Monstrous Women, Sublime Pleasure, and the Perils of Reception in Lessing's Aesthetics

Abstract

Enlightenment intellectuals viewed the moral cultivation of the individual through aesthetic pleasure to be a crucial means for regulating social relations in bourgeois civil society. G. E. Lessing's drama criticism and plays reveal how important reshaping women's social identity was to the definition of morally productive aesthetic pleasure in the Enlightenment. Drawing on contemporary feminist theory, this essay explores how and why the tension between aesthetic pleasure and morality that runs through Lessing's work centers on developing bourgeois norms of femininity and on their violation in French classical and epic dramas. The essay reveals how the gender-specific moral demands placed on cultural pleasure in Lessing's drama criticism helped lay the foundation for a cultural crisis in the late eighteenth century, as well as for a divided public sphere. Lessing's plays, however, offer a more complex vision of the audience's interests and needs and a more open vision of women's possible social roles.