and this was a common pattern� It was a shared and group-orientated correspondence� The sisters wrote on the same paper together and the paper itself was bought by Karoline in Frankfurt and sent back to Hanau� A gender-based reading of epistolary practices is integral to understanding how the Günderrode sisters adopted certain epistolary provisions and practices to develop and maintain their sister-group within a broader network of familial 30 Jordan Lavers relationships. The sisters configured sorority on the page through emotional, textual and material practices of letter writing� The exigencies of sisterhood, as the material and emotional limitations during separation, reinforce the need for maintenance work over-time with both loving communications and responses of anger and admonishment� The material and textual conventions of letter writing in early modern Europe were diverse and shaped by the specificities of the relationship between the sender and receiver, as well as the contingencies of local conditions, in creative and improvised ways (Daybell 12). Daybell describes this interaction between the sender and receiver as the multi-agent nature of letter writing (13). The privacy and intimacy of a letter was defined by reading practices from within the family as a group (Daybell, “Social Negotations” 8). The sisters’ correspondence was multi-agent because they exchanged and composed letters with each other, appearing on the page together, or wrote for one another as sister-scribes� The multi-agency of the letter is extended here to incorporate the materiality of the letters in their construction and dissemination. Frank Trentmann defines a material analysis as a question of “how things, hands and senses come together [and point] to a more open, fluid view of action” (Trentmann 290). Karoline did not write the letter to von Hohim in her own hand� The letter was written entirely by her youngest sister, Amalie, as the scribe� A material reading of this letter reveals the group orientation and multiagent composition of the text by identifying and comparing the handwriting and signatures of the sisters’ letters. Karoline’s letters were sometimes written through dictation by her younger sisters as scribes when she was visiting them� The sister-scribes were just one part of a gendered epistolary practice in which the sisters configured their sorority on the page. I define here a concept of sorority to analyze the group-oriented correspondence of the Günderrode sisters. I have chosen the word ‘sorority’ over ‘sisterhood’ in order to distance the concept from connotations of the political dimensions of sisterhood in the twentieth century as well as egalitarian principles associated with fraternity� Sorority is a subset of siblingship, concentrating on sister-exclusive connections of an epistolary network of letters� The correspondence between the Günderrode sisters provides a case study that highlights the female-exclusive practices of siblingship because their youngest brother, Hector, was intentionally left out of their group-oriented correspondence� He had no influence over the maintenance of their sorority as he did not contribute to the production of their correspondence. Hector’s signature never appeared alongside those of his sisters� The concept of sorority addresses a gap in the historiography of siblingship in early modern Europe that has neglected sister-sister relationships and the formation of sister hierarchies beyond brother-sister dyads and hierarchies based on marital status� Sorority is a theoretical tool to map Maintaining Sorority through the Expression of Emotion 31 kinship from the perspective of sister-groups� It challenges the assumption that by the end of the eighteenth century siblingship and sister relationships were structured by egalitarian principles and inherently sentimental with limited practical function beyond the privacy of the family home� In such arguments the work of the sisters was supposedly always on the behalf of the brother, who was the idealizer of their love (Sabean 22). Sorority draws attention to the contingencies of epistolary practices of sibling hierarchy and emotional expression in specific socio-historical contexts. It also historicizes the convergence of gender, age and marital status in siblingship (Hohkamp 69-70). Through an analysis of the letters by the Günderrode sisters, I demonstrate how the sisters maintained their sorority through the exchange of emotions� In their correspondence the younger sisters not only showed deference to Karoline, but also toward each other along the line of sisters� Both Charlotte and Amalie regularly addressed their letters to Karoline as “Liebe Beste Line�” Karoline did not address Charlotte with “Beste,” only “Liebe Lotte�” “Beste” was used