Marriage – A Tragedy: German Women Dramatists and the Politics of Genre

Abstract

Aristotle's Poetics identified tragedy as the most accomplished literary genre and declared only the writer of tragedy a truly writer. Until the twentieth century, literary critics followed his lead. Women were explicitly discouraged from writing tragedies, both by their male mentors and by the widely held assumption that tragedy by definition required the force and knowledge of a man, with the result that women's tragedies were considered essentially inadequate. Although the meaning and importance of tragedy have since evolved, the traditional genre hierarchy and the corresponding exclusion of women writers from the literary history of tragedy persist. While many German intellectuals – salient among them Gottsched, Goethe, and Nietzsche – envisioned the great German tragedy, few actually produced notable examples (Lessing's Emilia Galotti and Schiller's Maria Stuart ranking among the few popular and critical favourites). Thus it is no disgrace that German women dramatists were not recognized for their contribution to the tragic genre. Yet the systematic exclusion of women's tragedies from critical consideration raises questions. Major critical works on German tragedy have consistently ignored texts by women. Benno von Wiese's Die Deutsche Tragodie von Lessing his Hebbel (1952) mentions not one tragedy written by a woman in its entire 720 pages. And this lack of interest continues, as evident in Hellmut Flashar's recent collection of essays Tragodie. Idee und Transformation (1997), a volume equally devoid of any discussion of female authors. Robert Heitner's German Tragedy in the Age of Enlightenment (1963) does mention Luise Gottsched's Panthea, albeit without missing the opportunity to disqualify women categorically from the genre: