La Chercheuse d'Esprit: Gender, Mobility, and the Crisis of Authorship in J. M. R. Lenz's Conception of Soldiers' Marriages

Abstract

ABSTRACTTaking as its starting point the title page from Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz's essay on soldiers' marriages, this article explores the notion of authorship, i.e. the negotiation of author positions in literary, military, and sexual discourses in Lenz's play Die Soldaten (1776) and his essay ‘Über die Soldatenehen’ (posthumously published in 1913). In the play, authorship is an emancipatory concept associated with the female protagonist, Marie, and her attempts to assume a position in society that would allow her to articulate desire and liberate herself from male domination. In ‘Über die Soldatenehen’ this position is retracted and replaced by a male author position, in which authorship is identified with masculinity and the political power it serves to advance. While Lenz's national agenda is politically progressive, it is, at the same time, based on exploitation of female sexuality, which renders it anti‐emancipatory. Lenz's decision to designate his essay as ‘par un Allemand’ is contradictory, insofar as Lenz's own emancipatory conceptualisation of authorship is at odds with the writer's submission to the political demands of the day. Ultimately, Lenz's designation implies the denial of that which it asserts.