by the younger sisters as an initial address of respect for their eldest sister� The absence of “Beste” from their address of Karoline coincided with letter’s that were critical of Karoline’s behavior, which will be discussed later. Precedence is defined by Sophie Ruppel as the primacy of the eldest sibling in legal and social authority of the sibling group as well as formal representation across the events and situations of the siblings� Ruppel, however, acknowledges that more research and analysis is necessary in order to understand how precedence was practiced among a line of sisters (Ruppel 131). The practice of sorority among the Günderrode sisters maintained a hierarchy based on age and marital status� Between 1797 and 1801, when the letters discussed in this paper were written, Karoline, Wilhelmine, Charlotte and Amalie were unmarried and as historical subjects they are classified here as life-cycle singlewomen, that is, women who were expected to eventually marry (Bennett 2). Precedence and deference in the sorority is furthermore defined by the negotiation and maintenance of a relationship rather than strict obedience and subordination (Ruppel 101-02). The younger sisters maintained practices of deference and precedence to their eldest sister through their emotional expressions in their letters and continued to reinforce her ranked position, regardless of whether Karoline wanted to fulfill this role or not� On April 28, 1797, Charlotte and Amalie wrote a second letter together to Karoline, as she had not responded to their previous one. Charlotte wrote first and was followed by Amalie in the same bifolium� In the language of their letter the two younger sisters demonstrated the necessity to earn a response from Karoline in order to reaffirm their sister relationship following Karoline’s new residence in the Damenstift � In the line of sisters, Charlotte held precedence 32 Jordan Lavers over Amalie in their letter of deference to Karoline� The ranking of sisters was textually and materially visualized on the page� As the eldest in the household and the closest in age to Karoline, it was not necessary for Wilhelmine to demonstrate deference in the same form� As Charlotte wrote in her conclusion to her contribution in the letter: “Ob gleich du mir nicht antwortest so macht es mir Vergnugen an dich zu schreiben in der Hoffnung dich zu vorzeigen daß ich meine Vergehe bereue” (Senckenberg 9-10). Amalie introduced her contribution by strikingly emphasizing her physical difficulties and anxiety in writing a dutiful letter� She had received no response from her initial letter� By beginning her second letter with self-deprecation, because writing a good letter worthy of a response was not easy for her, Amalie could then earn a response from her eldest sister� Schon zum zweitenmale strenge ich mein Gehirn an, um vielleicht bloß eine Antwort zu verdienen, denn diesesmal verdiene ich wirklich eine Antwort, so wenig auch auf die Beine gebracht werden kann, denn aus einer Laterne etwas geniesbares ziehen ist wie du weist sehr schwer. (Senckenberg 9-10) Although Charlotte took precedence in her letter, it was necessary for both sisters to write and show due deference to their eldest sister to earn a response from her. This first letter is unique in comparison to the subsequent letters discussed in this article because it was one of the only letters in which Charlotte and Amalie shared the page. This letter is significant because it demonstrates how the sisters creatively and strategically adapted epistolary practices over time� As expressed in the quotation above, Charlotte and Amalie brought themselves pleasure by writing letters of deference to their eldest sister� To love their eldest sister was to demonstrate duty and deference to her in order to receive a response� Twelve year-old Amalie compared her production of a pleasurable letter for Karoline’s consumption to pulling out a treat from a lantern, possibly as a reference to St. Martin’s Day, when children walk in procession carrying lanterns, singing songs, and receive candy: “Wenn aus einer Laterne etwas geniesbares ziehen ist wie du weist sehr schwer.” The positive affirmation of their correspondence, through pleasure and sisterly love, signifies the importance of emotion in sustaining precedence and deference in the sorority: pleasing and positive continuous exchanges of letters to an eldest sister� Sisterly love was constituted by the form and the exchange of letters� Sincerity and intimacy of feeling were informed by the material and textual epistolary manifestations of feeling and temporal frequency of the exchange of letters by the sisters� The expressions of emotions by sisters to one another through the exchange of letters was inflected by gendered behavior. However, emotions