Gender, Collaboration, and Authorship in German Culture

Literary Joint Ventures, 1750-1850

John B. Lyon, Laura Deiulio, John B. Lyon, Laura Deiulio

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781501378331
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501351013
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Gender, Collaboration, and Authorship in German Culture challenges a model of literary production that persists in literary studies: the so-called Geniekult or the idea of the solitary male author as genius that emerged around 1800 in German lands. A closer look at creative practices during this time indicates that collaborative creative endeavors, specifically joint ventures between women and men, were an important mode of literary production during this era. This volume surveys a variety of such collaborations and proves that male and female spheres of creation were not as distinct as has been previously thought. It demonstrates that the model of the male genius that dominated literary studies for centuries was not inevitable, that viable alternatives to it existed. Finally, it demands that we rethink definitions of an author and a literary work in ways that account for the complex modes of creation from which they arose.

One The Gottscheds

Conjugal Authorship as a Disjointed Venture

Margaretmary Daley

Introduction: Gottsched or Gottsched

Johann Christoph (1700–66) and Luise Adelgunde Victorie Gottsched (1713–62) were married to each other from 1735 to her death in 1762, and each contributed significantly to German-language literary arts in the eighteenth century. It is fascinating to read their individual biographies and to imagine their marriage as a joint literary biography: indeed they worked together as editors, scholars, and thinkers and they worked apart as translators, writers, and critics.¹ They have not been neglected by critical studies; on the contrary, both Gottscheds are mentioned in standard reference works, at least as far back as 1883 in Scherer’s Geschichte der deutschen Literatur (History of German Literature), and as recently as 2004.² The standard view sees them as a stellar example of a great (male) author and an ideal (female) assistant married to each other; acknowledges the disparity in prestige; and notes their shared desire to see German literature in the hands of an elite, where it would be “a handmaiden for the moral edification of the uneducated populace.”³ In their German Literature, the Garlands (another married couple devoted to German literature) note: “Her collaboration with her husband in translating Bayle’s Dictionnaire is particularly noteworthy for her untiring commitment to a work that appeared under her husband’s name.”⁴ The Gottscheds strove to develop the German language as a vehicle as capable as Latin of producing sophisticated and beautifully crafted works of art. In this sense, both contributed to the notion of the author as the privileged originator (in the Romantic period, it will be termed “genius”) of works of literature. Yet this notion of the author is complicated by collaboration and by creative translations, a major practice of the Gottscheds. Therefore, I explore below many of the interesting, implicit, and frequently inconsistent aspects of collaborative authorship in this example. As Gottsched and Gottsched, they were intellectual peers, yet they were equal neither in the public sphere nor in their private understanding of husband and wife. Johann Christoph Gottsched’s programmatic desideratum for literature as a handmaiden to moral edification was not merely figurative.

In some respects his wife did act as a charming handmaiden— especially when compared to other literary women of the period. As one of the Gottscheds, as half of a conjoined couple, she is the more difficult spouse to understand. She and her husband did not put both of their names in the author place on a book, as did, for example, Henry and Mary Garland. But we cannot shelve her as a frustrated foremother of the unfulfilled housewives who inspired Betty Friedan to say that a woman, just as a man, could only find “self-realization in a career.”⁵ It is also difficult to define her solely on the basis of her career. On the one hand, L. A. V. Gottsched did produce her own creative writing: she composed tributary, pathos-toned poems and sarcastic comedies, and twenty-first-century scholars are raising awareness of these contributions as well as of her translations.⁶ On the other hand, she did not define herself through her career. Instead, her biography reveals someone who valued domestic life and wanted to have children and be a parent. She did not have children. She did contribute to German life and letters; therefore, perhaps the least confusing summary is to see her as an influential intellectual and literary producer, though she may have seen herself as contributing to one project (that of raising the standards for authors of German literature) while simultaneously practicing in a different way. As a couple, the Gottsched-and-Gottsched partnership left posterity with a sizable group of texts. Consequently, then, we need to reevaluate the theoretical definition of “the author” in order to understand the Gottscheds’ complex conjugal practice.

Defining the Theoretical Co-author Based on an Antediluvian Author

An author, in common understanding, is the person who thought up and wrote down the words of a literary work. But this is unsatisfactory when a different individual originally thought up the ideas that someone else then sets down. Who had the means to reproduce it and then to control and profit from its publication? And most importantly here, what happens when two people are filling these roles: how do they divide up the work and how do they combine their efforts to produce a joint venture? And, to put it bluntly, how do we credit a woman who contributed reluctantly or vaguely? The proliferation of questions and exceptional cases makes extracting a theoretical definition difficult. Despite the difficulty of definition, many nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century critics extolled the author to the point of an extreme. Roland Barthes attacked such deification of the “auteur” in an essay provocatively titled “The Death of the Author.” As the phrase “the Great Author” is a circumlocution of the Judeo-Christian God dating back before the times of the Gottscheds, the heresy Barthes invokes is intentional: the author is not to be worshipped, because he is a problematic construct, a fiction that did not exist as secondary literature assumed, and therefore his biographical details are radically irrelevant.⁷

Michel Foucault responded to Barthes and restored the concept of an “author,” yet not as a martyred human being; instead, Foucault put a pliable “author-function” in place of the both canonized and dead genius whose text had been liberated from his intent.⁸ Were we, too, to craft our tool of analysis from Foucault’s theories, we would have to conclude that the Gottscheds were “founders of a discursivity,” like Ann Radcliffe, or Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.⁹ Accordingly the author-function represented by Gottsched and Gottsched produced a discourse using and developing quality German language about literary merit, and they chose as their primary generic tool the periodical. Seen this way, Gottsched and Gottsched are guilty of the same error Jürgen Habermas finds among structuralists and post-structuralists, namely that the style of their own critical essays is as important as the message, that their critique can “no longer discern contrasts, shadings and ambivalent tones.”¹⁰ More importantly, we have been led astray by Barthes’s anachronistic death and return before the very birth of the author. By this, I mean that although each wrote fiction, the Gottscheds function in this essay as writers of non-fiction, or as literary critics even though their critical analysis predates most literary theory that serves to understand them. In fact, that prodigious preliminary work was necessary before the German language could be the vehicle for art worthy of serious critique is a constant undercurrent in the Gottscheds’ oeuvre.¹¹ And most importantly, both Barthes and Foucault have a skewed if edenic view of the individual, named author. There is no room for an author-couple. Jürgen Habermas introduces into this abstract discussion an insightful concept that allows us to entertain the theoretical notion of co-authors and the specific case of the Gottscheds.¹² One of these concepts shows that while we can discuss “the author” and communicate reasonably about the abstract notion, when we try to be very precise, we find that we have been ambiguous: “Stability and absence of ambiguity are rather the exception in the communicative practice of everyday life. A more realistic picture is that … of a diffuse, fragile, continuously revised and only momentarily successful communication in which participants rely on problematic and unclarified presuppositions and feel their way from one occasional commonality to the next.”¹³ In addition, employing Habermas’s keen theoretical insights on the author neatly brings us back to the time around 1800: Habermas advertises that he is commenting on Hegel’s ideas from his time in Jena. This is helpful for two reasons. First, the notion of the author that Barthes deconstructs was coming into use at the time of the publications of the Gottscheds, but it was not solidified. Nor was there a clear and consistent practice of legal copyright across the different German lands. This worked for and against the Gottscheds. J. C. Gottsched was able to earn substantial income from his edited publications that included many contributions from others and translations without, presumably, paying the contributors particularly well, or the translated “authors” at all: “Wenn ich von meinem Professions Salario hätte leben wollen, würde ich eine schlechte Figur gemacht haben. Mein Bücherschreiben hat mir ebensoviel, ja noch mehr eingetragen” (If I had had to live from my salary as a professor, I would have cut a poor figure. My writing of books brought in just as much, indeed more).¹⁴ J. C. Gottsched does not claim the term “author” for himself—he uses a more modest gerund: “my writing of books.” Second, Habermas maintains Hegel’s dynamic approach; this allows different shadings to the term “author” to be used over time, including one in which it is a substitute for parenting: “Thus deeply immersed in this cosmopolitan environment and remaining childless, [L. A. V.] Gottsched was able to throw herself into scholarly work.”¹⁵ In its etymology, the root of the word “author” refers symbolically to fathering, and yet it is rarely noted when a male partner remains childless. As married co-authors, the Gottscheds have an inverse relationship between their biological parenting (producing no children) and symbolic parenting (producing books).

