Women Write Back

Internationale Forschungen zur

124 Allgemeinen und
Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft

In Verbindung mit

Norbert Bachleitner (Universität Wien), Dietrich Briesemeister (Friedrich

Schiller-Universität Jena), Francis Claudon (Université Paris XII), Joachim
Knape (Universität Tübingen), Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität
Mainz), John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University), Alfred Noe (Universität
Wien), Manfred Pfister (Freie Universität Berlin), Sven H. Rossel (Universität
Wien)

herausgegeben von

Alberto Martino
(Universität Wien)

Redaktion: Ernst Grabovszki

Anschrift der Redaktion:

Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Berggasse 11/5, A-1090 Wien
 Women Write Back
Strategies of Response
and the Dynamics of European
Literary Culture, 1790-1805

Stephanie M. Hilger

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009

Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire
(1940) Oil on canvas, 18 1/4 x 25 3/8 inches
© Salvador Dalí. Fundación Gala-Salvador Dalí, (Artist Rights Society), 2006
Collection of the Salvador Dalí Museum, Inc., St. Petersburg, FL, 2006.
C/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2009.

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For my father
Acknowledgments

I want to express my thanks to the people who have read and commented on
various parts of this project: Nancy Blake, John Dussinger, Laurence Mall,
Carl Niekerk, and Mara Wade. I would also like to acknowledge my research
assistants, Martina Hamidouche-Huber and Sonja Wandelt-Schoene, who
assisted me at various stages of researching, writing, and proofreading this
book. Thank you to the College of the Holy Cross and the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for granting me research stipends and research
leaves for completing this book. Special thanks go to the readers and editors
at Rodopi for their guidance and support of this project, as well as to my
copyeditor, Ann Youmans. Thank you to my husband, Wail Hassan, for his
patience, encouragement, and help. Most of all, I wish to thank my parents for
their unflagging support throughout the years. To my father, who saw me
begin writing this book but could not witness its completion, I dedicate this
book.

An earlier version of chapter 2 appeared in Intertexts 10.1 (2006): 65–86.

Part of chapter 4 was published in French Review 79.4 (March 2006): 737–
748.
Contents

Introduction: Women Write Back 11

Chapter 1
Gender and Genre: Helen Maria Williams’ Julia, a Novel 37

Chapter 2
Adventurous Tales: Ellis Cornelia Knight’s Dinarbas; a Tale:
Being a Continuation of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia 67

Chapter 3
Staging Islam: Karoline von Günderrode’s
Mahomed, der Prophet von Mekka 91

Chapter 4
The Letter and the Body: Julie de Krüdener’s Valérie 119

Conclusion: Writing Back, Reading Forward 149

Bibliography 157
Introduction
Women Write Back

This book is about the stakes of writing in politically turbulent times. It

focuses on four women authors who published in the fifteen-year period
following the French Revolution: Karoline von Günderrode, Ellis Cornelia
Knight, Julie de Krüdener, and Helen Maria Williams. They wrote in three
languages—English, French, and German—and thereby engaged different
literary discourses and political contexts, yet the common theme was the
question of leadership in the context of a gradually changing body politic.
The authors wrote in an era that remembered Revolutionary ideals but had
also seen these ideals’ perversion through the Terreur and the far-reaching
effects of Napoleon’s rule on European politics. In the aftermath of the
French Revolution, the iconic representation of Marianne waiving the flag of
freedom was replaced first with the hissing sound of the guillotine and then
with the thunder of Napoleon’s canons. The air was thick with questions of
social and political reform, not only in France but also in England and the
German territories, where monarchs and absolutist statesmen ruled subjects
that were at once fascinated and repulsed by the events of 1789 and their
aftermath. These four authors serve as case studies for understanding the
mechanisms of literary production and women authors’ self-positioning on
the literary landscape at a time marked by simultaneous intellectual ferment
and fear of unruly expression.
Each of the four women produced a fictional work that engaged a well-
known text by a male author who had already become a canonical figure
during his lifetime. Karoline von Günderrode’s Mahomed, der Prophet von
Mekka responds to Voltaire’s Mahomet ou le fanatisme; Ellis Cornelia
Knight explicitly presents her Dinarbas as a continuation of Samuel
Johnson’s Rasselas; Julie de Krüdener’s Valérie engages the epistolary
framework of Goethe’s Werther; and Helen Maria Williams’ Julia enters into
dialogue with Rousseau’s Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloise. Writing a response to
or a continuation of a famous text in order to attract attention was, of course,
a widely used strategy in the eighteenth century. The argument of this book is
therefore not that Günderrode, Krüdener, Williams, and Knight were the only
authors participating in intertextual dialogue at a time when authors
passionately responded to and liberally borrowed from each other, especially
when it came to authoring a novel, a form still perceived as new, malleable,
and financially profitable. Instead, I argue that what unites these four authors
and sets their work apart from other types of intertextual discourse is their
manner of response, which I will term writing back. This concept, borrowed
from postcolonial theory and most explicitly theorized in Bill Ashcroft,
Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back (1989), high-
lights power dynamics in the process of writing and publication at times of
social and political upheaval. Parallels can be drawn between authors in the
postcolonial period and women writers from the French Revolution to the
end of Napoleon’s rule. Postcolonial literature emerged at a time when the
justification for colonial rule was being questioned. Authors living under
colonial rule found themselves in the paradoxical position of being both
fluent in and at the same imprisoned by the colonizer’s discourse. One way to
an independent voice was to acknowledge and then question the colonizer’s
literary tradition by rewriting and responding to its important works. One of
the best-known examples is the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall
Apart (1958), which challenges the premise of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness (1899), one of the most important, controversial, and influential
narratives of empire. Published two years before Nigerian independence,
Achebe’s novel claims the agency of postcolonial authors by strategically
inhabiting the colonizer’s literary conventions in order to transcend their
narrow boundaries.1 While not all postcolonial authors “wrote back” in this
explicit way, many of them, educated in the colonial system, used the
master’s tools in order to uncover the flawed foundation of the master’s
house. Using a well-known text as an anchor caused an ambivalent reception;
it ensured visibility yet also exposed authors to harsh criticism from the
literary establishment.
In a manner that perhaps foreshadows the postcolonial writers who
questioned the colonizer’s discourse of enlightened benevolence, women
authors of the late eighteenth century scrutinized the paradoxical deployment
of the Revolutionary concepts of liberty and equality in contemporary dis-
course by “writing back” to it. They questioned the literalization of the
concept of fraternity as solidarity between men to the exclusion of women in
the literary sphere. The clash between ideals and realities was especially

1
For readings of postcolonial responses to specific authors see Thomas Cartelli,
Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations (London:
Routledge, 1999); David Attwell, J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing
(Berkeley: U of California P, 1993) for a response to Defoe; and Byron Caminero-Sant-
angelo, African Fiction and Joseph Conrad: Reading Postcolonial Intertextuality (Albany:
State U of New York P, 2005).

12
acute considering changing perceptions of women authors in the late
eighteenth century. The space that women authors had established for them-
selves over the course of the century came under attack as late eighteenth-
century discourses on gender and propriety projected women into a sphere
that was constructed as an apolitical retreat from European political turmoil.
This apolitical space was imagined in conjunction with a gradually
developing discourse of women’s “incommensurable difference.”2 Thomas
Laqueur argues that, for centuries, women were seen as lesser versions of the
male ideal, but in the eighteenth century, they began to be viewed as total
opposites of their male counterparts as a result of a gradual switch from the
one-sex to the two-sex model of gender. Yet, despite the ideals of liberté,
égalité, and fraternité, this difference was not interpreted as neutral. Instead,
difference was translated as mystery, as the comments of the encyclopédiste
Denis Diderot demonstrate: “[L]e symbole des femmes en général est celle de
l’Apocalypse, sur le front de laquelle il était écrit Mystère” [“The symbol of
women in general is that of the Apocalypse on the forehead of which was
written Mystery”].3 Woman was seen as incomprehensible and was projected
into the realm of biological alterity and, ultimately, naturalized inferiority.
The womb was no longer imagined as a negative phallus but as the uterus,
“an organ whose fibers, nerves, and vasculature provided a naturalistic
explanation and justification for the social status of women.”4 The difference
of this organ was thought to make it function in mysterious ways that
permeated the entire body, as demonstrated in detail by Londa Schiebinger’s
analysis of female skeletons of the period.5 As Schiebinger argues, “even in
this age where males and females were considered essentially perfect in their

2
Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1990), p.149.
3
Denis Diderot, “Sur les femmes,” in Qu’est-ce qu’une femme?: A.L. Thomas, Diderot,
Madame d’Epinay, ed. by Elisabeth Badinter (Paris: P.O.L., 1989), pp. 163–85 (p. 180).
4
Laqueur, p. 152.
5
Laqueur’s Making Sex (1990) begins his cultural history of medicine and biology with the
Greeks and ends with Freud. Londa Schiebinger’s The Mind Has No Sex?: Women in the
Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989), Schiebinger’s Nature’s Body:
Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), and Schiebinger’s
Has Feminism Changed Science? (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999) focus on the period from
the seventeenth to the twentieth century and discuss early women scientists and gender in
medical discourse. An in-depth analysis of medical treatments of women, especially with
respect to pregnancy, can be found in Barbara Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A
Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany, trans. by Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1991) and Duden’s Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the
Unborn, trans. by Lee Hoinacki (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993).

13
difference, difference was arranged hierarchically.”6 The threat emanating
from the bearer of this mysterious difference called for its control through the
discursive consolidation of women’s roles as wives and mothers in an
apolitically imagined domestic sphere under patriarchal control.
The further women strayed from this gender hierarchy in the post-
Revolutionary period, the more they were criticized. Not surprisingly, women
authors writing for publication, especially those engaging political matters,
faced the harshest attacks. Their explicit transgression of ideologies regarding
gender and politics made them easy targets for those contemporaries who
objected to women’s position in the publicity of the literary sphere. Richard
Polwhele’s 1798 poem The Unsex’d Females laments an imaginary past in
which women were true to their so-called feminine nature, writing literature
without any relation to public matters:

“Ah! once the female Muse, to NATURE true

The unvalued store from FANCY, FEELING drew
Won, from the grasp of woe, the roseate hours
Cheer’d life’s dim vale, and strew’d the grave with flowers
But lo! where, pale, amidst the wild, she draws
Each precept cold from sceptic Reason’s vase.”7

Polwhele contrasts this picture of the feeling and submissive muse with the
“unsex’d female,” the woman writer who reasons about the affairs of her
time. The British commentator’s harsh judgment is echoed in Goethe’s
dismissal of a woman writer who had thematized a contemporary political
affair: “Die würdige Verfasserin der Tragödie der Charlotte Corday hätte
besser gethan, sich ein warmes Unterröckchen für den Winter zu stricken, als
sich mit dem Drama zu befassen” [“The worthy author of the tragedy of
Charlotte Corday would have done better knitting a warm winter underskirt
for herself instead of dealing with this drama.”8 Goethe here speaks about
Christine Westphalen who had published a play on the murderess of the
Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat in 1804.
Women’s substitution of the needle with the pen also drew harsh criticism
from contemporaries writing in French. In Émile, ou de l’éducation,
Rousseau proclaimed that “[l’]’aiguille et l’épée ne sauraient être maniées par
les mêmes mains. Si j’étais souverain, je ne permettrais la couture et les

6
Londa Schiebinger, The Mind, p. 191.
7
Richard Polwhele, The Unsex’d Females (London: Cadell and Davies, 1798), pp. 11–12.
Emphases in the original.
8
Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “An Eichstätt, 3. Oktober 1804,” in Goethes Werke (Weimar:
Böhlau, 1895), XVII, p. 204 (my translation).

14
métiers à l’aiguille qu’aux femmes, et aux boiteux réduits à s’occuper comme
elles” [“the needle and the sword cannot be handled by the same hands. If I
were sovereign, I would permit sewing and the needle trades only to women
and to the lame who are reduced to occupations like theirs”].9 In France,
Rousseau’s exclusion of women from the sphere of the sword was first
literalized by the banning of all women’s clubs in 1793 and the subsequent
executions of such vocal women as Olympe de Gouges and Marie-Jeanne
Roland. The Code Napoléon then institutionalized the subordination of
women to their fathers and husbands in legal and civic matters. This
curtailing of women’s rights was reflected in Napoleon’s views on women’s
education:

La Religion est une importante affaire dans une institution publique de demoiselles. Elle est,
quoi qu’on puisse dire, le plus sûr garant pour les mères et pour les maris. Élevez-nous des
croyantes et non des raisonneuses. La faiblesse du cerveau des femmes, la mobilité de leurs
idées, leur destinée dans l’ordre social, la nécessité d’une constante et perpétuelle
resignation et d’une sorte de charité indulgente et facile, tout cela ne peut s’obtenir que par
la Religion, par une religion charitable et douce.10

[Religion plays an important role in a public institution for young girls. It is, despite what
one could say, the best guarantee for mothers and husbands. Women should be raised as
believers and not as thinkers. The weakness of women’s brains, the mobility of their ideas,
their destiny in the social order, the necessity for a constant and perpetual resignation and
for an indulgent and easy kind of charity; all of this can only be obtained through religion, a
charitable and kind type of religion].

Napoleon—who himself had literary aspirations11—expressed his hostility

towards women who challenged his gender prescriptions when he exiled
Germaine de Staël, salonnière and one of the most famous women of the
time, in 1803.12

9
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile ou de l’éducation (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1966), p. 259
(my translation). See Mary Trouille, Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment: Women Writers
Read Rousseau (Albany: State U of New York P, 1997) for a discussion of eighteenth-
century women authors’ responses to Rousseau's statements about women.
10
Quoted in Rebecca Rogers, Les demoiselles de la legion d’honneur: Les maisons
d’éducation de la Légion d’honneur au XIXe siècle (Paris: Plon, 1992), pp. 332–33.
Napoleon’s statement stems from a letter written on May 15, 1807 to the chancellor of the
légion d’honneur, which financed houses for the education of the légionnaires’ daughters.
11
See Andrew Martin, Napoleon the Novelist (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).
12
See Waltraud Maierhofer et al., eds., Women against Napoleon: Historical and Fictional
Responses to His Rise and Legacy (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2007), for a discussion of
Napoleon’s female opponents, the most famous ones being Germaine de Staël and Queen
Luise of Prussia.

15
 Women authors of end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth
century came under increasing pressure to exchange the pen of reason with the
needle of feminine handiwork and to replace the act of thinking with devotion
to a higher male power, worldly or divine. Their expression was curtailed by a
discourse of incommensurable difference that served to reduce women’s
influence in the increasingly profitable literary sphere. The act of writing back
in which Karoline von Günderrode, Ellis Cornelia Knight, Julie de Krüdener,
and Helen Maria Williams engaged enabled these four women to position
themselves as authors by strategically navigating gender prescriptions and the
literary conventions of the publishing marketplace of their day, in England,
France, and the German-speaking territories.
In addition to studying women authors’ navigation of post-Revolutionary
discourses, this book reflects on the effects of these discourses on the
formation of eighteenth-century literary canons. These canons, gradually
consolidated in the nineteenth century, often duplicated contemporaries’ fear
of the “unsex’d female” wielding the unruly pen of thought and the sword of
reason. Women authors were gradually excluded and had become nearly
invisible by the middle of the twentieth century, except for a few prominent
figures who were constructed as exceptions to the rule. In the British
tradition, Ian Watt’s 1957 dismissal of eighteenth-century women authors’
literary production as quantitatively superior yet qualitatively inferior to male
writers exemplified the century-long accumulation of gender biases in the
conception of literary history, especially with respect to constructing the
history of the “rise of the novel” as the ascendance of the male bourgeois
subject.13 Watt’s mid-century assessment exemplifies the type of misogynist
literary history that came under attack by the feminist movement of the 1960s
and 1970s. As a result of the practical application of French and Anglo-
American feminist theory to literary analysis, the 1980s were a crucial decade
for the reappraisal of women authors. Since then, scholars have worked to
expand the canon to include women authors in all three national literary
traditions—British, French, and German. As a result, scholarship has come a
long way since the dismissive comments of Watt and, before him, Polwhele,
Napoleon, and Goethe. While the scope of this book does not allow for a

13
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (London: Chatto
and Windus, 1957), p. 298. Josephine Donovan reminds us that Watt stands in a long line of
Marxist scholars such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Lucien Goldmann, and Georg Lukács who, while
investigating the connections between the rise of the novel and its economic bases, largely
ignored the role of women. See Josephine Donovan, “Women and the Rise of the Novel: A
Feminist-Marxist Theory,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 16.3 (Spring
1991), 441–62.

16
discussion of all the critics active in the recovery process—a testament to the
efforts of a great many scholars—the following sections will outline some
milestones, especially as they pertain to the analysis of eighteenth-century
women authors who write back through their use of fiction.
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s influential 1979 study on literary
representations of women, The Madwoman in the Attic, paved the way for a
number of investigations into literature not only about but also by women in
a variety of time periods. “Images of women” criticism from the 1970s was,
in the subsequent decade, extended by the inquiry into literature created by
women, among them eighteenth-century women authors. In the British
tradition, Jane Spencer’s The Rise of the Woman Novelist (1986) and Dale
Spender’s Mothers of the Novel (1986) constitute important steps in
recovering women’s literary contributions. Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and
Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987) presents a
Foucauldian approach to the issue by examining the role of the middle-class
woman at the center of the class struggle, first between the bourgeoisie and
the aristocracy and later between the bourgeoisie and the laboring classes. In
the 1990s, Cheryl Turner’s Living by the Pen (1992) explored the
professionalization of women’s authorship and Margaret A. Doody’s The
True Story of the Novel (1996) discussed women’s literary contributions in
the context of her challenge of the myth of the novel’s self-contained
development. Clifford Siskin’s The Work of Writing (1998) discusses the
“Great Forgetting that became The Great Tradition,” the neglect of every
woman author in the period 1700–1830 in Britain except Jane Austen.14 More
recently, Michael McKeon’s monumental The Secret History of Domesticity
(2005) provides readers with an exploration of women’s role as producers of
literature, a topic largely omitted from his earlier The Origins of the English
Novel (1987). These are some of the works of the past twenty years that have
questioned Ian Watt’s dismissive claim and that have led to further
discussions and debates.15 Even today, critics feel compelled to engage
Watt’s thesis because a number of its presuppositions persist. The 2000
double issue of Eighteenth-Century Fiction, which was devoted to “Recon-
sidering the Rise of the Novel,” demonstrates that the work of recovering

14
Clifford Siskin, The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700–1830
(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998), p. 195.
15
For responses to Nancy Armstrong and Michael McKeon’s theses, in particular, see Leila
Silvana May, “The Strong-Arming of Desire: A Reconsideration of Nancy Armstrong’s
Desire and Domestic Fiction,” English Literary History, 68.1 (2001), 267–85 and Homer
Obed Brown, “Of the Title to Things Real: Conflicting Stories,” English Literary History, 9
(1988), 917–54.

17
women’s roles as producers of literature is by no means complete and needs
to continue in several national literary traditions.16
In the German tradition, the period designation “Weimarer Klassik,” a
term coined by the nineteenth-century critic Heinrich Laube, loomed as large
over scholarship on eighteenth-century literature as Ian Watt’s theories did
over the English tradition.17 This concept of national literary history
established a cult of genius, which centered on Goethe and Schiller and their
work at the court of Weimar. A de facto exclusion of all those authors—men
and women—who were not working on “classical” themes in Weimar
resulted, which profoundly shaped the writing of German literary history.
The term “classical” not only referred to the themes of this literature but also
expressed a value judgment paralleling Watt’s distinction between quality
and quantity. Similarly to the British tradition, the advent of feminism and its
foray into academia has challenged such restrictive conceptions of German
literary history over the course of the past three decades. In 1987, Barbara
Becker-Cantarino published Der lange Weg zur Mündigkeit, which has
become a seminal work in understanding women’s social role and their
position as authors in German-speaking lands from 1500 to 1800.18 In the

16
For further explicitly feminist responses to Ian Watt’s analysis, see Ros Ballaster, “Women
and the Rise of the Novel: Sexual Prescripts,” in Women and Literature in Britain 1700–
1800, ed. by Vivien Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), pp. 197–216; Josephine
Donovan, Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405–1726 (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1999); Susanne Fendler, “Intertwining Literary Histories: Women’s Contribution to the Rise
of the Novel,” in Feminist Contributions to the Literary Canon: Setting Standards of Taste,
ed. by Susanne Fendler (Lewiston: Mellen, 1997), pp. 31–64; Catherine Gallagher,
“Nobody’s Story: Gender, Property, and the Rise of the Novel,” in Eighteenth-Century
Literary History: An MLQ Reader, ed. by Marshall Brown (Durham: Duke UP, 1999), pp.
27–42; Elissa Gelfand and Margaret Switten, “Gender and the Rise of the Novel,” French
Review, 61.3 (February 1988), 443–53; Nancy Miller, French Dressing: Women, Men and
Ancien Régime Fiction (New York and London: Routledge, 1995); Hilary Schor, “Notes of a
Libertine Daughter: Clarissa, Feminism, and the Rise of the Novel,” Stanford Humanities
Review, 8.1 (2000), 94–117; and Charlotte Sussman, “‘I Wonder Whether Poor Miss Sally
Godfrey Be Living or Dead:’ The Married Woman and the Rise of the Novel,” Diacritics,
20.1 (Spring 1990), 88–102.
17
Heinrich Laube, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur (Stuttgart: Hallberger’sche Verlagshandlung,
1839). For a detailed discussion of the coinage and dissemination of the term “Weimarer Klassik,”
see Klaus Berghahn, “Von Weimar nach Versailles,” in Die Klassik-Legende, ed. by Reinhold
Grimm and Jost Hermand (Frankfurt a.M.: Athenäum, 1971), pp. 50–78.
18
Also see Gisela Brinker-Gabler, Deutsche Dichterinnen vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegen-
wart: Gedichte und Lebensläufe (Frankfurt a.M: Fischer, 1978) and her Deutsche Literatur
von Frauen (München: C.H. Beck, 1988) for a discussion of women authors throughout the
ages. For women poets in specific, see Susan Cocalis, ed., The Defiant Muse: German

18
following decade, Susanne Kord’s Ein Blick hinter die Kulissen (1992)
focused on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German-language dramatists
by exploring the complex relation of women and the stage, gender and genre.
Her book Sich einen Namen machen (1996) analyzes women’s authorial
strategy of anonymity in various genres. In addition to discussing women’s
position in the literary sphere, these critical works function as sourcebooks
and have been extremely influential on later generations of literary critics.
While the British tradition’s early recovery efforts focused on fiction in
response to Watt’s Rise of the Novel, German scholarship simultaneously
recovered women’s novels and dramas in response to the conception of the
German eighteenth century as the age of Goethe, the novelist, and Schiller,
the dramatist. Becker-Cantarino and Kord are not the only critics active in
rethinking the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German literary canon, yet
their work constitutes an important milestone in the study of women authors
working “in the shadow of Olympus,” as Katherine Goodman and Edith
Waldstein describe the eighteenth-century German literary scene.19
Alongside critical discussions of neglected authors, new editions of
eighteenth-century texts have become a vehicle for expanding the canon
under the auspices of pioneering feminist scholars. The Canadian publisher
Broadview holds an extensive collection of reprints of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century novels by British men and women. The University Press
of Kentucky reprinted nine women’s novels in its “Eighteenth-Century
Novels by Women” series. In the past years, Eighteenth-Century Collections
Online has been expanding the corpus of texts available for scholarship and
classroom use by digitizing a vast amount of literature. The online Brown
University Women Writers Project has focused its digitization efforts on texts
by women writers from the past to the present, and the online Orlando
Project provides a wealth of pertinent background information on women
authors. For German literature, the Georg Olms Verlag has published
facsimile reprints of sixteenth- to eighteenth-century women’s texts in the
twenty-six-title series “Frühe Frauenliteratur in Deutschland.” The renewed
accessibility of this literature has created new impetus for scholarly work on
authors ranging from Caroline Auguste Fischer to Charlotte von Stein.
Previously unavailable texts by eighteenth-century German women can be
found as digital editions in the Deutsche Literatur von Frauen volume in the
CD-ROM Digitale Bibliothek series. Various online projects have also

Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to the Present (New York: Feminist Press at the City
U of New York, 1986).
19
Katherinne R. Goodman and Edith Waldstein, eds. In the Shadow of Olympus: German
Women Writers Around 1800 (Albany: State U of New York P, 1992), p. xi.

19
increased the number of German-language authors’ texts available for re-
search and teaching, such as Sophie: A Digital Library of Works by German-
Speaking Women and Wortblume, which focuses on women’s poetry.20
In conjunction with the creation of easily accessible editions of the
originals, scholars of eighteenth-century literature by women also spear-
headed a translation project. This makes it possible to include German and
French women authors in the English-language classroom and thereby widen
their dissemination. Jeannine Blackwell and Susanne Zantop’s anthology of
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women writers, Bitter Healing, is an
example of this translation effort. The Modern Language Association of
America’s “Texts and Translations series” has established another subset of
eighteenth-century literature by women authors. While the only text by a
German eighteenth-century woman currently included in this bilingual series
is Eleonore Thon’s Adelheit von Rastenberg, edited and introduced by Karin
Wurst,21 the list already contains six titles by French women authors: Isabelle
de Charrière’s Lettres de Mistriss Henley and Trois Femmes, Sophie Cottin’s
Claire d’Albe, Claire de Duras’ Ourika, Françoise de Graffigny’s Lettres
d’une Péruvienne and Marie Riccoboni’s Histoire d’Ernestine.22 These new
bilingual editions of novels by women authors reflect the rethinking of the
French tradition by those who have been at the forefront of reinserting
women’s writing into the literary canon, which once more illustrates the
interaction between scholarship and the teaching of eighteenth-century
literature. Joan DeJean, Nancy K. Miller, Margaret Cohen, Margaret Miller,
Joan Hinde Stewart, and Philip Stewart—all prominent scholars of
eighteenth-century literature and culture—serve as editors for the volumes in
the MLA series. The partial overlap between the authors in the MLA series
and Raymond Trousson’s 1996 anthology Romans de femmes du XVIIIe
siècle, published by Robert Laffont, demonstrates the gradual consolidation

20
Eighteenth-Century Collections Online <http://gale.cengage.com/EighteenthCentury/
index.htm>; Brown University Women Writers Project <http://www.wwp.brown.edu/>;
Orlando Project <http://www.cambridge.org/online/orlandoonline/>; Deutsche Literatur
von Frauen, ed. Mark Lehmstedt, in Digitale Bibliothek (Berlin: Directmedia Publishing,
2001), XLV; Sophie: A Digital Library of Works by German-Speaking Women
<http://sophie.byu.edu/>; Wortblume <http://www.wortblume.de/>.
21
Karin Wurst also edited Frauen und Drama im achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Köln: Böhlau,
1991), which contains four eighteenth-century plays by German women. The only other
German-language text in the MLA series is from a later period, namely Elsa Bernstein’s
Dämmerung (1893), edited and translated by Susanne Kord.
22
For full publication information on the novels in the MLA series, see bibliography.

20
of a counter-canon of French literature by women authors.23 Recovery of
French women authors in print is paralleled by online projects such as The
ARTFL French Women Writers Project, a searchable database of texts from
the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.24
The process of recovering eighteenth-century novels by women in the
French tradition has taken a path different from the English context, where
the eighteenth century had been hailed as the age of the rise of the novel, and
from German literary historiography, in which the eighteenth century figured
as the age of the Goethian Bildungsroman and the Schillerian drama. The
recovery of eighteenth-century French novels by women was a two-step
process. Traditionally, literary histories emphasized the nineteenth century as
the age of great novels, establishing Stendhal and Balzac as its beacons. In
1963, the critic Georges May lamented this fact: “L’histoire du roman
français reste à faire [...] Le volume qui serait consacré au roman du XVIIIe
siècle fait tout particulièrement défaut” [“The history of the French novel
remains to be written [...] The volume that would focus on the eighteenth-
century novel is especially missing”].25 May’s comments point at the
association of the eighteenth century with the Lumières and the treatises of its
philosophes, which led to the scholarly neglect of its fictional production.
Many scholars followed May’s suggestion by filling the gap in the reception
of the eighteenth-century novel, yet they initially ignored the role of women.
In one of the earliest attempts to define a canon of French eighteenth-century
fiction, René Étiemble’s 1966 Pléiade anthology Romanciers du XVIIIe
siècle, the absence of romancières is especially palpable.26 From the

23
Raymond Trousson, ed., Romans de femmes du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Editions Robert
Laffont, 1996). Trousson’s anthology contains novels by Alexandrine de Tencin, Françoise
de Graffigny, Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, Isabelle de Charrière, Olympe de Gouges, Adélaïde
de Souza, Sophie Cottin, Caroline de Genlis, Julie de Krüdener, and Claire de Duras.
24
ARTFL French Women Writers Project. http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/projects/
FWW/. Also see the searchable database of the new collaborative project, New Approaches
to European Women’s Writing. At its inception, the database focused on eighteenth-century
French authors, yet it has widened its scope to include the international reception of pre-
1900 European women writers from different national and linguistic traditions. While these
authors’ texts themselves have not been digitized on this site, bibliographical references as
well as hyperlinks are provided, if available, at http://www.womenwriters.nl/index.php/
Database_WomenWriters.
25
Georges May, Le dilemme du roman au XIIIe siècle: Étude sur les rapports du roman et de
la critique (1715–1761) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), p.1.
26
Étiemble’s two-volume anthology contains works by Hamilton, Le Sage, Abbé Prévost,
Crébillon fils, Duclos, Cazotte, Vivant Denon, Louvet, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Sade, and
Sénac de Meilhan. René Étiemble, ed., Romanciers du XVIIIe siècle, 2 vols (Paris:
Gallimard, 1960 and 1965).

21
seventies onward, “images of women” criticism was followed by scholarly
interest in French women authors, as was the case in British and German
literary studies. Pierre Fauchery’s 1972 La destinée feminine dans le roman
européen du dix-huitième siècle, 1713-1807 identified French, alongside
British and German, novels about and by women authors. Nancy K. Miller’s
The Heroine’s Text (1980), The Poetics of Gender (1986), Subject to Change
(1988), and French Dressing (1995) uncovered the “highly masculinist mode
of critical pleasure” governing the exclusion of women from the French
canon.27 In the French context, the recovery of eighteenth-century women
authors highlighted continuities with French women’s literary production of
earlier and later centuries, such as Joan DeJean’s Fictions of Sappho (1989)
and DeJean and Miller’s The Politics of Tradition (1988) and Displacements
(1991). DeJean’s 1991 Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the
Novel in France cautions readers against uncritically applying observations
about the English context to French literature written by women authors, the
origins of which she locates in the seventeenth-century writings of authors
such as Madeleine de Scudéry and Madame de Lafayette. DeJean and
Miller’s work illustrates the close and productive ties between scholarship
about women authors, images of women criticism, and feminist theory in the
past two decades. Among others, these critics also reflect on the position of
these lines of inquiry in literary scholarship of the present and the future.
The discussion of the rethinking of the canon in these three national
literatures demonstrates that the recovery of women authors has, in practice,
correlated with feminist scholarship, beginning in the 1970s and peaking in
the two subsequent decades. This observation highlights the question of the
role of feminist scholarship in the twenty-first century, which is often
depicted as an academic discipline in trouble. One of the most controversial
and thereby influential articles on this topic is Susan Gubar’s “What Ails
Feminist Criticism?” published in the Summer 1998 issue of Critical Inquiry.
Gubar uses the metaphor of disease to express her “apprehension about the
state of feminist literary criticism.”28 Gubar explains that she switched the
image from death to disease to “argue that [...] feminist criticism suffers from
internal ailments about which one can postulate possibilities of recovery.”29
Gubar’s article triggered widespread debate, and her premises were

27
Nancy K. Miller, “Men’s Reading, Women’s Writing: Gender and the Rise of the Novel,” in
Displacements: Women, Tradition, Literatures in French, ed. by Joan DeJean and Nancy K.
Miller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991), pp. 37–54 (p. 41).
28
Susan Gubar, “What Ails Feminist Criticism?” Critical Inquiry, 24.4 (Summer 1998), 878–
902 (p. 880).
29
Gubar, “What Ails,” p. 880.

22
questioned. Some of the objections were encapsulated in Robyn Wiegman’s
response, “What Ails Feminist Criticism? A Second Opinion,” published in
the Critical Inquiry Winter issue the following year. Wiegman argues that
Gubar postulates a decline of feminist criticism throughout the generations
and thereby “purifies her heroine—the first stage generation—exempting it
from the political responsibility that has accompanied white feminism’s fall
into epistemological contingency.”30 In the same issue, Gubar responded to
Wiegman with “Notations in Medias Res,” explaining that her “tongue-in-
cheek representation of the beginning of feminist criticism as a paradise lost
was meant to capture the intellectual excitement of humanists during the
seventies” and that “from its onset feminist criticism included lesbian,
African American, and postcolonial voices arguing against monolithic
versions of womanhood.”31
As a result of the publicity and contentiousness of the Critical Inquiry
debate, other journals published special issues on the future of feminism in
general and of feminist literary criticism in particular, such as Tulsa Studies
in Women’s Literature (“Feminism and Time,” Spring 2002), Signs: Journal
of Women in Culture and Society (“Feminisms at a Millenium,” Summer
2000 and “Gender and Cultural Memory,” Fall 2002), Modern Language
Quarterly (“Feminism in Time,” March 2004) and, most prominently, the
October 2006 issue of Publications of the Modern Language Association of
America, which devoted its entire “Theories and Methodologies” section to
the topic of “Feminist Criticism Today.” Rather than conclude that these
internal debates indicate the endpoint of feminism –its death—I would argue
that the self-reflexive turn indicates that it is very much alive. The wide array
of books and journal articles published in the past decade on the issue of
feminism’s future in academia bears witness to its vitality.32 Far from being a

30
Robyn Wiegman, “Critical Response I: What Ails Feminist Criticism? A Second Opinion,”
Critical Inquiry, 25.2 (Winter 1999), 362–79 (p. 379).
31
Susan Gubar, “Critical Response II: Notations in Medias Res,” Critical Inquiry, 25.2
(Winter 1999), 380–96 (p. 382). The Winter 1999 issue also published letters by Carolyn
Heilbrun and Sandra Gilbert.
32
For book-length studies on the future of feminism see Rory Dicker and Alison Piepmeier,
eds., Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the Twenty-First Century (Boston:
Northeastern UP, 2003); Rita Felski, Literature after Feminism (Chicago: U of Chicago P,
2003); Stacy Gillis et al., ed., Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration (London:
Palgrave, 2004); Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham: Duke
UP, 2005); Astrid Henry, Not My Mother’s Sister Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-
Wave Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2004); Daisy Hernández and Bushra Rehman,
eds., Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism (New York: Seal, 2002);
Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake, eds., Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing

23
sick patient—let alone a dead one—feminism has reached the point discussed
by Martin Heidegger in his 1969 essay on “The End of Philosophy and the
Task of Thinking:” “We understand the end of something too easily in the
negative sense as a mere stopping, as the lack of continuation, perhaps even
as decline and impotence [...] In contrast, what we say about the end of
philosophy means the completion of metaphysics.”33 Positing feminism’s
future as a discussion of its end illustrates Heidegger’s theory on the
development of intellectual thought processes and the elusive ideal of
originality and novelty. Rather than viewing this self-questioning as an end—
in the sense of decline and impotence—we can also consider it as having the
end—in the sense of a goal—of critically reflecting on the disciplinary future.
Like philosophy, feminism has changed.
The fact that feminism has a past does not make it passé. Despite dis-
agreements and internal debates, feminist scholars share the concern of
positing feminist criticism in the future. This concern unites even Gubar’s
and Wiegman’s seemingly irreconcilable positions. Gubar concludes her
essay by saying that “feminist criticism needs to get into training to assume
the vital roles we will undoubtedly want it to play in the twenty-first
century.”34 Wiegman similarly reflects on feminism’s future vitality:
“Feminism in the academy, after all, lacks the kind of institutional support
that can guarantee its reproduction (which is one of the many reasons that its
reproduction becomes the locus of so much discontent) and we have yet to
adequately consider what constitutes, at this date, a continuing political
intervention.”35 Feminism finds itself in a double bind. On the one hand, it is
portrayed as an ailing interpretive practice, while, on the other, unlike other
disciplines that face similar self-questioning, feminism occupies a less secure
institutional position due to its interdisciplinary nature. Sharon Marcus argues
that “[f]eminist criticism is no longer the latest trend and is unlikely to

Feminism (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997); Devoney Looser and E. Ann Kaplan,

eds., Generations: Academic Feminists in Dialogue (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997);
Ellen Messer-Davidow, Disciplining Feminism: From Social Activism to Academic
Discourse (Durham: Duke UP, 2002); Chandra Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders:
Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham: Duke UP, 2003); Ruth Robbins,
Literary Feminisms (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000); Robyn Wiegman, ed., Women’s Studies
On Its Own (Durham: Duke UP, 2002); Elizabeth Wilson, Psychosomatic: Feminism and
the Neurological Body (Durham: Duke UP, 2004); and Linda Zerilli, Feminism and the
Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005).
33
Martin Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in On Time and
Being, trans. by Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002), pp. 55–73 (p. 56).
34
Susan Gubar, “What Ails,” p. 902.
35
Wiegman, “Critical Response I,” p. 379.

24
become a tradition.”36 This is certainly true for feminist literary criticism.
While feminist literary criticism played a pioneering role in the establishment
of women’s and gender studies departments in the 1970s and 1980s, much of
the work currently happening under this umbrella takes place in other
disciplines, such as sociology, anthropology, and political science. Feminist
literary scholarship has gradually moved to the margins of both women’s
studies programs and departments of literature. In literature departments,
feminist scholars find themselves in the paradoxical position of old-fashioned
rebels arguing for revisions to reading lists and syllabi that should no longer
be dominated by canonical male authors, but in practice often still are. In
women’s or gender studies programs, feminist literary critics appear
comparatively apolitical among fellow feminists who, in fields such as
sociology or health care policy, expose gender inequalities and argue for
legislative change.
Answering the question of feminism’s future and, within it, the role of
feminist literary criticism, involves inserting feminism’s internal debates into
the wider perception of feminism in popular discourse. The conjecture that
academic feminism might be passé is paralleled by a popular perception that
the conclusions reached by feminists have become self-evident and therefore
no longer need to be discussed. As a result of this view, feminism has, in
Toril Moi’s words, become an “f-word.” Moi retraces the process by which
words such as “feminazi” and other disparaging remarks were first used by
the likes of Rush Limbaugh before gradually entering mainstream discourse.
Moi posits that the premise for this hostility is the view that “since every
sensible person is in favor of equality and justice for women, feminists are a
bunch of fanatics, a lunatic fringe, an extremist, power-hungry minority
whose ideas do not merit serious assessment.”37 Taking gender equality for
granted initiates its erosion by labeling those who insist on highlighting
persisting inequalities as old-fashioned fanatics. This undermining is palpable
in popular discourse on gender issues and also in responses to scholarship
and teaching done from a feminist perspective. Such views not only halt
future research but also undermine the work of the past three decades.
Consequently, feminism’s future lies in counteracting the nonchalant
attitude toward past, present, and future feminist work. This applies to
popular feminism as well as to academic feminism. For feminist literary
criticism in particular, this involves recasting the concept of political

36
Sharon Marcus, “Feminist Criticism: A Tale of Two Bodies,” PMLA, 121.5 (October 2006),
1722–28 (p. 1726).
37
Toril Moi, “’I’m Not a Feminist, But …’: How Feminism Became the F-Word,” PMLA,
121.5 (October 2006), 1735–44 (p. 1737).

25
intervention in light of the current erosion of past scholarship and correlating
teaching practices grown out of feminist scholarship with the concept of
political intervention. Sharon Marcus maintains that

[i]t would be absurd to argue that because what we teach does not produce direct political
change—assigning Virginia Woolf does not lead to more women in Congress—it therefore
has no effect on social attitudes and the politics of knowledge. When there are no women
writers on the syllabus, or fewer than there could be, the message is that women’s writing is
less valuable than men’s, that women, by extension, are worth less than men and that female
students will be valued only if they devote themselves to what really counts—the
masterworks of genius that too many syllabi still assert to be male handiwork.38

The implications of course syllabi are political; they establish value

hierarchies through the choice of texts deemed worth teaching. The politics
of knowledge influence the availability of eighteenth-century texts in user-
friendly and affordable editions and this availability, in turn, shapes the
content of course syllabi. Eighteenth-century women authors’ texts have been
republished and reedited, yet this endeavor has been spearheaded mainly by
smaller publishing houses. The large publishers continue to be reluctant to
venture beyond a narrowly circumscribed corpus of women authors. Smaller
companies, which have a tighter profit margin than the publishing conglom-
erates, face an increasing financial strain, heightened by the competition with
new online venues. While new online editions of texts by women have been
useful for scholarship and, to some degree, teaching, not arguing for more
printed editions of this literature establishes a new bias based on old
premises. Despite all advances in electronic and web publishing, the equation
between literary value and printed matter persists. If new editions of
women’s texts are exclusively relegated to the electronic medium, the
ghettoization of literature by women will be reestablished in a new form.
Once more the majority of women authors would be presented as electronic
footnotes to a printed literary history that includes only a select few and
thereby presents them as exceptions to the rule of the qualitative inferiority of
women’s writing.
One of the political interventions by feminist literary criticism consists in
reflecting on a select few women authors’ edification in order to create a
productive and meaningful space for the reception of others. This inter-
vention involves investigating the relation between these writers’ academic
and popular reception, which are connected in the same manner as popular
and academic feminism. The figure of Jane Austen is perhaps the most

38
Marcus, p. 1724.

26
instructive in this regard. The visibility that Austen has attained in both
academic and popular consciousness is unmatched by any other eighteenth-
century British—or even European—woman writer. Austen’s work figures
prominently in the main publishers’ catalogues, her novels are widely
translated, entire seminars are devoted to her life and work, and scholarly
publications abound. There exist big-budget Hollywood adaptations of her
novels, movie interpretations of her life, and twentieth-century incarnations
such as Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones character.
The argument is not that Jane Austen’s ubiquity is to be deplored; after
all, the focus on Austen has stirred popular and academic curiosity about the
late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century and its other women authors.
Instead, I want to highlight the implications of this intense focus on Austen,
as they recall Ian Watt’s academic bias from a half century ago:

The majority of eighteenth-century novels were actually written by women, but this had
long remained a purely quantitative assertion of dominance; it was Jane Austen who
completed the work that Fanny Burney had begun, and challenged masculine prerogative in
a much more important matter. Her example suggests that the feminine sensibility was in
some ways better equipped to reveal the intricacies of personal relationships and was
therefore at a real advantage in the realm of the novel.39

Watt’s evaluation of Jane Austen is a two-handed compliment in more than

one way. First, it establishes Austen and Burney as the exceptions that prove
the rule. Second, it postulates “feminine sensibility” as more apt at dealing
with the “intricacies of personal relationships.” While scholars such as
Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Claudia Johnson, Mary Poovey, and many
others have shown that Austen’s novels are more than expositions of
interpersonal relationships, the popular reception of her novels and her life is
Wattian in its focus on this issue, the female protagonist’s search for the
perfect heterosexual relationship.40 Hollywood adaptations of Pride and
Prejudice (2005) and Sense and Sensibility (1995) demonstrate this in a
particularly forceful way, as does the recent Becoming Jane (2007), a
Hollywood interpretation of the young Austen’s life.

39
Watt, p. 298.
40
See Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and
the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979); Claudia
Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstone-
craft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995); Claudia Johnson, Jane
Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988); and Mary
Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary
Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984).

