"People will make for themselves an artificial existence": gender and fashion in the works of Caroline de la Motte Fouque (1775-1831).

The theme of fashion in clothing is of central importance to the late Romantic author Caroline de la Motte Fouque. Inspired by the abolition of class-specific dress regulations after the French Revolution, she countered the anthropological and moral discourse on fashion of her time (bourgeois naturalness versus aristocratic artificiality) with an unusual cultural history of fashion. But in her novels and pedagogical writings she also examined changes in fashion as markers of the historical process of bourgeois gender differentiation into a female private sphere and a masculine public sphere. In this article I argue that Fouque's anachronistic adherence to the aristocratic tradition of public dress for women represents not so much nostalgia for the ancien regime as an innovative form of feminine protest against the gender-specific consequences of this structural transformation. (JB)

Caroline de la Motte Fouque's interest in fashionable clothing struck contemporary observers as little more than a superficial, `typically female' and, moreover, aristocratic preoccupation. The latter point was based on her noble descent as avon Briest. Born in 1775 in Berlin as her parents' only daughter, she married her second husband, the Romantic poet Friedrich de la Motte Fouque, in 1803. Until her death in 1831 she lived together with him and her four children on her father's estate in Nennhausen outside Rathenow, during which time she wrote numerous novels, stories, and essays on culture.

Over the years, Nennhausen became a center where such literary figures as August Wilhelm Schlegel, Chamisso, Eichendorff, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Karl August Varnhagen von Ense met and socialized. But contacts were also cultivated with the royal house of Prussia. In her correspondence, alongside literary and family news, Caroline Fouque would exchange the latest fashion tips and seek detailed descriptions of costumes--themselves ironically often modelled on descriptions in Caroline and Friedrich Fouque's own literary texts--at the court balls of Berlin. She would, in turn, depict such dress in her own publications, which no one less than Heinrich Heine himself praised for their "depth of perception" (44).

But Caroline Fouque herself reinforced the prejudices about her by the way she employed the disparaging fashion allegories typical of her day. For instance, the power of Paris fashion seemed to her "more invincible than Bonaparte." Yet it was a power that derived less from the tyranny of a warmonger than from the caprice of a "moody child" (Fouque, Briefe 12). Fashion appears both as the personified expression of absolutist rule and as the harmless whim of a child within a bourgeois family situation. However, Fouque does not go so far as to suggest the idea of a fickle, whimsical, irrational femininity prevalent elsewhere. (1)

My focus here is on Fouque's historically atypical tendency to forge a link between the spheres of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, and on the implications this has for the role of women around 1800. Taking Fouque's cultural history of fashion as an example, I intend to show that it was precisely her preoccupation with seemingly random changes in dress fashion that allowed Caroline Fouque to make historical observations concerning differing gender concepts in the ancien regime, the Revolution, and the Restoration. In addition, it should be noted that, although Fouque dresses the aristocratic female protagonists of her narrative texts in costumes denoting plain, bourgeois domesticity and virtue, she still grants them pre-revolutionary, courtly forms of public ceremonial activity. In Fouque's late pedagogical essay this linkage finally issues in a study of female role behavior.

In this regard, Fouque's texts run counter to the gender-specific consequences of the historical transformations of the eighteenth century described by Ute Frevert, Karin Hausen, and Joan Landes. The Enlightenment was accompanied by a definition of gender that did not coalesce until after the Restoration and that was manifested in the increasing relegation of the feminine to the private and the masculine to the public sphere. An important discursive element in this process consisted in the confrontation between what was considered to be bourgeois "naturalness" and noble "artificiality," played out above all in the arena of women's clothing with its ever-shifting fashions. It is a precondition of such a view of fashion that dress may be individually chosen and interpretable as a meaningful system of signs. I believe that while Caroline Fouque may well have availed herself of contemporary physiognomic methods of interpretation and developed them into a system of literary allusion, she also undermined their moral and pedagogical intent. Precisely this interpretation of an artificially produced, changeable exterior, I want to suggest, can add cultural, social, and historical insights to an individual and gender-specific characterology determined by fate and biology.

In four articles from her Geschichte der Moden (History of Fashion) published in 1829/30 in Cotta' s Morgenblatt fur gebildete Stande, Caroline Fouque thus examines the "external physiognomy of the moment" (34) as a "Beitrag zur Geschichte der Zeit" (Contribution to the History of the Age), as the subtitle puts it. (2) At the beginning of the first article, Fouque contrasts three generations by pointing to the feminine apparel of her governess, her mother, and herself: "I remember very well that in the days of my childhood, my father's house could boast of three different epochs in the dress of my governess, my mother, and my own self" (9). Initially, Fouqu6 depicts the French governess in terms of past fashion. Her detailed description of everyday wear from the first half of the eighteenth century includes additional information on the social standing, circumstances, and character of a respectable, older widow.