Conclusion: Progression, Reaction, and Tension in Hardenberg's Gender Writing

Summary

IN DISCUSSING GLAUBEN UND LIEBE in his address Von deutscher Republik, Thomas Mann referred to Novalis as a conservative figure who nevertheless served future progress. Here Mann aptly characterizes Hardenberg's own optimistic view of his ability to synthesize tradition and progression through poetry, though he also points to the fascinating and complex tensions that are present in the poet's work. Certainly such contradictory impulses are present in Hardenberg's treatment of gender. His model of Poësie demonstrates remarkably modern insights into the nature of identity as a thing constructed in language and, therefore, also alterable through the use of language. And from the events of 1797, particularly from his writing about the loss of Sophie, Hardenberg gained an awareness that writing about women was also a matter of creating fictions in language. But he did not use this awareness as a basis for systematically altering all of the models of gender he encountered in enlightened thought and writing of the eighteenth century. Whether for reasons of his provincial, quasi-bourgeois experience of family or because he found merit in the works of largely reactionary writers on gender such as Rousseau, Kant, and Fichte, Hardenberg's letters, jottings, and fragments evince a socially and politically conservative treatment of women. In many of his political writings, certainly in those preceding 1798, he writes on issues such as women's place in society and their intellectual faculties in a manner that does little to challenge the then conventional models of femininity.