27
 In addition, a whole new literary subgenre of Jane Austen-inspired novels
has emerged in the past ten years, in the wake of the success of Bridget
Jones. These novels thematize the long and arduous search for Prince
Charming with Austen’s life and work as the inspiration. These texts’ focus
on the love plot and their casting of Austen as one of her own heroines
depoliticize not only her writings but also the authorial self-positioning of the
late eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century woman. The titles and
descriptions of some of these novels illustrate this conflation of life and work
under the umbrella of a romance: Dear Jane Austen: A Heroine’s Guide to
Life and Love (Patrice Hannon); Lost in Austen (Emma Campbell Webster) is
described as a “labyrinth of love and lies” on the back cover; The 101 Things
You Didn’t Know about Jane Austen (Patrice Hannon) states that its subject is
the “intriguing romantic literary heroine,” as does Just Jane (Nancy Moser),
subtitled “A Novel of Jane Austen’s Life.” Those novels that do not conflate
Austen with one of her heroines all focus on the romantic plot: Mr. Darcy
Takes a Wife (Linda Berdoll); Me and Mr. Darcy (Alexandra Potter); The
Second Mrs. Darcy (Elizabeth Aston); and Letters from Pemberley (Jane
Dawkins). In addition, the Jane Austen franchise has profited by extending its
reach into the self-help section, advising readers on the pitfalls of romantic
relationship and domestic endeavors: Jane Austen’s Guide to Dating (Lauren
Henderson), the Jane Austen Cookbook (Maggie Black), and In the Garden
with Jane Austen (Kim Wilson).41 This list of Jane Austen-inspired
publications, which is by no means exhaustive, shows that shrewd cross-
genre marketing holds seemingly limitless possibilities. The extent of interest
in these publications is not limited to the English-speaking world; some of
the above-mentioned books have been translated into languages such as
German, Polish, Portuguese, and Japanese.
As a result of this focus, novels by Austen herself are now prominently
displayed in big-chain bookstores alongside the twentieth- and twenty-first-
century sequels. Austen’s novels and those created in her vein are often
marketed as “chick lit,” a term gaining increasing currency. This designation
is problematic on more than one level. The popular term “chick lit” not only
evokes helpless, naïve, yet loveable creatures, but also contains the same
ambiguity as the designation “women’s literature” often used in academic
discourse. This classification does not specify whether the referent is
literature by, for, or about women, thereby assuming an underlying
correlation between the three possibilities. Critically investigating such
gendered categorizations has become especially important at a time when the

41
For complete publication information on these novels, see bibliography.

28
practice of feminism has been subject to (self-)questioning. While there is no
seamless overlap between the popular and the academic discourse on an
author, the example of Jane Austen illustrates the complex intersections
between these two discursive spheres at a time when the reinvestigation of
the idea of “women’s literature” is inextricably linked to the question of
feminism’s future. The fact that one of the roundtables at the 2008 American
Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies was devoted to “Jane Austen: Vital
Critical Questions” is telling. The session title echoes Gubar’s inquiry into
the current vitality of feminist studies, and the description of the panel
acknowledges Austen’s ubiquity not only in the “chick lit” section of the
local bookstore but also on the bookshelf of the eighteenth-century scholar:
“The aim of this panel is to develop an energetic exchange on an author who
seems to have emerged as one of the most compelling objects of study for
ASECS members.”42 The questions posed by the panelists address the need to
critically reflect on the implications of the intense popular and academic
focus on Austen: “Does the fact that Austen's work elicits genuine affection
from scholarly as well as general readers help or hinder academic study?”
“How do Authors become Cultural Systems?” “Is Austen the endgame for
author-centered literary studies?”43
These reflections on Jane Austen’s ubiquity in the popular and academic
marketplace ultimately lead to the investigation of her contemporaries’
comparative absence from it, whether they be British or from other European
literary traditions. One of the productive tools for studying this issue is the
application of critical analyses of the present-day book market to the
investigation of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century women’s
position in the literary marketplace of their day. In her PMLA article, Sinead
McDermott argues that this mode of inquiry constitutes the type of “political
intervention” for which feminist literary scholarship has been searching in the
past few decades:
One significant strand in this new research focuses on the relation between women’s
literature and the marketplace: the culture of literary prizes, the connection between
(post)feminism and popular fictional forms such as “chick lit,” and the celebrity culture
surrounding particular female authors. As each of these examples suggests, there is a
pressing need for work that explores the significance of the female author as a literary and
cultural construct, and here the work of literary feminists may be particularly useful.44

42
Vickie Cutting, “ASECS Annual Meeting Announcements.” E-mail to ASECS listserv
advertising and describing session 71, “Jane Austen: Vital Critical Questions” at the ASECS
Annual Meeting in Portland, OR, on March 27, 2008. 17 March 2008.
43
Ibid.
44
Sinead McDermott, “Notes on the Afterlife of Feminist Criticism,” PMLA, 121.5 (October
2006), 1729–34 (p. 1733).

29
A “(post)feminist” perspective is particularly well-suited to explore reception
mechanisms and the celebrity culture that construct Austen as the pioneer of
chick lit well beyond the English-speaking world. This exploration is closely
linked to the analysis of the female author as a literary and cultural construct
by reconsidering the work of Austen’s contemporaries who do not occupy the
same prominent space in current popular and/or academic consciousness,
such as Günderrode, Knight, Krüdener, and Williams.
The move beyond the scholarly realm to consider the popular discourse
on feminism and the popular marketplace of chick lit allows for a
(post)feminist—not in the sense of past, but self-aware—analysis of gender
and authorship in the eighteenth century through the concept of writing back
as a specific form of intertextuality. The twenty-first-century Jane Austen
franchise demonstrates that intertextual dialogue can span several centuries.
Considering the discourse within which these responses are situated is crucial
in determining the type of intervention that they constitute. Chick lit is the
product of an environment in which those who persist on highlighting gender
dynamics and inequalities are labeled “feminazis.” Such labels result from a
self-contented perception that, in the democratic West, equality, liberty, and
fraternity have long since been achieved. Rewriting Jane Austen’s novels and
her life from a chick lit perspective establishes authors within a profitable
literary franchise that does not directly challenge this ideology of the present-
day fruition of past egalitarian ideals. These novels highlight the writing
woman’s private plot of love and domestic life; they focus on their Jane
Austen-inspired characters’ romantic adventures rather than highlighting their
predecessor’s role as a feminazi in the public field of writing of her time.
In the late eighteenth century, the threat of being labeled a feminazi was
wielded by some of the most public and vocal figures of the time, such as
Napoleon, Goethe, and Polwhele. In the post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic
period, excluding female agents from the public terrain fulfilled several
functions at once. This exclusion established an apolitically imagined
domestic sphere as a retreat from public conflict at the same time that it
attempted to stifle dissent in its own ranks—regarding gender politics—in
order to present a united front to potential enemies. Women experienced a
discursive curtailing of their public expression during this period, which was
marked by increasing nationalistic sentiments not only in Britain and France,
but in the fragmented German-speaking territories that began to feel a sense
of national unity as a result of outside threats. While not all vocal women
suffered the tragic end of Olympe de Gouges, character assassination
commonly resulted from their involvement in the public sphere. Politically
vocal women especially were portrayed as the feminazis of their time.

30
Perceived national disloyalty was cast as a gendered defect, as was straying
from the discursive ideal of feminine propriety. Helen Maria Williams, a
British woman who reported sympathetically on the French Revolution, was
viewed as a Jacobin supporter and described as a “strumpet”; Julie de
Krüdener, who advised the Russian emperor Alexander I to draw up the
Treaty of the Holy Alliance, was labeled a “whore”; Ellis Cornelia Knight’s
precarious position at the English court made her an object of disdain when
she insisted on financial remuneration from the prime minister; and Karoline
von Günderrode was accused of being too philosophical and not poetic
enough in her Mahomed. Not conforming to their contemporaries’ perception
of feminine privacy and domesticity drew harsh criticism of these women’s
lives and affected the reception of their work when it thematized questions of
political change from the ambivalent vantage point of writing back. At the
same time, however, this ambivalence enabled these authors to navigate the
late eighteenth-century literary marketplace and to achieve a means of
subsistence, either through active marketing of their writings or through the
remainders of the patronage system.
The four authors discussed in this book are ambivalent figures since their
lives and writings call into question the discursive binary of the public and
private spheres deployed during their lifetime to enforce gender roles. In
eighteenth-century discourse, the sphere of the “public” was equated with
“masculine” and “political,” whereas the realm of the “private” was
associated with “feminine” and “domestic.” Jürgen Habermas’ Struktur-
wandel der Öffentlichkeit (1962), translated as The Structural Transformation
of the Public Sphere in 1989, has been one of the most influential studies of
this binary for the field of eighteenth-century studies. While Habermas’
thesis has been criticized for conceptual limitations from a variety of vantage
points,45 it is important to remember that he uses the terms “public” and

45
Habermas was criticized for projecting the British situation onto France and the German-
speaking lands, which were different in their social and political structures. For the German
context, see Peter Uwe Hohendahl, The Institution of Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982);
Isabel Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815 (Ithaca: Cornell UP,
1996); and Ernst Manheim, Aufklärung und öffentliche Meinung: Studien zur Soziologie der
Öffentlichkeit im 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart—Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1979).
For France, see Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French
Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994) and Rémy Saisselin, The Literary Enterprise in
Eighteenth-Century France (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1979). In addition, scholars objected
to Habermas’ construction of a bourgeois master narrative (Richard Sennett, The Fall of
Public Man (New York: Knopf, 1976)), his focus on the public sphere to the detriment of
the private realm (Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, Histoire de la vie privée, 5 vols (Paris:
Seuil, 1985–1987)), his neglect of the role of gender in the public sphere (Elizabeth Eger et

31
“private” to designate a mode of discourse rather than to describe a historical
reality. Habermas, in fact, highlights the existence of more than two spheres
and explores the complex intersections and mutual infiltrations of these
realms in the eighteenth century. He argues that the opposition between the
“intimate sphere of the conjugal family” and the “public sphere” was, above
all, a discursive construct.46 He also points out that the intimate/domestic
sphere formed an integral part of the private sphere of the gradually
developing market economy, in which individuals could act as their own
agents, thereby exploring the nuances in the concepts of “intimate” and
“private:” “The sphere of the market we call ‘private;’ the sphere of the
family, as the core of the private sphere, we call the ‘intimate sphere.’ The
latter was believed to be independent of the former, whereas in truth it was
profoundly caught up in the requirements of the market.”47 Even though dis-
cursively the intimate domestic sphere of the family was imagined as un-
affected by the workings of the private realm of the market economy due to
the division of work and family life, both were connected not only to each
other but also to what Habermas calls the “public sphere in the world of
letters” and “the public sphere in the political realm.”48 The intersections of
the various spheres created hybrid spaces of expression for historical agents
who challenged the eighteenth-century classificatory binary and whose
writings were excluded as a result of the subsequent naturalization of its dis-
cursive aspect.
A (post)feminist analysis of women authors’ strategies of writing back
acknowledges the hybrid space within which women authors wrote and
published, and thereby continues the work done by feminist scholars in the
past decades. The self-reflexive turn in feminist criticism is a particularly apt
moment for examining the hybridity of these authors’ texts, since one of its
interventions consists in scrutinizing the conditions for textual production as
well as the mechanisms of reception. Highlighting the ambivalence of
eighteenth-century women’s authorial self-positioning allows for an

al., eds., Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2001); Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution
(Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988); and Johanna Meehan, ed., Feminists Read Habermas:
Gendering the Subject of Discourse (New York: Routledge, 1995)); and his oversight of
such issues as nationalism, religion, science, and class (Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and
the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT, 1992) and Eighteenth-Century Studies 29.1 (Fall
1995)).
46
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a
Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. by Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT, 1998), p. 51.
47
Habermas, The Structural Transformation, p. 55.
48
Ibid., p. 51.

32
understanding of their responses to male authors outside the interpretive
framework of women’s writing as merely imitative of men’s. This inter-
pretive dismissal is, at times, wielded as a refusal to reflect on the
implications of women’s textual responses to famous authors. The simple act
of considering responses to texts such as Goethe’s Werther, Johnson’s
Rasselas, Rousseau’s Julie and Voltaire’s Mahomet can be met with hostility
because it is viewed as an attempt to overthrow the canon. Yet rather than
destroying what is already known about eighteenth-century literature, the
analysis of strategies of writing back allows for a more complex under-
standing of the literary production in this time period because it
acknowledges its hybridity.
Günderrode’s, Knight’s, Krüdener’s, and Williams’ strategic navigation
of the late-eighteenth- and the early-nineteenth-century literary marketplace
was reflected in their choice of fiction as the vehicle for their literary
expression. Fiction was one of the eighteenth-century textual forms that, in
its malleability, allowed these authors to position themselves in the hybrid
spaces created by the intersections between discursive spheres. Fiction—
alongside such developing media of expression as newspapers, periodicals,
yearbooks, essays, and epistolary exchanges—allowed authors to cross
boundaries in a period that, as John McCarthy argues in his history of essay
writing in German, was characterized by a “spirit of innovation and
experimentation,” in which “[t]he new mentality was paired with a novel
manner of expressing it.”49 Authors explored the uses of fiction by fusing
seemingly opposite elements; they thereby created new spaces for discussing
questions of politics and leadership in the contentious post-Revolutionary
period. The case studies in this book—presented chronologically—show how
four women’s self-positioning by means of hybrid fictional creations allowed
them to navigate gender prescriptions while participating in the debates of the
post-Revolutionary period. Fiction allowed these women authors to situate
themselves in the strategic space between publicly performed drama and
privately consumed poetry. By writing back, they experimented with the
genre by exploring its fluid boundaries and incorporating elements from
philosophical essay writing, epistolary exchange, poetry, and the dramatic
genre. The following chapters will explore these authors’ imagining of a new

49
John A. McCarthy, Crossing Boundaries: A Theory and History of Essay Writing in
German, 1680–1815 (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1989), p. 316. For a discussion of
the multitude of (new) eighteenth-century forms of textual expression, also see Paul
Korshin, ed., The Widening Circle: Essays on the Circulation of Literature in Eighteenth-
Century Europe (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1976) and Monika Estermann et al.,
eds., Buchkulturen: Festschrift für Reinhard Wittmann (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005).

33
body politic through the experimental body of their texts; the analytical
approach will combine close reading with the analysis of these texts’
production and marketing in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
and beyond.
The first chapter, “Gender and Genre: Helen Maria Williams’ Julia, a
Novel,” focuses on the author’s representation of social and political change.
A writer of poetry and reporter on the French Revolution, Williams also
explored the medium of fiction by responding to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s
Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761). Her Julia (1790), a third-person
narrative that embeds elements from various textual genres, diverges from the
epistolary form of her predecessor in order to construct a vision of an
alternative lifestyle for women based on female bonding and compassion, a
utopia that unsettles strict distinctions between private and public. Williams
forsook Rousseau’s epistolary medium, yet she crafted a sentimental
domestic plot similar to Julie. This allowed her to embed comments on the
changing body politic and disseminate them to a widened audience of readers
of fiction without explicitly violating gender decorum.
The question of social and political change is reflected in the discussion of
leadership in Ellis Cornelia Knight’s Dinarbas; a Tale: Being a Continuation
of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1790), which is the focus of the second
chapter. Knight challenged what she perceived as the pessimistic ending of
Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759). Knight
rewrote Johnson’s philosophical tale by echoing literary forms deemed
appropriate for women authors: the epistolary, gothic, and sentimental novel.
She thereby seemingly conformed to prescriptions for domestic subject matter,
only to link such topics to larger political issues of leadership and government
by highlighting the role that social class played in the marriage market of her
time. Foregrounding the private aspect of love in Dinarbas allowed her to
circumvent possible accusations of meddling too directly in public affairs in the
contentious post-1789 period. At the same time, however, this strategy
necessarily implied the mingling of these spheres.
Questions of leadership also inform the third chapter, “Staging Islam:
Karoline von Günderrode’s Mahomed, der Prophet von Mekka.” Günderrode
used the “Lesedrama”—a drama for reading—as a way to fuse fiction,
history, and religion. This hybrid literary form enabled her to engage in a
complex ideological debate that, on the literary scene, had started with
Voltaire’s tragedy Mahomet ou le fanatisme (1741) and Goethe’s translation
of it (1800). Instead of presenting the protagonist of her Mahomed, der
Prophet von Mekka (1805) as a figure of religious and political fanaticism,
Günderrode created a character driven by the desire for knowledge. This

34
allowed her to present a culturally and religiously different body politic. In
addition, the remote setting served as a disguise for her own self-fashioning,
which establishes the prophet as an image of the visionary Romantic poet.
The fourth and last chapter, “The Letter and the Body: Julie de
Krüdener’s Valérie,” traces the effect of debates concerning the body politic
on the body of the protagonist Gustave. Krüdener’s 1804 novel adapts the
epistolary framework and the language of sensibility of Goethe’s Die Leiden
des jungen Werther (1774) to represent the epistolary subject’s frustrated
attempts to integrate his individuality into the social fabric of his time.
Gustave’s diseased body and masochistic tendencies serve as an image of the
painful reconfiguration of the body politic in the post-Revolutionary period.
Krüdener strategically explores epistolary conventions and expectations
created by this genre in order to market her novel successfully without
throwing disrepute on her own moral character.
In addition to analyzing the four women authors’ strategic self-
positioning and their exploration of the malleability of the fictional genre,
each chapter will discuss the effects of these authors’ acts of writing back on
their reception, from the eighteenth century to the present day. The
interweaving of political material with supposedly private story lines caused
their contemporaries discomfort, which affected the subsequent transmission
of their texts. The following chapters will outline the ways in which a
biographical interpretive approach was engaged in order to obliterate,
discredit, and attack these women’s role as producers of literature by fitting
them into the categories of salonnière, amateur, friend of a famous male
contemporary, or even national traitor. The intent of reconstructing these
biographical readings is not to duplicate this mode of interpretation but,
instead, to strive for a critical, (post)feminist reconsideration of the
conditions of not only literary production but also textual transmission and
canon formation.

35
Chapter 1

Gender and Genre:

Helen Maria Williams’ Julia, a Novel

In Helen Maria Williams’ two-volume Julia, a Novel (1790), two of the main
characters—Julia Clifford and Frederick Seymour—passionately discuss
Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther. Julia argues that “it is well written,
but few will justify its principles,” to which Seymour responds that Werther is
“subject to the power of passion.”1 The title of Williams’ novel and this dis-
cussion explicitly establish the author’s literary reference points. Rousseau’s
Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and Goethe’s Werther (1774) are ever-
present in Williams’ novel of passion, unrequited love, and despair. Yet
rather than dutifully imitating, Williams (1761–1827) creatively diverges
from her models and claims her own space as an author on the literary scene
of the time. The premise of her narrative is different from Goethe’s and
Rousseau’s. Williams’ Julia is neither the impetus for an epistolary exchange
between male correspondents, as Lotte is in Goethe’s narrative, nor is she
what Katharine Ann Jensen has termed an “Epistolary Woman,” a letter-
writing subject such as Rousseau’s Julie who pines for and writes about her
lover.2 Williams abandons the epistolary framework of her models and
instead constructs a third-person narrative. This allows her to create a virtue-
in-distress novel at the center of which stands a heroine of whose moral
fortitude the reader is assured—unlike Rousseau’s Julie—and whose actions
are directly visible, since they are not mediated by the epistolary agent’s
interpretation—as is the case with Lotte, who is mainly presented through

1
Helen Maria Williams, Julia, a Novel, ed. by Peter Garside, 2 vols (London: Routledge/
Thoemmes Press, 1995), II, pp. 202–3. All further references to this novel will be to this
edition and will be made parenthetically within the text. The page reference will be
preceded by the volume number in Roman numerals.
2
Katherine Ann Jensen, Writing Love: Letters, Women, and the Novel in France, 1605–1776
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1995), p. 3. Williams’ choice of the name Julia for the
title and her omission of any reference to Eloisa distanced her novel from the epistolary
tradition, especially because Rousseau’s novel was translated and commonly referred to as
Eloisa in English. See James H. Warner, “Eighteenth-Century English Reactions to the
Nouvelle Héloïse,” PMLA, 52.3 (September 1937).
Werther’s eyes. The third-person narrator’s presentation of the protagonist as
a moral rock enables Williams to market her novel as appropriate reading
material for women. Williams fits her Julia into the domestic realm of the
virtue-in-distress narrative, thereby echoing contemporary prescriptions
regarding gender and genre, publicity and privacy. This strategy allows her to
embed elements from a variety of other textual genres—poetry and letter
writing—that address contemporary developments in the public realm of
writing and politics and to disseminate them to a novel-reading audience.
The novel’s hybrid form mirrors Williams’ identity as a writer and
intellectual. She was educated by her mother after her father’s death. As a
young woman, Williams distinguished herself as a poet. With the help of
Andrew Kippis, a dissenting minister, she published socially and politically
engaged poems such as Edwin and Eltruda about families separated during
the War of the Roses, Peru about the European exploitation of South
America, and A Poem on the Bill Lately Passed for Regulating the Slave
Trade. Her Poems had over 1,500 subscribers.3 Williams’ poetry was not only
financially profitable, it also earned her the respect of her contemporaries.
Williams’ “poetry was so popular that several people addressed verse
compliments to her, including George Harding, Anna Seward, and the young
William Wordsworth”4 in his 1787 “Sonnet on Seeing Miss Helen Maria
Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress.” After the success of her first poem
Edwin and Eltruda, Williams relocated to London, where she came into
closer contact with well-established literary and political contemporaries such
as Samuel Johnson and the Bluestocking and salonnière Elizabeth Montagu.5
Eventually, the Williams women—Helen Maria, her sister, and their
mother—opened their own salon in London and invited the leading dissenters
of their time. During this period, Williams continued to write poetry and
made an acquaintance that would be important for her future life as a writer,

3
Helen Maria Williams, Edwin and Eltruda: A Legendary Tale (London: T. Cadell, 1782);
Helen Maria Williams, Peru, a Poem: In Six Cantos (London: T. Cadell, 1784); Helen
Maria Williams, A Poem on the Bill Lately Passed for Regulating the Slave Trade (Lon-
don: T. Cadell, 1788); Helen Maria Williams, Poems. In Two Volumes (London: T. Cadell,
1786). For information on the popularity of Williams’ poetry, see Carol Shiner Wilson,
“Helen Maria Williams,” in An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers, ed. by Paul
Schlueter and June Schlueter (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1998), pp. 680–82 (p. 680).
4
Janet Todd, “Williams, Helen Maria,” in A Dictionary of British and American Women
Writers 1660–1800, ed. by Janet Todd (Totowa: Rowman and Allanheld, 1985), pp. 323–26
(p. 324).
5
For more information on Williams’ social circles, see Jack Fruchtman, ed., An Eye-Witness
Account of the French Revolution: Letters Containing a Sketch of the Politics of France
(New York: Peter Lang, 1997).

38
her French tutor Monique du Fossé, who had fled to England after a
mésalliance. Du Fossé’s life story made Williams aware of the abuses of the
ancien régime and the social and political revolution across the Channel.6
When, in 1790, the du Fossés invited Helen Maria and Cecilia to Paris, the
sisters accepted and moved to the European continent. At this point, Helen
Maria Williams switched her focus from poetry to letters in order to record
her reactions to the French Revolution with more immediacy.
Probably written to a fictional correspondent, these letters chronicle
Williams’ response to the Revolution from its early days to 1796. In contrast
to other contemporaries who initially welcomed the social and political
changes but lost their enthusiasm during the Terreur, Williams never
abandoned hope that the Revolution’s ideals could be realized. Therefore, her
letters represent a unique voice among the copious writings of this tumultuous
period. Williams’ unwavering support of the French Revolution affected not
only the reception of her Letters but of her entire oeuvre. From the moment
Williams published the first volume of her Letters Written in France in 1790,
she was accused of betraying both her sex and her country.7 While early
criticism of her correspondence was merely disapproving, it soon turned into
harsh personal attacks, especially after the first general enthusiasm for the
Revolution had waned. The harshness of these ad hominem attacks attests to
degree to which Williams’ letters were perceived as a threat: the more readers
the letters attracted, the more scathing critics’ comments regarding gender
and politics became.8 As Vivien Jones observes, “In the eyes of anti-Jacobin
propagandists, the spectacle of women writing republican history was a triple
violation—of sexual morality and generic decorum as well as national

6
Monique had married the son of Baron du Fossé. This attachment outraged the baron,
because his son had chosen a social inferior as his spouse. The baron requested an
immediate annulment of the marriage. The son refused and was imprisoned. Monique fled
to England, where she lived in poverty and survived on tutoring. When the baron died, his
son was released and reunited with his bride in France. He renounced his aristocratic status
during the Revolution and shared his estate with his brothers. See Jack Fruchtman, An Eye-
Witness Account, pp. 5–6.
7
Helen Maria Williams, Letters Written in France, in the summer 1790, to a friend in
England; containing, various anecdotes relative to the French Revolution; and memoirs of
Mons. and Madame du F--- (London: T. Cadell , 1790).
8
Mary Favret observes that Williams’ Letters “were widely excerpted, quoted, applauded and
attacked in the British press. In The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740–1815, Robert D.
Mayo calls Williams ‘the overwhelming favorite among writers of popular history and
biography [...] [T]hanks to the labors of piratical miscellany editors, [she] became perhaps
the best-known contemporary author to magazine writers of her generation’” (Mary Favret,
Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1993), pp. 53–54).

39
political loyalty.”9 One of the attacks came from Richard Polwhele, who, in
his 1798 poem The Unsex’d Females, objects to women’s engagement with
contemporary political affairs. While he directs his criticism at the
“Wollstonecraftian” in general, a footnote singles out Williams and criticizes
her choice of the French Revolution as a subject matter: “But is it not
extraordinary, that such a genius, a female and so young, should have become
a politician—that the fair Helen, whose notes of love have charmed the
moonlight vallies, should stand forward, an intemperate advocate for Gallic
licentiousness—that such a woman should import with her, a blast more
pestilential than that of Avernus.”10 And Polwhele was not alone in attacking
Williams. The form and content of her Letters from France clearly made her
contemporaries uncomfortable. The British Critic labeled Williams a
“‘misguided female’” in 1796 and criticized her for wielding a “‘polluted
pen’” in 1801.11 To bolster the assertion that Williams had transgressed the
codes of proper female behavior, reviewers tried to establish her sexual
impropriety by commenting on her relationship to John Hurtford Stone, her
literary collaborator and a divorced man considered a traitor in England. In
April 1798, the Anti-Jacobin described her as “a Poissarde more bloody, [...]
a st--mp-t more shameless, than any which [...] Paris ever vomited forth.”12
Her contemporaries’ suspicions about Williams’ national disloyalty
culminated in the hypothesis that she was a British spy, which gained in
currency after her naturalization as a French citizen in 1817. She was
presented as a negative example to her (female) contemporaries, a warning
for them not to embark upon her public path.
As a result of the scathing anti-Jacobin criticism, Williams’ name—well-
known to her contemporaries—was gradually obliterated from popular con-
sciousness in the nineteenth century. In 1817, the critic William Beloe asked,
“What is she now? [...] If she lives (and whether she does or not, few know
and nobody cares), she is a wanderer—an exile, unnoticed and unknown.”13
While Williams had been a widely read if controversial figure during her

9
Vivien Jones, “Women Writing Revolution: Narratives of History and Sexuality in
Wollstonecraft and Williams,” in Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and
Contexts 1780–1832, ed. by Stephen Copley and John Whale (London and New York:
Routledge, 1992), pp. 178–99 (p. 179).
10
Richard Polwhele, The Unsex’d Females (London: Cadell and Davies, 1798), p. 19.
11
The comments in the British Critic are reported in Deborah Kennedy, “Benevolent
Historian: Helen Maria Williams and Her British Readers,” in Rebellious Hearts: British
Women Writers and the French Revolution, ed. by Adriana Craciun and Kari E. Lokke
(Albany: State U of New York P, 2001), pp. 317–36 (p. 324).
12
Quoted in Kennedy, “Benevolent Historian,” p. 324.
13
Quoted in Favret, Romantic Correspondence, p. 55.

40
lifetime, she gradually vanished from literary and historical accounts,
especially in the second half of the nineteenth century. Her name only
resurfaced in the early twentieth century with Lionel Woodward’s 1930
biography Une anglaise amie de la Révolution française: Hélène-Maria
Williams et ses amis.14 While this study was crucial in rescuing Williams’
legacy from oblivion, it also implicitly subscribed to a common mechanism in
the recovery of women authors. Williams was seen as a worthwhile object of
study because of her connection to famous friends, such as Bernardin de
Saint-Pierre, William Wordsworth, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Significantly,
Woodward’s book was republished in 1977 with the abbreviated title Hélène-
Maria Williams et ses amis.15 This title completely omitted her connection to
the Revolution and focused on her role as salonnière and correspondent.
Many pages of his biography are filled with lists of people whom Williams
met, befriended, and with whom she corresponded. Woodward’s recovery
was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it reinserted Williams into
literary and historical consciousness. On the other, it placed Williams in the
famous-by-association category and implicitly justified Williams’ exclusion:
“Le public, peu fidèle, oublia vite l’auteur qui l’avait autrefois charmé. Les
ouvrages de l’Anglaise, pleins de préventions et d’inexactitudes, seront
remplacés dans le domaine de l’histoire par des travaux d’une érudition
spéciale” [“The audience, not very faithful, quickly forgot the once-charming
author. The works of the English woman, full of prejudice and inaccuracy,
will be replaced by studies of special erudition in the field of history”].16 By
belittling Williams’s contribution to historiography on the basis of her
“prejudice and inaccuracy” and her lack of erudition, Woodward ushered in a
period of benevolent patronizing in Williams criticism.

14
Lionel Woodward, Une anglaise amie de la Révolution française: Hélène-Maria Williams
et ses amis (Paris: H. Champion, 1930). This book was also published as Woodward’s PhD
thesis with a slightly different title: Lionel Woodward, Une adhérente anglaise de la
Révolution française: Hélène-Maria Williams et ses amis (Paris: H. Champion, 1930).
15
Lionel Woodward, Hélène-Maria Williams et ses amis (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1977).
16
Woodward, Une anglaise, p. 267. In another comment of the same kind, Woodward warns
his readers of Williams’ mistakes in observation and judgment: “Il faut cependant avertir le
lecteur que miss Williams, dans certaines observations qu’elle portera sur les hommes et les
événements, se trompera assez souvent, ou parce que’elle n’a pas pu se dégager tout à fait
de l’influence de ses premiers amis, ou parce qu’elle n’a jamais pu oublier les peines qu’elle
a souffertes [...] Cependant, il ne faut jamais perdre de vue que miss Williams a toujours été
sincère” [“The reader needs to be alerted that Miss Williams makes frequent mistakes in
certain observations about people and events, either because she could not completely
liberate herself from the influence of her first friends, or because she could never forget the
hardships that she suffered [...] However, we should not lose sight of the fact that Miss
Williams has always been sincere”] (Woodward, Une anglaise, p. 33).

41
 This well-meaning gesture of belittlement was duplicated by subsequent
critics, as the 1962 example of M. Ray Adams demonstrates. He bewails the
fact that “[n]o modern appraisal has been made in English of this record in
thirteen volumes of her more than thirty years’ residence in France.”17 Yet he
also voices the complaints all too familiar in the appraisal of women authors’
texts by male critics:

Her style lacks simplicity and would be more elegant, if it were less ornamental. She revels
in poetic periods. Crowded figures of speech, emotional ecstasies, and barbarous diction
often rob her style of the gravity and decorum which the subject demands. In particular, she
often shows an exasperating contempt of anglicism. Such words as “epocha,” “phasis,”
“meridional,” “centrical,” and “epuration” are without excuse. Her use of un-English idioms
leads one reviewer to observe that she has almost forgotten her own language. This
handicap, which she never overcame, sometimes puts the English reader almost out of
sympathy with her enthusiasm and generous sentiment. In general, as Saintsbury [author of
the 1896 History of English Literature in the Nineteenth Century] has remarked, her prose
is “formal but not ungraceful, neither Johnsonian nor in any way slipshod.”18

At the same time that Williams is praised for the fact that “no one of them
[women radicals] knew as much of the French Revolution first-hand [...] as
Helen Maria Williams,”19 her use of the English language is scolded because
of its lack of simplicity, its un-English expressions, and its un-Johnsonian
characteristics. Williams is defined by everything she is not; she is neither
Johnson nor a loyal linguistic patriot. Adams is exasperated at Williams’
linguistic and ideological switch to the French side. His judgment not only
parallels Saintsbury’s, whom he quotes, but also Richard Polwhele’s 1790
attack of Williams’ “Gallic licentiousness.” Williams’ ambiguous allegiances
in an era of increasing national sentiment gradually erased her from the
writing of (literary) history.
Only in the late 1980s did Williams’ name resurface without the usual
negative qualifications attached to it. This newly awakened interest can be
ascribed to the confluence of two specific factors: the celebration of the 200th
anniversary of the French Revolution, including the large number of related
colloquia and publications, and the gradual recovery of eighteenth-century
women’s texts that was gaining force at the time, prompted by the awareness
of the need to expand “the 1790–92 British canon of revolutionary debate,

17
M. Ray Adams, “Helen Maria Williams and the French Revolution,” in Wordsworth and
Coleridge: Studies in Honor of George McLean Harper, ed. by Earl Leslie Griggs (New
York: Russell and Russell, 1962), pp. 87–117 (pp. 87–88).
18
Ibid., pp. 99–100.
19
Ibid., p. 86.

42
usually comprised of Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and Mary
Wollstonecraft.”20 In this context, her Letters from France were republished
in multiple editions,21 which, in turn, prompted an important number of
scholarly articles exploring her journalistic activity outside of the interpretive
framework of the question of her national allegiance.22 As a result of the

20
Jacqueline LeBlanc, “Politics and Commercial Sensibility in Helen Maria Williams’ Letters
from France,” Eighteenth-Century Life, 21.1 (February 1997), 26–44 (p. 26).
21
Helen Maria Williams, Letters from France, ed. by Janet M. Todd (Delmar: Scholars’
Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975); Helen Maria Williams, Letters Written in France, ed. by
Jonathan Wordsworth (Oxford and New York: Woodstock Books, 1989); Helen Maria
Williams, An Eye-Witness Account of the French Revolution: Letters Containing a Sketch
of the Politics of France, ed. by Jack Fruchtman (New York: Peter Lang, 1997); Helen
Maria Williams, Letters Written in France: in the Summer 1790, to a Friend in England,
Containing Various Anecdotes Relative to the French Revolution, ed. by Neil Fraistat and
Susan S. Lanser (Peterborough, ON and Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2001); and
Helen Maria Williams, Letters from France containing a great variety of original infor-
mation concerning the most important events that have occurred in that country in the
years 1790, 1791, 1792, and 1793. To which are annexed, the correspondence of
Dumourier with Pache, the war minister, and with the commissaries - letters of
Bournonville, Miranda, Valence, & C. & C.; Vol. 1, ed. by Caroline Franklin (London:
Routledge, 2006); Helen Maria Williams, Letters Containing a Sketch of the Scenes which
Passed in Various Departments of France during the Tyranny of Robespierre, ed. by
Stephen Bending and Stephen Bygrave (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007).
22
See, for example, among others, the following articles and books on the Letters: Sandra
Adickes, The Social Quest: The Expanded Vision of Four Women Travelers in the Era of
the French Revolution (New York: Peter Lang, 1991); Matthew Bray, “Helen Maria
Williams and Edmund Burke: Radical Critique and Complicity,” Eighteenth-Century Life,
16.2 (May 1992), 1–24; Ulrich Broich, “Revolutionstouristen: Britische Literaten besich-
tigen die Französische Revolution,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 54.3 (2004),
283–300; Julie Ellison, “Redoubled Feeling: Politics, Sentiment, and the Sublime in
Williams and Wollstonecraft,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 20 (1990), 197–215;
Mary A. Favret, “Spectatrice as Spectacle: Helen Maria Williams at Home in the
Revolution,” Studies in Romanticism, 33.2 (Summer 1993), 273–95; Jack Fruchtman, “The
Politics of Sensibility: Helen Maria Williams’s Julia and the Terror in France,” Eighteenth-
Century Women: Studies in their Lives, Work, and Culture, 1 (2001), 185–202; Lia Guerra,
“Helen Maria Williams: The Shaping of a Poetic Identity,” DQR Studies in Literature, 39.1
(2007), 63–76; Chris Jones, “Helen Maria Williams and Radical Sensibility,” Prose
Studies: History, Theory, Criticism, 12.1 (May 1989), 3–24; Vivien Jones, “Women
Writing Revolution: Narratives of History and Sexuality in Wollstonecraft and Williams,” in
Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts 1780–1832, ed. by Stephen
Copley and John Whale (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 178–99; Deborah
Kennedy, “Spectacle of the Guillotine: Helen Maria Williams and the Reign of Terror,”
Philological Quarterly, 73.1 (1994), 95–113; Deborah Kennedy, “Responding to the
French Revolution: Williams’s Julia and Burney’s The Wanderer,” in Jane Austen and
Mary Shelley and their Sisters, ed. by Laura Dabundo (Lanham: University Press of
America, 2002), pp. 5–17; Deborah Kennedy, Helen Maria Williams and the Age of

43
newly awakened interest in Williams’ letters, critics are also turning their
attention to her other writings, among them her only novel, Julia, published in
1790. The novel was republished twice in the twentieth century after not
having been published for nearly two hundred years.23 In addition, a new
critical edition is planned by Broadview Press.24
Williams’ Letters and her novel mirror each other in a number of ways.
Williams’ reports on the French Revolution fuse journalistic writing with the
terms of sentimental fictional discourse. In her letters, she uses the popular
virtue-in-distress narrative to construct a plot at the center of which stands
Liberty, the female heroine, whose virtue is besieged by the Terreur’s
personification, Robespierre. Williams presents this plot from the perspective
of the “English outsider/‘spectatrice’ of revolutionary events and politics,
while simultaneously making a public spectacle of herself, her sentimental
attachments, and the domestic virtues she espoused.”25 In her Letters,
Williams mixes genres and carefully crafts an authorial persona that is both
removed and at the center of Revolutionary events. The Letters’ generic
instability and Williams’ authorial stance have been discussed in secondary
literature, yet these characteristics and their implications, which are also
present in Julia, remain largely unexplored in this novel. While the Letters
reference virtue-in-distress-narratives, Julia is a virtue-in-distress novel in the
third person with interspersed elements from the epistolary genre and poetry.

Revolution (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2002); Jacqueline LeBlanc, “Politics and Commercial
Sensibility in Helen Maria Williams’ Letters from France,” Eighteenth-Century Life, 21.1
(February 1997), 26–44; Mark B. Ledden, “Revolutionary Plots: Helen Maria Williams’s
Letters from France,” Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism, 3 (1995), 1–13; Anne K. Mellor,
“English Women Writers and the French Revolution,” in Rebel Daughters: Women and the
French Revolution, ed. by Sara Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine (New York and Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1992), pp. 255–72; Judith Scheffler, “Romantic Women Writing on Imprison-
ment and Prison Reform,” Wordsworth Circle, 19.2 (Spring 1988), 99–103; Richard C.
Sha, “Expanding the Limits of Feminine Writing: The Prose Sketches of Sydney Owenson
(Lady Morgan) and Helen Maria Williams,” in Romantic Women Writers: Voices and
Countervoices, ed. by Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley (Hanover and London: UP
of New England, 1995), pp. 194–206; and Nicola Watson, “Novel Eloisas: Revolutionary
and Counter-Revolutionary Narratives in Helen Maria Williams, Wordsworth and Byron,”
Wordsworth Circle, 23.1 (Winter 1992), 18–23.
23
Helen Maria Williams, Julia, ed. by Gina Luria (New York: Garland Publishing, 1974);
Helen Maria Williams, Julia, a Novel, ed. by Peter Garside (London: Routledge/Thoemmes
Press, 1995). Both of these editions are facsimile reprints.
24
Marjorie Mather, “Re: New edition of “Julia”?” E-mail to Stephanie Hilger. 18 April 2008.
Mather, editor at Broadview Press, confirmed that Julia, edited by Orianne Smith, is
forthcoming in the next few years, although an exact publication date has not yet been set.
25
Favret, “Spectatrice,” p. 275.

44
Like the allegorized figure of Liberty, the protagonist is under siege in the
novel’s main plot; Seymour’s advances repeatedly threaten Julia’s moral and
physical integrity. Yet the novel’s meaning exceeds that of a virtue-in-distress
novel. Some of the embedded poems, most notably “The Bastille,” and
epistolary accounts, for example, of Sophie Herbert during the American
Revolution, refer to the contemporary political situation beyond the
protagonists’ immediate domestic setting. These textual elements are inserted
in ways that correlate with developments in the main plot. Julia’s actions
therefore always signify more; the hybridity of Williams’ text transcends the
virtue-in-distress narrative that we are ostensibly reading. Julia’s body is
suffering metonymically for the social body politic.
Writing a novel with references to contemporary political events allowed
Williams, the journalist, to broaden her audience. Her experimentation with
the genre of fiction was geared at (young) female readers who, oftentimes,
were barred access to explicitly political reading material. Disseminating
political references through a virtue-in-distress novel was, therefore, a
strategic move. Williams strove to market her novel as appropriate reading
material for young women, a moral tale, through a number of narrative
techniques. She changes the plot of her textual model in a way that allows her
to emphasize Julia’s irreproachable character. Instead of two men vying for
one woman’s love as in Rousseau’s Julie, in Williams’ novel, there is only
one man, Frederick Seymour, caught between his wife Charlotte and Julia, her
cousin. Yet, it is not Frederick who expresses ethical considerations. Instead,
Julia is the one who represents the moral center of the novel. When she learns
about Frederick’s passion for her, she suffers from the awkwardness of her
position, not the least because of the strong friendship that ties her to her
cousin. Yet Julia never wavers; she consistently rejects Frederick’s advances
and tries to protect Charlotte from the painful knowledge of her husband’s
misguided infatuation.
Julia’s morality made contemporary reviewers from such established
journals as the Analytical, the European Magazine, and the Monthly present
the novel as appropriate reading material for young women.26 In her review of
Julia, Mary Wollstonecraft “warmly recommend[s] her [Williams’] novel to
our young female readers, who will here meet with refinement of sentiment,
without a very great alloy of romantic notions.”27 While she complains that

26
For an overview and discussion of contemporary reviews, see Peter Garside, “Introduction,”
in Julia, a Novel, ed. by Peter Garside (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1995), pp. v–
xxi (p. xvii).
27
Mary Wollstonecraft, “Rev. of Julia, by Helen Maria Williams,” Analytical Review, 7 (May
1790), pp. 97–100 (p.98).

