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)

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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).