Sovereign Feminine: Music and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Germany

By Matthew Head

In the German states in the late eighteenth century, women flourished as musical performers and composers, their achievements measuring the progress of culture and society from barbarism to civilization. Female excellence, and related feminocentric values, were celebrated by forward-looking critics who argued for music as a fine art, a component of modern, polite, and commercial culture, rather than a symbol of institutional power. In the eyes of such critics, femininity—a newly emerging and primarily bourgeois ideal—linked women and music under the valorized signs of refinement, sensibility, virtue, patriotism, luxury, and, above all, beauty. This moment in musical history was eclipsed in the first decades of the nineteenth century, and ultimately erased from the music-historical record, by now familiar developments: the formation of musical canons, a musical history based on technical progress, the idea of masterworks, authorial autonomy, the musical sublime, and aggressively essentializing ideas about the relationship between sex, gender and art. In Sovereign Feminine, Matthew Head restores this earlier musical history and explores the role that women played in the development of classical music.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: May 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9780520954762

Matthew Head

Matthew Head is a Reader in Music at King’s College London. He is the author of Orientalism, Masquerade, and Mozart’s Turkish Music (2000).

Book preview

THE AHMANSON FOUNDATION has endowed this imprint to honor the memory of FRANKLIN D. MURPHY who for half a century served arts and letters, beauty and learning, in equal measure by shaping with a brilliant devotion those institutions upon which they rely.

Sovereign Feminine

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Ahmanson Foundation Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation.

The publisher also gratefully acknowledges the generous contributions to this book provided by the Hibberd Endowment and the Manfred Bukofzer Endowment of the American Musicological Society.

Sovereign Feminine

Music and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Germany

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Matthew Head

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

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Examples 1, 3, and 4 are reproduced with permission from Journal of the American Musicological Society 52, no. 2 (1999): 211, 225, and 229.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Head, Matthew William.

Sovereign feminine : music and gender in eighteenth-century Germany / Matthew Head.

pages    cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-27384-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

eISBN 9780520954762

1. Gender identity in music. 2. Women musicians—Germany—History—18th century. 3. Music—Social aspects—Germany—History—18th century. 4. Music—Germany—18th century—History and criticism. I. Title.

ML82.H44 2013

Manufactured in the United States of America

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In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro 100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.

For my mother, Carol Ann Head (née Scott),and her feeling for beauty

What better can temper manly rudeness, or strengthen and support the weakness of man, what so soon can assuage the rapid blaze of wrath, what more charm masculine power, what so quickly dissipate peevishness and ill-temper, what so well can while away the insipid tedious hours of life, as the near and affectionate look of a noble, beautiful woman? What is so strong as her soft delicate hand? What so persuasive as her tears restrained? Who but beholding her must cease to sin?

J.C. LAVATER, PHYSIOGNOMY (1775–1777)

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction: Fictions of Female Ascendance

Appendix: Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Two Prefaces to the Fair Sex

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES

TABLES

MUSICAL EXAMPLES

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Today, references to gender issues in accounts of music’s cultural meaning and context are unremarkable, even characteristic of nuanced historical interpretation. As a university student between 1985 and 1995 I could hardly have predicted this state of affairs. When I began reading about music and gender in the early 1990s, as a British graduate student at Yale, gender was at the center of a large, at times acrimonious, controversy over the boundaries and ambitions of musical scholarship. In a relatively conservative institution such as Yale’s department of music it was risky to show too active an interest in the latest enthusiasms. Like many other students at that time, I had been trained to discuss music through the vocabulary of music theory, as a sounding structure, and in terms of the history of compositional style. These approaches were common to both my undergraduate studies at Oxford and the doctoral program at Yale, so much so that, methodologically, I felt at home for most of my time in New Haven, despite my visa status as a nonresident alien. Intellectual tensions arose less from national differences than from the then widespread practice among students of shuttling back and forth between two basic approaches, structural analysis and the discussion of historical style. At this distance, though, my sense of having been torn between these two subdisciplines seems comical: both approaches, after all, constitute music as unworldly and self-referential in essence. It was their fundamental agreement that sustained the long-standing rivalry between them.