45
“Julia’s principles are so fixed that nothing can tempt her to act wrong; and as
she appears like a rock, against which the waves vainly beat,” she concedes
that “[t]his plan gives the author an opportunity to display the most exemplary
degree of rectitude in the conduct of her heroine.”28 By characterizing Julia
as an example of conduct literature, Wollstonecraft highlights the novel’s
didactic value and thereby establishes Williams’ propriety: “[H]er [Williams’]
mind does not seem to be debauched, if we may be allowed the expression,
by reading novels [...] Without any acquaintance with Miss W. only from the
perusal of this production, we should venture to affirm, that sound principles
animate her conduct, and that the sentiments they dictate are the pillars
instead of being the fanciful ornaments of her character.”29 Wollstonecraft
establishes a parallel between the author’s “sound” and the protagonist’s
“fixed” principles. While Wollstonecraft’s appreciation of the novel is not
unqualified, she repeatedly emphasizes the author’s morality, which was all
the more important since, unlike many women authors, Williams did not
publish her novel anonymously or under a pseudonym. Wollstonecraft’s focus
on Williams’ propriety, and her silence on the novel’s explicitly political
narrative insertions represent her strategic echoing of contemporary dis-
courses of gender and genre. The review’s presentation of Williams as con-
forming to contemporary expectations attached to female authorship shows
Wollstonecraft’s awareness of the repercussions of the label of impropriety
when it was attached to a woman author; her review is more than a
sympathetic account of a fellow author who addresses the Revolutionary
ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The review can also be read as
Wollstonecraft’s reflections regarding her own self-presentation as a woman
engaging contemporary political debates, the most forceful expression of
which would be her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which was
published in 1792, two years after Williams’ Julia.
Creating a virtue-in-distress novel with an irreproachable female character
allowed Williams to echo the discourse of feminine authorial propriety while
embedding elements that question this discourse. The author took a number of
precautions to establish the morality of her tale and, ultimately, of herself.
The “advertisement” to the novel, which blurs the line between the authorial
and the narratorial voice, exemplifies this strategy: “The purpose of these
pages is to trace the danger arising from the uncontrouled indulgence of
strong affections [...] The materials of the following sketch are taken from
nature” (Julia, I, iii). Besides closely mirroring Rousseau’s preface to Julie,

28
Ibid., “Rev.,” p. 99.
29
Ibid., “Rev.,” p. 98.

46
which claims that the narrative does not result from his imagination but from
nature, Williams’ advertisement displays the tone of modesty expected of
women authors of the time, referring to the “little confidence” (I, iv) with
which this text is offered to the reader: “[P]erhaps, the pen which records this
narrative may, in vain, have attempted to rescue it from oblivion” (I, iii). The
reference to the inadequacy of the writer’s pen is part of what Ros Ballaster
terms eighteenth-century women authors’ “self-conscious display of
incommensurability.”30 This gesture is an ambivalent move that draws upon
the eighteenth-century discourse on women’s difference by displaying the
author’s adherence to the code of modesty while, at the same time, asserting
the quality of her work.31
The advertisement’s approximation of the narratorial and the authorial
voice permeates the entire novel. When the third-person narrator claims her
ignorance of Latin, the reader also hears the author’s voice: “Chartres then
added a Latin quotation of some length, which we believe was very apposite;
but which, as we are entirely ignorant of Latin, we must leave our learned
readers to guess” (Julia, I, 124). The formal “we” truly becomes the plural
form in the reader’s ears. The audience is flattered at the same time that the
narrator/author belittles her intellect and thereby establishes her modesty.
Readers are not the only ones who are cajoled in Julia; so are the literary
“greats” of Williams’ time. In the same way that Williams invokes
Rousseau’s Julie and Goethe’s Werther as literary reference points, she also
acknowledges the influence of other authors. For example, when Charlotte’s
father returns from the East Indian colonies, a scene of celebration is
described in the following terms: “The tenants were seated in the hall; the ale
flowed liberally; nothing was heard but the rejoicing: and the Vicar of
Wakefield, who had a taste for happy human faces, would have found this a
charming spectacle” (I, 74). By invoking Oliver Goldsmith’s 1766 novel The
Vicar of Wakefield, Williams legitimates her description of idyllic family and
community life. At the same time, this allows her to display her familiarity
with contemporary works. This is not the only time that Williams refers to her
literary contemporaries, as can be seen, for example, in the description of a
minor character: “He was one of those persons whom Sterne describes as
walking straight forward through the path of his world; turning neither to the
right hand, nor the left” (I, 171). By paraphrasing one of Laurence Sterne’s

30
Ros Ballaster, “Women and the Rise of the Novel: Sexual Prescripts,” in Women and
Literature in Britain 1700–1800, ed. by Vivien Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000),
pp. 197–216 (p.197).
31
For further discussion of this issue, also see Cheryl Turner, Living by the Pen: Women
Writers in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).

47
ideas, Williams bows to literary authority while presenting herself as a well-
read and therefore readable author.
Williams acknowledges the literary output of her contemporaries, yet she
also displays her knowledge of the literature of the past, a strategy which is
especially palpable in “An Address to Poetry” (I, 15–24). In this poem of
twenty-two stanzas, she invokes the power of poetry and its masterful
handling by Homer, Milton, Shakespeare, Thomson, and Pope. This is
Williams’ first use of poetry in the novel; she inserts the poem into the
narrative as one of Julia’s compositions: “We shall venture to insert the
following Address to Poetry, written by Julia a short time before her visit to
town, as proof of her fondness for that charming art” (I, 14). “An Address”
illustrates the protagonist’s morality, and it allows the author to graft her
voice onto Julia’s, establish her poetic calling, and insert it in a literary
tradition:

Oh Poesy! Oh nymph most dear,

To whom I early gave my heart,
Whose voice is sweetest to my ear
Of aught in nature or in art;
Thou, who canst all my breast controul,
Come, and thy harp of various cadence bring,
And long with melting music swell the string
That suits the present temper of my soul. (I, 15)

The focus on the protagonist’s sensitivity also legitimizes her creator’s

authorial aspirations. Deborah Kennedy argues, that “[t]hough she lacked the
benefits of a formal education [...] Williams could still legitimately enter the
public sphere as a poet of sensibility and [...] she presented her credentials as
those of the heart, not the head, consciously excluding herself from the more
intellectual arena reserved for talented and educated men.”32 By echoing
gender expectations and claiming the feminine domain of the private, the
heart, Williams strategically carves out a space from which she ventures into
what the discourse on “incommensurable difference” considered to be the
public/masculine domain of the head. Yet, again, she is careful not to appear
immodest: she prefaces the poem with the remark that “even where the talents
of the poet are altogether inadequate to the acquisition of fame, the cultivation
of them may still confer the most soothing enjoyment” (Julia, I, 13–14).
Williams strategically echoes her contemporaries’ interpretation of Julia’s

32
Deborah Kennedy, “‘Storms of Sorrow:’ The Poetry of Helen Maria Williams,” Man and
Nature: Proceedings of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 10 (1991),
77–91 (p. 79).

48
moral character as a reflection of her creator’s propriety in order to establish
and reflect on her position as a late eighteenth-century English author.
Williams’ strategic mix of self-denigration and self-assertion enables her
to position herself in an illustrious line of poets:

Thy page, Oh SHAKESPEARE! let me view,

Thine! at whose name my bosom glows;
Proud that my earliest breath I drew
In that blest isle where Shakespeare rose! —
Where shall my dazzled glances roll?
Shall I pursue gay Ariel’s flight,
Or wander where those hags of night
With deeds unnam’d shall freeze my trembling soul? (I, 17, capitals in original)

The speaker identifies Shakespeare as her inspiration and extends her flattery
to “that blest isle where Shakespeare rose,” that is, Britain. This extension is
used to include her, who drew her “earliest breath” in that same place. She,
the poem argues, is therefore able to continue the grand literary tradition that
is represented by figures such as Milton, Thomson, and Pope:

In those still moments when the breast [...]

Glows by some higher thought possest [...]
Then, awful MILTON, raise the veil
That hides from human eye the heav’nly throng! [...]
Then, THOMSON, then be ever near,
And paint whatever season reigns [...]
And POPE, the music of thy verse
Shall winter’s dreary gloom dispel,
And fond remembrance oft rehearse
The moral song she knows so well (I, 18–22, capitals in original)

Praising Shakespeare, Milton, Thomson, and Pope was especially important

for Williams who had, by the time of the novel’s publication, moved to
France and was reporting on the events there from a sympathetic perspective.
This flattery allows Williams to insert herself into the English literary
tradition by displaying her knowledge of and respect for it.
Through the intermediary of her protagonist, Williams inserts her name
besides those of the male “greats” in the British tradition. She balances this
self-assertion with a display of propriety through her choice of poetic genre.
By inserting occasional poetry meant to demonstrate the sensibility of its
author, Williams opts for a genre deemed acceptable for women writers. The
narrator explains, “Verses were sometimes composed by Julia, merely to
amuse her grandfather” (I, 68). Again, Julia’s—and by extension, the

49
author’s—creative talent is framed in a discourse of modesty and self-
effacement. These poems are presented as pastime; the lines are composed in
the service of others. On the level of the plot, Julia writes them to entertain
the patriarchal figure of the grandfather. On the level of the novel’s
composition, Williams’ “advertisement” explains that she inserted these
poems to please her readers: “I have been encouraged, by the indulgence with
which my former poems have met with, to intersperse some poetical pieces in
these volumes” (I, iii). Julia and her author present themselves as proper
women writing not for fame and fortune but for others’ entertainment and
pleasure. In addition, they present their writings not as sparked by “unsex’d”
intellectual reflection but by commiseration with fellow creatures. The
inserted poem entitled “The Linnet” demonstrates Julia’s compassion and her
propriety; she composes it after witnessing “a black cat seize a linnet that was
perched upon a neighbouring tree, and to whose song she had been listening”
(I, 68–69). After the maid “rescued the linnet from its gripe [sic],” “Julia
scrawled the following lines upon this incident” (I, 69, my italics):

When fading Autumn’s latest hours

Strip the brown wood, and chill the flowers [...]
A Linnet, among leafless trees,
Sung, in the pauses of the breeze [...]
A prowling cat, with jetty skin [...]
Drew near—and shook the wither’d leaves [...]
And grasps the victim in his jaws.
The linnet’s muse, a tim’rous maid,
Saw, and to Molly scream’d for aid [. . . ]
Heroic Molly dauntless flew [...]
Snatch’d from Grimalkin’s teeth his prey. (I, 69–71)

In the same way that Williams’ “advertisement” was replete with self-
belittling gestures, Julia’s writing is presented as “scrawling,” amateurish with
no consequence except innocent entertainment of the writer’s immediate sur-
roundings.
Williams was successful in constructing her authorial personality as that
of a self-effacing, proper, and feeling woman through the intermediary of her
poem-writing protagonist. Reviewers praised what they described as the
elegant poetry in the novel.33 Besides “The Linnet” and the “Address to
Poetry,” there are six more poems in the novel that fit this description: “Song”
(I, 151–52), “Ballad” (I, 153–54), “Sonnet to Hope” (I, 204), “Elegy” (II, 27–

33
For a discussion of reviewers’ reactions to these poems, see Eleanor Ty, Unsex’d Revolu-
tionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993), p. 76.

50
29), “Song” (II, 137–38), and “Sonnet to Peace” (II, 159). “The Linnet” in
particular was singled out for praise as the best representative of poetry “cast
in a polite ‘feminine’ literary mode.”34 The domestic propriety of these poems
was reassuring from the pen of a woman who had not only published
politically and socially critical poems on the slave trade and colonial
exploitation but who also participated in a public debate on the French
Revolution in her Letters. What is puzzling is that none of the reviews
mentioned the longest poem in the novel, “The Bastille” (II, 218–23), a four-
part poem of twelve stanzas that occupied six pages in the novel and had an
explicit political reference point. Was the poem so well concealed amid the
virtue-and-distress narrative and the other proper feminine poetry that it
passed by reviewers’ critical eyes? Were reviewers puzzled by its presence
and did not know how to discuss it? Were reviewers reticent to point out its
existence for fear of hurting Williams, as was perhaps the case with Mary
Wollstonecraft, sympathetic to Williams’ authorial strategies? While these
questions cannot be answered with certainty, the absence of “The Bastille”
from contemporary reviews is telling in that it reveals, at least, that the
presence of such political matter in a supposedly private and domestic
narrative was unexpected and hence unspeakable.
“The Bastille” is inserted in the narrative when the tensions between
Frederick Seymour, Charlotte, and Julia reach their highest point. The poem’s
gloomy mood echoes the sense of danger that permeates the main plot: “Mr.
F— called at Mr. Clifford’s one evening, and finding Charlotte and Julia
sitting at work, he desired their permission to read to them a poem, written by
a friend lately arrived from France, and who, for some supposed offence
against the state, had been immured several years in the Bastille, but was at
length liberated by the interference of a person in power. The horrors of his
solitary dungeon were one night cheered by the following prophetic dream”
(II, 217). Mr. F—, a family acquaintance, is the transmitter of the political
material regarding the French revolution. Deborah Kennedy argues that by
“using Mr. F—, a male intermediary, to introduce the political material into
the novel, Williams avoids directly involving her heroines in politics.”35 In
fact, Williams creates a double removal by means of two male intermediaries:
Mr. F— and the prisoner/author of the poem himself. By not directly
involving her female characters in the public aspects of politics, Williams
ostensibly keeps the barrier between private/female and public/male intact.

34
Peter Garside, “Introduction,” in Helen Maria Williams, Julia, a Novel (London: Routledge/
Thoemmes Press, 1995), pp. v–xxi (p. vii).
35
Deborah Kennedy, “Responding to the French Revolution,” p. 6.

51
Yet on a metafictional level, the author, who has aligned herself with the
narrator in the preface and with the protagonist through the insertion of her
poetry, does meddle with public affairs. Therefore, additional layers of
protection are inserted between the author and politics. The subtitle of “The
Bastille” describes the poem as a “vision,” which it is in a double sense. On
the one hand, the poem describes the fall of the Bastille as a hopeful dream by
one of its prisoners. On the other, it predicts events in the future. While Julia
was published in 1790, the novel is set in 1776. These strategies create a
sense of indirection, which functions as a protective barrier for the author.
In addition to these mechanisms of protection regarding the author’s
gender, Williams also attempts to diffuse criticism of national disloyalty
through the speaker of the poem. The speaker is a British prisoner who
strategically contrasts the tomblike atmosphere of the ancien régime with the
“blissful vales” of his birth country:

Stretch’d helpless in this living tomb,

Oh haste, congenial death!
Seize, seize this ling’ring breath,
And shroud me in unconscious gloom—
Britain! Britain! thy exil’d son no more
Thy blissful vales shall see;
Why did I leave thy hallow’d shore.
Distinguish’d land, where all are free? (Julia, II, 218–19)

Williams’ reference to Britain’s “hallow’d shores” serves as strategic flattery

of her readers’ national allegiance, displacing fear of power abuses onto the
neighbor across the Channel in order to thematize the danger for abusive
leadership in a more general sense.
The speaker describes the effect of incarceration on his physical and
mental health:

Drear cell! along whose lonely bounds,

Uninvited by light,
Chill silence dwells with night [...]
Where long inaction wastes the frame,
And half annihilates the mind! [...]
Terrific visions hover near [...]
Oh, tear me from these haunted walls [...]
Lest madness seize my soul (II, 218–20)

When the symbol of absolutist power falls, his narrative changes from a
description of claustrophobic confinement to the praise of absolute personal
freedom:

52
 Those troubled phantoms melt away!
I lose the sense of care—
I feel the vital air—
I see, I see the light of day!—
Visions of bliss! eternal powers!
What force has shook those hated walls?
What arm has rent those threat’ning towers?
It falls—the guilty fabric falls! (II, 220–21)

In this vision, the walls of the Bastille tumble and the prisoner escapes from
the surveillance of its threatening towers. He experiences freedom with all his
unbridled senses. Williams uses the story of an individual to illustrate the
effects of political change. This allows her to make public observations within
the relatively unthreatening framework of an individual’s personal story,
which is embedded in the narrative of yet another individual, Julia.
In “The Bastille,” the defeat of arbitrary power ushers in a new era that,
far from being firmly established, has to be protected from new injustices and
attacks:

Shall Freedom’s sacred temple rise,

And charm an emulating world!
‘Tis her awak’ning voice commands
Those firm, those patriot bands,
Arm’d to avenge her cause,
And guard her violated laws!—
Did ever earth a scene display
More glorious to the eye of day,
Than millions with according mind,
Who claim the rights of human kind? (II, 221)

Williams personifies Freedom in light of new social and political ideals.

Freedom becomes the besieged and threatened virtuous young maiden who
needs to be protected. Her predicament parallels that of the novel’s
protagonist, Julia, whose virtue is also under attack. This parallel allows
Williams to package her political ideas in the principles of propriety and
modesty that shape popular virtue-in-distress narratives. Yet Freedom—and,
by extension, Julia—is not merely a passive character who needs protection;
she is also an assertive figure who commands those who fight on her behalf.
Freedom is represented as the Goddess Liberty and is linked to Europe’s
Republican past: “Does the fam’d Roman page sublime, / An hour more
bright unroll, / To animate the soul, / Than this, lov’d theme of future time?”
(II, 222). Williams’ description of Freedom echoes contemporary represen-
tations of Liberty:

53
 Attached to her tricolor sash, she wears a lion-headed sword, attesting symbolically to her
triumph over superstition, despotism, and the monarchy. Syncretically combining Christian
and republican symbols, this virginal figure wears the phrygian cap, yet is surrounded by an
aureole. She is figured as young, innocent, and pure; precisely the kind of transparent,
natural representation that a reading of Rousseau inclined the revolutionaries to adopt [...]
As opposed to the sexually threatening images of the female aristocratic body, this feminine
representation of the reinvented body politic seems almost to call out for the protection of
virile republican men.36

In this allegorical representation, Liberty is an ambivalent figure. Her lion-

headed sword attests to her strength, but her innocence and purity signal a
need of protection. Williams’ Freedom—the author, accused of “Gallic
licentiousness,” significantly abandons the Latinate “Liberty” here—displays
the same characteristics; she needs to be defended even though she is the
protector of the weak and helpless:

The peasant, while he fondly sees

His infants round the hearth,
Pursue their simple mirth,
Or emulously climb his knees,
No more bewails their future lot,
By tyranny’s stern rod opprest;
While Freedom guards his straw-roof’d cot,
And all his useful toils are blest. (Julia, II, 222)

Under Freedom’s reign, arbitrary power no longer tyrannizes the peasant who
is able to imagine a better future for his offspring. The allegorized figure of
freedom protects the family from violence and oppression even though she is
in danger herself.
“The Bastille” is inserted at a point in the narrative when Julia’s role as
the guarantor of happiness is increasingly compromised. With Charlotte, she
has created a safe domestic haven, a retreat from the pleasures and
temptations of city life: “This young lady [Julia] lamented nothing so much in
leaving London, as her separation from Charlotte; for she found that the joys
of dissipation are like gaudy colours, which for a moment attract the sight, but
soon fatigue and oppress it; while the satisfactions of home resemble the
green robe of nature, on which the eye loves to rest, and to which it always
returns with a sensation of delight” (I, 57). When Frederick Seymour courts
Charlotte and is introduced to Julia, he at first fits into the cousins’ “domestic

36
Joan Landes, “Representing the Body Politic,” p. 28. The image that Landes analyzes is La
Liberté Patronne des Français (c. 1795) by Louis Charles Ruotte, after Louis-Marie
Sicardi, finished by Jacques-Louis Copis.

54
circle” (I, 114). Frederick enjoys his conversations with Julia, yet soon the
seeds for the disturbance of domestic contentment are sown because
Frederick “discovered that Charlotte’s society lost its charm when Julia was
absent” (I, 116). Julia strives to maintain the domestic harmony by keeping
Frederic’s infatuation from Charlotte. Yet her attempts to maintain happiness
are marred because she faces intensifying threats as a result of the
externalization of Frederic’s intensifying desire. The ensuing attacks on
Julia’s body parallel the threats experienced by the new body politic
established according to the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity.
Frederick’s attacks on Julia are presented as a series of tests of the
protagonist’s character. The first one occurs when Frederick comes into
possession of an object that both highlights Julia’s inattainability and
alleviates its effects:

One evening Charlotte, while she was making tea, requested Julia to try some new music,
which she had received from London, on the piano forte. Julia pulled off her gloves, and
placed them hastily on her lap: one of them dropped on the floor while she was playing.
Frederick Seymour, who was walking up and down the room, seized a moment when
Charlotte was talking to Mrs. Seymour, and pretending to be looking over some songs
which lay on the piano forte, dropped one of them on the spot where the glove lay, which he
contrived to pick up, at the same time putting it hastily into his bosom [...] Seymour, when
he reached his own apartment, locked the door, pulled the precious prize from his bosom,
pressed it to his heart and lips ten thousand times, and was guilty of the most passionate
extravagancies. (I, 184–86)

The glove becomes the fetishized substitute for Julia, allowing Frederick to
indulge in what the novel describes as “the most passionate extravagancies.”
When Julia searches for her glove, she feels a sense of physical encroach-
ment, “disturbed and uneasy from a suspicion of what had really happened”
(I, 185), and fears the revelation of the material proof of Frederick’s passion.
The second attack on the protagonist’s integrity takes place when
Frederick, Julia, Charlotte, and Chartres, one of the cousins’ acquaintances,
make an excursion to the ruins of an abandoned abbey in the countryside.
Chartres decides to climb one of the crumbling towers. Charlotte does not
dare to ascend, but Julia joins him, to Frederick’s dismay. Frederick’s fears
become reality upon the group’s departure:

At that moment a gust of wind shook the building, and some loose stones fell from the top
of the wall and rolled with velocity down the hill, in the direction where Julia was walking;
whom they would inevitably have crushed in their passage, if [Frederick] Seymour had not
flown with impetuosity and snatched her from the impending destruction. She received no
other injury than a blow from a small stone, that struck her ancle, which was bruised by the

55
 stroke, and became swelled and painful from the swiftness with which he had hurried her
over the rough and hilly grounds. (I, 196–97)

Even though Frederick’s quick reaction prevents a serious physical injury,

Julia’s overall suffering continues precisely because of him. Saving Julia from
the crumbling building allows Frederic to get into physical contact with her.
The passage exceeds its literal meaning and Julia’s ankle becomes her
Achilles’ heel. She strives to avoid the traps of Seymour’s attraction. The
road on which she walks is therefore long and treacherous: “Julia walked with
great difficulty along that narrow and dangerous road which has been before
described, and which was two miles in length; but she had not gone far before
her ancle swelled so much, that it could support her weight no longer, and she
was unable to proceed” (I, 197–98). Julia’s impaired ankle foreshadows the
literal and figurative bruises that she will experience on her “path of
rectitude” (II, 4).
The third and most violent test of Julia’s character also takes the form of a
physical attack. One evening, Julia leaves a social gathering to prevent an
encounter with Frederick. As she is about to slip away, Frederick appears and
entreats her to let him accompany her to the carriage: “A few minutes after, a
violent noise and confusion were heard in the hall [...] one of Julia’s chairmen
had fallen near Frederick Seymour’s door: the chair was broken, and the
glasses were shivered. When Charlotte reached the hall, Seymour and the
servants were taking Julia out of the chair: her forehead was cut with the
broken glass, and bled violently” (II, 206–7). This passage establishes the
possibility that Frederick might have attempted to force himself onto Julia.
While the chairman’s fall prevents a literal rape, on the symbolic level the
violation of the virginal heroine has occurred. Framing her novel as a didactic
virtue-in-distress narrative enables Williams to present Julia as appropriate
reading material to young women because the protagonist never strays:
“Rectitude stood in the place of indifference; and, since she could not entirely
controul her feelings, she disregarded them altogether, and only studied, with
a fervent desire of acting right, to regulate her conduct by the strictest
propriety” (II, 2–3). Constructing the novel as a third-person narrative rather
than a Rousseauian epistolary account shifts the focus from Julia’s ambivalent
sentiments for Seymour to a description of her propriety. In contrast to an
epistolary novel, Julia’s feelings are never explored at length; they are only
mentioned obliquely in the above-cited passage. This shift in focus in the
virtue-in-distress narrative allows a move away from a discussion of romantic
feelings and relationships in order to focus on female friendship as the most

56
powerful sentiment linking not only the characters in the main plot but also
the various narrative pieces.
Williams’ use of the virtue-in-distress model establishes parallels between
Julia and the personified figure of Freedom in “The Bastille.” The friendship
linking Julia and Charlotte is mirrored in the relation between Freedom and
the equally feminized figure of Philosophy, described at the end of the poem:

Philosophy! oh, share the meed

Of Freedom’s noblest deed!
‘Tis thine each truth to scan,
Guardian of bliss, and friend of man!
‘Tis thine all human wrongs to heal,
‘Tis thine to love all nature’s weal;
To give each gen’rous purpose birth,
And renovate the gladden’d earth. (II, 222–23)

Philosophy and Freedom’s cooperation are integral to the improvement of

man’s condition. Both are feminized in their association with maternal
functions; female friendship is established as the crucial element in the
restoration of social justice and harmony.
The importance of female bonding, and the disastrous effects of the lack
thereof, are further illustrated on a different narrative level, the intercalated
epistolary love story of Sophia Herbert and Captain F—, Mr. F—’s brother.
The story of Sophia, which is set in 1776 during the American Revolution, is
introduced by a male character in a similar way to “The Bastille.” Once more,
Julia and Charlotte are protected from direct involvement in political affairs.
Mr. F—, Julia’s suitor, “in the course of a walk [...] took an opportunity of
telling Julia, that he had lately lost his only brother” (I, 241). The narrator
highlights the fact that Julia does not request his brother’s story but that Mr.
F—, whom Julia will eventually reject, sends her related documents: “‘The
circumstances of his [Mr. F—’s brother] death [...] are such as I am unable to
relate, but they were particularly affecting, and, if you will give me
permission, I will send you a packet which contains the account, and which, I
believe, will interest you’” (I, 241). Julia learns about current political affairs
not through her own initiative but through the insistence of her male
acquaintance, who forwards her the story of his brother and Sophie Herbert.
The account consists of two sets of letters written by the couple’s friends:
one by a comrade of Captain F—, who fought with him for the British in the
American War of Independence, and the other by Sophia Herbert’s friend,
Frances Lawrence. The following story emerges: Sophia Herbert is the
daughter of a landowner in Norfolk, Virginia. She has two brothers, one of

57
them a soldier, “personally known to General Washington, [who] had been
appointed one of his aid-du-camps” (I, 246). Upon the British declaration of
war, the father and his soldier son rush toward town to fight. Sophia remains
by herself on the estate (I, 247). When she learns that the British have set the
town on fire, she runs toward it, and, “[c]areless of danger, and almost
insensible of her situation, Sophia still pressed forward, till she was stopped
by a bleeding corpse which opposed her passage” (I, 248). When she realizes
that she has stumbled over her brother’s lifeless body, she faints and is
rescued by a British officer, Captain F—, who leads her back to her family’s
burning estate. Sophia’s father survives the battle; he is reunited with his
daughter and both retreat to a hamlet in the neighborhood, where the British
officer visits them regularly.
There, Sophia is wooed by “her generous lover,” and “although Mr.
Herbert lamented that Captain F— was an Englishman, he did not suffer
political prejudice to subdue those sentiments of esteem and gratitude which
the conduct of that young man had nobly merited, and consented that his
daughter should marry Captain F— at the end of the summer compaign [sic]”
(I, 255–56). The father leaves for battle and eventually dies. At this point,
Sophia’s second brother “heard with the utmost indignation of her
engagements to Captain F—, and seemed to feel less concerned for his
father’s death, than regret at the weakness which had led him to bestow his
daughter on a man who had drawn his sword against America” (I, 257–58).
Sophia, however, defies her brother’s intolerance and insists on marrying
Captain F—. Yet soon afterwards, the fatal tidings of her lover’s death arrive:
“She shed no tear, but her blood seemed chilled in her veins: she started
frequently, and there was a wildness and disorder in her countenance, that
alarmed us for her reason [...] her fever increased every moment, and the
following night her reason entirely forsook her” (I, 258–59). Sophia, grief-
stricken, eventually dies and becomes a symbol of tolerance in times of war
and conflict over the interpretation of ideals such as freedom and equality.
The figure of Sophia plays an important role in the author’s self-
presentation. Sophia’s plea for tolerance toward people of complex national
allegiances constitutes the author’s disguised defense of her own position as a
British woman in favor of the French Revolution. Through an intermediary
male character, Williams quotes from the Book of Ruth in the Old Testament:
“This valuable domestic [Robert, the British servant of the American Mr.
Herbert] had felt towards his master that sentiment of steadfast fidelity which
Naomi expresses to Ruth, in the beautiful language of Scripture, ‘Whither
thou goest I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be
my people, and thy God shall be my God; where thou diest will I die, and

58
there will I be buried. The Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death
part thee and me’” (I, 251–52). Williams’ use of the Bible contributes to her
self-presentation as a moral woman while commenting on political events and
underlining the importance of female solidarity. Naomi and Ruth, Freedom
and Philosophy, and Julia and Charlotte become the protagonists in this story
on the role of women in changing times. The disastrous effect of these ties’
destruction is presented by Frances Lawrence, whose letters relate Sophia’s
story: “I have been visiting the grave where the remains of my friend repose
[...] She is at rest, and this cruel war had made her happiness impossible.
Alas, how dreadful are the effects of war! Every form of evil and misery is in
its train: the groans of despair are mingled with the song of triumph, and the
laurels of victory are nourished with the tears of humanity” (I, 263). Frances’
record of Sophia’s life during the war focuses on women’s suffering. Sophia
becomes engulfed in the panicked crowd of women when she searches the
burning town for her brother: “Sophia [...] flew with precipitation towards the
town; but, as she approached, the sight of the spreading flames, the
tumultuous cries of the women, and the clash of arms, made her shrink back
involuntarily. She had, however, gone too far to retreat, and was mingled with
a crowd of helpless women and children, who were flying in desperation, they
knew not whither” (I, 247–48). Women and children are presented as the
victims of men’s actions. Sophia dies of grief because her lover’s “thirst for
military fame” (I, 243) led to his death. Captain F—’s ambition not only
destroys Sophia’s life, it also severely impacts her friend Frances: “I have
poured out my complaints; but the sorrow I feel is not for her, but for myself”
(I, 263). The destruction of this friendship serves as a warning to Julia and
Charlotte. Sophia’s story outlines the danger of letting Frederick Seymour’s
misguided infatuation cause a war that would transform Julia and Charlotte’s
idyllic cohabitation into a battlefield with the women’s friendship as the
primary casualty.
Warning against unbridled passion’s insalubrious effects therefore
constitutes a crucial element of Williams’ authorial self-presentation; she
fashions herself as a writer of didactic literature for young women:

Women have even greater reason than men to fortify their hearts against those strong
affections, which, when not regulated by discretion, plunge in aggravated misery that sex,
who, to use the words of an elegant and amiable writer, “cannot plunge into business, or
dissipate themselves in pleasure and riot, as men too often do, when under the pressure of
misfortunes; but must bear their sorrows in silence, unknown and unpitied; must often put
on a face of serenity and chearfulness, when their hearts are torn with anguish, or sinking in
despair.” Though a woman with rectitude of principle, will resolutely combat those feelings
which her reason condemns; yet, if they have been suffered to acquire force, the struggle
often proves too severe for the delicacy of the female frame; and, though reason, virtue, and

59
 piety, may sustain the conflict with the heart, life is frequently the atonement of its
weakness. (II, 239–40)

In a footnote, Williams identifies the “elegant and amiable writer” as John

Gregory (1724–1773). Gregory, a physician, was the author of the influential
A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters, a manual on the education of girls,
written after his wife’s death in 1761 and published posthumously in 1774.37
This is the same writer whom Mary Wollstonecraft will criticize with
“affectionate respect” in her 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Woman.38
Williams’ reference to Gregory, author of a widely disseminated yet
misogynist advice manual, which argues for women’s modesty and the
concealment of their learning, is another manifestation of her strategic
negotiation of social and literary conventions in her presentation of gender
roles. Williams adopts a conservative persona cautioning women against tales
of passion and the desire to base marriages on such sentiments. Quoting the
pedagogical writings of Gregory—and thereby seemingly subscribing to his
essentialization of gender roles—establishes the propriety of Williams’ work
while undermining such naturalized constructions of gender behavior.
While the novel confirms Dr. Gregory’s claim about the destructiveness of
strong affections, it turns his premise of women’s special vulnerability on its
head by establishing a male character, Frederick Seymour, as its prime victim.
Julia and Charlotte, who eventually learns of her husband’s passion for her
cousin, suffer from the strain of the situation, yet it is the “unhappy Seymour,
[who,] agitated by the utmost violence of conflicting passions, resembled one
of those plants which are scattered on the bleak mountains, undefended, and
exposed to all the fury of the elements” (Julia, I, 123). The “oppressive pain
in his head” (II, 225) turns into delirium: “Mr. Clifford and Julia sat by his
bed-side all night. He continued talking at intervals with the wildest
incoherence; sometimes raving of Julia, then fancying he was kneeling to
Charlotte for pardon, and calling to his infant to plead for him. Mr. Clifford
considered all he said as the inexplicable wanderings of frenzy; but Julia, who
well understood their force, listened to them with unutterable agony” (II,
231–32). Seymour’s condition worsens, and he eventually dies. The clash
between the overtly didactic passages and the actual plot establishes a tension
in the novel that forces readers to reconsider the relation between these
elements. Williams voices Gregory’s description of women’s susceptibility to

37
John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (London: Strahan, 1774).
38
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political
and Moral Subjects, ed. by Ulrich H. Hardt (Troy: Whitston Publishing Company, 1982), p.
209.

60
passion’s dangers only to demonstrate the limitations of his theory through a
case study of her male protagonist who gradually loses his reason.
The tension between explicitly didactic passages and the novel’s case
studies also permeates the discussion of love and passion as the basis for
marriage, which acquired particular currency in the eighteenth century. In
Love as Passion, Niklas Luhmann argues that reciprocal feelings were
becoming increasingly important as reasons for agreeing or refusing to marry
someone.39 Julia, who “revolted at the idea of marrying where she did not
love” (I, 187–88), reflects this development. Yet Julia’s echoing of the new
discourse is couched within a didactic passage cautioning against basing
marriage on “romantic feelings”:

It must be acknowledged, that the young people of the present age have in general the
wisdom to repress those romantic feelings which used to triumph over ambition and avarice,
and have adopted the prudent maxims of maturer life. Marriage is now founded on the solid
basis of convenience, and love is an article commonly omitted in the treaty. But Julia, who
had passed her life in retirement, was not so far advanced in the lessons of the world. Her
heart, delicate, yet fervent in its affections, capable of the purest attachment, revolted at the
idea of marrying where she did not love; and, though she was now unhappy, she determined
not to fly from her present evils to a species of wretchedness, of all others the most
intolerable to a mind of her disposition. (I, 187–88)

The passage’s didactic voice praises young people’s repression of romantic

feelings in favor of the considerations of maturer life. In addition, the focus
on love is presented as a passing fad since “young people of the present age”
“now” base marriage on convenience. Julia’s refusal of her numerous suitors
is couched in a conservative discourse, which creates a tension regarding the
philosophy of marriage. The tension in this specific passage permeates the
entire novel and transforms it into irony. “Convenience,” “ambition,” and
“avarice” are presented as a “solid basis” for marriage, yet the case studies of
various characters suffering precisely because of such attachments contradict
this statement. Williams echoes regressive and misogynist statements—such
as Dr. Gregory’s—and then undermines their claim to absolute truth. The
story of Miss Forbes, a secondary character in the novel, is a particularly
forceful example of this point. The death of Miss Forbes’ parents leaves her
without resources or shelter. A newlywed couple welcomes Miss Forbes into
their home, but the husband makes improper advances and Miss Forbes
decides to abandon this arrangement. As a woman without means, her only
escape is marrying Captain Meynell, who, “it was said [...] had a good deal of

39
Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, trans. by Jeremy Gaines
and Doris L. Jones (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986).

61
money in the stocks” (II, 74). Yet, soon after the marriage, it is revealed “that
Captain Meynell had no money at all, and only married her in hopes that her
great friends would provide for him” (II, 76). The exploitation of Miss Forbes
does not stop at this point. It is revealed that the marriage to Meynell was her
original benefactor’s scheme to “get her more into his own clutches” (II, 76)
and “keep her for his own vile ends” (II, 75–76). The above-praised motives
of ambition and avarice are at the basis of this marriage of convenience,
which turns out not to be convenient at all for Miss Forbes. This is only one
of the numerous unhappy marriages described in the novel’s various subplots,
Charlotte and Seymour’s being another. Even though their attachment was not
based on an extreme interpretation of the idea of convenience, it is no more
viable than Miss Forbes’. At the same time, the novel only presents love in its
extreme manifestation, passion. Passion results from the impossibility to
attain the love object and therefore only exists outside of the matrimonial
relationship. The novel shows love and marriage as occupying different
realms and thereby portrays the dilemma of many contemporaries, namely the
impossibility to combine these two elements in practice.
Marriage and romantic love are presented as undesirable human attach-
ments. The only functioning relationships are those between Charlotte and
Julia, Liberty and Philosophy, Ruth and Naomi, and Sophia Herbert and
Frances Lawrence. Female friendship becomes the most reliable form of
interpersonal interaction. In the main plot, Seymour’s death not only
demonstrates the shortcomings of marriages of convenience and passion’s
devastating effects but also becomes a necessary precondition for Williams’
alternative social vision based on women’s friendship. Whereas in Julie, the
dying female protagonist hopes to be reunited with her lover after death, in
Julia, the man dies, rendering a complete reconciliation between Julia and
Charlotte possible. In a fateful twist, it is the birth of Seymour’s son that
reconciles the cousins and strengthens their friendship. Charlotte’s hope that,
after the birth of their child, “Seymour would have an additional reason for
loving her” (II, 160) does not come true. Instead, the birth allows the cousins
to overcome the alienation caused by the revelation of Frederick’s passion:
“When Charlotte’s hour of danger approached, she intreated Julia to come
and stay at her house during her confinement. Julia was gratified by this mark
of confidence, but excused herself from staying in the house; promising, at the
same time, to spend with Charlotte the greatest part of every day” (II, 224).
While Seymour’s misguided infatuation had been a source of discord for the
cousins, his offspring becomes a reconciling force. Julia nurses her cousin
back to health when, after the birth, Charlotte is afflicted with a fever and
“Julia, terrified at her danger, no longer hesitated to remain at the house;

62
where she scarcely quitted her bed-side for a moment, and attended her with
unremitting care” (II, 224–25). Charlotte’s weakness strengthens Julia—who,
as a result of the tension, had also grown “pale and thin, lost her appetite, and
her health [had] sensibly declined” (II, 213). The intensity of the female bond
is an important factor in her own and in Charlotte’s recovery, who “at length
[...] regained her health, and found comfort in her infant, whom she nursed
herself, and in whom she centered all her hopes and affections” (II, 241–42).
Their friendship heals their individual bodies in the same way that Liberty
and Philosophy’s mutual support mends the suffering body politic in “The
Bastille.” After Seymour’s death, Julia and Charlotte form an alternative
social sphere from which men in their function as husbands, suitors, and
soldiers are excluded while other women such as Miss Forbes are welcomed
and integrated.
Williams was part of an increasing number of women authors who devised
female communities as self-sufficient spheres of existence.40 In this alternative
social sphere, respect, friendship, and kindness are the key principles that
unite the characters. Williams’ presentation of female bonding in this safe
space has the characteristics of what Janet Todd terms “sentimental
friendship”:

Sentimental friendship is a close, effusive tie, revelling in rapture and rhetoric. Unlike the
sentimental romance which so often ruins, it aids and saves, providing close emotional
support in a patriarchal world. If heterosexual love has proved violent or painful, it may
even threaten and replace this love. Outside the text, sentimental friendship becomes a
means of befriending the female reader; through her relationship with her friend, the heroine
can display her exemplary state, and under her mask of sentiment, stand as a model for
other young ladies who may unwisely yearn to stray.41

Charlotte and Julia create an all-female community that enables their

existence outside heterosexual relationships and allows other women such as
Miss Forbes to seek refuge from the disappointments of love and social
constraints. Williams’ use of a virtue-in-distress narrative rather than an
epistolary romance allows her to present her protagonist as an example of
moral conduct:

40
For an insightful exploration of alternative ways of life for women during this time period,
see Alessa Johns, Women’s Utopias of the Eighteenth Century (Urbana and Chicago: U of
Illinois P, 2003) and Rebecca D’Monté and Nicole Pohl, eds., Female Communities 1600–
1800: Literary Visions and Cultural Realities (London: Macmillan, 2000).
41
Janet Todd, Women’s Friendship in Literature (New York: Columbia UP, 1980), p. 3.

63
 She found consolation in the duties of religion, the exercise of benevolence, and the society
of persons of understanding and merit. To such people her acquaintance was highly
valuable, and she lived admired, respected, and beloved. She refuted many honourable
offers of marriage, and devoted much of her time to the improvement of Seymour’s child,
whom she loved with the most partial fondness. But the idea of its father still continued, at
times, to embitter the satisfaction of her life; which, but for that one unconquered weakness,
would have been, above the common lot, fortunate and happy. (II, 244–45)

Even though Julia’s ambiguous sentiments for Seymour are never fully
explored in the novel, this passage emphasizes their centrality in her moral
struggle. She never strays from the path of rectitude yet remains troubled by
her barely acknowledged and never explored attraction to Seymour, her
“unconquered weakness.” Using a morally irreproachable character to
demonstrate the negative outcome of both marriages of convenience and
romantic love allows Williams to construct her novel as exemplary reading
material for young women while offering her audience alternate social models
based on female bonding and solidarity.
This female community provides the novel’s scarred and emotionally
bruised women with a legitimate sphere of existence outside the bounds of
marriage. Yet the novel points at the precariousness of this alternative
because the women have no means of independent subsistence. They remain
dependent on patriarchal power structures. They live under the roof of
Charlotte’s father who made his fortune in the East Indies and receive further
financial support from Miss Forbes through the intermediary of her husband:
“Mrs. Meynell [Miss Forbes], on the departure of her husband for India, was
received into Mr. Clifford’s family, where she was treated with every mark of
respect and kindness. Captain Meynell, a few years after, died in India; and
the fortune he had acquired was transmitted to his wife, who still continued to
live in Mr. Clifford’s family” (II, 242). The colonial enterprise, in which both
Captain Meynell and Charlotte’s father participated, serves the financial well-
being of the female characters. Julia’s alternative community protects helpless
women from evil men at the same that it depends on the financial support
derived from the colonial activities of benevolent fathers and dead husbands.
Julia and Charlotte’s relative independence becomes possible only because of
the dependence of colonized subjects. The novel does not resolve this tension.
Julia thereby points at the limited means available to eighteenth-century
women to earn their subsistence while continuing to maintain the appearance
of propriety and decorum. Julia and Charlotte’s alternative female community
is only possible because of their male relatives’ wealth. That this solution was
not available to all eighteenth-century women is demonstrated by the author’s

64
careful and strategic negotiation of writing as a means of securing an income
with discourses regarding appropriate gender behavior.
Considering Williams’ Julia in the context of the late-eighteenth-century
literary marketplace and its conventions of gender and genre allows for an
analysis that both uncovers and transcends a nineteenth-century reception
focused on Williams’ supposed national disloyalty and impropriety. By
writing from France for an English-speaking audience, Williams occupied a
precarious social and political position. She therefore carefully navigated
contemporary discourses of gender and politics, both echoing and
strategically questioning their presuppositions. Her novel is a palimpsest, the
total meaning of which exceeds the sum of its constituent parts. The various
narrative levels interact in such a way that the domestic setting of the main
plot is intimately intertwined with the political references in the various
subplots. Julia’s body is not the only one that comes under attack; the body
politic is also in turmoil. The novel describes a society in transition, marked
by enthusiasm for the principles of equality and liberty yet also by fear of
their corruption through greediness, avarice, and political calculation. The
stories of Charlotte and Julia, Liberty and Philosophy, Ruth and Naomi, and
Sophie Herbert and Frances Lawrence are strategic ways of inserting political
material into the novel while outlining an alternate, peaceful, all-female social
model, the utopian character of which this woman author’s careful acts of
self-positioning forcefully illustrate.