in the letters cannot be attributed to a female specificity. The emotions themselves Maintaining Sorority through the Expression of Emotion 33 do not have a gender� The patterns and practices of emotional expression were gendered practices, thereby constructing historical lived-experience of gender through emotional expression. I adopt Benno Gammerl’s concept of emotional styles to analyze the expression of gendered emotions, because emotional styles are not restricted to “identity-based concepts of personhood or culture nor to rules and models nor to the aesthetic dimensions of expression” (163). As Gammerl defines his concept, “emotional styles encompass, instead, the experience, fostering, and display of emotions, and oscillate between discursive patterns and embodied practices as well as between common scripts and specific appropriations” (163). I adopt the term “emotional styles” to analyse expressions of emotions instead of representation of emotion in order to avoid a standardization of feminine emotionality in the exchange of letters by sisters� Attempting to locate specific feminine emotionality in representations of women’s emotions in historical texts leads to cultural relativism that constructs difference at the expense of historical lived experience and to speculate on what practices drove those differences. An approach of merely representing difference fails to acknowledge the historical categories of gendered bodies. Characterizing gender difference in emotional expression to a particular “women’s culture,” as anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod has argued, does not escape the tendency towards essentialism (147). By framing a historical analysis of gendered emotions around the question of representation of difference, such analyses paradoxically re-instate an “essentialised view of gender as difference,” and freeze difference within those categories, constructing coherence and homogeneity (Shields 428). The concept of gendered practices of emotional expression furthers a similar theoretical trajectory as Susan Broomhall’s and Jacqueline Van Gent’s notion of “rendered expressions of emotional selves” (147). Linda Pollock also defines emotions as “socially constituted syndromes” (571). I adopt the concept of emotional styles to analyze how the expression of emotions in correspondence maintained practices of precedence and deference in the sorority over time� Emotions “[emerge] from bodily dispositions conditioned by a social context, which always has cultural and historical specificity” (Scheer 193). The gendering practices of emotional expressions in letter writing by the Günderrodes were part of a process of on-going maintenance work of the sorority as an exchange task� The correspondence of the Günderrode sisters was an exchange task that was adapted over time to consider ever changing circumstances across their life course� Their familial feeling of sisterliness was constituted by a number of practices. As William M. Reddy describes it, “stable patterns of such statements, repeated over years, have very profound, shaping effects on one’s whole emotional makeup” (331). The exchange of letters was a part of what Reddy describes as “the deployment of attentional resources” (23). The letter was not 34 Jordan Lavers just a physical manifestation of sister-sister relationships that they held in their hands, but letters were also agents in the production and continuous reproduction of sisterly affections over distance and time. The material production of letter writing was highly-activated thought material that shaped and maintained siblingship at each stage of its production, dissemination and consumption� Thoughts and attention about any given situation or relationship are conceptualized not as pre-existing an expression, but as occupying an intermediate state, “somewhere between fully attended and fully ignored” (Reddy 20). Reddy argues further: “the indeterminacy of action situations demands a selective sensitivity, a flexible deployment of attentiveness” (20). Attention and activation of kinship and emotional expression in letter writing were embodied by a blank piece of paper: the form of the letter was not immediately fixed to an innate pre-existing relationship, rather, it was open to a number of possible configurations of epistolarity to form the boundaries of the sorority� Through its provisions, the tools and bodies needed, the composition of a letter calls to attention the specific familial dispositions and the reproduction of kinship constituted by gendered emotions� The meaning and value of the object was contingent to its usage� The expressions of emotion in letters by the sisters were emotives explicitly directed towards the exchange process of letters� Reddy writes that “Emotives are themselves instruments for directly changing, building, hiding, intensifying emotions, instruments that may be more or less successful. Within the disaggregated self, emotives are a dynamic tool that can be seized by attention in the service of various high-level goals” (104-05). Social materiality as embodied materiality questions the agency and causation of social relationships when material objects are embedded in the fabric of kinship practices� The sisters used quills and ink on paper to co-ordinate their emotional practices into habits over time and they transformed reciprocity into reproductivity through their exchange of letters� Through the expressions of Liebe and Bosheit , the composition and exchange of letters could be either productive or disruptive and pleasant or unpleasant to the sorority� As an exchange unfolding over time, the letters elucidate rhetorical patterns of emotional expressions that were habituated in order to constitute sisterly affections of the sorority. Karoline wrote to Charlotte in August, 1800: Wenn du mich ein geringsten liebst, so halte dein Versprechen u komm, bist du’s allein so kan ich dich 1 bis 2 Nächte bei mir einquartieren, vor essen u trinken u dein liebliches Wohlergehen lasse mich nur sorgen. Ich bitte dich kome, sonst werde ich dir böse u melankolisch. ( FDH -Hs: 8323) Karoline singled out Charlotte to attend to her in Frankfurt� Charlotte could only visit Karoline after receiving the invitation� Intimacy and love between the Maintaining Sorority through the Expression of Emotion 35 sisters were informed by precedence and deference in the sorority. Charlotte’s enunciation of “bloße Empfindung” in her letters was not merely an appropriation of style from a cult of sensibility� Sincerity and legitimacy of sisterly love were maintained through the temporal frequency of the exchange� The material intimacies of visitation, attendance and eating, correspond to the epistolary exchange between Karoline and Charlotte that was differentiated from the open and shared correspondence by Amalie and Wilhelmine. Charlotte wrote separately from Amalie on paper physically split from an original bifolium� In the undated letter from the first months of 1800 quoted below, the paper was folded in the standard bifolium form but the original sheet had been cropped in half� One piece was given to Charlotte and the other to Amalie. We know the paper was cut in half as each letter by Charlotte and Amalie were half the size of a traditional bifolium leaf� The only letter that is the full bifolium leaf was written by Karoline’s mother, Wilhelmine and Amalie ( FDH -Hs: 8282)� The intimacy of Charlotte’s sisterly relationship with Karoline was distinguished from Amalie both in the physical separation of the full page and her use of spacing and sealing in order to maintain epistolary secrecy when she wrote and then finally dispatched it� Charlotte folded her letter with the traditional tuck-and-seal method, in which the bifolium was folded twice horizontally, twice vertically, and then the left portion is tucked into the right side before sealing (Steen 65)� In the opening paragraph quoted below, Charlotte displayed her love and devotion for her eldest sister textually and materially to reinforce confidence in Karoline’s position. The change in composition and style to individual missives between Karoline and Charlotte was due to the likelihood that Charlotte would join Karoline in the convent in Frankfurt. Intimacy and closer affection between beloved sisters was not an innate love but strategic and fostered over time through their correspondence� Meine Beste! Ich hatte mir fest vorgenommen dir nur was scherzhaftes zu schreiben; aber dein leztes Brief hat mir so gerührt; hat alle Quellen meines Liebe gegen dich aufgethan, daß es mir nicht möglich wäre dir so etwas Gewöhnliches zu schreiben� Ja Liebe! Er hat mir so innige Freude gemacht, daß ich weinen könnte� “Gewiß Beste, ich liebe dich recht innig, und war wollen recht innig, recht vergnügt� Auch selbst du dich nicht mehr klagen können, daß ich kein Zutrauen zu dir hätte; und was war auch ein Mangel daran wenn ich dir manches nicht sagte, denn du weist ia bloße Empfindungen sind so schwer zu sagen, und man muß auch fürchte daß man mißverstanden wird; und öfters ist man sie sich selbst nicht deutlich bewußt� Aber ich weiß es, ich kann die alles denn du bist schonend und liebreich gegen mich� Ia noch freue mich darauf, denn es ist der schönste Augenblik, wenn man jemand Geliebtes sein ganzes Herz zeigen kann. (Senckenberg 15-18) 36 Jordan Lavers Charlotte’s deference to Karoline was distinguished from that of Wilhelmine and Amalie, as she sought to convey simple and sincere feelings (Lutz 296). The enunciation of “ich liebe dich recht innig” was