Starting in the mid-1980s, the time of Joseph Kerman’s critique of music analysis and his attendant call for historical criticism, through the disciplinary upheaval of the 1990s (that period of the new musicology), it seemed as though the historical approach had triumphed over the abstractions of theory. But this was true only insofar as what passed for music history was itself being rethought. The history of music, as I had learned it, was paradoxically ahistorical. Music was said to be deployed in, even tailored to, social contexts, and to be shaped by changing aesthetic ambitions; but its very nature and essential meaning were largely thought of as self-referential—as, in the parlance of the day, purely musical. This ontological assumption served from the outset to set musical material outside of history. The development of musical form and style, we were assured, just happened to take place in scenes from the past, like a favorite actor’s appearing in a series of costume dramas.

Changes in musical scholarship that took place in the 1990s were many and various, but nearly all of them involved finding alternative approaches to writing music history. A good example was feminist criticism and gender studies, hot topics in my North American context in the 1990s and in some ways transformative influences on the discipline. The transformation was not, however, the result of anything as straightforward as breaking musical codes. Musicologists did not simply discover that music in fact contained signs for masculinity and femininity. Rather, there was a shift in academic understanding of what and where the music was: a shift, in other words, in views about the ontology of music. This might be summarized as a movement from text to context, were it not that such vocabulary maintains precisely the boundaries that had partly dissolved. In the North American context particularly, scholars as different in their approaches as Leo Treitler, Gary Tomlinson, and Lawrence Kramer argued that the distinction between music and its worldly contexts, including the context of our understanding, is illusory; for music written before the rise of ideas of aesthetic autonomy in the nineteenth century, it is an anachronistic imposition.

When I returned to England in 1995 I carried these debates in my luggage. They made it through customs, but it was unclear to me whether they would survive in their new habitat. In the United Kingdom there appeared to be an attitude at once less defensive and less excited about the prospects of gender studies in musicology. The battle lines of the North American debate, the quasi-emancipatory struggle over ancient and modern scholarship, appeared not to resonate here as loudly, not to engage academic passions in similar ways. A new colleague put her finger on a characteristic of British musicology in observing that gender issues had a future here but as components of something else, not as issues in their own right. The implied contrast between how they and we approached gender was perhaps illusory, but the point highlighted some perceived differences of musicological tone and rhetoric that required negotiation.

Mediating national differences was only part of the challenge, however. The pioneering and inspirational literature on music, gender, and sexuality that reached a critical mass around 1990 had left my favored period, the late eighteenth century, largely untouched. What place was there in a study of gender and the Enlightenment, I wondered, for the compelling dramas told in millennial musicology about the dangerousness of woman, her imperiled agency, her containment, and her triumph? In late eighteenth-century contexts, was the figure of woman always a figure of Otherness; was she necessarily mad, bad, and dangerous to know? If not, then what remained historically relevant in the scholarly literature to inspire me?

I did not face these challenges alone: my project unfolded as part of a broader disciplinary process of historicizing feminist criticism, a process that is still ongoing. Susan McClary’s groundbreaking Feminine Endings (1991), a text I found particularly inspiring, included issues of historical difference in music and in the sex-gender system, alongside a critical apparatus that linked musical analysis, narrative theory, and semiotics. McClary’s sensitivity to music as an analog of human action, identity, character, feeling, and desire, and her willingness to prioritize those issues in her scholarship represent enduring contributions to the discipline. In subsequent volumes Ruth Solie and Mary Ann Smart responded to McClary’s challenge by setting gender within still broader fields of difference and more specific moments of reception. Consideration of contingencies of staging, performance, and revision revealed that studies of gender and sexuality could help to recover the strangeness of the past. In recent studies of early modern Italy by Wendy Heller and Bonnie Gordon, historical difference in the sex-gender system defamiliarizes musical culture, even to the point that singing is invested with alterity as a release of vital spirit. Both authors discovered that the woman question had a long history: that thinking about the nature of woman and her roles in music was not the invention of late twentieth-century musicology. On the contrary, female vocality, affiliated with the body, morality, and sexuality, was a preoccupation of the early modern period with far-reaching implications for the development of musical genres and styles. Inevitably, though, all this talk of women in musicology has caused frustration, not least among those who were doing the talking. Some even abandoned ship. Without subjecting men and masculinity to historical analysis, Thomas Laqueur argued in a special issue of Cambridge Opera Journal (2007), the feminist project is incomplete, the male still set in transcendent remove from the contingencies of history. Coincidentally, my study too turns to male investments in, and identifications with, the female sign, as evidenced in the context of Beethoven’s authorial identification with Joan of Arc and Johann Friedrich Reichardt’s feelings for musical women.