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Chapter 2

Adventurous Tales: Ellis Cornelia Knight’s Dinarbas;

a Tale: Being a Continuation of Rasselas, Prince of
Abissinia

Like Helen Maria Williams’ Julia, Ellis Cornelia Knight’s (1757–1837)

Dinarbas; a Tale: Being a Continuation of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia
(1790) explicitly invokes the text of a well-known male author, Samuel
Johnson’s 1759 The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. Knight
responds to Johnson’s Rasselas by taking the title of his last chapter, “The
conclusion, in which nothing is concluded,” as her justification for writing
Dinarbas. In her introduction, she refers to “Sir John Hawkins [who], in his
life of Dr. Johnson, says, ‘that the writer had an intention of marrying his
hero, and placing him in a state of permanent felicity.’”1 Knight quotes the
statement made by Johnson’s biographer in 17872 in order to justify her work:
“This passage suggested the idea of the continuation now offered, with the
greatest diffidence, to the reader, and without any thought of a vain and

1
Ellis Cornelia Knight, Dinarbas; a Tale: Being a Continuation of Rasselas, Prince of
Abissinia, ed. by Ann Messenger (East Lansing: East Lansing Colleagues Press, 1993), p. 9.
All further references to this novel will be to this edition and will be made parenthetically
within the text.
2
Hawkins describes Johnson’s intent as follows: “The tale of Rasselas was written to answer
a pressing necessity, and was so concluded as to admit of a continuation; and, in fact,
Johnson had meditated a second part, in which he meant to marry his hero, and place him in
a state of permanent felicity: but it fared with this resolution as it did with that of Dr.
Young, who, in his estimate of human life, promised, as he had given the dark, so, in a
future publication, he would display the bright side of his subject; he never did it, for he had
found out that it had no bright side, and Johnson had much the same discovery, and that in
this state of our existence all our enjoyments are fugacious, and permanent felicity is
unattainable” (John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson (New York: Macmillan, 1961),
p. 157). The “pressing necessity” that Hawkins mentions was a financial one. Johnson wrote
and published Rasselas quickly, either to provide for his mother in her last illness or,
according to James Boswell, to pay for her funeral and some of her debts (James Boswell,
The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., 2 vols. (New York: George Routledge and Sons, 1892),
I, p. 195). Hawkins’ reference to a future publication clearly serves as a springboard for
Knight’s text, which she constructs in opposition to Hawkins’ conclusion that Johnson
viewed permanent happiness as an unattainable goal.
presumptuous comparison; as every attempt to imitate the energetic stile,
strong imagery, and profound knowledge, of the author of Rasselas, would be
equally rash with that of the suitors to bend the bow of Ulysses” (9). Modestly
bowing before Johnson’s authority by claiming that she is neither vain nor
presumptuous and is in “want of genius and literary fame” (10) are moves
typical for women authors of the time, enabling them to publish their stories
while echoing the contemporary discourse of female propriety and privacy.
As the analysis of Helen Maria Williams’ Julia has demonstrated, flattery of
literary authorities and self-belittling gestures are central elements of this
strategy of what Ros Ballaster calls “self-conscious display of incommen-
surability.”3 Yet even though Knight claims that her tale is secondary to
Rasselas, it soon becomes clear that she has no intention of quietly existing in
Johnson’s shadow. In Dinarbas, Knight employs existing literary and social
conventions in strategic ways that allow her to appear nonthreatening to the
status quo while carving out a space for divergence at a time when the
Western European body politic was undergoing violent and tumultuous
change.
Knight’s strategic response to Johnson was a factor in the novel’s success
in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. Dinarbas was
published in several editions and translated into various languages.4 Con-
temporary reviews were generally positive. Although there were objections to
Knight’s supposed impertinence of rethinking Johnson’s narrative premise,

3
Ros Ballaster, “Women and the Rise of the Novel: Sexual Prescripts” in Women and
Literature in Britain 1700–1800, ed. by Vivien Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000),
pp. 197–216 (p. 197). Various critics have discussed the ambivalence of these self-belittling
gestures. For insightful analyses, see Ballaster, Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the
Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and
Jane Austen (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1984), and Cheryl Turner, Living by
the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge,
1992).
4
Knight’s strategic balancing act paid off during her lifetime: “Five editions of Dinarbas
alone were published in England in Ellis Cornelia Knight’s lifetime (1790, 1792, 1793,
1800, 1811); others were published as an additional volume of Rasselas, and several
appeared in the United States” (Ann Messenger, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Dinarbas: a
Tale; Being a Continuation of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, ed. by Ann Messenger (East
Lansing: East Lansing Colleagues Press, 1993), pp. 1–6 (p. 5)). C.J. Rawson states that
“there were at least ten editions by 1820” (Claude J. Rawson, “The Continuation of
Rasselas,” in Bicentenary Essays on Rasselas, ed. by Magdi Wahba (Cairo: Société
Orientale de Publicité, 1959), pp. 85–95 (p. 86)). In addition, Barbara Luttrell mentions that
“Dinarbas was translated into French and Italian … and reached four English editions by
1800” (Barbara Luttrell, The Prim Romantic: A Biography of Ellis Cornelia Knight 1758–
1837 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965), p. 87).

68
her literary production was treated with respect.5 Despite Dinarbas’ popular
and critical success during the author’s lifetime, the novel gradually fell into
oblivion during the course of the nineteenth century. By the twentieth century,
the novel had largely become absent from literary histories, mainly due to the
general neglect of women’s contributions to the history of the novel. When, in
the second half of the twentieth century, Dinarbas slowly reemerged in
critical discussions due to renewed interest in Rasselas on the occasion of the
novel’s bicentenary anniversary, Knight’s novel was frequently dismissed as
inferior because of its supposed audaciousness, as a 1959 article by C.J.
Rawson demonstrates. Rawson summarizes the plot of Dinarbas and con-
cludes that Knight’s text is an example of “the minor fiction of the period”; he
characterizes Dinarbas by the “cheerful incomprehension of its original” and
argues that Knight “never really meets Johnson on his own terms.”6 Rawson
argues that examples of Johnsonian “cadence or sentiment [. . .] do not make
Miss Knight’s book Johnsonian.”7 This article exemplifies a strain of
criticism that does not take Knight’s text on its own terms but, instead,
focuses on the author’s shortcomings at imitating Johnson.8 As Robert
Uphaus observes, Rawson’s perception of Dinarbas as a failed sequel to
Rasselas was perpetuated in the 1970s, and, instead of exploring the
significance of her divergence from Rasselas, Knight was blamed for her
presumptuousness.9

5
Fanny Burney even recommended the novel as reading material to the Queen’s daughters.
Burney’s reaction is symptomatic of the contemporary reception: “If you can forgive the
presumption of the idea, I think you must be pleased with the execution” (Quoted in
Luttrell, p. 86).
6
Rawson, p. 91, p. 92, p. 94.
7
Ibid., p. 87.
8
In 1965, even Knight’s twentieth-century biographer, Barbara Luttrell, praised what she
calls Rawson’s “lucid and detailed appraisal of Dinarbas” while arguing that Knight should
not be blamed for her efforts: “Dinarbas, judged as a sequel, was a failure both in degree
and in concept, but there were many who had read Rasselas, and many more who had not,
who were to enjoy it for its own sake; and no one could blame the youthful author too
harshly for her inability to match Johnson in philosophy or acquired wisdom. Her story has
its own merits: a neat plot, action—impossible though some of the adventures are that befall
the quartet of lovers—and at least an attempt at convincing characterization” (Luttrell, p.
86). Luttrell considers Dinarbas to be a failure as a sequel. She recognizes that Knight’s text
only superficially fits this description and that it has its own merits. Yet, by implicitly
deferring to Rawson’s judgment, the assessment of Dinarbas as a text in its own right is
undermined.
9
For a concise overview of the reception history of Dinarbas from the eighteenth to the
twentieth century, see Robert W. Uphaus, “Cornelia Knight’s Dinarbas: A Sequel to
Rasselas,” Philological Quarterly, 65.4 (Fall 1986), 433–46. For a discussion of Knight’s
novel in the context of other responses to Rasselas, see Jessica Richard, “’I am Equally

69
 While the dismissal of Dinarbas reflects a general reticence to rethink the
eighteenth-century literary canon, it also correlates with a specific issue in
Johnson criticism, namely the construction of Johnson’s Rasselas as the locus
criticus, the key text for understanding Johnson’s work:

Rasselas has been the most widely read and continuously commented upon of all of
Johnson’s writings. Since its publication in 1759 hardly a year has gone by that has not
produced a new edition of or essay upon the text. Even during the nineteenth century, when
Johnson’s own writings were neglected in favor of Boswell’s Life, Rasselas continued to be
reissued and analyzed. In fact, because of the Victorian neglect of the Johnson canon,
Rasselas is the only one of Johnson’s literary works with a continuous critical history.10

Rasselas’ ambivalent genre has been a main issue for discussion. As

Tomarken observes, “After nearly two and a half centuries of almost
continuous dispute, critics are still unable to decide whether Rasselas is a
novel, oriental tale, or apologue and whether its conclusion is to be seen in
religious or secular terms.”11 This discussion has impacted the reception of
Knight’s Dinarbas. Critics struggling with the complex nature of Johnson’s
text have been reticent to consider Dinarbas seriously for fear of further
complicating the analysis of Rasselas. Taking Knight’s subtitle, Dinarbas,
Being a Continuation of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, on a literal level has
allowed critics to dismiss the novel as unoriginal and presumptuous and
thereby to neglect its complex textual politics. Only recently have critics
begun to study Dinarbas in its own right, a development that correlates with
the publication of new editions of Knight’s text after nearly two centuries of
neglect.12 Considering Dinarbas within the framework of writing back allows
for an analysis of this woman author’s negotiation of the eighteenth-century
literary marketplace and discourses regarding gender and publication.
In order to justify her decision to publish Dinarbas and to maintain her
propriety, Knight engages in a careful balancing act that reflects the author’s

Weary of Confinement:’ Women Writers and Rasselas from Dinarbas to Jane Eyre,” Tulsa
Studies in Women’s Literature, 22.2 (2003), 335–56.
10
Edward Tomarken, Johnson, Rasselas, and the Choice of Criticism (Lexington: UP of
Kentucky, 1989), p. 5.
11
Ibid., p. 5.
12
Two new editions of Dinarbas were published in 1993 and 1994: Ellis Cornelia Knight,
Dinarbas: a Tale; Being a Continuation of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, ed. by Ann
Messenger (East Lansing: East Lansing Colleagues Press, 1993) and Ellis Cornelia Knight,
Dinarbas; A Tale: Being a Continuation of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, ed. by Lynne
Meloccaro (London: Dent, 1994). A joint edition of Dinarbas and Rasselas was also
published: Lynne Meloccaro, ed., Dinarbas and Rasselas (North Clarendon: Everyman’s
Classic Library, 1994).

70
complex relation to literary and social authority. The novel’s genesis is
intertwined with the financial situation faced by the family in 1775 after the
death of Knight’s father and provider, Sir John Knight, a naval officer who
had been knighted and promoted to rear admiral of the White. Knight’s
mother had applied for a government pension without success, and the family
was facing difficult times. Publishing was one of the few means for a middle-
class woman to engage in financially remunerative activity in the late
eighteenth century.13 Even so, conforming to gendered expectations of
propriety in the publicity of the literary marketplace was an important concern
for women writers. Knight’s mother claimed that Dinarbas was written for
her private enjoyment when she was ill rather for than public fame, which
constituted one of the strategies employed in marketing Knight’s writing.14
Publishing anonymously and delegating negotiations with the publisher to a
family friend were other strategic decisions taken to disassociate Knight from
the public aspect of the literary marketplace.15 This cautious self-positioning
was important in responding to a popular text by a well-known author, whom
Knight knew personally. However, her identity soon became known. On the
one hand, writing what she herself called a “continuation” of Rasselas
provided the opportunity for success and financial reward. Yet on the other, it
invited comparisons to Johnson by literary critics and book reviewers.
Moreover, Knight risked alienating Johnson himself, a family friend who, as
she put it in her Autobiography, “was always kind to me, but he was very
intimate at our house, had a high opinion of my father, and conversed
willingly with my mother.”16 Knight had known Johnson since her childhood:
“When I first knew Dr. Johnson, I was a little afraid of his deep tone of voice
and great wig; but when I had reached my seventh or eighth year, I was
accustomed to all this, and felt grateful for his indulgence.”17 In her

13
For an insightful discussion of writing as a financially remunerative activity for women in
the eighteenth century, see Cheryl Turner, Living by the Pen: Women Writers in the
Eighteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).
14
Barbara Luttrell quotes a letter from Ellis Cornelia Knight to one of her friends, in which
she reports her mother’s presentation of Dinarbas: “My child (she announced) is now about
to put into the world a work written to amuse me in illness, which has had the happiness of
meeting the approbation of some friends. She publishes it, not from vanity, but to make up
in some sort to me the reduction in our little pittance by the lease of our house being
expired” (Luttrell, p. 84).
15
The family friend was the dramatist and translator John Hoole, who negotiated publication
of Dinarbas with the London publishing house Dilly.
16
Ellis Cornelia Knight, Autobiography of Miss Cornelia Knight, Lady Companion to the
Princess Charlotte of Wales, 2 vols (London: W. H. Allen and Co., 1861), I, p. 12.
17
Ibid., I, p. 14.

71
Autobiography, written during the last years of her life, Knight describes
Johnson as a venerable yet sympathetic man, yet she also undermines his aura
by relating less positive character traits. When in 1776, the nineteen-year-old
Cornelia and her widowed mother were leaving for comparatively cheaper
continental Europe, Johnson alienated the daughter: “When I went abroad,
Dr. Johnson gave me his blessing, and exhorted me not to become a Roman
Catholic, adding, that ‘if I extended my belief, I might at length turn Turk.’ I
was insensible of the goodness of the advice, because I knew it to be
unnecessary, and was therefore hurt at the supposition.”18 Johnson’s
insinuations of her immaturity and susceptibility to foreign influences hurt the
teenager and were vividly remembered and recounted by the old lady who
spent much of her adult life abroad.19 Relating Johnson’s comments in her
autobiography constitutes a retrospective justification of her conception of
Dinarbas. Knight underlines that Johnson—one of the celebrated authors of
her time—was, after all, just a flawed human being and that, therefore, it was
not presumptuous to respond to his tale.20 Knight’s strategic mix of deference
and defiance was crucial in her self-presentation and the creation of a new
tale that would interest and intrigue readers.
Knight, who socialized with Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund
Burke, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, was well-positioned on the literary
scene to gain access to publication venues. At the same time, however, her
relation to the author of Rasselas shows that she occupied an uneasy position

18
Ibid., I, pp. 14–15.
19
As an expatriate, Knight had to preempt the accusation of national disloyalty insinuated by
Johnson before her departure. Therefore, Knight highlighted her allegiance to the British
nation in a manner similar to Williams’ praise of England as the “blessed isle” in “The
Bastille.” In her Autobiography, Knight describes her reaction to Admiral Nelson’s victory
over the French fleet in the Battle of the Nile (1798) while she is in Naples. She expresses
her national pride by painting a lively picture of the “shouts, bursts of applause, [and] the
toasts drank” (Knight, Autobiography, I, p. 111) when the King of Naples welcomes
Nelson’s ship: “Bands of music played our national airs […] No Englishman or
Englishwoman can hear those airs without emotion in a foreign land, however trifling may
be the effect they produce in our own country; but under such circumstances as these they
created a powerful excitement” (Knight, Autobiography, I, p. 115). At the same time that
Knight, the expatriate, expresses relief at being in a place sympathetic to the English, her
depiction of national pride also serves to flatter those on whom she would become
dependent after her mother’s death.
20
Another belittling remark by Johnson is related by Barbara Luttrell. The night before the
Knights’ departure for Europe, Johnson had apparently said, referring to Ellis Cornelia’s
unusual height: “‘Go, my dear, for you are too big for an island’” (Luttrell, p. 39). Even
though the veracity of such assertions is difficult to ascertain, their recording points at a
tension in the relationship between Knight and Johnson.

72
with respect to literary authority. Knight’s strategic presentation of Dinarbas,
a direct engagement with Johnson’s tale, illustrates one of the efforts of
negotiating her privileged yet precarious relationships with literary and social
patrons. Dinarbas was written during her mother’s lifetime, a period of
intense literary patronage, which was followed by an era of social patronage
intimately entwined with the political developments of the late eighteenth
century. Before she died in 1799, Knight’s mother “had particularly
commended me to their [Lord Nelson’s and Sir William Hamilton’s] care.”21
By enlisting the protection of Hamilton, British ambassador to the court of
Naples, and of Nelson, the most celebrated admiral of the French
Revolutionary Wars, Knight’s mother had attempted to secure her daughter’s
social, financial, and emotional welfare. Knight, without any financial or
emotional family support after her mother’s death, became part of Hamilton
and Nelson’s entourage from 1800 to 1805. She accompanied Hamilton and
Nelson on a triumphal return back to England. Yet Knight’s fortune changed
when she discovered Nelson’s illicit affair with Hamilton’s wife, Emma, that
had begun in 1798. She was in a difficult situation: “Most of my friends were
very urgent with me to drop the acquaintance, but, circumstanced as I had
been, I feared the charge of ingratitude, though greatly embarrassed as to
what to do, for things became very unpleasant.”22 Although she wanted to
distance herself from the illicit affair, she felt loyal towards those who helped
her in difficult circumstances.
Instead of openly alienating her benefactors, Knight gradually distanced
herself from Nelson and the Hamiltons and formed new social connections
that allowed her to secure a different type of livelihood:

One morning in March, 1805, Lady Aylesbury communicated to me the queen’s wishes
with regard to myself. Her Majesty had been pleased to express a desire that I should be
attached to her person without any particular employment [. . .] Her Majesty added, that she
would allow me three hundred pounds a year, and that I should be present at her evening
parties, when invited, and always on Sundays and red-letter days, and be ready to attend
upon her in the morning when required to do so; but that I should have leave to visit my
friends.23

Knight emphasizes her modesty by mentioning that she accepted this position
“gratefully, and the more so that it was unsolicited on my part.” Knight would
act as lady companion to the queen’s granddaughter, Princess Charlotte. This
position was fitting considering Fanny Burney’s recommendation of Dinarbas

21
Knight, Autobiography, I, p. 138.
22
Ibid., I, p. 162.
23
Ibid., I, p. 168.

73
as appropriate reading material for the queen’s female offspring. The royal
family provided for Knight’s financial as well as her intellectual needs
because the queen “was fond of reading aloud, either in French or English,
and I had my work. Her library […] was well furnished with books in those
languages and in German, and she was so good as to give me a key, with
permission to take home any that I liked.”24 The title of her autobiography—
Autobiography of Miss Cornelia Knight, Lady Companion to the Princess
Charlotte of Wales—points at the importance of these nine years (1805–
1814), as does the fact she devotes half of her account to this period. The
social and financial security experienced in the royal household was upended
when, in 1814, amid the political turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars, Knight was
dismissed by the regent, apparently for not preventing meetings between
Princess Charlotte, the regent’s daughter, and her secret lover.25 Knight’s
autobiography remains vague on this issue; keeping her respectability intact
in this situation was as important as it was ten years earlier when she
discovered Nelson and Lady Hamilton’s illicit relationship. In a letter, she
describes her feelings upon her dismissal: “I mean no complaint against the
Regent. I was much hurt when he dismissed me, and felt angry; for which
reason I made apologies in my letter, though I am not conscious of having
said or done anything to offend him.”26 This letter demonstrates Knight’s
awareness that maintaining her good reputation was crucial for securing her
future livelihood.
Once more, Knight finds herself alone and abandoned by authority and
friends. She describes her efforts at securing an adequate income:

I wrote to inquire about the time of payment of my pension, when I heard of it from Lord
Liverpool the last time I was at Rochetts. I was advised by Lord St. Vincent to explain to
Lord Liverpool how inadequate it was as a compensation to what I had with the Queen, as,
besides the 300 l. a year, I had apartments, &c. I saw Lord Liverpool on this subject, and
showed him letters which contained great promises: but nothing more was done, and I am
tired of the subject, being at the same time truly thankful to Providence that I am in the
situation in which I am. I have received for answer to my last inquiries, that it is dated 28th
October, and that the first quarter will not be paid for some time.27

24
Ibid., I, p. 169, 170.
25
Princess Charlotte’s secret lover was Frederick William Henry Augustus, nephew to
Frederick the Great. Their relationship eventually led the princess to cause a scandal by
breaking off her engagement to William, Prince of Orange (Luttrell, pp. 184–86).
26
Knight, Autobiography, II, p. 11.
27
Ibid., II, pp. 29–30.

74
Knight was as dependent on compensation from the government as her
mother, who, despite her efforts, never managed to secure a pension. Luttrell
relates that, “after a disdainful silence he [the Prime Minister] informed her
that the salary she had received from the Queen, £300 a year, was to be
continued. Cornelia’s reminder that at Warwick House it had been £500 was
answered with a cold bow. Asked when the pension would begin, Lord
Liverpool said distantly that it depended on what money was in the
Exchequer.”28 Faced with these vague promises, Knight spent the remainder
of her life moving back and forth between England and continental Europe
fueled by feelings of alienation and financial worries.29
Knight’s negotiation of her precarious social position is reflected both in
her Autobiography, written at the end of her life, and in Dinarbas, published
in 1790. Dinarbas illustrates how the genre of fiction could be used
strategically by an author such as Knight to comment on the social and
political upheaval in the late eighteenth century. Knight’s novel allowed her
to highlight her propriety while subtly engaging social debates. By
maintaining the physical displacement of her model—Johnson’s tale takes
place in the half-real, half-legendary kingdom of Abissinia—Knight achieves
two things: she dutifully pays homage to Johnson’s fictional craft while
allowing oblique social commentary in this fashionably remote setting.30 Yet,
whereas in Rasselas the Abissinian setting serves as a backdrop for the
characters’ philosophical discussions about life, in Dinarbas Knight explores
the narrative possibilities of the exotic terrain to create a story that, as Ann
Messenger puts it, is a “much busier book than Rasselas, with battles,

28
Luttrell, p. 195.
29
For extensive information on Knight’s life, see her two-volume Autobiography of Miss
Cornelia Knight, Lady Companion to the Princess Charlotte of Wales, Barbara Luttrell’s
biography, The Prim Romantic, and Lady Eliott-Drake, ed., Lady Knight’s Letters from
France and Italy 1776–1795 (London: A. Humphreys, 1905).
30
The origins of the discourse on Abissinia can be traced back to Herodotus’s History, in
which the Abissinian—one of the people that the historian encounters during his travels—is
described as being “scorched on the burning sands that surround him” (Herodotus, The
History, trans. by George Rawlinson (New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1947), p. 93).
In the medieval period, Abissinia became the dominion of the legendary Christian king,
Prester John, and was thought to be located in modern-day Ethiopia. In historiography,
Abissinia has always been a mythical domain, an overdetermined signifier inscribed with
cultural conflicts and ideologies. For an insightful account of Abissinia as this mythical
locus in Rasselas, see M. Van Wyk Smith, “Father Lobo, Ethiopia, and the Transkei; or,
Why Rasselas Was Not a Mpondo Prince,” The Journal of African Travel Writing, 4
(1986), 5–16.

75
treachery, politics, love affairs, and other adventures.”31 Knight explores the
malleability of the fictional genre by integrating narrative elements from
romances, thereby creating a hybrid textual form that is as difficult to classify
as Johnson’s Rasselas. This strategic fusion of an old and a new narrative
tradition allows Knight to diverge from her predecessor. In Knight’s text, the
characters thematize socially and politically contentious issues through their
actions, whereas in Rasselas they merely discuss and philosophize about
them. Her characters undergo adventures, encounter obstacles, and engage in
battles to prove their honor, which allows Knight to enact questions of
leadership and social class. In addition, the characters’ amorous quests
illustrate the relation between the sexes and the connection between love and
marriage. This allows her to thematize two elements simultaneously, an
individual’s public role in society and his/her private identity, of which the
domestic forms only one, if an important, part. At the same time that her
novel reflects the discursive binary of the public and the private sphere, it also
acknowledges the limitations of this construct since her characters’ actions
repeatedly demonstrate the interdependence of these domains.
Whereas Knight’s characters enact the intermingling of the public and
private aspects of love and marriage, Johnson’s Rasselas and Nekayah merely
discuss marital relationships. In their discussions, Johnson’s siblings disagree
on the utility of marriage. Rasselas claims that “marriage is evidently the
dictate of nature; men and women were made to be companions of each other,
and therefore I cannot be persuaded but that marriage is one of the means of
happiness.”32 Nekayah disagrees with her brother’s conviction that humans
are guided by an instinctual matrimonial drive. She cites examples of early
and late marriages, where, on the one hand, the couple, once married,
“discover[s] what nothing but voluntary blindness had before concealed” or,
on the other, husband and wife realize that “long customs are not easily
broken.”33 Yet Rasselas maintains hope for a positive outcome of these
institutionalized attachments: “The union of these two affections, said
Rasselas, would produce all that could be wished. Perhaps there is a time
when marriage might unite them, a time neither too early for the father, nor
too late for the husband.”34 While Nekayah considers the desires of both
husband and wife, Rasselas highlights only the interests of the father and

31
Ann Messenger, His and Hers: Essays in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature
(Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1986), p. 201.
32
Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (London: Oxford UP, 1971),
p. 73.
33
Ibid., pp. 76–77.
34
Ibid., p. 78.

76
husband. This patriarchal logic also manifests itself in Rasselas’ thoughts on
the issue of personal choice: “But surely, interposed the prince, you suppose
the chief motive of choice forgotten or neglected. Whenever I shall seek a
wife, it shall be my first question, whether she be willing to be led by
reason?”35 In Johnson’s book, this moment never arrives: Rasselas remains a
bachelor. The tension in the siblings’ discussion regarding marriage and
personal choice is never resolved; it becomes one of the unanswered
questions about what Johnson calls the “choice of life” in his text.
By contrast, Knight’s additions to Johnson’s cast of characters allow for a
narrative enactment of various matrimonial scenarios. In addition to
Johnson’s protagonists—Rasselas, his sister Nekayah, her servant Pekuah, the
philosopher Imlac, and the astronomer—Knight’s novel is peopled by
characters whom the original cast encounters at a fortress on the Abissinian
border: the governor Amalphis, his son Dinarbas and his daughter Zilia, and
the priest Elphenor. By introducing a new set of siblings, Dinarbas and Zilia,
who are roughly the same age as Rasselas and Nekayah, Knight creates the
possibility of a relationship that transcends the mere friendship uniting
Johnson’s characters. This possibility manifests itself early on; we hear of
Rasselas’ interest in Zilia’s “irresistible charm” (23) and of Dinarbas’
attraction to the “natural sweetness of her [Nekayah’s] temper” (23). The
focus on the men’s attraction might indicate a duplication of the patriarchal
logic of Johnson’s Rasselas, yet Knight’s novel is guided by different
premises. When her Rasselas asks Amalphis for permission to marry his
daughter Zilia, the father disregards social conventions by invoking his
daughter’s right of choice:

as for your request, Sir, I thank you for the honour you are disposed to confer on my family;
but, contrary to the custom of our country, I disclaim all right over the choice of Zilia: if she
consents, I shall be happy to bestow her on a man, whose conduct and principles I have ever
esteemed, and whose kindness I am ambitious to preserve: permit me to consult her
inclinations; Zilia is sincere, and will soon determine my answer. (68)

Although Knight has a male character speak on behalf of women, she

attributes to him a socially contested statement regarding marriage practices
that carries the authority of his position on the fictional social hierarchy.
Amalphis allows his daughter to choose her partner, which reflects the
gradual move away from marriages of convenience to marriages based on, if
not love, at least mutual affection. Knight uses patriarchal authority to subvert
the patriarchal order in a similar way to Helen Maria Williams in her Julia.

35
Ibid., p. 77, my italics.

77
 Amalphis paves the way for his daughter’s self-assertion, thereby
obviating the need for a female protagonist who fights the establishment.
Knight’s strategy parallels Williams’, who also relies on male characters to
introduce the political material in her novel. Amalphis’ statement allows for
Zilia’s personal choice, which she expresses in a letter to Rasselas.36 Knight
uses the conventional association of the epistolary form with femininity to
give voice to Zilia’s sentiments:

As sincerity and candour are the ruling principles of Zilia, let my sovereign pardon me if I
disclose my heart to Rasselas: think, O prince! what must be my sensations, when I learn
that fortune and thy own merit have placed thee in a rank above my fondest hopes […] I
thank thee for the assurance that thou wishest me to share thy honours […] Zilia could
never doubt the honour of Rasselas; but is she assured of his love? […] The throne of
Abissinia, even dignified as it is by thy virtues, has no charms for me, if the place which I
once flattered myself with possessing in thy breast is no longer mine […] Hast thou the
same sentiments from which we sometimes derived the highest felicity […] ? If the
emotions of thy heart impelled thee to summon Zilia to the court of Gonthar, she will obey
their summons. (107–8, my emphasis)

This letter, marked by the eighteenth-century discourse of sensibility, is

inserted at a point in the novel when various subplots are resolved and
Rasselas is able to ask for Zilia’s hand.37 Zilia’s letter voices her feelings but
also questions Rasselas’s motives. While Zilia presents herself as a demure
epistolary woman, she is not a representative of what Thomas O. Beebee calls
the “male ventriloquis[t]” epistolary tradition that can be traced back to
Ovid’s Heroides, in which “the women write to absent husbands and lovers,
who apparently have better things to do than to write back.”38 She is not what
Katharine Ann Jensen has termed an “Epistolary Woman”; she does not
practice “a form of self-alienation by accepting [her] own abandonment as the

36
The name of Amalphis’ daughter alludes to one of the most famous eighteenth-century
epistolary heroines, Françoise de Graffigny’s Zilia from her 1747 novel Lettres d’une
Péruvienne. Graffigny’s Zilia stands in the tradition of reverse Othering, also employed by
Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes (1721). In her letters, Graffigny’s protagonist criticizes
French society from the viewpoint of an outsider trying to understand a different culture’s
social conventions. See Stephanie Hilger, “Comment peut-on être Péruvienne? Françoise de
Graffigny, a Strategic Femme de Lettres,” College Literature, 32.2 (Spring 2005), 62–82.
37
For an extensive discussion of the language of feeling and sensibility in eighteenth-century
fiction, see Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses
in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993).
38
Thomas O. Beebee, Epistolary Fiction in Europe 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1995), p. 106.

78
premise for [her] writing.”39 Zilia writes from a different premise and,
therefore, her letters are not an expression of lament but an assertion of her
agency. Zilia holds the power of decision. Marrying Rasselas has become a
possibility, but she wants to ensure that he reciprocates her feelings and does
not merely act out of honorable motives: “Zilia could never doubt the honour
of Rasselas; but is she assured of his love?” (107). She wants Rasselas to give
proof in writing of his love and desire: “as thy prudence was then superior to
thy passion, and as, since that time, every thing has prevented thee from
conveying to me thy sentiments, an explanation is now necessary, both for thy
satisfaction, and for my own” (107). While Rasselas’ honorable restraint of
passion has prevented Zilia from becoming a seduced and abandoned
epistolary woman, he now has to prove his passion as a condition for their
marriage. Both Knight and Williams strategically enter into dialogue with the
premises of the epistolary tradition, thereby interrogating the relation of two
of its main components, love and marriage.
The tension that arises from the author’s critical engagement with the
epistolary tradition reflects a social process that was moving toward equating
marriage with love rather than with convenience, honor, esteem, and
friendship. As Niklas Luhmann argues, while the idea of passionate love as
the basis for the choice of a spouse was still developing in the eighteenth
century, increasing “attention was paid […] to the inability to love each other
as a reason for refusing to marry.”40 Zilia exemplifies this standpoint; she
does not want to marry Rasselas if he does not love her. A similar discourse is
invoked in the developing relationship between Nekayah and Dinarbas.
Conflicted about her feelings for him, Nekayah exclaims to herself, “Did not
my sentiments too nearly regard himself [. . .] how excellent a friend might I
have found in him” (49). Earlier in the century, “of the old alternative of love
and friendship, the latter was clearly opted for as the basis for both intimacy
and the special tasks assigned to the family in society” (Luhmann 100), but in
Dinarbas friendship can no longer encompass the relationship between
Nekayah and Dinarbas. Yet, at the same time, Dinarbas reassures Nekayah
that he is not going to transform her into an “Epistolary Woman” by seducing
her: “you are mistaken in Dinarbas, if you suppose him capable of passing the
bounds of that respect which he owes you: his conduct might have assured
you of his efforts to subdue a passion, of which he is no longer master” (50).
Dinarbas acknowledges his passion, yet this avowal is hidden beneath a third-

39
Katharine Ann Jensen, Writing Love: Letters, Women, and the Novel in France, 1605–1776
(Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois UP, 1995), p. 88.
40
Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, trans. by Jeremy Gaines
and Doris L. Jones (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986), p. 129.

79
person voice, also employed by Zilia at certain points in her letter. This
rhetorical indirection allows the characters to maintain propriety by dis-
placing agency at a time when love and passion had become important
elements in the choice of the matrimonial partner, yet remained difficult to
speak of. Social realities were gradually changing, but the shift was still
incomplete and, therefore, gave rise to tensions that were subject to
negotiation during this transitional phase.
This unspeakability—the impossibility of establishing love as the ex-
clusive basis for matrimony in Dinarbas and Julia—stems from the fact that
social considerations still play a role in the characters’ choice of a partner.
Social standing creates a hurdle when Nekayah reveals that she is the
daughter of the emperor of Abissinia. She points to her responsibilities
towards her father and country, which she would ignore by marrying the
socially inferior Dinarbas: “It is true I consider as a prejudice the difference
of our birth; but it is a prejudice established by the universal custom of ages,
and consequently ought to be respected by all who regard their fame: virtue is
wholly in our power, but fame depends on the breath of the multitude, and the
multitude is governed by prejudice” (51). Confronted with Nekayah’s inter-
pretation of their situation, Dinarbas is “astonished and distressed” (52). He
asserts the superiority of feelings over social customs: “only remember that
though we may be masters of our actions, we cannot command our
sentiments: mine will never alter; but your sincerity has found the only means
of imposing on them an eternal silence” (52). He echoes the tradition of the
romance by leaving her with words that indicate that he might, through his
deeds, overcome social prejudice: “I thank you for the confidence you have
reposed in me: you will soon judge whether I deserve it” (52). The relation-
ship between the protagonists expresses a changing social reality, yet Knight
refrains from creating socially subversive characters, especially women. In
Knight and Williams, the female characters are strategically established as
conservative agents. These authors embed the gradually emerging discourse
on love as the basis for marriage in a social conformist stance that shields
them against possible accusations of being too radical in a time when these
issues were subject to intense debate.
The question of the characters’ social rank also affects Zilia and Rasselas.
While Zilia’s father expresses his daughter’s right of choice, Zilia has
internalized the status quo to such a degree that she does not agree to marry
Rasselas until his social rank, which he hides from her, is revealed. Like
Nekayah, Zilia is reluctant to marry a social inferior. Their reluctance causes
the postponement of the marriages and, as a consequence, narrative suspense.
This suspense is heightened when the couples are temporarily separated

80
because Rasselas and Dinarbas engage in military expeditions. The question
of marriage remains unresolved until a letter reaches Abissinia that recounts
Rasselas’ accession to the throne in the Happy Valley after his father’s death.
Now that his social and political position is strengthened, Rasselas reveals his
rank to Zilia and Amalphis. The epistolary medium mixes the narrative of
public events with the expression of Rasselas’ private feelings. While the
characters’ mutual attraction reflects the gradually developing acceptance of
love matches in the late eighteenth century, they can only act on these feelings
if social considerations do not hinder their union. In the pragmatic logic of a
time in which this shift is still incomplete, both couples can now get married:

Convinced of the sentiments of Rasselas, she [Zilia] no longer hesitated to accompany her
father to Gonthar. They were received amidst the acclamations of a people who considered
the felicity of their sovereign as their own. A day was fixed for the celebration of the
marriage, which was to take place immediately on the expiration of the first month’s
mourning for the late emperor. Dinarbas and Nekayah had a more particular share in the
general joy. Rasselas willingly bestowed his sister on his friend and benefactor, and
appointed the same time for their union. (109)

Zilia envelops her acceptance of Rasselas’ proposal in a discourse of love

while hinting at the importance of the revelation of Rasselas’ “rank above
[her] fondest hopes” (107). This upholding of the status quo also affects
Nekayah and Dinarbas’ relationship. The new ruler of the Happy Valley’s
sanctioning of his sister’s love for a social inferior renders their marriage
possible. However, the process of legitimization is not exclusively one-sided
since Dinarbas played an active role in enabling Rasselas to marry his sister.
Shortly before his death, the late emperor “no longer considered the alliance
[between Rasselas and Zilia] as derogatory from his dignity” because Zilia
“was the sister of his deliverer” (100). On his quest to prove the nobility of
his character, Dinarbas had rescued the emperor from imprisonment and
thereby prepared the way for his sister’s union with Rasselas. Therefore,
rather than being an act of social and political defiance, the couple’s marriage
conforms to social convention while simultaneously highlighting the
gradually changing factors in determining the basis for marital relationships.
Knight’s strategically careful discussion of developments in marriage
practices and her emphasis on the intersection of its private and public aspects
are extended by her thematization of public leadership. For this purpose,
Knight adds a plot line that is not present in Johnson’s Rasselas. This plot
line focuses on the struggles for political leadership in the Happy Valley and
provides Knight with an opportunity to comment on the post-1789 situation.
By introducing more family members—Rasselas and Nekayah’s brothers,

81
Menas and Sarza—Knight explores the battle for political power in the
context of a family story, thus once again connecting the public with the
private and thereby embedding the novel’s political referentiality. After
Rasselas left the Happy Valley, Menas and Sarza started a rebellion against
their father and eventually overthrew him. When Rasselas returns, he is first
imprisoned, then pardoned, and later accedes to the throne after the repenting
Sarza dies and Menas is killed in battle. These events prompt Rasselas to
reflect on the basis for leadership. Rasselas condemns his brothers’ radical
political overthrow as decisively as the other characters reject abrupt change
with regards to marriage practices. Instead, he believes in the gradual reform
of the corrupt, but potentially salvageable, system of his father’s reign. The
thematization of political leadership in Rasselas reflects contemporary
discussions on the role of the British monarchy in particular and state forms
in general. This debate was not new in Britain but was acquiring new urgency
as a result of the events across the Channel and the 1790 publication of the
influential Reflections on the Revolution in France by Edmund Burke, with
whom the Knights socialized.41 As Marilyn Morris observes, the debate on
political leadership in Britain had begun with the revolution of 1688, after
which it had taken “a whole century for the monarchy to develop a coherent
philosophy of rule along with a self-confident identity.”42 The British
monarchy’s search for self-justification suffered a blow from the French
Revolution, so that “although the Crown had strengthened its place in the
polity by the mid-1780s, its ideological underpinnings remained shaky until
the mid-1790s.”43 Knight’s representation of Rasselas as a benevolent and
enlightened monarch participates in this debate by returning to a nostalgic
past, the reign of Louis XIV, the Sun King: “A monarch should in this imitate
the sun, whose rays bestow colour and radiancy on the flowers which spring
up beneath his influence, but who stops not his fiery chariot to contemplate
their beauty, lest he should endanger the safety of the universe, to which it is
his essential office to communicate light and heat” (122). The enlightened
monarch is a figure of goodwill and justice. Rather than abusing his
privileges, he shares them with all his subjects, who consequently bloom
under the radiance of his reign. Rasselas’ first act of office, the celebration of
the two couples’ weddings, establishes his benevolence: “The nuptials of
Rasselas and Zilia, Dinarbas and Nekayah, were celebrated without

41
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 2nd edition (London: Printed for
J. Dodsley, 1790).
42
Marilyn Morris, The British Monarchy and the French Revolution (New Haven and
London: Yale UP, 1998), p. 26.
43
Ibid., p. 38.

82
ostentatious magnificence, but with a dignity becoming their rank. The poor
had the greatest share in the rejoicings, because the superfluous treasures,
consumed on similar occasions, were distributed among them” (136).
Simplicity and dignity are introduced at court, and the common good is
established as the ruler’s guiding principle.
Despite Rasselas’ benevolence, poverty still exists in the Happy Valley.
Material hardship is presented as a consequence of his father’s reign and,
therefore, as an ailment that needs to be remedied. The sore on the social
body is a reflection of the ruler’s diseased body. Contemporary political
thinkers, philosophers, and moralists considered the problems of the body
politic to correlate with the ruler’s physical body and its weakening by a life
of luxury. When Rasselas accedes to the throne, he identifies the reasons for
the failures of the previous reign in his father’s excessive lifestyle:

But the emperor only retained the exterior of royalty; the power had passed from his feeble
hand into the grasp of Menas: his anger was therefore derided, and his remonstrances were
neglected; and finding, with grief, that the only means to retain the poor appearance of
sovereignty, was to consent unconditionally to the desire of his son, he took the road of the
valley, surrounded by every new professor of the arts of luxury whom he could collect,
seeking to forget the power he had lost in scenes of magnificence and pleasure. (80–81)

As the body of the monarch weakens, his power erodes and the body politic
goes to waste. Roy Porter argues that the idea of the body politic was based
on an “epistemology accustomed to map the body politic upon the body
human”: “In other words, just as, in the kingdom, wealth easily mutated into
waste, so in the individual, excessive consumption could, seemingly paradox-
ically, produce not strength but physical dissolution.”44 Over the course of the
years, the imperial persona of Rasselas’ father gradually became an empty
shell, weakened by comfort and leisure and therefore in need of reform.
Rather than completely overthrowing the status quo, Rasselas endeavors
to reform the “poor appearance of sovereignty” (81). In contrast to his father,
who “made few reflections on the revolutions which replaced him on the
throne” (100), Rasselas strives to be a self-conscious ruler who foregoes
luxury for his own version of realpolitik. In order to ensure order, stability,
and prosperity, Rasselas “applied himself with unremitting vigilance to the
forming of an army” (109). He “applied himself seriously, with the assistance
of the most eminent for learning and rectitude, to form a code of laws, which

44
Roy Porter, “Consumption: Disease of a Consumer Society?,” in Consumption and the
World of Goods, ed. by John Brewer and Roy Porter (London and New York: Routledge,
1993), pp. 58–81 (p. 59, 62).

83
might for the future rather prevent crimes than chastise them” (112). He also
abstains from “erecting [him]self into a judge of religious causes” (114) and
promises to “encourage all men of letters” (121). Rasselas pronounces his
military, legal, religious, and educational guidelines. His self-construction as
an enlightened ruler and his strictness are presented as complementary, not
mutually exclusive. Rasselas’ guidelines on law and order are to reverse the
erosion of social barriers that occurred during his father’s reign. Rasselas’
father argues that his mistaken notions of social equality were the precursor to
the disintegration of the body politic. The deposed ruler warns his son to
“beware of [his] errors” as a politician: “we [. . .] are placed in a sphere, in
which it is our duty to direct [. . .] a mistaken notion of humanity has made
me detest war, and consequently neglect my army; the desire of being loved
has induced me to court the friendship of my slaves, and you see the gratitude
of my favourites” (103). Rasselas’ father presents himself as a counter-
example of positive leadership; his son is therefore compelled to look for
other role models.
In his search for models of political authority, Rasselas returns to an
idealized past before his father’s time and organizes society according to
hereditary class privilege. He presents this idea as the guarantee for order and
general prosperity. Significantly, it is not Rasselas but his social inferior
Dinarbas who voices the rationale for a society based on class divisions:

I found how unjustly we often attribute to greatness fastidious and oppressive insolence: he
who finds himself by birth superior in rank to the rest of mankind, can have neither the
motives of jealousy, nor of emulation: his condescension will scarcely be abused, or his
courtesy humiliated: it is not so with him who has risen above his equals by the caprice of
fortune, and whose ambition makes him still aim at loftier distinctions: he fears lest
affability and ease should again sink him to his former station; and as his greatness is only
comparative, he thinks himself obliged to support it by artificial means. (86)

Dinarbas argues that stable class divisions ensure general welfare whereas
social mobility creates an aggressive atmosphere conducive to despotism and
tyranny. In the eighteenth century, there was great optimism for the
possibilities of class mobility, yet there also reigned fear of the shifts that,
although less violent than in France, British society was undergoing: “Con-
temporary commentators noted the almost infinite gradations of economic and
social status between one group and the next above it, such that the people in
any one grade were not sharply set apart from the one above them and,
moreover, could hope by emulation and material success to elevate them-

84
selves into their ranks.”45 Dinarbas’ comments reflect the fear of the chaotic
potential of social emulation. His function as the conservative agent with
respect to social mobility is similar to Zilia’s cautious attitude towards
changing marriage practices. Yet, paradoxically, Dinarbas himself success-
fully climbs the social ladder and becomes governor of Servia, albeit with the
help of his patron and brother-in-law, Rasselas. The novel is riddled with such
moments of ambivalence regarding new social mobility and the old system of
patronage. For example, Dinarbas accepts the government of Servia offered
to him by the sultan of Constantinople only after the sultan agrees to form an
alliance with Rasselas. Dinarbas climbs the social ladder on the condition that
it does not upset the social and political status quo too profoundly. Social
change is presented as a necessary development, yet Dinarbas is apprehen-
sive of abrupt and violent upheavals. In this sense, the characters’ actions
parallel their creator’s strategic balancing act on the literary scene of her time.
The relationship between Dinarbas and Rasselas illustrates the ambiguity
of patronage in a changing society, which Knight experienced as protégée of
Lord Nelson and lady companion to Princess Charlotte. She also felt its
effects through her father’s social position and its consequences on the
family. As a naval officer, Knight’s father was knighted, which allowed his
family to rise socially and economically. His nobility of character was
recognized by social institutions in the same way that Dinarbas’ worth is
consecrated by his marriage to Nekayah. Yet, whereas Dinarbas becomes part
of the power structure, Sir John Knight was never able to ensure financial
security and social stability for his family. On the contrary, after his death,
officer Knight’s social ascension propelled his wife into a protracted and
futile fight to obtain a government pension and his daughter into a constant
search for benefactors and subsequent quarrels over remuneration. While the
knighting caused the Knight family to rise socially, it caused financial
hardship for the women who, now bound by class decorum, were at the mercy
of those who had elevated them. Knight’s ambivalent evaluation of the
shifting social fabric reflects on the possibilities of social mobility and
illustrates the problematic transitions in a society where the social shift is not
yet complete and where titles have become empty shells devoid of meaning.
Dinarbas’ cautious attitude with regard to the supposedly limitless
possibilities of social mobility can be read as a critique of Johnson’s
Rasselas. In Rasselas, Imlac, the poet, expresses confidence in the social

45
Ian R. Christie, “Conservatism and Stability in British Society,” in The French Revolution
and British Popular Politics, ed. by Mark Philp (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991), pp.
169–87 (p. 170).

