Amalia Schoppe's Die Colonisten and the "menace of mimicry".('The Colonists')(Critical Essay)

Amalia Schoppe (1791-1858) was well known as an editor, publicist, and popular author in her own time, but she was soon forgotten. She is accorded a place in German literary history as the mentor of Friedrich Hebbel, but rarely as a writer, and until now there has been little response to calls for a reassessment of her work. Here I examine just one of Schoppe's books, the two-volume novel Die Colonisten (The Colonists, 1836). The text draws on traditional topoi of the time in what appears to be a conventional script reaffirming the values of middle-class European society. Drawing on the popular legend of Inkle and Yarico and the concept of mimicry elaborated in Bhabha's The Location of Culture, I attempt to show how the text, in a sophisticated double-voiced discourse, links colonization and middle-class gender relations. Such a reading challenges previous interpretations of the text and the unqualified dismissal of Schoppe's work as trivial and insignificant. (JW)

**********

In his commemoration of the life of "Schenectady's most prolific author," Amalia Schoppe (1791-1858), George Danton, a professor at Union College in Schenectady, New York, where Schoppe spent her last years, characterized her life and achievement in the following way (1939):

 
   Amalia Schoppe, nee Weise, was a minor German authoress. Her 
   voluminous works are no longer read, and no one, even during her 
   lifetime, considered their literary value very seriously. She 
   belongs to that type of popular writer who, while living, has a 
   certain vogue, but who is quickly "dated," and who almost 
   immediately passes into oblivion.... She was distinctly a moral 
   writer, and her popularity was primarily due to her didacticism.... 
   But if Frau Schoppe is of slight importance as a creative artist, 
   she does, nevertheless, have a definite significance in the history 
   of world literature through her association with the dramatist, 
   Hebbel.... The woman deserves more than a word of praise for what 
   she did for a starving genius ... (425). 

Popular, moral, didactic, second-rate--the measure of worth of a piece of writing was the literary canon; those who did not measure up were, like Europe's primitive others, bound for extinction. Danton's comments were intended as a celebration; a condemnation could hardly have been more damning, but he was right about Schoppe's fate as a writer. (1) She is accorded a place in German literary history, but normally as the overzealous mentor of the "starving" Friedrich Hebbel in the shadow of whose carefully guarded genius she is often judged both as a person, and as a writer. (2) The impact of Hebbel scholarship on the assessment of both is evident in the odd mixture of praise and deprecation in the Schoppe entry in Goedecke's Grundrisz zur Geschichte der deutschen Dichtung (Outline of the History of German Literature, 1910): "We will retain a fond memory not so much of the productive, but mediocre authoress, but of the kindly, if limited and narrow patroness of the young Hebbel" (414).

In her own lifetime Schoppe was a well-known editor, publicist, and popular author. (3) Her first published works, a small selection of poems, appeared in Kerner's Poetischer Almanach fur das Jahr 1812 and several more were published in Uhland and Fouque's Deutscher Dichterwald (A Forest of German Poets) in the following year. From this modest, albeit ambitious beginning she turned to writing as a profession and livelihood in 1821 when she left her husband, an unstable alcoholic, who was no longer able to provide for the family. In a writing career spanning the next thirty years, she engaged in a vast range of activities: editing two magazines--the fashion magazine, Neue Pariser Modeblatter (1827-45) and the young people's weekly, Iduna (1831-38)--making regular contributions to numerous journals and newspapers, among them Cotta's highly regarded Morgenblatt fur gebildete Stande; and producing translations and a number of practical manuals. In between, she wrote some two hundred novels and stories, an output that brought her ambivalent admiration: at least she hasn't forgotten how to cook, said Kerner (1844); (4) critical castigation: her pen has overtaken her good sense, said Menzel (1830); (5) and satirical scorn: "she can knit a novel as easily as she can a stocking," Schoppe is alleged to have claimed of herself (1846). (6) Nevertheless, this "script manic" (7) novel knitter retained her position among the top third of the popular writers in the German lending libraries for almost two-thirds of the nineteenth century. (8)

After her death, however, only three of her books were republished, and now her work is indeed virtually forgotten. (9) Despite the growth of interest in popular culture and the extensive reclamation work of feminist scholarship since the 1970s, there has been little response to the few calls for a reassessment of Schoppe's work. (10) As a contribution to that process I want to examine just one of her books, the two-volume novel Die Colonisten (The Colonists, 1836). The novel is significant in the German-Australian context as the first known work of German literature to present the perspective of the Australian Aborigines on colonization (Corkhill 42), but it is also of potential interest to feminist scholars as an early exploration of the connection between colonization and middle-class gender relations. (11) In a reading that draws on the popular legend of Inkle and Yarico and the concept of mimicry elaborated by Homi K. Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994) I will attempt to show how the text, in a sophisticated "double-voiced discourse," (12) links the discourse of savagery and the discourse of femininity and exposes the nether side of the European vision of the other, its impact on "savages" and women. In drawing attention to its transgressive dimension, my reading challenges previous interpretations of the text and the unqualified dismissal of Schoppe's work as trivial and unworthy of more serious consideration. (13)