Before marrying, J. C. Gottsched generated (or “parented”) the impressive literary periodical titled Die vernünftigen Tadlerinnen (The Reasonable Female Tatlers). After their marriage, L. A. V. Gottsched adopted this work, thus making the periodical an interesting case on which to test authorship and co-authorship. Using the common understanding of the author, we may ask who wrote it and look inside the work’s pages. In the first issue, an “I” addresses the readers and announces that the journals will be written by a group of women named Phyllis, Calliste, and Iris. That “I” sounds like an author and claims to have collaborating authors. Yet they are not the authors, for these unrealistic names drawn from an imaginary and literary realm signaled a fiction upon a fiction, or fictitious authorship.¹⁶ In the last issue, the readers are addressed again by a first-person speaker, whom we, in our antediluvian understanding of authorial voice, may take to be J. C. Gottsched, and who reveals co-writers named M. J. May, J. G. Hamann, and L. G. (Lucas Geiger).¹⁷ Finally, the journals were revised, expanded, and reprinted a decade later. At that time, L. A. V. Gottsched offered original prose that was included in the later publications. But to claim that Die vernünftigen Tadlerinnen was authored by both Gottscheds is, as suggested by Gabriele Ball, incorrect.¹⁸ At the same time, the refutation that the Gottscheds collaborated equally on parts of Die vernünftigen Tadlerinnen does not cancel the discrete contribution that L. A. V. Gottsched made to the periodical. In fact, there is particular interest in her two essayistic pieces, and these are included in the reprint that is otherwise based on the earlier edition. We could say the later version was co-authored by J. C. Gottsched and others, including L. A. V. Gottsched, and possibly count the words from the various co-authors and list them in order of magnitude. This would favor quantity over concept, however, and confounds the question of what constitutes authorship.

The Gottscheds were active at a time when the prescriptive lines between author and editor were not yet drawn. Richard Steele “authored” the majority of the British periodical The Tatler in 1709 before persuading Joseph Addison and Jonathan Swift to contribute. Similarly, Sophie von La Roche’s and Mariane Ehrmann’s work on their respective periodicals Pomona für Teutschlands Töchter (Pomona for Germany’s Daughters, 1783–4) and Amaliens Erholungsstunden (Amalie’s Leisure Hours, 1790–2) falls under both editorship and authorship.¹⁹ When trying to answer who the author of the Gottscheds’ or these concomitant periodicals is, the task becomes frustrating because the definition of the “author” seems “diffuse, fragile, and constantly revised,” to borrow from Habermas. This is a larger problem of communicative situations for which Habermas has a heuristic solution. In “Arbeit und Interaktion” (Work and Interaction), he makes a case for the importance of three dialectical conceptions: language, work, and interaction in his reading of Hegel’s philosophy of mind. Habermas remarks that Hegel only pondered this systematic in his Jena years, a place of much male–female co-authorship.²⁰ As abstract a task as it is to read Habermas reading Hegel (reading Kant after Foucault reading Barthes), it gives us a new way to think about co-authorship. While “Arbeit und Interaktion” has been read primarily to understand how Habermas draws on Hegelian philosophy in constructing his theory of communicative rationality, it serves here to identify analytical rubrics needed for the construct of the “co-author” without a totalizing perspective. Habermas’s ru...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Gottscheds: Conjugal Authorship as a Disjointed Venture
• 2. A Dynamic Interplay: Cooperation between Sophie von La Roche, Christoph Martin Wieland, and Goethe on Their Way to Authorship
• 3. “Collaborating with Spirits”: Cagliostro, Elisa von der Recke, and the Phantoms of Unmündigkeit
• 4. A Freedom Apart: Feminine Bildung in Sophie Mereau’s “Marie” and Amanda und Eduard
• 5. Scenes from a Marriage: Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel, Collaboration as Symphilosophy and After
• 6. Holy Hermaphrodite: The Collaboration between Caroline and Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué
• 7. Concepts of Collaboration: Märchenomas, the Woman Writer, and the Brothers Grimm
• 8. A Meeting of Minds? The Dialogue between Voices Female and Male in the Poems of the West–Eastern Divan
• 9. The Correspondence of Rahel Levin Varnhagen and Ludwig Robert: Epistolary Writing as a Space for Symphilosophieren
• 10. Reflexive Authorship in Bettina Brentano-von Arnim’s Die Günderode: Narrative Disunity, Hölderlin, and Günderrode
• 11. “Where Words Are Not Enough”: Audience and Authorship in the Marriage Diaries of Robert and Clara Schumann
• 12. Therese Robinson’s Die Auswanderer (1852) as Goethe’s Future Novel of America
• Index
• Imprint