85
developments caused by the technological advances of Johnson’s day. During
his travels, Imlac “conversed with great numbers of the northern and western
nations of Europe; the nations which are now in possession of all power and
all knowledge; whose armies are irresistible, and whose fleets command the
remotest parts of the globe.” Imlac states that the Europeans “are more
powerful, Sir, than we, […] because they are wiser; knowledge will always
predominate over ignorance, as man governs the other animals.”46 He
illustrates European predominance by highlighting specific technological
developments:

In enumerating the particular comforts of life we shall find many advantages on the side of
the Europeans. They cure wounds and diseases with which we languish and perish. We
suffer inclemencies of weather which they can obviate. They have engines for the despatch
of many laborious works, which we must perform by manual industry. There is such
communication between distant places, that one friend can hardly be said to be absent from
another. Their policy removes all publick inconveniences: they have roads cut through their
mountains, and bridges laid upon rivers. And, if we descend to the privacies of life, their
habitations are more commodious, and their possessions are more secure.47

Johnson’s Imlac presents eighteenth-century Europe as a convenient and

secure place.48 Technological advances allow for a more comfortable life and,
therefore, a healthier social body. In contrast to Johnson, who does not
explicitly address the issue of social class in this context, Knight discusses
problems caused by social transitions. Through Rasselas’ search for positive
models of leadership, Knight looks beneath the shiny exterior of so-called
enlightened progress and thematizes the paradoxical situation of those who
are excluded and live on the margins of late-eighteenth-century society.
Instead of establishing the European present as a model social body,
Knight’s Dinarbas returns to an idealized past. Dinarbas visited the shores of
Greece and, upon his homecoming, answers Rasselas’ question of “whether
the scenes so beautifully described by the ancient European poets are really as
interesting as we should believe from their works” (92). Dinarbas explains
that “the noble simplicity of the Grecian temples, the elegance of their

46
Johnson, p. 30.
47
Ibid., p. 32.
48
Steven Scherwatzky argues that this Eurocentric moment expresses Johnson’s skepticism of
the colonial enterprise and his endeavor to strip “the colonies of their exotic appeal” in an
attempt to “deromanticize utopias” (Steven Scherwatzky, “Johnson, Rasselas, and the
Politics of Empire,” Eighteenth-Century Life, 16 (November 1992), 103–13 (p. 106)). This
skepticism, present not only in Rasselas but also in Johnson’s essays and political writings,
led Johnson to insist “upon the benefits of his own world, which he believed were many,
though often abused, neglected, or taken for granted” (Scherwatzky, p. 107).

86
proportion, the harmony of the parts, and the majesty of the whole, give an
impression of awe and of satisfaction, which no modern building affords”
(95). He “found the same characteristic feature [simplicity and elegance] in
all their remaining productions” (96). Dinarbas establishes ancient Greek
architecture as the marker of an ideal society and the “illustrious men of
ancient Greece and Rome” as examples of positive leadership: “their enter-
prises were vast, and their minds capacious; they formed a comprehensive
plan, and acted up to it. It is not by adding one little idea to another, that per-
fection is insensibly attained. Alexander had conceived his scheme for the
conquest of the east, before he left his native Macedon; nor did Caesar take
the command in Gaul, without a previous design of becoming the first in the
republic” (96). Instead of directly attacking the current state of affairs, Knight
engages in a more cautious critique by highlighting strong leadership in the
antiquity. However, while Europe’s classical past was frequently invoked as a
model for a possible republican present in the eighteenth century, Knight does
not foreground its republican ideals but the leadership qualities of individual
historical figures. Her presentation of the classical past supports her vision of
firm, yet enlightened, monarchical rule in the figure of Rasselas. Rasselas
establishes his leadership by outlining law and order and by heeding the
negative example of his father’s lax reign. At the same time, he insists on the
monarch’s respect for his subjects as the basis for a stable monarchy:

I cannot see what the sovereign gains by debasing the faculties of his subjects: a good
prince will be respected and beloved by a wise nation, and, what he can never rely on from a
herd of willing slaves, will be sure of their fidelity: he will not be deserted at the first
appearance of a foreign enemy, or domestic usurper, who, in our despotic governments,
obtains the same tribute of obedience as the rightful monarch, because he has the same
authority, that of terror. (97)

Terror and arbitrary absolutist rule are established as negative counter-

examples as is lax leadership that erodes the basis for political authority.
From this perspective, continuity in class privilege and leadership is seen to
ensure not only a stable society but also the loyalty of the ruler’s subjects. At
the same time, however, Dinarbas advocates the necessary reforms for
general welfare that ensure this loyalty and stability. Knight comments on the
dangers of totalitarian monarchy and on the pitfalls of revolutionary chaos,
thereby situating her novel in a larger contemporary debate on the national
body politic. By strategically embedding her criticism of contemporary social
and political affairs into the narrative of a family affair—that of the main
characters’ marriage—Knight infuses the public with the private. As a result,
Dinarbas is characterized by a hybridity of genre that allows Knight to

87
negotiate conventions regarding gender and genre with respect to political
subject matter.
Knight uses a similar strategic mixture of public and private elements to
participate in another contemporary discussion, the debate on gender roles
and the position of women in society. She thematizes and ultimately criticizes
the issue of gender prejudice in the figure of her Rasselas who, “though he
had acquired much philosophy by his reading and observation, still retained
the idea that women, if not beings of an inferior class, were at least not
worthy of gaining too great an ascendancy over the minds of men” (20). In
contrast to Johnson, who does not extensively discuss his Rasselas’ notions
about women, Knight highlights her character’s gender prejudice. The
misogynist perspective of Knight’s Rasselas is paralleled by Amalphis’ fear
of women’s destructive and destabilizing influence in the realm of politics:

The good or the bad dispositions of women have a very extensive influence in society, and
could we be so fortunate as to discover the motives of what we call by the general name of
caprice, we might probably succeed in preventing the effects. Empires have been ruined by
the jealousies of women; to them are owing many of the great revolutions that have decided
the fate of nations; and if we join to theirs the sacerdotal influence, I fancy we shall prove
that statesmen and conquerors have often been simply the machines put in motion by weak
hands, and versatile heads. (123)

In giving voice to these objections against women’s involvement in public

affairs, Knight can expose the social reasons for women’s “caprice” and,
thereby, denaturalize it. Pekuah observes that “the jealousy of women is
fomented by the influence of men” (123). Knight responds to various plot
lines in Rasselas where Nekayah and Pekuah meet women who are “em-
bittered by petty competitions and worthless emulation [. . .] always jealous of
the beauty of each other,” who compete “with each other in obsequiousness
and reverence,” and who engage in “childish play.”49 Pekuah’s observation
that men “foment” this behavior uncovers the reasons for women’s so-called
caprice. Knight thereby criticizes the contemporary discourse on “incommen-
surable difference” that constructed women as total opposites of men and
naturalized this difference as inferiority.
At the same time that she criticizes the idea of “incommensurable
difference” by denaturalizing gender behavior, Knight strategically echoes
other contemporary discourses regarding gender and politics. In this context,
Imlac highlights the role of women as the educators of future leaders in
Dinarbas:

49
Johnson, p. 63, 102, 103.

88
 If women [. . .] frequently do great hurt by interposing in affairs which seem foreign to their
sex, how useful are they when they turn their thoughts to the education of their children, and
by these domestic and natural cares provide happiness in future, not only for themselves but
for their country! The first impressions are difficult to efface, and the first impressions are
given by women; their mistaken tenderness has formed cowards, and their capricious anger
has reared up tyrants. (123–24)

These comments tie the private to the public and, more specifically, to the
political. The body of the mother has the power to establish a healthy body
politic by preventing the formation of tyrants and cowards. Imlac’s speech
echoes Rousseauian ideas concerning gender and education, yet Rousseau’s
patriarchal approach is transcended in the chapter entitled “Education.” Imlac
praises the positive influence of mothers on their children, yet he also
explains the advantages of public education to Rasselas, who depends on
Imlac’s guidelines to restructure the Abissinian body politic. Imlac’s focus on
public education liberates women from their Rousseauian role as mothers by
referencing an educational model that includes them: “The greatest model of
this sort is the Lacedaemonian school, which was imperfect only in what was
ill-planned from the first” (124). The Lacedaemonian school in ancient Sparta
consisted of public education for boys and girls and emphasized physical
training. To Knight’s late-eighteenth-century readers, Imlac’s recon-
ceptualization of the new Abissinian educational system offers an educational
paradigm based on gender equality and legitimized by the authority of Greek
antiquity. Knight strategically concedes that something about that model was
“ill-planned” in order to mitigate the radical nature of such a proposition. Is
the reader to understand that this something pertained to gender equality or to
the emphasis on physical education? Or to another aspect? Not defining the
model’s shortcomings allows Knight to offer a radical alternative while giving
her readers room for interpretation. She thereby shielded herself from
accusations of being too radical, which is a strategy that the author employed
throughout her text.
As a result of Knight’s strategic negotiation of discourses regarding
writing and gender, Dinarbas is marked by a pragmatism that stands at the
center of her response to Rasselas. Rasselas ends on a disillusioned and
cynical note. The characters talk and philosophize about “various schemes of
happiness,” but they never put them into action.50 Johnson’s Rasselas, for
example, dreams about a “little kingdom, in which he might administer justice
in his own person, and see all the parts of government with his own eyes; but
he could never fix the limits of his dominion, and was always adding to the

50
Ibid., p. 133.

89
number of his subjects.”51 In contrast to Johnson’s disillusioned presentation
of human greed, Knight constructs her Rasselas not as a greedy dreamer but
as a ruler who negotiates legal and territorial disputes. Whereas the
conclusion of Rasselas states that “of these wishes that they [the characters]
had formed they well knew that none could be obtained,”52 the characters in
Dinarbas have to “return to the busy scene of action where [they] are called”
(139) instead of musing on the impossibility of their daydreams. Although
they are as aware as Johnson’s characters of the dark realities of the human
condition, they come to a different conclusion:

Youth will vanish, health will decay, beauty fade, and strength sink into imbecility; but if
we have enjoyed their advantages, let us not say there is no good, because the good in this
world is not permanent: none but the guilty are excluded from at least temporary happiness;
and if he whose imagination is lively, and whose heart glows with sensibility, is more
subject than others to poignant grief and maddening disappointment, surely he will confess
that he has moments of ecstacy and consolatory reflection that repay him for all his
sufferings. (139)

Rather than submit to a pessimistic view of the vanity of human wishes,

Knight argues for the individual’s need to find a “scene of action” despite
difficult circumstances. Knight’s acknowledgment of social realities does not
lead her to despair or to submit unquestioningly to the status quo, but rather
to carve out a space for pragmatic agency and self-fulfillment by apparently
subscribing to, yet ultimately questioning, social convention and prejudice.
Knight situated her authorial persona in that ambivalent space between
literary patronage and writing as a financially remunerative activity created by
the gradually changing conditions for literary production. This ambivalence is
at the center of Knight’s creation of a hybrid fictional form that allows her to
comment on contemporary political topics by using the supposedly private
narrative convention of the romance, the love conquest. Dinarbas thereby
echoes the discursive binary of the public and the private and the theory of
the incommensurable difference separating women from men. Yet rather than
naturalizing such differences, she highlights the limitations of these constructs
through her characters’ actions, which repeatedly demonstrate their inter-
dependence.

51
Ibid., p. 133.
52
Ibid., p. 134.

90
Chapter 3

Staging Islam:
Karoline von Günderrode’s
Mahomed, der Prophet von Mekka

The examples of Helen Maria Williams and Ellis Cornelia Knight demon-
strate that a multitude of factors determine how a woman author’s name is
recorded in literary history, with, paradoxically, the least influential one often
being her literary works. As a result of her reporting on the French
Revolution, Williams was mainly remembered as a cultural go-between with
suspect national allegiances. Knight was associated with her position in the
British courtly household, her role as lady companion to Princess Charlotte
and her social contacts with famous contemporaries such as the national hero
Lord Nelson. Williams’ Letters and Knight’s Autobiography have been read
as reflections of these contacts, yet their literary production—Julia and
Dinarbas—has largely been neglected. While contextualizing women
authors’ writing is crucial in understanding their strategic negotiation of the
literary marketplace and discourses of gender difference, limiting this
contextualization to their contacts with famous (male) contemporaries runs
the danger of turning these women into appendices to other historical and
literary figures rather than authors in their own right.
Karoline Friederieke Louise Maximiliane von Günderrode (1780–1806)
illustrates this phenomenon of celebrity by association, which Susanne Kord
has termed “Biographismus in der Kritik” [“biographical critical approach”].1
In literary histories, her name appears most frequently in conjunction with
that of the renowned Brentano family who lived in Frankfurt. Günderrode
met the Brentanos when, at the age of seventeen, she moved to a Frankfurt
“Damenstift,” a Protestant institution for unmarried noblewomen.2 Her move

1
Susanne Kord, Sich einen Namen machen: Anonymität und weibliche Autorschaft, 1700–
1900 (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1996), p. 147.
2
See Max Preitz, “Karoline von Günderrode in ihrer Umwelt I. Briefe von Lisette und
Christian Gottfried Nees von Esenbeck, Karoline von Günderrode, Friedrich Creuzer,
to the “Damenstift” was prompted by her family’s financial difficulties after
the death of her father, a chamberlain at the Württemberg court in Karlsruhe.
In Frankfurt, Günderrode devoted her time to her studies and writing and
socialized with the Brentanos. Her extensive correspondence with the most
prominent literary members of the family, Clemens and Bettina, has been a
point of interest for generations of literary critics. Günderrode’s letters were
reedited, excerpted, and widely discussed, mainly for their insights into the
Brentanos’ social and literary world.
An additional point of interest, also linked to Günderrode’s Brentano
connection, was her passionate love for Friedrich Karl von Savigny, whom
she also met in Frankfurt. Even though he was attracted to Günderrode, in
1804, he married another member of the Brentano family, Kunigunde.
Around the time of this disappointment, Günderrode published her first
collection of poems, Gedichte und Phantasien, and, a year later, Poetische
Fragmente.3 The simultaneity of her disappointed love and these publications
transformed Günderrode into the perfect incarnation of Romantic Welt-
schmerz for literary historians. This critical construction was strengthened by
the repercussions of her second love affair, with the married Friedrich
Creuzer. When Günderrode realized that Creuzer was not going to divorce
his wife, she stabbed herself to death on the banks of the Rhine River. The
spectacular manner of her death inserted her into a generation of unhappy
Romantic poets such as Novalis and Kleist. Günderrode was received as the
Romantic woman writer par excellence. Her dramatic death and her con-
nection to the Brentanos triggered a wealth of biographies and biographical
essays on Günderrode, which focused on her correspondence with famous
contemporaries and on her poetry as an expression of Romantic despair.
The most influential of the biographical writings on Günderrode were
those produced by Bettina von Arnim (née Brentano) in the nineteenth and
Christa Wolf in the twentieth century. In 1840, Bettina von Arnim published
her version of Karoline’s life, Die Günderode.4 Arnim’s text consists of a
collection of letters exchanged between herself and Günderrode and some of
Günderrode’s poems. Arnim claims to write the authoritative version of her

Clemens Brentano und Susanne von Heyden,” Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts
(1962), 208–306 (p. 212).
3
Karoline von Günderrode [Tian], Gedichte und Phantasien (Hamburg und Frankfurt: J.C.
Hermannsche Buchhandlung, 1804) and Karoline von Günderrode [Tian], Poetische Frag-
mente (Frankfurt a.M.: Friedrich Wilmans, 1805).
4
In the remainder of the chapter, I will refer to Bettina Brentano-von Arnim by “von Arnim”
as this is the name most frequently used in secondary literature.

92
friend’s life by introducing the collection with one of her own letters that
testifies to the two women’s close friendship:

Der Plaudergeist in meiner Brust hat immer fort geschwätzt mit Dir [...] Durch dich feuert
der Geist wie die Sonn durchs frische Laub feuert, und mir gehts wie dem Keim, der in der
Sonn brütet, wenn ich an Dich denken will, es wärmt mich und ich werd freudig und stolz
und streck meine Blätter aus.

[The chatterbox in my bosom continuously chatted with you [...] The spirit flames through
you in the same way that the sun fires through new foliage. I am like the seed sitting in the
sun; when I want to think of you, I warm up and become happy and proud and unfurl my
leaves.]5

Bettina von Arnim refers to her intense communication with Günderrode,

thereby authenticating her account. By immortalizing her friend as “die
Günderrode,” Arnim ensured that the name was remembered by subsequent
generations. At the same time, however, Arnim’s account became one of the
cornerstones of the Günderrode cult that focused on her connection to famous
contemporaries and on her poetry as the expression of Romantic sensibility.
Despite the important number of biographical accounts published since
Arnim’s Die Günderrode, none has been as influential as Christa Wolf’s
writings in ensuring that Günderrode’s name lived on in the twentieth
century.6 Christa Wolf’s 1979 publications Karoline von Günderrode: Der

5
Bettina von Arnim, Die Günderode (Berlin: Verlag von Wilhelm Hertz, 1890), p. 1. All
translations of foreign-language texts in this chapter are mine, unless otherwise noted.
6
Von Arnim and Wolf were not the only biographers of Günderrode. In the twentieth century,
a wealth of biographical essays appeared, as well as an important number of monographs,
some of which combined Günderrode’s biography with a selection of her letters. For book-
length monographs, see, for example, the following works: Geneviève Bianquis, Caroline de
Günderode 1780–1806: Ouvrage accompagné de lettres inédites (Paris: Alcan, 1910);
Ludwig Geiger, Karoline von Günderode und ihre Freunde (Stuttgart, Leipzig, Berlin,
Wien: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1895); Dagmar von Gersdorff, Die Erde ist mir Heimat
nicht geworden: Das Leben der Karoline von Günderrode (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel-Verlag,
2006); Otto Heuschele, Karoline von Günderrode: Trost in der Dichtung (Halle: Werk-
stätten der Stadt Halle, Burg Giebichenstein, 1932); Markus Hille, Karoline von Günderrode
(Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999); Waltraud Howeg, Karoline
von Günderrode und Hölderlin (Halle: Dissertation 1953); Ernst Jeep, Karoline von
Günderrode: Mittheilungen über ihr Leben und Dichten (Wolfenbüttel: Zwissler, 1895);
Margarete Lazarowicz, Karoline von Günderrode: Portrait einer Fremden (Frankfurt: Peter
Lang, 1986); Margarete Mattheis, Die Guenderrode: Gestalt, Leben und Wirkung (Marburg:
Dissertation, 1934); Annelore Naumann, Caroline von Günderrode (Berlin: Dissertation,
1957); Birgit Weißendorn, ed. “Ich sende Dir ein zärtliches Pfand”: Die Briefe der
Karoline von Günderrode (Frankfurt a.M. and Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1992); and Richard
Wilhelm, Die Günderrode: Dichtung und Schicksal (Frankfurt a.M.: Societäts-Verlag,

93
Schatten eines Traumes (The Shadow of a Dream) and Kein Ort. Nirgends
(published in English as No Place on Earth in 1982) attest to Günderrode’s
importance as a reference point for subsequent generations of women
authors.7 In the introductory essay to Der Schatten eines Traumes—an
edition of Günderrode’s poetry, prose, and excerpts from her letters—Wolf
amalgamates Günderrode’s life story and her writings to comment on the
position of women authors in the patriarchal society of early-nineteenth-
century Germany and on the identity crisis of all post-Goethe authors writing
in German. Wolf enters into dialogue not only with Günderrode but also with
Arnim when she comments on the reception of Arnim’s Die Günderode:

Dieses Buch hatte das Unglück, in die Hände staubtrockener Textkritik zu fallen, deren
Instrumenten es ein leichtes ist, es als “Fälschung” zu entlarven. Daß die Bettine mit ihrem
Material frei umgegangen ist, Briefe zusammengezogen, Stücke aus anderen Briefwechseln
hineingenommen, manches erfunden hat, ist ihr angekreidet worden. Authentisch ist dies
Buch dennoch, in einem poetischen Sinn: als Zeugnis für eine Freundschaft zwischen zwei
Frauen, ein Beleg aber auch für Lebensformen und Sitten einer Zeit und für eine Kritik an
diesen Sitten, die sich nicht scheut, an die Wurzeln zu gehn. (29)

[This book was so unfortunate as to fall into the hands of dry textual critics, for whose
instruments it is easy to unmask it as a “forgery.” The fact that Bettine treated her material
freely, shortened letters, included letters from other correspondences, and invented some
things has been held against her. But still, this book is authentic, in a poetic sense: as a
testimony to the friendship between two women, but also as a document of an era’s social
forms and customs and a powerful criticism of these customs.]

Wolf’s remark about poetic authenticity and her defense of Bettina von
Arnim’s editorial liberty is both an homage to Arnim and a justification of
her own version of Günderrode’s life and work, Der Schatten eines Traumes,

1938). The authoritative edition of Günderrode’s letters remains the one edited by Max
Preitz for the 1962 and 1964 issues of Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts: Max
Preitz, “Karoline von Günderrode in ihrer Umwelt I” and Max Preitz, “Karoline von
Günderrode in ihrer Umwelt II. Karoline von Günderrode’s Briefwechsel mit Friedrich Karl
und Gunda von Savigny,” Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts (1964), 158–235. Also
see Max Preitz and Doris Hopp, “Karoline von Günderrode in ihrer Umwelt III. Karoline
von Günderrodes Studienbuch,” Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts (1975), 223–
323. Despite being the authoritative version of Günderrode’s personal writings, in terms of
popularity, Preitz’ edition lags far behind the collections assembled by Bettina von Arnim
and Christa Wolf, two of the most famous German women writers of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.
7
Christa Wolf, Kein Ort. Nirgends. (Darmstadt and Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1979); Christa
Wolf, Karoline von Günderrode: Der Schatten eines Traumes; Gedichte, Prosa, Briefe,
Zeugnisse von Zeitgenossen (Darmstadt and Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1981); Christa Wolf,
No Place on Earth, trans. by Jan van Heurck (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1982).

94
which she constructed with some liberty herself. Wolf’s postscript to Der
Schatten eines Traumes emphasizes the fact that “diese Auswahl aus den
Texten der Karoline von Günderrode subjektiv [ist]. Sie erhebt nicht den
Anspruch, eine Werkausgabe zu ersetzen” [“this selection of Karoline von
Günderrode’s texts is subjective. It does not claim to replace a critical
edition”].8 Wolf’s presentation of Günderrode’s life is conceived of as a
feminist monument to the nineteenth-century author.
Kein Ort. Nirgends, Wolf’s other published monument to Günderrode, is
a novel in which the author enters the minds of two poets who committed
suicide, Kleist and Günderrode, and imagines a conversation between them.
The book focuses on Günderrode as an unhappy lover who meticulously
plans her dramatic suicide:

Das ist es, was ich von ihm haben kann: den Schatten eines Traums. Sie verbot sich zu
weinen und vergaß den Traum und den Grund für ihre Trauer [...] Sie kennt die Stelle unter
der Brust, wo sie den Dolch ansetzen muß, ein Chirurg, den sie scherzhaft fragte, hat sie ihr
mit einem Druck seines Fingers bezeichnet. Seitdem, wenn sie sich sammelt, spürt sie den
Druck und ist augenblicklich ruhig. Es wird leicht sein und sicher, sie muß nur achten, daß
sie die Waffe immer bei sich hat.9

[This is what I can have of him: the shadow of a dream. She forbade herself to cry and
forgot the dream and the reason for her sorrow […] She knows the location beneath her
breast, where she has to apply the dagger; a surgeon whom she asked jokingly showed it to
her with the pressure of his finger. Since then, when she collects herself, she feels the
pressure and is quiet instantaneously. It will be easy and reliable; she only has to carry the
weapon with her at all times.]

Christa Wolf’s omniscient point of view in this novel and her collection of
Günderrode’s letters claim authenticity not on the literal but on the poetic
level. Wolf’s work is part of the early feminist effort to recover women’s
literary voices, which tended to focus on biographical genres perceived as
most illustrative of the precariousness of the female condition such as letters
and poems.

8
Wolf, Karoline von Günderrode: Der Schatten eines Traumes, p. 271.
9
Wolf, Kein Ort. Nirgends., p. 10. The phrase “den Schatten eines Traumes” [“the shadow of
a dream”] originally appeared in a letter from Günderrode to Karoline von Barkhaus. This
letter, written in 1799, expresses Günderrode’s love for Friedrich Karl von Savigny, who
would, in May 1804, marry her friend Kunigunde Brentano: “Wenn Sie etwas von
S.[avigny] hören darf ich Sie dann bitten es mir zu schreiben, verargen Sie mir diese Bitte
nicht, es ist ia [sic] das Einzige was ich von ihm haben kann, der Schatten eines Traumes”
[“If you hear something about him, please write to me. Do not hold this request against me;
it is the only thing that I can have of him, the shadow of a dream”] (Preitz, “Karoline von
Günderrode in ihrer Umwelt II,” p. 166).

95
 As a result of these critical tendencies, there were comparatively fewer
nonbiographical discussions of Günderrode’s literary work and little interest
in her literary production beyond her letters and her poetry; it was not until
1990 that a reliable historical-critical edition became available that claimed
more than poetic truth and that contained all of Günderrode’s works,
including her tragedies.10 Her “private” expression of feelings in the form of
her letters and poems dominated critical discussion at the expense of her
more “public” engagement with political issues through her dramatic
production. In its focus on Günderrode’s private writings, this scholarship
perpetuated her contemporaries’ uneasiness regarding drama written by
women, which was marked as inappropriate due to its public associations.
Günderrode was aware of the problematic image of women dramatists. In one
of her letters to her lover Savigny, “moving into a mood of irony, Günder-
rode presents her literary production as a form of impermissible imagining
and speaks of the ‘flaw’ of writing a drama.”11 At the same time that
Günderrode echoes contemporary discourse concerning gender and genre she
also mocks it because she continues to write plays such as Hildgund, Nikator,
and Mahomed. Her friends’ reactions to her 1804 play Mahomed, der
Prophet von Mekka illustrate in forceful ways that Günderrode did not
conform to their expectations. Friedrich Creuzer told her that “ich bei
wiederholter Lesung viele Stellen in dem Dialog Ihres Mahommed zu
räsonnirt in Gedanken u Ausdruck—zu philosophirend in Ton u Farbe u
folglich zu wenig poetisch gefunden habe” [“upon repeated reading I find
many places in the dialogue of your Mahommed too reasoning in thought and
expression—too philosophizing in tone and color and, as a result, not poetic
enough”].12 By swerving from “feminine” forms of expression and discussing

10
Karoline von Günderrode, Sämtliche Werke und ausgewählte Studien, 3 vols, ed. by Walter
Morgenthaler (Basel and Frankfurt a.M.: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1990). This critical edition
of Günderrode’s complete works consists of three volumes. The first volume contains her
works (excluding her correspondence). The second volume reports variations and texts with
questionable authorship. The third volume outlines editorial policies, evaluates previous
editions, and contains materials relevant for understanding Günderrode’s writing. Morgen-
thaler’s edition has replaced the three nineteenth- and early twentieth-century editions of
Günderrode’s collected works, which do not comment on editorial principles: Friedrich
Götz, ed., Gesammelte Dichtungen von Karoline von Günderode (Mannheim: Götz, 1857);
Leopold Hirschberg, ed., Gesammelte Werke der Karoline von Günderode, 3 vols (Berlin:
Bibliophiler Verlag O. Goldschmidt-Gabrielli, 1920–1922); and Elisabeth Salomon, ed.,
Karoline von Günderode. Gesammelte Dichtungen (München: Drei Masken, 1923).
11
Dagmar von Hoff, “Censorship in the Work of Karoline von Günderrode,” Women in Ger-
man Yearbook, 11 (1995), 99–112 (p.100).
12
Karoline von Günderrode, Sämtliche Werke, III, p. 135.

96
a controversial topic in a drama, Günderrode upsets her readers’ expectations,
which can also be seen in the request from her friend Lisette Nees: “Warum
willst Du mir doch den Mahomet nicht schiken? Ich bitte Dich darum,
hauptsächlich der beygefügten Gedichte wegen” [“Why don’t you want to
send me Mahomet? I ask you for it, mainly because of the attached
poems”].13 Although Nees requests the tragedy, she does so because of the
genre that she expects from Günderrode’s pen. Günderrode’s “philoso-
phizing” and “reasoning” literary production was criticized by her contem-
poraries and gradually forgotten over the course of the nineteenth and the
early twentieth centuries as a result of the focus on her socially more
acceptable literary composition, her poetry.14
As a result of the patterns governing the reception of Günderrode’s
literary works, there exists less criticism on Günderrode’s plays than on her
poetry or letters. Günderrode’s dramatic production has only become a topic
of scholarly interest relatively recently, in the wake of the foray of feminism
into literary scholarship.15 Within this body of work, Mahomed, der Prophet
von Mekka rarely stands at the center of discussion. This could be linked to
the fact that German literary scholarship has been slower than the British or
French to privilege texts that explore cultural and religious difference in the

13
Quoted in Preitz, “Karoline von Günderrode in ihrer Umwelt I,” p. 270.
14
For an overview of Günderrode criticism in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
in specific, see Birgit Wägenbaur, “Literaturwissenschaftliche Frauenforschung 1890 bis
1930 (Beispiel: Günderrode-Rezeption),” in Akten des X. Internationalen Germanisten-
kongresses Wien 2000: “Zeitenwende—Die Germanistik auf dem Weg vom 20. ins 21.
Jahrhundert,” X, ed. by Peter Wiesinger (Bern: Peter Lang, 2003), pp. 21–29. For an outline
of Günderrode scholarship in the second half of the twentieth century, see Helga Dormann,
“Die Karoline von Günderrode-Forschung 1945–1995. Ein Bericht,” Athenäum: Jahrbuch
für Romantik, 6 (1996), 227–48.
15
See, for example, among others, Barbara Becker-Cantarino, Schriftstellerinnen der Roman-
tik: Epoche—Werke—Wirkung (München: C.H. Beck, 2000); Hoff, “Censorship”; Susanne
Kord, Ein Blick hinter die Kulissen: Deutschsprachige Dramatikerinnen im 18. und 19.
Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 1992); Elisabeth Krimmer, In the Company of Men:
Cross-Dressed Women Around 1800 (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2004); Patricia Ann
Simpson, The Erotics of War in German Romanticism (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2006). The
most extensive treatment of Mahomed in specific can be found in Ruth Christmann,
Zwischen Identitätsgewinn und Bewußtseinsverlust: Das philosophisch-literarische Werk
der Karoline von Günderrode (1780–1806) (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 200–
212; Ingeborg Solbrig, “The Contemplative Muse: Karoline von Günderrode’s Religious
Works,” Germanic Notes, 18.1/2 (1987), 18–20; and Ingeborg Solbrig, “Die orientalische
Muse Meletes: Zu den Mohammed-Dichtungen Karoline von Günderrodes,” Jahrbuch der
deutschen Schillergesellschaft, 33 (1989), 299–322.

97
context of postcolonial studies.16 Susanne Zantop suggests that “[t]he
shortness of the colonial period, the absence of vocal ‘colonial’ subjects in
the German ‘metropolis’ (the lack of a metropolis, for that matter), and the
preponderance of the Holocaust in all post-World War II discussions have
obscured the significance of colonial fantasies in the formation of German
national identity and of race relations within Germany.”17 These factors may
have contributed to German studies’ comparatively late investigation not only
of its colonial fantasies but also of cultural difference, certainly in the literature
of earlier periods, which had already been defined by a canonized body of
works. This canonization also explains scholarship’s reticence toward a play
such as Günderrode’s Mahomed, which explicitly engages texts by two
canonical figures from the French and the German literary tradition, Voltaire’s
Le fanatisme ou Mahomet le Prophète (1741) and Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s
Mahomet (1800), which was a translation of Voltaire’s play.18
Günderrode was aware of the prejudice against a woman author writing a
drama that explicitly engages a different religion and a famous male
contemporary’s text. She, therefore, strategically crafted Mahomed—which
also addressed the contemporary issue of leadership—in such a way as to
ensure its publication. The play was published under the pseudonym
“Tian,”19 which, however, provided her with incomplete protection since she
wrote openly about the play’s composition in her letters. She established an
additional layer of protection by crafting Mahomed as a Lesedrama, a play
meant for reading rather than performance, one of the most famous examples
being Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan der Weise (1779).20 Writing a

16
Günderrode’s use of oriental and ancient Egyptian myths in her poems and narrative works
has received greater critical attention than her treatment of Islam. See, most recently, Helga
Dormann, Die Kunst des inneren Sinns: Mythisierung der inneren und äußeren Natur im
Werk Karoline von Günderrodes (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2004) and Annette
Simonis, “’Das verschleierte Bild.’ Mythopoetik und Geschlechterrollen bei Karoline von
Günderrode,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte,
74 (2000), 254–78.
17
Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial
Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham: Duke UP, 1997), p. 3.
18
Voltaire, Le fanatisme ou Mahomet le Prophète, in Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire (Paris:
Garnier Frères, 1877), IV. Voltaire’s play is sometimes referred to by the abbreviated titles
Mahomet ou le Fanatisme or Mahomet. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Mahomet, in Sämtliche
Werke, XI (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1998). These will be the editions
used in this chapter.
19
Another pseudonym that Günderrode used was “Ion.”
20
At the time, Lessing himself was not allowed to write about religion. This censorship
resulted from the controversy sparked by his edition of the writings by Hermann Samuel
Reimarus, who was critical of the teachings of Christianity.

98
Lesedrama allowed Günderrode to avoid many of the negative associations
regarding female authorship and the theater by situating herself in the hybrid
space created by the intersection of the dramatic and the fictional genre.
Günderrode’s strategic presentation of her play as a Lesedrama also affected
her choice of a title. When her editor and agent Christian Nees von Esenbeck
objected that Mahomed “scheint mir mehr eine dialogisierte Geschichte als
ein Drama” (“appears to me more a history in dialogues than a drama”),
Günderrode agreed to alter the title of the play.21 She changed it from “eine
dramatische Dichtung”—reminiscent of the subtitle of Lessing’s Nathan der
Weise: Ein dramatisches Gedicht [“Nathan the Wise: A Dramatic Poem”]—
to a “dramatisches Fragment.” Günderrode strategically combined self-
censorship with self-assertion by calling Mahomed a fragment yet not
omitting the reference to the dramatic genre. Nees responded favorably to
what he called the “voluntary limitation of her task.”22 However, Günderrode
eventually forsook him as the agent for her Fragmente von Tian, which
included Mahomed. She turned to Creuzer to help oversee the publication of
the collection but dismissed him as well.23 In November 1804, she secretly
sold the drama to the publisher Friedrich Wilmans in Frankfurt am Main with
the help of an unknown intermediary. While Günderrode was pragmatic
about the necessity of a male intermediary in publishing negotiations, she
prevented any of them gaining too much control over her rethinking of
Goethe’s and Voltaire’s version of the prophet’s story.
Günderrode had to engage in a strategic balancing act since Mahomed
participated in a complex and fraught debate. Both Goethe’s and Voltaire’s
plays on Muhammad were embroiled in heated ideological disputes and
personal conflict.24 Günderrode’s version was therefore marked as contro-

21
Quoted in Preitz, “Karoline von Günderrode in ihrer Umwelt I,” p. 238.
22
Nees wrote: “Durch die vorgeschlagene Umtaufung und Namensveränderung Ihres
Mahomeds haben Sie alle meine Zweifel in Bezug auf deßen Herausgabe völlig beseitigt.
Sie bezeichnen durch den Titel ‘Dramatisches Fragment’ eine freywillige Beschränkung
Ihrer Aufgabe” [“The proposed rechristening and name change of your Mahomed have
dispelled all my doubts about its publication. The title ‘Dramatic Fragment’ indicates a
voluntary limitation of your task”] (Quoted in Preitz, “Karoline von Günderrode in ihrer
Umwelt I,” p. 241).
23
Before taking matters into her own hands, Günderrode wrote to Creuzer: “Mahomed u alle
Gedichte die Sie kenen sind verkauft brechen Sie also alle Unterhandlungen deshalb ab”
[“Mahomed and all the poems that you know have been sold; therefore stop all
negotiations”] (Quoted in Preitz, “Karoline von Günderrode in ihrer Umwelt II,” p. 232).
24
When referring to the protagonists of the plays, I will follow the authors’ spelling of their
names: “Mahomed” (Günderrode) and “Mahomet” (Goethe and Voltaire). I will use the
standard spelling that is closest to the Arabic, “Muhammad,” when referring to the
historical/religious figure of the prophet of Islam.

99
versial and provocative from the outset. The first performance of Voltaire’s
Le fanatisme ou Mahomet le Prophète in Lille in 1741 had sparked vigorous
debate, and the play had to be withdrawn after only three performances at the
Comédie Française in Paris because of its controversial content.25 It was only
performed again after 1751, with great success. Although on a literal level the
play attacked Islam, it also offended those who read it as an Enlightenment
satire-in-disguise on Christian, or more specifically on French Catholic,
society and its political and religious leaders.26 Although Voltaire’s negative
treatment of the prophet in Mahomet has to be relativized in light of his other
writings, his one-sided representation cannot be dismissed as a mere allegory
that did not affect the perception of the literal Other in eighteenth-century
consciousness. As Djavâd Hadidi points out, two opposing traditions were
interpreting Islam at the beginning of the eighteenth century: one presented
Islam as a heresy, whereas the other, informed by travels to Muslim countries
and the actual study of Islamic texts, contradicted this negative re-
presentation.27 Voltaire’s play appeared on stage at a crucial point in the
representation of Islam. Voltaire was aware that he was being unfair to
Muslims, yet he was willing to perpetuate the misrepresentation of Islam in
order to attack all kinds of power abuse.28

25
For a discussion of the performance history of Voltaire’s play, see Haydn Mason, “Fathers,
Good and Bad, in Voltaire’s Mahomet,” in Myth and its Making in the French Theatre:
Studies Presented to W.D. Howarth, ed. by E. Freeman, H. Mason, M. O’Regan and S.W.
Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988), pp. 121–35.
26
Despite, or perhaps because of, his opinions about power abuse and religious fanaticism in
his own country, Voltaire dedicated the play to Pope Benoît XIV. This was an attempt,
possibly even with a touch of irony, to evade censorship and ensure the authorities’ pro-
tection, yet the play’s two levels of interpretation—literal and allegorical—forced it off the
stage. On this topic, see Magdy Badir, “Faut-il tromper le peuple? L’idéologie bourgeoise
dans la tragédie Mahomet de Voltaire,” French Literature Series, 15 (1988), 41–49.
27
Djavâd Hadidi, Voltaire et l’Islam (Paris: Langues et Civilisations, 1974), pp. 9–12.
28
In one of his letters to Frederick the Great, Voltaire acknowledged the inaccuracy of his
portrayal of Muhammad: “Je sai que Mahomet n’a pas tramé précisément l’espèce de
trahison qui fait le sujet de cette tragédie” [“I know that Mahomet did not exactly plot the
kind of treason that is the topic of this tragedy”] (Voltaire, “To Frederick II, King of
Prussia.” 20 January 1740. Letter D2386 in The Complete Works of Voltaire (Geneva:
Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1971), XCI, p. 383). In another letter, to Madame Denis, Voltaire
writes about the possibly offensive potential of his tragedy: “Il n’appartenait assurément
qu’aux musulmans de se plaindre, car j’ai fait Mahomet un peu plus méchant qu’il n’était”
[“Assuredly, only Muslims had a right to complain because I made Mahomet appear a little
bit meaner than he actually was”] (Voltaire, “To Marie Louise Denis.” 29 October 1751.
Letter D4597 in The Complete Works of Voltaire (Geneva: Institut et Musée Voltaire, 1971),
XCVI, p. 305). By acknowledging his unfair treatment of Islam, Voltaire relegated the
interpretation to the literal level, which served to invalidate criticism by those who saw

100
 Voltaire portrays Mahomet as a ruthless leader and inhuman parent in a
plot revolving around two father figures, Mahomet and Zopire, and Zopire’s
biological children, Séide and his sister Palmire. As a young boy, Séide was
abducted from Zopire by Mahomet, who raised him as his own son. Time
passes and the separated siblings grow up. Palmire, now a young woman,
attracts Mahomet’s attention and triggers his desire to conquer Mecca.
Mahomet’s officer Omar orders Séide to kill Zopire, his biological father,
whom he does not know. Séide believes he works in the service of God but
also hopes to liberate Palmire, with whom he has fallen in love, unaware of
the fact that they are siblings. When Zopire dies, he realizes that Séide, his
killer, is his abducted son and orders him to take vengeance. However,
Mahomet has already issued orders to poison Séide. Séide dies slowly and
painfully, which Mahomet presents as God’s punishment for his actions.
Upon learning of Séide’s death, Palmire throws herself onto his dagger and
dies. The biological father and his children perish, whereas Mahomet, the one
responsible for their demise, survives.
The reductive characterization of Mahomet as the incarnation of absolute
evil was criticized by Voltaire’s contemporaries because of the lack of
vraisemblance/plausibility and the absence of tragic potential of the title
character. Voltaire himself, perhaps aware of these objections, shifted the
emphasis from Mahomet to Séide as the protagonist in his discussions of the
play. In his dedicatory letter to Frederick of Prussia, Voltaire establishes
Séide as the focus of the play:

C’est un jeune homme né avec de la vertu, qui séduit par son fanatisme, assassine un
vieillard qui l’aime, et qui dans l’idée de servir dieu se rend coupable sans le savoir d’un
parricide; c’est un imposteur qui ordonne ce meurtre, et qui promet à L’assassin un inceste
pour récompense.29

[A young man, born with virtue but seduced by fanaticism, murders an old man who loves
him. Because he thinks he serves God, he unknowingly commits parricide. An impostor
orders this murder and promises the murderer an incestuous relationship as a reward.]

Shifting the focus from Mahomet to Séide and positing an Oedipal drama
with the timeless topoi of parricide and incest allows Voltaire to deflect some

Mahomet as a disguised attack on the Catholic church and established authority in general.
See Ahmad Gunny, “Tragedy in the Service of Propaganda: Voltaire’s Mahomet,” in En
marge du classicisme: Essays on the French Theatre from the Renaissance to the Enlighten-
ment, ed. by Alan Howe and Richard Waller (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1987), pp. 227–42.
29
Voltaire, “To Frederick II,” pp. 380–81.