My chosen period, the late eighteenth century, brought additional challenges. Music making, including something approaching a mania for composing, was then so widespread among amateurs of both sexes that a historically oriented study of the period needed to come to terms with this phenomenon. This period also saw the emergence of writing about music as a widespread and professionalized activity, taking the diverse forms of musical theory, pedagogy, criticism, reviewing, aesthetics, and history. Such writing presupposed, and helped to form, a readership in thrall to self-improvement and polite conversation, for whom knowledge about music was as important as its practice. Limiting the scholarly focus to images of women in texted and operatic music would likely fall flat.

This book traces a journey through this challenging and rapidly changing terrain. A collection of relatively self-standing essays written across a decade or more, the book reflects my evolving understanding of what gender studies can contribute to scholarship on a period no longer called classical. There is a cost in presenting my material as a series of related fragments. Unities of style and method are jeopardized, and the book does not proceed as the exhaustive working through of a single argument. But there are benefits, too, in a study that embodies disciplinary history and shows an author’s attempts to do justice to historical materials within the limits of his gradually developing methods and beliefs.

Chapters 2, 3, and 6 were published previously in the academic journals of the University of California Press and appear with light revisions and updating. In their new context here they form aspects of the book’s larger themes: the exalted status often accorded the female sign, and a newly emerging ideal of femininity, in the musical culture of the late German Enlightenment. Chapter 2, focusing on the iconic image of the young lady at music, unpacks the ideal of female musical accomplishment in all its contradictions and ambivalence. The earliest of my essays to make it into this book, it is also the most strenuously critical of the period’s idealizations of musical women. As the project unfolded and my material was tested by (and on) anonymous peer reviewers, colleagues, students, and friends, I realized that it was unnecessary to keep reissuing health warnings about the dangers of female idealization. On the contrary, it seemed to me that it was time to ask if idealization (however problematic) might have had other roles than putting women in their place. Ironically, then, it is as if the project proceeded in reverse, moving from a strenuous deconstruction of the mystique of femininity to a position in which that mystique serves as a hermeneutic window into the musical aspirations of the period. One of the problems I had with this book was that I found it difficult to justify that change of approach. Wasn’t I in danger of turning feminist criticism on its head, of betraying precisely the intellectual and political agendas that inspired my turn to gender issues? For a few years I went quiet (at least on gender issues), and the project stalled.

During that time I developed a private pleasure in tracking down female composers of the period. That activity caused concern among some of my colleagues, who reminded me that gender and sexuality were hotter themes than women composers. I knew what they meant, but I became suspicious of this emphasis on representations, particularly because there were still so few discussions of works composed by women in musicology’s major journals. It seemed that the stigma that used to surround works by female composers now attended research into them, or, at least, research that was framed as rediscovery. The challenge as I understood it was to say something about women as composers, or about their music, that would engage a musicological community turning ever more explicitly to issues of musical meaning. An initial answer I came up with, which appeared in an article published in 2004, involved no great innovation, just a shift of emphasis. In an account of the life and works of a then forgotten musician, Charlotte (Minna) Brandes, I offered the standard kinds of appraisal (her biography and contemporary reception, and some comments on style and text setting) but also sought to render unfamiliar the question of what composing, and being a composer, had meant, culturally, in her lifetime. I sought to redeploy the recovery project as part of a history of musical authorship. As part of this I traced the high value placed on her works at the time of her death, when authenticity and naturalness represented cherished ideals and the emotional authenticity and naturalness of her works was attributed above all to her sex. In the course of that discussion I indicated that Minna Brandes was not alone: a vast number of women composed and published their music in the late eighteenth century, a fact that challenges commonly held assumptions that women were prohibited from or chastised for composing. It appears, rather, that in this historical moment there was a desire for female authorship, which reached an intensity not met again until the feminist movement of the 1970s.

