Women Dramatists in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany: The Hazards of Marriage as Love Match

Abstract

Love that ideally leads to marriage occupies much of the literature in the second half of the eighteenth century. Even the most prestigious genre, drama, and in particular the bourgeois tragedy, revolves around this core of bourgeois intimacy. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Mis Sara Sampson and Emilia Galotti, Heinrich Leopold Wagner's Die Kindsmorderin, Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz's Der Hofmeister, Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Clav , and Friedrich Schille 's Kabal und Liebe, to name only the most famous examples, help to construct and present various aspects of the new bourgeois conception of love. Whether regarded as a system of communication or as an idea that provides norms for grasping the emotions of individuals, love is a culturally produced – not a natural – concept and therefore changes historically even though its terminology may remain unchanged (Wulf 8). Modern criticism recognizes the centrality of the discourse of love in literature in the creation of bourgeois identity in the eighteenth century (Borchmeyer; Greis; Sase; Luhmann; Gallas; Clauss). Recent analyses consider primarily the canonized texts, while casting only generalizing glances at other traditions – in particular at so-called trivial literature. Gunther Sase contends that the trivial tradition – under which he subsumes women's literature – confirms the dominant concept of love with facile solutions (Sase 71-72). In his study on eighteenth-century drama, he briefly comments on the novels Elisa oder das Weib wie es seyn sollte (1795) by Wilhelmine Caroline von Wobeser (56) and Das Fraulein von Sternheim (1771) by Sophie von La Roche (19). Yet he ignores the more appropriate comparison with women's dramatic production. As feminist criticism has shown, it is a simplification to assume that women writers produced in the trivial tradition and that their texts affirmed the given value system. Instead, their literary production stands in a complex socially, aesthetically, and culturally determined tension with canonized literature (Becker-Cantarino; Runge; Lange; Kord, Ein Blick hinter die Kulissen and Sich einen Namen machen; Wurst, Negotiations of Containment and