directed to the exchange of letters as Charlotte re-affirmed her trust and confidence in Karoline. Recognition of sincerity in their correspondence was dependent on the temporality and the regularity of the epistolary exchange� Sincere emotions were therefore influenced by the patterns of regularity of composition and dissemination of the exchange process in relation to the letters written before and thereafter� Charlotte recognized how difficult such sincere constructions were to compose textually: “Verzeihe daß ich so häßlich schreibe, ich habe aber meine Hände noch gar nicht in meiner Gewalt”(FDH-Hs: 8286)� Charlote ended her letter with a Nachschrift of deference: “Habe Gedult mit meinem Gekritzel; aber es war mir nothwendig dir zu schreiben”(Senckenberg 5-6). She apologized for the quality of her writing as scribbles and scrawls� She emphasized the importance of careful composition and sought Karoline’s patience for such an improper form. The expression of love between sisters in letters was not a perfect exchange of deference, but they could be imperfect in form, style and temporality� In the following undated letter by Karoline to Charlotte, Karoline reassured her younger sister that her failures in writing did not impede their closeness, their harmony in spirit� Liebe Lotte, dich werde ich nicht sehen wenn die andern hierher kommen das weis ich wohl, und bescheide mich auch daß es so sein muß; aber kaum kann ich es erwarten dich zu sehen� Tausenderlei habe ich dir zu sagen was nur Lotte wissen soll� Gewis liebst du mich nicht wie ich dich liebe; dein Bild steht rein von meiner Seele und deine Fehler welche mich wenn ich dir näher bin oft zu Ungeduld und Heftigkeit reitzen scheinen ein so klein und unbedenkens als Atome� Alles was ich weis und gelernt habe möchte ich gerne dir mittheilen; trost Liebe und Harmonie in deiner Seel suchen� Ich bitte dich Lotte bin ich wieder nun dich so lerne meine Fehler liebend ertragen, laß es dich nicht verdrießen wenn ich dir die deinige sage, denn du weist daß ich gegen nichts unduldsamer bin als gegen die Fehler geliebter Personen; ich bitte dich thun alles mögliche damit unsere schöne Harmonie nie gestört werde� Deine Karoline� ( FDH -Hs: 8325) Although Karoline could not see Charlotte as she was hosting other guests in her apartment in the Damenstift , she assured her sister that she wanted to see and confide in her, what she would only share with Charlotte. Any failures or misdemeanors in their correspondence would only appear to be as small as atoms, once Karoline was physically close to Charlotte� Karoline forgave Charlotte’s failures in writing; however, she affirmed that Charlotte should strive to do all that is possible to evade any disruption to their letters of synchronicity Maintaining Sorority through the Expression of Emotion 37 and harmony� Physical intimacy in presence was preferred, but, in the face of absence, regularity and reciprocity of the correspondence was absolutely necessary� No matter how inconceivable failures in writing might have been, these failures put into question the extent to which harmony in the sorority could be sustained with consistent absence if frequent failures could indeed perturb such harmony� Hands construct, exchange and hold letters as embodied materializations of relationships� Those same hands could be troubled or, as it will be subsequently demonstrated, reluctant to exchange the letters on time� The sorority had to be maintained because it was imperfect, separated and disrupted by distance, and it was not a continuous cyclical exchange of idealized sisterly affections. The correspondence did not always go according to plan. Karoline’s correspondence to her sisters was marked by her tardiness. She was reluctant to respond to her sisters on time and as regularly as they wanted it to be. Although Charlotte was sympathetic to the evils of Karoline’s delay, such inactivity stressed the limitations of the sorority, and these subsequent letters by the younger sisters questioned the authority of Karoline and the value of her love for her them: Ich war recht vergnügt als ich deinen Brief erhielt, denn ich wuste gar nicht was ich denken sollte? weil du mir solange nicht geschrieben hättest. ob du krank warest, ob du mich ganz vergeßen hättest? und wirst du mir verzeihen? Daß ich so egoistisch war lieber das erstern zu wünschen? ia! daß ich sogar ganz beruhigt war, als ich erfahren hatte daß es die Schuld sei, aber demungeachtet habe ich doch herzliches Mitleid mit dir, und wünsche recht sehr daß du deines Übels überhoben wärest. ( FDH -Hs: 8286) Wilhelmine’s and Amalie’s expressions of anger maintained Karoline’s precedence in the sorority� Their anger towards Karoline was expressed directly at her lack of commitment to the exchange of letters� Carroll