101
of the criticism regarding his choice of subject matter and the question of his
title character’s tragic potential.
The ideological debate accompanied the text when Goethe translated it
into German in 1800. Although Voltaire’s play had been available in a
German version since 1748, Goethe’s translation, commissioned by the Duke
of Weimar, soon became the authoritative text.30 Like Voltaire’s play,
Goethe’s Mahomet did not escape censorship. In Vienna, “the notorious
censor Hägelin prohibited the production because he believed he saw
allusions to Napoleon in the figure of Mahomet.”31 Goethe’s translation of
Voltaire’s Mahomet was part of an endeavor to invigorate German drama
through the adaptation of texts from other national traditions, especially the
French, in ways most suitable for the German context. Goethe took great care
in making his translation appear natural by transforming Voltaire’s
alexandrines into blank verse. However, Goethe did little to alter the overall
content; he only softened the tone and sometimes deleted harsher words and
lengthy monologues.32 Two of the most visible changes were Goethe’s
elimination of the word “fanaticism” in the title of his translation, Mahomet,
and his alteration of the ending, with which Voltaire himself was dissatisfied.
Goethe abridges the play’s final scene by shortening Palmire’s last words
before her death. In Voltaire’s version, Palmire dies with the following
speech:

30
The first German translation of Voltaire’s Mahomet appeared anonymously in 1748. Two
different, subsequent translations appeared in 1749 (by Heinrich Gottfried Koch) and in
1764 (by a translator who signed his name “C.S.F.v.S”). Another translation of the play, by
Johann Friedrich Löwen, was performed on December 4, 1767. For further information on
the translation history of Voltaire’s play, see the accompanying materials in Goethe,
Mahomet, p. 1182.
31
Ingeborg Solbrig, “The Theater, Theory, and Politics: Voltaire’s Le fanatisme ou Mahomet
le Prophète and Goethe’s Mahomet Adaptation,” Michigan Germanic Studies, 16.1 (1990),
21–43 (p. 26). Yet the relation between Napoleon, Goethe, Voltaire and the figure of the
prophet Muhammad goes far beyond the censorship imposed by Hägelin. Edward Said
discusses Napoleon’s project of conquering Egypt, and his “admiration for Islam and
Mohammed and […] his obvious veneration for the Koran, with which he seemed perfectly
familiar” (Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978), p. 82). Napoleon also
knew Voltaire’s Mahomet. Said points out that Napoleon “discussed Voltaire’s Mahomet
with Goethe, and defended Islam” (Said, p. 82). This observation attests to the struggle over
the representation of Islam in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.
32
As Solbrig points out, Goethe “translated the first half of the text almost literally; however,
in the second half, he occasionally mitigated the more drastic words and exaggerated
monologues by changing a word, but mostly by eliminating phrases, even entire lines
(Solbrig, “The Theater,” p. 31).

102
 Je meurs.
Je cesse de te voir, imposteur exécrable.
Je me flatte, en mourant, qu’un Dieu plus équitable
Réserve un avenir pour les coeurs innocents.
Tu dois régner; le monde est fait pour les tyrans.33

[I’m dying.
I cannot see you any more, atrocious impostor.
Dying, I pride myself that a more equitable God
Reserves a future for innocent hearts.
You will reign; the world is made for tyrants.]

Goethe omits the pathos. His Palmire dies without Voltaire’s didactic
reference to God and salvation:

Ich sterbe, fort!

Dich nicht zu sehen ist das größte Glück.
Die Welt ist für Tyrannen, lebe du!34

[I’m dying. Leave!

Not to see you, is the greatest happiness.
The world is for tyrants—you live!]

Not only does Goethe shorten Palmire’s words, he also omits Mahomet’s
final speech, with which Voltaire’s version concluded. Voltaire had often
been criticized for this monologue, in which Mahomet appears remorseful
and asks Zopire and his children for vengeance: “Père, enfants malheureux,
immolés à ma rage, / Vengez la terre et vous, et le ciel que j’outrage. /
Arrachez-moi ce jour, et ce perfide coeur, / Ce coeur né pour haïr, qui brûle
avec fureur” [“Father, unfortunate children, sacrificed to my rage. / Avenge
the earth, yourselves, and the sky that I insult./ Tear out my treacherous heart
today, /This heart born to hate and burning with fury”].35 The speech struck
readers as overly didactic because of its lack of vraisemblance. Mahomet’s
regret does not sound sincere, since Voltaire did not outline any development
in his one-sided protagonist that would make such an ending plausible.36
Goethe was limited in the changes he could undertake because his text
was a commissioned translation, and his resulting play was criticized for the
same reasons as the original: the lack of tragic potential in a completely one-

33
Voltaire, Le fanatisme, p. 161.
34
Goethe, Mahomet, p. 588.
35
Voltaire, Le fanatisme, p. 162.
36
For extensive discussions of Voltaire’s ending, see Gunny, “Tragedy in the Service of
Propaganda,” and also Solbrig, “The Theatre.”

103
sided character and the parallels that audiences might draw between the
tragedy and the contemporary political situation, in Goethe’s case between
Mahomet and Napoleon. One of Goethe’s most prominent contemporaries,
Johann Gottfried Herder, who respected Islam, criticized the tragedy for its
negative portrayal of the prophet Muhammad. Herder posits a clash between
form and content. He praises Goethe’s German translation but criticizes the
“French” content, which portrays Muhammad in an extremely negative
light.37 Goethe himself strongly disagreed with Voltaire’s portrayal of the
prophet, but the medium of the translation only allowed him to express a
limited degree of divergence. Katharina Mommsen observes that Goethe was
conflicted when the Duke of Weimar, Carl August, ordered him to translate
Voltaire’s Mahomet for a performance at his wife’s birthday celebration.
Mommsen refers to various letters that “machen es deutlich, wie sehr er
[Goethe] sich Gewalt antun mußte, um den Wunsch seines Landesherrn zu
erfüllen” [“make it clear how he [Goethe] had to force himself to fulfill his
sovereign’s request”].38 Goethe could not refuse Carl August’s request,
however, because it was the Duke who financed the Weimar theater that
Goethe directed. Whenever Goethe mentions his Mahomet, his inner
resistance surfaces in his reference to the translation as a “sonderbar,” a
strange, task and in his refusal to discuss this play explicitly.39 Despite his
status as the poet in Weimar, Goethe was subject to the economic and
political workings of the court.
Goethe, whose patron rewarded him with the honorary title “Meccanus”
for his translation, was all the more conflicted about making Voltaire’s play
available in German because he himself had planned to write a tragedy about
Muhammad,

den ich nie als einen Betrüger hatte ansehn können [...] Ich hatte kurz vorher das Leben des
orientalischen Propheten mit großem Interesse gelesen und studiert, und war daher, als der
Gedanke mir aufging, ziemlich vorbereitet.40

37
Karoline Herder describes her husband’s reaction in a letter to her friend Karl Ludwig
Knebel: “‘Vortreffliche, vortreffliche Verse,’ sagte mein Mann, ‘aber der Inhalt ist eine
Versündigung gegen die Menschheit und alles’” [“‘Superb, superb verses,’ said my
husband, ‘but the content is a sin against humanity and everything’”] (Quoted in Goethe,
Mahomet, p. 1196).
38
Katharina Mommsen, Goethe und die arabische Welt (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel Verlag, 1988),
p. 222.
39
For Goethe’s comments about his play, see Goethe, Mahomet, pp. 1185–90.
40
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit, in Sämtliche
Werke (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1986), XIV, p. 685.

104
 [whom I was never able to consider a deceiver […] Shortly before, I had read and studied
the oriental prophet’s life with great interest, and was therefore, when I had the idea, fairly
well prepared.]

In 1773 Goethe had composed an outline and had written a number of scenes
for the tragedy, which he wanted to title Mahomet.41 He lost these documents
and stalled at the reconstruction effort: “Ich erinnere mich auch noch der
Intentionen einzelner Stellen, doch würde mich die Entwickelung derselben
hier zu weit führen” [“I also recall the intentions at certain passages, yet
elaborating on them would lead me too far”].42 Goethe had planned to focus
on the clash between the protagonist’s religious mission and the loss of
integrity caused by his political functions. Goethe’s outline sketches
Muhammad’s struggle with these opposites, his downfall over the course of
four acts and his eventual purification in the fifth and last act.43 Goethe’s
protagonist is a figure of German Idealism who represents the struggle
between an individual’s ideals and their actual manifestation. The clash
between the content of Goethe’s own planned tragedy and the commissioned
Voltaire translation indicates the complexity of Goethe’s relation to the
Muhammad topic, which was shaped by his conflicting positions as
intellectual authority and subject in the service of local power. This tension
resulted in a peculiar mixture of resistance to, and fascination with, the figure
of the prophet, a character who is led yet also leads. Goethe’s abandonment
of his own Muhammad project prevented a potential conflict with his

41
For detailed information about Goethe’s planned tragedy, see Mommsen.
42
Goethe, Aus meinem Leben, p. 687. When Goethe refers to this play, his complex relation-
ship with the Muhammad topic surfaces. He uses the passive voice, obscuring agency, to
refer to the hymn at the beginning of the play which “verloren gegangen [ist]” [“has been
lost”] (Goethe, Aus meinem Leben, p. 686).
43
The outline of Goethe’s play and the other fragments were found after his death. Goethe had
sketched the play as follows: “Das Stück fing mit einer Hymne an, welche Mahomet allein
unter dem heiteren Nachthimmel anstimmt [...]. Nachdem sich also Mahomet selbst bekehrt,
teilt er diese Gefühle und Gesinnungen den Seinigen mit [...]. Im zweiten Akt versucht er
selbst, heftiger aber Ali, diesen Glauben in dem Stamme weiter auszubreiten [...]. Im dritten
Akt bezwingt er seine Gegner, macht seine Religion zur öffentlichen [...]. Im vierten Akte
verfolgt Mahomet seine Eroberungen [...] es fehlt nicht an Grausamkeiten [...]. Im fünften
fühlt er sich vergiftet [...]. Er reinigt seine Lehre, befestigt sein Reich und stirbt.” [“The play
began with a hymn, which Mahomet strikes up by himself beneath the clear nightly sky [...].
After Mahomet converts, he shares these feelings and convictions with his entourage [...]. In
the second act, he, but even more Ali, tries to propagate his faith further among the tribe
[...]. In the third act, he defeats his opponents, makes his religion the official religion [...]. In
the fourth act, Mahomet continues his conquests [...] there is no lack of brutalities [...]. In the
fifth, he believes to be poisoned [...]. He purifies his teachings, secures his empire and dies]
(Goethe, Aus meinem Leben, pp. 685–87).

105
financier, yet it also prevented the perception of cultural difference from
evolving and thereby fixed the representation of the religious Other on the
eighteenth-century stage.
While Karoline von Günderrode faced difficulties as a woman author, she
did not write in the service of any authority. This creative independence freed
her from those anxieties that shaped Goethe’s ambivalent relation to the
Muhammad topic. As a result, she was able to challenge the representation of
the cultural and religious Other in the early nineteenth century. In her letters,
Günderrode expressed her reaction to writing an alternate life story of the
prophet of Islam:

[I]ch schreibe ein Drama, meine ganze Seele ist damit beschäftiget, ja ich denke mich so
lebhaft hinein, werde so einheimisch darin, daß mir mein eignes Leben fremd wird; ich habe
sehr viel Anlage zu einer solchen Abstraktion, zu einem solchen Eintauchen in einen Strom
innerer Betrachtungen und Erzeugungen.44

[I am writing a drama, my whole soul is occupied with it, yes, I think myself so vividly into
it, I feel so at home in it that my own life becomes strange to me; I have a disposition to
such abstraction, to this kind of diving into a stream of inner reflections and emanations.]

Although the reference to a sense of personal estrangement caused by literary

activity is a conventional Romantic gesture, Günderrode’s observation that
she becomes alienated from her own life (“fremd”) while feeling at home in
that of her character (“einheimisch”) takes on special meaning due to the
nature of the topic, namely the exploration of a religious figure from a
different culture. In contrast to Voltaire’s Mahomet and Goethe’s translation,
which present cultural difference as inhumanity, Günderrode recovers the
familiar in the religious Other and explores those aspects of Islam that show
an affinity with Christianity. At the beginning of her play, the reader is
cautioned against hasty judgments. The first chorus presents the Lesedrama
as a riddle: “Selig, selig! wer ergründet / Was hier Wahrheit sey und Trug;
Wer des Räthsels Lösung findet, / Denn es bringt der Irrthum Fluch”
[“Blessed be the one who fathoms what is truth and what is fraud and who
solves the riddle, because erring brings malediction”].45 Günderrode
questions her predecessors’ portrayal of the prophet by encouraging an

44
Quoted in Preitz, “Karoline von Günderrode in ihrer Umwelt II,” p. 199.
45
Karoline von Günderrode, Mahomed, der Prophet von Mekka, in Sämtliche Werke und
ausgewählte Studien, ed. by Walter Morgenthaler (Basel and Frankfurt a.M.: Stroemfeld/
Roter Stern, 1990), I, p. 112. All further references will be to this edition and will be made
parenthetically within the text.

106
alternative vision, which she achieves by strategically presenting her
protagonist as a familiar, yet complex, character.
Günderrode achieves this familiarity by portraying her Mahomed as a
figure of German Idealism. Her protagonist is torn between his worldly and
spiritual sides, his greed and the desire for moral integrity. By presenting her
protagonist in the framework of this recognizable literary tradition,
Günderrode ignored the perception that religious figures in general, and
prophets in particular, lack tragic potential.46 Günderrode allows her
Mahomed to doubt and thereby establishes his internal struggle as the center
of her play:

Schon Morgen! Wahrlich, ja! jener Purpurstreif in Osten verkündet das Licht des Tages, das
schon der Sonne Feuerschoos entquillt. Das Gestirn der Zwillinge, das auf dieser ganzen
Reise mich stets begleitet, auf das ich hoffend stets geblickt, erlischt im Morgenstrahl.
Zweifaches Leben floß aus diesem Gestirn auf mich herab, und ein Sinnbild war es mir,
meines doppelten Lebens, das mich theilweise an die Erde und die Geschäfte der Welt
knüpft, und mich theilweise zu dem Ueberirrdischen und zu seltsamen Offenbarungen führt.
Wenn die Gestirne um Mitternacht hoch über meinem Scheitel steh’n, so fallen mit ihren
senkrechten Strahlen allerlei wunderliche Lichter in meine Seele, die dann verschwinden,
wenn die Sterne vom Sonnenlicht verschlungen werden. (111)

[Morning already! Truly, yes! The purple streak in the East announces daylight, already
flowing from the sun’s lap of fire. The Gemini constellation, which has accompanied me
throughout my journey and on which I have always looked full of hope, is extinguished by
the morning rays. From this constellation, double life flowed down onto me, and, to me, it

46
Christian Nees von Esenbeck, a contemporary reviewer for the Jenaische Allgemeine
Zeitung, wrote: “Kann nun ein Prophet Subject eines wahren Drama seyn? Ich glaube nicht
[...] er ist der Mund des Schicksals [...] n o t h w e n d i g ist alles, was er thut, und nicht wie
s e i n Werk” [“Can a prophet be the subject of a real tragedy? I do not think so [...] he is the
mouthpiece of fate, therefore nothing that he does is h i s deed”] (Quoted in Karoline von
Günderrode, Sämtliche Werke, III, pp. 130–31). Günderrode attempts to anticipate this
criticism by creating a character who is wrought with doubt and inner division. Yet the same
reviewer also criticizes this decision. He appears uncomfortable with Günderrode’s uncon-
ventional way of thinking about a prophet, especially one from a foreign religion: “Um den
inneren Kampf des irdischen Geistes mit dem Propheten-Geiste [...] zu verlängern, und die
tragische Tendenz des Stückes zu erhalten, lassen Sie Mahomed [...] dem Zweifel an seiner
höheren Bestimmung Raum geben [...] wodurch der Leser und Zuschauer leicht in den
Sündenfall einer psychologischen Deutung der Denk- und Handlungsweise Mahomeds [...]
gestürzt werden könnte” [“In order to prolong the inner struggle between the worldly spirit
and the spirit of the prophet [...] and to maintain the play’s tragic tendency [...] you give
space to Mahomed’s doubts about his higher calling [...], as a result of which readers and the
audience can easily be plunged into the sin of interpreting Mahomed’s way of thinking and
acting [...] from a psychological perspective”] (Quoted in Karoline von Günderrode,
Sämtliche Werke, III, p. 131). Günderrode diverges from her predecessors since neither
Voltaire nor Goethe psychologized Muhammad.

107
 was a symbol of my double life that partly ties me to the earth and the business of the world
and partly leads me to the celestial and to strange revelations. At midnight, when the
constellations stand right above me, all kinds of curious lights fall, with their vertical rays,
into my soul and disappear when the stars are devoured by sunlight.]

The Gemini constellation represents Mahomed’s double life. He is caught in

between the business of the world and the celestial. Günderrode’s presen-
tation of Mahomed as a figure of German Idealism trying to overcome
physical desires and material greed establishes what Edward Said has termed
“sympathetic identification” for her readers. Günderrode, like Herder, is an
example of the “eighteenth-century mind [that] could breach the doctrinal
walls erected between the West and Islam and see hidden elements of kinship
between himself [herself] and the Orient.”47 Günderrode makes the Orient
appear familiar by presenting Mahomed as a human being wrought with
inner doubt rather than a dogmatic religious leader or a fanatic monster. In
order to achieve this identification, she uses a number of strategies to
highlight similarities between Occident and Orient, Christianity and Islam.
The first strategy is the presentation of Mahomed as a regular human
being with his own specific history rather than an unidentifiable and
frightening Other. Whereas, in Voltaire’s tragedy, Mahomet is mainly
characterized through his opponents’ words, Günderrode lets Mahomed
speak for himself. Mahomed is humanized when the audience sees him act as
a husband and father. Upon his return home, his wife Kadischa exclaims,
“Du bist wieder zu Hause, mein theurer Gemahl? [...] Sag, darf ich wissen,
was dich vergnügt, daß deine Freude größer werde durch den Zusatz der
meinigen?” [“You are back home, my cherished husband? [...] Could you tell
me what puts you in high spirits, so that your happiness may be increased
through the addition of mine?”] (133). The audience’s sympathetic identi-
fication is elicited when Mahomed is depicted as a husband who is eagerly
awaited by his wife. As a father, he has suffered as much as Voltaire’s
Zopire: “Einst, da meine Söhne starben, da war ich sehr traurig, jetzt sind sie
mir auferstanden, darum bin ich fröhlich” [“When my sons died, I was very
sad; now they have been resurrected for me, therefore I am cheerful”] (133).
Mahomed’s parental grief explains his religious mission: “Gott hat mir die
Völker dieser Erde zu Erben meiner Thaten gegeben, hier meinen Nahlid und
den tapfern Ali, zu Kindern meines Herzens” [“God assigned the people of
this earth as heirs to my deeds; he made my Nahlid and the brave Ali children
of my heart”] (133). Mahomed becomes a foster father to those who surround
him and thereby gives meaning to the loss of his own children. Although

47
Said, p. 118.

108
Voltaire also mentions the death of one of Mahomet’s sons, this reference
stresses the unbridgeable divide between Mahomet and Zopire. Voltaire’s
Zopire refers to his killing of Mahomet’s son as a response to the murder of
his whole family:

Le cruel fit périr ma femme et mes enfants:

Et moi, jusqu’en son camp j’ai porté le carnage;
La mort de son fils même honora mon courage.
Les flambeaux de la haine entre nous allumés
Jamais des mains du temps ne seront consumés48

[The cruel one killed my wife and my children.

And I carried the carnage into his own camp.
The death of his own son honored my courage.
The torches of hate that are lit between us
will never be consumed by the hands of time].

Whereas in Voltaire’s play hate begins an unstoppable cycle of violence and

is the principal motivation for the conquest of Mecca, Günderrode fore-
grounds love as the point of departure.
Günderrode’s Mahomed is humanized as he recounts his individual
development, “was lange, lange meine Seele schon gebrütet hat” [“on what
my soul has been brooding for a long, long time”] (115). The form of the
Lesedrama allowed Günderrode to insert a long monologue in which
Mahomed summarizes his Bildung and the resulting inner conflict:

Ich war ein Knabe noch, als die Häupter unserer Vaterstadt mich erwählten, den geweihten
Stein in der heiligen Kaaba an die bestimmte Stelle zu tragen [...] Ich ward ein Jüngling [...]
und ob meine Seele gleich rein war, wie ein Tempel Gottes [...] so ward ich doch verworfen
[...] mußte den stolzen Nacken in ungewohnte Knechtschaft beugen [...] [bis] der ehrwürdige
Boheira, sich mir [nahte] [...] und mir die Herrschaft über Arabien [weissagte]. (115–16)

[I was still a boy when the city’s chieftains selected me to carry the blessed rock in the holy
Caaba to the specified location [...] I became a youth [...] and even though my soul was as
pure as a temple of God [...] I was rejected [...] and had to submit to the yoke of
unaccustomed servitude [...] [until] the venerable Boheira approached me [...] and predicted
my reign over Arabia.]

From the moment that his reign over Arabia is predicted, luck is on his side
until, one day, a messenger is sent to Mahomed with the news of a friend’s
illness. Before the envoy even opens his mouth, “wußte ich alles voraus, ja
ich hätte ihm jedes seiner Worte in den Mund legen können, und als er

48
Voltaire, Le fanatisme, p. 108.

109
ausgesprochen hatte, war es mir, als habe ich diese Begebenheit gerade so
schon einmal erlebt” [“I knew everything in advance, I could have put each
of his words into his mouth. When he had finished speaking, it was as if I had
already experienced this same incident”] (116). Instead of rejoicing over his
visionary gift, Mahomed falls into “ein tiefsinniges Nachdenken [...] ich
suchte die Einsamkeit und brachte ganze Nächte in den Gebirgen dieses
Landes zu” [“deep reflection [...] I longed for solitude and spent whole nights
in the mountains of this country”] (116). Mahomed is burdened by what he
sees; the images “beherrschten mich vielmehr und quälten mich” [“held sway
over me and tortured me”] (117). Günderrode explores her readers’
familiarity with narratives of Bildung and explains the process by which
Mahomed’s torturous visions developed into his inner conflict. As a result,
rather than being an unfathomable religious and cultural Other, Mahomed is
presented as an individual with a past that explains his present predicament.
Günderrode’s second strategy for establishing her readers’ sympathetic
identification with Mahomed is her use of sources. Voltaire and Günderrode
probably used the same accounts, those most widely available in the
eighteenth century: the Count of Boulainvilliers’ Vie de Mahomed (London,
1730; translated into German in 1786) and Jean Gagnier’s La vie de Mahomet
(Amsterdam, 1732; translated into German in 1802/04).49 Even though
Voltaire and Günderrode had the same sources at their disposal, they came to
radically different conclusions. This is less astonishing considering the fact
that the sources themselves disagree vehemently over the life of the prophet
of Islam. In the preface, Gagnier positions his text in opposition to
Boulainvilliers’ earlier Vie de Mahomed. Gagnier states that he was invited to
write a life of Muhammad after Boulainvilliers died.50 Gagnier justifies his
writing of a new account by arguing that “Mr. de Boulainvilliers écrivoit
plutôt un R O M A N qu’une Histoire” [“Mr. Boulainvilliers wrote a N O V

49
Henri de Boulainvilliers, La vie de Mahomed (London: Pierre Humbert, 1730); Henri de
Boulainvilliers, Leben des Muhamed. Aus dem Französischen des Grafen von Boulain-
villiers mit einigen Anmerkungen übersetzt von J.A. Mebes (Halle: Johann Christian Hendels
Verlag, 1786); Jean Gagnier, La vie de Mahomet; traduite et compilée de l’Alcoran, des
traditions authentiques de la Sonna et des meilleurs auteurs arabes, 2 vols (Amsterdam:
Wetsteins & Smith, 1732); Jean Gagnier, Leben des Mohammeds, des Propheten. Nach dem
Französischen des J. Gagnier, mit einigen Anmerkungen. von C.F.R. Vetterlein, 2 vols
(Köthen: I.A. Aue, 1802–1804). See Gunny, pp. 229–30; Erich Regen, Die Dramen
Karolinens von Günderode (Berlin: Philosophische Fakultät der Friedrich-Wilhelms-
Universität zu Berlin, 1910), p. 29; and Günderrode, Sämtliche Werke, III, p. 126 for a
discussion of eighteenth-century works on Muhammad and Islam.
50
Boulainvilliers’ account only went up to the fifth or sixth year after the Hegira,
Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina.

110
E L rather than a history”].51 Boulainvilliers’ account is sympathetic to
Muhammad, a fact to which Gagnier strongly objects:

Mr. le Comte [Boulainvilliers] étant donc plein d’admiration pour la personne de Mahomet,
& pour les grandes choses qu’il a éxécutées dans l’établissement de sa nouvelle Religion, &
en même tems indigné contre les Adversaires d’entre les Théologiens Chrétiens, s’emporte
ainsi à s’écrier: Effets prodigieux! & qui se rapportent mal à l’idée que l’on nous donne de
Mahomet, comme d’un Imposteur, haïssable & malin, également rempli de défauts dans le
corps & dans L’Esprit, & c.52

[The count [Boulainvilliers] was full of admiration for Mahomet and for the great things he
executed through the establishment of his new religion. At the same time he was indignant
at the adversaries among the Christian theologians; he was carried away and exclaimed the
following: His prodigious effects contradict the image that we are given of Mahomet, as an
impostor, detestable and cunning, filled with shortcomings in the body as well as in the
spirit, etc]

Gagnier contrasts his own objectivity with what he presents as Boulain-

villiers’ subjective admiration of Muhammad. Gagnier claims that, in his
version “il y a cette différence que je n’y ai mis rien du mien” [“there is this
difference, that I have included nothing of my own”].53 Gagnier’s claim to
objectivity and his commitment to write a history rather than a novel conceals
his ideological investment in constructing his Muhammad as the opposite of
Boulainvilliers’: as a false prophet and a despicable character. In order to
present the “faux Prophéte Mahomet, & sa Religion, ou plutôt sa folle &
impie Superstition” [“false prophet Mahomet and his religion, or rather his
mad and impious superstition”], Gagnier invokes the authority of Christian
theologians, which Boulainvilliers undermined.54 Gagnier thereby claims
truthfulness for his own picture of the one who “a dit, avec d’horribles

51
Gagnier, La vie de Mahomet, I, p. ix. The eighteenth-century spelling from these sources has
been preserved.
52
Ibid., I, pp. xx–xxi. Emphases in the original.
53
Gagnier, La vie de Mahomet, I, p. xxxix. Gagnier insists on his objectivity”:[I]l y a cette
différence que je n’y ai mis rien du mien, que l’ordre & l’arrangement des matériaux pour
composer cette Histoire, qui est toute tirée des monumens authentiques de l’Alcoran, & de
ses Commentateurs, de la Sonna, ou Livre de leurs Traditions généralement reçuës, & de
leurs plus célébres Historiens, au lieu que Mr. le Comte y a mis presque tout du sien”
[“[T]here is this difference: I have included nothing of my own except the order & the
arrangement of the material for this history, which has all been drawn from authentic
monuments of the Qu’ran, & its commentators, of the Sonna, or the book of their generally
accepted traditions and of their most famous historians, in contrast to which the count’s
history is nearly all of his own invention”] (Ibid., I, p. xxxix).
54
Ibid., I, p. xi.

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blasphêmes, ce qu’il y a de plus faux contre notre Sainte Religion, l’attaquant
dans tous les principaux Articles & les dogmes essentiels de sa créance”
[“divulged, with horrible blasphemies, inaccuracies about our holy religion,
attacking it in its main articles & the essential dogmas of its belief”].55 In his
preface, Gagnier establishes a polarity between Islam and Christianity, which
Boulainvilliers avoids in his Vie de Mahomed.
The above description demonstrates that Günderrode’s attitude towards
Muhammad is closer to Boulainvilliers’ sympathetic than to Gagnier’s hostile
interpretation, even though many of her dramatic scenes are based directly on
Gagnier.56 One strategy which Günderrode uses to trigger the audience’s
sympathy for the religious Other is her selection of episodes from her sources
that have an affinity with scenes from the New Testament; Günderrode’s
Mahomed appears as a version of Jesus at certain points in the Lesedrama.
One of these scenes, related in great detail by Gagnier, occurs when
Mahomed enters Mecca and destroys the pagan gods in the Caaba, thereby
replacing polytheism with monotheism.57 Günderrode takes this episode from
Gagnier and inserts it into one of Mahomed’s speeches. Mahomed’s fury at
the false gods reminds her Christian readers of Jesus’ anger at the money
changers in the temple. By presenting the scene in Lutheran biblical
language, Günderrode further increases the sense of familiarity and
recognition:

Er ist ein Gott des Lebens, sein ewiges Seyn strömt in frischen Quellen durch den ganzen
Weltkreis, durch alle Räume und alle Himmel. Und diesen Gott habt ihr verlassen? habt ihn

55
Ibid., I, p. xxvii.
56
See Regen, p. 30.
57
Gagnier describes the scene in the following words: “Ensuite voulant entrer dans la Ca’aba,
il mit pied à terre, mais appercevant dans l’intérieur des statuës d’Idoles en forme d’Anges,
comme aussi la figure d’Ibrahim, tenant en sa main des fléches ou des baguettes, dont les
Idolâtres se servoient pour tirer les sorts, il s’arrêta tout court, sans y entrer, & dit: Que Dieu
les perde! Ils ont fabriqué la figure de notre Grand-père le représentant avec les fléches du
sort. Qu’a de commun Ibrahim avec ces fléches? [...] Et en même tems il commanda qu’on
les abbattit, il les fit traîner hors de la Ca’aba, & les mit en piéces. Il y avoit encore dans ce
Temple une Colombe de bois: il la rompit de ses propres mains & la jetta par terre” [“When
he wanted to enter the Caaba he put his feet to the ground but when, inside, he perceived
idols in the form of angels, as well as the statue of Abraham, holding in his hand arrows or
sticks which the idolaters used to draw lots, he stopped abruptly and, without entering, said:
God forsake them! They created the figure of our grandfather and represented him with
arrows of fate. What does Abraham have in common with these arrows? [...] At the same
time, he gave the order to knock down the statues; he had them dragged out of the Caaba,
and broke them. In the temple, there was still a wooden dove: he broke it with his own hands
and threw it on the ground”] (Gagnier, La vie de Mahomet, II, p. 126).

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 zersplittert in eure Götzen, Feuer, Sonne, Mond und Thiere? [...] Der Gott, den ich euch
verkünde, kann keine Götzen neben sich dulden, er wohnt nicht in einem Tempel oder
einem Herzen, das die Abgötterei befleckt hat; darum stoßt die schnöden Altäre um, auf
denen ihr euren Götzen sündige Opfer gebracht habt. Reinigt euern Tempel, daß ich euch
dort den Geist der Wahrheit und seine Gebote noch ferner bekannt mache. (128–30)

[He is a God of life; his eternal being flows from fresh sources into the whole world, into all
the spaces and skies. And you forsook this God? You split him up into your idols: fire, sun,
moon, and animals [...] The God that I proclaim cannot allow any idols besides himself, he
does not live in a temple or in a heart that has been stained by idolatry; therefore overthrow
the shameless altars, on which you brought sinful sacrifices to your idols. Clean your
temples so that I can further reveal the spirit of truth and its commandments.]

Mahomed’s speech echoes, in its references to the temple and idols, the
verses John 2.13–16:

Und der Juden Ostern war nahe, und Jesus zog hinauf gen Jerusalem. Und er fand im
Tempel sitzen, die da Ochsen, Schafe und Tauben feil hatten, und die Wechsler. Und er
machte eine Geißel aus Stricken und trieb sie alle zum Tempel hinaus samt den Schafen und
Ochsen und verschüttete den Wechslern das Geld und stieß die Tische um und sprach zu
denen, die die Tauben feil hatten: tragt das von dannen und macht nicht meines Vaters Haus
zum Kaufhause!

[And the Jews’ passover was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem, And found in the
temple those that sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting: And
when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the
sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers’ money, and overthrew the tables; And
said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father’s house an
house of merchandise.]

Günderrode’s adaptation of familiar scenes from the New Testament in

Lutheran language presents Mahomed as a protagonist with relatable
Christian traits to her early-nineteenth-century Christian readers.58
Within her echoing of familiar biblical scenes, Günderrode embeds the
unfamiliar by relating the history of the prophet Muhammad in long
monologues typical for a Lesedrama. These summaries refute Voltaire’s
version and highlight not only Mahomed’s humanity but also his visionary
qualities. In order to achieve this effect, Günderrode diverges from the main
lines of the Muslim tradition. One such divergence occurs in her presentation
of Mahomed’s prophetic calling. She conflates two key moments in
traditional accounts of the prophet’s life, the opening of the child

58
See Ingeborg Solbrig’s “Die orientalische Muse Meletes” for an insightful discussion of
Günderrode’s use of biblical language in her works on Muhammad.

113
Muhammad’s chest and the angel Gabriel’s revelation to the adult
Muhammad: 59

An einem schwülen Tage [...] verirrte ich mich in der Wüste [...] Plötzlich ward ich von
fürchterlichen Stimmen erweckt, tiefes Dunkel war um mich her [...] und versunken wär’ ich
in gräßlichem Wahnsinn, wäre mir von Ost her nicht ein tröstender Engel erschienen [...]
und nun führte er mich auf einen hohen Fels, den eine unermeßliche Ebne umgab [...] Der
Engel aber sprach zu mir: siehe! glaube! thue! Aber ich antwortete: ich bin ein Sterblicher
nur, und dies ist ein unsterbliches Werk. Da nahm der Engel das Herz aus meiner Brust und
drückte es gewaltig, bis ihm ein dunkler Tropfen entquoll, es war die irrdische [sic] Angst
und der Zweifel; und als er das Herz wieder in meine Brust gefügt hatte, war es mir sehr
wohl und leicht, denn die enge Schranke der Sterblichkeit war von mir abgefallen. (117–18)

[On a sweltering day [...] I got lost in the desert [...] Suddenly horrible voices awoke me,
deep darkness surrounded me [...] and I would have plunged into frightful madness had a
comforting angel not appeared from the East [...] and he led me atop a high rock that was
surrounded by an immense plain [...] The angel spoke to me: See! Believe! Act! But I
answered: I am only mortal and this is an immortal undertaking. Then the angel removed my
heart from my chest and squeezed it forcefully until a dark drop emanated from it; it was
worldly fear and doubt. When he had reinserted the heart into my chest, I was at ease and
felt relieved because the narrow barrier of mortality had fallen off.]

Günderrode’s conflation of Muhammad’s childhood and his adulthood is

significant because both her sources follow the main lines of the Muslim
tradition. Gagnier and Boulainvilliers both locate the opening of
Muhammad’s chest in the prophet’s childhood. Unlike the traditional image
of Muhammad as a prophet already chosen as a child and, therefore, not in
doubt about his religious mission as an adult, Günderrode’s protagonist, who

59
Compare Ibn Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, trans. by A. Guillaume (Oxford: Oxford UP,
1978), pp. 71–73. Ibn Ishaq’s (702–68 C.E.) biography of Muhammad is one of the
authoritative texts in the Muslim tradition. In Boulainvilliers, the removal of the heart is
described in the following terms: “Now, one day, when the child was at the pasture of the
flocks, being about four or five years old [...] Mahomet had indeed been carried away by two
unknown persons into a neighbouring mountain [...] the men who carried him away told him
they were angels, sent to take out of him that root of evil which every man brings with him
into the world: that immediately they laid him on his back, ript open his breast with a knife
of fire, and having taken out his heart, one of them squeez’d it ‘till it discharg’d certain
black drops; that afterwards, they washed it in snow, and weighed it in a balance, first
against ten other hearts, and then against an hundred, and still it was heaviest. This done,
they put his heart into its proper place again, and having closed up his breast, they set him
upright upon his feet” (Boulainvilliers, The Life of Mahomet (London: J. Osborn, 1743), pp.
196–97). Gagnier differs slightly from Boulainvilliers’ account. He locates this event “à
l’âge de trois ans” [“at the age of three”], refers to only one “certaine tache noire” [“certain
black spot”] and says, “ils lui remplirent le ventre de lumière” [“they filled his belly with
light”] (Gagnier, La vie de Mahomet, I, p. 88).

114
receives his calling as an adult, can be seen struggling with his vocation.
Günderrode thereby invests her protagonist with tragic potential; he
continues to question his religious role even after his heart is supposedly
emptied of fear and doubt: “Der Zweifel hat den Himmel aus mir
verdrängt.—Das Heiligthum Gottes ist ein Tummelplatz der Leidenschaften.
Wie andere bin ich geworden, der Geist herrscht nicht mehr in mir, mein
Wunsch und Entschluß, Muth und Zagheit, Glauben und Furcht kämpfen
menschlich in meiner Seele” [“Doubt has displaced the heavens in me.—
God’s sanctuary is a playground of passions. I have become like others, the
spirit no longer reigns in me, my desire and decision, courage and timidity,
belief and fear battle in my human soul”] (152–53). Mahomed remains
human; the angel Gabriel failed to remove all of his doubts. Mahomed is,
therefore, not simply an agent of a higher force but a character who thinks
and questions. He is a prophet struggling with his faith and fear, which
humanizes his actions when he orders the avoidance of violence in the
conquest of Mecca: “dringt alle zugleich in Mekka ein, laßt jedem, der sich
unterwirft, Gnade wiederfahren, denn, beim Allah! ich will jede Grausamkeit,
die ihr gegen besiegte Feinde verübt, blutig rächen, höret und gehorchet!”
[“all enter into Mecca and be merciful to everyone who capitulates. I swear
by Allah that I will bloodily avenge each cruelty you commit against
vanquished enemies; listen and obey!”] (191). Mahomed’s religious doubts
inform his political leadership. His conscience supersedes any absolute divine
command, making him a strong yet humane religious and political leader.
By depicting her Mahomed as a Christ-like figure, Günderrode questions
Voltaire’s one-dimensional presentation of his protagonist. In her Lesedrama,
Mahomed, like Jesus, is a religious visionary who is not immediately
recognized as such. Mahomed’s followers ask him when their prophet will
appear, not knowing that it is Mahomed himself. Mahomed responds with
religious language and a narrative form that would have been familiar to
Günderrode’s readers, a parable that establishes the connections between
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.60 The parable concludes, “Dies ist der

60
Günderrode uses the familiar form of the parable to establish Mahomed as the prophet and
to underline the connections between the three religions. Mahomed tells the story of a father
and his two sons. The father is Moses, identified by the “Gesetztafel” [“tablets of the law”]
(138) in his left hand. His first son is Jesus, recognizable by his “Dornenkrone” [“crown of
thorns”], and the second son—Mahomed—is characterized by the fact that he has “zwei
Augen, das eine richtet er gen Himmel, das andere zur Erde” [“two eyes; he directs one
toward heaven and the other toward earth”]. Mahomed is caught between his spiritual
mission and practical concerns, as a result of which he, in this parable, carries, “in der einen
Hand [...] ein Buch, in der andern ein Schwerdt” [“in the one hand [...] a book, in the other a
sword”] (138).

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Ueberwinder. Einst wird es euch klar werden nach dieser Zeit, jetzt aber
bleibt es euch noch dunkel” [“He is the redeemer. In the future, this will
become clear, but now it is dark to you”] (138). These words echo John the
Baptist’s assertion about Jesus: “aber er ist mitten unter euch getreten, den ihr
nicht kennt. Der ist’s, der nach mir kommen wird, welcher vor mir gewesen
ist” [“but there standeth one among you, whom ye know not; He it is, who
coming after me is preferred before me”] (John 1.26–27). Only later in the
play will Omar, one of Mahomed’s most loyal followers, fall on his knees
and exclaim: “Ja, wahrlich, Mahomed! du bist ein Seher, du hast die tiefen
Gedanken meines Geistes, die nie Worte wurden, durchschaut! Ja, ich
bekenne, du bist der Prophet des einzigen Gottes” [“Truly, Mahomed, you
are a visionary, you have seen the deep thoughts that I have never expressed!
Yes, I declare, you are the prophet of the only God”] (160). Günderrrode’s
presentation of Mahomed as a misunderstood Christ-like visionary fulfills
two functions. First, it allows her to participate in the ideological debate on
Islam by presenting an alternative version to Voltaire’s play and Goethe’s
translation. Second, this presentation enables her to portray a character who,
like the creative visionary, is misunderstood by his contemporaries.
This double displacement strategically camouflages Günderrode’s
reflections on the role of the author, especially the woman writer, in the early
nineteenth century. Mahomed, the religious visionary, comes to stand for the
poet who faces criticism by his or her contemporaries. Günderrode’s
Mahomed, a misunderstood and doubting character, stands in for the
Romantic woman writer’s feeling of alienation from her surroundings and her
inner struggle and doubt. In one of her letters, Günderrode presents this
feeling as a conflict between her feminine and masculine sides:

Gestern las ich Ossians Darthula [...] Schon oft hatte ich den unweiblichen Wunsch mich in
ein wildes Schlachtgetümmel zu werfen, zu sterben, Warum ward ich kein Mann! ich habe
keinen Sinn für weibliche Tugenden, für Weiberglükseeligkeit. Nur das Wilde, Grose,
Glänzende gefällt mir. Es ist ein unseliges aber unverbesserliches Misverhältniß in meiner
Seele; und es wird und muß so bleiben, denn ich bin ein Weib, und habe Begierden wie ein
Mann, ohne Männerkraft. Darum bin ich so wechselnd, und so uneins mit mir.61

[Yesterday, I read Ossian’s Darthula [...] I have often had the unfeminine desire to throw
myself into battle and to die. Why was I not born a man! I have no taste for female virtues,
for female bliss. Only wild, great, and shining things appeal to me. There is an unfortunate
but incorrigible incongruity in my soul; and it will and must stay this way because I am a
woman and have a man’s appetites, without a man’s strength. This is why I am so
undetermined and divided within myself.]

61
Quoted in Preitz, “Karoline von Günderrode in ihrer Umwelt II,” pp. 170–71.

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This letter voices Günderrode’s feeling of being torn between her con-
temporaries’ expectations that she compose poetry and her desire to venture
into the unfeminine sphere of drama to discuss such topics as religion and
history.
Günderrode’s choice of the Lesedrama expresses her awareness of the
discursive binary regarding gender and genre and her strategic negotiation of
it. With Mahomed, der Prophet von Mekka, Günderrode ventured beyond
poetry to discuss the life of the Islamic prophet and the more general question
of leadership. At the same time, however, she refrained from writing a drama
in the traditional sense. Instead, she composed a Lesedrama, a hybrid genre
that allowed her to deflect some of her contemporaries’ objections while
challenging their expectations. The Lesedrama was situated on the border
between drama and fiction; it could be performed but lent itself just as well—
if not better—to private as well as public reading. Karoline von Günderrode,
like Helen Maria Williams and Ellis Cornelia Knight, explored the
possibilities presented by the realm of fiction and its intersection with
different genres and traditions. Günderrode chose a fluid generic space within
which to position her response to the work of two literary authorities,
Voltaire and Goethe. Presenting her protagonist as a hybrid character in a
hybrid genre allowed Günderrode to paint an alternate picture of the Islamic
prophet at the same time that it expressed her own alienation as a woman
author in the early-nineteenth-century German literary marketplace.

