Scattered thoughts on current feminist literary critical work in nineteenth-century German studies.

This examination of the current status of feminist scholarly work on nineteenth-century German literature highlights both positive and more problematic developments. It acknowledges the work that is now being done on individual German women writers and the newer scholarship that emphasizes feminist theoretical approaches to a variety of analytical categories. It welcomes the newly emerging evidence of a growing alignment between German Studies and feminist inquiry but also pinpoints such concerns as American indifference to German topics, the continuing ambiguities in the circumscribing of feminist inquiry, the history/theory dichotomy, and the inevitable envious comparisons that must be drawn when feminist Germanists consider nineteenth-century writings by non-German women.

To Susanne, who suggested this essay and who, if things were fair and right in the world, would be around to comment on it.

In 1893, Constantin RoBler published a long-winded piece in the PreuBische Jahrbucher that bore the imprecise (if just in terms of the considerable heft of the article) title "Hingeworfene Gedanken zur Frauenfrage" (Scattered/casual Thoughts on the Woman Question). His use of that word "hingeworfen" implies, as his piece then goes on to demonstrate, a certain dismissive quality that embodies for me the way most male German literary and cultural critics in the nineteenth century (and often enough since) have approached anything to do with women's emancipatory efforts. At the same time, RoBler seems to have had a lasting effect on me because, even though I read his article twenty or more years ago, I remember his title to this day. And when it came time to provide a heading for my thoughts on feminist criticism and German Studies, it was the first phrase that occurred to me. I considered doing away with the "hingeworfen," but for me it is not a matter of RoBler's casual dismissiveness--I am not presenting these thoughts in a way that would indicate how unimportant this topic is, but rather to show my excitement at a variety of developments. Germanist feminist literary criticism on pre-twentieth-century eras seems at the moment to be in an active and energetic phase, although the picture is far from unambiguously positive. What follows are thoughts on several topics ranging from something as basic, and as complex, as how to define feminist literary critical work, to my sense of how that work is currently being done.

I recently spent some time with the latest (1999) PMLA Bibliography, perusing the lists of articles and books being published in the field of literary and cultural criticism. And I was both heartened and astonished at the expansion of feminist work evident in the category "German Literature, 1800-1899." For there I found not just Karl August, but Rahel Varnhagen; not just Achim, but Bettine von Arnim; not even Friedrich, but definitely Caroline de la Motte Fouque; not just Arthur but Johanna Schopenhauer. And not just Droste and Ebner-Eschenbach, but Frieda von Bulow and Louise Aston, Hedwig Dohm and the Grafin Hahn-Hahn. And Louise Otto and Luise Buchner and Fanny Lewald and Gabriele Reuter and Dorothea Schlegel and Therese Albertine Louise Jakob. In addition I discovered dissertations on Johanna Schopenhauer, Fanny Lewald, Gabriele Reuter, Ricarda Huch, and Lou Andreas-Salome.

In the matter of the presence of German women writers in critical work, then, the world of feminist literary criticism has changed considerably in the fifteen years since I published a review essay on that topic in the Internationales Archiv fur Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur. Moreover, the mismatch between German Studies and feminism that I bemoaned in a 1993 Women in German Yearbook article seems to have been transformed into an increased volume of work on German women authors as well as an exciting diversification of approaches to those authors and to the whole rich topic of gendered approaches to literature and culture.

In 1986, on the other hand, what I could report focused almost exclusively on aspects of literary history. For feminist literary criticism, the 1970s and 1980s were, above all, an era of rediscovery of the past and (a word I still very much like) a re-vision of what we had previously learned; gender was a term that was used not as it is today, in a broadening of feminist concerns beyond women as subjects, but rather to designate the major significance of gender in our very examination of women. Therefore, I wrote of scholarship and research involving women-mostly creative writers, but also graphic artists, journalists, and political activists. I was particularly keen on what I called "the importance of the subjective, the examination of personal experience" (233). I did mention class here and there; I disregarded other analytical categories such as ethnicity, race, sexual orientation/sexuality, and only rarely referred to feminist work on male authors. In my effort to underline the significance of feminist inquiry, I also selected obvious and easy targets to make merry of, those late-nineteenth-century acknowledgments of women in books with titles such as Dichter und Frauen (Geiger), Frauenliebe und Dichterleben (Vogel), and Matter beruhmter Manner (Arndt).

My concluding suggestions in that review essay tended toward particular interests of my own. I longed for more feminist examinations of writers like Hedwig Dohm or Rahel Varnhagen or Rosa Mayreder, also more feminist biographies. I pressed for more revisionary work on the gendered nature of genres like the letter and the autobiography and such forms as the occasional poem (Gelegenheitsgedicht) "... whose anonymity and exposure to critical ridicule make it a logical choice for investigation by feminist critics all too aware of how often anonymity and ridicule are connected with women writers" (255).