Smith-Rosenberg argued that in the female world of love and ritual of the eighteenth century, hostility and criticism towards other women was discouraged (14). Smith-Rosenberg assumed that anger and hostility were harmful to the network of women and discouraged close and affectionate ties. As presented in the letters by Wilhelmine, Charlotte and Amalie, this was not the case� Expressed in letters by younger sisters, anger was not just the privilege of familial ranking, nor solely a response to a challenge hierarchy (Broomhall and Van Gent 155). The expression of anger by Amalie maintained the sorority by strengthening the precedence of her eldest sister and it was negotiated within the rhetoric of deference� The younger sisters could defend themselves and criticize their eldest sister through their expression of anger in a letter (Pollock 576). Anger expressed by the younger sisters was therefore not illicit� It was directed towards maintaining the exchange of letters in the sorority. When the younger sisters expressed anger, 38 Jordan Lavers they had to legitimize their sentiment because of their position of rank and deference in the sorority (Kennedy 12-13). As expressed by Wilhelmine, love and anger were still a part of the same desire for closeness and regularity in the correspondence� In 1799, wedged between contributions by her mother and her youngest sister, Wilhelmine wrote, “Liebe, böse, Line! Ich bin dir fast böse, weil du so gottlos faul bist; du weist nicht wie sehr einem nach einem Brief von lieber Hand sehnt? Ich muß es beinahe glauben. Deine Mine, die dich immer herzlich liebt” ( FDH -Hs: 8282)� Wilhelmine was not entirely angry with Karoline, but her criticism was a response to Karoline’s laziness in not responding to their letters. In the same letter Amalie wrote a similiar critical response to Karoline that was, in contrast, not as playful in style as Wilhelmine‘s contribution. Amalie’s was direct in justifying her frustrations with her sister’s eight-day silence. Amalie did not write an initial address of “Liebe Line,” which was standard in their correspondence, and thereby set the tone of her angry missive� Der Weg von Frankfurt nach Hanau ist doch nicht so immer lange; auch sind Posten angelegt und Boten durchkreuzen pfleisig die Chaussee; ich sehe also nicht ein warum du gar nicht von dir hören lasst, man weis nicht ob du lebst oder nicht lebst� Lese doch, ich bitte, zum Exempel für dich Iphigenia� Sie konnte es fast nicht ertragen von ihren Eltern und Geschwistern getrent zu sein und hätte gewiß gerne eine Louis D’or für einen Brief gegeben; aber dir, u abscheulich, sind 2 Kreuzer zu viel. Wie, oder wäre als Faulheit von dir? Sie wäre auch nicht sehr rühmlich. Und nun denke dir einmal recht lebhaft wie es muß zumuthe ist. ( FDH -Hs: 8295) Amalie referred to the myth of Iphigenia, who was the eldest daughter of Agamemnon and was sacrificed to the gods so that he could sail safely to Troy. Amalie reminded Karoline of her separation in Frankfurt and that her position of authority as the eldest sister was not inherent� She had to work to maintain her precedent position with her younger sisters� The younger sisters could dismiss Karoline’s precedence and sacrifice it, which Amalie represented with the figure of Iphigenia. Amalie suggested that Karoline should reflexively and sympathetically consider how Iphigenia would have felt after she was abandoned on the island by her family. Amalie signed-off in anger and this emotion was textualized in her rhetorical play with the form of the epistolary signature� After closing with the formulaic adieu , she followed with an insult: “Adieu unwürdiges Schädigsten, mache dich bald meiner werth. Amalie” ( FDH -Hs: 8295). Amalie’s abrupt signature emphasized Karoline’s separation and she criticized Karoline’s failure to correspond with her sisters in Hanau� Amalie challenged her eldest sister’s continued appreciation of their sister relationship and the sorority itself. What value did they have for her, if she refused to correspond with them and Maintaining Sorority through the Expression of Emotion 39 thus damaged the reciprocity of the exchange relationship through idleness and silence? Karoline’s authoritative position was dependent on her active and reciprocal exchanges with her sisters that were loving and regular� Amalie did not express her anger to reject Karoline completely, but to reinforce her obligation and the duty to her younger sisters through continued participation in their correspondence, lest it should fall apart and become inactive and unloving� Charlotte ended a letter to Karoline from December, 1799, with a mocking Nachschrift : “Wenn du dieses lesen kannst, so gratuliere ich dir”(Senckenberg 11-12). Charlotte’s joke was for once not aimed at