Why then not write a book about this repertory and the kinds of musical authorship it demonstrates? Why leave so many interesting stories untold, or no more than hinted at in backnotes? There were several reasons. The first concerns the term woman, which in this historical site was broken up by other terms of social difference to such an extent that it would impose a false unity if taken as the fundamental category of research. Distinctions of rank, for example, would mock any attempt to collapse female royalty, professional female musicians, ladies of leisure, and the laboring poor into a single social group. To write a book about women composers in eighteenth-century Germany would risk inscribing and reifying sexual dimorphism at the cost of historical reality. The challenge, as I saw it, was to relate female authorship to the broader feminocentric trends in contemporary musical culture.

Exploring the reception of female composers returned me to the issue of idealization. Idealization of female musicians was popping up again and again, a seemingly productive aspect of the period that served to articulate some of its most cherished and distinctive ideals. My (inevitably partial) reading of feminist criticism had alerted me, however, to idealization as something problematic, something I felt I should resist. Marina Warner’s Monuments and Maidens often rang in my ears, but I think that Warner insisted too much on the gulf separating the real and symbolic realms. She argued, famously, that the female form is available for allegorical use and invested with symbolic power precisely because such power is not available to women on the ground. But some of her material seems to contradict this. It took time for me to let go of my assumption that idealizations of women, and femininity, were little more than forms of containment, objectification, and disempowerment. Eventually I found I could retain something of that critical perspective and at the same time trace its (in other ways) productive aspects in the rise of major developments in music of the period: the culture of sensibility; the accomplishment ideal; the primacy accorded native, female singing voices over imported castrati; the burgeoning numbers of female composers; androgyny in sound ideals and notions of authorship; the premium placed upon reformed, polite male manners in everything from critical writing to ensemble playing; and the centrality of women in some of the period’s contemporary music-historical narratives.

In that spirit I conceived chapters 1, 4, and 5, in which, without endorsing female idealization, I attempt to show how significant it was to the musical culture of the period. I joined these chapters with revised versions of the texts published earlier, which appear here as chapters 2, 3, and 6. In the long, wide-lens introduction I lay out the theme that unifies the book, that of the sovereign feminine, along with the related trope of the living muse, using examples from a range of musical, literary, and visual sources. I also explain the historical narrative that is embedded in the sequence of chapters, specifically a blossoming of the female sign in the 1770s and 1780s, which was followed by drastic reversals of fortune in the following two decades.

It is a pleasure to thank the many institutions that contributed to the completion of this project. Progress was facilitated by periods of research leave in 2002 from the University of Southampton and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, U.K. (AHRC), and from King’s College London in 2010. Purchase of microfilms was funded in part by a small grant from the AHRC in 2001. The staff of many libraries helped reduce my carbon footprint by providing reproductions of rare materials, and I am particularly grateful for the assistance of the staff of the Landeshauptarchiv Schwerin (Mecklenburg), the Herzogin Anna-Amalia-Bibliothek (Weimar), the Goethehaus in Frankfurt, the Hamburger Öffentliche Bücherhallen, the Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek, the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, the library of the Universität der Künste (Berlin), the New York Public Library, Yale University Library, the British Library, and the National Portrait Gallery in London. The Conservatoire Royale in Brussels held many essential sources, some of which were made available to me in legible reproductions.

