The Self and the Others:

1

• The Self and the Others
• Identity, Gender and Ethnicity
• in German Culture around 1800

Week 9 Gender and Ethnicity in
Nineteenth-Century Womens Writing Fischer and
Droste-Hülshoff
2
Caroline Auguste Fischer

• Lived 1764 1842 ..
• A shadowy image compared to the great (male)
  writers. Not in any literary circles, no
  relationships to better-known writers. Pictures
  of her?
• An unusual life for a woman by standards of the
  time
• Unusually good education for humble middle-class
  origins
• Marriage children confinement divorce
  leaving her son in
• Copenhagen/ death of daughter at three years of
  age.
• Lived in Dresden with the writer and scholar
  Christian August Fischer.
• Published novels that dealt with the struggles
  between social convention and creative desires,
  possibly to counter the antifeminist tracts
  produced by her partner. Women in conflict with
  conformity and desire for expression Susanne
  Zantop.
• Second marriage broke down attempted a
  teaching career, died impoverished in 1842.
• What do we expect from William der Neger, in
  terms of its treatment of gender and racial
  issues?

3
Approaching William der Neger

• Historical Contexts
• Emancipation movements in Britain and elsewhere.
  Education, outlawing of slavery in some areas.
• Background of black slave uprisings in the
  Caribbean 1791-1803/4 (Kleists Die Verlobung in
  St. Domingo)
• Issues of women writers finding their voice in
  the salon culture of Romantic circles? Are
• The novella could be seen to be about two
  repressed minorities struggling for different
  forms of freedom and finding this in part, if not
  in whole?
• Does Molly find full expression as an artist?

4
William der Neger II Theory, Questions and
Conclusions

• Frantz Fanon Black Skin, White Masks (1952).
• The white colonial gaze power
• Fixing the other in terms of skin/ body/ face
• Black people as divided/ masked in white
  blackness.
• 1. Is Fischer diagnosing this (Fanons)
  phenomenon, or falling foul of it?
• 2. What are the taboos interracial sexuality?
  Dramatising a struggle, or shying away from it?
• 3. Does the link between gender and racial
  struggle support or undermine both causes,
  particularly Williams?
• 4. What attempts does the novella make in
  overcoming binary oppositions how successful are
  these?

5
Annette von Droste-Hülshoff

• Approaching Die Judenbuche
• Elements of a crime story an ethical tale? What
  is the moral?
• A psychology of subjectivity/ identity?
• Representation of male-female relationships
  power, authority and violence
• Representations of Judaism its insurmountable
  otherness?