A Woman's Post: Gender and Nation in Historical Fiction by Louise von François

Summary

This essay examines the intersection of gender and nation in four pieces of historical fiction by Louise von François: the story “Der Posten der Frau” (The Woman's Post), published anonymously in 1857 and one of François's first works; the story “Fräulein Muthchen und ihr Hausmeier” (Miss Muthchen and Her Chief Steward, 1859); the novel Die letzte Reckenburgerin (1870; translated as The Last von Reckenburg, 1887, rpt. 1995); and the succeeding novel Frau Erdmuthens Zwillingssöhne (Mrs. Erdmuth's Twin Sons, 1872). Judging from the holdings of private, for-profit lending libraries, historical fiction constituted the most popular literary genre in Germany for most of the nineteenth century, including that period we call realism. To take one example, between 1858 and 1861 historical novels represented almost fifty percent of German novels published. As Brent O. Peterson points out, however, the wide field of historical novels remains largely unexplored. The past thirty years have produced only four full-length studies of German historical fiction, none of which deals with aspects of gender as they pertain to the narration of nation. And yet, writes Peterson, “to understand ‘Germany’ as a discursive formation, i.e., as a set of ideas rather than merely a place or a political entity, one needs to examine how gender was encoded in the emerging nationalist narrative. Historical fiction . . . provides unparalleled access to the gendered construction of the German nation.”

Whereas Peterson's work primarily investigates novels by men (with a brief glance at François), we need to remember Todd Kontje's dictum that “often-marginalized or -trivialized novels by German women played a central role in shaping attitudes toward class, gender, and the nation.” Francois's “Der Posten der Frau” deals with the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), Frau Erdmuthens Zwillingssöhne with the period from 1770 to 1813, “Fräulein Muthchen und ihr Hausmeier” with the year 1813, and Die letzte Reckenburgerin with the time between 1780 and 1836. The works emphasize Prussian military triumphs over the French, especially what Anthony D. Smith terms “the myth of a heroic age” (Frederick “the Great”), and the “myths of decline” (1806–12) and “regeneration” (1813–15). Smith sees these elements as constituent in the project of constructing what Benedict Anderson terms an “imagined community” in the form of a nation.