Countermemory in Karoline von Günderrode’s “Darthula nach Ossian”: A Female Warrior, Her Unruly Breast, and the Construction of Her Myth

Allingham, Liesl

doi:10.1353/gyr.2014.0006

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…And, as Allingham has argued, in "Darthula" Günderrode's refocusing of the action of Ossian's piece on Darthula herself involves a nuanced consideration of the ways male and female heroism is constructed. 153 Some writers suggest that Günderrode understood gender according to conventional categories, 154 and she did occasionally make statements that presuppose stereotypical ideas about of gender. For example, in a letter to a friend she exclaims: "Why was I not a man!…”

Section: Karoline Von Günderrode Gender and The Idea Of The Earthmentioning

confidence: 99%

Women, Women Writers, and Early German Romanticism

Ezekiel¹

2020

Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism

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Early German Romanticism is sometimes claimed to present a radical challenge to the gender norms of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 1 However, critics argue that the romantic concern with the efforts of an active "male" subject to rediscover its lost wholeness and create an aesthetic self through interactions with a "feminine" nature, often through the intercession of women, has reinforced a dichotomous view of gender, along with its damaging stereotypes. 2 In particular, women are often presented in early German Romanticism as connected to nature and able to mediate the divine, already experiencing the unity with nature and the absolute that the alienated male subject must retrieve. 3 Overt statements that associate women with passivity, motherhood, non-discursive reasoning and "otherness" add to the moments in which early German Romanticism risks reinscribing, rather than undermining, the longstanding association of women and the feminine with nature and their exclusion from reason and subjecthood. Even Schlegel's famous call for a "gentle masculinity" and an "independent femininity," which would mitigate the characteristics bestowed on men and women by nature, arguably presupposes the dichotomies that he aims to subvert. The same can be said of Novalis' depictions of gender fluidity, in which male protagonists become "feminized," and thereby productive, through taking on the features of the female characters with which they interact. The early German romantic ideal of a unified humanity that merges masculine and feminine characteristics and re-integrates the alienated subject and object, together with the modes of knowledge of discourse and intuition, arguably does not reject gender stereotypes, but can only function as part of a paradigm in which these gendered characteristics are seen as fundamental.Nonetheless, this chapter argues that a critique of gender norms is present in early German Romanticism, although it appears inconsistently and competes with a more conservative model.The first two sections of the chapter respectively describe the thought of Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis on women and gender and present feminist criticisms of this model, without attempting to defend early German Romanticism from this critique. A third section explains the integral place of gender in early German romantic thought, showing why problems with the early German romantic model of gender create more thoroughgoing difficulties for the romantic project in general. Section four provides a partial defense of early German Romanticism against

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Section: Karoline Von Günderrode Gender and The Idea Of The Earthmentioning

confidence: 99%