This book was a long time in the writing, and in the course of its preparation I received assistance from many individuals. Ellen Rosand and Jane Stevens provided sympathetic reading as I transformed materials excised from my dissertation into my first article in Journal of Musicology. In those early days Susan McClary, Philip Brett, and Judith Butler provided me with not just inspiring models but conversation and moral support. Graduate seminars at Yale with Wayne Koestenbaum and Lawrence Kramer offered safe and stimulating environments for my fledgling efforts to link cultural theory and music. Lawrence Kramer continued to offer incisive feedback over the next decade. At Southampton University, Jeanice Brooks provided encouragement, commented on draft material, and opened up conference opportunities. Sterling E. Murray, John Rice, Ric Graebner, Lars Franke, and Hugo Shirley helped me with translations of eighteenth-century German handwriting when my time, and expertise, failed. Over the photocopier, Robynn J. Stilwell told me about her work on film adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels, piquing my curiosity about representations of the period and reminding me that the eighteenth century is ongoing. Marian Gilbart Read was an inspiration, with her amazing knowledge of eighteenth-century literature and her exquisite feeling for the manners and mores of the period. Through her brilliant example, and the occasional nudge, Julie Brown helped me to focus on ideas, raised the intellectual bar, and was always kind and candid. Toward the end of my time at Southampton, a colleague in English literature, Emma Clery, brought my understanding of the female sign and early capitalism up to speed. Similarly, on arriving at King’s College London in 2007, I drew inspiration from the writings of, and exhibitions curated by another literary colleague, Elizabeth Eger. Two outstanding students, now holding doctorates from King’s College London, provided research assistance: Carlo Cenciarelli undertook the translations of Eximeno at short notice when Italian music theory got the better of me, and Hugo Shirley lent skills in technology and editorial patience to the task of converting earlier publications into editable text. A generous and incisive reader, Suzanne Aspden strengthened my arguments in several chapters and corrected some schoolboy errors concerning Elizabeth Sheridan. At University of California Press, Mary Francis was my expert guide through the trials of proposal, peer review, and revision, while Juliane Brand provided brilliant bilingual copyediting and Jacqueline Volin shepherded my manuscript through production. Ultimately, though, the book owes its existence (though not its faults) to Roger Parker, who gently insisted that it was time to gather my thoughts into a monograph. Without his belief that I could do this I would never have attempted it. In the last three years he has provided constant, sometimes ’round-the-clock support, read and commented on everything, and offered a perspective, at once pragmatic and intellectual, that helped me to finish.

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Introduction

Fictions of Female Ascendance

Beautiful, rich, and orphaned, Lady Sophia Sternheim, the eponymous musical heroine of Sophie von La Roche’s epistolary novel of 1771, was destined to be hunted by libertines and suffer the torments of stolen reputation. Packed off to court by her ambitious guardians, Count and Countess Löbau, who hope to make her a royal mistress, her pristine virtue is prematurely desecrated by a sham marriage to Lord Derby, a rake. Undone, fleeing her seducer, her conscience embraces death, and she hovers between heaven and earth. Unlike many of her type, however, she does not die: she struggles against the temptations of the grave and, didactically renouncing even that morbid luxury, discovers an enduring moral heroism and social conscience. Exalted by her disgrace, she resolves to dedicate her life to acts of benevolence, the appreciation of nature, the education of girls, the cultivation of friendship, and the solace of music.

With this heroine, who sings and accompanies herself on the lute, improvises, and plays extensively from memory, La Roche struck a resounding chord in the culture of sensibility. On the basis of Die Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim she emerged almost overnight as one of the most celebrated authors of her age.¹ For a year or two the future of German literature seemed to lie partly in her hands. Critics discerned a moral and emotional authenticity linking author and heroine, one that, for a brief historical moment, they desired above all other artistic values. That the author was female contributed to the critics’ sense that the prose bypassed the mediation of learning and artifice. La Roche’s fiction, as the product of (or some ideal of) female nature, was felt to offer glimpses of her heroine’s invisible interiority, and of the operations of her heart and mind. The young Goethe, whose Werther of 1774 was directly inspired by and soon eclipsed Sternheim, published a review in 1772 that discovered in the novel a portrait of the human soul. His friend and future Weimar colleague Johann Herder used similar language, speaking of glimpses of the inner workings of the soul.

These reviews came in response to prompts from La Roche’s editor, Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813), the foremost German-language novelist of his day. Wieland provided an ostensibly apologetic preface and footnotes for the work of his female acquaintance, who (as the conceit went) knew nothing about the publication of her manuscript. Wieland’s interventions acted as insurance for La Roche’s modesty, as well as offering the endorsement of a literary authority. Perhaps even more important, they provided cues to the work’s aesthetic context. Wieland attributed to the novelist an intuitive knowledge of human nature, acquired through experience and superior to the more prestigious and almost exclusively male dry philosophy of those, such as himself, engaged in the long study of humanity; the same point is made in the novel when Sophia Sternheim asserts that women’s feelings are frequently more accurate than the reasonings of men.² The author, like her heroine, emerges in Wieland’s preface as an exquisitely sensitive and unclouded instrument of moral insight. In a fantasy of art springing unmediated from nature, La Roche is said by Wieland to write without "authorial art" (8). In acknowledging that stern or misguided critics might censure the work for ungrammatical or naive stylistic aspects, by overstating the presence of certain faults and announcing them to be evidence of superior merit, Wieland effectively silenced such criticism. Prefiguring the terms in which Herder would idealize traditional and popular poetry in his Volkslieder (1779), and echoing contemporary discourse about the noble savage, Wieland praised the originality of image and expression . . . [and] felicitous energy and aptness. . . . [F]or each original thought she immediately invents a singular expression, whose vigorous strength and truth are perfectly adequate to the intuitive ideas which are the well-spring of her reflections (8).

