Gender Studies and Romanticism

Summary

Historically, a pronounced gender bias toward male authors has skewed our critical understanding of German Romanticism. Standard workhorses like Frenzel's Daten deutscher Dichtung identify the “most important” Romantic writers as Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, Joseph von Eichendorff, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Heinrich von Kleist, Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel, and Ludwig Tieck. Influential theoretical studies like Jochen Hörisch's Die fröhliche Wissenschaft der Poesie, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy's The Literary Absolute, Manfred Frank's Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik, Winfried Menninghaus's Unendliche Verdopplung, Azade Seyhan's Representation and Its Discontents, and Ernst Behler's German Romantic Literary Theory likewise focus almost exclusively on male authors. As incisive as these analyses are in their articulations of Romantic theory, the theory they articulate clearly is androcentric. In these studies the female Romantics largely play the role of helpmeet to their male companions. For the most part, they are not treated as authors in their own right. And they often are referred to much too familiarly by their first names, an unreflected rhetorical gesture that implicitly suggests these women are not to be taken as seriously as their surnamed male counterparts. Read from a gender perspective, most scholarship on Romantic literary theory tacitly skips over Friedrich Schlegel's earliest prefigurations and formulations of Romantic criticism in terms of a theory of the feminine — his progressive essays “Ueber die weiblichen Charaktere in den griechischen Dichtern” (On the Feminine Characters in the Greek Poets, 1794), “Über die Diotima” (On Diotima, 1795), and “Über die Philosophie: An Dorothea” (On Philosophy: To Dorothea, 1799) — and reflects instead his markedly more conservative treatment of the feminine in the Gespräch über die Poesie (Conversation on Poesy, 1800).