To Perform, or Not to Perform, Femininity

The ›Impossible Act‹

In this groundbreaking study, Wendy Arons examines how late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century women writers from Sophie von La Roche to Sophie Mereau used models of performance and theater to frame and interrogate the image of the ›Ideal Woman.‹ Arons argues that the performance of femininity was, for women writers of this era, an ›impossible act‹, grounded in a fundamental contradiction. Ideal femininity in the eighteenth century was associated with ›naiveté‹ and naturalness, by definition unstudied and uncalculated; yet, in order to project such traits successfully to an audience, women had to engage in a conscious performance of self, in acts of Verstellung that were the antithesis of ›naturalness‹.

The Impossible Act contributes a new perspective to a number of existing studies by Dorothea von Mücke, Christopher Wild, Günther Heeg and others that confront the relationship between gender, theatricality and subjectivity in the eighteenth century. 1 Rather than analyzing canonical works, however, Arons focuses on narrative texts by a small number of mostly underrepresented women writers, including Sophie von La Roche, Karoline Schulze-Kummerfeld, Marianne Ehrmann, Friederike Helene Unger and Sophie Mereau. Arons’ seemingly unusual choice of texts is informed by her innovative methodology. Arons’ study takes an open-ended approach to ›literariness‹: while some of the works she chooses, such as Marianne Ehrmann’s novel Amalie and Schulze-Kummerfeld’s memoirs, make claims to facticity, all are strongly indebted to the traditions of the empfindsamer Briefroman and eighteenth-century women’s literature. At the same time, by considering unpublished texts together with published ones, Arons’ study presents an implicit challenge to the public / private distinction that informs many social-historical accounts of eighteenth-century literary history.

The texts Arons has chosen intersect the discourses of performance and gender in the eighteenth century. All of them thematize theater, either by reflecting on social ›performance‹ or by depicting a heroine or female first-person narrator who is also an actress, in many cases referencing the author’s own experiences on stage. Arons does not make grandiose claims about the literary merit of these women’s texts, nor does she merely use them as a source of biographical or historical information. Rather, she argues for their relevance as sources of insight into »how women were imagining femininity«, at a period in history when antitheatricality was being relentlessly deployed to promote an ever-more-rigid model of gendered subjectivity (p. 11).

Gender and the »Project of Sincerity«

In the book’s introduction and theoretical first chapter (»›Sophie‹ and the ›Theater‹«), Arons introduces the eighteenth-century model of »antitheatrical subjectivity«, a bourgeois mode of self-presentation which privileged authenticity and sincerity and vilified Verstellung in all its forms. In Arons’ study, antitheatricality provides a framework for understanding the »naturalization« of gender in the eighteenth century. She uses the figure of ›Sophie‹, the imaginary helpmeet of the male pedagogical subject in Rousseau’s Emile, as a metonymy for the ›Ideal Woman‹ of eighteenth-century literature: a creature of the domestic sphere, ›Sophie‹ is ›naturally‹ modest, chaste, and naive. Through an analysis of texts by Rousseau and various eighteenth-century German including Gellert and Novalis, Arons exposes the uses of ›natural‹ femininity to justify women’s exclusion from the public sphere. In addition, she points out a basic contradiction of »compulsory antitheatrical femininity«: naiveté is by definition not performable, but as the »sign of virtuous femininity,« it cannot not be performed.

As an idea and as an institution, the eighteenth-century theater provided a space where ideas about femininity and ›naturalness‹ could be contested and transformed. Arons defines »Theater« broadly, as »an intersecting and often contradictory set of historical changes, practices, theories, attitudes and ideas about performance, literature, aesthetics and ontology« (p. 30). On the one hand, eighteenth-century theater actually advanced the cause of antitheatricality by promoting an »aesthetics of illusionism«, which encouraged absorption and a sense of immediacy on the part of the audience. Because of its performed nature, however, theater invoked the spectre of unreadability. Arons demonstrates this tension in her analysis of Lessing’s Miss Sara Sampson. In its depiction of two competing female »performances« of authenticity, Arons argues, Lessing’s play thematizes the impossibility of distinguishing »acting« from »being«, especially where the performance of feminine authenticity is concerned (p. 37). In both theoretical and literary texts from the eighteenth century, therefore, feminine ›naturalness‹ is a site of fraught performance and anxious scrutiny.

