Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friederike Helene Unger

Birte Giesler Social Satire, Literary Parody, and Gender Critique in French and German Fairy Tales of the Enlightenment: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friederike Helene Unger This chapter investigates a French- and a German-language fairy tale of the Enlighten- ment: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Queen Fantasque (1758) and Friederike Helene Unger’s Prince Bimbam (1802). Both parody the formal shape of the French conte de fées, while debating gender identity in the context of the emerging modern ‘bourgeois’ culture. They deal with literature as a subject matter and reflect on social norms. While Rousseau focuses on the miraculous and offers a concept of ‘nature’as a predetermined category, the interpretation reveals the tautological structure of the narrator’s argu- ment and gender concept. In contrast, Unger attacks gendered literary patterns. The ideas of originality and identity dissolve into an endless reflection of (poetic) images. The chapter investigates the intertextuality of both texts, and demonstrates how story- telling functions as a means of mediating and questioning gender identity. While both make the fairytale genre a subject of irony, Unger’s text simultaneously works as a parody of the genre of the Bildungsroman. The idea that mankind is ontologically divided into two incommensurable sexes gained acceptance during the eighteenth century and is thus part of the history of thought of the Modern Age (Hausen 369f.). This way of thinking about sex- ual difference took the place of the former “one-sex model” which considered the boundaries between male and female “of degree and not of kind” (Laqueur 25) while understanding the female body as “a lesser version of the male’s” (ibid. VIII). As is generally known, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the prominent Enlight- enment pedagogue and philosopher, played a major rôle in the development of the philosophy of two incommensurable genders, explaining them as being part of “nature” and “natural” determination (Kofman 11f.). Rousseau’s gender philosophy has influenced the Western history of thought about gender relation- ships in a fundamental way during the last 250 years (Kleine 162). It is based on the images of two fundamentally different sexes with two specific gender characters and incorporates the idea that this ontological difference is “natural” (Felden 225f.). At the same time, Rousseau describes the female character as completely fixated on the male (Murphy 759f.). Thus, following Rousseau’s gender concept, the two gender characters appear not only incommesurable but also complementary (Bovenschen 164–181). The relationship between nature and the supernatural or miraculous, or rather the relation between reason and imagination, was a central topic of the philosophical and aesthetic debates in the eighteenth century (Nelle 170–173). Consequently, the fairytale genre enjoyed increasing popularity in the literature 234 of the Enlightenment, the Weimar classical period, and – above all – Romanticism. Novalis even conceived of the fairytale as “Canon der Poïsie” (449) (“canon of poetry”). However, philosophers of the French Enlightenment, such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau, used and transformed the genre of the French conte de fées into a satiric mixture of genres to parody that of the con- temporary conte de fées itself (Wührl 35). In the context of German-language literature, Christoph Martin Wieland brought the French conte de fées to the German-speaking (and -writing) world (Wührl 36). Influenced by the philosophy of the Enlightenment, Wieland used ironic citations of the French conte de fées for poetological considerations of the relationship between imagination, fancy, and reason (Schaefer 146–156). In the following, a French and a German parodistic fairytale dealing with sex and gender issues will be discussed and analysed from a gender-critical perspective: La Reine Fantasque (The Queen Fantasque) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, first released in 1758, and Friederike Helene Unger’s Prinz Bimbam. Ein Mährchen für Alt und Jung (Prince Bimbam. A Fairytale for Old and Young), published in 1802 but only recently taken notice of by researchers in literary studies (Thiel 51–99; Giesler 245–281). Although both works parody the genre of the French conte de fées and its typical narrative techniques, by using aesthetic forms and stylistic devices of the comic such as irony, parody, satire, transgression of norms in shape and content, breaching levels of fiction, and significant names, the propositions given by Rousseau’s and Unger’s texts are quite different. The following gender-critical reading of both texts reveals the underlying assumptions and indirect statements of both works: In Rousseau’s text, the physical act of the narration itself is brought into the fictitious world and used as an ironic means to interrupt and subvert the cited genre (Runte, The Paradox 52f.). While ‘nature’ serves as a reference point for the narrator who is part of the fiction, female stubbornness is a major target of the mockery. Friedmar Apel has argued that Rousseau’s satire of the fairytale was an ironic “Versuch einer märchenhaften Widerlegung der Märchenform” (71) (“attempt at a fabulous refutation of the shape of the fairy tale genre”)1 in order to prove that the genre of the traditional fairytale (predicated on imagination and the marvellous) is inappropriate to question reality and culturally-given conditions and norms. From a gender-critical perspective, however, the female protagonist of Rousseau’s fairytale evinces some revolutionary aspects (Murphy 759) while the narrative structure of the text questions the prevailing culture by demon- strating that its ostensible affirmation is in fact a subjective statement of male speech from a male standpoint. On the contrary, in Unger’s satiric fairytale the 1 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own and emphases according to the original..

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