11 - Weibliche Irrsterne: Louise Otto and the Notion of Female Genius in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Summary

IN 1681 THE ENGLISH P OET John Dryden asserted that “genius must be born, and never can be taught.” Certainly, by the eighteenth century many of Germany's greatest writers and philosophers were seeking to explore the character and nature of a true genius. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Immanuel Kant, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, among others, all wrote extensively on the subject of the natural genius. By the end of that century, genius had become tied to human creativity but remained a mystical gift that the ordinary laws of human nature could not explai n. The possibility that erudition was at the heart of genius was not suggested until the late nineteenth century, and throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries genius remained a trait that, it was believed, only an elite few could possess. Furthermore, the concept of natural genius never accounted for gender: since there was no female equivalent of a Shakespeare or Mozart, women were excluded on historical grounds. Beginning with the ancient Greeks, it was commonly assumed that women do not create, they procreate; women do not produce, they reproduce. These notions manifested in a gender bias in the concept of genius that condemned women to cultural inferiority. Indeed, Goethe's and Friedrich Schiller's aesthetic objections to female authorship were based on contemporary conceptions of separate and strictly divided gender roles. “Female genius,” therefore, was a contradiction in terms.

In 1851, the early feminist German writer Louise Otto, later Otto- Peters (1819–95), challenged the exclusion of women from the sphere of genius in a series of four essays titled “Genialität” (Exceptional Creative Disposition) that she published in her periodical Die Frauen-Zeitung (1848–52; The Women's Newspaper). A close reading of “Genialität” reveals that Otto-Peters anticipated central arguments of the natureversus- nurture debate before they were formalized in the late nineteenth century. She also claimed a place for women as literary and artistic creators at a time when they were excluded on the basis of their gender from the category of creative genius. I argue that while Otto judged the traditions of creative production by male standards to determine what was culturally valuable, she was the first in the German-speaking context to advance the idea of creative genius beyond its male embodiment.