The Perils of Publicity:
Sophie von La Roche, Karoline Schulze-Kummerfeld,
Marianne Ehrmann

Texts by eighteenth-century women often bear witness to the internalization of antitheatrical anxieties. However, Arons argues, performance and theatricality also had a positive function, providing women writers with »loopholes in the discourse of antitheatricality« (p. 13). In Chapters 2, 3 and 4 of The Impossible Act, Arons analyzes narrative texts by late-eighteenth-century women that explore the dangers of misreading and being misread, both on the social stage and in the theater. In Chapter 2 (»Performance as Power«), Arons reads Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim as a cautionary tale about the dangers of social misreading: its morally principled heroine, Sophie Sternheim, incurs the wrath of society when she fails to perform her virtuous and naive nature in a convincing way, and exposes herself to danger when she fails to read the true intentions of Lord Derby, a rake who imitates virtuous behavior. Yet, Sophie Sternheim is also shown to use performance in a positive way, for example by using »pedagogical theater« to help foster the moral improvement of the troubled »G. Family« (p. 71). In this regard, Arons argues, von La Roche’s novel resists a simple valorization of »aesthetic transparency« in favor of a more positive view of the moral and social value of performance; she compares von La Roche’s conclusions in Sternheim to ideas articulated in Kant’s pragmatic anthropology, which argues that role-playing may in fact engender virtue (p. 70).

The subsequent two chapters are concentrated on two novel-length works by actress-writers, which bear witness to their authors’ attempts to control their reputations as ›public women.‹ Chapter 3 (»The Performance of a Lifetime«) is concerned with the memoirs of the eighteenth-century actress Karoline Schulze-Kummerfeld. Arons considers the literary tropes and strategies at work in Schulze-Kummerfeld’s self-representation, which straddles the line between autobiographical fact and sentimental fiction. Schulze-Kummerfeld casts herself as the virtuous, forthright heroine of her narrative and juxtaposes her own natural honesty with the hypocrisy and dissimulation of the Hamburg bourgeoisie, for example the in-laws she acquires as a result of her unfortunate marriage. By characterizing herself as uncompromisingly forthright, Schulze-Kummerfeld »reveals the extent to which she internalized the concept of an antitheatrical subjectivity« (p. 87). Yet, Arons argues, Schulze-Kummerfeld’s memoirs make extensive use of performative strategies; her memoirs represent an attempt to gain control of her public image through a literary performance of self.

Issues of performance and self-presentation are also at stake in Marianne Ehrmann’s Amalie. Eine wahre Geschichte in Briefen, which Arons considers in the fourth chapter (»Antitheatricality and the Public Woman«). Ehrmann’s autobiographical novel depicts the theatrical life and progress towards adulthood of Amalie, a virtuous, witty and educated heroine who appears to be an idealized version of Ehrmann herself. Through Amalie, the novel presents a performative alternative to the image of the ›Ideal Woman‹, characterized not by blind naiveté but by awareness, education and self-mastery. The text employs theatrical strategies on a structural level as well: by cloaking her own ideas as »the private correspondence of a (fictional) Ideal Woman«, Ehrmann puts forth her own ideas about theater as a site of female education and participation in public life. Like Schulze-Kummerfeld, Ehrmann does not simply recount her experiences in the theater, but rather mobilizes »Theater« and performance in order to justify her activity as a ›public woman‹.

Radical Departures:
Elise Bürger and Friedrike Helene Unger

Chapters 5 and 6 of The Impossible Act posit a shift away from discourses of bourgeois anti-theatricality in narrative texts by Elise Bürger, Friederike Helene Unger and Sophie Mereau, three women whose texts and public reputations diverge markedly from the image of the ›Ideal Woman‹. By depicting female characters who enjoy ›extraordinary mobility‹ and deliberately use the performance of femininity to achieve greater creative freedom and personal happiness, Arons argues, these texts resist the discourse of bourgeois interiority. They do so, for example, by avoiding depictions of »psychological depth,« as with Elise Bürger’s 1799 short story Aglaia: Bürger’s narrative is a picaresque tale about a young woman whose inner »truth« is not readily available to the reader, but whose fate and happiness are contingent on her reception by an audience.

