3 - Between Feminism and National Identity: The Historical Novels of Renate Feyl

Summary

In the introduction to a collection of essays exploring the somewhat discordant relationship between feminism and cultural studies, Sue Thornham lists a series of issues explored by a woman she sees as a forerunner for those working at the intersection of these two areas — Mary Wollstonecraft. Thornham's list includes “questions about women's relation to (the dominant) culture, to power, to discourse, to identity, to lived experience, to cultural production and to representation.” In novels written both during the existence and subsequent to the demise of the East German state where she resided, Renate Feyl pursues precisely these issues, and can thus be characterized as a writer at the nexus of cultural studies and feminism. Her historical fiction foregrounds the struggle of Age-of-Goethe female authors against dominant patriarchal power structures at home, in the literary marketplace, and in the political domain. These women overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles in the spheres of cultural production, self-representation, and authorial identity as female authors. Their “lived experience” at both the personal and professional level is vividly rendered through Feyl's minute attention to the ambience and material details of the period. What makes Feyl stand out among the writers whom Thornham would place at the uneasy juncture between feminist theory and cultural studies is her pursuit of the vexed issue of German national identity in the GDR (in her first novel) and in the Berlin Republic (in her subsequent historical fiction), as refracted through her eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century settings.