Gender-Bending in the Biedermeier

Abstract

This essay complicates the notion that the German Wars of Liberation brought about renewed conservatism regarding the gender stereotypes that restricted women to their "natural" calling in the domestic realm. An examination of homosocial bonding in Theodor Körner's patriotic poetry leads to an analysis of Caroline de la Motte Fouqué's novels about the French Revolution, and Henriette Frölich's Virginia, oder die Kolonie von Kentucky . Although the two women writers differ sharply in their political viewpoints, both use their fiction to explore the limits of permissible behavior for women and to intervene into the public sphere. (TK)