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Chapter 4

The Letter and the Body:

Julie de Krüdener’s Valérie

The focus on women authors’ biographies and their connections to famous

contemporaries has profoundly shaped the reception of their works. The
biographical approach has resulted in privileging those literary forms seen as
the expression of the author’s personal life—her letters, autobiography, and
poetry. Helen Maria Williams is often remembered either for William
Wordsworth’s sonnet on her sensibility or for her relation to John Hurtford
Stone and the questions it posed about her national allegiance and propriety.
In a similar way, Ellis Cornelia Knight is usually associated with her
guardian Lord Nelson or Princess Charlotte; Knight’s autobiography has
therefore been read for its revelations about these political figures while her
novel Dinarbas gradually fell into oblivion. Karoline von Günderrode, who
drowned herself in the Rhine, is frequently mentioned either in relation to the
Brentanos or to unhappy male Romantic poets such as Novalis and Kleist. As
a result of this focus, criticism has concentrated either on her letters or on her
poetry to the neglect of her dramatic—and more political—production.
The case is not much different for Julie de Krüdener (1764–1824).1 Most
of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century references focus on her life
and her connections to important people on the literary and political scene,
such as Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Chateaubriand, and the Russian emperor
Alexander I, and on her influence on the Treaty of the Holy Alliance (1815).2

1
In secondary literature, Krüdener is referred to either as Juliane von Krüdener or Julie de
Krüdener, usually depending on whether her work is discussed in the context of the German
or the French national literary tradition. In this chapter, I will use “Julie de Krüdener” as the
French spelling reflects the language in which she wrote her novels.
2
See the following nineteenth- and early twentieth-century works on Krüdener’s life: Charles
Eynard, Vie de Madame de Krüdener, 2 vols (Paris: Cherbuliez, 1849); Abel Hermant,
Madame de Krüdener: L’amie du tsar Alexandre Ier (Paris: Hachette 1934); Paul Lacroix
Jacob, Madame de Krudener, ses lettres et ses ouvrages (Paris: Paul Ollendorf, 1990);
Ernest John Knapton, The Lady of the Holy Alliance: The Life of Julie de Krüdener (New
York: AMS Press, 1966); Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Oeuvres I: Fin des portraits
littéraires, Portraits de femmes (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1951). For a complete list
The biographical interest also influenced the reception of her literary work.
While most of her writings fell into oblivion, one of her novels, Valérie ou
Lettres de Gustave de Linar à Ernest de G. (1804), sparked considerable
interest and was an instant international success. In 1804, the text appeared in
four French editions, as well as in translations, three in German, one in
English, and one in Dutch. Another German translation appeared in 1805 and
one in Russian in 1807. Even after Krüdener’s death, Valérie continued to be
republished until 1898.3 Part of the reason for this success was the reception
of Valérie as an autobiographical novel, or at the very least a novel with
autobiographical underpinnings, a roman à clef of sorts. Reading a novel by a
woman who was on intimate terms with important literary and political
figures led readers to focus more on expected celebrity revelations than on
the text itself. While the biographical interest in Valérie ensured the
transmission of the novel and of the author’s name, it also bore dangers. The
biographical reading eventually resulted in attacks on Krüdener’s lifestyle,
her political sympathies, and the perceived immorality of the novel. As a
result of these ad hominem attacks, Krüdener criticism reached its most
negative tone in the middle of the twentieth century.4 Only in the second half
of the century did critics once more investigate Krüdener’s novel outside of
the biographical approach that shed a negative light on the author’s moral
character. The year 1974 witnessed the publication of a new critical edition of

of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century works on Krüdener’s life, see Francis Ley,
Madame de Krüdener et son temps 1764–1824 (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1961), pp. 637–40.
Ley lists thirty-three biographical accounts in seven languages: French, English, German,
Russian, Danish, Norwegian, and Dutch. In the second half of the twentieth century, Ley,
who identifies himself as Krüdener’s last descendant, sparked new interest in Krüdener. He
published an extensive list of books and articles on her life and work, which also contain
selections from her correspondence: Francis Ley, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Madame de
Staël, Chateaubriand, Benjamin Constant et Madame de Krüdener (Paris: Editions
Montaigne, 1967); Francis Ley, “Goethe et Mme de Krüdener,” Etudes Germaniques, 23.1
(1968), 54–57; Francis Ley, “Le roman Valérie jugé par Goethe, Jean-Paul et Sophie
Laroche,” Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France, 96.2 (1996), 313–16; Francis Ley,
“Madame de Krüdener (1764–1824),” in Études sur le XVIIIe siècle: Portraits de femmes,
ed. by Roland Mortier and Hervé Hasquin (Bruxelles: Editions de l’Université de
Bruxelles), 2000, pp. 61–74; Francis Ley, “Madame de Krüdener à Paris (1802–1804),”
Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France, 99.1 (1999), 99–108.
3
For an overview of Valérie’s publication history, see Francis Ley, Madame de Krüdener et
son temps and Michel Mercier, Valérie: Origine et destinée d’un roman (Lille: Service de
Reproduction des Thèses de l’Université de Lille III, 1974).
4
For the reception history of Valérie, see Walter Pabst, “Juliane von Krüdener, Jacques
Delille und die mémoire involontaire,” in Themen und Texte: Gesammelte Studien zur
romanistischen und vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft von Walter Pabst, ed. by Eberhard
Leube and Ludwig Schrader (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1977), pp. 198–233.

120
Valérie by Michel Mercier as well as the related publication of Mercier’s
dissertation Valérie: Origine et destinée d’un roman.5 Then, in 1996, the
influential eighteenth-century critic Raymond Trousson included Krüdener’s
text in his anthology of eighteenth-century French women novelists, Romans
de femmes du XVIIIe siècle.6 The appearance of Valérie in readily available
editions spurred the publication of critical analyses of Krüdener’s novel,
frequently in the context of discussions of other late-eighteenth- and early-
nineteenth-century women authors.7
While much attention has been paid to Krüdener’s contacts with famous
contemporaries, little investigation has been done of the author’s self-
positioning on the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century literary
scene. Julie de Krüdener’s publishing strategies illustrate the workings of the
turn-of-the-century literary marketplace in particularly forceful ways.
Krüdener deliberately devised Valérie as a work that would cause a stir in
literary circles. She wanted Valérie to be a sensation; she wanted it to be the
novel that everyone would talk about when it appeared. In order to ensure the
success of Valérie, Krüdener launched an ingenious public relations
campaign that capitalized on the developing market for goods and accessories
associated with fictional characters. She publicized her novel by creating a
demand for objects à la Valérie the moment the novel appeared:

[P]endant plusieurs jours se dévouant avec la plus persévérante ardeur à assurer son
triomphe, elle [Krüdener] courut les magasins de mode les plus en vogue pour demander
incognito, tantôt des écharpes, tantôt des chapeaux, des plumes, des guirlandes, des rubans à
la Valérie. En voyant cette étrangère, belle encore et fort élégante, descendre de voiture d’un
air si sûr de son fait pour demander les objets de fantaisie qu’elle inventait, les marchands se
sentaient saisis d’une bienveillance inexprimable et d’un désir si vif de la contenter qu’il

5
Julie de Krüdener, Valérie, ed. by Michel Mercier (Paris: Editions Klincksiek, 1974) and
Michel Mercier, Valérie: Origine et destinée d’un roman.
6
Raymond Trousson, ed., Romans de femmes du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Editions Robert
Laffont, 1996). The most recent edition of the novel contains other works and previously
unpublished material: Michel Mercier, Francis Ley, and Elena Gretchanaia, eds., Autour de
Valérie: Oeuvres de Mme de Krüdener (Paris: Champion, 2007).
7
See, for example, Tili Boon Cuillé, Narrative Interludes: Musical Tableaux in Eighteenth-
Century French Texts (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006); Beatrice Guenther, “Letters Ex-
changed Across Borders: Mme de Staël’s Delphine and the Epistolary Novels of Juliane von
Krüdener & Sophie Moreau,” The Comparatist, 22 (1998), 78–90; Stephanie Hilger,
“Epistolarity, Publicity, and Painful Sensibility: Julie de Krüdener’s Valérie,” French
Review, 79.4 (2006), 737–48; K. Wesley Lacy, “A Forgotten Best-Seller: Madame de
Krüdener’s Valérie,” Romance Notes, 18 (1978), 362–67; Paul Pelckmans; “L’impasse
imaginaire. Notes sur la sensibilité familiale dans le roman français sous le Premier
Empire,” Orbis Litterarum, 34 (1979), 33–52; and Rachel Sauvé, De l’éloge à l’exclusion:
Les femmes auteurs au XIX siècle (Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2000).

121
 fallait bien qu’on parvint à s’entendre [...] Avec ses emplettes, elle se transportait dans un
autre magasin, feignant d’y chercher ce qui n’avait jamais existé que dans sa fantaisie. Grâce
à ce manège, elle parvint à exciter dans le commerce, une émulation si furieuse en l’honneur
de Valérie que pour huit jours au moins tout fut à la Valérie. Des amies, complices
innocentes de ce stratagême allaient après elle, sur ses indications, constater son triomphe et
en portaient la renommée au faubourg Saint-Germain et à la Chaussée d’Antin.8

[For several days she [Krüdener] committed herself with the most persevering zeal to
ensuring her triumph; she ran incognito to the most fashionable boutiques and asked for
scarves, hats, feathers, garlands, and ribbons, all à la Valérie. When the shopkeepers saw
this foreigner, who was still beautiful and very elegant, descend from her coach and ask with
a self-convinced demeanor for the fantasy objects that she had invented, they were touched
with inexpressible benevolence and an intense desire to please her so that an understanding
was eventually established [...] She went to another store with her purchases, pretending to
look there for something that only existed in her fantasy. Thanks to this show, she managed
to excite such a furious emulation in the business world that, at least for eight days,
everything was à la Valérie. Friends of hers, innocent accomplices of this stratagem, went to
the stores afterwards, following her instructions; they saw her triumph and brought her fame
to the Faubourg Saint-Germain and the Chaussée d’Antin.]

At the same time that Charles Eynard, Krüdener’s nineteenth-century bio-

grapher, reproduces the contemporary discourse on gender when he
characterizes her as “malicieuse” [“malicious”],9 he cannot hide his
fascination with Krüdener’s ingenious marketing campaign. Krüdener
publicized her novel by creating demand for objects that did not exist yet.
Consumer demand eventually triggered these objects’ manufacture; only two
months after the publication of Valérie, the first cup with a Valérie motif was
produced.10

8
Charles Eynard, Vie de Madame de Krüdener, 2 vols (Paris: Cherbuliez, 1849), I, pp. 136–37.
Translations of all foreign-language texts in this chapter are mine, unless otherwise noted.
9
Ibid., I, p. 137.
10
Krüdener’s letter to her friend Camille Jourdan indicates that, only two months after the
publication of the novel, there were already plans to produce the objects that Krüdener had
created in her fantasy: “Je n’ai pas pu vous envoyer le livre ni le souvenir que je vous
destinais, ce sera une tasse avec quelque chose de Valérie. Je n’ai pu l’avoir assez vite à
Paris, mais ce sera une occupation chère dès que j’aurai un moment de loisir. Ce sera à
Berlin probablement. Si Dayott y exécute bien mon idée, ce sera à Paris même que vous
l’aurez et où on le fera. On va imprimer la seconde édition de Valérie avec estampes. J’aime
donc mieux que ce soit ce livre-là qu’un autre qu’on vous remette” [“I was not able to send
you either the book or the souvenir that I had in mind for you, it will be a cup with
something from Valérie. I was not able to get it quickly enough in Paris, but I will gladly
procure it once I have a moment of leisure. It will probably be in Berlin. If Dayott executes
my idea successfully, you will get it in Paris, where it will also be produced. The second
edition of Valérie will be printed with engravings. Therefore, this book shall be given to you
rather than another”] (Quoted in Ley, Madame de Krüdener, p. 236). Krüdener’s marketing

122
 The success of Krüdener’s marketing campaign was made possible by
what Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J.H. Plumb have termed the “birth
of a consumer society” in the late eighteenth century and its subsequent
development in the nineteenth century.11 Krüdener tapped into the reality of
consumption by influencing not only consumers but also suppliers. By re-
ferring to a literary work, she established a cultural coordinate that merchants
could not ignore if they wanted to appear cultured or fashionable. As Grant
McCracken, a theorist of culture and consumption, points out, “Fashion had
become unambiguously the uppermost design consideration for most of the
consumer goods of the eighteenth century.”12 In order to be fashionable in the
early nineteenth century, consumers and suppliers had to know of, or pretend to
at least have heard of, objects with a design à la Valérie. Consumption acquired
a symbolic function; it could determine who was “in” and who was “out.”
Significantly, Krüdener’s fictional products are designed for female
consumption—scarves, hats, feathers, garlands, and ribbons. While Krü-
dener’s marketing strategy acknowledges the growth of a female reading
public, it also reflects the perception that the woman, rather than the man, is
the main consumer, especially in the bourgeois household. As Elizabeth
Kowaleski-Wallace points out, “Over the course of the long eighteenth
century, two processes occurred simultaneously. The first was a cultural
struggle to define both the meaning of consumption and the practices of
modern consumerism. The second was the ideological construction of the
female subject.”13 The confluence of consumption and gender identity from
the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century explains the shopkeepers’
response to Krüdener. They saw a rich and fashionable woman asking for
products that could have existed at a time when images of literary heroines
graced all sorts of objects. The demand for new fashionable products
triggered a process of emulation, a pressure to keep abreast of the latest
developments in fashion, because of the “triumph of style over utility, of
aesthetics over function.”14 While one did not need yet another scarf as a

efforts paid off during her lifetime. Valérie entered the circuit of fashionable consumption;
readers could look at engravings accompanying the text while sipping tea from a cup with a
decorative design à la Valérie.
11
Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The
Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982).
12
Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character
of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988), p. 21.
13
Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the
Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia UP, 1997), p. 5.
14
McCracken, p. 19.

123
protection against the cold, one wanted a scarf à la Valérie as a symbolic
indicator of one’s knowledge of the latest cultural trends.
The most suitable place for exploring the symbolic quality of objects was
Paris. By running to Parisian stores and asking for objects à la Valérie,
Krüdener created demand for the novel in the fashionable quarters of the city,
the Faubourg Saint-Germain and the Chaussée d’Antin, a demand that would
ultimately cross not only city limits but also national boundaries. Yet living
in Paris was a mixed blessing for the author. On the one hand, it allowed
Krüdener to publicize her novel through the intermediary of related consumer
goods, while on the other, the demands of fashionable society imposed a
strain on her economic resources and her mental well-being. Her marketing
shrewdly explored the confluence of culture and consumption, yet Krüdener
herself fell victim to its vicious cycle. A letter to her mother leaves no doubt
about her precarious financial situation:

Voici, ma bonne et tendre mère, l’état de mes dettes faites en 1803 [...]. Mais depuis douze
ans, obligée de vivre d’après mon rang, avec le modique revenu que j’avais, tout ayant
renchéri presque du double partout, comment aurais-je pu suffire avec à peu près cinq mille
roubles [...] mon rang, la considération du monde plus ou moins attaché à l’extérieur, ne
m’obligeaient-ils pas à avoir toujours du monde autour de moi, soit une gouvernante pour
ma fille, ou une dame de compagnie [...]? Si mes ouvrages, comme tout l’annonce,
réussissent, ils me rapporteront de l’argent. Et cet argent éteindra peu à peu, si le Ciel
m’accorde la vie, mes dettes [...]. Personne ne peut me remplacer ici; il faut être présente, et
influente par les avantages qui appartiennent à une femme, pour avoir mille moyens utiles
pour faire réussir l’ouvrage.15

[My good and tender mother, these are my debts accrued in 1803 [...]. But how could I have
had enough with approximately five thousand rubles when, for twelve years, I have had to
live according to my rank with my modest income and the doubling of prices everywhere
[...]? Didn’t my rank and the opinion of the world, which is more or less attached to the
exterior, force me to always keep people around me, either a governess for my daughter or
woman companion for myself [...]? If my works are a success—as it appears they will be—
they will make money. And this money will, if Heaven grants me life, gradually cover my
debts [...]. No one can replace me here; I have to be present, and use my feminine influence
a thousand ways to make my work successful.]

Krüdener is caught in the paradox of promoting her novel in a city where she
cannot afford to live, yet where the contacts to build a successful marketing
campaign are located.
In addition to straining her financial resources, life in Paris exhausted
Krüdener mentally. She wanted to escape to the quieter countryside, as she

15
Quoted in Ley, Madame de Krüdener, pp. 228–30.

124
explained in a letter to her friend Mme. Armand: “Le temps a été des plus
sauvages ici; aussi depuis deux mois, mes nerfs s’en ressentent-ils bien. Paris
m’ennuie; je soupire après notre lac, votre présence et le calme [...] Un été
passé sans oiseaux me paraît une banqueroute” [“The weather here has been
most savage; my nerves have been feeling it for two months. Paris annoys
me; I long for our lake, your presence and the quiet [...] A summer spent
without birds is a bankruptcy in my eyes”].16 While the opposition between
the city and the countryside was a conventional literary trope, Krüdener’s
nervous strain also stemmed from her negotiation of female propriety with
the realities of the literary marketplace for a woman author. Krüdener
performed a precarious balancing act; she published her novel anonymously
yet was directly involved in its marketing and strategically explored the
autobiographical reading, thereby lifting at least a corner of the protective
veil of anonymity.17 Her opposition of the country to the city is a discursive
encapsulation of the dissonance between the private act of writing and the
public aspect of selling the text. Krüdener published her writing since it
allowed her to earn an income when she was in the final stages of separating
from her husband. While publishing promised financial reward for herself
and her daughter Juliette, it also made Krüdener, the divorcing wife, even
more suspicious. In order to fare well under this intense scrutiny, Krüdener
took a couple of steps to protect her reputation while marketing Valérie as
effectively as possible.
One of the strategies for keeping her respectability intact was Krüdener’s
choice of influential male mentors and intermediaries who could help shape
public opinion even before the novel appeared. In order to preempt the abuse
that women authors often suffered from contemporary reviewers and
publishers, Krüdener contacted the prominent French author François René
de Chateaubriand. She sent him the manuscript of Valérie in order to prompt
him to publish a favorable review in one of France’s major literary journals.
One of Krüdener’s letters suggests that the author of René received it
favorably: “Châteaubriand a été enchanté de ma Valérie” [“Châteaubriand
was pleased with my Valérie”].18 However, Chateaubriand left Paris to accept
a position at the French embassy in Rome before writing any kind of review
of Valérie. After Chateaubriand’s departure, Krüdener contacted Joseph
François Michaud, literary critic and poet, who eventually published a

16
Quoted in Eynard, I, p. 135.
17
The first three French editions appeared anonymously. Only in 1837 did a signed edition
appear with a foreword by Sainte-Beuve. See Mercier, Valérie: Origine et destinée d’un
roman, p. 625.
18
Quoted in Ley, Madame de Krüdener, p. 227.

125
favorable report on the novel in the Mercure de France, one of the main
journals of the time. Krüdener also enlisted her long-time friend Bernardin de
Saint-Pierre and recorded his optimism about the prospects of the novel: “M.
de Saint-Pierre est enthousiasmé de Valérie, les autres journalistes, gens de
lettres, aussi: ils prétendent que ce sera une des choses les plus marquantes
qui auront paru depuis longtemps” [“M. de Saint Pierre is enthusiastic about
Valérie, as are the other journalists and men of letters: they believe it will be
one of the most striking things that have been published in a long time”].19 In
one of her letters, Krüdener invoked the positive response of eminent figures
on the French literary scene and thereby presented her novel as the literary
work to appear in Paris: “Elle [Valérie] est attendue ici avec une extrême
impatience; les libraires sont assaillis de demandes; comme plusieurs gens de
lettres en ont parlé et que d’ailleurs une femme connue dans la société inspire
toujours de la curiosité, que d’ailleurs mes amis ont employé des moyens
pour faire valoir beaucoup cet ouvrage, cela n’est pas étonnant” [“She
[Valérie] is awaited here with extreme impatience; the booksellers are
assailed with requests. This is not astonishing considering the fact that
various literary people have talked about it and that a woman known in
society always inspires curiosity. Also, my friends have used their means to
make this work known”].20 Krüdener used her social position to market her
novel on the fashionable Parisian literary scene. She deployed her private
correspondence and public reviews by such figures as Chateaubriand,
Michaud, and Saint-Pierre to ensure the success of Valérie upon its
publication.
Krüdener’s other strategy was to time the release of the novel. Despite the
fact that Valérie had already been completed and had received positive
reviews by spring 1803, Krüdener delayed publication until the end of the
year in order to wait for the return of those Parisians who had retreated to the
countryside for the summer.21 When the novel appeared, Krüdener’s mentor
Saint-Pierre praised it as a work by a foreign author in an article for the
Journal des Débats. He characterizes the novel as

le premier coup d’essai d’une dame étrangère. S’il s’y rencontre quelques négligences,
quelques hardiesses de style, vous ne pourriez refuser votre indulgence au génie et au
sentiment qui ont quelquefois leur privilège pour le choix des couleurs et de l’emploi des
mots et des images [...] Tous ces sujets sont peints avec des couleurs naïves, mélancoliques
et quelquefois brûlantes, qui auraient fait honneur au pinceau de Sterne et d’Young [...] Quoi

19
Quoted in Ley, Madame de Krüdener, p. 228.
20
Quoted in ibid., p. 232.
21
Valérie was published at the beginning of December 1803 with the date 1804.

126
 qu’il en soit, vous ne verrez pas sans intérêt une dame étrangère allumer avec tant d’éclat le
flambeau de la littérature française.22

[the first attempt by a foreign lady. If there are some oversights, some bold stylistic choices,
you cannot refuse your indulgence to genius and sentiment, which are sometimes more
important for the choice of colors and the use of words and images [...] All these subjects are
painted with naïve, melancholic, and occasionally flaming colors that would have honored
the brush of Sterne and Young [...] Be that as it may, you will not, without interest, observe
a foreign lady light the torch of French literature with such splendor.]

Saint-Pierre praises Krüdener’s treatment of the topics in her novel at the

same time that he refers to her stylistic oversights, which was a gesture
typical in reviews of works by women authors during this period.23 Yet in
contrast to other contemporary reviewers who locate supposed shortcomings
in the author’s gender, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre attributes them to the fact
that Krüdener is a foreigner. By highlighting Krüdener’s foreignness, Saint-
Pierre sparked interest and confirmed the impression of those who, like the
French poet Chênedollé, already thought that Krüdener had “quelque chose
d’asiatique” [“something Asiatic”].24 Promoting Krüdener as an exotic author
strategically marketed her hybridity although it did not completely escape the
condescending tone of male critics’ reviews of women’s work.
Contemporaries’ observations regarding Krüdener’s exotic, “Asiatic,”
nature were comments on her provenance. Krüdener came from a culturally,
ethnically, and linguistically hybrid European border region. She was born
Barbara Juliana von Vietinghof in Riga in the Russian Baltic, a place that had
undergone continuous change. After Teutonic, Polish, and Scandinavian rule,
Livonia—containing today’s northern Latvia and southern Estonia—had
come under Russian overlordship in the eighteenth century.25 As Ernest

22
Quoted in Ley, Madame de Krüdener, pp. 232–33.
23
Mary Poovey explores male reviewers’ ambivalent praise of women authors:
“The kind of critical indulgence male reviewers accorded women served to keep them in
their proper place more effectively than even the most hostile criticism would have; it
flattered the more tractable women into complaisance and humiliated the more discerning.
Women were praised for their ‘quickness of apprehension,’ ‘delicate taste,’ and for not
presuming to ‘strong judgment.’ Even the critical vocabulary applied to women’s writings
calls for special interpretation; to say that a lady’s novel is “in the main correctly written” is
to praise grammar and spelling rather than ideas” (Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the
Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and
Jane Austen (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1984), p. 39).
24
Quoted in Ley, “Madame de Krüdener (1764–1824),” p. 61.
25
For an overview of the history of the region in relation to the Vietinghof family, see Ernest
John Knapton, The Lady of the Holy Alliance: The Life of Julie de Krüdener (New York:
AMS Press, 1966).

127
Knapton points out, “The Vietinghof family was a typical product of this
Livonian world.”26 The Vietinghof family ancestry can be traced back to the
German Ruhr valley. As early as the fourteenth century, the name Vietinghof
was recorded in accounts of the Baltic provinces and referred to
administrators, diplomats, soldiers, and the landed nobility. As the daughter
of one of these wealthy and influential landowners in the eighteenth century,
Krüdener was educated in French and traveled extensively throughout
Europe, first with her parents and then with her husband, the diplomat
Burckhard Alexis Constantin, Baron von Krüdener. As a consequence of her
education in the literary and cultural lingua franca of the day, Krüdener wrote
and published in French, yet she also strategically explored her hybrid
identity of Germanic and Baltic elements to market her novel beyond the
borders of the French literary tradition.
In the same way that Krüdener had enlisted famous French con-
temporaries such as Saint-Pierre to promote her novel, she also contacted
well-known German literary authorities. Krüdener corresponded in German
with the poet Jean Paul. In a private letter to Krüdener, he praised the novel
for its reformation of corrupt French manners: “Valérie führt die Höfe zu
einem moralischen Gesundbrunnen. Frankreich ist ein kranker Hof, und die
Quelle, wozu Sie führten, springt ebenso glänzend wie heilsam” [“Valérie is
a moral fountain for the courts. France is a sick court and the spring toward
which you lead gushes forth both radiantly and salutarily”].27 Jean Paul
explores the trope of the French body politic’s disintegration and contrasts it,
by implication, with Krüdener’s Germanic wholesomeness. While Jean Paul
did not write a review proper of Valérie, he nevertheless mentioned the novel
approvingly in his Vorschule der Ästhetik. Reviews of the novel in major
German literary journals paralleled Jean Paul’s favorable evaluation. Zeitung
für die elegante Welt, the Französische Miscellen, the Hamburgische
Correspondent, and the Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung all published
positive commentaries on Valérie.28 The novel’s success in German-speaking
lands is reflected in the comments of Sophie von La Roche, who was one of
the most famous women authors at the time. In a letter from 1804, La Roche
writes: “Ich bereue, Valérie [...] an Fürstin Isenburg gegeben zu haben [...]
denn nie, nie gab es etwas Schöneres [...] Frau von Krüdener [...] hat dadurch
allen englischen Romanen auf lange Zeit den Weg und den Kredit gesperrt.
Reine Moral, reine Liebe, fürtreffliche Ideen über Italien und Freundschaft”

26
Knapton, p. 6.
27
Quoted in Dorothea Berger, Jean Paul und Frau von Krüdener im Spiegel ihres Brief-
wechsels. Factum, non fabula (Wiesbaden: Limes Verlag, 1957), p. 57.
28
Ley, Madame de Krüdener, pp. 238–39.

128
[“I regret having given Valérie [...] to the Princess Isenburg [...] because there
has never ever been anything more beautiful [...] With it, Mme de Krüdener
[...] has barred the credit for all English novels for a long time. Healthy
morals, pure love, and pertinent ideas about Italy and friendship”].29 La
Roche praises the novel’s impeccable morals and its representation of love
and friendship by establishing British literature as a reference point in a
manner similar to Saint-Pierre’s reference to Sterne and Young. Yet La
Roche is confused by Krüdener’s hybrid national background. She con-
gratulates Sweden, rather than Russia to which the province of Livonia had
been annexed by that point, on this author: “Schweden kann stolz auf diese
Schriftstellerin sein” [“Sweden can be proud of this woman author”].30 These
comments demonstrate the positive response to Krüdener’s novel and her
contemporaries’ fascination with her complex, if bewildering, international
background.
Krüdener became the image of the cosmopolitan author transcending
narrow linguistic and national boundaries. She not only positioned her novel
in the French and German literary market but also actively contributed to its
transmission in the Russian context, to which she also had personal and
cultural ties. She asked her friend Bérenger to place an excerpt of Valérie in
the Journal des dames: “Par ce moyen, j’espère le voir en Russie, car ce
journal y arrive” [“By this means, I hope to see it in Russia, because this
journal gets there”].31 While Krüdener’s contemporaries received her
international self-positioning as that of a citizen of a cosmopolitan and
multilingual republic of letters, subsequent generations living in times of
gradually solidifying national allegiances and consolidating national literary
canons were uneasy with this author, who did not fit into one single national
literary history.
Valérie’s autobiographical referentiality—the marketing of Krüdener’s
hybridity being one of its manifestations—gradually caused the obliteration
of the author’s name from later generations’ literary histories, yet it was
crucial in ensuring its dissemination to her contemporaries. Krüdener situates
her novel on the fine line between a fictional story and a narrative with
autobiographical underpinnings by echoing familiar contemporary literary
discourses. Valérie is the story of a woman who is married to an older man

29
Quoted in Kurt Kampf, Sophie Laroche, Ihre Briefe an die Gräfin Elise zu Solms-Laubach
(Offenbach: Offenbacher Geschichtsverein, 1965), p. 97. For the reception of Valérie by
German authors, also see Francis Ley, “Le roman Valérie jugé par Goethe, Jean-Paul et
Sophie Laroche” and Francis Ley, “Goethe et Mme de Krüdener.”
30
Quoted in Kampf, p. 97.
31
Quoted in Ley, Madame de Krüdener, p. 231.

129
and becomes the object of a younger man’s passion. Readers and literary
critics were quick to draw parallels between Valérie and Krüdener because
certain episodes in the author’s life resembled those described in the novel:
Krüdener’s marriage to a diplomat eighteen years her senior and the existence
of Alexander de Stakiev, an ambassadorial secretary, who fell in love with
the author yet never told her about his passion. In addition, the characters’
travels through Italy mirror her husband’s diplomatic mission in that country.
Krüdener established these parallels, yet she also limited the autobiographical
reading by modeling her Valérie on famous epistolary novels of her time, in
particular on Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther (1774). The comments
of a reviewer for the Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung demonstrate
that her strategic modeling was recognized: “Valérie gehört zu den wenigen
Romanen, die wie Göthe’s Werther, Rousseau’s Heloise, die Delphine der
Frau von Stael, den höchsten Gipfel der Dichtung erreichen” [“Valérie
belongs to that small number of novels which, like Goethe’s Werther,
Rousseau’s Héloïse, and Mme de Staël’s Delphine attain poetry’s highest
peak”].32 Placing her novel in a successful literary tradition allowed for an
interpretation beyond an exclusively autobiographical reading. At the same
time, however, choosing the epistolary tradition as her reference point main-
tained this interpretive possibility since her predecessors’ novels had also
been subject to biographical interpretations.
Krüdener’s strategic use of epistolary conventions placed the author in a
literary tradition, yet it also made her vulnerable to attacks by those authors
to whom she was compared. While Goethe, for example, had advised
Chancellor Müller to read Valérie,33 he was extremely displeased with the
above-quoted review that compared Werther to Krüdener’s novel. He even
wrote in protest to the editor of the Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung:
“Verzeihen Ew. Wohlgeboren, wenn ich Sie vor dem Herrn GDZ warne: die
Recension der Valérie ist die erste, die ich ungedruckt wünschte” [“Forgive
me, Sir, if I warn you about Mr. GDZ [the author of the review]: The review
of Valérie is the first one that I wish would never have been published”].34
Goethe claimed that the novel was worthless: “Das Buch ist null, ohne daß
man sagen kann, es sei schlecht, doch die Nichtigkeit erweckt gerade bei
vielen Menschen Gunst” [“The book is nil, even though one cannot say that it
is bad, but nothingness awakens appreciation in many people”].35 Goethe
had, by that time, developed ambivalent feelings toward Werther, a work of

32
Quoted in Berger, p. 71.
33
Ley, “Le roman Valérie,” p. 314.
34
Quoted in Berger, p. 72.
35
Quoted in ibid., p. 58.

130
his youth, and resented the comparison to Krüdener, who had openly
expressed her dislike of certain aspects of the book in literary salons.36
Krüdener had criticized Werther because, in her opinion, it focused only on
one thought and advocated suicide; she also disagreed with Faust and
described Goethe as the “Grand Prêtre du Paganisme germanique” [“grand
priest of Germanic paganism”].37 By echoing Werther, Krüdener placed her
novel in distinguished company while highlighting her model’s perceived
shortcomings. She claimed her novel’s moral superiority, thereby echoing the
discourse on female propriety yet also provoking an influential literary figure
by criticizing his work in the half-public, half-private sphere of the literary
salon. Goethe’s resentment of the comparison between Valérie and Werther
was still audible in his later ad hominem attacks regarding Krüdener’s
involvement in European politics during the last decade of her life, in
particular her influence on Alexander I’s role in the Treaty of the Holy
Alliance between Russia, Austria, and Prussia in 1815. In a harsh invective
written in 1818, Goethe compared her influence on the Russian emperor to
that of a whore roaming through Europe.38 When Krüdener died in 1825,

36
Goethe had been told by Germaine de Staël, who herself had developed a competitive
relationship with Krüdener because of the comparison of Valérie to Delphine, that Krüdener
had criticized his Werther. Krüdener’s opinion about Werther is recorded in the journal of
Chênedollé, a poet and one of Krüdener’s mentors: “Le 22 au soir (22 floréal 1802) chez Mme
de Beaumont, elle (Mme de Krüdener) critiquait Werther. Elle disait qu’il n’y avait pas de
pensée, et qu’il n’y avait que le mérite de la passion exprimée—Comment, lui dis-je, point de
pensée? Il n’y a point de pensées détachées, mais c’est une pensée continue!” [“On the evening
of the 22nd (22nd floréal 1802), at Mme de Beaumont’s, she (Madame de Krüdener) criticized
Werther. She said that there was no thought and that it only had the merit of giving a voice to
passion—How, I asked her, no thought? There are no separate thoughts, instead it is one single
continuous thought!”] (Quoted in Ley, “Goethe et Mme de Krüdener,” pp. 54–55).
37
Quoted in Ley, “Goethe et Mme de Krüdener,” pp. 56–57.
38
Goethe’s invective attacks Krüdener’s involvement in the political affairs of her time:
V. Krüdener
Jena, den 4. April 1818
Junge Huren, alte Nonnen
Hatten sonst schon viel gewonnen,
Wenn, von Pfaffen wohlberaten,
Sie im Kloster Wunder taten.
Jetzt geht’s über Land und Leute
Durch Europens edle Weite!
Hofgemäße Löwen schranzen,
Affen, Hund und Bären tanzen—
Neue leidge Zauberflöten—
Hurenpack, zuletzt Propheten!
(Goethe, “V. Krüdener,” Sämtliche Werke (Zürich: Artemis Verlag, 1953), II, p. 432)

131
Goethe commented to Chancellor Müller: “Nekrolog der Frau von Krüdener:
So ein Leben ist wie Hobelspäne; kaum ein Häufchen Asche ist daraus zu
gewinnen zum Seifensieden” [“Necrology of Mrs. Krüdener: Such a life is
like wood shavings, you can barely extract enough ash from them to simmer
soap”].39 Goethe’s acrid comments demonstrate his resistance to Krüdener
entering the literary and political sphere of his time.
Krüdener’s strategic echoing of Werther triggered Goethe’s resentment,
yet it also allowed her to use epistolary conventions in ways that emphasized
the morality of her text and, consequently, the propriety of its author.
Highlighting her propriety was all the more important in light of the novel’s
autobiographical underpinnings. Krüdener wrote a preface that is typical for
eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century epistolary novels. She disclaimed all
responsibility for the indecency that readers might perceive by emphasizing
the novel’s didactic purpose:

Mon sincère désir a été celui de présenter un ouvrage moral, de peindre cette pureté de
moeurs dont on n’offre pas assez de tableaux, et qui est si étroitement liée au bonheur
véritable. J’ai pensé qu’il pouvait être utile de montrer que les âmes les plus sujettes à être
entraînées par de fortes passions, sont aussi celles qui ont reçu le plus de moyens pour leur
résister, et que le secret de la sagesse est de les employer à temps.40

[It has been my sincere wish to present a moral work, to paint that purity of morals of which
not enough paintings are made and which is so closely linked to true happiness. I thought it
might be useful to show that the souls who are most likely to be carried away by strong
passion are also the ones who have received the means to resist them, and that the wise
secret is to use them in time.]

[V. Krüdener
Jena, April 4, 1818
Young whores, old nuns,
had in other times already gained a lot,
when, following the advice of priests,
they worked miracles in the cloister.
Now they travel through Europe’s noble
stretches and trample upon land and people!
Lions behave like courtiers,
Apes, dogs and bears dance—
New, accursed magic flutes—
Pack of whores, even prophets!]
39
Quoted in Berger, p. 59.
40
Julie de Krüdener, Valérie, in Romans de femmes du XVIIIe siècle, ed. by Raymond
Trousson (Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, 1996), p. 836. All further references will be to this
edition and will be made parenthetically within the text.

132
This didactic disclaimer establishes the morality of Krüdener’s novel while
teasing the reader with the intimation of a scandalous and possibly auto-
biographic narrative by a femme du monde.
Krüdener explores her novel’s autobiographical underpinnings and simul-
taneously distances herself from them. One of the distancing devices in this
epistolary novel is the creation of a narrator who transmits a story of love and
passion related to her by a third party and recorded in a manuscript. The
emphasis on the narrative’s indirect transmittal acts as a distancing device,
yet it also invites a conflation of the narrator and the author:

Je me trouvais, il y a quelques années, dans une des plus belles provinces du Danemark [...]
la rêveuse mélancolie invitait à s’asseoir sur les tombeaux des anciens Scandinaves [...] Ce
fut au milieu de ces rêves, de ces fictions et de ces souvenirs, que je fus surprise un jour par
le récit touchant d’une de ces infortunes qui vont chercher au fond du coeur des larmes et
des regrets. L’histoire d’un jeune Suédois, d’une naissance illustre, me fut racontée par la
personne même qui avait été la cause innocente de son malheur. J’obtins quelques fragments
écrits par lui-même: je ne pus les parcourir qu’à la hâte; mais je résolus de noter sur-le-
champ les traits principaux qui étaient restés gravés dans ma mémoire. J’obtins après
quelques années la permission de les publier: je changeai les noms, les lieux, les temps; je
remplis les lacunes, j’ajoutai les détails qui me parurent nécessaires; mais je puis le dire avec
vérité, que, loin d’embellir le caractère de Gustave, je n’ai peut-être pas montré toutes ses
vertus; je craignais de faire trouver invraisemblable ce qui pourtant n’était que vrai. (835–
36)

[A number of years ago, I was in one of the most beautiful provinces in Denmark [...]
dreamy melancholy invited me to sit on one of the ancient Scandinavians’ tombs [...] It was
in the middle of these dreams, of these fictions and these memories when, one day, I was
surprised by the touching account of one of these misfortunes that bring forth tears and
regrets from the bottom of the heart. I was told the story of a young Swedish man of
illustrious birth by the person who herself had been the innocent cause of his unhappiness. I
obtained some fragments that he had written himself; I was only able to skim through them
hastily, but I resolved to jot down at once the principal traits that were engraved in my
memory. After a number of years, I obtained the permission to publish them: I changed the
names, the location, the time; I filled the gaps, I added details that appeared necessary to me,
but I can say with truth that, far from embellishing Gustave’s character, I might not even
have shown all of his virtues; I feared to make appear implausible what was true
nevertheless.]

While the epistolary narrative frame creates remove, it is also an expression

of Krüdener’s strategic conflation of narrator and author. This conflation
allows Krüdener, like Helen Maria Williams, to highlight her efforts to enter
the early-nineteenth-century literary scene. The narrator’s comment about the
delayed publication becomes a disguised hint at Krüdener’s considerable
publicizing and marketing efforts.

133
 The epistolary tradition provided Krüdener with the didactic disclaimer
and the fiction of the found manuscript. In addition, it furnished the title
format of a protagonist’s first name, Valérie. Krüdener adapted this tradition
in order to further underline her own morality through her protagonist. The
titles of most epistolary novels refer to at least one of the correspondents, yet
Valérie is not one of them, as the subtitle, Lettres de Gustave de Linar à
Ernest de G., indicates. The subtitle thwarts the intimation of a female
perspective on love and passion. The letters are not written by Valérie but
about her. The dialectic tension between the title and the subtitle reflects
Krüdener’s strategic positioning of her novel. The title markets her novel as a
woman’s story, yet the subtitle’s reference to male correspondents is another
means of warding off accusations of the author’s immorality. It is not a
woman, or more specifically Krüdener in an autobiographical reading, who
describes passion’s disastrous effects, but a man. Krüdener paints an
irreproachable image of femininity that circulates between herself and her
protagonist. Like Helen Maria Williams’ Julia, Krüdener’s Valérie is a moral
rock. Valérie’s feelings for Gustave remain a mystery throughout the novel;
she stays loyal to her husband and never strays from the path of rectitude. By
contrast, Gustave’s physical and mental suffering, caused by his infatuation
with Valérie, is described at length. His predicament is similar to Seymour’s
in Julia. In the same way that Seymour’s private pain is linked to the
suffering of the post-Revolutionary European body politic, Gustave’s
individual crisis reflects a society in turmoil.
In contrast to Williams or Knight, whose novels consist of intertwined
plot lines that portray the characters’ private predicaments on the one hand
and explicit political struggles on the other, Krüdener fuses these two strands
by creating what Lynn Hunt has called a family romance. This genre can be
considered “a prepolitical category for organizing political experience.”41 The
individual’s diseased body and the diseased body politic are intertwined
through a narrative of the smallest social structure, the family. Hunt argues
that the “vogue of novels about orphans after 1795” reflects the disruption of
social structures in the aftermath of the French Revolution.42 Gustave is such
an orphan who is reinserted into a new family structure. He is adopted by a
count, a friend of his deceased father:

Il se plaît dans l’idée [...] qu’il pourra, en achevant lui-même mon éducation, remplir le saint
devoir dont il se chargea en m’adoptant. Quel ami, Ernest, que ce second père! Quel homme

41
Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: U of California P,
1992), p. 196.
42
Ibid., p. 14.

134
 excellent! La mort seule a pu interrompre cette amitié qui le liait à celui que j’ai perdu, et le
comte se plaît à la continuer religieusement en moi [...] il trouve que je ressemble beaucoup
à mon père, que j’ai dans mon regard la même mélancolie; il me reproche d’être comme lui,
presque sauvage, et de craindre trop le monde. (837–38)

[He [the count] enjoys the idea [...] that he will, by completing my education himself, fulfill
the holy mission that he took upon himself when he adopted me. What a friend, this second
father, Ernest! What an excellent man! Only death could interrupt the friendship that linked
him to the one that I lost and that the count enjoys continuing religiously with me [...] he
thinks that I resemble my father, that my gaze has the same melancholy; he reproaches me
of being like him, nearly wild, and of being too afraid of the world.]

The count acts as a second father to his “fils d’adoption” [“adoptive son”]
(947) and Gustave recognizes him as such. The cause of death of Gustave’s
father remains mysterious. Gustave’s identity as a “jeune Suédois” [“young
Swede”] (835) precludes any explicit reference to the French political
situation, but the mention that Gustave is “d’une naissance illustre” [“of
illustrious birth”] (835) echoes popular narratives of orphans of executed
French aristocrats as does Gustave’s adoption by a count.
The countess, Valérie, complicates Gustave’s insertion into his adoptive
family. She is twenty years younger than her thirty-seven-year-old husband
and therefore of the same age as Gustave. She “veut que je la regarde comme
une soeur” [“wants that I think of her as a sister”] (838). The substitute
family structure immediately sounds socially, if not biologically, incestuous.
Gustave forces himself to consider her a sibling, yet soon his descriptions
reveal his physical attraction to Valérie. Gustave attempts to subdue his
gradually increasing passion by constructing her as an ideal, an ethereal
rather than physical being: he observes that Valérie has “quelque chose
d’idéal et de charmant … On dirait, à la voir si delicate, si svelte, que c’est
une pensée” [“something ideal and charming … She is like a thought,
delicate and svelte as she is”] (841). However, Gustave’s attempt to repress
his incestuous longings for Valérie propels him even further into the social
taboo. His sublimation of Valérie into an ideal also functions as a belated
manifestation of his Oedipal desire for his mother when he was an
adolescent. At the end of the novel, the narrator inserts the fragmentary
journal of Gustave’s deceased mother, in which she records key episodes in
Gustave’s life. One such moment occurs at the age of fifteen when he tells his
mother about his solitary longings for “un être ideal, charmant” [“an ideal
and charming being”] (953). She warns him against idealized conceptions of
love, to which Gustave responds:

135
 Oui, ma belle maman, la vertu ne m’effraie plus depuis qu’elle a pris vos traits. Vous
réalisez pour moi l’idée de Platon, qui pensait que si la vertu se rendait visible on ne pourrait
plus lui resister. Il faudra que la femme qui sera ma compagne vous ressemble, pour qu’elle
aie toute mon âme. (953)

[Yes, beautiful mother, virtue no longer frightens me since it took your traits. You
incorporate Plato’s idea. He thought that when virtue revealed itself, one could no longer
resist it. The woman who will be my companion will have to resemble you in order to
possess my entire soul.]