From the comments of Wieland, Goethe, and Herder about Sternheim it appears that a novel by and about a woman helped to trigger a fantasy that literature could overcome problems endemic to writing and the aesthetic principle of mimesis. As a mediation of thought, writing was felt to jeopardize truthful self-representation; it was, as Derrida observed in his famous commentary on Rousseau, the trace of a voice, always secondhand and at one step removed from speech. (In the courtroom one does not write, one speaks the truth.) A clue that La Roche’s epistolary novel of female virtue and seduction came to stand for a new literary authenticity is found in Goethe’s description of the writing as a portrait, for at that time the visual arts were enjoying the enviable status of (purportedly) representing nature through its own natural signs of light, line, and shape. The fantasy that La Roche’s writing was natural and unmediated is of course difficult to reconcile with the text itself, and Wieland seems to be acknowledging this when, toward the end of his preface, he folds the novel back into the conventional literary category of satire, suggesting that it should be understood as a satire on court life and the great world in general (9). The beautiful fallacy according to which La Roche created the novel purely out of herself and her firsthand experience of the world might also have struck some readers as tenuous, given the direct relationship between Sophia Sternheim and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), as well as the indebtedness of La Roche’s vision of woman to Rousseau’s Emile (1762). But what is important in Wieland’s preface, and in the novel, is that at this historical moment the idealism that saw literature as a natural language of the passions and instrument of moral instruction found an intense, influential focus both in a fictional heroine and in the first German-language novel by a woman. As a result, the figure of woman (as both author and invented character) was granted elevated significance to mediate the realms of nature and art.

What contemporary critics (and modern editors) did not observe was that La Roche in the novel granted letters and song the very qualities that the critics attributed to her authorship. In her confessional and sternly analytical letters, as in her songs, Sophia Sternheim shows herself unwilling to dissemble. Her writing and singing voice cannot lie. Soon after her sham wedding, still unaware that her presumed husband is nothing of the sort, she discloses to him her love for another. I had brought her a lute, her seducer recalls:

She had the complaisance to sing a pretty Italian air of her composing, in which she besought Venus to make her a present of her [Venus’s] girdle, that she might retain the object of her tenderness. The thoughts were happy and well expressed, the music well adapted, and her voice so pathetic, that I heard her with the sweetest transport. But this pleasing dream vanished, when I observed that, during the most tender passages, which she sang the best, she did not cast her eyes on me, but declining her head, cast them on the floor, and uttered sighs, which certainly had not me for their object. (121)

In this scene, which privileges music as a medium of love, Sophia’s singing and composing are—to recall Wieland’s comment—without authorial art. This does not mean that they lack technical skill, but they are without falsity. Within that severe strand of bourgeois Protestant morality that she personifies, Sophie is above the deceit of art. Her morality and music possess the transparency of tears. She renounces the theatrical and sets standards for representation that no representation, strictly speaking, can achieve.

It comes as no surprise that Sophia is critical of opera: she regards its musically laced fictions to be lacking in truth, and declares that the entwining of music, dance, costume, song, and scenery inflames sensibility without directing it to a higher moral goal (55–56). This critique, derived directly from Addison and Rousseau, is part of Sophia’s pietistic renunciation of appearances. She disapproves not just of opera but of the culture of display that links stage fictions to the vain performances of aristocratic viewers. Her own dress and toilette are plain, her manners muted. When Sophia sheds tears, the reader is invited to regard them not as stylized, theatrical displays of sensibility but as glimpses [of the] inner workings of the human soul—an invitation that many modern readers may find difficult to accept. Indeed, the taste for La Roche’s moralizing was soon challenged, not least by those who had championed her cause. To tether art to the didactic end of refining sentiment is to limit its power, Goethe asserted in his 1772 review of Johann George Sulzer’s Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (1771–1774).³ Only three years after The History of Sophia Sternheim was published, Goethe’s Werther blows his brains out for love. But for a short historical moment, La Roche was imaginatively fused with her heroine and assumed the privilege conventionally accorded to only the best male writers: at once the exemplar of her sex and given sex-transcending, quasi-universal significance. Briefly the figure of woman assumed a leadership role in the development of German literature.

