The Virginal Mother in German Culture: From Sophie von La Roche and Goethe to Metropolis by Lauren Nossett

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Virginal Mother in German Culture: From Sophie von La Roche and Goethe to Metropolis by Lauren Nossett Katra Byram The Virginal Mother in German Culture: From Sophie von La Roche and Goethe to Metropolis. By Lauren Nossett. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019. Pp. vii + 232. Paper $34.95. ISBN 978-0810139299. Lauren Nossett's book delineates a previously unidentified tradition of gendered representation in German literature: the figure of the virginal mother. In works from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, the ideal of womanhood appears as a young, virtuous, as-yet unmarried woman who freely provides nurture and care for other women's children. This figure, Nossett argues, "reflects the complex social ideal of woman as both maternal and a sexless being and is influential in perpetuating restrictive moral and sexual standards for women" (4). In other words, it points to the impossible standards against which German women were measured over a span of nearly 200 years. Moreover, since the virginal mother's role is predicated on the [End Page 401] absence or inadequacy of biological mothers, this figure of ideal femininity always assumes other women's failure. Even as the virginal mother embodies the idea that a woman's natural destiny lies in the nurture of children, she comes into being because others fall short of fulfilling this destiny. In fact, the virginal mother herself occupies a precarious position. Since the stories in which she appears inevitably conclude with her marriage, her virtuous purity is destined to end as she becomes a potentially fallible wife and mother. With this figure, then, as with many others in Western culture, women are both idealized and censured. By exposing the function of this peculiarly German female figure, Nossett augments our knowledge of the female types employed to regulate female behavior and sexuality. The virginal mother belongs alongside the figures of the old maid, the selfless mother, the Rabenmutter (callous mother), and the "fallen woman" as a type that taught girls and young women what they were supposed to become and what fates they must avoid at all costs. Nossett traces the arc of the figure's development in German literary culture in five chapters, discussing works by Sophie von La Roche, Goethe, E. Marlitt, Hedwig Dohm, Adelheid Popp, Ottilie Baader, Thea von Harbou, and Fritz Lang. For the most part, these chapters employ a historical framework to explain the figure's appearance, appeal, and transformation over time. In addition to the book's introduction, which delineates the early development of modern discourses of gender and virginity in scientific and religious thought, chapters generally begin with a broadly accessible explanation of the relevant sociohistorical context. The first chapter, for instance, casts the virginal mother as Sophie von La Roche's strategy for establishing herself as a writer in a society where the hardening of divergent gender roles proclaimed women to be out of place in the public sphere and where the "writing woman" was held up as the epitome of unnatural womanhood. Chapter 5 reads the autobiographical works of Hedwig Dohm, Adelheid Popp, and Ottilie Baader against the backdrop of the feminist and socialist movements that they helped to lead. In historical terms, Nossett suggests that the figure of the virginal mother is a product of the bourgeois era, coming into existence in the eighteenth century, becoming a ubiquitous and popular figure in the nineteenth, and losing relevance with the Nazi emphasis on the biological dimension of motherhood in the twentieth. In this regard, her book largely corresponds to a historical trajectory of German gender relations and ideology that has been excavated by feminist scholars such as Silvia Bovenschen, Karin Hausen, and Ute Frevert since the late 1970s. Nossett engages extensively with this scholarship, as well as with the body of study on motherhood in the Western world by authors including Nancy Chodorow, Sarah Hrdy, Elisabeth Badinter, Ann Dally, and Ann Taylor Allen. The only substantial interruption to this historical focus comes in the chapter on virginal mothers in several of Goethe's works, where Nossett employs the narrative theory of Mikhail Bakhtin and a psychoanalytic framework derived from Julia Kristeva [End Page 402] to argue that...