Gustave establishes his mother as the Platonic ideal of virtue; Valérie

becomes her substitution in the orphan’s complex process of displacement
geared at regaining a feeling of wholeness. Gustave’s private loss of a
harmonious family unit is paralleled by the public destruction of the national
family. His desire to refashion his adoptive family with the image of the
original maternal figure finds expression in his longing for an ideal
representation of femininity.
Feminine figures occupied a central position in Revolutionary and post-
Revolutionary political discourse. Female allegorical representations of
political ideals were common at a time when political rhetoric established a
correspondence between individual bodies and the body politic. The king’s
body had occupied a special place in the legal and popular imaginary during
the ancien régime. The meaning of the divinely ordained royal body
transgressed its physicality since it was both private and public, material and
spiritual. The ancien régime’s discursive convergence of the king’s body and
the body politic was instrumentalized by the Revolutionary imaginary. The
king’s body was presented as corrupted by a life of luxury and leisure. The
problems of the body politic were attributed to the disease of the king, who
was portrayed as effeminate and weakened.43 Revolutionary rhetoric con-
structed a counterpoint to the corrupted royal body: the image of the clean,
healthy, and virtuous Republican woman/mother based on a reading of
Rousseau. Degenerate effeminate manners were replaced with healthy
Republican motherhood.44 Yet in Krüdener’s novel, written after the waning

43
See Roy Porter’s article on the effects of consumption—in its double sense—on the king’s
body and his body politic: Roy Porter, “Consumption: Disease of a Consumer Society?,” in
Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. by John Brewer and Roy Porter (London and New
York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 58–81. On this topic, also see the articles in Sara E. Melzer and
Kathryn Norberg, eds., From the Royal to the Republican Body: Incorporating the Political in
Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France (Berkeley: U of California P, 1998).
44
For a detailed discussion of representations of the body politic in the Revolutionary period,
see Bernadette Fort, ed., Fictions of the French Revolution (Evanston: Northwestern UP,
1991); Joan B. Landes, Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in

136
of Revolutionary enthusiasm, the Terreur, and the Napoleonic wars, mother-
hood no longer holds the promise of a healthy body politic.
Valérie’s body does not bring forth healthy offspring for the new
Republic. When Valérie gives birth, Gustave recites a song, copied in
Valérie’s hand, that he finds lying on the piano:

J’aimais une jeune bergère.

Après neuf mois de marriage,
Instants trop courts!
Elle allait me donner un gage
De nos amours,
Quand la Parque, qui tout ravage,
Trancha ses jours. (879)

[I loved a young shepherdess.

After nine months of marriage
Too short!
She was going to give me a token
of our love
When Fate, which destroys everything,
cut her days short.]

The pastoral song’s tragic outcome foreshadows the novel’s ensuing events.
Valérie stays alive yet her son Adolphe dies shortly after his birth, plunging
the mother into grief and melancholy. Gustave’s mistaken belief that the song
is Rousseau’s is significant as it reflects contemporary associations of the
discourse on motherhood with this thinker.45 Valérie’s uncorrupted youth
provides the basis for the ideal of healthy motherhood, yet her body’s frailty
fails to ensure viable offspring. Her inadequacy for the Republican project
marks the Revolutionary family romance’s impasse, its lack of a harmonious
conclusion.
Adolphe is not the only unviable offspring in the post-Revolutionary
family romance; so is Gustave. His rebirth as the count’s adoptive son
ultimately leads to his self-destruction. Constructing Valérie as an ideal in the
image of his mother is Gustave’s attempt to avoid slipping from the role of

Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001); Joan B. Landes, Women and the
Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988); Dorinda
Outram, The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political Culture (New
Haven: Yale UP, 1989); and Mona Ozouf, La fête révolutionnaire, 1789–1799 (Paris:
Gallimard, 1976).
45
In his footnote on page 879 of the novel, the editor, Raymond Trousson, states that, while
the author of the song is unknown, it is not Rousseau.

137
adoptive son to the incestuous position of lover. The effort required by this
project of idealization and substitution allows the protagonist to remain a part
of his adoptive family, yet it robs him of his mental and physical strength and
eventually leads to his death. In order not to succumb to his attraction to
Valérie, Gustave replaces his adoptive mother with a number of fetishized
substitutes, such as her portrait by the famous Swiss painter Angelica
Kauffmann:

Je me suis établi dans le petit salon jaune: j’y avais fait placer le portrait de Valérie [...] Au-
dessous du tableau, qui occupe une grande place, est une ottomane de toile des Indes: je m’y
suis assis; j’ai fait du feu; j’ai mis auprès de l’ottomane un grand oranger que Valérie aime
beaucoup; j’ai arrangé la table à thé; j’en ai pris comme j’en prenais avec elle, car elle l’aime
passionément. Le parfum du thé et de l’oranger, la place où elle était assise, et où je n’ai eu
garde de m’asseoir, croyant la voir occupée par elle, tout m’a rappelé ce temps de ravissants
souvenirs. (891)

[I settled in the small yellow sitting room; I had Valérie’s portrait hung there [...] Under the
painting, which covers a large space, there is an ottoman of Indian canvas: I sat on it, I lit a
fire; and next to the ottoman I placed a tall orange tree that Valérie likes a lot; I laid the tea
table; I took tea as if she were there, because she likes it passionately. The scent of the tea
and of the orange tree, the spot where she had sat, and where I made sure not to sit,
believing it was occupied by her, everything reminded me of this time of delightful
memories.]

Gustave’s idealization of Valérie, aimed at maintaining the substitute family

structure, turns into idolatry. His attempt to repress his incestuous desire also
acknowledges its existence. By establishing a shrine to Valérie and
decorating it with exotic objects and pleasurable smells, he creates distance to
the object of his desire while, simultaneously, establishing immediacy based
on the sensual remembrance of things past.
The clash between Gustave’s physical desire for and his idealization of
Valérie leads him to seek out imperfect copies of the woman he cannot
possess. He is able to maintain the ideal of Valérie by projecting his physical
longings onto a different woman. One evening, Gustave wanders the streets
of Venice and sees a woman whom he believes to be Valérie. When he hears
someone referring to this woman as Bianca, he realizes his mistake but does
not want to abandon its salutary effects. He lingers in front of the house
Bianca entered; the illusion is continued when someone opens the window
and throws out orange peels, which remind him of an evening spent with
Valérie and fill his senses with “une volupté inexprimable” [“an
indescribable voluptuousness”] (887):

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 Il y avait quinze jours, qu’assis auprès de Valérie [...] Valérie avait engagé les autres à aller
souper, se plaignant d’un léger mal de tête, et ne voulant manger que quelques oranges
qu’elle me pria de lui apporter; nous étions restés seuls [...] elle me jeta quelques écorces
d’oranges. J’en vis une que ses lèvres avaient touchée, je l’approchai des miennes; un
frisson délicieux me fit tressaillir, je recueillis ces écorces: je respirais leur parfum; il me
semblait que l’avenir venait se mêler à mes présentes délices. (888)

[Fifteen days ago I was sitting next to Valérie [...] Valérie had asked the others to go and
have dinner as she had a slight headache and only wanted some oranges that she asked me to
bring to her; we were alone [...] she threw some orange peels at me. I saw one that her lips
had touched, I brought it to my lips; a delicious shudder made me shiver; I gathered those
peels: I inhaled their perfume; it seemed that the future mingled with my present delight.]

The smell of oranges triggers the remembrance of happy times past. While
Gustave cannot approach the count’s wife, he can kiss the orange peels, place
an orange tree next to Valérie’s portrait and, later on, approach Bianca, the
daughter of a poor opera composer.
Bianca becomes the imperfect copy of the unattainable ideal: “je sens que
Bianca fait quelquefois une vive impression sur mes sens. Ce n’est rien de ce
trouble céleste qui mêle ensemble tout mon être, et me fait rêver au ciel” [“I
feel that, sometimes, Bianca makes a lively impression on my senses. It does
not compare to that celestial turmoil stirring my whole being and making me
dream of heaven”] (903). In contrast to Valérie, Bianca allows him “quelques
petites libertés” [“some small liberties”] (903). Gustave attempts to merge the
copy with the ideal by asking Bianca to perform as Valérie. He stages an
elaborate fantasy with the help of fetishized objects:

“Oui, Bianca [...] j’ai encore une prière à vous faire” [...] j’allai dans une des plus belles
boutiques à la mercerie, acheter un châle bleu, très beau, comme celui que porte Valérie et
qu’elle a presque toujours [...] “laisse moi relever vos cheveux tout simplement [...] il faut
encore ôter ce tablier de couleur; il faut que votre robe soit toute blanche.” Et j’arrangeai sa
robe afin qu’elle coulât doucement en longs replis jusqu’à terre; puis je tirai le châle bleu, je
le jetai négligemment sur ses épaules: “Voilà qui est fait [...] actuellement, Bianca,
permettez que je m’asseye là, vis-à-vis de vous.” Je posai les lumières de manière à projeter
son ombre vers moi, et à ne l’éclairer que faiblement; je travaillais ainsi à construire le plus
artistement possible, une illusion [...] “Chantez la romance d’hier [...] Diminuez votre voix.”
[...] Je croyais la voir; je fermais les yeux à moitié pour voir moins distinctement: alors ces
cheveux, cette taille, ce châle, cette tête que je l’avais priée d’incliner un peu, tout me
paraissait Valérie. Mon imagination se monta à un point incroyable; la réalité était disparue,
le passé revivait, m’enveloppait; la voix que j’entendais m’envoyait les accents de l’amour;
j’étais hors de moi; je frissonais, je brûlais tour à tour. (906)

[“Yes, Bianca [...] I have one more request” [...] I went to one of the nicest boutiques in the
haberdashery and bought a beautiful blue shawl, like the one that Valérie wears most of the
time [...] “let me simply put up your hair [...] we still have to remove this colorful apron;

139
 your dress has to be completely white.” And I arranged her dress in such a manner that it
flowed in long folds to the ground; then I took the blue shawl and I threw it negligently over
her shoulders: “Now we are done [...] at present, Bianca, allow me to sit there, facing you.” I
set the lights in such a way that her shadow was projected towards me and that she was only
softly lit; I was working to construct, as artistically as possible, an illusion [...] “Sing the
romance from yesterday [...] lower your voice.” I thought I saw her; I half-closed my eyes to
see less distinctly. The hair, the waist, the shawl, the head that I had asked her to incline
slightly, everything resembled Valérie. My imagination heightened to an unbelievable point;
reality had disappeared, the past returned and enveloped me; the voice I heard sent me
accents of love; I was beside myself, in turn I shivered and burned.]

The hairdo, the dress, and the blue shawl are all items worn by Valérie on a
previous occasion. Having staged the illusion, Gustave nearly succumbs to it:
“je m’élançai vers elle pour la saisir dans mes bras; ma démence allait
jusqu’à l’appeler Valérie; dans ce moment on frappa à la porte” [“I rushed
toward her in order to pull her into my arms; my madness went so far as to
call her Valérie; at that moment someone knocked on the door”] (906–7). But
before Gustave entirely loses control, Bianca’s brother-in-law, Angelo,
reerects the barrier separating Valérie from Bianca by intruding on the
illusion and thereby destroying it. Bianca discards the shawl and now the
doppelgänger merely appears as a “marionnette qui ne se doutait nullement
de [s]on âme” [“puppet that had no idea of [its] soul”] (907).
Bianca is rescued from the protagonist’s intense desire by a deus ex
machina in the form of her brother-in-law. Valérie’s purity is not even sullied
in her substitute; her fetishes never fulfill Gustave’s desire. As in Werther,
the image of the idealized woman is never in danger because characters do
not succumb to their physical desire. In contrast to Goethe’s novel, however,
the male letter writer’s restraint does not lead him to shoot himself. Gustave,
consumed by passion, reassures his friend: “Ne t’effraie pas, Ernest, jamais je
n’attenterai à ma vie; jamais je n’offenserai cet être qui compta mes jours, et
me donna pendant si longtemps un bonheur si pur [...] je n’accuserai pas le
ciel de mes malheurs, comme font tant de mes semblables; je souffrirai, sans
me plaindre, la peine dont je fus l’artisan, et que j’aime, quoiqu’elle me tue:
je souffrirai, mais je dormirai ensuite” [“Do not be frightened Ernest, I will
never take my own life; I will never offend the being that counted my days
and has given me pure happiness for such a long time [...] I will not blame
the heavens for my misfortunes, as many of those like me do; I will suffer,
without complaining, from the pain that I caused and that I like, even though
it kills me: I will suffer, but then I will sleep”] (916). Gustave’s rejection of
suicide and his criticism of those who blame God for their misfortunes
represent Krüdener’s direct criticism of Werther’s ending. Werther not only
commits suicide but also justifies his decision by stating that “du, Geist des

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Himmels, begünstigst meinen Entschluß” [“Thou, Spirit of heaven, lookest
upon my resolve with favour”].46
Gustave’s explicit rejection of suicide differs not only from Werther’s
decision but also from that of the other novel to which Valérie was compared,
Staël’s Delphine. Staël’s female protagonist poisons herself; Krüdener
criticized this ending in a letter to her friend Bérenger:

Vous l’avez lu, sans doute, cet autre “roman dont l’héroïne, d’ailleurs si généreuse et si
bonne, épouvante tant son sexe par le suicide” [...] Malgré les beautés dont il étincelle, il ne
doit pas réussir [...] Et la religion “est là debout” pour frapper de mort cette doctrine,
d’autant plus effrayante que le talent qui cherche à la propager est immense [...] Je ne vois
dans Delphine que la triste victime d’une passion forte et malheureuse, et dans ses dernières
actions, que les inconséquences d’une tête qui ne raisonne plus.47

[You have probably read the other “novel whose heroine, otherwise so generous and good,
terrifies her sex by her suicide” [...] Despite its sparkling beauty it cannot succeed [...] And
religion disapproves of this doctrine, which is all the more frightening because the talent that
tries to propagate it is immense [...] In Delphine I only see the sad victim of a strong and
unfortunate passion and in her last actions I see the inconsistency of a mind that no longer
reasons.]

Krüdener’s characterization of Delphine’s ending as immoral is audible in

this passage, even though she takes great care to underline Staël’s morality at
other points in this letter. Gustave’s comment regarding Werther’s end allows
Krüdener to emphasize her morality by underlining its religious base. She
thereby, once more, strategically explores the approximations between the
novel and her life made by readers and herself.
The author rejects suicide, yet the protagonist’s death is the only logical
conclusion in a narrative that outlines the failure of the Revolutionary ideals
of liberty, equality, and fraternity and personifies the body politic in the
protagonist’s body. Gustave’s suffering is symptomatic of the body politic’s
pain under the Terreur and the ensuing Revolutionary Wars. His refusal to
accept the disharmony of his adoptive family and the inattainability of his
ideal projects him into a masochistic cycle of lament that ultimately results in
his self-annihilation. He rejects Werther’s pistol but gradually wastes away
through the “éternelles répétitions” (849) of “tous les détails” (869) relating
to Valérie: “T’écrire, te dire tout, c’est revivre dans chaque instant de la
nouvelle existence qu’elle m’a créée [...] Tout fortifie sa naissante amitié;

46
Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werther (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 1986),
p. 146. English translation from Johann Wolfgang Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther,
trans. by Michael Hulse (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 131.
47
Quoted in Ley, Madame de Krüdener, p. 244.

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tout alimente ma dévorante passion: elle met entre nous deux son innocence;
et l’univers reste pour elle comme il est, tandis que tout est changé pour moi”
[“To write to you, to tell you everything, is to relive every moment of the
new existence she has created for me [...] Everything strengthens her nascent
friendship; everything feeds my devouring passion: she places her innocence
between us; and the universe remains unchanged for her, while everything
has changed for me”] (862–63). Gustave’s accounts to Ernest at first relieve
his tension, yet they also torture him with inattainability of his ideal.
Gustave’s awareness of the clash between his passion and Valérie’s
friendship emphasizes his awkward position in his adoptive family. In order
to reestablish harmony, Gustave needs to disappear from the family structure.
He does not commit suicide directly but begins to self-mutilate. The pleasure
and pain of repetitive letter writing are transformed into Gustave’s more
physical attempts on his body’s integrity. In the course of a gondola
excursion, Gustave is overwhelmed by the awkwardness of his position in the
count’s family:

Je détestais l’amour, le comte, et moi-même plus que tout le reste; et quand la barque rentra
dans le canal et se rapprocha du rivage, je saisis un instant où elle était près de moi, je sautai
à terre, ne voulant plus renfermer mes horribles sentiments dans l’espace étroit d’une
gondole; je m’accrochai aux branches d’un buisson, et je vis avec délice couler mon sang de
mes mains meurtries, que j’enfonçai dans les épines: une espèce de rage indéfinissable me
poussait; il s’y mêlait une sorte de volupté; et, tout en détestant les caresses que Valérie
faisait au comte, j’aimais à me les retracer; j’en créais de nouvelles; ma jalousie était avide
de nouveaux tourments: je sentais aussi que je rompais les dernier liens de la vertu en
commençant à haïr le comte. (909–10)

[I hated love, the count, and myself more than the rest. When the boat entered the canal and
approached the shore, I seized a moment when she was close to me and I jumped onshore. I
no longer wanted to contain my horrible feelings in the tight space of a gondola; I hung on
to the branches of a bush, and, with delight, I saw blood run from my bruised hands. I drove
them into the thorns: an indefinable rage pushed me; a type of voluptuousness mixed with it.
While I hated the caresses that Valérie bestowed upon the count, I loved retracing them; I
created new ones; my jealousy was avid for new torments: I also felt that I ruptured the last
bonds of virtue because I started hating the count.]

Gustave’s Oedipal conflict transforms the accidental experience of pain into a

conscious pursuit of it. His love for his adoptive mother and hate for his
adoptive father are translated into self-loathing. Gustave’s anger at his
impossible position in his adoptive family is turned inward when his mind
compulsively repeats painful scenes and his body becomes a displaced target
for his frustration.

142
 Gustave realizes that he needs to separate from the count’s family and
travels on his own in search of mental peace. Yet rather than relieving him,
this decision further propels him into the self-destructive cycle that he has
entered:

Mais alors toute la douleur de la séparation vint me saisir [...] Je courus à ma chambre; je me
jetai à terre, frappant ma tête contre le plancher, et répétant en gémissant le nom de Valérie.
“Hélas! me disais-je, elle ne m’entendra donc plus jamais!” Erich, le vieux Erich entra. Ce
n’était pas la première fois qu’il m’avait vu dans cet état violent: il me gronda. Je feignis de
me jeter sur mon lit pour le renvoyer; je passai plusieurs heures dans la plus violente
agitation, et je résolus de t’écrire. Je retrouvai dans ma tête toutes les situations douloureuses
de cette journée; cela me calmait: il est si doux de donner au moins une idée du trouble qui
nous détruit! (921)

[But then, the pain of the separation took hold of me [...] I ran to my room, threw myself onto
the ground and hit my head against the floor while I moaned and repeated Valérie’s name.
“Alas! I told myself, she will never hear me again!” Erich, the old Erich entered. This was not
the first time he saw me in this violent state: he scolded me. I pretended to throw myself onto
the bed to send him away; I spent several hours in the most violent agitation, and I resolved to
write to you. In my head, I once more encountered the day’s painful situations; this calmed me:
it is so sweet, at least, to give an idea of the trouble that destroys us!]

Gustave repeatedly beats his head against the floor, attempting, not for the
first time, to drown his emotional suffering with intensely painful physical
sensations. This repetitive physical action parallels his compulsive writing.
Gustave inscribes the paper and his body with his mental suffering, which
projects him into a repetitive cycle of masochistic lament from which he
cannot escape.
At the end of the novel, Gustave’s mental suffering has impaired his
physical health to such a degree that he can no longer actively hurt himself.
He has become too weak to engage in self-mutilation or to write to Ernest.
The pen has been removed from his hand; therefore the count narrates
Gustave’s last days on his deathbed:

une fièvre dévorante le consume; elle est accompagnée d’un délire qui vient tous les soirs à
la même heure, et qui empêche le malade de prendre le moindre repos [...] L’agitation la
plus violente était dans ses traits, sa poitrine oppressée était découverte, et je frémis en
voyant sa maigreur. Ses mains se plaçaient alternativement sur sa tête, où il paraissait
souffrir, et retombaient sur le lit. Il me regarda avec des yeux égarés, mais sans témoigner la
moindre surprise. (941)

[a devouring fever consumes him; it is accompanied by a delirium that returns every evening
at the same time and prevents the patient from resting at all [...] The most violent agitation
was in his features, his oppressed chest was uncovered and I shuddered when I saw his

143
 thinness. He placed his hands on his head, which seemed to ache, and then they fell onto the
bed. He looked at me with distraught eyes, but without any sign of surprise.]

Gustave is consumed by the literalized fires of passion but only dies after the
count expresses his knowledge of his adoptive son’s dilemma and forgives
him: “Cher Gustave! calmez-vous. Je sais tout, je vous plains, je vous aime,
je donnerais ma vie pour vous” [“Dear Gustave! calm down. I know every-
thing, I pity you, I love you, I would give my life for you”] (944). Gustave is
“soulagé d’un poids terrible” [“relieved of a horrible weight”] (944). This
relief is heightened by the count’s revelation that Valérie, to whom Gustave
wrote a letter confessing his love, also “sait tout” [“knows everything”]
(947). After this collective absolution, Gustave, for the first time, calls the
count “[m]on père” [my father]” (947) and makes his last arrangements. The
novel ends with the count viewing Gustave’s corpse and closing his coffin: “Je
posai mes lèvres sur son front glacé: ‘ô mon fils! Mon fils! [...]’ C’est tout ce
que je pus dire. Je restai immobile” [“I put my lips on his cold forehead: ‘O my
son! My son [...]’ This is all that I could say. I stood there without moving”
(961). The count laments the substitute family’s failure to create a healthy
social body. The post-Revolutionary family romance concludes with the
extinction of Gustave’s body, which functions metonymically in representing
the failure of Revolutionary ideals to establish a healthy body politic.
Gustave’s story is that of an individual who dies as a result of unrequited
passion, yet its implications transcend the private level by engaging
contemporary public political discourse. Valérie functions as a family
romance in Lynn Hunt’s sense; the novel establishes parallels between the
smallest social unit, the family, and the national family in the post-
Revolutionary social fabric. Krüdener’s use of the epistolary genre for her
family romance allowed her to express her concern with, as Elizabeth H.
Cook argues, “the boundaries of public and private—and with questions of
gender and corporealization that are inextricably involved in this
definition.”48 The private story of Gustave’s body has political implications at
a time in which the body of the individual was no longer embedded in the old
hierarchy and not yet situated in a new stable social universe. The epistolary
narrative of the individual’s physical and mental suffering manifests a
process that Peter Brooks has called “body work.”49 In the post-
Revolutionary period, “each body must in turn be made semiotic—receive

48
Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-
Century Republic of Letters (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996), p. 12.
49
Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge and London:
Harvard UP, 1993).

144
the mark of meaning. Narratives often dramatize the making of that mark of
meaning, the process by which the body becomes an intelligible sign.”50 The
body no longer has an a priori signification and has to go through a painful
process of redefinition. Analyzing the pathologies of the “most private of
affairs,”51 the human body, implies an interrogation of the failures of the
body politic, its public counterpart, in the same way that the family romance
is also a story about the national family.
Julie de Krüdener’s 1805 epistolary novel demonstrates a private
narrative’s public implications at a time when the changes in the French
national body politic had caused upheaval in the entire European political
fabric, first with the French Revolutionary and then the Napoleonic wars. The
impasse with which the novel ends—the reestablishment of peace through the
annihilation of the failed social experiment of a substitute family structure—
reflects the larger sense of political questioning regarding the long-standing
political conflict in which European powers had been engaging in the
aftermath of the French Revolution. In the same way that Krüdener shrewdly
and carefully combines fictional and autobiographical elements in Valérie,
she also strategically embeds the novel’s political referentiality in the
recognizable literary form of an individual’s epistolary complaint. The
private is the public for this woman author who, in order to successfully
market her writings in the cosmopolitan and international republic of letters,
deplored the corruption of the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity and
their translation into increasingly nationalistic tendencies.
Krüdener’s cosmopolitanism constituted an integral part of her appeal for
the literary marketplace. Her friends and reviewers presented her foreignness
as the exotic appeal of this author writing in French, the literary lingua franca
of her time. Contemporaries’ difficulty in correctly pinpointing Krüdener’s
national, regional, and linguistic provenance became a constitutive element of
her appeal. In order to maintain her identity as an exotic rather than a
suspicious femme de lettres, Krüdener was dependent on the free trade of
ideas, books, and consumer goods, which was threatened by the increasingly
nationalistic tendencies of her time. She strategically situated herself in the
cosmopolitan republic of letters that incarnated the ideals of liberté, égalité,
and fraternité. When the Terreur, the French Revolutionary Wars, and the
Napoleonic period stained the political application of these ideals, Krüdener
searched for a political model that could transcend the factionalism of her
time. She envisioned an international Christian republic that could end the

50
Ibid., p. 54.
51
Ibid., p. 33.

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violence. This vision was based on her desire to “faire revivre le
christianisme communautaire primitif en régénérant celui de son temps,
entaché des violences de la Révolution” [“participate in the rebirth of
communal primitive Christianity by regenerating that of her time which had
been stained by Revolutionary violence”].52 In her later life, this desire led
her to preach publicly, even to European dignitaries, about her desire to
replace Napoleon, whom she saw as the head of the empire’s political
violence, with a leader worthy of guiding the Christian republic. Krüdener
found this leader in the person of the Russian emperor Alexander whom she
exhorted to lead a new Christian Church and to defeat Napoleon. Under her
influence, Alexander drew up the Treaty of the Holy Alliance (1815) between
Russia, Austria, and Prussia; these countries’ leaders resolved “to take for
their sole guide the precepts of the Holy Religion, namely the precepts of
Justice, Christian Charity and Peace.”53
Krüdener’s suggestion of an ideal social structure based on the Christian
principles of justice, charity, and peace—often portrayed as feminine figures
in allegorical representations—is consistent with her construction of an
idealized feminine figure in her epistolary novel. Valérie foreshadows these
political ideals on a fictional level and allows Krüdener to strengthen her self-
presentation as a moral figure in the early-nineteenth-century literary market-
place. Projecting a “moi idéal pudique” [“ideal and modest I”] was all the
more important since Krüdener had engaged in extramarital affairs and even
had an illegitimate child.54 Idealizing herself through her protagonist was
geared at fading this stain on her reputation, as was her political engagement
in the name of Christianity. Yet the establishment of an ideal failed to
guarantee a viable body politic both in Krüdener’s 1805 novel and in the
aftermath of the 1815 Holy Alliance. In the same way that Gustave’s body
eventually wastes away as a result of the inattainability of his ideal, the Holy
Alliance’s vision of a Christian transnational body politic would gradually be
translated into the signatories’ repressive policies toward nationalist and
liberal movements and into Krüdener’s imperialist dreams. Alexander exiled
her in 1822 because she publicly expressed her desire to see him “reconquérir
les Saints Lieux” [“reconquer the Holy Places”].55 Her desire to see
Christianity enter the “murs de Constantinople” [“walls of Constantinople”]
amounted to a call for a new Crusade, from which the Russian emperor

52
Ley, “Madame de Krüdener,” p. 66.
53
Quoted in James Hastings and John A. Selbie, Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, 24 vols
(Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing, 2003), XXIV, p. 446.
54
Janine Rossard, Pudeur et Romantisme (Paris: Librairie A.G. Nizet, 1982), p. 35.
55
Quoted in Ley, “Madame de Krüdener,” p. 69.

146
wanted to distance himself; he exiled Krüdener to the Crimean peninsula,
where she died in 1824.56
Valérie expresses the impasse experienced by an author who lived in the
post-Revolutionary period and experienced the Terreur, the French
Revolutionary Wars, and Napoleon’s rule. Krüdener used the republic of
letters to reflect on new ways of constructing a viable body politic via her
protagonist Gustave. Valérie leads to the conclusion that political ideals,
notwithstanding their imagined purity, eventually lead to the corruption of
that body they are supposed to protect from violence, torture, and death.
Gustave’s total devotion to the feminine ideal ushers in his gradual
destruction; his body—as a representation of the body politic—eventually
falls apart. At the same time that the feminine ideal anchors the novel’s
political referentiality, it also serves as the author’s strategic self-
presentation. Krüdener presents herself in the image of the idealized feminine
character who, unaffected by the fires of passion, never strays from the path
of rectitude. This self-presentation was especially important, not only because
Krüdener herself had succumbed to extramarital attraction but also because
she was politically active and thereby questioned gender roles and the related
precepts of privacy and publicity. Krüdener’s play with her novel’s
autobiographical underpinnings and her veiling of its political referentiality
therefore needs to be explored as her strategic positioning on the early-
nineteenth-century literary marketplace and political sphere. Rather than
seeing the tensions inherent in this self-positioning as paradoxical, exploring
their complexity allows for an understanding of a woman author not as an
appendage to a famous male contemporary but as a social agent strategically
negotiating the interwoven discourses of gender and genre.

56
Quoted in Ley, “Madame de Krüdener,” p. 69.

147
Conclusion
Writing Back, Reading Forward

Intertextual dialogue is a feature of all literary discourse. No author writes in

a void; any publication is always already a response to prior texts, literary
genres, and intellectual debates. The specific type of intertextuality, however,
depends on the historical and intellectual context and the author’s position on
the literary marketplace. As a result of eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-
century concept of genders, women had to situate their literary contribution
carefully and strategically. Responding to a popular text by a well-known
author was part of that strategy. It allowed authors such as Helen Maria
Williams, Ellis Cornelia Knight, Karoline von Günderrode, and Julie de
Krüdener to awaken readers’ curiosity by providing a recognizable literary
framework. Referencing Rousseau’s Julie, Johnson’s Rasselas, Voltaire’s
Mahomet, and Goethe’s Werther established a launching pad for the success-
ful dissemination of their texts.
Financial considerations had become important to authors by the late
eighteenth century because the earlier system of patronage had all but dis-
appeared. This observation applies, of course, to both women and men of this
period. Yet for those women who were literate, primarily from the upper
middle classes and the aristocracy, writing was one of the few acceptable
means of earning an income or of contributing financially to the household in
economically challenging times. It is, therefore, no coincidence that the four
authors’ publishing efforts were triggered by the disappearance of their
family’s male provider. For Günderrode, Knight, and Williams, it was the
death of their father, and for Krüdener, the separation and eventual divorce
from her husband that provided the impetus for publishing and marketing
their writing.
Referring to a famous text provided a recognizable context for these
women’s literary contribution, yet it also highlighted their paradoxical
position in the aftermath of the French Revolution. The call for liberty and
equality had been heard in France and in neighboring European countries, but
a literal interpretation of the concept of fraternity created obstacles to
women’s entrance into the publishing world. The discursive consolidation of
women’s supposed “incommensurable difference” and its naturalization into
narrowly defined gender roles created an aura of disrepute for any woman
seeking access to the late-eighteenth-century public sphere. The Lumières’
ideals of freedom and equality were eroded in the aftermath of the French
Revolution. This was the case not only in France but also in other European
countries, where the first enthusiasm for the political implementation of
Enlightenment ideals had waned after Robespierre’s bloody reign and
Napoleon’s emergence as a national leader with international aspirations. In
this context, women who were active in the public sphere were either
punished physically such as Olympe de Gouges or labeled with terms that
reprimanded them for their transgression. By definition, publishing women
participated in the public sphere and therefore diverged from the discursively
established apolitical realm of femininity. Derogative terminology such as
Richard Polwhele’s characterization of Williams as “unsex’d” or Goethe’s
description of Krüdener as a “whore” attempted to force these publicly vocal
women back into a narrowly conceived sphere of privacy. The dissemination
of these labels was inextricably tied to the economic realities of the literary
marketplace, which had become a true industry by the turn of the century.
The anxiety felt by established authors about women’s increasing presence
on the literary scene can be witnessed in Goethe and Schiller’s exchange of
letters on this topic and their use of the term “dilettante” to dismiss women
writers as amateurs.1 Those authors who could be turned away with the threat
of impropriety lessened the competition for publishers and readers. Those
women who entered and remained in the literary sphere were characterized as
second-class citizens of the republic of letters.
The realities of the literary marketplace were closely tied to the
emergence and establishment of fiction as the genre, attracting a wider
readership and presenting greater financial opportunities than poetry and
drama. While the public dimension of the stage still acted as a deterrent to
many women, fiction provided them with a literary venue that transcended
poetry’s connotations of privacy without foregrounding the public aspect of
the writing profession. The case of Helen Maria Williams illustrates this
particularly forcefully. At the same time that Williams published political
reports on the French Revolution, she also explored the potential of the
fictional genre. In Julia, she used the plot of a sentimental romance, changed
the narrative premises by abandoning the epistolary form of Rousseau’s
Julie, and carefully embedded political reflections. Authors’ perception of the
novel as a new genre allowed for a malleability that resulted in hybrid textual

1
For a detailed discussion of Goethe and Schiller’s writing on female authorship and
dilettantism, see Helen Fronius, Women and Literature in the Goethe Era, 1770–1820:
Determined Dilettantes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), pp. 62–66.

150
creations such as Julia, which combined fiction with poetry, and allowed
Williams to reach a different readership than her Letters.
Williams was not the only author who experimented with fictional forms;
so did Knight, Günderrode, and Krüdener. Knight’s Dinarbas fuses the new
genre, the novel, with elements from an old narrative tradition, the romance,
in order to explore the interdependence between the individual’s public role
in society and his or her private identity. The result of Knight’s fusion of
genres is that her characters—unlike those in Johnson’s Rasselas—
experience adventures that illustrate the mingling of their private and public
roles. The creative adaptation of the textual predecessor also informs
Günderrode’s text. Rather than responding to Voltaire’s drama with a play of
her own, Günderrode chose the form of the Lesedrama, a play meant for
reading rather than performance. Situating Mahomed in the hybrid space
created by the intersection between the dramatic and the fictional genre
allowed Günderrode to creatively avoid the negative associations regarding
female authorship and the public aspect of the stage. Günderrode’s careful
approach to writing and publishing is paralleled by Krüdener’s self-
positioning. Krüdener’s strategic yet cautious play with the autobiographical
dimension of her epistolary novel Valérie allowed her to tease readers with
the intimation of potentially scandalous revelations while constructing an
image of irreproachable femininity. The expression of this feminine ideal
through a Wertherian epistolary account, in turn, serves as the vehicle for the
novel’s political referentiality. The epistolary subject’s intense mental and
physical sufferings become an allegorical representation of the body politic’s
pain in the post-Revolutionary period. The four authors’ exploration of the
malleability of the fictional form contributed to the genre’s development and its
success with the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century reading public.
Günderrode, Knight, Krüdener, and Williams carefully negotiated con-
temporary requirements for female propriety at the same time that they
challenged those prescriptions. On the one hand, these authors seemingly
conformed to the expectation of women’s invisibility in the public sphere by
publishing anonymously, under a pseudonym, or with the help of a male
intermediary. Yet on the other, writing a sequel to or an adaptation of a well-
known text directed a bright spotlight at their publication and heightened
curiosity about the author’s identity, as did their active marketing efforts.
They thereby hastened the process of lifting the veil of anonymity, which
tended to be a short-lived form of protection in the interconnected European
literary and social circles of the late eighteenth century. The analytical
concept of writing back explores the signification of such ambivalences in

151
late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century women authors’ positioning on
the literary scene.
The idea of writing back highlights the political stakes of being a woman
writer in the post-Revolutionary period; it is a tool for retracing the strategies
that informed her literary enterprise. The use of a twentieth-century concept for
the analysis of eighteenth-century literature is intended as a defamiliarizing
gesture. The analytical framework of writing back, imbued with the
awareness of the political dimension to the act of writing, enables a reading
of Mahomed, Dinarbas, Valérie, and Julia that goes beyond classifying these
texts as pure imitations. Each chapter in this book has shown that these
women authors’ negotiation of gender discourse with the realities of the
political context and the literary marketplace makes them more than second-
class citizens of the republic of letters. Each author’s entrance into this
transnational and multilingual sphere constituted an act of writing back, a
strategically conceived literary response.
These writers were neither opportunistic imitators of fashionable
literature nor powerless victims of the dominant discourse. Their literary acts
engaged the premises of popular writings of their time through an exploration
of the possibilities provided by the genre of fiction. The four case studies in
Women Write Back therefore argue for an inclusion of women authors
beyond their relegation to appendices or footnotes in traditional literary
histories. The analysis of processes of writing back necessarily entails the
reconsideration of the texts to which these women responded and their
position in the literary canon. Goethe, Johnson, Rousseau, and Voltaire have
secured their place in the eighteenth-century canon, yet Günderrode, Knight,
Krüdener, and Williams have largely been excluded or have only been
received in gender-specific ways. Therefore, uncovering the exclusionary
mechanisms of canon formation is a necessary if challenging endeavor as we,
in the twenty-first century, attempt to come to terms with the ambivalent
legacy of the period of Enlightenment, Aufklärung, and Lumières, commonly
invoked as the origin of Western democracy.
Women Write Back continues the work done by feminist scholars over the
past three decades. While these critics are not the only ones interested in
women authors, the recovery of such writers has, in practice, correlated with
feminist literary scholarship. The current position of academic feminism—
seen as an ailing and even dying discipline by some—poses the question of
the future of recovering neglected texts by women. While the appropriateness
of feminist approaches for the analysis of non-Western women authors is
rarely questioned even during this time of disciplinary crisis, it has come
under fire for the discussion of our own literary heritage. In addition to

152
establishing a problematic binary, this assumption presupposes that all
women’s contributions to the Western literary tradition have been recovered
and that, therefore, all obstacles to true liberty, equality, and fraternity have
been overcome. “We” no longer need feminism, but “they” do. But is this
really the case? A look at many college syllabi on the literature of this period
reveals that the proportion of male authors still by far exceeds that of female
writers. Jane Austen might be included, a whole course might even be
devoted to her in the wake of the avalanche of cinematic and literary
adaptations of her life and writing, yet the basic outlines of many courses on
the “age of Johnson,” the “age of Goethe,” and the “age of Voltaire” remain
surprisingly similar to those from thirty years ago. Resistance to making
course syllabi more inclusive might not even be the main reason for the
persistence of these patterns, as material factors play a noticeable role.
Anybody teaching an eighteenth-century literature course faces a lack of
readily available, user-friendly, and affordable editions of women’s texts for
use in the classroom, especially in the case of foreign-language literature.
While facsimile reprints or microfiches are necessary research tools, they are
less effective for teaching purposes. Photocopies are an option, yet they, once
more, contribute to the de facto ghettoization of women authors by
establishing a value hierarchy: male authors are reprinted by well-known
publishing houses while women writers are photocopied on a machine at the
local copy shop. The same applies to online editions if these are the only
venues for republishing literature by women.
Publishing new print editions of women writers is therefore one of the
main goals for scholars who want to ensure that previous generations of
feminist literary critics’ work continues to matter. The paradox faced by these
scholars is that reediting or translating a literary text, especially one by an
unknown author, rarely “counts” in the academic sense of the term. While it
renders an “old” text accessible to a “new” audience, its use for tenure and
promotion purposes is limited. The realities of the academic publishing
market thereby perpetuate the cycle in which these authors’ texts have been
caught for two centuries. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
discourses on gender and publishing excluded them; in present times, they
continue to be invisible because of the lack of publication venues. Those
critics who, despite the obstacles, have produced new editions of women
authors’ texts certainly have provided a forceful answer to the question of
feminist criticism’s role for the analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
literature. Their work highlights the political dimension of the literary
marketplace in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the stakes of

153
scholarship in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which are fashioned as
the inheritors of the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity.
The use of case studies in Women Write Back reflects the need to look at
each woman’s specific act of self-positioning in an era that, in practice, often
fell short of the ideals that it propagated. In this sense, the present book is not
a history of women authors but an illustration of the complexity of their self-
positioning in the aftermath of the French Revolution, the fifteen-year period
from 1790 to 1805. Each author’s accession to the literary sphere followed a
unique path. This makes it difficult to generalize about the challenges that all
women faced during this period. At the same time, however, patterns emerge
in these authors’ crafting of their writing and in subsequent reception patterns
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which were often biographical
in focus. The four chapters have reconstructed these patterns in order to show
that, while none of these authors have been totally erased from (literary)
historiography, they have often been remembered more for their connections
to famous (male) contemporaries than for their writing. The aim of this study
has been to explore the effect of these women’s personal associations on their
creation of an authorial identity and on their subsequent reception.
The four case studies in Women Write Back have shown that, in the inter-
connected literary and social circles of the eighteenth century, a woman’s
acquaintance with a famous male contemporary could provide her with an
entrance into the literary sphere. Such an acquaintance was, however, also a
double-edged sword for the author’s self-positioning and her subsequent
critical reception. The case of Ellis Cornelia Knight demonstrates that this
self-positioning was even more precarious when it involved the direct
response to the acquaintance’s text. Moving in Samuel Johnson’s circles
provided Knight with a pathway into the republic of letters, yet it also
triggered her subsequent exclusion as an author from literary histories
because her direct continuation of Rasselas was received as an improper act
of defiance. The biographical approach’s effect on the reception of an
author’s oeuvre is also demonstrated by Karoline von Günderrode. Her
association with the Brentanos and Friedrich Karl von Savigny led to
criticism’s focus on those writings that reflected her relation with these
figures, mainly her letters and her poems. A play such as Mahomed did not fit
into the biographical pattern of reception and did not, therefore, generate the
same amount of critical interest. Similar observations can be made about
Julie de Krüdener. Her friendship with famous contemporaries such as
Alexander I of Russia secured her a spot in post-Revolutionary historio-
graphy as one of the active proponents of the Treaty of the Holy Alliance.
This association was an ambivalent one because Alexander eventually exiled

154
her and the Alliance developed the same imperialist and repressive
tendencies that it set out to fight in the figure of Napoleon. By the middle of
the nineteenth century, Krüdener’s political involvement had not only
become suspicious but had also relegated interest in her literary production to
the back burner of scholarship. Helen Maria Williams’ political associations
had a comparable effect on her reception as an author. As a reporter on the
French Revolution and as one of the few observers who maintained the hope
that its ideals could be realized, she was excluded from the British literary
tradition as a national traitor who had crossed over to the Gallic side, and her
reputation was further tarnished by an illicit relationship with John Hurtford
Stone. Krüdener’s case illustrates a similar unease over national allegiances.
As a result of her multilingual and transnational identity, various national
literary traditions are unsure as to whether she can or should be claimed as
one of their own. The cosmopolitan realities of the late-eighteenth-century
republic of letters necessitate a transnational approach to all of these authors,
not only because their allegiances and identities questioned rigidly
established national boundaries but because their writing back often occurred
across national and linguistic frontiers.
The analytical framework of writing back does not imply that women
were only responders and that only women responded. Intertextual dialogue
was employed by all authors, male and female. Yet when male authors
adapted women writers’ literary forms, their engagement was more likely to
be read as intertextual dialogue than to be presented as dilettantish imitation.
The framework of writing back questions such readings and can therefore be
used for the analysis of texts produced by all literary agents who have been
erased from traditional literary histories. Creating a space for these writers
necessarily extends the past decades’ effort of rethinking the image painted of
eighteenth-century literature. How would the canonical figures appear in this
image? What would be the position of Goethe, Johnson, Rousseau, and
Voltaire in this reconceptualized literary history? My choice of Salvador
Dali’s painting “Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire” (1940)
for the cover of this book provides a starting point for discussion. The longer
we look at Dali’s painting, the more we see. Voltaire’s bust stands at the
center, yet it does not occupy the entire space of the painting. Instead, it is
surrounded by a bustling scene that seemingly has no direct relation to the
eighteenth-century French thinker. Moreover, the bust itself is inhabited by
figures and thereby merges into the surrounding scene. When we look at the
bust, we simultaneously see Voltaire and two other figures, which have been
interpreted either as Dutch merchants or Spanish nuns. The double ambiguity
of this image underlines the viewer’s active role in constructing meaning out

155
of perception. The distance between the viewer and the image shrinks as the
viewer’s awareness of his/her role in the image’s creation heightens. The
spectator is part of the image itself. Like the female figure on the left side of the
painting, the viewer is at once outside and inside the main scene of action. The
viewer muses on the workings of the marketplace, whether it is the slave
market mentioned in the painting’s title or the eighteenth-century literary and
cultural marketplace referenced by Voltaire’s bust. In the same way that we
create the image on the canvas, we also construct literary history. It does not
have an a priori existence but is born from our scholarship. Perceiving the
presence of less canonical writers in this painting does not erase a figure such
as Voltaire but acknowledges the diversity and interconnectedness of all the
agents in the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century literary marketplace.

156
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