Mobile Mothers: Bridging Domestic Place and Public Space in the Eighteenth-Century Chivalric Dramas of Eleonore Thon and Elise Bürger

Abstract

This article examines the interrelationship of motherhood, cross-dressing, and mobility. By employing motherhood both to compel and to justify female mobility, these authors use the ideologies designed to restrict women to domesticity as the means to bridge the gendered boundaries between private place and public space. In the process, they rewrite motherhood, constructing a notion of ideal motherhood that is no longer biological, but rather depends on female engagement in mobile practices.

Keywords:

• chivalric drama
• cross-dressing
• eighteenth century
• gender
• mobility

Notes

As Fleig points out, Bürger's and Thon's choices to name their respective protagonists Adelheit is likely a reference to the Adelheid of Goethe's Götz (128). When necessary, I will use Adelheit von Teck's full name to avoid confusion.

Daniela Richter makes a similar claim, arguing that “women made the domestic and family sphere the basis for their unique perspective on general public issues” (2).

For more on gender complementarity in the German realm, see the foundational texts by Claudia Honegger, Karin Hausen, and Isabel Hull.

Habermas's failure to account for gender in his discussion of the authentic public sphere has been discussed at length in literature. Wischermann provides a summary of feminist responses to Habermas and alternative approaches to the public/private divide.

A house, for example, is private relative to the street it is on, but when the house becomes the target of focus, the living room is then “the public part of a domestic private space” (Gal 265).

Though not all female mobilities in the two dramas access public spaces, the opposite is not true; female access to public spaces requires physical geographic mobility.

That is not to claim that eighteenth-century women did not travel in real life, as countless travel reports, including by Thon herself, can attest.

By publishing under the name “Jenny,” Thon follows the common practice of women writers employing pseudonyms. Their primary concern, according to Ruth Dawson, was not to conceal gender—most women writers used female pseudonyms—but rather to maintain social respectability through anonymity (26–27).

Detailing a similar strategy in Friederike Helene Unger's novel Rosalie und Nettchen, Elisabeth Krimmer states that “the defeat of the target culture is effected by an import from abroad” (78).

Thon arguably not only avails herself of temporal displacement but also displaces a critique of bourgeois values onto aristocratic society (Hilger 396).

Successful passing also relies on the notion of authenticity: “[W]e trust that our ability to see and read carries with it a certain degree of epistemological certainty” (Schlossberg 1).

This is Adelheit's only moment of resistance against her marital duties, but the play suggests a pattern of resistance against patriarchal control. Adelheit vehemently opposed her father and protested the marriage to Robert.

In this context, see also Krimmer, who argues that by eliminating the “epistemologically unstable” body, the death of a cross-dresser can reassert a stable social order (33).

For a detailed biographical account, see Wurst, “Spurensicherung” 210–16.

For more on the debate, see Marilyn Yalom (91–104) and Ludmilla Jordanova (29–30).

The emphasis on Adelheit's authenticity stands in contrast to the female protagonist in Bürger's prose narrative “Agalaja.” Wendy Arons argues that by refusing to reveal Agalaja's subjectivity and interior identity, the text emphasizes the performative aspects of femininity while eschewing claims to authenticity (153).

In this respect, see also Fleig, who similarly argues that the drama takes traditional masculine and specifically knightly virtues such as courage and valor and attaches them to traditionally feminine virtues and motherliness (132).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Liesl Allingham

Liesl Allingham is an Assistant Professor of German in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Virginia Tech. Her most recent publication, “Desire and Nested Mobilities of Passing in Dorothea Schlegel's Florentin and Benedikte Naubert's Heerfort und Klärchen,” appeared in German Life and Letters in 2013.