Similarly, Friederike Helene Unger’s novel Melanie, das Findelkind embraces »a theatricality that mitigates against the reader’s absorbed identification into the novel’s scene« (p. 162). Through narrative strategies that alert the reader to the text’s fictionality, the novel undermines a sense of the heroine’s stable identity, thus pointing to the ways in which identity is »performed«. These texts also offer a more positive take on the eighteenth-century theater: Aglaia showcases an idealized depiction of female collaboration in the theater (which may in fact reflect Bürger’s collaboration with her fellow actress and poet Sophie Albrecht in Altona in the early 1790s). 2 Unger’s Melanie is also a hardworking actress who excels at performing sentimental and tragic roles such as Emilia Galotti. Instead of performing her own »naturalness«, however, as many eighteenth-century actresses were said to do, Melanie views acting as »work« that involves intense study, self-awareness and self-improvement. Through their emphasis on externality and their valorization of theater and performance, Arons argues, Bürger’s and Unger’s texts resist the cultural pressure to produce the »truth« of female subjectivity.

Theater as a Means of Survival:
Sophie Mereau

The Impossible Act closes with a discussion of two texts by Sophie Mereau, Die Flucht nach der Hauptstadt and Marie, that make an even more extreme departure from eighteenth-century models of feminine authenticity. Arons identifies a radical gesture in the »utter superficiality of character and action« expressed in Die Flucht nach der Hauptstadt, a short narrative depicting a young woman who unhesitatingly enlists performance both onstage and off in the pursuit of love and pleasure. Through these narrative strategies, Die Flucht nach der Hauptstadt calls into question the notion of stable and fixed identity and with it, the very underpinnings of gender itself. Die Flucht and Marie also offer the most enthusiastic endorsement of theater of any of the texts Arons examines: while the narrator / heroine of Die Flucht nach der Hauptstadt is disappointed by the reality of theatrical life, the eponymous heroine of Marie experiences life on the stage as a utopia of creative autonomy, thus providing »an image of the artistically fulfilled, independent woman« that »is both compelling and unprecedented« (p. 194). Mereau’s texts embrace »Theater« as a source of emotional fulfillment, a means of survival and a way of rejecting models of femininity grounded in antitheatrical subjectivity.

In the book’s conclusion, Arons revisits the question of what it means to perform femininity for an audience. She sketches an outline of eighteenth-century women’s strategies for controlling their image in public life, drawing a parallel between Karoline Schulze-Kummerfeld’s onstage interventions and the use of first-person »alter egos« in texts by women writers (p. 212). The book ends with a discussion of Elise Bürger’s 1814 one-act play, Die antike Statue aus Florenz, a text that uses the tableaux vivant as a starting point for a reflection on femininity as something that must constantly be performed and reinvented, not only on stage but also in the domestic sphere. Bürger’s text, Arons shows, provides a fitting bookend to her discussion of eighteenth-century antitheatrical femininity, as it both hearkens back to the early eighteenth century (»to the kind of flirtatious ostentation that piqued Rousseau«) and looks forward to present-day models of gender as something that is both performed and »socially compelled« (p. 220).

Summary

In all, Arons’ study represents an invaluable contribution both to theater studies and to an existing body of feminist scholarship on eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century women writers. The elegance with which Arons handles cross-disciplinary questions, for example in her use of the tropes of »Sophie« and the »Theater«, makes this study particularly compelling. Arons’ narrative voice is engaging, witty and accessible without sacrificing complexity. For these reasons, The Impossible Act provides scholars working in other fields (particularly those who cannot read German) with an excellent and much-needed introduction to ongoing debates in both German literary studies and theater studies. Moreover, her interdisciplinary approach makes a strong case for the relevance of works by women who have all too often been ignored by literary scholarship. Scholars working on underrepresented women writers are typically faced with the burden of having to introduce a great deal of background information in a short space. Arons deals with this issue very efficiently: she shifts quickly from bio-bibliographical considerations to the close readings and analyses that form the backbone of her arguments.

The study’s emphasis on the problems of misreading inspires further questions about the historical circulation and readership (real or intended) of these women’s texts. However, this may be, like the genealogy of »femininity as performance« from the eighteenth century to Butler that Arons proposes in her conclusion, »the project of another book«. In any case, it underscores the way in which Arons’s clear and incisive textual analyses open up a dialogue between different areas of inquiry, clearing the way for a critically informed engagement with questions of gender, writing and performance in a variety of cultural and historical contexts.