Nineteenth-century German literary women's reception of Madame de Stael.

This essay examines Madame de Stael's impact on German women writers from Romanticism to the Vormarz, including Caroline Paulus, F.H. Unger, Johanna Schopenhauer, Ida Hahn-Hahn, and Luise Muhlbach. I argue that these German women refer in their novels to Stael's exemplary life and to her influential stories of politically engaged and artistic heroines in order to authorize their own discourses on art and politics. These authors' intertextual responses to Stael's powerful statements on women's social and artistic potential reflect their ambivalent positions regarding women's cultural role, and show that Stael's example inspired their development of a female authorial identity. (JEM)

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Reactions to Madame de Stael and her writings by influential German men of letters, including Goethe, Schiller, Jean Paul, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and A.W. Schlegel, have long been documented and continue to be the subject of literary scholarship. (1) As yet, however, scant attention has been paid to the numerous German women authors who not only commented on Stael in letters and book reviews, but whose novels also contain intertextual references to her life and works. (2) As Europe's most prominent woman author of the period around 1800, Germaine de Stael (1766-1817) exerted a profound impact on subsequent German literary women, including Friederike Helene Unger, Caroline Paulus, Johanna Schopenhauer, Ida Hahn-Hahn, and Luise Muhlbach. Stael's influential stories of politically engaged and artistic heroines shaped the historical development of the German novel by inspiring these German women authors to write on women's role in public culture and politics. German women's responses to Stael and her novels shed light on the authors' positions concerning the controversial issue of women's participation in the public sphere. Moreover, these writers' references to Stael and her literary characters indicate that her example fostered their development of a self-consciously female authorial identity, corroborating Kari Lokke's premise that Stael played a role "as an originary figure in the history of Western women's self-definition of poetic identity" ("Sibylline Leaves" 159).

The concept of intertextuality helps define German women's complex relationship to Stael and their dynamic process of reading and reformulating her literary models. Bakhtin's dialogic theory of discourse, for example, underscores the intertextual dimension of narrative by considering every utterance a response to previous utterances. Based on Bakhtin's concept of dialogism, which conceives of the literary text "as a rejoinder in a given dialogue" (274), my analysis will examine these German women's novels as dialogic responses to Stael's powerful statements on women's role in art and politics in her novels. Bakhtin's notion of dialogism is useful for examining women's writing because it foregrounds the "differentiated socio-ideological position of the author" within discourse (300). (3) A feminist Bahktinian approach takes into account the specific relationship of a gendered speaker to multivocal discourse in a given epoch. In addition, Bakhtin's focus on the social context of an utterance is particularly valuable to feminist literary criticism, for it provides a model for reading intertexts within their broader historical and sociological contexts (Eigler 191). Analyzing these German women's intertextual references to Stael not only reconstructs an important element of the international literary-historical context of their novels, but also illuminates the authors' positions in relationship to the socio-historical context of nineteenth-century discussions of gender and authorship.

In keeping with Bakhtin's shift in emphasis away from sources of influence to the process of an author's "further creative development of another's ... discourse in a new context and under new conditions" (347), I want to demonstrate the significance of Stael's discourses of politics and female creativity for German women writers, while acknowledging their independent and intentional transformations of her models within their own German cultural and historical contexts. In examining German women's responses to influential literary precursors, it is important, as Joeres has recently asserted, to strike a balance between, on the one hand, viewing German women authors as passive products of discourse and, on the other, attributing too much agency to them (33). They do exhibit some degree of agency in their obvious business savvy in capitalizing on the widespread reputation of Stael and her literary creations. Furthermore, German women consciously enter into a dialogic relationship with Stael's utterances on women's cultural role in order to validate their own discourses on art and politics. In fact, even a conservative Biedermeier novel such as Johanna Schopenhauer's Gabriele can be shown to express the writer's ambition to authorize her own creative endeavors through intertextual references to Corinne.