Karoline’s laziness or a delay; rather it referred to the fact that Karoline’s eyesight was deteriorating. In the contents of the letter, Charlotte notified Karoline that their doctor could see her and Karoline could purchase a pair of glasses: “Eben habe ich mit dem Docter gesprochen, er kann nicht den Tag bestimmen wenn er kommen kann, um dir die Brille zu kaufen, doch wird er noch zu dir kommen ehr die noch Lengfeld gehst” (Senckenberg 11-12). That following year, Karoline wrote to Charlotte in August: “Ich habe weder Zeit noch Augen viel zu schreiben nur ein paar Worte” ( FDH -Hs: 8323). Karoline’s ability to write letters as the eldest sister was hindered by her deteriorating eyesight� Not just a subject of potential humor for the sisters, Karoline’s eyesight was partially responsible for Amalie and Wilhelmine writing letters for Karoline as sister-scribes� Karoline was the sister of precedence and the most articulate� She always spoke on behalf of her sorority� However her eyes failed her� She could not always read well and her handwriting was often large and simplified, as she was unable to write a thorough letter within the confines of a bifolium. I conclude with this reference to eyesight and the sister-scribes as it reinforces the exchange of the letters as the body, hands, eyes and emotions, coming together to maintain the sorority, as well as the limitations imposed by the failures of hands and eyes and even of sisterly love� Charlotte died in 1801 and Amalie died in 1802. Wilhelmine’s marriage in 1804 marked the end of the sorority as she left Karoline and their shared correspondence� They no longer wrote for and with each other� In a fashion similar to the sister-scribes, Karoline sought help from both Bettine Brentano and Susan von Heyden to write for her in her letters and in her journal (Morgenthaler). Along with the sisters Gunda and Bettine Brentano, Karoline had befriended Susan von Heyden and her half-sister, Lisette Nees von Essenbeck, both born as von Mettingh in Frankfurt, before Susan and Lisette were married� Lisette referred to Karoline’s secretary in a letter addressed to Karoline. In February 1806, Karoline received medicine for her eyes from the botanist Christian Gottfried Nees von Essenbeck, the husband of Lisette� He directed Karoline to apply Augenwasser to a handkerchief and then to her closed eyes for as long as it was necessary ( FDH -Hs: 8331)� He requested her to communicate the results to him and if this 40 Jordan Lavers preparation did not work, he would send her a different mixture. The production and consumption of letters in the exchange network was only as successful as the actions and gestures of the physical bodies involved, that is, how those bodies read, wrote and felt their sisterliness� As I have discussed here, the correspondence among the Günderrode sisters provides a case study for an analysis of how letters negotiated and maintained sister-sister relationships in German-speaking aristocratic families. What remains to be analyzed in letters by early modern sisters in Europe in general, is how were material and textual practices of sister-clusters strategically adopted within their familial and inter-familial networks� The extent of the role of the sister-cluster in the broader network is represented here with Charlotte’s recommendation that Karoline should write to their relatives in Frankfurt and send them a document that verified their lineage: “Du wirst also gebethen versprochenen Stammbaum sobald wie möglich schikken, um Otto der sich sehr viel Vortheil von dieser Verwandschaft versprich; aber noch sehr daran zweifelt daß sie genug sein bewiesen könnte werden, davon zu überzeugen” ( FHD -Hs: 8287). (Otto, the mediator between Karoline and her relatives, is referred to in other letters between the sisters, however his identity is unknown�) Charlotte argued further in her letter that it was not enough to just demonstrate lineage or visualize a family tree� Kinship was not active unless it was practiced, regardless of the families’ well-known position in the patrician society of Alten-Limpurg. Sorority and the group-orientated correspondence of the sister-cluster were networking strategies of the Günderrode sisters� The exchange of letters by female relations formed affective nodes of exchange networks through their correspondence, thereby activating and maintaining configurations of kinship, which could otherwise remain idle or even illegitimate (Hohkamp 94). The Günderrode sisters’ network of letters extended further to the von Leonhardi, von Mettingh, von Glauburg, as well as the Fichard, Brentano and Serviere sisters, when these women were all singlewomen and then later once they had married off into different families. 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