THE FEMALE SIGN IN THE LATE ENLIGHTENMENT

La Roche’s overnight fortune is an example of a largely forgotten aspect of eighteenth-century culture, when figures of womanhood enjoyed exalted status as signs of reform, progress, morality, and civilization. Counterintuitive though it may appear today, woman featured in the historiography, political theory, aesthetics, and artistic practices of this period less as a subordinate term, still more rarely as Other, than as an emblem of social, moral, and artistic ideals. The view that woman civilizes, that she cultivates, Sylvana Tomaselli has written in an incisive analysis of Enlightenment historiography, is as recurrent as the view that she is nature’s most dutiful and untouched daughter.⁴

In this book, taking my lead from Tomaselli, I excavate the rhetorical and symbolic feminine, finding in images and practices of late eighteenth-century women arguments in favor of emerging modernity: these include the reform of despotism; the positive value of commerce and luxury; stimuli to politeness and refinement, and evidence of the educative and moral utility of the arts, music included. The elevation of the fair sex—what Jean Starobinski, writing of male gallantry and the visual arts in Paris before the French Revolution, quizzically styled the fictitious ascendancy of woman—elided the real and the imaginary, affording some women cultural capital and symbolic power, tantalizing others with discursive illusions of the same.⁵ Although rarely a matter of political and legal equality, this fictitious ascendance of woman was neither entirely fictitious nor entirely about women. Female and feminine authority in the arts and letters was part of the semiotic and rhetorical apparatus of those broader historical reforms often discussed by historians under the label Enlightenment.⁶

Such elevated significance depended on a reinvention of woman herself against the backdrop of what were styled classical and religious superstitions, those old prejudices that women have no soul, are the offspring of wolves, or, in the one-sex system of anatomy and medicine that continued until the end of the seventeenth century, represent a less perfect form of the male.⁷ In the eighteenth century hierarchically arranged similarity between man and woman (the one-sex model) was challenged by a metaphysics of difference (the two-sex model) in which hierarchy is unstable. The (notion of the) opposite sex was born and the female body could now achieve perfection according to its own ideal. Between the 1730s and 1790s careful drawings of the female skeleton first appeared, expressing a desire to discover sexual differences in every part of the body, even if that desire was frustrated by apparent similarity.⁸ With biblical, classical, and Renaissance texts still circulating, and with the outcome of the search for sexual difference still unclear, the thinking about sex and gender was contradictory. No one possessed a single scientific truth about sex through which to enforce a sexual difference of labor, or, as modern thinking puts it, keep women in their place. Conclusions were at once provisional and unfamiliar.

The leading German physiologist of the period, J.F. Ackermann, affirmed in his influential treatise on sexual difference of 1788 that women were better suited than men to intellectual activity because of their weaker bones and finer nerves.⁹ He asserted that the female brain weighs more than the male as a proportion of total body mass, and he agreed with Descartes’s idea that the pineal gland is the seat of the soul and origin of ideas, observing that in absolute terms the female version of this gland is larger than that of the male.¹⁰ Within a prevailing nerve theory that conceptualized the human body as a corded framework of nerves whose excitement constitutes feelings, sensations, and, ultimately, cognitions, Ackermann asserted that women are the more civilized of the sexes—and further removed from the realm of beasts, more sensitive, and quicker of mind than men.¹¹ Ackermann’s comments put an entirely different complexion on all those portraits of the period—familiar now from postcards and costume dramas—that show literary and musical ladies at their desks and claviers. Seen through Ackermann’s eyes, such images banish superstition about female nature and install women, at least women of a certain class, in provocatively contemporary iconography.

FEMINOCENTRIC INNOVATIONS IN THE LATER EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

La Roche’s newness inspired the new. A series of inclusive, often gynocentric genres and