Nineteenth-Century German Literary Women's Reception of Madame de Staël

Abstract

This essay examines Madame de Staël's impact on German women writers from Romanticism to the Vormärz , including Caroline Paulus, F.H. Unger, Johanna Schopenhauer, Ida Hahn-Hahn, and Luise Mühlbach. I argue that these German women refer in their novels to Staël's exemplary life and to her influential stories of politically engaged and artistic heroines in order to authorize their own discourses on art and politics. These authors' intertextual responses to Staël's powerful statements on women's social and artistic potential reflect their ambivalent positions regarding women's cultural role, and show that Staël's example inspired their development of a female authorial identity. (JEM)