poetry in his Volkslieder (1779), and echoing contemporary discourse about “the noble savage,” Wieland praised the “originality of image and expression . . . [and] felicitous energy and aptness. . . . [F]or each original thought she immediately invents a singular expression, whose vigorous strength and truth are perfectly adequate to the intuitive ideas which are the well-spring of her reflections” (8).
From the comments of Wieland, Goethe, and Herder about Sternheim it appears that a novel by and about a woman helped to trigger a fantasy that literature could overcome problems endemic to writing and the aesthetic principle of mimesis. As a mediation of thought, writing was felt to jeopardize truthful self-representation; it was, as Derrida observed in his famous commentary on Rousseau, the trace of a voice, always secondhand and at one step removed from speech. (In the courtroom one does not write, one speaks the truth.) A clue that La Roche’s epistolary novel of female virtue and seduction came to stand for a new literary authenticity is found in Goethe’s description of the writing as a “portrait,” for at that time the visual arts were enjoying the enviable status of (purportedly) representing nature through its own natural signs of light, line, and shape. The fantasy that La Roche’s writing was natural and unmediated is of course difficult to reconcile with the text itself, and Wieland seems to be acknowledging this when, toward the end of his preface, he folds the novel back into the conventional literary category of satire, suggesting that it should be understood as “a satire on court life and the great world in general” (9). The beautiful fallacy according to which La Roche created the novel purely out of herself and her firsthand experience of the world might also have struck some readers as tenuous, given the direct relationship between Sophia Sternheim and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), as well as the indebtedness of La Roche’s vision of woman to Rousseau’s Emile (1762). But what is important in Wieland’s preface, and in the novel, is that at this historical moment the idealism that saw literature as a natural language of the passions and instrument of moral instruction found an intense, influential focus both in a fictional heroine and in the first German-language novel by a woman. As a result, the figure of woman (as both author and invented character) was granted elevated significance to mediate the realms of nature and art.
What contemporary critics (and modern editors) did not observe was that La Roche in the novel granted letters and song the very qualities that the critics attributed to her authorship. In her confessional and sternly analytical letters, as in her songs, Sophia Sternheim shows herself unwilling to dissemble. Her writing and singing voice cannot lie. Soon after her sham wedding, still unaware that her presumed husband is nothing of the sort, she discloses to him her love for another. “I had brought her a lute,” her seducer recalls:
She had the complaisance to sing a pretty Italian air of her composing, in which she besought Venus to make her a present of her [Venus’s] girdle, that she might retain the object of her tenderness. The thoughts were happy and well expressed, the music well adapted, and her voice so pathetic, that I heard her with the sweetest transport. But this pleasing dream vanished, when I observed that, during the most tender passages, which she sang the best, she did not cast her eyes on me, but declining her head, cast them on the floor, and uttered sighs, which certainly had not me for their object. (121)
In this scene, which privileges music as a medium of love, Sophia’s singing and composing are—to recall Wieland’s comment—without “authorial art.” This does not mean that they lack technical skill, but they are without falsity. Within that severe strand of bourgeois Protestant morality that she personifies, Sophie is “above” the deceit of art. Her morality and music possess the transparency of tears. She renounces the theatrical and sets standards for representation that no representation, strictly speaking, can achieve.
It comes as no surprise that Sophia is critical of opera: she regards its musically laced fictions to be lacking in truth, and declares that the entwining of music, dance, costume, song, and scenery inflames sensibility without directing it to a higher moral goal (55–56). This critique, derived directly from Addison and Rousseau, is part of Sophia’s pietistic renunciation of appearances. She disapproves not just of opera but of the culture of display that links stage fictions to the vain performances of aristocratic viewers. Her own dress and toilette are plain, her manners muted. When Sophia sheds tears, the reader is invited to regard them not as stylized, theatrical displays of sensibility but as “glimpses [of the] inner workings of the human soul”—an invitation that many modern readers may find difficult to accept. Indeed, the taste for La Roche’s moralizing was soon challenged, not least by those who had championed her cause. To tether art to the didactic end of refining sentiment is to limit its power, Goethe asserted in his 1772 review of Johann George Sulzer’s Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–1774).3 Only three years after The History of Sophia Sternheim was published, Goethe’s Werther blows his brains out for love. But for a short historical moment, La Roche was imaginatively fused with her heroine and assumed the privilege conventionally accorded to only the best male writers: at once the exemplar of her sex and given sex-transcending, quasi-universal significance. Briefly the figure of woman assumed a leadership role in the development of German literature.
THE FEMALE SIGN IN THE LATE ENLIGHTENMENT
La Roche’s overnight fortune is an example of a largely forgotten aspect of eighteenth-century culture, when figures of womanhood enjoyed exalted status as signs of reform, progress, morality, and civilization. Counterintuitive though it may appear today, woman featured in the historiography, political theory, aesthetics, and artistic practices of this period less as a subordinate term, still more rarely as “Other,” than as an emblem of social, moral, and artistic ideals. “The view that woman civilizes, that she cultivates,” Sylvana Tomaselli has written in an incisive analysis of Enlightenment historiography, “is as recurrent as the view that she is nature’s most dutiful and untouched daughter.”4
In this book, taking my lead from Tomaselli, I excavate the rhetorical and symbolic feminine, finding in images and practices of late eighteenth-century women arguments in favor of emerging modernity: these include the reform of despotism; the positive value of commerce and luxury; stimuli to politeness and refinement, and evidence of the educative and moral utility of the arts, music included. The elevation of “the fair sex”—what Jean Starobinski, writing of male gallantry and the visual arts in Paris before the French Revolution, quizzically styled the “fictitious ascendancy of woman”—elided the real and the imaginary, affording some women cultural capital and symbolic power, tantalizing others with discursive illusions of the same.5 Although rarely a matter of political and legal equality, this fictitious ascendance of woman was neither entirely fictitious nor entirely “about” women. Female and feminine authority in the arts and letters was part of the semiotic and rhetorical apparatus of those broader historical reforms often discussed by historians under the label “Enlightenment.”6
Such elevated significance depended on a reinvention of woman herself against the backdrop of what were styled classical and religious superstitions, those old prejudices that women have no soul, are the offspring of wolves, or, in the one-sex system of anatomy and medicine that continued until the end of the seventeenth century, represent a less perfect form of the male.7 In the eighteenth century hierarchically arranged similarity between man and woman (the one-sex model) was challenged by a metaphysics of difference (the two-sex model) in which hierarchy is unstable. The (notion of the) opposite sex was born and the female body could now achieve perfection according to its own ideal. Between the 1730s and 1790s careful drawings of the female skeleton first appeared, expressing a desire to discover sexual differences in every part of the body, even if that desire was frustrated by apparent similarity.8 With biblical, classical, and Renaissance texts still circulating, and with the outcome of the search for sexual difference still unclear, the thinking about sex and gender was contradictory. No one possessed a single scientific truth about sex through which to enforce a sexual difference of labor, or, as modern thinking puts it, keep women in their place. Conclusions were at once provisional and unfamiliar.
The
